Those Post-9/11 -isms and -ologies: A Look Back at a Decade

[Geee]

Pajamas Media:

The Never-ending Day

Like millions of Americans, I did not sleep much on the night of September 11. I was horrified all day, but by the evening of September 11, 2001, increasingly angry. Horrified because 3,000 innocents had been murdered not just by 7th-century fanatical terrorists, but by cruel Dark-Age murderers who, in the best parasitical fashion, had managed to gnaw at their distracted host from the inside.

That duplicity was eerie and creepy — the premeditated design of Middle Easterners to live among and blend in for months with the very culture they despised and wished to destroy. Their hatred soon translated into sixteen acres of ash in Manhattan and a smoking Pentagon. Most of us could no longer watch the tape of those jumping off the World Trade Center, calibrating in extremis whether it was worse to implode on the concrete or be incinerated in their offices. Those images have never left us.

The entire day was ghoulish, and by evening, like some of you, I was worried that a number of post-modern Western ideologies of the last three decades were not only known to bin Laden’s gang, but comprehensively so to the point they would be used serially against the West in brilliantly sinister fashion. Was 9/11 the beginning of something even worse? No civilization could endure three or four successive attacks such as those on September 11.

Our Problem With “Appeasement”

The word “appeasement” has had a volatile history. In the 1930s it meant purported sobriety and circumspection in preferring reasonable concessions to an aggressor in lieu of risking destructive war. Appeasement grew in response to the horrors of World War I and the theory that relatively minor differences had eventually led to nightmares like the Somme and Verdun. But by the end of World War II, appeasement for the first time evolved into a term of scorn, a near-criminal naiveté that had gotten 50 million killed by failing to confront an ascendant Japan and Germany when they were comparatively still weak.

Although during the Cold War “appeasement” mostly remained a pejorative term, it also reflected poorly, in purportedly McCarthyite fashion, on any who leveled the charge — as if granting a few concessions was the smarter and more reasonable alternative to mindless preparedness and brinkmanship in the nuclear age.

So when the cloud rose over Manhattan, we were in a strange never-never land of having long appeased radical Islam while fearful of confessing just that, as if it were worse to admit to, than to have embraced, appeasement. Under the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations, the U.S. had not reacted strongly to the murder of Americans in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and Yemen, or after the first attempt to topple the World Trade Center. We failed to grasp that with each attack, Islamic terrorists were becoming both more sophisticated and bolder. Even though bin Laden lacked the comparative resources of a like-minded Attila the Hun or Hitler, it was going to be hard after 9/11 in any meaningful way to convince al-Qaeda — or for the matter millions in the United States — that such attacks on the United States should be synonymous with the jihadists’ own destruction.