Or, YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!!!!
I've always believed, profoundly, that the principles of natural selection apply as much to the evolution of political societies as they do to the evolution of biological organisms. War is the architect of human society, and has been for at least the last ten thousand years of human sociability, since the first villages came together to defend crops and herd animals from nomadic hunter-gatherers - and from those of other villages who were not averse to supplementing their wealth, their prestige and power, by pillaging their neighbours.
War drives technology. War drives ethics and morality. War is the engine of human civilizational effort. And it's only in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars, in the aftermath of the development of nuclear weapons, that this profound truth has been forgotten.
There is something else I've always believed - that you can insult a man's manhood and that, in the majority of cases, a man will stand still for such an insult and not retaliate. You can steal his woman, and in the majority of cases he will not retaliate. You can even take his life, the lives of his woman and children, and as was demonstrated by Jewish passivity and cowardice in the face of the Nazis extermination program, he will go to his death like a sheep to the slaughter, demurely and with barely a bleat of protest.
But the one thing you cannot insult, attempt to take away, or even disrespect in a humorous or satirical fashion without expecting to receive the most serious consequences in return, is a man's religion.
One thing that cannot be said of muslims generally is that they are insincere in the respect which they give to their religion and to their Prophet in particular.
We, on the other hand, the still so-called 'Christian' West, are a deal less passionate about religion. Indeed, partly in consequence of the religious wars in Europe in the past, partly because of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, we've learned to distrust all religious enthusiasm and its tendency to violence. We are, however, passionate about our civil and political liberties, especially the liberty to satirize, insult, and generally provoke those we oppose or who oppose us, through the written word and through the political cartoon.
Before this latest furore broke out in Denmark I would have said (and honestly believed) that nowhere were the Liberal (in its original sense, not the emasculated version found in America) values of freedom of thought, of expression, more highly valued than in Britain. I find it shameful that the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, can be seen in the world's media pandering to the Muslim murderers and their would-be tyranny by praising the British press for not yet publishing the cartoons in question.
Today's Guardian Newspaper (Link) reports that a group of Muslims who had gathered to protest the publication of the cartoons at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park (as anyone is privileged to do - native Britain or not - because that's one of the liberties granted by the Crown) attempted to attack a passing motocyclist who had derided them as extremists. Which could hardly be called untrue though I've no doubt the muslims found it 'offensive'. The motorcyclist had to be protected from this mob by the police who are routinely stationed there to prevent free speech from becoming violence in the streets.
The liberty the Crown grants is that everyone under its sway may freely and publically express his opinion so long as it's not seditious, or calculated to break the Sovereign's Peace, nor forbidden. In practice, no one pays attenion to any of the clauses but all the English know the principle by heart.
The muslims broke the peace because, no matter how proper their outrage in their own eyes, they were prepared to do violence to another because he or she had expressed his opinion.
Elsewhere in London muslim protesters have paraded down London's streets waving banners calling for further bombings and more murders of British people for the heinous crime of not immediately kowtowing to their feelings of outrage.
On a personal note, just let me say this: F*CK YOU, muslims.
Straw, that cowardly little man, in fear mostly of losing muslim votes, muslims in Britain having a political tradition of voting Labour, the party of Straw and Blair (as well as fearing the physical numbers of muslims in Britain) will not condemn an outrage against one of the principle values of Liberal English culture (liberal in the original sense, I'll once again remind you) but will condemn Denmark and other European nations for standing in support of that value. The French said it best in the headline of the Paris paper whose editor was immediately sacked by the owner for its publication: Yes, we do have the right to caricature God. I'm no lover of the French, but I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment. And it's my firm belief that the kind of cultural cowardice exemplified by Straw should finish its career at the end of a noose - though only after a proper trial and appropriate appeals procedure, of course.
Personally, if I were British Prime Minister, I'd be more inclined to say "Piss on your dunghill cock of a prophet and his murdering adherents" and begin construction of a new generation of H-Blocks (for those of you who don't know, H-Blocks are the internment camps in which both republican and 'loyalist' terrorists are held in Northern Ireland) - only this new generation of camps would be referred to as 'M-Blocks'.
It's time for a winnowing of the wheat from the chaff. Time to make up our minds now as to where we stand. With the adherents of an antique religion known for its barbarity, its opposition to every value held dear by the West, for its propensity for slaughtering non-combatant innocents, its medieval grotesqueries masquerading as 'law'; or with the traditions of the West and the religion of the West. And don't bleat to me about the Crusades, or the Inquisition: I'm not concerned with whether Islam is better than Christianity, with whether or not Christianity has its own catalog of horrors than can be quoted against it: it has.
Nor do I believe that I have to be a Christian in order to support fundamental values which underpin our present society that have their roots in the Christian Church and its development as an organisation. The Roman Church is the first Western Bureacracy - out of it grew concepts of order and organisation, record-keeping, historiograhy, and syllogistic logic. I can support those values even if I no longer believe in the religious revelation.
Which flavor of religion tastes nicer isn't the issue. The issue is that there is in development a clash of civilizations whose like has not been seen since the days of the original Crusades. Zealots of Islam and Christianity will tout this clash as one of religions, and for some, maybe many, that's what it will be. But I see it as a clash of world-views, where not merely overtly religious values are being contested but every value in these two systems is available to be fought over, two systems as unlike each other (for all the trivial resemblances in the names worshipped and the book that's revered) as it is possible to be.
Where the Christian West has come to value the individual, Islam values the Umma, the community. Where the West has come to exalt individual experience and expression and, in America particularly, has constructed a civilization on that premise, Islam values submission (Islam does not mean 'peace' - it's literal meaning is 'surrender to the will of Allah'.)
Both ironic and ominous, then, that in America the response of the government is to condemn freedom and complain that muslims' feelings must not be hurt. Why does Bush not condemn this kind of tyranny, this kind of threat to American freedoms (though it's no surprise that Clinton, the spineless liar and adulterer, condemned the cartoons as abhorrent, comparing free publication to anti-semitism of all things)? Why does he not condemn it as forcefully as he condemned the tyranny of a petty demagogue in Iraq? To topple a flyspeck regime he spends endless billions of dollars and the lives of 2000 dead Americans. But not so much as a breath of air has he to spare for the threat that's been apparent since 9/11 and Bin Laden's first taped message - the threat of a civilizational antagonism that is as implacable as it is sincere.
I said at the beginning that war is the engine of human development. I'm not wringing my hands in sorrow or dread, because I'm looking forward to the killing-fields. Let these motherf*ckers come marching through the 'hood here in South Richmond. I'll be out on the barricades with the n*ggers and the wetbacks and the white trailer trash, the red-necks and the intellectuals, with the crack-whores, the doctors and the dentists. And none of us will give a sh*t about any of that, because we'll once more be united by a threat to what we are - the children of Christianity, Capitalism, and Liberty.
And it's only out of such a clash, whatever the American 'liberal' sheep may say, that some kind of renewal may come to replace the current cultural malaise, disenchantment and self-doubt that's overtaken the West and allowed it to make itself subject to terrors inspired by medieval mullahs and their clans of murdering swine.
We need to be reminded of who we are. And we will be, thanks to the rise of Islam. And once we've remembered (and that may take some time, to be filled no doubt by further Islamic outrages and atrocities) we need to kick their sand-n*gger butts back to the stone-age from whence they came.
And we will.