Posted on 12/18/2002 9:46:05 AM PST by Marauder
The war on terror is a ploy. It's not real. It's not necessary. It's just a horror show meant to keep us all cowed and passive while the government has its way. The Bush administration keeps us quaking in our slippers, issuing periodic vague alerts as an elaborate justification for its agenda of plundering the environment, demonizing nonwhite undesirables, quashing our civil liberties and attacking foreign countries with impunity.
This is a view that many people, including certain prominent intellectuals and Hollywood yahoos, appear to share: We live in a culture of fear, for no apparent reason except that Big Brother wants it that way.
This came up recently at a dinner party I attended, where the prevailing view around the table seemed to be that this cartoon worldview as depicted in "provocateur" Michael Moore's film Bowling for Columbine was right.
"Why are we so afraid?" my companions asked. This struck me as an astounding question to pose in a post-Sept. 11 world, but one I nonetheless took seriously because these were intelligent, thoughtful people.
When I said the painfully obvious -- that we're afraid because little more than a year ago terrorists attacked us catastrophically on our own soil and that we're afraid because, duh, that's why they call it terrorism -- I was greeted by a series of incredulous "yeah buts."
Then it occurred to me that the problem wasn't that these people weren't aware of a terrorist threat, but that they didn't really believe in it anymore. Or that, like communism, it had become an amorphous chimera whose danger they doubted. They had forgotten what exactly about this new form of terrorism was so terrifying.
Maybe they need to be reminded. Maybe we all do.
Islamist terror should scare us for very good reasons, the primary one being that it is genocidal and not preventable, a lethal combination. Al-Qaida is bent on annihilating us (the Western infidels), and it is very close to having the means to do so.
Captured videos show al-Qaida operatives testing poison gas on dogs. We know that Osama bin Laden has tried to buy nuclear material on the black market. Although our enemies have obtained such weapons in the past, none before has been in a position to use them without facing retaliation. Mutually assured destruction has always been a deterrent to rogue nations.
Not so al-Qaida because its members are blithely homicidal (they do not spare civilians, even their own) as well as suicidal. More important, they no longer are state-sponsored. They are widely dispersed, largely untraceable and therefore, as an entity, mostly unpunishable and possibly even unstoppable.
The danger is apocalyptic. What's more, it's insidious and ubiquitous. The terrorist diaspora has spread across the world in covert cells from Indonesia, Central Asia, East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula to Lackawanna, N.Y., where authorities arrested six suspected al-Qaida operatives in September. They are indeed everywhere, around us and among us, striking randomly in New York City, Washington, D.C., Bali, Yemen, Kenya, Kuwait and Afghanistan and vowing more to come.
Is this fantasy? Is this paranoia? Hardly. Casualties are mounting on all sides, the enemy is invisible and we are the big fat designated target with nowhere to hide. I'd say we have cause to be very nervous.
This is not the Cold War. It's far worse. Yet leftists are approaching it in the same spirit of insouciant denial with which they once dismissed the threat of communist spies in our midst.
As access to Soviet archives has shown, they were wrong then. And they're wrong now. The evidence is in the rubble and the bodies.
This is the kind of information that we need to see published widely. The kind of pap that is spread by the wacky leftists is setting us up for real trouble.
BTW, I did a search on "Hollywood yahoos" and got no results, so I hope this isn't a redundant post.
Disagree.
A full-scale nuclear exchange with the USSR would have resulted in the complete destruction of the US and the killing of the vast majority of Americans.
Terrorists have nothing anywhere near the capability, and won't develop it anytime soon.
They can hurt the US badly, but they cannot destroy it.
Great element of truth in that statement. The dinner party chatter described is reminiscent of recounts of the British upper/ruling class discussing Hitler at their dinner parties. Their assumptions were catastrophically wrong, and conclusions as shallow as their character.
That's the problem with anything Hollywood attempts to get serious about, it comes out as shallow. Because it is.
I have a freind who, although I do not think that he is an extreme leftist by native inclination, has nevertheless bought into the whole Noam Chomskyite blame-America-for-everything nonesense. (He's Muslim, but of a moderate, Sufi bent. I think the radicalism has more to do with the non-Muslim American college students he hangs out with, and his involvement with yet more lefties through Amnesty International.)
When I asked this guy, during a discussion of Iraq, whether he didn't at least appreciate, leaving aside means, the fact of what had been accomplished in the liberation of Afghanistan, he totally shocked me by claiming that America had made things worse there. But the only good thing he could say about the Taliban was they had "brought stability". I didn't have the heart to tell him that this is exactly what people said (and truthfully) about HITLER.
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