The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
The "American Spirit"? Do we still have what it takes?
Sunday we pointed to an excellent essay by a former New York City Policeman, who remembered back to a time when the media and American people got behind our country in times of war -- when the people, media, and our troops abroad acted as one team.
Teamwork and team spirit has been stressed, has been coached into me and my friends, ever since I was a small child. As a kid I watched my childhood heroes, men like Darrell Royal and Vince Lombardi, talk about one thing: Teamwork -- the very essence of success. The very essence of winning. Our sports heroes and championship teams are always built of the same material: hard work, common purpose, and teamwork. And team spirit. Is it any wonder why America wins so often. We are raised to win.
All the great American heros we have idolized througout the decades have had these qualities of heart, hard work, and teamwork. Babe Ruth, Johnny Unitas, Michael Jordan, Vince Lombardi. Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, George Patton. Men who would...not...lose.
But they have not left us, it only appears that way. Along with these great men of the past, we still find them, although finding them is much harder today--especially given a media who only wants to paint a picture of anti-American doom and gloom. We saw it with Todd Beamer on 9/11. We saw it in our own President as he stood on that pile of rubble, and raised the spirits of a nation as he told the purveyors of terror they were no longer safe. And he is making that promise happen.
We still see our heroes at work every day in places like Afghanistan and the Sunni Triangle and the Syrian border... No our heroes haven't left us; they are still very much with us--it is the media that has left them behind. These brave men and women, who are our very finest, who put themselves on the line every day only get heard from in our media when they come home in a body bag. Or when one of their "grieving" mothers decided to become the next poster child of national victimhood. It is attention on people like these by the Michael Moores and the George Soros' that are the cancer that is killing the American spirit. And so our real heroes, the ones in harms way, go unnoticed except as martyrs for a "losers" ideology. But even if our anemic press does not extoll the virtues of our heroes, we know they are still there. They are still among us.
So here is my question: what has happened to us??
Michelle Malkin asks the same questions of us today: namely what is it that caused a country of citizens that simply could not be defeated, anyplace, anytime, to a country that was brought to its knees during the Vietnam conflict--not by its external enemies who could not win alone, but by its internal enemies--the anti-American left, raving anti-war zealots, their willing "comrades" in the media, and distorted reporting of a far away war we were actually winning, but whom our press convinced a large number of our citizens we were losing. And so we folded our tents and went home--and in so doing left millions to be slaughtered in the killing fields by monsters like Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot. So I think it is hugely relevant that Malkin (with help from David Frum) asks a relevant question: is it happening again? :
The war we are fighting, the one that includes Iraq as a theatre of combat but encompasses a second theatre in Afghanistan and many smaller ones in Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere, is a post-modern war. That is this war's one striking similarity to the Cold War, of which Vietnam was a theatre we happened to lose without losing a single battle. How did we lose that theatre without losing any battles? Can the same thing happen again today?
We lost Vietnam because it was the first post-modern war theatre, and we failed to appreciate that. One man did appreciate it, though, but unfortunately for us he commanded the other side. His name was General Vo Nguyen Giap, and he commanded the North Vietnamese army from the 1950s through the 1970s. In that time he defeated in succession France (at that time a world power), the United States (a superpower) and China (a rising regional power). The latter is especially interesting--Giap studied infowar under Mao Zedong in the 1930s. He used Mao's own tactics, improved by Giap's brilliance and extensive experience against us, against Mao's own creation, Communist China. Giap managed to defeat three nations whose military capabilities were vastly superior to his own. He may have been the 20th Century's most intelligent general.
How did Giap do it? In short, he discovered how to make his own troops expendable proxies, while he waged the actual war in the mind of his opponent. With the US, he discovered that we are unbeatable in combat but we are political hemophiliacs. Prick us in just the right spot, and we will bleed ourselves to death. The facts on the battlefield become secondary to the facts as we perceive them, whether those perceptions are accurate or not. The Tet Offensive was Giap's greatest show of post-modern warfare. It was an unmitigated disaster for his own troops, who were slaughtered all across Vietnam during that uprising. But it crystallized in the US political mind as a defeat for us that presaged inevitable defeat in the war itself, thanks mostly to the way the anti-war movement and the media portrayed Tet. Giap went on to lose Tet and every other battle after it, but he won the war. He won with a post-modern war strategy, the only type of strategy that can defeat us.
Principally, he played to the US anti-war movement, using it as a psychological nuclear weapon to devastate our will to fight. Giap had discovered by the mid-1960s that the US anti-war movement was the key to his own success or failure, far more relevant to the war than anything actually going on in Vietnam itself. He began to court that movement, to cry common cause with it, as a way to divide the US public on the war. Absent a coherent counter message coming from our own leadership at the time, through the Johnson and Nixon administrations, Giap's message prevailed. The left turned irrevocably against the war, Jane Fonda and her cohorts supplied the high-level pro-North propaganda, and we eventually retreated. We won every battle but the one that mattered most--the one that took place in the American mind.
