Believing the worst
ISIS has done the world one favor, and one favor only.
Favor, you say? Are you mad? What sort of favor could ISIS be doing anyone?
That favor is to make more people believe that evil exists.
One would think 9/11 would have done it. And for many it did. One would have thought the beheading of Daniel Pearl would have done it. And for many it did. But something about ISIS and its atrocities and the scope of its victims, combined with its bloodthirsty reveling in its own mayhem, has silenced (for the moment; I certainly don’t think it’s permanent) a great many of those inclined to make excuses or offer rational explanations. Nor is anyone but those on the fringes denying that this is happening; the videos ISIS has released have seen to that.
Not that this realization will necessarily lead to truly effective action on the part of the West. So far it hasn’t, although it did seem to help the Yazidis on the mountain. It’s hard to imagine that the West will find its spine again, and even if it does the problem is much, much bigger than ISIS and will require a more concerted, sustained, and widespread effort than any country or group of countries seems to have the stomach for.
But the first step is recognizing evil when you see it.
World War II was an interesting case. The Nazis and the Axis powers were seen as evil, and an enormous number of countries united to fight them in an all-out war of the sort that might be mentally/emotionally impossible today. But the details of the evil regarding the Holocaust were minimized and/or even denied until after the war, when the evidence became irrefutable.* Why?
The Nazis were very different from ISIS in that they did not brag about their atrocities. They were “civilized” enough to hide them and perpetrate deceptions around them. Some of the motivation for that was to fool people, including their victims, into cooperating. But some was to lull the world into inaction. The Nazis knew that people find the worst difficult to believe, and they were counting on that. In fact, they often taunted their concentration camp victims by saying that if any happened to survive, the world would not believe their tales.
That brings me to Jan Karski. Karski was a hero of the WWII years, a Polish officer whose life had many twistings and turnings and stupendous bravery, and included action as a major figure in the Resistance. It fell to Karski (who was Catholic, but had been brought up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Poland) to document the Holocaust and to personally inform the Brits and FDR and other influential Americans about it as early as 1943. To say that their reaction was disappointing is to understate the matter.
Scott Johnson recently published a post at Powerline about Karski and his heroism, featuring some of Karski’s interviews. Watching them, I was struck by Karski’s demeanor. He just may be one of the most intense and yet controlled people I’ve ever seen, without being bombastic or loud. Even though he is speaking many decades after the events, he remains outraged at the responses he got.
There are videos of him discussing Roosevelt, too, but this is the one in which he talks about the reaction of Felix Frankfurter to his tale:
Frankfurter’s reaction sounded simple: “I don’t believe you.” But it was anything but. As Karski goes on to explain, “Probably he wanted to show me, yes, that the world is unprepared. This is an unprecedented problem, this is a horrible problem.” In other words, Frankfurter felt both overwhelmed and impotent, and in simultaneous denial and awareness of the horror of it all.
Was the Holocaust actually “unprecedented”? In the modern world, it seems to have been. Not that there hadn’t been problems something like it (the Armenians and Turks, to take just one example). But bad as that was, the Holocaust differed in style and especially in scope. The destruction of the Armenians was localized, but this was European-wide, and it was perpetrated by one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced, European nation on earth, a country that was simultaneously trying to conquer the Western world.
I’m not excusing Frankfurter’s reaction. But I think light can be shed on it by the following passage written by Arthur Koestler, which I’ve discussed in a previous post. Koestler was one of the people with whom Karski met (in 1943), and he joined the cause of spreading the word. Koestler wrote this passage in 1944 as part of an essay entitled “On Disbelieving Atrocities” (it appeared in the Sunday NY Times Magazine) about how difficult it was to energize others to do something about the horrors. I think that here Koestler is describing some profound truths about human nature:
There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark, and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past, laughing and chatting.
