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COMMENTARY
March 8, 2006
Afghan wilds
I am so damn proud of our Canadian guys, in Afghanistan. They have taken over a dangerous mission, and they are up to it. Our Kandahar detachment does not consist of “peacekeepers”. A person must have his brains scrambled for breakfast to think it does. For the peace is being imposed. Our guys are not “honest, impartial middlemen” between the Taliban savages and the elected government of Afghanistan. We are there to serve the latter by eliminating the former. It is a kill or be killed proposition. We are there to protect the common people; and therefore to kill the common enemy.The pansies of the Left are already fibrillating: “We didn’t think this was going to be a war!” Grow up, little people. The Canadians killed in New York on 9/11/01, died in an act of war. Obviously not one they chose for themselves. No one chooses to be in the way of a fuel-laden jumbo jet, piloted by an Arab kamikaze. You do not always get to choose your enemies. Sometimes your enemies choose you. Recall: this is the ancient story. The peace and freedom, the religious and cultural and scientific creativity of a high civilization, depend finally on the will to maintain order, to vindicate the right, to stop the criminal and insurgent. There is no neutral ground between civilization and barbarism. There is not even a boundary. You are either going up, or you are coming down. In the words of W.H. Auden: Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being, From absence to be on display, Without a name or history I wake Between my body and the day. Do you follow? Let me explain. Beneath the garments of our civility, we are naked men. The conditions for our survival must never be forgotten. We were not born in our clothing. Every fragment of our comfortable world was purchased at risk, from the wilderness of nature, and the wilderness in the heart of man. Our ancestors built and rebuilt, all ultimately, as Nehemiah built Jerusalem wall -- sword in one hand, trowel in the other. To follow from my remarks on Saturday, which were chiefly translated from Wafa Sultan’s magnificent Arabic, there is not and never was a “clash of civilizations”. It is in the nature of things that only one civilization can prevail at one time: that the inferior will aspire to the superior, and be assimilated to it; or else, it will aspire to bring the superior down. The clashes are thus between higher and lower; between civilization and barbarism in their many degrees; and barbarism prevails where its hard beak meets the soft mush of decadence. For part of the superiority of the high civilization is to be found in its self-confident ability to defend itself, and to uphold civilized norms. We maintain and extend the frontiers of our civilization; or else they shrink. The Western model of civilization, with its openness and freedom, is flawed, as all civilizations are flawed. We may now be succumbing to our decadence, our death wish. But what remains is all we have against the “day of outrage when hellikins cavort through ruined drawing-rooms” (Auden again). We fight in Afghanistan because that is where our enemy is congregated. The jumbo jets that smashed into the Twin Towers were despatched from an Afghan cave. We have gone to find the bloody bastards who sent them. That is why we are there. That is why we have made the commitment to establish a civilized order in the Afghan wilds. Military families understand this. A woman who marries a soldier needs guts herself. But the sort of woman who marries a soldier is likely to have them. A soldier is not a policeman. He does not sign up to make arrests or direct traffic. He trains to be ready when called, to kill his nation’s enemies -- to kill or be killed. And the nobility of that calling is written in heroism and blood. There will always be casualties. Do our people, does our government have the spine for the mission we have chosen? To do our modest share in the West’s response to an existential threat? In the end, it will be a question of whether we are capable of shame. For only those capable of shame last the course. If the decision were in the gift of our whinging foreign minister, Peter MacKay, I would think not. His “reassurance”, Monday, that Canada will find a way to continue subsidizing the Palestinian Authority, now that it is controlled by the murderous terrorist organization, Hamas, calls all bets off. It is the instinct of such people, to “soften the hard line” between us and the people who want us dead. They thus become the accomplices of our mortal enemies. Against barbarism, the civilized must never be soft. Against barbarism, the civilized must be ferocious. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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