Peace movement blames America
Wednesday, September 26, 2001
By MARC BERLEY PROFESSOR
Just as America must fight a "new kind of war," so it must deal with a new kind of peace movement, one that blames American foreign policy for the recent terrorist attack.
Blame the hateful mass murderers seeking martyrdom in their radical holy war against America? Not the new peace movement -- it's a part of a global war against America.
Those who opposed U.S. military action in the past questioned the right of America to protect its interests in other countries.
That questioning centered on two issues: the definition of American interests and our right to impose our interests on others. These have always been reasonable questions, whatever one's view in particular cases.
The new peace movement has nothing to do with reasonable questions. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" So asks Susan Sontag in The New Yorker.
Never before have so many Americans been killed on American soil. But the new self-proclaimed peaceniks are anti-American cultural warriors willing to sink to unimaginable moral equivalencies.
Whereas the old peace movement questioned America's right to kill people in other countries when no attack on American soil had occurred, the new peace movement defends the brutal killing of thousands of Americans on the grounds that America got what it had coming.</p.
The new peace movement doubtless recalls the old. The latter began with communist sympathizers who excused the Soviet Union its innumerable crimes against humanity, seeing capitalism as the world's great evil. Having adjusted to the end of the Cold War, the new peace movement hates America for being the world's sole remaining superpower. And it wants that power eviscerated.
Unmoved to anger against the perpetrators of the atrocious violence of September 11th, the new peaceniks merely heat up their longstanding anger against America.
Deplorably, they turn the death of thousands of innocent lives into an opportunity to point a cold ideological finger at America.
In its extremism, the new peace movement has something in common with Jerry Falwell: the refusal to blame those responsible for the September 11th atrocity, choosing instead to blame America.
Falwell blames America for harboring heretics. The peaceniks blame America for harboring Americans. Put the two together and you get the holy war of Osama bin Laden, the jihad declared against the U.S. by the Taliban.
So far the percentage of Americans who blame America is small. But those who do blame America congregate in places that shape the future of American culture: our nation's college and university campuses.
Anyone who thought that the loss of more than 6,000 lives on American soil might have led to unanimous patriotic compassion even at America's campuses was too hopeful. The Sontag sentiment is highly audible on campus.
The day after the September 11th attack, one of my Columbia students voiced this representative reaction: "I hope it will cause America to examine its foreign policy decisions."
Like the old one, the new peace movement is rooted in our universities. Thus, it is ruled by political correctness, which, after expunging America's virtues and exaggerating its crimes, credits America's most vicious enemies with political and moral validity.
As part of its anti-American campaign, political correctness teaches young Americans to identify their country as a global oppressor and to regard the rest of the world as blameless victims.
It not only urges identification with such victims but also encourages students to see themselves as victims too.
Thus they can simultaneously identify with the victims of the September 11th attack and blame the oppressive U.S.
Off campus, Americans are united, and their present unity is a beauty to behold. A New York Times/CBS poll shows 85 percent supporting military action against whoever is responsible for the recent attacks.
But once America starts fighting, opposition will grow. The same poll shows there is already less support for a protracted war than for a short one. And this "new kind of war" is likely to be a very long one.
If we are to win this long war against terrorism, the next generation will have to be another great generation. Lines at recruitment offices for America's armed forces suggest it just might be exactly that.
But courageous, patriotic young Americans will find their peers using the cloak of a new "peace" movement to make a war against them.
These people are religious extremists, not unlike the Taliban.
They are essentially Druids who believe that spirits live in trees and that humans must be sacrificed to their pagan gods.
Be safe, marsh!