#35: The "That would make US just like THEM" Argument

When I was a boy in the Bronx, the streets were a tough place to be. Not as tough nearly as today’s inner city slums, but it was certainly possible to come home showing signs of having been roughed up. My dear late mother once asked me what had happened and I replied that I had gotten “beat up.” “Did you fight back?” she asked. “yes,” I replied, “but he was much bigger than me.” “Ah,” she said, “and did you wait for him to turn his back, and hit him with a brick?” I was aghast. I was saturated with “boy’s books,” many of them British, and what she was suggesting was outrageous. Not Queensbury, not cricket, not fair play!

“Of course not!” I almost shouted, “that would have been UNFAIR.”

My mother, the Holocaust survivor, smiled as she continued preparing dinner and said quietly, “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about fighting.”

Sport is one thing, fighting is another.

There should be an annual award for the stupidest argument used to support a self-destructive policy. It could be a spin-off of the Darwin Awards. There could be an index based on just how stupid the argument is and how large and negative the consequences of the policy it supports. An example some might propose, I suppose, might be the fabled “Domino theory” used to support America’s entrance into the Viet Nam war. But the Domino Theory was not stupid, it was just, as it turned out, false. Viet Nam did turn commie, but the other states in the region continued in various other forms of despotism of their own unique devising. No, I would give this year’s award at least to the “that would make us ‘just like them’” argument.

“That would make us ‘just like them’.”

What the hell does that mean?

Well, it means, for one thing, that we have to fight “fair,” while the other side gets to do whatever it chooses. The other side can maim, torture, and video tape what it’s doing, pretty successfully undermining our own public willingness to combat it. We, on the other hand, must be driven by extreme rectitude and fastidiousness and must subject our every action to the most demanding moral and legal review.

If we do not handicap ourselves in this way, well, then we “become ‘just like them’.”

Is this not the most mind-bendingly stupid piece of fatuous smug self-indulgent Norwegian/French crap you have ever heard? If not, it is certainly in the running.

For one thing (and only one thing) it is simply not true.

If torturing terrorists for information, for example, “made us ‘just like them,’” then we would suddenly be chopping off criminals’ hands, stoning women in the streets, banning alcohol, persecuting religious minorities, and living under shariah “law”. For these are the thing we would have to do in order to be “just like them.” We have a long, long way to go before we become “just like them.”

Of course, this is an enthymeme and its concealed assumption is the famous one with which I started: it is the Domino Argument. Once, it is argued, you have “soiled yourself morally in one thing,” you have embarked on a road of no return. Torture one terrorist and the next thing you know, you are doing a bloody rampage through the streets of Chicago! (Hmmm, I never thought of that. Maybe it’s because we tortured a terrorist that we’re seeing the bloody carnage in our urban centers. That’s an argument our “progressives” haven’t noticed yet, I must draw it to their attention. Abu Ghraib actually caused minority violence in our urban centers. )

The move is a very tempting one, I admit. We smile knowingly at Lord Acton’s dictum, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That’s an application of Domino. You start with one cigarette, next thing you know, you’ve got terminal emphysema. Start with one whiff of Mary Jane and the next thing, you’re a dying crack whore. To paraphrase Chairman Mao, “A thousand mile journey to hell starts with a single step.” Yeah, yeah.

Sure, if you’re dealing with a physiological addictive substance, starting by itself can get you hooked; but when extended beyond the biological, the principle becomes a mere metaphor. This move is staple in the repertoire of the Excusers, namely the reduction of ALL human activity to the level of the biological. The compulsive philanderer now has an “addiction”; he’s no longer an out-of-control horny toad, he has an illness and we should pity, not despise, him. It was a reprehensible disposition, but since Slick Willy was discovered to possess it, it became acceptable among the “better” people. The compulsive liar is an “addict,” the compulsive thief, you guessed it, another “addict,” the serial rapist, child-molester, all addicts. And addiction is an illness, not a character defect. Poor addicts. Thank God we have Oprah and Doctor Phil to educate us on these matters.

But the pragmatic decision to inflict pain and discomfort on a terrorist in custody in order to gain information from him, that is not biological, it is not even a “disposition.” It can be the most practical and even the most moral expedient available at the time. If it were not, our enemies wouldn’t be using it themselves. Of course, those psychos actually enjoy doing it, but that’s not the point.

The point is that only an idiot goes into a fight with one (or both) hands tied behind his back by his own choice.

Now, you’re saying to yourself, that’s pretty obvious. But I must appeal once again to the progressive’s most fundamental principle, his AXIOM (see Post #21: Who Are You Going to Believe, Me or Your Lying Eyes?):

If it looks OBVIOUS to the non-academic, non-intellectual, it IS, and HAS TO BE … FALSE! Prima facie Obviousness is the hallmark of the False. Counter-intuitiveness is the reliable indicator of the True.

I said that only an idiot goes into a fight with a voluntary handicap, but that’s not entirely true.

It’s rather an idiot, or a person ideologically damaged in judgment, or …

Someone who has a political dog in the fight. (See Post #19: Cui Bono And Two Other Money Questions)

If you’re betting on Brutal Bart to win the match, it sure pays for you to convince Simple Simon to enter the ring with his hands tied behind his back. Tell him that nice fighters don’t use their fists, even if the other side does. If he’s really stupid, tell him that fist blows actually don’t work. If you say it often enough, he might come to believe it. That’s been the mantra on torture: Only stupid uneducated people think torture works, real educated experts will tell you that it actually doesn’t. Duh!

The “we don’t want to be like them” crowd includes, really, two populations, the simple-minded and brain-washed ideologues, on the one hand, and the internationalist socialist “intellectual” fifth-columnists, on the other.

The bottom line of the “we don’t want to become ‘just like them’” crowd is that they want to handicap the U.S. in its to-the-death struggle with 13^th C vicious religious psychopaths. But why would they want to do that? The answer is, sadly, not counter-intuitive: they hate the traditional American culture.

They blame that culture for everything they think is wrong with the world and they do so because they have been taught to do so. They have absorbed an entire world-view from decades and decades of left-leaning scribblers, school-teachers, and academic poseurs drowning them in socialist rhetoric.

The only antidote to this poisonous concoction is a return to a mind cleansed of their counter-intuitive “theoretical” clap-trap, a return to a mind that trusts it’s own instincts, to a mind that repays verbal rubbish with instant and penetrating contempt.

We are in a fight, not a gentleman’s game of croquets on the lawn. In a fight, the objective is to win. In a game, perhaps it’s how you play it that’s important; in a fight, it’s not. It’s whether you win or lose.