Saturday, January 07, 2006

"This war paradigm is, like, reeeally harshing my mellow here, man..."

While clicking around in Google's news aggregator, I happened upon this news item in a neighborhood newspaper in Florida. It was an admiring story on a peace event at a local church, featuring Jewish, Christian, and Muslim speakers calling for interfaith dialog, activists plumping for a Department of Peace, and a call-in appearance by Dennis Kucinich. On the surface, just an instance of your normal mainstream Protestant useful idiocy.

But as I've mentioned before, these are inappropriate times to be indulging feel-good follies like this. In the days of the Cold War, the mass graves of Communism were hidden out of sight and out of (progressives') mind, and the frontlines of the conflict tended (but only tended) to stay out of public view. Bloc politics were stark, unnuanced things, with lots of room in the interstices for those inclined to triangulation. Religious progressives could flatter themselves that they were witnesses for peace, voices of conscience, full of righteous prophetic wrath at Uncle, full of excuses for Ivan, save for the occasional, pro forma denunciation of the Socialist Sphere.

But in the present conflict there is no possibility of a balance of power. The enemy considers the death of his victims to be religiously meritorious, and his own death to be an ascent into paradise. There is no attempt on his part to humor the peaceniks' delusion that "everyone wants peace," as the Sovs would do with their "peace offensives" from time to time. The reasons to resist the blandishments of the Christian peace lobby are even more pronounced now than they were back in the Nuclear Freeze days: Losing the resolve to fight off The Jihad now increases the chances of a catastrophe that is beyond lamentation later.

In other words, peaceniks should really get a grasp on the idea that pacifism is morally acceptable only as a personal choice, not a government policy. They have no right, none, to offer my and my family's throats to the scimitar, for the sake of assuaging their flaming, self-congratulatory "consciences".

Let's finish with a laugh: One of the Peace Secretary's functions, from Kucinich:

The secretary of peace would have direct contact with the United Nations.

snort!

What for?

What the @#$% for?

Certainly not to protect America from the Religion of Peace©.