Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 3)
<p>Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are <font color="red">marked in red</font>; changes from 2 to 3 are <font color='blue'>marked in blue</font>.  I think the changes largely<br />
speak for themselves.  I will say that I think some of the criticisms<br />
I received reflect a conservative bias in the blogosphere population,<br />
and that for appeal to a wider audience it <em>is</em> necessary to<br />
excoriate the Right a little harder than a lot of people here will be<br />
completely comfortable with.</p>
<p>I have removed the paragraph about profiling, not out of political<br />
correctness but because I have been presented with good arguments that<br />
profiling is easy for terrorists to game against (and apparently they<br />
have often done so in Israel).</p>
<p>It has been suggested that I should add the heroes of Flight 93 to<br />
the list of those we swear shall not have died in vain.  But they<br />
had already achieved that; they saved many lives and provided a<br />
moral example which shall not be forgotten.</p>
<p>Congratulations to the trivia spotters who identified &#8220;to be dealt<br />
with as wolves are&#8221; as a quote from H. Beam Piper&#8217;s <cite>Lord Kalvan<br />
of Otherwhen</cite>.  Jerry Pournelle did, I believe, quote it in<br />
<cite>Prince Of Sparta</cite>. I had always assumed Piper<br />
was referring to the Viking sentence of outlawry, in which the outlaw<br />
was declared a &#8220;wolf&#8217;s head&#8221;.  Apparently there is a 1703 historical<br />
cite from the US as well.</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 <font color="red">bigotry</font> 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 to<br />
the enemy <em>is</em> our only practical instrument of<br />
self-defense;</p>
<p>WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis 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 who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser<br />
sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and<br />
a smoldering resentment of the West&#8217;s success and Islam&#8217;s failures;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><font color='blue'>THAT the terrorists have declared and are<br />
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 bestiality,<br />
slavery, and fanaticism;</font></p>
<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;</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 their future malice <font color='red'>even<br />
<em>without</em> weapons of mass destruction;</font></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance<br />
with rogue states such as Iraq, <font color='red'>Iran,</font> and<br />
North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working<br />
towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction<br />
that would multiply the terrorists&#8217; ability to commit atrocities by a<br />
thousandfold;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger<br />
in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts<br />
to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his<br />
own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression<br />
against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror<br />
network in Palestine and elsewhere.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state<br />
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,<br />
to be dealt with as <font color="red">feral beasts</font> 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, discredit, and destroy<br />
those 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 peacible 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><font color="red">IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings<br />
out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject<br />
the alternative of ceding to the world&#8217;s barbarians the exclusive<br />
privilege of force.</font></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 <font color='red'>Islamo-fascist</font> 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><font color='red'>WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the<br />
military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the<br />
distributed threat with a distributed response; </font><font color='blue'>to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the<br />
ordinary citizen&#8217;s right and obligation to respond to terrorist<br />
aggression with effective force.</font></p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future<br />
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible <font color='blue'>overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other<br />
nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of<br />
weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those<br />
nations</font> until such time as the root causes of terrorism have<br />
been eradicated from their 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 dictators 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 <font color='red'>Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the<br />
Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.</font></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 both to<br />
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it<br />
afterwards.  We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that<br />
evil.</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 <font color='blue'>win</font> their women and<br />
children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and<br />
virulent <font color='red'>ideologies</font> from the face of the<br />
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
			16 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)
</pre>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83141982">Blogspot<br />
comments</a></p>
