Orson Scott Card: The War of Stories [the story that we must tell to Muslim world]

The Ornery American ^ | August 8, 2004 | Orson Scott Card

[Tolik]

Links to 4 authors mentioned:

1. Lee Harris: Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History

Lee Harris essays posted here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=leeharris  His archive is at the TechCentralStation

Lee Harris classics. If you have time, read these articles:

essay Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology By Lee Harris (FR post)   "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," (original)

The Clausewitz Curse (FR post)             The Clausewitz Curse (original)
Given our uncertainty, what alternative does this, or any, administration have? 

 Our World-Historical Gamble  (FR post)           Our World-Historical Gamble (original)
The collapse of the liberal order and the end of classical sovereignty.

 The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing  http://www.policyreview.org/dec02/harris.html

America-bashing has sadly come to be “the opium of the intellectual,” to use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Marx in order to characterize those who followed the latter into the twentieth century. And like opium it produces vivid and fantastic dreams.

2. Imperial Hubris, a book "written anonymously by the former head of the CIA unit devoted to assessing and tracking Osama bin Laden"

Through Our Enemies' Eyes

3. Thomas P. M. Barnett: The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century

His website: http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/pentagonsnewmap.htm  Interesting conversation: http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/pnm/conversation.htm

FR discussions: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=thomaspmbarnett

4. Marc Sageman: Understanding Terror Networks

Statement of Marc Sageman to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
 

[Tolik]

Orson Scott Card:

...But ultimately, all these self-murdering "heroes" are not martyrs at all, they are victims of the trickery of ambitious, selfish, ruthless men.

That is the story that we must tell, over and over again. And, unlike the vile stories they tell about American motives, this story has the great advantage of being obviously and relentlessly true.

Telling this story is not enough, of course. We must also show that we are relentless in our pursuit of these ruthless enemies of civilization, and that we will allow them no shelter. The combination of our true story and their endless series of defeats will, eventually, be this:

They will no longer be able to persuade young Muslim men to become eunuchs in the service of their ambition.

Instead, the Muslim world -- which consists, after all, of mothers and fathers who want their children to grow up and have families of their own -- will recognize that if they stop these fanatics from killing non-Muslims, the rest of the world would be glad to help them get better governments and rise out of the poverty and oppression that make their lives so miserable.

But military victories without a powerful story ultimately create more recruits to give up their future in service of Osama's ambition.

Orson Scott Card - PING  [please freepmail me if you want or don't want to be pinged to Orson Scott Card political articles]

[Tolik]

If you want to bookmark his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/k-orsonscottcard/browse

His own political website: http://www.ornery.org/index.html  is heavily populated by American- and other Leftists who are delightfully annoyed by Mr. Card's conservatism. He does not post on that site and its moderated by somebody else. He is a registered Democrat upset with hijacking of his party by the Left.

His literary, non-political website: http://www.hatrack.com

His fresh articles appear in the Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC: http://www.rhinotimes.com/greensboro/  (before being posted permanently on his The Ornery American website http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/index.html ). He has 2 columns in the RhinoTimes: one on political/international events, and the second one: reviews on movies, books, and anything he wants (!). I check his and  Michael Medved's  reviews and found myself reliably relying on them.

[crusty codger]

because any appeasement, any forbearance, will be interpreted by them as victory and proof that God wants them to continue

Are you listening JFnK?

[stockpirate]

Left out of all these links is one that shows the history of Muslim Terrorists and the "direct" link to Nazi Germany and Hitler. LINK

[boris]

The story we need to tell them--over and over again: "We have atomic weapons and are not afraid to use them," That is the ruthlessness that is required.

--Boris

[cinives]

> They are educated -- often in the West (so much for sharing our "values"). There is no way to classify them as "hopeless," or to view their seeking of martyrdom as the result of "desperation."

He misses this point - of course they are educated, usually at US universities (think Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley etc etc) with ultra-liberal leanings. What their education is in is socialism, the victicrat mentality, along with the "blame America for all wrongs" worldview.

Have you ever heard of any radical who studied for a degree at, say, Grove City College ???

[Charlotte Corday]

These all appear to be books well worth reading. But they may be making too much of Osama as the prime mover of it all.

I would be interested to know what their authors (and Card) would suggest our next move be if Osama is found (as I suspect to be the case) to have been under six feet of dirt, somewhere in Afghanistan, for some time now.

[Teacher317]

bumping a great article

[Bommer]

Like they care. Mein Kamph is mandatory reading for Palestinians. Muslims embrace intolerace, bigotry, and murder as a way of life. You can't convince them of being associated with evil when they embrace it!

[Taliesan]

Great article!

This is great:

In effect, then, what we are fighting is not a particular group of men, but a group of stories, and while armies can do a great deal against stories (the story of Nazism, for instance, was rather thoroughly done in by the combined military strength of many nations, as was the story of Japanese superiority and imperial destiny), a story can keep an enemy alive long past the point of military defeat.

This is great:

Almost all the troubles in the world right now are generated from within the disconnected, unincluded nations. Where we are successfully exporting the global economy, the Pax Americana generally prevails; where that economy does not reach, for whatever reason, there is no peace. And now those disconnected nations are exporting their conflicts abroad.

This is great:

But military victories without a powerful story ultimately create more recruits to give up their future in service of Osama's ambition.

But this:

the Muslim world -- which consists, after all, of mothers and fathers who want their children to grow up and have families of their own --

is the moment where own Card's "story" gets in front of his eyes and makes him see what is not there.

These Muslim parents, in fact, want their children to be in paradise forever, hailed by Allah as martyr/heroes, in accordance with their Muslim "story".

Other than that one lapse, perhaps from fatigue, a brilliant piece!

[Slings and Arrows]

Ping!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[RonF]

These Muslim parents, in fact, want their children to be in paradise forever, hailed by Allah as martyr/heroes, in accordance with their Muslim "story".

That's what they say for public consumption. What do you think they'd say if they weren't worrying that if they don't toe the party line in public, they'll get slaughtered?

[Tolik]

I agree that importance of Osama persona is overemphasized. But if we talk about the idea instead of persona, all stays. Looks like that the Jihadist movement is well decentralized, but acts with the common idea in mind.

I think it is very important to kill Osama (or prove that he is dead already), but it won't be the end of the fight by a long stretch.

[4CJ]

But ultimately, all these self-murdering "heroes" are not martyrs at all, they are victims of the trickery of ambitious, selfish, ruthless men.

Bump.

Now we just need to institute "Ender's Game".

[Valin]

Card's Law: No event has just one cause, no person has just one motive, and no action has just the intended effect.

BINGO! WE HAVE A WINNER.

[Taliesan]

You don't understand how a religious culture works. They believe what their religion teaches. They believe in paradise. They believe in the virgins. They BELIEVE it.

They VOLUNTEER their children. Those who don't volunteer are not "slaughtered".

[RebelBanker]

If you do not believe Orson Scott Card (as well as President Bush) that a most basic desire common to all human beings is to have children who grow up and have their own children, what do you propose we do about it?

I tend to agree with Mr. Card and Pres. Bush because passing along genetic material is an instinct or drive common to all living things. You can train people or animals to overcome their instincts, but the basic instinct is still there.

[Valin]

If I may, you might want to take a look at
Occidentalism
(The west in the eyes of it's enemies)
by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1594200084/qid=1092754857/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-0308205-9579009?v=glance&s=books

Book Description
A pioneering investigation of the lineage of anti-Western stereotypes that traces them back to the West itself.

Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others.

We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders-often Jews-pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.

A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision.


It's a small densely packed book.