The Bracken Anthology (11 page)

Most of us wish we could turn back the calendar to Norman Rockwell's America. But we cannot, for that America is water long over the dam and gone from our sight, if not from our memories. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” If that is true, judging by current and even accelerating cultural shifts, we might already have passed the point of no return.

The prudent American will trim his sails accordingly.

(This non-fiction essay and the short story “What I saw at the coup” were both written largely in response to the article published on July 25, 2012 in the semi-official Small Wars Journal titled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A Vision of the Future.” My twin essays represent starkly different “visions of the future” that would-be tyrants, their hopeful henchmen and other self-deluded nimrods may want to consider, before ordering the U.S. military or militarized federal agencies to suppress Americans citizens.)

#11

September 2012

How Islam—and the ever-present threat it poses to humanity—could be brought to an end

(Posted in Lawrence Auster’s “View From the Right”)

Your commenter James P. writes: “Muslim refusal to engage in rational debate, engage in self-examination, or permit “humorous” attacks on their religion are not weaknesses. They are mighty strengths! They are not Islam’s ‘brittle glass jaw’; they are its bulging biceps! These attributes generate fear in their enemies, and cause their enemies to seek to avoid provoking Muslims and to appease Muslims when they are angry.”

I agree that these attributes of Islam have proven to be a great advantage to it as a war religion for 1,400 years. However, we are now seeing before our eyes a paradigm shift that may bring about the end of Islam in the present generation. Samuel Huntington spoke of Islam’s “bloody borders,” but until the modern era, the true scope of the horror was only realized by the victims living on those borders who were under constant attack (the ultimately unsuccessful and now condemned counter-jihad we call the Crusades being the notable exception).

Five hundred or a thousand miles from Islam’s bloody borders, it was always difficult to make people understand the existential threat Islam presented to all non-Muslim societies. After its early rampant “break out” period, when seen in the context of each generation, Islam appeared to be merely biting off one more small slice of territory at a time. And on it marched, generation after generation, always moving forward, rarely being pushed back, impervious to self-examination or reformation, as deadly in our modern times as it was at the beginning.

That is changing now, because today the entire world sees Islam’s true face revealed when Muslims go into these insane rages after perceived insults to Mohammed. Their ingrained lack of introspection means that Muslims can easily be provoked into going beyond the stealth-mode they normally follow beyond Islam’s bloody borders, waking up the world to the existential threat Islam poses to all non-Muslim societies. Down the centuries, the West has often had appeasers and accommodationists as leaders, men who were willing to cut short-term local deals that over time always led to incremental Islamic advances. And these weak Western leaders were the only men who mattered, era by era. Today, as a contrast, average citizens around the world are beginning to understand how to push Islam’s automatic rage buttons, and this changes the former equation in a fundamental way. As you mentioned, videos released by lone, non-state actors at the right time could be used to torpedo the next sell-out by Western appeasers, such as over the inclusion of Turkey in the EU.

Another fundamental difference today from prior centuries is that millions of people understand that Islam has another tremendous weakness, another glass jaw, and that is their worship of the black moon rock in Mecca as Islam’s literal god-head. This black rock enshrined in the corner of the Kaaba is essential to Islam in a way that nothing in Judaism or Christianity is. The Cross lives in the hearts of Christians, and Christianity would not be destroyed if Jerusalem or Rome were destroyed. But that physical black rock in Mecca is the “hard drive” of Islam. Muslims believe that it contains all of the sins of all of the observant followers of the Prophet since the time of Mohammed, as sort of an Islamic Doomsday Book. Two of the Five Pillars of Islam involve the physical worship of that black moon rock. One is the Hajj to Mecca where pilgrims walk in a circle around the rock, and the other is the five-time daily prayer performed in its direction. (The other three pillars are ephemeral: the Shahada conversion prayer, the tithe, and observing Ramadan.) A religion that is impervious to change or self-examination (which James P says are strengths) cannot suddenly be reduced to The Three Pillars of Islam after 1,400 unbroken years as the Five Pillars of Islam.

In ancient Islamic history, the black moon rock was once stolen by a competing tribe, but after a brief time it was “found.” Islam carried on because nobody outside of a very small circle of imams even knew the rock was missing before it was replaced. But if Mecca was suddenly turned into a giant crater, there would be no way to conceal the fact from the world at large, including every Muslim. Today, observant Muslims believe that if every infidel nation fired every rocket and bomb at Mecca, Allah would turn them back or stop them in mid-flight. It is impossible for observant Muslims to believe that the Infidels could destroy the Kaaba, which is literally the physical manifestation on earth of their “greatest God.”

The Crusaders were only able to retake Jerusalem for a short time, and never got close to taking Mecca (assuming that they even understood its importance to Islam and had some notion of taking it). It was not within their power to threaten this source of Islam’s power and mystique, even if they had desired to do so. In all eras before modern mass communications, even if a Crusader “commando team” had made it to Mecca, it would not have changed anything, because the leading Muslim clerics would have replaced the black rock and rebuilt the Kaaba, and nobody would have ever known, in the same way that nobody at the time knew that the black rock had once been stolen and carried off.

Today, the entire world would know in the same hour that Mecca had been destroyed. This would destroy Islam as surely as the Aztec and Inca religions and empires were destroyed when the Spanish conquistadors captured and executed the “living Gods” at the center of the Aztec and Inca belief systems. If there is no Mecca, there is no Islam. There can be no Islam with three instead of five pillars, the two physical pillars having been destroyed by the Gods of the Infidels. “Allahu Akbar” means “our God is greatest.” This cannot be so if the Infidel God destroys the physical god-head of Islam, which is the black moon rock at the Kaaba in Mecca.

