Dealing With Communism and Missing the Point
My friends at the National Review have an extended discussion going on the Long Telegram, the present state of the Global War on Terrorism, and the advisability and logistics of confronting the Soviet Union in the period immediately after the Second World War.
It began with a related question – why has there been no “Long Telegram” in this war? That is to say, no galvanizing and transcendental document which lays out simply and clearly the path of victory. In short (I mean it, because the rest of this is very long) there’s been no “Long Telegram” in this war because there was one in the last war. Kenan’s document and the strategy that it laid out – and how it was followed in the years thereafter – exhausted the American people and left them incapable of following such a simple and direct strategy in a state of relative unity.
Political life, I’ve often said, is kind of like a locked steering wheel. When parked, you can shift it only slightly from one side to another – and that with a high degree of force. When unlocked, however, one can spin the wheel wildly to one side or another before choosing to lock it again. When so locked, it will again move only slightly – but from its new centre.
The choice here wasn’t between either ordering Eisenhower east in June 1945 and the “Long Twilight Struggle” of the Cold War. The other option – the best option – runs somewhere in-between. In the day, they called it Rollback.
What could have been doing in 1945-1946? Nuclear production could have been ramped up. Military production could have been vastly increased – many of the weapons which were due at the end of the war were, frankly, amazing. Another two to three years of research and development within the West at the rate of 1945 would have put the weapons of 1955 or so into Allied hands by the end of that period of time. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union – cut off from foreign assistance – would be lucky to get as far as they did in our timeline.
Yes, the American and British people were exhausted. And so, just like in 1918, they made a conscious decision not to finish the job – not to put the screws in while they had the chance and, thus, they paid a terrible price in the years that followed. “Republic’s cant fight wars,” lamented the Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut. She was at least half right.
Combine high-level military spending, a far more aggressive approach to Soviet espionage, constant covert warfare against communism wherever it might be found, and finally an ultimate policy of waging a war of liberation against the Soviet Union itself and you get, in the end, a chance – if things move fast enough – to create the kind of world order – a true Pax Americana – which could have lasted for centuries.
Of course, it probably wouldn’t even have been necessary to launch a war against the USSR itself without provocation. A sufficiently aggressive policy would have pushed the Soviet Union into a corner from which war seemed the only escape and, failing that, any of a thousand clashes along the bloody frontiers of communism could have provided a chance for war.
Imagine it as a more aggressive version of the Truman Doctrine: “The United States will resist, by the use of force – including all of the weapons in its arsenal – the expansion of communism anywhere in the world.”
Such noble words would, of course, have had to be backed by force. This would have been simple enough. Get a map, find an encampment of communist insurgents somewhere in the world, and then drop a nuclear bomb on it. Too often, we forget the psychology of war. People don’t fight because they’re machines – people fight because they think they have something to gain out of it or, alternatively, because they think that they have no choice. Give people a choice of practically-certain death or relative peace and, in general, most will opt for the latter. Those deranged individuals who will continue to struggle in the name of odious and despised causes even when death is the only possible reward will, in general, sort themselves out easily enough.
My point is that, with sufficient will, communism could have been defeated far earlier and more easily than it was. And, if it was done sufficiently early, it might well have been done in time to preserve the greatest force for civilization that the world has ever seen: the British Empire. Had the British Empire survived – and indeed been revitalized and enriched in a post-war world – who knows what troubles might have been saved.
Delay affords us nothing, but psychological comfort for the cautious. What could have been settled with a couple of dozen nuclear bombs in the 1940’s instead took fifty years to sort out and left a bigger mess than mere radioactive fallout in its wake.
Had the United States adopted a more aggressive posture, thousands of problems could have been ended before we were even aware of them. Imagine the trouble that a more-assertive Truman might have saved us during Korea! I sincerely believe that history will record that the failure of the United States to use nuclear weapons against China when their forces entered the conflict in Korea was one of the greatest mistakes – and the greatest tragedies – in history. Not only might the Cold War have been shortened, but the regime itself – and the Chinese power we face today – might also have been forever destroyed.
