Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Multiculturalism
— as opposed to the notion of a multiracial society united by a single
culture — has become an abject contradiction in the modern Western
world. Romance for a culture in the abstract that one has rejected in
the concrete makes little sense. Multiculturalists talk grandly of
Africa, Latin America, and Asia, usually in contrast to the core values
of the United States and Europe. Certainly, in terms of food, fashion,
music, art, and architecture, the Western paradigm is enriched from
other cultures. But the reason that millions cross the Mediterranean to
Europe or the Rio Grande to the United States is for something more that
transcends the periphery and involves fundamental values — consensual
government, free-market capitalism, the freedom of the individual,
religious tolerance, equality between the sexes, rights of dissent, and a
society governed by rationalism divorced from religious stricture.
Somehow that obvious message has now been abandoned, as Western hosts
lost confidence in the very society that gives us the wealth and leisure
to ignore or caricature its foundations. The result is that millions of
immigrants flock to the West, enjoy its material security, and yet feel
little need to bond with their adopted culture, given that their hosts
themselves are ambiguous about what others desperately seek out. Why did the family of the Boston bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, even wish to come to Boston? If they really were in danger
back home in the Islamic regions within Russia, why would members of the
family return to the source of their supposed dangers? And if the city
of Boston, the state of Massachusetts, and the federal government of the
United States extended the Tsarnaevs years’ worth of public assistance,
why would such largesse incur such hatred of the United States in the
hearts of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar? Obviously, the Tsarnaevs had some sense
that the United States was a freer, more humane, and more prosperous
place than the Russia they left, but they also felt no love for it, felt
no pressure from their hosts to cultivate such love — and believed that
they could continue to live as Russian Muslims inside the United
States. Did not the Tsarnaevs flee the Muslim hinterlands of Russia
because they did not like the thought of things like pressure cookers
full of ball bearings exploding and killing and maiming the innocent on
the street? Why for that matter did Major Nidal Hasan, a Palestinian-American
citizen whose family was welcomed into the United States from the
war-torn West Bank, so detest his adopted country that he would kill 13
fellow Americans and injure 32 others rather than just return in
disillusionment to the land of his forefathers? Was it the idea that he
could square the circle of being a radical anti-American Muslim, but
with the advantages of subsidized education, material security, and
freedom of expression unknown in Jericho? When General George Casey
worried that the army’s diversity program might be imperiled after the
slaughter, did the general ever express commensurate concern that Hasan
apparently had never taken, as part of his military training, any course
on the Constitution and American history, one that would have reminded
him why he was sworn to defend his singular country’s values and
history? Why would Anwar al-Awlaki, another U.S. citizen, whose family was
welcomed to the United States for sanctuary from the misery and violence
of Yemen, grow to despise America and devote the latter part of his
adult life to terrorizing the United States? He certainly need not have
conducted his hatred from a Virginia mosque when all of the Middle East
was ripe for his activism. Was Awlaki ever reminded in school or by any
religious figure why exactly America was more tolerant of Muslims than
Yemen was of Christians? Or did he hate his country because it treated
Muslims humanely in a way that he would never treat Christians? Why did
Mohamed Morsi wish to go to university in the U.S. or teach in the
California State University system — given that California values were
antithetical to his own Muslim Brotherhood strictures? Was it because
Morsi understood that American education would not do to him what he
will soon do to Egyptian education?
The United Kingdom is currently reeling from the beheading of a British
soldier by two British subjects whose fathers had fled from
violence-prone Nigeria. Why did they not return to Nigeria, carve out
new lives there, and find their roots? Is it because there are too many
in Nigeria like themselves who take machetes to the streets? For that
matter, why do some Pakistani immigrants in cold, foggy Britain brag of
establishing Sharia there? Is it because they wish to follow their
version of Sharia in a liberal Western society that is more
accommodating than are the radical Islamists whom they so often praise
from afar?
Is Britain to be run in the shadows by some diehard Western
traditionalists pulling the levers of free-market capitalism, democracy,
and freedom of the individual, so that in its plazas and squares others
have the freedom and wherewithal to damn just those values? In Britain,
as in the West in general, deportation is a fossilized concept. Unity
is passé. Patriotism is long suspect. The hip metrosexual cultures of
the urban West strain to find fault in their inheritance, and seem to
appreciate those who do that in the most cool fashion — but always with
the expectation that there will be some poor blokes who, in terms of
clean water, medical care, free speech, and dependable electricity,
ensure that London is not Lagos, that Stockholm is not Damascus, and
that Los Angeles is not Nuevo Laredo. 1 2 Next › From The National Review
