Some September 11 Thoughts

Michelle Malkin has an excellent round up of links to 9/11 memories.



On the evening of September 11, 2001, I posted an essay to a listserv of a science fiction club which I was attending at the time. In it, I talked about some of the warnings we had had over the years, and the changes to our mindset necesary to prevail over those who had done this. I touched only very lightly on the need for a certain degree of unity among ourselves, thinking it should be obvious to anyone with any grasp of history what happens to a people with factions willing to do anything for political gain.



I was wrong. Judging by the evidence, the average american has never heard of Bosworth Field or Manzikert or any number of other historical situations where members of a society seeking political advantage over another member provided the wedge for outsiders to bring the society low and eventually destroy it. It is all very well and good to campaign based upon who will do a better job. It is something else again to continually hound and vilify your leaders, denigrate their decision making, require that they sat a "timetable for withdrawal" (for the terminally clueless, withdrawal means retreat) thus telling out enemies that they only have to hold out until a certain date. Last I checked, we still have bases and troops in Germany and Japan and we haven't fought either of them since 1945.



I've often speculated on how the societal inability to carry extended projects to completion is rooted in the rise of the 30 or 60 minute television program, where the situation at the end of the program has all been resolved due to some artifice of the writer and everything is exactly as it was at the beginning of the program. This is the generation that crippled President Nixon's attempts to deal with the Vietnam situation because they presumed when he said he wanted to end the war he would just wave some kind of magic wand and the troops would all be out by dinner time on Inauguration day just like on their favorite TV program.



I've linked Bill Whittle's essays over at Eject! Eject Eject! before. If you haven't, I suggest you read all of them. In his most recent, Tribes, he talks accurately upon the unwillingness of the sheep to believe that there really are wolves in the world. People are both profoundly lazy, and at the same time want to believe that they are safe, regardless of whether or not they are. It is easy to pretend you don't see clear evidence that there are people in the world who will do anything to get what they want, and who do not care if they hurt others in the process. Some of these want direct personal power (Hitler and Stalin come to mind, and Mugabe and Kim today). Others want their pre-eminence and worldly dominion for their religion (Savanarola, Torquemada, and Mohammed historically, Khameni and Bin Ladin today) and personal power may only have been a byproduct of that.



The more I look around and consider the situation, the more convinced I am that the die-hard left of today is different only in degree, not in kind, from these individuals and their followers. The immediate "don't question my/his/our patriotism!" before anybody has is only the first confirmation. Many times I have seen them throw this out when nobody has questioned their patriotism, only their judgment. There is a line out of Shakespeare, "The lady doth protest too much," which deals precisely with this sort of situation.



Well for me, that all ends today, right now. Everybody has a right to wonder at others motivations, and should have the ability to speculate as to the true causes and roots of motivation for this. When every action you undertake supports a hypothesis of "You seem motivated to sabotage the current leadership of the United States no matter the cost to your fellow citizens and our military and our long term well-being as a country", that is a mindset of treason, and whether or not the actual crime of treason has been committed, should be noted and broadcast so that our fellow citizens are aware of your predilections.



Criticize the mistakes of the administration all you want. That is your right under the Constitution. I myself criticize the administration on several fronts (immigration, spending, trade policy, etcetera). I'll criticize needless mistakes in the War on Terror as they occur, but keep in mind that this is a war, and the next war where there are no major mistakes made will be the very first in the history of all the world. In the War on Terror, this administration "gets it" in a way that I can't point to in any back to at least Truman, and before him not back to Lincoln. Trying to undercut them on this one point puts yourself on the same moral level as Ducas at Manzikert. He got power out of it, but destroyed the Byzantine Empire just as certainly as if he'd overrun it with a Mongol horde. Whether you like it or not, we are committed to this war. If we stop prosecuting it to the maximum and most effective level, we will lose troops and fight (and lose) battles that we otherwise wouldn't. If we don't fight it effectively enough, the real fundamentalist hordes will take us over, compared to which Pat Robertson and his ilk are but ill-behaved children to compared to true psychopaths. If you love our artwork, look at what the Taliban did to Afghanistan's. If you love high culture and civilization, compare modern day India to Pakistan, and consider that they were one society until the British left and placed the Hindus in charge of one and the Muslims in charge of the other. Consider what Pakistan did to what is now Bangladesh until India intervened. If you love female equality, look at how it exists in Iran today. If you love the ability to dissent from official truth, look at how it existed in Iraq under the Ba'athists, and contrast with how it exists in the same place today. If you want homosexuals to be able to participate freely and openly in society, look at anywhere in the Muslim world, and compare it to here, where various cities host quite "in your face" gay pride festivals and it is those who would sequester homosexuals who are marginalized to the shadows. If you love the ability to ignore what the priest who may not even be of your religion says, look at what happens here versus what happens in Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or even Indonesia. These vermin are saying exactly what they want to do to us, and if they don't want to actually do it, then I must say their actions belie this desire.



To ignore the evidence that the War on Terror is necessary is to go beyond an inability to see, to an unwillingness to see, or hear, or even consider. Anybody who tries to sabotage the War on Terror is not my friend, nor are they my children's friend, and they are definitely not my country's friend. Our ways, the very ways they are trying to end, require us to allow them to talk. But those same ways allow me (and others) to point out these facts as well; censorship is denied not only for me but also for thee.



And your attempts to shame or guilt or intimidate us into silence tells me that you can't meet us on the ground of open debate, either. But only sheep think that way, and those of us who support the President in the War on Terror are not sheep, not matter how much it may comfort you to think it so.