Saturday, August 19, 2006
"The age of the small, mean god"
I'm in possession of Ralph Peters' just-published Never Quit The Fight, a collection of columns and articles previously published in other places. I have read many of the New York Post columns, but not the articles from military affairs journals such as Parameters and Armed Forces Journal. Besides, it is a much different experience to read Peters -- who is brilliant and relentless in argument -- in a complete campaign than a series of disconnected patrols.
Also, if you buy the book you get its introduction, which is worthy of a barely fair use excerpt:
This book focuses on a period of slightly more than two years in our recent history, from the late summer of 2003 to the autumn of 2005. Despite glances backward and projections into the distant future, the themes addressed here were dictated by this brief, turbulent, inspiring, and disheartening period. A nation at war pretended that it was not. A presidential administration insisted that we were at war but acted as though the greed-spurred 1990s had never ended. A national election offered the American people one of the poorest choices in our history, between an incumbent administration that stood for arrogance, corruption, and security, and a challenger who emanated fecklessness, weakness, and a spirit of surrender. We gritted our teeth and chose the man who would fight over a man who didn't seem to stand for anything at all.
At home, this was a period of political polarization, when both of our major political parties fell captive to extremists. The Democratic party went through an intellectual and moral collapse, allowing an intolerant minority among Republicans to harden their prejudices and insist that their morality was the only morality. Most Americans were left politically homeless as neofascist organizations, such as MoveOn.org, battled over our heads with a religious right that appeared to have discarded the Gospels in favor of Old Testament cruelty.
Abroad, our men and women in uniform fought remarkably well despite poor national leadership on one hand and a hard-left minority on the other that seemed to feel more empathy for Islamist terrorists than for our own troops. "Support our troops, bring them home!" became the most cynical political mantra since the McCarthy era. Yet our troops never wavered. They deserve far more respect and recognition than an insincere political class and our toxic media will grant them.
As the events of 9/11 receded, many Americans appeared to lose touch with the implacable and merciless nature of our enemies. Our government was penalized for performing too well in the wake of terror's high watermark: As further attacks on our country were frustrated and our troops carried the war into terror's homelands, citizens relaxed into a business-as-usual attitude. Yet we face opponents who would wait a generation, if need be, to exterminate myriad Americans, Europeans, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, less-devout Muslimss, and adherents of any other faith that did not conform to the severe interpretation of God's will insisted upon by Islamist madmen. The stakes are all or nothing to our enemies. Their visions may seem preposterous and absurd, but history suggests that philosophical absurdities are far more apt to kill masses of the innocent than reason.
This new age of endless war is profoundly different from any previous experience of conflict within living memory. After the titanic industrial-war struggles of the twentieth century, when the alliance that produced the most materiel won the big wars and conflicts were about competitions for power and rival theories of government, we now find ourselves in a death struggle with demons from the dawn of time, engaged in Cain-and-Abel warfare waged against us by opponents whose view of God is superstitious, soaked in blood, and obsessed with behavior rather than transcendent faith. We are not at war with ideas, but with beliefs. And those beliefs are a throwback to ancient eras of human sacrifice and carnivorous gods.
One of the few moral triumphs of the modern age was the ability to doubt and still believe (although much of Europe has elevated doubt above belief, leaving a continent bereft of meaning and spirit). The religious extremists who threaten civilization today permit no doubt -- and ultimately care less about faith than about conformity. From atheist Europe to the maddened Islamic realms of the Middle East, this is not an age of religious revival, but of religious degeneration, the age of the small, mean god. While the struggle for the soul of Islam is the conflict immediately before us, every major religion appears to be at war with itself. We may have entered an age of religious fragmentation, when great faiths divide into factions of those who believe in a merciful deity and those who would form their religions into militant engines to serve a vengeful bogeyman. It will be up to those who believe in God's benevolence to rescue their faiths from the geniuses of hate.
This is the fatal issue of our time.
Even those who despise religion had best pay attention: The issue of God's will, as interpreted by discontented human beings, will reshape the governance of continents in the coming of decades. We insist that our wars are not religious wars. But they are. Because our enemies believe them to be so.
Do not confuse this with moral equivalence.
10 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Fri Aug 18, 11:32:00 PM:
Wow he can be depressing...
Not to mention melodramatic.
By 
, at
Sat Aug 19, 12:17:00 AM:
Do not confuse this with moral equivalence.
So does that mean Peters thinks both parties are farking idiots, each in their own special way?
By , at
Sat Aug 19, 01:19:00 AM:
No. It means that modern American Individualists KNOW their individual moral code is theirs because they arrived at it ... individually. "A man's partner gets killed, he's gotta do something about it."
Individual responsibility to act on the moral code painfully acquired based on individual choices.
Versus faith blind and unreasoning in a bloodthirsty God who demands death to be appeased.
There is no equivalence whatsoever, and no wonder that Americans who decide for themselves what moral code they will follow draw Allah's ire above all others.
By PeterBoston, at
Sat Aug 19, 06:13:00 AM:
An assemblage of snarky characterizations is not an interpretation of current events, nor is it even good writing. I know it's only an introduction, but if Ralph Peters has forgotten how to use the word because then I'm going to be forgetting him.
By , at
Sat Aug 19, 09:21:00 AM:
Couldn't he have just plagiarized Dickens and said,"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was a time to try men's souls...." ?
And then get on with it?
The message is "We're all a bunch of schmucks that are discarding our generational philosophical beliefs, but we better pull ourselves up by our bootstraps right quick, because those Islamic guys are calling our metaphysical bluff."
