RUTHFULLY YOURS

If many do not recall (including our President from whom no statement can be found at this time of writing), it is because our culture and its leaders have failed to truly learn. They have failed to broadly inculcate the lessons of that great global conflict — one that led to such massive death and culminated in such compelling victory over tyrannical evil.

We again face a tyrannical evil with global ambition, an ideology that glorifies death and abhors freedom. We again have a choice — to engage the gathering threat at home and abroad in time to stop freedom’s loss — or, to dither and decline until compelled by the engulfing violence.

We seem to be coming to a point of mental and moral isolationism, indeed both a virtual and a real disarmament. We are unwilling to see either the far threat or the near manifestation for what they are, though they manifest themselves daily. And because we are unwilling, we are dangerously unable. Hence we conflate enemies and friends, equivocate where there is no equivalence, mis-analyze intelligence, and have no real strategy for deterrence, defense or victory.

Such self-disablement requires an Orwellian warping of language and logic, on a consistent basis, so as to lull us into imagining that the enemy does not mean what he says, does not, in fact, mean anything at all. The radical Islamist is not even an enemy — but is instead a ‘friend in waiting’, to whom certain quaint accommodations are due, allies sacrificed, histories revised and laws altered.  Islam must not be mentioned unless with reverence; its books and tenets not examined, its parts not viewed as a whole; its martial history, statecraft and aspirations ignored. A cynical ignorance pervades in our approach and is as carefully cultivated by the enemy as it is by ourselves. The worst elements from the Islamist enemy are embraced as the essential solution set by leaders here and abroad; a kind of cognitive dissonance obtains, further blinding us.

Accordingly, suffering an acute case of semantic infiltration, we have begun to adopt the enemy’s terms, his laws and maps, and his very definition of ourselves as the problem and the oppressor. It has been suggested that this is only possible because our faith in our own cause — western civilization, and the American project — has begun to atrophy after so many years of vain self-focus, false critique and plain neglect (the decline of western birth rates to below replacement levels provides a meta example).

At the same time, the enemy’s rabid faith in the rightness of his cause — and hence his hope of persevering — is renewed, increasing and virile. His civilizational myths are both ancient and newly blooded — while ours have their meaning and memory sapped by the censors of political correctness and the debasers of culture. As between evil and good we are increasingly unsure; such calculus requires a value judgment and that, we are told, is a ‘bad thing’.  Arthur Koestler’s existential question about the West’s ‘willingness to acquiesce in its own survival’ is once again tabled, if not yet in our peoples’ core, most certainly in the actions and views of much our cultural and political elite.

Our leadership elite shrinks from American exceptionalism, and everywhere apologizes for our accomplishments, values and our commitments — as if these are an embarrassing burden instead of a legacy for which they are merely the temporary stewards. Theirs is not the America which, with a vision cleared by grievous attack and thousands lost (recall isolationism had been our soporific until Pearl Harbor), sent its sons up the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc to “fight for life and leave the air singed with their honor.”  They do not seem to understand that America or revere it.

These are not ‘great-souled men’, tested, humbled and fired by experience. They are instead Churchill’s pygmies who stand on the shoulders of great men ignorantly, imagining themselves bringers of a great and needed change.  They are poseurs, but of a very dangerous sort and at a very dangerous time.  Such measures as are available to us suggest that time is pressing.

Now, more than sixty six years after D-Day, is a good time to reflect upon what that America was, and what America is now. It is a good time to reflect upon how to ensure its leaders are shaken from their present drift, or are soon replaced by ones without delusion.