Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Thursday, July 21, 2005 Nail on the head and Lileks goes south, too Instapunk has a fine blog on Hugh Hewitts shallow and idiotic attack on Tancredo for responding to a hypothetical question about being nuked by Osama with returning the favor on Mecca. There's another blog further down which already tore Hugh a new one which is also worthwhile to read. And Lumpy's gentle takedown of James Lileks who lets an analogy get away from him is worth the visit. I like Lileks a lot, but he missed the boat on this one. As I said in comment at Instapunk, there's something to be said for overkill. Earning the enmity of a billion people isn't fun, but so long as they can't do a darn thing about it, so what? Rome didn't fall because all the people they abused finally got a chance to kick it when it was down. It fell to completely new hordes of barbarians who could care less how Rome had treated the Jews, the Greeks, the Gauls. Plus, enmity gives us a reason to maintain our strength. (Let's drop the big one, there'll be no one left to blame us." Randy Newman [was being snide and is a loony lefty now, but by mocking he might have had it right by accident]). Frankly, I love my God, my family, and my country. If blowing up the rest of the world means I can save my family, my country, and not offend God -- then I'm okay with that. The truth is that God, much as it is said in the Bahagavad Gita about war applies to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Jesus. God is impassive to history. He is not disturbed that animals kill others or each other. He understands how he made us and the conflict of competition that arises. He does not condemn us for defending our lives even when we get carried away. He'd rather we became as saints and wise as he, but since that's not about to happen, God is not angry with us. The question is, do we want to survive and increase more than those who hate us or breed the haters? There is no law that says we have to last or that our enemies must endure for another thousand years as a culture. It's up to us if we want to be around and free in the future. Forgive me if I'm partial to America right now. Destroy us and maybe in a couple thousand years there might be a set of circumstances which creates a people capable of freedom, a republic, and self-determination in the most positive way, but by then billions upon billions will have lived miserable, slavish lives. So, does blowing up a billion miserable, slavish, and terrified Muslims sound so awful and irrational when billions of miserable, slavish, and terrified Muslims have already lived and died and were murdered by their own culture? This sounds a bit Hitlerian, of course, when looked at in the light of the 20th Century and the ideologies of evil, but exactly what is wrong about wanting to live when there are so many who want to kill you and take what you have? Remember the Pax Romana? In the East, do you think Islam did those folks any real favors over time as everything that was worthwhile eroded into the sickest, most depressing, and arbitrary conditions? I realize the argument that "everybody's going to die sometime so why not kill them" is not an edifying notion to the tender hearted; nor the old saying, "kill them all and let God sort them out". That's not my proposal although the Hugh Hewitts of the world get their panties in a bunch because someone has uttered the G word (genocide), but the fact of the matter is that Western nations succeed precisely because they use overwhelming force to destroy their enemies (as Hanson writes about in Culture and Carnage). As Americans who basically want to be left alone so we can go about our business selling Cokes, hamburgers, and watching TV, we like to smash our enemies and end any possibility of long term or endless feuds. We aren't made for feuding but for finishing the job and getting on to what we'd rather be doing. We don't like looking over our shoulders all the time. So we'd rather kill them all than worry about nits growing into lice that will come back to annoy us. That's the American Way, like it or not. I don't necessarily like it, but I prefer it to what the rest of the world likes which is a constant level of despair, evil, tyranny, and oppression. An American will trade on the idea of acting like a beast for one day so that he might be a lamb for the rest of his days, rather than act like a slave everyday and suffer as one as the world usually settles for. So sue me if you think that's horrible. It's not nice, but life isn't really nice either. And you know, it's not being blown up in a subway that bothers me so much. It's being grotesquely maimed. That's the soldier's real nightmare. Being killed by a nuclear bomb is not as bad as surviving a nuclear bomb for a little while. But then, I have looked death in the face when I had my heart attack, and I didn't find it daunting to know I was going to die. Death really isn't the worst thing in the world. Evil is. posted by Mark Butterworth | 8:44 PM | |
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