Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Vlad The Impaler, Part II

I want to be clear that I am not advocating torturing people en masse in the post below. I put myself in a bad position by declining to comment and make clear my thoughts on the antics of Vlad the Impaler.

Here are my unorganized thoughts on the war we find ourselves in.

As is true of human nature, the nature of warfare does not change as the years go by. The weapons change, the tactics change, and the battlefields change, but war stays the same. Why? Because war is a natural outgrowth of human nature.

Therefore, the thing that beat an enemy a thousand years before Christ, is the same thing that will beat an enemy today.

It is not guns, spears, rocks, or knives that beats the enemy, and, believe it or not, it is not killing the enemy that beats the enemy.

You can never kill every last one of those who oppose you. One thing the Lefties get right is War breeds more enemies. You kill one, and more will show up angry at the one you killed.

We are fighting what we think of as a 21st century war against a medieval enemy. We are using surgical strikes, GPS-mapping, and targeted bombing, all to insure that we kill as few civilians as possible. That is admirable. But, we may find that it also works against us.

We must understand that our enemy in this war has the advantage of being baptised in a Warrior Creed. Islam itself, teaches them to strike fear into the hearts of the infidel. To fight without ceasing, and to die the noble death of a martyr. Warrior Creeds teach that one should not fear dying. Instead, one should fear dishonor, humiliation, and bringing shame upon one's people.

Remember that the Japanese warriors of WWII would take a knife and plunge it into their belly, slicing themselves from groin to chest if they felt they had let their people down.

The Jihadis we are fighting against are no different.

They are Warriors because they were raised in a Warrior Culture. We were not.

Sure, we've got better hardware, but that won't win us the war. What will win us the war is to strike fear into their hearts. To shame and humiliate them.

What brings shame and humiliation upon a warrior?

Think about warrior types that you know. Think about athletes. Think about the most macho human beings you have layed eyes on in our culture. What do they fear? What causes them to lose their minds? What causes them to lose control of their emotions?

Having their manhood called into question in graphic terms. Having their woman taken away from them. Being shown to be weak. Being forced to part with their image of themselves as the most macho men you will ever lay eyes on.

A few days back I posted an excerpt from an article by an Australian Police Detective who seemed to have the right idea. He describes patrolling a Muslim neighborhood, and the fear his fellow policemen felt at having a brick hurled at their police car:


As we drove away in our marked police car, a half-brick bounced on the roof of the vehicle. The driver kept going.

I said, “What are you doing, they’ve just hit the car with a house brick!”

The young constable said, “Oh, they always do that when we drive past.”

The police were either too scared or too lazy to do anything about it. The damage bill on police cars became costly and these street terrorists grew stronger and the police became purely defensive. You see, the Police Royal Commission was about to start and the police retreated inside themselves knowing that the judicial system considered them easy targets. The police did not want to get hurt or attract Internal Affairs complaints.

Call me stupid, call me a dinosaur, but I made sure that day that at least one person in the group that threw the brick was arrested. I began by approaching the group just as that magistrate had lectured me and the other police involved in the Croydon search warrant. I simply asked who threw the brick. I was greeted with abuse and threats.

I then reverted to the old ways of policing. I grabbed the nearest male and convinced him that it was he who had thrown the brick. His brave mates did nothing. By the time we arrived at the police station, this young fool had become compliant, apologetic and so afraid that he kept crying.

You may not agree with what I did, but I paraded this goose around the police station for all the young police to see what they had become frightened of. For some months after that, police routinely rounded up the family whenever it was warranted.



That is what needs to be done to the Jihadis we are fighting. Of course, we are not allowed to broadcast the humiliation of our enemy for the world to see. It is against the Geneva Convention. But, they are allowed to broadcast the beheading of our friends and family, and our media will happily sell commercial time for us to have the privilege of watching.

What kind of sense does that make?

If we do not change our way of doing battle, I doubt that we will win. I think we will, instead, find ourselves in a kind of stalemate, until, eventually, one of their "sleeper cells" detonates a nuclear weapon in one of our cities. And then, we will act like beasts. We would probably retaliate with nuclear weapons and millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of people will die.

I do not want to see that happen.

And, that is why I brought up the subject of Vlad the Impaler. It seems to me he knew how to strike fear into the heart of his enemy. However, his weakness was that he was truly crazy. He did not go about war with the calm head of a rational being, but instead, like the Jihadis, would turn on anyone who wandered into his path at the wrong time.

We have the advantage of being rational. Now, if we would only also use our advantage in knowing how to thoroughly humiliate an enemy, as we have done time and again throughout Western history.

I am not advocating that we impale tens of thousands of Muslims. But, I am advocating that we do what we need to do to scare them out of their minds. They don't mind dying. It is humiliation that they fear.

If we need to display their gruesome dead bodies for their friends to see, then that might be a better deal than eventually resorting to WMD's, don't you think?

And, if we have to humiliate some top level Al Qaeda terrorists on international television, I don't think that would strip us of every last vestige of our humanity.

We need to get serious, or I fear we will end up being forced to become truly monstrous.

2 comments:

unaha-closp said...

This is what gets me most of all.

We do not treat this as a serious enemy. Probably because they have not proven themselves to be worth the trouble. Will it take a megadeath to get our attention?

I have every confidence that their natural human inventiveness will lead them to improve their effectiveness and achieve that megadeath.

elmers brother said...

I am afraid unaha-closp is right. We don't take the threat seriously. We're too afraid of offending someone or worse yet hurting their feelings.