Friday, January 9, 2015

Enough Part 2: What Must Happen But Probably Won’t

Yesterday’s essay has excited a fair amount of mostly positive comment. However, some highly relevant questions should rise to the fore at this time:

  • What does the threat of terrorism mean to ordinary Americans striving to go about their business in peace?
  • What could be done to mitigate that threat?
  • What will and what won’t be done to mitigate it?

With regard to those questions, recall the following two paragraphs of the earlier essay:

What lives in the heart that enables it to “reach” others – to commit to others’ defense, and to be confident that others are reciprocally committed? Values. A nation must be founded on either values or violence – and in either case, it must be capable of marshaling sufficient violence to defend itself and to punish those who have attacked it when the occasion demands it. But there are few values that can elicit that degree of willing commitment.

And:

Islam is massively useful to our political class. The powers that be are grateful for the threat it presents, and for the repeated evidences of that threat it provides. It serves to justify all manner of intrusions on Americans’ rights, and all manner of incursions upon our privacy. Thus, to expect that the State will ever act against Islam, regardless of how its atrocities proliferate, is a foolish notion.

The implications practically answer today’s questions all by themselves.


First, we must grapple with the most annoying aspect of the threat of Islam: it’s not something against which we can wield our military, especially within the borders of the United States. It’s a belief system that has adherents in practically every nation on Earth, including some three million here in the Land of the Formerly Free. Some unknown percentage of Muslims are wholly in agreement with the jihadists; these either join in jihad campaigns or willingly lend the jihadists material and emotional support.

Islam is therefore a diffuse threat: spread unevenly among more peaceable men. Science fiction writer L. Neil Smith has told us that a diffuse threat must be countered with a diffuse defense. This is entirely correct. But what does it imply?

  • A heavily armed civil society;
  • General recognition of the viciousness of the Islamic creed;
  • Governmental measures to prevent further Islamic immigration to the U.S.

At this time, none of those three conditions are in force. American civil society is armed to some extent, but not uniformly and not continuously. Islamic terror attacks, like atrocities of other kids, tend to occur where the probability of a prompt armed response is next to zero. Indeed, our major concentrations of population tend to have the most restrictive anti-firearms laws in the nation; getting a carry permit requires extreme notoriety, political connections, or both.

Due to the reluctance of decent Americans to view nominally peaceable neighbors as potential threats, there is no general recognition of the noxiousness of Islam. In this regard, governmental sources deserve much of the blame, for their endless repetitions of the mantra that “Islam is a religion of peace” and their habitual refusal to link terrorist acts by Muslims to the creed that plainly motivates them. However, our own inclination toward a “default amiability” cannot be excluded from the mix. Time was, we knew better than to assume that an allegiant to a creed that advocates our destruction “doesn’t really mean it.”

Finally, the members of the political class, here and elsewhere, regard an armed and alert citizenry like the ninth circle of Hell. Nothing else can check their excesses. Nothing else constitutes a serious threat to their power. Nothing else can overturn an established State with a minimum spillage of blood...especially, the blood of the revolutionaries. The hostility of government to the private possession of weaponry cannot be excised from the nature of government itself: an institution that possesses the privilege of using coercive force against individuals and other institutions.

We’re batting zero for three...and the ninth inning will soon be upon us.


The most painful aspect of our condition has yet to be addressed: the enervation of our values.

As I wrote some time ago:

Get into your time machine, go back fifty years [i.e., to 1950 -- FWP], and walk the streets of any of the great cities of this continent. They were safe. They were almost perfectly clean. People didn't jostle one another, hurl obscene imprecations at one another, deface the sides of buildings with moronic scrawling, or pollute the air with pain-threshold levels of their preferred "music." Men treated women with courtesy, respect, and a certain protective affection. Even the poor, of which, though they were less numerous than they are today, there was no shortage, were clean, self-reliant, self-respecting, and courteous.

The police would sort out those who couldn't meet the prevailing standards and would unceremoniously tell them to "keep moving," in which effort they were overwhelmingly reinforced by the non-uniformed public. If you wanted to surround yourself with degeneracy, you had to find the local Skid Row, the only place where such things were tolerated. It wasn't a big place, and the folks you found there permitted themselves no pride about their condition. No one indulged in nonsense notions about the "dignity" of the homeless, of welfare dependents, of drug addicts, of gang members, or any of today's mascot-groups for the coercive-compassion camp. As a result, government, which fattens on public perceptions of danger and disorder, was relatively small and unintrusive.

