I usually don't get involved in things like this, as I've long known the futility and uselessness of arguing with jello. However, for the benefit of those looking on and wondering where the truth really lies, I figured I'd say a few things.
back2dafront made quite a spiel over on another thread about how terrible it is to serve in the armed forces, and I must say that the tears of purple koolade were just pouring down my cheeks in rivers. He's such an abused little fellow ... Personally, I'll bet my wife's been shot at more than he has. (Yes, she has been shot at.)
But there is one thing that rubs me wrong about attitudes such as his and anti-absolutism's (I think his handle was). You see, all of my life, even as a kid, I found myself as being the court of last resort. If someone had a problem, and no one knew how to fix it, they'd come to me hoping against hope that I could do something about it. It gives me a sense of satisfaction to look back and realize that I succeeded more often than not. (I'm 62 now.)
But one of the eternal vexations of that life has been the 10s of thousands of times that someone would come to me and I would explain what the problem was, how to avoid it, and what would happen if it was not handled in the correct manner, only to have them laugh at, scorn, or condemn me for suggesting it. That in itself wasn't bad, as I've always felt that we should all have the freedom to make our own decisions, though I did resent their ridicule, endless accusations of evil motives, and complete refusal to face any reality, even their own.
But the thing that did bother me is that as soon as they run merrily into the trap that I had already told them about and that happened exactly as I told them it would, they immediately come whining and crying to me expecting me to bail their worthless butts out of their jam, usually with the attitude that I should thank them for the privilege, as well as apologize for not having fixed the pitfall before they ran into it.
The liberal "peaceniks" of the world are the most useless batch of despicable morons this poor innocent earth has even been infested with, even to themselves. 90% of the problems they find themselves in is directly due to the fact that they cannot or will not face reality, and always demand that someone else face it for them. They come on with the "I'm soooo innocent!" routine with their patented little quiver of the lower lip and the pitiful attitude and the single little tear that rolls oh so slowly down their cheek. (They spend a half-hour every morning in front of the mirror practicing these things.)
They'll mess their pants and throw tantrums in the street because they don't have hamburger's to eat, then turn right around and do it again because you killed a cow to make it for them. LIke lice, they have no concern about anyone or anything except their own delusional fantacies of self glory and intelligence, while sucking the blood of those around about them. They endlessly yammer on about all the marvelous things they are doing for mankind, but in reality you could give them a boxcar full of crowbars to 'protect' and they'd have the whole works ruined in 48 hours.
But all of that is nothing, compared to the bloodguilt on their hands. They are the enablers who, by reason of the fact that they will not face reality, make the very existence of the world's monsters possible. They, by their cowardice, provide the fertilizer the monsters need to grow. They are the one who, having caused many of the conditions that bred the monsters, against the advice of those who know what they are talking about, make it necessary for young men to go out and shoot others. And all the while they continue their incessant blather about how innocent they are and how much they care, while roundly condemning those who are forced to go clean up the messes they made. Bull pucky!
A friend sent an article to me the other day that covers this very subject. It's written by Mark Steyn of the National Post. I don't expect the liberal peaceniks to agree with it or even understand it, for there is no way they could do so with a depth of intelligence and insight that is best compared to the gild on a $2.00 ring. But for you young ones who haven't got brain damage from sitting on them so much, read this article and think about it, then compare it to the self-centered rantings of the liberals.
Here it is:
The Curtain Will Come Down on the Peaceniks
Mark Steyn National PostMonday, February 17, 2003
The "peace" marches? Oh, I've nothing to say. Can't improve on Tony Blair, looking out of his window and observing:
"If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for. If there are one million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started."
In other words, if it's a numbers game, those are the ones that matter. I'm tempted to leave it there and go skiing, but let me come back to it in a roundabout sort of way.
