American Thinker: When the Left Cares, and When It Doesn'tThe article continues, mentioning Brian DePalma's rewriting of the VietNam and Cambodian tragedies (while making a pretty good living off the movie versions thereof. And also his new movie (just premiered at the Venice Film Festival) of an atrocity in Iraq.Left wing artists love to portray themselves as avatars of compassion, and are often praised by the media and cultural establishment for the humanity their political work supposedly demonstrates. But theirs is a highly selective compassion, often ignoring the victims of the groups they supported.
In 1979 William Shawcross' book Sideshow was published, subtitled "Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia," esentially blaming the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia for Pol Pot's and the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields" slaughter in Cambodia, which claimed the lives of between one and three million Cambodians after the U.S. withdrawal. Shawcross had been an outspoken critic of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. Shawcross, however, is an intellectually honest man, and wrote "Remember: for Cambodia, read Iraq" last March for The UK Times:That's a rather good question, I think. Clearly they don't particularly matter in the grand scheme of things."...horror had engulfed all of Indo-China as a result of the US defeat in 1975.... Given the catastrophe of the communist victories, I have always thought that those like myself who were opposed to the American efforts in Indochina should be very humble.... I still believe the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the correct thing to do - and it was something only the United States could have done. For all the horrors that extremist Sunnis and Shias are inflicting on each other today, the US rid the world of the Pol Pot of the Middle East. So long as the vile Saddam family regime remained in power there was no hope of progress in the region....Fourteen years after 1975 and the Boat People and killing fields, De Palma made a fictional movie about American atrocities against the Vietnamese, and thirty two years later still invokes the anti-war mantras of the seventies, as though many millions had not suffered and died, brutally, because we didn't prevail in Southeast Asia. Where was and is his concern for those people; where is his movie about that, those graphic images?In Indo-China the majority of Western journalists (including myself) believed that the war could not or should not be won. Similarly today, for too many pundits hatred (and it really is that) of Bush and Blair dominates perceptions. Armchair editorialists love to dismiss the US effort in terms of Abu Ghraib or Haditha.
If Iraq collapses, such nihilist killing will spread far wider. As in Cambodia, bloody mass murder is the only alternative to what the US-led coalition is trying to achieve."
Saying you 'care' is one thing. It's easy to 'care'. It's easy to be anti-war - hell, who wants war? I sure don't. I think war's a horrible thing, something to be avoided if at all possible... but not through giving whoever threatens war against you everything they want, even if you don't see a use for it. (After all, who really cared about Viet Nam and Cambodia anyway?)
You see a ghastly calculation performed on the left any more. Yes, it's at least somewhat, slightly acknowledged that Saddam was a bad guy - but his actions, his atrocities have been blamed on the US. And by ignoring all other aspects of the period - the threat from the USSR, the Iran-Iraq war, the tensions in the ME, Afghanistan's fall to the USSR and then descent into chaos when the Russians left, it's possible to paint Saddam as a victim of the eEvile US.
And once you're a victim, you bear no responsibility for your actions and choices. You're absolved of all evil, and painted with a saintly aspect that shields you from criticism.
But - what about the victims of the 'victim'? They're rendered irrelevant. The hundreds upon hundreds of thousands dead under Saddam, the excesses of his rule, the sheer humanitarian disaster that was Saddam's reign (and we won't talk about the ecological disaster caused by draining the swamps those damn rebellious Marsh Arabs lived in) are virtually ignored. A choice is made. They aren't important. What's important is making sure there's no war.