It can happen again today. We premised this war not so much on a nation's right of self-defense as on our moral superiority over the enemy. We do happen to be morally superior to Osama bin Laden and his head-chopping henchmen, but our war premise had the effect of leaving us vulnerable to any flimsy charge either the caliphascist enemy or the anti-American agitators in the West could throw at us, and they have managed to throw quite a lot at us: Abu Ghraib, false allegations of mistreatment at Gitmo, old charges of US crimes in the MidEast, our support for Israel, whatever small offense or canard our enemies could come up with. Once our moral superiority is punctured, our rationale for war loses much of its steam. And absent a coherent and consistent counter message from our own leadership, the enemy's narrative begins to take hold: We're bogged down in a fruitless war in Iraq, we should never have invaded in the first place, our leaders are liars, etc.
We're not getting that coherent and consistent message from the Bush administration. The facts are available, but we're getting a muddle of same-old same-old and platitudes instead of a sustained morale-building information campaign. David Frum is sounding the alarm that we're in trouble in the post-modern aspects of the war, and I hope the White House gets the message. If they don't, the caliphascist message most prominently expressed in Fahrenheit 9-11 and the media will take hold, and irrespective of how things are going in the war on the other side of the world--where things are going pretty well, mostly--we will lose heart right here. And then we will lose Iraq to the caliphascists, just like we lost Vietnam to General Giap.
Are we going to let it happen again... only this time with much more to lose--possibly everything? (the vaporization of American cities perhaps? the bilogical death of a few hundred thousand innocents followed by a crippling financial crash ?). Is this what we have come to? To sit by and watch our country's humiliation like mourners at a wake, because a bunch of Hollywood actors or news anchors feel guilty about making 20 mil per movie and driving around in limos??? I think not.
Are we, the citizens of the greatest country in the world, going to allow these elitist ivory-tower neo-socialist cretins to hypnotize us into the self-destruction of everything that our forefathers have given for us in their toil and sweat and blood? Not if I have anything to do with it.
No, I have a different question: When are we going to show them what we are made of? When are we going to rise up and prove to the world that America IS the greatest experiment that has ever occurred or will ever occur on this planet. That Americans are WINNERS because we were built that way; and we will continue to prevail--not simply because we work harder or because we have the freedom to be creative and innovative--but because we still have that American spirit buried deep inside ourselves. This American spirit is the same spirit that carried us through two World Wars, a Revolutionary War, and a Civil War. This is a soul buried deep within each of us; a spirit that can and must flower once again and move us as it moved our ancestors: to act as one to accomplish great and noble achievements.
It will and must lead us to ridding the world of mass murderers and bearded psychopathic misogynistic female-phobes who would imprison us all in a 9th centruy fundamentalist hell; we will rise up and prevail because we simply have no other choice. And because we can: we alone have the pedigree. For we are the same country that saved the world from Nazism and Fascism. We put a man on the moon. We remain the one destination on this planet were people wake up in the middle of the night and dream of finding a way, any way, to get here--to beome a part of the American Spirit, even in today's troubled times.
And yet is anyone suggesting that we are going to let these...traitors in our midst--these people so filled with anti-American negativity that they can't see with their own eyes--tell us we can't win this thing? Over my dead body.
So it is up to us all to stop the bleeding and to shut these preachers of doom down for good. Can we find our collective spirit as a nation in time to prevent the defeatists from sabotaging us? You are damn right we can. And I not only believe that we can, but we will. But first we have to cut through the crap the mainstream is throwing at us: we have to quit listening to the losers and the defeatists and the naysayers, and instead to find that quiet "one heartbeat" of who we really are and where we come from--and then we need to get to work. We have to find that sense of teamwork, that spirit we once had in spades--the spirit of being one nation, under God, indivisible--and a team that will not let the doomsayers talk us into quitting this time.
In short we each need to look deep within ourselves and into the genes we inherited from our ancestors, and we have to find the American Spirit again: without that spirit we will continue to listen to low-lifes like Krugman and Moore and Dowd and Kennedy--as they try to talk us into surrender; into succumbing to monstrous low-lifes like bin Laden--and we will pay an incalculable price.
But I don't see it coming down that way--because we ARE Americans, and all the CNN doom and gloom cannot take that away from us. And WITH that American Spirit, anything is possible. We will find ourselves collectively beginning to laugh at these sick purveyors of negativity--and then we will quit listening to them altogether. We will rid the world of those who would murder millions with mushroom clouds, and we will not feel bad or guilty about having done this for the fellow inhabitants of our planet. By demonstrating how to create wealth and spread prosperity through ingenuity and hard work, we will save the economies of those parts of the world through our democratic example, and through our basic decency. Because with the American spirit, we can achieve anything. You know it and I know it.
