Acceleration

Labor Day should be about relaxation—a day off. If you must talk politics, it should be about domestic issues—the economy, jobs, and the like. The news there remains tepid at best. But this Labor Day, if there's any serious talk, it's very important to look outward, beyond our shores.

An evil has grown inside a major religious ideology, it's gaining influence and strength, and it's again headed our way. Complacency is unthinkable. Repeating the errors of the past is inexcusable, and falling pray to politically correct thinking that refuses to characterize it properly is, well, unacceptable.

It's time to state things bluntly and unequivocably. Islamist groups, a non-trivial segment of broader Islam, have become the Nazis of the 21st century. It really doesn't matter if the group is ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezballah, or any of the dozens of off-shoots around the world. They all differ by degree, not by intent. They all are bent on violence, on dominance, on genocide, on intolerance, and on evil.

An anonymous commenter at Instapundit (posted at 10:50am, 31 Aug 14), makes the following observation:

Let’s accept, arguendo, that the outgoing DIA chief is right, and that we are now in an era of danger similar to the mid-1930s. How did we get here? It’s worth looking back into the mists of time — an entire year, to Labor Day weekend 2013. What had not happened then? It’s quite a list, actually: the Chinese ADIZ, the Russian annexation of Crimea, the rise of ISIS, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fall of Mosul, the end of Hungarian liberal democracy, the Central American refugee crisis, the Egyptian-UAE attacks on Libya, the extermination of Iraqi Christians, the Yazidi genocide, the scramble to revise NATO’s eastern-frontier defenses, the Kristallnacht-style pogroms in European cities, the reemergence of mainstream anti-Semitism, the third (or fourth, perhaps) American war in Iraq, racial riots in middle America, et cetera and ad nauseam.

All that was in the future just one year ago ...

But the larger point here is not what’s happening, because what’s happening is obvious. Things are falling apart. The point is how fast it’s come. It takes the blood and labor of generations to build a general peace, and that peace is sustained by two pillars: a common moral vision, and force majeure. We spent a quarter-century chipping away at the latter, and finally discarded the former, and now that peace is gone. All this was the work of decades.

Look back, again, to Labor Day weekend 2013, and understand one thing: its undoing was the work of mere months.

Evil things have begun to accelerate in the vacuum created by Barack Obama's foreign policy debacles. As a president, he does not share the "moral vision" of his predecessors and he seems generally unwilling to use "force majeure" in situations where it is not only justified, but essential.

It's become so bad that even prominent Democrats, politicians who protected this president far past a time when he no longer deserved their protection, have begun to sound the alarm. His trained hamsters in the media have slowly begun to ask tepid questions, but still refuse to do their job. The result is chaos in many parts of the world. Acceleration.

It's interesting to note that during the presidency of George W. Bush, the bright lights of the Left argued that other nations hated us, spawning violence and discord. Yet, overall, the world was relatively calm. Russia was not a hegemon, Islamists were on the run, and Iraq and Afghanistan were as stable as could be expected.

Today, during the presidency of Barack Obama, other countries still hate us, but they also have no respect for us, do not fear us, do not trust us to support their actions when they're allies, and they do not expect us to back up our words with deeds when they're enemies. They view our president as inconsequential at best and an empty suit at worst. They believe (possibly correctly) that we no longer have the will to fight evil when it threatens us and our allies.

In the 1930s, apologists and isolationists told us that the Nazis could be contained, that the Nazis could be reasoned with, that their claims of genocidal intent were only words, that the Nazi would take only a little and then stop. As the Nazis grew in strength and violence, as anti-Semitism grew, those same apologists and isolationists doubled down on their claims. Sound familiar?

Today, ISIS and every other Islamist group are following the same trajectory as last century's Nazis. Barack Obama and his shrinking band of supporters play the role of the apologists and isolationists of the 1930s. His inaction and indecision, his complacency in the face of evil, his politicization of every foreign policy judgement is unprecedented and shocking. He is enabling the "acceleration" and as a consequence, he is aiding and abetting evil.