"But let there be no misunderstanding. The war against terror is every bit as important as our fight against fascism in World War II. Or our struggle against the spread of Communism during the Cold War"
About this Quote
The line is built to do one thing: draft the audience into a moral inheritance. By yoking the “war against terror” to World War II and the Cold War, Jim Bunning isn’t arguing policy so much as assigning it a pedigree. Those earlier conflicts arrive pre-loaded with emotional permissions: sacrifice, secrecy, surveillance, collateral damage, and a long timeline. If you accept the analogy, you also accept the implied conclusion that hesitation is a kind of historical illiteracy.
“Let there be no misunderstanding” is the tell. It’s a rhetorical preemptive strike, signaling that dissent will be treated not as an alternate assessment of risk but as confusion, even bad faith. The sentence doesn’t describe terrorism; it describes how to feel about terrorism. “Every bit as important” is a calibration phrase, flattening differences in scale and geography into a single moral plane. That’s the move: turn a diffuse, borderless threat into something as legible as a world war or an ideological superpower.
The subtext is political triage. Post-9/11, leaders needed a narrative sturdy enough to justify open-ended commitments at home and abroad. WWII provides clarity (good war, clear villain). The Cold War provides duration (decades of containment, permanent readiness). Together they supply a template for patience and unity while insulating the project from short-term metrics.
It also quietly reframes “terror” as an -ism, not a tactic, inviting an expansive definition of the enemy. Once you invoke fascism and communism, you’re not just fighting perpetrators; you’re licensing a crusade against an idea, with all the mission creep that implies.
“Let there be no misunderstanding” is the tell. It’s a rhetorical preemptive strike, signaling that dissent will be treated not as an alternate assessment of risk but as confusion, even bad faith. The sentence doesn’t describe terrorism; it describes how to feel about terrorism. “Every bit as important” is a calibration phrase, flattening differences in scale and geography into a single moral plane. That’s the move: turn a diffuse, borderless threat into something as legible as a world war or an ideological superpower.
The subtext is political triage. Post-9/11, leaders needed a narrative sturdy enough to justify open-ended commitments at home and abroad. WWII provides clarity (good war, clear villain). The Cold War provides duration (decades of containment, permanent readiness). Together they supply a template for patience and unity while insulating the project from short-term metrics.
It also quietly reframes “terror” as an -ism, not a tactic, inviting an expansive definition of the enemy. Once you invoke fascism and communism, you’re not just fighting perpetrators; you’re licensing a crusade against an idea, with all the mission creep that implies.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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