Saint James Matamoros, Lead Us in Crusade!
Perhaps there are readers who are shocked, or at least puzzled, that I and all men of good will call for a Crusade against the Islamist enemy currently troubling the peace of the world.
Part of this is merely verbal disorder. A generation raised with no ability to read or speak the English language, and who use Orwellian Newspeak in lieu of thought, cannot apprehend the meaning of a common sense proposition because they cannot understand the meaning of ordinary words. It is for this reason that their masters (let us call them “The Conditioners”) have trained them.
To the properly conditioned politically correct leftist moron, the word “Crusade” means “Racist Genocide” and their every reaction, emotion and rational, to the common sense proposition is false to facts. They are shocked and astonished that anyone would be advocating genocide, when, of course, no one is; no one, of course, save the antisemites among the enemy.
Part of this, a more sinister part, is historical. We in the West enjoy all the benefits of Christian civilization, from classical art to modern science, from democracy to free enterprise to the academic freedom of the university system. The Left has made an astonishing effort over the last two centuries, an effort which has proved to be astonishingly successful, to hide the Christian origin and Christian nature of all these institutions from the modern generation.
The effort has been so successful that it is the default assumption of the modern day that Christianity opposes freedom of religion (when indeed it is the only religion that insists upon it and always has) and opposes science and academic freedom (when indeed it is the only religion that invented and promoted the university system, and the only world view in which modern physics mades metaphysical sense).
Christianity, in short, is Western civilization. Western civilization is Christianity.
This causes strange convulsions among the modern generations, all of whom have been taught that Christianity was a perversion of the enlightened and tolerant classical paganism, that the ascendancy of Christian faith was an age of darkness and superstition, and that the growth of all modern enlightenment was despite, and not because of, the Church and her deplorable obscurantist barbarism. The lie is admixed with sufficient truth to give it plausibility, at least to the ill educated, and is a more complex topic than can be addressed in a sentence.
For now, it is sufficient to say that the Revolutionaries of France and Russia who chopped off the heads and spread the Terror, and sent the innocent to gulags, and orchestrated the Ukrainian famine, were in rebellion against the moral authority of the Church, and not agents of an evolution from dim superstition toward scientific enlightenment. For now, it is sufficient to say that the American Revolution, which promoted the separation of Church and State, and defended the traditional Christian view of the freedom of the conscience, was not a return to paganism, but was a reaction against Protestant national churches, and a return to medieval de facto separations between the international Church and local barons and kings, none of whose powers were in theory absolute. But, this is a matter for another day, and these statements must be hedged about with exceptions and conditions too numerous to here recite.
The word “Crusade” does not mean racist genocide. It means the defense of civilization against encroaching barbarians or against encroaching oriental despotism. It is the opposition to those twin brothers, Tyranny and Anarchy. Crusade is the use of military force by the gathered princes and republics of Christendom against the mutual and indeed universal foe, the Dar-al-Islam, a Seventh Century heresy of Christianity that spread, unlike other heresies, among external barbarians, and which seeks, and ever has and ever shall, to supplant Christianity.
So when I call for a Crusade, for what am I calling?
Let me put it to you this way: it has been the policy of both the Obama and the Bush administration to fight the violent Jihadists supporting Sharia law, such as Al Qaeda, while supporting, sometimes financially, sometimes with gestures and applause, the less violent Jihadists supporting Sharia law, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the current Prime Minister of Turkey, Erdogan.
The rise of Shariaists (if I may coin the term) in Egypt and Turkey has been a disaster for Western policy. The West must treat Sharia law as it treated Communism during the Cold War, or as it treated Fascism during and after World War Two.
Now, to be sure, there are different brands and toxicities of Shariasm just as there are differences between Mussolini Fascism versus Hitler Fascism, or between Mao, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, South American and Hollywood Screenwriter versions of Communism. But each member of the genus agrees on a core value. All Shariaists agree on the supremacy of Seventh Century theocratic law governing every aspect of human life, public and private. They may disagree on means to be used, and may disagree on whether the Umma follows the Sons of the Prophet versus the elected leaders of the congregation. But if they believe in Sharia Law, they are totalitarians who cannot live in peace with Western Democracies, and whose religions requires and demands and rewards them for intolerant hatred even to the point of suicide-murder of innocent bystanders of Christians, Jews, Hindus, and other pagans.
There is a small, disorganized, and silent group of Muslims who are not Shariaists, and who are willing to forswear Jihad and live in peace and alliance in mutual toleration of other religions and other legal systems in the context of a modern Western democracy. They are not the enemy. However, until and unless they can stir the consensus of Muslim opinion against Sharia and toward a civilized version of Islam, they are also meaningless, as meaningless as the non-Nazis in Germany during World War Two, as meaningless as the non-Communists in Russia during the Cold War. They may from time to time be of small use in intelligence gathering, and they may, if the spirit moves them, begin to move the center of balance of the consensus in the Dar-al-Islam away from Sharia Totalitarian Theocracy. With them, if they beg us, we can make alliance. So far, the entire policy of the West has been to do overemphasize both the power and the importance of these liberal (I mean the word in its original meaning) Mohammedans, and to mistake the nonviolent Shariaists for them.
I am as worried about collateral damage to innocent Mohammedans as I am worried about collateral damage to German women and children during World War Two. It should be minimized except in cases where the Shariaists take advantage of our civilized squeamishness to hide behind them and mingle among them. In that case, they have the duty to distance themselves from the Shariaists among them and to cease providing cover and concealment for them. Otherwise, damage to them is laid at the feet of the Shariaist enemy they shelter, not at our feet.
