| Monday, June 24, 2002 |
14:53 - What it all comes down to is...
http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_06_23_armedndangerous_archive.html#78108401
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Eric Raymond has the third part of his piercing look at Islam posted.
We will not be prepared to win the war against Islamic terror until we understand the following things:
- Islam is a religion of war and conversion by the sword, not peace.
- The primary threat of terrorism comes from Arabs and middle-easterners between the ages of fifteen and forty, and we must summon the will to profile accordingly.
- We are dealing with religious fanaticism rather than rational grievances against America or the West.
- Our enemies cannot be reasoned with or appeased anywhere short of surrender and submission to shari'a law.
- Apologists for mainstream Islam are systematically lying to us about Islamic doctrine in order to shield terrorists who they know are acting in strict accordance with that doctrine.
The hardest challenge for Americans is to grasp is the fact that the evil of the 9/11 hijackings, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the threat of al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction set off in American cities is not simply the evil of al-Qaeda. It is in fact the Koranically-correct expression of the tendency of Islam (Sunni fundamentalism) which is has been pre-eminent through most of Islamic history and now encompasses over 90% of the worlds Muslims.
We need to face the fact that we are confronting not just a barbaric and evil group of men, but a barbaric and evil religion. To protect ourselves, we must either force the complete reform of Islam (purging it of jihadism and its tendency towards periodic fundamentalist outbreaks) or destroy its hold over its followers...
To win the war on terror, we must understand jihadism and clearly distinguish it from ethical self-defense. We must be prepared not merely to counter fanaticism not merely by killing the fanatical in self-defense, but also by discrediting the doctrines and habits of thought that make fanatics in the first place -- whether they occur in the other guy's religion or our own. Islam has declared itself the immediate adversary of modernity -- but more than one world religion will have to go under the knife before our children can sleep in peace.
Pause a bit. Let this all sink in.
Ready? Good. Let's move on.
What Raymond is saying, then-- and what more and more people in the blogosphere, like Mike Hendrix, are coming to terms with-- is that our terrible choice is becoming clearer with each passing day. We must choose one of exactly two options:
- Surrender utterly to the will of fundamentalist Islam, or
- Destroy religion.
That's right... that's what it comes down to. The sad, tragic fact is that no matter how we try to rationalize the things that are happening in the world, we're on the brink of something unspeakably huge. We're engaged not in a war of economics or oil or land or oppression. We're engaged in perhaps the most significant war in all human history, a war of ideals-- on the one side, science and reason and secular humanism (which for lack of a better catch-all concept I'll call "science")... and on the other side, religion and blind faith and fanaticism and superstition (which for lack of a better catch-all concept I'll call "religion").
We've been fighting this war on the popular level for hundreds of years now, ever since the Renaissance and the rise of the middle class in Europe. Before that time, there was no science-- that was the realm of alchemists and ancient Greeks, and only those results of it that were irrefutable became codified by the religious incumbents, and what was left over was dismissed and shunned. Why not, after all? It's not like it really offered any answers that were better than what the priests had.
But times are different now. Scientific thought is respected, not distrusted-- it has taken us to the moon and fired nuclear power plants. It has leveled Japanese cities and given us flying buses that carry thousands of people around the world every day. None of these very tangible advances owe the slightest thing to the old religious thinkers, whose only purpose now seems to be to tell us which of those advancements we're allowed to use and which we aren't. They can't create anything of their own except rules.
We've been fighting minor skirmishes in this conflict now throughout the history of our country, getting more and more frequent with each new advancement. Roe vs. Wade. Brown vs. Board of Education. Free-speech issues polarize those who want the right to speak against those who want to suppress it, and in most cases these tiny debating figures cast vast shadows on the back walls of the hall: the shadows of these two forces that we're now beginning to see for what they are. The two biggest ideas humans have ever had.
These two ideas have never lived pleasantly together. But now their disagreements have reached a fever pitch; religion has fired the first shot of the full-scale war in the form of the jetliners in New York, and science must now decide whether to fight back or whether to back down and give up all of its hard-earned gains.
I don't think it's going to do so. As anathema as it is for a true follower of Islam to refuse the call to jihad as stated in the Koran, it is just as much so for science to retreat from what it knows to be true. And so the two sides are going to dig in and make their stand, preparing for a pitched battle that will begin just as soon as the participants become willing to accept the magnitude of this war and the choices we are going to have to make.
Those of us who see where this is all going tend to be agnostics and students of science (the two concepts are very much intertwined-- science is founded on logic and the ability to observe facts, and so by definition a scientist cannot "know" that there is or is not a God). We recognize the importance of religion in helping people to live their daily lives, to see beauty in an otherwise dreary and stark world, to hope for something to reward them for a life of hardships and struggle. It's a powerful human tendency, and we're not immune to its allure. Some of the best scientists I've known have been devoutly religious; to them, math and physics reveal part of God's mind and thereby a beauty unfathomable by ordinary humans. You know what? We believe that too; only we have different names that we give God. It's all to do with how we envision our roles in the Universe and how we go about unlocking the mysteries around us. God, to most of us, is that best part of each of us-- that piece of ourselves that makes us want to be good human beings and bring hope and light to our world. Nathan Lane's Catholic priest character in Jeffrey described it as a bunch of people at a picnic, batting a balloon around. Every time the balloon is just about to touch the ground... someone always reaches out to tap it back up. That balloon-- that's God.
