The Gathering Storm
Monday
We just watched the 2002 movie, The Gathering Storm, starring Albert Finney. It is worth watching. Here was a man (Winston Churchill) who could see what was coming and was trying to warn people, but very few people wanted to hear it. Everybody had been so traumatized by the scale of the horror of the first World War, they didn't want to contemplate anything that made them feel another war was possible. He was harshly criticized, ignored, and accused of being a warmonger.
We felt strangely comforted by the movie. Of course, in the case of World War Two, we already know Churchill was right. Hitler was, in fact, rejecting the Treaty of Versailles and building an army. He did, in fact, have military ambitions for his country. And it was, in fact, foolish for the rest of the global powers to be busy dismantling their military. But during Churchill's "wilderness years" he was almost alone in his alarm about what was happening.
The term "wilderness years" refers to the span between 1929 and 1939 when Churchill was warning people about the danger of Nazism, and the rest of the world was trying to find a way not to believe it. In other words, it was similar to what's happening now: We're trying to get through to others about Islam and our listeners are trying to find any way they can to not believe it.
Check out the movie. And you can read more about this trying time in Winston Churchill's life here: The Wilderness Years.
2 comments:
Since this is Veterans Day it’s therefore very appropriate to site the wisdom of the first Constitutional President of the United States of America, George Washington, who had, so well explained “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” Moreover President Washington stated that “However pacific the general policy of the nation may be ,it ought never be without an adequate stock of military knowledge for emergencies.”
Furthermore, with this post- 9/11 USA it should likewise be remembered that one very good way to defeat the jihadists who compose the many brutal and deadly Islamic terror entities ,such as al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, is by the means of a very strong power of US military might. As Thomas Jefferson had declared “With every barbarous people …force is law.”
A strategic point re persuading people about Islam.
Often, when telling people about the totalitarian character of Islam, the first thing to say, before saying anything else, is about a moderate strategy in response to that totalitarianism: Muslims already citizens should of course retain the same rights as everyone else, but there should be a moratorium on further immigration of Muslims into non-Muslim nations until a majority of Muslim-majority nations protect freedom of speech and religion. One should point out that many Muslims are innocent of Islamic totalitarianism — but that the Muslim leadership is NOT innocent, and that's because Islamic totalitarianism is central to the core texts of Islam and to the earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad.
Why present strategy first? Because I have found that when I have led off not with a moderate strategy, but rather with explanations of Islam's totalitarian expansionist character, people frequently assume that anyone who acknowledges Islamic totalitarianism must want a virtually genocidal strategic response. "So what are you going to do about it? Kill them all?" It's a stupid response, yet one frequently hears it. By the time one hears it, the minds of one's listeners have often closed down. They seem to think that if a problem is very difficult, it's better to stick one's head in the sand about it. I had a friend who as a child once stepped on a nail, which went all the way into his foot. His response was to yell and cry to his father not to remove it! I mean, it's so obvious it had to be removed, but this friend, who was a child at the time, so it's not hard to understand, let his fears and emotions cause him to deny an undeniable reality. And that's what's happening with Islam. It's a nail in the foot that people are too terrified to acknowledge or do anything about.
So lead off with the moderate strategy (containment), acknowledge the rights of all citizens including Muslim ones, and give the essential qualifications exonerating many Muslims, but not exonerating the leadership and not exonerating the core texts themselves.
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