With the release of Fitna, it is a good time to consider the question of freedom in the face of Jihadist terror. Freedom is defined by choice. Choice defines us. The choices we make and do not make define who we are. On a global scale, the intricate webwork of choices that people make interact with each other to create the past, the present and the future.
The unrecognized war we are in goes by many names, the War on Terror, the Jihad and the Anti-Jihad, the Fall of An Empire and the Rise of Another Empire or even simply 9/11. Yet, it’s true name is the War of Choice.
The American experiment in constitutional democracy was an experiment in choice. After millennia of tyranny, the Founders staked the survival of a nation on the belief that a people could be entrusted with the power to conduct their own affairs and to choose their own leaders. Democracy has had a mixed record over the years, yet it has a far better record than tyranny does. The American experiment was a triumph for freedom of choice and helped to spread that freedom across Europe and parts of the world.
The rise of Islam, too very much centered on choice. Before Mohammed's reign, Mecca was a city that favored many religions and while the dunes and valleys held no utopias, still Jews, Christians and Pagans co-existed in the deserts of Arabia. The coming of Islam changed all that and the wave of slaughter that began there spread across the Middle East and swept across the world into Asia, Africa and Europe bearing with it a wave of corpses and leaving massacred and enslaved populations in its wake. Where before men had a choice, now they had none.
The very definition of Islam is not merely peace as its apologists would claim, but peace through submission and total surrender. If the American experiment was built on freedom of choice, Islam was built on freedom from choice. Freedom from choice remains the fundamental appeal of Islam today, harnessing the purity of tyranny to sweep away the confusing welter of choices that the wave of Western cultural and technology has brought into the slums and tribal realms of the Ummah.
Like all totalitarian philosophies from the storefront cult to the vast slave empires of Russia and Germany, the primary appeal of Islam is its very simplicity. Islam removes all questions and doubts, to submit to Islam is to know the peace of never having to think for oneself, to ponder or to worry or doubt. Islam offers absolute freedom from choice and in returns demands everything including the willingness of its worshipers to kill and die in its name.
The fateful meeting between American democracy and Islamic theocracy on the world stage is a confrontation between freedom and tyranny, not merely in terms of political systems, but in the soul of man. The battle between America and Islam is not only a struggle between political and economic systems or the fate of nations, it is a question of whether any individual may think for himself, speak for himself, believe what he chooses to believe and live his life as he sees fit.
The world today turns in the shadow of the chains being forged for it from Islamabad to Tehran. Democracy's rise in the 20th century witnessed three bloody counter-reactions in the form of world girdling tyrannies determined to stamp it out. The first of those tyrannies was Marxist. The second of those tyrannies was Fascist. and the third and last of those tyrannies is Islamic.
America defeated the tyranny of Fascism on the battlefield and the tyranny of Marxism at the calculator, but how and whether we will defeat the tyranny of Islam is as of yet unknown. The strength of tyranny lies in its inflexibility, in its refusal to surrender and its disdain for the mortal weaknesses of its subjects-- yet those are also its weaknesses. Democracy is more unstable than tyranny yet more flexible and far more innovative. As Marxist and Fascist systems of government have time and time again sowed the seeds of their own destruction, so too Islamist regimes and factions bring about their own downfall.
The fanatical drive toward an Islamist tyranny is premised on the belief that only such a system of government can repair the corruption, the malfeasance and the deprivation and humiliation of Arab and Muslim states. The paradox of a tyranny built on a popular belief in its efficacy is that the tyrannical regime can never deliver on its own populist promises.
Lenin promised the Russian people three things, peace, land and bread and delivered none of the three. With the rise of the Communist tyranny across Russia the peasants found that their land had been seized, bread shortages were commonplace and war was the primary purpose of the Soviet Union. This is typical of tyrannies in that their populist phase quickly gives way to their militaristic phase as the tyranny attempts to distract its own people from its failures by cultivating enemies. This paranoid mindset is both meant to divert the people from the regime's failures and to buy time for its own hopeless economic programs to work by engaging in a Ponzi scheme of conquering other countries to help offset its own economic failures and obsessive militarization.
Both Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan launched doomed wars because their own economies and resources were insufficient to meet their national and military obligations. Like Islamist regimes, the paranoid mindset of their ideology made this into a smooth transition from promising prosperity to delivering devastation. Yet large portions of the human race when given a choice will prefer the promised offered by totalitarian ideologies over the conditional prosperity of democracy, because it takes away the most difficult part of life, choice.
It would seem outwardly irrational that so many people would consciously reject the freedom to choose, that men would bow their heads in indolent slavery, that women would prefer degradation and oppression for themselves and mutilation and death for their children-- yet choice is the most difficult burden that we carry through life. Being free people means that we have no one to blame but ourselves for our failures and so heavy is that burden that even most of the free nations of the world are increasingly choosing to wrap themselves in the mummifying shroud of socialism, the crib and mobile of the nanny state, the safety and security of services incompetently and inefficiently provided at no charge beyond the majority of your taxable income.
What after all is choice but the burden of humanity, the task of free will set on us by our presence in this world. Life becomes so much easier when choice is taken away and given the vast echoing clangor of a technological culture whose mightiest towers reach to the sky and whose rockets sail beyond the gaseous sea of earth's atmosphere to the spheres and rocks that travel around our solar system, is it any wonder that so many choose to retreat into the caves with Osama and to glare balefully from the darkness at the light.
Tyranny is the retreat from freedom, the abandonment of choice and the assault on humanity itself for choice is what makes us individuals and the goal of all tyranny is to remove choice and replace individuality with an echoing conformity, row after row of men across the globe bent supinely with their faces in the dirt toward Mecca, once a symbol of religious freedom and now transformed into a grim reminder of the resurgence of an old movement toward global tyranny.
