Taliban, Cortez, and Neo-Nazis

Because of my strident criticisms of the Tea Party, some people have described me as a rabid left-wing ideologue. My response is that I believe in meeting things at their level and according to their nature. Thus, I am strongly critical of the Tea Party because they are a bunch of rabid, brutal, totalitarian-minded conmen and thugs. Whereas I am minimally to not at all critical of more reasonable Republicans such as Christine Todd Whitman and John McCain and have positive regard for Richard Lugar, Colin Powell, Lisa Murkowski and Olympia Snowe - a stance that a "rabid left-wing ideologue" wouldn't take.

Here however I seek not to talk of the Tea Party but of another group. A group that is just as totalitarian in its character as the Tea Party and even more extreme in its purposes and its methods. It is not a group native to the United States of America, and its target is not just United States of America but also the whole of the world.

That group of course is the Taliban.

The Taliban intends nothing less than takeover of the whole world and its subjection to the kind of rule that the Taliban had imposed on Afghanistan. And while most of its rhetoric is against Israel and United States of America, nobody should be fooled. They don't only want to destroy Israel and America. They want the whole world.

When Cortez landed in what is now Mexico, the people living next to the Aztecs saw the Aztecs as barbaric conquerors. Cortez was able to use these tribes to destroy the Aztec city-state Tenochtitlan. What these people did not realize was that the Spanish were not only intending a takeover of Tenochtitlan; they wanted to enslave them as well. And they did.

With Taliban, nobody should be fooled. They are not only a threat to Israel and America; they are a threat to everyone. And it's important that the world see this and act accordingly.

What does it mean to act accordingly? Understand the nature of the threat and deal with it according to its nature. Winston Churchill was one of the few people in 1930s who understood the nature of the Nazi threat; the rest of the world did not. Because that threat was not understood, it was allowed to become much bigger than it should have ever been allowed to be. And the result was the worst war that the world has ever known.

While everyone knows what Taliban is, not everyone knows that they have been working with neo-Nazis. From these of course the Taliban stands much to learn, and it is doing that precisely. The Neo-Nazis know what Hitler had done and how he did it. And their instruction is certainly not lost on the Taliban.

And just like the anti-Aztec sentiment was used by Cortez to first destroy the Aztecs and then enslave the rest of Mesoamerica, so the anti-American or anti-Jewish sentiment, in any part of the world, becomes a means for the Taliban to get into those countries and plant their poison roots. The solution to that is not to outlaw anti-American or anti-Jewish sentiment; that is impossible. The solution is for the people in those countries to realize that, whatever they see America's or Israel's sins as being, the Taliban is much worse.

They have gone to Asia; they have gone to Africa; they have gone to Europe; they are going wherever they can go. And everywhere that they go, they either impose brutal medieval tyranny, slaughter anyone that they can, or work with splinter groups to use them against the civil institutions, liberty, women's rights, scientific fact, economy and rule of law in these countries.

And this is only the beginning.

Not everyone is the Taliban, and most conflicts can be resolved diplomatically. Economic disputes, environmental disputes, border disputes, historical disputes, ethnic disputes, and most ideological disputes, have diplomatic solutions. But there can be no diplomatic solution to a group that wants global takeover with aim to impose global brutal medieval tyranny and would not stay from any atrocity to bring it about. And the sooner this is recognized and dealt with appropriately, the less damage is to be expected in the future.

I believe that fighting the Taliban should be an international undertaking in which not only the nations that receive the brunt of the Taliban's rhetoric, but also the rest of the world, needs to contribute troops or resources. The reason being that the Taliban's target is the whole world. And while China or India or France or Russia or Brazil may not be the first target of Taliban's rhetoric, they are very much the target of their attempted takeover. However badly the Aztecs treated their neighbors, the Spanish were worse. And nothing that has come out of America or Israel begins to compare with the horrors that the Taliban wants to inflict upon humanity.