Somewhere on the evening of the 11th of September, the realization struck. America is at war. This is not a war of princes and principalities, of borders and negotiated surrenders. This was is a cultural war. The Seventy Years War (or Cold War) had overtones of a culture war, but was, still, fundementally, a war of states, and nations.
The enemy has billed this as a war of cultural annihilation. Either they remove us, or we will remove them. They have defined the goals of the conflict. They have repeated these goals for the last decade or more.
The enemy is just as vulnerable to these objectives as we are. More so, in fact. The enemy builds his force on ignorance, on the Big Lie. The enemy's greatest fear is that the prosperity of the West will seduce the generation after this one. That the memories of old blood feuds will fade when presented with McDonald's and computers and cheap cell phones. Every call they make to recruit is against the decadence of the West destroying their way of life.
This should be our stated objective. To destroy their way of life. Never forget this; this is their stated objective against us. After we punish the enemy with bombs, with bullets, we must salt the soil that nourishes the the twisted tree of intolerance and fanaticism. We must change the hearts and minds of the young.
We salt the soil with small computers. With internet access. With a telephone in every village. With juvenile novels and encyclopedias translated into Arabic and Farsi and Pushtu. With teachers who speak their language, and who teach them to use these tools to answer questions for themselves. Yes, some of those teachers will be killed. They are soldiers in this war as much as anyone who puts on a beret or takes up a gun, and we will make martyrs of them for the world.
The organizations they decry as the mouthpieces of the US shall be USED as the mouthpieces of the West. We tell their children that there is a life beyond subsistence farming and blood feuds. We tell their wives and daughters that there is a life where they are valued as individuals and people in their own right, not as mutilated chattel.
We give them the tools of bilateral communication, rather than unilateral indoctrination. We give them the internet. We declare a Great Work, shared between the US and European Union, and Russia, of bringing the internet to spot on the planet. Not just the US. Not just Europe. The world.
They will see pornography sites. They will also see sites discussing engineering, and simple improvements to agriculture. Some may even see this site. The curiousity of children will be piqued, and their questions answered. With each question asked, and each answer given, we slowly wean them away from the culture of intolerance.
They'll be able to ask questions without censure or censoring, and get answers they might not otherwise have.
This is not to say that the call for military action should be ignored, or set aside. This plan of action can only come after we have destroyed a country's will to fight and put it on the brink of nonexistance. We must, and this weighs heavily on my heart, make life so miserable for the people of that country that when the books arrive, when the teachers and computers come in, that they are hailed as saviors.
I am not competent to discuss the military campaign, and while my blood seethes with the rest of America's, I cannot let my hunger for vengeance blind me to the long-term nature of this conflict. The President has the job of dealing with the Here and Now, and a thoroughly crushing job and responsibility it is. No less overwhelming are the roles of his advisors, who must present him with options, for the Here and Now.
Someone needs to think upon the After. I have no doubts that we have the military might to capture bin-Ladin, and to punish those who harbor him and his ilk. And we certainly have the means of killing as many of his followers as we can find.
But for each one we kill, we irrigate the seeds of a dozen martyrs with blood, unless we plan strategically.
It is the purpose of this discussion to plan strategically. We must dry up the well of potential recruits.
The second or third or tenth wave of bombings must be with GameBoys and Pokemon, and an Arabic translation of Monopoly, and Arabic entertainment media.
The adults are beyond our reach. The young must be reached, so that 20 years from now, the suggestion of piloting a captured airliner into an office building full of innocent bystanders meets with truly universal horror. When confronted with the bogeyman of The Great Satan, the next generation of Muslim children should look perplexed, and talk about the friends they know through the Internet.
I fear, in the haste for vengeance, that the nature of this conflict will be forgotten. Make no bones about it -- this is a culture war. It can only end with a declaration on the order of Cartago Delenda Est.
We cannot win this war with bombs or bullets, although we can accelerate its prosecution by those means. We can only win this war through a generational conflict; we must win the war in the hearts and minds of the children growing up in the Middle East now. Winning that longer war will be costlier and less immediately gratifying than cluster bombs and Fuel Air Explosives, and "killing the bastards and everyone that helped them.
It is a war that all of us can participate in. If you are an author, or a game designer, or someone who writes textbooks for young children, contact your publisher about translating your works into Arabic or Farsi or Pushtu. If you are a publisher, offer whatever fun, entertaining or educational Arabic translations at the smallest markup possible to the State Department, or sell them the plates to print them themselves through the GPO.
If you work for the government, or with the government, help us find the person or person(s) to deliver these munitions of peace to.
Bin Laden has declared this a culture war. Let's show him what a culture war TRULY looks like. Let's send in Shakespeare. And Heinlein. And Harlequin Romances, Pokemon and The Simpsons.
Ken Burnside (burnside@chorus.net)
Reproduction is expressly permitted under the following conditions:
1: The author's permission is requested, and his name is
included as part of the reproduction.
2: The link to
http://www.adastragames.com/
remains.
3: If your publication compensates authors financially for original
material, the author accepts payments via PayPal at
burnside@chorus.net. He humbly
requests that you pay him at half the usual rates, and donate the other half to
the American Red Cross.
4: If you do not
have a formal payment policy, he asks that you make a contribution to the above
organization in lieu of payment, on the honor system.
Last Modified on: Wednesday, 14-Nov-2007 16:11:07 MST