Whatever You Do, Don't Fight Back



Out of Dallas comes a story about a 60 year old woman who wrestled away a gun from a 19 year old teenager trying to steal her car and shot him. The story's closing paragraph contains the cautionary note that has become obligatory for postmodern America.

"We don't recommend it," Sgt. McFarlin said of the woman's decision to confront her attacker. "Always the safe thing to do, unless you're in fear of imminent bodily injury, is to comply."

Complying is indeed the recommended option these days, whether it's with criminals or terrorists. Follow orders and hope you don't get hurt. How many women have been forced into cars at the threat of a knife or a gun, only to be taken away and raped and murdered. When people are taught to comply, imminent injury ceases to be a risk but a consequence.

Complying was the standard recommendation for airplane hijackings. This cultural programming was only broken on Flight 93, when the consequences of compliance had become clear. It is not in Afghanistan or Iraq, where the only truly decisive victory against terrorism occurred, but on that plane, when the passengers chose to resist their attackers and foil their plans.

The common denominator between crime and terrorism is that both are cultural threats to our society. They originate from cultures existing abroad and in the fringes of our own society. A criminal culture and a terrorist culture. They cannot be defeated purely through military means, they must be defeated at the cultural level, and that will only happen when a society of committed individuals resist them, rather than comply with them.

But we have been assiduously taught not to do this. We are taught to vest out faith and rights into the hands of government bodies who will handle our security for us. Our approach to terrorism is only an extension of our approach to crime, which is to slide back and forth between aggressive rhetoric and overbearing action to appeasement and downright romanticisation of the criminal and the terrorist. This romanticisation of murderers and criminals who challenge authority, itself stems from the loss of liberty inherent in a state which preaches government power as the ultimate good and the ultimate solution.

Once we transferred responsibility for our security from ourselves to a designated professional force and made it all but illegal, for people to defend others or themselves using force, we created the kind of society that could stand by as Kitty Genovese was attacked repeatedly over a half and allowed to die without any help.

We created a society perpetually afraid of crime and dependent on police brutality and ruthless policing to keep it at bay. By taking away the ability of ordinary citizens to protect themselves, we were left with the false choice of either weak policing and anarchy or ruthless policing and obscene erosions of individual freedoms.

All attempts to transfer individual responsibilities to the government however, are doomed to failure. A government educational system can never replace parents. Government policing can never take the place of individual deterrence and self-defense. Governments can defeat armed forces, but they cannot defeat a culture. Only one culture can defeat another culture and only one civilization can defeat another civilization.

The War on Terror was marked by a government that rushed to pass laws, that were promptly never taken advantage of, or misused for ordinary criminal prosecutions. While everyone from the President on down rushed to insure the public that everything was under control, attempts to give the American people a role in the War on Terror were either squashed or squandered. The government insisted on doing it on its own and worked hard to convince the public that this was a conventional threat that could be defeated by conventional means, because government always seeks to rhetorically recreate a situation along the parameters that place it within its sphere of control.

In the War on Terror, domestic terrorists have been barely touched, and the successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, ignored the fact that the real threat lay not from Osama Bin Laden, but from the growing Muslim immigration and accompanying legitimization of terrorism and delegitimization of self-defense, that has turned Europe's former great empires into supine chambers of appeasement before the spawn of Mohammedanism. Unable to admit the average American understands, the government's attempt to fight terrorism can only stop state sponsors of terrorism, but not the disease vector of terrorism itself, which is Islam.

The dream of Islamic supremacy cannot be blown up with a bomb. It can be defeated only by a superior culture. A culture that is unafraid of the truth and whose superiority rests in individual liberty and self-reliance, rather than on grand government programs that hunt mosquitoes with howitzer cannons.

Individual liberty is a free society's immunity mechanism that prevents it from being overcome by malignant ideologies. A socialist state which seeks to subdue the native energies, spirits and vigor of its people, turns a Democratic society into little more than an inferior version of the dictatorships and totalitarian ideologies it resists. Inferior because true totalitarian regimes are far more thorough, both in crushing their own people and in maintaining a police state over them.

A government cannot subdue the Islamic threat. Military force is an important component over defeating Islamic terrorism abroad, but we can score military victories over Islamic terrorism across the world, and yet see it spring up in new places every week. Because all that Islamists require is a weak government and a crumbling social structure to move in and begin taking over. Africa alone offers dozens of such places. So does Southeast Asia. So does Europe.

A government cannot subdue an ideology. Bombing another training camp in Pakistan does only a limited amount of good, when mosques are preaching Jihad recruiting terrorists in our own cities. Fighting Islamic terrorism abroad does little good, when our own schools and colleges are prosyletising students with classes on the glories of the Religion of Peace.

