Every War Is Civil / Jehovallah Versus The Lord

I

There are many ways to classify the over-arching continuum of history: the story of the migration of tribes, the story of the spread of technology, the story of organized religion, the story of economic forces, and so forth. The best choice among the various over-simplifications, however, is this: history is the story of civil war.

We know by virute of science and intuition that humans are far more similar to each other than we can even quantify and even the most insular among us recognize that humanity is one family. This family fights, as do all families. But there is a indissoluble bond nonetheless. With this is mind, we are led to the truism that all war is civil war.

Civil war works on many levels, and they are by no means restricted by artificial and myopic national borders. Today, we see a civil war within the arbitrary borders of a political fiction called "Iraq". When we take a broader view, as we must, we see that most conflicts can be seen as manifestations of larger civil wars.

The 20th century lasted from 1914 to 1989. It was the last century to be dominated by Europe and, fitingly, it can best be described as a 75-civil war. Democratic capitalism, communism, fascism, and national socialism fought over the breadth of the continent over these decades, vacilating between military and political tactics.

When we ascend further, and see the Earth as a whole, I see an Eastern camp and a Middle Eastern camp. The eastern camp consists of everything between the Pakistan/India border and the coast of California. This camp accounts for probably 2/3 of humanity. I don't pretend to be qualified to synthesize the eastern mind but, suffice it to say, they're not monotheists.

The Middle Eastern camp, or the ME camp, is no longer restricted to the Middle East; it has long since taken over Europe and the entire western hemsiphere. The ME camp is the monotheism camp. Jews, Christians, and Muslims fall into this group; we need to take a deep breath and understand that monotheism is the exception throughout human history and even today. China and India see to that.

But we must understand that we, from Los Angeles to Baghdad, are defined by what, from the proper vantage point, is a very distinguishable camp in humanity's endless civil war: the Monotheists. Ah, the monotheists, who have been so busy killing each other these last 2,000 years that they have managed to convince themselves that they don't all sprout from the same seed.

The desert does something to people. It makes them more fatalistic, more absolutist, more judgemental. It is no accident that the three monotheisms were born in the desert. These men, from Abraham on, came up with the idea that religion should not seek to explain the wonders of the natural world, but rather should seek to dictate individual morality, more often than not at the point of a sword.

The Middle East birthed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the blink of an historical eye. There is a reason they all come from the same patch of place, and there is a reason that they have spent so much of their history fighting each other. When one has a holy book on his side, he can find a way to justify crucifying his cousin. Only a holy book could do that. The Communist Manifesto was another such holy book, with splintered camps of devotees murdering each other for the sin of misinterpreting its pages.

Monotheisms are, by definition, expansionist; they are the capitalism of religious models. Their only logic is expansion, driven by the Promethean certitude that they are doing what's best for people, whether they know it or not. They usually don't know it, by the way.

The "clash between civilizations" label for the current conflict is only slightly more substantial a subtitle than "First Blood: Part II"; as much commie ass as John J. Rambo kicked, the label was a contradiction. This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash within the civilization of monotheism.

II

America is not primarily American, nor is it primarily European; it is primarily a Middle Eastern society. What then accounts for the apparent chasms between the beliefs and conduct of these monotheist tribes? We must consider two factors: the nature of Jehovah versus God versus Allah, and the material condition of each of these tribes today.

Jehovah and Allah would get along well. They are.....assholes. Domineering, jealous, vindictive, pathologically violent figures. The kind of people that would destroy a city to avenge a perceived slight by the residents of said city. The God of the New Testament is qualitatively different from Jehovah and Allah, but this is not simply the function of a temporal shift in human mentality, because this peaceful and loving and forgiving Lord was born in between the sociopaths Jehovah and Allah.

So we can say this, we who do not fear truth: the Jewish and Muslim Gods are agressive, judgmental, and violent, while the Christian God is pacifistic, loving, and forgiving. This surely accounts for at least some of the difference between what Muslims and Christians perceive as acceptable conduct in the name or defense of their faith.

What then, accounts for the fact that the Jews, who have quite a violent God themselves, are not driven to the extreme and nihilistic violence of radical Muslims? Despite its conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories, which borders at times on brutal and criminal, Israelis don't kill as Jews, they kill as citizens of a temporal political state that they rightly perceive to be facing relentless attack.

