Are we Revere or Chamberlain?

 

 

"Turning a blind eye or a deaf ear has never worked well in dealing with ruthless people..."

Whatever else Neville Chamberlain did in his career, he will forever be remembered as the leader of the United Kingdom who turned a blind eye towards the growing menace of Nazis in Europe. He thought a policy of appeasement would protect the UK from any truculent threat the emerging Nazis movement might make. He was dead wrong. Once the Nazis invaded Poland, the UK realized the real goal of the Nazis. England joined the battle and was very late to the party.

The rest is history. In the 1940s, the world came within a whisker of losing itself into the cauldron of totalitarianism. Genocide was being committed in Europe, and many in the world knew about it. After the hangover many had from World War I, most of the world had no interest in more war. Some saw what was coming - they were the Paul Reveres of the 40s. However, many like Chamberlain, thought if we just ignored it, this new Nazi threat might just go away.

What we need to understand is very simple - evil will take on different forms, in different lands, in different people. The Nazis were just one form, in one land, and one time. Pure evil knows no boundaries. To ignore evil has never worked well in the past, will not in the future, and certainly will not work today.

One of the advantages we have today is total connectivity of media. We do not have to rely on antidotal or second hand evidence to witness evil. We can see it up front and personal. There is hardly a day which goes by that another barbaric act is not posted on the internet. And yet even with that, some people would rather talk about something else - ignore this evil. You know, happy talk. This stuff happening in Iraq and Syria, well - that is their problem, not ours. Many of the Left still blame George W. Bush. If we had not meddled in Iraq by getting rid of that nice guy Saddam Hussein, these problems would not be happening. And so the debate goes on, while evil grows like germs in a petri dish.

The news flash is not good folks. This is not the fault of any one person or any one country. This evil has been growing for years, and it now has visible form. This is the caliphate - some in Islam even believe it is arrival of the Twelfth Inman. Yesterday I addressed this new breed of terrorists, ISIS, are coming for you. They are. They are coming for everyone who believes differently than them. To use a Chamberlain type of appeasement will not save us. To ignore them will be deadly.

So the Paul Revere in me will say this: I know we are war weary. I know Afghanistan has gone on much too long. I also know the reason both Iraq and Afghanistan went on too long was our generals were not allowed to fight those wars to win. As General Powell would say, "We don't like fair fights. We like to use overwhelming force to win."

This is a war we must fight to win. We must take the battle to them, right where they are. No more pin prick bombing with 500 pound bombs dropped from F-18 jets. It is time to unleash total hell on ISIS, and do it now. To save millions of lives, we must once again take some lives. If we don't, we will be fighting these ruthless murderers on our own soil. And it will be sooner rather than later.