Just You Wait

"The attack on the West is among other things

an attack on the mind of the West. To be equipped with the mind

of the West is like being an idiot savant, mentally defective

but with a special gift for making arithmetic calculations. It is a mind

without a soul, efficient, like a calculator, but hopeless in doing what is

humanly important. The mind of the West is capable of great economic success,

to be sure, and of developing and promoting advanced technology,

but cannot grasp the higher things in life, for it lacks spirituality

and understanding of human suffering."

I'm a fan of the West. Big fan. And while we should avoid self-loathing as much as possible, don't we all know that there is some truth to the quote above? Whether these words were written by Ghandi or bin Laden is irrelevant; what matters is that there is truth to them, and that eventually that truth will be visited upon us by people who will use our "advanced technology" to make us confront "human suffering" on a scale that we cannot comprehend.

One of the ugly realities of globalization is that Western weapons will inevitably be obtained by decidedly non-Western thinkers. Only someone from the West, such as myself, could be so absurd as to talk about "rational" uses for nuclear weapons, since they are the most irrational invention imaginable, but they still allow some room for logic.

That logic was once known as Mutually Assured Destruction, which worked just fine. The reason, the only reason it worked, was that all actors involved were Western. Even the Russians, those insrutable Slavs, Eastern in many ways, fell into the broader Western fold. All nuclear actors, in other words, were deterable. Only the West would assume that such a situation was sustainable.

We will see a nuclear weapon used in the near future. It may be used by a state, perhaps Pakistan, but more than likely it will be used in a terrorist attack. If a nuclear bomb is detonated in this country, we can say goodbye to the last tattered remnants of our republic. Does anyone think that the reaction to a strike would be anything less than immediate and indefinate martial law?

There once was a "logical" reason to develop nuclear weapons; a fanatical, yet ultimately deterrable enemy, had to be crushed. It was, in the cold Western sense, "logical" to use these weapons on Japan. The problem is that it has been supremely logical to destroy these weapons ever since. Instead, these weapons were built by the thousands.

Here is where the West lost itself. Was it "logical" to build more than enough nuclear weapons to kill every human being on Earth? And, even if that was deemed logical in some theoretical clusterfuck of a universe, was it logical to assume that anyone that could conceivable procure these weapons would be "logical" themselves? The answer to both questions is no.

It is illogical to assume that other people are logical. This is the West's fatal flaw. We will see it realized. Just you wait.