It is the almost insane hatred one sees in our enemies that has most horrified me since September 11, 2001. I have written elsewhere that militant Islam is suicide terrorism as social contract – they are willing to destroy their entire societies in order to strike their enemy. But Orwell's column makes me realize that the Islamist movement is also a spiritual and moral suicide blah blah blah....
You know what's horrified me the most since 2001? The almost insane hatred exhibited in my countrymen. We'll beat the "Islamofascists," or bin Laden, or Hussein, or whoever we're worried about this week. But the blithe pundits suggesting that "[e]very ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business?" The Hitchens, Sullivans, and Mario Loyolas of the world resurrecting George Orwell in order to recast their enemies as existential, ideological threats and themselves from writers to warriors? The vast swath of the country willing to embrace torture and domestic surveillance? I don't know how we beat that lust for war, for bloodshed, for danger, for enemies abroad and at home. Nor the domestic mindset that emerges from it.
