Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris

Author:Lee Harris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Modern, Political Freedom & Security, Philosophy, Political, General, Civilization, Political Science, Terrorism, World Politics, History
ISBN: 9780743267007
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2004-03-10T23:00:00+00:00

Toward Neo-Sovereignty

We live in a world in which ruthlessness will triumph unless there are men who know how to deal with it effectively. Civilized life begins to exist only when men have learned how to fight ruthlessness without succumbing to it themselves, and it only exists for as long as they remember the trick of how this is done. This trick has been mastered by the United States.

Has America always acted wisely or in a purely benevolent manner? Of course not, but it must be stressed here that we are not trying to imagine a perfect world but simply trying to keep civilization alive and well in the one we have, and the best way to ensure this is for America to continue to hold its position of overwhelming military dominance, as long as the code of honor that governs those who control the means of this dominance is still binding on them psychologically.

Dominance is not necessarily domination. The whole point and value of American supremacy is not to permit America to manage the world or to impose its will or its own culture on others. Empire is most emphatically not what American power should be used for. Of what possible benefit could an empire be, economically or otherwise?

Indeed, any such activity on the part of the United States would be counterproductive to its genuine purpose, which is to deter the renewals of the strategy of deliberate ruthlessness through the world, for the good of both itself and the world. America, in short, must use its power, unilaterally if need be, to destroy and remove any group of people who are deliberately and consciously following a policy of ruthlessness, whether this group is a state against another state, a state against its own people, or an Al-Qaeda-like organization.

Much of the future of the world will hinge on keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of men ruthless enough to use them, men who do not recognize the legitimacy of the present world order and who are willing to use whatever power falls into their hands in order to destroy it.

With 9/11 the world was shown two hitherto unimaginable possibilities. The first was the possibility of an attack on an American city by a gang of ruthless adolescents and young men employing catastrophic terror. The second was the certainty that such an act would be greeted by rejoicing in much of the Muslim world, as 9/11 in fact was. By how much of the population of that world doesn't matter. Any society that can fill even one street with people dancing over the carnage of 9/11 is to be suspected, for it takes much less than a street to pull off such an act. The gang— often composed of fewer than even the nineteen Al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9/11— can arise anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances.

Our hindsight is unavoidably distorted. When we think of Hitler or Mussolini or Lenin, we think of them strutting grandiloquently across the stage of

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