The Belmont Club

I found this in the comments section over at The Belmont Club. It is just one example of the fine writing Wretchard often provides on his site:

"I saw a comment from an Egyptian a while back that Islamism would not be repudiated there until after it had triumphed.

This was the situation with respect to Communism too. It was an evil which seemed to have irreversibly convinced clerics, writers, artists -- all of them blinded by it's dark stardust -- that it was good. Nobody could see its evil except those who had lived under it. It was proof against verbal argument. Only experience could refute it. The price of admission to enlightenment was the willingness to pass through the Gulag.

And therefore many concluded, from the 1960s to the 1980s, that it was the inevitable wave of the future. All that is, except the men of faith. People like John Paul and Ronald Reagan shamed the intellectuals with their faith. They understood that not only was "the Shadow a passing thing" but that it could not stand up to the light.

When Ronald Reagan said, "tear down that wall" it was the hardest thing in the world to have said at the time. No intellectual could have uttered those words. It was a wholly unreasonable demand. I'm sure Ronald knew that it was unreasonable. But he didn't care; because though unreasonable it was true.

I think the War on Terror will be won by the side which understands that Muslims -- like the Russians -- are men. It will be won by those who know that ignorance, cruelty, obscurantism and death have no appeal to the best of men; that there is forever truth and high beauty beyond the power of evil to mar."