Failures of Imagination?

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I recently discovered the film Secondhand Lions. Robert Duvall, Michael Caine, and Haley Joel Osmont. Beautiful tightly plotted movie, highly recommended, and if it hadn't been up against Return Of The King it might have won Best Picture. Robert Duvall and Michael Caine are a pair of brothers, old coots who disappeared for forty years before turning back up in Texas. Everyone knows they've got money, and everyone's got their theories as to how they got it. One person thinks they were mobsters, another bank robbers, a third contract killers. Nobody knows where the money is, and everybody wants to get their hands on it. Walter (Haley Joel Osmont) is their great nephew dumped off with them by his mother for the summer. Over time, Michael Caine starts telling this fantastic story about where they were all that time, what they were doing, and incidentally, where they got their money. Along the way, we see how the two old brothers treat the world around them, and the boy starts to get a sense that there really is something to their story, no matter how many people tell him otherwise because it's too fantastic. Nothing out of science fiction or fantasy, but quite a bit of the stuff that romantic fiction is made of. The imaginations of the adults simply will not stretch far enough to believe what you as the observer suspect more and more along the way is the truth. They're older, "wiser", and "not that naive." But the story Michael Caine's character tells is not only compelling, but has all the little elements that make it believable and fits with the way the brothers treat the world around them, and when the major confrontation happens, Walter decides he believes his great uncles rather than his mother (who's lied to him for convenience many times) and her latest sleazy boyfriend, who are trying to justify stealing the two brothers' money.



There is eventual corroboration of main theme of the brothers' story just as the picture ends, after a twenty year fast forward, but by that point the viewer who has been watching carefully doesn't really need it, and the point of the corroboration is elsewhere. The watchers of the movie have seen the evidence. No matter how unlikely, we know it's the truth, even if those characters stuck in denial on the silver screen do not. If Michael Caine has possibly embellished the details a bit, that's not really important. You know that the basic story happened, where the on-screen adults refuse to believe.



This happens in the real world, also. When Heaven's Gate group suicided, the local rag ran a transcript of the sheriff's call. The first officers at the scene just could not understand what happened, despite it being fairly straightforward logically. Their minds just could not make the deduction. Their prejudices refused to believe 39 people could commit mass suicide, and they asked for back-up partially to figure out what had happened.



The real world happens, and it cares not a whit for our prejudices and experiences. It just is. It doesn't matter whether we believe there is an express train coming down the track or not. We're just as spectacularly dead either way when it hits us.



We have once again reached a point in history where many people believe that their perception is everything, despite it missing a large number of data points and ignoring another large number of them. People who would have no problem demanding immediate action if a group of neo-nazi skinheads took over the government of Germany, changed the flag to a swastika, built up their army, and started saying things like lebensraum and Drang Nach Osten and Judenfrei, nonetheless have a failure of imagination when it comes to the Islamists. When you're talking about the Nazis, I don't imagine anyone would have any problem extrapolating what would happen next. It's all happened before, and most of us have heard stories about it and seen movies and television ad nauseum (Hollywood has no problem with Nazis as bad guys; after all, they attacked the communists and almost won). Indeed, many folks believe something very similar has happened here in the United States, despite the vast weight of the evidence to the contrary. For example, instead of metaphorically "scapegoating the jews" so to speak, we are going quite a distance out of our way not to hold those of the ethnicity that was responsible for the most recent atrocities, despite the fact that a not insignificant proportion have actively worked to advance the cause of those who perpetuated the atrocities, and yet we refuse (mostly correctly) to allow our law enforcement and counter-terrorism units to concentrate their efforts on this ethnicity. We have yet to restrict them in any fashion, or treat them in any way disfavorably as compared to any other group. Compare and contrast this to the treatment that the Jews received in Nazi Germany, even before Kristallnicht. Consider that we are gearing up for Congressional elections, not burning the Reichstag, and that it is accepted by all concerned that our current president will leave office in January 2009 while having no apparent successor currently in sight. Indeed, for the first time in 56 years, we will have neither a sitting president nor vice-president on the ballot in 2008.



Why, if we are so intent upon manufacturing threats and conspiracies, are we unable to believe the publicly stated intentions of a large faction of a major world religion? They make no secret of their Islamist doctrine, and conquest for the sake of spreading their religion is embedded far more strongly in the dogma of Islam than it ever was in Christianity, yet a significant portion of our population completely discounts this threat while obsessing about the "establishment of a theocracy" here in the United States, presumably of the fundamentalist or evangelical Christian stripe. Despite their words, despite their actions, it's almost as if these people have dismissed the islamists as being unimportant, much like the British Empire of a century ago dismissed the request of one chinese mandarin who inquired as to when this barbarian chieftainess Victoria was going to come do homage to the Son of Heaven? The world today is different in many ways, but one of the most important is the damage a small group of dedicated people can do.



There is the fact that there have been christian theocracies, many of them spread all over europe. There is also historical favoritism towards protestant christians in this country. However, there hasn't been a single christian majority nation which has been believably a theocracy since at least the Spanish Civil War, and not really since the French Revolution. Protestant favoritism has never been legally based in this country, and its social practice in this country and elsewhere have been dying since the end of World War II and in another generation you'll have people who don't even realize that protestants used to be favored.



Compare and contrast this to Islamic nations, where the dhimmi tax is the order of the day, non-moslems are severely restricted in their opportunities and not allowed to do certain things. There is no imagination required to believe Islamists intend exactly what they say; these are typical practices in those countries that are officially islamic.



