The cost of continual, low-level terrorism

In response to my post on “retail terrorism,” inspired by David Yeagley’s chilling article at FrontPage Magazine, a correspondent speculates on the effects of chronic, low-level, freelance terrorism in this country, signs of which already exist, and which may very well keep growing in the future. Comparing such routinized terrorism to the constant pressure exerted on Rome by the barbarian invaders, he argues that it would add such overbearing costs to our economy, and so degrade our quality of life, that we would be worn down to the point where we couldn’t function any more, or at least to the point where our continued resistance to the populations who were committing the terrorism (and who, relative to us, would thrive in the degraded conditions that their terrorism had created) wouldn’t seem worth it anymore. In short, if we don’t stop and reverse Islamic immigration, what we’re looking at is the death of our society through slow motion jihad from within.

Correspondent:

In fact this is arguably the most ominous threat yet. People from some of the Third World countries carry all manner of disease, hepatitis being only one of the more obvious. How such an attack would play out is likely to be not good.

Assume that “disgruntled employee” who happens to be from a Moslem country, Mr. A., works in a regional food distribution center and decides to contaminate, oh, bread randomly with something carrying hepatitis or cholera or some other malady. A lot of people get sick, more than a few die, eventually the ‘epidemic’ is traced to one source, and then what? If Mr. A is caught, what conclusions will be drawn? Again we’ll hear of the tiny minority of fanatics, the tiny percentage of disaffected, how Mr. A grew up in a poor country, we can’t judge, then he’ll go to jail. And then when it happens again and again, what? Do we all just learn to put up with a certain number of fatalities per year because the food supply can no longer be safe? Or do we have yet another round of useless government regulations and surveillance, along the lines of the TSA, further sucking resources that could be used elsewhere?

How many human-induced plagues clearly intended to kill Americans would it take before someone connects the dots?

Or maybe the real question is: when will enough of us realize that there’s a war on, and it’s being fought via all manner of methods right in our back yard?

Historians differ on the fall of the Western empire as well as on the expansion of Mohammedanism across the Levant and northern Africa. But we do know, for example, that one reason Roman cities didn’t hold out against barbarians was that once their water supply was cut, they became plague zones. The barbarians themselves were used to a much, much lower standard of living, almost Neolithic, in fact, than the Romans they were attacking. Thus it became a contest of “Who can live and function under increasingly primitive conditions, and still be able to fight?” and the more primitive peoples won that fight.

If chronic low-level terrorism permanently degraded the quality of life in America, how would Americans take it compared to the outsiders? People from certain parts of the globe are used to perpetually interrupted power and water, unreliable sewage service, a rather boring diet, simple entertainments. How many Americans could live in a situation where their power (and heat/air conditioning) was off for hours every day, where the water taps didn’t always work and when they did you shouldn’t drink the water, where any TV not battery powered may as well be junk? We are complacent about the food supply, and moreover we increasingly let someone else cook for us (either in a restaurant, or in a regional food processing plant making ready-to-heat-and-eat meals), we’re complacent about the water supply…. and I’m not at all sure how many of our countrymen are ready to adapt to a world in which the only entertainments available are simple things such as books, board games and the like. Morale is a serious thing. Did Christians and Jews outside the Arabian peninsula give up to the raiders from the desert because they just couldn’t take the constant, low-level bloodshed of raids in combination with the ongoing attacks on irrigation systems & trade routes? I don’t know and it may be impossible to find out, but it is worth considering.

LA:

Interesting thoughts, all around.

Correspondent:

It’s a picture that has been building up in my head for years. Gibbon observed that each siege of Rome further damaged the aqueducts, and that in time the repairs were shoddier and shoddier. Of course shoddier repairs won’t hold up under normal use, so the water supply becomes less and less reliable, leading to more incidents of disease. The same thing likely was going on in other cities, and even in the bigger villas….

But the point remains: we live in the expectation of reliable services. Just In Time manufacturing demands reliable sources of raw materials, energy, transportation, communication and so forth. If we have to expend time/energy/ money/manpower to police all the power lines and gas lines, to look over the shoulders of everyone in the food industry, then that’s a huge drain on society. “Barbarians” who can live at a lower level of social organization have an advantage in the situation where resources are unreliable; therefore, if they cause such a situation to come to be, they are more likely to “thrive on chaos”.

Anyway, the relevance to today is as noted: how much “friction” can we afford in our society for security to protect us from the 10% or 1% or .1% of Mohammadans who will commit various jihadi atrocities? Can we afford to monitor the entire power grid, because some Saudi “student” may take down a critical inter-pool tie some summer day? Can we afford to monitor the entire natural gas pipeline system, because some Jordanian “refugees” may break into a compression station and damage it seriously on a winter night? Can we afford to monitor the entire food industry, because some minimum wage employees who happen to pray to Mecca five times a day decide to pollute vegetables with Hep, or cholera, or typhoid?

That’s the real question: how much of a price must we pay for the ‘privilege’ of having followers of Muhammad within our borders?

LA:

I raised a related question at the beginning of my article, “How to Defeat Jihad in America,” that as long as the Muslims are here, we will be living under a continual threat of terrorism, and thus under the unending burden of fear, security alerts, and permanent security measures with their costs and indignities, and that the only way permanently to end the threat of terrorism is to remove, over a period of years, most Muslims from this country. But your argument goes further. You’re saying that the more Muslims who are here, the more our security costs go up, to the point where we literally can’t afford it anymore and it cripples us.

Correspondent:

Even if it does not cripple us, the cost increases without limit, it seems to me.

Paul Cella adds:

My impression (from reading parts of Andrew Bostom’s book, The Legacy of Jihad) is that the Islamic “razzias” or raids did indeed have a powerful effect on Christian moral. There was one essay in particular (I don’t have the book here with me) by a scholar of jihad in Spain, where this factor really stood out in my mind—just the constant threat of brutality, of rapine and plunder and massacre, from the Muslims. What horrors they endured!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 04, 2005 10:30 AM | Send