Today marks the 14th anniversary of September 11th. We all know the story, so I won’t go over it again. I’ve done that the last several years, as I could. I give memory and honor to my dead countrymen who died that day. I give thought to the peace of their souls.

I give thought also to where we stand fifteen years later.

We have all but destroyed Al Qaeda, those who were responsible for the deaths. In this, there is honor, if not as much glory as we’d hoped. A son finished the war of his father and slew his father’s greatest enemy. In this too, there is honor, but again perhaps not as much glory as one might have hoped. Of the one who came after the victorious son, though it was under his command that the master of the AQ did fall, we have seen more broken oaths than kept ones, more defeats than victories, and more cowardice than heroism.

We saw our Arab neighbors rise up in a Spring of Democracy and Hope, only for a winter of Islamists and Warfare to take its place. In this, America is to blame partially, because we could have stepped in several places and helped bring promised hope, but instead we stood back and let those with zealotry in their hearts claim the victory.

And we have seen the rise of what may very well be the greatest evil of my time: ISIS or ISIL. We freed people from tyranny, but now they find only barbarism in their lands. Everything we feared Al Qeada for, ISIL has born as glorious fruit. Yet we sit back and do nothing.

The reasons are many, and some of them are good, but in the end even good reasons not to resist what can only be classified as evil are paltry dressings and offerings to the corpses of those who died because of our inaction. And of those who flee, I am left to wonder, how many of them will go to new lands and do terrible deeds as well? Before these wars in ISIL lands and their borders, those who left Muslim lands have spent more than twenty years turning once safe lands into places of fear and pain.

Now, not all Muslims are like this, nor should we view them as such. Yet of their number, by the best estimates 1/15-1/4th do believe in the supremacy of Islam and in its literal teachings. Which means of the massive wave of refugees fleeing to Europe and letting nothing stand in their way, a far deadly number have ill in their hearts for the people living in the lands offering them hope and shelter.

It is foolish to believe the violence will stay in the Middle East. And violence will be met with violence. And there will be more dead.

I do not know the solution to what comes, or if it can be prevented. Eventually, there will be a reckoning. What shall be reckoned, I am not sure I can say. Who shall be victorious, this too I do not know. I faith in the Gods that they will help protect their children, but even in this I do not know what methods will be used.

Fourteen years since the first fell, and what we hoped would be the last was not. We fought in the name of freedom, and indeed freedoms came. But in freedom was allowed all things, including that which would allow nothing but itself. And now totalitarianism seeks to control all. Before it was Nazism. Then Communism. Now Islamism. The name changes, the faces change, but the danger, the desire for control, that never does. And perhaps the war will wear white faces and brown faces, or maybe it will wear all different kinds of faces, but we should look beyond the faces.

Fourteen years ago, 3000 people died because authoritarians wanted to crush the freedom of everyone but themselves. Fourteen years later, authoritarians try to crush all except themselves because the things practiced under freedom are Evil. History is purged, buildings are purged, people are purged, and the cloak authoritarianism wears this time would see people like me, Pagans and Heathens, wiped from all memories of the earth. Over three hundred million people desire my death in the name of Allah.

No doubt I will be decried for saying this. I may be called bigot, or racist, or many a foul thing. But I do not mind these slurs, they have no power to me. Because words like blasphemer, idolator, sinner, are used to justify my death. Against such things, being slandered because I will not give up my Gods, my Faith, or my Freedom is a little, petty thing.

So let us remember today that the ancient war over the Freedom of Mankind vs the Subjugation of Mankind has never passed. If we wish to be who we are, then we need freedom more than anything else, and authoritarianism must be ever fought against, no matter what it cloaks itself in or how noble it might ever appear.

Or else we give the greatest disrespect to those who died free for the sake of inspiring fear. The title of the post refers to a quote supposedly from Churchill, in which he claimed that if Hitler were to invade Hell, Churchill would give a favorable reference to Satan himself in order to fight against the totalitarianism of the Nazis. So in the end, in order to preserve the freedom of all, consider that we too might have to make our own proverbial referral for the Devil. Because there are worse things out there than the Devil. There are things out that that would kill us alongside the devil so only they exist.