“Nothing But Our Enemies’ Objectives”
David A. Bell, a professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, has written a piece for the Los Angeles Times in which he argues that the atrocities of 11 September 2001 didn’t really warrant America’s terrible vengeance. (Emphasis mine.)
Bell uses the numbers argument thus:
IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.
This isn’t an especially amenable argument to either Right or Left: to the Right, because of its notorious habit of being patriotic and taking offense at seeing our country attacked by jihadi mass murderers in whatever numbers and, to the Left, on account of its fetish for making intellectually degenerate comparisons between the number of those murdered on 11 September 2001 and the number of troops we have lost in Iraq.
But Bell doesn’t linger as much on this argument as one would have thought going in. Soon, he slinks into his college boy mode and blames the Enlightenment for America’s overreaction.
Yeah. The Enlightenment.
Until this period, most people in the West took warfare for granted as an utterly unavoidable part of the social order. Western states fought constantly and devoted most of their disposable resources to this purpose; during the 1700s, no more than six or seven years passed without at least one major European power at war.
The Enlightenment, however, popularized the notion that war was a barbaric relic of mankind’s infancy, an anachronism that should soon vanish from the Earth. Human societies, wrote the influential thinkers of the time, followed a common path of historical evolution from savage beginnings toward ever-greater levels of peaceful civilization, politeness and commercial exchange.
The unexpected consequence of this change was that those who considered themselves “enlightened,” but who still thought they needed to go to war, found it hard to justify war as anything other than an apocalyptic struggle for survival against an irredeemably evil enemy. In such struggles, of course, there could be no reason to practice restraint or to treat the enemy as an honorable opponent.
Preposterous sophistry. “The unexpected consequence” of what change? A change in the minds of a relative few who unaccountably regarded war as some sort of evolutionary relic? Speaking of anachronisms! There’s never been a time when such a theoretical and masturbatory notion ever actually mattered. That’s just a conceit of the over-schooled. And now Bell would have us believe that it was the Enlightenment that endowed all wars that followed with a puritanical or otherwise ideological quality that they had not theretofore possessed? Gibberish.
Mankind has been waging war amongst and against itself over questions of ideological purity and supremacy for ever. Whether any warring power has ever considered itself a product of some artificial category —such as an era or an age— is irrelevant.
So why does Bell make this lame argument and attribute to the War against Islamofascism an apocalyptic character that war had long before the Enlightenment? Because he wishes to insinuate that we Westerners have slipped our leashes and now wage war in some unprecedented way:
Ever since, the enlightened dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of modern total war have been bound closely to each other in the West. Precisely when the Enlightenment hopes glowed most brightly, wars often took on an especially hideous character.
But we do not live in the Enlightenment, professor, however much the vermin need crushing and the tyrants need to bleed.
There is no legitimate reason for Bell to suggest that we are overreacting to the threat of Islamofascism. He wishes to dismiss the present struggle as a criminal matter that was blown out of proportion, but he ignores every other factor that informs this civilizational war. Could a handful of Arab and Muslim states have choked off the world’s energy supply a century ago? When was the last time a mentally ill Iranian demagogue could have threatened to incinerate an entire nation of Jews —and be regarded as potentially capable of such? What is the benefit to human and civil rights in the world to allow sharia law to encroach further upon the West and its friends? No liberal worth his salt can sit there on his stupid hippie ass and seriously declare that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are going to be just fine so long as we don’t let a little mass murder muss our hair.
Any liberal who doesn’t see the necessity of this struggle isn’t really a liberal in any respectable sense of the word, but an out and out Leftist who champions the goals of anti-Western anarchism. But these are the people who see themselves as enlightened in the modern world. They know better than the rest of us that war against the enemies of our way of life is just a game played by the hidden hands and secret cabals of international finance.
What makes their fate so pathetic is that the very people whom they defend against Bushitler would cut their empty heads off just as indifferently as they would mine.
