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 addam
once pledged to wage "the mother of all battles" and to
leave "thousands of Americans dead in the sand." Even
a few American pundits believed him — before his army was annihilated
in four days. The terrorists in the Middle East and their Taliban
sponsors in Afghanistan now promise to do all sorts of horrible
things to us — from an unending jihad of terror, to murdering
Americans on sight worldwide, to hints of gassing us in our schools
and offices. We are told to be aware that our "new" enemies
will be disguised, untraceable, unpredictable, and therefore nearly
unstoppable.
This mythology
of horror is hardly new and perhaps dates from the dawn of the Greek
city-state. Classical folklore, both in art and literature, is full
of brutal, terror-inducing creatures that practice every evil art
of destruction.
Sirens —
in the manner advised in the hijackers' manuals — masked their
evil with sweet voices and smiles. Proteus, like bin Laden, appeared
suddenly — but never in the same guise. Beastly Cyclopes and
Amazons — just like the fundamentalists — did not build
cities, write literature, or create technology. They instead preferred
to murder against civilization.
What was the
purpose of these scary creatures in the Greek mind?
The early myths
conveyed to the city-state that civilization's struggle against
wild hatred and fury — like our own against the present terrorists
and their hosts — was a constant and always frightening one.
Stymphalean Birds, like hijackers, dove out of nowhere. The many-necked
Hydra shot out another ghastly head each time one was cut off. Foul,
hit-and-run Harpies fed like parasites on their hosts. And the nearly
invincible Nemean Lion was reputed to be impenetrable to the tools
of conventional weaponry.
All these opponents
— who symbolized the age-old evil that we once again see arrayed
against us — played on the innate fears of comfortable citizens
that there were primeval forces in the world that enjoyed chaos
and killing, and that did not fight like the good hoplite soldiers
of the polis. Disguise, stealth, bloody rhetoric, hideous new ways
of murder, attacks on the innocent and unprepared, threats to use
unspeakable methods of mass destruction can all, if we are not careful,
turn us to stone in fear.
But arrayed
against the pre-civilized Scylla, Echidna, and Charybdis, of course,
are the fearless heroes of myth — Odysseus, Theseus, Perseus,
Heracles, and others — who in art and literature reminded the
new civilization of the city-state that culture could always defeat
the untamed. Such figures as Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, were
enshrined as protectors of order through the tools of civilization
— law, justice, reason, and technology. The Furies, Gorgons,
and Cyclopes were hideous to behold, and their howls and shrieks
worse to hear, but they were all eventually blinded, decapitated,
or driven back into the dank through learning and courage. Perseus
did not have to see Medusa to cut off her head.
There is also
a rhetoric of war that can be as frightening as it is empty. Epaminondas,
the Theban liberator, was lectured endlessly about the impossibility
of marching into the heart of Sparta to free the helots — in
a land that had boasted of no invasion for "seven hundred years."
In such a strong confine, "No Spartan woman would ever see
the smoke of an enemy campfire," King Agesilaus bragged —
shortly before his entire countryside went up in flames. "Oh,
the ambitious man," the King later stammered of Epaminondas
as he watched his own once-vaunted army of professional killers,
in their horrific dreadlocks and scarlet cloaks, cower inside the
city.
On the eve
of Normandy, Hitler and his generals boasted of the Waffen SS that
such a singular division would push the "cowboys" into
the sea — the same feared division that in a few weeks' time
was incinerated by American GIs in the Falaise Gap. To paraphrase
Churchill, "some cowboys." The sea of death, as it turned
out, was not of water, but of flames.
I think some
Americans are now fearful of the ordeal ahead, and not out of ideological
concerns. How, after all, can progressives stomach mass murderers
who treat women like animals, urge the killing of Jews on sight,
behead innocents, and forbid religious or political tolerance? While
the Vatican, the Harvard library, and the United Nations have not
yet been blown apart, there is clearly no reason to believe that
any of them are immune from these fundamentalists' hatred of non-Muslims,
the Western rational tradition, or liberal internationalism.
Nor are those
protesting really pacifists: Even the most smugly "moral"
now realize that ignoring evil — whether in Bosnia, Iraq, or
Afghanistan — only gets women and children killed. The Vietnam-era
cry of resistance that 'they are not attacking us here at home'
is now irrelevant; and past restraint in confronting terrorism has
only invited this disaster. Even the professedly peace-loving realize
that the 7,000 may be only a beginning, and that self-proclaimed
nonresistance only fuels the arrogance of these killers — who
act on the conviction that Americans are either cowardly or impotent.
And even critics
of military action do not believe that our dead are a result of
America's politics. They — and the world — know well that
no country has saved more Muslims in the last 20 years — whether
the Kuwaiti, Shiite, or Kurdish victims of Saddam; the Afghani enemies
of Soviet Communism; the starving in Somalia; or the targeted in
Bosnia and Kosovo. Make Israel or America disappear tomorrow, and
the terrorists would only turn to murdering Westerners in Europe
or Japan. India and Russia, both targets of these madmen, are not
always strong American allies or sympathetic to our foreign policies.
Rather, many
in America are hesitant because they are fearful of Gorgons and
Harpies — in dread of a long, bitter struggle against the shrieking
and beastly which will interrupt our daily routines, cost us more
lives, and earn us more hatred. Fear — not the usual coffee-house
ideology, the smug morality of the faculty lounge, or the easy five-minute
guilt of the suburban affluent — is the real fuel of their
protests.
This is understandable
in a democracy, which as the historian Thucydides tells us, is at
first fickle and prone to self-doubt. Yet — as he also reminds
us, of both classical Athens and Syracuse — democracies eventually
prove the most resourceful and resolved in war, as they slowly marshal
their enormous arsenal against the unfamiliar, and answer the mythology
of terror with the reality of power.
In the trying
months ahead, we should not listen to what the fundamentalist terrorists
say, but instead watch what we do. Like all enemies of civilization,
the primordial Taliban and the beastly supporters of bin Laden will
soon fall. And perhaps best of all, at last — like Medusa and
the Hydra — they too will grow mute.
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