|
Whitaker's Current Articles June 7, 2003
|
Fun Quote:
The Supreme Court has declared that you cannot be put to death if you
are mentally retarded. Being mentally retarded means you score
less than 70 on an IQ test.
So liberals insist that no one should have to
pass a test to get a high school diploma, but you do have to pass a
test to get executed.
Will We Ever Get out of Iraq?
Not if we compromise.
No one will ever see the real lesson of the
Vietnam War. The hawks say that the lesson of Vietnam was that
fighting to win is good. The doves said that the lesson of Vietnam was that peace
is good.
The real lesson of Vietnam was that there is
nothing worse than half a war.
No one can see this lesson because our society
is still based on the kind of thinking that got us into the Vietnam
mess. We got into half a war in Vietnam because we compromised
between fighting the war and getting out.
Our national obsession with compromise says
that there are two sides to every question so the truth must lie
somewhere in the middle. No mindset could be worse for dealing
with military matters.
When you are putting lives on the line you have
to decide either to fight it out or get out fast.
This is common sense, but the first thing our
compromise mentality does is throw out common sense. When we have a
problem, we don’t look for the solution. We look for the
compromise.
If you compromise all the time, you never
finish anything. One side will want to keep doing what you are
doing and the other side wants to stop. So you compromise. You
don’t do it and you don’t quit.
Most of America’s real policy disasters can be
traced back to our failure to do it or to get out of it. Vietnam
was just a very obvious example of this.
So when will both sides agree to get out of
Iraq?
Well, the United States Army landed in Western
Europe in 1943.
The Soviet Union stopped being a threat in
1989.
Our troops are still in Western Europe.
They’re still there and we are still compromising about them.
Since we became obsessed with the idea that
truth equals compromise the only major military commitments we have
gotten out of have been Vietnam and Somalia.
Do those two names tell you anything?
Is the Truth a Shell With Feathers?
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Well, according to the way we now make our
life-and-death national policies, what came first was a compromise,
a shell with feathers.
Like most sayings that sound Shrewd, the idea
that Truth lies somewhere in the middle is really dumb.
To start with, “the Truth lies somewhere in the
middle” sounds like a reasonable approach, an approach that allows
for human error. But if you say that “the truth lies somewhere in
the middle,” you are assuming that both sides already know all subject that
there is to know.
“The Truth lies somewhere in the middle” means
that half of all you need to know is one side and half of all you
need to know is on the other. So you just mix them and you get all
the Truth there is.
Sounds stupid when you say it in plain English,
doesn’t it? Most Shrewd Sayings sound retarded when you state them
in plain English.
Moderation in Action
In mid-sixteenth the Protestant theologian John
Calvin ruled the city of Geneva, Switzerland. In 1553 Calvin had a
former classmate of his, Michael Servatus, burned alive. Servatus
started screaming when the flames reached his face. He stopped
screaming over twenty minutes later.
The burning of Michael Servatus was an act of
Moderation.
In Calvin’s world, the Catholic Church was his
deadly enemy, the “other side” of the world of Christianity. There was Calvin on one side and the Pope on the
other. But Servatus was not in the center between them.
Servatus was a Unitarian, a belief condemned by
both sides.
So in a rare show of cooperation, the Catholic
authorities sent Calvin evidence that Michael Servatus held beliefs
that were anathema to both Catholics and Protestants.
Catholics on one side, Calvinists on the other,
the Truth in the middle, right?
There is no Easy Out
The world would be a safe and easy place if
all we had to do was compromise.
Freedom and safety would be easy if the Truth
were in the middle of the road.
It isn’t.
Freedom and safety require just as much
intolerance as tolerance.
Yes, intolerance is very dangerous. But you
cannot do the right thing by an endless series of compromises.
Some things are true and some things are false. Some things work
and some things do not work.
What people call political Moderation is a good
example. Moderation is a compromise between liberal policies which
are always disastrous and simple political sanity. But in the real
world a compromise between sanity and insanity is still simply
insane.
As long as we remain committed to the nostrum
of compromise what we do will not work. That’s where Vietnam came
from. That’s where Somalia came from.
Insanity has been defined as doing the same
thing you always do and expecting different results this time.
Another name for that is Moderation.
|
