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Posted on 10/18/2001 5:18:54 AM PDT by Mr. Mulliner

Nader and the New "Peace" Movement

FrontPageMagazine.com | October 18, 2001

A COLUMNIST for the online magazine Salon, in an October 12 report, asks the Web site’s readers how Ralph Nader would have responded to September 11 had he actually been elected President. It is a good question. Nader’s answers were given by our nation’s self-proclaimed populist leader in a speech last week at San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium. They should lead us to thank our lucky stars that, as a candidate, Nader has less chance of gaining one Electoral College vote than the left-wing’s choice in 1948, Henry A. Wallace, did in that election.

It has long been known that Nader, as visitors to his Presidential Web site easily discovered, was fiercely opposed to America’s alliance with Israel, and was a supporter of those who believed justice was on the side of the Palestinian opponents of the Middle East’s only democracy. But now, speaking in his never ending Green Party campaign, Nader for the first time made U.S. foreign policy a central focus of his comments. "When are we going to learn from history?" he asked the crowd. "When are we going to learn that we can’t bomb our way to justice?" According to Nader, bombing would give the Muslim world another reason to hate America. Like others in the so-called peace movement, he condemns the US for bolstering repressive Arab regimes like that in Saudi Arabia – echoing the views of the radical Islamofascists – and stresses the horrors of U.S. sanctions on Iraq, which he says creates misery and despair for innocent children. Bombing, according to Nader, harms Afghanistan’s people, and gives bin Laden and company "exactly what they want." The military expert Nader says "little children are going to be the biggest sufferers. There’s no such thing as a ‘military’ bombing. When you bomb out electricity, you also bomb the water-purifying plants."

This from a man who chastises us for not learning from history! The Bush administration has gone out of its way to follow September 11 with a cautious, restrained and targeted bombing campaign – hitting the Taliban infrastructure and trying to take out its headquarters, military installations and government offices. To Nader, who obviously knows nothing about World War II, military bombing is something that never existed. And of course, does the radical Islamic world need any other reasons to hate America, which it already does? Does he think if we give bin Laden total love, as Toni Morrison suggested, that love would do the trick? And yes, Nader offers the old left-wing homily that we have to "side with the millions and millions of workers and peasants for a change, instead of dictators." (Notice the old Leninist language, "workers and peasants.") I guess Nader thinks the Taliban and the Arab dictatorships and monarchies have the interests of the "workers and peasants" at heart, and our strong action against these very oppressors of the Arab peoples is something the average people living in the Muslim world are upset about.

Nader is primarily upset because he sees an intense war spirit seizing America. The terrorists should be brought before an international court of law and tried for their offenses by accepted legal tribunals. Colin Powell is said to have opposed such a tactic, and has commented wisely that such a move would lead bin Laden and company to hire Johnny Cochran, who would come up with another O.J. defense, and probably gain acquittal. Besides, bin Laden would complain that he could only be tried by a fundamentalist Moslem government, operating under Islamic law. Undoubtedly, our concerned multiculturalists on the Left would come to his defense, and use the argument that it is ethnocentric and racist to apply Western standards to Third World peoples.

Nader then takes a second position. Democracies win, he says, because "they’re open to debate," which means that the government should not say "shut up, get in line and wave the flag." Nader does not seem to realize that democracies win, as they did in World War II, because our men sacrificed and fought a brutal battle against a totalitarian foe, and not because at home we have freedom of speech. No one has sought to stop Nader from foolishly speaking before large student audiences, where his naiveté or some would prefer to say his stupidity has been received with flying colors and accolades. Preserving Nader’s right to utter contemptible and ridiculous positions is precisely what our soldiers fight to preserve, but to preserve that right, sometimes we need to exercise our military muscle. Our country has been attacked, and we are, as most sane people understand, a nation at war. Evidently, that fact is too much for our erstwhile Presidential contender to grasp.

There is hope, however. Ralph Nader tells us that he "trusts the people not the government." If that is so, all he has to do is look at public opinion polls, or the American flag our citizens are proudly flying from rural areas to suburbs to our large cities, and he will see what the American people are thinking. Actually, Mr. Nader is of course being disingenuous. He trusts the radical elite, and not the people. He is at home with his small unrepresentative coterie of radical activists and left-wing intellectuals. It is his problem that he mistakes this group for "the people." Unfortunately his stature might work to poison the minds of some well-meaning but gullible young students. One student told the press that Nader "said so many things I needed to hear, about the way that children in Iraq are being killed and about what we’re doing in Afghanistan." Nader convinced her that "our foreign policy is way too brutal." Note to this gullible student: Over 5000 of our fellow citizens lost their lives on September 11 in an unprecedented and horrendous attack on people like you. Doesn’t what we’re doing in Afghanistan have a little something to do with that? Another student tells the Salon reporter that having heard Nader, she now feels free not to hold her antiwar views in check, since she has learned from the great populist that "our democracy is being pulled out from under us."

Let us be clear. Our democracy is indeed being put to the test, and is severely threatened by our worst enemies. If it is taken from us, it will not be by those responding to aggression by moving to destroy our enemies. As the President has said, you’re either with us or against us. Ralph Nader, by cautioning inaction, putting the blame for terrorism on the United States, and calling for "peace," – as if recitation of the magic words would really guarantee it – is acting in the interests of our enemies. In 1948, American self-proclaimed "progressives," – actually Communists and fellow-travelers – worked hard to elect Henry A. Wallace on a third party "peace" ticket, arguing that the Truman administration’s necessary and tough response to Stalin’s expansionism was paving the way towards war. Had Henry Wallace won and had real influence, Joseph Stalin would have found the going easier. The American people responded to Wallace’s campaign with a resounding thud. Let Ralph Nader run again for President. This time around his votes will make it look like Wallace had a landslide.

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