The Brink of Madness

A familiar place

Historian Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that we have been here before. In the 1930s the world was on the road to total war. It was a time of tinpot dictators strutting before the world stage while democracies tried ever new ways to appease them and postpone the inevitable. But it was all in vain, as we know from looking back. And in our hindsight we understand that the cost of stopping them sooner would have been much less than it turned out to be in the end.

But as the sage has said, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And our elites in government, in the media and in the universities, the people who should know better, have proven that they have learned nothing. And from that nothing will come the terrible storm through which we must ultimately pass. And as before, the toll in blood will be higher than it might have been. Much promise of human potential will be cut short; wasted by the false promise of moral relativism and post-modern multiculturalism that has made us all too vulnerable.

In time, I believe we will wake up from that deadly illusion and throw off the bonds that the left has slowly woven around us to keep us passive and quiet while the enemy advances upon us. And as before we will win the day.

But not before we pay, with compound interest, the butcher's bill of our forgetfulness.

Our present generation too is on the brink of moral insanity. 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.

It is now nearly five years since jihadists from the Arab world left a crater in Manhattan and ignited the Pentagon. Apart from the frontline in Iraq , the United States and NATO have troops battling the Islamic fascists in Afghanistan . European police scramble daily to avoid another London or Madrid train bombing. The French, Dutch, and Danish governments are worried that a sizable number of Muslim immigrants inside their countries are not assimilating, and, more worrisome, are starting to demand that their hosts alter their liberal values to accommodate radical Islam. It is apparently not safe for Australians in Bali, and a Jew alone in any Arab nation would have to be discreet — and perhaps now in France or Sweden as well. Canadians’ past opposition to the Iraq war, and their empathy for the Palestinians, earned no reprieve, if we can believe that Islamists were caught plotting to behead their prime minister. Russians have been blown up by Muslim Chechnyans from Moscow to Beslan. India is routinely attacked by Islamic terrorists. An elected Lebanese minister must keep in mind that a Hezbollah or Syrian terrorist — not an Israeli bomb — might kill him if he utters a wrong word. The only mystery here in the United States is which target the jihadists want to destroy first: the Holland Tunnel in New York or the Sears Tower in Chicago .

In nearly all these cases there is a certain sameness: The Koran is quoted as the moral authority of the perpetrators; terrorism is the preferred method of violence; Jews are usually blamed; dozens of rambling complaints are aired, and killers are often considered stateless, at least in the sense that the countries in which they seek shelter or conduct business or find support do not accept culpability for their actions.