The reason that the Jews have largely ignored their psychotic God recently is that their material success has rendered unappetizing the prospect of blowing themselves up for Jehovah, or beheading those who would denigrate Jewish law as revealed to Moses. Put simply, it's easy to cling to ideas of a vengeful and absolutist God when your life is nasty, brutish, and short. Unfortunately, Muslims are far more likely to have nasty, brutish, and short lives than are Jews and (especially white) Christians.

While we recognize that many pathologies can be assuaged by indoor plumbing and clean drinking water, others are less vulnerable to these inducements. Radical Islam is one such threat; it will never be totally co-opted by material progress, social dignity, or physical security. How many of the 9/11 hijackers grew up in the fetid alleys of Palestinian refugee camps, vainly clutching the worthless deeds to their homes in Israel? None. How many lived and thrived in the west, enjoying freedoms and opportunities only dreamed of in their homes countires? Most of them.

We do ourselves no good by claiming that Islamist terrorists are not "real Muslims". It's a tendency that many in the west share, up to and including Tony Blair and George Bush. As soon as a Muslim kills a few dozen people along with himself, the leaders of the west assure us that they had simply "hijacked" an otherwise peaceful religion.

To say that terrorists are not real Muslims is to entirely surrender to wishes rather than reality. The terrorists are real Muslims; that's the whole point. These men have read the Koran, and most of them have memorized it. They have read the passage instructing the reader to go out and kill the infidel, and they believe, from the bottoms of their filthy hearts, that this is truly the revealed will of God.

To say that these people are not Muslims is wishful thinking bordering on the suicidal. If a man walks onto a bus and blows himself up, do we need to guess his religion? No; 10 times out of 9, he (or she) is a Muslim. A real Muslim. One who grew up steeped in the Koran and genuinely beholden to its teachings. Here is the truth that the west refuses to acknowledge: the root of Islamist terrorism is.....Islam.

III

So, we must come to a synthesis. When we look at the three major tribes of the monotheist camp, we see that one of them, the Muslims, are far more willing to use agressive violence as a specific manifestation of their faith; they are far more willing than memebers of either of the other tribes to openly engage in holy war.

Two of the tribes have a violent God and one of them has a peaceful God. The two violent Gods, Jehovah and Allah, differ in one important respect, however. Both use massive violence to articulate their displeasure with followers on occasion. But only one God, Allah, specifically tells his followers to use violence themselves against members of the other tribes for the simple crime of not belonging to the right tribe.

We can be sure that an improvement in the temporal physical life of Muslims will put a damper on the allure of Islamist terrorism. We can be just as sure, however, that as long as their are Muslims, their will be Islamist terrorism. Go kill the infidel means go kill the infidel. Period. No amount of political compromise or socio-economic justice can erase those words or obscure a final fact that makes us uncomfortable, but which must be acknowledged.

Here is this uncomfortable truth: when a Christian man intentionally murders people in the name of his faith, he can point to no passage in his holy book that commands him to do so. Considerable, and futile, mental gymnastics are needed to find a license to kill in the name of the Christian God. A man who truly believes in the Bible can not kill in his Lord's name and remain true to the text.

When a Muslim man intentionally murders people in the name of his faith, he can point to a very concise and un-ambiguous passage in his holy text that does not obliquely justify killing, but specifically mandates and orders it. Considerable mental gymnastics must be taken by a devout Muslim to not find justification for murder in his holy book. A man who truly believes in the Koran can kill in his Allah's name and remain true to the text.

Liberation Conservatism

Conservatism, as practiced from above, is a force to be feared and resisted. This is the force that leads to executions for those who dare to assert that the earth revolves around the sun. This is the force that turns the water cannon against citizens demanding their constitutional rights. Conservatism from above is the timeless force that seeks only to conserve its own power. Conservatism from below, however, may be the only hope for America.

Conservatism from below is not aimed at conserving a grip on the levers of power by a few; rather, it is a force of the many, in which they seek to deny powers to the state, with the sober understanding that any power yielded to any government will be jealously conserved and abused by that government. Conservatism from below, in other words, strives to assure that conservatism from above is never possible.

