We all love to tut-tut about the appeasers of the 1930s. How could they have been so blind, we ask knowingly? Didn’t Hitler promise in Mein Kampf that he was going to off the Jews? Shouldn’t we have got the message on Kristallnacht when the Nazi thugs went around Germany trashing Jewish businesses? Austria? Czechoslovakia?
“Not any longer,” writes Victor Davis Hanson.
That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians.
Just as in the 1930s the West deals piecemeal with Muslim grievances.
India, after all, is in Kashmir; Russia is in Chechnya; America is in Iraq, Canada is in Afghanistan; Spain was in Iraq (or rather, still is in Al Andalus); or Israel was in Gaza and Lebanon.
So we try to understand the “freedom fighters” and their demand for “liberation.” Or at least, the folks whose meat and drink comes from identifying and appeasing oppressed communities demand that we do.
Perhaps we should view all this from a broader perspective, and realize that we cannot just mobilize the West into an all-out war against Islamism. There is, perhaps, a natural trajectory for a great global movement like Islamism and the response to it, just like it took about 150 years for the virus of socialism to take its course through the world. First it germinated in the intellectual salons of Europe, then metastatized into national politics. Then it became an epidemic as it ravaged whole nations and continents weakened by revolution and civil war.
Maybe the course of Islamism will be like that, a vast global conflict. Or maybe it is a paper tiger that will fizzle out in the sands of the Middle East.
The problem is that we don’t know. So we prefer to put off the hard decision, the moment when we have to get serious.
But that moment will surely come. Or will it?
No comments:
Post a Comment