"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Friday, July 08, 2005

Here’s another comment that I thought was worthy of a front page response.

I don’t think the people of London, who have been bombed by more different factions than any other city over the last 60 years exactly needed “waking up”.  Nor do I think our media is in any way negligent of the threat.  Indeed, the BBC has full of discussion about where and when the probably inevitable attack on London would be for years.  Londoners before yesterday, or even in the 90’s, were not like New Yorkers before 9/11.  Nor could they have been, given the IRA attacks throughout the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, the Iranian embassy siege in 1980, the neo-Nazi bomber David Copeland, etc., etc., etc.

So, though it’s good to try and find a silver lining to every cloud, I don’t think this is it.

Absolutely, I agree, it’s not like London has been immune from attacks over the years.  God knows the Brits have been subject to a hell of a lot more direct terrorist activity than we have.  I remember living in the UK as a teenager, and every time you’d go through Heathrow there would be armed guards carrying machine guns walking through the terminals.  But I think the main difference between the IRA bombings and what you see today is that nobody was trying to argue that the threat from the IRA didn’t exist.  Everyone knew it did, they knew what they were facing, and they dealt with it.  Nowadays, however, there is a willful ignorance on the part of so many people over there, and I think it’s due primarily to sheer, utter hatred of George W. Bush.  Look at the popularity of the conspiracy theories of oil and globalization and American hegemony and God knows what else.  During WWII nobody was making documentaries claiming that Churchill was secretly trying to establish a British hegemony on the continent.  It’s not so much that the British people were blind to the possibility of a few bombings of this type, it’s that they were blind to the bigger picture, that these types of suicide bombings are only the beginning of a larger war, declared on the West by radical fascist Islam, that has been going on for decades.

Let me elaborate on a thought I posited in my original post.  There is a logical fallacy originally coined, ironically, by Leo Strauss called reductio ad Hitlerum, which is described thus:

The “reductio ad Hitlerum” fallacy is a special case of the genetic fallacy, of the form “Adolf Hitler, or the Nazi party, supported X, therefore X must be evil”.  The fallacious nature of this argument is best illustrated by identifying “X” as something that Adolf Hitler or his minions did support but is not considered evil, setting X = “painting watercolors” or X = “practicing vegetarianism”. Those policies advocated by Hitler and his party which are generally considered evil can all be condemned on other, logically solid, grounds.

What the British and European people have been deluding themselves with is sort of an inverted “reductio ad Bushium,” in that if Bush believes something then it must be inherently wrong, thus the opposite must be supported.  Therefore when Bush says that terrorism is a global threat and the western world has not done enough to be proactive in fighting it, the “reductio ad Bushium” argument dictates that anyone who supports this belief therefore supports Bush.  Because of the palpable hatred of Bush, societal pressures have forced a lot of people to willfully ignore the threat of radical Islamism, lest they be seen by their peers as somehow being a gullible, willing pawn in Bush’s nefarious quest for global fascist hegemony.  By portraying Bush as alternately a mindless chimp, a puppet whose strings are being pulled by his overlords in the military/industrial complex, or a fascist dictator, it has made it so much easier for so many people to ignore the validity of his underlying message.  Rather than starting from a baseline of, “Yes, we agree the Islamic world is a dire threat, and yes, they have been escalating a declared war on us for over twenty years, and yes, we need to proactively remove this threat,” the British and Europeans (and their allies in the American left) have set about trying to divine the nefarious plot behind Bush’s every action.  “Bush supports big business and he’s a devout Christian and he believes in globalization and all these other things that we are against; therefore, his belief on terrorism must be false.” And because of this I think they largely deluded themselves into a sense of complacency, that because the evil fascist Bush said there was a threat, there actually really wasn’t. 

The problem I see here is that this attitude is probably going to be strengthened by these bombings, not negated by them.  The blame is already happening.  “If only Bush hadn’t gone off and inflamed the Islamic world, these attacks never would have happened.” This morning I received an email from a British friend of mine (very much a left-winger) who lives in London, the content of which can be summed by quite easily.  “Hi everyone.  The wife, kids, and I are all okay.  While our sympathies go out to the families of the victims, let’s not forget the people of Iraq, who are subject to this sort of thing every day, due to the misguided policies of Bush and Blair.” In other words, none of this would have ever happened if Bush and his poodle Blair hadn’t launched their illegal war on the peace-loving people of Iraq.  It’s not the Islamists that are the threat, it’s all Bush’s fault for making them want to attack us. 

This is not a problem that is going to go away.  Whether or not you supported the Iraq or Afghanistan campaigns, the time for scholarly debate on them is over.  There are only two options left, to capitulate and withdraw and apologize, or to keep up the fight and win, no matter what the cost.  Unfortunately, I think the British people are so entrenched in their rank hatred of Bush that the thought of fighting a war he believes in will be anathema to them, no matter what the cost they end up paying in the long term.