Posted on 01/21/2015 5:16:09 AM PST by servo1969
I haven’t yet seen the movie American Sniper, but I have read Chris Kyle’s autobiography, on which it is based. I therefore believe that I am qualified to write on the topic.
Although, come to think of it, I’m not really going to write about American Sniper at all. Instead, I’m going to write about some of the reactions to American Sniper, which function as a Rorschach test of American (and, dare I say, un-American?) values.
I have to begin with the fundamental premise, one that drives the Left nuts, which is that Clint Eastwood, with help from a superb Bradley Cooper, has directed an incredibly good movie, one that doesn’t shy away from war’s ugliness, but that acknowledges, not just the physical bravery of our men, but also their moral decency. As I try endlessly to explain to anybody who can listen, both good guys and bad guys kill. After all, no one will deny that a woman has acted bravely and honorably if she shoots to death the man trying to kill her child. Likewise, only sadistic psychopaths will applaud the broken bodies of Christians, Jews, women, children, gays, blacks, and the “wrong” kind of Muslims that ISIS, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, and other Islamic Jihad organizations leave in their wake.
Let me fall back here on my already wordy poster, one that’s targeted at the buffoonish Seth Rogen, but that addresses the larger issue, which is that why one kills matters as much as the fact that one does kill:
(I also won’t waste time in this post correcting the innumerable personal slurs the Left is now hurling at Chris Kyle, most of which are based upon a failure either to see the movie or read the book. Ian Tuttle, thankfully, takes care of setting that record straight.)
Mentioning Seth Rogen, though, leads me nicely back to the point I want to make in this post, which is an observation I first made to my friends on the Watcher’s Council: namely, that American Sniper has been remarkably effective at flushing weasels out from under cover, proving that good art frequently has multiple virtues. For example, one of my neighbors, a nice, but rather brittle, angry woman, whose life has not treated her with the generosity she was raised to expect, posted the following image on Facebook:
Doesn’t that ugly, mean-spirited poster sum up just about everything that’s wrong with the Leftist view of the world? The wrongness of it all begins with the terrible slur against Kyle and all the other American troops who have fought against the same type of men who are now crucifying, raping, beheading, and generally rampaging their way across the Middle East, with occasional detours into Europe. I know those men. My Dad was one.
Really, there’s no sugar-coating it. For five years of his life, my Dad was a hate-filled killer. He poured his energy, brains, skill, and courage into slaughtering as many people as he possibly could. If he could have killed more, he would have.
In case you’re wondering, Daddy wasn’t Dexter or Charles Manson or Stalin. Instead, he was an ordinary foot soldier in WWII, fighting with the RAF and ANZAC in the Mediterranean theater.
During all those years of fighting, mostly in North Africa with detours into Greece and Crete, Daddy wasn’t glorying in slaughter for the thrill of it. He didn’t kill to slake blood lust or because he was a racist. In fact, quite the opposite. He was killing because he understood the stakes, which was to stop the spread of genocidal racism: If he didn’t do his bit to halt the Nazis in North Africa, those same Nazis would descend on Palestine, and with the help of the enthusiastic ancestors of today’s ISIS, have slaughtered where they stood every Jewish man, woman, and child in the British Mandate of Palestine.
Chris Kyle and his comrades, as Kyle made clear in his book, didn’t kill Iraqis because they took a sadistic glee in a human turkey shoot. They killed specific Iraqis who were bound and determined to kill the Americans (which is ground enough to want to kill the Iraqis first) and, moreover, who were equally bound and determined to put into place precisely the ideological governance we now see in the Middle East with ISIS and in Nigeria with Boko Haram.
Ultimately, Kyle and his comrades were killing humans fatally infected with a deadly ideological disease. These men understood (and, wherever they still fight, understand) that people infected with genocidal, imperialist, tyrannical values need to be exterminated just as surely as we kill a rabid dog or, 70 years ago, as we killed rabid Nazis. Unfortunately, the reality of war is that, when we kill the guilty, we sometimes kill the innocent. My Dad knew that, amongst the Nazis he was fighting were ordinary Germans who were forced by circumstances to fight for those same rabid Nazis.
Knowing that didn’t stop Daddy, or any of the other Allied troops. They understood that this is how the world works. (For more of my thoughts on that specific topic, you can check out my annual Passover post.) As Daddy once said, you cannot fight a war if you don’t hate your enemy — by which he meant if you don’t hate the values your enemy seeks to advance.
So, clearly, one level of Leftist stupidity is its members’ complete inability to understand that soldiers can hate the ideology without doing the Leftist thing and turning everything into some agonized Greek tragedy about racism, sexism, homophobia, and third world victimization. Smart people are able to winnow out good from bad, and they know in which directions to aim their guns.
But there’s a second level of stupidity at work in that ugly, mean-spirited poster, and that’s the stupidity that is unable to comprehend that, without the sheepdogs, the sheep aren’t able to go around sweetly and smugly ministering to the less fortunate among them. Please believe me that I don’t intend to be snide about charity. I think charity is a wonderful thing, provided that it’s not forced upon people through government coercion. It’s one thing for me, while exercising my values, to donate my time, money, and labor to aid those less fortunate than I. It’s another thing entirely when the government, with a gun aimed at my head, announces that I’ve volunteered to donate 50% of my annual income to help those that the government deems should be recipients of government beneficence.
