In the horror of Beslan we see again the face of the enemy we first encountered three years ago. We look into his or her eyes and know that hatred grows, grievance festers, determination increases, the pitilessness has not waned.
Once again, we receive a reminder as to the nature of this foe, unlike any we have known before. And we know, surely, that, if a moment arrives when he or she can wield powers of life-or-death over our own children, no mercy will be shown.
But still the silliness goes on. The real enemy, we are told, is our own leadership: George W. Bush, who is a stupid man, or Tony Blair, who is a liar.
(Both "stupidity" and "lies", it appears, relate to our leaders' insistence that we face an evil without precedent.) The anti-war marches continue, as though the repudiation by Western citizens of the actions of their own leaders will alert the enemy to the fact that we are, after all, his friends, causing him to cast down his weapons with a friendly smile.
The force most threatening to the West today is not the fanaticism or the weaponry or the ingenuity of Islamism, but the simplistic sentiment of its own people, which, reducing the mystery of the human condition to a set of Pollyanna platitudes, reserves judgment and condemnation for those on its own side. This tendency arises from the belief that the world would be a nice place if everyone would just embrace the concepts of peace, love and understanding.
We recognised this once, of course, as the hippy ideal, a philosophy based on hedonistic idleness, pre-oedipal neurosis, wishful thinking and confidence that the world will hold together even if you drop out of it. But now this thinking infects half the globe. I have remarked in the past year how people no longer bother to state their political opinions in the form of opening gambits, as though these could ever be matters of controversy, but simply start talking.
"Isn't Bush stupid!" they say, dispensing with the question mark.
Dylan Thomas, asked once about his politics, replied with mordant irony: "The only politics for a conscientious artist is left wing under a right-wing government." But in the age beyond irony, his joke describes the politics of nearly everyone who does not have the responsibility of power.
For four decades, mainstream Western opinion has been drifting leftwards as a result of the complacency that flowed from the security created by conservative governments. Outside power, the favoured philosophy is one that distances you from responsibility for the actions of those on whose resolve you depend for your survival. Western society is in the grip of a virus of sentiment, a dull positivity based on nothing but complacency and smugness and a freedom stolen from the jungle of time which allowed a single generation, raised in peace and tranquillity, to believe that peace and prosperity were natural states of affairs. A generation that grew up in the habit of harmlessly pummelling the chest of its leaders in peacetime continues to do so even as this tendency emerges as the most powerful weapon in the armoury of the enemy. We have seen in Spain how al-Qaeda was able to manipulate public sentiment to change a government; within a year, the same may have happened in the US and Britain.
Who, then, will save our children from the hell we have just glimpsed yet again? Michael Moore? There was a time when the works of this irresponsible cynic would have been derided as the half-baked rantings of a perpetual student, but now, although it is established that most of what he says is nonsense, this egomaniac has become the fabulously wealthy figurehead of a worldwide movement.
So, what is the individual to do who not only finds this tedious but perceives in it the potential for disaster? It would be easy, in the present climate, to join in the general "pacifism". I don't underestimate the appetite of the world for even one more person suddenly piping up about how "stupid" George Bush is. Such a person, far from encountering the glazed tedium they might deserve, would be hailed as a radical, an original, a kind of hero.
The moral choice facing each of us who lives now in the protectorate of the US is not between peace and war, but between standing four square behind those who defend us, or joining those who, knowing they will be protected anyway, choose to abuse their freedom by spitting at those who would save their children's lives.
As an individual, I can pledge only the piece of ground on which I stand, and so choose to pledge it again to those who have embraced responsibility for ensuring that I can continue to choose between supporting them or not.
I don't seek to change anyone's mind. I merely invite people to countenance, as I did, the possibility that everything they have believed may not so much have been wrong as right only in circumstances which are now changed.