MaxedOutMama
Friday, February 04, 2005
Common Nightmares
I am very thankful for the bloggers. I started reading blogs when the Rather scandal erupted, because that was where the action was. I started to blog as a way to help myself overcome a lot of remaining problems with written language. I'm still blogging because I think most bloggers are a lot more honest and a lot more public spirited than those who have dominated the traditional marketplace of ideas. I want to share with them. I want to make common cause with them.
If it weren't for bloggers I would be crying when I read something like this column defending Churchill, also from Common Dreams:
Sometimes you have to be honest and admit that you are faced with a set of choices each of which is bad, and proceed to make an honest attempt to pick the best and most hopeful of those bad choices. Notably, these same voices were rather silent during the long, long years of sanctions imposed by the world against the apartheid regime of South Africa. Believe me, those in Soweto suffered more than the rich - this is a truism, not some startling, innovative insight. The possible benefit of sanctions is that they serve to accomplish a difficult task without war and its collateral casualties against the innocent. The certainty is that the innocent will suffer from them to some degree.
So a top-level official of the UN is willing to characterize the sanctions against Iraq under Saddam Hussein as genocide, but the UN is not willing to call the deaths in Sudan genocide, or willing to call ethnic cleansing in Bosnia genocide, or that unfortunate incident with those Hutus and Tutsis in that odd little country so far away. What is any honest human being with a moral conscience to think? What kind of muddled thinking can justify such sentiments?
Halliday in 99; Halliday in 2003 (read the whole article, please); Hans von Sponeck et al provide aid and comfort to dictatorship in 2000; Halliday gives a Guardian interview in 2000, Halliday speaks to Salon in 2002:
Chrenkoff, the unbelievably accurate, comments on the new drive to ban the swastika from Europe but not to ban the Communist sickle and quotes:
I would have thought that the problem is the symbols' association with mass murder, but for the EU it's obviously only racism. Racism, of course, is one of the left's pet issues; murderous regimes aren't, hence the recent crusade against totalitarian emblems is likely to degenerate into another politically correct farce.
Precisely. There are some who reject racism because it leads to the denial of human rights, and all too frequently to deaths. There are others who object because it is a politically incorrect position. Not, of course, that we object to racism when an article is printed in the Saudi press by a university professor explaining that Jews kill Muslim children and use their blood to bake passover bread. So we have a "war of extermination against the Palestinian people" in the Western bank when a Palestinian child dies, but it is "fight against oppression" when an Israeli child dies on a bus in Israel from a bomb detonated by a suicidal bomber.
There are some who think morally upright consciences can only be maintained while one is lying in a prone position under the boot of a dictator, but fear the awful imperialistic power of a modern democracy. It's amazing how these brave individuals are found living in the brazen gut of those modern imperialistic democracies rather than cushioning the footfall of the dictator. These are the fools who commemorate KristallNacht with a march in Oslo in which a Jew may not march while wearing a star of David. Not all at Common Dreams share this folly, but far too many do.
The contest of our times is not between Democrat and Republican, but between reality and unreality, between responsibility and irresponsibility, and between truth and fiction. There is much that's good in voices that are contrary to the conventional wisdom - but we should not blindly admire what is bad. For that reason, I think we should make our Churchills famous, study their words, expose them mercilessly, and never forget their habits of thought. There is a similarity between the twisted logic and narcissistic self-righteousness of a man like Halliday and a man like Hitler. I cannot understand those who don't see it.
Churchill is just a parasite living off that narcissism. He is valuable because he exposes what such individuals admire, not because of what he says. Churchill should be bronzed and carefully preserved in the sterile sanctuary of some cultural museum of modern democratic lunacy, the base of his bust's pedestal engraved with these words:
All of this reminds me of one of those dreadful movies of the 60's or 70's, in which a Caucausian actor cast as the Amerindian hero sets out on a hopeless war against the oppressive ranchers. There's a picture of Ward Churchill here. You get the impression he's been starring in his own internal movie his entire life.
The ranting professor concludes with a final wallop about the awful dimensions of America's guilt. Chief No-Nag, he of brown skin and calloused hands and introduced here, took on two ranting fools in the parking lot of the Dollar General shortly after the election. They were insulting America and saying they wanted to leave. He gave them a brief lesson on the staggering intellectual power of the American constitution and the bull-headed qualities of your average Indian peasant.
Wrong casting, professor. This cesspool of misery and vice we call America is where the brown-skinned people come for a better life. Chief No-Nag could explain to you that it's not perfect, just better than anywhere else than he's found. Since you're such an admirer of brown-skinned Clint Eastwoods, go ahead and make his day. You don't talk about his country like that around him. If you ever run into him and run your mouth off, your consciousness will be expanded at the exact moment you lose your testicles - or did that already happen? It could explain much.
