Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 2)

Substantive changes from version 1 are marked in
red. I think the changes largely speak for themselves. I will
say that I think some of the criticisms I received reflect a
conservative bias in the blogosphere population, and that for appeal
to a wider audience it is necessary to excoriate the Right a
little harder than a lot of people here will be completely comfortable
with.

Major trivia points to anyone who can identify the source of the
phrase I was quoting in my first draft, the longer form of which reads
“we declare them the enemies of all men, to be dealt with as wolves
are”. And no, a Web search won’t do it.

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to
the enemy is our only practical instrument of
self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of
the anti-idiotarian position:

THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
hands of terrorists by rogue states;
THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser
sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and
a smoldering resentment of the West’s success and Islam’s failures;
THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty,
are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
and shari’a law on the kaffir West;
THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
underestimated their future malice even
without weapons of mass destruction;
THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance
with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and
North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working
towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction
that would multiply the terrorists’ ability to commit atrocities by a
thousandfold;
THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger
through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of
chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated
willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and
his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and
elsewhere.

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,
to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy
those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
surveillance of public areas;

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness’ requires us not to notice the
dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our
terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to
both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the
overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the
population.

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings
out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject
the alternative of ceding to the world’s barbarians the exclusive
privilege of force.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members
of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the
military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the
distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm not merely
airline pilots but ordinary citizens, and to recognize the citizen’s
right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective
force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the conquest and
occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of
terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until
such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from
their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
within the moral community of mankind that gives
aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the
Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it
afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that
evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized
ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World
Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those
who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the
nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered
by terrorism and rogue states;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			16 October 2002

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