John C. Wright's Journal

Specifically, they were the admixture of Northern barbarian cultural values mutating and being mutated by Italian and Greek civilization that they both admired and imitated and overran.

Knights are Christian. Heavy cavalry units from any other era and civilization simply are not knights, not the Paladin of Charlemagne, and simply do not have the other attributes of knighthood.

When Gary Gygax or George RR Martin attempt to construct a Faux Middle Ages setting, with castles and princesses and dragons and so on, but they don’t want to offend anyone, so they want to leave the Christianity out of it, they also remove any reason for the institutions being and acting the way they do.

Tolkien came the closest to having a Faux Middle Ages that was actually medieval in feel and flavor, but the way he did it was by putting in place every element in his Middle Earth that had a parallel element in real earth, so the structure still made sense. Instead of the fall of the Roman Empire, we have the Fall of Numenor. Instead of the split of the empire East from West, we have the split of the Kingdom of Isildur, North from South. Instead of Constantinople, was have Minas Tirith. Instead of the paynims, we have the southrons, who look and act just like them. Instead of the Corsairs from north Africa, which are conquered Christian lands, we have the Corsairs of the Umbar, who once were Numenoreans, but then fell under the sway of the Dark Lord. Instead of the Turks, we have the Orcs.

But Tolkien carefully (almost unrealistically) removes any mention of religion from his world. We have a few references to Elbereth, the Star-kindler of the Elves, or to Eru, The One, and we can glean the names of the archangels from the SILMARILLION. But we do not see any services being held for soldiers dead on the battle field. There are no monkish or priestly orders, no chapels, no temples, no Sybil of Avernus and no Oracle of Delphi.

When I was reading GAME OF THRONES, the parallel between the crusading religion of the Seven and the “Old Ways” who carved faces into trees is a parallel to the relationship between growing Christianity and dying paganism in the post-Julian-the-Apostate days onward. But why does the religion of the Seven oppose other forms of worship? Why do they have priesthoods? In Rome and Athens, the priests were state functionaries who were usually members of royal or noble families, not a full-time profession involving oaths and special uniforms. There were no archibishops of Zeus and no Pope of Jupiter. Even the religion of the Mohammedans (which is as close to Christianity as you can get, once you remove the pessimism about man’s estate, and the humanity of having a human god) did not have these Roman bureaucratic and militaristic hierarchic ideas.

My objection to such things is that they never seem to hang together, and they never seem to copy the real religious practices of other real religions, such as Buddhism or Hinduism or the semireligious philosophy of Confucianism. That is because the Christians evolved something unique in history. Other religions have priests, and some oriental religions even have things like holy hermits who practice asceticism. The Roman genius for authority and organization (which has both its good and bad aspects) developed things like the Office of Pope and the canonical Holy Books. The holy books of other religions simply do not have the legal imprimateur of their established Church hierarchy, because there is no other institution like the Church. The closest parallel is to priestly families, as Levites among the Jews or Magi among the Zoroasterians, or a priestly caste, as Brahmins among the Hindu.

Its bogus. It is as bogus as shows that want to have Ninja, but don’t want to take place in Japan, so they invent the Ninja of Arabia! or the Norse Ninja of Iceland! Yes, that ancient Viking assassin-clan that used magic and deception, and the rigorous training methods of Viking Buddhist monks, in the name of Odin!

Bogus as a three dollar bill. When the Gary Gygax of AD 4008 decides to make a ‘Generic’ pre-atomic war role playing game, the setting will always be the ‘generic’ federated republic composed of 50 smaller states who broke from the ethnic and monarchic ancient regimes of the Old World: these Genericans will always have Nine Supreme Judges robed in place, and a Senate like the senate of Rome, and a House of Representatives, modeled on the House of Commons in Britain … BUT … so as not to offend anyone, there will be no Supreme Executive officer of the Republic, indeed, no executive branch at all. There will never once be mentioned a man named George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. But every Generic nation set in the generic Twentieth Century will have a written constitutions. And they will always used the Bald Eagle as their symbol — but let us never mention That Nation, lest someone in 4008 be offended.

