John C. Wright's Journal

A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from “Chosen” Company 2-12 Infantry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope.

The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.” The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.

More unpersons. In the same way that the suffering of unpersons are not really real to our self-appointed moral and mental superiors on the Left, likewise the victories of unpersons stir not the faintest praise, emotion, gratitude or mention, even when representing the allegedly most cherished values of liberty and equality the Left allegedly support. 

In that spirit, let us give those on the Left who have drifted into the camp of the enemy the finger on more time:

                                             You tell ’em Granny!

By the way, yesterday was polling day here in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Do you go vote?

Oh, sorry. This is a picture of a Kurdish woman — you heard me, a minority and a female — voting on how the state of which she is a citizen should be governed. No, this is not a picture from yesterday in Virginia.

My Leftist friends tell me it cost too much in blood and treasure and in American good will around the globe to let this woman vote. She is an unperson to them. When you ask them about her, and women like her, you get this strange blank-out effect in their chains of reasoning.

A friend of mine, who is, through no fault of mine, no longer my friend, laughed in my face when I told her that this woman, and folk like her, are better off because the US invaded Iraq. She leaned forward and laughed in my face. The idea that life in a democracy was better than life in a nationwide slavelabor deathcamp meant nothing to my friend. She blanked it out of her brain.

Those who suffered under Saddam — blank out— there are no such persons. Those whom the United States set free — blank out— the United States cannot free anyone, or do any good in the world. 

The gain to our national honor was pissed away by the public behavior of the Left, which has emboldened the enemy. The Left weakens us, and leaves us confused and helpless. The enemy adroitly exploits the weaknesses of our psychology, our legal system, our media. We, on the other hand, cannot even get up the gumption to declare war in a proper constitutional fashion. 

If it was a propaganda technique, it must have been grossly unsuccessful, because even a bloodthirsty war-hawk like me, someone willing and eager to be convinced of war propaganda, was not convinced that 9/11 was directly related to Saddam.

Do you personally know someone who actually says that we attacked Iraq to punish Saddam for 9/11? Really and truly? Or do you only know articles in Lefty publications criticizing someone — not people that really exist, mind you — who might say such a thing?

“In order to support those women, it is not enough to cheerlead the people that have proven they are incompetent.”

I could care less about the Bush Administration (aside from my native desire not to see good men slandered by ne’er-do-wells). I do not look to Caesar for my salvation. The Left did not commit treason against the Administration: one cannot betray an administrator–he is a servant. We owe him no personal loyalty. The Left committed treason against the nation, the West, against civilization and humanity, all things to which we owe loyalty.

Any administration that was not criminally incompetent would have had to invade Iraq and for substantially the same reasons given by the Congress: had Clinton served a third term, his administration would have helmed this same war.

The causes for war were not light nor transient, and their weight over the years had been growing. 9/11 gave those reasons a new urgency and a new implication.

The 2008 administration, Republican or non-nuts Democrat, will have to continue the global war against the Jihad in much the same way. Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia should be on our list for war targets: anywhere that supports or harbors the Jihad is an enemy.

If the next administration is nuts-Democrat, of course, all bets are off. The war will be put (on our side) on hold until another attack, this time with nukes or nerve gas, strikes continental America. I am assuming Hillary is a non-Nuts Democrat. She has not positioned herself with the antiwar lunatics.

She is clearly a man with brass enough to do the job. All she would have to do is bump off Ahmadinejad and drop his body with a suicide note in Fort Marcy Park, and then have Tyson’s Chicken come by the Rose Law Firm and trash all the billing records for the Pentagon so that there was no evidence her administration declared war. The press would give her a free pass. And I would cheer, because then the Iranians would get a chance at democracy.

(Only a slim chance, mind, but the West is not in a position to give the followers of Mahound more than a slim chance at democracy–it is not a seed that grows well outside its native soil.)  

So, yes, I agree, cheering for our side is not sufficient for victory, but cheering for the other side is treasonous in intent, perhaps in deed. The lesson of the Vietnam war is pertinent here: the gangland thugs we fought after the war said that the only thing that kept them hanging on to hope when they were on the brink of giving up was the antiwar movement here in America. The Left handed them victory, basically by cheering for them. Ideas have consequences, and so do words. 

The reason why Americans do not censor public speech is because of our respect for the weighty consequences of words. No freedom is really worth anything unless its abuse is serious. The Left, by booing our side and cheering for the Jihad, is abusing their powers of public speech, and ignoring the consequences. Real people are going to die real deaths because the Left was too childish and fancy-free to govern their speech soberly.

The yellow people in Vietnam were not real to Left then, in much the same way the brown people in Iraq are not real to the Left now.

I am beginning to hope, based on your comments, that these people are real to you, at least. Thank you. 

Courtesy should be like an aura: an invisible field surrounding every man, so that when she steps near, she turns into a lady in his eyes. Why? You put a woman in a culture where every man gives off unconscious and unselfconscious signs of respect for womanhood, your young women will naturally absorb an impression that their femininity is worthy of respect. You put a woman in a culture were every man gives off the unconscious signs of hostility all men feel for rivals and the contempt for eunuchs, your young women will absorb an impression that their pseudo-masculinity is worthy of disrespect. Women of low self esteem and weak willpower are easier for ruthless Lotharios to victimize. It is merely a matter of economics: what men hold at low esteem, they value lightly.  That is true for self-esteem as for other estimations of value.

Once womanhood is held to be of low esteem, the idea spreads. How many fathers interview their daughter’s dates these days? How many brothers make sure their younger sister is being treated with honor and respect by her suitor, and that the boy is worthy of her?

What do we have instead of the old rituals and playfulness of love, the romance, the mystery, the wild hopes, and solemn and cherished foolishness, the lighthearted sobriety? What do we have instead of knights and princesses, the flirtatious glance, the love poem, the lover’s vow, Hero and Leander, Romeo and Juliette, the waltz? For what did we trade that all?

For sleaze. For date rape. For disposable relationships. For trophy wives. For teen pregnancy and  single-mothers with their temporary live-in boyfriend.  For the reduction of the feminine mystique to a meat market commodity. For a generation of bitter girls of brittle self-respect and lustful slobs who abuse them. You’ve come a long way, baby.

Romance was killed off by the sexual revolution. But the sexual revolution was, in the informal setting of love and courtship, what the abolition of private property was in Russia after the October Revolution, in the setting of political economy. I put it to you that no productive and honest man, one who worked hard and wanted to keep the fruits of his labor, no such man had any benefit coming to him from the collectivization and expropriation of private property. Only the dishonest had an incentive to collaborate: only those who wanted what they had not earned. Likewise, I put it to you that no healthy, truthful and honest lover had anything to gain from the abolition of standards and rules concerning the mating game. A man who wanted to remain a virgin before marriage, marry his true love, and remain faithful to her for happily ever after, fathering and raising his own children and not another man’s, well, he had nothing to gain by the removal of social norms, by the degradation of women, and the social acceptance, first of fornication, next of adultery, finally of grotesque perversion. He had nothing to gain by collaboration.

Who stood to gain? Hugh Hefner, who made money exposing women to the insincere lust of strangers; Bill Clinton, who can explain away perjury under oath, so long as it was done in the name of extramarital unnatural acts with a young woman who trusted him; Robert Heinlein, whose free-spirited characters started by questioning the wisdom of monogamy, and ended up  playing Oedipus with their mothers?

What did the honest man stand to gain from it, the non-exploiter, the non-polygamist, the non-pervert, the non-stalker, the non-creep?