But there's a big difference between that balloon and religious fanaticism. And that's what we have now come to realize is the enemy like none we have ever faced before. Organized religion, the drive to band together in huge groups and follow to the letter a document that advocates fiery and bloody death to nonbelievers-- that's the opposite of God; it's the absolute antithesis of what religion at its best is supposed to be about. And ever since September 11, we have known exactly what happens when religious fanaticism gains enough power on a global scale to take literally the prophetic words that call believers to arms. I've been writing since that day about how 9/11 is not a crime perpetrated merely by Muslim extremists, but by religion in general-- fundamentalist fanaticism of any stripe that decides that the threat posed by freedom and science and reason makes those things a worthy target for horrific fiery jihad. It happened to be the Muslims in this phase of history. In another, it could have been the Christians or the Jews or the Buddhists. When religion ceases to be one's personal relationship with God and becomes a cause worth dying for, then the true face of evil takes shape.
That is what attacked us in September. That is what is readying more attacks on us for the near future. And that is what we must realize is the enemy that we've been building ourselves up to fight for centuries. Galileo, Newton, Martin Luther, Copernicus, Franklin, Jefferson, Adam Smith, Lincoln, Watson and Crick, Einstein-- It's all been for this coming confrontation; the one that will define the future of humanity.
According to Mike,
But what if the unthinkable might possibly be true? What if the problem is not restricted access to the fruits of life in a relatively free and secular society, but a deeply-rooted and (in the case of Muslim fundamentalists) religion-mandated opposition to a free and secular society itself? A hatred and mistrust of the things we assume everybody naturally desires? At that point, the sanctified liberal idea of the sameness and unity of all human beings, no matter their culture or philosophy, falls apart. And, in falling apart, the liberal ideal leaves us with a bigger and more insuperable moral hole to fill in: how do you defend yourself against that which you cannot even comprehend? How does a society, any society, defend itself against an enemy it cannot or will not recognize? When even the validity of the concept of having an "enemy" in the first place is questioned, what do you do when the guns start firing and the bombs start going off in your neighborhood?
That's when we start having to choose sides for good. Those who refuse to come down on one side or the other aren't going to benefit from either side's victory. But in the meantime, they're the ones who are keeping us from seeing the real scale of this battle-- a scale that the other side already sees all too clearly. They're already operating on that scale. They're already attuned to images like giant buildings falling down in columns of fire. But we weren't, and we still aren't. That's why disbelief that 9/11 could have happened still hangs over us, and now takes the form of wishing to think of it as a fluke, a freakish aberration in history that nobody-- not even the enemy-- could countenance doing again.
That's just it, though. They can do it again, and they will. It will likely take another attack on the order of 9/11 or bigger to make us see that.
Fortunately, we on the side of science/reason/freedom have an advantage: the things that we believe in work. Science is on our side, and rewards us in ways that Allah does not reward his followers. We're the ones creating the weapons; the other side merely benefits from our ability to provide them. So in the long term, if we decide to escalate this war to the level that the fanatics believe they've already taken it, we will win. But only if we do acknowledge that those are the stakes.
Go to www.islam.org, where you will find a poll that shows you that the vast majority of the site's users believe that the "war on terror" is really, and has always been, a War on Muslims (or a War on Islam). They've been of this mind since the Eleventh. No matter how loudly we tried to proclaim that what we were fighting was terrorism, the enemy used every opportunity to give us to know that they considered Islam to be the victim of our retaliation. That troubled us deeply at the time. It still feels viscerally wrong. But the fact is that Muslims have felt themselves to be under attack ever since 9/11 because they had every reason to expect that they would be-- in terms of jihad, it was absolutely sensible for the West to declare war not on terrorism but on Islam itself. That makes jihad all the more righteous.
And so in turning to face the realities of this upcoming war and stare it in the eyes, we are going to have to ready not only our technology and our science in our defense, but we will have to use the very strengths of freedom and secularism to bolster them on the side where we are specifically being attacked. We have words. We have the ability to use words in a way that they're not allowed to, in a way that they can't fathom. We can barrage the world with ideas. We can blog to the high heavens. We can use flowery and poetic language like Suleiman Abu Gheith and friends. We can parody and satire and Photoshop our way into the minds of anybody with eyes and ears. We can fight on their terms, using the same ideological weapons that they use-- plus a little of our own poison of reason and logic-- to shatter any house of cards that they build up in front of themselves.
They want to fight a war of symbols? They think destroying the World Trade Center will make the United States incapable of trading with the world? Ha-- we'll show them what destroying a symbol is all about.
We've endured the WTC's destruction with anger and sorrow, but without a mosquito's wing's worth of damage to our strength as a nation or our financial power or our core values of freedom and reason. Can Islam withstand the destruction of the Ka'aba with the same resolve and stolid strength?
No, we probably won't actually do this. But can Islam risk it? Is that gamble worth this price-- is the destruction of another American symbol that important? And what symbol do they think will be more important to us than the World Trade Center and its 2833 civilian victims?
Our weapons are poised, and all we need is an excuse. Maybe posing a non-ignorable threat on their own terms, as in the picture at the right, will force a stalemate-- and a stalemate is the best we can hope for at this stage. But once we have the go-ahead to fire, we'll be committing to the greatest war of ideas this world has ever witnessed. It truly will be Armageddon.
UPDATE: Steven den Beste wrote about these issues, just five days after the attacks; he puts it in the terms that Theocracy is just the latest in a string of forms of authoritarianism which we have fought and will conquer: Slavery, Monarchy, Fascism, Communism. I wonder, though, whether Theocracy is possibly the oldest of all these (except possibly Slavery)-- and the most potentially upsetting to humanity as a whole when we engage it in war?
Also, den Beste's essay doesn't go to the extreme of our having to attack Islam, by name, on its own terms. That's something we're only just now seeming to want to discuss.
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