Well, all you guys writing Generic Middle Ages, I hate to tell you, but — only Christendom ever had a “Middle Ages” between the fall of Christian Rome and the rise of the powerful Christian Monarchies of the Renaissance. And even those monarchs were not like the leaders of other nations in Asia and Africa, because their theory of kingship was based on the sacrament of coronation, the anointing, and based on the idea of a law above even the law of kings, and other ideas that have their roots in Charlemagne, and in the Holy Roman Empire. A sultan is not a king, Rex, regis, and neither is a Tenno nor a Shogun. Kingship is different. There are periods in history when other empires rose and fell, but no example in any history of any continent, except Europe, of an empire that fell, whose culture and religion was preserved by the barbarians who overran it, and who erected the same empire again over and over: Caesar was born again as Czars and Kaisers: and the Senate was seated again in the Capitol, except on Capitol hill in Washington, not on the Capitoline hill in Rome. The Roman Empire did not fully die until Napoleon.The Roman Republic lives on in America, even if Roman virtue, once ours, is now gone.

So — Dragon Crystal Jesus is a fine word to capture my annoyance with That Religion Whom None Dare Name, and they worship a lawful-good henotheistic deity named Generic.

• SF has supermen but not demigods. Paul Mu’ad Dib is not meant by his inventor, Frank Herbert, to be a real messiah sent by a real God on a real divine mission: Paul is a super-human, a product of eugenic breeding to the stage of development beyond human. He is no more a prophet than The Gray Lensman, who was likewise a super-man, a product of eugenic breeding. If Herbert had meant Paul to be a real Messiah, the Jihad he foretells would have been cast in the tale as a victory: instead it is depicted as an unmitigated disaster that Paul is powerless to stop.
• SF has no giants, but plenty of giant robots: just ask Daisaku Kusama (or Johnny Sokko, take your pick).
• SF has The Invisible Man but not Rings of Invisibility. When Angelica or Gyges or Frodo Baggins uses a ring to turn invisible, neither has to worry about leaving footprints in the snow. When John Griffon turns invisible, however, he has to run around in the nude, and the retinas of his eyes still reflect a bit of light. Now, a nude scientist is no more real than an invisible damsel, an invisible tyrant, or an invisible hobbit, but an invisible man who has to shed shirt and face-bandages to turn invisible is more realistic: HG Wells has thought through the day-to-day practical details of what invisibility would actually entail if it were possible.
• SF has no magic, but plenty of psionics. The Gray Lensman can read minds. The Slans can read minds. The Psychohistorians can read minds. The Jedi can read minds, sort of. Vulcans can read minds. The  Martians from MARTIAN CHRONICLES can read minds. The Martian from LAST AND FIRST MEN can read minds, at least of other Martian cloud-masses. The Martian from THE JUSTICE LEAGUE can read minds. The Martians from A PRINCESS OF MARS can read minds, or, somehow, make it so that clean-limbed fighting men of Virginia can read their minds when he is on their world. The Martian from MY FAVORITE MARTIAN can read minds. What is the difference between magic and psionics? Nothing except for the world view: magic lives in worlds where there are spirits. Psionics is an application of a yet-undiscovered branch of psychiatry: the technology of parapsychology.
• SF has no gods or genii but plenty of Arisians, Eddorians, Talosians, Organians, Metrones, and other godlike superbeings.
• SF has no monsters, strictly speaking, no children of Echidna, but it has plenty, nay, a superabundance, of monstrous mutants, usually caused by radiation, or dinosaurs melted from ancient glaciers, and it has plenty of alien critters. There is hardly a planet in space that does not have a dinosaur or a ten-limbed lion on it.

My point here is that the scientific revolution did indeed revolutionize our view of the world and our place in the order of creation: but it did not revolutionize, or even change, the way to tell a tale. You cannot tell a really good tale without gods and monsters (well, maybe Tolstoy could, but he might need Napoleon, who almost counts as a monster) but in Science Fiction these things have to come from Mars or Antares, or some place farther yonder: because we have sailed the seas that Odysseus sailed, and seen no sign of Scylla.
Mars was once beyond the edge of our maps, and so Barsoomians could be imagined there. If you want to have your hero teleported to a distant land for a sword fight or to win the heart of a space princess, Alpha Scorpii is a better bet than Mars, these days.

Let me tell you the background of what I am working on:

Once upon a time, when I was done writing THE GOLDEN AGE, I came across a website where the posters were discussing the ideas in all seriousness. It seems there is a group called the Transhumanist or the Extropians who literally believe the invented fictions of far-future fiction are not only possible, but likely, and greatly to be desired, and likely to happen within one lifetime. In particular, they long for the days with godlike superhuman intellects can be contrived by engineering, or human minds downloaded without loss of personality into vessels (mechanisms or biotechnological or what-have-you) more durable than mere human flesh and blood. Now I am not surprised that the ideas in my humble book and the ideas of the Transhumanists overlapped to such a degree: my ideas are not that original, for I think anyone who sat down and thought about the problems and the possibilities would reach much the same thoughts.