I know that a great many people share, with individual variations, the same type of dream. I have quarrelled about it with analysts and I believe it to be an archtype in the Jungian sense: an expression of the individual’s ultimate loneliness when faced with death and cosmic violence; and his inability to communicate the unique horror of his experience. I further believe that it is the root of the ineffectiveness of our atrocity propaganda.
For, after all, you are the crowd who walk past laughing on the road; and there are a few of us, escaped victims or eyewitnesses of the things which happen in the thicket and who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming on the wireless, yelling at you in newspapers and in public meetings, theatres and cinemas.
Now and then we succeed in reaching your ear for a minute. I know it each time it happens by a certain dumb wonder on your faces, a faint glassy stare entering your eye, and I tell myself: now you have got them, now hold them, hold them, so that they will remain awake. But it only lasts a minute. You shake yourself like puppies who have got their fur wet; then the transparent screen descends again and you walk on, protected by the dream barrier which stifles all sound.
We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic van der Lubbe set fire to the German Parliament; we said that if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial [Koestler seems to have been unaware of the gassing method that had come to be used most often by that time] of the total Jewish population of Europe.
So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. he told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it.
As to this country [Koestler was referring to Britain, where he was living at the time and writing for the war effort], I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belsen; you can convince them for an hour, they they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.
Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas you others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would be alive.
In that earlier post, I wrote:
Why is it so difficult to hear the screaming? Much of it is self-protective: if we paid attention to all the pain and suffering in the world, we’d be paralyzed by empathy and unable to enjoy our own lives. What’s more, there’s often a sense of powerlessness to change things.
However, despite the denial, during World War II we were already dedicated to the all-out war against the Nazis. That was the excuse FDR and others gave: that the continuance of that fight was our most effective response. Now we are not willing to commit to that sort of huge effort, despite our lack of the ability to deny the evil that is happening before our eyes. We are not powerless, and we are not in denial, but we are unwilling to unleash the power we have. And it is understandable, as long as the horror continues to stay away from our shores. I don’t think it’s any accident that the US has experienced no widespread terrorist attack in the nature of 9/11 since that date. The giant isn’t sleeping, but it’s taking a light nap, and the terrorists want to keep it that way.
*[NOTE: Some, of course, continue to deny the Holocaust to this day. But for the most part they have a very different, and far more pernicious, agenda than those who ignored or denied it during the war itself.]
Neo,
Don’t forget the savagery of the Japanese during WW II.
One thing that has made the use of our powerful military impossible is the concern for collateral damage and rules of engagement. Many French died in the attacks of D Day. Many German and Japanese cities were incinerated. We could destroy ISIS if we were not concerned about civilians and bad PR. The Muzzies know this.
Evil is, insofar as it is, a corruption and perversion of the good.
Therefore, there are Democrats as a corruption and perversion of what should be good citizens and good political parties.
What is a good citizen or party? Not rocket science. Relatively simple. It starts here: Love of country aka Patriotism.
To the degree the democrat is not patriotic, they are to that degree evil. For example: Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and anyone who is even in their galaxy of thought.
There are also different kinds of being non-patriotic. There is the active hated of America – Obama – and the absolute concern for self and power at the expense of all else – Pelosi, Reid, the majority of Dems.
You want evil? We certainly do not need to look as far as ISIS, although they are evil. This is a plank in our own eye situation. It’s here!
Mr. Frank:
I haven’t forgotten. But the post was already way too long as it is!
Also, it’s my impression that people in this country were somewhat more willing to believe the atrocities of the Japanese. The Japanese were far more “other.”
I just saw on Yahoo.de that 9 people from Germany have been used in suicide bombings in Iraq and Kurdistan, apparently for propaganda purposes. From the brief report, it seems like the Germans are taking this very seriously.