So what's your choice? And what are you going to do about it?
Teamwork and team spirit has been stressed, has been coached into me and my friends, ever since I was a small child. As a kid I watched my childhood heroes, men like Darrell Royal and Vince Lombardi, talk about one thing: Teamwork -- the very essence of success. The very essence of winning. Our sports heroes and championship teams are always built of the same material: hard work, common purpose, and teamwork. And team spirit. Is it any wonder why America wins so often. We are raised to win.
All the great American heros we have idolized througout the decades have had these qualities of heart, hard work, and teamwork. Babe Ruth, Johnny Unitas, Michael Jordan, Vince Lombardi. Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, George Patton. Men who would...not...lose.
But they have not left us, it only appears that way. Along with these great men of the past, we still find them, although finding them is much harder today--especially given a media who only wants to paint a picture of anti-American doom and gloom. We saw it with Todd Beamer on 9/11. We saw it in our own President as he stood on that pile of rubble, and raised the spirits of a nation as he told the purveyors of terror they were no longer safe. And he is making that promise happen.
We still see our heroes at work every day in places like Afghanistan and the Sunni Triangle and the Syrian border... No our heroes haven't left us; they are still very much with us--it is the media that has left them behind. These brave men and women, who are our very finest, who put themselves on the line every day only get heard from in our media when they come home in a body bag. Or when one of their "grieving" mothers decided to become the next poster child of national victimhood. It is attention on people like these by the Michael Moores and the George Soros' that are the cancer that is killing the American spirit. And so our real heroes, the ones in harms way, go unnoticed except as martyrs for a "losers" ideology. But even if our anemic press does not extoll the virtues of our heroes, we know they are still there. They are still among us.
So here is my question: what has happened to us??
Michelle Malkin asks the same questions of us today: namely what is it that caused a country of citizens that simply could not be defeated, anyplace, anytime, to a country that was brought to its knees during the Vietnam conflict--not by its external enemies who could not win alone, but by its internal enemies--the anti-American left, raving anti-war zealots, their willing "comrades" in the media, and distorted reporting of a far away war we were actually winning, but whom our press convinced a large number of our citizens we were losing. And so we folded our tents and went home--and in so doing left millions to be slaughtered in the killing fields by monsters like Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot. So I think it is hugely relevant that Malkin (with help from David Frum) asks a relevant question: is it happening again? :
The war we are fighting, the one that includes Iraq as a theatre of combat but encompasses a second theatre in Afghanistan and many smaller ones in Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere, is a post-modern war. That is this war's one striking similarity to the Cold War, of which Vietnam was a theatre we happened to lose without losing a single battle. How did we lose that theatre without losing any battles? Can the same thing happen again today?
We lost Vietnam because it was the first post-modern war theatre, and we failed to appreciate that. One man did appreciate it, though, but unfortunately for us he commanded the other side. His name was General Vo Nguyen Giap, and he commanded the North Vietnamese army from the 1950s through the 1970s. In that time he defeated in succession France (at that time a world power), the United States (a superpower) and China (a rising regional power). The latter is especially interesting--Giap studied infowar under Mao Zedong in the 1930s. He used Mao's own tactics, improved by Giap's brilliance and extensive experience against us, against Mao's own creation, Communist China. Giap managed to defeat three nations whose military capabilities were vastly superior to his own. He may have been the 20th Century's most intelligent general.
How did Giap do it? In short, he discovered how to make his own troops expendable proxies, while he waged the actual war in the mind of his opponent. With the US, he discovered that we are unbeatable in combat but we are political hemophiliacs. Prick us in just the right spot, and we will bleed ourselves to death. The facts on the battlefield become secondary to the facts as we perceive them, whether those perceptions are accurate or not. The Tet Offensive was Giap's greatest show of post-modern warfare. It was an unmitigated disaster for his own troops, who were slaughtered all across Vietnam during that uprising. But it crystallized in the US political mind as a defeat for us that presaged inevitable defeat in the war itself, thanks mostly to the way the anti-war movement and the media portrayed Tet. Giap went on to lose Tet and every other battle after it, but he won the war. He won with a post-modern war strategy, the only type of strategy that can defeat us.
Principally, he played to the US anti-war movement, using it as a psychological nuclear weapon to devastate our will to fight. Giap had discovered by the mid-1960s that the US anti-war movement was the key to his own success or failure, far more relevant to the war than anything actually going on in Vietnam itself. He began to court that movement, to cry common cause with it, as a way to divide the US public on the war. Absent a coherent counter message coming from our own leadership at the time, through the Johnson and Nixon administrations, Giap's message prevailed. The left turned irrevocably against the war, Jane Fonda and her cohorts supplied the high-level pro-North propaganda, and we eventually retreated. We won every battle but the one that mattered most--the one that took place in the American mind.