What was odd about conversing with them, it that it was as if, say, H.G. Wells, who made up the idea of invaders from Mars, were talking to Flying Saucer cultists, people who actually believed in the Men from Mars. What I thought was fiction, they thought could well be real.

I cannot fault these fine people for their hopes: I would not mind living in a far future utopia myself. But I don’t think it is actually going to happen. They are expecting The Singularity in their lifetimes: I am not expecting to see a manned mission to Mars in my lifetime. They are expecting that science will find a way to reverse entropy (hence the name of the group, Extropians—named for extropy, the reverse process of entropy). That seems like an article of faith to me, not a scientific speculation or even a legitimate science fictional speculation. And I don’t mean that as a slur: I like religion. (I don’t like science masquerading as religion or religion masquerading as science—but that is a discussion for another day).

Where I differed from the honorable Extropians was in my skepticism. Here is what I was skeptical about: Even if you had the power to change human nature because you had broken down the rules of psychology to an operable engineering algorithm, you could not change the human condition. There would still be scarce resources; there would still be entropy. Scarcity means competition, which means poverty and exploitation; entropy means death. The computer minds of the far future would still forget thoughts because they have to prioritize computer time and storage space. If we were all disembodied brain-information living in a computer mainframe larger than earth, we would still eventually run out of resources for what we wanted to do. Malthus always has the last laugh. Death still wins.

To break this rule, you’d have to break the universe; and anyone who sets about the break the universe is sure to run into opposition. Ah! That gave me an idea for a war involving all of timespace in which no party, no galaxy, no cluster, no supercluster, could afford to be neutral.

So I decided to write an anti-singularity post-singularity novel.

My take on it might be different from yours if you wrote it up, dear reader, for I am of the generation that Gave Up On The Moon. We had a launch vehicle capable of orbit, capable of lunar landings, the mighty Saturn V, and now the expertise to build them has evaporated. I don’t have a flying car or a jetpack. The moon was not blown out of Orbit in 1999 as promised, nor did Khan and his eugenic supermen take over Asia, nor did the UFOs from a dying world invade. I visited the Year A.D. 2000 and all I came back with was an Internet filled with porn, where anonymous yammerheads tell you their opinions in all caps.

So I wanted to write a post-singularity novel that treats the singularity with the same cynical realism with which the history has treated the space program. I wanted a universe with no magic and no faster than light drive.  I wanted posthumans, no matter how superintelligent, to still suffer from the laws of cause and effect and supply and demand: no matter what their energy supply or how they sustained their larger-than-galactic thinking mechanisms, they still hungered, they still died. There still ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, not in this universe, at any rate.

My plan was to have each volume in the story scale up from the previous volume. The first volume would take place in the near-future, and involve only the Earth, and the final would take place in the Year A.D. Oh-My-Gosh-That’s-Lots-of-Zeroes, and involve everything from here to the Corona Borealis Supercluster one billion light years away. I am following in the footsteps here of TAU ZERO by Poul Anderson, and also AT THE ESCHATON by the great Charles Sheffield.

If THE GOLDEN AGE was my attempt to rewrite Olaf Stabledon’s LAST AND FIRST MEN, then this current project is my attempt to rewrite the dismal vision of his STARMAKER. I am not an ambitious writer: I merely want to write the greatest space epic ever.

That is the monster I have been attempting to capture on the nib of my pen for the past year. I am about 200 pages into it, and less than a tenth of the way into my outline.

So much for the background. Now for the progress report:

In the early morning hours of this Saturday, I had a breakthrough with a scene that was causing me great difficulty, when a certain plot-twist naturally suggested itself.

Pacing is an important requirement, as is the seamlessness with which one plot development arises, both naturally in hindsight but unexpectedly in foresight.

The trick of plot tricks is to trick the reader. Got that?

The trick has to be fair and square. The reader cannot see it coming, but once it comes, he should clap his hand to his brow and say, “Of course!  What else!”  rather than say, “Jeez, what a creaky plot contrivance. Why not just put up a sign that says LAZY AUTHOR NEEDS THIS DUMB THING TO HAPPEN TO MAKE THE ENDING COME OUT AS DICTATED?”