BTW, I have been in Normandy/Brittany for about a week. Of all the towns in the area, only Bayeux escaped destruction. Yes, the costs of ignoring evil are enormous. The French are flying Allied flags all over, and their gratitude seems sincere.
oh no! somehow i contaminated neo and she is writing things of length similar to mine… oy… quick, get her some jello…
That favor is to make more people believe that evil exists.
of course evil exists…
but not if you dont believe in god, and the gospel
of course the familiar refrain is that, if god exists, why would he allow such suffering (evil)?
the answer is in the apologetics, if god wanted to be loved, really loved, then god had to give those he created the capacity to love, and that only comes from free will, and with free will comes the capcity for evil as well as good.
now. if you do not have god, you are in a pickle in terms of what or how to be moral. you might WANT a moral or ethical conceptual, but its not possible. go ahead, try it, the left has been trying for ages and ultimately those that claim they have created a morality, tend to ignore the abitrary nature of said morality, and that its prime features are only such for lack of acclimation and or experience.
that what it devolves into is a pragmatism that then creates a self justification in that anything done, is moral, even if it would be evil by others.
what it also does is totally leave the leftist without any moral compass. this is why they seek out terrorists as people who are part of their idea of change, which is their only morality given the assumption of the hegelian truth (Skewed) to the idea that all changes lead to a form of forward progress.
what is evil? actions beyond a certain point? what would sociopathis considere evil compared to normal thinkers compared to aspergers compared to downs syndrome, etc?
shouldnt there be but one morality?
the left thinks so, but then the left makes exceptions to all moralities as a pragmatic necessity.
if we were to measure evil by the horror of its actions, then what if it did not participate in a horror?
what if evil decided not to comit horrors?
would it cease to be evil?
or is there more to it? (of course)
on another note. would neo like to see the time frame from a programatic study as to how long after each person posts does she start a new thread? revealing to say the least… all one needs is an abilty to write a program that can scrape off the post dates and times, and compare them to the creation date time of the article before them… then once one sees that, one has a hard time beieving bs… among other things…
we all practice some evil, and cover it, and more so when we belive we are not commiting it.
People simply do not wish to acknowledge the evil side of human nature. They want to explain away what is for them something too horrible to contemplate. They want to find some good inside evil when confronted with the horrors it perpetrates. They choose to ignore the reality that evil has no redemptive qualities. Its far more comfortable for them close their eyes and plug their ears.
I dunno.
A lot of our concerns with ISIS could be and were said about Saddam, yet despite our long engagement enforcing the Gulf War ceasefire and its comprehensive set of demands for reform, the long spotlight on Saddam’s ‘evil’, and Saddam’s multiple breach of the UN mandates, people still opposed the Iraq mission.
Artfldgr:
I don’t know what you’re getting at.
But I do have certain posting habits that have developed over the years. They are rather simple. What time I get to the blog depends on other things in my life: other commitments, sleep/wake cycle, what’s happening in the news. When I log on, the first thing I do ordinarily is check the comments and weed out spam and trolls. Most of that activity is outside the radar of the reader (that’s the point of it). Then I review my drafts and see if anything is ready to publish and should be published (usually not, unless I know I’m going to have a exceptionally busy day in my non-blog life and have planned ahead). Then I check a few news and blog websites and see what’s happening and what I might want to tackle. Then I either write it, or add to a short draft I already have, and then I write another (short or long) and another (short or long), depending again on how much time I have free, or energy I have to spare for it.
My main activity is reading the news or other opinions (or researching), and then writing my posts. Reading and monitoring comments is also important, but I do that much more quickly, and sometimes don’t get to it till after I’ve written, and then only a sort of skimming of the comments. I usually am writing the post primarily, but checking back and forth intermittently at the comments to see if anything special is happening there, such as an altercation or a troll attack. Sometimes, if some comment especially interests me, I will add a comment/response to it, and then go back to writing my post.
I have no idea whether that pertains to anything you’re getting at, but I think it’s an interesting topic: how does a blogger blog? It’s a bit of a 3-ring circus, actually.
I consider myself much more politically/historically/economically enlightened than most of my friends. I’m certainly NO Victor Davis Hanson but I really like economics (The Austrian school) politics, history etc. and I’ve been alive long enough, read enough and paid attention enough to see the patterns of an economic or political catastrophe when it’s coming.
