A Memorial Day Pony-Related Thought · 1:54pm May 25th, 2015
Last night I slept safe in my bed and awoke after a good night's sleep. I did not fear that, in the night, the enemies of my country would come and destroy my house and kill myself or my wife or any of my loved ones. I take this for granted, as do most Americans. Even though I know better, having extensively studied both military and social history, I tend to assume that peace and law are the norm, war and crime very rare exceptions to the rule.
The truth is that -- to the extent that peace and order are the norm -- this is only because the brave have been willing to fight and subdue those forces which would bring war and crime to our shores and make them normal -- as, indeed, they have been normal for depressingly large numbers of humans during depressingly long periods of history. Read about the Classical Dark Ages -- it's very beautifully discussed in the works of Homer, among dryer and more academic places. Or the Medieval Dark Ages. Or Europe during the World Wars, or Africa and the Middle East right now.
This brings up the point that we are far from safe now, though we are safer than we might otherwise be, because of the brave people in uniform who guard us while we sleep. A new evil -- or simply this generation's version of a very old evil -- is rising in the Mideast and in Africa. It wants to kill or enslave us all. It is willing to burn up as many of the humans running its meme in their brains as it needs to win, and it won't be stopped until we are both able and willing to instead kill the humans who have been the most virulently infected by it.
Its name is radical Islam, and it won't go away just because we whine that it won't play fair and we pick up our toys and go home. It will follow us home, as Europe has already found out but mostly refuses to face, and as America should have realized on 9-11 and maybe is starting to realize again after a score of pinprick terrorist attacks, most recently on a convention in Garland Texas, which might have been worse had not a brave man with a pistol shot straight enough to neutralize the superior arms and armor of his foe by killing the creatures bearing them.
It is in the process of acquiring nuclear missiles. Soon, it will be able to kill not a half-dozen here or a half-dozen there, nor even a few thousand when it gets its hands on some passenger jets, but hundreds of thousands per attack. More, if we're actually stupid enough to let the radical Muslims build up a sizable arsenal. Our best hope there is a sadly-selfish one -- it's far more likely that the first atomic war radical Islam will start will be Iran vs. Israel or Pakistan vs. India, which both will give us warning, and allies who will have flashed-over from rules-of-engagement to kill-em-all mode, and will probably remain in that mode until the end of the war.
We are facing a global war of survival, a true "clash of civilizations" in Huntington's famous term, and it will not end until either their survivors tremble and beg before us, offering concession after concession in return for being allowed to live and practice a safely-watered-down version of what they once considered an invincible Faith; or our survivors tremble and beg before them, hoping for mercy and lives in dhimmitude, which will mean accepting whatever abuse the Faithful choose to dish out to us, whenever they want to, with scant hope of redress -- and virtually no freedom of speech or ability to bear arms. Read up on it -- the social history of non-Muslims under Islam is scarcely secret. Heck, it's playing out right now in Iraq and Syria under ISIS.
The Pony relevance of this?
In the Shadow Wars, the Ponies struggle for survival against a merciless alien foe. They win, and in winning earn the right to live on, to see their civilization live on, and to have a future for their foals. And then time passes. New generations are born. And these new generations don't understand that the peace and prosperity and safety that they take for granted was bought with the blood, sweat and tears of their elders. The veteran Ponies become strange old stallions and mares, who start at loud noises and seem saddened by certain memories, and their children and grandchildren don't know why. Or rather, they know, but don't want to admit it to themselves, because that would mean admitting that the Universe is a dangerous place, and safety can turn to terror in an instant of bad fortune.
Princess Luna is used to this. It's part of why she went mad, over a millennium ago. The generation that fought the Wars, long-lived as never before due to advancing medical technlogy, will learn it.
This scenario required little creativity for me to invent. It's basically a Ponification of what happened to the Greatest Generation, the one that fought World War II -- as should be obvious from the Translation Convention I gave for the titles of Sweetie Belle's hit songs (two of them based on the Andrews Sisters -- the other one cribbed from Robotech, because I just couldn't resist having her be that world's "Lin Minmei"
Ah, well. The Millennials haven't learned the lesson yet, thanks to poor leadership on George W. Bush's part, and close-to-treasonous leadership on Barack H. Obama's part. The lesson will be learned, one way or another. My personal belief is that at the end we will still be standing tall, and it will be the Muslim world in ruins, having to submit to our culture; because we are a damned strong people, and history is littered with the wreckage of would-be global tyrannies who thought we were weak. That applies both to us, and to the British who originally founded our nation.
