WHO IS THE ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHER?

Submitted by JACK THACKARY (United States), Mar 9, 2009 at 20:43

Well hello there, Grand Infidel......I like the name, by the way, quite memorable.

It is rather difficult to respond to your posting because the bulk of what you said was simply a matter of stating some obvious well-known facts that do not, however, in any way serve as viable counterpoints to what I stated in my last message. Certainly fanatical Islamists would like to take over Europe, and perhaps they will eventually through sheer dint of numbers---they apparently breed like bunny rabbits---and through exploiting the weak liberal underbelly of modern socialist European societies. And, yes, the Nazi regime displayed a very different form of menace than does the al Queda form of modern terrorism. But the fact that modern terrorist organizations comprise an amorphous group of hate-filled fanatics does not make them more formidable than the Nazi regime of seventy years ago. I'd rather be faced with the rag-tag platoons of misfits found in al Queda than by Hitler's panzer divisions any day.

Your statement that, "Neither was National Socialism an absurd mish-mash of mythologies............" is itself somewhat absurd. I mean, if the crazy-quilt collection of propaganda extolling the virtues of Hitler's mythological "Aryan Race" didn't qualify as a mish-mash of nonsensical beliefs, what does?

Toward the end of your post you say, "It's easy being an armchair philospher---totally removed from the virulence we're talking about." Are you referencing yourself in that sentence? Because earlier you said that you are an Australian and, last I heard, Australia has yet to be targeted by Islamic terrorists, so it seems you yourself are somewhat removed from Islamic virulence.

As for myself, I am a New Yorker. I know people who lost family members in the attacks of September 11, 2001, I have seen the rubble at ground zero, I can recall a phone conversation with my girlfriend that day who saw the towers fall from her 60th floor office window in Manhattan and I heard the Air Force jets blasting by over her head as she cried on the telephone, and 43 members of the union I am a member of died that day in the World Trade Center towers. I live 25 miles away from Ground Zero; you live approximately 14,000 miles away somewhere in Australia. So who is "removed from the virulence" and who is the "armchair philosopher" here?

That being said, I believe the worst thing we can do here in America is to live in fear. We've faced worse enemies in the past than these mindless fanatics and they are a let less formidable than they've been made out to be. We need to put them in perspective and get over this obsession that they will take over the world via suicide bomber. I suppose they may take over much of Europe---some people already refer to it as "Eurabia"---and they can certainly conquer France [I mean, who couldn't?] But they will never rule North America. Nor will they become dominant in the Catholic strongholds of South and Central America. Asia, aside from Indonesia, will not be corrupted by them either.

Way back in World War I the late Thomas Edward Lawrence saw them for what they were. Describing the Beduin Arab, he said: "They were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and colour blind, for whom body and spirit were forever and inevitably opposed." This, coupled with their inherent disunity and their collective animosity and distrust for all things outside their narrow sphere of influence, will cripple all of their efforts from now until forever.

- JACK T.

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