The Non-Intelligent Response Or, the Salvation of the West

Some singularly salient points made by Phanarath the Dane in a guest posting on Gates of Vienna.

The West has become a very civilized place.

We have become used to dealing with people of reason and good morals. So even when we have enemies we tend to look for something good in them, something they would like to happen, something that would make it worth their while to make peace with us. We think that a reasonable deal can usually make things better for everyone involved.

And this is because we are clever and civilized. We don’t run around attacking people for no other reason than that they are unknown to us. We try to talk to them, thinking that a common understanding will benefit all parties. However, we didn’t arrive at this way of doing things in a peaceful manner. We had to fight many wars and share many stories with our former enemies before these ideas dawned open us….

However, we seem to fall somewhat short when dealing with Muslims. It seems that all the resources and the justifications tend to fall their way.

This IS a major problem.

But when empires were still around there was another way of dealing with things. From the Romans to the Nazis (in eastern Europe and Russia) it was the custom to execute a number of civilians whenever a soldier was killed by what might be a fraction of the local population. The British empire had the same way of dealing with such things. If a British soldier was killed ten or a hundred would be swinging on the gallows indiscriminately the next day.

Today we know that this kind of punishment is immoral and unjust.

War is hell. Killing civilians in air raids could be equally defined as immoral and unjust. Oh well. to quotes Cicero Silent leges inter arma. (In time of war the laws are silent.)

But back then people counted on it. And it became the natural order of things. So when the Romans, the Brits, or the Nazis killed off a village, people would tend to blame those that had made them angry.

I would love to be a “good” person. But at the same time I have come to understand that morals are no good if they don’t do any good.

When we try to respond intelligently to the threats the Western world is faced with today, we ignore the fact that we are dealing with barbarians. Any of the old empires would have done a lot better then us. The danger we face is Muslims, and they are not as civilized as we would like them to be. They have no self-interest that we can try to understand, not as a group anyway. The intelligent response will not work. It will only be exploited.

Yep, sure enough. It’s pointless to try to negotiate with psychopaths.

Soldiers of an empire would be expected to kill any commoner who looked at them in a wrong way. They would only be held responsible if they happened to kill someone “important”. The USA is not behaving anywhere near the way an empire would. So basically the US especially, and the West in general, is getting all the blame for being an empire without getting any of the benefits, and it is not working very well for us.

What will work is a predictable response to any Muslim offense, and the response must be repeated every time the offense happens. And I suppose that the time for killing innocent people is past.

There are several useful suggestions as to possible “predictable responses”. Unfortunately, we haven’t YET been bloodied enough to REALLY take the war seriously.