Sometimes a minor correction can have major results. I had two characters talking, Menelaus and Soren, and in the first draft, Soren was friendly from the beginning of the scene, trying to arrange for Menelaus to fit into a future society into which cryonic suspension has just, through no wish of his own, deposited him. On the advice of my wife, I rewrote the chapter. Menelaus was too passive. Because Menelaus is the hero, and heroes do things, they don’t just have things done to them.

I lost a lost of good images and good lines during the rewrite. Sad, but writing is not for the sentimental. Writing is a business, just like being a hit-man. Except the pay is not as good.

(The passiveness of the heroine was one of my wife’s main discontents with THE FAMILY TRADE by Charles Stross, a book she read in manuscript because of the author’s generosity. I wished he had given her the chance to advise him before the book was done, because she several had suggestions, fairly easy to implement, that would have improved, perhaps, the manuscript. There was a scene where the heroine was in prison, basically doing nothing, and she should have been doing something, or so I hear. I did not read it, so I cannot say how well it was executed. The basic story idea for THE FAMILY TRADE is a brilliant one: Assume a Zelazny-like universe were one family has the power to cross between worlds, but only with what they carry on their persons. What trade naturally suggests itself? What is worth the most money and requires the smallest load? Suppose that any time you came to a border, you can can “cross” to a parallel world where the borders and walls and fences are differently placed, take a dozen steps, and cross back, and so now the Berlin Wall (or whatever) is behind you. With that talent, what would you be? When I heard Stross’ idea, I clapped my hand to my brow and said “Of course! What else!”— you can read the book and see if you found the answer executed in an entertaining way.)

((EDITORIAL COMMENT: my wife insists that I add here that she enjoyed THE FAMILY TRADE books very much.))

(((There was one supremely clever idea I just heard about, that the editors, servants of the Dark Lord, forced poor Mr. Stross to remove, which I really really wished he had not. I would not dream of telling it to you, dear readers, because I dare not spoil the possibility that the esteemed Charles Stross might use it in some as-yet undrempt sequel in the same background. If anyone reading this knows what I am talking about, I mean the idea about the helicopter. CHARLIE! YOU SHOULD HAVE KEPT THE IDEA ABOUT THE HELICOPTER!! It was a freaking Wizard idea. Simply oo-rah wizard cool, not to mention QX and shiny as a king’s tin hat.)))

The point here is that the hero has to be DOING something. Even if he is in prison with his eyes burned out of his head by hot irons, you have to have him DOING something. Corwin of Amber scraped away at the thick oak door of his prison with a sharpened spoon he stole from a banquet, for chrissake. It was pathetic, but it was something. Corwin’s eyes grew back by magic for no reason, and a mad wizard rescued him, by magic for no reason, but who cares? Because Corwin was doing something to escape, it does not seem (to this reader, at least) like a contrivance when the plot contrives to let him out of prison. It looked like the escape was earned. That is lesson number one.

Lesson number two: even the most contrived plot contrivance can be forgiven if something is made of it later. Corwin later returns to the his cell and examines the magical picture the mad magician sculpted into a wall with a sharpened spoon. The picture comes alive and he falls into it, finding himself in the cell and lair of the magician, where, among other things, the origin of the universe is revealed, as well as the reason the universe must be destroyed. It is not Shakespeare, but, Good Gosh it is prime Zelazny: that is just a darn cool scene. If the magician’s magic picture on the wall had been mentioned only in the escape-from-jail scene, but not built on later, it would seem less realistic and hence more contrived.

Drama is about conflict, and that means, an all-powerful hero is as uninteresting as an impotent hero. The first has no conflict because there is nothing he cannot do; the second has no conflict because he can do nothing.

So in my scene, my wife made the suggestion, straight out of Creative Writing 101, of having Menelaus be the active mover of the scene rather than the passive observer. He has to initiate the contact with Soren, and have the agreement between the two men be Menelaus’s idea, not not Soren’s idea–Gabby is a sidekick. 

I added some drama by having Menelaus bet all his major organs, and, yes, his life, against an organlegger of the future, and the bet gives him a deadline he has to escape, and so in the revised version, Menelaus has to talk Soren into taking his case before sundown.

To add more drama, I made it next to impossible for Menelaus to find Soren; I made it so he did not recognize Soren when he did find him; I gave Soren a strong reason why he cannot take the case: Soren will lose his new house to the bank if he uses the money to help Menelaus.

