All animals live by killing. That’s the awful truth that we spend our lives avoiding. Even your average cow does nothing but kill innocent living grasses all day.
Some people believe that they know a higher truth than the instinctive need to live and the instinctive desire to protect your own. They believe that we can break the “cycle of violence.” And that leads them away from loyalty to their community or nation. As William Hawkins puts it:
Only an intense belief in a "higher truth" can lead people to turn against their own country during a war. The flowering of this strain of liberal doctrine goes back to the decades following the Napoleonic Wars.
Actually it goes back before that. Christianity views all selfish action—let alone violent action—in a questionable light. And we can regard the tension between church and state in the Christian era as a healthy response to the problematic both of untrammeled selfishness and unrestrained unselfishness.
So the liberal reaction to 9/11 was predictable.
Liberals warned against "overreacting" to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Katrina vanden Heuvel, in the misnomered journal the Nation, argued, "The most promising and effective way to halt terrorism lies in bringing those responsible to justice through nonmilitary actions in cooperation with the global community and within the framework of domestic and international law."
Maybe so. But the 20th century’s foremost theorist of thuggery, V.I. Lenin, had another idea. He called people like Heuvel “useful idiots.” And after 9/11 the useful idiots knew what to do.
The patriotic unity felt by Americans in all walks of life when the Pentagon and World Trade Center were attacked by al Qaeda had to be torn asunder as quickly as possible to conform with liberal-left ideology. Thus, groups like Moveon.org cranked up their partisan hate speech.
For the left believes not in the nation state but in “class division and hyper-individuality.” It’s a curious combination. People are only allowed to form communities based on class. For the rest, we are individuals.
But sometimes reality has a way of breaking through.
The French philosopher Ernest Renan started out as a classical liberal but after his country lost its 1870 war with Prussia became an eloquent exponent of nationalism. He argued, "A nation is a living principle, a spiritual principle. ... To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present, to have done great things together, the will to do the like again — such are the essential conditions for the making of a people."
There’s nothing like having foreign soldiers in your country to concentrate the mind.
In Iraq, of course, there are foreign soldiers not just from the US, but from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran. And that is not counting the non-state actors like Al Qaeda.
No, history is not over, Virginia. Not for a while. Not in your lifetime.
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