Michael Barone Posts on the Enemies of Freedom
It’s an important article about how we have people in the US who wish the government to fail in the war against Islamo-fascist terrorist, and yet fail to understand the broader implications of such a failure.
RealClearPolitics - Articles - Our Covert Enemies
Our Covert Enemies By Michael Barone In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.
Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington’s) transnationalism. (emphasis added)
He goes on to show the thinking and the fallacies in that thinking:
At the center of their thinking is a notion of moral relativism. No idea is morally superior to another. Hitler had his way, we have ours — who’s to say who is right? (emphasis added)
This is often touted as not being judgement. Who would want to say that Hitler, or Moa or Stalin for that matter, was “wrong?” I would. And I think the hundreds of millions of dead and crippled people who lived through the horrors of their regimes would want to!
Mr. Barone is quick to point out the logical fallacy and intellectual blindness of these covert enemies:
Rich white men have imposed their ideas because of their wealth and through the use of force. Rich white nations imposed their rule on benighted people of color around the world. For this sin of imperialism they must forever be regarded as morally stained and presumptively wrong. Our covert enemies go quickly from the notion that all societies are morally equal to the notion that all societies are morally equal except ours, which is worse. (emphasis added)
Mr. Barone accurately describes the origin of this 5th column of enemies. You may recall that those politicians who spoke out the loudest against the war in Iraq are those politicians whose careers were born in Vietnam
We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes.
I wonder who will remember the Pelosis, Reids, Murthas, Kennedys and Kerrys the next time Islamo-fascist terrorists attack the US or our allies in this long war. I also wonder how many people who now want to pull US forces out of Iraq, regardless of the risk, will admit they were wrong when it doesn’t bring them the peace they thought they would get.
The DaybyDay cartoon has a poignant message today:
“If there’s just one truth about global jihad… it’s that you can’t go home again.”
That’s the truth that many Americans just aren’t facing up to.
