Why ISIS is MUCH Worse Than the Army of Nazi Germany

 On Friday I decried the manipulative use of the press by the Administration to foist words on us like "extremist" when they want to avoid saying "terrorist" or the real phrase, "Islamic terrorist."  Well, I actually read my own columns multiple times, both before they are published and then afterwards.

Sometimes I get to thinking about something related to the column that spawns another, and it certainly happened here.  Trying to think about the terrorists of ISIS and Al Qaeda as "extremists", as the press was trying to get us to think, my mind wandered about what was going through the minds of the terrorists themselves, and something occurred to me.

We have fought actual wars against actual armies full of actual soldiers on the other side.  The "other side" soldiers have been fighting not for an ideology, but for some nationalistic chauvinism.  I mean, do you really think that the German Army in World War II were all a bunch of Nazis, fighting for the great glory of Nazi principles and because they shared Adolf Hitler's hatred of non-Aryan peoples everywhere?

Of course not.  They fought because they were conscripted to fight, drafted into the service.  If they volunteered, it was likely to fight for the Fatherland -- "for Germany" as opposed to "for the Nazi ideology."  That is a pretty significant difference, folks.

Think about it ... that difference colors our perception about us (the Allies) and the way that the enemy viewed us.  The German soldier didn't see the American (including the American soldier) as an innately bad person; he saw him as the enemy in the way of his army's conquest of the world in the name of the Third Reich.  Were the Germans to win, we would still be Americans, just under the rule of the German leaders.

That is decidedly not the case with ISIS.  What leadership they have is certainly ideological, but the difference is that the troops are the ideologues, as much as their leaders are.  These are not conscripts; they are volunteers who have joined the army of ISIS because they want to destroy, or at least change, the people different from them.  That is far more frightening than the Nazis, folks.

When has there ever been a conquering army where the ideology distinguished the soldier as much as the political leadership?  Even the Crusades weren't a great example; the soldiers of the Crusades were conscripted as much as the WWII American army was.

I've been thinking about that.  What, for example, would any of the great U.S. generals of recent wars -- Patton, Eisenhower, Pershing, Schwarzkopf -- be able to do; what would their approach to strategy and tactics be, if instead of going up against an enemy army of conscripts and volunteers for their country, they had to plan a war against an enemy army of ideologues bent on the destruction of the enemy in total and the conversion of anyone left to a specific, bad-tasting flavor of Islam?

I'll take the German Army, thanks.  They mostly acted in accordance with the Geneva Convention and, well, human decency -- it was their political leaders who created the concentration camps, not the military.  The Japanese military was certainly worse to POWs, but that was more because they were populated with brutal thugs, not because of their ideology.  Surely some of the Japanese working in the POW camps were, quietly, not really thrilled about the way Allied prisoners in their camps were treated.

Soldiers of ISIS would have no such compunction, or they wouldn't be there in the first place!  They hate their enemy and swear to kill them, however horrifically they can, because the enemy is not Islamic and their belief system says they are "infidels", who need to be destroyed.

We cannot approach this by calling them "extremists" or anything else.  It is not just ISIS who is the enemy needing to be vanquished; it is the individuals in ISIS, from general to private, who need to be eliminated.  We would have been perfectly happy to have captured Hitler and just let the soldiers of the German Army go back to their fields and factories without reeducation.  Such is not the case with ISIS.  That war will only be over when their army is vaporized and their ideology is pulverized.

We thought we faced the worst of humanity in WWII, perhaps.  We knew nothing.  Nazi Germany was some brutal, bigoted leadership backed by a strong military, but a military linked by a common love of country, not of ideology.  ISIS is ideologically terrorist, top to bottom.

And we have a president who just thinks of them as "extremists."  Crazy.


Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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