Civilization will win when it terrorizes terrorists
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
“Terror will always succeed unless confronted by a greater terror.”
Quoting Adolf Hitler has never been this writer’s favorite pastime, but desperate times require desperate utterances.
World War II proved the aptness of Hitler’s remark, but in a way beyond his wildest imaginings.
That war saw Hitler himself dead in his bunker, the ruins of his “thousand year Reich” around him.
Embracing terror, the Nazis produced death on the personal level unseen in the modern era, directed to victims inside and outside of Germany – Jews, Catholics, communists, homosexuals, the physically imperfect, neighbor states.
Eventually, Nazi armies overran the continent.
When the Gestapo held sway in France, resisters were met with a simple Hitlerian response: “For every German soldier killed, 100 French civilians.”
A Frenchman might have enjoyed cutting a Nazi throat, but it seldom happened because one did not lightly send a wife, child, mother, father, relative, friend, or one’s entire village before a firing squad.
Still, had some divine clairvoyant at the zenith of Nazi power presented an accurate vision of 1945, it would have seemed incredible:
Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin fire-bombed into rubble; Germany destroyed; Europe in ruins.
Hitler’s terrorism seemed invincible, just as the strategies of suicide bombers and of Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda do now.
When Islamist fanatics destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and hit the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on 9/11, their heirs proclaimed they were destroying our “cathedrals” – these being our centers of commerce and the military.
Without wondering about their own “cathedrals” and how someday we may define them, Iran and Iran’s terrorist puppet Hezbollah have moved the peg along, calling for the destruction of Israel, America and any other nation that dares oppose them.
Hitler did not accurately foresee the consequences of terror. Nor do the radical Islamist now.
No one can see around corners. None can predict civilization’s response if radical Islam follows its murderous path.
But as much as the past is prologue, terror states, most notably Iran, need to be wary.
Their hour of gravest danger is when peace-seeking people turn from measured response to fury.
July 2006
