Just change the language - that'll make everything all right.

Using the Tu Quoque fallacy of classical logic, a couple of readers argue that I'm as biased as they admit being (of course, they are "pacifists," and that makes everything they do and say all right -very moral, you know). But there is some merit in what they say - where I'm concerned, at least. That's due the fact that I identify in a way with the people of Israel. By that I mean that I, too, once found myself facing an implacable and surrounding enemy determined and trying hard to destroy me. Like the Israelis, my enemy was totally amoral, observing no rule of civilized behavior. Also cowardly, willing to hide behind a shield made of his enemy's higher principles and morality, my enemy attacked my family, my wives and children, with alacrity. Just like any other terrorist.

Like the dithering and vacillating crowd of the U.N. and the world's nations posturing before one another their sanctimonious pacifism, a crowd stood by gawking but unwilling to lift a finger as I, too, fought for my life against a pack of ravening hyenas. When my counterattack turned the tables on the men trying to kill me, the crowd around me also clamored for a cease fire. I'll never forget the bubble-head woman who exhorted bystanders to "get his arms - he's hurting that man!" As the attackers tried to kick me in the ribs and testicles, one guy had just tried to smashed my larynx with a karate blow. The bubble-head probably had no idea that a smashed larynx means death by strangulation. All the other fights she's seen were on television or movie theater screens.

That's just like the pacifists and public in general as they watch the struggle between Israel and Hezbollah: damned little idea of what's really going on. Every time I watch the news of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon of late, I have the weird feeling that I'm watching the sports news, or that I've stumbled into a pep rally for either the nitwit left or nitwit right. A visit to any of the Internet forums gives much the same impression. Everybody seems to get his concept of the rules and morality of war and survival against an enemy made implacable by ideology nationalist, ideological, or religious from one team sport or the other. "Rah, rah, sis, boom, bah!" "It's my turn." "The other guys are not playing fair." "They're better staffed or equipped." "They're running up the score." Yap, yap, yap. Worse, it's all dependent and decided on the basis of which team I "support." My guys can't be wrong. If I thought that, it would mean I'm not loyal. Can't be disloyal, no matter what. That would mean I'm not a "team player."

These people remind me for all the world of the moron who shot the Sikh gentlemen the day after 9-11 because the latter wore a turban. Literally too ignorant to know better, the chauvinist red-neck reasoned that since his victim's headdress somehow resembled Arab headdress, the man was an Arab. Arabs, he said, had attacked the U.S., and he was a patriot. "An American," he said. "To the bone."

There's the other side of the non compos mentis spectrum, to - the militant pacifist. Of all the cuckoo-bird crowd, I think they may be more dangerous. There's a quote from John Stuart Mill, one I cite elsewhere on this website. It's so apropos, and I could never have said it so well, that I'll quote the great scholar, economist, and philosopher again here. "War" Mill said, "is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

"Decayed and degraded state . . ." There you have it. In the literally scores of conversations and debates I've had over the years with people who call themselves "pacifist," what I have found most often is self-reserving cowardice. The unwillingness to take part in society except for the purpose of personal gain. Were all the people they look at down their holier-than-thou, Pecksniffian noses to practice what they preach, neither we - not they - would have any chance of being free. At the risk of being repetitious - I've said this here before, too - I learned very early the lesson that only the strong, and willing to fight, or those protected by someone like that, are ever free.

The lesson didn't come easy. I hated, literally, to fight. I hated even to be near angry people. I still do, matter of fact. That's despite having participated in combative sports for fifty-eight years, more than a thousand organized judo and wrestling contests. When you fight, you get hurt, you know - no way around it. But a grandfather told me when I was still recovering from poliomyelitis, "Son you have to learn to fight, and shoot. Men are free only when it costs too much to take away their freedom. When the price may be his life, he'll leave you alone." Gramps was right. I've never seen it to fail.

