The Paradigm Precipice
Topic: Islamic Jihad
"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries. " William Shakespeare

The source of the Tide in this famous quotation from
Julius Caesar is most often, some Catastrophic Event which shatters the manner in which a People perceive the World, for the term Paradigm, means simply, "A new way of looking at things.

Pearl Harbor was such a Catastrophic Event, and the Paradigm Shift it engendered created a Nation with a World View out of the previous isolationist US. A generation rode this Paradigm to political power, and as usual in times such as that, some got it and were lead on to fortune, and some didn't and
their lives were bound in shallows and in miseries.

Vietnam a generation later engendered yet another Paradigm Shift and as above some got it and some didn't, with much the same results as the generation of their Fathers.

The Destruction of the World Trade Towers was also a Catastrophic Event and it in its turn has created a NEW Paradigm Shift and is always the case, some get it and some don't.

This lack of vision has no definitive political bias. The Paradigm Shift of the Vietnam Era was driven by political forces from the Left, but some of them GET it.

Some of the former greatest spokesmen for the Left get it.

Adam Michnik gets it. In A View from the Left: We, the Traitors he says

A German journalist published an article in the paper Die Tageszeitung in which he claimed that Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, and George Konrad, Europe's long-standing moral authorities, had suddenly become undiscriminating admirers of America.

I read that article with a twinge of nostalgia. Here we are, together again. Our three names were grouped to-gether for the first time by Timothy Garton Ash in his widely acclaimed essay nearly two decades ago. If I recall correctly, Havel and I were doing jail time then, and Konrad's books were banned from print in Hungary. Even though we did not meet very often, we maintained a common ground in our reflections on the worlds of values and of politics. We were united by a dream of freedom, a dream of a world infused with tolerance, hope, respect for human dignity, and a refusal of conformist silence in the face of evil.

Today, however, the primary threat is terrorism by Islamist fundamentalists. War has been declared against the democratic world. It is this world, whose sins and mistakes we know all too well, that we want to defend.

These are the reasons behind our absolute war on the terrorist, corrupt, intolerant regime of the despot from Baghdad. One cannot perceive totalitarian threats in George W. Bush's policies and at the same time defend Saddam Hussein. There are limits to absurdity, which should not be exceeded recklessly."

Christopher Hitchens gets it. In his statement on the Unite Against Terror Petition website
(which I was honored to sign) he says,

"Association with this statement and with many of its fellow-signatories involves two commitments. The first is the elementary duty of solidarity with true and authentic resistance movements within the Muslim world, such as the Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, who were fighting against Ba'athism and Talibanism (and the latent alliance between the two) long before any American or British government had woken up to the threat. It should go without saying that, though the suffering of their peoples was intense, neither Jalal Talabani nor Ahmed Shah Masoud ever considered letting off explosive devices at random in foreign capitals. I have my political and ideological differences with both groups, but these differences are between me and them, and are not mediated through acts of nihilistic murder.

My second commitment is equally elementary. The foreign policy of a democracy should be determined only at election times or by votes in Congress or Parliament. It is one hundred per cent unacceptable even to imply, let alone to assert, that a suicide-murderer or his apologists can by these means acquire the right to any say in how matters are decided.

Both of these observations, and indeed this very statement, would be redundant if it were not for the widespread cultural presence of a pseudo-Left, and an isolationist Right, both of whom have degenerated to the point where they regard jihadism as some form of "liberation theology". The old slogans are often the best, and "Death to Fascism" is life-affirming in these conditions.


Nick Cohen gets it, he says I still fight oppression and replies to his detractors on the Left

The liberals who say I have deserted the left should ask themselves where they stand on Islamism.

Some DON'T get it. Read the following on Instapundit
YOU’RE EITHER WITH US OR YOU’RE AGAINST US:
James Wolcott is beating up on liberal hawks (he singles out Roger L. Simon in particular) for making common cause with conservatives by supporting the Terror War:

The fact is that by subscribing to Bush's War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq with every corpuscle of your tired body you've made common cause with Republican conservatives, neoconservatives, and Christian fundamentalists who are dedicated to destroying those parcels of liberalism on which you stake your tiny claims of pride…Do you really think that conservative supremacy in the executive, congressional, and judicial branches of government means that gay rights and abortion rights will somehow be spared?.

UPDATE: On a related note, Harry Hatchett says many on today's anti-war left strikingly resemble right-wing nationalists and isolationists. It begs the question then. Who, really, are the new conservatives? I couldn't care less, personally, about being tainted with conservative cooties. But those who fear and loathe the idea might want to read Harry's essay.

Oh and for those who object to the anti-war left and the right wing nationalists being tarred with the same brush?

This quote from George Orwell fits that pretty well and shows us the concept is not anything news.

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, "he that is not with me is against me". The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle,
**********************************************
, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security...In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted;in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism


My father was in the Navy. When I was a small boy, we lived on an Island in the Pacific, Midway.
I remember one of the things I liked to do was dive into a wave when it was just curling over. Done right, you could curl into a ball and it twirled you around and around. It was a lot of fun. Done wrong, missing the timing something quite different could happen.
The Wave SLAMMED you down on the beach floor. That could smart!

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries. "

I do believe the Irrational Left and the Democratic Party is about to learn what "something different
could happen" means.

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