Go, Ralph, go! Sheesh.
-David
By , at
Sat Aug 19, 10:58:00 AM:
Ralph Peters is right.
I have said before on this blog comments that this is indeed a war of religious freedom. Therefore every campaign of this war must be fought with that thought at the very forefront. It is no wonder that his introduction mirrors that same theme.
What Peters is saying is we (civilized, peaceful religions and even agnostics) need to get our act together or else we will lose.
Religious freedom. Choice. Free will. This war is essentially about those basic elements. And in no point in history until now has such an evil force risen to snuff out those basic principles on such a large scale.
A belief system that has 1 billion adherents dwarfs any army that has ever come before.
We are doomed. So yes, the melodramtic porse is very appropriate.
Wake up fellowship of free men! Confront this evil like men of old!
Dan-O
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Sat Aug 19, 06:27:00 PM:
I admit I am tired of those who claim the Republicans have been taken over by an intolerant minority blah, blah, blah.
You can go days reading conservative blogs without encountering more than an occasional anonymous comment from people who want to bring it all back to America's moral failings because of abortion or homosexual promiscuity or whatever. People have opinions about these topics without acting or expressing themselves intolerantly.
We all take umbrage at someone declaring an act to be immoral that we find acceptable, and more especially when it is something we engage in ourselves. Then we all turn around and do the same thing to the next guy.
I don't know what people's motives are for needing to scorn what we call the Religious Right. Some may want to keep street cred with their less-conservative friends, defensively demonstrating that they aren't fanatics; some may have personal issues from religious upbringings; some may pride themselves on their logical positivism; and others still may harbor resentments at implied accusations from religious people. But the emotional leakage seeps out. The "disproportionate response" is revealing that for many, it is not a simply logical proposition.
By Consul-At-Arms, at
Sun Aug 20, 07:05:00 PM:
I've linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2006/08/re-age-of-small-mean-god.html
By , at
Tue Aug 22, 10:26:00 AM:
AVI:
If the "conservative blogs" were truly representative of what the Republican Party stands for, I would have far less of a problem with the GOP. But I don't think they are.
Here are some of the data I find troubling:
(1) Efforts to "get out the vote" for Bush in the '04 election by planting anti-same sex marriage initiatives on the ballot in multiple states.
(2) The Administration's interest in planting non-expert evangelical Christians in key positions at federal agencies (I'm thinking FDA and NIH) to override sound scientific decisions on moralistic grounds.
(3) Stem cell research.
The evangelical push may have peaked with the Harriet Miers nomination. Bush truly seemed to think he could treat the Supreme Court like the rest of his Administration -- that it would be enough simply to say, winking, "Hey: she's one of us." I think the "nonreligious" right put on a good show resisting this nomination -- and the conservative bloggers played a key role here.
So while I don't think the GOP is irretrievably lost to fanatics, I do believe that the religious right has a pretty strong foothold in the party, which has lurched to the right in recent years (which is to be expected after the nation has been attacked).
I don't think "scorn" is a "disproportionate response," when the religious right has a clear and obvious agenda to work through government to legislate their morality, whether at the state or federal level. And they've proven very organized and effective in recent years. I don't think scorn is a particularly useful response in dealing with the religious right -- "strong resistance" is more in order for me.
Sure, as a social liberal, I have my own views about what's moral and what isn't: I'm not particularly "tolerant" of much of this emerging evangelical Christian doctrine. You make a good point here. I think the difference between me and the religious right is I'm not determined to acquire political power in order to put the kaibosh on the stuff I don't like.
I'm strongly opposed to manger scenes and the Ten Commandments on government property (on a "thin end of the wedge" theory), but I'd happily cave on that point if the religious right would take their sodomy laws, decency-in-media prescriptions and abstinence programs, and get out of government.
Am I pro-sodomy, pro-indecency, pro-promiscuity? No. I just don't want the likes of James Dobson making these decisions for me, and I don't doubt they'd be more than happy to do it, if given the chance.
I dunno. Maybe it really is hard for a truly committed Christian to get by in the world these days, with what's on television, what's taught in the public schools, etc. I'm just not convinced the rest of us need to change, or submit to restrictions on our autonomy, just to make that Christian more comfortable.
By , at
Mon Jan 01, 02:37:00 PM:
Researching critiques of "Never Quit The Fight" (one of several books on the Iraq issue I'm currently reading) lead me here.
Like a lot of locations where we can (freedom is grand, is it not) post our thoughts without fear, I see a variety (mine is one) of comments and (as everyone has one) "opinions". Peters' book seems to say; We are/did invade in an improper manner (most would agree although many have mixed feelings about 'if' we should have in the first place. Old history); we prosecuted the war in an improper manner (attritting the enemy gave way to media induced 'politically' correct fighting and it cost us men, machines and money); and we are occupying in an improper manner (too much dough going to our nations companies, not enough keeping the unemployed Iraq population 'doing something' besides shooting at each other and us), not displaying enough 'violence' and 'shock and awe [real!]' to impress the locals into submission (something that, while opinions vary, was decided upon at N. and H. during WWII - and got results - no, not suggesting NW in Iraq, just more all encompassing violence) and so they don't fear us; and capitulation to the media in all these things.
I guess we'll all (as individuals and a nation) keep posting and voting opinions until something a bit worse than 9/11 occurs. We might be brought to focus then but I'm not sure. The 9/11 attack only kept us together for a few months. Wonder what it will take to keep us together and focused on one outcome over the necessary (probably) decade it will take to finish this Jihad?
