Watching the high-quality, Cold War movie Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy [from 2011, based on the 1974 John le Carré novel] the thought occurs to me: the West was genuinely petrified of communist spies in the gov't, in the 1930s to 1970s, in Britain, Germany, France, and America. Similarly, the West today is petrified of Muslim jihadis in the citizenry. Now, why is that? Why the continuous, omnipresent threat of treason and Fifth Column destruction from within?
The answer is gross philosophic incompetence in the West. Instead of unendingly watching over your shoulder and staring hard at your Western colleagues in the '30s to '70s, all those guys should have been undergoing deep education and enlightenment about the genuine falsity and evil of communist philosophy. So too we in the West today need to educate and enlighten everyone about the real falsity and evil of Islam. Then all this awful, nasty, subversion business would stop.
But you can't defeat these Western liberal enemies with the poor philosophy of today. You can't defeat communism with its close cousin welfare statism. And you can't defeat Islam with its close cousin Christianity. The Siren Song of foolish idealism will continue to exist and thrive in the West. The massive threat will remain. Some weak and low people are guaranteed to philosophically struggle and soldier on, as they naively seek to "civilize" and "liberate" the planet via force, and trusting in their false and depraved communist or Islamic beliefs.
Only philosophy can save us. Bu it needs to be strictly rational and liberal. It needs to be relatively hard-line, laissez-faire capitalism and atheism, with a moral code of clear egoism and selfishness to boot. Otherwise the internal threat is going to be forever with us.
George Smiley will never have his rest. And neither will we.