Gee, they really mean it

Alex D. writes:

Recently I have been reading a Vietnam novel written by a former Green Beret. It’s fiction but he draws on his combat experiences. One interesting point he brings up several times is the hard time new arrivals had with the realities of life there.

Despite being told all through training that people there want to kill you, it still would take over a month for most to come to the realization that people REALLY want to kill you. They had accepted the fact in a abstract but not concrete fashion. The Arab Street is much more violent than most Americans are accustomed to. Like the inexperienced GIs they can’t internalize that when Muslims say “Strike the infidel on the neck,” it’s YOU they are talking about, and gee, they really mean it.

Alex D. sends a follow-up:

By coincidence just yesterday I ran into a guy that had recently returned from Iraq. And he mentioned that it took him a full two months to accept the fact that they meant it. Despite being shot at several times, it was not until his buddy, next to him, got hit in the leg that it finally dawned on him, “They really mean to kill me!”

Real dangers must be presented in dangerous terms. Elegant logic does not convince, the threat must be perceived as personal to have any lasting effect. I like to think that boxing is a microcosms of life, things are reduced to their most basic levels. The boxing coach doesn’t say the opponent tries to hit a boxer on the nose. He says, “The guy is trying to hit YOU on the nose.” This is how the dangers are perceived. Otherwise things will get worse, and we can only but hope they get better.

LA to Alex D:

This is a profound point, and it doesn’t just pertain to soldiers in Iraq, it pertains to the entire mentality of the West. Because of our liberal view of the world in which we see everyone as being nice like us, because of our lack of first principles by which we could perceive the difference between good and bad, and between “us” and “them,” we are not capable of perceiving the existence of evil or of enemies until we affected personally and physically by them. For this reason, Western peoples will only wake up to the danger of Islam—if they ever wake up to it—after Islam has already caused extensive damage to the West. Those soldiers in Iraq, who failed to grasp that they were in a war until they were actually shot at and hit, are a symbol the West as a whole, which will not grasp that Islam is in a war with it until Islam manifests in tyrannical and brutal ways inside the West.

“It is among the evils … of democratical governments, that the people must feel, before they will see…. hence it is that this form of government is so slow.” G. Washington.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 28, 2006 06:06 PM | Send