If you think about it – taking the long struggle as a model for this war is kind of defeatist. Taking forty-five years to defeat an enemy – and in the end achieving victory largely through economic attrition – is the very definition of winning ugly. God help us if we give Islamism four and a half decades to accumulate power within safe sanctuaries.
Our response in 2001 – also in retrospect a tragic error – was driven by both the caution built into our statesmen and institutions by the Cold War and, further, by the various cultural pathologies that the long fight against the disease of communism has left us fighting with. Imagine our enemies as viral or bacterial. If we beat them early on – using the maximum measures available to us – we’re likely to pass through the threat unscathed. If, on the other hand, for some misguided reason we allow the disease to ravage the body and, in the end, defeat it largely because we’re larger and stronger than it – some effects are likely to be long-lasting.
Yes, we won that long war but, in so doing, we hollowed ourselves out and were stripped of much of our own faith in ourselves. Even by September 11th – a decade after the Soviet Union itself passed into history – we continued to struggle with the lingering after-effects of the disease. Most notably, the Cold War had left us with a situation where a large part of our political and cultural elites had been turned against the nations and civilization to which they nominally owed allegiance. The fifth column, built up by years of communist propaganda and subversion – even if most of its adherents are nothing more than useful idiots exploited by other, more malicious, individuals – has proven to be one of our most deadly foes in the years since.
Moreover, the long years had built into us a caution and slowness to move and anger which resulted in a failure to effectively exploit the immediate aftermath of the assault. The immediate instinct in the hours after September 11th in many of the most responsible minds in the land was to make sure that no one blamed any particular group – and to prevent hate crimes and the like. Thus was it that the true nature of the enemy was distorted and omitted by those who piously adhered to multicultural dogma. Here were the needs of the many sacrificed for the needs of the few.
While I’ve yet to read “World War IV” – I think that the gravest mistake in using the Cold War as a model for this war is thinking that we have another forty years in which to fight it. The monster growing on the other side of the Pacific is going to have to be confronted sooner or later – and I don’t see any way that that match is going to be postponed anywhere close to that long.
What we need to be looking for here is a chance to unlock the wheel and to kick this war into a higher gear. What is needed now is raw and decisive force.
It began with a related question – why has there been no “Long Telegram” in this war? That is to say, no galvanizing and transcendental document which lays out simply and clearly the path of victory. In short (I mean it, because the rest of this is very long) there’s been no “Long Telegram” in this war because there was one in the last war. Kenan’s document and the strategy that it laid out – and how it was followed in the years thereafter – exhausted the American people and left them incapable of following such a simple and direct strategy in a state of relative unity.
Political life, I’ve often said, is kind of like a locked steering wheel. When parked, you can shift it only slightly from one side to another – and that with a high degree of force. When unlocked, however, one can spin the wheel wildly to one side or another before choosing to lock it again. When so locked, it will again move only slightly – but from its new centre.
The choice here wasn’t between either ordering Eisenhower east in June 1945 and the “Long Twilight Struggle” of the Cold War. The other option – the best option – runs somewhere in-between. In the day, they called it Rollback.
What could have been doing in 1945-1946? Nuclear production could have been ramped up. Military production could have been vastly increased – many of the weapons which were due at the end of the war were, frankly, amazing. Another two to three years of research and development within the West at the rate of 1945 would have put the weapons of 1955 or so into Allied hands by the end of that period of time. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union – cut off from foreign assistance – would be lucky to get as far as they did in our timeline.
Yes, the American and British people were exhausted. And so, just like in 1918, they made a conscious decision not to finish the job – not to put the screws in while they had the chance and, thus, they paid a terrible price in the years that followed. “Republic’s cant fight wars,” lamented the Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut. She was at least half right.
Combine high-level military spending, a far more aggressive approach to Soviet espionage, constant covert warfare against communism wherever it might be found, and finally an ultimate policy of waging a war of liberation against the Soviet Union itself and you get, in the end, a chance – if things move fast enough – to create the kind of world order – a true Pax Americana – which could have lasted for centuries.
