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In Front of a Dictator's Tank

At one point during the recent turmoil in Egypt I saw a video of unarmed Muslim protestors kneeling on the street to pray right in front of a water cannon, which merrily blasted away at them. That had quite an effect on me. I wonder how many proud secularists in the West felt uncomfortable watching that video, and if so, did they know why? Was it because of the obvious cruelty or was it something else?

There is a connection between this contemporary image and a point made by George Orwell in his review, written in the early days of World War II, of the unabridged edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf.
[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all Western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he never is a able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won't do.

Hitler...knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control, and in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice...
A 'tin materialist/utilitarian/secularist' somehow won't do, either. Western utilitarians stand for nothing but the most craven comfort-worship. Their crowning achievement is the American baby-boomer generation, a generation that has never known sacrifice of any kind. It has never aspired to any achievement more noble than toys, entertainments, and status symbols. But since we haven't been hit with a real life-or-death struggle for so many years, we can't yet appreciate what pygmies we've become.
(George Orwell, "Notes on the Way," from Time and Tide.) I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period -- twenty years, perhaps -- during which he did not notice it.
Most baby boomers will probably make it to the grave and never really discover that they 'can't fly'. Maybe that will be OK with America at large. The government could start some new loan program that would fund more exotic funerals or coffins for dead baby boomers. I wouldn't mind having titanium handles on my coffin, and a high-tech carbon-fiber lid.

In our "War on Terror" everybody in the West believes that they hold the high moral ground since suicide bombers deliberately target innocent people. But I wonder if compassion for the victims is the real concern, or whether it's the unnerving idea that there are people in this world who care more for an idea or principle than their own skin.

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