Terms
Let us make precise and clear-cut the terms we should be using.
Aristotle wrote that A is A; you may also call it B, but it always remains A. A thing is what it is and, to say it is something else, is to deny reality. There is a lot of denial of reality going around these days.
As John Adams wrote: 'Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence'.
POINT 1: There is no "War in Iraq" or "War in Afghanistan". Like the Pacific and Europe in World War II, Iraq and Afghanistan are just parts of a larger war. Unlike them, they are not separate from each other. Therefore, they are part of the Middle East Theatre of Operations [METO] as the Pacific was the PTO and Europe the ETO.
POINT 2: Many on the Left and some on the Right want to "end the War". There are only two ways to end a war: (1) by achieving Victory or (2) by being Defeated. A pullout, before Victory is achieved, is Defeat. They want Defeat. Pullout may be the best policy―I am not arguing that here―but, leaving without achieving our objective is Defeat.
POINT 3: We are engaged in a War Against Islam. The term is more correct than "War against Islamo-Fascism" or "War On Terror".
Islam has been at war with all non-Muslims since the time of its founder, Muhammad [his name be cursed]. Like the Hundred Years' War, there have been periods of peace in this long conflict, but the Muslim has never stopped believing that he is at war with all non-Muslims. He can't: Allah commands that all of the world be conquered in his name and he must submit, in all things, to the will of Allah [the word Islam means "submission", sometimes rendered as "surrender"]. Any periods of peace we in the West have enjoyed have only occurred after we have dealt them such a devastating blow that they have not been able to wage their jihad and then have pursued polices that have kept them subjugated. This began to fade in the latter half of the 20th Century as we forgot the dangers posed by this militant religion and as they regrouped under new and committed leaders.
If you doubt that Islam is at war with all non-Muslims, keep in mind this:
Islamic apologists often point out that Islam is not a monolith and that there are differences of opinion among the different Islamic schools of thought. That is true, but, while there are differences, there are also common elements. Just as Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christians differ on many aspects of Christianity, still they accept important common elements. So it is with Islam. One of the common elements to all Islamic schools of thought is jihad, understood as the obligation of the Ummah to conquer and subdue the world in the name of Allah and rule it under Sharia law. The four Sunni Madhhabs (schools of fiqh [Islamic religious jurisprudence]) -- Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali -- all agree that there is a collective obligation on Muslims to make war on the rest of the world. Furthermore, even the schools of thought outside Sunni orthodoxy, including Sufism and the Jafari (Shia) school, agree on the necessity of jihad. When it comes to matters of jihad, the different schools disagree on such questions as whether infidels must first be asked to convert to Islam before hostilities may begin (Osama bin Laden asked America to convert before Al-Qaeda’s attacks); how plunder should be distributed among victorious jihadists; whether a long-term Fabian strategy against dar al-harb is preferable to an all-out frontal attack; etc.
[Source: Gregory M. Davis, Islam 101, section 4g, found at http://www.jihadwatch.org/islam101/]
They have been at war with us for centuries and we, therefore, have been at war with them. We are engaged in a War Against Islam whether we want to say so or not. In an interview with a Pakistani TV network on 23 July 2008, Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid, Al-Qaeda's No. 3 man and top commander in Afghanistan, has this to say: “Islam does not distinguish between the American people and the American government, since both are in a state of war with Islam”.
[Source: http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD200008]
POINT 4: The term "Islamo-Fascism" seems to have been created by Leftists. Since (1) they wrongly place fascism on the Right, (2) they believe [rightly] Muslims want to establish a theocratic regime on Earth, and (3) anything political that has any connection with religion is bad and emanates out of rightwing thinking, the term makes sense to them. Therefore, the term is nothing but a way to associate Islam with the right-wing. Muslims believe in a totalitarian way of governing; in submission [that word] to an all-powerful Islamic leader or leaders.
POINT 5: As to the term "War On Terror", it is just plain silly: how can you wage war on a thing?
POINT 6: What is fascism? It is when a government allows private property to exist, but controls and manages the use and disposal of property in all its forms. Citizens retain all of the burdens and responsibilities associated with property ownership, but are not allowed to control and shape its use.
As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.
[Source: Sheldon Richman, The Concise Encylcopedia Of Economics, Liberty Fund, found at http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html]
On the political spectrum, therefore, it is located between modern liberalism and socialism.
POINT 7: What is socialism? It is when a government allows no private property to exist, and controls and manages the use and disposal of property in all its forms. Citizens are not allowed to control their lives and are subject to the whims of bureaucrats and officials. If they retain freedoms and liberties, they do so at the discretion of them. On the political spectrum, therefore, it is the next logical stage after fascism; some would argue that it lies between fascism and communism.
POINT 8: What is pragmatism? It is a tool used by Leftists, or those operating under the influence of Leftist logic, to achieve Utopian ends—heaven on earth through social, political, cultural, and spiritual engineering. It is merely a tool of ideology, part of the means to an end.
POINT 9:The Big Lie - When confronted with truths that reflect unpleasantly on them, the Leftists deflect it buy claiming over-an-over ad nauseum that these truths apply to and are products of the Right. This practice is known as The Big Lie. It has been successfully practiced by the Left since, at the very least, the French Revolution. Thus, we have the now-widespread belief that the Nazis and the Black Shirts of Italy were right-wingers when the reality-the truth-is they were both people of the Left. I suspect the violent objections from the Left to conservatives use of the term 'fascist' arise from the fact that they have spent well over seventy years trying to convince the world of The Big Lie that it is not and never has been a Leftist ideology.
How does one practice this distortion truth and why is it effective? In a report issued during World War II by the OSS, the author provided an explanation for all practitioners by describing how Hitler practiced it:
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
By repeating their lies over and over, the Left creates a false reality that supplements the real world. In this false reality, the lie is the truth, the truth is the lie. A is not A. [But we know that A must always be A.]
The Left also practices a variation of The Big Lie that I like to call The Big Deception which involves a Big Deflection away from the reality of the situation. None of their policies or actions can survive direct questioning, so the Leftists must turn the tables on the questioners and make it seem as though the inquisitors have bad or evil intentions. Overtime and after constant and unrelenting hectoring, the Left's way of thinking triumphs. They successfully infect enough people so that this diseased mode of thinking becomes chronic, deep-rooted, instinctual. If the Devil's greatest triumph was that he convinced people he did not exist, the Left's greatest triumph has been to convince people that the Leftist way of thinking is normal. It is not. It is a perversion of reason and a horribly mutant form of logic. It is antithetical to human life. Nothing but decay and destruction are left [pun intended] in it's wake.
Paco states what a lot of us are thinking these days:
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