Of course, it probably wouldn’t even have been necessary to launch a war against the USSR itself without provocation. A sufficiently aggressive policy would have pushed the Soviet Union into a corner from which war seemed the only escape and, failing that, any of a thousand clashes along the bloody frontiers of communism could have provided a chance for war.
Imagine it as a more aggressive version of the Truman Doctrine: “The United States will resist, by the use of force – including all of the weapons in its arsenal – the expansion of communism anywhere in the world.”
Such noble words would, of course, have had to be backed by force. This would have been simple enough. Get a map, find an encampment of communist insurgents somewhere in the world, and then drop a nuclear bomb on it. Too often, we forget the psychology of war. People don’t fight because they’re machines – people fight because they think they have something to gain out of it or, alternatively, because they think that they have no choice. Give people a choice of practically-certain death or relative peace and, in general, most will opt for the latter. Those deranged individuals who will continue to struggle in the name of odious and despised causes even when death is the only possible reward will, in general, sort themselves out easily enough.
My point is that, with sufficient will, communism could have been defeated far earlier and more easily than it was. And, if it was done sufficiently early, it might well have been done in time to preserve the greatest force for civilization that the world has ever seen: the British Empire. Had the British Empire survived – and indeed been revitalized and enriched in a post-war world – who knows what troubles might have been saved.
Delay affords us nothing, but psychological comfort for the cautious. What could have been settled with a couple of dozen nuclear bombs in the 1940’s instead took fifty years to sort out and left a bigger mess than mere radioactive fallout in its wake.
Had the United States adopted a more aggressive posture, thousands of problems could have been ended before we were even aware of them. Imagine the trouble that a more-assertive Truman might have saved us during Korea! I sincerely believe that history will record that the failure of the United States to use nuclear weapons against China when their forces entered the conflict in Korea was one of the greatest mistakes – and the greatest tragedies – in history. Not only might the Cold War have been shortened, but the regime itself – and the Chinese power we face today – might also have been forever destroyed.
If you think about it – taking the long struggle as a model for this war is kind of defeatist. Taking forty-five years to defeat an enemy – and in the end achieving victory largely through economic attrition – is the very definition of winning ugly. God help us if we give Islamism four and a half decades to accumulate power within safe sanctuaries.
Our response in 2001 – also in retrospect a tragic error – was driven by both the caution built into our statesmen and institutions by the Cold War and, further, by the various cultural pathologies that the long fight against the disease of communism has left us fighting with. Imagine our enemies as viral or bacterial. If we beat them early on – using the maximum measures available to us – we’re likely to pass through the threat unscathed. If, on the other hand, for some misguided reason we allow the disease to ravage the body and, in the end, defeat it largely because we’re larger and stronger than it – some effects are likely to be long-lasting.
Yes, we won that long war but, in so doing, we hollowed ourselves out and were stripped of much of our own faith in ourselves. Even by September 11th – a decade after the Soviet Union itself passed into history – we continued to struggle with the lingering after-effects of the disease. Most notably, the Cold War had left us with a situation where a large part of our political and cultural elites had been turned against the nations and civilization to which they nominally owed allegiance. The fifth column, built up by years of communist propaganda and subversion – even if most of its adherents are nothing more than useful idiots exploited by other, more malicious, individuals – has proven to be one of our most deadly foes in the years since.
Moreover, the long years had built into us a caution and slowness to move and anger which resulted in a failure to effectively exploit the immediate aftermath of the assault. The immediate instinct in the hours after September 11th in many of the most responsible minds in the land was to make sure that no one blamed any particular group – and to prevent hate crimes and the like. Thus was it that the true nature of the enemy was distorted and omitted by those who piously adhered to multicultural dogma. Here were the needs of the many sacrificed for the needs of the few.
While I’ve yet to read “World War IV” – I think that the gravest mistake in using the Cold War as a model for this war is thinking that we have another forty years in which to fight it. The monster growing on the other side of the Pacific is going to have to be confronted sooner or later – and I don’t see any way that that match is going to be postponed anywhere close to that long.
