I have to thank James Gorski for inspiring me to dig my heels in and take on Andrew McCarthy’s, “The Grand Jihad,” in earnest. This book rightfully belongs on the same shelf next to where you keep your copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
No matter how much religion you believe, no matter how securely you hold to the fundamental rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no matter how you uphold the rule of law in Western society, these values, in themselves, won’t protect you.
We’re up against an army of wartime consigliere’s to borrow from The Godfather, who have honed their religious, philosophical, tactical, economic, political, organizational and emotional war-making crafts for over a millennium. They’re very thorough, they’re very effective, there is no domain of life that they have overlooked or failed to infiltrate, and they will never give up.
That’s the long war against the West that we are in. These decade-long shooting battles are no more than skirmishes in the long war.
The righteousness of liberty, the benefits to the human condition that directly accrue from individualism, these fundamentals are seen as the source of many evils by Islamists and their trampy bedfellows on the left. For them, freedom is submission to the collective. We may use the same words, but we don’t speak the same language.
I wish there was a vast right wing conspiracy. We need that level of dedication to effectively fight the very real Islamic and totalitarian conspiracies. But it’s not in the nature of individualists to conspire! The source of our character and moral strength is a tactical weakness in the long war.
We cannot, we dare not, disengage from these battles. To disengage is to accept defeat. It’s a shitty deal. The shittiest in fact. But there you have it.