From the Stoa today, I will show how even I am conflicted time to time in my moral and philosophical stance, demonstrating that I, too, am human and subject to error. In my heart I like to think of myself as a modern Stoic, but one that wears the cloak of Immanuel Kant and pulls crib notes from his pocket from time to time.
When I was younger I liked to think of my country as having the moral high ground in most situations around the world. We do not conquer, we liberate. We do not kill prisoners on the battlefield, we don't bully other nations around...to give some examples. I've grown up over the years and I realize that there comes a time where absolute morality can become a suicide wish. We do not conquer and we do liberate. That truth has not changed in my life (sorry, Native Americans, I'm talking 20th and 21st centuries). Did we kill prisoners on the battlefield? Yep. Sometimes the GIs were worked up, had a grudge, or were simply advancing too quickly to lose manpower taking prisoners to the rear. War sucks, that is why intelligent folk try to avoid it. Do we push other countries around? Depends on who is in office at the time.
Watching the news lately and seeing the farce that is called justice being handed down to terrorists that we've been holding for ten years or more has me grinding my teeth. Muslims around the world are laughing at us, and rightly so. In Japanese culture, the likely winner of a fight is not the one who is the best with a sword, but one who has the highest level of resolve. Muslims listen only to power, who has it and who has to abide by it. They respect those who know how to possess it and wield it. They are not confounded by our Western sense of morality. People forget that they never experienced the Age of Enlightenment. They never experienced the Renaissance like western culture did. They had a type of Renaissance when they shed their nomadic ways and settled in the civilized rump of the dead and dying classical world but that mostly came from their translating documents from Latin and Greek and exclaiming, "How about that". They have never had the foundation for women's suffrage, made possible in the West by our underpinnings that stretch all the way back to the freedom that Spartan and Athenian women possessed.
Not only does the entire world not believe in the same things as the West, but America differs radically from Europe in where we have taken those concepts and evolved them. Progressivism in Europe had its roots from the French Revolution. In America, we believed in WE the people, meaning the emphasis is on the individual forming a government BY and FOR us. While the French put the emphasis elsewhere. They said, "we the PEOPLE" and eventually put together governments that were OF and OVER the people.
No, I'm not digressing, I'm simply piling up the bricks that I will use to assemble my completed ideas, so please bear with me.
In Christianity, and especially Catholicism, all are god's children be them beggars or kings. Jesus even had a female apostle who was once a prostitute (oh, be quiet out there and keep the yelling down). He turned no one away for any reason. It was always the individual that turned from Him. Those Romans and notables (as written in their own hand and first person accounts) of the day who met him were never the same person again. He had a way of stripping away the falsehoods that we build around ourselves and seeing the light within that was us.
Christianity underwent a painful evolution of decay and rebirth. The Church, though it kept the flame of learning alive through the Dark Ages also repressed original thought, murdered those who disagreed with it, killed Jews and massacred Muslims in Jesus' name. It grew up, though. It reformed itself and found its way once more after the Reformation and religious wars of the 15th and 16th centuries. Huge amounts of blood was shed growing up.
Islam tolerates nothing but its own, and often times, only its own flavor. The differing shoots and twigs of Islam are as likely to kill themselves off as they are a Jew. The only peace to be found in Islam is through submission to those that have more power than you...thus the translation of Islam = to submit.
We have a separation of church and State, needed because the State always wants to corrupt the church (NOT the other way around of which so many Liberals are ignorant). In Islam the State IS the religion. Islam is their Law, their Religion, their Culture, and their Government. We celebrate life (except for pro-abortion folks) and reluctantly let our loved ones cross over to death while Islam celebrates death and the after-life where all of their wishes and desires (no matter how crass and degenerate) will be sated. When their day to day life is so bad, as brought about by their own government, death is a sweet release.
During the Middle Ages and the Wars of Reformation, Western culture developed something that is thought of as "the rules of war". They developed slowly and were not consistently applied, but they did work, and do work, after a fashion today. There were times during the Wars of Reformation that entire cities were obliterated and vast tracts of land were empty and unproductive. Eventually, everyone came to realize that if they continued to fight like this that there would be nothing left and so informal rules came up over the treatment of prisoners and how a city can be stormed, sacked, or otherwise wrested from another. Rules of Parlay and the "white flag" allowed rules and terms to be discussed for everything from the treatment of religious artifacts to personal combat. The only Muslim that had anything like this was Saladin (he was no savage, you know).
After the American Civil War and WWI, international rules were developed and a sort of standardization came about in Geneva. This is where I start to get to my point, which I could have made sooner, though it would not have had the same impact.
Though non-Western entities signed these conventions and use them politically, they have never really used them as they were intended. When we want to send a message to a Muslim nation, we send a diplomat, or cut off aid, or restrict their access to technology to get our point across. When they want to send a message, they saw a man's head off, record the act, and then put it out on the Internet. Yep, that is civilized.
They understand that what we have done is to tie our hands and not to fight with our full resolve and power. This is weakness to them. We give them gaps to exploit, we have a media that lovingly details our battle plans, both politically and militarily to the entire world on an instants basis. We have soldiers who are given medals for showing restraint on the battlefield while they will set up in a school house full of children and wait for a bomb to give them a great PR point on the nightly news about the evil West. I never accused Muslims of being dumb, I wish they were, but they are not. They recognize the war we are in even if we do not. We will continue to fight our non-war our way and they will continue to fight their Total War their way. In the end, even if we do not lose militarily, they will permeate our culture from within, exploiting our tolerance and liberalism for their own ends. It will all end the same if we don't begin being realistic about things.
We do not have to be sadistic monsters to fight Islam, we simply need to be firmly rooted in who we are and what our laws are. You want Sharia law in Oklahoma? NO. Why? Because this is not Syria, that is why. You can practice your Religion in so far as it does not conflict with the Laws of the Land. Just as a Jehovah's Witness about blood transfusions and "wards of the state" as it relates to children. You want to build a mosque, sure, but you can not blast your calls five times a day because that interferes with my right to peace and quiet. You want to build a mosque at Ground Zero? You better have to jump through the same hoops as someone else trying to rebuild...
I said it at the beginning and I'll say it again, "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb". Don't be stuck on stupid, but dumb back in closet and get your head out of your rear. We are in a war, even if we don't want to believe it.
There is much here for you to think about. Many questions and answers that you will likely come up with all on your own. If you wish to bring them to the Stoa, you are free to do so.
Now, I must be off to be a responsible citizen of the United States.
Live well.
--Zavost
No comments:
Post a Comment