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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Wednesday, April 14, 2004
14:45 - A little fear of God is a good thing

(top) link
Read this post by Mike of Cold Fury, regarding the true-believing fifth-columners right here within our borders; and then read CapLion's response to it:

I would contend that there are two distinct camps in the anti-war crowd. There are the Berkeley brats and the Evan Maloney interviewees-- mostly amiable leftists against the big bad establishment as it's still the in thing to do among the more bellbottoms than brains crowd. That's fine, I can handle stupid kids doing stupid things, that's more or less a given.

What worries me, though, is the other camp. The organizers. The sympathizers. The people who carry North Korean and Palestinian flags and actually believe that the US should be destroyed, and have for some 20 years of their lives. These people are the price we pay for the 1st Amendment.

I'm glad they exist, in principle. I'm glad we can point to them as they rave and rant about things they've never actually experienced or even have a basic understanding of and say, that's the difference. Those people aren't being dragged off to the gulag for dissent against the government. Our system works better.

However, there must be a line in the sand, when it's no longer free speech and dissent. When it comes to aiding and abetting the enemy, these people have to be removed from society and pay the price of their actions.

. . .

Now, I know some of my readers will balk at the implication that people chanting clever little slogans and waving signs are committing treason and should be put to death because of it. To those people, I'll say this: I would tend to agree with you. However, when those slogans are "Burn America, Burn" and the signs read "War against America is the real war on terror", it's time to draw a line and say this crap stops here.

These people, as I said, are a byproduct of the freedom we all enjoy. 50 years ago, we had a strong society that simply wouldn't tolerate this sort of thing. If a gaggle of morons walked down main street in the 50's waving flags of the Soviet Union, men would have loosened their ties, rolled up their sleeves, and proceeded to whip the snot out of them. The cops, if anything, would likely join them. The local judge, if anything, would probably charge the people getting the snot whipped out of them with inciting a riot or disturbing the peace or some such.

Unfortunately, for all our marvelous advances in technology, medicine and manufacturing, society has been going to hell in a hand cart for the last forty years. Instead of men rolling up their sleeves to deal with such things, we're now forced to stand by the sidelines and grumble, lest we be charged with assault by the justice system that has been so mutilated by soccer moms and trial lawyers, it's possible to sue fast food chains because you're fat or are prone to drop coffee in your lap.

For a parallel perspective, read this article on South Korea and its relationship to North Korea, via InstaPundit; note the changing attitudes among young South Koreans, who have never known war with the North, but who have always known an American military presence. Who do they think is the bigger threat?

Most of the anti-war keyboard commandos here in America today are like these South Korean kids, worshipping an idol of a world that they think may as well exist because they've simply never seen first-hand evidence to the contrary. Most of the hard-core Left here has never lived through a real, home-front-gripping war—or if they have, it was Vietnam, which gave them a legacy of righteous anti-patriotism that something like World War II never would have in a million years. People who grow up learning only the lessons of Vietnam naturally come to believe that the U.S. is at the very least capable of evil as much as it is of good, and that war is fundamentally bad. There's an element of truth in each of these statements—but it's only an element, among others. There are mitigating circumstances. Someone growing up with the lessons of WWII and Vietnam would be able to balance "The U.S. sometimes gets sucked into wars that are cruel and unjust and it shouldn't be involved in" with "The U.S.'s performance in WWII was so valiant as to set it and its allies above any other nation in the history of the world on questions of morality", and "War is bad" with "War sometimes is necessary to remove a greater evil than war".

But without those balancing elements, the positive lessons of America's military history as well as the negative ones, there's only negative energy in these people's brains. They see no concrete, first-hand evidence to counter their condemnations of the thing they have seen America do, and so their frame of reference is fatally imbalanced. Through it, even the good things America does-- good on the scale of WWII, even-- are evil.

These people don't even really "hate America", per se-- or at least, not the principle of America. Press them, and they'll say they're fighting for freedom and for democracy; even the far-Left kooks at least believe that those words should be on their banners, even if their interpretation of them is twisted beyond recognition. Their idea of "freedom" is what Europe has, or aspires to have: freedom from poverty and sickness and envy and war, rather than actual individual liberty—"free beer" rather than "free speech". (The two are mutually exclusive, diametrically opposed concepts, yet they use the same vocabulary, unfortunately.) They're not actually arguing for slavery or for theocracy or for monarchy. At least, not if you force them to explain their reasoning.

What they hate is what they perceive America to have become, or to have refused to become; they're personally affronted that America has not simply ceased to matter as a national entity, that a Roddenberry-esque world government has not risen to benevolent power, with all national governments subservient to it, and with all cultures in the world inviolate from each other and yet coexisting peacefully. They see imbalance of global power as being the culprit for this failure, and since the U.S. is the only superpower left, well—that's gotta come down, man. No matter what kind of destruction of human life and achievement that really entails. It's gotta go.

So any exercise of American military power, seen through the inevitable lens of Vietnam, automatically becomes an act of injustice aimed at preserving American supremacy—bad—and inevitably polluting other cultures with our own—bad. In their minds, any setback to world government (which is seen as the only real guarantor for peace that they can stomach, because for some reason if there's world government, everyone will just be peaceful-- all wars are merely the result of American injustice, after all) is held much higher in importance than any threat to American citizens, much less to American interests, or to the American economy fueled by American corporations.

But it is anti-American to wave the signs that Mike links to. Whatever these people think they're fighting for, whether the America they hold in their minds as the ideal future is real or merely a college kid's juvenile fantasy, they're causing deep damage to this country, now, in the present day, made up of us people. We are America, and if these people think we're the problem, then they're our enemies. So there.

So the question on everyone's tongue is, "At what point does this anti-American rabble-rousing cross the line into prosecutable treason?" It's a question that hasn't needed asking since Vietnam, and even then it never really went anywhere. But at the risk of bringing about the kind of all-out Civil War that I've been suggesting might indeed be in our future, something needs to happen that clearly delineates the answer to that question. To use ugly and cliché language, someone needs to be made an example of. They need to have the fear of God put into them.

If for no other reason than to throw into stark relief just how much people have been getting away with, and how harshly they would have been treated if they'd done their rabble-rousing in any other country. Particularly in one of the dictatorships whose flags they so proudly wave.

We need a new historical context, something for people to use as a yardstick. Right now the only measurement people can make is "how far are we from Vietnam?" We need a new one: "How far are we from WWII?"

Or, as Mike Silverman says in CapLion's comments:

The problem is that most Americans have forgotten what an enemy is...someone you have to kill because otherwise he will kill you.

There was a brief moment after 9/11 when it looked like that would change, but in the end, 9/11 wasn't enough of a shock to the system to change the dominant way the US public thinks, which is basically that as long as "Friends" airs on time and the local mall is full of fun stuff to buy, nobody really cares what radicals (here and overseas) are saying about us.

Our collective sense of context is badly broken, and with it our ability to filter experience. This is what needs to change... and sooner or later, somehow or other, it will.


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