I’ll paint people into inescapable corners of logic and fact lamenting some situation or other even gaining the occasional, grudging nod of agreement but I know it’s all for naught. They simply don’t want to know. See your recent post about the average American not even knowing what party is in power. So in the end, to preserve my personal sense of peace, I’ve decided to chuck it.
When my friends and family ask why I’ve “calmed down” so much where “issues” are concerned I tell them internally I haven’t. That despite my ability to rub their faces in decades of a good predictive track record, that I’ve merely decided to stop wasting my breath and attempts to break through their self imposed “bliss” and concluded that my one vote will have to suffice.
Otherwise I’ll be reading or tinkering on one hobby or other. F##k it all..
With respect to the holocaust and world reaction to it generally back then, I don’t believe that anti-semitism can be completely discounted, the virulent anti-Jew anti-semitism that has persisted for centuries or longer. Hitler understood that Jews comprised a discrete and isolated group which could be targeted without the kind of pushback and outside support that other groups might have had back then. Likewise homosexuals. Likewise Gypsies.
My parents and my grandparents before them subscribed to the annual Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year, and I eventually would up with every book of the year from the mid-forties through 1985. These books were bound volumes that were supposed to chronicle the events of each year. While they covered WWII and its aftermath in great detail in most ways, they were utterly silent about the plight of the Jews under Hitler, concentration camps, and the holocaust generally, all the way up until the late 50s and early 60s, when, if they had to mention it at all (such as coverage of the capture, trial, and execution of Adolph Eichmann as events which occurred in later years), they mentioned it in passing, as if it was something everybody already knew. But they never covered it in the first place! I’m sorry, I’m thinking anti-semitism.
G Jourbert:
Of course anti-Semitism was part of it. But I’m trying to explain the reaction of people like Felix Frankfurter, who was no anti-Semite.
“Voyage of the Damned” also illustrates the point.
Not being Jewish, I’m not sure where Felix and any other Jew’s reaction comes from. Is it different from liberal Jewish reaction nowadays to the Palestinian question, or of Israel’s precarious position in the Middle East? Is it something cultural? Do Jews not want to bring this kind of victimhood attention upon themselves, preferring to inobtrusively go along to get along, or something like that? Or just plain denial (which is what it appears you are suggesting)?
Just for grins. How about: You are complicit in evil for not casting his remarks in bronze and allowing them to stand as undisturbed monuments for weeks. Or something.
Frankfurter, given his personality and how it led to his strained relationships with colleagues on the Court, may not be the best example. He was an outlier in many ways.
The politically correct are big on cultural and moral relativism. People like John Kerry make excuses for jihadists. It’s not the jihadists fault, they were forced them to do those awful things.
The situation in the Middle East is byzantine. As someone who has a kind of insidey insight into disinformation and having spent two years in the area I suspect that we are seeing lots of smoke, lots of mirrors and some exceptionally high quality prestidigitation. So, how to make sense of the mess? That old, reliable fallback – cui bono.
Above and beyond the impenetrable intricacies of tribal warfare are the twin specters of heresy and racial animosity. The two major power centers are Saudi Arabia (Arab and Wahabist Sunnis) and Iran (Persian and Shia). The wild card is the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafist, and opportunistically a cat’s paw of Iran.
The question is who stands to benefit from the reintroduction of western (US) military forces in the area. I think that it is clearly the Saudis.
Denial came into fashion after WWI, pushed, of course, by the enlightened. At that time is was denial of German atrocities in Belgium, which atrocities were used in Entente propaganda in the war, but the long term upshot was that all reports of atrocities were considered suspect. So it is with the sophisticated.
As Orwell remarked, that sad thing about reports of atrocities is not that they are false, but that they are likely true.
C S Lewis had quite a few discussions with British soldiers during the early days of WWII, and he says that, almost to a man, they disbelieved the reports of German atrocities.
