Cry, the Other Beloved Country

Bob Newman

As a freshman attending Georges Valley High School in the teeming metropolis of Thomaston, Maine, in 1971, I was required to read Alan Paton’s celebrated novel Cry, the Beloved Country.

Published in 1948, I distinctly recall our elderly teacher’s passion for Paton’s book. She fairly glowed as she spoke of the pain in Stephen Kumalo’s heart and on more than one occasion I saw tears in this woman of letters’ eyes as she read Paton’s words to the heathens seated before her. I had no way of knowing that one day, far in the future, I too would traipse across Kumalo’s country, weapon in hand (although I was hunting game and not man, and with a rifle rather than umkhonto), where his Zulu forebears were once the most fearsome people roaming the veld of what is now called South Africa.

Paton decried the horrors of apartheid, which was an especially terrible form of terrorism. Today, in other countries, terrorism manifests itself in many forms, from the communist (the New Peoples Army in the Philippines, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Maoist rebels in Nepal et al.) and the Islamic (al Qaeda and its offshoots, Islamic Jihad, al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Hamas, Fatah and Hezbollah, to name a handful) to American domestic (the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front and Earth First! for starters). And there are those individuals who terrorize others with mere words and images (as opposed to outright violence) that attempt to achieve a goal using unsubstantiated fear and threats of dire consequences as vehicles, such as the deceptively named American Civil Liberties Union (founded by a rabid Marxist and great admirer of Stalin; go figure) and master propagandist Michael Moore.

If you do your homework, you will find all manner of forms of terrorism running amok on our planet. Complacency, cowardice, personal and institutional corruption, sloth, ignorance, naïveté and wishful thinking are terrorism’s most precious enablers. And in today’s world, where purportedly problem-solving agencies such as the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the European Union somehow remain revered by many, terrorists know that the aforementioned enablers course through the veins of these cancer-ridden bodies, weakening them and thus making them susceptible to infiltration and exploitation.

It is time for America—the Great Land—to once again rise above the pestiferous squalor of global decay and assert itself in the one and only fashion our enemy respects and understands: sudden, graphic violence delivered to the most sensitive of regions on the terrorist body.

Our “allies” who decry such tactics are part of the threat, need to be made to understand that vocalizations against our policy do nothing but assist the enemy, and that such assistance is intolerable. If they refuse to cooperate, they must come to know painful repercussions in the form of economic, diplomatic, legal and political sanctions.

If we fail to fight this global asymmetric war on all fronts and with all our resources, Kumalo’s heartache will, like the suffering being felt daily in so many other countries, overcome us. And crying won’t do us a damn bit of good.

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Bob Newman, a decorated, retired US Marine, is host of the “Gunny Bob Show” on Newsradio 850 KOA in Denver, and host of “Inhuman Newman’s Anger-Management Hour” on 630 KHOW, also in Denver. His “Global Positioning Statement,” a daily insider’s update on the war on terror, is carried by various Clear Channel radio stations from coast to coast. A ground-combat veteran, he is the director of international security & counterterrorism services for The GeoScope Group and is the military science & terrorism columnist for The Denver Daily News. He can be reached at bobnewman@clearchannel.com.

bobnewman@clearchannel.com