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Writings and Publications by Joseph B. H. McMillan
"Free Speech, The War on Terror and Islam"
by Joseph B.H. McMillan:
The Problem Identified; Debate or Debacle; Arabs, Islam and the Nazis; Islam and the Dark Ages; Civilization and Tolerance under Islam; Conservatives "calling it as it is"?; Free Speech and Debate; The Consequences; A Solution?; Footnotes
(NOTE: This article is in British English)
The Problem Identified;
In the so-called freedom loving democracies of the world we bade farewell to 2003 with bloodshed in the Middle East, terror threats and alerts, a determination to "preserve our liberties", and a resolve to "win the war on terror".
But 2004 began inauspiciously for achieving our goals, and it has only got worse.
For any enterprise to succeed, especially war, two essential conditions must be scrupulously observed.
The first is to know yourself. The second is to know the competition, or in war, the enemy.
The great Japanese martial artist, Gichin Funakoshi, put it this way: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."(1)
But knowing yourself requires deep reflection on what you believe; what are your fundamental values? Once those values are established, you can then measure the action you intend to take against those values. If the action is to protect fundamental values, you can feel confident in your action and undertake the enterprise with unwavering conviction. Funakoshi summed it up like this: "If introspection reveals the self to be unjust, then no matter how base the opponent may be, will I not be afraid? If introspection reveals the self to be just, then I will go even though against a thousand or ten thousand men."(2)
In war, the most fundamental value usually at stake is freedom. Not freedom in the 'do as you please' sense, but freedom on the model of our Covenant with God; a freedom defined by "obligations", not "rights".
When the Scots declared their independence from England in the year 1320, on the 6th day of April, it was to this freedom that they appealed in what became known as The Declaration of Arbroath: " To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand. ….It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself." (3)
It is also, I trust, self-evident that an essential, perhaps the most fundamental, ingredient of knowing yourself and knowing your enemy is the absence of delusion. For delusion leads to appeasement. And appeasement leads to catastrophe.
In simple terms, if we delude ourselves as to the real identity of the enemy, and we delude ourselves as to his true nature and intentions, we incline ourselves to accommodate his hostility and demands. We appease him. And when he sees our weakness he exploits it by deceiving us as to his true motives and intentions. As Mohammed said, "war is deception."(4)
And the more we delude ourselves and appease our enemy, the worse will be the consequences when the truth does finally dawn on us, and we have to face the facts.
Churchill put it this way: "If you will not fight when you can win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to a time when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of victory. There may be a worse case; you may have to fight when there is no chance of victory because it is better to perish then to live as slaves." (5)
US President Ronald Reagan referred to this quote in a letter regarding his policy towards the Soviet Union.(6) His policy demonstrates a very isolated instance of winning without fighting, but only because he had the courage to defy his detractors and refused to be deluded, or to appease.
Gichin Funakoshi said this regarding winning without martial conflict: "For to win a hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill."(7)
Unfortunately, in the war being conducted against terror today, we are, to varying degrees depending of political persuasion, deluded. Some even actively advocate appeasement, deluding themselves even further that they are not practicing appeasement but "tolerance", "inclusion", "multilateralism", or "cultural diversity".
The problem we shall have in the so-called "war on terror", however, will not be simply identifying the delusion, although that will take a courage which has so far eluded our political leaders. The solution will only be found in a rebirth of independent, and individual, philosophical reflection and analysis, rooted in reality and facts, which the institutions and peoples of the Western democracies are ill-prepared to undertake.
Two relatively minor 'events', one in America, the other in Britain, well illustrate the Herculean task at hand.
The first in time was the publication of a book by two members of the so-called neo-conservative cabal, Messrs Frum and Perle, called An End to Evil.
The other, in Britain, was a quite astonishing spectacle played out in a national newspaper which purported to be an example of 'free speech' in action, in the best of British traditions.
The latter well demonstrates the delusion gripping western nations and, as such, is a good place to start.
Click here for Part 2 of this article, "Debate or Debacle"
Copyright © Joseph BH McMillan 2002 - 2007 All Rights Reserved
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