The Guardian speaks...the left is often wrong about the enemy

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Here's another article (below my comments) from the left's beloved newspaper, the Guardian.

A fairly good history lesson for the "lefties", written by one of the left's few (somewhat) legitimized media, on how the Antiwar folks will side with evil to make their own country wrong.

(The left, in the west especially, NEVER, repeat...NEVER see any good in their own country and that countries way of life).

This is why they are completely impotent to effect change in the hearts and minds of those that they target...the people of their own country.

They seem to think they can hammer the people that love their country with the message that their country is evil (and by implication: the people that love their country are therefore evil, too) and have that message accepted!? This is actually a very good thing!

Led by people educated FAR past their own intelligence, they founder decade after decade and produce nothing positive...protect and nurture NOTHING of value...create nothing life affirming.

They ignore the lessons of history that showed their marxist/trotsky-ist/anarchist ivory tower beliefs have NEVER -- with any society (past the a "commune" or two -- for a while) -- EVER had ANY workable results for the good of mankind...and ANY time, ANYWHERE, EVER.

In addition, they also have conveniently ignored -- and/or denied -- that the greatest atrocities and mass killings, ever committed on a systems people -- their own -- were under two men of their "ilk"...Stalin and Mao.

20+ million were killed in Stalin's purges. 12-15 million in Mao's cultural revolution -- PLUS as many as a 100,000,000 starved to death -- often while being beaten and tortured for hiding the food Mao thought they had. He couldn't imagine that his failed agricultural policies could be such a failure. These two guys made Hitler look like a choir boy.

The irony here, is the intellectuals were the first to die.

They will still write that the US is the "greatest serial killer of all time", or other similar "sentiments".

Maybe if they got their information from somewhere other than that spoon fed by those they let do their thinking for them, they would know the lies they are told and not look like such idiot sycophants.

You may know who their sources are, they are the ones quoted here rather regularly damning the US.

They live in the country that has allowed them unlimited freedom of thought and speech, yet they yearn for a system that -- when actually applied -- always takes those freedoms away...first.

Does this seem a little stupid to anyone other than me??

When you get down to it (other than those at the top and those attempting to get power) the goal of the "rank and file" left is just to "get off" on hatred...self hatred, included.

Unfortunately that hatred (for self and others) blinds them to what the ultimate result would be if they actually got their way...the destruction of freedom, prosperity, and their ability to live free...or at all.

JB

=========

Idealising the other side

Opponents of the Boer war were right, but like today's anti-war crowd, wrong about the enemy

Geoffrey Wheatcroft Friday October 19, 2001 The Guardian

For this newspaper, there's nothing new in accusations of unpatriotic pusillanimity, to which anybody opposing a war or urging restraint is always liable. That's something the Guardian, or Manchester Guardian, learned in the past. A case can always be made for peace, not least now as missiles fall on Afghanistan, and the party of peace has to be sustained by faith in its own virtue, and the hope that it will be vindicated by posterity. It often is.

The trouble is that, even though the peace party may be right about war in general or a particular war, it is all too often wrong about the enemy. Acting on the unspoken principle "their country right or wrong", the liberal left has a fatal tendency to idealise and extenuate the other side. This has happened again and again over the past hundred years, going back to the most dramatic example of all.

Many on the left not only opposed the Vietnam war - who now defends it? - but persuaded themselves that Ho Chi Minh was nothing more than a brave nationalist and agrarian reformer. That was not how it looked to those who spent years in his re-education camps. In 1956, the Manchester Guardian was right to oppose the Suez expedition, but the Daily Express was right about Nasser, rather than his leftwing admirers. He really was a "tinpot dictator", who did no good for the Egyptian people, or the Palestinians either. Even in 1940-41 there were some leftwing pacifists prepared to extenuate Hitler, as Orwell noted at the time.

But then throughout the interwar years it had been liberals and socialists who not only said that the first world war had been an atrocious mass slaughter, which was true, but that Germany had been the victim, which wasn't. Everyone now damns appeasement, but Munich righted a "wrong" which many on the left accepted. HN Brailsford said that "the worst offence" of the postwar settlement "was the subjection of over three million Germans to Czech rule".

