I like Wretchard's blog and I generally support the positions that he takes but there's something wrong with the latest essay at the Belmont Club. Animal models are well and good for making analogies to human situations. George Orwell took this form to great heights in his classic Animal Farm but there is a terrible danger of dehumanization in using such models.
The major problem with his article is that it frames the situation in a self-defeating way. The idea of a human form of Ichneumon Wasp with islamist killing parasites being made secure by a paralyzing fifth column of postmodernists, cultural relativists, and assorted other tribes of the left is to give these people a subhuman quality that is intrinsically evil and impossible to reform. Kill them all is the instinctive response. But is that what we want? No.
What we want is to fracture them against each other. A kill them all response unites them. What we want is to reform and peel off those we can to our own side. A dehumanizing message gives them no common ground with us. We can no longer befriend the bug, the assassin, the parasitic demon.
What we need is something better, much better than this message, but unfortunately Wretchard is very talented in his walk down the wrong road. Glenn Reynolds has graced him with an instalanche and the killer bug, intrinsically evil meme has already gone 'round the world.
What we need is to demonstrate to the leftists that they can turn away from the codependent enablers of the islamists and turn back to the noble cause of battling for human liberty when it counts. The left, too much of it anyway, seems to have forgotten that the center-right is its electoral opponent but those who believe in slavery, in unequal rights based on religion, in conversion or death, those are the enemy. No matter how far fetched the idea of a restored Caliphate ruling triumphantly over the entire world, this is their goal and it is not a goal that any honest leftist can tolerate in any shape, way, or form.
What we need to demonstrate to the islamists is that Islam does not honor the suicide. It condemns the apostate to hell. And the leadership of Al Queda and the rest of the terrorist breed are not true faithful but betrayers of the faith, members of a nihilistic death cult that is abhorrent to God. Following them means losing any hope of salvation and paradise.
And what we need to demonstrate to our fellow war-coalition members is that while dehumanization may be momentarily satisfying to our most base emotions, it is destructive to the cause and it strengthens the hand of the terror masters to reclaim their waverers. The Islamists and their leftist enablers are members of the culture of death. You cannot fight death with death, only with life. That's a hard challenge for even the best of wordsmiths. I hope that Wretchard rises to that challenge next time he takes up the subject.
Posted by TMLutas at March 14, 2004 10:37 PM