Posted on 02/17/2003 8:10:26 AM PST by aculeus
The Green Party putatively was organized to save the environment by destroying the human race. Its founder, Herbert Marcuse, a Comintern operative and guru of the Black Panthers and other terrorist groups, had other plans in mind. A "refugee" from Nazism, he helped establish the neo-Marxist, neo-Freudian Frankfurt School as a major destructive force on religion, education, morality and all that makes for Judeo-Christian culture. Returning to Germany, he gathered together the tattered remnants of the Communist Party, gave them an "environmentalist" mask -- and presto-change-o gave us the Green Party. In time the Greens moved to the United States to protect the tsetse fly and the anopheles mosquito from capitalism.
Thank the Green Party for having helped defeat Al Gore in 2000. But since then, along with Democratic leftists and other usual suspects, it has been shouting mightily against "pre-emptive action" by the United States to scotch the Iraqi snake. But the Green Party counts on short memories. In 2000 it crowned Ralph Nader, the noted "consumer advocate" and most famous of non-Muslim Arab-Americans, its presidential nominee, and he too roared against pre-emption.
But back in 1977, Nader had different views. Interviewed by New York City's Village Voice in its April 4, 1977, issue, he defended violence in words he now would probably like the country to forget. "What activists [attacking nuclear reactors] are trying to do is make new law based on the settled Anglo-Saxon tradition of self-defense," Nader said. "That is, if someone tries to break into your house you can retaliate lawfully. In the case of a nuclear reactor, the self-defense is projective. But what are you going to do: Wait until radioactivity is all over the place? Shouldn't you destroy property before it destroys you? Here you are violating a minor law to get judgment on a more important one."
Now let's not get into side arguments. Nuclear reactors do not spew radioactivity all over the place. That's just one of environmentalism's standard fictions. Some 80 percent of France's energy generation is nuclear, but its people aren't dying like flies. What is interesting in the context of today's debate is that Nader was defending terrorist pre-emptive action by a small group of malcontents, yet he deplores such action by the president of the United States to prevent a nuclear and/or biological holocaust.
What Nader, the Green Party and much of the Democratic leadership are telling us is that however sure we may be that Saddam Hussein has an arsenal of biological mass-destructive weapons -- and is reaching toward nuclear capability -- we should not act until anthrax, smallpox and radiation are "all over the place." That kind of thinking was good enough for Neville Chamberlain back in the 1930s -- but the world suffered tragedy and death from his delusions. Saddam is not yet Adolf Hitler, but weapons of mass destruction in his hands should be enough to keep us awake.
Precisely what is "pre-emptive action"? President Franklin D. Roosevelt may have said "again and again and again" that he would not send American boys into battle, but the fact, as all the now-available documents show, is that the United States already was "pre-emptively" at war with Nazi Germany before Pearl Harbor. As the U.S. Navy sank German U-boats and U.S. materiel poured into Britain and the U.S.S.R., only a declaration of war was lacking. Fearful of the America First Committee, FDR talked peace, but so far President George W. Bush has shown more honesty and courage.
The Green Party and the Daschle-Kerry wing of the Democratic Party are hardly as powerful as the America First movement. But given the ability of television and the dominantly left-wing press to turn up the decibels and thwart the public will, much time has been lost as a handful of "investigators" lifted up each rock in Iraq.
The U.N. Security Council's Resolution 1441 was not meant to arrive at facts. It was an attempt to stall action and to protect the U.N.'s gluteus maximus. Had the Security Council failed to act it would have demonstrated that it was as irrelevant and impotent as the League of Nations when it ran away from halting Benito Mussolini's rape of Ethiopia.
The purpose of the U.N. was supposed to be to prevent wars, even if it had to act "pre-emptively" -- and not to interfere in the internal affairs of member nations. Since one of the major instigators of the international body was the Soviet Union, it was not conceived as a vehicle to ensure human and/or democratic rights. It could work to get the lion to lie down with the lamb, not to tell lamb or lion what they should have for dinner.
Certainly not Roosevelt, not Josef Stalin, not Winston Churchill and not Chiang Kai-shek expected the United Nations to become the agency toward which it now is deliberately moving. In the interest of blocking rampant aggression, the United Nations may or may not act. But nowhere in the charter, or in the intent of those who wrote it, was a sovereign nation to be prevented from taking that role unto itself, pre-emptively or after the fact. The United Nations did not say "boo" when the Soviet Union, in its own interests, absorbed the Baltic states and took over Eastern Europe. On what moral or legal ground then can it claim the right to prevent the United States from acting in the Middle East as the U.N. should be acting to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction?
Ralph de Toledano is the dean of Washington columnists and a frequent writer for Insight magazine.
But back in 1977, Nader had different views. Interviewed by New York City's Village Voice in its April 4, 1977, issue, he defended violence in words he now would probably like the country to forget. "What activists [attacking nuclear reactors] are trying to do is make new law based on the settled Anglo-Saxon tradition of self-defense," Nader said. "That is, if someone tries to break into your house you can retaliate lawfully. In the case of a nuclear reactor, the self-defense is projective. But what are you going to do: Wait until radioactivity is all over the place? Shouldn't you destroy property before it destroys you? Here you are violating a minor law to get judgment on a more important one."
One of the weird things that I've started to notice lately, is how people in the green party are actually saying that Neville Chamberlain made the right choice, and they wish he was around today.
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