The American man of 1950 held to a different collection of values than does the man of 2015. He was unafraid of firearms, whether or not he owned one. He unhesitatingly supported the forces of order in their duties – and was quite appropriately shocked and angered when some member thereof shirked those duties or betrayed them for private gain. He was far more willing to put himself at risk when the occasion demanded it; indeed, a great many of the men alive at that time had done so quite recently, in Europe and the Pacific. He needed no one to tell him what deserved “tolerance” and what did not.

Men that manly and upright aren’t completely gone from our society, but they’re considerably fewer in number. In part that’s because of social devolution: parents allowing their sons to acquire bad, unmanly values, whether knowingly or otherwise. But in part it’s a consequence of governmental social-engineering programs designed to make men feel guilty about being men.

These days it takes unusual courage even to speak publicly against a threat to society. Imagine how rare is the degree of courage required to take up arms against it. That should tell you all you need to know about the pressures and constraints on our military.

In part, we’re zero for three on the conditions mentioned in the previous segment because we lack the manpower, in its exact sense, to bring them about. But that lack is not entirely the fault of today’s American man:

Throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and most of the rest of the First World, manhood -- masculine virtue and the self-respect that flows from it -- is being anathematized if not outlawed. Worse yet, it's been made risky to the practitioner. No aspect of male conduct is deemed too trivial to condemn. Believe it or not, there's a nation in Europe where urinating while standing up has been made into a penalizable offense. Think I'm kidding? Try it in a public loo in Germany and get back to me on the results.

Just as there is no defense, there is no Last Graf, wherein the wise and perspicacious commentator prescribes a cure for the malady. Manhood is being transformed into a liability at best, a crime at worst. Exhibiting traditional masculine virtue and civic duty in a public setting can get you arrested, brutalized or killed. Exhibiting gallantry toward a woman isn't quite as hazardous, but it's far from safe, especially if the woman is unknown to you. The "authorities," such as they are, are most definitely not on your side.

Turning that around is a prerequisite to attaining a proper stance against Islam.


I wish I could be more upbeat about this. It’s simply not my nature to evade, deny, or obfuscate the facts. We’re in for a rough ride. Indeed, Americans look at the one nation on Earth that’s adopted something approximating an effective posture against Islam – Israel – and recoil almost as often as they applaud. That’s hardly a harbinger of better times to come.

More anon.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's my question. I don't disagree that Islam is generally a brutal and backwards "faith". I don't disagree that a large portion, if not a majority of the adherents to this faith are "true believers", either fighters/potential fighters, or supporters. Having said that, there ARE "Muslims" who are lapsed, or in whatever other way have become apostates to their religion.

So my question is, how to we reconcile the fact that some (many) Americans are unwilling or unable to stand up to defend themselves physically and politically, and instead don the cloak of blind universal acceptance, against the fact that some of the Muslims that would be prevented from entering the US under a blanket ban would actually be decent and harmless people?

This is a very real problem for me, because as willing to admit that stereotypes exist for a reason I may become, a stereotype can and will never be a rule. As vehemently as I will defend the honor and security of this country, the underlying principle of all men being created equal still holds sway with me. I also recognize that this may be the very chink in the armor that Islamists will use to further their evil cause. And so as a true American, who believes in American values, and ALL that that entails, what is the answer?

Col. B. Bunny said...

It doesn't matter if an erstwhile good person isn't admitted to the U.S. We have zero obligation to admit immigrants and we have an infinitesimal need for immigrants. A would-be immigrant who can't enter the U.S. can live his life in his own country or anywhere in the world to which he can gain entry. If he would rather be in the U.S. that his problem and not ours.

Islam as a whole is a threat. It's easy to exclude or deport all Muslims instead of getting into a navel-gazing exercise about who's a good one and who's not. If we want to be less harsh, we should demand that Muslim immigrants in the U.S. must spit on the Koran and abjure it completely by an oath on violation of which they are to be put on the next plane or boat back to their home country.

