Of Ragheads and Racism

George Rebane

We are in an ‘all in’ war between two civilizations – western civilization of the European pedigree, and Islamic civilization formerly of the Arabic and now of a broader pedigree.  In their own words they declare that the west and Islam can no longer co-exist on this planet, and their intent is to prevail using every means available to them.  To the world they have amply demonstrated the truth of their intentions.

 

In response, the west is at its wits end with our European neighbors all tangled up in their apologetic history, while we Americans are in total denial.  Nine years after the towers fell, with the intervening years dominated by two constrained military land campaigns, we still talk about conducting a “war on terror”, and are now doing our best to downgrade even that into the moral equivalent of a civil law enforcement campaign against organized crime.

I count myself among those who see this as a global clash of cultures and have expanded on it in ‘We Believe What We Need to Believe’.  Ascribing the current conflict as a “war on terror” is about as informative and intellectually destructive as calling WW2 a ‘war against the mechanized division’.   

Where this conflict fits in a broader view of the future has been described in my report on George Friedman’s essay ‘The Next 100 Years’.

While Islam still spreads its ideas with steel (as once did the Christians), we are now promoting uncertain programs that demonstrate our weakness to a culture that recognizes only existential strength.  I expanded on this in ‘The Great Commission’.

It is no longer clear that we in the west have the visceral wherewithal to defend our traditions and belief system.  This I covered in ‘Is Ours a Defendable Culture?’.  Secular humanism is now our official religion.   This belief system has moved us beyond the absolutes that founded our nation and left us a solid bedrock for growth into arguably the most enlightened and beneficial nation-state in human history.  We are now intentionally shedding this heritage at (to some) an alarming rate.

A major fraction of Americans now look at our country as an impediment to a global future in which all cultures (save ours) are equally honored, and in which time-honored absolutes of the west are abandoned.  This was my focus in ‘Where is the Moral Fiber?’

We are now a polarized nation that is rapidly passing beyond the ability to conduct productive debate required for healing.  I provide a more technical analysis of how this can be so in ‘Why Reason Fails’.

The above summary is reviewed in response to my being indicted by the usual group of local morality mentors as a “racist” for using the pejorative label ‘ragheads’ to designate Islamic fascists of all or no head coverings.  As a perusal of any reputable dictionary illustrates, these gentlemen of the left have no clue of what racist means, let alone how to use it in reasoned discourse.  This dust-up started on Russ Steele’s NC MediaWatch here.

Let there be no mistake, I am not some mealy-mouthed “balanced” commentator on this matter.  I loathe that part of Islam that is such an asymmetrical reflection of ours.  I am especially repulsed by their end-times philosophy and their eagerness for and celebration of taking innocent life wholesale.  There are hundreds of thousands of them, by their own count, who would be honored to detonate a dreadful suitcase on the street of any American city in their murderous rush to Allah.  And thereafter millions more of them would again fill their streets in celebration.

The collectivists have always viewed human life in the aggregate.  Their elites speak to us in an autocratic and lifeless bureaucratize.  They like the impersonal one size, one set of rules fits all.  This philosophy is nowhere more evident than in how they have historically designed and operated their killing machines.

To such people form is everything.  For, when properly used, it can hide every function.  Today when we go to war, we are taught to kill in cold blood.  The enemy does not consist of human beings, but are merely ciphers with various capabilities.  Nameless ciphers that can be detected, identified, located, targeted, neutralized.  Afterward, just put the little wire tie around the mouth of the plastic bag and drop the whole thing into the nearest dumpster.

When human beings can be repackaged in that manner, then their liquidation can be managed in the assembly line executions of Katyn forest, the ‘the final solution’ factories of the Holocaust,  the regional starvation of the Kulaks, and the elimination of a complete subculture spanning the entire country in its state-managed Cultural Revolution.  These become simply waste disposal operations for targeted classes.

