What it all depends on

A reader makes a simple and profound, but no longer widely understood, point: civilization’s survival rests on violence.

The fundamental problem with the people of the West is that they are so accustomed to civilized behavior that they are repulsed by the means necessary to curtail uncivilized behavior. It matters not what moderate Muslims or Westerners think about terrorism, whether or not they consider it legitimate, whether or not they support it, etc. The only thing that matters is what they are willing to kill for.

If the extremist Islamists are willing to blow up bridges to advance their cause, then they will be stopped only when the Westerners are willing to blow them up to stop them. I have no doubt that “75 percent of Muslims believe terror is not the answer”—so long as that means that the 75 percent are doing nothing more than clicking a mouse or punching telephone survey keys. But I doubt that 75 percent of moderate Muslims and Westerners are willing to go to war with Islamists, institute frightfully Draconian policies to slam the borders shut and take away the rights of the Muslims, renounce multiculturalism, etc. The number that support those measures is more like 5 percent, which is why the West is likely doomed.

The history of warfare and class struggles teaches one thing. In order to beat your enemy, you must be willing to go farther enforcing your rights than your enemies are willing to go in traipsing them. As long as people believe that their country is not worth fighting for, then they are not only doomed, but they deserve to be doomed.

Picture the U.S. in 1993. Imagine that the government was determined to respond to the first WTC bombing by executing Omar Ahmel Rahman. And that they were so determined that they not only carried out the execution but also refused to apologize for it. Imagine further that the response was a terror attack and demonstrations in the U.S. by Muslim extremists, but the US authorities responded to THAT with a massacre à la Tiananmen square. Do you doubt for a moment that every jihad sympathizer in the West –those that survived—would be forever disabused of the notion that they had any right to even consider advancing their agenda?

Of course, outnumbering your enemy 10 to 1 means very little. If he is willing to do anything to win, and you are willing to do very little, then he outnumbers you one to zero.

My reply:

You’ve said it all. All the talk comes down to this. It’s so simple. Once you give up this, things get very complicated and difficult and unresolvable. All the problems we have now, all the endless talk and agonizing, is just impotent chatter surrounding that which we are not willing to do, which would save us.

As I was preparing your comment for posting, I kept thinking of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which has a theme similar to yours. Civilization depends on the hard men who are willing and able to kill, but society never honors these men because it wants to ignore the fact that its existence depends on violence.

I should add that this theme is found in in many Westerns, such as Shane, My Darling Clementine, The Searchers, and so on.

Spencer Warren adds:

The point your reader makes also explains the death of the Western as a genre in the past few decades, in contrast to the period before the mid-Sixties when it was the most popular genre in movies and on TV. It is interesting that the height of the Cold War in the Fifties also saw the summit of the adult Western—High Noon, Shane, The Searchers, Seven Men From Now, Comanche Station, The Hanging Tree, Gunman’s Walk, and others. The last two great Westerns appeared in 1962, Liberty Valance and Ride the High Country. In its depiction of the vulnerability of civilization to barbarism, and its reliance on the man who fights (John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards), The Searchers is the outstanding example for us today. The early scene of the attack on the homestead by the savage Indians is a metaphor for the crisis we face. If the public starts to see Muslim terrorists as the Indians in The Searchers, then we will start making progress. But we don’t have a leader with the imagination or guts to draw such a parallel. It would make one of our minorities feel bad.

A perfect expression of the decadence of much contemporary opinion was the acclaim heaped on Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Its message is the opposite of the classic Western—violence is pointless, there is nothing worth fighting for. Its mediocre, typically pedestrian Eastwood direction, in contrast to the poetic and dramatic power of the classic Westerns, expresses the moral and aesthetic mediocrity of our time. Of course, it was only due to the victories through violence of our forebears that mediocrities like Eastwood have the freedom to indulge in their nihilist fantasies.

See my “Rediscovering the Classic Western,” found under that title in Google.

A reader writes:

Isn’t this all a restatement of Joseph de Maistre’s inflammatory (but not necessarily untrue) remark that civilization rests on the hangman?

I don’t remember if I ever read DeMaistre where he says that, but as long as I’ve thought about these things, I have always believed, as an axiom, that capital punishment is the indispensable basis of civilization.

I can hear people asking: But what about Europe, which has no capital punishment? The answer is that Europe is steadily going out of existence, and that it will continue to do so unless it rediscovers the traditional sense of right and wrong, of civilization versus barbarism, that expresses itself in, among other things, capital punishment.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 01, 2005 01:35 AM | Send