The Laughter in the Dark
The AP reports that "a car bomb blasted through a busy bus station near one of Iraq's holiest shrines Saturday and killed at least 56 people, police and hospital officials said. The bus station bombing occurred about 200 yards from the Imam Hussein shrine in Karbala, where the grandson of Islam's Prophet Muhammad is buried — one of the most important sites for Shiites."
Implicit in the enemy use of these tactics is the presumption that its political target has a moral sensibility -- that it somehow cares about the threat to kill innocents unless it bends to their evil will. Otherwise it would not be affected. Blackmail is useless against those who don't care for the victims because there can be no assault on the sensibility of the insensible. Pity and virtue are treated as weakness -- but only by evil -- by those who hate pity, and hate it from pride.
But still more evil than terrorists are those who help them in projecting a moral inversion. For terrorists are themselves fully cognizant of the difference between innocence and guilt. It is this fine sensibility that allows terrorists to design one outrage greater than the other; that teaches it to seek out the child that they might mutilate it. Lucifer would have been a poor devil had he not the memory of an angel. But their apologists have no sense of evil; and are in some way morally inferior to the terrorists themselves. They have no memory of Paradise Lost. Darkness and light are all the same to them; or rather darkness is light and night their shade of preference. For the apologists of terror, the victims themselves are "little Eichmanns" and those who try to defend the victims blamed instead of the murderers. And not only do they believe this but will try to persuade anyone who will listen of its truth. The phrase "lost soul" is not just a metaphor but a diagnosis.
How can anyone leave the field to such evil? Or think that we could, by giving it victory, escape it ourselves?
posted by wretchardthecat at 4/14/2007 04:04:00 AM
13 Comments:
Al Qaeda had a rotten day
Al Qaeda is an utter failure. Most of their "surge" failed. More importantly, we now see that they can't even try to do anything besides suicide bombings, which proves they are a failure. Al Qaeda can't hold territory. They can't run for office. They can't plant their flag anywhere. Instead they cower in caves and sewers, unable to do anything besides ask civilians to kill civilians. Al Qaeda can't peacefully persuade anyone to follow them, and in fact the Iraqi Sunnis recently turned against them.
As for the Iraqi Parliament bombing, it mostly failed. The US had intelligence reports before the bombing took place, and increased security. That foiled most of the attack. As an Iraqi at the bombing scene said, AQ bombed a mostly deserted cafeteria. If they had launched the bomb in the assembly hall a few minutes earlier, they could have taken out most of the parliament. Indeed, it was later reported that unexploded explosives were found and detonated in a controlled blast. In summary, Al Qaeda bombed the wrong room, most of its explosives didn't work, and there were leaks from inside their organization.
It is also important to remember that several ministers of parliament have been arrested and had their houses searched because of being part of terrorist organizations. Large amounts of weapons were found. So it shouldn't be shocking that a terrorist group managed to get something into the parliament.
This shows how the MSM hates America by always twists the truth to try and say America is the loser. Imagine if the US had tried a raid on a terrorist camp, and most of our weapons didn't work, we hit the wrong part of the camp, word of the attack leaked out in advance, and we missed most of the terrorists. The media would quickly say the raid was a failure, which "proves" that the US has lost the war. Yet when our enemy, Al Qaeda, tries an operation that fails in exactly those ways, the media says it was a success, which "proves" that the US has lost the war. This really just shows that the media and the hate-America crowd can't be trusted.
"But still more evil than terrorists are those who help them in projecting a moral inversion."
Every day I wake and check in on the war. The whole war. Mainly I read my favorite blogs and a few conservative Brit papers and Spengler.
The extent of the moral inversion of which you speak dumbfounds me. The left, the MSM, our academic elite, the Euros have seemingly sided with evil....and each day I keep waiting for the event that will shake them awake and back to our side.
Maybe it is like WWII, where the left only got fired up about Hitler when he attacked the Soviet Union. So maybe if the terrorists do have a spring offensive in Europe....or carry out a second 9/11 when a Democrat sits at 1600 Pensylvania Avenue...or another Beslen....
The people of Rohan did, in the end, so wake and join the beleaguered defenders of Gondor at the gates.
Godspeed
"Or think that we could, by giving it victory, escape it ourselves?"