I don’t think it is correct that “progressives” refuse to recognize the existence of evil…as a test, try talking to a progressive about a person who is an American conservative Christian. living in a rural area, who has been economically successful without benefit of university education…and see what his emotional reaction is.
The “progressives” want to focus their search for evildoers domestically rather than internationally, because it is more helpful to their search for expanded power.
David Foster, 6:15 pm — “The ‘progressives’ want to focus their search for evildoers domestically rather than internationally, because it is more helpful to their search for expanded power.”
Or is it merely that the “progressives” have different demons than we do?
We good guys think ISIS/AlQaeda/Etc. and pee cee collectivists/statists are evil and gemuine dangers, whereas “progressives” think Tea Partiers and bitter clingers and employers who balk at subsidizing selected birth control choices for wymyn they employ are evil and genuine dangers. And then we choose our temporary allies accordingly.
M J R,
The difference is that we on the right are right and those on the left are wrong. 😉 We are their demons, no doubt about it, but personally, I do not see most of those on the left as demons or even enemies; I consider them to be useful idiots.
Having witnessed the human response to on-the-spot disaster…
No small amount of the matter is that our psyche recoils and rejects truly horrific bad news — even if it’s as close to hand as a flame and a pool of gasoline.
This emotive state is brought up in fiction, time and time again.
In Aliens, the cry is:”This can’t be happening… this can’t be happening.”
It was used more than once in Star Trek plots.
My take is that Felix believed the account — but couldn’t officially believe the account.
One the primary themes of Nazi anti-Semitism was that Jews were intrinsically dis-loyal — particularly in wartime — and that they worked to their parochial interests, worldwide.
Frankfurter had to regard that theme as radioactive — and the bomb hadn’t even been dropped yet.
If he, a prominent Jew, were to mount the soap box, wouldn’t he be accused of grandstanding, advocating a parochial priority, and implicitly damning the FDR administration?
And what action beyond total war could be made policy?
If he, Frankfurter, were to broadcast such a truth, wouldn’t it actually demoralize American Jewry?
Nazism was so dripping with anti-Semitism that the US Army would not send Jewish draftees to the Europe. An American Jew had to volunteer for that campaign.
Instead, most American Jews fought in the Pacific. Famously, the USMC became what it became largely because it had many, many. heroic Ashkenazi Jews.
Likewise, the US Army was not at all wild about Negro infantry outfits for much the same reason: they had plenty of anti-Negro Nazi propaganda to make the brass fear for them in the exact same light.
This changed only very late in the war, when the outcome was no longer in doubt.
Of course, Nazi troops had been shooting prisoners out of hand all along — particularly the SS. The Red Army reciprocated.
In contrast, the US Army never feared that the Nazis would liquidate Japanese American (Nisei) troops.
So, in Frankfurter’s case, being in the Government — the USSC — he dared not admit to a truth he couldn’t act on.
&&&
In my business life, I’ve seen countless events that were even more obvious than the Holocaust — skip off into denial-land, as to recognize them would force that man to do what he simply could not bear to do.
This willful denial was most pronounced when kin were involved.
This has been addressed in fiction countless times.
“The Priory School” Sherlock Holmes…etc.
People may not believe what is happening. It’s hard to tell why. For those with a strong stomach, you can go here:
http://www.barenakedislam.com/category/beheadings-graphic/
If those pictures don’t strike a note of revulsion and anger, nothing can.
The United States has the military power to do whatever needs to be done. What is lacking is the will. The jihadis know this and depend on it. Third and fourth generation warfare is designed to counter our overwhelming military strength with guerilla type warfare where they shelter among the civilians and count on us to be careful about collateral damage and the laws of war. We are too comfortable, the threat seems too remote, and our elites have bought into the idea that all cultures are equivalent. Unless we wake up, they are on the move are going to inflict a lot of damage and a lot more people will die unnecessarily.
Because such a matter is intrinsically secret, we’ll probably never get to the truth; but IIRC FDR made his “unconditional surrender” demand at Casablanca — to the complete astonishment of Churchill — pretty shortly after receiving additional confirmation that the Nazis were liquidating Jews, en masse, in the east.