He is a warning to us all. Brailsford was a celebrated Manchester Guardian journalist and socialist authority on foreign affairs, who had confidently stated: "It is as certain as anything in politics can be, that the frontiers of our modern national states are finally drawn. My own belief is that there will be no more wars among the six Great Powers." This was written in early 1914.

Most people on the left agreed with Keynes that Germany had been shockingly ill-used by the Versailles treaty. Lowes Dickinson insisted even after the war that Germany had always been a pacific power, and that the culprit in 1914 had been "primitive, barbarous, aggressive" Serbia. Today, few historians would deny that Germany was in fact the aggressor.

But the time when the party of peace was most startlingly right about the war and wrong about the enemy was 100 years ago, during the Boer war. The "pro-Boers" courageously opposed the war, with the Manchester Guardian to the fore under its great owner-editor CP Scott. This required physical well as moral courage. Pro-Boer speakers were attacked by mobs and - an oddly contemporary note - printers entering the paper's office were searched for bombs. Thanks to its opposition, the Manchester Guardian lost about 15% of its circulation.

Those opponents were half right. The question the war asked was not whether Kruger's Transvaal republic had any moral purpose, but whether the British empire did, and radicals were near the mark when they said that the war was being fought to make the rand safe for the gold-mining companies.

Where the peace party was painfully wrong was summed up in their name, pro-Boers. They idolised the Boers as brave nationalists, a people struggling to be free. They were that in their own terms, but the freedom they wanted meant keeping their hands on the gold - and their feet on the necks of the black Africans. The pro-Boers' nemesis came in 1948 when those Afrikaner freedom-fighters took power in South Africa and created the apartheid state.

And today? It is quite hard to idolise or extenuate Osama bin Laden, but some are doing their best. In response to the atrocity of September 11, a false syllogism was proposed: we should attack poverty and injustice because they are "the causes of terrorism", and "the west should take the blame for pushing people in developing countries to the end of their tether". Poverty and injustice should be righted because they are wrong, but they did not breed this latest horror. Bin Laden was brought up in luxury, and his zealous recruits were educated, middle-class men.

Caution is still a valid principle - against the excessive use of American force or Tony Blair's millenarian rhetoric about changing the whole world. And yet history is tragic, human nature is not essentially benign, the Boers were not noble heroes, the Kaiser and Hitler were not much-maligned men pushed to the end of their tether. And Bin Laden and his followers are not Fanon's wretched of the earth avenging injustice, they are bloodthirsty religious maniacs. The world is not as simple - or as lovable - as liberals would sometimes wish.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,576825,00.html

-- Jackson Brown (Jackson_Brown@deja.com), October 19, 2001

Answers

Mr. Brown paints an entire spectrum of thought with a single brush when he says, "(The left, in the west especially, NEVER, repeat...NEVER see any good in their own country and that countries way of life). " This would be funny is he was not so deadly serious. As it is, he is simply wrong.

He concludes with "Unfortunately that hatred (for self and others) blinds them to what the ultimate result would be if they actually got their way...the destruction of freedom, prosperity, and their ability to live free...or at all."

What I "hate" is propaganda, hypocrisy, and the distortion of reality wherever it occurs.

Who EXACTLY are you referring to here, Mr. Brown? Certainly not me or anyone I know. What you are actually doing, is using stereotypes and categories with no specific referents to create empty images in people's heads, much like television does.

I can only speak for myself. I do not consider myself liberal, left, right, or conservative. I refuse to apply or to let others apply any labels to me. Labels are demeaning, usually meaningless, and misrepresent one slice of reality as if it is all of reality.

When I post a comment on this board critical of the U.S., it is almost always in response to a ludicrous piece that has extolled the virtues of the U.S. in utterly propagandistic ways. Much of the material on this Board since 9/11 has been pure propaganda. As I said before, propaganda distorts reality, conceals the truth, and treats everyone with disrespect. It's bullshit, and this article is more of it.