But the pacifist MUST believe otherwise. He knows, like I said, that to fight means you get hurt. It's the "getting hurt" part that troubles him most. Except for human respect, that is. He wants others to see something high-minded and proud in his gutless, limp-wristed effeminacy. Yes, effeminacy. We've had several generations of female ascendancy in the U.S., and the evidence of it is everywhere. Generation after generation of wimps raised in "single-parent (still another of those feminist euphemisms - this one means divorced mom, bastard kid, or both) homes" don't want to fight, either. Won't, either - when's the last time we won a war?

Shit! Now I've butchered a sacred cow. Stepped on some toes. Well, f--- it! I don't know if it's ever occurred to you, but in Vietnam - and more recently; see if the shoe fits - our military, armed with every gee-whiz, high-tech, Buck Rogers, whoop-de-do weapon known to man couldn't defeat in a ground war an army of guys dressed in black P.J.s and armed only with small arms. In the skies, guys flying thirty year old MIG-17s fought our guys in the latest F-4s armed with air-to-air missiles and Vulcan cannon to a draw. Even with the intervention of regulars, the NVA, who were armed with everything out of date, obsolescent, and second hand, we should have clobbered them. Why didn't we? BECAUSE WE DIDN'T DO WHAT IT TOOK. Which means we weren't good enough.

Ooops! Another sacred cow. Yeah, yeah, YEAH! I know. We couldn't do this, and we couldn't do that. We couldn't go here, and we couldn't go there. Who the hell fights a war like that?! ONLY US. Do I have to repeat myself? WE AREN'T GOOD - that means we haven't the will - ENOUGH. Because we've become effeminate as a society and nation

Think about it! These days in the Home of the Brave, everybody who's ever heard a shot fired is a "hero." Everybody, in fact, who was even so much as in the same country with a war. Like so many others, we'll soon need another word to describe a real hero. How the hell did it get to be like that?

Well, think about it. Go back to the Korean "War? Does anybody remember Panmumjon, Korea? The "Truce Village?" That was the place in Korea, where during the Korean "Conflict" we "negotiated" with the enemy. We negotiated while the enemy fortified and supplied the hill we would try to take the next day. When the enemy negotiated for it, we gave up the hill. The next day or so, once the enemy had reneged on the "negotiated" deal, we paid the price in blood to take the goddamned thing back. It went on over and over. When it started all over again in Vietnam, there were those of us who just couldn't believe what was happening. But every time we got into one of these f------ idiot's nightmare scenarios, the ladies - and the pacifists - loved it. "Peace Talks" sounds to humane. Just lovely. NO MATTER HOW MANY GOT KILLED AS A RESULT.

Actually, we haven't had a war since WW-2. Think about that. We've lost more than sixty thousand soldiers without having a war! We do one thing, but CALL it another. What side of society does that sound like? Yeah. Damned right. You may be too young to remember a male-dominated world, but there are those among us who do. If you can't remember, get a history book or the old newspapers and go back to the Sixties. Listen to militant feminism. "I am woman, hear me roar," a woman named Helen Reddy sang. Women wanted all the male roles in society; and, by damn, they would HAVE them. In the climate-controlled, super civilized society male muscle had finally built for them, they could do anything a man could do - even soldier. There had to be a few concessions, made of course. A forty pound pack, for instance, is damned sexist. So is a twenty-five mile hike with one on your back, carrying a nine pound rifle. Forty pushups are forty pushups, ten pull-ups likewise - male or female.

But politics IS male or female, and the girls could vote. The country effeminized, and remembering what Gramps said would happen as it started, I recall ruefully that he didn't miss a thing that's now a fact of life. And among the first things to change was the nation's way of war. We stopped having them. Oh, we kept fighting people just like a war, but under different rules. Overrun with female influences, all that feminist, never-say-what-it is language, we just didn't have the balls to SAY it. It came to be something like killing a baby, one of the first things on the feminist agenda. When you killed a baby, it was "women's right to choose." That made it a whole lot easier, and, brother, did they ever get to KILLING!

