It is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, so it time to once again remember what ultimately led to the disaster and the endless Middle-Eastern wars: diversity and globalism.
The 9/11 attacks were, in a very real sense, the result of a liberal, globalist outlook, that believes that every person is the same (or, more accurately, interchangeable). John Wilder recently noted that globalists (as well as a couple other ideologies) depend on Homo Economicus:
What’s a person? Well, one Homo Economicus is very much like another. So much so, that they have the same desires, the same wants, the same potential, the same value. In extremes of this viewpoint, they even have the same intellectual potential. ...
But to achieve this "perfect" economic human unit, certain constraints must be removed. Wilder lists these as "family, religion, tradition, ancestors, culture, border, community, and hierarchy." It is because of these globalist views that we got the inane comments from our leaders following 9/11 that "Islam is a religion of peace" and similar statements downplaying any suggestion that Islam was evil or barbaric. In his article "What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us," Ayaan Hirsi Ali points out that after 9/11:
... President George W. Bush stood at the Islamic Center of Washington to insist that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” Following Bush’s lead, after later atrocities in Paris, Brussels, Manchester, and elsewhere, Western leaders repeatedly said that the killers had “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, the notion of “Abrahamic faiths” was revived or normalized, as though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were merely variations within one spiritual family, separated by temperament more than by theology or civilizational ambition.
But such suggestions are ludicrous. The America political scientist Samuel P. Huntington had stated well before 9/11 that Islam had bloody borders, because it is an inherently violent, conqueror culture and people.
In fact, 9/11 (or something like it) probably was no surprise to Huntington who had, in 1996, released his prescient book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. In it, Huntington explained that rather than the end of the Cold War signaling a victory for a global liberal order, the collapse of a bi-polar power structure would cause nations to revert to competition and conflict based around civilizations. And, in that vein, he predicted in broad strokes the conflict between Russia and the West in Ukraine (which is divided between the West and Russian civilization), the competition between China and the West, as well as conflict between Islam and everyone else.
But our elites have ignored this to our ultimate ruin. Going back to Ali's article, he explains:
After centuries of religious war, the West had concluded that privatizing faith was the price of stability and progress. Religion would become hobby, heritage, or private consolation; politics would be conducted in the cooler register of interests. Having made that bargain, Western societies forgot that secularism and pluralism were local settlements, not universal defaults, and so assumed that every rival civilization must ultimately favor the same compartmentalization. When confronted by an adversary for whom the public order was explicitly theological, and for whom the separation of sacred and political authority was itself an offense against God, the West did the only thing its own intellectual settlement allowed: It translated theology into categories it found more manageable.
As a result, for a quarter-century, America and the West have chosen to enmesh themselves with dysfunctional Muslim societies, with the goal of rectifying “what went wrong.” Simultaneously, they opened their doors to mass Muslim migration, taking in millions of refugees from war-torn societies that had notably failed to be transformed by the influx of American money, democracy experts, and boots on the ground. ...
As it turned out, the prediction that a large-scale encounter between the populations of the Western nations and Muslim lands might bring about a meaningful social transformation was correct. What Western optimists failed to imagine was that their own societies would be reshaped in the image of the newcomers they sought to evangelize. ...
Stated differently, if America and the West went to war against an elite vanguard of Muslim extremists who used terrorism as its principal tool, it ended 25 years later with a self-inflicted defeat caused by misdiagnosing the enemy and importing culturally incompatible demographics that could be utilized by that vanguard, as well as by other political vectors, both domestic and foreign. After failing to defeat Muslim terrorists abroad, the West now finds itself fighting the same enemies at home, while watching their own countries transformed by the mass immigration of people who decidedly do not share the common Western fantasy that religion and culture are the source of merely superficial differences. The idea that there are barbarians who live outside the gates has long been part of the Western inheritance. The idea that bringing the barbarians inside the gates might result in the destruction of Western civilization was equally part of that inheritance, even if it was now forbidden to think it.
Thus, I have to agree with some of the comments from Kurt Schlichter in his article from yesterday, "How 9/11 Changed Everything." He points out:
In the week of the attacks, America understood that 9/11 had to be answered with the full weight of American wrath. Many of us still understand it. If there is one overriding failure in the war on terror, it is that we did not kill enough of the terrorists. Instead, we focused on turning savages into civilized human beings. Our forebears had it right when they dealt with barbarians, whether Roman or British or whoever was disciplining the primitives. It was time to dust off the punitive expedition: go into the territory of the people who attacked you and cause so much damage that the savages use your name to scare their children for the next hundred generations.
And:
... Islamic radicals attacked us not because we like Israel, and not because of some bogus gripe, but because we will not submit to their primitive desert cult. That’s a hard truth for people who cannot conceive of America being in the right. We were in the right. We remain in the right. As for the violence we inflicted in return, they forgot a basic truth: violence must be met with violence. Too many in the West believe the schoolmarm mantra that violence never solves anything. History teaches the opposite. Violence solves everything.
The problem is that we didn't fight like that. If we had, after Al Qaeda was driven back to the Tora Bora mountain complex in 2001, we would have dropped a strategic nuclear weapon on their heads. That would have given them a story with which to terrify their children. Instead we coddled the savages with the idea that we could win "hearts and minds" which was the Middle-Eastern equivalent of rolling over and exposing our bellies.
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince it is ideal to be both loved and feared, but if a choice must be made, it is safer to be feared than loved. That should have been our philosophy. So when Schlichter complains about the people that are tired of the forever wars in the Middle-East, he should consider that perhaps that they are not tired of our killing Muslim terrorists but, rather, that they are tired of a leadership unwilling to win quickly and decisively.
But on a more basic level, we can only win by returning to our roots including a strong, muscular Christianity and civilizational pride. Restoring those constraints identified by Wilder: "family, religion, tradition, ancestors, culture, border, community, and hierarchy."
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