When the West was still governed by statesmen rather than spivs, John Quincy Adams said, ‘[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’ After the aforementioned shift took place, John F. Kennedy disagreed: ‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.’
The listeners were supposed to jump up and scream ‘let’s march!!!’, rather than sit back and ask awkward questions. Any price, Mr President? Any burden? Any hardship? Can we put at least some limit on those? Does the price go as high as self-extinction? Impoverishment? Social disintegration? And what if our present friends change their minds and become our foes after we’ve armed them to the teeth? Are we certain their definition of liberty is the same as ours? And when you say ‘we’, do you mean yourself, your government or all of us? What if we, ‘the people’, feel differently from the way your royal ‘we’ does?
Alas, moderntiy breeds a populace incapable of asking such questions forcefully enough, if at all. Whether such unquestioning docility spills out into a tuneless rendition of Stars and Stripes or a mighty roar of Horst Wessel is only a matter of the time, place and response desired by the demagogue.
Thus Americans, and we along with them, nod their assent when fed reassurances that we aren’t fighting Islam. We’re fighting Islamism, of the kind that makes its adherents fly planes into tall buildings. Such reassurances are either mendacious or ignorant, or usually both. In any modern war, agression is initiated by the impassioned and empowered elite, not the people at large. It wasn’t, for example, the German people who started the war, but the Nazi elite. But this irrefutable consideration didn’t prevent that original Eurosceptic Sir Arthur Harris from doing what had to be done.
What would John Q Adams do if he were alive today? Assuming he still kept his principles, he wouldn’t embark on the futile task of building nations at the cost of thousands of American lives — and millions in the nations being built. He’d also know enough about the history of Islam to know it’s an aggressive creed, with world domination built into its doctrinal DNA. That hasn’t changed in the last 1,400 years and is unlikely to change in the next thousand. What has been variable is the West’s ability to ‘champion and vindicate’ its own freedom. This is now at its lowest ebb, and the current bellicosity of Americans assisted by their satraps (well, us) only serves to underscore this fact, not to deny it.
If they set themselves the task that’s sound ethically, intellectually and morally — that of protecting their rather tasteless architecture against planes cum bombs — they could do a much better job of it by relying on punitive prevention rather than sanctimonious, laser-guided lessons in democracy. It would be simple enough to declare that the West is not going to take issue with what goes on within the Muslim world. If they choose to castrate their women, maim their thieves or stone their adulterers, they should by all means go ahead (we can’t stop them anyway). But any act of terrorism against any Western country will result in massive, and Harris-style indiscriminate, retaliation. That could take the form of confiscation (rather than merely freezing) of all Muslim assets in the West, massive bombing raids on the sites dear to their rulers’ hearts, occupation of the oil fields, economic blocade (as opposed to limp-wristed sanctions), you name it. Whatever works.
The lines would be clearly drawn, the measures prepared in advance and put into a trip-up mode, we’d all know where we stand. But to act this way the West has to regain its erstwhile self-confidence, its certainty that it stands for the God-given truth, not something as transient and nebulous as ‘democracy’. Yes, and pigs will fly, though of course not to the Middle East.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking of founding a new lobby, the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism. Can I count on you as a member?