Posted on 02/18/2003 1:42:35 AM PST by nickcarraway
Pacifism only makes sense in a world of pacifists. In a world saturated with evil and tyranny, pacifism is a flashing green light for aggression and an abandonment of the innocent to lunatics.
The opponents of a war against Saddam Hussein say that they are not pacifists. "We are not in favor of doing nothing," they will say. But they are in favor of doing nothing -- that is, nothing effective. Advocating ineffective means of combating evil is the same as doing nothing about it.
Some antiwar protestors recognize the weakness of their position. They see that conceding to Hussein's evil undermines their counsel of passivity and their confidence in disarmament through diplomacy alone. So they have stopped conceding to his evil. This makes their position more coherent -- and more disgraceful.
They are doing violence to the truth in order to buttress their position. They have transformed Saddam Hussein into a pacifist and George Bush into a warmonger. They have assigned good motives to Hussein and bad motives to Bush.
Hussein is benign ("He is no imminent threat," they say) while they assert with equal certainty that crassness is driving George Bush to war. Their generosity of judgment extends to their enemies but not to their friends.
Everything has to be turned upside down for their position to make sense. They must say Bush is a crazy cowboy, then say Saddam Hussein is a man too rational to threaten America. They must fret over Iraq's sovereignty, then tell Bush he must entrust the security of his sovereign country to a pacifist United Nations. They must decry America's greed, then applaud German and French officials up to their eyeballs in business deals with Hussein for altruistic opposition to the war.
They do not trust George Bush -- he is deceiving them about his real intentions, faking up Al Qaeda links, etc. -- but they must trust Saddam Hussein. Their faith in him grows by the day. They are sure he is now cooperating with inspectors, and that he will disarm posthaste. Officials at the U.N. gave him a pat on the head Friday, saying he is making "progress" at coming clean. And then they accused America of fibbing about Hussein's ties to terrorists.
Hussein wouldn't hurt an American, they say, but Bush will hurt Iraqis. Bush is an "imperialist," but Hussein, who has invaded a country, is not.
Ho Chi Minh said that antiwar protestors on the streets of America helped win the Vietnam war for him. Hussein can bank on the same defense. If he wins the war on terror, he can say that he first won it on the streets of the enemy. The enemy didn't want to fight, except against its own leaders.
We are witnessing something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome. Psychologists describe the syndrome as an emotional attachment, "a bond of interdependence between captive and captor that develops when someone threatens your life, deliberates, and doesn't kill you," as one psychology book puts it. "The relief resulting from the removal of the threat of death generates intense feelings of gratitude and fear that combine to make the captive reluctant to display negative feelings toward the captor or terrorist...It is this dynamic, which causes former hostages and abuse survivors to minimize the damage done to them...The victims' need to survive is stronger than his/her impulse to hate the person who has created the dilemma. The victim comes to see the captor as a 'good guy,' even a savior..."
Perhaps the syndrome should be renamed the Baghdad Syndrome. Last weekend's demonstrations make it clear that the antiwar protestors are willing to cast their defenders as captors and their captors as pussycats.
... . Their generosity of judgment extends to their enemies but not to their friends.
Everything has to be turned upside down for their position to make sense....
We are witnessing something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome. Psychologists describe the syndrome as an emotional attachment, "a bond of interdependence between captive and captor that develops when someone threatens your life, ... as one psychology book puts it. "The relief resulting from the removal of the threat of death generates intense feelings of gratitude and fear that combine to make the captive reluctant to display negative feelings toward the captor or terrorist...It is this dynamic, ....The victims' need to survive is stronger than his/her impulse to hate the person who has created the dilemma. The victim comes to see the captor as a 'good guy,' even a savior..."
Perhaps the syndrome should be renamed the Baghdad Syndrome.
Looking at it from another perspective:
Isaiah 5:20 Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
Reduced to its simplist form:
Syndrome = SIN
The sins of Baghdad
The sins of Saddam
Oh gosh, let's not get down on the Germans and the French now....
No it isn't--unless you're a hungry horse. It's merely a series of straw men, each smaller and dryer than the last, lined up and presented as a critique of the antiwar movement.
The mob does not speak for me. Any more than does the War Party. They are flip sides of the same coin and I recongnise them both for what they are---the deadly enemy of all that is good, true and beautiful.
The desperate need to associate anti-interventionist conservatives with the mob indicates a deep insecurity on the part of pro-war conservatives. And you should be insecure.
You are a tiny minority and your antics invigorate your siamese twin--the folks like ANSWER, et al. But once they start wiggling around they will use up your life force.
The citation of the "stockholm sydrome" is accurate---but only to describe the mental state of interventionist conservatives. You are wholly mezmerized by the mob. Just as the Francophobes are wholly absorbed by the French and not by the problem of why the American Administration failed to win the day in the Security Council. Everything is directed towards the Other because you are afraid to examine the vast nothingness of your own position. Both of you are interventionists. Both of you are destroyers. Both of you are progress-mongers.
It appears that the only escape from both of you is what Santayana called "the mental reservation":
"..."Society suffocates liberty merely by existing, and it must exist, and all its members are equally its slaves. The individual may elude the feeling, though not the fact, of subjection to society either by a willing conformity or by a mental reservation....."
Oh gag me.
"We need to teach our kids why social [Leftists] -- including, sometimes, their teachers -- claim that all violence and anger are wrong: It's an expression of hostility toward America itself and an inadequate understanding of sin and the need for justice. And we must make sure that they know why -- in the face of great evil -- getting angry isn't wrong. It's the necessary prologue to justice." --Chuck Colson
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell
Or perhaps this would register better in your mind as thoughtful commentary on the situation:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
Kinda sounding like the gospel according to George Lucas isn't it?
This critique from a champion of irrationality and purple prose.
Yeah... I'm still trying to figure that one out. The only answer I come up with is i.
This is too true. But the thing that is strange, then as now, is that the majority of Americans were not opposed to Vietnam (until the very end, when it was clear that the Government had lost confidence in it) and the majority of Americans are not opposed to Iraq now. Yet somehow the press and the media give the impression that a world-wide but relatively tiny bunch of anarchists, leftists, Islamics and useful idiots represent the population of this country and, for that matter, any country in which they have turned out to do their travelling dog-and-pony show.
I will repeat in paraphrase for the benefit of all what has been said of you before.
Like Blanche DuBois, living at the sufferage of family (and strangers, when family gets too sick of you to want to feed your pathetic carcass), your angst and pathos are beyond our skills. You are suicidal, and because your religious convictions (if they can rightly be called that) prohibit the act of taking your own life, you have chosen to despise and work tirelessly for the destruction of the one nation in all the earth that gave you every possible choice for success in life - because in that endless array of choices in that friendly, affluent society, you never made the right ones and were self destructive.
In other words, if you are a miserable failure, everyone else has to have a miserable life, too, preferably at the end of a foriegn weapon.
I don't hate you so much as pity you anymore, and hope to the Almighty that noone sees your shallow and vicious cries for help as rational thought or dialogue worthy of consideration.
You want to commit suicide, do it on your time, not ours.
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