For absurd foreign policy prescriptions, it’s hard to beat the Obama State Department. But Foreign Policy magazine gave them a run for their money: in an article entitled “Can Gay Marriage Defeat the Islamic State? A Few — Admittedly Sappy — Thoughts on the Power of #LoveWins,” Rosa Brooks argues that the horrific terror entity can be overcome by the awesome power of the rainbow.
Brooks asks her readers:
There is another glaring fallacy in her “analysis”: if the Nazis and Soviets and KKK and Pol Pot and Rwandan génocidaires ever really learned that “brutality and fear can keep people down for only so long,” they didn’t learn it in the manner Brooks seems to think they did.
It is hard to tell how, exactly, she thinks they learned this. By viewing photos of loving couples of any persuasion? Did a photo of an embracing couple move Adolf Hitler to call his genocidal armies back home and close the extermination camps?
Did some image of happiness make Pol Pot realize his stacks and shelves full of skulls were a terrible mistake, leading him to resign and become a florist?
No rational analysis will find Brooks’ claim to be the “lesson of history.” If the Nazis learned that “#LoveWins,” they must have learned it in the blood and ruin of Berlin, as Soviet troops ran wild and raped every young German woman they could catch. The groups Brooks names learned that #LoveWins — if they ever learned it — at the point of a gun.
They were forced by violence to stop what they were doing.
Yes, even the Klan was prosecuted in the “racist” United States. The only exception to this rule is the Soviet Union — yet Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t oversee the dissolution of the Soviet Union because he realized that the United States was in fact a big hunk of love. The Soviet Union collapsed under the economic pressure that Ronald Reagan brought to bear upon it, and the societal/cultural courage that Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa brought upon it. It might still exist today if Walesa hadn’t been willing to risk his life in the Gdansk Shipyard.
That’s what will defeat the Islamic State today: people willing to risk their lives to safeguard the dignity and freedom of every human being.
Yet those who are willing to do that are generally the very ones who, in a case of suicidal short-sightedness, are vilified as “racists” and “bigots” by the supporters of gay marriage.
Because love doesn’t always win.
Brooks asks her readers:
Do you want to fight the Islamic State and the forces of Islamic extremist terrorism? … I’ll tell you the best way to send a message to those masked gunmen in Iraq and Syria and to everyone else who gains power by sowing violence and fear. Just keep posting that second set of images.
Brooks is referring to images of gay marriage supporters celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling.Post them on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and in comments all over the Internet. Send them to your friends and your family. Send them to your pen pal in France and your old roommate in Tunisia. Send them to strangers.Where did Brooks get the idea that a mass posting of photos of gay marriage supporters would conquer the Islamic State? Because, well:
… that’s the lesson of history: Brutality and fear can keep people down for only so long. The Nazis learned this; the Soviets learned it; the Ku Klux Klan learned it; Pol Pot learned it; the Rwandan génocidaires learned it. One of these days, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda will learn it too.It is much, much more likely — or certain — that the Islamic State sees the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage as evidence of the United States’ decadence and societal decay, and that this will serve to embolden and encourage them.
There is another glaring fallacy in her “analysis”: if the Nazis and Soviets and KKK and Pol Pot and Rwandan génocidaires ever really learned that “brutality and fear can keep people down for only so long,” they didn’t learn it in the manner Brooks seems to think they did.
It is hard to tell how, exactly, she thinks they learned this. By viewing photos of loving couples of any persuasion? Did a photo of an embracing couple move Adolf Hitler to call his genocidal armies back home and close the extermination camps?
Did some image of happiness make Pol Pot realize his stacks and shelves full of skulls were a terrible mistake, leading him to resign and become a florist?
No rational analysis will find Brooks’ claim to be the “lesson of history.” If the Nazis learned that “#LoveWins,” they must have learned it in the blood and ruin of Berlin, as Soviet troops ran wild and raped every young German woman they could catch. The groups Brooks names learned that #LoveWins — if they ever learned it — at the point of a gun.
They were forced by violence to stop what they were doing.
Yes, even the Klan was prosecuted in the “racist” United States. The only exception to this rule is the Soviet Union — yet Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t oversee the dissolution of the Soviet Union because he realized that the United States was in fact a big hunk of love. The Soviet Union collapsed under the economic pressure that Ronald Reagan brought to bear upon it, and the societal/cultural courage that Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa brought upon it. It might still exist today if Walesa hadn’t been willing to risk his life in the Gdansk Shipyard.
That’s what will defeat the Islamic State today: people willing to risk their lives to safeguard the dignity and freedom of every human being.
Yet those who are willing to do that are generally the very ones who, in a case of suicidal short-sightedness, are vilified as “racists” and “bigots” by the supporters of gay marriage.
Because love doesn’t always win.
No comments:
Post a Comment