When we speak of liberals and conservatives in our present context, what we are really referring to is where one comes down on the nature versus nurture ratio. Conservatives feel that, wherever this balance may lie, the state has no business in legislating nurture or in manipulating nature. Liberals feel that, nature being cruel and nurture having millions of manifestations, none of which can be "equal", it is the state's job to somehow compensate for the inequalities of both nature and nurture.

Conservatism from the bottom is in fact a liberating ideology because it has the audacity to say, "I Can". It does not pretend that inequalities do not exist, but merely accepts them as inevitable as the wind and the rain. It does not pretend that members of consent-based communities have no responsibility towards each other, but simply says that the state is an illegitimate patron of this process. It recognizes that all state power, however benevolently cloaked, must and will be exercised in perpetuity and for always-expanding reasons and justifications. It understands that the alternative, the only alternative to an omnipotent state, is for the citizen to say to his government, "I Can".

Conservatism has historically been used to maintain a fixed grip on entrenched power. This is conservatism practiced from above. Conservatism from below, liberation conservatism, is used to take power back from the conservatives on high. Power is not returned to the citizen by creating new federal bureaucracies tasked with figuring out how the federal government got so powerful; it is returned to the citizen when the citizen says to the government, "Thanks, but no thanks. I Can".

This is all very simple on paper, of course, and the reason it runs into such legion practical pitfalls is that the hour is getting late. The federal government has created a dependency in the minds, hearts, and wallets of the citizens that may be irreversible. Local governments are starved of revenue and authority. This is no conspiracy theory, of course, but the inevitable result of ceding power, any power, to a centralized and geographically distant bureaucracy.

Here's how it works: the federal government takes most of a citizen's tax monies; the citizen's local and state institutions receive comparably little. Here is the first step in creating dependency; since most of a citizen's taxes go to the federal government rather than more local ones, the citizen relies on the federal government for a corresponding degree of the services provided with tax revenues.

The second step is the ultimate power grab: the federal government can deficit spend and the state governments cannot. So not only does the federal government collect more money than the states, but it isn't even bound to restrict its expenditures to the level of money collected. States have checking accounts; the federal government has a credit card with no spending limit.

The corresponding realization must then be this: American liberals, and all the federal programs and bureaucracies they have authored, are the real on high conservatives. They are the entrenched power. Their power is not manifested by denying citizens their rights, or by excommunicating scientists, or by stationing federal troops in restive cities. Rather their power is entrenched by maintaining the feeling of dependence.

A mentality has been assiduously crafted and promoted, especially among minorities and the working class, that people need the federal government, that without their tax revenues going to Social Security and FEMA, the heartless conservatives would swoop down upon their homes and rob them blind. Then when Hurricane Katrina strikes, and the federal government proves breathtakingly negligent, there is no money or authority at the local level to deal with the needs of the citizens. "You need us, you need us", comes the chant from Washington. "Yes, we do need you", says New Orleans, "we need you to either do your fucking job or get out of the way".

There are two ways that a bloated and voracious federal government can be changed. They are bankruptcy and revolution. We are heading for the former unless we realize the need for the latter. This revolution does not need blood, however, nor does it need hostility between competing segments of civil society. All it needs is a clear and concise belief, an admittedly monumental paradigm shift. All it needs is for citizens to look at what the federal government has provided as opposed to what could have been provided at the same cost by local institutions. When the citizen sees this balance sheet in his mind's eye, he will be left with one conclusion. "I Can".

Who Are We?

My sister is a student at a public university, and her abnormal psychology professor gave her a dose of abnormal psychology recently. When my sister informed her professor that she had made a mistake in sourcing a paper and asked for a chance to correct it, her professor told her, "you white people are all the same...always looking for other people to clean up your messes".

Firstly, I take issue with the logic of this indictment. If white people are always looking for other people to clean up their messes, why was my sister asking for permission to clean up her own mess? She is a disgrace to white people everywhere, apparently. All joking aside, I wonder how it is that a person who felt it acceptable to say this to a student could possibly be employed by a public university.

