Where Have All Our War Heroes Gone?

Today Barack Hussein Obama is a million times more famous than Jeremy Glick, Todd Beamer or any of the other Flight 93 passengers who rushed the cockpit and prevented the terrorists from using their plane as guide missile. He is more famous than any of the firefighters, NYPD and PAPD police officers, as well as civilians who tried to save lives during the attacks of 9/11. He is of course vastly more famous than any of the soldiers who have died over the last eight years fighting terrorism.

In Israel, the preparations are underway for the annual Rabin commemorations. The former Prime Minister is not being remembered for his shelling of a ship full of Jewish refugees and arms being brought in by Nationalist Zionists. He is not being remembered for his Six Day War heroism, which consisted him of having a nervous breakdown and then having a helmet plopped on his head for that famous Jerusalem photo, incidentally a photo that conservative general, Rehavam Ze'evi, who would later be murdered by the same terrorists that Rabin helped bring into Israel, is routinely cropped out of. No, Rabin is remembered for signing the disastrous Oslo accords, turning over a sizable portion of Israel to Arafat's terrorists, and creating a disaster that has cost the lives of a great number of Israelis in the process. Naturally Rabin is remembered as a hero, and is vastly more famous than of the soldiers and civilians murdered because of his policies.

And that in sum total is the problem with the world today. Our cultural heroes are not the people who fight evil or save lives, but who pimp appeasement in the name of peace. Every insipid quote from them about non-violence is repeated and savored, treated as a great insight into how we should all live. It doesn't matter whether their actual lives bore any resemblance to their fictional lives.

In real life Gandhi was a sadistic hypocrite who flirted with Nazi and Japanese occupations, viciously abused his wife and children, endorsed Apartheid so long as it excluded his fellow Indians and casually flipped from moralizing about extremes of non-violence, to endorsing even the most brutal butchery if it accomplished his political ends. That of course is not the Gandhi we know. The Gandhi we know is a saint of peace, an apostle of appeasement whose virtues are used as a model for urging us to never respond with force to the people who want to kill us.

Let us go back to America for a moment. Which American leader has an entire holiday dedicated in his name? Martin Luther King, who delivered the following speech;

"Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts... And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. "

Had the speech been penned in the halls of the Kremlin, it could hardly have been written any differently. And yet Martin Luther King has his own holiday, while the numberless American soldiers of every race and creed who died in Vietnam, remain anonymous except for a list of names on a wall.

And so it goes as we reward those who speak about peace and counsel appeasement. We speak about them fighting for peace, when in truth those who fight for peace are those who pick up a rifle and stand in defense of their country against those who would destroy, enslave and oppress. They exploit freedom to urge a surrender to those who would take away that very freedom they abuse.

The West has embraced appeasement as its cultural model, and it is a process that has been underway for some time. American 19th century liberals who had become very enthusiastic about war before the Civil War, embraced anti-war activism denouncing every conflict America entered into. In Europe the senselessness of WW1 turned it into a convenient model for reducing every war as another conflict between capitalists and imperialists, an attitude that nearly turned over most of Europe to Hitler, all but for England bringing in Churchill at the last minute to do the dirty work of war, and then giving him the boot once he was done, to make way for the work of building the socialist utopia.

In Israel Rabin's assassination helped create a convenient icon that elevates the death of one single man, over the deaths of all caused by his policies. It is as if Chamberlain had been shot to death, and Labor had gone on treating his death as a vindication of his policies even with German troops running wild across the countryside. That is literally the situation in Israel, as everyone from politicians to schoolchildren on down will be lectured sonorously on the great virtues of peace as embodied by a man who destroyed Israel's security and created its greatest crisis... in exchange for a Nobel Peace Prize.

This flavor of leftist lunacy epitomizes just how appeasement has become embodied as the modern political virtue of virtues... despite endless examples to the contrary. The great modern heroes imposed on us are the men who chose to give up, to wave the white flag in the name of peace or whatever collection of trite virtues about love, togetherness and amity that their speechwriters could cobble together on short notice.

But while a decadent culture may reward pacifists and appeasers with golden thrones and laurels, at least after death, the real world does not. In the real world, Obama's Afghan policy is faltering badly, because soft power is just a fancy way of saying indecisive. Ahmadinejad and Chavez are playing the Great Leader like a cheap deck of cards and the world is laughing at us. In the real world, agreements with the VC meant the submergence of Vietnam beneath the boot of a Communist tyranny. In the real world, shaking hands with Hitler and Stalin meant agreeing to the mass murder of millions and the tyranny of hundreds of millions. In the real world shaking hands with Arafat meant shaking hands with terrorism. And in the real world the much ballyhooed ideas, the stirring quotes that coat a sugary layer over the reality of embracing evil, are a suicide pill for civilization.

Let us stop venerating the appeasers and stop treating the Gandhis, Rabins, Kings, Chamberlains and Obamas as heroes. They are not heroes. Speaking about peace is not heroism and fighting for peace does not mean delivering a well written speech absolutely detached from the hard realities of the world. Heroism is not about expressing ideas that others will have to die for because there will be no one left to defend them. Heroism is not found by surrendering to evil, by leaving your nation naked to those who would murder, torture and enslave your citizens. Heroism is found in resisting them. Death is not proof of heroism. Many men have died and the worms have eaten their bones. Dying in defense of others is heroism and it is the common virtue that unites our true heroes, who rushed into burning buildings, manned tanks and machine gun posts in the face of overwhelming opposition, and fought back even when appeasement and the sweet song of peace seemed easier by far.

Ir is time to reject the obscene lie that claims that a well written speech about non-violence is nobler and more worthy of note and remembrance than that lonely soldier in the fog waiting for the enemy to come.