Monday, May 28, 2007

MEMORIAL DAY 2007

Today, as I drove around southern Maryland from Annapolis to Scotland Island and back to Washington with my wife in our Jeep Liberty Renegade, driving past so many American flags on display, some fresh and in full wave, others ragged and woefully ripe for its "dignified burning" which is in the officially proscribed act of retiring it, I realized once again that in my limited lifetime of fifty-one years, I have never personally known someone who has sacrificed his or her life in service to our nation, specifically in a military uniform.

I have never suffered the loss that so many in our nation and others have suffered in losing to an untimely death a dear relative or a close friend while performing active military service, partially because of an accident of birth, a time spanning from the Vietnam War, where I and my immediate generation and the one immediately preceding mine, were excepted by age or gender. While decendent from a family whose military tradition has waned since the American Civil War, the few family members and friends I have known who have indeed fought for American forces on foreign soil such as Iraq and Afghanistan have survived with honor. I am very proud of these men regardless of whether I appove or disappove of certain foreign policy choices of any administration. I feel inadequate to express my own gratitude to these living heroes and to those who did not make it back to their families intact, but I must. War is a wicked endeavor. But war often requires war to extinguish itself, just fire is often turned back with more fire.

To this end, I must repost the following essay by Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch:

Today is Memorial Day, and while Hugh grills the Jihad Watch burgers I thought I'd note that one of the reasons why the popular culture does not honor our fighting forces today or in general is that the politically correct mindset assumes that we have moved beyond all that. Conflicts don't ever need to be solved with wars, you see. All we need to do is understand each other a little better, show the opposition that we are really good fellows after all, win over a few hearts and minds, teach the children not to hate, and voila, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

Unfortunately, in the real world, sometimes one may know someone else quite well, and see that he is a good fellow, and despite all the hand-holding and Kumbaya singing, still want to kill or subjugate for reasons of one's own, that don't proceed from the Kumbaya-singer's actions at all.

This is a point that all too many in Washington, at the highest levels, stubbornly refuse to grasp. It is axiomatic in the State Department, and in Europe, and at the UN, that all conflicts can be solved through negotiated concessions. This is so much a part of the air they all breathe that it would be unthinkable even to question it. No one would even think to ask, "What if we implement state-of-the-art hearts-and-minds initiatives, and conform to all their foreign policy and cultural demands, and they still hate us?" This cannot be. The non-Western man is just a reactor, not an actor. He has no imperatives of his own that might set him against us. He is, ultimately, at our mercy, and it is up to us and us alone to pacify him.

The unconscious paternalism of this is ironic, coming as it does from the most besotted of relativist multiculturalists, but in any case, the fact of Memorial Day, and the reality of those who died in this nation's conflicts, shows it all to be false. Sometimes there are disputes between peoples that can't be smoothed over by any amount of making nice. And then, if a nation does not have within it those who will fight and will die to defend it, it will perish.

Today those who believe we have moved beyond wars, beyond fighting, rule the day. Unfortunately, we face a foe who believes war and fighting is his religious duty. He will not be pacified. Our fight is not just military, although it has a military dimension, and a huge adjustment in our current foreign entanglements is needed to defend ourselves most effectively from this scourge. It is a matter of will. Of remembering that there is in Judeo-Christian civilization, and in all civilizations that are threatened by the jihadist imperative of Islamic supremacism, something worth fighting and dying for. Remembering that we are only here to fight this battle today because others fought and died throughout history for our nations, our people, and the principles for which we stand. Let us not just honor them today, but, each in our way, seek to emulate them.

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Thursday, May 24, 2007

NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS

By Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch:

NGOs have come a long, and very dismal way, since the dreams of Rene Cassin. They are filled as naturally with creatures of a certain worldview and bent as is the BBC World Service, or The Guardian. What is that worldview? That worldview consists of those who wish to criticize, in the main, what they see as the white, Western world, for not properly making their chief concern, and rescuing from their own misrulers often prompted by ideologies (such as Islam) that the members of those NGOs will never recognize as being the source of the misgovernment, the corruption and cruelty and waste that are such noticeable features of so much of what used to be called (thank god the phrase is falling out of fashion) the "Third World."

Nationalism for them is not acceptable if it is an impulse animating the residents of the advanced West. They are not allowed to take a special interest, have a special affection and tenderness for, their own countries, and histories. They are not allowed to worry about cultural continuity, and cultural continuity as being connected, possibly, to other kinds of continuity, including that of ethnic makeup. These are impermissible for that "white, Western world" —even if perfectly permissible for everyone else (compare, for example, the policies toward immigration and immigrants in Japan, Korea, China, or the same policies toward non-Arabs, directed especially at black Africans, in Egypt, Libya, Chad, and Morocco).

The rest of the world is entitled to preserve itself. We, on the other hand, in North America and Western Europe and the outposts of the former British Empire, such as Australia and New Zealand, are required to give up whatever "local" patriotism, interest and pride in our national histories and cultures, and open ourselves permanently to the world.

Other countries can remain countries.

The United States, Canada, Australia, England, France, Italy, and the other countries of Western Europe, on the other hand, are not allowed to remain countries in that full sense. Their people are not allowed to maintain their own legal and political institutions and social arrangements, or render them less vulnerable to undermining from within by taking control of their own immigration policy. They are not allowed to fully defend themselves, and if they try...well, the NGOs will come down hard.

For those who now staff the NGOs have big plans for the West, big plans for Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and especially for the United States.

Yes, for the United States and other advanced "white, Western" countries (Japan doesn't count, nor South Korea, in this calculation) the futuree is clear.

They are to be transformed. They are to be stripped of that has given them their national identities, treated merely as geogrpahically identifiable places that should be permanently available to all those who wish to come, and those who wish to come will, in the main, be those from comparatively poor and often ill-governed neighbors (in the case of the United States, those neighbors include Mexico, Central America, and some but not all of the countries of South America), or from lands further away where the local despots, or locally-prevailing ideologies, explain the malgovernance -- but those who come from Muslim lands, places that are so unpleasnat and malfunctioning becuase of Islam unfortunately do not see things aright and "flee from Islam," and far from abandoning Islam (refugees from the Nazis or Communists hated Nazism, hated Communism), they bring it with them in their undeclared mental baggage, and unpack it right away.

According to the New Men who have infiltrated and taken over so many of the formerly respectable NGOs, la Lutte Continue, and the hostility they always felt toward their own Western world can now be plausibly, even respectably, channeled into their work at these NGOs, with their highly selective and tendentious indignation.

Their goal for the United States is clear.

The United States is not to remain a country. The United States is, rather, to be transformed, in the determined if unstated view of so many of the ideologues at NGOs, to be turned into, by slow degrees, into one great big...NGO.

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