Sultan Knish
Over two centuries ago a group of British colonists huddling amid the
forests and rivers of a new continent decided what they could and could
not say by killing enough soldiers and mercenaries that the people who
had been in charge of their speech decided they should try their luck
somewhere where the regulating was easier.
This state of affairs in which the country that those colonists formed
became and remains one of the very few places in the world, even among
Western democracies, where freedom of speech is absolute, came about
through stirring speeches, deeply felt debates, classical ideas and a
passionate political culture-- but most of all it came about because
large numbers of people were willing to kill over it.
Currently large numbers of people are willing to kill over the idea that
Islam is the supreme religion, that Mohammed is a deity whom all
mankind should respect and that the infidels living in the suburban
sprawl of a thoroughly explored continent should accept that or die. Our
government calls those people a tiny minority of extremists. Our
unofficial name for them is, "Muslims."
Laws are decided by many things, but sweep away all the lawbooks, the
pleas from tearful mothers, the timed publicity campaigns, the novel
legal theories and the greedy bureaucrats expanding their turf, and
under the table you will find a gun. The first and final law is still
the law of force. The law begins with the power to impose its will on
others. It ends with the enforcement of that power.
Law either has force behind it or it does not, and if it has no force
behind it then it is an optional thing that is subject to custom. And
every now and then the law is challenged, not with novel legal theories
or with petitions, but with force, and it either responds with force or
submits to a new law. That is what we call revolution.
Islam has made laws that it expects all of mankind to abide by. These
laws are not backed by novel legal theories or by petitions, though its
practitioners are willing to offer both, they are backed by the naked
practice of force. And the imposition of these laws can only be defended
against by force.
We are no longer led by revolutionary believers in the freedom of man,
but by revolutionary believers in the submission of man to the higher
principles that make their utopian sandcastles possible. They cannot
honestly draw a red line on freedom, not when they have crossed it so
many times themselves for their own agendas. They believe in a variety
of rights, but all of those rights involve imposing their ideas and
beliefs on others, and that is something they have in common with the
Muslim lawyers waving guns and black flags over our burning embassies.
They might contemplate killing and dying for gay marriage or the right
to put tobacco warnings on cigarettes, but not for the pure idea that
anyone should be able to say anything that they want without regard to
ideological alliances.
The lawyers who run all our national affairs have chosen to respond to
the Islamic legal briefs of bombs and bullets with the equivocation with
which they meet all difficult questions. They will not abandon the
principle of freedom of speech, but they will lock up the filmmaker
whose imprisonment the murderous Muslim legalists called for. They will
not censor YouTube, but they will encourage YouTube to censor itself.
They will not ban speech that offends Islam, but they will strongly
condemn and discourage it.
These equivocators offer to abandon the practice of freedom so long as
they are allowed to retain the theory of freedom. The Bill of Rights
will not change, but as in the Soviet Union it will not apply. The
authorities will pay lip service to the freedoms that we only think we
have until we actually try to use them and then we will discover that we
don't actually have any of these freedoms left in stock.
In theory America will be an independent country, in practice it will be
a vassal state of the Muslim world whose displays of outrage will be
our law telling us what we can and cannot say, what we can and cannot
think, and what we can and cannot do.
This is the typical kind of bargain that decadent empires make with the
barbarous warlords on their doorstep. The empire will keep its splendor
and its titles, while the barbarians will tell the empire what to do.
Eventually the warlords will rule the empire, but that will only come as
a shock to the citizenry who were too dazzled by the pageantry of power
to realize that power is not defined by its display, but by its usage.
Power is law and where there is no power, there is also no law, and
those who have the power also make the laws.
What is the difference between American law and Muslim law? There are a
great many differences, but the only one that matters is the difference
between Constantinople and Istanbul. The only reason that we do not have
Muslim law is that Muslims have not yet succeeded in forcing it on us,
as they have already done to a sizable percent of the peoples and
cultures of the world. That difference will be eliminated the moment
that they succeed in doing so.
Law is not some mystical or technical affair. At its most basic it is
the school bully demanding a cut of your lunch money in perpetuity. It
is the ability to force someone to do something for some reason. Law can
be high-minded, it can be moral or it can be a mob demanding that you
imprison anyone who offends Mohammed. This is school bully law and it is
as valid as any other kind because the distinctions that legal
theorists make have no relevance in the face of the law of force.