So there is a third lesson from Creative Writing 101. If you can raise the stakes, raise them. Not only should something be at stake in the plot, more than one thing should be at stake, and the stakes should be personal to the character, as well as affecting the character’s loved ones. A doctor-drama where a surgeon is working to rescue a pregnant woman’s baby is exciting, because who does not like babies?–but it is more dramatic if the woman is his wife, and she reveals that the child is the bastard son of the Mafia assassin sent to kill the doctor due to his horseracing debts–the assassin is none other than his long lost elder brother, Racer X! Can he save his wife’s cuckold-child, the son of the man who tried to kill him, not knowing the killer is his own brother? If the child, who is actually his nephew, needs a liver transplant, and the doctor is himself the only compatible donor, having him perform surgery on himself while working on his wife while working on the child while the assassin stalks ever nearer down the darkened hospital corridors is more dramatic than merely having the doc work on a stranger. Better yet, have the scene take place aboard a sinking ship surrounded by sharks in the arctic. Even better, have it take place aboard Airforce One during a lightning storm, and the pilot is fainted at the yoke, the copilot is a Red spy, and radioactive sharks with lasers in their head are about to open fire on the plane, killing the President, who is also the doctor performing the surgery, and he has to get back to the White House in time to veto a bill to kill a basket of endangered cute puppies or something. And make his wife the Queen of England, so that the kid in the womb is the Prince of Wales. That’s entertainment.

You are not the friend of your hero, O novelist.

So now Menelaus, instead of merely passively listening to Soren educate him to the future world in which he finds himself, now has to talk a reluctant Soren into being his patron and mentor, and, in effect, talk Soren out of his house, and if Menelaus fails to persuade Soren by sundown, he goes under the knife of the organlegger.

Oh, and he missed the deadline because an alien-math experiment he rashly introduced into his nervous system wakes up and takes control of his brain at the last minute, or maybe Menelaus goes insane. He wakes up, and the sun is already gone down, and now it is too late for him.

I added that part because I did not want things to go too easily for my hero. The rule is: big heroes face big problems. They fight Titans!

Menelaus doesn’t get eaten by the shrieking eels at this time. The eel doesn’t get him. I’m explaining to you because you looked nervous.

The second son is named Teresias: he was blinded and castrated at the age of fourteen weeks, when still a newborn, long before he could walk or talk.

The defense counsel argues that, since the child did not, at fourteen weeks, have organs that can properly be called sexual organs, since they did not at that time have the biological ability to produce sperm, the mother’s action was not legally castration since it did not cut off functioning testes, but merely masses of tissue that might one day become testes. He argues that a trespass must show real damages, not merely potential or speculative damages. What was cut off this child was merely excess tissue of no particular meaning. The baby did not even know what a peepee was at the time. The defense counsel asks for a summary dismissal on this count.

How do you rule?

The third son is named Sampson: he was blinded and castrated at the age of fourteen hours before he was born, before he even emerged from the womb. A surgeon introduce a probe into the womb and damaged the organs of sight and reproduction before they developed.

The defense counsel argues that, since the child did not, before birth, have any recognized rights as a human being, he certain had no right to be left in a particular state of health by his mother. He can only be called a potential being at the time of the act, one with no rights. Indeed, since his mother had the full legal right to kill him in the womb, and prevent his emergence into birth and into humanity, he should be grateful that she did not cut off his legs also, or abort him altogether. The argument here is that the mother did not damage the child’s eyes and testicles, but merely prevented the eyes and testicles from coming into being, while allowing the rest of the organism to come into being. The counsel for the defense asks for a summary dismissal on the count of castration, and also on the count of blinding, since these acts did not deprive a human being of any organs or tissues recognized as having real existence at the time of the act.  

How to do you rule?  

More importantly, if you rule against the defense counsel in the first two cases, on what possible grounds in law or logic can you rule in favor of the defense counsel in the third case?

A fourth son, who is not a party to this case, is dead. When the surgeon was trying to put out the fourth baby’s eyes in the womb, the probe slipped and entered the baby’s brain pan and killed him.  He was stillborn. The holding in Roe v. Wade (which is controlling) is that this action was lawful.

The defense counsel argues that since it is lawful to kill a child in the womb, it must therefore be lawful to maim a child in the womb, since maiming is a lesser and included offense to killing. One cannot possibly kill a child without maiming him, because the legal definition of maiming is a battery that leaves a wound, and the legal definition of battery is unlawful touching; and no one can kill another without touching him, directly or by an instrumentality; therefore if killing the child is legal, maiming must also be legal.

