Our Greatest Test
By Bruce Walker (09/11/03)
America has faced many wars, hot and cold, since 1776. Two of the hot wars, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, were fought on America soil with Americans fighting and killing other Americans. Other early American wars, against Britain in 1812, against Mexico, and finally against Spain, were also fought near or on American soil. All that changed in the Twentieth Century.
The Second World War was a global war that encompassed land, air and sea power as well. The Cold War, interspersed with scattered hot wars, was a battle to see if totalitarianism could outlast free democracy. All of these conflicts were critical, but none was as critical as the war begun against America on September 11, 2001.
The other wars and battles against totalitarianism or authoritarianism in the Twentieth Century were fought because America introduced itself into the conflict. Hitler had no real intention of conquering the United States, or even Britain. When Hess flew to Britain in 1940, it was to create a modus vivendi with the British Empire.
The Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists went to some care to avoid involving America in the Second World War. U-boats, except in a few isolated and insubordinate cases, did not attack American naval vessels until after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese launched a surprise attack on America only after long negotiations and America’s conscious decision to wage economic war against Japan.
Our cause in the Second World War was righteous, but had America and the other English-speaking democracies chosen to reside safely and comfortably separated by seas and oceans from the bad powers, supported by large navies and air forces and giant, diverse economies, there is little reason to believe that the Nazis or Japanese or Soviets or Fascists would ever directly threaten Anglo-America and less reason to believe that these totalitarian systems could have hurt America any more than, say, Napoleon did with his European system.
The Cold War had a similar flavor. Had America abandoned the peoples of Western Europe to communism or neutrality of the Finnish type - providing neither protection nor massive foreign aid - there is little reason to believe that the Soviet Union could have harnessed those destroyed nations into industrial dynamos.
Moreover, as we learned during the Cold War, communist victory in China created a major political headache for Russia. A communist Germany or a communist France would have been much harder for the Kremlin to control than a communist Poland (which, ultimately, the Kremlin proved unable to control.)
America chose to defend peoples threatened with great evils in the Old World, something that the Founding Fathers had counseled against doing. The choice was right, but it was a choice on the part of America (and the other English-speaking democracies.)
The Second World War, like our current war, began in the month of September. But the Second World War began with panzer divisions crossing the Polish border, soon to be followed by Red Army units coming from the other side of Poland. Our present war began with an attack on the American homeland.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, it was intended to neutralize American naval power just long enough to present us with a fiat accompli, Japanese domination of half of the Pacific Ocean. Had America not backed China in 1941, there is no reason at all to believe that the Japanese would have attacked America.
Our current war is not because of America support for any particular nation, although our support for Israel, of course, makes us hated more in Islamic nations. Our current war is fought because America is America. This is a dramatic reversal in the sentiments of peoples.
Once, the immigration into America by peoples all over the world was correctly seen as conclusive proof that America was the best nation on earth. Particularly telling was the fact that persecuted peoples came to America for a new life. This signature of American immigration continues to this day.
Iraqis, Iranians, Sikhs, Bahai, Zoroastrians, Chinese and dozens of other peoples had done what the human race has been doing for more than two centuries: leaving their homelands, their languages, their customs and their coreligionists to come to the melting pot of America. Nothing has changed, except how the world perceives this flow.
Admiration has turned to envy and envy has turned to hate. Those of us faithful to the Judeo-Christian tradition should not be surprised. Although we recognize many more than ten divinely inspired laws of human conduct, we also recognize ten particular commands from the Blessed Creator of the Universe. Among those ten, are only a handful that deal directly with interpersonal relationships: honor our parents and our marital vows, and do not murder, steal, lie...or covet.
Sadly, much of modern political philosophy is constructed around bigger and better ways to violate the holy injunction not to be jealous of our fellow man. The glorification of sin leads to horrific moral decisions. There is no sinister secret why America is prosperous, tolerant and content. Coveting, however, requires a crutch.
So nations which reside on vast oceans of petrodollars and sit astride the primary trade routes of the world convince themselves - because they want to be convinced - that America has “stolen” prosperity and safety from them. African countries with treasure troves of mineral wealth explain their utter destitution by putative malice of Americans.
Old, sophisticated nations of Europe - peoples who have been protected by the good will of American power - have convinced themselves that their system of socialism and of self-importance should make them growing, flourishing and happy, although they are anything but that. Our happiness, according to those who worship the pagan idol of Covetousness, is the cause of their misery.
That is the reason why America, which has defended what is right in the world because it is right, finds almost no one willing to defend America when it is right because it is right. Stated bluntly, most of the world wants evil to triumphant. Americans are viewed the same way that Southern bigots used to view enterprising black people: we have become “uppidity.”
The Ku Klux Klansmen, who embraced a hatred of bankers and capitalists as well as blacks, perceived a rising black middle class the same way that Europe perceives a nation populated by the wretched masses of the teeming shores of Europe who have now surpassed their social betters in Europe. Our gain must, somehow, be their loss.
If envy is the core principle which unites the world against us, why has it blossomed so much in the last few decades? One cause - a true, but secondary, cause - is the collapse of the Soviet Union. Communism, which is aggressively atheistic, occupied and oppressed the Moslems of Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Kirghiz, Tajikistan and Azerbaijan.
Even the most Christophobic and anti-American Moslems could not ignore the fact that Soviet Russia (and Communist China) held much more of dar al-Islam than the tiny sliver of Israel or that America was the only major power that never held an Islamic country as a colony.
Even the proudest Europeans could not ignore the fact that America rescue Europe from totalitarian monsters, rebuilt Europe with American wealth, as was protecting Europe at the request of the democratically elected governments of Europe.
Once the Soviet Union imploded, then those stark confrontations with reality which the Soviet Empire required was removed from public consciousness. It was not so much the threat of Soviet power that prevented wanton vitriol of America from overflowing as it was the obvious benevolence of the United States compared to the Soviet Union.
The primary cause for the rise of anti-Americanism, however, is deeper and is worse. Paganism is creeping, like the Black Death seven centuries ago, across the Old World. God commands us not to covet, but the demigods of Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Osama bin Ladin and their Marxist dogmas embrace envy.
We deceive ourselves when we believe that global terrorism is the product of genuine Islam. Our war is against paganism in a hundred different guises, including pseudo-Islam. I knew a number of Iranian students in my youth, before the Shah was overthrown. Their affection for Islam was perfunctory, at best. Their affection for Hitler and Stalin and the Marxist ideals each of these atheists held dear was profound.
What we are fighting is nothing less than sin dressed up as a pantheon of gods and goddesses. Europe has ceased being religiously serious, but Iraq and Syria are not religiously serious either. Ethical monotheism is a cosmic joke to those who hate America. Who are the enemies of these sin-worshipers? America, Israel, serious Christians, professional Jews.
This battlefield is not territorial. Jews who hate Judaism and nominal Christians who hate Christianity are, perhaps, the greatest enemies of all in this war. The battlefield is spiritual. Seldom, if ever, in human history has the contrast between good and evil, between light and darkness, between truth and lying been more obvious.
If America lost the Revolutionary War, if the Union lost the Civil War, if the Allies lost the Great War, the cost was tolerable. Britain was the home of much virtue, even if British power was wrongly used to keep the colonies within the British empire. The South was brimming with morally serious men like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Imperial Germany produced men like Albert Schweitzer.
No longer are the moral distinctions vague. No longer are the consequences of defeat unclear. Those that hate us, hate us because they have emphatically rejected the Blessed Creator of the Universe. The stakes for America and for the world could not be higher. We must win.
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