A demand for a code of conduct backed by violence is law. It is not our
law, it is not the law of the civilized man, but it is the law that we
are slowly adopting. It is the law of the decadents appeasing the
savages. Its only real content warns against offending the savage on the
grounds that this will have negative consequences for our soldiers, our
billboards, our image in the world and our embassies. And that is the
law of the savage mediated by all the fine useless intellectualization
of the decadent.
Under this code, Muslim violence dictates our permissible forms of
speech. To know whether a thing may be said, drawn or filmed, we must
first determine how Muslims will react to it. If they will react with
violence, as they do to a sizable percentage of things, then it becomes
incitement, retroactively, that must be punished and condemned.
Muslim violence has become our law. It is the law of action which
determines our laws of speech. To understand what we can say, we first
have to decide what Muslims will do about it. A long long time ago,
perhaps less than twenty years ago, our government would meet their
action with an action of its own, it would meet force with force. The
British government did not do that with Salman Rushdie, instead it got
him to read a statement apologizing for his book, but perhaps ours would
have done better. Probably not.
When we were revolutionaries, our government saw force as a way of
dealing with other countries who wanted to tell Americans what to do.
But since then our government has really gotten used to telling us what
to do. Occasionally it invades other countries in the name of some
global consensus that claims to be able to treat countries the way that
our government treats us and tell them what to do.
Lately that consensus, which we can call the United Nations, the
International Community or an International Disease of Corrupt
Bureaucrats and Power Mad Utopians, has been telling our government that
it needs to tell us what we can and cannot say. And our government has
no response except to mumble something about the First Amendment, which
it doesn't really believe in anymore, but since it's had no luck getting
rid of the Second Amendment, it isn't about to try with the First, and
urges the consensus and the murderous mobs to work with us to arrive at
an agreement that we can all live with. And by "we", I don't mean us.
In a world where jet planes rapidly crisscross the planet and bombs can
be embedded in anything, where companies and non-profits both lust for
immigrants and unstable Third World societies export their instability
to First World societies as immigration, where corporations have offices
everywhere and national interest is just a fancy way of saying
international trade relationships, the primary law becomes maintaining
the stability of a broken system and containing its inherent violence.
The lawyers running the system will not defend national interests
because they don't believe in them, they won't defend freedom because
they don't believe in it, they will defend the system because it is the
only thing that they do believe in. And they will defend it at the point
where it is easiest to defend, not from the attacking Muslims, but from
the natives who appear to be making them angry.
Would you rather fight a billion violent madmen or arrest a filmmaker?
The answer is very simple. Forget Theodore Roosevelt's "Perdicaris alive
or Raisuli dead". The Obama motto is "It's okay if Perdicaris is dead,
so long as Raisuli isn't too mad at us."
Forget the Bill of Rights, a document thrown together by agrarian
utopianists worried about central government. Our new breed of
lawyer-kings is composed of urban utopianists ruling through central
government. To them the Bill of Rights is a piece of incomprehensible
lunacy that prevents them from getting anything done. They are not
concerned with rural government trespasses, they are worried about bombs
and riots in their cities and they are terrified of their global goals
being sabotaged by some movie trailer.
They are making Muslim violence into our new law, just as they made
urban violence into our new law, just as they have made their own
bureaucratic mandates backed by SWAT teams and prisons into our new law.
The age when laws were made by men, rather than machines of social
progress composed of lawyers and activists, bureaucrats and think-tanks,
lobbyists and judges, is long since gone. There is no law in our laws,
but the law of force. The Constitution sits on a dusty shelf while the
judges bang their gavels and practice the law that mandates something
because those in power want it that way.
And now our utopian lawyer-kings, our armies of bleeding-heart social
justice activist, our legions of bureaucrats stamping their papers over
our skulls, our grinning black-robed activist judges wielding their
gavels like swords, are cringing in terror before a Muslim mob. The
bullies who have bullied us for so long have proven to be cowards. While
they dismantle our army to sell it for scraps so that the EPA and HUD
and the cowboy poetry festivals can get their billions, they order us to
fall on our knees before the Army of Allah.
The liberal bullies who bullied us for so long have been successfully
bullied and have handed us over to the bully's bully. But bullies, of
the liberal or Muslim kind, are cowards. Their bullying only works until
they are successfully bullied and without their threat of force, their
laws wither and blow away on the wind.
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