I don't think they analyze it that far, Wretchard. Rather, they operate under the assumption that the evil not named is the evil not seen, thus avoiding the invocation of terrorism as an independent phenomena, and placing blame for what aspects they choose to discuss on elements they feel they understand and can affect i.e. the West, the US. This sates the need for discussion of the topic on its own terms and instead allows them to pretend they have an understanding of the phenomena through their own conceptions of the West in general and the US in particular. They then criticize those who choose to confront the problem by charging them with bringing the evil home, or with creating more of it, thus providing the answer to the problem by 1. Circularly defining the problem as a symptom of the West/the US's actions, and 2. Placing the blame somewhere comfortable instead of somewhere logical.
How many times have you heard a critic of the US discuss Middle Eastern Radical Islamic terrorism without pitching it as a reaction to the West, rather than discuss it as a pathology of the societies from which they spring? A pathology which, if Israel or the West didn't exist, would simply be setting a different target, rather than not existing itself?
Choosing to treat terrorism as the response to Western actions, rather than the cause of them, is an act of whistling by the graveyard: It's an act of superstition, not logic, attributing to the West a level of control over other societies that it doesn't even have over its own. But it is comforting to apologists, as it does allow them the moral inversions you describe.
> Blackmail is useless against those who don't care for the victims
I don't see the role of compassion in this. Any government will collapse if enough of its citizens are killed, or it can't provide basic things like law & order and the ability to get food and shelter.
Besides trying to make the government collapse, AQ is trying to provoke retaliation, not compassion, killing of Sunni civilians by Shiites.
Bill Whittle has a new essay up where he discusses the "moral inversion" currently on display, what led up to it, how it's propagated: http://www.ejectejecteject.com/
I agree with him, and I know a lot of people on the blogosphere agree with him, too. The problem is, people who do *not* daily read the internet and just listen to the "news" as they're getting ready for work in the morning haven't got a clue how much of what they're hearing is just plain wrong, if not black and white lies.
The does seem to be a gathering tsunami to fire Rosie O'Donnell, though, and the Duke non-rape case is also a symptom of "truth and justice" fighting back and winning against black lies.
I just wonder how Pelosi's trip to Syria, hijab and all, played to middle America -- what all those mommy's and daddy's thought to themselves about Ms. Pelosi as they heard about her trip while getting ready to go out into their day.
I also note that the blubbering British sailors seem to have piped down, but I can't tell if that's because they've discovered they're not hero's and are belatedly ashamed, or if wiser heads than theirs reminded them that discretion is the better part of valor and not to embarrass their superiors any more than they're already reddened.
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Without even reading about their alleged concerns, I'm just going to leap to the assumption that any "Afghan Human Rights" organization *must* be in it for the money. They're looking for a payoff (as they've been taught to do by watching the UN), so of course they'll target American soldiers, and not the Taliban nor the French nor the Dutch.
Not gonna worry about it. Tell it to the United Nations who are in charge of dealing with human rights violations..
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How can anyone leave the field to such evil? Or think that we could, by giving it victory, escape it ourselves?
It's very simple. We can not keep on wasting our soldier's lives and treasure for a people that won't step up and do what it necessary to cleanse their neighborhoods of Al-Qaeda elements. Actually, the situation is even worse, for there are many Shiites willing to ethnically cleanse the Sunni terror sympathizers but the US is preventing them from doing do so in some horribly mistaken liberal notion that we can externally impose a multi-sectarian peace on an internal Islamic division.
Islam needs to undergo its own reformation and its going to be as bloody, or more so, as our own Christian one was. We are not doing the Iraqis any favor by delaying the inevitable battle while nothing gets accomplished. Be honest, Wretchard, if you thought the US could "win" this conflict by getting Sunni Islamists and Shiite Islamists to sit down together and sing Kumbaya, you would support benchmarks, a set time for the inept, deceitful Maliki government to get its act together. You don't believe that. Bush doesn't, McCain doesn't and I don't.
Iraq needs a victory, and victories happen when one side defeats the other. Anything else is what Edward Luttwak call a compromise that kills:
An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat.
It's time to give war a chance. This is an infection that needs to burn out without our attempting to quell the fever prematurely. Yes, a lot of Shiite Islamists and Sunni Islamists are going to die, but that's the price of religious transformation. Show a little spine. Besides, with yesterday's carbombing dead in Karbala (56) and today's in Baghdad (37), it's not like were preventing mass killing by staying.
Nahncee:
I was talking about western human rights organizations. Any Afghan human rights organization will be essentially an offshoot of western or westernized ideologies. And so far as I can tell, most Afghans are more interested in personal survival than they are in the welfare of bandits.
Yes beautifully put Wretchard. I wondered the same thing though not quite so eloquently.
