New ping list for Islamic Jihad and terrorism. 3 pings per day, every day. Some from my old ping list are on by default.
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Posted on 11/21/2003 6:37:43 AM PST by Tolik
Fritz Kraemer died recently. What has this got to do with U.S. President George W. Bush's visit to London? Let me explain.
The monocle-wearing Professor Kraemer, a curious survivor of Wilhelmine Germany, and an accomplished scholar of international law, political philosophy and history, died of kidney failure at 95 in Washington on Sept. 8. It could be argued that his was the clearest mind behind the American prosecution of the Cold War against Soviet Communism. From a small office in the Pentagon, he taught a generation of U.S. officers not only the principles of geostrategic warfare, but the reasons why it must be fought and won.
Mr. Kraemer grasped that it takes more than superior manpower and firepower to defeat an ideologically driven enemy. He knew that geostrategic contests are determined as much by irrational and immaterial factors. He grasped that the great weakness of the United States and the West, after the defeat of Nazism, was identical with the great weakness of Germany that had allowed the rise of Hitler.
In each case, it is the existence of an intellectual elite who think about abstractions instead of realities, and whose instinct to appease a mortal enemy is founded in a lazy, cowardly, and conceited moral relativism. Mr. Kraemer was father to the phrase "provocative weakness" -- in two words, the reason why the West is under attack today from such terror networks as al-Qaeda.
The man was a miracle of nature. In the Germany of his early manhood, in the 1930s, he launched himself physically and fearlessly into demonstrations by both Brownshirts and Reds, as a streetfighting army of one.
He merits a full hagiography -- I invite readers to Google-search the obituaries -- but my purpose today is to juxtapose him with Henry Kissinger, whose intellectual mentor Mr. Kraemer was. Mr. Kraemer disowned his protege in the detente era of the 1970s.
He believed Mr. Kissinger guilty of spineless concessions to the political and intellectual zeitgeist. Mr. Kraemer was a man who believed in fighting for the truth -- regardless of consequences -- and of fighting with no option of surrender or even compromise with evil. He was no "mere conservative."
Donald Rumsfeld is his true protege in the U.S. government, and to a lesser extent so is Mr. Bush. These are men who realize the U.S., and all free peoples, has a mortal enemy in ideological Islamism, and that it must be defeated rather than accommodated.
This has made them deeply unpopular with the intelligentsia of our time, and especially with their half-educated reflection in the mass media. Europe and Canada are much farther down the rathole to surrender, but the U.S. also teeters.
As I write, anti-Bush demonstrations are cranking up in the London streets. Surprisingly, the most recent survey of British public opinion shows fully 62 per cent essentially pro-American -- despite the 24/7 barrage of anti-American malice in such media as the BBC. And Prime Minister Tony Blair has, so far, survived the political ordeal of standing with Mr. Bush, the Poles, the Australians and other allies against Islamo-fascism, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But there is hell to pay for this courageous position.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing -- and those with little knowledge of how the world unfolds demand that the U.S. and Britain give up defending themselves against the menace made visible on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. To what is apparently a majority of polling respondents on the European continent, little democratic Israel is the world's most dangerous country, and George W. Bush its most dangerous man.
What is interesting here, to those capable of taking a longer view, is the spectacle of history repeating itself -- less in outward events, than in inward structure. As in the 1930s, leftists and pacifists on the streets of Europe directly advanced the triumphs of Nazism, so today the demonstrators work to advance the triumphs of Islamism for they refuse to acknowledge the consequences of ignoring such an enemy.
And so the bombing of synagogues in Istanbul draws, from Britain's Stop the War Coalition, no whimper of distress. But the arrival in England of the western world's pre-eminent statesman ignites a self-righteous outcry; and the coalition's demonstrators directly aid potential terrorists by distracting the police from urgent security measures.
In their own subjective world of illusions, the demonstrators demand not surrender, but an unobtainable "peace." However, in the objective world of cause and effect, they are reliable allies of the people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, who blow up Jews in synagogues and supermarkets, who tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves.
The connection between present and past was well-made in an e-mail forwarded to me from an American Jew, returning from holiday in Europe. He wrote: "When my grandfather left Europe in 1937, the graffiti on the walls read, 'Jews go to Palestine.' Today the graffiti reads, 'Jews out of Palestine.' How soon Europe forgets."
Fritz Kraemer, that German refugee in the U.S., understood what Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were about. He had a reputation as a moral absolutist. Which means he refused to succumb to evil.
Read previous columns by David Warren at www.ottawacitizen.com
© The Ottawa Citizen 2003
If you want to bookmark his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/k-davidwarren/browse
His own website: http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/Comment/Nov03/index173.shtml
His page at the Ottawa Citizen: http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/columnists/davidwarren.html
New ping list for Islamic Jihad and terrorism. 3 pings per day, every day. Some from my old ping list are on by default.
On or off let me know by freepmail.
Easy on, easy off, via freepmail.
Yet there are plenty of nay-sayers out there who claim that the Public Schools aren't doing their job!
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