Winning the war of ideas vs. Islamists

I agree with Paul Berman. The only way to win the war against radical Islamism is to show the world na mali ang extremist ideas nila, to convince most of the non-hardcore types to abandon these ideas, and to discourage others from joining their ranks.

Totalitarian movements are fundamentally ideological movements – they are driven by ideas. The ideas they are driven by are modern ideas, even if they are presented as exotic and are clothed in seventh century Muslim robes. If the ideas are modern we can argue against them, just as we could argue against fascists and communists. Winning the argument is actually the only victory that can be obtained. We are facing a mass movement with a huge number of adherents. There is no way we can defeat such a movement with Police or Military force. The only way to defeat such a movement is to convince its adherents and sympathisers, and potential sympathisers, that the ideas of that movement are wrong and ought to be abandoned in favour of better ideas. Now this sounds preposterous to some people who can't imagine that anything can be won by force of persuasion. But what finally caused Communism to collapse was that the Communists themselves recognised that they were wrong and that their own ideas were not worth defending.

In the present case it's more difficult still because these movements are not dependent on states, and the ideas can be held by people in civil society. The possibility of crushing these movements by force does not exist. We have to win by persuasion. That means the central thing that should be going on is a war of ideas - even if, at times, there is also a need for a war of weapons.

and this applies to our own situation here in the Philippines:

Totalitarian movements have regularly been greeted by the blindness to which liberalism is prone, and even by apologetics. Hitler, and not just Stalin, had his apologists. Without these apologists neither one of those dictators would have been able to get as far as he did. And what we are seeing now is something exactly parallel. There are only a few screwballs defending Al Qaeda, or Zarqawi in Iraq, or applauding Saddam. But the people who really matter are those (many more numerous) who find some way to say either that these totalitarian movements are normal, natural, rational, or, in any case, that they should be ignored because we should focus our attention on defeating Bush. In these ways, the adherents of the totalitarian movements are not given much opposition and sometimes are even given a back-handed support. So, naturally, the movements prosper.

Of course, Arroyo is not as bad as Hitler or Stalin. GMA falls somewhere between Marcos and Estrada (although she's more Marcosian than Erap-like). But she has her own apologists too. Replace "defeating Bush" with "defeating the Opposition" and voila!

Some people will wonder kung bakit ko isinama si Wretchard sa listahan. Well, I've always said na I agree with him 95% of the time on issues related to terrorism and Iraq. Pero pagdating sa Philippine politics, the former ramos guy and peace negotiator has a blind spot, IMO.