Fourteen years later, I have nothing fundamentally new to add.
The horror of that day has long since been eclipsed in my mind by the consequent exposure of our own weakness, and our determined unwillingness to squarely confront the enemy that brought such horror to us, in the years since. Our appetite for self-deception and willfully naïve thinking far exceeds anything I’d have imagined. Our foundational institutions, from academia to journalism to entertainment and the arts to government and even our military, have been extensively compromised beyond likely repair by determined ideological termites whose goal of an ever-weaker America is now at hand. The realities of the day did not shake their belief systems, as I had once supposed an attack on our nation would. Nor has the steady litany of attacks in the years since — from London, to Madrid, to Beslan, to Bali, to Mumbai, to Kenya, to Paris, to Moscow, to the Fort Hood shooter, to the Beltway Snipers … the list goes on and on. Nor has the rise of ISIS, with all its attendant barbarity plainly on display for the whole world to see. ISIS operates with free reign because we — The United States in particular, and the West in general — lack the resolve and moral conviction to do anything substantial to stop them. We are now led by people deluded enough to believe that weakness is somehow strength, and that our implacable and barbaric enemies can be persuaded by olive branches and “Coexist” bumper-sticker platitudes. These are people who led us to abandon all gains in Iraq, with our intentions and timetable so clearly advertised that we might as well have hung out a “This territory up for grabs” sign. ISIS is expanding its reach virtually unchecked, and is successfully recruiting from Western populations, for God’s sake — because unlike us, they actually believe in themselves and what they are doing.
Soon, Iran — whose political and spiritual leaders have been unambiguous about their intentions toward Israel, the United States, and the West — will have nukes. They’ll have them because, gullible fools that we’ve become, we’ve effectively surrendered on that front too.
I’ve pleaded. I’ve striven to educate. As have many others, with much greater dedication and skill. At this point, those who can be awakened have been. Those who do not wish to see, won’t.
I’m weary of seeing things I don’t want to see, that few others are willing to see and acknowledge. I have no patience to stand by and watch a slow cultural suicide, nor do I especially want to spend years studying the mechanics of self-inflicted civilizational decline when there are far higher aspirations for this civilization of ours to reach. I have zero respect or patience for PC scolds and their demonstrably flawed multicultural platitudes, whose net effect ends up somewhere between naïve ignorance and willful sabotage. We, who have managed to welcome and happily “Coexist” with people of just about every other belief system in the world, have encountered an enemy that has been pretty clear about its lack of interest in “Coexist”-ing with us, and with our cultural foundations now compromised due to the willful actions of some among us, we are under-equipped to confront that reality and deal with it. We’re in grave danger of losing everything that matters, not because a handful of Jihadist scumbags attacked us on 9/11/2001, but because far too many among us are willing and eager to choose cultural surrender as an alternative to fighting and decisively defeating those rotten bastards.
It seems maybe, remotely possible that in the final, twilight years of this once great Civilization of ours, the lunatics who labored to institute such weakness might, as they finally start to notice things crumbling around them, look back and wonder whether they’d perhaps made a mistake or two — long, long after it’s far too late to do anything to turn the tide. I’m not holding my breath.
We’re a culture in serious need of a reboot, and I’ve turned my efforts to finding a way for that to happen — for some remnant of our indomitable spirit to have a chance to thrive again unhindered. Because in the end, mere physical survival and avoiding playing a part in the fulfillment of a Jihadi death wish for another day isn’t what it’s about. It’s the long-term survival of the essence of who we are that matters. And how that goes … is entirely up to us.
An amazing 70 years ago today, the Czech town of Plzeň was liberated by the United States Army.
Thousands of residents, visitors, and veterans gathered to celebrate this anniversary with the Plzeň Liberation Festival (Slavnosti svobodi Plzeň), as they have since 1990 when recognition of the day was no longer outlawed. My thoughts have been with the surviving veterans and our true friends the Czechs, as they celebrated this extraordinary day of hope and freedom. Na zdraví!