We can't afford hairsplitting as a nation now and we've GOT to get over being besotted with foreigners.

Francis W. Porretto said...

Bravo, Colonel. I couldn't have put it any better.

Col. B. Bunny said...

Yes, you could.

:-)

KG said...

Anonymous, if they were "decent and harmless" people, they wouldn't be muslims.
Decent and harmless people would never adhere to such a backward, murderous ideology.

Anonymous said...

Well, given that it is acceptable for Muslims to lie to heretics to advance their political system (disguised as religion), simply demanding what Col B Bunny suggests (that Muslim immigrants in the U.S. must spit on the Koran and abjure it completely by an oath) wouldn't solve the problem as a suicide attack would nullify the penalty.

Steve

Anonymous said...

It's me anonymous again. I'm still having a hard time with universally grouping certain people who otherwise show no evil tendencies into the same group as true evil practitioners just because they were born into and raised under a particular religion. If you all are truly correct in your blanket approach, I'm sure I'll come around, because I have a lot of respect for the management and contributors here, rarely finding a word I disagree with. Meanwhile I will continue to evaluate my cautious case-by-case outlook.

Francis W. Porretto said...

It’s like this, Anon:
1. The dictates of Islam mandate the conversion, subjugation, or death of all non-Muslims;
2. To declare oneself a Muslim is to endorse the dictates of Islam;
3. A declared Muslim therefore subscribes to that doctrine.

The usual rejoinder from people who don’t want to believe such a thing about their “nice, peaceable neighbors” always reduces either to “well, they reject that part of it” or “oh, they don’t really mean it.” Yet in every nation that has permitted Islam to gain a foothold among as much as 5% of its residents, the results have been the same:
-- Demands for special privileges and accommodations on the basis of Islam;
-- Disruption of public thoroughfares and events that displease Muslims;
-- Brutalization of women, girls, Jews, homosexuals, and “dissidents;”
-- Eventually, the establishment of Islamic exclaves (look it up) where the laws of the nation are set aside in favor of sharia.

That puts both the “reject that part” and the “don’t mean it” exculpations in the toilet where they belong.

Col. Bunny has the right of it: Islam incorporates a political culture, and that culture is a threat to the United States, just as Communism was and is. We cannot allow a political culture hostile to our own to take root in our country – and to the extent that we have already allowed it, we’re suffering already. Study. Read about developments in Hamtramck, Michigan. Look up what’s been happening at Minnesota’s airports, and at Armour Foods. Learn about “Islamberg” and “Sheikh Gilani Lane.” Especially, look up the reports about the behavior of Muslims in New Jersey when the World Trade Center fell.

It’s not cosmological physics. It’s just the willingness to collect the dots. Are you willing?

MissAnthropy said...

You know what Anonymous? You may not be comfortable with generalizing and stereotyping but that's how the world works. We are forced to operate with incomplete, imperfect information, and that imperfect information is used to make life and death decisions.

We are going to have to learn how to perform the civil and social equivalent of triage. It beats "paralysis of analysis."

Col. B. Bunny said...

Anon,

You are correct that Muslims could lie even if forced to take an oath. It's sanctioned by the Koran.

Still, not every Mohammedan wants to commit suicide or go home, and not every Mohammedan is a good liar. Forcing a Muslim to abjure Islam in an unmistakable and insulting way won't catch every dissembler but it will cause some to balk. Next bus out of town!

Other tests and disabilities can be imposed, as they must for our survival.

We're in a war with Islam and we won't be safe till Muslims are removed from the West. War is often a very painful way of regaining common sense about life's fundamentals.

I'm not crazy about even allowing an opportunity for a dishonest abjuring. Muslims have nothing whatsoever to contribute to the West. What they have "contributed" has been welfare parasitism, crime, decay, misery, destruction, and death. The proponents of the Gordian knot to Alexander wanted to tie him up in mental chains as Muslims want to do to us now. We willing cooperate with this by indulging our sick obsession with separating good ones and bad ones. I say, Enough! Wherever there is all but a minute population of Muslims, you see the same bullshit.

Kindly note that the aforementioned earthy term is not directed at you.