The New Barbarians

Anthony Harrigan

Anthony Harrigan is the author, co-author or editor of twenty books. He has lectured at Yale University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Colorado and the National War College.

The concept of barbarians and barbarous behavior goes back to ancient Greece. To the Greeks barbarians were foreigners who were not Greeks or Romans and hence uncivilized. Barbarous behavior was described as brutal or coarse. This concept and attitude has been with us for more than two millennia. And this kind of behavior has characterized societies and countries and their residents down through the ages.

We have been confronted by barbarians who were complete savages in remote continents and also by modern peoples with traditions of higher education, such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The 20th century saw barbarism with nation states that became committed to cruelty on an enormous scale -- in the gulag and the German concentration camps where cruelty was carried out in the most systematic manner.

Today, barbarism appears in a different form, in the war Islamic terrorists are waging against the West. Though sometimes aligned with nation states, such as Saddam’s Iraq, the new barbarism of the 21st century is primarily organized or directed by political and religious movements such as al Qaeda. Many of the new barbarian terrorists, such as certain of the attackers of the World Trade Center, received a modern education that did not take.

Bruce Fein, a writer on legal issues and an attorney with Bruce Fein and Associates in Washington, D.C., wrote June 22 that

. . . terrorism is the employment of indiscriminate violence to cow or intimidate a civilian population to achieve a morally squalid political objective.

He added that al Qaeda and brother terrorists and sympathizers live in a demonic intellectual and moral world alien to Western civilization. This makes today’s terrorism -- the new barbarism -- so much more difficult to combat. Identifying potential individual bombers and deterring them is infinitely more complex than wiping out the Soviet and Nazi operations of concentration camps -- terrorism, and barbarism belonging to another age.

The cultural divide between Westerners or Western-influenced Asians and the terrorists of contemporary fanatical Islam is incredibly deep and wide. There are no common human bonds. Strangely though, the new barbarians have sympathizers and apologists in the West who demonstrate their acceptance or toleration of the new barbarism by condemning every Western effort to contain or defeat the terrorists by finding fault with determined Western leaders and seeking to portray Western armed forces as oppressors of allegedly misunderstood, neglected and slighted Islamic people. They carry their campaign to denigrate the United States and its coalition partners to the point where they aid and abet the terrorists.

Nancy Salvato, an Illinois educator, writing in The Washington Times, June 20, said “the media continue to spin to the public that we are losing the war.” She added “a fifth column, at the very least, slanders our leaders.” The fifth column, the major media, with a few exceptions, does its best to disparage American and allied freedom fighters while building up the image of the terrorists.

Generally, the fifth column tries to avoid the use of the word “terrorist.” They describe the practitioners of terrorism in Iraq as insurgents, a word that doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation. On June 21, the BBC world news, which is shown in the United States with the assistance of the Public Broadcasting Service and the financial aid of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation, covered the beheading of a South Korean civilian. The in-country reporter for the BBC concluded the coverage with the comment that the brutal act showed the necessity of listening to “the militants.” That’s like saying that the World War II allies should have listened to the sadists who ran Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps.

Laws against sedition go back to the administration of President John Adams and have been used countless times against those hostile to the United States, as in the case of Eugene Debs, the perennial socialist candidate for President. He was imprisoned because of his opposition to the draft laws. In a real sense, he was a forerunner or prototype of today’s terrorist apologists who are working to eliminate the Patriot Act enacted after 9/11 to apprehend and/or deter terrorists operating in secret cells in the United States. In the case of the contemporary agitation, the major media fail to report on the significant antiterrorist measures built into the legal systems of other free world countries. India, hailed in the media as the world’s largest democracy, has had preventive detention in its constitution since the Indian Union was created. For many years, the British have had the Defense of the Realm Act, which has made it possible to deal with Irish Republican Army terrorists. This allowed the British government to hold suspects for long periods of time without interference by anyone in or out of government.