Perhaps one of the most moving events of the week took place on Tuesday when around 300 Czech teenagers from local schools gathered in a city cultural centre to hear veterans from Plzeň’s liberation. Altogether there were around a dozen veterans, now mostly in their nineties, both from the US and Belgium. Their broad message was simple: ‘We helped to liberate this county 70 years ago. Now it is up to you to make sure you safeguard the liberty you now enjoy.’ At the end of the session many of the veterans and audience had tears in their eyes.
Don’t miss this photo essay from 2010, which I mentioned a few years ago — especially the story of Zdenka Sladkova, who has tended a memorial at a U.S. pilot’s crash site since 1945.
After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.
This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman. This was not an “un-Islamic” attack by a bunch of thugs—the perpetrators could be heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. Nor was it spontaneous. It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow terror, and in that it has worked.
The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what webelieve about Islam truly doesn’t matter. This type of violence, jihad, is what they, the Islamists, believe.
and this:
Those responsible for the slaughter in Paris, just like the man who killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, are seeking to impose terror. And every time we give in to their vision of justified religious violence, we are giving them exactly what they want.
…
How we respond to this attack is of great consequence. If we take the position that we are dealing with a handful of murderous thugs with no connection to what they so vocally claim, then we are not answering them. We have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer pretend that it is possible to divorce actions from the ideals that inspire them.
This would be a departure for the West, which too often has responded to jihadist violence with appeasement. We appease the Muslim heads of government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of peace, and we oblige.
What do we get in return? Kalashnikovs in the heart of Paris. The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.
There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against the staff of Charlie Hebdo. It is the obligation of the Western media and Western leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom of expression, whether in satire on any other form. The West must not appease, it must not be silenced. We must send a united message to the terrorists: Your violence cannot destroy our soul.
Claire Berlinski, who happened upon the scene of the shooting, wrote an impassioned response:
The assailants are as yet at liberty. I hope they’ll be dead by the time you read this. But if not: You want me too? Come get me. Because nothing short of killing me — and many more of my kind — will ever shut us up.
And if you don’t believe that now, you’ll believe it very soon. Because there are more of us willing to die for that freedom than those of you eager to take it from us. And soon you will find out that those of us willing to die for that freedom are also much better at killing than you.
So come and get me. Je suis Charlie.
On the other hand, there’s this: Ostracized by Cowardly West, Charlie Hebdo Faced the Islamists Alone. The point, I fear, is tragically valid: For all the genuinely well-intentioned chorus of “Je suis Charlie“ today, no one seemed to be saying it when it would have mattered most: before the staff of Charlie Hebdo were murdered.
My cousin wrote gloomily from Marseille:
Our democracy is also slipping away as you have seen. The crazy Islamists are here and everywhere very numerous. They were accomodated, nourished, and now they kill us.
Soon Arabs will be more numerous than native French and there will be a risk of civil war, or of a government of the extreme right that’s no better.
In this moment there is a severe malaise in France, one senses the coming catastrophe but does not dare to believe in it.
Antonio Martinez, on the widely-seen video of the Jihadists shooting a police officer who lay prone on the sidewalk outside the Charlie Hebdo offices:
Imagine if the free citizen of France who shot this video from the balcony had an AR-15 instead of an iPhone.
I’m at a loss for what else to add at the moment. For my part, I’d hoped we’d have the chance to do far worse than kill the scumbag perpetrators. I’d like us to have had the chance to hurt their delicate feelings some more — to make them feel bad about, and give some further thought to, the primitive, backward worldview they champion.
I feel fresh out of patience. I’ve begged and pleaded about this stuff before. If we haven’t seen enough by now to wake us up from our slumber of self-deception and force us to confront the reality of the enemy we’re up against, I don’t dare to imagine what more it will take…
I published the following on September 11th, 2004, on another site I had back then. That site having gone the way of homepage.mac.com, I thought I’d reunite this post with the rest of my 9/11 series.
Plenty has happened in the decade since, and I’m glad to see that we did ultimately rebuild at the World Trade Center site, even as I’m still concerned that it took us as long as it did.