What we need to be looking for here is a chance to unlock the wheel and to kick this war into a higher gear. What is needed now is raw and decisive force.
posted by Adam Yoshida at
12:05 AM
12 Comments:
Anytime you want to head down here and enlist in this Great Struggle, you're welcome to do so. I'm sure the army or marines could use a leader of your quality.
But I'm not betting on that happening anytime soon...
Lord above, those bearded bogeymen really have turned you into a scared little fellow, haven’t they?
Now, lest you accuse me of not appreciating the threat we face from nutjob fundamentalist Muslims, let me set your mind at ease: I do indeed see and understand that these people are dangerous, and we need to fight them.
But we also need to have some perspective. These guys are not the nazis and they aren't the soviets.
The nazis had one of the world's biggest armies in the 30's and 40's, and Germany was one of the world's leading industrial and technological countries. They were indeed an awful threat, as we saw. It took the U.S., Soviet Russia, Britain and a host of assorted other countries to bring the nazis down, and it still took 6 years.
The soviets had nuclear bombs from about 1949 until they broke up, and while they were nowhere near as technologically up to speed as the U.S. and our allies, they had a gigantic military, quite the industrial base, and the brutality to bleed everything out of their workers that the workers had to give. They, too were a serious threat.
The nazis could have invaded the U.S., and while it's unlikely they could have taken us, they sure would have killed and maimed an obscene number of Americans trying. They might not have had much shot at beating us, but in trying, they might well have smashed things up so badly that the country would have come apart.
The soviets, of course, could have wiped millions of Americans off the face of the world in a few hours.
What can the terrorists do? Blow up a few buildings? Shoot down some airplanes? They can kill a few thousand of us at one go, as they have shown us, but it would be beyond them to hit us badly enough to bring on the end of the U.S.--unless we lend them a hand and overreact and do most of the heavy lifting for them.
Now, I am in no way belittling the loss of 3000 Americans. It was an atrocity, and I pray we never see anything like it again. But what happened to us was nothing like World War II or the Cold War, and we need to grow up and stop pretending that these assholes living in caves are anything that threatens the existence of the U.S. There are going to be terrorists, most likely forever; there will always be those who hate the U.S., most likely as long as there is a U.S.; there will always be people screwed up enough and pissed off enough to kill themselves if they think they can take out a few of their hated enemy by doing so.
We’re never going to be able to kill them all off. Never. And if we as a country obsess about terrorism to the point you do, or let people like George Bush cynically exploit it for much longer, we could well kill our own country off. That’s what the terrorists hope for. They knew they could never take us down, but if they could manipulate us into overreacting badly enough, they could steer us into a position where we might do their own dirty work for them.
What I’m saying is that we as a country need to get a sense of perspective about terrorism. Yes, it’s a threat. Yes, Americans can die in horrific ways at the hands of beastly assholes. Yes, we need to do all we can to lessen the threat. But we cannot afford to lose our heads about it. That’s what the terrorists want.
I’ve often heard George Bush say they “hate us for our freedoms.” And I guess maybe they do, some of them. But the way to fight them is not by willingly giving up our freedoms. If these losers hate us for our freedoms, then maybe freedom is something worth having. I don’t want to give it up just so George Bush can have an easier time screwing the country up and breeding a whole new generation of terrorists, many of whom might never have become terrorists but for his monumental incompetence and hubris.
The funny thing about osama bin ladin is how much he and Bush need each other. They’re each other’s useful idiots. Neither one would have ever been anything without the other. And what’s funnier is how much people like you need osama bin ladin and how much he needs those like you. He is your useful idiot, too. You, too, are his.
How lucky you all are to have each other.
"The nazis could have invaded the U.S., and while it's unlikely they could have taken us, they sure would have killed and maimed an obscene number of Americans trying."
The Nazis couldn't even invade ENGLAND, even after conquering all of continental Europe, and while being supplied militarily by the SOVIETS (that the Soviets and the Nazis were in material alliance against the West for two years seems to be forgotten by far too many people)! What, exactly, are you basing your "opinion", that the Nazis could have invaded the US, on?