At Casablanca:
“…Roosevelt proposed that:
“[t]he number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc.) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population…. [T]his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over 50 percent of the lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, college professors, etc., in Germany were Jews.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_Conference
His proposal indicates that he hadn’t a CLUE about Muslim culture… which is where he stayed until he met King Ibn Saud.
Perfect.
What IS interesting about FDR’s proposal is that it’s perfectly politically correct. He was slicing up a foreign polity based upon Progressive class and ethnic structures.
Couple of items:
To admit evil is to admit the possiblity of a responsibility to do something about it. The doing can range from laborious to dangerous to distasteful.
Capra’s film for the occupation troops–available on youtube–runs through the costs. Heartbreaking. “Money?….There isn’t that much money.”
To admit evil means to admit–for some people, that they’ve been on the wrong side.
It means that, for some people, their side doesn’t look so hot and requires some tweaking before it’s sold.
Given that the left uses civilian casualties as our enemies do–complete reproach and an unequivocal proof that we should stop–and we’ve bought it. The old saw about kind to the cruel means being cruel to the kind doesn’t penetrate.
Another blog has constructed the TWANLOC (Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen) acronym. For whatever reason, TWANLOC will see evil differently, or claim to see it differently, than the rest of us.
A State department hack recently observed that ISIS is unresponsive to outreach. Can’t get more authoritative than that on outreach. Now what?
What is evil is zero’s plan, given his context. One observer remarked that our tentative coalition partners understand that Obama will bail on them to save a senate seat. We’re going to get a bunch of folks to sign up and stand up and then, because it’s a dem thing, we’re going to bail on them, betray them, and leave them to the headchoppers. Take that to the bank.
JJ,
First, thank you for your service. Secondly, I favor total war if we must go to war. No quarter given and no concern for ‘collateral damage.
A degenerate religion with doctrines of inherited and collective sin piqued my interest. The false myth of spontaneous conception which justifies the pro-choice doctrine confirmed that evil does in fact exist. ISIS is interesting, but they pale in comparison.
Artfldgr:
God is separating the wheat from the chaff. He is identifying and removing/destroying corrupt spirits from his body.
Well, the indoctrination by the Leftist monsters is frighteningly effective: I don’t know WHAT can penetrate it.
E.g.: I have sent a niece of mine (27, college-indoctrinated, liberal-birdbrain parents) exactly two political emails in the past year: one was about Columbus Day, a semi-humorous complaint about the PC gang trying to end the holiday, and the other was a fantastic response by a Michigan professor to the Perpetually Offended[TM] moslem student union bitching about the Danish mohammed cartoons. Said professor said that what he found “offensive” was [list of moslem crimes against humanity]. It was great.
So she sent me the following in reply:
“I love you very much but to be perfectly honest, I find this offensive. I absolutely respect your right to have an opinion on all of these issues, but I do not wish to receive emails like this one. Again, I’m not aiming to start a debate, and I respect your stance on it, I just would prefer not to receive politically-charged emails.”
IOW: “I don’t want to hear Anything that might upset me, so you have to Shut Up now.”
Anyone have any suggestions? I’m heartsick and very angry about this: even angrier at the Leftist [insert every curse word here]. How on Earth do they get such an iron grip on our kids??? and we can’t break it???
Existence of evil can be denied until the Gates of Hell clang shut: this we saw in World War II and many other instances, and we still see it today. I hate them for taking my niece. Hate them.
You will recall that the Hitler Youth didn’t hesitate to inform on their parents, friends, loved ones, sending any apostates to a grisly death.
Humans are pretty scary when molded by Evil.
Beverly
Your presumption about your niece’s motivation, to the extent motivation is unconscious, is probably correct.
I think neo has said in her musings on the/her fever swamps that libs are because they believe. If they did not believe, they would not–as a person–exist. Belief is as vital as air. It cannot stand to be threatened.
