The Right of National Defense

Writing this post on Memorial Day, my thoughts, of course, turned to those who fought and died to preserve our country. My thoughts also turned to the issue of national defense, in general, and whether we still "get it." We all--well, most of us-- understand defending our nation when it comes under physical attack, e.g., Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and most of us--well, many of us--also understand that at times one must defend our country from threats that have not yet blown through our door, e.g., the Kaiser's and the Nazi Fuehrer's Germany, Il Duce's Italy, Kim's North Korea, and Saddam's Iraq come to mind.

The military provides the most obvious tool we have to defend our nation. For the better part of the past century the USA has kept a formidable military institution with a dazzling range of much-tested capabilities unmatched by any other nation in history. Even under the appalling Mr. Obama, the United States has the only military that can reach and blow apart any place on the globe. I hope that remains the case for many, many years to come. That, however, is nowhere near enough to defend the country from the threats now faced.

We have many other well-funded "defense" institutions, and I hope, for example, that my nearly 34 years in the State Department contributed in some small way to the national defense. As an aside, I have long thought that the Department of State should be renamed the Department of Defense, and our current DoD go back to its original and much more evocative name, the Department of War. The name changes might help members of both Departments with clarity of mission. Some of our national "defense" institutions are OK at their job, e.g., CIA, FBI, NSA; while others, such as State and Justice are highly erratic, and need to be pared down and refocused; and some such as the bloated and wasteful Department of Homeland should be broken up and many of the pieces outright thrown away.

None of our government institutions, however, can over the long term defend our nation without a major change in thinking within our nation about our nation. What kind of a nation do we want? What kind of Western civilization do we want? For that debate, let's go to the UK. There it seems, at least to this outside observer, that the debate has begun in earnest in the wake of the Woolwich savagery which saw two Muslims brutally murder a young soldier in the name of Allah. There are also reports of an attempted killing of a British prison warden by Islamic prisoners "radicalized" in prison. We now see growing outrage over Muslim violence in Britain and what, apparently, was a leftist attempt to alter radically the nature of British society by encouraging immigration from poor countries and have those immigrants become dependent on and vote for Labour. It appears from documents recently made available that this was a planned effort. The Labour politicians involved in altering Britain's immigration laws deliberately sought to change British society, and knew the country would see a rise in social pathologies such as crime as a result. A visitor to any major British city can testify that Labour's plan has succeeded, social pathologies and all. Some two to three million immigrants from the third world entered the UK in less than ten years. The Labour politicians understood that this radical attempt to alter British society would not have public approval, so they did what leftist politicians do best: lie and label as "racist" anybody opposed to this massive social engineering.

Sound vaguely familiar? This is not unlike what happened in the US with the horrid 1965 immigration law which significantly changed the source of our immigration away from Europe to the third world, put the emphasis on "family reunification," and created a whole new class of people dependent on the government and the Democratic party urban machine. The effect, however, has proven more dramatic in Britain for a number of reasons. The US, of course, is much larger and since its creation has been an immigrant-based country; while our founding political and ethical traditions come largely from England, we are used to a relatively high degree of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. That was not the case in the UK or in the rest of Europe where nationalities were akin to racial groupings, or at the very least well defined tribes. Those European countries, consequently, were much less adept at incorporating immigrants into the life of the nation than the more heterogenous less densely populated USA. Massive immigration to Europe from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean has proven more jarring and disruptive than in the US. With, however, the rise of  leftist multiculturalism in the US, and the extension of a vast social welfare state, our once vaunted ability to "melt" immigrants and recast them as Americans has suffered. We have begun increasingly to resemble the European nations as they struggle to retain their tribal identity.

VS Naipaul once remarked that Indian immigrants in Britain never make the final journey; they remain Indian. That is even more so for those followers of totalitarian Islam which insists that those who are not Muslim, must be converted, enslaved, or killed. Islam demands that visitors or residents in the countries where it holds sway pay its strictures and customs great heed or risk severe punishment. Islam also demands that those countries which allow Muslim immigrants to live there must also pay great heed to Islam's strictures and sensitivities or risk severe punishment. As I have said many times, try to build a church in Saudi Arabia, impossible; try to stop a mosque from being built next to Ground Zero in NYC, impossible.  

It seems that perhaps, perhaps, perhaps you can only push the English tribe so far. We perhaps are seeing the stirrings of a "backlash," in others words, of a demand that those who live in England, and enjoy its freedoms and benefits, comply with English law and tradition, or get voted and booted off the island. Before I go on, let me make clear that I am not English, and have no English or any other British ancestry. I, however, have great admiration for Britain and England, in particular, and am heartened to see that--it appears, it seems, just maybe--the British, and the English, in particular, have begun to reach their limit. We see, for example, the rise of the UKIP--somewhat similar to the Tea Party movement here in the US--calling foul on the EU and its socialist/totalitarian pretensions and challenging the increasingly ossified Tory party to stand up for Britain.

We also see the EDL (English Defence League) on the rise, again--I add "apparently." I know that the press habitually labels the EDL "far right extremists." I don't know if they are, and maybe the EDL originates as charged by its opponents with football hooliganism. Having read much of what the EDL has written and gone to its website, I am not clear what it is about their positions, remarkably well-written and thoughtful for a bunch of "football hooligans," that makes them far-right. I do not know what their economic policies are and what they think about socialized medicine and welfare payments or the size of government. The positions they take on defending England from Islamic extremism, however, seem very reasonable and something most Americans could support. I don't find them racist, at all. Again, I don't know them well, and might be embarrassed by some smoking gun firing "racist bullets," but I get suspicious when the media and the political establishment dismiss a grassroots movement as "far right extremists" and provide no evidence. We have heard that here in the US, too, re the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and conservatives in general. I wonder, therefore, would that make those who favor Islamic immigration, left-wing extremists? Hmmm. Well, that part of the equation just might be true given the documents we see coming out of the Freedom of Information process in the UK.

This has gotten a bit long. Let me wrap up by saying that it does no good to have elaborate military and police organizations, and committees looking into extremism, if we let the enemy enter through our front doors. Make no mistake, as I noted before, "We should be at war; instead, we are under attack." It should be a total war, not just restricted to drones and incursions in far away hamlets in Pakistan and North Africa. We need to look, inter alia, at our energy policies that send billions of dollars to corrupt Islamist regimes, and at our immigration and public assistance policies that let the enemy into our countries and then pay them to live here, and transform our societies into a copy of the corrupt societies from which they came.

Islam is not a religion like any other. It is a totalitarian, life destroying creed that has been attacking us since the seventh century.

As we honor our dead on Memorial Day, we must ask, have we kept faith with those whom we asked to risk and even sacrifice their lives for our national defense?