Friday, February 02, 2007

Getting into the war...

"This is where the real war is, a war worth fighting. I've never been to Afghanistan and I'm not going to Iraq. But they don't seem to be places that matter, not to me. Maybe, just possibly, we can win a war in Iraq, but sure as hell we're losing the war at our doorstep. You go up to the top of the block and look around. From that roof, you can see power and Parliament, you'll see where all the big people make their money... But if you look down by your feet, you'll see where the war is."

I've given some thought to trying to get directly into the Moslem war. I don't think I'd be much use, but there could be some way that I'd free up a real Marine to fight. But 37 is the sign up cutoff, and that's history for me.

But I've been realising that there are lots of wars going on, and that the one I'm in is still important. More important than the Moslem war, and essential to it. The greatest danger to any people is still tyranny. The Moslems can't conquer us. But our own domestic enemies can. I directly fight, or at least irritate, a major domestic enemy, crime. Crime is an insurgency, too. As criminals control more and more people's lives, all our liberties decrease. And crime will be a basis for our domestic enemies to impose more and more direct limits on us.

Moslems aren't killing, raping, robbing, and oppressing tens of thousands of us every year. Americans are doing that. I cannot imagine the level of peace and freedom and security we could have built at home for a tenth of the trouble and money we've spent on foreigners who hate us already, and who always will.

Just to start with, we could have built and staffed enough prisons so that we could honestly say, "If you kill, rape, rob, or burgle an American, we have a place for you."

Aaaanyway, what got me thinking about this again was the above quoted passage in a book, "Rat Run", a novel by Gerald Seymour, who is a marvellous observer. He has a social worker in a housing project say that, and it's true.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Americans are killing, raping,robbing and opressing tens of thousands? I dont' see it. Could you explain?

staghounds said...

Here you go.

Obviously it should have been hundreds of thousands.

One of the many unintended consequences of "urban renewal" has been the creation of housing projects, zones where hundreds or thousands of people who have absolutely no responsibility are concentrated together with only others like themselves. None of them work, and almost none of them are adult men over the age of 25.

These are ideal breeding spots for what we'd call an insurgency if our insurgents had a political or religious agenda. Since they don't, we call them criminals and gangsters. But it works exactly the same as it did in Ramadi, Hue, or Belfast. The decent people there ar as much oppressed by the Crips, or Willie with his crowbar, as they would be by the Mahdi Army.

It seems odd to me that we'll devote pretty serious thinking and resources to protecting neighbourhoods in Fallujah or Kandahar, but Saint Louis and Gary get the bare minimum.

People of all political outlooks are rightly interested in (approaching, since 2003) five thousand dead Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines.

Eighty thousand murdered Americans at home, not so much.

Anonymous said...

Agreed: But I don't put them there, they go there on their own. Having grown up a brisk day's walk from Gary, and a short afternoon's walk from Crown Point, I can tell you this: there is no force so powerful at keeping "the undesireables" in their place as American Liberalism. They want to "protect" those "unfortunate" classes, as long as they don't end up in the backyards of the priveleged elite. Crown Point, the county seat, last bastion of the Klan in north America, is populated predominantly by transplanted "old southern democrats". Yeah, it's a war. No, nobody pays much attention.

But I know it's there. I see it being fought. And clearly so do you.

To say "Americans" did this is disingenuous. The people doing this are a subset of "Americans" I call "Fucktards" Not all Americans are responsible for this, and a lot of us are fighting it. As is evidenced in the hundreds of thousands of towns and cities where the races and creeds live together without a thought to their differences. I am in those places every day, I live now in a neighborhood with black, white, hindu, muslim, baptist, yadda yadda.

Careful how you paint me with that bloodstained brush "American".

staghounds said...

I meant far more Americans are suffering at the hands of their neighbours than at those of the Moslem extremists, terrorists, Iraqui insurgents, Taliban, or whoever we are in a war with.

Clearly YOU didn't kill any Americans today. But forty or fifty Americans did. My only point was Seymour's, that the constant, bloodier civil insurgency we're in at home is a war too.