Derbyshire and I agree: we are not in a war

I have been saying lately (see this, this, and this) that we are not waging a war against Islamic extremists and should stop saying that we are waging a war until we really are waging one. I would like for us to wage a war, defined as an effort aimed at destroying the adversary’s ability or will to harm us. But the only way we can get there is by honestly acknowledging that at present we are not waging one, instead of indulging in the overheated fantasy that we are.

John Derbyshire, like me, says we are not waging a war and that the president’s war rhetoric is absurdly overblown. Unlike me, however, Derbyshire says that this is a good thing, since he thinks that Islam poses no threat to the West at all. Derbyshire takes empiricism and nominalism to the point of the non-existence of anything: he doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as God (he protests that he’s not an atheist, but this is false), and he doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as the human species (since evolution means we’re changing all the time), and he also doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as Islam—beyond, that is, a collection of annoyed persons

- end of initial entry -

Alan Roebuck comments:

Derb does say several true and important things in his “Means and Ends” column; that’s why I was particularly disappointed when he undercut his entire position by declaring the worldwide jihad to be nothing but a “worldwide nuisance” which is “not really that important.” It seems that his faculty of common sense, which is generally free from liberal influence, still allows him to recognize many important truths, e.g., that we’re not really fighting our enemies, and that we would be fully justified in doing so. And in this era of Liberalism-as-the-State Religion, even the public expression of common sense can be genuinely praiseworthy. But when it comes to the higher-level integration of these facts, using non-scientific and non-materialistic truths, Derb often fails spectacularly, and this failure often nullifies his common sense.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 19, 2007 10:28 AM | Send