I have no expectation that any American president would order the destruction of Mecca, even if American cities had been destroyed with nuclear bombs sent from a Muslim country with a clear return address. However, not all nations are as hamstrung by self-doubt and political correctness as we are. Russia, India, and Israel, I am sure, have Mecca on their target list. If Moscow, New Delhi, or Tel Aviv were destroyed by an Islamic bomb, I believe that Mecca would be wiped off the planet Earth the same day, even the same hour.

And that would spell the end of Islam, after its unparalleled 1,400-year reign of terror.

No Mecca, no Islam, as long as the world witnesses Mecca’s physical annihilation. There will follow a period of madness, with many Muslims committing mass suicide and mass terror, but more of them will become atheists or convert to Christianity (“the stronger horse”). In all cases, Islam as we know it will be finished. After fourteen centuries, the steady mantra “Our God is greatest” cannot become “We used to believe that our God was the greatest, but it was proven to be weaker, if not a fraud.” The glass jaw of Islam, its inability to self-examine or reform in any way, will prove to be its Achilles’ heel. The 1,400-year run of murder and madness will at last come to an end. After sixty generations, we may be the one to witness its ultimate destruction and collapse.

God willing.

#12

September 2012

What I Saw at the Coup

(short fiction)

This is the first time in many years that I have put pen to paper for a lengthy letter, so please forgive my misspellings, poor handwriting or any other errors. I will probably do this in one go and be finished with it. I won’t need much of this new notebook. It’s a nice room, desk and chair, but really, no computer? I just wish they would stop the hammering outside. I need to focus in order to write well.

No one person could possibly expect to know the full truth about such a complex history, so near to its time. But I know what I know, saw what I saw, and heard what I heard. Now it’s time to set the record straight, at least about what transpired between some of the key players in the lead up to the recent events.

What I have heard called “the plan” began as idle office chat, nothing more. (Of course, not much chat is ever truly idle at the very highest levels of power, between senior presidential advisors.) The first time I heard it mentioned was over lunch with Dennis in the White House Mess, down in the basement next to the situation room. We were at a quiet corner table of the wood-paneled dining room, tossing ideas for the next talking points back and forth. Routine.

One of right-wing hate radio’s loudest and most poisonous voices was conducting an embarrassing public feud with our press secretary. The President had trapped himself in a seeming contradiction. The video and audio were both damning, and one must admit, very funny—if one’s goal was to make the President look and sound like a liar and a fool. The Youtube videos were getting millions of hits; the TV comics were not letting it go. We had been knocked completely off message, the optics were horrible, and our favorability ratings were collapsing at a crucial moment. (It seems like an ice-age ago when such trivialities actually mattered to me.)

I said something offhandedly to Dennis. “I just wish we could get rid of those bastards, once and for all.”

He stared at me for a long time, chewing on his second BLT sandwich until the Navy steward retreated from range, and then he said, “Actually, Jacinda, there is sort of a plan for that.”

“What do you mean, ‘a plan for that’?”

He explained that it was nothing formal, and there was nothing in writing. Nor would there ever be. It was just a concept he had come up with, along with a few other trusted colleagues and advisors. An idea. They had gamed out various scenarios. We could solve our problems with molding public opinion if we removed just a few dozen key right-wing opinion makers. That was the exact word he used, “removed.” That was last spring, and I put it off as a harmless thought experiment. I didn’t hear anything more about it for several months.

Then one day after another media talking points session in the mess, Dennis said, “Remember the plan we were talking about? You know, we really could do it.”

“Are you serious?”

“The timing would have to be just right. Mainly, it would depend on external events.”

Remembering the numbers from our earlier conversation, I told him that removing a few dozen of the worst reactionaries wouldn’t change anything. Other fast-talking right wingers would just take their places. Except they would be angrier than ever.

“Not dozens.” He paused. “Around two thousand, actually.”

The new number shocked me. “That’s not possible.”

“No, it’s very possible. We’ve studied it from every angle.”

Clearly, he knew more about a plan than he was letting on. Nobody was closer to the President than the two of us and his wife, and I had heard nothing from the boss, not even a hint. “You’re making this up. You’re not serious. Is it a joke, or a test? I wasn’t born yesterday.” I had to be careful. This was dangerous territory, when any spoken word could be recorded almost anywhere. Trust in a man like Dennis was a very slender reed upon which to cling.

“No, I’m very serious,” he said. “Here’s how we came up with two thousand. I was given a copy of a new law enforcement software program, one that Justice had for testing and evaluation. A refinement of the social networking analysis stuff. Data-mining, all of that. We put it on a clean computer, adjusted it for our own parameters, and made the list. We tried it at different levels from ten up to ten thousand. The optimal number for the greatest effect with the least initial disruption came in at about two thousand.”

I shook my head and said, “Dennis, it’s crazy to even talk about it.”

He continued with what, I saw later, was a canned pitch. “Do you want everything we’ve worked for to be lost? What if it came to striking boldly, or losing all of the progress we’ve made over the last fifty or a hundred years?”

I sidestepped. “You know as well as I do that boldness isn’t the President’s forte.”

“Well, you could help stiffen his backbone.”

“We could both be facing prison time just for talking like this.”

“Not as long as we’re in power. You know how I know? Operation Fast and Furious. At least four hundred dead and there was no blowback that we couldn’t handle. Our media stuck right with us all the way through. For me, that was the final test. We can do almost anything if we get the timing right, and most of the media stays with us.”