I say we need a Crusade, because Islam cannot be tolerated as a political power. Islam can, if it reforms itself, be tolerated as a disestablished religion, but “Islamic Republics” must be smashed, if for no other reason than to protect the Christian minorities who lived in those nations since before the rise of this most violent and vile of heresies in the Seventh Century.
All those lands were once Christian, and should be placed under Christian princes or parliaments or republics again.
I am not advocating forced conversions: that is against Christian faith and was not what the original Crusades were about anyway. The original Crusades were about the political force of Christian princes of Christendom against the political force of Caliphs of the Dar-al-Islam to make lands groaning under Islamic oppression return to the bosom of civilization, and for the protection of pilgrims and travelers.
Again and again, when the common sense notion arises that we should treat our enemies like our enemies, the same suicidally stupid objections arise: just today another boneheaded troll was accusing me of advocating genocide because I do not advocate the preemptive surrender of civilization to barbarism.
The only real objection is that the enemy is irregular, that is, not in uniform, that the enemy has no centralized command structure, and that the enemy is motivated by a religion which our current laws and customs do not allow us to expel from the nation absent more.
These objections are the same as those raised against efforts to defeat Communism, and raised by the same parties and for the same reasons: because the objectors are fellow travelers to the enemy. They are in sympathy with the enemy’s goals and means, even if they are not in the enemy’s pay, and even if the enemy, given a chance, would saw off their heads.
These objections are not serious. One can make war against a decentralized enemy, as the actions by marines against Barbary Pirates or US Cavalry against Red Indians shows. One can halt religiously-motivated acts of war and acts of crime and terror without outlawing peaceful exercises of the religion: the worship of the Aztec gods in America is legal — no law forbidding verbal prayer to Tezcatlipoca would be Constitutional, for example — provided one does not commit human sacrifice. Collateral damage can be minimized.
When I call for a Crusade, for what am I calling?
I call for an end to all aid and comfort, financial, political and verbal to Sharia Law and the Jihadists who support it. Whether seemingly peaceful or openly violent, these are the enemies of our civilization who cannot live in peace with our civilization’s religion. There are no friendly, no, nor even neutral Jihadists.
I call for the downfall of Islamic regimes wheresoever situate, by military force and by whatever means of economic, legal, and propaganda warfare can be brought to bear.
I call for the public humiliation, shaming, and any legal sanctions limited by Constitutional provisions against those among us aiding and abetting and cheering for the enemy. The groves of Academia and the whorehouses of Hollywood and the halls of power, and the temple and the pulpit must be swept clean of those who promote and defend the enemy. During wartime, especially a war whose sole tactic is psychological war, it is not prudent nor moral to allow the bullhorns and silver screens of the most powerful propaganda machine in the history of man to remain in the hands of the Fifth Column.
Riots should be handled in the traditional British fashion of reading the Riot Act and opening fire on the crowds.
Despots in the Middle East who are not Shariaists should be handled carefully, at arm’s length, but where prudent and convenient be made allies, and against allegedly democratic reformers who are in reality promoters of Sharia Law Totalitarianism. (You fools, you make this mistake a generation ago, thinking that the Communists were democratic merely because they said they were. How can you be so lacking in perception?)
Sharia-based regimes must be attacked and destroyed upon the earliest legal casus beli, or for the protection of Coptic or other Christian minorities. The United States and other European powers must stand ready to retaliate in overwhelming force against the burning of a single church building in the Middle East, and destroy and kill any presidents, sheiks, parliaments, or regimes who do not or cannot protect the Christian minorities in their lands.
The protection of Christians should and must be a policy of the United States and of the West. The policy of aided and funding and abetting the destruction of Christians in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe must cease. It is madness.
Do I think any such Crusade will ever be declared, or even considered? I do not. Nothing I have said here could be repeated in polite company without being met by guffaws of laughter or supercilious sneers. The idea of Christian civilization actually, you know, admitting that it is Christian, acting civilized, or defending herself from her enemies is regarded not only as unthinkable, but, in the foetid, dank and lard-soaked minds of the intelligentsia, unconstitutional. To those whose lives are devoted to the avoidance of any clear, bright, or noble thought in their hearts or heads, the matter is literally unthinkable.
For that matter, the war is itself unthinkable. The idea that Dar-al-Islam is at war with Christendom is literally something they cannot think. And so they do not. They pretend the motives for the violence are something else. They blame themselves, they blame economics, they blame the United States, the blame the Jews. They pretend the goals, tactics, and strategy of the Jihad do not exist, or that these goals are other than they are.
The Jihad announces its goals. They seek the rise of totalitarian theocracy, Sharia Law, first in the Middle East and eventually, with the aid of Allah, across all of the Earth. Though this last claim is more rhetorical than real, it is akin to Communist daydreams of the socialist world state, or Fascist daydreams of a Thousand-Year Reich. They seek to undermine Western values, traditions, laws and customs and to impose their own, by direct and terrible violence where they are strong, by means more subtle, peaceful and legal where not. This is “law war” using an institutions own rule against it to subvert it; but it is a tactic of psychological war nonetheless.
They seek the genocide of the Jewish race.
Such are their strategic goals. Tactically, in the short term, this generation faces a Jihad hegemony in the Middle East and Indochina, and the division and destruction of Israel. This means the weakening of Western resolve, influence and interest in Middle Eastern and Indochinese affairs. This means they celebrate when Leftists will not announce that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, or when pompous idiots denounce the opposition to building a victory Mosque at Ground Zero in Manhattan, atop the soil soaked with innocent blood.
But the war is upon us, like it or no. Living in peace is not an option. The options are denial, which is tantamount to preemptive surrender, and fighting.
Therefore let us fight. We have so much to fight for.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
