Western Standard Editorial Contest
The Threat Within
Robert Holmes
I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their words, a contempt born of academic persuasion and elitism. Denigration so complete it smacks of Apartheid and a Cracker mentality. These are my friends, who I admire so much for their erudition and accomplishments, graduates of our best universities, experienced middle-aged, productive members of this Peaceable Country.
Over lunch we speak for the first time of the War in Afghanistan, the mad, mad mullahs, the Taliban, Iraq, Iran, Israel, the Americans, 9/11, terrorist cells in Canada, the horrible-to-contemplate possibilities of domestic terrorism that never existed before now, our children and grandchildren's world. How to fix it. We tsk-tsk through our meals, sip our wine and order more, comfortable in our opinions and wise pronunciations.
“My eldest son is off to Kandahar” I say, wanting to share my anxiety and some pride with those closest to me. They respond with expressions of regret, condolences, some sympathetic noises.
“They're psychopaths, with low IQ's, not able to function at any meaningful level in a civilised society. Most would be in prison if not for being engaged in such violence”, an opinion greeted with nods and smiling agreement. “It's likely a form of therapy and serves the additional purpose of keeping them off the streets”. Chuckles. Not my son of course, after all he's an officer. Just the non–coms. How comforting. How disturbing.
It's come to this... decades of liberal, Trudeaupian propaganda delivered through our school systems and media has created a mind-set in many that refuses to contemplate any necessity of responding to nihilistic, global threats and violence with force. And if we must we send off our least valuable, our most aberrant. How terribly, terribly sad such a point of view.
No talk of good and evil, only moral equivalency. No sense of history: Facism was a temporary, distant aberration, never to be repeated. Didn't we fix that sometime in the last century? Tyranny and despots belong in fairy tales. The Caliphate is a Third World, Islamic delusion with no chance of implementation. A parallel system of Sharia law in Canada or Europe only a hypothetical. We'd never vote for that, right? Or maybe that would only require an Order In Council? If so, we should consider very carefully which political party appeals to a demographic that may be most disposed to introduce such a measure.
We should be cautious of the propagandists who would have us believe that by responding militarily to a death cult with global aspirations we are somehow mirroring the terrorist's philosophy. They obfuscate to achieve their own perverse ends, political or otherwise. The threat within is often bland, blase and comfortable in it's sense of entitlement without risk.
Support for our brave sons and daughters in the military in their efforts to eliminate a very real and very immediate threat to our freedoms is as important now as it has ever been. Support that I believe will come from a conservative base of Canadians; sober, serious and hardworking, rather than elitists of any particular political or philosophical persuasion.