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News :: Miscellaneous |
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PHONY WAR OF WORDS |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sam Smith, The Progressive Review
(No verified email address) |
12 Oct 2001
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The News-Gazette has run several articles by the below-named Michael Kelly, smearing pacifists, while trying to make the claim that only they are opposed to the war. The fact is that many citizens who are not pacifists also oppose this cruel war which does not discriminate between the inooncent and the guilty. Sam Smith names a number of reasons for ANYONE to oppose the war. ML |
As we have noted, a number of pro-regime writers have presented the absurd argument that anyone who is opposed to the war is a pacifist. In fact, those opposed this war seem far better practitioners of realpolitik than their critics. Here are just a few reasons a non-pacifist might oppose the war:
- It will just lead to worse problems including increased guerilla actions.
- It is a war we can't win.
- It is not a just war.
- It is unconstitutional.
- It violates international law including the UN Charter.
- It is wrecking our constitutional system.
- It is a high risk act of mindless machismo
- It is poorly planned by incompetent and corrupt leaders.
- It is giving the nation a mass case of agoraphobia, making us prisoners of our own fears.
- It is a war without defined objectives, a defined enemy, or a definition of victory.
- It is a war we can't win without simultaneously ending our imperial role in the Muslim world.
- It will badly hurt the American economy.
- It is a war premised on the assumption that 6,000 innocent Americans' lives are worth more than the 500,000 innocent Iraqi children's lives lost during the Iraqi embargo.
- It is a war for unstated corrupt ends, including the interests of multinational oil companies.
Those who are labeling as pacifists all critics of the war don't want to deal with such issues. Instead writers for major papers - such as Michael Kelly in the Washington Post and Scott Simon in the Wall Street Journal - create a deceitful dichotomy with some of the most intellectually dishonest arguments of recent times. Hear what Simon - employed by a radio network, NPR (run incidentally by a former top government propaganda official) - has to say on the topic:
"And what price would those who urge reconciliation today pay for peace? Should Americans impose a unitary religious state, throw women out of school and work, and rob other religious groups of their rights, so that we have the kind of society the attackers accept? Do pacifists really want to live in the kind of world that the terrorists who hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon would make?"
This is not only logically faulty, it is slime of the sort one heard from the McCarthyites and other right-wingers of the 1950s. Only now it is pushed by postmodern post-liberals brought up on the idea that anything can be justified as long as one is in power.
Others, wishing to retain at least visiting rights to reality, should not be intimidated by such agitprop. The very indecency of the argument illuminates the failure of the case. |
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