Posted on 01/04/2004 11:01:15 AM PST by quidnunc
I'm thinking the unthinkable as the New Year opens.
That is, that world terrorism may win its war against the western democracies and our civilization will be replaced by barbarianism.
It's a tough thought a very tough thought.
But remember, Imperial Rome wasn't destroyed by a superior race, but by nomadic German tribes, living in caves.
Yet how can such a militarily-strong and advanced civilization such as we have today lose against disparate wild-eyed fanatics and rogue nations?
Ponder Vietnam: Here we had one of the world's two superpowers, the United States of America, going up against hit-and-run bandits.
The U.S.A. lost.
With all its conventional military might, it couldn't beat the guerrilla squads of Ho Chi Minh.
True, the U.S. never went full throttle against Communist North Vietnam.
The bureaucrats in Washington refused to let the military pull out all the stops.
Had Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater been elected in 1964, Hanoi would have been a pile of dust in days and the war over. But average Americans didn't have the stomach for that.
Ponder Kenya:
In the 1950s, the British were driven out of Kenya by a bunch of terrorists called the Mau-Mau, led by Jomo Kenyatta.
The Brits had military superiority in Kenya traditional military superiority but couldn't tackle Kenyatta's own hit-and-run guerrilla squads. Exhausted, the Brits capitulated.
Ponder Yugoslavia: In the Second World War, Yugoslav partisans held down several German divisions for years by constant and unrelenting harassment. Some historians feel if those divisions had been freed up the outcome of the war might have been far different.
Ponder Israel:
Every single day it is under attack from its internal enemies.
A husband and wife go off to work in the morning and don't know if they'll return home at night.
When their children go off to school in the morning, they don't know if they will return in the afternoon.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at canoe.ca ...
A better way to put it might be, "democratic, Constitutional Republic."
This is naive thinking considering the prevailing wisdom at the time was to fight wars of proxy to in the West's contest with the Soviet Block rather than risk all out nuclear war. How soon many forget the gloom that prevailed over a potential nuclear war.
Rome lives today in our modern system of government...the Senate, rights of citizens, etc.
What about those barbarians?
Where are they now?
Rome survived, they did not.
So its a felony to vote?
I hear its a felony to believe in the Constitution as well
This article could be construed as the same so you better have your post pulled so you wont be mixed in with people who believe in such Constitutional things as free speech and protecting our country !
A flyer from our own FBI says were terrorists to be on the lookout for people like us were terrorists in our own country because of our beleifs
I think you're too generous. Kind of a painful read, actually. Cave-dwelling German nomads? Historical parallels between the Viet Cong and the Jihadists? (Never mind the fact that we did defeat the VC and the NVA only won through an armored blitzkrieg, not a guerrilla war). The only real similarity the author is able to squeeze out of this historical toffee act is that people willing to die for their cause sometimes win. And sometimes not - witness the kamikaze in WWII. This is achingly superficial analysis by someone who wants to scare us, not convince us.
Could our people and our societies have the fortitude to survive such day-by-day threats to our lives.[?]
Suicide bombers in our shopping malls, restaurants, bars and buses.
Personally, I doubt it.
What would actually happen, at least in the United States, is that not a single mosque would be left standing and those individuals who were even suspected of Islamist terrorism would be swinging from lamp-posts without a trial. The only reason it hasn't happened that way in Israel is that unlike the U.S. they do not have oceans between them and their source of troubles.
The issue of what happens in response to suicide war is dealt with at some length in Victor David Hanson's Ripples of Battle, in his exposition on Okinawa. In fact, suicide warriors tend to lose a lot. What they end up doing is enraging the other side and making the war even more savage. And that is precisely what will happen if the Islamists decide to take suicide bombing campaigns into the United States. Folks, we're not even mad, yet.
True, a lone superpower will be defeated from within not from without.. Vietnam was a symptom hopefully heeded and Ann Coulters portrait of a very real Trojan Horse("in treason") will relegated as hyperbole at deadly risk...
This girls a genius.. put her finger smack on on the most important weakness to western civization currently.. America's granting the right to outright obvious treason as a some kind of freedom... because when america goes, so does western culture.. World culture emerges.. with all the well documented errors of socialism.. Europe is already compromised past redemption..
Fantastic post! A keeper. Unfortunately, you are very correct.
The above just an excerpt. Recommend that all read marron's extremely cogent post #33.
I didn't want to go off on a tangent. My sole point was we could have won the Viet Nam war militarily with conventional weapons.
One thing that I should have added: many people today have the attitude of "why should I care, it doesn't effect me." They are so completely self-absorbed that don't get angry about anything unless it negatively effects them personally. Otherwise, forget it. There's the massive loss of the sense that we're all in this big boat called America together.
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