The defense counsel says that the right of a mother to maim her children obviously should cover the periods when the child is in the womb, out of the womb, before he learns to talk, and before he reaches the age of majority, because what happens in the womb controls all the outcomes of what happens thereafter. By the simple law of cause and effect, a child blinded in the womb will be blind when born and all the years of his life thereafter; so that if the act of blinding a baby is legal in the womb, the anticipated, natural and inevitable  consequences of the act, years after, cannot retroactively call into question the legality of the act.

If it is lawful to kill or blind a child in the womb, that fact that the child after birth has eyes and testicles at all is due to the grace and permission of the mother, so that if she blinds him at fourteen years of age, she has not deprived him of anything she had no right to take from him: indeed, he should regard his fourteen years of eyesight as a free gift, and be grateful. The defense asks for a dismissal of all charges on these grounds.

If the offspring has no right to life before he is legally-recognized human being, on what grounds can he have a right to be free from maiming, being blinded, being castrated, provided the battery takes placed before he is a legally recognized human being? If he has no such right, then the prosecution has not stated a cause of action. 

How to you rule?

The counsel for the prosecution argues as follows: A child in the womb imposes on his mother the duty to love and protect him, and blinding or castrating him abrogates that duty. The counsel argues that this duty obtains from the first moment her actions have the ability to effect the health and wellbeing of her child, whether that child is human or not, whether that child is a mass of tissue or not.

The counsel for the defense (the prosecutor argues) seems to want to find some other property, aside from child-ness, that grants the child a right to be free from mutilation, so that, upon finding this property, whatever it is, is one that the child lacks, the defendant may deprive it of eyes and limbs and members without further scruples, and therefore abrogate the duty.

The problem with this approach is that children, since they develop from single-celled fertilized eggs, have no other properties of any kind whatsoever except child-ness. They are pure potential: no actual developments develop before development, by definition.

The only difference between the three cases, is the degree of the development of the child on his way from pure potential to actual adulthood. Since at every moment of time while the child exists there is a previous moment when the child can be maimed, it does not make any sense in law or logic to forbid maiming children after and only after a given point in time or a given stage of development.

If the child has any right to life and limb, organs of sex and organs of sight, that right must exist from the very moment when the child can first be deprived of life and limb. The State’s Attorney calls for the case to go to the jury, where he will argue for the strongest possible penalty, since the mother is utterly unrepentant, and regards it as her innate, God-given right to maim and kill any child of hers.

How do you rule?  Has the State stated a cause of action? Do you allow the case to go to the jury?

[Indeed, the nation-state is a recent invention of Europe, the idea that nations (linguistic groups) had a natural harmony of interests, and that therefore princedoms and multi-lingual empires should be broken up and borders redistributed to follow language and ethnic lines.]

Indeed, in American Law, there is one and only one group of people against which the military are not legally allowed to act: American civilians. The rule is called the Posse Comitatus Act, and it was violated flagrantly by the Clinton Administration during the Waco massacre. Any one else is fair game, whether they are a nation-state, a principality, an empire, a city-state, a tribe, or a gang of pirates on the high seas. 

The Roman and British and American law even has a name, a legal category, for the type of enemy who commits an act of war not on behalf of a nation state: Hostis Humani Generis: enemies of all mankind. Terrorists are in the same category as Pirates: warships, and not just civilians, are allowed to open fire on them.

I have run across this sentiment voiced frequently that we are not allowed to declare war on anyone but a nation.

It is a widespread blindness: as if we met a pirate ship at sea, and, if the ship STRUCK its colors rather than raised them, that act somehow, miraculously, by fairy magic, took of the enemy out of the category of “people the military can attack” and put them into a special category of people who can attack us, but whom we cannot counter-attack. As if running across a soldier with a rifle in his hand magically made him sacrosanct if he threw off his uniform and hid behind an old lady while firing at you gave him a firmer obligation to be treated as an enemy combatant according to the usages of civilized war rather than nullified that obligation.

No; in reality what happens if you come across a ship flying no colors, you are allowed by the law of the sea to treat her as a pirate and sink her. In reality, if you come across a soldier fighting not in uniform, you are allowed by the usages of war to treat him as a spy, and hang him without trial. Some people seem to think that coming across soldiers not in uniform automatically makes the soldier a US citizen entitled to Habeas Corpus and the full panoply of Constitutional rights. This is not merely false and imprudent: it is the opposite of the truth and it is suicidal.