Consider the treatment of non-islamics in islamic countries, and historic militant expansionism of islam. Dhimmi is real. It is happening today. The pressure to adopt Islam is intense, starting with increased taxes and going from there through being unable to bring any kind of legal action against a Muslim, not being allowed to testify against them in court. If ever you give in, and accept Islam, not only do the imams have dominion over you forever, but you are never permitted to give it up. If you are raised in an Islamic household, you will be required while still a child to profess islam, and once you have done so, there is no recognition of the fact that you may have done so under coercion, or before the age of consent. You are moslem forever. Not even in the darkest, most repressive days of christianity did the christian priests go so far. Several muslim countries still enforce the death penalty for apostasy - attempting to leave the islamic faith.



So far, I have ignored the militant nature of Islam, how it carried the religion at the point of a sword all the way from Arabia to the Philippines and Morocco and Spain, most of it within a century or so after founding, and how it wants to do so today. Indeed, it is doing the best it can towards that purpose. Christianity a hundred years after the death of Jesus, or Paul, was a small sect, and if not generally persecuted to the degree portrayed in christian mythology, was officially forbidden and hid in the shadows where nobody looked. The reason we have so few examples of early christian lore, or buildings, is because they were forced to hide from official notice. For nearly three centuries, this was how christians lived. The christian philosophy has developed in accordance with this fact; it does not need official sponsorship from the state in order to attract believers.



Islam has never done anything of the kind. Indeed, they would likely have become something more akin to christianity if they had had to live thus. What they did in India was in no way atypical. I'm not going to pretend the Crusaders were saints, but the moslems, in general, gave at least as good as they got in terms of atrocities (there were some exceptions). The conquest of Cyprus, Syria, and Persia all had their atrocities. Not to mention the destruction of most of the remnants of classical civilization in Africa. Vlad Tepes was mostly noteworthy for being one of the few non-moslems willing to be savage enough to give them pause. Here's one more link just to drive the point home.



"So what," you say, "The last major offensive of the Islamic world was in 1683." True enough, but it was the last because they ran out of the means to carry them out, not because they had renounced conquest in the name of religion. The europeans had built their own civilization, and their technology, both civil and military, surpassed the Ottomans. By the time of Lepanto in 1571, it was only greater numbers that made them formidable, and when the southern european powers of the Mediterreanean combined against them to generate approximately equal numbers, the Turks were beaten. By the time of their last assault on Vienna, even superior numbers were insufficient to achieve their objective.



Not only have the Islamists today never given up on the goal of spreading their religion through conquest and force, the laws in the islamic countries hobble any who would speak against them or moderate their influence. It is a mistake to think of an islamic ruler as having the same sort of power that an absolute despot in most of the rest of the world. The real power lies in the mosque, which may grant the ruler some leeway, but nonetheless rules with an iron hand, and there are few islamic rulers who have successfully defied their priests. It is probably closer to the mark to think of their nominal rulers as administrators, because although they have discretion and authority of their own, there are boundaries they cannot cross if they wish to retain their position or their lives, as both Nasser and Sadat of Egypt, to name the first examples that spring to mind, demonstrate. Neither the ruler nor anyone else can fight sharia, and sharia supports the Islamists. There are a number of courageous moslems, primarily in the west, who have spoken out against Islamism and various parts of Islamic law. To date, I cannot point to a difference they have made in the overall islamic mindset, and many of them are under fatwas of death. I respect and admire them for speaking out, but thus far I cannot see that they have had much effect.



In short, this situation is in no way, shape, or form comparable to what limited efforts that christians have made to promote their values through legal-based means. The Islamic theocracies might be very comparable to Nazi Germany, if the Nazis had been in power for 1400 years and essentially every german was a true believer in Nazism and the virtues of the master race. This was not the case, as is demonstrated by the actions of Oskar Schindler and the White Rose group, among many others. China under Mao, the greatest mass murderer in history, comes closer, but even that falls short of the degree to which Islamic society proscribes disagreement with, and debate about its religious precepts, let alone the penalties for acting against those principles. If any imam has yet disavowed or spoken against world conquest by Islam, it's news to me. I just executed searches on several major search engines, and didn't come up with any. I seem to recall the pope apologizing for the crusades and indeed, christians have questioned them almost since they happened. I haven't heard of any reciprocation from moslems for their co-religionists' deeds in the same places, before, during, and after.



With all of this evidence readily available, if not precisely trumpeted by the guardians of our national discussions, the media, I cannot put the failure to comprehend the threat down to a failure of imagination. The data, the explanations, have been laid out quite solidly any number of places and they are easily findable on any search engine (except perhaps the ones based in Islamic countries, which are censored much the same as Google, MSN and Yahoo drew so much fire for accepting and cooperating with in China). Those sheriff's deputies who encountered the Heaven's Gate bodies I mentioned earlier did figure it out for themselves, although it took them a bit longer than you might think if you'd never been in a similarly worldview stretching situation. But they did manage to stretch their worldview to accommodate new facts. Those who do not believe in the war on terror are being presented with new facts that contradict their worldview, and instead of adapting their worldview to the new facts, they pretend those facts do not exist. Instead of believing in quite open and blatant islamist conspiracies for world domination, they insist upon creating ones which do not stand up under the comparison with known facts. This is not a failure of imagination. This amounts to nothing less than a willful denial of evidence, much like any number of scientists in the past refused to believe theories which described the world better than existing theories and correctly predicted subsequent events, much as the islamist hypothesis has correctly predicted everything from the arrests and other activity in Egypt to Iran wanting to join Pakistan in the nuclear club to the actions of the Wahhabi priesthood in Saudi Arabia.



TO BE CONTINUED


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This page contains a single entry by Dan Melson published on June 5, 2006 1:00 PM.

Buyer's Basic Guide to The Foreclosure Market and REOs was the previous entry in this blog.

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