There is no such thing as reverse racism, just as sure as our society harbors no sympathy for reverse murder or reverse rape. Racism is racism. When it is "reversed", none of its immorality is alleviated. My sister's professor made a blatanly racist and intellectually childish comment, and it got me to thinking how it is that I am far more outraged by this than my sister was.

If a white professor had started a sentence with, "you black people are all the same...", he would have been fired the same day, I imagine. I can also imgaine him on the front page of the local newspapers and as the crucible for a new push for sensitivity training, diversity awareness, and other assorted acts of moral masturbation in which young people congregate to apologize for living in such a rapacious and bigoted society.

I don't mean for one minute to underestimate the weight of the crimes that have been perpetrated by white men in my country against African-Americans. Neither do I intend to endorse the logic of these racist men, which I must do in order to buy into my sister's professor's world view. Racist whites see people as defined by their skin color. So do racist blacks, such as my sister's professor.

I am not proud to be a white man. I am proud to be a good man, and relatively proud to be an American, but I attach precisely no importance to my skin color. I fully understand that the overarching forces of society and economics mean that I will benefit to some degree by being born white, but that is different from defining myself as white, or allowing anyone else to do so. I don't define myself by my skin, my height, my name, or the shape of my ears, because I have no control over these attributes. I define myself by my actions.

If we accept the world view of my sister's professor, not only am I and my sister responsible for the various and well-documented sins of our great-great-great-great-second-step-cousins-twice-removed, but we are also to be credited with representative democracy, walking on the moon, are curing polio. And not only does my sister's professor share victimhood with the nameless millions of her ancestors who were enslaved by my ancestors, but she is just as responsible for those of her ancestors who kidnapped and sold her other ancestors to my ancestors. American armies did not pierce the heart of darkness with soldiers and cotton tycoons to enslave Africans; other Africans gladly sold their cousins to the Americans, with full knowledge of the destination.

I was in a train station in Munich a few years ago with my closest friend, and we were buying a ticket to Florence. "Before leaving Germany", said the man at the counter, "I suggest you visit Dresden. It's really quite beautiful.....or it was, until you destroyed it". Ah yes, the great destroyer of Dresden, born 35 years after the fact.

If I am responsible for destroying Dresden by virtue of my nationality, then I am also to be commended for rebuilding it. And if I am responsible for destroying Dresden, the ticket man is every bit as responsible for the war itself. For every life wasted, for every book burnt. I wondered why he was at work at the train station that day. Didn't he have Jews to kill? And since I'm an American of German descent, which side am I responsible for? Both? Sucks to be me.

The kind of conversation-ending intellectual infantilism cited above, which denies people their very identity as individual human beings and is designed to end conversations before they are allowed to become substantive, has no place in the hearts and minds of rational people. It will continue to exist, of course, but it must be relegated to people who sell train tickets, and exorcised from the ranks of those who teach our children.

Beware the Narrative

We are witnessing now, in real time, the construction of the Narrative that will arise to explain our inevitable defeat and (partial) withdrawal from Iraq. This Narrative, as it must, will shadow the Narrative that has taken hold regarding America's defeat in Vietnam.

Firstly, it must be said that certain types of people, such as the type of people who would read this blog, often delude themselves into thinking that their Narrative of the Vietnam War or the Iraq War is in any way similar to the dominant paradigm throughout the country as a whole. In order to understand how most Americans think about Vietnam, for example, we should not read Howard Zinn. We should watch Rambo.

The dominant Narrative of the Vietnam War boasts two villains. First, we have the natives who, despite the unending selflessness and generosity of the United States, steadfastly refuse to live up to their responsibilities and defend their own country. Second, and more central, are the liberals. Yes, the liberals, along with their elitist allies in the media, forced us to quit just as we were turning a corner and the war was becoming winnable.

The Narrative that has taken hold regarding Vietnam holds that if the Democrats and the media had been more realistic, more patient, more patriotic, more focused on the "good" news from the war zone, the war would have been won. Tet was a smashing military success for the United States and its South Vietnamese allies, yet the elitist pansies at the New York Times and CBS News found a way to portray it as a defeat, hence demoralizing the American people and making the war unwinnable.

