Armies may be defeated and disbanded, but ideologies live underground forever. This is especially the case with ideologies whose vitality is stoked by, and in turn intoxicates, the malice and anger of a humiliated and defeated underclass. From the Jesus Movement to Lenin’s October Revolution to Chairman Mao’s Long March to Hitler’s great rallies — and today, ISIS — life’s losers have always been a source of power for any charismatic opportunist who is willing to exploit them.
That pack of sociopaths who are ISIS can be killed, but the ideal which is ISIS, like all the other mad ideals which have caused so much human misery, will persist in some form or another till the day that the sun burns out. Bad ideals can only be contained, made disreputable, made laughable.
I am thinking about these things as America makes haste to disgrace itself in the matter of Syrian refugees. Of course we bear moral responsibility for our role in disrupting the Middle East’s fragile political equilibrium and making them refugees. Of course we must do the humane thing.
We know, too, what will happen when they get here: They will be humiliated and swindled without apology on the public streets of The Melting Pot; we will undoubtedly create more America-haters than we allow in. What is more, the very Republicans mobilizing against the refugees will mobilize with equal vigor to assure that Americans have the means of killing each other in vastly greater numbers than the most ambitious terrorist daydreams. Even so, we need to stop behaving like bellicose yahoos, make such amends as we are able, and welcome them to, you know, the Home Of The Brave.
I find myself recalling, too, this passage from Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again:
After a while, however, in the midwatches of the night, behind thick walls and bolted doors and shuttered windows, it came to me full flood at last in confession sof unutterable despair. I don’t know why it was that people so unburdened themselves to me, a stranger, unless it was because they knew the love I bore them and their land. They seemed to feel a desperate need to talk to someone who would understand. The thing was pent up in them, and my sympathy for all things German had burst the dam of their reserve and caution. Their tales of woe and fear unspeakable gushed forth and beat upon my ears. They told me stories of their friends and relatives who had said unguarded things in public and disappeared without a trace, stories of the Gestapo, stories of neighbors’ quarrels and petty personal spite turned into political persecution, stories of concentration camps and pogroms, stories of rich Jews stripped and beaten and robbed of everything they had then denied the right to earn a pauper’s wage, stories of well-bred Jewesses despoiled and turned out of heir homes and forced to kneel and scrub off anti-Nazi slogans scribbled on the sidewalks while young barbarians dressed like soldiers formed a ring and prodded them with bayonets and made the quiet places echo with the shameless laughter of their mockery. It was a picture of the Dark Ages come again — shocking beyond belief, but true as the hell that man forever creates for himself.
That was written in the mid-1930s, and published in 1940. America knew what was happening in Germany and, constrained by the same feverish nutjobs and cowards who are so noisy today, turned a blind eye.
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”
Voltaire
Our moral failure then was even greater than now, for Germany was a Western nation celebrated for its contributions to the arts, to philosophy, to the sciences; its people understood democracy, and shared the Enlightenment ideals. We cannot do in the Middle East what we could have done in Germany, because they simply don’t understand what we are talking about when we use words like ‘democracy’ and expressions like ‘separation of church and state.’ They will have to do the hard work of figuring it out and freeing themselves … themselves; all we can do is try to contain the sickness and keep them alive until that happens.
Containment isn’t perfect, and never can be. The Berlin Wall was frequently breached, Russia had defectors and unlikely wannabe immigrants (Lee Harvey Oswald, for instance, and, for a while, Madalyn Murray O’Hair), even North Korea has uninvited visitors and unauthorized departures from time-to-time. But, on the other hand, people change their minds; today’s sympathizer becomes tomorrow’s enemy (Sidney Hook and communism), and today’s enemy becomes tomorrow’s friend.
To bar the door against Syrian refugees is, at very best, cowardice before phantasms unlikely to ever materialize. America should live-up to its Statue of Liberty.