Lawrence Auster
“This is from the Times of India
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday expressed deep shock over the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, saying that the incident is a “reminder” of the common dangers faced in the sub-continent.
“The manner of her going is a reminder of the common dangers that our region faces from cowardly acts of terrorism and of the need to eradicate this dangerous threat,” he said in a statement from Goa.
Is there not something deeply wrong with a culture in which, when mass murder occurs, political leaders and pundits immediately describe it as a “reminder”—as though the most important thing about a monstrous crime is not that it’s a monstrous crime, but that it leads us to a thought process about some other issue? This is the abstract and unreal mind-set of liberalism, which, as we can see, has taken root in India as well as in the West.
Another word that ought to be dropped in these circumstances is “cowardly.” Obviously, there is nothing cowardly about a Muslim being willing to die in the act of killing his enemies, which according to the Koran is the holiest act a Muslim can perform. The recourse to the word “cowardly” is another symptom of liberalism. Liberal politicians don’t want to call the perpetrators of these crimes “enemies” or “evil,” since liberalism prohibits the recognition of the existence of enemies and evil. So they call them “cowardly,” which makes the speaker sound tough and determined, when in fact he is only being absurd.
One of the most characteristic things about liberalism is the moral poverty it inflicts on those who follow it.
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Calling a terrorist act a “reminder” is similar to saying that people are “shocked” by its occurrence—liberals, as I’ve often noted, are constantly being “shocked” by a reality they refuse to recognize. Both phrases suggest that people don’t really believe that terrorism exists, so they require the “reminder” to “shock” them back into the realization that it does. The subtext is: this event forces us once again (for the nth time) to think about this problem that we don’t want to think about, or rather it forces us to declare how important it is for us to think about this problem that we don’t want to think about.
By contrast, a society that actually recognized and was facing the reality of jihadism and terrorism would not speak of a terrorist act as a reminder, because it would already be involved in opposing the jihadists and making war against them. Do you think that when the Japanese sank a U.S. destroyer in the Pacific in 1943, American leaders and journalists said that this was a “reminder” of the fact that we were in a war?”
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Excellent point.
Courage refers strictly to the attitude with which one faces a challenge. It makes no moral judgments about the challenge itself.
Evil men can be courageous, and good men can be cowards.
Interesting. I wonder if the shooter knew about the bomber; or vice versa.