And just like "abortion," and "woman's right to choose," so it was with war. War became a "policing action," or a "conflict." And we no longer kill the enemy, either. We "engaged" him. In the Presidential Study commission by the first "Bush Presidency," two hundred and fifty-two pages did not once use the world "kill." We ENGAGE our nation's enemies. Doesn't tell you anything? No, I don't suppose. Too effeminate. Oops - that's "metrosexual."

A few years ago - did I tell you about this one? - a female security adviser (groan) at the Pentagon recommended that we develop "a kinder, gentler Army!" No, I am NOT kidding. Soldiers in boot camp could hold up their yellow (appropriate color, anyway) "stress card" whenever things got too tough for their tender psyches. Some soldiers got time out for their period. Guess who.

Parenthetically, a few years ago I ran into an old buddy about to retire from the Marine Corps. "Hal," he said, "you got out just in time. With things the way they are now - women in combat roles and all that - they'd have drawn and quartered you." He was damned well right about that.

Hell, I served with - and there still are - guys in this country, guys so tough, smart, and well-trained that they would kick ass even against numbers twenty times theirs. Anywhere, anytime, anybody. That's when they're free to do what they've been selected and trained to do. Declare war, then let them do what men at war have done since time immemorial, and they will destroy those who want to work their will on you.

But we don't do that any more. First thing you know, if we do that, some women and kids will get killed. Never you mind that the enemy hid among them in order to shoot at our soldiers with impunity. STOP THE KILLING! In fact, it's worse than that nowadays. Now, at the first sound of guns, we have people demanding "peace talks." We negotiate. I don't care what kind of miserable, murdering, baby-killing sonofabitch you choose, there will be those here in the Land of the Free who want to protect him by negotiation from the retribution he deserves. And those who protect him will be women and effeminate males. And those people will call themselves "liberals." It's Panmumjon and the Paris Peace Talks (during the war in Vietnam, dummy) all over again.

Let me tell you something, from the view of a guy seventy years old, who's been everywhere, done everything - and everybody: IF YOU NEGOTIATE WITH ANYONE WHO HAS SWORN TO KILL YOU, WHOSE VERY REASON FOR LIVING IS TO KILL YOU, WHOSE CULTURE AND RELIGION DEMAND THAT HE KILL YOU; IF YOU NEGOTIATE WITH ANYONE WHOSE HISTORY OF MURDER, PILLAGE, AND TERRORISM IS DECADES - EVEN CENTURIES - LONG, WHO EXPLODES BOMBS ON AIRLINERS AND SHOOTS IN THE HEAD AND THROWS OVERBOARD OLD MEN IN WHEELCHAIRS, WHO SHOOTS KATYUSHA ROCKETS INTO A VILLAGE ANYWHERE, WHO HIDES AMONG AND USES FOR SHIELDS WOMEN AND CHILDREN, HE WILL USE YOUR DAMNED FOOLISHNESS TO KILL MORE OF THOSE WOMEN AND CHILDREN; AND, EVENTUALLY, HE WILL KILL YOU.

And I'll tell you what he has also done: he has shown you to the world for the gutless wonder that you are. I quote again J.S. Mill: "A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish."

Does that remind you of anyone - a nation, for instance - these days?

Another of the words the girls have butchered - like "chauvinist" ("male chauvinist") - is HEROES! Everybody in a military uniform is a hero. That's not the only place. There are heroes all over the place nowadays. Take sports (YOU take 'em: I lost interest with the steroids thing; but don't worry, there'll be a word pretty soon, and everything will be all right). How can anyone expect of a society whose priorities are so mix-mastered and splattered that it worships as heroes - by paying them a salary equal to literally THOUSANDS of normal people - guys who play football, baseball, basketball and the like; that's while paying people who face death just about daily, fighting psychotic enemies like the al Qa'ida, the Taliban, the PLO, Hezbollah, and Hamas with lethal weapons less than a "superstar" athlete makes for one game? Elsewhere, some bimbo whose sole contribution to the nation is basically pelvic thrusts while shrieking cacophonously into a microphone is hero-worshipped by our sleep-walking adolescent set. She makes more with one recoding than all the policeman and fireman - many of them honest-to-god real heroes in the long since passé sense of the word - at the World Trade Center on 9-11 put together. Man, we pay the people charged with educating our kids less in a year than a professional athlete "hero" makes for one game.

