Go Ethiopia!

You know, 20 years ago, Sam Kinison was yelling at them:

Why don’t you live where the food is?!

Now, the Ethiopians are the forefront of the defense of Western Civilization. Who would’ve thought?

The Ethiopians are dealing The Enemy a righteous defeat in Somalia as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) is falling back and abandoning its positions throughout the country. It looks like the decision of Al Qaeda’s Ayman Al-Zawahiri recently put so much stock in the seemingly triumphant ICU is not going to pay off as the street cred of The Enemy plummets (as per the NY Times.)

The once feared Shebab, the devout young Islamic fighters, began deserting in droves. (Shebab is the Arabic word for youth.) “We can’t resist,” said Musa Abdullahi, an 18-year-old Shebab who quit his unit after half his comrades were cut down by Ethiopian helicopter gunships. “We thought this fighting would be like the others. It’s not.”

Funny how whenever The Enemy is on the march, the media reports his advance as inevitable. But whenever he is on the run, the headlines read “Islamists Seem to Give Up Grip On Somali City.”

How have the freaking Ethiopians dealt the enemy juggernaut such a decisive defeat when the mightiest nation in the history of the earth (us) has failed to do so in Iraq? Cliff May notes:

More “boots on the ground” may be part of the explanation. The Ethiopians are not attempting to have a “light footprint.” They are not worried about whether they will be seen as “occupiers” or whether their “occupation” will be viewed as benevolent.

Secondly, the Ethiopians are not overly concerned about whether their tactics will win approval from the proverbial Arab Street – or the European Street or Turtle Bay. They are fighting a war; their intention is to defeat their enemies; everything else is secondary or tertiary.

In other words,

The Ethiopians saw the establishment of an Islamist theocracy on its border as unacceptable.

The Ethiopians chose to go to war.

The Ethiopians chose to win.

Of course, as Bill Roggio notes, the conflict may well be far from over. The Enemy may simply have “gone to ground” in preparation for an insurgency. We decisively defeated the Iraqi armed forces in 2003 – but have yet to decisively thrash The Enemy since he has changed his strategy to nihilistic guerilla warfare. But even if this comes to pass, the Ethiopians and the Ethiopian-backed Somali Transitional Government have a better starting position against such a strategy, as they will be wholly unconcerned with their world image and fight to win. Similarly, a global media that can barely find Somalia on a map, much less get there, will be much less of an advantage to The Enemy than they have been in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And, of course, the Ethiopians don’t have to put up with nonsense like this:

If they are in need of intellectual mentorship, Eugene's green anarchists have a resource close at hand. John Zerzan is in his sixties, a graduate of Stanford and San Francisco State University and one of the foremost anticivilization thinkers in the world. In the '60s he was a Marxist and a Maoist and a Vietnam protester and a devotee of the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic scene. He now believes that Paleolithic humans and the few remaining primitive cultures provide the best models for how humans should subsist. His books include Elements of Refusal, Future Primitive, and Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections. He is an editor of Green Anarchy, which calls itself "an anticivilization journal of theory and action." He was a confidant of Theodore Kaczynski during the Unabomber trial.

What? Kid Various lost you with the comparison between Islamist thugs and the radical Green Anarchists?

Basically, they both constitute elements of The Enemy. Forces arrayed in counter to the values of the Enlightenment. In short, they are both Romantic movements that seek to destroy the achievements of the Enlightenment and reinstall a primitive worldview. The Romantics in the West lionizing the Oriental “noble savages” and the Orientals being the, uh, actual savages.

The fact that in today, in the modern United States, there are such things as “anti-civilization activists” scares the crap out of us. Because, although their worldview is extreme, the underlying currents of their philosophy are not relegated only to the fringe.

We can’t fight The Enemy until we decide that a) there is an enemy and that b) the survival of our way of life depends on defeating him. And, frankly, we’re just not at that point yet. Half the country doesn’t believe that we’re at war. Half the country is more inclined to believe that we are the problem and that if we just left well enough alone and stopped rocking the boat, that everything would be ok.

Well people better wise up.

And all The Kid can say is, “GO ETHIOPIANS!”