What someone like your niece does as reality forces itself in on her is a puzzle. Wild, panicked flailing? There comes a time when even fingers in the ears–speaking metaphorically–cannot block reality. Perhaps, as wretchard said, not until she screams, “But I’m on your side,” and the executioner only smiles. Too late for her by then, but, given the incremental efforts of her and others like her, too late for others, as well.
Um, but there are many, many out there who DO know that evil exists.
And they know exactly WHO is responsible for it:
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4641/isis-zionist-plot
File under: Here we go again….
Beverly:
There is a more benign interpretation, although I’m not saying it’s true.
There are many people who just don’t like to get any unsolicited political emails. Your niece might be trying to indicate something like that.
Beverly,
It’ll take an activist social movement.
Neo,
Her niece said “offensive”.
I’m sure the niece gets political emails that she enjoys, as long as their on her side.
That said I don’t like getting them. Typically I’d receive forwarded emails of things I’ve long known about.
There’s a new picture on FB with Pelosi stating that they never treated Bush the way that ‘we’re’ treating Obama. I didn’t click so I’m not sure who is treating Obama poorly.
My head nearly exploded and all I could think of was ‘TWAN-freakin’-LOC’. I think I understand radical muslims more than I understand leftists.
I think people who deny evil do so because they’d have to change their whole world view. God exists, hell exists, it’s all real, and so forth. Changing their world view would entail changing their lives and how they act. So in short – that ain’t happenin’!
Barry…
I’ve come around to understand that EVERY time a Muslim pronounces a Zionist plot as a causative action — I jump to the conclusion that it’s a Muslim plot.
We can start with the fact that ‘Zionist plots’, per se, are Islamist constructs. In every case, they are proclaimed whenever an Islamist plot has generated blowback: bad public relations.
The most famous Zionist plots are:
9-05/06-72 massacre — Munich Olympics
6-27-76 hijacking — Air France
9-11-01 hijackings — America
7-07-05 bombings — Europe
11-26-08 atrocities — Mumbai
It’s in the devious nature of Zionist plotters that their primary targets are almost always Jews. This is done so as to confuse the logically minded.
And I have to say, no logical mind WOULD suspect Zionists.
1) The goal of Zionists is the establishment of a Democratic Jewish nation inside the classic borders of the ancient Hebrew state circa King David’s reign.
2) That goal has actually been achieved, rendering further activism entirely moot. Thus ‘Zionist activist’ as a term of art, puzzles the mind. Such souls have gone the way of Abolitionists and American Revolutionaries….
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What’s really scary is that such Muslims that be are allowed to stand tall on the soap box and twitter loud and far.
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The boys of Brussels are going to have to take the plunge and expel Muslims — en masse.
It’s the ONLY way that Europeans can balance their books, as Muslims are economic bleeders.
The grand scheme whereby Muslims would clothe and feed the retired Christians and atheists was ever bizarre. It’s all the more insane with their track record of dogmatic rage dripping all over the police blotter.
My niece is a good person, very sweet; but she’s a devoted Obama worshipper. As is her fiance. Even though she lives in a majority-Republican city, and is taking some flak for (as she indignantly said) being a “fool” for voting for him. Her objection to that was that it was so Rude of people to say such things, so Unfair.
IOW, she’s been absorbed by the Borg.
I never send her political emails, knowing it would have this effect; the previous one (singular) was one I thought was wryly amusing, about Columbus Day (she replied by declaring that Columbus “practiced sexual slavery!” so she couldn’t be “on team Columbus”).
I also almost never try to communicate with the kids about all this very important stuff, because frankly, it makes me sick to my stomach to hear all the horrid Leftist lies they’ve been told come spouting out of their mouths. The brainwashing is terrible.
Beverly.
Of course it’s terrible. But the leftist lies are different from, say, an assertion that the world is flat or a difference of opinion on whether Pluto is a planet.