If it weren't for bloggers I would be crying when I read something like this column defending Churchill, also from Common Dreams:
But while it's easy to attack Churchill's inflammatory words, it's harder to deny the core argument of his essay. It is a critique of U.S. policies around the globe, particularly the 12 years of sanctions in Iraq that former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay denounced as "a systematic program ... of deliberate genocide."I agree that sanctions tend to harm the helpless in a society such as Hussein's madhouse. But what is the alternative? Leaving him alone to do as he pleases, which has in the past included slaughtering over two hundred thousands of his domestic opponents? Fomenting revolution but not participating in the action, which in the past caused those fighting against the regime in Iraq to be killed by the tens of thousands? Standing by while Saddam Hussein invades other countries, kills tens of thousands, and threatens an entire region?
I have long been a vocal opponent of sanctions in Iraq, because everything I read on the subject revealed that it was regular citizens, not the leadership, who suffered under sanctions. Saddam Hussein easily circumvented the restrictions, made billions of dollars and built more palaces. It was regular Iraqis who died for lack of clean water, sewage-treatment facilities and basic medical supplies.
We might expect Hussein to show indifference to his own people, but I was shocked by the degree of indifference Americans showed toward them. We continued to enforce sanctions that killed civilians.
Sometimes you have to be honest and admit that you are faced with a set of choices each of which is bad, and proceed to make an honest attempt to pick the best and most hopeful of those bad choices. Notably, these same voices were rather silent during the long, long years of sanctions imposed by the world against the apartheid regime of South Africa. Believe me, those in Soweto suffered more than the rich - this is a truism, not some startling, innovative insight. The possible benefit of sanctions is that they serve to accomplish a difficult task without war and its collateral casualties against the innocent. The certainty is that the innocent will suffer from them to some degree.
So a top-level official of the UN is willing to characterize the sanctions against Iraq under Saddam Hussein as genocide, but the UN is not willing to call the deaths in Sudan genocide, or willing to call ethnic cleansing in Bosnia genocide, or that unfortunate incident with those Hutus and Tutsis in that odd little country so far away. What is any honest human being with a moral conscience to think? What kind of muddled thinking can justify such sentiments?
Halliday in 99; Halliday in 2003 (read the whole article, please); Hans von Sponeck et al provide aid and comfort to dictatorship in 2000; Halliday gives a Guardian interview in 2000, Halliday speaks to Salon in 2002:
Q: What would be the best way for the Bush administration to foster democracy?The Anfal link 1, Summary of "events" in Iraq, Wikipedia on the subject. Aside from offing his own population, the estimates are well over 500,000 dead in the Iran-Iraq war, and then there was the lighting of the Kuwaiti oilfields on fire.
A: I think that the way to get democracy into Iraq is to end the economic embargo, to restore the income level and the buying power of the Iraqi people, to get people back to work, restore the high educational standards, allow people the means to travel overseas again as they used to -- generally to restore the health and wealth of Iraq and the Iraqi people. That is what will bring change. Nothing else will, in my view. And we have to recognize that the only people competent to make decisions about the future of Iraq and its system of government is the Iraqi people. We cannot second-guess them long-distance from overseas.
Q: But Saddam is a ruthless despot and remains a fundamental problem for the Iraqi people. In its condemnation of Saddam, the Bush administration certainly has a claim to the moral higher ground, doesn't it?
A: I don't think so. I mean, Saddam Hussein may not be a nice man, but neither was George Bush Sr. Anybody who oversaw the Gulf War is well aware of crimes against humanity and is responsible thereof. We don't have to like the president of Iraq. Did we like the president of Indonesia? Or the Congo? Or Chile -- Mr. Pinochet? I don't think so.
Chrenkoff, the unbelievably accurate, comments on the new drive to ban the swastika from Europe but not to ban the Communist sickle and quotes:
'He is completely aware of the pain this (communist rule) has caused,' Roscam Abbing said. But including the hammer and sickle alongside the swastika 'might not be appropriate' under the anti-racism rules being negotiated, he said, noting the Nazi swastika was seen as a symbol specifically associated with anti-Semitism."Arthur comments:
I would have thought that the problem is the symbols' association with mass murder, but for the EU it's obviously only racism. Racism, of course, is one of the left's pet issues; murderous regimes aren't, hence the recent crusade against totalitarian emblems is likely to degenerate into another politically correct farce.
Precisely. There are some who reject racism because it leads to the denial of human rights, and all too frequently to deaths. There are others who object because it is a politically incorrect position. Not, of course, that we object to racism when an article is printed in the Saudi press by a university professor explaining that Jews kill Muslim children and use their blood to bake passover bread. So we have a "war of extermination against the Palestinian people" in the Western bank when a Palestinian child dies, but it is "fight against oppression" when an Israeli child dies on a bus in Israel from a bomb detonated by a suicidal bomber.
There are some who think morally upright consciences can only be maintained while one is lying in a prone position under the boot of a dictator, but fear the awful imperialistic power of a modern democracy. It's amazing how these brave individuals are found living in the brazen gut of those modern imperialistic democracies rather than cushioning the footfall of the dictator. These are the fools who commemorate KristallNacht with a march in Oslo in which a Jew may not march while wearing a star of David. Not all at Common Dreams share this folly, but far too many do.
