This Blast from the Past was originally published in September 2012 at Classical Values.
The War Party
by Sanford Begley
I’ve been listening to both sides since 9/11/01. There is a group who want to go to war with Islam, a group who want to ignore it and hope it goes away, and a group who says you can’t war with a religion.
The largest group is obviously the second one. Most people anywhere, any time, just want to be left alone to live their lives. Raise fat healthy babies and sit outside of an evening with a drink and their loved ones. These people are the ones the other two groups are hopeful of converting…not going to happen for the most part. People who want to live and let live only change as they are forced to. This is as true of the Muslim camel herder as it is of the Fundamentalist tobacco farmer.
The unfortunate thing is that this group never gets their way. Throughout history they have either been drafted into wars or had the wars fought on their fields. When the armies destroy your means of livelihood you go to war through lack of options. These are the meek whom the Christian Bible claims will inherit the earth. Most of them will get a six by three piece of it and that is all.
The group that wants to go to war is especially incensed right now. The events of 9/11/12 are to them a declaration of war, and proof that there can be no peace. Most of them acknowledge that it will only work as a war of extermination but losing what they see as a war is not a reasonable option in their eyes. They argue that there are no alternatives since the Fundamentalist extremist faction of Islam is at war with us, whether we will or not, and that the moderate Muslims do not try to prevent or even condemn the actions of their more active faction.
The ones who want to give peace a chance are the most politically and socially ascendent group at present, which is always subject to change. They have only one real argument in their favor. There is, in their opinion, no viable enemy. The RIFs are a minority hiding among their peaceful brethren, and there is no way to cull the sheep from the goats. No one wants to destroy innocent lives, so their thinking has a valid point. Unfortunately that leaves a powerful nation at the hands of a vicious minority that lives to embarrass and damage us. After all, their loudly proclaimed goal is our destruction and enslavement.
There are two points that come to my mind after much study and soul searching. One is that we must fight or lose, if we let them go unchecked they will destroy us from without and within. The more important point is the moral justification for the war party. We must fight or lose against an enemy without borders or a head. To destroy a Bin Laden is to do little to slow the enemy and they are everywhere, from the deserts of the middle east to the streets of Chicago. Their fellow religionists either support or condone them, save for those who live in the second group I mentioned at the beginning of this piece.
Those in the second group as I said wish to live in peace and not become involved, and as I said earlier that never happens. The farmer’s fields will be trampled under by the armies fighting over them and the little people are killed by the armies of both sides. This is why they shouldn’t let others think for them, they should take a stand. If they continue as they are the war party will realize that these moderate and peaceful muslims are like their small farmer counterparts in Nazi Germany. Those who die as collateral damage in a war not of their choosing.
For there is no difference between a small farmer in Bavaria feeding the Nazi war machine as a byproduct of his peaceful life, and a small Muslim businessman hiding a terrorist in his mosque.