Leftist lies are props of one’s self-image, one’s personality, one’s self-presentation in everyday life (Goffman).
Quite literally, your relations and their millions of like-minded (hurts to use “mind” in this context) cannot give up a lefty lie.
Blert: Where did you get that idea about Jewish soldiers not being sent to Europe unless they volunteered? Absolutely untrue. Neither my father nor any other Jewish veteran I knew was ever asked to volunteer for Europe — they were sent and they went. A couple of the more prominent examples were General Maurice Rose, CO) of the 3rd Armored Divison, and Major Abe Baum, CO of Georgie Patton’s “Jewish Brigade” that he sent on the ill-considered mission to rescue his son-in-law from a German POW camp.
My father had an Infantry platoon in Europe. His first runner was a Jewish guy who spoke Yiddish, which would have been useful in Holland and Germany. But when the Army–possibly it was only his division–found what even the mild-mannered Wehrmacht did to Jewish POWs, the Jews were pulled from line units.
The Eight Air Force provided bogus non-Jewish ID to its aircrew.
RA – Must have been at a unit level then — my father’s Yiddish certainly came in handy; he was rated as an official German translator.
Your second point is correct. The Army did offer Jewish soldiers the option of putting a religion code on their dogtags other than the “H” (Hebrew) which was used at the time. (I had “J” on mine in 1970.)
The British, after first interning the Jewish German refugees, eventually formed them into Commando units, alongside the Danish, French, Norwegian, and other Troops they formed. They made them change the Jewish sounding names to British names, though.
Richard.
My father was in the 104th ID Timberwolves. The CG was Terry Allen, whose men think he walked on water. He was well known for looking out for his guys. After leaving the Canadian Corps, he figured out a way to continue the officers’ liquor ration. His emphasis on night fighting meant they had a very low casualty rate and lessons learned about such things, referring to the Timberwolves, were preached to us at Benning several wars later.
From which it is possible that it was only the division, Allen being so involved. OTOH, it applied only to line units. Don’t know if official translators were presumed to be in a line unit, subject to capture.
Most of the Germans my Dad’s guys captured had at least one guy speaking English. That was sufficient for first-level interrogation, “Where are the tanks?” and “hands up”.
This is a fascinating post and I agree with portions of it.
But I think it avoids a key issue — and that is that it is not the responsibility of the US government to “combat evil” of whatever sort. The responsibility of the US government is to conduct an excellent defense of our country.
So I think at least some of the disinterest in “evil” in other countries is 1) there is radical horrific “mass evil” going on in *dozens* of countries, not merely the Middle East, and 2) the recommended solution is always, from the US, to “commit troops, go to war, and spend lots of money” to “combat this particular evil right here.”
Since the sole option to “combat this evil right here” appears to always be “America goes to war” many people who might otherwise be engaged in “combating evil” turn it off, since they don’t want America to “go to war.” And what else are they going to do to “combat evil?”
In the absence of an opportunity for an individual to help or assist, such individuals will often shut their eyes and go on about their business.
Also, it’s my impression that people in this country were somewhat more willing to believe the atrocities of the Japanese.
Remember also that the Japanese had been at war in China for the better part of two years before war broke out in Europe. The horrors of Nanking had been reported by the New York Times and other outlets years before allegations of death camps started to emerge in the States.
RA — my father was in an Engineer Combat Battalion, definitely a line unit, usually an in-front-of-the-line unit (mine clearing and road building was their speciality.) He became a rated translator after V-E Day. Since he had only arrived in France in February 1945, he didn’t have enough points to go home immediatley. Instead of being sent to Japan, he stayed in Europe until May of 1946, working at a POW camp. Thank God for Harry Truman!
Blert,
Indeed, you are correct.
It is what is known as “projection”, of course.
Something that the extremely paranoid are extremely good at.
Imagine raising and educating your youth to be extremely paranoid… (hey, maybe that’s not such a bad idea!)
File under: Some are born paranoid; some achieve paranoia, and some have paranoia thrust upon them….