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January 25, 2006
Thank you for being honest
I attended a dinner up at the Reagan Library this past summer; the guest speaker was Dennis Prager, who told us about his belief that it was deeply dishonest of the Left to claim they oppose the war but support the troops.
Prager offered a rousing stem-winder, one that left me wondering how on Earth anyone could claim to support the troops when saying in essence that they were dying for an immoral cause. He wrote about it, too, and it's well worth revisiting, in light of yesterday's repulsive column in the L.A. Times.
To those who say that giving voice to their opposition to an "illegal war" is the true hallmark of a patriot, well, I agree with Rusty Shackleford when he says that the time for debate in a democracy is before we vote on whether or not to send our troops into battle. Once they've left our shores to implement the will of the People -- carrying out the orders of the Commander in Chief with the assent of the Congress -- the time for such criticism is long past.
Let me be clear: I appreciate Stein's honesty, and I wish all those who claim to "support the troops" while condemning the war they fight were as willing to be forthright. All that being said, I also believe we should as a society condemn them for trying to undermine our GI's fighting spirit, and, in the more extreme cases, for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
When we begin hearing our enemies reciting talking points from the Democratic leadership (or is it the Democratic leadership spouting Al Queda talking points?), I think we've reasonable exceeded the boundaries of acceptable wartime debate.
Laws for punishing sedition and treason exist because at some point, Americans understood that when a state of war exists, the usual rules do not apply.
When critics of the war say they support the troops, but they do not want us to "win," listen to what they are saying. If they don't want American GIs to win, who do they want to emerge victorious from this war?
George Orwell spoke of those pacifists who opposed fighting Hitler as being, in effect, supporters of facism.
Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one.
In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.
Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U.
They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
The similarities are staggering; only the names have changed in the intervening 66 years.
Can anyone really say that the opponents of America's battle against Muslim terrorists are anything other than a fifth column for our enemies, a 21st-century updated version of Lenin's "useful idiots"?
Whether motivated by pacificism, a belief that America is truly the most terrible oppressor in the history of the Earth, or simply by an "anybody-but-Bush" mania, it's time for us to take Orwell's lesson to heart: When confronting evil, one must choose sides. And those who choose poorly must face both the moral implications of that choice, as well as the real-world consequences.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 25, 2006 07:09 AM
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