While liberals have been frozen in deep denial since September 11, 2001, conservatives often feel outrage and despair -- because nobody listens to our constant alarms.  Under Leftists our national response to Islamic aggression has been feeble at best.  The West seems willing to commit suicide from plain cowardice, ignorance and stupidity. 

But -- liberal denial and conservative despair are not justified by history.

Denial is childish and ultimately suicidal.  But historically, democracies always try to deny grave dangers as long as possible. 

The Jihad War is not the first great threat to our existence.  We have won painful victories against similar threats in World War I and II, and in the war against Soviet Imperialism. 

We forget that our Cold War resistance also started with massive denial.  Churchill was a voice in the wilderness for years, raising the alarm about Hitler, while the British Establishment tried its damndest not to listen.  Afterwards, Churchill wrote that democracies usually end up doing the right thing -- but only after exhausting all the alternatives. 

That’s good to know in retrospect, but it doesn’t look like that when blind denial is the order of the day. 

Like today. 

I believe the civilized world is slowly beginning to face the nasty reality of global Islamist aggression.  Islamist aggression is enormously destructive -- but no more than Nazi or Stalinist aggression. 

In previous global wars, visible agents for the other side penetrated our institutions, our media, universities, and government, just like the Muslim Brotherhood and its spawn have done today. 

The aggressors in those assaults were also fanatics who poisoned clear and honest debate for years.  Stalin’s first atom bomb in 1949 was as frightening as the Iranian bomb we are expecting any day.  The Communists used the same weapons: Imperialist utopian propaganda, followed by infiltration, intimidation, false fronts, agit-prop, large-scale recruitment of useful idiots, constant lying, false words of peace, the works. 

The false slogan “Islam means peace” is the same as “the peace-loving Soviet Union.”  They are both Big Lies, as used by the Nazis and the Soviets: Keep repeating a Big Lie often enough, and your sheer audacity will collapse the opposition. 

If anything, the long toll of Communist murders was even higher than the toll of Islamic fascism -- so far.  But the longer we stay in denial, the more innocents will die. 

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was also greeted by the Left with enormous enthusiasm and decades of lies to keep the West suckered.  Obamanism -- the messianic narcissism of the Left -- was then known as Lenin’s Cult of Personality.  Obama is just a repetition neurosis for the Left.  They always do the same thing, and it always fails in the long run. 

It took three and a half decades after 1917 before Churchill and Truman were able to tell the public that, yes, we were really under attack by the Soviet Empire. 

Telling the truth is a turning point when people are in suicidal denial. 

We can see three turning points in the Cold War. 

1. 1917  - The Bolsheviks stage a coup in Russia with the active connivance of the Kaiser’s General Staff, murder the Romanov family, children and all, and claim to implement Marxist utopianism. 

The Western Left goes into hysterical celebration, and ignores the endless murder campaigns that destroyed whole regions over the next three decades. 

2. 1949 - Stalin explodes his first nuclear bomb. 

Stalin’s bomb was a wake-up call.  After three decades of self-deception, the West finally began to face the truth. 

3. 1989 - Glasnost, Perestroika, and the crumbling of the Soviet Empire. 

The Empire fell, in part because Communist elites no longer believed the lies they repeated every day.  Ten or more years before the Empire fell, small numbers of dissidents started an underground press, Samizdat.  The habit of truth-telling snowballed, until it was obvious that nobody really believed the official lies any more. 

At the same time, Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II led the resistance from the West.  A combination of internal and external pressures caused the Empire to crumble. 

In the Long Jihad War we are now moving from stage 1 -- massive denial -- to stage 2 -- facing the truth.  With the rise of ISIS, aggressive Islam has broadcast its true nature to the world.  The Corporate Media can no longer deny what is obvious. 

The fanatics of ISIS use social media to spread snuff videos as a way to out-radicalize Al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Right now ISIS seems to be picking up more recruits than the competition. 

But for other radical Muslims those public decapitations carry a heavy cost.  The truth is their enemy, and ISIS ends up showing the truth. 

The real wellsprings of Islamic radicalism, Saudi Arabia and Iran, are now being forced to distance themselves from viral spread of bloody murder videos of innocent men, women and children, the open enslavement of African children for sexual brutality, the existence of public slave markets to sell human beings, the decapitation and public torture of any opponents. 