PS - the real threat that Moslems pose to the US and Europe is not through terrorist acts. The chance of getting killed by a terrorist is utterly remote. It is through the destruction of the nations themselves through the mass importation of Moslem immigrants. Banning Moslem immigration, and financing the expatriation and resettlement of Moslems in their own countries is a necessary precondition of saving the West.
But because liberals, including Adam, have no concept of "country" other than a bundle of liberal "propositions", they therefore have no aversion to demographically, decline-of-Rome-style, overthrowing whole nations, because, in their worldview, there is nothing to overthrow, or at least nothing worth preserving.
Adam has said nothing about ending mass immigration, financing the repatriation of anyone who is incompatible with the existence of the US (which will probably mean, in practice, most people who entered after 1965), and deporting every single illegal immigrant in the country. That's because Adam, despite his chest beating and calls for nuclear war, is a liberal-propositionist who differs from other liberals only in that not only will he acquiesce in the continued destruction of his own country (which is...where are you from anyway?), but also every other country on the face of the earth that looks capable of threatening liberalism, or should I say Yoshidism. He's not "conservative" in any real sense of the word, but a liberal on steroids, or, in other words, a neo-con.
I guess I exaggerated the threat somewhat of the nazis, but they still could have done a lot worse than the terrorists ever could. If they hadn't invaded Russia, they might have taken Britain. Who knows, Hitler might have tried some kind of invasion of the U.S. I'm not saying he could have overrun us, but he could have done a lot of damage.
And how do you propose stripping Americans of their citizenship and sending them back "home"?
What about native born "real" Americans (which I guess means "white" to you) who conert to Islam? Where do we send them?
Forced deportation of American citizens and legal immigrants (I'm not talking about illegal immigrants here) goes against everything this country was built on and everything we should aspire to.
And it's a funny thing, if you go back 100 years, people were saying the same things about East Asians, European Jews and Eastern Europeans that right wingers are saying about Hispanic immigrants today: they won't assimilate; they CAN'T assimilate; They're not like us; they're all criminals; they're a threat to our way of life...
Go back 60 years before that, and they were saying it about the Irish: they won't assimilate; they CAN'T assimilate; They're not like us; they're all criminals; they're a threat to our way of life...
Go back 100 years before that, and they were saying it about German Protestants and Schotch-Irish Presbyterians: they won't assimilate; they CAN'T assimilate; They're not like us; they're all criminals; they're a threat to our way of life...
100 years before that, English Congregationalists were saying it about English Baptists, English Anglicans were saying it about English Quakers, and on and on:
they won't assimilate; they CAN'T assimilate; They're not like us; they're all criminals; they're a threat to our way of life...
Funny how it never worked out that way.
I'm not scared of Muslims, any more than I'm scared of Jews or Japanese Buddhists or Eastern Orthodox Christians or Catholics or Mennonites or the Amish or Methodists or Baptists or Presbyterians or Lutherans or Reformed or Episcopalians or Quakers or the United Brethren.
There are bad people in all of those religions and denominations, but there are an awful lot of good ones, too.
I try to be a good American, and you can't be both a good American and a bigot
There was a lot for me to play with in that latest comment, but I'll stick to a fairly simple question, especially in light of your last sentence.
What proportion of America's population do you believe ought to be composed of Moslems? What, exactly, do you mean by "America"?
"If they hadn't invaded Russia, they might have taken Britain."
You've got this exactly backwards (and I'm beginning to wonder if you've ever read anything about World War II) - Hitler failed to invade Britain, even with the Soviets' material backing. It was after that, unable to subdue Britain, that he turned East and invaded Russia, indefinitely postponing his plan to take Britain.
When I say "America" I mean the United States.
And what kind of question is "What proportion of America's population do you believe ought to be composed of Moslems?"
Whatever the proportion of Muslims in the United States happens to be is what I believe the proportion of Muslims in the United States ought to be.
I don't believe in mass deportations or in forced conversions. I don't have any problem with Muslims living in the U.S.
You right wingers are scared to death of everything: "Ooooh! The bearded Islamofreaks are coming to kill us and make us all wear burkhas!"
It's getting old and tired.
