They forget that in some parts of the world, "Here there be tigers," as some ancient maps of China and S.E. Asia used to warn. It is the particular blindness of modern educated people not to grasp what an integral part military readiness plays in the tranquility of their lives. And not to understand the capacity for primitive, uncivilized behavior. T.R. Fehrenbach in his book This Kind of War, recounted how North Korean women prisoners repatriated to N. Korea after the Armistice elected to defecate in the compartments of the trains taking them home from the south. Similar expressions of contempt can be mined from the events of our times.
A bomber pilot during the Korean War later wrote in National Review that something struck him as peculiar during one mission, He sat in the cockpit hurtling over the surface of the sea and wondered at the fact that a man of his education would be involved in such an ugly brawl (not his exact formulation) and would find himself flying over the Yellow Sea or the Sea of Japan so far from home. Then it occurred to him that it is precisely correct that men of his education and skill would be involved in the hazardous enterprise of manning ("personning"?) the military of their homeland.
Not so thereafter.
The Colonel entered the Armed Forces of this great nation in 1968 with the conviction that it was every man's duty to learn the military arts and serve. Suffice it to say that the Colonel can count on one hand the number of men amongst his high school or university friends and acquaintances who did or were willing (but for a physical impediment) to serve. One roommate contemplated attending seminary school to obtain an exemption from military service during Vietnam.
Few young people today remotely contemplate service in lieu of personal pursuits. And no wonder. A major film producer produces a film about the Black September terrorists at the Munich Olympics and can't seem to figure out the origin of the moral stench that blew from that murderous episode.
J.R. Nyquist holds forth on the national loss of nerve:
[C.S. Lewis] didn't live to see the Sixties Revolution, the trans-valuation of values foretold by Friedrich Nietzsche: the advent of European nihilism and the abdication of common sense. He didn't live to see the values of the counter-culture triumph over the traditions of higher culture and the standards of higher education. He didn't see the final erosion of taste and manners exemplified by symphony orchestras begging for money while bat-biting pop [stars] enjoy fabulous wealth, hailed by presidents and prime ministers."Intuition Deficit Disorder." By J. R. Nyquist, Financial Sense Online, 2/17/06 (emphasis added).
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It is my contention that a civilization cannot suffer a serious degeneration of its culture without a corollary degeneration of its defensive structures through an attenuation of the very instinct of self-preservation. America's intellectual elite, the highest political leadership and the best brains of the national security apparatus, fails to recognize or enumerate their country's enemies. When the president dares to mention the existence of an "axis of evil," he is mocked and derided by the culture as an ignoramus. It has become, in fact, a faux pas to publicly name the real enemy or to discuss emerging enmities.
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