New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: It's really an attack on our civility

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: It's really an attack on our civilityIt's really an attack on our civility

The recent terror attack in London should help Americans see much more clearly and understand much better what we are up against. This clarity is not impossible: The 19th and 20th centuries provided us with enough religious and political wars to perceive what happens when the idea of individual rights has no sanctity within a system.

We have seen the crude methods put forth by terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Irish Republican Army and by those loons who flew passenger planes into the World Trade Center and now claim to have set off the explosions that killed at least 49 innocent commuters in London.

One thing we can be sure of is that the sort of hysteria we find very common in Muslim countries will not take place in America or in England. We have both exhibited as much violent hysteria as possible in our separate pasts, but seem to have evolved beyond the primitive levels of violent outbursts at those whose only crime is being a symbol of a hidden threat. There will be no Muslim businesses burned, no Muslims burned alive before cheering crowds, no retaliatory murders of noncombatants.

That is our strength and our burden. Our belief in a person being innocent until proven guilty extends itself out to entire groups. The result is that some terrible crime committed by a cell of Muslim nuts is no condemnation of Muslims at large. That belief will always cost us in the short run; loons will hide among us and they will spill blood whenever they can and as much as they can.

Still, we cannot expect to truly assess what is going on in the minds of people who blow themselves up or blow up others far from the field of battle, or the organized savagery that we call war. The barbarians are either mad or have embraced the idea that there are no innocents and that those who are not combatants have no rights at all and should expect no mercy. Such thinking, if that is what we want to call it, usually makes a perfect fit in systems deeply influenced by religious loons. The slaveholding South and Adolf Hitler's Third Reich made it clear how comfortably refinement and barbarism could work together.

In that land of sweet magnolias and in the country that had produced Bach, Goethe and so many other giants of art, thought and science, torture and murder were assumed to be the only ways in which things could be kept in order. The crudest vision of a nation held sway.

Someday the Muslim communities in Western countries may begin to see these rabid swine for what they are and, when sufficiently suspicious, will report them to the authorities. Whether they do or not, we can be sure that some Muslims will begin to understand the sheer social greatness and grace of democratic societies in which individual rights are considered essential and mob rule, even when air-brushed with religious rhetoric, is recognized as the enemy.

This is a war all right, but it is most deeply a war of ideas in much the same way that World War II was. However twisted up it might be by oil, a Palestinian homeland and other considerations, this is a conflict between civilization and barbarism, and those who do not understand that are truly fools.

Originally published on July 11, 2005