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Thank you Registered!
Posted on 06/13/2002 10:32:31 AM PDT by Kermit
A reader, Hedley Thomas, has a problem with at least one aspect of "anti-hate" laws, such as the racial and religious vilification legislation now in place in the Australian state of Victoria.
As to racial and religious vilification, I'm not too sure I agree with you. Born a Jew but brought up as a Christian; at about 10 I decided it was all a lot of bollocks and went my own way. Active military service, five years in Saudi Arabia, a visit to Auschwitz and episode 6.052 of Priests and Children, has reinforced my original decision.
However, there is one aspect of the vilification legislation that puzzles me. I cannot find any reference to my concern but, that may say more about my investigative skills than anything else.
However, you will recall that in World War II, there was a lot of propaganda on the allied side regarding the enemy, with both the Germans and the Japanese depicted at the bottom of the food chain. I sometimes wonder what will happen in the next major conflict - presumably the government will be prevented by the legislation from vilifying the enemy on racial grounds. How then to motivate the masses?
This is predicated on the idea that to fight effectively, we need to hate the enemy. I personally believe that nothing could be further from the truth. You have probably noticed the reluctance of political leaders and journalists to address head-on the issue of what it is we're fighting against. When people like Silvio Berlusconi, Lou Dobbs and Oriana Fallaci actually do so, it's surprising enough that people comment on it! Actually, most of the rhetoric during this so-called War on Terrorism has been directed towards the enemy beliefs and practices, rather than at the enemy itself. The general tone has been "more in sorrow than in anger".
This is in stark contrast to World War Two, in which a visceral hatred of the enemy, especially in the case of the Japanese, when it also used racial vilification ("When those little yellow bellies meet the Cohens and the Kellys"), was commonplace and even encouraged by official government propaganda. The "hate sessions" in George Orwell's book 1984, were actually a satire on the officially sanctioned lectures in Britain during wartime, in which the audience was encouraged to display hatred of the Nazi enemy.
Does this reluctance on the part of today's leaders to use extreme language, and vilify the enemy signify the we have become somehow too soft? The we're not hard enough or strong enough to conquer and destroy the enemy? I don't think so.
The modern Western way of war has become increasingly dispassionate, and the language we use has changed along with that development. Here at the start of the 21st century we find ourselves waging wars which are fought increasingly at a great distance. Since the horrific bloodletting of both World Wars in which millions of conscripts were killed in infantry battles, military leaders have become fixated on preserving the lives of their own men by using technology to call down greater and greater firepower with more precision on the enemy at longer and longer ranges.
America in particular as the leader of the West, and the most highly technologically advanced nation in the world, tries to fight push-button wars whenever possible. The air war against Kosovo is the apotheosis of this technique. It was a war against Serbia in all but name, it was fought essentially from 15,000 ft, and most importantly, it worked. Serbia pulled out of Kosovo essentially without firing a shot at Western forces. This was the ultimate form of war as a dispassionate tool of foreign policy. It was predicated on there being minimal American losses, and hopefully none at all. When a single American pilot was shot down there was enormous interest in his fate and great rejoicing when he was rescued. This was clearly not your grandfather's war in which appalling losses were regarded as part of a neccessary price to pay for victory.
The criticism of America and the American way of war is that it is extremely fixated on the use of gadgets rather than men to achieve objectives. There are very good reasons for this. The experience of the US Army in World War Two, was that you could lose an awful lot of men if you fought the same way everyone else did, and machines are much cheaper for America to produce that trained soldiers, sailors and airmen. If you have an enormous technological lead over your enemies, then why not use that to minimise your own casualties and maximise his? The unfortunate flipside to that is that this introduces a certain timidity when it's time to finish the jon by occupying territory. In the final analysis, the war is over when a man with a gun stands on a patch of ground and says "this is mine, anyone want to argue the toss?". It's difficult to control territory from 15,000 ft, looking down from satellites, or pressing buttons in a bunker in Colorado.