Putting aside my irritation at a government that denies me the opportunity to redistribute my own wealth, let me get to the real issue and the real stupidity behind that poster: There is no charity when there is no civil society. Charity works when society is sufficiently stable, free, and predictable that people can actually earn and keep money — and then give it away if they want to. A strong, infrastructure underlying a free, market-based society creates both extra time and extra wealth, not to mention a capacity for empathy that is utterly lacking when people are suffering under either complete anarchy or sadistic, malevolent totalitarian rule.
You, my dear, smug Leftists, are able to boast in self-aggrandizing tones about your ability to shake down hard-working citizens only because men like Chris Kyle are willing to do the dirty work of keeping both tyrants and anarchy at bay. You’re like the person who dines in style on the steak, but sneeringly describes as a hillbilly the rancher who raised that cow and as a murderer the butcher who got that lovely filet mignon to your table.
Great art not only opens our minds, but it enable us to see with clarity those minds that cannot and will not open. People who value freedom understand that there’s a price to pay for freedom’s blessings and we are appropriately and eternally grateful to those who are willing to do the dirty work that goes with paying that price.
Radical, jihadist, fundamentalist Islam (or whatever other nouns and adjectives you wish to apply to the 10% of the worlds Muslims who seek only to destroy) must be destroyed, lest we are all destroyed. My problem is that I’m a tiny middle-aged Jewish woman, who is a great target, but a lousy fighter. I live because Chris Kyle, and the SEALS, and the Marines, and the Navy, and the Army, and the Air Force put themselves in front of me, as a living barrier protecting me from the abyss.
I pity those people who don’t appreciate the gift they’ve been given, and do nothing more than set themselves up as the socialist twins to those murderous Islamists that the Kyle’s of this world fight. Because, really, once you strip away those smug words about the personal virtues of government funded charity, you discover that the Left and the Islamists are pretty much the same people. It’s just that the Islamists have gone further down the path necessary to achieve their ultimate ends:
Leftists wish you dead. hey wish all of us dead who oppose their utopian agenda.
I wish them all they wish me.
This is an outstandung article. I especially like the comparison table at the end. Thank you for posting it!
I don't want to see them, I don't want to hear them. I don't care what they think or what they believe.
For me, our relationship in any way shape or form has been irreparably damaged and can never be repaired.
A good article, thanks for posting.
I saw the movie last night, it was great, best movie I seen all year. Like Mark Levin said, go see it you will not be disappointed. Liberals are going absolutely nuts over the success over that movie, and all I can say is let them because all they are doing is hurting themselves. People are absolutely sick and tired of them and their BS.
—great article—
I nominate this post as the most awesome post ever on Free Republic!
Leftists wish all Christians dead (preferably using the State),
and, even if you are not Christian just happen to adhere to some Christian values,
you’ll oppose their quest to kill all Christians,
so you’re their enemy as well.
But, the left’s ideology IS all about the spirit of anti-Christ.
Yea, verily yea.
Good article, thanks for posting it.
ping...
“You, my dear, smug Leftists, are able to boast in self-aggrandizing tones about your ability to shake down hard-working citizens only because men like Chris Kyle are willing to do the dirty work of keeping both tyrants and anarchy at bay. You’re like the person who dines in style on the steak, but sneeringly describes as a hillbilly the rancher who raised that cow and as a murderer the butcher who got that lovely filet mignon to your table.”
The money shot.
What an incredible post!
I wonder. Does this include rabid liberals?
So very, very true. If you bother to (and can stand to) ask a libtard sometime about tyranny in the world. You'll get an earful of the usual drivel about "the rich" and/or "corporations" or "big oil" or maybe even Zionists. Bet you dollars to donuts though you will not hear anything about the real tyrants and despots in the world. Not one word about North Korea, China, ISIS, Boko Haram, etc.
To libtards, those are not examples evil despots in the world. No, libtards are more concerned with the perceived evils of the groups they've been told to target. (eg. Koch bros, TEA Party, et. al.) Ask a libtard and the likes of Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Pol-Pot, Che...they were all in the past - we're so much more enlightened now! {snort} We don't have dictators nor terrorists, we have heroic freedom fighters with maybe a touch too much zeal. :-/
It is another facet of the libtards' disconnect from reality. There is evil in the world today, here, now. Human nature didn't just change overnight (or in the span of a few years, which is overnight for a species). The Saddam Husseins and Hermann Goerings of the world didn't only occur at other times and in other places. The next one could be your neighbor, the kid delivering your paper, your town's mayor, or even someone elected and serving in DC. You think despots are dumb and would've gotten weeded out? Well some are, but not every one is dumb enough to write a grade-school essay on their plans for ethnic or religious cleansing. Some are only waiting, planning, for their chance...
My point is evil is here now, with us, close by. Always has been always will be until the 2nd coming. Meanwhile, we need to be, or we need to support, men and women like Mr. Kyle who fight for us and our survival. If any libtards out there don't like his tactics, they are welcome to go try their own. Please, get on a plane, fly to one of the areas controlled by these savages and then go tell them - in person - how they need to stop raping, killing, and mutilating people. Let me know how that works out for ya.
Nazis are socialists.
Liberals are socialists.
So Nazis and liberals form two subsets of the same superset. Question is, how big is the intersection between the set “Nazis” and the set “liberals”?
Unfortunately leftists never leave you alone. They can't be bargained with. Every compromise with them is just "a first step" to further tyranny. They can't be reasoned with. They don't care about your rights. They don't care anything about our desire to live our lives as we see fit. And they will not stop until we are either enslaved, or we are killed "resisting arrest" or they are dead.
Opening phrase that triggers intelligent people to skip the review.
Ultimately the intersection is total
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