Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
Let me know if you want in or out
Posted on 02/03/2005 5:38:33 AM PST by Tolik
February 3, 2005
Editor's Note: This section is in honor of our critics—some angry and some not so angry.
Dear Editors,
Victor Davis Hanson, of the far-right Hoover Institution, in his hate-filled diatribe against people he calls "Islamofascists," displays a level of self-delusion, arrogance and willful ignorance that are breathtaking in scope, and deeply disturbing to most Americans ("Why They Hate Us," 1/13/05).
Hanson's silly speculations about "modernism, pathological partnerships" and "infomercials" as the causes of terrorism, are as ridiculous and clueless as they sound. This is simple-minded tripe masquerading as informed political analysis.
The reason "they hate us" is simple. For the past 50 years, our government has had in place a strict foreign policy of torturing and assassinating their leaders, destroying their governments, stealing their oil, occupying their lands and committing other acts of state-sponsored terrorism throughout the Middle East.
Most of these atrocities have been carried out covertly, by various U.S. intelligence organizations, and were ignored or downplayed by an often supportive American Press. (This is the same American Press that is owned by, or allied with, the very same corporations that have been profiting so handsomely from the U.S. government's gruesome, and bloody, foreign policy of domination, subjugation and destruction.)
Thus, most Americans have no idea whatsoever of our government's evil acts. The time to expose these evil acts has come, for they have endangered the lives of all Americans, and the lives of everyone on this planet.
No solution to the problem of terrorism can come until these facts are accounted for, and discussed openly. Hiding them from the American People, and conspiring to keep them a secret, have only served to heighten the danger to the world, and prolong the problem.
And if the U.S. Corporate Press and Federal Government of the United States continue to choose the cowardly path of dishonesty and self-delusion, then the American People themselves must do the job of exposing our government's foreign policy of state-terrorism and imperial land grabs, for a "true patriot must always be willing to protect his country against his government."
The Founding Fathers understood this, Dr. Martin Luther King understood this, and so must we understand this, if our nation is to survive into the next century.
Hanson:
1. Stealing Oil. Since 1973 at least OPEC has adjudicated oil prices without much care what the US does or says. It costs somewhere between $2-3 to pump a barrel of oil in the Middle East; it now sells for about $50. Billions of dollars leave American consumers and end up in the hands of the likes of the Iranian mullahs, the Saudi Royal family and others who are no friends of America. No one has been more critical than I of our prior appeasement of the Mubaraks, Husseins, and Saudi Royals—it is past time to distance ourselves from all of them. Middle East price-gauging hurts most of all the poor of Latin America and Africa who pay through the nose for their imported oil. And the worst wannabe imperialists were the French national oil companies who dealt with an outlaw Saddam Hussein to receive 75% of all the revenues of oil pumped.
2. Violence. Nasser's gassing of Yemenis; Saddam's gassing of Kurds, the Iranian-Iraqi war, the attacks against Israel, Black September, the obliteration of Hama, the dirty war in Algeria, and thousands of others had little to do with America, but millions died nonetheless for religion, tribal honor, land, and a host of other Middle East quarrels that did not involve America. Such are the wages of a region where there is not a single democracy.
3. The Press. Anyone who thinks Ted Koppel, Dan Rather, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Bill Moyers and the hosts of other American journalists and opinion makers are pro-US government or conspire to hide facts from the American people is absolutely stark raving mad. In this age of the Internet and global radio anyone can learn of anything, whether that means watching televised beheadings or collating zillions of proposed conspiracy rants like this puerile letter.
4. 'Occupying Lands' There are far more Arabs who have moved to Europe and the United States to "occupy" Western ground than Americans have moved to the Middle East. The author should ask a basic question: can an Arab Muslim move to Detroit and open a mosque more easily than a Christian visit Riyadh to establish a church? That charge comes right out of bin Laden's infomercials.
5. Like all conspiracists, note the lack of any detail that can be established and supported; the charge is all generalities with boilerplate rhetoric about "corporations," "atrocities," and "domination" and reads like one of those C-span-televised Answer or Moveon.org rallies—sounds immature, half-baked, and full of self-righteous angst.
Cold War support for anti-communist authoritarians was hardly defensible and only then given Stalin's and Mao's 80 million murdered, but it makes absolutely no sense after 1989, and we must begin to support only those regimes that are pledged to democratic reform. The Right is beginning to see that; but the Left just cannot give up its romance. Thus a Castro who killed over 20,000 and is still a dictator will always be better than a thug like Pinochet who killed 4,000 or so and is out of power. The generation of the 1960s is like a deer in the headlights and aging very badly. Thus we hear of Michael Moore's praise for the beheaders and murderers ("Minutemen") who did their best to assassinate and blow up the brave Iraqis who went to the streets to vote in their country's first free elections.
