Posted on 02/18/2003 12:50:41 PM PST by Lando Lincoln
This was in my inbox this morning, with a .NL tag, which I believe makes it of Dutch origin. There was also a blog URL, which I did not visit.
Hi,
I am sure you get lotsa e-mails about this.
Your essay on war made me sick. This attitude is going to generate
conflict. You are going to actually create more and more enemies. Not only
in the middle east, but in europe and all the intelligent parts of the
world. War on Saddam will bring more war. Not peace or anything.
Extremists will get more likely to plan terrorist attacks. The family of
murderdered people will get more extreme.
Everything you say i 'should face' and everything you call a 'fact' is
highly doubtable. To end the story with a statement that you are a mere
essayist and that this only reflects your opinion should make you remove
all the 'facts' from the story. Furthermore this statement disqualifies
anyone that disagrees with you, so it isn't really possible to discuss it
with you. This completely disqualifies your own argument. Which is a
shame.
Your cowboy mentality can only end with the decimation or utter detruction
of one 'side' in the conflict that is not yet there. To willingly take
that course is exactly as evil as making a terrorist attack. You are
levelling yourself down to the state of a terrorist.
I had hoped the US had learned something from their wars. Europe has
learnt it's lesson in ww2. The US could have learned it in Vietnam.
Apparently they are still as stupid and irrational as before. Go on,
create more suffering, more pain. You can end the problem, but you choose
to perpetuate it. Why?
It makes me sick.
Marius.
Dear Marius.
A few notes for you to consider.
We heard precisely this argument, in the same bleating tone, from people opposed to the action in Afghanistan. We heard claims stating that 10 million Afghans would be killed. We heard of the Arab Street rising in a sea of fire. We heard of a Vietnam-style quagmire. I am convinced that had I written this essay before the Afghan conflict was resolved, I would have received an identical letter from you and people like you.
The FACT of that engagement is that Afghans cheered US troops in Kabul. The FACT is that women are no longer executed in football stadiums. The FACT is that people can dance and listen to music and watch television without fear of beatings, arrest and torture. The FACT is that Afghan women, many of them doctors and lawyers, are no longer prisoners of their house, requiring male escorts so that they can glimpse daylight from the confines of their mobile shrouds of shame and isolation. The FACT is that the vaunted Arab Street, the legions of enraged Holy Warriors that would arise in the millions and bring ruin to us all, decided not to show up for the party. The FACT is that in a domination-based culture, strength is respected and conciliation seen as weakness. Those are the undeniable FACTS of Afghanistan.
I am not going to debate any further the reasons for this Iraqi action with the likes of people like you. You are sickened? Well, I and many of my countrymen are sickened also. We are sickened by your moral corruption, your ethical cowardice, your intellectual dishonesty, and your smug, fawning, diseased inability to judge right from wrong, or even make ANY decision of any weight or consequence whatsoever.
You talk about Europeans learning the lessons of WWII. Your have learned precisely NOTHING from World War II, a conflict that cost many, many AMERICAN lives in the liberation of the Netherlands, Belgium and France, more American gravestones than you could visit in the rest of your miserable, ungrateful, simpering life.
Every argument you make about us not taking action in Iraq was PRECISELY the same fearful rationalization and a craven, subservient appeasement that we watched during Hitler's ten years of taunting, intimidation and ever-growing confidence that he faced a continent of whimpering fools and cowards who did not have the sense to get out of a burning building.
Furthermore, I should add that we did INDEED learn a lesson in Vietnam, and that lesson is this: When we next commit American troops to action overseas, we had better damn well go there to WIN, and win decisively. The sooner this is accomplished, the sooner the rebuilding can begin. You may look at Japan, Germany and Afghanistan as examples of the overall benefit of this violent, horrible but necessary action, and you may look to impoverished, desperate, modern-day Vietnam as an example of the failure to do so.
A final helpful note to you gutless, whiny European crybabies: Calling us "Cowboys" is a COMPLIMENT to us, understand Marius? That icon of the American frontier represents courage, strength, self-confidence, hard work, sacrifice and ingenuity. I have yet to see legions of the world's people flocking to film after film after film glorifying the noble and magnificent lives of Dutch intellectuals discussing Marxist dogma in their dim, damp basements. Your further reference to us being "idiots" may be statistically challenged by comparing the number of American vs. Dutch Nobel-winning scientists, or patents of invention. I DARE you to do so.
Let me tell you something about life, Marius. Some people do unkind things. We sit in front of computers while people are being tortured to death all around the world. The freedom you have to throw such slander and insults at us was paid for by the blood and treasure of the US, which was the force of liberation of your country during WWII and which paid for its continuing freedom through the hard and cruel shadow conflict of the Cold War. We have come to accept your ingratitude and revisionist lies. We will NOT continue to accept your moral bankruptcy, hypocritical fatuity and self-aggrandizing posturing from preventing us from doing what is right.