The contest of our times is not between Democrat and Republican, but between reality and unreality, between responsibility and irresponsibility, and between truth and fiction. There is much that's good in voices that are contrary to the conventional wisdom - but we should not blindly admire what is bad. For that reason, I think we should make our Churchills famous, study their words, expose them mercilessly, and never forget their habits of thought. There is a similarity between the twisted logic and narcissistic self-righteousness of a man like Halliday and a man like Hitler. I cannot understand those who don't see it.
Churchill is just a parasite living off that narcissism. He is valuable because he exposes what such individuals admire, not because of what he says. Churchill should be bronzed and carefully preserved in the sterile sanctuary of some cultural museum of modern democratic lunacy, the base of his bust's pedestal engraved with these words:
Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the "news" media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast "aren't like" Americans, not least because they don't "value life' in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life – all lives, not just their own – far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.I see. So Saddam Hussein was killing and causing wars, and in the attempt to stop his rise, the US undertook a limited war, followed by a ceasefire and a sanctions regime. It's fine if Saddam Hussein does it - after all, he didn't invade Kuwait for profit, did he. It was something about oil wells, wasn't it? But it's wrong, of course, if the US counters such a war. The Prof is a hopeful man, and he has a solution:
The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy
In sum one can discern a certain optimism – it might even be call humanitarianism – imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.
Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name – indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it – mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
Were the opportunity acted upon in some reasonably good faith fashion – a sufficiently large number of Americans rising up and doing whatever is necessary to force an immediate lifting of the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, or maybe hanging a few of America's abundant supply of major war criminals (Henry Kissinger comes quickly to mind, as do Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and George the Elder) – there is every reason to expect that military operations against the US on its domestic front would be immediately suspended.You know, I believe France would be satisfied with that. Not Saddam Hussein, though. Sadly, because there is so much wrong with Kansas, Alabama, Ohio, and Georgia, to name just a few of the criminal states of the criminal United States of America, such was not to be. Even Ward Churchill realizes that:
Whether they would remain so would of course be contingent upon follow-up. By that, it may be assumed that American acceptance of onsite inspections by international observers to verify destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (as well as dismantlement of all facilities in which more might be manufactured), Nuremberg-style trials in which a few thousand US military/corporate personnel could be properly adjudicated and punished for their Crimes Against humanity, and payment of reparations to the array of nations/peoples whose assets the US has plundered over the years, would suffice.
Refusing the realization that the world has suddenly shifted its axis, and that they are therefore no longer "in charge," they have by-and-large reverted instantly to type, working themselves into their usual bloodlust on the now obsolete premise that the bloodletting will "naturally" occur elsewhere and to someone else.Well, you know, it's the terrible commercialization of American culture striking again. It's almost as if our Pavlovian stimulus/response patterns made us think "we're number 2 - we'll have to try harder!". Avis and Hertz, the sadistic imperialistic agents of world capitalism, triumph again. But all is not lost, according to this brave faux Indian (I have more Indian blood than he does, smirk. Cherokee.):
The desire to pummel the helpless runs rabid as ever.Tell it to the Marines, Prof. Nice plot, but you've got your casting wrong.
Only, this time it's different.
The time the helpless aren't, or at least are not so helpless as they were.
This time, somewhere, perhaps in an Afghani mountain cave, possibly in a Brooklyn basement, maybe another local altogether – but somewhere, all the same – there's a grim-visaged (wo)man wearing a Clint Eastwood smile.
"Go ahead, punks," s/he's saying, "Make my day."
And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad – or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the "terrorists"' own schedule, and at a place of their choosing – the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here "at home."
Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?
That, too, is their choice to make.
Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.
"You've got to learn, " the line went, "that when you push people around, some people push back."
All of this reminds me of one of those dreadful movies of the 60's or 70's, in which a Caucausian actor cast as the Amerindian hero sets out on a hopeless war against the oppressive ranchers. There's a picture of Ward Churchill here. You get the impression he's been starring in his own internal movie his entire life.
The ranting professor concludes with a final wallop about the awful dimensions of America's guilt. Chief No-Nag, he of brown skin and calloused hands and introduced here, took on two ranting fools in the parking lot of the Dollar General shortly after the election. They were insulting America and saying they wanted to leave. He gave them a brief lesson on the staggering intellectual power of the American constitution and the bull-headed qualities of your average Indian peasant.
Wrong casting, professor. This cesspool of misery and vice we call America is where the brown-skinned people come for a better life. Chief No-Nag could explain to you that it's not perfect, just better than anywhere else than he's found. Since you're such an admirer of brown-skinned Clint Eastwoods, go ahead and make his day. You don't talk about his country like that around him. If you ever run into him and run your mouth off, your consciousness will be expanded at the exact moment you lose your testicles - or did that already happen? It could explain much.
