Mark Twain’s Cat & The Threat Of Islamic Terrorism

The most perceptive comment about learning (or not) the lessons of history is not George Santayana’s famous observation, “Those

who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is from Mark Twain:

The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won’t sit upon a cold stove lid, either.

We are the cat, and our stove (both hot and cold) is racism and McCarthyism, the oppression of unpopular groups and persecution of domestic dissent.

McCarthyism can be characterized a number of ways, but one of them is the repression of domestic dissent flowing from an inordinate fear of domestic subversion. It is now well–established that there were indeed Soviet spies in the United States, but there was never an actual threat of domestic violence or revolution. Left-wing teachers or other public employees were often misguided or even foolish in their views and sympathies, but they were never a threat to our domestic security, and many of the measures taken against them were indeed violations of civil liberties.

Now, however, there is a clear, present, and ongoing danger of actual violence against Americans from individuals and groups in the United States — some open, some deeply buried underground — devoted to a militantly anti-American foreign ideology, and our president, our security services, our military leaders, and the representatives of what passes for enlightened are worried once again.

What they are worried about, however, almost incomprehensibly, is not that real domestic threat. What they are worried about is that racist, right-wing teabaggers (usually referred by our elites, when they are on good behavior, as conservatives) will overreact, and say or do something that will cast aspersions on all the innocent, peace-loving Muslims. Here are a couple of good examples, quoted in Newsbusters:

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas regretted the Fort Hood mass murderer, Major Nidal Hasan, is a Muslim because of how that reality will be abused by conservatives. On this weekend’s Inside Washington, Thomas, now Editor at Large with Newsweek after stints as Assistant Managing Editor and Washington bureau chief, rued:

I cringe that he’s a Muslim. I mean, because it inflames all the fears. I think he’s probably just a nut case. But with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going and it just — I mean these things are tragic, but that makes it much worse.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg soon chimed in with agreement: “It really is tragic that he was a Muslim.”

That’s rather like saying it’s tragic that nut cases Lenin and Stalin were socialists, since their crimes will “get the right wing going” to blame innocent socialists.

One need not say that over-reaction could not be a problem in order to say it is not the main problem we face. We need not deny that the vast preponderance of Muslims are not jihadists, nor should we fail to protect their civil liberties. I do not propose that we return to the mindset or methods of McCarthyism, but I do think it would be a good idea for our political and military leaders and our self-appointed betters in the liberal media (but I repeat myself) to take their heads out of the politically correct sand in which they’re buried.