The Unpleasant Truth

The unpleasant truth is that ethical societies will never vanquish monstrous strategies except through etymology: coining and then deploying. The neologisms, “geographic neutralization” and “ethnic restructuring.”

The definitions? You tell me. This is a pop quiz. Essays are for extra credit. But, there is a time limit: windows of opportunity. When our window closes their window opens and they will defenestrate in a heart-beat.

Hippocrates said that drastic illnesses call for drastic remedies. What do you call the Dresden fire bombing? What do you call Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What do you call the Sand Creek massacre. So, war is not murder? Wait. Watch. … See what happens. Perhaps I am wrong. Ah, but a just war is not murder. McCain was our hero, blanket bombing Hanoi to make the world a “safe place for democracy.” Hanoi is still communist the last time I looked. Bush and Cheney are war criminals, but there will be no Hague trials.

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.” – Henry Kissinger.

Let me ask this question: does a nation pioneer the development of weapons of mass destruction while the thought of using them never enters their minds? Right now, we are launching missile strikes in at SUSPECTED targets in Yemen, but we have not declared war. China sends a shipload of weapons destined for Zimbabwe, for Mugabe to wipe out his opposition, but no coastal port allows them to dock. But what does the world at large do about it? Nothing.

Each and every nuclear sub silently circling the oceans contains MORE destructive fire power than ALL 5 years of WWII BOTH SIDES COMBINED. It is not inconceivable that genetically engineered bio-weapons will be designed specific to peoples with certain ancestry because of something called genetic markers. These are all ideas for a sci-fi screen play. Surely you don’t think I am serious or correct about any of this. Lighten up! No one is ready to do anything about such things until and unless they are ready to do EVERYTHING about it.

The very fact that Tom Tancredo said what he did is just one of many proofs that I am not saying anything which has never been said before:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Tancredo

Tancredo traces his interest in politics to the eighth grade, when he played Fidel Castro in a class assignment. He urges America to reject “the siren song of multiculturalism” and depicts Islam as “a civilization bent on destroying ours.” In September 2006, when Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor who said the prophet Mohammed had brought “things only evil and inhuman”,[2] sparking Muslim anger throughout the world, Tancredo urged him not to apologize.

In July, when Tancredo proposed that America respond to any future terrorist attack by bombing Mecca and other holy sites, John Podhoretz, writing on the National Review’s website, said: “Tom Tancredo is an idiot.”

But as we well know, idiots are sometimes elected to high office.

http://www.quotecounterquote.com/2009/11/hearts-and-minds-from-bible-to.html

VIETNAM WAR QUOTE: “We must be ready to fight in Vietnam, but the ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and the minds of the people who actually live out there.” Lyndon Baines Johnson Hearts and Minds” speech, May 4, 1965

VIETNAM WAR COUNTERQUOTE:
“If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” U.S. Green Berets slogan during the Vietnam War

When the threat decade after decade is ideological, your enemy becomes the minds of a generation in which the meme dwells and breeds its offspring. How does one defend against a generation or an idea? You don’t. Your choice is to be vanquished or vanquisher.

Certain kinds of enemies may only effectively be incarcerated in ancient history. Notice we have not had a troublesome pharaoh for some time. Today, Switzerland is only legislating against minarets. Tomorrow, who knows? The basements?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minaret_controversy_in_Switzerland

And the Swiss are so flexible and lenient! Their knives are a bit of everything and their cheese has holes!

I suppose I am making fun of euphemisms like “sleep management” and others to be found here

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/166848.html

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism

(excerpt: A similar progression occurred with the following terms for persons with physical handicaps:

lame → crippled → handicapped → disabled → physically challenged → differently abled
)

I am saying something without saying anything (to confuse certain people) – see “Persecution and the Art of Writing” by Leo Strauss (pay special attention to “Apples of gold in silver fittings) – Nota bene: If I were to post that I one day anticipate a “World War III” that does NOT mean that I am telling the world to have a third world war, but simply that like the prophet Daniel, there is certain handwriting on the wall (in Daniel’s case, Mene mene tekel upharsin) and (if you ask me what I think it means) then I interpret it in a certain way (in Daniel’s case it was

“you have been weighed and found wanting.)