Human cultures have been in a deadly competition since the dawn of time.  Nations and heroes fought and killed each other in the ‘heat of battle’.  And the pride and strength they drew from such enterprise was the greater when the victor acknowledged that a worthy opponent had been vanquished.  Coup was counted against equals or the stronger, no one took pride in prevailing against the weak, defenseless, or incapacitated.  Killing was done in hot blood, and its preparations on both sides included the heating of that blood.

Choosing and using appropriate names and labels for your enemy was as important for preparing your mind for battle as it was for preparing your armaments.  These labels had to be simple, unique, and connected with a part of your enemy that differentiated him from you.  And they had to invoke a primal desire to fight that enemy, and to bring the conflict to a resolution at whatever level you were called on to engage.

In the past we recognized this as we labeled our enemies 'savages', ‘redskins’, ‘Japs’, ‘Krauts’, 'Nazis', 'reds' and ‘commies’.   Other cultures and political ideologies call us by even worse monikers – ‘running dogs’, ‘capitalist pigs’, ‘kwai loh’, ‘gaijin’, ‘infidel’,  ‘Great Satan’, … - to constantly remind their numbers of how we differ from them.  But in war, whatever the label, it has to call up and summarize in the combatants’ minds all that is reprehensible, all that is hateful about your opponent.  You are preparing to lay your life on the line in the attempt to kill him.  You are not about to enter into another fruitless negotiation to select which trade, travel, and banking sanctions you will attempt to impose on the bastards.

No matter how else we may think about them, they are living, breathing human beings dedicated to their way of life with determination and willingness to sacrifice that is beyond our ken, and most certainly beyond what we in the west have ever experienced.  Our public mood and motivation to fight them is pathetic.  We would rather respond from a remotely controlled Predator that fires a nice sanitary Hellfire missile at something in the crosshairs from 20,000 feet.  And when we do send our fighters over there to hunt them out, we admonish them with a set of standing orders the size of a phone book, and promise to prosecute them to the full extent should their bullets or emotions stray.  The jihadists and their supportive populations know that we are neither serious nor dedicated opponents.  They see no fire in our bellies. 

I recall in my infantry training a particularly memorable segment.  One of the last vestiges of primitive, close quarter combat in which modern warriors are expected to excel is with the bayonet.  Since this takes place when you are eyeball to eyeball with your enemy, it requires that you have all your ‘juices flowing’, feeling as invincible as your chemistry allows.  Before running the bayonet course and the one-on-one fights, we were inducted into what the Army calls the ‘Spirit of the Bayonet’.  It involved a series of group exercises that induced you into a controlled state of group hysteria and self-confidence similar to what a good coach attempts at the start of an important game.

This was the only part of the training in which you were not punished for destroying your rifle - a weapon that you literally kept spotless, in the best of repair, and even slept with.  As a corn-fed, athletic big guy, I was totally overcome with ‘the spirit’ and knocked the bejeezus out of the first bayonet dummy and wound up with my M-1 Garand in two pieces.  The sergeant course-master tossed me a new weapon with fixed bayonet and told me to get my butt back in there.  My own object of utter disgust was the NKVD agent who day after day interrogated my aunt with an already 'bloody' Nagant revolver on a naked table, and, of course, the system that fielded such terror over half a continent.  Recalling that got me worked up.

So, according to my lights, the historical use of such pejoratives to label your enemy as human beings has worked.  And often enough, when both sides understand the existential preparedness of the other to enter into an ‘all in’ engagement, the fight has been avoided or called off.  We know of no invasion that has been cancelled because one side decided to bow a lot and show excess courtesies to the aggressor.

Then how do we begin negotiating a co-existence with a culture that does not even have co-existence as a core value?  I see only three alternatives – we kill them all, they conquer us and impose the global Caliphate, or we repeat the 21st century version of the Battle of Vienna (1683), buy some time, and let our children handle what the future may bring.