But we shouldn't get too cocky. There's an even longer history of wrecked civilizations who went down before the mindless will to hate that is the essence of Islam. We will win if we are both smart and brave, but we can lose by being stupid and cowardly. And if we win, as always it will be because the courageous among us would rather die on their feet than live on their knees.
I guess my theory is simply that Love beats Hate. If I didn't believe this, I'd hardly be a fan of My Little Pony, nor would I be writing the Shadow Wars Storyverse.
Hooray for the Harmony!
3096124
I was inspired to write this by your Facebook Memorial Day posts, you know ...
3096142 aww!!
A certain poem stanza comes to mind.
At the hour the barbarian chose to disclose his pretenses
And raged against Man, they engaged on the breasts that they bared for us
The first felon-strike of the sword he had longtime prepared for us
Their bodies were all our defense while we wrought our defenses.
Let us give them No Quarter.
"by killing the creatures bearing them."
Beware. The moment we stop thinking of the monsters in real life who do evil as human, we embrace their logic. That those we fight are not people, and therefore, do not feel any guilt, regret, pity, etc, for killing them, it's not like you're killing PEOPLE. That's THEIR logic.
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Oh yeah. That's a pretty dark path to follow, and one were the dark is neither comforting nor restful.
3096459
I'm well aware that the Muslim fundamentalists are human. I'm a student of history, so I'm well aware that humans have done some pretty dreadful things in their times, including some human cultures which now behave far better. However, I also think that we need to be "cruel to be kind" when it comes to a struggle for survival between two rival concepts of civilization, because if we try to be kind here, what will happen is that we will give our foes time enough to build into a really major threat that will only be put down by fairly extreme rules of engagement.
I'll give you a historical analogy. Suppose that in 1936 the Allies had decided to respond to the German reoccupation of the Rhineland (which blatantly violated the Treaty of Versailles) by deciding that since the treaty had been violated, the Great War must now be resumed. The Germans had marched about 120 thousand troops into the Rhineland -- this was close to their full military strength at the time. The Allies could have fairly easily mobilized sufficient force to utterly smash this force; indeed, to march on into Germany and put an end to the Third Reich.
Such an action, of course, would have resulted in the deaths of at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Germans, and at least thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of British and French. So much death and destruction, over a mere point of honor in a treaty? Consequently, no sane politician argued for this course. (Churchill may have, but everyone knew he wasn't sane). So the peace held ...
... and because the peace held, just three years later, in 1939, World War II broke out. When it ended, in 1945, something like a hundred million lay dead, including over seven million Germans (I do not know if this number includes the over one million Germans done to death by their own regime). The Western Allies, who in 1936 had quailed at the prospect of having to machinegun pro-German protestors in the Rhineland, by 1945 were routinely burning whole cities to the ground by mass incendiary bombardment. Both America and Britain, decades later, regretted doing this. This regret did not cause any of the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in those air raids to spring back to life.
The Soviets marched into Eastern Europe and enslaved it for the next 44 years. They were especially brutal in Germany, where more or less by direct order the Soviet troops were allowed to rape and plunder the civilian populace, including torturing to death anyone to whom they took a particular dislike. A signature Soviet war crime against Germans was killing underaged girls by literally raping them to death; sometimes finishing them off with bayonets, sometimes killing them simply because their small, poorly-nourished bodies could not survive being gang-raped.
Were the British and French being "kind" to Germany in 1936? Definitely yes. Would the Germans have been far, far, FAR better off if the British and French had been "cruel" to Germany in 1936? Also, definitely yes. A little cruelty in 1936 would have spared Germany a lot of cruelty in 1944-45, and this was predictable.