The other day I got a copy of Andrew Roberts' new book, Hitler And Churchill: Secrets Of Leadership, which sounds like some lame-o management techniques cash-in, but is, in fact, a very useful take on very familiar material. Most of us have read a gazillion books about the Second World War (when I say "most of us," I exclude the fellow in Hyde Park on Saturday holding a placard with the words "PEACE IN OUR TIME," and even then I kind of hope he was some waggish saboteur, since the notion that the peaceniks, though deluded, are that ignorant is a little mind-boggling).
But, comparing Britain's and Germany's wartime leaders directly, you can't help feeling that victory and defeat were predetermined: As Philip Hensher neatly put it in his review of Roberts' essay, "Churchill knew very well what Hitler was like, but Hitler had no idea what sort of man Churchill was."
Just so. When you read Hitler's private assessments of the man who stood between him and world domination, they're just silly: Churchill was "that puppet of Jewry." OK, that's fine as a bit of red meat tossed to the crowd when you're foaming at Nuremberg, but as a serious evaluation of your opponent made in the quiet of your study it's simply ... inadequate. This failure to engage with reality is particularly telling when you look at how each leader dealt with setbacks: During the Blitz, Churchill would stand on the roof and watch the Luftwaffe bombing London; in the morning, he would walk through the ruins. Hitler, by contrast, never visited bombed-out areas and, just in case the driver should take a wrong turn, he drove the streets with his car windows curtained. His final days were spent in a bunker -- the perfect ending for a man whose worldview depended on keeping reality at bay no matter how relentlessly it closed in on him.
Hitler's problem was that he was over-invested in ideology. He'd invented a universal theory -- the wickedness of the international Jewish conspiracy -- and he persisted in fitting every square peg of cold hard reality into that theory's round hole. Thus, Churchill must be a "puppet of Jewry." As a general rule, when it's reality versus delusion, bet on reality.
That held true in the Cold War. Moral equivalists like Harold Pinter insisted that America and the Soviet Union were both equally bad. But the traffic across the Berlin Wall was all one way. East German guards were not unduly overworked trying to keep people from getting in. The Eastern bloc collapsed because it was a lie, and the alternative wasn't.Well, the Soviet Union's gone now so Pinter no longer has to observe the pox-on-both-their-houses niceties. Addressing the demonstrators on Saturday, he declared that the U.S. is "a country run by a bunch of criminals ... with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug."
Got that? It's not Saddam who's the thug, it's Tony. It's not the Baathist killers from Tikrit who are the bunch of criminals, it's the Republican Party. It's not the million-man murderer of Baghdad who's the new Hitler, it's George W. Bush. It's not the Iraqi one-party state with its government-controlled media that "crushes dissent," it's the White House. It's not the Wahhabis who are the fundamentalists, it's Bush, Blair and the other Christians. It's not Osama bin Laden who's the terrorist, it's American foreign policy. Supporting the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is "pacifist," but it's "racist" for America to disagree with the UN, even though it's Colin Powell and Condi Rice doing the disagreeing and the fellows they're disagreeing with are a bunch of white guys from Europe.
The new Universal Theory, to which 99% of Saturday's speakers and placards enthusiastically subscribed, is that, whatever the problem, American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame.
In fact, it's not so different from the old Universal Theory, in that the international Zionist conspiracy is assumed to be behind the scenes controlling the cowboys: Bush is a "puppet of Jewry," just like Churchill was -- notwithstanding the fact that America's Jews voted overwhelmingly for Gore.But, if you believe that the first non-imperialist great power in modern history is the source of all the world's woes, then logic is irrelevant. "It's all about oil"? Yes, for the French, whose stake in Iraqi oil is far more of a determining factor than America's ever has been or will be. "America created Saddam"? No, not really, the French and Germans and Russians have sold him far more stuff, and Paris built him that reactor which would have made him a nuclear power by now, if the Israelis hadn't destroyed it in the Eighties.
But, as Colin Powell and Jack Straw have surely learned by now, there's no real point doing the patient line-by-line rebuttal: Nobody's interested in French oil contracts or German arms sales or even Saddamite corpse tallies because it doesn't fit into the Universal Theory which insists that everything can be explained by the Evil of America. On the other hand, the indestructible belief that "over 4,000" civilians were killed by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan is impervious to scientific evidence because it accords perfectly with the Universal Theory.
