Hi how are you I’m fine let’s get to the meat, the discussion of the weekend anti-war rallies. Or, if you dislike these things: matchbook 102! Imagine if you woke from an operation and discovered that your tumor was gone. You’d think: I suppose that’s a good thing. But. You learned that the hospital might profit from the operation. You learned that the doctor who made the diagnosis had decided to ignore all the other doctors who believed the tumor could be discouraged if everyone protested the tumor in the strongest possible terms, and urged the tumor to relent. How would you feel? You’d be mad. You’d look up at the ceiling of your room and nurse your fury until you came to truly hate that butcher. And when he came by to see how you were doing, you’d have only one logical, sensible thing to say: YOU TOOK IT OUT FOR THE WRONG REASONS. PUT IT BACK!
The other day a variety of people gathered in various cities to say, in essence, put it back. The Movement to Reinstall Saddam commemorated the first anniversary of the Iraq campaign by expressing their outrage at the loss of an ally in the war against America. These people are the fringe of the left; yes. They are the Klan with out the sheets. Worse: they don’t have the inbred moonshine-addled mah-pappy-hated-nigras-an-I-hate-‘em-too dense-as-a-neutron-star stupidity of your average Kluxer. They didn’t come to this level of stupidity naturally. They had to work at it. I’m sure you’ll find in these pictures people who have cool jobs in San Francisco, people who get grants, write code, run the coffee-frother at a funky bookstore, and have no problem marching alongside someone who spells Israel with swastika instead of an S.
Or with this guy (Via LGF; the site has dozens of shots. Judge for yourself.)
That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a traitor. He may be an idiot, a maroon, a 33rd degree moonbat, but he’s still a traitor. That is a man who celebrates the death of Americans (and others) and supports the people who killed them. Oh, sure, he’s nuts. But he fits right in. So what were all these people against, exactly?
A free press in Iraq. Freedom to own a satellite dish. Freedom to vote. A new Constitution that might actually be worth the paper on which it’s printed. Oil revenues going to the people instead of Saddam, or French oligopolies. Freedom to leave the country. Freedom to demonstrate against the people who made it possible for you to demonstrate.
Freedom. More freedom now than before, and yes it comes with peril; it always does, at first. But freedom is either in retreat, or on the advance. These people marched to protest the premature bestowal of freedom by exterior forces. Better the Iraqi people live under the boot for 20 years, and rise up and get slaughtered and rise up again and slaughter those who killed their kin, then have Bush push the FF button and get it over with now. Better they suffer for the right reasons than live better for the wrong ones.
This has nothing to do with Iraq. This is all about the hard left’s worse nightmare. For years they have insisted that every occupant of the White House is a sawdust puppet whose limbs jerk to the strings of International Finance (cough Jews cough) and this satisfies the faithful; the President doesn’t have to be explicitly evil to be inherently evil. He’s the President. Say no more, nudge nudge. But Bushitler is explicitly evil. He attacked Afghanistan for that oil pipeline deal. He attacked Iraq for no reason whatsoever. It’s almost a godsend; finally, a homicidal maniac president who lives up to his advance. And the beauty of it, really, is that you can pinpoint the date when the mask came off. September 12, 2001. For some reason – Gaia knows what – he just decided to crank up the war machine and start killing brown people. Well, at least it’s all in the open now. Put on the old Crosby Stills and Nash albums. Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. It never changes. Us vs. them. Start printing the fliers. Contact the GLBT office in Kabul for a statement of solidarity with the protestors in Paris and London -
Oh come on, they have to have an office. Okay, go down to the Village, get a quote about how ten thousand people will die in Afghanistan, and how she remembers Kabul as a lovely city with a market where her mother went on weekends to buy flowers, whatever. Look, I don’t know why I have to say this - if Bush is defeated in Afghanistan he will be defeated in America, and that means Jesse Helms will not hold up NEA funding from a theater group because it wants to put on a play that says Reagan was Jesus’ HIV positive lover, HELLO, I mean it's symbolic? Focus on the larger issues, people.
An exaggeration, of course, but I always told that the “personal was the political” – a phrase that made my blood run cold. It’s an equation that has the power to weaken both elements. People think that it means the former will trump the latter, but I fear it would be the opposite. All personal beliefs are equal, of course. But some are more equal than others.
Why? Because they have the potential to be better for everyone, once we get rid of the things that hold us all back. In the future – which is right around the corner, better believe it – the machine will be smashed, and we’ll all have freedom in the true sense, which is freedom from people who don’t accept our definition of freedom. They’re stuck on old tight small private definitions, with their freedoms of “property” and freedoms to hold ideas that stand contrary to human progress. Doubleplus ungood thoughtcrime – sorry, sorry, I mean false definitions of freedom that are really about slavery, don’t you see? Slavery to old ideas that keep the new world – which is right around the corner, brother – from coming into being. It’s a world with full employment, and no industry. It’s a world of endless abundance and prosperity, without capitalism. It’s a world that has some Jews, but we’re not sure where they are and anyway they don’t count much anymore. It’s a world where the people of Iraq own the oil, and incidentally nothing runs on oil anymore, because it’s poison. It’s a world where everything in the West is so cool that China is shamed by our example and totally gets out of Tibet. Without a shot. Which would totally annoy the NRA if they knew it was coming, which it is.
Yes indeed. Um-hmm. Once we’ve wrecked the rare society that gave us the freedom to wreck it, true freedom will be ours.
These people want “freedom,” but only for themselves. Freedom to preen. Freedom to flatter themselves that they are somehow committing an act of bravery by Speaking Truth to Power. But they’re speaking Nonsense to Indifference. Pictures of Bush as Hitler sieg-heiling away would get them killed if this was truly the country they insist it is. Nothing will happen to them. They know it. They would be killed for doing this in Saddam’s Iraq, of course; they know that too. Doesn’t matter. Bush is worse than Saddam, in the macro sense. Saddam’s sins are an inconvenient obstacle; hard to defend the fellow, but you have to concentrate on the real villains here, the people who truly threaten progressive transnational peace and solidarity and justice and human rights and –
What? Did we march on the first anniversary of Saddam gassing the Kurds?
I don’t understand the question.
