[ExI] Terrorist? Who can tell?

[Lee Corbin]

John Grigg writes

> Hey, let's invade Iran and then just keep going!
> U.S. foreign policy should be just like playing the
> classic boardgame Risk!

Actually, I got over that attitude about the time I
turned eleven!  :-)  But up until then, what Hitler
had tried to do made a whole lot of sense to me  :-D

> Oh, wait, that would be biting off more than we can chew...

Well, maybe someday. What if we make the nanotech breakthrough first?
World Domination!

> I am amazed (in a good way) there is not more support for
> reinstating the draft.  It would be a key way of having an
> American military capable of of doing everything on the
> Neocon wishlist.

In a democracy, there seems to be two requirements for
a workable draft: an enormous reservoir of patriotism and
a palpable feeling of emergency.

> I think had New York City itself been vaporized in a flash
> of nuclear fire, we would have likely seen a draft brought back.
> And people would have generally embraced it.    

Good point. There's still a lot of life left in the old carcass,
though I wonder how much there'd be without the Italians
and 19th century Germans and Scots-Irish who came.
The liberal WASP progressives, who a century ago were
all for eugenics, prohibition, and other revolutionary
measures have mostly lost their patriotism, and the only
fire left in their bellies would appear to be an one-worlder
internationalist urge to be green, or to supplant capitalism.

Speaking of the alteration of national character, I'm listening
to Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia", where while narrating his
adventures and dismay in the Spanish Civil War (1936), he
describes in great detail the ineptitude of the Spanish in so
many things, from war making (both sides) to the stark poverty
of the countryside. He mentions, for example, that while the
Spanish secret police had all the enthusiasm of the Gestapo,
they simply didn't have any of its competence.

As I listened, it became clear to me that if you teleported 
Cortez, Pizarro, DeSoto and all their followers into the Spain
of 1936 and enlisted their wholehearted support in the Loyalist
cause, Franco would have been beaten. More realistically, if
they'd joined the more religious side, i.e., the Nationalists,
then the war wouldn't have lasted a month longer.

What happened to the indomitable will of the Conquistadors and
to the fact that between 1500 and 1650 the Spanish infantry
*never* lost a single battle? There was simply no stopping them,
as the inhabitants of the Americas learned. Where there is a will,
there most often indeed is a way, and will they had aplenty.

I think that what happened was that during the 17th and 18th
century the spirit of conquest and the tremendous vitality and
will of the Spanish gradually died on the vine. Too many reverses
at the hands of the superior technology of the Dutch, English,
and French finally cracked their armor. (In the same way, I 
contend, the Sweden of Charles XII gradually turned into the
milquetoast country of today, but only after Peter the Great
pulled their teeth. No more would Swedish bayonets terrify
all of Europe.) And the Japanese of mid-century too: no
amount of elan and invincibly high morale really works against
vastly superior industrial strength and better technology.

Vietnam had an effect on the American soul almost as deadly
and wearying as the decades of the sixties and seventies 
themselves. Yet just as it took Rome a long time to become
Italian, so indeed America would respond just as you have
suggested. Despite all the talk and soul-searching and great
remorse expressed here and there, once again the "likely
suspects" would be rounded up and put into concentration
camps, precisely as befell the Japanese in 1942.

Rome was no longer capable of Republican government by
the first century BC, and though Caesar was a genocidal
monster outside of Italy, and an unscrupulous politician inside
it, he and later Augustus saw clearly what needed to be done,
which escaped many of their contemporaries. And it wasn't
for hundreds of years yet that Roman patriotism was to 
perish, perhaps forever. (Today, the Italians explain that
they're too intelligent to make good soldiers, and you can
sort of see what they're getting at.)  I am afraid that what
the Italian Fascists, with all their symbols of unity, their great
hunger to regain the sense of national purpose and glory that
animated their great ancestors, really were after was simply
out of reach.

Perhaps after the present demographic changes in America
are carried through another couple of generations (and the
average IQ has fallen to 95), not even the nuking of an
American city will be able to rouse the old passions.

Lee