The first several paragraphs are skippable, being an exposition of the history of Western Civ from a certain point of view, that gives less credit to Judeo-Christianity (and especially the latter) than it ought.
Be that as it may, the rest of the essay is bracing in its clarity and importance:
The result is modern Western society; a society whose overwhelming advantages include: freedom for each individual to live, think, question and speak as he sees fit; respect for the law and the rights of others; individual safety and empowerment; and a benevolent atmosphere of cooperation and peace among men.There then follows a shameful catalog of event after event of state-complicit islamic terror attacks against the West, that went effectively unanswered. With the end of the Cold War, there is absolutely no excuse for that anymore.
But along with all the advantages of an individual-based society comes one inherent risk. In delegating his use of force, and forsaking adherence to any gang or tribe, each individual is disarmed and essentially helpless should his government fail to act on his behalf.
It would therefore be of the highest treason for a government to abandon any law-abiding citizen who comes under attack. In fact failing to protect an individual would be beyond treason: it would essentially reverse and betray 2,500 years of Western development. It would be tantamount to taking the individual, whose life and happiness is for the first time important, stripping him of all his defenses, and then offering him up to any mindless brute or savage to skin alive as he pleased.
And yet, in the past few decades, this is exactly what Western governments have done repeatedly. If it is not stopped soon, Western, i.e. civil and peaceful, society will break down -– and we will return to the primitive state of gang rule and utter contempt for the individual which currently exists in the entire non-Westernized world.
To understand the pattern of failures, and to see how it must be broken, it is important to survey the relevant historical events of the past 25 years or so. For though the faltering of Western governments could be decried since the end of World War II, and even more so with the events in Korea and Vietnam, a watershed of sorts began with our response to the rise of fundamentalist Islamic nations and their self-proclaimed hatred and hostility towards the West and all things Western.
The pattern began in 1979 when the newly empowered supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, took power.
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This event signaled to all observers, that though the West still had abundant physical means to defend its citizens, it had lost its will to do so. In fact, not only would it not defend its citizens, it would even act against them, as did the US State Department when, after the eventual release of the hostages, it quashed their attempt to seek redress in international courts, simply to avoid “stirring up” trouble with foreign nations!
The absence of any military response and the complete abdication of the government’s responsibility to its citizens was the first sign to the Islamic world that it could act with impunity against any Western citizen -- and act it did. A series of attacks throughout the Middle East followed.
The catalog should be read as a refresher for everyone, because to see it all in one place (and it's surprisingly long) illustrates the point dramatically.
After coming to the present day, and the mohammed cartoon protests, the essay concludes,
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw “praised the UK media for refusing to reprint the cartoons” saying that “I believe the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong.” He later added that “freedom of speech did not mean an open season on religious taboos.” EU commissioner Frattini capitulated completely and suggested that the press adopt a “voluntary code” of self-censorship.As denizens of representative Republics, we in the West get whatever government we deserve.
No Western government has taken a single action to eliminate the sources of the bounties on the heads of Western citizens, to hunt down the issuers of death threats against editors and publishers, nor even to pledge full and unconditional protection to any citizen who wishes to exercise his statutory rights in the face of violent Islamic opposition.
The historical pattern is clear and consistent. For twenty five plus years, Islamists have isolated and targeted Western citizens around the world with impunity, and have succeeded in fostering fear in most citizens. They have effectively used a divide and conquer strategy, with little or no opposition. The pattern must be broken immediately.
To see how, imagine a neo-Nazi state arising and declaring to Western nations: “We have no quarrel with you, we just want to exterminate the Jews who reside within your borders.” The proper response would of course be: “if you want to harm our law-abiding citizens, you DO have a quarrel with us, in fact you have a war, for no one may threaten our citizens without threatening our nation as a whole.” Similar reasoning extends from a segment of the population to a single individual citizen. If a nation threatens one citizen, it threatens the nation, and we must do everything in our power, including going to war if necessary, to eradicate the threat. Otherwise there is no point for individuals to delegate their use of force to the state, and every enemy will employ a “divide and conquer” tactic to eliminate us one citizen at a time.
As a reminder of this, let us resurrect Dumas’ famous Musketeers’ rallying call: “One for All and All for One” emphasizing the latter phrase. For only by standing together to defend each individual can a peaceful society exist. Thus we must stand together and protect the lonely author who dares question a religion and who is sentenced to death because of it. We must stand together to defend his publishers who are firebombed for printing the book. We must stand together to defend the individual film-maker and political dissident who criticize Islam and are sentenced to death because of it. We must stand together to defend the benign cartoonist, who pens a simple cartoon, and is then forced into hiding by death threats and bounties.
To stand together means to assert our rights with our government as our agent. To those who threaten us with force, asserting our rights means responding with force, in fact, with overwhelming force. We must say to Iran (which on February 14 just reconfirmed the Rushdie fatwa) “oust and turn over the regime which sees fit to condemn a single citizen of ours to death, or face all out war.” And if they refuse, give them the war they started, but be sure to win it decisively, not protecting their mosques and infrastructure, but instead doing everything necessary to ensure they have no capacity to ever threaten us again. To Pakistan and India, which host clerics bold enough to put bounties on the heads of our citizens, demand that they turn over the men and their supporters, and if they refuse, go in and take them by force.
For if we fail to reverse our pattern, men will continue to learn that their rights are a sham, that the government’s promise to protect the individual is a hoax, and that only by refraining from thinking and speaking out might they be momentarily safe. Men will then go on to realize that they must seek out true protectors, in the form of some gang; ethnic, religious or otherwise; who may afford them a measure of security, albeit at the cost of complete obedience. Eventually the gangs will fight it out in an effort to wrest absolute power and to subjugate the others.
So will end the great intellectual and political achievement of the West, which began 2,500 years ago in Greece with its discovery and reverence for the individual, and which culminated in the enunciation of the guiding principles of the United States. The end will not come because an over-powering enemy has arisen –- no, to our everlasting shame, the end will come because Western governments, in a display of incredible cowardice and treason, have abandoned and delivered their disarmed individual citizens to a mob of stone-age savages.
It is time to vote accordingly and tell our representatives what they must do.
