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Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 1)
<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 religious jihad as our<br />
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;</li>
<li>THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance<br />
with rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea; states that are known<br />
to have active programs working towards the development and delivery<br />
of weapons that would multiply the terrorists&#8217; ability to commit<br />
atrocities by a 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.
</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 wolves 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 significant 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 and<br />
use the dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of<br />
our 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<br />
the population.</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 Islamic 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, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear<br />
blackmail of the West, the conquest and occupation of Iraq and other<br />
nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession<br />
of weapons of mass destruction, until such time as the root causes of<br />
terrorism have 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.</em></em></p>
<p>ism 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 Christian religious chauvinism<br />
and bigotry that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our<br />
self-declared 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 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 culture from<br />
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
____________________
(your signature here)
</pre>
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