Prepositions and Gerunds Never Secured a Beachhead

Here we are back in business. Holiday over, and the fight must go on. One brief comment on the comments. If you will see from the misspent life, there was some disagreement about whether we are engaged in a fight for ideas. My point is not that ideas are not being fought about, and the like, but the idea that many of the intellectuals on both sides like to act like this war is fought in tweed coats and pipes while drinking coffee on the lecture circuit. My point is that these people, while intelligent and (self-)important, cannot be seen as the winners of these wars. Nazis were not beaten because their ideas were so terrible. They were beaten because there were a few million people who fought better and tougher and beat the Hun back through superior fighters. Were the ideals of freedom superior? Sure they were. Did the intellectuals motivate our side to fight stronger? Absolutely. But in the end, machine gun nests were not taken by ideas, nor were cities and bridges captured through a giant academic decathlon like in Billy Madison…

Despite what John Kerry and other liberals in the 80's wished, the Soviet Union only went away because they were terrified of the M1 Abrams Tank, Pershing missiles and the several hundred thousand soldiers sailors and airmen we had all over Europe. The point of the 4th of July posting is to remember that the men that are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are winning this war of "ideas." We are not pondering the issues of school vouchers and abortion right now. We must re-elect our President to stop a group of people who will not stop until we are wiped from this Earth.

Comments

[The Misspent Life]

I thought I was hysterical and mellow dramatic...

I bow to no one (except maybe the JCS of the 40's-50s who would regularly draw up plans to nuke cities around the world) in my willingness to use the armed forces to do what they do best; shoot and blow things up (people, buildings, whatev). That said, you still need to fight the ideas at the same time. You can have all the superior force you want but if you the public doesn't have the nads to use it you might as well be sniffing flowers. The tweeds take it upon ourselves to undermine public support for military actions at all times. They did not do this with the same furvor during WWII or before. They are now no longer anti-war, they are on the other side. That is why you need to fight the war of ideas at home as well as break things abroad.

There is no doubt that the way we won the war of ideas in WWII was by pulverizing the Japs and Krauts into the ground. When people are shown a stronger or a weaker horse, they choose the strong horse. The problem is our tweeds at home choose the weak horse, and will do all they can to turn the strong horse into dog food. While we can win the war of ideas with force abroad we can't pulverize our fellow citizens into the ground so we need to take on their ideas and pulverize those with our own ideas.

Read this: http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/04summer/peters.htm

[Dominic]

The West won WW2 and WW3 (the Cold War) in no small part because of its ideas. Both the Nazis and the Soviets believed in their own manifest destiny, and politicised scientific research and military theory. The West started from a more flexible (and constantly flexed) set of ideas, and therefore was able to beat them with tanks and missiles and so on.

The Nazis and the Soviets had those too, but had ideological blocks that prevented their system from taking advantage of them.