Posted on 01/27/2003 5:31:29 AM PST by IronJack
The anti-war crowd was out last weekend, in case you missed it. Except for the desultory listlessness, you could almost have imagined you were back in The Sixties, milling around the Mall waiting for Abby Hoffman to burn his draft card. But aside from some frenzied blather from the dais, there was little energy in this movement, little sense that it was anything but a token gesture by a gang of left-wing bomb-throwers with some time on their hands and a lot of party buddies.
It's not war they oppose; it's George Bush. And they don't oppose him because he's wrong, but because he's Republican. These are the Left's foot soldiers, the same phalanx of phonies and fatalists they summon every time it looks like America is in danger of recovering its ideological core. They've been with us in one form or another ever since the Summer of Love, and their objections to the war in Iraq are the same as their objections to Vietnam. In fact, they have all their protest signage in mothballs at a warehouse in Berkeley awaiting the day Buffalo Springfield hits the charts again.
They were wrong about Vietnam, by the way. American withdrawal in that theater opened the door for the atrocities of the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge, an orgy of gore and depravity that built mountains of skulls and made "killing fields" a household term.
And they're wrong about Iraq as well. Any legitimate moral concern with the impending war is drowned in the effluvium of the fifth columnists, whose only goal is to sow dissent, to present an America somehow ambiguous about its identity and unsure of its moral authority to wage war in its own defense.
The partisanship of this "movement" is clear when one considers that Bill Clinton waged war in the Sudan, the Balkans, and Haiti with nary a peep from these same self-appointed guardians of peace. Ramsey Clark was mysteriously silent when we did the Reaper's work in Serbia. International A.N.S.W.E.R. had none when Mr. Clinton launched cruise missiles into an aspirin factory. But when George Bush, under credible intelligence that Saddam Hussein is developing nuclear and biological weapons, demands that the swaggering tyrant live up to the UN inspection agreement, Bush is the aggressor, a petty cowboy bent on cleanin' up Dodge.
Does anyone seriously expect the Workers World Party to EVER find that America is engaged in a just war? Sure, they keep their mouths shut when the warmonger is a liberal; leftists can always be counted on to tailor their outrage to their agenda. They are the masters of moral relativism, after all. But their umbrage is rooted more in the threat to their relentless Marxist advance than in any uneasiness with the concept of war itself.
These are people who consider Bush's popularity more dangerous than Saddam's plutonium. And understandably. Already weakened by decades of social debacles, they know a triumphant Republican president will further demonstrate their ineptitude, their pathological inadequacy in dealing with real-world threats. And an assertion of American sovereignty will threaten the globalist gains they've made over the last 30 years. It will make borders okay again. And worst of all, it will clarify America's vision, the one that the Left has successfully clouded for half a century now.
But perhaps the pettiest of motives is the simplest. There's an old joke about why a dog licks himself: "Because he can." And that's the simplest answer to the anti-war question too. "Protesting" and "demonstrating," especially if done with an air of high dudgeon, is an empowering font of camaraderie and social conscience. Youths whose only political thoughts before last weekend came from bumper stickers and U2 lyrics suddenly find themselves milling around the seats of power, raising that most democratic of voices, the polyglot roar of the crowd. How ennobling to trudge the high road against the infamy of greedy louts! What martyrs they are to suffer in the name of Peace and Love! What a great place to meet easy . er, I mean, "sexually liberated" . chicks!
Yes, this is a superficial crowd. Yes, this is the same crowd that beheaded kings and commoners and overthrew czars in favor of madmen. Yes, these are guys who will sit around their apartments tonight and look for themselves on TV. Angry, bored rabble seeking meaning in rote gestures, defining themselves in rhyming tetrameter, awash in the fraternite of the mob. But their voices and their oddly uniform rhetoric get airplay on all the networks; a couple even get their pictures in the New York Times.
And, from appearances, they represent a sizable segment of America. Until you actually listen to them. Then you hear the same empty wind you heard in 1968 in Chicago - a hodgepodge of simpleminded sloganeering, Marxist revolutionary yammer, and anarchist paranoia writ large. You hear the stridency, the lunacy, the blatant contradictions. You smell the cloying stench of hypocrisy - how many of these angst-ridden individuals rode their bikes to the rally? And you know that this is not an organized resistance to an idea, but the manipulated bloviations of self-absorbed reactionaries, augmented by useful idiots and filled out by busloads of professional sympathizers pretending to an angst they haven't earned. A colorful, noisy, and kinetic combination, but one hardly fit to dress itself, much less dictate foreign policy for the rest of America, the America that stayed home and watched the freak show play out on the nightly news
Agreed. Now, when we will focus our attention on those who are supposedly on our side who engage in precisely the same things and same tactics toward the same ends?
I prefer scanning all sectors.
Birth of Tha SYNDICATE, the philosophical heir to William Lloyd Garrison.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
Yep. That wind isn't coming from their oral orifice.
Apparently. I wonder how we manged to secure THAT monopoly ...
I thought all of America came to Free Republic ... :)
Who, for example? And what?
What I mean is that we have more than a few conservatives who go out of their way to disparage the Bush Administration, personally and politically, and throw monkey wrenches into the war effort.
I could care less how "principled" they say their arguments are (I'm beginning to hate the word "principle[d]"). The net result is the same as if the arguments came from the Left: They hate President Bush. I'm not talking about mere disagreements. I'm talking about venomous, volumous vitriol.
The far-Left and far-Right are indistinguishable, and the far-Right and the entirety of the Left is absolutely worthless.
Birth of Tha SYNDICATE, the philosophical heir to William Lloyd Garrison.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
However, Neville Chamberlain showed us the value of those "virtues" against an unprincipled enemy.
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