It can happen again today. We premised this war not so much on a nation's right of self-defense as on our moral superiority over the enemy. We do happen to be morally superior to Osama bin Laden and his head-chopping henchmen, but our war premise had the effect of leaving us vulnerable to any flimsy charge either the caliphascist enemy or the anti-American agitators in the West could throw at us, and they have managed to throw quite a lot at us: Abu Ghraib, false allegations of mistreatment at Gitmo, old charges of US crimes in the MidEast, our support for Israel, whatever small offense or canard our enemies could come up with. Once our moral superiority is punctured, our rationale for war loses much of its steam. And absent a coherent and consistent counter message from our own leadership, the enemy's narrative begins to take hold: We're bogged down in a fruitless war in Iraq, we should never have invaded in the first place, our leaders are liars, etc.
We're not getting that coherent and consistent message from the Bush administration. The facts are available, but we're getting a muddle of same-old same-old and platitudes instead of a sustained morale-building information campaign. David Frum is sounding the alarm that we're in trouble in the post-modern aspects of the war, and I hope the White House gets the message. If they don't, the caliphascist message most prominently expressed in Fahrenheit 9-11 and the media will take hold, and irrespective of how things are going in the war on the other side of the world--where things are going pretty well, mostly--we will lose heart right here. And then we will lose Iraq to the caliphascists, just like we lost Vietnam to General Giap.
Are we going to let it happen again... only this time with much more to lose--possibly everything? (the vaporization of American cities perhaps? the bilogical death of a few hundred thousand innocents followed by a crippling financial crash ?). Is this what we have come to? To sit by and watch our country's humiliation like mourners at a wake, because a bunch of Hollywood actors or news anchors feel guilty about making 20 mil per movie and driving around in limos??? I think not.
Are we, the citizens of the greatest country in the world, going to allow these elitist ivory-tower neo-socialist cretins to hypnotize us into the self-destruction of everything that our forefathers have given for us in their toil and sweat and blood? Not if I have anything to do with it.
No, I have a different question: When are we going to show them what we are made of? When are we going to rise up and prove to the world that America IS the greatest experiment that has ever occurred or will ever occur on this planet. That Americans are WINNERS because we were built that way; and we will continue to prevail--not simply because we work harder or because we have the freedom to be creative and innovative--but because we still have that American spirit buried deep inside ourselves. This American spirit is the same spirit that carried us through two World Wars, a Revolutionary War, and a Civil War. This is a soul buried deep within each of us; a spirit that can and must flower once again and move us as it moved our ancestors: to act as one to accomplish great and noble achievements.
It will and must lead us to ridding the world of mass murderers and bearded psychopathic misogynistic female-phobes who would imprison us all in a 9th centruy fundamentalist hell; we will rise up and prevail because we simply have no other choice. And because we can: we alone have the pedigree. For we are the same country that saved the world from Nazism and Fascism. We put a man on the moon. We remain the one destination on this planet were people wake up in the middle of the night and dream of finding a way, any way, to get here--to beome a part of the American Spirit, even in today's troubled times.
And yet is anyone suggesting that we are going to let these...traitors in our midst--these people so filled with anti-American negativity that they can't see with their own eyes--tell us we can't win this thing? Over my dead body.
So it is up to us all to stop the bleeding and to shut these preachers of doom down for good. Can we find our collective spirit as a nation in time to prevent the defeatists from sabotaging us? You are damn right we can. And I not only believe that we can, but we will. But first we have to cut through the crap the mainstream is throwing at us: we have to quit listening to the losers and the defeatists and the naysayers, and instead to find that quiet "one heartbeat" of who we really are and where we come from--and then we need to get to work. We have to find that sense of teamwork, that spirit we once had in spades--the spirit of being one nation, under God, indivisible--and a team that will not let the doomsayers talk us into quitting this time.
In short we each need to look deep within ourselves and into the genes we inherited from our ancestors, and we have to find the American Spirit again: without that spirit we will continue to listen to low-lifes like Krugman and Moore and Dowd and Kennedy--as they try to talk us into surrender; into succumbing to monstrous low-lifes like bin Laden--and we will pay an incalculable price.
But I don't see it coming down that way--because we ARE Americans, and all the CNN doom and gloom cannot take that away from us. And WITH that American Spirit, anything is possible. We will find ourselves collectively beginning to laugh at these sick purveyors of negativity--and then we will quit listening to them altogether. We will rid the world of those who would murder millions with mushroom clouds, and we will not feel bad or guilty about having done this for the fellow inhabitants of our planet. By demonstrating how to create wealth and spread prosperity through ingenuity and hard work, we will save the economies of those parts of the world through our democratic example, and through our basic decency. Because with the American spirit, we can achieve anything. You know it and I know it.
So what's your choice? And what are you going to do about it?
