Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Daniel Greenfield article: They
Don't Have to Silence Us, If We Silence Ourselves First

They Don't Have to Silence Us, If We Silence Ourselves First

Posted: 27 Apr 2010 08:19 PM PDT

What is a free country? Is it a country that is free of being
ruled by any other country, or is it a country of free people who are not
afraid. The truth is that no country can be free, unless its people are
free. Not freedom as embodied in legal documents or stirring anthems,
which nearly every country has, but free in their minds. Unafraid to
believe, to speak and to live.

Tyranny isn't a man holding a gun to your head and telling you
what to do. Tyranny is when you do what you're told, because you're
holding the gun to your own head. And then you have become a collaborator
in your own oppression. It is possible to be enslaved without ever
becoming a slave. And it is sadly possible for people to act like slaves
without any chains being anywhere in sight.

No regime, no ideology
and no power can maintain absolute physical control of all the people, all
of the time. To rule, they need to control not their bodies, but their
minds and their souls. Tyranny wants loyalty, but it will settle for fear.
And fear once internalized, destroys moral courage and replaces it with
moral cowardice, eroding the strength of beliefs and ideas with the
poisonous liquid of dread. The individual becomes an agent for the forces
of tyranny, warning himself against any action that could get him into
trouble. And then he is finally a slave.

In Stockholm Syndrome,
hostages try to take control of their powerlessness by identifying with
their captors. Under tyranny, entire populations can suffer from Stockholm
Syndrome, paying devoted obeisance to the tyrants who murdered them in
numberless amounts. Because once oppression is internalized, it comes to
seem like a benediction. The mind forged slave embraces his chains as a
moral good, clings to them as an expression of all that is right and
sensible in the world. He will even die for them. Because to a slave,
freedom is more terrifying than death.

Recently we rediscovered
the simple fact that even on Cable television, on a network where anything
goes, one thing does not go. Depicting Mohammed. Even in a bear suit. That
same iron law has been unofficially passed in country after country, where
operas, newspapers, books, television programs have been censored in order
to avoid offending the people who might kill them, if they were not
censored. Speech and image have been blocked, cut out, snipped and
silenced. Not because anyone has actually been killed, but because
attempts have made to kill some people. Which is enough to make free
speech go the way of the Dodo.

And that is exactly the point. They
don't have to silence us, if we silence ourselves first. They don't have
to oppress us, if we oppress ourselves first. They don't have to demand
our surrender and submission, if we surrender and submit first. Islam, we
love it. Sharia law, we'll gladly adopt it. Free speech, it has to have
its limits. Women's rights, we'll have to walk a fine line. Freedom. Ha,
what freedom. We've already traded that away for a nice set of
multicultural bongos, a few curry shops, a glass of arack and a
leatherbound copy of the Koran.

A free country is not one that
nickel and dimes its birthright of freedom like a ten year old begging his
parents to extend his curfew. It is a country whose people
uncompromisingly refuse to surrender their freedoms, in the face of
tyranny, torture and death. In the face of armies, tanks, secret police
and all the forces of the world arrayed against them. And a country that
compromises on its freedom is no longer free. It will know fear. It will
know terror. It will be oppressed, and there will be no relief from that
oppression, until they choose freedom over tyranny once
again.

Fear is a reflex. Tyranny thrives on it, imbues it and feeds
it. It kills randomly in order to spread that terror further. To create
populations who never know when their day will come. When the suicide
bomber, the black van, the sword and the secret police will come for them.
Men will fight and die for freedom on the battlefield, but the struggle to
remain defiant in a society where everyone is afraid all the time is a
much harder fight. Yet overcoming that reflex to find safety by
surrendering and collaborating, by learning to love Big Brother and
embracing his ideals, is what it takes to be a free citizen of a free
nation.

Pavlov, the formulator of the Pavlov Reflex, knew quite a
lot about conditioning. His own experiments showed that fear could be
conditioned by the ringing of a bell. Perhaps those insights were what
enabled Pavlov to go on defying the Soviet Union for decades. At a time
when most scientists and researchers were terrified out of their minds at
a slip, a wrong word that might send them to a long death in the basements
of the Lubyanka or an even longer death in the Gulags-- Pavlov would ride
buses and lecture the passengers on the fascism of the Soviet regime. And
while those scientists eventually ended up in the Gulags themselves,
Pavlov died a natural death.

Where so many Russians had become
conditioned to hear the ringing of the bell everywhere, and to search for
it when they didn't, to be afraid all the time, and to love the thing they
feared in order to have some measure of security-- Pavlov understood the
reflex and rejected it. He chose to be a free man instead. And freedom
comes from standing up to evil. From confronting it and defying it. Not
from submitting to it and collaborating with it. From silencing yourself
in the hope that you will no longer be afraid when the bell
rings.

Today the bell is Islam. The bell is Mohammed. That two
headed religion with its two faces, the Religion of Peace and the Religion
of Death. And if you focus hard enough on it as the Religion of Peace,
perhaps you won't notice the grinning skull on its other side. And so the
bell rings, and the poodles run to their master, licking his hands and
showering him with adoration. Oh yes Islam is a wonderful religion. It has
so many human rights. Truly it is a paragon for us today. If only we could
be as free as Muslims. If only.

And what is the source of Islam's
power? Comedy Central reminds us of that again. Its power is simple
enough. Its followers are more willing to kill those who resist, than
those who are not its followers are willing to resist them.

No military victory. No superior technology. Not even sheer
numbers, as there is still no First World country in which Muslims have
officially become a majority. Their power comes from fear. From being
prepared to murder anyone who disagrees with them. Until the mere threat
alone, from a worthless source, is enough to badly panic a multibillion
dollar corporation. The same corporation that would never take protests
from Jews or Christians seriously, caves when a single Muslim on a
previously obscure website threatens a beheading. What is the difference?
The difference is murder. Muslims murder people who offend them. And
having gained a reputation for that, they are quickly parlaying it into
practical political power.

A nation's police, legal and military divisions are entirely
useless if they cannot protect the exercise of such basic freedoms.
Without that they become nothing more than glorified social service
centers that enforce the law only when it isn't too dangerous for them.
Only when it won't offend the wrong people. The wrong people being those
who kill on casual provocation. And such a country, though it may have
documents to its name attesting its freedoms, and endless ranks of
judiciary appointees and professors debating those freedoms-- they mean
nothing if the people cannot actually exercise those freedoms.

The
Bush Administration's War on Terror did not actually put an end to fear of
Islamic terrorism, instead it fed it with endless alerts and prolonged
battles thousands of miles away, while in the heart of civilization,
terror remained emboldened enough to wave its green scimitar decorated
flag. That is why the assault on Salman Rushdie was in some ways a more
significant strategic blow than 9/11. On 9/11 thousands of our fellow
Americans died. But when we surrender to Islamic terror and intimidation,
our freedom dies. For everyone. And the bell begins to ring.

Only
by defying Islam, can we begin the process of taking back our freedoms.
Only by speaking out, do our voices matter. Because they don't have to
silence us, if we silence ourselves first.