We are not a civilization that would ‘kill them all’ even if we could.  They correctly assess that we don’t yet have the will to resist them with blood if necessary.  The best that we can do at this stage of the game is to convince the radical Islamists and their supportive populations that we actually have the equivalent hatred of them, a hatred of which they have long accused us.

This missive would be incomplete without considering the sense of urgency that the jihadists now feel.  Their enterprise is cash intensive, and that cash comes through their sale of fossil fuels to the west.  Through the hands of our smiling Islamic ‘allies’ in the mid-east and elsewhere, our dollars go to finance their war against us.  As those wells begin to dry up and/or we find alternative sources of energy, their ability to prosecute jihad will be shut down.  Therefore, time is of essence to them, and, by extension, it is also of essence to us.  The west has yet to field a defending army.  Why?

While they teach and preach the evils of the west to their children, we are apologetically spoon feeding our kids and pre-educated adults the pabulum of equal worth of all cultures.  This does not bode well for the survival of our culture.  Because of this unwillingness to recognize our self-avowed mortal enemy, that enemy is steadily  shutting down more of our civilization as they continue to colonize the parts that we have already paralyzed, and, through political correctness, daily continue to extend that paralysis.

Racism; no.  Ragheads?  You bet!

Comments

[RL Crabb]

As sad and scary as your assessment is, I can't find much fault with it. As a cartoonist who has been hit with the racist tag more than once in my long career, I was amused by the reaction to your raghead comment. It was obvious to me that you did it to push some buttons and you hit the target dead center.
Perhaps I am more aware of these attitudes because of my profession. Cartoonists have been high on the hit list of Islamic terrorists since the publication of the Mohammad cartoons in Europe a few years back. A lot of my fellows are still under police protection with a price on their heads. Of course, no one yells foul when Muslim cartoonists spoon feed hate and murder to their children, except for Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last week.
Stewart did a piece featuring the latest Hamas kiddie show, where little Palestinians are encouraged to become weapons of the faith and to kill as many Jews as possible. Talk about racist!
Sometimes I think we are headed toward World War Three no matter which way we go. The Liberals want to go the Chamberlain route, figuring if they just talk long enough the Muslims will get tired and give up. Conservatives want to kick their asses back to Mecca, like we did in the last World War. If we were to get hit again like we did on 9/11, that view would no doubt prevail.
Or we could spend another 50 years nibbling around the edges like we did with the Soviet Union. As recents events in Iran have shown, not everyone in old Persia is onboard with the Mullahs. Maybe we should bomb them with rock'n'roll and South Park DVDs.

[George Rebane]

Agreed, and I think you hit it on the head Bob. We have already bombed them with "rock n' roll and South Park DVDs" against which they have no commensurate defense and they know it. They can defend their culture only by going on the road they are now on, and hope that we're 'too civilized' to respond in kind. And most of us can agree that we should keep bombing them with rock n' roll etc.

[Steve Enos]

During WW II many in America used the term “Japs” overseas and here at home. Then here at home they rounded up American citizens that they called “Japs”, took away their real estate, businesses, broke apart their families and “interned” them in concentration camps.

I take the position this was clearly wrong on so many levels. I take the position it was a violation of the Constitution of the United Sates of America to do so. These were mostly American citizens and their only reason for being sent to concentration camps was the fact that they were of Japanese heritage.

“Jap’s” and “ragheads” are nothing more than racist terms and there is no place for them to be used. We are better than that.

[Michael Anderson]

Even though I think Tom Friedman is mostly a boob and not a very good writer, his knowledge of the Middle East and Asia is comprehensive and when he writes about the conflict between Islam and the west, he describes a more nuanced problem than you, George. "Us vs. Them" is too reductionist IMHO.

Bombing them not only with rock & roll, but also economic hope, still hasn't been tried. Yes, that might lead to the Great Tripling, but the alternative is much worse.

[Tony]

Bald head white guys making pronouncements is one reason we are in the current wars.
Why were the towers attacked?
What did Bin Laden say he did it for?
It wasn't because he hates our freedom.