What’s Wrong With The World Part XV—Craven
Craven
The third glimmering that came to me that the rot was deeper than it seemed came in the year 2001 after September 11th.
The World Trade Center attack, and many others of its kind, were acts of war by the most dishonorable and despicable enemy in the history of warfare: an enemy indeed that not only was unwilling and unable to face our fighting men in combat, but which went out of its way to attack the weakest, most helpless, and most inoffensive of victims, women, children, and civilians—and even then was not willing to attack the weak in a face to face match, but only attacking by surprise and ambush, without warning or parley, at targets chosen only for propaganda value, not military value.
To add Orwellian dishonesty to dishonor, the enemy refers to their gruesome henchmen, who violate their own religious law by committing suicide, as ‘martyrs’ — a word that among sane people means someone who is the victim of violence, dying at the hands of oppressors rather than repudiate his faith; the word does not mean an oppressor, driven mad by hate to the point where he destroys himself merely to mar a non-military target and wound the innocent.
Having been soundly and deeply bored and annoyed by the super-hyperbolically over-exaggerated accusations of the Moderns that an utterly imaginary boogieman Theocracy was hounding and persecuting them, I confess I was curious (once 9/11 brought the Jihad sharply into the public view) at how the Moderns were to react to an utterly real and undeniably present Theocracy, who both announced and carried out acts of terror in order to hound and persecute them.
Conservatives are accused of oppressing women on the grounds that we don’t want women to murder babies in the womb. Some Conservatives are even so bold as to dare suggest that both sexes are happier when each side fulfills their traditional roles, roles which are based on rational and practical, if not biological and psychological, considerations of the strengths and weakness of each. Some conservatives argue that a society that encourages pornography and fornication and no-fault divorce ends up exploiting and demeaning women by demoting them from wives and mothers into Heffnerian sex-bunnies. Such is the extent of conservative oppression.
One would think that the modern fascist Mohammedans, who actually do oppress women, not only by opposition to prenatal infanticide, but also by dressing them in head-to-toe trashbag-looking garments, by beating them, by mutilating female genitalia in order to deprive their daughters of the possibility of sexual pleasure, by stoning adulteresses, by murdering rape victims, by murdering victims of scandal, by murdering wives and daughters for any other reasons, or by dismembering women them for wearing nail polish, by killing women for reading books or visiting soccer games, and so on and so on, would be subjected to excoriation of all those same feminists who excoriate the Conservatives. The modern fascist-style Mohammedans actually do what Christians are accused of doing, and do many other barbarisms and brutal acts against women no Christian man ever contemplates.
I awaited the outpouring of outrage from the perennially outraged.
Instead I heard crickets chirruping.
Instead I heard handwringing over whether or not it was right to fly the American flag, and I heard self-righteous condemnation of flying the American flag, as such signs of patriotism in wartime were divisive and provocative. Instead I heard that George Bush and other world leaders rushed to Mosques on 9/12, to assure the world that they admired and respected Islam, and all of the (alleged) contributions to world peace and world progress that savage religion boasted. Instead I heard that the head of NASA had a new job; instead of shooting rockets into outer space, his mission was to build up the self-esteem of Muslims by pretending the Middle East had made contributions to the aerospace sciences. To fly the flag or to fail to pretend Muslims deserved praise for utterly imaginary accomplishments would be to create more terrorists and may provoke violence.
Instead I was regaled by the oft repeated tale that the Coalition forces marching against the terror masters in the Middle East were merely stirring up more enemies, creating the problem. I was warned that opposing the enemy may provoke violence.
Instead I heard that the Danish Cartoon riots inspired book publishers and television producers to accept the de facto Islamic censorship of images, words, and programs, rather than stir up trouble. Opposing the censorship may provoke violence.
Instead I heard the Michael Savage, radio talk show host, is not allowed to travel into Great Britain, for the same reason that Geert Wilders, Dutch PM, is not allowed. To speak honestly about Islam is “too controversial” and may provoke violence.
Instead I heard that the Spain was pulling out of the Coalition, because her trainlines had been bombed; the that British government was busily cautioning Her Majesty’s loyal subjects to pull down statues of Florentine Boars in Derby, and to cease flying the Union Jack, not to do and not to do whatever else the hair-trigger sensitivity of Muslim madness might demand. It may provoke violence.
Instead I heard that to fight the war was to provoke the enemy, ergo our only safety lay in immediate surrender, indeed, pre-emptive surrender. (The fact that surrender was to be proffered to a foe who has publicly and repeatedly announced he does not want our surrender was unworthy of notice. The reality-based community was unwilling or unable to notice that the Jihadists are not the Danes. They do not want the danegeld. They are not fighting us to get something out of us. They are fighting us to kill us.)
I listened for the outrage of the eternally outraged to condemn, when it happened in reality, at Muslim hands, what these eternally Outraged eternally but baselessly claimed to fear from Christian hands. The Boy Who Cried Wolf had cried wolf so often, that when I real wolf appeared, I expected to hear the Boy cry even louder.
