Post by Peter TreiI hope your books are better than the public persona you're projecting here.
Tom Kratman _is_ a controversial author.
Since his book "Caliphate" has been discussed in this newsgroup, you may know why.
I am... conflicted... about books like that.
For one thing, I am a Canadian, and thus this gives me a certain detachment
vis-a-vis the Bill of Rights.
I don't feel ashamed to question whether the Second Amendment is an appropriate
rule to follow in a society with large, anonymous cities.
As for the First Amendment, while I disagree with Canada's "hate literature"
laws as they stand, I would be inclined to consider, and perhaps support, laws
which left alone any attempt to present the case for any political viewpoint,
however distasteful to current sentiment, in a factual manner - but which would
permit works like, say, the movie "Jüd Suss" to be banned, as they incite
hatred by appeal to the emotions rather than the mind.
A consequence of that is that today's politically-correct elites would be
legally able, were they inclined to do so, to ban a book like "Caliphate".
(Despite our country's current broader laws, though, it has not been banned in
Canada, in case you're wondering.)
As I said, I'm conflicted.
Because, as people are aware from my own political postings here, I'm in a
basic agreement with the premise of the work.
While I accept that it *is* a fact that the vast majority of Muslims in Europe,
as in Canada and the United States, are innocent people and good citizens...
it is also true that:
- there are some terrorists among them;
- we have no magic way to tell who they are;
- they carry certain cultural and historical baggage that makes some of their children susceptible to radicalization; and
- they are, to a certain degree, subject to intimidation within their community that prevents the good majority from properly speaking out in a way sufficient to deprive the ideas that lead to terrorist acts of their legitimacy.
If one is *irrevocably and absolutely* committed to not rounding up and deporting a group living in your territory by race or religion - _no matter what_ - then Kratman's point in Caliphate, that you then are accepting as a consequence of that position some risk of exactly the sort of bleak future for your descendants as that book describes...
is absolutely correct.
Somebody had *better* make that point before it actually is too late.
But does that mean that Hitler was right?
I doubt Tom Kratman thinks so. With a name like Kratman, after all...
Of course, Hitler rounded up the Jews. Who we know as being model citizens who
have contributed far out of proportion to their numbers to the sciences and the
arts.
World War II, and its painful and tragic costs for American families,
discredited racism - and led directly to such things as the Voting Rights Act
of 1964.
Which, of course, is why Jesse Jackson's Presidential bid was torpedoed so rapidly after the Farrakhan debacle:
There are two kinds of white American.
The ones who are racist.
The ones who are not racist - and whose not being racist stemmed from the
horrors of the Holocaust. Thus, first they became super-sensitive to racism
against Jews, and then they also rejected racism against black people as a...
logical corollary.
And, thus, a candidate who is perceived even as being slightly "soft" on
anti-Semitism is even less likely to be considered an option by the
*non-racist* group of white Americans than, oh, say, David Duke.
But there's a difference between being wrong in fact, wrong in a particular
instance, and being wrong in theory.
And this brings to mind a recent post of mine in another newsgroup.
Someone quoted (with strong disapproval) Hitler:
(begin quote)
A lopsided education has helped to encourage that illusion. Man must realize
that a fundamental law of necessity reigns throughout the whole realm of Nature
and that his existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife. He
will then feel that there cannot be a separate law for mankind in a world in
which planets and suns follow their orbits, where moons and planets trace their
destined paths, where the strong are always the masters of the weak and where
those subject to such laws must obey them or be destroyed.
(end quote)
but in service of an argument against "empiricism". (Basically, he believes
that scientists have utterly betrayed all that is good and decent by claiming
that he Earth rotates on its axis once every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4
seconds, instead of once every 24 hours, as is as obvious as day and night.)
And, thus, in the spirit of the old quote about "a lie that is half the truth
is a harder matter to fight" - Kipling wasn't the original source of it - I
wrote the following:
(begin quote)
I think that pretty much everyone agrees today that Hitler was wrong. About
*something*, at least. After all, it's pretty much agreed upon by everyone that
the Nazis were evil.
The Communists also had slave labor camps with cruel treatment of their
innocent prisoners - but some *respectable* people still try to apologize for
Communism to this day.
But _what_ was Hitler wrong about?
Was he wrong to say that the forces of natural selection apply to human beings
just as pitilessly as to animals?
No: but he was wrong about how we should _respond_ to that fact.
That is: while it is correct to acknowledge that the laws of nature do not
guarantee our survival, and thus we must indeed look out for that ourselves -
it is *also* correct that we should not do... more than is necessary... in that
regard. We should do what our intellect and technology gives us the power to
do, to provide for humanity a humane and just social order were the weak, the
ill, the disadvantaged are not ignored or pushed aside, but are helped to
survive as well.
Hitler's thinking, though almost universally repudiated, does still live on -
the news about a terrible knife rampage in Japan shows that.
(end quote)
John Savard