Just as the once apparently doomed forces of western liberalism defeated totalitarian fascism in 1945 and totalitarian communism in 1991, we now face a war against totalitarian fundamentalism. (Note that I mean western as a moral appellation, not a geographic designation.) Arnold Kling has a strong essay on the war against terrorism, which mentions two other great pieces:
Elliot Cohen points out that the war on terrorism is better described as World War IV (where WW III was the Cold War). As Cohen says:
The enemy in this war is not “terrorism” — a distilled essence of evil, conducted by the real-world equivalents of J. K. Rowling’s Lord Voldemort, Tolkien’s Sauron or C. S. Lewis’s White Witch — but militant Islam. The enemy has an ideology, and an hour spent surfing the Web will give the average citizen at least the kind of insights that he might have found during World Wars II and III by reading “Mein Kampf” or the writings of Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Those insights, of course, eluded those in the West who preferred — understandably, but dangerously — to define the problem as something more manageable, such as German resentment about the Versailles Treaty, an exaggerated form of Russian national interest, or peasant resentment of landlords taken a bit too far. In the reported words of one survivor of the Holocaust, when asked what lesson he had taken from his experience of the 1940s, “If someone tells you that he intends to kill you, believe him.”
Ralph Peters in 1998 described the Seven Signs of Non-competitive States:
- Restrictions on the free flow of information.
- The subjugation of women.
- Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
- The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
- Domination by a restrictive religion.
- A low valuation of education.
- Low prestige assigned to work.
Sounds a lot like the Arab states (other than Turkey, which is actually Islamic but not Arab).
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