January 24, 2005
The prime reason why the Arabs, or if you prefer, the Islamicists, hate America is because of our unbending, one-sided policy in the matter of the Palestinian-Israeli issue. Ask any Arab you know.
Hanson: Arabs are not the same as Islamicists, a violent minority who distorts Islam for political purposes and hijacks popular anger at failed regimes for their own reactionary purposes. In fact, I ask a lot of Arabs why they don't like America, and they don't tell me that Israel is their problem. In fact, most privately admire the U.S. (thus the millions who wish to visit or live here). They find that anti-Americanism is a vicarious way of expressing angst at their own autocratic Middle East—much safer than demonstrating in Damascus or Tripoli.
Anger over Palestine is a psychological mechanism that diverts attention from the real problems facing Arab society—a failing region due not to Jews or Americans, but to autocracy, gender apartheid, statism, tribalism, corruption, censured media, religious intolerance, polygamy and a host of other pathologies. China, alternatively, no longer blames the United States and its 'running dog' capitalism for its problems because it is successful and self-confident, competing with, rather than scapegoating, the West. Japan is not talking about a lost Manchuria or the Russian-occupied islands, nor is Germany deteriorating because of the Polish "theft" of East Prussia, nor is the Argentine democracy calling for suicide bombers to hit the Falklands.
If the Arab world reformed and prospered (with the aid of billions of petrodollars), it would not fault the Jews but see that the problem of borders could be adjudicated without bombing, anti-Semitic rhetoric, and other pathetic grandstanding. So the Palestinians first must reform, create a humane transparent society and then negotiate as a liberal government with the Israelis, with plenty of women, dissidents, and opposition leaders involved without fear or a rope, bullet, or bomb in their futures. Intifadas and suicide bombers lead nowhere but to global repulsion.
Voting, free media, dissent, religious tolerance, and negotiations might create non-violent opposition to current Israeli policy and a return to near 1967 borders. Unfortunately, there is the suspicion that in such a present lunatic atmosphere a large minority of Palestinians wishes to destroy Israel outright, and the majority either will not or cannot condemn them, while the Arab world on the cheap finds psychological solace in nursing such myths and hurts. Some of us remember the cheering in the streets on the erroneous news that Saddam was sending nerve gas missiles into Tel Aviv to repeat the Holocaust, and the cheering that, despite the efforts of Arafat's street thugs, was seen in Palestine on news that 3,000 Americans were incinerated. What we have seen since 9/11 is very strange in historical terms: an entire Middle East that alone of the world thinks it has singular wounds and grievances that date back centuries, while Asia, Latin America, and Africa try to move ahead with needed reform.
Finally, I think the real problem that the Arab world faces is not anti-Americanism, but a growing anti-Middle Eastern feeling in the West—witness Europe over immigration and Turkey's desire to join the EU. Too many images of masked beheaders, suicide bombers, screaming infantile protestors, fatwas, pot-bellied clerics yelling about "apes and pigs" and conspiracy theories take their toll: after Baathism, pan-Arabism, Nasserism, and now Islamicism, most in the world are shrugging, saying “there is something deeply wrong with all this” and so have turned off.
Bush's real problem is not the Sunni Triangle, but the American public, which finds the Iraqis, like the Egyptians, et al., full of ingratitude for American aid and not worth the effort. Odd that bin Laden grasped this, making himself so odious and his supporters so creepy that most in the West simply think, "What sick society created this demon and how do we distance ourselves from it?" I admire the President's efforts to bring democracy, endure such hatred, and I believe in the Arab people's ability to create a humane society on their own. He is more the humanist than any Michael Moore who couldn’t care less whether the Taliban or Saddam lynched and whipped the innocent.
January 19, 2005
Dear Editor:
We pity Victor Davis Hanson, who claims to be an historian, for his misinterpretation and understanding of the contemporary facts of life, how they are dealt with and influenced by various factors and powers.
Hanson keeps repeating the name of Bin Laden and blaming Islamist fundamentalism in almost every sentence of his article “Islamicists hate us for who we are, not what we do.” Did the respected "historian" review recent historical facts about who was the party that patronized and financed the fundamentalists and the dictatorial regimes that he blames for the conflicts in today's Middle East.