DePalma speaks of using graphic images found on the internet in his film. How many other such graphic images could he have found from Iraq, ones that did not relate to an isolated brutal crime committed by Americans but were of those committed by the Saddam Hussein regime? Might that have offered context? The mass graves, the amputees, the pictures of some of the thousands of dead Kurds in the villages attacked with nerve gas. How many graphic images might DePalma have found of mass executions, beheadings and atrocities committed routinely by Al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgencies?Whenever any story is told, the teller has the choice to slant the story how he sees fit. The events of 9/11, depending on how the teller wants to describe them and what he wants to focus on ban be a story of triumph, or a story of tragedy, with the heroes and villians and victims interchangeable. Think of the saga of Star Wars - told by Darth Vader. Would Luke and the Rebellion be heroes? Or terrorists? All is mutable, all subject to editorial whim. How the story is told depends on the reaction you want to get. And the 'real' story, the facts and events that underlie the narratives, goes unremarked and ignored.Last June the intrepid embedded blogger and former Special Forces soldier Michael Yon posted on his blogsite "Bless the Beasts and Children," about his experience with American and Iraqi troops coming across a lifeless village where the people and even the livestock had been slaughtered by Al Qaeda. Children had been beheaded. The big media has not picked up the story, though Yon even provides photographs. I doubt that DePalma will ever make a movie from those graphic images.
We understand that our troops in Iraq are seeking to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. What we don't seem to understand as well, though Yon and other milbloggers embedded in Iraq do and have reported on it, is that the Iraqi people have also been winning the hearts and minds of our soldiers. The feigned and opportunistic faux compassion of the anti-war left stands in stark contrast to the genuine compassion of the soldiers in Iraq.J.Our soldiers in Iraq, men and women, are many of them hard, as they are trained to be hard. They are armed, and many and probably most will, should the need arise, kill without hesitation or perhaps minimal hesitation. They will aim a weapon at other human beings and pull a trigger.
Yet they will also put their own lives on the line by standing between terrorist killers and their intended Iraqi victims. They will smile at Iraqi children and receive smiles in return. They will see, in Iraqi families, children, mothers, father, and even young Iraqi soldiers, representations of those they have compassion for, and that compassion will and does grow to include those Iraqis, real people. When South Vietnam fell, there was no group of Americans more disheartened and crushed than the Vietnam Vets who clearly understood the horror that had befallen people whom they had come to know, and cared about.
There is more genuine compassion in the average American warrior than in a dozen Hollywood anti-war activists patting each other on the back for their "bravery" in dissenting from a war fought by truly brave men and women enduring hardship and separation from loved ones to protect our freedoms and our civilization, whose fruits are bestowed so lavishly on the likes of Brian DePalma.
Comments (2)
The moral relativism of the Left is not only disingenuous but disgusting. In claiming that 'all acitivities in war are bad' they belie the nature of war as fought for thousands of years. By trying to paint all individuals as bad as the worst of them, they then refuse to criticize the likes of Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro and the man who studied to be a doctor turned torturer, Che Guevara. Yes, Che! turned learning and education aimed at preserving life and twisted his learning to torture and killing. Shame that the Leftists don't bring that up... yet I do not tar all those who study medicine with the brush of Che!, yet such as DePalma feels at easy to brush all soldiers with the acts of one man. Apparently, to this twisted schema, all wars are equal but fighting against the west is makes the enemy better than those upholding the law of nations and seeking to hold despots and tyrants accountable for their actions.
I remember a Leftist at university trying to argue that: 'all wars are unnecessary'. And I simply asked him to name all the unnecessary wars... that was a flummoxing time when I started to bring up nasty little things like the Barbary Wars and War of 1812 and sending volunteers out to fly for China as part of the Flying Tigers... going further back to establish rights required fighting against Kings that thought themselves deific and unaccountable, while the basis of that law was in the accountability. Wars big and wars small, across history and generations... they are all 'equal'? How about when 300 Spartans stood with 1700 Thesbians to derail the forces of an Empire looking to extend its grasp? While they lost the battle, they so embroiled the supply lines and gave Athenians time to counter the shipping of the Persians, that their people were saved and would counter attack for two generations. And win, an Empire toppled because a small contingent fought to lose in a winning concept. The 300, in truth part of a campaign waged effectively by Athens and Sparta, stood as soldiers. David Drake would later bring up the difference to a Roman Officer who would say: 'It is an insult to call me a warrior. We kill warriors. I am a soldier of Rome.'
