| Friday, June 21, 2002 |
14:24 - There is a difference
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With this weekend's Lileks Screed in mind, and after meandering through a few discussions in blogland (the latest of which express fresh outrage over the death of Gal, the sweet-faced little girl at the bottom of today's Bleat), I find that the biggest ideological confrontation going on these days seems to be between the outrage of people who want to see the Palestinians defeated (and then rewarded with a state, as with Japan), and the caution of people who see such talk as being tantamount to Naziism.
I tell you, though, I'm getting awfully sick of that accusation. Especially coming from people whose forebears didn't exactly take such caution to heart themselves.
There is a fundamental difference between American public anger against Islamic fundamentalism, and Nazi anti-Semitism. I would have thought that was obvious, but apparently it's not. Evidently the very fact that our enemies seem to speak a common language and worship the same God is enough to make any attack upon them, even a self-defensive one, "racist" and therefore the work of evil monsters.
Take another look, if you will, at Michael Trossman's post from a few days ago-- or read it now if you missed it the first time. Consider how it was that Hitler came to power. Consider the national mood that codified anti-Semitism into law. And imagine that happening in America today with Muslims.
Doesn't really work, does it?
No, because the situations are entirely different.
Hitler wanted to kill the Jews because-- well, because of a personal grudge, evidently. Because it would help him leverage the will of the people to vault himself into power-- find a cheap and easy scapegoat, something that the country can feel that it's "cleansing" itself of by scouring it from within themselves, after which they can consider themselves "pure". Hitler's method was to dig up old racial libels, make propagandistic films, play on Germany's humiliation in the aftermath of WWI, and create a mythological "fatherland" that didn't really exist yet-- but that was only because of this one straw-man obstacle, this enemy-in-our-midst, which-- if they're rounded up and wiped out-- means that the German people would become the rightful inheritors of the Earth.
An ingenious plan, and one that came damned close to working, too.
But for anybody to claim that that's the motivation of the Americans who want to see an end brought to militant Islam-- well, that takes a person with an agenda, an anti-American axe to grind. Because even the most perfunctory glimpse can reveal that it isn't the case.
If America were to go to war against Islam-- a far-fetched concept in itself, because no matter how much proof were offered to the world community of Islam's harmful nature with respect to the modern planet, nobody would endorse us in it-- we would be doing it with deep regret, searching desperately for an alternative right up to the very last minute. We would destroy only the most strategic targets, taking only the bare minimum of lives necessary to remove the threat posed by those who consider 9/11 only to be the first stroke in a grand holy war. We would stop attacking the instant it became clear that the threat had been neutralized in a way that would last. (If that ends up meaning that all of Islam has to be undermined, well, we would deeply regret that too-- but it isn't our fault that Islam was founded with the principles that it was. It predates us. And so we won't stop short of that goal if that's what it takes.)
Hitler took on the Jews for no good reason-- where were the Jewish suicide bombers in Munich and Dresden? Where were the angry Jewish mobs calling for German blood? Where were the militant Jewish factions preaching a bloody end to the European races? Nowhere. Hitler simply needed a scapegoat for political gain, and the Jews were a convenient target. Hitler hated the Jews for ideological and political reasons, not for living historical ones. He hated the Jews for what they were, not for anything they did.
And that's what made his racism evil.
But we are going to war out of self-defense. We've been attacked, and we know that more attacks are coming-- they've only been prevented so far by intense efforts both at home and abroad. It's a sad fact that our enemy is a race, or more accurately (and more troublesome), a religion-- how do we target that enemy without being "racist"? We're bound to get these accusations, but that's the magnitude of the dichotomy that's been thrust upon us. It's really that big a decision to have to make.
We're on the brink of a new sea change in thought regarding race, religion, fascism, democracy, and the like, on the same scale as the one that Hitler brought to the world-- if World War II marked the beginning of the age of the sensibilities we've all known (tolerance, political correctness, anti-discrimination, the "Noble Redman", and the big enemy being Communism), 9/11 has marked the beginning of a new age that's just as important to recognize. A history book written in the year 3000 will use the same bold-face heading to describe World War II and whatever 9/11 has now touched off.
And now, while al Qaeda regroups in countries surrounding Afghanistan and plots the Next Big Move, the Palestinians prove that giving them their own state is not only no longer deserved, but a grave strategic error both in military and cultural terms-- and we have to put up with people who look at five-year-old Palestinian girls deliberately put into the line of Israeli fire and accidentally killed by ricocheting debris (and mourned by Israelis), and five-year-old Israeli girls shot through the head point-blank by Palestinian terrorists invading a home (and cheered by Palestinians)-- and claim that they're morally equivalent.
These are the same people who see the first tentative steps taken by America towards reining in Islam, and shout "Nazi!" at the top of their lungs. They're the people who tell pollsters that they'd be willing to dodge the draft, because, y'know, that means we'd be fighting for The Man and stuff, y'know? They're the people who think that understanding the answer to "Why do they hate us?" means we can pay someone some money, tweak a few buttons or levers in our global financial influence, and al Qaeda would become satisfied and go away. They're the people who say that "violence is not the answer" and talk of a "cycle of violence", as though if the Palestinians stopped blowing up bus stops and hotels, the IDF would keep bulldozing private homes. They're the people who claim that the Palestinian actions are the result of "desperation", when it's affluent and intelligent college students working on their master's theses who do the bombing these days, as happened in one of the recent attacks-- not the poor and desperate, as one might expect.
Some people just don't want to see the US get involved in another war-- even though it's painfully clear that we're already in one, whether we like it or not. We didn't start this one, no matter what "globalization" arguments are brought to bear-- but we will finish it. And we'll do so regardless of whether someone tries to invoke Godwin's Law on America's ass. It doesn't work that way. Thanks for playing.
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