Now, if I had a weekly television series, say “Boston Legal”, then I could weave all these observations into the plot, the way they do. Actually, I did do that a while back and called it “Waging P.E.A.C.E.)

I wonder what Truman or Eisenhower would have said if you had predicted to them that within a few decades, America would be fighting undeclared wars, torturing prisoners, holding captives indefinitely without due process, I wonder what they would have said, if anything, AFTER they finished telling you that you were out of your mind.

But each of you can be your own prophet and interpret the handwriting on the wall any way you see fit, or, you may close your eyes and say “there is no wall, there is no writing.” This is the beauty of the Reformation!

Yes, I agree, we only think in the terms to which we have been conditioned. Muslims think in terms of haram (forbidden) and halal (permitted.)

There are groups or types who sexualize everything. Scientists think in terms of experiment. Mathematicians think axiomatically. Artists think aesthetically. An entrepreneur or an accountant thinks in terms of profit, loss and net worth. Atheists think in terms of discrediting notions of God and religion. The devout seek not only proofs of God but also arguments that their own creed is the only truth. When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are pockets.

When you stop and think about it, the Bible starts and ends with ethnocide. The first extermination is described in the account of Noah’s ark. The Bible ends with an extermination in the Book of Revelation. There is also the suggestion that various peoples, such as the Malachites be exterminated, together with all their beasts. Somewhere in the Psalms there is one verse that says something “blessed is he who dashes their infants’ heads against a rock.”

I have been thinking today about how often the entire world, or large parts of it, have become polarized. I suspect the first large scale polarization was our homo sapient ancestors against the Neanderthal. They co-existed for a period of 50,000 years. The last signs of Neanderthal are to be found at the Rock of Gibralter. I would not be surprised if our ancestors killed the Neanderthal on sight.

The Internet is chocked full of the sort of things I hint at, stated far more explicitly than my understated style.

http://hammerofevil.blogspot.com/2007/01/25-how-do-you-choose-enemies-to-attack.html

Those of us who lived through the cold war era of the 1950s well remember how we demonized the Communists who in turn demonized us as Capitalists. Before that, the world was polarized into the Nazis and axis powers vs the Allies.

With each decade and each century the terminology changes but the polarization remains the same. We need not state what the polarity is today, for we know that all too well.

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis; aufgehoben (uniting opposites, and then starting the process all over again in endless cycles.) I should post the link to my Senior paper on Hegel.

If I were asking the opening question of for a seminar on the Iliad, perhaps I would ask “What would Achilles’ attitude be towards ethnocide?”

In fact, I wonder what the earliest historical example is of a writer describing ethnocide in modern terms, and conceding that it may be morally repugnant.

What China did to Tibet is considered a form of ethnocide, not because they slew all Tibetans, but because China systematically, with malice of forethought, destroyed the fabric of Tibetan culture and tradition.

Conservative Islamic societies, who wage a “soft war” against Western Internet influence view the demonic West as attempting ethnocide in the sense that our secular, material culture threatens to destroy the Islamic moral fabric of their youth.

You might say that Islam sees the West as guilty of Socrates’ crime, corrupting the youth, and they are wondering how large a chalice of hemlock to prepare.

If (lets be imaginative), say, Stalin has a Tardis time travel machine (OK, he STEALS it from Dr. Who), and Stalin travels back in time with weapons of mass destruction, and gives Achilles the button, what does Achilles do?

If Achilles pushes that button then, bing, bang, boom, Troy is gone! Is the poetry gone? Is the plot gone? Or does the poetry and drama morph into something that culture has yet to imagine?

Achilles starts asking Stalin some questions. Stalin explains the usual dictator stuff, you know “one death is a tragedy, ten million deaths is a statistic.”

There is one little sentence in American history that no one really seems to think deeply about:

“Live free or die.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Free_or_Die

The question is, when does the “or die” kick in and how does it play out?

The way I see it, Achilles knew how and when to die, but America has forgotten how to kill in the way that Achilles killed and, with all due respect, America may have forgotten the how and why of when to die.

Now, purely by coincidence, I just finished watching a Netflix DVD, “The Taking of Pelham 123”

with John Travolta. We could have an interesting discussion if we carefully analyze that movie from the perspective of Achilles, Stalin and Dr. Who.

But then, we would have to talk about who is the MOST free. When are we the most free? And what makes us so free?