By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on 2.22.02 @ 1:31PM
The barbarism committed against the Wall Street Journal's Danny Pearl would not have surprised Admiral Sir John Fisher.
Why is it that every time I read of the grim designs held by the
international terrorists of the present I think of the uncelebrated
and mostly unremembered Admiral Sir John Fisher? The barbarism
committed against the Wall Street Journal's Danny Pearl
would not have surprised the Admiral.
I thought of him the other day while reading Robert D. Kaplan's
Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos and
I thought of him this morning when I heard of Pearl's cold-blooded
murder. Both are among the best journalists America has. Unlike the
stuffed-shirts who wheel around Washington pretending to a
knowledge they do not have, these "foreign correspondents" go out
in the field and apprehend what they did not know. Kaplan has been
one of the best journalists covering terror and barbarism in
foreign parts for years, partly for The American
Spectator. In Warrior Politics (now a bestseller) he
makes the point that America's role in the world today is not
unlike that of Britain at the end of the 19th Century --back in
Fisher's day. We have to stomp on barbarians "with nasty little
wars in anarchic corners of the world."
I remember Kaplan well. Well over a decade ago he wandered into
the office of The American Spectator with manuscripts and
plans for reporting on hell from the actual hellholes. We
encouraged him. In fact, friends at a foundation bankrolled one of
his first books. Now Kaplan is reporting the glum news about
terrorists to members of our government. He even has chatted with
our debonair President.
Well, he would not have all that much to report if the British
had taken Fisher seriously back in 1915. He knew how to handle the
terrorists of his time. He served as First Sea Lord under First
Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and was nothing if not
action-oriented. The world was turning toward warfare without
rules, terrorism, if you will; and Fisher knew how to deal with it.
Late in 1914 British intelligence brought Admiralty news that the
Germans were going to commence bombing London from the Zeppelin
fleet. "He proposed to me," writes his boss Churchill in The
World Crisis "that we should take a large number of hostages
from the German population in our hands and should declare our
intention of executing one of them for every civilian killed by
bombs from aircraft." Churchill declined the advise and Fisher
resigned.
Okay, okay, the old boy's suggestion sounds a bit rough. And
anyway there is no one in the American government today, not even
Paul Wolfowitz, likely to round up our population of Muslim
graduate students and hold them as prospective hostages.
Yet stop and think back to World War I. If the limits of the
tolerable had been set then by the likes of Admiral Fisher, would
even Hitler have been so heedless of public opinion as to
eventually order the "blitz"? Would Muslim terrorists have any
sympathy at all back home today if it were understood that by
blowing themselves up they would be ensuring the deaths of many of
their own? More to the point, if something like Fisher's expedient
had been followed would the world have come so far down the road to
barbarism that there would be tolerance shown to savages who kill
innocent people in cold blood?
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is editor in chief of The
American Spectator.
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