When Mr. Brown says, "They live in the country that has allowed them unlimited freedom of thought and speech, ..." he is again misguided. As a white person I do indeed have a great deal of freedom in the U.S. Historically however, the U.S. has treated blacks, native peoples, and chinese workers (in California last century) horribly.

I wonder how free native americans and blacks feel in this country even today. Or don't they count in your thinking, Mr. Brown?

-- Neil (nmruggles@earthlink.net), October 19, 2001.


I can only speak for myself. I do not consider myself liberal, left, right, or conservative. I refuse to apply or to let others apply any labels to me. Labels are demeaning, usually meaningless, and misrepresent one slice of reality as if it is all of reality.

It seems I must have hit a nerve if you now -- in effect -- include yourself as offended by what I wrote. However, your point about the single brush is very valid. I'll take the responsibility of not being more specific.

Let me put it this way. My comments may or may not apply to others, however they definitely apply to those who label themselves.

In short, I didn't pick the labels, they did.

If the comments I made do not apply to you, they you are not who I am talking about.

You, in fact, say this does not describe you or anyone you know.

If your not familiar with these "movements", I suggest you read their "literature" and their own reports of their own activities. Until you do, you will never understand who and what I am talking about.

BTW - this was not addressed to those who have serious criticisms of the government. If you've read other things I've posted, I have been very clear that I have been critical of specific American policies.

I was speaking of those that ""NEVER see any good in their own country and that countries way of life""

If this doesn't fit -- or come close to -- you, then it wasn't addressing you.

If it does fit you, then your protests here say something else.

I won't waste more time and go into it in detail, but I suggest you re-read your reply in light of what I wrote. You have twisted and misapplied what was written.

Now this does fit those to whom my comments were directed.

JB

-- Jackson Brown (Jackson_Brown@deja.com), October 19, 2001.


Brown, you are a fuxing moron. The good ole US of A is an EMPIRE. And as such, conducts itself with all the immorality of any empire ever concieved. Killing? But of course! That's what we do best!

-- freddie the flagwaver (flag_waving_freddie@rednecks.com), October 20, 2001.

Gee --

I wondered what bugs would scurry about if a few rotten stumps got kicked.

JB

-- Jackson Brown (Jackson_Brown@deja.com), October 20, 2001.


The trouble with this whole page is that there is no definition of left and right. During the Cold War, the american press associated left with communism, and right with capitalism. Now that the cold war is over, the classic defition is reappearing ... especially in Europe. Right means the totalitarianism/military dictatorship/police state end of politics. Left means the anti-totalitarian/anti-megaorganization/pro-democracy end of politics.

The biggest danger of the war against Afghanistan, is if it is used as an excuse for the rise of totalitarianism in the USA. The most dangerous enemy of the USA is the anti-democracy movement now usurping power in Washington. The last time this happened was the McCarthy era fifty years ago...

-- Mark Blaine (ytokca@yahoo.com), October 20, 2001.



Right means the totalitarianism/military dictatorship/police state end of politics. Left means the anti-totalitarian/anti- megaorganization/pro-democracy end of politics.

Give me one example, in any country of any size, where the left had control and that country didn't turn into totalitarianism/military dictatorship/police state ...what you say the right is "about".

The problem with both extremes -- right and left -- is they turn into each other.

You may believe this rhetoric, but history shows it's a lie.

JB

-- Jackson Brown (Jackson_Brown@deja.com), October 20, 2001.


I'll give you an example. Your closest ally in this current war has been many times under a left-wing govt as it is now! Remember Tony Blair? He's head of the British Labour Govt in power in Britain right now.

I agree with Niel - I'm with the anti-ismists!

-- clivus (clivus@attglobal.net), October 20, 2001.


I know your stretching here to make up an example, but "Labour" equals Liberal, not leftist.

Of course you knew that anyway.

Water muddying, are we...hmmmm?

JB

-- Jackson Brown (Jackson_Brown@deja.com), October 20, 2001.


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