Given the cruel and bloody deeds of the Islamic terrorists, it is strange and shocking that their cause should elicit any sympathy from people in the Western world, that people in the civilized world should fail to recognize the new barbarism of the 21st century. It is a fact, however, that self-hatred, hatred of their civilization, has flourished among so-called intellectuals since the end of World War I with its culturally demoralizing blood letting on a vast scale. This, in turn, led to the nihilistic intellectuals’ infatuation with the Third World after World War II and the anti-Westernism of the incompetent societies of the southern hemisphere. The heroes of the Western rejectionists were Third World terrorists and former terrorists such as Arafat, who became a virtual secular saint. This accounts in good part for the West European adulation of the Palestinians who, have been intent on driving the Israelis into the sea, though vestigial European anti-Jewish feeling -- and not so vestigial attitudes -- remains a factor in the pro-Palestinian cause.

It is important to note that attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers on Jewish children in school buses has produced little outrage in France, Germany, and Belgium; the outrage and media attention being lavished instead on Israeli military strikes against leaders of Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank. This has been the pattern of much media coverage in the United States, the ABC network being a longtime offender.

President Bush has made frequent and proper use of the word “barbarian,” but his critics have conspicuously avoided the term even as they shy away from the word “terrorist” as much as possible.

Aside from the political bias built into avoidance of the noun “barbarian” or adjective “barbaric,” there is the fact that many contemporary people have a hard time seeing someone in modern dress being a barbarian. For many people, the word “barbarian” conjures up the image of nomads from east of the Rhine River spilling across to the west bank and seizing the orderly farms of Romanized Gaul. They think of “barbarian” as a term from antiquity. They prefer to use other words when discussing the revolutionaries who seized the American embassy in Iran in the 1970s, murdered the Marines in Beirut, blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in the l990s, and beheaded Americans in 2004.

It is important that both Americans and Europeans restore the word “barbarian” to their vocabularies and the concept to their thinking as the Western world will be threatened by barbaric behavior for many decades to come -- so long as Islamic terrorism exists in this world. Westerners and Asians who are not extremist, anti-Western Muslims need to bring up to date their image of barbarians. Russians, being the target of fanatical, violent Chechan Muslims, already understand the reality of barbarism in the 21st century.

It is hard for the American and European public to develop a full understanding of the new barbarians when the major media conveniently ignore the scale of the terror that Saddam’s regime carried out against the Iraqi people. The central fact is that Saddam’s forces tortured and killed thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children every day. Their graves have been found all over the country. But the media don’t return to that reality or explore it in greater detail. Instead, the media focus on brutal and humiliating acts committed at one prison by a handful of rogue troops. This is a deliberate media strategy designed to undermine the war against terror. Moreover, the terrorists -- the new barbarians -- have instant access to web sites that are used by the media to further undermine free world resistance. One is reminded that the media and the academic world sought to whitewash Mao Tse-tung’s horrific campaigns of mass murder by portraying the bloodthirsty Communists as “land reformers.”

One also has to keep focusing on the total lack of respect and compassion in reviewing the actions of the new barbarians who portray themselves as defenders of a religious faith. What kind of religion is it that considers women and children acceptable targets for suicide bombing?

This question has to be addressed by all civilized people. The Religion and Society Report (June 2004) cites the horrors committed in the terrorists’ war against “infidels.” It cites the case of the four American civilians killed in Iraq March 31, noting that “their car was ambushed, their bodies set on fire perhaps while they were still alive -- then mutilated and dragged through the streets. Finally, two of the bodies were suspended from a bridge. It is true that some Muslim authorities in the United States have spoken out, saying that the mutilation of bodies is forbidden in the Koran. But worldwide there have been few prominent Islamic clerics who have condemned such atrocities as being contrary to their religion. In the main, Muslim leaders, clerical as well as secular, have been silent about such atrocities. They have praised action taken against “infidels.”

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, in an address to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (June 10), addressed the very disturbing Islamic toleration of the most horrifying atrocities. He said

What we are fighting against is the prospect of a new evil empire, a radical Islamic caliphate that would suppress the freedom of its people and threaten the security of every other nation’s citizens.