I'm more worried about terrorism from home grown right-wing and fundamentalist Christian nuts these days.
While the one worst attack on this country came at the hands of Muslim fundies, it's worth noting that they were all foreigners, not home grown. We've had no trouble to speak of from native born American Muslims.
And after the 1 big attack 6 years ago and the World Trade Center bomb 8 years before that, pretty much all of the terrorist attacks here were at the hands of American born right-wing and fundamentalist Christian, whether groups or people working alone or as 2 or 3.
If we want to be serious about terrorism in this country, we need to stop obsessing about scary Muslims and start looking at our own home grown nuts.
And though my choice of words might not have been the best (I should have said defeated rather than invaded), I still believe Germany could have beaten Britain if they had kept on bombing the Island until there was nothing standing. They got involved in Russia and couldn't fight 2 wars at once as well as 1. I don't know, as I'm certainly no expert on World War II.
But to get back to what seems like the main point to me, Muslims have every bit as much right as I do to live in the United States. And they have evry bit as much right to worship their faith as I do to worship mine. Singling them out for deportataion or harassment or jailing or forbidding them to worship or gather goes against every ideal that my country was built upon, and has been striving for--slowly, and at times fitfully--for more than 200 years. It's unAmerican.
"Whatever the proportion of Muslims in the United States happens to be is what I believe the proportion of Muslims in the United States ought to be."
OK, so you have no objection to the United States becoming an Islamic country. That is to say, you have no objection to America essentially being eliminated and replaced by a foreign entity. Why do you support the destruction of America?
"You right wingers are scared to death of everything: "Ooooh! The bearded Islamofreaks are coming to kill us and make us all wear burkhas!"
It's getting old and tired.
I'm more worried about terrorism from home grown right-wing and fundamentalist Christian nuts these days."
What did I say that makes you think I'm particularly afraid of anything? You should re-read my first and second comments, and try again.
"While the one worst attack on this country came at the hands of Muslim fundies, it's worth noting that they were all foreigners, not home grown. We've had no trouble to speak of from native born American Muslims.
And after the 1 big attack 6 years ago and the World Trade Center bomb 8 years before that, pretty much all of the terrorist attacks here were at the hands of American born right-wing and fundamentalist Christian, whether groups or people working alone or as 2 or 3."
This is all instructive of your mentality (you are clearly debating someone that isn't present), because I never actually mentioned terrorism. Or, more correctly, in my second comment I specifically DENIED that there was a major threat to Americans from terrorism. You can direct any "terrorism" related comments towards Adam, the neo-con, because I completely reject the mainstream "War on Terror" discourse.
"If we want to be serious about terrorism in this country, we need to stop obsessing about scary Muslims and start looking at our own home grown nuts."
Ditto. I don't particularly care about "terrorists" (although they are a deadly nuisance). I care about the destruction of entire nations in the pursue of false, illogical, liberal and democratic abstractions.
"I don't know, as I'm certainly no expert on World War II."
I noticed that!
"But to get back to what seems like the main point to me, Muslims have every bit as much right as I do to live in the United States. And they have evry bit as much right to worship their faith as I do to worship mine. Singling them out for deportataion or harassment or jailing or forbidding them to worship or gather goes against every ideal that my country was built upon, and has been striving for--slowly, and at times fitfully--for more than 200"
No they don't, and your "country's" (I use that term advisedly, because it's not clear that you even have a country, so much as a squabbling litany of nationalities, all but one explicitly organised on racial lines, under a single, increasingly-totalitarian, government) ideals are worthless. They will last as long as the founding peoples of the USA, the Anglo-Saxons, last. Seeing as you have rejected out of hand the idea that Anglo-Saxons should have their own exclusive nations and their own identity for themselves, your ideals aren't worth a cup of warm spit. Not only does Islam, an utterly hostile civilisation that repeatedly tried to destroy the West whenever it had the means, nd came breathtakingly close on two or three occasions (most notoriously, Tours in 732, Vienna in 1683), not have any place in America, at a bare minimum the continual acceptace of Moslem immigrants is suicidal and must be arrested immediately.
