From John Ray's shorter notes
|
26 March, 2014
Do we need a civilizational regress to deal with militant Islam?
"At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene,
And foughten for our feith at Tramissene"
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote that about 600 years ago in the English of his day. Even then the enemy was Muslim. Tramissene was a Moorish kingdom in North Africa
The modern Western world, however, is in no mood to fight for its faith, mainly because it doesn't have one, or, more precisely, it has a multiplicity of faiths, including Leftism. But we are surely keen to fight to ensure the safety of ourselves and our families. But the recent atrocities in Brussels suggest that we are losing the fight. Any of us could get struck down at any time by Islamic hate.
And the reason we are losing is clear. We have only recently gained peace and civility in the Western world and we want to hang on to that. If a group of people attack us, we no longer strike back in kind but attempt to deal with the harassment using police methods only. We have reached the highest level of civilization the world has ever seen and we don't want to depart from the high levels of civility and tolerance that go with that.
But from the Vikings to Nazi Germany to the Bosnian Serbs our ancestors and relatives have been just as bloodthirsty as ISIS. Take a look at the guy below. He could be the grandfather of any of us, could he not?
He is Radovan Karadzic, former leader of the Bosnian Serbs who in the '90s committed atrocities just as bad as any done by ISIS. And his Slavic genes are undoubtedly widespread in America. And his wobbly Christianity is familiar enough too. There is a lot of wobbly Christianity in America.
So there is no doubt that it would take only a small civilizational regress for us to be as merciless to the Muslims as they are to us. And once we decided to abandon our present peaceful ways, it would take very little to squash Muslim aggression for a very long time. A nuclear device detonated over Raqqa or Mecca or both would probably be enough to convince Muslims to pull their heads in. And if not, there are plenty of other Muslim cities ..... The main reason we do not do that is that innocent, non-combatant people would die in such blasts. But the Jihadis show absolute disregard for our innocent men, women and children so they certainly provoke tit for tat.
Our attachment to the high level of peace and civilization that we have only recently attained is strong -- as is shown by the huge amount of Muslim aggression that we have so far tolerated. But I think that our tolerance is not limitless so we may have to take a temporary step down to an earlier level of civilization to deal with the Muslim menace effectively. Winston Churchill killed tens of thousands of German non-combatant men, women and children in his fire bombings of Dresden and Hamburg -- and the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mostly civilian. So the step back would be only a small one -- and hopefully very temporary.
A SMALL CLARIFICATION: A good Serbian friend, Rich Kozlovich, was disturbed that I was disrespecting Serbs above. My intention was quite different. I see Karadzic as just a normal European person in a particular situation, not unlike President Truman, who burnt hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to death with nuclear weapons. I should have mentioned that it was Muslims whom the Serbs were savaging. And in what they did to the Muslims they were only doing what Muslims had in the past done to them. What the Muslims did in the past can, I think, be readily deduced from what they are doing in Syria right now.
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