Here in Seattle you hear all kinds of excuse making for terrorists: - -well they were desperate,
the US forced them into it;
-what would you do if the oppressors's foot was on your neck;
-the resistance has to make its point.
I goad them: why do you always have to approve of the terrorists AFTER the attack. Why don't you get out of your armchair and do some proactive terror?
I try to make them see that aprobation after the fact is a kind of assent to murder. For it is murder that we are talking about here. One of mankind's oldest proscriptions. Thou shall not murder. What happened to that?
Wherever America is not present, evil wins out over the good. This is a constant function.
The good people don't always win in in war. Only in American wars have the side with the most good, won consistently historically. Those who love war have never experienced it, and those who love war do not love the good.
We can not keep on wasting our soldier's lives and treasure for a people that won't step up and do what it necessary to cleanse their neighborhoods of Al-Qaeda elements.
This has become an excuse not to do anything, hoping that others will do your dirty work for you. This is laziness and dishonor. And there has never been a historical case where laziness and dishonor brought victory to the Good. Betrayal, evil, temptation, and mercenary impulses are not what builds great alliances or achieves victory through trying odds.
Do people really think that "victory" is as easy as refusing to resist evil and just let war do its thing, cause war is inevitable?
We are not doing the Iraqis any favor by delaying the inevitable battle while nothing gets accomplished.
Since when has anything great or of lasting worth been achieved because the people gave into the inevitable and stopped delaying it? Greatness is achieved by resisting entropy, not giving into temptation and doing the easy thing. Where there is life, there is hope. But evil has never believed in that, for death is its ultimate goal. Dying is easy, living is hard.
But their apologists have no sense of evil; and are in some way morally inferior to the terrorists themselves. They have no memory of Paradise Lost. Darkness and light are all the same to them; or rather darkness is light and night their shade of preference. For the apologists of terror, the victims themselves are "little Eichmanns" and those who try to defend the victims blamed instead of the murderers. And not only do they believe this but will try to persuade anyone who will listen of its truth. The phrase "lost soul" is not just a metaphor but a diagnosis.
They are servants of entropy after all. And given how entropy seeks to equalize differences, so do they. Good is different from Evil, so they will make Good the same as Evil. Since it is easier to destroy the Good than convert Evil to something better, they reverse inverse America into something less than what we are. Thereby equalizing the difference between us and them. Mediocrity is not mutually exclusive with evil.
True believers are always morally superior to those who believe in nothing, Wretchard. It is perhaps analogous to the contempt we feel for arms merchants that sell to both sides. At least the two sides have the excuse that they're fighting for their own goals, but the merchant of death is only interested in himself, and it does not matter whether world burns around him in the process.While Good has a view over Evil and vice a versa, how do they both view an agent that tries to play both sides at the same time? With respect? I think not.
How can anyone leave the field to such evil? Or think that we could, by giving it victory, escape it ourselves?
Why would they want to escape it? Their beliefs, if you could even call it that, is both narcissistic as well as nihilistic. There is the personal goals for the sef combined with the belief that because death and failure are inevitable, you should speed along the process of entropy to get everything over faster and with less suffering. If they succede in making both us and our enemies stop fighting, it will be because there will no longer exist any belief, value, or philosophy that people would be willing to die for or kill for. So they work on the US first and foremost, because it equalizes the difference fastest and easiest. I am sure they plan on working on the Islamic Jihad latter on, but of course so does the Revolution plan on glory after the initial victory. Doesn't mean it occurs of course.
Their priorities are simple. They believe the fervency of belief that must be prioritized for disbelief is Christian Fundamentalism here in the United States. Obviously they believe that once they have taken care of this, they will have the power to take care of the Islamic Jihad. But of course, one wonders how you can have power to do anything if you don't believe in anything worth dying or killing for.
It is one justificiation for pacifism. If somebody wants true peace, then what better way to do it than to get everyone to stop fighting, and the only way to do that, is to make people believe that nothing is worth fighting for.
I think fundamentally, wretchard, the reason why the Left thinks Evil and Good are the same thing, is that both Evil and Good have things the people on their various sides, will kill, mutilate, and die for. If the Left or whatever nomenclature you wish to label disillusioned disbelievers as, wishes for eternal peace, then they obviously would be against both Good and Evil. Meaning they would be the same thing to them. So they don't want to escape Evil, wretchard. They want to escape Evil and Good. Or anything else that induces humanity into fighting and killing and dieing and ... living. Because is not death inevitable? Why should a baby be given a life of pain...
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