Thursday, November 11, 2004

November 11 - Veterans’ Day

November 11 - Veterans’ Day by Henry W. Hessing


World War I was called, “the war to end all wars.” Joining the Allies whose soldiers suffered trench warfare, bombardment, starvation and poison gas, the United States entered the war in Europe in the autumn of 1918. Thereafter, Germany’s defeat was a matter of time. November 11, the date we remember the Armistice is called Veterans’ Day.

America witnessed the horror of war on our native soil three years ago when 3,000 innocents died. Death came at the hands of the primitive savagery of militant Islam. We have seen Osama bin Laden and his barbarians squatting in caves, invoking their “prophet” from the literal Dark Ages. As with all dictators and tyrants, their inculcation of hatred against America is a necessary tool of tribal rulers who need scapegoats to blame for the misery of their own subjects. They believe that this world is evil, that man must surrender his mind, and that true life begins after the grave. The enemies of man’s life renounce reason in favor of mysticism and death worship. They reject thought and demand blind obedience. Our enemies are anti-mind which means anti-life.

In a lecture given in October 2001, Dr. Harry Binswanger made, parenthesis mine, this analysis: “Compare that (primitive barbarism) to the moral meaning of the World Trade Center as a symbol of what capitalism is: individual freedom, the freedom to use one’s mind to produce prosperity, a rising standard of living and individual happiness. Freedom, wealth, happiness and life are our values and the reason America is under attack…. The enemy is also defined by an idea – the idea that man is depraved, that the mind is to be jettisoned, that life is a waste.” Has hatred of life reached so low a level to demand to return to living as a primitive in a cave?

In September of this year, Andrew C. McCarthy wrote in National Review about the mentality, parenthesis mine, that: “espouses and supports an interpretation of Islam that calls for violent jihad against the United States and our allies. It would supplant our Constitution, our rule of law, (with barbarism.) It is dedicated to our destruction and must be eliminated…we are at war with militant Islam because we stand for life against the apostates of death… The war on militant Islam is about eradicating a mortal, global threat to the United States. Our enemies have demonstrated that they will not be rehabilitated. We must permanently neutralize them because if we don’t, they will kill us. Those who help militant Islam function as a lethal force that abets killing Americans and our allies in the most brutal fashion imaginable.”

A free country has a great responsibility: the right to use force as an instrument of a free nation’s self-defense, which means: the defense of a man’s individual rights. It is individualism that lies at America’s freedom. Militant Islam would have us renounce individualism and bow to theocratic dictates.

Antiwar activists say it is okay to go to war if the UN sanctions war but not if we go to war to defend our sovereignty. They want the individual to subordinate his freedom to their collective will and the government of a free people to subordinate the liberty of its citizens to the collective known as the United Nations. Their rational is the same as militant Islam as they want the same type of capitulation.

To prevail, we must resolutely act on our moral right to defend ourselves, regardless of the wishes of any other nation. Our purpose in this war is to preserve American national security. We must be willing and able to go to those places where militant Islam derives support whether at home or abroad. But we are not obliged to stay in a war zone until nirvana has arrived. We need to stay until we eradicate the enemy and his ideas based on the premise of death. We must annihilate the anti-life, anti-mind forces responsible for barbarism, beheadings, and bombings.

The United States of America is the greatest, noblest and in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world. Our soldiers preserve qualities of character typical at the time of America’s birth - earnestness, dedication and a sense of honor made visible in action. They defend our country because they personally are unwilling to live as slaves. This is an enormous virtue. The choice is clear: freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness or primordial morality, slavery, brute force, terror and death. Ours is the morality of life. Theirs is the morality of death.