Instead I heard that the Beltway Snipers were angry white males, not Jihadists. Instead I heard that the Fort Hood shootings were prompted by pre-post traumatic stress disorder, and that to blame Major Hasan’s religious leanings for the act of Jihad will only create more victims and may provoke violence. Instead I heard that the failed attempts by the crotchbomber and the Time Square truck bomber were no doubt perpetrated by Tea Party Members, angry white males and not Jihadists.
I was more than utterly aghast to hear this endless litany of utter unreality coming again and again from the pens and lips of the Left. This is not the Far Left, either, not the ultra-Marxist extremists: these entirely psychotic yet delusional ravings come from the leadership of the Democrat party, men of sober and responsible character. They were constitutionally and perennially unable and unwilling to recognize their avowed enemies.
When confronted by the enemy, the only enemy they perceived or could perceive included George W. Bush, the sinister Republican Party, the even more sinister Tea Party movement, and the most sinister Theocracy.
How could anyone one innocently mistake the enemy, not once, not twice, but forever and aye, so that no matter what the Jihadists do or say, the only enemy the Modern mind sees is the angry white male?
What in the world could make a sober and sane man utter such utter inanity, insanity, asininity, bosh, blather, tripe, twiddle, twaddle, piffle, puke, prate, jabberwocky, fiddlefaddle and flapdoodle?
The phenomenon of utter disconnection from reality is complex, and has many causes, some psychological, some political, but one of them, the primary one, is merely craven and loathsome cowardice.
The punks are afraid.
These Left-leaning so-called self-congratulatory “warriors bold” of liberty who are always willing to insult Bush or shout out a swearword in order to stick it to the Man and to encourage the cause of Freedom of Speech and Liberty of Conscience, are, in the final analysis, lard-assed pushovers, wimps, and sissies.
In the most powerful nation on Earth, protected by the most deadly and efficient and destructive military in world history—indeed, the most deadly military imaginable, since the US arsenal includes sufficient nuclear and biochemical weapons to render the biosphere uninhabitable—the cowards are afraid.
They are too afraid even to name the name of the enemy.
Even when confronting acts which are merely symbolic, and form no real threat, such as, for example, the insolent insult of building a Mosque at Ground Zero—the Mohammedans always erect Mosques at the site of their victorious battles—the Modern man cannot summon the intestinal fortitude, the patriotism, the cultural confidence, the balls, the brass, the grit, the gumption to meet the smirking perpetrator of the insult with a calm and curt “No.”
“No, you should not dare to desecrate the memory of our honored dead; no, you should not dare to spit on our flag or trample the crucifix; no, we will not forget that you seek to hand the enemy a propaganda victory in war— especially in this war, a terror war, which by its nature consists of no military victories, but only of propaganda victories.”
How hard is that to say? For a coward, infinitely hard.
In case you think I am slandering them, let us read the words of TIME Magazine on this very issue: “… a national political fight conducted on [these] terms … will lead to a chain reaction at home and abroad that will have one winner — the very extreme and violent jihadists we all can claim as our true enemy.”
(http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2010923,00.html#ixzz0wtKwq61X)
In other words, the enemy, if denied a propaganda victory, will be provoked.
It does not seem to occur to these enlightened pacifists that the enemy is already sufficiently provoked to commit acts of terror-murder worldwide. To those who actually hear what the enemy publicly announces, the provocation has nothing whatsoever to do with this generation or any of its doings: the enemy is provoked due to military losses in Andalusia in 1492, before the New World was even discovered. The enemy is provoked by Moses. The enemy is provoked by Christ.
And what do we hear instead of a calm and curt “No” to the foe? The self-righteous have decided that to oppose the Ground Zero Mosque is bigotry. (These are the same people who said that to enforce boarder security in Arizona is bigotry, to amend the Constitution of California to define marriage as marriage is bigotry, to join the Tea Party and object to government overspending is bigotry, and to demand government regulation of semi-governmental banks and lenders such as Freddie and Fannie is bigotry.) Ad hominem ad nauseam.
The argument that fighting a war might provoke the enemy was often disguised as the argument that, even as Athens was driven to ruin by overreach when she assaulted Syracuse while engaged in a war with Sparta, so also America while engaged in a war with the Taliban dared not provoke allegedly moderate Muslims. The argument, if true, assumes that there is a group of moderate Muslims willing to attack us or aid our attackers if our firemen fly the American flag or if the British park service maintains an ancient statue of a boar in Darby, who are unwilling to attack us or aid our attackers if we avoid such provocations, but instead flatter the nonexistent Muslim aerospace accomplishments and praise the nonexistent Muslim contributions to the writing of the US Constitution, and have our Christian presidents go to pray to Mosques, and have the Muslim call to pray ring out over the burnt and bloodstained bits of bone left in the ground at Ground Zero from a nearby Mosque.
Obviously, the peace and goodwill of creatures willing to attack us if we fly the flag yet willing to live in peace with us if we trumpet their god’s call to prayer over the innocent dead murdered in the name of their god is peace and goodwill only a craven coward would seek, by our own repeated displays of weakness, to purchase.