"Superstar," I guess you know, is much more admirable than "hero." "Hero" means basically a poor kid suckered by Madison Avenue huckster recruiters and promises to provide him the college education or training he needs give him a chance in a society owned by the corporations who have put him in this kind of straits in the first place, corporations who will profit by the wars he'll have sprung on him. What will he get for his arm, or leg, or life? The "undying respect of a grateful nation." With that and three and a half bucks, he can get a gallon of the corporation's gasoline.

But the unkindest cut of them all will be that once he's fighting the war the corporations use to make the billions they pay the "superstar" heroes, his nation's effeminate "pacifists" and humanists - liberals - will demand that he play by every cockamamie rule they can dream up to assure his defeat and death. He'll have warfare designed - cheerleaders and commercials, the whole shebang - to resemble the silly damned kids' game played by the society's REAL heroes, the ones it calls "superstars." If - perish the ugly, inhumane thought - he gets the upper hand, they will demand that he negotiate. "Peace Talks." His "kinder, gentler" Army will stand guard with empty weapons (remember the Marine - MARINES, for chrisssakes! - at Beirut?), and he won't shoot until he's shot at. Then, everybody will get a medal (remember Jessica Lynch?). And we'll go on with "policing actions" (the Korean War - remember?), "conflicts," "limited war," and abortions (notice the lack of parenthesis) the like. Killing, war - but calling it something else. Much easier, that way.

And you really expect a society and nation this FUBAR to win a war? Win peace? Be serious!

Grampa made his predictions, I'll make mine. You'll elect Hillary Clinton President of the U.S., because when she runs, ninety percent of women will vote for her. There'll be more and more women in Congress (THEY go vote, by god), too. Al Qa'ida, Hezbollah, and the rest can't wait. With a majority of Congress and government female, metrosexual, and homosexual, you'll dither and deliberate - "Let's talk" (and talk, talk, and talk) with every new attack. Then you'll negotiate. A lot of people - the innocent, as always with this kind of thing - will die. That'll be all right, as long as you can come up with the right word to describe it. You'll keep striving for peace by changing the word for everything your don't like and throwing bodies to the great gods of appeasement for political gain.

Until the inevitable happens. The Islamic Terrorists will get their hideous act together. They'll learn something beside blowing themselves up on airliners, in coffee shops, and the rest. Instead of knocking down buildings, they'll hit you where you really live. They mean to kill you all, you know (in case you've chosen not to hear what they're screeching at the top of their maniacal lungs). When they finally acquire a real tactician, they'll make life so miserable - and deadly - that you'll HAVE to do something male (gasp!). Maybe groups of people will realize first that the political process - including women in power - can't deal with psychotic killers. They'll start forming their own defense committees and enclaves (as I predicted they would in 1974).

But you'll learn, my country, you'll learn. You're a woman, and you'll learn by being raped and dying, just like all those individual women, the ones you liberated and "empowered," only to be raped, murdered, and thrown away like used condoms, already victims of feminist, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" indoctrination. Had you learned from them, you'd have discovered that when the rapist who outweighs you by a hundred pounds because he's a male rips off your clothes, throws you on the ground in an alley, and forces your legs apart, what happens will happen no matter what you call or characterize what he's doing. Just like his bomb-throwing, airliner blasting brethren, THIS "terrorist" won't care, either. Neither will there be a "cease fire." And all the attempts at negotiation here will result just like all the other attempts at negotiation with "terrorists" in history. You don't get to hold up your yellow "stress card." You just satisfy this guy's urges, then you die.

And you'll, no doubt, die thinking you wish there were one of those "male chauvinist pigs" you heard your hero sisters talk about still around. But then, you'll probably have never been aware of J.S. Mill, or of men bigger than the dwarfs he spoke of. Too bad.