When John Rambo is tasked with returning to Vietnam to rescue American POW's, he has one question to ask of his commander. This question sums up the Narrative with a clarity that only a punch-drunk steroid hound could muster. It is beautiful in its simplicity, in its embrace of the Narrative that we all owe it to ourselves to learn. What does John Rambo ask his government before being sent back to the 'Nam? All he wants to know is, "do we get to win this time?"

I don't have much sympathy for this perspective, but it needs to be understood, since it is happening all over again with Iraq. From my perspective, any American war in Vietnam was unwinnable by definition. Losing faith in the war after several years and countless promises of progress was less a sign of treason than of reason.

In the context of Iraq, we have heard for some time now the grumbling from politicians (I hesitate to call them anything as flattering as "leaders") about how the Iraqis need to "step up". Yes, those ingrates are going to have to learn to handle their own war and stop taking our kindness for weakness. We have been good enough to make their land the central front of a global war, and yet they seem to show no gratitude. Fucking Arabs.

So, just as in Vietnam, the natives are not stepping up. In both wars, of course, our local allies have taken far more casualties than the American military and have fought with far inferior weaponry. This does not matter in the construction of the Narrative, however, since any American failure (or crime) must surely be someone else's fault.

Our definition of "stepping up", of course, is "fighting for American interests". Why are there not millions of Iraqis flocking to fight for American interests? Because they're Iraqi, not American. And, since America will not stay in Iraq forever, the locals can perhaps be excused for placing their perceptions of their own local interests over the fulfilment of American interests.

And, just as in Vietnam, we have the liberals. I have no regard for the Democrats in Congress, and I have no illusion that their current "opposition" to the war has any trace of substance deeper than the most myopic political calculations. There is no genuine opposition to the war in the government. Since not even "the liberals" are calling for an end to the war, it is difficult to saddle them with responsibility for the coming train wreck. Indeed, the American people as a whole turned against the premise of the war long before the "liberals" caught up.

Then we have the media, with their incessant trumpeting of bad news and their studious ignorance of good news. There is a lot to be said for this. When NBC Nightly News opens its broadcast with a story about a car bomb, it does border on the surreal. What kind of way is this to report a war? It is so utterly devoid of context and proportion as to be essentially useless as "news".

Can we imagine what World War II would have been like on the home front if the top story of every day focused solely on what blew up and who was blown up with it, with absolutely no metrics of political progress or strategic objectives? For example, Iraqi Kurdistan is a smashing success by any standard. But don't we all know deep down that we won't hear a word about it unless and until shit starts blowing up there?

Despite the media's problems of perspective, they are not inventing the suicide bombers. There have been more suicide bombers in Iraq since America invaded than there were across the globe throughout all history until that point. Way more. The capital city, four years after the invasion, is the most dangerous place on the planet. If I were to walk down a street, any street, in that city, my life would be counted in minutes, if not seconds.

The danger of the Narrative, by virtue of who the Narrative seeks to blame, is clear to see. When America loses a war that it should never have waged and could never have realistically expected to "win", it attacks the very pillars of its system. We go to war to spread liberty, so we delude ourselves, and when we lose, we blame...freedom of speech and multiparty democratic representation. "Oh, if only the government controlled the media...... Oh, if only we had a one-party state..... We had this thing won, but free speech ruined it". The danger in adopting this view is glaringly obvious.

The war in Iraq is lost. The question now is what our Narrative will be. Why did we lose? Did we lose because those ingrate ragheads wouldn't know what to do with freedom if it came with printed instructions? Did we lose because those pussy intellectuals hate George Bush so much that they allied themselves with the terrorists by obligingly putting every car bomb on TV? Did we lose because the traitorous liberals gave up, as they always do, when the going got tough? Or, did we lose because we were aggressors? Did we lose because the war was illegal? Did we lose because we invaded a country we knew nothing about? Did we lose because people tend to resent being told what to do by a country that lies 6,000 miles away? Did we lose because we were.......wrong? Unless we entertain this notion, this will happen again.

Irakornam, Nutshelled

For those who don't care to descend into the minutiae of my argument regarding the Irakornam Syndrome, here is the message in a condensed version: No superpower, no matter how super, no matter how powerful, will ever win a land war in Asia unless said superpower is......Asian.
P.S. Iraq is in Asia. P.P.S. The United States is not in Asia.