Please pass that on to your readers. I'm certain they will understand not a word of it.
Bill Whittle
Yes, the fact that I state that I am an essayist means that it is impossible to disagree with me, therefor the entire argument for invasion, all sixteen pages of it, is invalid.
This is what the pro-appeasement, pro-Saddam, pro-status quo crowd calls an argument. It is the best argument they seem to be able to make. There are armies of people ready to criticize any plan, and ACTION to stop this never-ending agony of deceit, sanctions, inspections, etc. I have heard from quite a few of them. But not one, NOT ONE dares present ANYTHING LIKE a reasonable plan for what to DO about it.
And I am coming to understand why. It takes courage to advocate an unpleasant but necessary action. It takes none at all to come out strongly in favor of flowers, bunnies and kids playing in the sunshine. It shocks our opponents to think that we actually value these things too, that we want the same results of peace and freedom but have seen from hard experience that they cannot simply be WISHED into existence.
The left will rabidly attack the idea that we are going to Iraq for a moral purpose as well as a practical one. For them, for their what is left of their continuing sanity, it HAS to be about oil, money, revenge and whatever other base motivations they can hurl at us.
There is a simple, but obscure reason for this, and my experience over the last few days is leading me to see it more clearly...
We have fact, history, logic and reason on our side. We also have great power, great wealth, great ingenuity and great courage. They have none of these things. All they have is 'compassion.' They see this as trumping all else.
If an argument is made that we ALSO have compassion, that the end result of this violence will be a huge gain in freedom and happiness for the targets of their 'compassion,' then they have nothing. Nothing. All they have is the ruins of Marxism in an ever-more free and prosperous world.
And that scares the living hell out of them.
. . . and the people who promote the fantasy of safety apart from courage and faith, have the nerve to accuse Republicans of demagogery. What's "demagougic" about telling people there is no free lunch?Telling the people that a tax cut on the rich benefits the poor is "demagogery"?
Just read this:
________________________________
We live in interesting times. We face an adversary so mentally shackled, so consumed with hatred and revenge, that their only weapon is Terror. That is their sword. Our shield, is courage.
They want, they need us to be afraid. And some of us are. News reporters, in particular, seem to have bones made of margarine and I suspect their blood looks as pink and watery as watermelon juice. They daily tell us how afraid we are. What they’re really telling us is how afraid they are.
We have -- we here today – have lived our lives more free of fear than any humans in history. No other generation comes even close. We have conquered the diseases that have taken our children from us, slain hunger to the point where the number one health risk to poor Americans is obesity. We have a stable government, a functioning society, and teams of highly trained and magnificently skilled rescuers only three button-pushes away. Fear is not something modern Americans have had to face very often.
And when we are afraid, we seem to fear the most unlikely things: plane crashes and terrorist attacks. Nothing baffles me more than listening to a 340 pound smoker, a person who will drive drunk, without seatbelts, talking about how they are going to die in a commercial jetliner.
Terrorists worry me, but they don’t frighten me. The worst thing they can do is kill me, and despite my best efforts to the contrary, that’s going to happen regardless of what they may scheme and fantasize about.
Terrorism can never, never destroy this nation. They may kill thousands of us, perhaps even take one of our cities – cities they could never build, filled with people they can never be. Perhaps it will be my city. Perhaps it will be me. But if they do, life will go on. Some things are bigger and more important than our own lives. America can survive the loss of a city. America can survive the loss of all her cities. Because our image and idea of America lives in our hearts, and as long as there are Americans alive in the world, America will survive.
But there are people that do scare me – people that scare me very badly indeed, because these people have the power to kill this idea we call America.
We have turned our children’s minds over to certain people who are so bitter and angry, so hateful of the country that gave them birth and safety, that their poison now fills our college campuses and has overrun entire communities. These are not loyal dissenters who rightfully question the policies of our nation, but small and diseased people who cannot understand why their fantasy ideologies are never in vogue, who can see nothing noble or magnificent on their foggy and dim and very close inner horizons. People whose anger and envy have driven them to turn all virtue into an ironic smirk, people who react to strength and morality with the revulsion born of a lifetime of failure and dark plans for revenge on the happy, the confident and the self-reliant.
I fear these people. I hate them. I hate them because they can kill our confidence, corrode our will, poison our history and make us believe we are the base, savage and dismal society they see through their cataracts of failure. These people can kill America. And they are determined to do it if we let them. And the one thing they mock and spit on, the one trait they despise above all others, is the physical and moral courage that they have never known, and that is the leaden nugget of their self-hatred.
There are people – Americans – who would turn this into the Land of the Guilty and the Home of the Terrified. We cannot let them do this. We simply can not.
This is TRUE !
Thanks!
Oh, please, yes, on. Bracing stuff.
These guys have inherited the Colonialist mentality and don't even know it.
I agree wholeheartedly - This is a central point to his essay. I hope everyone caught it!!
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