Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 2)
<p>Substantive changes from version 1 are <font color="red">marked in<br />
red</font>.  I think the changes largely speak for themselves.  I will<br />
say that I think some of the criticisms I received reflect a<br />
conservative bias in the blogosphere population, and that for appeal<br />
to a wider audience it <em>is</em> necessary to excoriate the Right a<br />
little harder than a lot of people here will be completely comfortable<br />
with.</p>
<p>Major trivia points to anyone who can identify the source of the<br />
phrase I was quoting in my first draft, the longer form of which reads<br />
&#8220;we declare them the enemies of all men, to be dealt with as wolves<br />
are&#8221;.  And no, a Web search won&#8217;t do it.</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>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;</li>
<li>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;</li>
<li>THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or<br />
concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against<br />
globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty,<br />
are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;</li>
<li>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;</li>
<li>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>;</li>
<li>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;</li>
<li>THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger<br />
through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of<br />
chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated<br />
willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and<br />
his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and<br />
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>WE REJECT the theory that `fairness&#8217; requires us not to notice the<br />
dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our<br />
terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to<br />
both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the<br />
overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the<br />
population.</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 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; to arm not merely<br />
airline pilots but ordinary citizens, and to recognize the citizen&#8217;s<br />
right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective<br />
force.</font></p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future<br />
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the conquest and<br />
occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of<br />
terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until<br />
such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from<br />
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 seduce their women and children to civilized<br />
ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent <font color='red'>ideologies</font> from the face of the Earth.</p>
<p>THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World<br />
Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those<br />
who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the<br />
nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered<br />
by terrorism and rogue states;</p>
<p>YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.</p>
<pre>
			Eric S. Raymond
			16 October 2002

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