We live in such blessed times, as good as it has ever been if you are in a first-world western country far from the horrors elsewhere. The aim was always to bring the rest of the world up to the standards we created for ourselves and have continuously improved on. The reality will be that our way of life is being destroyed to the point where not all that far in the future, we will have our elites, as does every society, while the mass of humanity will live like dogs. A fascinating paper brought to light by John Hinderaker at Powerline: The Treason of the Professors. He has a summary of the paper he links to: Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict – The Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column.
The left in our societies has been a fifth column for the longest time. They have been enemies of the bourgeois state since the middle of the eighteenth century [vide French Revolution]. Over the past century, they teamed up with Stalin and have now joined Islamists in doing what they can to bring down the West. Many excerpts at the Powerline link but the article is long. Here is his abstract, itself as bleak as anything you might read anywhere:
Islamist extremists allege law of war violations against the United States to undermine American legitimacy, convince Americans that the United States is an evil regime fighting an illegal and immoral war against Islam, and destroy the political will of the American people. Yet these extremists’ own capacity to substantiate their claims is inferior to that of a critical cadre of American law of armed conflict academics whose scholarship and advocacy constitute information warfare that tilts the battlefield against U.S. forces. These academics argue that the Islamist jihad is a response to valid grievances against U.S. foreign policy, that civilian casualties and Abu Ghraib prove the injustice of the U.S. cause, that military action is an aggressive over-reaction, and that the United States is engaged in war crimes that breed terrorists, threaten the rule-of-law, and make us less safe. Rather than lending their prodigious talents to the service of their nation, these legal academics, for reasons ranging from the benign to the malignant, have mustered into the Islamist order of battle to direct their legal expertise against American military forces and American political will. This psychological warfare by American elites against their own people is celebrated by Islamists as a portent of U.S. weakness and the coming triumph of Islamism over the West.
This Article defends these claims and then calls for a paradigmatic shift in our thoughts about the objects and purposes of the law of armed conflict and about the duties that law professors bear in conjunction with the rights they claim under academic freedom. It then examines the consequences of suffering this trahison des professeurs to exist and sketches key recommendations to attenuate its influence, shore up American political will, and achieve victory over the Islamic State and Islamist extremism more broadly.
I don’t have to read the full article to know what he means, but I will do it anyway. Here is the last para which has only melancholy about it. There is no Charles Martel, nor with democratic politics as they are, can there be.
The warison sounds; the warning is sent; the assistance of the sacred and the profane is summoned. Whether once again the West will heed the call, march apace against the Islamist invaders, and deliver justice swift and sure to disloyal courtiers abasing it from within, or whether the West has become deaf to the plaintive, fading notes of one encircled knight who long ago called forth its soldiers and calls them yet again, will decide if the Song of Roland remains within the inheritance of future generations of its peoples. If the West will not harken now to Roland and his horn, neither it, nor its peoples, nor the law they revere will outlive the bleak day of desecration when Islamists, wielding their Sword, 776 strike his Song, all it represents, and all it can teach, from history.
To mention Roland and Roncesvalles to a modern European is as dead a notion as it is possible to be. When we were in that part of France a while back we went to the tourist office to find out where the battlefield had been. I admit to being surprised by this, but not only did no one know where it was, no one even knew what it was. I really don’t know how we get back from where we are.
Law of Markets 