Ben Laden and his Al-Qaeda were raised, trained and financed by no other than U.S. administrations to fight the communists and the U.S.S.R., Saddam Hussein was financed and supported to fight the new Iranian regime that overthrew their puppet dictatorial regime under Shah Muhammad Riza Bahlawi, not to mention the many dictatorial Arab, African, and Central and South American dictatorial regimes supported by the U.S.
Hanson: Who is “we”? Fact: for a time to stop Soviet communism from killing thousands more Afghans and imposing an atheist collectivism that had claimed over 80 million Russian and Chinese civilians in past decades, the United States provided arms to a number of Afghan resistance groups, among them cliques ranging from Islamicists around a young bin Laden to other tribal groups like those under Masood. We supplied about 2% of Saddam’s total arsenal on the dubious premise that it was at war with Iran that had recently stormed the US embassy and through its surrogate Hezbollah murdered Americans. No one has been more critical than I of American realpolitik in the Cold War that backed anti-communists regardless of their odious natures—although I had the luxury also of not being responsible for the security of the United States that was targeted by over 7,000 Soviet warheads. And by the way, are you furious as well that we armed and supplied the Soviet Union in WWII even though we knew Stalin had killed over 30 million of his own? And are you angry that Europe, Russia, and China supplied almost all of Saddam’s weapons? Consider: Greece was furious that we bombed Christian Europeans to save Muslims in Bosnia; Arabs in the Sudan are angry we champion the cause of black Muslims who are subject to a racist genocide; Baathists hated us for saving Muslims in Kuwait; Russians were mad in the 1990s that we asked for accountability in their war against Muslim terrorists in Chechnya; Israelis were puzzled why we gave billions (so far over $50 billion) to Egypt and much as well to Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. So many Americans now simply feel the hatred is deductive and taking on an infantile character. Perhaps next time the mujahideen can stop Milosevic, or get Saddam out of Kuwait, or bring peace to Darfur—such is the growing weariness of the American people with this part of the world.
Hanson without shame wrote: "Israel's West Bank turned out not to be the impoverished, but more often the pampered of the middle class..." The Zionist movement with the help of western colonialism invaded in 1948 and occupied 78% of the land of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine, and in 1967 occupied the remaining 22% plus and over the Syrian Golan Heights and Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, are all of these territories Israeli, or do you indorse the infamous saying: "might is right"?
Hanson: The post-1967 borders are still being adjudicated, with hopes they will find a Sinai like solution. But history is not kind to authoritarian regimes who war with democracies and lose—witness 10% of Germany now inside Poland. The quote is wrong—I was referring to the profile of Hamas suicide-murderers, who, in fact, really are not the poorer of the West Bank. I don’t think the 1947, 56, or 67 wars had much to do with the so-called West Bank (then under Jordanian control) but everything with destroying Israel.
Let me know if you want in or out
If the Arab world reformed and prospered, we would all be better off and violence would probably decrease, but I despair that there will ever be an end to "blaming the Jews."
The left doesn't get this any better than they get the "values" concept. They sure are good at re-writing history and twisting everything. They don't live on the same planet that we do, everything is relative to them, the truth is a lie, up is down, etc.
bump
Looks like the Angry Readers are the ones who display "a level of self-delusion, arrogance and willful ignorance that are breathtaking in scope, and deeply disturbing to most Americans." Anyone who spouts Michael Moore's anti-American propoganda as if it were fact has definitely got a screw loose.
A very good summation of most of the crap that comes from the Left.
"They sure are good at re-writing history and twisting everything"
To thier own detriment. Its like "blowback" in the Intelligence sector.
That whole rant at VDH sounds almost exactly like a rabid leftie that's on a forum I frequest. My leftie and this ranter are really reading from the same little red book (I was about to say "hymnal", then thought better of it).
VDH missed one: Peter Lance, Richard Miniter, and Gerald Posner have all produced evidence that OBL was NOT "funded" by the U.S., and was on his jihad long before we went into Kuwait. This is now beyond dispute, and is another looney left comment.
The sad thing is the leftwing feverswamp actually believes this nonsense. The good news is when their views become know to the general American population they get laughed down.
I used to post against rabid Lefties in other forums myself, but it's just too exasperating when they continue to do exactly what Hansen says in point #5.
BTTT
I like Johnson's "History of the American People." If you want something with slant, Tindall and Shi's "America" used to be considered the "most balanced," but not the newer ed.
Has it really ended anyplace else?
Interesting stuff.
bump and thanks!
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