|
|
|
|
11/2/03 Another Dose of Liberal Anti-Americanism It is SoothSeeker's usual policy to relegate specific responses to liberal columnists to the Liberalism section. Paul Krugman's most recent anti-American diatribe is a special case. He retails fallacy after fallacy, his whole argument resting on the liberal myth of George W. Bush's lack of intelligence and the anti-Semitic/populist theory of the great "Neo-Con" conspiracy that motivates an attempted global coup that is being ascribed to the Bush administration. Krugman opens with the report that "President Bush was genuinely surprised to learn from moderate Islamic leaders that they had become deeply distrustful of American intentions." He goes on to suggest that this surprise demonstrates that Bush is willfully out of touch with reality. What it really demonstrates is that Bush is an adherent of the common-sense view that language is what it purports to be: as Rush Limbaugh is fond of putting it, "words mean things." When someone told Bush he was meeting with "moderate" Muslims, he thought that word meant what it usually does: reasonable, rational, temperate, the opposite of fanatical. When these Muslims said they were "distrustful of American intentions," they demonstrated that they were just fanatics in moderate clothing. And Bush, who is a man of integrity, is always surprised by the fraud and deceit committed by people he wants to take at face value (remember what he said after his first meeting with Vladimir Putin). No one can distrust American intentions unless they come to the table with a preexisting bias against America (and no one with a pre-existing bias against us can be called "moderate"). We have not annexed Afghanistan, and we're not stealing Iraqi oil. We've liberated two predominantly Muslim peoples from their oppressors who happened to be Muslims. The only Muslims we have killed intentionally were the ones who had guns or bombs and were trying to kill us or other Muslims. Our enemies in both nations and elsewhere are perfectly happy to kill Muslim babies to try to win a propaganda war (which would be funny if it weren't so tragic and if it didn't seem like they were actually succeeding, thanks mostly to so-called journalists like Krugman, who find it so easy to draw a moral equivalency between a just war to depose wicked tyrants and the terrorist brutality of people who are, by their own open declaration, bent on world hegemony). Krugman is on the defensive because he had previously tried to analyze the thinking of Mahathir Mohamad, that Malaysian prime minister who said in a recent speech that Jews are now running the world (you know, echoing the thinking that led to Hitler's "final solution" to Germany's problems during WWII). He concluded in that previous piece that it was probably our fault that Mohamad said such a racist thing, because Muslims in southeast Asia think we're making war on Islam. For those of us who find that notion offensive enough (because it is without foundation but feeds the flames by making it seem like there must be some foundation, because why else would a Jewish-American journalist be making the argument), he continues in the newest piece to douse the flames in gasoline by arguing that if we want people like Mohamad to stop making anti-Semitic speeches we'll have to start kowtowing to the anti-Semitic terrorists in Palestine, and punish Israel for defending itself. He uses the fact that there is still a need for some Realpolitik in the world, even after the end of the cold war, to try to make Bush out as a hypocrite. He attacks Bush for negotiating with Uzbekistan for military assistance, when Uzbekistan is ruled by a brutal dictatorship. Of course, he does not say it was worse than the Taliban or that it has harbored members of Al Quaeda (SoothSeeker has no idea if either assertion is true, but if they are not true, then we fought a greater evil by allying ourselves with a lesser one, which is the best you can do in a world of shades of gray). Krugman is apparently ignorant of the reality of diplomacy, which is that the enemy of our enemy is our friend, and that every President since Washington has compromised with despots when it was necessary to do so. To approach the issue as Krugman's attack suggests we must, we would have to have declared war not on Afghanistan and Iraq, but on every third-world dictatorship simultaneously, and China besides. That is a war we could not win, and for which there would not be anything close to the justification Krugman and his ilk monotonously claim we have to have before we can even start talking about mobilizing troops. Of course, we could not have entered WWII as allies of the Soviet Union, either, but we would have had to attack Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union all at once, or risk being called hypocrites by ivory-tower pseudo-intellectuals. We would have lost the war, but at least we would have been consistent. But that is what his ilk wants to do: give us two choices: make war on all evil people at once, or let all evil despots have their way with the world. Because they want us to let evil despots alone, unless those despots are fighting terrorists (i.e. Slobodan Milosevic, the only man evil enough to justify war in the liberal mind, because his enemies were Muslim terrorists borrowing pages from the book of Yasser Arafat) and winning. So Krugman's view is that we should mollify the "moderate" Muslims by axing any outspoken Christian in our government or military who suggests that there are a lot of fanatical Muslims out there who hate Christians; by publicly chastising Ariel Sharon for refusing to compromise with terrorists who refuse to compromise, but hold the blood of babies and schoolchildren hostage to their intemperate demands. And my answer is this: what would be the point? Could we have convinced the Nazis in WWII to surrender if we had just admitted that maybe a few Jews really did deserved to die in gas chambers? Maybe we could have mollified Japan by conceding that all the Chinese really were good for was to be dominated by their Japanese superiors. Should we have offered public apologies for the fact that our soldiers referred to Nazis and Japanese who were later, in large numbers, convicted of war crimes, by rude epithets like Nip and Kraut? We are at war, and those "moderates" Krugman thinks we should try to win over (and I guess he must be naive enough to think it is possible) are sympathizers with the enemy. Third-world Muslims came out in large numbers to cheer the deaths in the World Trade Center on 9-11. Were they moderate then? No! They were fanatical, and the vocal ones still are. While some of our generals are speaking out in churches suggesting that there are a lot of Muslims who want us dead because we're Christian, and this is considered controversial in our culture, clerics throughout the Muslim world are calling Christians and Jews pigs and dogs and encouraging their "flock" to strap on bombs and kill our little piglets and puppies, and no one in those cultures feels empowered to complain that these are immoderate sermons (in Iraq, moderate clerics end up murdered by the thugs Krugman argues we had no good reason to depose). The Muslim despotism that dominates the third world squelches all moderation. Our culture of openness and tolerance encourages moderation to the point of complacency. I hope it is this complacency that produces Krugman's flavor of anti-Americanism. Because if it is not complacency, he is a far worse human being than I, like Bush, would ever prefer to assume. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
|
|
All Original Content (C) 2003, 2004, 2005 SoothSeeker.Com
SoothSeeker Welcomes your Comments at letters@soothseeker.com Report problems to webmaster@soothseeker.com
Hits on this site:
|