I can only speculate as to the ultimate causes of nationwide and eon-long lack of fortitude. Perhaps it is that with no belief in an afterlife, and no loyalty to anything grander or larger than their sexual organs, the Modern secularists live in utmost terror of death. Spoiled brats, they live in anxious fear that their lives might include the discomforts, privation, terror, pain, not to mention the selflessness and sacrifice of war.
But since the Jihadists actually threaten them with death, I cannot explain why the Modern is and continues to be possessed of hair-pulling, voice-hoarsening, eye-rolling, convulsions of fear and terror of the Theocracy of the Judo-Christians, and not only unafraid of the Jihadists, but willing to spill national security secrets to help them, willing to send over human shields to guard their bomb-sights, willing to work tirelessly and without pay for the eventual victory of the world Caliphate and the imposition of Muslim law, including laws abolishing abortion, sodomy, adultery, and intoxication, including laws abolishing all the civil rights and privileges the Moderns allege they defend.
Ayn Rand offers a very simple and clear explanation: they want to die. The useful idiots of the political and social Left are eagerly seeking a way to destroy civilization, the economy, their freedoms and yours, because they seek death due to an un-admitted, subliminal and secret death-wish.
While this indeed does fit all the facts — (there are still Liberals today who defend the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, agents of a Communist Empire devoted resolution to the death of all Liberals worldwide; there are countless Liberals whose loyalties are as self-destructive and self-defeating as those of a German Jew fiercely loyal to the Nazi Party) — I dismiss the Randian explanation as both facile and non-disprovable. I do not think it is merely death, bodily death, that the Modern Minds seeks. They fight too bravely in the cause of the enemy for that. I speculate that the Moderns want the destruction of their very existence, their souls, their essential selfhood.
I suspect, quite simply, that the Modern man wants to have no center, no heart, no mind, no soul.
The Modern man is not even as dignified as a hedonist or an epicurean: those philosophers at least recognized that short-term, vain and destructive pleasures must be eschewed in order to seek pleasures rightly understood, which are moderate, long-term and self-sustaining pleasures. No, the Modern is a sub-epicurean: the pleasures he seeks are the short and self-destructive ones, precisely because self-destruction is the goal.
I part company from Ayn Rand only in that I think the self-destruction craved is spiritual, not physical, which is a category Ayn Rand’s philosophy does not recognize.
Haunted by guilt and shame, these Moderns are uneasy around anything that exposes them for the bullies and cowards that they are. Haunted by the knowledge that they are foolish and ignorant, they are filled with discontent and helpless fury when anything and anyone who acts like an educated, intelligent, or responsible adult in the public eye.
Hypnotized, drugged, and enamored by airy visions of ecologically safe gender-neutral socialist Utopia on Earth, days when all men shall be as long lived as the inhabitants of Shangri-La, and as stuffed with wealth and ease as inhabitants of Cockaigne, and as peaceful and pure and blessed as the inhabitants as Eden, the Modern man is repelled by any talk of reality, of necessary evil, particularly that horrifically real and necessary evil called war. Modern man is hence addicted to visions.
When one is addicted to unreality, one is allergic to reality: even a small whiff of reality will set off the weeping and sneezing fits of mindless rage and content-free sarcasm which passes for ratiocination among intellectuals. The fit lasts until everyone in range is called a bigot, and then it subsides until next time. Like all allergies, ever smaller whiffs of the pollen or cat hair trigger the rash.
The cowards do not want to be brave, do not want to have fortitude nor stoicism nor dignity nor forbearance. They want to be cowards. They want to be afraid.
Philosophy, neither the studies of Aristotle, nor the hortatory of Epictetus, nor the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, has anything to say to those who do not believe that the subject matter of their studies, exhortations nor meditations exist. These ancient philosophers believe that there is such a thing as the virtue called fortitude, and that it was both served the duty of man and served the happiness of man to find and practice fortitude. The idea that cowards want to be cowards, and would be encouraged and lauded and applauded for this defect, was one never in the contemplation of any of these noble pagan sages.
Why do moderns want to be cowards? It is because they want to be victims; they think victimhood grants them moral superiority without the effort or practice of virtue. You cannot tell a coward that bravery will increase his long term chances of survival and happiness if he despises happiness and seeks not to survive. His unhappiness gives him the right to complain, as if from the stance of moral superiority, about his people more moral than himself. That is his true goal: to assume the high ground of moral superiority in order to quell the whisper of the conscience.
Cowardice is a vice, an ingrained habit of the passions, not something that a man can be talked out of. It is not a matter of a wrong conclusion, but rather a matter of wrong habituation. It requires not just years, but accumulated centuries of custom, law, peer pressure, not to mention the sanction of religion and the respect for the heroic dead, to ingrain into the selfish heart men naturally have that selflessness called courage: and it requires a more than ordinary strength of character to maintain that quiet and longsuffering form of courage known as fortitude.
A society that despises its saints and heroes and admires its sinners and villains cannot teach its young the art of courage.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
