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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]

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.

So, the problem is that the West's hedonistic story is too realistic to include virgins?

If only they'd been promised 72 women-of-easy-virtue in the after-life, we could've trumped them with a trip to the Bunny Ranch in the here-and-now!

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.

I don't think this story will be good enough. I believe that truth is seldom sufficient to break a really good, (even partially) internally consistent fantasy. The problem here is that their story is that the ambitious, selfish, ruthless men are doing the work of Allah, so their personal attributes do not matter, nor does the individual sacrifice count against the Jihad story.

The communist story was an economic one, to be played out in the here-and-now. We beat them with a better here-and-now story.

The Nazi story was one of supermen, and supermen don't listen to stories from lesser men.

I'm afraid we'll need to tell the Islamic world the same story we told the Nazi's, and like the Nazi's, they won't believe it until our boots are on their necks. And maybe not even then.

I like the analysis, I don't think the proposed story is going to work. But then, I'm not in sales, so what do I know?