In September 2001, I was living about 110 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. According to published flight path information, American Airlines Flight 11 passed not so very far from overhead on that morning three years ago, on its way toward New York City and its collision with the north tower of the World Trade Center. I visited Ground Zero two weeks after the terrorist attacks, at which time the fence perimeter allowed one to get within two blocks or so of the site — close enough to experience the twisted wreckage of the towers’ remaining outer walls, the debris everywhere, the people working to search for human remains and clear the site, as something undeniably real. And amid the complex knot of feelings that continued to unravel in the sunken pit of my stomach — including the struggle to address the seemingly impossible question of how any human being could be capable of following through on, much less conceiving of such a vicious attack — I also felt, and still very much feel today, a strong conviction about at least one thing: Ultimately, we must rebuild.
Why care so much about putting some new buildings in Lower Manhattan? After all, the catastrophe of that day is over, its victims irreversibly claimed. Nothing we do now can bring them back to us.
I care about what we do to rebuild, because the towers symbolize something positive to me — they were monuments to human progress, to what people in a free and voluntary society are capable of achieving. And I care because I see vital symbolism in the act of rebuilding itself, of finding and enacting a design that not only mourns respectfully “They are gone”, but also affirms with conviction “We are still here.” That our culture is not going away; that we will continue to aspire, dream, strive, design, build, achieve, and live, in many ways, as we have. That we will create our own future rather than accept the fate chosen for us.
But how to rebuild? What to construct in the emptiness where the towers once stood? For me, architect Sherri Tracinski hit on the key issue in her 2002 article written in disappointed response to earlier WTC redevelopment proposals for buildings that fell short of the the Twin Towers’ stature:
Anything less than a new tower at the same height — or higher — is demonstrating to those who hate us that we intend to cut back, roll over, and give up. It is not the quick, violent suicide of putting a gun to your head, but the slow suicide of a man who has given up trying to live.
“Throughout history,” she reminds us, “many great buildings have been damaged and destroyed in war. What a society does to rebuild afterward is an omen for its future survival.” [emphasis mine]
Twenty-five hundred years ago, a marauding Persian army sacked the Greek city of Athens and burned the Parthenon, the city’s most important temple. What did the ancient Athenians do? They didn’t decide they should make a smaller temple so that it would be less of a target in the future. They didn’t decide that they were guilty of offending the enemy with their wealth and success. They didn’t leave a barren plateau to commemorate the men who died fighting the Persians. Instead, after they roundly defeated the enemy, they rebuilt bigger and better.
The old Parthenon had been built of limestone. The new Parthenon was built of the finest material the Athenians could find—white marble—and decorated with inspiring sculptures of heroes. It was the greatest Greek temple ever built and marked the beginning of the Athenian “Golden Age.”
It is in the wake of historic precedents such as this one that we are left to decide what it is that we will do. Will we “cut back” half-heartedly? Or will we summon the will to replace what was taken from us with something still more ambitious? In July, the cornerstone was laid for the first and tallest building now scheduled to be constructed at the site. The planned “Freedom Tower” would, at 1,776 feet, stand taller still than did the 1,362 and 1,368 foot Twin Towers. Yet if the tone and content of last Tuesday’s Frontline report “Sacred Ground” is to be believed, the construction of the tower seems anything but certain — jeopardized by infighting among rival architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, developer Larry Silverstein, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the city and state governments of New York. Will we blow it by letting the project become mired in egos and politics? Will we be persuaded that we shouldn’t even care — or maybe, just maybe should even be glad to see the towers gone?
It’s at this point that I struggle to fathom stuff like this. It takes a pretty twisted worldview to attempt to brush aside the viciousness and human toll of September 11th and invoke a phrase like “radical architectural criticism” to describe the deliberate flying of aircraft full of people into buildings full of people. People, some of whom chose to jump to their deaths rather than accept the fate that had been chosen for them. Maus creator Art Spiegelman really ought to know better. And he ought to know all about what life in an actual police state is like. James Lileks takes him deservedly to task, on the eve of publication of Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. (There’s no anchor, so you’ll have to scroll to about the bottom third of the page to find the part about Spiegelman. There’s a pointed note about journalism and the recent carnage in Beslan along the way. Link courtesy of Instapundit.)
