Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 5)
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<p>Changes are deliberately not marked.  Read the whole thing, this is<br />
a final pre-publication draft.  Most of the changes from version 4<br />
are deletions of excess verbiage.</p>
<p>Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from<br />
across the blogosphere.  Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.<br />
Since this process has to close sometime, I&#8217;m declaring that there<br />
wuill be at most one pre-publication draft.</p>
<p>I will post a fair copy of the final version.  For legal purposes,<br />
this work is &copy;2002 by Eric S. Raymond.  Email me for distribution<br />
terms &#8212; I&#8217;m not especially interested in making money from it, but I<br />
want some artistic control of how it&#8217;s used.</p>
<p>However, this may not happen for a week, as I am about to go on<br />
the Linux Lunacy Caribbean cruise.</p>
<p>Brian O&#8217;Connell has supplied this excellent button for<br />
JavaScript-aware browsers:<br />
<img name="aim" width="100" height="40" border="0"<br />
src="http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/aim-off.png"<br />
onmouseover="swtchon('aim')" onmouseout="swtchoff('aim')"<br />
alt="Click to Read" title="Click to Read"/></p>
<p>And Erica from Sperari has suppiled a very tasteful static button:<br />
<img name="aim-thumb-button.png" border="0"<br />
src="http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/aim-button-thumb.jpg" alt='AIM button' /></p>
<p>These buttons will be included with the final version.</p>
<hr />
<p>WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed<br />
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,<br />
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political<br />
categories;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive<br />
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding<br />
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of<br />
evil for the act of evil;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist&#8217;<br />
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the<br />
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically<br />
descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more<br />
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to<br />
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to<br />
the aggressors is our only practical instrument<br />
of self-defense;</p>
<p>WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the premises of<br />
the anti-idiotarian position:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death<br />
perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the<br />
hands of terrorists by rogue states;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT the terrorists and their state sponsors have declared and<br />
are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but<br />
against its core virtues: against the freedom of thought and speech<br />
and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of<br />
women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the<br />
qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery,<br />
slavery, and fanaticism;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or<br />
concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against<br />
globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,<br />
are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from<br />
their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam<br />
and shari&#8217;a law on the kaffir West;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use<br />
civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent<br />
people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we<br />
underestimated the scope of their future malice even<br />
<em>without</em> weapons of mass destruction;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found,<br />
alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea;<br />
states that are known to have active programs working towards the<br />
development and delivery of weapons of that would multiply the<br />
terrorists&#8217; ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present<br />
danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known<br />
efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even<br />
on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit<br />
aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the<br />
Islamist terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>RE DECLARE that both the terrorists and their state<br />
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind,<br />
to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.</p>
<p>WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause&#8217; of Islamo-fascist terrorism<br />
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam<br />
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of<br />
the war against terror must be to displace and discredit those<br />
animating ideas.</p>
<p>WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy<br />
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can<br />
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free<br />
speech, or the right of peacable assembly, or the right to bear<br />
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures<br />
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level<br />
surveillance of public areas;</p>
<p>IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in<br />
both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative<br />
of ceding to the world&#8217;s barbarians the exclusive privilege of<br />
force;</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,<br />
and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members<br />
of the Islamo-fascist terror network;</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the<br />
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating<br />
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of<br />
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police<br />
cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a<br />
distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well<br />
the ordinary citizen&#8217;s right and duty to respond to terrorist<br />
aggression with effective force.</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future<br />
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible<br />
overthrow of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine<br />
sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass<br />
destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as<br />
the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their<br />
societies.</p>
<p>WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion<br />
<em>within</em> the moral community of mankind that gives<br />
aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left &#8212; the moral blindness that<br />
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and<br />
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place<br />
than any culture in which jihad, &#8216;honor killings&#8217;, and female genital<br />
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right &#8212; whether it manifests as<br />
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political<br />
agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.</p>
<p>WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization<br />
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it<br />
to the end.   We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in<br />
our words, and in our deeds.</p>
<p>WE HAVE AWAKENED; we have seen the face of evil in the acts of the<br />
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through<br />
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much to<br />
enable and excuse their evil.  We shall not flinch from our duty to<br />
confront that evil.</p>
<p>WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that those we delegate to<br />
lead pursue the war against terror with an unflagging will to victory<br />
and all means necessary &mdash; while remaining always mindful that we<br />
must not become what we fight;</p>
<p>WE SHALL REMEMBER that the West&#8217;s keenest weapons are reason and the<br />
truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which<br />
terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against<br />
the expedient lie from our own side, lest our victories become tainted<br />
and hollow, sowing trouble for the future.</p>
<p>WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not<br />
be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;</p>
<p>WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the<br />
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we<br />
<em>shall</em> defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing<br />
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our<br />
wealth and freedoms to win their women and children to civilized ways,<br />
and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the<br />
face of the Earth.</p>
<p>THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade<br />
Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who<br />
died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless<br />
victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by<br />
terrorism and rogue states:</p>
<p>YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.</p>
<pre>
			Eric S. Raymond
			17 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)
</pre>
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