“….pushed onto Iraq and Saddam Hussein with a tenuous link that was disproved after the fact…”

Oh, brother. We had several reasons for going to war. We have an official Act of Congress that states the reasons for the war: the October 10th, 2002 “House Joint Resolution Authorizing Use of Force Against Iraq”, http://www.usembassy.it/file2002_10/alia/a2101002.htm

An examination of the document shows that the reasons given were accurate. In my judgment, they were also sufficient. Instead of repeating every point, please read my earlier post entitled, “I cannot believe we are still having this discussion.” http://johncwright.livejournal.com/129753.html?nc=32

I am normally patient enough to repeat an argument for someone who has not heard it before: but I hope you will forgive me if I simply post a link, because I have nothing to add to what was formerly said.

“Not all Muslims believe in the more severe punishments that we get news reports of, and neither were all Nazis evil.”

A person does not need to be “evil” in order to justify opening fire on him; he merely needs to be in the uniform of the enemy, aiding and abetting him. This is also merely a false dichotomy. We are at war with the Jihadists and their supporters and sponsors, not with all Islam: All the Western political leaders have repeated that point to the point of nausea.

“And furthermore the war on terror is distracting from very clear, definable threats to the United States such as the downturn in the economy…”

Words fail me. I would like the readers to dwell on this sentence for a time, and to compare the threat to life and limb posed by the housing market speculator’s bubble as opposed to, say, the Madrid bombings or the Gulf War.

” … China’s rise economically and militarily while depending on their industry; and Russia’s current trend towards policies similar to ones enacted by the Soviet Union…”

Amen and no argument from me, brother. War with China and with the Russians is a distinct and terrifying possibility: I am tempted to call it inevitable. China is particularly canny, and has been playing a winning game for the last two decades. Only the complete political otherworldliness of the terror-masters and their goals makes them unable to link with Russia or China as a natural ally against the West.

“If we have clearly defined problems that are concentrated on as well as the more nebulous and ill-defined problems of terrorism, dissent will look as foolish as it would have in during WWII.”

Please forgive me for being rude, but your mind is filled with utter rubbish. Wake up and start thinking. Think hard and clear, as if your life, and as if my life, depended on it: because it does. Look at the facts. Put aside emotion and sentiment, and concentrate with your full attention on the facts of the current war.

The enemy has chosen a method of attack designed to prevent a massive counterattack; it is known as asymmetrical warfare. These are tactical means chosen to achieve a political goal by means of force, or, in other words, war. The means in this particular case are entirely psychological warfare tactics: random attacks on civilian targets of no military value given leverage by media exploitation to create fear and terror and to break the coalition will to resist. The strategic goals of the enemy have been clearly stated in their public announcements: reduction of Western military power and political prestige in the Middle East, the erection of a Caliphate based on Sharia principles, beginning with forcing the West to defer to Islamic Law wherever Mohammedans are situate, Holy War against the infidels, and the recovery of territory historically part of Dar-al-Islam. They don’t intend conquest per se: they intent to weaken our resolve, and to gain what can be gained by intimidation. They don’t want land. They want prestige. They want Islamic men to be legally allowed to beat their wives and honor-kill their daughters without interference, if even all three both live in England. Are we clear?

The means chosen include to fight not in uniform, hiding among civilian populations, so that any retaliation involves unacceptable (to us) levels of collateral civilian damage. The means chosen involve using a distributed rather than a concentrated command structure, so that the death of one or two individuals does not prevent further attacks. Since the attacks are random terror-acts against civilian targets in any case, no overall command is needed: copycat terror-acts are just as useful as acts performed by the party. Terror is also used against neutral or fence-sitting civilians to draw them by fear into obedience. The means chosen involve support from state actors (like Saddam) who promote, support, train and house the terrorists, but at a sufficient remove to create doubt as to who is paying them and why.

Hence, by the very nature of asymmetrical warfare, the only way to fight the terror-masters is to deprive them of civilian cover; the only way to deprive them of civilian cover is to plant a democracy, so that the mass of people has a vested interest in the defeat of the terrorists hiding in their midst. The only way to make it not in the best interests of the terrorists to fight not in uniform is the Bush Doctrine, that is, to treat any nation that tolerates terrorists in their midst, or who pays, or even merely encourages terrorists, as a enemy herself.

The only option other than the Bush Doctrine is genocide.

