Wednesday, November 15, 2006

How Nuclear Weapons Have Contributed Greatly To The Evil In Our Modern World

My title seems trite and silly to us, a generation of people who grew up hearing such platitudes as, "You can't hug children with nuclear arms." In light of the enormous destructive potential of even one nuclear warhead, my title seems to be trading in the obvious. Of course nuclear weapons have brought great evil into the world. After all, one nuclear bomb ruined Hiroshima's whole day. But, I am not merely saying nukes have brought evil into the world. I'm saying nuclear weapons allow evil to flourish, to grow larger, to have more impact.

Today, I heard military expert Max Boot, on the Dennis Prager radio show, make the very dubious claim that the atomic bomb has not had much impact on modern warfare. The evidence is very much to the contrary.

Nuclear weapons by the fact that they allow for Mutually Assured Destruction, ensure that the major powers, and those that generate the favored ideologies will never go up against each other directly. In the days of World War II, when Germany threatened England or Russia, when the ideologies of the various sides came to a head, those powers and ideologies went to war with each other.

This is an advantage to the world, because the stronger ideology, the one which provides the individual with the strongest raison d'etre, invariably wins. To put it simply, Communism and Democracy beat Nazism because Nazism was at most, a regional ideology, catering only to a very specific kind of fascism; white supremacism. Democracy and Communism, on the other hand, provided meaning on a universal level, which of course, left them the two standing powers in the aftermath of WWII.

However, because of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union and the United States were unable to square off and fight each other for dominance. The result was that both powers fought each other using proxies. The Soviet Union used Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese people to fight the United States. The United States used people like Osama Bin Laden to fight against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

The result was the Cold War; a war which lasted almost four decades. Sure, we managed to avoid direct armed conflict with the Soviet Union, and thus, the inevitable use of nuclear weapons. And yes, that is a good thing. Meanwhile though, great evil was allowed to flourish during those four decades, and it manifested in multiple genocides, wars, and the occupation and subjugation of Eastern Europe. Hundreds of millions of people had their lives squandered in the resulting psychological Holocaust which naturally flows from Communist dictatorship.

And, all this was because of the simple fact that the two powers found themselves incapable of squaring off against each other directly.

One of the major complaints about the execution of the Viet Nam war was that "we fought with one arm tied behind our back. This is another consequence of the military superiority which we have developed. To put it simply, we believe that it would be unfair to hit the enemy with anything near the full-force of our military capabilities. Once again, the result of this is that we allow great evil to flourish and grow. The Cambodian genocide most certainly was the result of our refusal to fight the Vietnam War with the full-force of our military.

Today, we are making the same mistake in the "War on Terror". In fact, I would contend that the very name "The War on Terror" stems from a refusal to confront our enemy, because of the potential resulting consequences. If we were to actually name the enemy in this war, then we would have to truly confront the apocalyptic ideology of the enemy, and we would recognize that we had to destroy them, no matter what. To truly recognize this enemy, Islamofascism, is to understand that there is no victory but by the complete obliteration or humiliation of every last person who subscribes to its ideology. There is no potential for compromise. There are no talking points for negotiation. There is no hope for growing a partnership.

This war will only be won when we have become so desperate that we will do anything.

3 comments:

Snouck said...

Two things;

First: I fully agree that nuclear weapons have totally transformed the picture as far as war is concerned. Massed industrial armies do not make sense anymore in the nuclear age.

Second: I disagree that the war against the Jihadists is not working because the US Armed forces are not "hard" enough.

Look at Iraq. How long did it take for the US Armed Forces to destroy the Iraqi Army?

Three weeks. And they were fully crushed.

And how long is the US Army fighting the insurgents?

Three years. With no end to the fighting in sight. The Insurgents can not beat the Americans and the Americans can not beat the insurgents.

So how can it be that the US forces won so quickly against the Iraqis and have such difficulty in defeating the much lighter armed insurgents?

Because the US forces are not designed to fight insurgents. They are designed to defeat modern armies. Defeating the insurgents is a completely different job that requires a different kind of force.

Due to "institutional inertia" the US have not developed such a force. As long as they keep fighting this war with a unsuited force, the USA will keep getting these results.

What you seem to be discribing in your last but one paragraph is not in line with Western morality. If the US would step outside that morality it would lose the support of the friends it has around the globe. It would even lose the support of its own population and drive people in the arms of the suicidal Left.

That is the last thing we want.

Regards,

Snouck

Pastorius said...

Hi Snouck,
In another comment you left today, you described the terrorists as being "like weeds" which have wrapped themselves throughout the lawn of the West. That is an apt description. And, it also points to the fact that we will have to do very distasteful things to get rid of the terrorist threat in the West. We will have to totally weed not just all terrorists, but all potential terrorists.

And, we will have to convince the Muslim world that they don't want to mess with us anymore.

Your point in this comment to me is a very good point. I acknowledge its logic. But, at the same time, I don't think there is much difference between the army of a Muslim nation and the terrorists who hate us. They all follow the same ideology. And, that ideology has to be humiliated to the point that it will no longer fight.

We won against Germany and Japan by being ruthless. We beat them until they were convinced that they would lose everything if they even dared to move one step more.

That is the way war works.

The way we are fighting currently is not according to the chthonian rules of war.

You and I do probably differ on this subject. However, as I said, I acknowledge the logic of your point, and I hope things turn out more the way you believe they will rather than the way I think they are going to turn out.

Anonymous said...

Consequences of nuking Mecca:

http://www.faithfreedom.org/oped/VernonRichards50806.htm

Has the threat already been made?

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42272