November 8, 2005
"At War" -- Just Imagine!
By Bill
Murchison
And no one saw it coming? The French riots: the burning, the looting,
and now, the killing that make you just sad enough, perhaps, to
bump freedom fries from the menu and reinstate French fries, out
of a fraternal sympathy the French have piggishly denied the Americans
since the Iraq war began.
On the other hand, it's not just the French.
Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear next year a plea
against the use of military tribunals to try terror suspects.
"Our country is at war," the president sought to remind
his countrymen at a press conference the same day. At war on the
battlefield; otherwise imprisoned in a mental morass. Witness
the glee with which liberals and assorted W-phobes have assailed
their country's headman for "lying" the country into
war -- which he didn't, operating rather on the same unfortunately
flawed information that every other world leader judged credible
concerning weapons of mass destruction. Anyway, there you are.
During a war, the commander in chief has to remind us the war
is on.
A kind of nuttiness overtakes us -- as the French, our persistent
critics from the time the Iraq war came onto radar screens, were
overtaken by blindness as to their own condition.
Accommodating Europe's largest Muslim population, the French
could be said to have their hand stuck out for a ruler-slap or
a knife stroke -- depending on the mood of the militants. Three
hundred French towns -- not counting the suburbs of Paris -- struck
by rioting! If not war, it certainly has the right look.
"War over what?" is the question. War over the indigestibility
of the Muslim morsel that the West has been trying for several
decades to ingest with hope and a glass of water. It's not working.
Professor Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilization"
thesis looks more and more plausible as time goes by. One factor
in that category nevertheless needs more discussion than it has
received -- the religious factor: not Christianity against Islam;
rather, passionless secularism against passionate discontent and
despair, often enough presented in religious terms.
To the extent you'd want to call it a religious war, this one
is waged for the most part by religious dropouts on the Western
side. In modern-day France, there isn't much religion of any kind
-- just spacious indifference masquerading as tolerance. As long
as the ordinary Frenchman gets his 35-hour week and August vacation,
he's fine. The assumption that leisure and gain are what life
is about -- c'est la France. And c'est the rest of Europe to one
degree or another, a continent drained of its spiritual inheritance
by habit and neglect.
Come the Muslims, not so much thirsting for the overthrow of
Christianity -- of which there isn't much in France anyway --
as seeking to convert powerlessness into power by force of numbers
and will. Post-Christian Europe lacks a rationale for denying
the newcomers that power. What it has to say, mostly, is, voila!
-- we got here first. Which "we" did.
The rioters would argue, "so what?" Firstness confers
no special rights. Europe's "specialness" having consisted
in its Christianity, now lost, what reason can there be not to
welcome the newcomers? None the riotous newcomers can see. The
failure of France in our time is its failure to appreciate why
French distinctiveness was rooted, at bottom, in adherence to
the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
So it goes in a closely related way, with Americans. To many
W-phobes, American distinctiveness is as offensive and hateful
as Christian distinctiveness: a sign of pride and willfulness.
We are the world! Why not act like it?
Whatever makes a country stand out from other countries -- that
thing becomes the attribute worth defending against all comers.
Clearly, in France, Christianity no longer inspires the descendants
of those who followed St. Joan. In America, the present crisis
is less critical. But nuttiness is infectious. A people who have
to be reminded they are at war, fighting for their homes and liberties
-- you can't watch some of these people, or listen to them, without
wondering whether avian flu is our deadliest enemy.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
