Best Of
Recent comments
- Ummm, no.
The rightness or
2 weeks 18 hours ago - I recently saw the re-trial
2 weeks 19 hours ago - I am a conservative who did
2 weeks 21 hours ago - Amen.
We're called to serve
2 weeks 3 days ago - I have to disagree with your
2 weeks 6 days ago - To break up the monotony of
3 weeks 3 days ago - Although I am a conservative
3 weeks 4 days ago - Been reading your blogs,
3 weeks 6 days ago - Excellent post, Will.
3 weeks 6 days ago - Thanks for the reminder,
3 weeks 6 days ago
Friends of GWH
Subscribe
Recent blog posts
- Evangelicals and the Future of Politics: Wise Words from Joel Hunter
- Election 2008: The Day After
- The 2008 Good Will Hinton Voting Guide
- Dumb Reasons To Not Vote For Barack Obama
- The Immorality of the Housing Bailout
- Random Non-Partisan Thought of the Day
- Good: Bad on the Election and Voting
- Good Will Hinton Interviews Eric Metaxas
- Good Will Hinton Interviews Bridget Kibbey
- More On Obama and the Ayers Non-Story
Recommended Blogs
Who's online
Online users
Hearts and Minds
The Belmont Club had an interesting post about the use of propaganda by those we are fighting in Iraq.
One security analyst I heard speak claimed that practically every insurgent operation in Iraq had a video camera unit attached, but until recently practically all Jihadi video was in Arabic. "Arabic is the language of the [Sunni Salafist] Jihad, and Jihadi videos were not even widely distributed in places like Indonesia or even Pakistan because they were in Arabic."
The overarching purpose of those videos was to demonstrate American mortality and the vulnerability of the West. To spread the word that it is fun and easy to hunt Americans.
The insurgents are good at creating choas in Iraq, but they are even better at spreading the propaganda of choas. The western media is eager for "content" from Iraq, even if it is content produced by those trying to kill our soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
But coldly regarded the virtual Jihad poses a formidable challenge because it uses the very sinews of an open society as a vector to spread, in particular the media and the Internet. And while physical Jihadis can be effectively met by traditional arms -- including counterinsurgency -- the West is still casting about for a method to meet the dark spirit of the virtual Jihad with a puissant spirit of its own.
The success of military science against the physical Jihad is owed partially to the existence of vocabulary about how to think about kinetic warfare. But for fighting the virtual Jihad we have no words. No name for the threat it represents, not even a name for our enemies.
I suspect this is an allusion to Bush's short lived use of the term "Islamic facsism". It's true, we do not yet have the intellectual framework to describe the world we live in. It may take a few more years, it may take a generation, before the rational West is able to intellectually process the events that occur half a world away and seem so foreign to our daily lives. And until we can accurately understand and describe these events, I suspect it will be a slog with no end in sight.
Comments
Civil Liberties
The Shining City Upon A Hill
I was born an American citizen in the year of 1960. I was born at the tail end of the baby boom in an era some referred to as Camelot. Our President was young and optimistic. He told Americans that this was our time; a time of hopefulness and inspiration; that we could go anywhere and that we could do anything that we put our hearts and our minds to. President Kennedy challenged us to ask what we could do to contribute to making our country and our world a better place to live.
Growing up in the 1960’s my perceptions of society and my concept of what it meant to be an American were shaped by events and by the culture of the day. We were smack in the middle of the cold war; Viet Nam raged. Communist China and Soviet Russia were out there; we knew it and we could feel it. We knew what Communist China was, and what Soviet Russia was and stood for. In that time, in that era we also knew, without question who we were and what we stood for.
I grew up knowing certain truths. I knew without question that America was the land of the free and home of the brave. That we were as President Lincoln said: “A nation conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”; that ours was a Government “of the people, by the people, for the people”.
I knew without question that America stood for honor and for liberty and for freedom. I knew without question that we answered to a higher calling, that our Constitution and our Bill of Rights set a higher standard for us and that through our actions and our conduct we demonstrated to the world our commitment to these higher standards. I grew up knowing that the world looked to us for leadership and that because we honored our Constitution and our civil liberties set forth in the Bill of Rights, we could lead with honor and dignity. America could expect more from her neighbors and from her partners in the world because we expected more from our selves.
When I think about America; who we are as a people and what we stand for as a country, I have to ask my self what defines America. It is with out question, everything that President Lincoln spoke about in the Gettysburg Address. It is without question everything President Kennedy inspired when he asked us to: “Ask not what our Country could do for us, ask what we could do for our Country”. It is our liberties and our freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. It is our sure knowledge that we live to higher standards and that we have always strove to be a beacon of liberty and freedom in this world. President Reagan spoke about this when he spoke about America as a shinning city upon a hill.
As I write today in 2006, I write with a heavy heart. I think of all the truths that I took on faith about who we are as a people and what we stand for as a country. If these articles of absolute faith were true when I was a child, I know that they are no longer true today.
My heart is heavy, because I do love my country passionately and deeply. America stood for liberty and justice. We had always been governed by the rule of law. Where we could be secure in our knowledge that the heavy hand and tyranny of government could not, without due process and warrant invade our privacy or oppress our lives; where the rule of law and the constitution protected our right to the writ of habeas corpus. Where our communications; our phone calls and our e-mails could not be searched, viewed and invaded without proper warrant and probable cause; where citizens did not have to fear being jailed and imprisoned without charge, access to a lawyer or facing their accusers.
Now we know that these truths are no longer true. In America today, the government can invade our privacy and monitor our communications without due process or warrant; in America today citizens can be imprisoned indefinitely without charge and without access to a lawyer. In America today citizens can be denied the great writ. The President can subjectively and unilaterally designate an “enemy of the state” and remove their civil liberties and civil rights indefinitely and without due process.
When I was growing up, I knew that this was what Soviet Russia did. I knew that these things happened in Communist China. But not in America. To think such things was sacrilegious and outrages.
It breaks my heart to see how far we have come. Once we take these things for granted, once we accept our loss of liberties and freedoms I fear America will have changed for ever. When I read the words that the great patriot President Lincoln wrote at Gettysburg, it breaks my heart to think about those who came before us; what they were willing to endure and sacrifice for the United States of America; for the idea of a Government “of the people, by the people, for the people”.
I fear that the path we have taken takes us closer to Soviet Russia and Communist China and farther away from that shinning city upon a hill.
Daniel McHenry
Post new comment