Yet the lofty Left wishes to toss that away as a world created by 'Dead, White, European Males', while the sources of the idea ranged from Egypt to Persia, through Europe and non-Europeans who invaded Europe to those considered barbarians of far northern climes. Women have played a large part in this, not only in knowledge, as seen in Athens in ancient times and in Byzantium under Justinian, but in knowledge of medicine and healing. And what the Left refuses to acknowledge is that while the situation of women was bad in the West all the way up to pre-industrial times, it was far, far *worse* elsewhere. Stories of Amazons and Valkyries and Berserker women do *not* go back through Arabia or Africa or China: those were European women who would enlist as *men* in armies to fight. Ancient Egypt would also have female Kings, as rarity, but Europe would elevate women to nobility *permanently* and start the long climb out of being secondary in society. That was not some lovely matriarchal nurturing system that no one can point to in sub-saharan africa, that was *in* Europe. The 'DWEM' criticism forgets that the very *rights* that allows one to chastise and demean that history were *fought for* and *won* by those very same 'DWEM's and some large number of women, to boot. That is called 'civilization' and it advances to protect itself against depredation while securing those within it and giving them the widest latitude to secure their safety.
Today we now face a host of enemies that, in our 'enlightened times' we dare not name. Civilization does have limits and boundaries, and those that transgress them, go beyond them, and confront civilization become the enemy of it. Globalization and Transnationalism both fall flat on their faces because neither wants to recognize limits of the power granted to supra-national government, but then have no remedy for those seeking to bring *everything* down. The Left wants everyone to get every right all the time and never, ever, blame the individual for wrongs they willingly and blatantly commit. Unfortunately that is not supporting civilization, that is dissolving it and returning us to a world of self-justification for personal warfare. To warlords and tyrants who rule by the sword. Yet it was those very same 'DWEM's that were able to classify such things, and call them as they were. They had faced the horror of a world run by warlords and despots and created the system of calling them by particular names: banditti, pirate, brigand, corsair, buccaneer, and outlaw.
Outside the protection of the law: outlaw.
They wage predatory warfare, personal warfare, illegitimate warfare and set themselves outside the law and above it as their own law. And by our own ties with England before the Revolution, they would gain a classification: hostis humani generis - enemy of mankind.
That is what the Left wishes to make equal with Nation state based war: those who would tear down civilization and replace it with warlord. Somehow I just do not see 'terrorists' as equal with soldiers fighting under lawful restraint and upholding the law of nations as equal. And if you stand up *for* President Lincoln as the great Emancipator and ender of slavery and good in his outlooks for the Nation, then you will also have to think on how the Armies of the Union operated against those that acted just like terrorists when found by said Armies. As found in the Field Manual 100, 1863 last reprinted in 1898, approved by President Lincoln:
"Art. 82.
Men, or squads of men, who commit hostilities, whether by fighting, or inroads for destruction or plunder, or by raids of any kind, without commission, without being part and portion of the organized hostile army, and without sharing continuously in the war, but who do so with intermitting returns to their homes and avocations, or with the occasional assumption of the semblance of peaceful pursuits, divesting themselves of the character or appearance of soldiers - such men, or squads of men, are not public enemies, and, therefore, if captured, are not entitled to the privileges of prisoners of war, but shall be treated summarily as highway robbers or pirates."
I do stand with Lincoln on that view, and no Treaty has changed this outlook as it addresses illegitimate warfare under the law of nations. And available to each and every President since Lincoln and the power vested in the office via the Constitution.
Posted by ajacksonian | September 9, 2007 8:24 AM
Posted on September 9, 2007 08:24
I think the left is setting itself up for some real problems in the future, by doing what they can right now to screw Bush.
Instapundit says the war's been overlawyered - I think he's right. And it's going to haunt us badly in the future. We've set precedents that will be very hard to ignore.
j.
Posted by JLawson | September 9, 2007 10:02 PM
Posted on September 9, 2007 22:02