So the use of dispassionate language when discussing the enemy is just another reflection of this new Western way of war. We don't hate the enemy because we don't have to charge into a withering crossfire, jump into a trench and stick a sharp piece of metal into the body of another human being, twist and pull. Do you know how hard that is? Not just technically, but psychologically? But today, all we need to do is press a button and make the problem go away. You don't need to hate someone to be able to do that.
I think the present conflict is essentially similar to the British campaign against the Mahdi in the Sudan towards the end of the 19th century. At the battle of Omdurman in 1898, which featured the last great cavalry charge in history, the Mahdi's forces came on in the same old way, and they were killed in the same old way, by high technology.
"Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not", was the ditty that summed the situation up. The forces of the Mahdi counted on their spirit and on the rightness of their cause, and on the help of Allah to bring them victory over the infidel. The British used massed rifle fire from disciplined troops and automatic weapons. Guess which side won?
So it is today, with one glaring difference. The world is now too small and crowded to allow anything short of the destruction of the enemy. We live cheek-by-jowl in a world where borders and physisical distance mean nothing anymore. By destroying the enemy, I don't mean physical annihilation, but rather the end of the the Islamofascists ability and/or desire to wage war against the West. I'm not entirely sure how this can be achieved, especially in the short term, but it must be achieved somehow.
The reason they attacked us is actually quite easy to ascertain. At some very deep level I think they realise that we're going to destroy them. That their way of life, predicated on a set of medieval assumptions about the way society should be governed, will be swept away in a tide of modern Western secularism. They say they fear the West as an aggressor which cannot be appeased, which cannot be turned aside, which must be met head on and defeated or it will destroy them. They are correct.
What they fear is the loss of their religion as they understand it, and it's inner certainty about how to live a good life, pleasing to God. In a very real sense, they see the seductive tide of Western secularism, and see in us a threat to God. How would 14th century Europe have reacted to the discovery of a 21st century America across the Atlantic? Very much the way the core of the Arab//Muslim world is responding now - with a mixture of awe, fear, attraction and repulsion. Ultimately, such a medieval Europe would have had to go to war against such a modern nation, no matter how doomed such a gesture might have been. To give in to the future would have meant abandoning their souls.
As long as Islamofascism as an ideology exists, the West will be in grave danger. This time we cannot allow the forces of the latest Islamic military figurehead to melt away into the desert when they are defeated, to lick their wounds and wait for another more propitious day. This is nothing less than a war of survival, which only one ideology will walk away from intact. I'm afraid it's not going to be them.
There is no need to hate such an enemy, because we can empathise with their position to some extent. Seven hundred years ago, we WERE them! We can understand them to some extent, but they do not and cannot understand us. In a very real sense they are trying to fight the future. The future with its high technology, its secularism, it's equality of the sexes, and its multi-religious communities is indeed a deadly threat to their world view. But all they can do is delay it, damage it, or warp it. In the end, the future will arrive. Resistance truly is futile.
Thank you Registered!
Indeed. This, not any prattle about poverty, colonialism*, or alleged grievances, is the "root cause" of the conflict.
*Some people use the word "colonialism" as a shorthand for exactly what Hill describes here. In that case, it's just a different, more left-tinged, way of making the same point.
For this the author suggest we must feel guilty about battling those who do the work of the Devil?
Indeed. This, not any prattle about poverty, colonialism*, or alleged grievances, is the "root cause" of the conflict.
*Some people use the word "colonialism" as a shorthand for exactly what Hill describes here. In that case, it's just a different, more left-tinged, way of making the same point.
Exactly, no matter if it's 'medieval' islamic fundamentalists, -- or even the socalled 'moral majority' we have here at FR.
-- These fanatical types quite rightly see the threat of western science based secularism as the 'great evil', to their authoritaran way of life.
I doubt there is a political solution.
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