Under the control of the radical Left, our media have lied and lied about Hamas, Hezb’allah, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and all the murderous throwbacks to ancient desert tribes.  It is a paradox, but ISIS is taking the covers off those lies. 

In the next decade, as the Gulf oil monopoly declines with new energy discoveries, the big money fuel for Islamic radicalism will start draining away.  Without oil money Muslim countries may become failed states, following Afghanistan, the Sudan, Libya and the rest.  Gulf states export oil and ancient hatreds, but nothing else.  Without their oil, their power of subversion and war-making will crumble as quickly as the Soviet Empire. 

When that happens modernist Muslims will overthrow the radical priesthoods.  It happened after World War I, when a wave of modernization swept the Islamic world.  We just saw it happen again in Egypt, where the awful Muslim Brotherhood, the assassins of Anwar Sadat, were overthrown by the political mainstream.  Egypt opted for gradual progress over radical masochism. 

Saudi Arabia decapitates as many human beings as ISIS, but our media cover it up to keep us in denial.  Iran is just as murderous and even more dangerous.  The mullahs ordered their thugs to drive police vans into crowds of young people during the Green Revolution in Tehran, while Obama and Valerie Jarrett said absolutely nothing. 

We now know that Jarrett was running back-channel surrender talks to the mullahs even before Obama was inaugurated.  For almost six years the President of the United States told the world that Iran would never be allowed to get nuclear weapons.  Every single public promise was a conscious lie. 

As Prime Minister Netanyahu just told the UN, the only reason for Iran to build centrifuges is to purify uranium for bombs.  Today the mullahs either have a bomb or are within weeks or months of getting one.  For practical purposes it makes no difference. 

At what point do you know a gunslinger is ready to shoot you? When he reaches for his Colt .45, or when he actually pulls the trigger?  It makes no difference. 

With 15 minutes of warning time for ICBMs to fly from Iran to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and even Russia, every sane nation has to assume the worst. 

No slick lies from this White House will fool anybody but the Current Occupant. 

The Jihad War is a kind of extension of the Cold War.  Obama grew up during the Cold War -- in his case, he lived in Jakarta in the aftermath of a massive civil war between Communists, a modernist military regime, and rampaging Islamists. 

Obama is a Cold War leftover.  His whole inner circle never knew anything else.  In their minds radical Muslims are just allies of convenience to reverse the verdict of the Cold War.  This is the logic of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1938. 

Our enemy today is not just violent Islam, but the Obama Left that invites the Muslim Brotherhood to “help” our own government.  A key to the global Jihad War is that we are being assaulted by a Left-Islamofascist Axis. 

The lessons are not hard to spot. 

1. When you are being assaulted, first tell the truth.  We have barely reached that stage today in the Jihad War. 
2. Understand your enemy’s  strengths and weaknesses.  The biggest enemy asset in the War of Soviet Aggression was our useful idiots, the same sort of people who today pretend to be blind, deaf and dumb to the danger of Islamist aggression. 
3. Penetrate and support civilized peoples in enemy lands.  Today, supporting the Kurds with weapons, training, and tactical air is a no-brainer. 
4. Use the seductions of Western prosperity and freedom to sow doubt in the minds of the enemy.  Niall Ferguson, the economic historian, points out that the Soviet Union was never able to meet consumer demand for something as simple as Levi jeans -- jeans had to be imported from the West, just as Venezuela today has to import toilet paper. 
5. Never stop talking up the values of 1776, the Western Enlightenment in Europe and America.  That means mobilizing the entire Anglosphere, including nations where educated people speak English as a second language. 
6. Abandoning your natural allies is slow suicide.  Europe failed to defend Poland and Czechoslovakia.  Today Obama would love to sell out Israel to Hamas and Hezb’allah, except that Netanyahu won’t go.  The Israelis are on to Obama. 

 Jimmy Carter surrendered a modernizing Iran to the tender mercies of Khomeinism. 

 Eurosocialism surrendered secular Turkey to fascist neo-Ottomans. 

Obama tried to surrender Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood. 

He did manage to turn over a stable Libya to the barbarians. 

We’ve seen mass murdering totalitarians before.  We’ve seen their regiments of lies. 

We know our own media and political class are corrupt and for sale.  None of that is new. 

We can find the answers in our own values and history.  We can use the truth to defeat all enemies, foreign and domestic.

We’ve done it three times in the last 100 years. 

We can do it again.