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January 17, 2006
Came the great disillusionment
When I was I kid, "War of the Worlds" was one of my favorite books. The stage-setting passage by the narrator at the beginning was brilliant.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable.
It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
Now, reread it, this time with "terrestrial men" representing the people of the modern Western world, and the alien invaders as the representatives of global jihad.
Wretchard has done just that over at the Belmont Blog, and it's an interesting take on blindness to the source of a looming threat.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 17, 2006 08:13 AM
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