Right now, we are fighting the Terrorist Wars with both hands tied behind our backs, allowed to poke gingerly with our toes, but only when we're sure that we're poking known foes. Our forbearance would be hilarious if its predictable consequences weren't so horrendous. We allowed Iran to commit acts of war against us from the start of the Iraq insurgency on, and haven't even subjected them to a limited strike. We respond to terrorist attacks against our own soil by agonizing over the harsh words Westerners are saying about Muslims. We release captured enemy leaders for bad reasons or no reasons at all (do you suppose the Syrians and Iraqis are thanking us for letting loose so many who then went on to lead ISIS killings)? When our own citizens run off to join foreign forces with histories of mass atrocity, we worry about how we'll "re-integrate" them into our society when they come home (hint: the proper "re-integration" for open treason involves a firing squad and a burial detail).
What do you suppose is going to happen when, say, Manhattan or Oakland goes up in a nuclear fireball? How kind do you suppose we'll be then? The Muslim dead in our first week of retaliation will surpass the total dead on both sides during this whole war from 2001 to the present -- and if it doesn't, there'll be an impeachment proceeding, or maybe a White House coup, and the next President will order a massive counterstrike. How "kind" do you suppose our forces will be when they march into the ruins of Iran or Pakistan or where-ever, the soldiers all having lost civilian friends and loved ones to Islam. Do you suppose they'll be respectful of the local religion? Do you suppose that the political pressure from home will be to insist on such respect, or to demand quite the opposite?
Or -- forget about Manhattan or Oakland. What if it's Tel Aviv or Bombay that is hit? What do you think the Israelis, who don't have a very large population and hence are apt to feel a mite desperate in such a situation, will do to make sure that their surrounding enemies are in no condition to take advantage of the year or two of Israeli weakness before they can rebuild? There are rumors of "Jericho Options" which basically involve nuking every major Muslim city in their region, and nuking European ones, too, if the Europeans try to stop them. How many Muslims do you think will die then?
What do you think the Indians, who were restrained from genocidal war against the Muslims who once conquered their subcontinent by a thin British-trained liberal elite -- an elite which is right now being replaced by more nationalist politicians -- will do to Pakistan after the Pakistanis kill a few million or tens of millions of Indians? Remember, India is several times stronger than Pakistan. Do you think India will be satisfied with just finishing Pakistan as a military Power? I personally think that the Indian Army will march in victorious, and commence the genocide of the Pakistanis. And I think that if we've been hit, by then we'll be cheering them on and selling them anything they need to facilitate the killing.
Cultures change under crisis, and realizing that one faces existential annihilation or enslavement is a crisis. Look how America changed from December 6th to December 8th, 1941. Look how Britain changed from the fall of 1937 to the fall of 1940. The longer we wait before being willing to be cruel to be kind, the crueller it will be for the Muslims, because the more extreme will become our war objectives. If we are willing to wait until America takes multiple nuclear hits, then the war objective will become annihilation of Islam as a religion, at the very least.
I'd rather we squelch the problem now, before things go that far.
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It's actually called the 'Samson Option', after the Old Testament character of Samson: near the end of his story, captured, blinded, and publicly humiliated in a temple by the Philistines, Samson appealed God to grant him his supernatural strength one last time, so he could topple the pillars holding the temple up and take every Philistines in the building down with him.
But yes, the Samson Option does involve nuking every enemy of Israel, both at present and at the past, which pretty much translates to the entire Middle East, several European states and apparently even Russia. In short, if it goes off, human civilization is effectively finished.
So you're suggesting that a war of annihilation against Radical Islam is not only inevitable, it is necessary to prevent an even worse war of annihilation from happening that could destroy the Muslim world and/but leave the Western world traumatized and/or in ruins in the process?
It brings back in mind two articles that were published shortly after Charlie Hebdo Massacre earlier this year; one pretty much agrees with what you said about a total war against radical Islam, with an additional note that the West must join forces with leading Islamic nations in the Middle East to do so, as the majority of the Muslim world are just as much victims of Radical Islam as the West is. The other article, on the other hand, gives a historical analysis over the reasons WHY Radical Islam became powerful and influential over the last four decades, with implications that the threat of Radical Islam requires a much more complex, long-term solution than just a military No-Holds-Barred-Beatdown:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/joseph-lieberman-a-global-war-on-radical-islam-1421106699
http://www.globalresearch.ca/clash-of-civilizations-why-the-delay-in-islamic-reformation/5430129