It can happen here

 I have been busy lately, so have let postings sit for a while.  So, let's catch up, shall we?  A couple of days ago, Andrea Widburg had an impassioned essay on The anti-Enlightenment fury that makes Hamas's attack against Israel stand out.

War is part of the human condition. For a very long time, though, as part of its civilizing process, the West has had a single overriding rule of warfare: We acknowledge that civilians, including children, will (sadly) be collateral damage in any war. However, we do not deliberately wage war directly against civilians. Non-westernized Muslims, however, operate outside of this rule, fighting wars with Stone Age savagery. That’s why it's no surprise to learn about beheaded babies. I offer the following thoughts and others about the events and commentary following the Hamas massacres.

Beginning with the Enlightenment in the West, a new idea arose: Civilians are not legitimate military targets. Yes, they’ll be caught in the crossfire and suffer from the disease and famine that always follow in war’s wake, but the legitimate targets are your armed opponents. That’s one of the reasons the British painted the Native Americans as “savages.” In war, the Native Americans massacred all civilians (except for those children they kidnapped to prop up their flagging demographics), and the British had forgotten by then that they had once fought that way, too.

While Widburg's assessment rings true, she forgets, or never knew that there is a wider reason for the idea that civilians are not legitimate military targets. It began to dawn on the Western leaders that wars depleted societies of valuable treasure and people. Wars, in other words, were not desirable. But if one did not want to be fighting in the future, one must kill all the enemy personnel, not just the soldiers; literally all of them including civilians, children, babies, women. Otherwise, children would grow up hating the ones who invaded and killed their fathers. Eventually, this would mean fighting them again. But this time, they would wreak the same thing on you as you had on them. Thus we ceased waging war as we had for a combination of practical and moral reasons.

But in the case of the Muslims, they are not necessarily fighting for profit, though there is that. Muslim jihad permits them to keep what they take from the enemy. But they are also fighting for their god, known by many names but most recognized as Satan.  That is who Allah is.  What the Muslims lack on sophistication and power, they make up for in sheer savagery:

There is no emotion more potent than fear, and Muhammed understood that, if you can overwhelm a population through sheer horror, you will probably win. So rape the women, behead the babies, kidnap people, torture people, mutilate corpses, and generally do whatever it takes to win. That’s how you conquer a swath of the world just north and south of the equator, killing hundreds of millions (Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc.) as you go.

So, none of the headlines coming out of Israel about mass rapes, beheaded babies, families slaughtered in their homes, children in chicken cages (which hasn’t seemed to bother AOC), old women massacred at bus stops, and generalized mass murder surprises me. This is what Muslims do; it’s what they’ve always done because it works. Cow a civilian population sufficiently, and you win.

Widburg does recognize that we are also in the crosshairs of the Muslims as well as our own home-grown Leftists terrorists. I will have more on that in another posts. Let us just close with this quote from Widburg's piece:

During the years leading up to WWII, a common phrase was, “It can’t happen here” (which Sinclair Lewis used in his novel about an American fascist’s rise to power.) Americans believed that the Constitution insulated them from fascism. As we’ve seen, if fascists (and that’s what modern leftists are, for they’re an amalgam of corporatism and statism) take over a nation’s institutions, the Constitution will not help.

Moreover, when it comes to massacres by cultures that do not view civilians as non-combatants, think about our southern border. Wayne Allyn Root has the best of the several analyses I’ve seen about the fact that, since 2009, Democrats, with no pushback from Vichy Republicans, have been using the open border to bring into America millions of military-aged men from China, Muslim countries, and other non-Enlightenment countries. With that kind of army, it can happen here.

If you don't have one, buy a gun. Get training and carry that gun to defend yourself and your family. Get ammunition. If you can afford it, buy more than one so you can pass one to your neighbor if things get dicey. It can happen here.