How far are the "peace" crowd prepared to go? Well, they've stopped talking about their little pet cause of the Nineties, East Timor, ever since the guys who blew up that Bali nightclub and whoever's putting together those "Osama" audio tapes started listing support for East Timor's independence as one of the Islamist grievances against the West. But why be surprised? In fall 2001, being pro-gay and pro-feminist didn't stop the left defending an Afghan regime that disenfranchised women and executed homosexuals. Yet these are the same fellows who insist that a secular regime like Iraq's would never make common cause with Islamic fundamentalists, apparently requiring a higher degree of intellectual coherence of Saddam than of themselves.
You can believe all this if you want, just as Harold Pinter believed that the Iron Curtain was only there to prevent fleeing Westerners from swamping Warsaw Pact social services. But it depends on keeping reality at arm's length or beyond: You're metaphorically driving around with the curtains drawn. Perhaps that's why so many of the "peace" crowd get ever so touchy if you question their slogans. If you ask a guy with an "It's All About Oil" sign what he thinks of the recent contracts signed between Iraq and France's Total Fina Elf, he looks blank for a moment and then accuses you of wanting to crush dissent. It's not fair, you're trying to pull back his curtain.
I bet on reality.
The defining difference between Hitler and Churchill is that, while the former presided over a court of sycophants, the latter thrived on argument and antagonism. (Lord Alanbrooke's diaries are especially recommended in this regard.) He had a not untypical background for an Englishman of his time and class -- an unexceptional public school education, a bit of colonial adventuring. It's what the multiculturalists would have us believe was a narrow and blinkered upbringing. Yet an English public-school debating-society approach to life served him in good stead: He was utterly at ease with disagreement, quite happy to have any assertion tested. In Saturday's demonstrations, the heirs to Churchill's Harrow schoolmasters were well represented -- lots of teachers and professors. Yet the difference between now and then is their reluctance to expose their assertions to debate -- these days few institutions are as aggressively protective of their fragile little pieties as the academy.Well, so be it. If everybody thought like Saturday's marchers, it would be curtains for all of us. But we're not quite there yet, and reality will be breaking in very soon. Saying that Bush is the real "weapon of mass destruction" is awful cute the first nine or ten thousand times, but only if you live in Toronto or Paris or Madrid. Viewed by an Iraqi from the reality of Basra, it's pathetic.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
And as an apology to the French people who I have been in the habit recently of grouping into the same generalized category as their "leader," here is an email I saw directed to
www.ejectejecteject.com Some of you might enjoy the material contained there… At least there seems to be one Frog who has a bit of common sense and remembers what history should have taught us all.SHW
"…We French learned the hard way what you gain from appeasement (even if some retarded ones seem to have forgotten).
Because in 1936 when German troops occupied Rhenania they had orders to withdraw in front of any French troop and Hitler had told he would resign. And the reason was that the still puny German army had not a chance. In 1938 when Germany invaded Austria we still could have crushed it with ease…
So when I think in appeasement, I think in the 1940 humiliation, in the occupation, in the millions of dead, in the atrocities in Yugoslavia, Poland and Russia, in the Russian prisoners used to test the gas chambers, in Mengele's experiments, in the Jews and gipsy newborns slaughtered for the crime of being born Jews or gipsy. All of this could have been prevented without blood shed if we had taken action when Germany occupied Rhenania, all of this could have been prevented at a far lesser cost if we had taken any of the other golden opportunities we had. That is what you get when you let the monster grow instead of quashing him when he is small and weak.
And there is another thing: when you fail to quash the monster you are _responsible_ for his crimes. The Nazis were trialed at Nuremberg and some of them (far too few) were hanged for their crimes, but there should have been another trial at Munich for the appeasers and pacifists who had made those horrors possible. And I see no reason why some of them shouldn't have been hanged just like the high ranking Nazis were. "
Amen to that.
LoneWolf