He added that

. . . the Islamic jihadist terrorists who wage holy war against us represent . . . a system of values exactly the opposite of Americans. . . . Restoring the caliphate -- the seat of secular and ecclesiastical power that existed for centuries across a wide territory -- is their goal. They would create a new evil empire, stretching from Istanbul to Islamabad, from Khartoum to Kabul, from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok, and beyond.

The left-liberals in the American major media understand none of this or fiercely resist the truths Sen. Lieberman has cited. They are less opposed to Islamic terrorists, the barbarians, than to Americans who comprehend the moral imperative of waging war against the terrorists. As the Religion and Society Report said in May, this is not because they have sympathy for Islam:

Most have a strong and continuing aversion to any kind of religion. But their hatred of Christianity is more compelling. They find Christianity the real threat.

The Report points out that the leftist media see Christianity as a continuing threat because of Christian opposition to abortion and homosexual marriage. The media opposes the Israelis because they are regarded as too close to “right-wing Christians.” The jihadists, of course, are even more interested in killing Israelis than Americans.

Israel has suffered terribly from Islamic suicide bombers, which in proportion to the size of the respective American and Israeli populations, would mean that the United States had lost 40,000 people to the Islamic terrorists. Again, this reality is fudged by the liberal-left media.

Slowly, the nature of the challenge facing the American people has come to be understood despite the rolling barrage of left-liberal propaganda from the big media. Todd Lindberg of the Hoover Institution has written (June 29, 2004) that

. . . the nature of the challenge has clarified itself over the past couple of months, Abu M. Musad Zarqawi’s world of barbarity, mayhem, and beheadings is now comprehended.

Jack Dorwin of Livingston, Texas, in a letter to the Washington Times on the same day wrote that we have to “accept the fact that our enemy will do anything to anyone any time, to defeat us” and that we can’t rely on out-of-date rules to deal with “hordes of state-unaffiliated, ununiformed, cunning, and unprincipled warriors.” He added that our enemy is a “brutal barbarian with no conscience and no restraint” and that “the fight is more important than the welfare of our enemy by any measure.” He declared that “the bleeding hearts in our culture should reserve their tears for the victims of the Islamic jihadists.”

The United States has dealt with many enemies since the War of Independence. What the country faces now is a wholly new situation, a new challenge. Therefore, the American people have to change their thinking about the character of war. Since 9/11 they have been gradually, and with fierce opposition at home, changing their mindset. In the past, enemies were unable to reach our shores. Americans did not have to resist and overcome tremendously influential and well-financed internal opposition to the war in which the U.S. was engaged. To be sure, there was the threat of a pro-French coup as early as the very late 1790s. There were the “copperheads” who opposed the Union in the Civil War in the northern part of the country. And during World War I, there was the very real threat of anarchists such as Debs and Emma Goldman who endeavored to undermine the war effort. In the run-up to World War II, the American First Committee opposed any action to defeat Nazi Germany -- and it enjoyed considerable support, which didn’t fade away until Japan struck at Pearl Harbor. But there has been nothing like the entrenched anti-American leftists in today’s highly concentrated media system which seeks in every broadcast to subvert the lawful government of the United States and its lawfully developed and executed policies.

To be sure, in the 1940s, the agents of the Soviet Union, such as Alger Hiss, occupied high and powerful positions in the U.S. government and were bent on doing Joseph Stalin’s will. The internal security threat today is much wider and deeper than in the era of atomic spies. Today, the opponents of the war on terrorism aren’t agents of a single foreign power. But they provide aid and comfort to the Islamic jihadis who are loosely but effectively organized in many countries. They refuse to accept the reality of the new barbarism. To defeat their nefarious schemes requires a massive mobilization of American opinion so that the left media cannot be decisive in brainwashing the American people into bowing to the global forces that seek to destroy us, to kill our people by beheadings, suicide bombers or dirty bombs. The defeat of these forces can and must be accomplished by a truly informed and aware citizenry.     *

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” -- John Stuart Mill