Posted on 10/04/2001 8:29:29 AM PDT by Pokey78
In here is the key difference between us decent people, of any political stripe (left, right, whatever), and the "peace" activists. Steyn identifies with the humanity and the suffering of those he disagrees with most profoundly; the "peace" freaks can't even feel the anguish of their "allies."
As someone who tries to write, I remain in awe of Steyn's talent.
Here I stop reading...
Your loss. Your profound loss. This is a "print-it-out-and-keep-to-show-the-kids-someday" column.
1. The US were more multilateral. Sign on to Kyoto, pay some reparations, genuflect at Durban, and they won't slaughter our people.When,exactly, did Osama become an environmentalist or an advocate of reparations?
2. The US did not practise cultural hegemony. Imagine the howls from the Left if we attempted to solve this problem by ignoring a little thing called the 1st Amendment and tried by law to suppress or modify the various expressions of our culture. Has the Left checked with Babs Streisand on this one?
3. The disparity of wealth between the rich and poor nations did not exist. Osama bin Laden is not poor. He is a multimillionaire. Therefore, he did not direct the murder of thousands of people because of a resentment born of poverty. Further, the United States cannot eliminate the disparity of wealth. We have the most generous foreign aid programs in the world. We give billions each year to Egypt and the PLO. We were the most siginificant source of aid to Afghanistan. And still we were attacked.
4. World trade is to blame. Hear this, you heathens of the Left. The last time I checked, the dollar was falling in part because the United States has a very significant trade DEFICEIT. For those of you who have not taken an economics course, that means we import a lot more than we export. In other words, we are the principal customer for all those third world economies you bleat about. IT IS ILLOGICAL TO COMPLAIN ABOUT WORLD TRADE AND WEALTH DISPARITY AT THE SAME TIME. WORLD TRADE IS THE CURE FOR WEALTH DISPARITY.
No, as uncomfortable as it may be to the Left, we were not attacked because we failed to heed the "wisdom" of their various causes du jour. So they should immediately cease and desist from using our dead as political fodder.
Osama has told us why we are subject to attack:
1. Our success threatens to undermine the fealty of the Muslim world to his brand of Islam.
2. We support Arab regimes (i.e. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, etc.) with which he disagrees.
3. We support Israel.
4. We "plunder," i.e. buy, Arab oil.
5. We are not Muslims who adhere to his version of Islam.
So, dear members of the Left, unless you are willing to abandon the Arab peoples to a barbarous fudamentalism, to see Israel pushed into the sea, to forgo the purchase of oil from the Middle East (with economic consequences so severe that even your student loans and professorships will not be secure), and perhaps even convert to Osama's form of Islam, get used to it. We have no choice but to find and destroy those who have attacked us.
One of many keepers in this awesome piece.
BTTT. All FReepers should read this tour de force.
Steyn is marvelous.
Churchill once said that "a fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." 911 has made it easy to identify the fanatics--they're the ones that attribute the atrocity to the subject of their obsession. The enviornmentalists blame it on our failure to ratify Kyoto--nevermind that the planning for the attacks predates Bush's announcement of his candidacy. The race baiters (e.g., J Jackson, A Sharpton) blame it on our walking out of the UN's Durban Conference on Racism and yadda yadda yadda. The New Leftists blame it on Amercian Imperialism. Middle East peaceniks see it as the consequence of the breakdown in Isreali-Palestinian negotiations. To these people everything--no matter how horrendous or unrelated--comes back to the only issue that matters to them.
Relatedly, the historian Paul Johnson noted that intellectuals who speak about humanity in the abstract (e.g., Rousseau, Marx, Lenin) almost always treat real human beings with utter contempt and disrespect. The complete lack of empathy for individuals and the elevation of abstract cause over the suffering of real people is just a character trait possessed by collectivists from time immemorial. Stalin said something to the effect that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic. Steyn shouldn't be surprised at the reactions of those people. To expect them to behave any differently is as futile as expecting whales to fly.
Fear in a Handful of Dust
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S. Eliot - The Wasteland
Well worth broad circulation. It's a mixed blessing, but September 11 has limned the differences between right and left rather starkly.
I've no longer any patience with these people. The peaceniks exhibit the ultimate bankruptcy...of their souls.
Exactly.
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