Terrorism is only the poison the snake spits. The snake itself is the rise of Islam as a force in the modern world. That snake stretches out from the sand pits of the Middle East, its coils draping across Asia and Europe and its fangs reaching across the ocean to America. The snake's body is composed of the numbers of its worshipers, of their mosques and charities and schools and institutions.

For the poison to seep in, they might prefer a Liberal Democrat President, but they would settle for a Republican one whose administration will counsel people not to worry, teach them to tape the windows shut and do nothing, especially not blame Islam or Muslims for terrorism. Especially not to fight back.

Since 9/11 Muslims boast that conversions to Islam have gone up. The murder of over 3000 Americans served as a kind of publicity stunt to launch the promotion of the religion responsible for it. The average American today is fed a dozen lies about Islam before breakfast, all of them sickeningly sweet. The empty debate rages about whether to pull in and out of Iraq, when the real battle for the West is being fought in Paris and Brussels and Rome and for that matter Detroit.

As the death toll in the unofficial war being fought in Europe rises, the media trumpets each dead American soldier. In Sweden women are told not to dress provocatively or meet the eyes of Muslim men. In Australia rhetoric against Muslims is punished with jail time. In England republication of cartoons offensive to Muslims is set to trigger a criminal prosecution. In America rumors of a supposed Koran in the toilet trigger police investigations.

All of it falls under a single banner. The same banner liberals and conservatives both, have spent too much time waving since the 70's. Whatever you do, don't fight back.

Comments

  1. Self defense courses advise a woman never to get in a car, but to fight and run.
    If you get in the car you are dead.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Absolutely, Lemon. Any cop worth his salt will be honest with women and let them know that they should fight with every fiber of their being to avoid getting into an abductor's car. Crime scene number #2 is the deadly one, not the initial crime scene.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Outstanding article, Sultan. Police do move between touchy-feely community policing measures to tough on crime Flex Squads (every police department has its version of a Flex Squad, usually with the word tactical thrown in.) The later just adore pouncing on this or that gang house, seizing a quantity of drugs/guns and then holding huge press conferences with the mayor, police commissioner and his deputies. 'Look at us mom! See! We're doing a bang up job.'

    We've all been to such press conferences or watched them wondering what world are these cops living in where they think their measures solved all crimes and made us 100-percent safe?

    When facing any sort of criticism, cops invariably pull out their "numbers." Number of arrests, tags, drug seized etc etc etc. Heard it all before. And still know of people being victimized.

    And cops do make varying attempts to understand criminals and develop a rapport with them (ooo, big word meant to impress the local yokels at community meetings) to the who cares, let's pounce on them. As with terrorists--get tough versus sympathy for the devil, so to speak.

    People like Bush send out conflicting messages: we're not at war with Islam, oh wait, yes we are, that's why we've invaded an arab, muslim country and that's who wants to destroy us. That's why we've developed the dept. of Homeland Security in the first place. But at the same time, we're compelled by PC pressure to be tolerant of Muslims.

    Mixed messages.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous1/3/07

    Excellent take on Islam's modus operandi.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Goodmoring :)

    This headline accompanying an Independent UK article republished by AlterNet pretty much sums up what much of the world feels about terrorism and the Iraq War--

    "The War on Terror Is the Leading Cause of Terrorism."

    http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/48620/

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous7/3/07

    If I'm going down I'm taking someone with me - I'm going to inflict the maximum harm possible. I won't die for nothing - like Jack Bauer stated when he was freed from the Chinese prison.

    I don't know how many times I hear comply, don't resist.(diplomacy & dialogue anyone?) Then someone survives or the scum confesses how he walked someone out to the woods and told the victim to kneel on the ground and put a bullet in their head.

    Don't do it, never believe they won't hurt you. Never believe this person with a gun or a knife is going to let you go. They'll squash you like a bug and then go eat a hamburger. You're better off fighting like a insane maniac, like your life depended on it. Because it does. Now, apply this to Islam.

    If you look at what's happening around the world it seems like perfectly normal groups of people are experiencing a mass hallucination. I watch, read, I listen, news, blogs, talk radio. A very large percentage of people, educated people, deny Islam is a threat - to America, to Israel, to Western society. What they're telling us (the media) is just like the woman who comes home to find her husband in bed with another woman: It's not what it seems dear. Are you going to believe your eyes or are you going to believe me?

    Political correctness, moral equivelance is no less dangerous than the AIDS virus. It twists normal, rational people into denying their very nature - their sense of self preservation. It causes people to stop believing what their eyes and all their senses tell them is true. I think it sprouted out of Christianity. All the garage about hate the sin, love the sinner and don't judge people, turn the other cheek, no to the death penalty we're all the same. It makes me want to retch. If a man comes to kill you , you rise up early and kill him first.

    ReplyDelete
  7. exactly udiyah and great post

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thumbnail12/9/09

    I blame feminism for giving us bloody political correctness.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous7/5/14

    Nolo Cedere

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

You May Also Like