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May 2, 2006
The True Enemy
Shelby Steele has an interesting take on how moonbattery — or as he puts it, "white guilt" — prevents the USA from fighting all out and winning wars.
As we did in Vietnam, we are fighting in Iraq with one hand behind our back, fighting "so as to make a little room for an insurgency" — even though everyone including the insurgents knows that we could crush them if only we had the will.
The reason we don't is that we are no longer allowed to believe in ourselves, but are forced by politically correct ideology to renounce our own history. Consequently we are concerned not so much with the enemy as with our own sense of illegitimacy. You cannot win a fight while apologizing for your own existence. As Steele puts it:
Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem — win a war, fix immigration — they lose legitimacy.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.
Our enemy in Iraq is not so much al Qaeda or the remnants of Saddam's ghoulish regime, as our own carping media and our fear that if we take off the kid gloves and play to win, effete Euroweenies might denounce us as cowboys. It doesn't occur to us that we ought to be proud to be cowboys.
This same phenomenon is causing us to lose the war of conquest currently being waged against us by Mexico — potentially the most disastrous war in American history, because of our bizarre refusal to defend ourselves. Here the enemy isn't Vicente Fox or left-wing demagogues within our own country like Juan Jose Gutierrez or Dolores Huerta. It's Senators Kennedy and McCain, and the President himself, and the rest of the Washington bureaucrats who don't believe in our country enough to defend it regardless of whether the media would consider them "racist."
In the end, we only have one enemy that genuinely threatens us. The rest are just opportunistic infections. The true enemy is the liberal elite intelligentsia that has poisoned our most crucial resource: our belief in what we are.
Hat tip: Wiggins
Posted by Van Helsing at May 2, 2006 9:37 PM
Comments
Van H -- As an American rabbi succinctly stated in a recent article, the greatest democratic experiment that has ever existed on this earth is in danger of annihilation by its own hand, simply from the absurd fear that it might be called a name by those seeking to more swiftly bring about that demise.
Monsoon
Posted by: Monsoon at May 3, 2006 9:05 AM
Of course, not going to war at the drop of a hat is a much easier way to stop these problems....
Posted by: Alternative at May 3, 2006 10:57 AM
"Drop of a hat?" There were over 16 months between September 11, 2001 and March 19, 2003. This was the most telegraphed punch in human history.
Posted by: phil at May 3, 2006 11:07 AM
Yeah, it's the equivalent of a prize-fighter sending several notes a week before the first round saying "I'm going to hit you." Don't act surprised when he hits the guy.
Posted by: Archonix at May 3, 2006 11:48 AM
And then just hitting whoever they want.. links between Iraq and 9/11 are tenuous at best
Posted by: Alternative at May 3, 2006 12:24 PM
They are. If you ignore all the evidence that's been brought forward in the last few years...
Posted by: Archonix at May 3, 2006 12:25 PM
We have met the true enemy: it is the left side of our own brain. Let us hope the right side prevails or we will find ourselves in a straitjacket ranting in spanish and bowing toward Mecca.
Posted by: Theway2k at May 3, 2006 7:51 PM
Does this mean that Britain is fully backed to got to war with USA? After all, most of the funding for the last 25 years of terrorist activities in the UK has come from the USA...
Posted by: Alternative at May 4, 2006 7:14 AM
Largely from private donations, not the US government, which is bout as oposite to the Iraqi situation as you can get. And that IRA funding almost completely dried up toward the end of 2001 for some strange reason...
Posted by: Archonix at May 4, 2006 1:29 PM
And yet the government still had to make it illegal to support them in 2004. Suggests there was still plenty of support. As for Iraq supporting Al-Qaeda there is no link. There is of course plenty of propaganda to make you believe otherwise but then people have been trying to justify this war since before it started... those pesky hiding WMDs...
Posted by: Alternative at May 5, 2006 7:51 AM
Seems the current leader of AQ in Iraq was in Iraq before the invasion, receiving treatment for wounds received in Afghanistan.
Keep yelling the same old lies--they remain lies.
Posted by: nikko at May 5, 2006 3:29 PM
Nikko - that doesn't even make sense... read it again and please try harder...
Posted by: What at May 9, 2006 6:51 AM
