Ignoring History

ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ is from time to time chided by his liberal and even libertarian friends as being an adherent to the "war party". What his friends appear to ignore is the fact that a study of human history reveals that the planet has never enjoyed a prolonged era of "peace" that has not been the result of either military conquest or a will to militarily "defend the gates from the barbarians." Expecting otherwise is to expect or hope for that which has never occurred i.e. porcine aerobats or spotless leopards.

For most of human history, the life and survival of the tribes and nations (tribes writ large) have always been too precarious and vulnerable to the barbarians at the gates, or across the river, for pacifism and indolence to flourish, and the Warriors of every tribe in history have been most highly esteemed because it was they, fighting and defeating the tribes' enemies, who made the life and survival of the individuals and the tribe, and the avoidance of death and slavery, possible.
In the 20th century, perhaps for the first time in history, at least for the first time on so large a scale, we - Americans, Western Europeans - have perverted Liberal Democracy by eschewing the Warrior tradition (if tradition is, as Chesterton observed, "the democracy of the dead," the vote of our ancestors as to how things should be understood and done). Perhaps in a combination of revulsion and horror at the massive slaughter of World War II and the vaster slaughter that the weapons of today can inflict, and the achievement of a prosperity in America, and Western Europe, and most of what was once the British Empire, unprecedented in history, we have lulled ourselves into a lovely fantasy of "peace," as if by wanting it we could have it, the triumph of wishful thinking over historic reality.
"In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared humanist) Oscar Van Den
Boogaard . . . says that to him coping with the Islamization of Europe is like 'a process of mourning.' He is overwhelmed by 'a feeling of
sadness.' 'I am not a warrior,' he says, 'but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was really good at enjoying it.'"
Some cultures hew far closer than we to the old tribal ways, ideas, ideologies, and visions of conquest by force and fighting, and the growing movement of Jihadism embraces those traditions with a vengeance. We face an implacable marriage of religious fervor and tribal Warriorism in the tide of Jihadism that harbors only disdain and contempt for all peace other than the its own peace of its own imposition that follows conquest and subjugation, the peace of submission, the peace of Islamic domination and hegemony.
Van Den Boogaard may not think of himself as a Warrior, but the Jihadis who strategize and bomb to conquer Iraq and Somalia, Israel and Egypt and America, Bali and Spain and England do. They are the Warriors of Allah, who is greatly pleased by their martyrdom, who greatly rewards them in Paradise, and, like the Warriors of past centuries, they are the most highly exalted among their own peers and within their own culture. If Europe and America are to defend, protect, and perpetuate, our own distinct cultures and freedoms, we will have to leave our child-like peace fantasies behind...

At least until Muslims adopt [the words of John Lennon's composition of] "Imagine" as the 6th Pillar of Islam.

We are a long way from a majority of our population waking up to the reality of the threat which confronts western culture.

Update:

The anti-war movement has been with man all his existence. Its latest iteration denies the existence of the warrior in man. To their disciples man is peaceful and all must turn their back on war and like solutions. Unfortunately the “peaceniks” and I don’t mean that pejoratively are not storming the mosques with their mantra of peace. In fact they are trying in every way to help the Muslim warriors to blunt the efforts of the American warriors to peacefully settle the matter. They are actively working to deter our intelligence gathering capabilities and offering surrender to the opponent’s warriors as a solution to man’s age-old proclivities. That doesn’t work as history has taught us; man does not keep his word if he can conquer you with superior force; with military or a spiritually-based belief.

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