That’s how Spiegelman would have us feel about the towers, our culture, and ourselves? Thanks, Art. We’ll remember that.
Clearly there is nothing to stop us from succumbing to this kind of thinking if we choose to do so. How we respond, how we move on, is our choice. I’m moved to remember Senator McCain’s words as he declared in his gentle, measured tone, “What our enemies have sought to destroy is beyond their reach. It cannot be taken from us. It can only be surrendered.” And so indeed, it is left up to us to decide what to do next. We can resign ourselves to accept empty footprints and a hole in the sky, or some modest concession, where the towers once stood. Or we can rebuild with determination to reach still greater heights.
Those who perished needlessly in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, can never be replaced. But I believe we can best honor their memory by our commitment to keeping our enterprising culture alive and thriving.
What we have built still stands tall in our hearts.
Links
Frederick Turner’s “Honor in the Sky” provides another interesting take on the meaning of rebuilding, and offers the imaginative if maybe not practical (?) idea of placing a garden memorial atop the new building(s).
Team Twin Towers [link broken] hosts a page of comments from survivors and others who would like to see the towers or something like them rebuilt.
Another 9/11 has rolled around. And while the grief and anger are still there, and we have renewed cause for concern this year in the rise of ISIS/ISIL, I find that my feelings seem not particularly more pronounced on this day relative to any other. The problems that we are obliged to squarely face endure, and are relevant every day of the year, not just on anniversaries of the September 11th, 2001 Jihadist attacks on the United States.
The sickening brutality of ISIS/ISIL and its ideological fellow travelers such as Boko Haram has been something for the world to behold. If we cannot now see with complete clarity what these scumbags are about, I don’t know what it will take. The fact of things as I see it is that ISIS/ISIL are but a particularly awful symptom, one that is enabled and allowed to exist only to the extent that we lack the resolve to call them what they are and commit ourselves unreservedly to their complete and unconditional defeat.
The broader, underlying problem we face is an erosion of cultural confidence, and I’m sad to say it’s the predictable result of decades of steady, dedicated work by many among us — people whose aim has been to demoralize us and gradually chisel away at the foundations of our belief in who we are and the way that we live. An event such as 9/11 should have brought us to our senses, it seems to me, and brought an end to that idle self-doubt, seemingly born of boredom with years of relative safety and security. But I’ve been proven more wrong in that expectation than in any other of my life. Rather than have a change of heart, our cultural termites dug in and continued their toil. It makes no sense to me to see a culture of great achievement, worthy of celebration and of a strident and confident defense, in such willful and sometimes self-recriminating denial about the threats posed to it. But there it is. It’s an aspect of human nature that I suspect I will continue to struggle to understand for many years to come.
I do feel I’ve made progress, though, in casting off the shadow of gloom this past year and a half or so. It feels as if my thinking has shifted to a point of: OK. So that’s how it is. What are you going to do about it?
Our present condition is not cause to sit in idle resignation. It’s cause to get up, dust ourselves off, and fix the things that matter. And despite all the potential reasons for gloom, I’m doing it with gratitude in my heart, a cheerful demeanor, and a smile on my face — because I’ve learned that no matter what, one cannot allow others to drive him to despair. To have hope of prevailing, we must maintain a steady and undaunted focus on all that is positive in our love for what we hold dear. We must make that love stronger, more resilient, and more lasting than our enemies’ bitterness, brutality, and hate. It’s what I’ve been striving to do, and aim to continue to do, with The No Fear Pioneer (so please give a listen, and stay tuned for more to come).
That’s it for now. As in previous years, I may follow up with some links and quotes later, as I read good work by others. Below are links to my previous years’ 9/11 posts, including the 2009 retelling of my own peripheral but deeply affecting experience of that awful day. As before, I pledge myself never to forget — nor misremember. May we find our way to better times.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