THEREFORE, in order to avoid massive retaliation by a superior power, the terror-masters are required to fight not in uniform, to use irregular and civilians are soldiers, and to strike their colors. Like a spy and like a saboteur, the threat from a terrorist is designed to be what you so stupidly call nebulous and ill-defined. The only thing that is nebulous here is that the enemy is in hiding, like a sniper.

The problem is precisely defined: the enemy has specific goals and has selected a method of warfare precisely, nay, indeed, perfectly suited to achieve them. The enemy strengths cuts against all the psychological weakness of the West.

Asymmetric warfare is a method of war that involves civilian casualties and involves war-practices the civilized West finds barbaric and distasteful. The only way to fight the terrorists is to cut their support from nation-states that promote terrorism. It is not sufficient merely to prosecute the specific men or the specific organization who committed the act. Anyone of the enemy party is of the enemy.

Dissent looks foolish now, and wicked, and suicidal, at least to me.

The first comment in the comments box chides me for not admiring the healthy dissent and vibrancy created by the willingness of mainstream cinema to call into question the core values of the society. Myself, I would retort that this is exactly my complaint: the core values of society are countercultural, and they are expressed with a lockstep uniformity I find both non-vibrant to the point of boring and non-healthy to the point of morbid.

In the past, the values of the culture and the counterculture were at odds, but were not necessarily enemies. The culture prized things like modesty, fidelity, sobriety, and thrift; the counterculture was kept in check until holidays or late nights after work was done, and it was permitted to express itself. The counterculture prizes things like bragging, sexual nonchalance, wild fun, and immediate self-gratification: it is the culture of Just Do It and of Fa-La-La Live For Today. The counterculture expressed itself in off-duty hours and drinking songs in much the same way the culture expressed itself in hymns and austere public monuments. The speeches made at graduation ceremonies are solemn (and forgettable) precisely because they are the most pure expression of the culture: graduation speeches are the last opportunity for the elders of the tribe to impart their wisdom to the next generation, to transmit the values of the culture. The ribald lyrics, mocking altar and crown, that workingmen sing over their mugs of beer at the public house after the children are abed, were an expression of the counterculture.

In terms of religion, the culture believed in things like the Holy Ghost, and the counterculture believed in things like ghost stories. No one wants to hear about saints when they are drinking a pint; but they don’t mind hearing about some eerie Oriental spiritualism. It is no coincidence that rock stars and film stars go in for Zen Zoroastrianism or the study of Wiccan Cabalism rather than Rotary Club Episcopalianism.

A similar logic applies to the political beliefs of the counterculture: their sympathies are always with the rebels and the little guy, the minority, and the forgotten man. The political left appeals to the out-group, the people with no great love for the current power structure, and no self-interest tied into its preservation, and therefore no loyalty to its underlying values. The entertainment field has always been more accepting of minorities than the main population for the same reason the sports field has been: talent is all-important in these fields, race and color are secondary. When the first mixed-race ball teams started wining games, the other teams found they could not afford to remain racially segregated, because they could not afford to ignore the larger talent pool. In terms of story-telling or song-writing, it is easier to provoke a reaction from an audience with an appeal to the short-term and the self-centered: there are more stories about wild gambles paying off than there are about hard work and thrift paying off merely because wild gambles are more dramatic. Since poets and playwrights live in a world where their own artistic mad gambles sometimes pay off, the romance of grinding hard work rarely appears in their stories.

Paradoxically, one of the main things that keep the little man down, the lack of disciplined work habits, are lauded by the counterculture precisely because the counterculture is eternally in the holiday-time, when reason and virtue sleep.

With the rise of the mass media, films, radio and television naturally fell into the Holiday mood and off-duty hours camp. They were for entertainment, not instruction, and so they played songs of the counterculture. It is primarily radio and television that brought the counterculture into daily contact with the home: movies seen on Saturday matinees were not for work-days. But with the rise of the portable radio, that changed. The ribald lyrics were now an every day thing, a work-day thing.

What happened in postwar America, which was without precedent in history, was that the counterculture grew in wealth and prestige at the same time when the culture lost all faith in itself. The popular entertainments grew to be the main source for transmitting the values of society to the next generation: it is from these the youth get their ideas of right and wrong, normal and abnormal. The counterculture became the culture.

Now, every day is New Year’s Eve, a day for drinking and laughter and poking fun at the authority figures on whose shoulders the society rests. All the uniformed figures are to be splattered with mud for our amusement, whether it be a soldier’s uniform, the gray flannel suit of the businessman, or the collar of a cleric.