"Terrorism", when stacked up against atrocities such as the destruction of Byzantium, the conquest of Spain, repeated invasions of the Italian peninsula, the invasion (and subjugation) of four of Christendom's five most revered cities, is rather beside the point.
Well, there's not much point arguing anymore. If you say Muslims have no right to live in the United States, or worship here, then you must not know much about the constitution, in which freedom of religion and assembly are explicitly recognized as rights. We do have a bad government right now, but the system of laws we built our country on is strong enough to outlast this execrable president (I hope; it will take some work).
Our system has worked pretty well for more than 200 years, and we kind of like it.
As for t he racialist stuff: I'm a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant guy; there's nothing about that that makes me any more worthy than somebody from Honduras or Iceland or Hungary or Paraguay or Botswana or anywhere else. I'm only as worthy as my behavior and beliefs and words and deeds. And I don't behave in any specific way or believe or say or do any specific things because of where my forebears happened to come from 350 or 400 years ago. That's up to me now.
I'm proud to live in a country that respects all people, whatever they may look like and whoever or whatever they may worship or not worship. That's one of the things that makes us what we are. And the funny thing is, I like respecting people. I can learn a lot from them, and they all have something to teach me, even if it's by negative example.
And as for Islam being hostile, well, Christianity and Islam haven't had the best relationship for a long while, and both sides have behaved badly. The Crusades are not something I'm proud of as a Christian.
Now, I can see why somebody might look at Anglo-Saxon society and mistakenly come to believe that it's somehow the best there ever was or ever could be. A lot, maybe even most, of the big leaps in technology, science and government have come from Anglo-Saxon--and more broadly, Northern European--people for the last few hundred years.
That's true enough, but it's also true that 500 years is really a short time in the history of humanity. Over thousands of years, different parts of the world have taken the lead at different times in all kinds of fields. While Greek philosophers were writing some of the most important works ever, my forbears were drinking mead out of the skulls of their slain foes. While Arab mathmaticians were making great leaps forward, my forebears were still eating with their hands and feared bathing.
Do you know who the first grammarian was? It was a fellow named Panini, who wrote the first grammar of any language--Sanskrit--4000 years ago, before the Greeks were even on top of things. The Chinese famously came up with printing and gunpowder and the compass, not Europeans.
The Anglos and Western Europeans happened to take the lead at a time when technology and science reached a point where advancement sped up phenomenally; that made it hard for anybody else to catch up, much less overtake, the Anglos and Western Europeans. But if they had been 500 years behind, say, East Asians or Arabs or Africans, well, who knows which culture might be the dominant one now.
It haas nothing to do with race.
And by the way, if Muslims ever become a majority in this country--something I don't see as too likely, though I could always be wrong, then it would be just as likely that it would happen by Muslim citizens having children faster than non-Muslims as it would be by Muslims immigrating from abroad. And if it comes about by American born Muslims having children faster, then the Muslim "takeover", as you would put it, cannot by definition be a foreign one.
People have been wailing about the looming destruction of the U.S. for 200 years. There's always been some group of filthy foreigners who were overrunning us and outbreeding us, and it was always going to lead to our downfall. But it never happened. We're still here, and I think we're better for it.
On the other comment you suggested that there was nothing I could say to change your mind. That's fine, but I do need to clear some things up, for the benefit of Adam and the liberal residents here (or do I repeat myself?), because you still appear to be talking to someone who isn't me.
"Now, I can see why somebody might look at Anglo-Saxon society and mistakenly come to believe that it's somehow the best there ever was or ever could be."
That is not, and has never been, my view. You won't find anything in any of my comments that say otherwise. I do not believe the United States has anything worth teaching to the Arab world (to take a disreputable contemporary example), and I reject all attempts to impose one culture on another. I do not believe that Hispanics have much to teach Americans; and I certainly reject Americans ordering Hispanics around. Both groups of people have their own strengths and weaknesses, which, by definition, precludes supremacism (even if the US is way ahead in certain fields).
My "universal nationalist" position is based entirely on a nation's subjective right and obligation not to commit suicide.
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