Re: Anti-Americans

[TEX <tex@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>]

Wow. Nice article.  It changed a couple of my opinions, honestly.

           Clint "Tex" Payton
       email: tex@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu

On Thu, 27 Sep 2001, Erik wrote:

> The Anti-Americans
> Barry Farber
> Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2001
>
> Pretend you came to me the instant after the attack on America and said,
> "Barry, you remember American students and others taking the side of the
> Communists during the Cold War. You remember how their numbers multiplied
> during the war in Vietnam. You remember how hordes of Americans tried to
> keep freedom from the people of Nicaragua. You remember the candlelight
> vigils for Saddam Hussein's Iraq after the Gulf War and the somewhat more
> confusing redesigned protesters railing against America's role in what they
> call "globalism." Surely you see the never-ending parade of Americans
> praising the murderous dictator Fidel Castro. You even remember Americans
> taking the side of Adolf Hitler before America was drawn into the war.
>
> "Tell me, Barry. Now that you've seen what they did to innocent people in
> New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, do you think there are going to be
> Americans not only blaming America for this, but actually taking the side of
> the terrorists?"
>
> "No," I'd have said. "No, no way!"
>
> And I'd have been wrong.
>
> When the first of those blame-America voices came forward after the attack I
> took notes. The big teach-in at the University of North Carolina calling on
> America to begin by apologizing to the world. Then over to Berkley, Calif.,
> where they were saying things even more hostile to America's behavior and
> intent. I made sure I got the spelling right. I was going to quote them by
> name and organization.
>
> I changed my mind. Quoting a person by name in the public arena imputes a
> standing and a dignity to the person quoted that I refuse to accord to those
> blaming America and "explaining" if not actually excusing the terrorists.
> Even when you assail other people's views most bitterly, you've still
> somehow conferred a touch of collegiality upon them when you mention their
> names. You've thereby turned it all into something like ladies and gentlemen
> at the seminar disagreeing during the session between lunch and cocktails.
>
> This is no forum.
>
> This is war.
>
> I no more care about their names than Marines on Okinawa squinted to see if
> there were nametags on the Japanese soldiers coming at them with bayonets.
> You don't have to mention their names to answer them.
>
> My anger at this new crowd of "Blame America Firsters" is tempered by pity.
> You didn't prance around the wheelchair of the crippled boy in school and
> chant, "Ha, ha, ha. I can run and you can't!" And I don't feel like prancing
> around this new crowd chanting, "Ha, ha, ha. I can THINK and you can't!"
>
> They've got a vitamin missing from their brains. The vitamin is called
> proportionality. The crimes of which they accuse America, even if true -
> which they are mostly, manifestly, not - are dwarfed by the obvious and
> undeniable crimes of the ones they support. And the virtues and good deeds
> of the United States are omitted from their rhetoric as if they were
> obscenities studiously censored by chaperones from a play about to be
> performed on the stage of the Gaffney, S.C., YWCA.
>
> Proportionality is the ability - and the willingness - to distinguish
> morally between the mass murderer and the jaywalker.
>
> "Hitler was an anti-Semite. My butcher is an anti-Semite. Come, let's
> discuss these two anti-Semites."
>
> That's the fragrance of what happens when the glands of proportionality just
> don't pump.
>
> America the "Great Satan," indeed! America, oppressor of Third World masses,
> indeed. America, the despoiler of Palestinian aspirations, indeed.
>
> It's true, in America you can see enough female geography on any billboard
> to excite the heterosexual male. It even takes your gaze off the booze
> advertisements. But you know something? Without attacking the ascetic
> lifestyle of our attackers, let me venture a quiet word for mine.
>
> It occurs to me that the countries that allow sex appeal and alcohol are the
> countries that write the checks for the countries that horsewhip a woman if
> she should show a half-inch of leg above the ankle and confine their legal
> libations to nothing stronger than yak tea.
>
> Is it news to anybody that our developed world PAYS for Third World
> resources? And that the oil-rich satraps of the Near East COLLECT that
> payment? And continue to keep their own people in poverty, oppression,
> ignorance, totalitarian stranglehold and perpetual emotion?
>
> And as for Palestinian aspirations, tell me: If a Palestinian state is so
> important now, why was it never mentioned during all the years when all it
> would have taken to achieve that would have been a stroke of the pen - until
> 1967, when Israel counterattacked and took that West Bank territory from the
> ANTI-PALESTINIAN Jordanians?
>
> Look at America; the country they exult at having wounded so grievously. Can
> you name a country that ever amassed more power and abused it less? Can you
> name a country that ever amassed more wealth and distributed it more fairly?
>
> Can you name another country that was ever attacked by surprise as America
> was in 1941, rallied to defeat both powerful enemies, and wound up with LESS
> land than it had previously? (America gave the Philippines its independence
> after victory in World War II.)
>
> Can you name another country that, after victory, treated its allies and
> enemies alike to massive rehabilitation and rebuilding? Instead of rape and
> plunder we gave Germany and Japan democracy implants. They're both strong
> and prosperous democracies today. And you call that "satanic"?
>
> My cousin Guerney visited Germany and Japan a few decades after the war, saw
> their democracy and prosperity, and came home and said, "I swear, I think we
> LOST World War II and they lied to us!"
>
> Other countries roll over countries when the fortunes of war turn in their
> favor and somehow manage to keep those countries in their portfolios
> forevermore. America restored liberty to every single country we helped
> liberate in World War II. All we asked of them was enough land to bury our
> dead.
>
> Have you forgotten that America had the nuclear bomb exclusively for four
> years beginning in 1945? Had we been so satanically inclined, we could have
> folded up the world and stuck it in our glove compartment with no backtalk
> Instead, we put the bomb away and hit Europe with the Marshall Plan, the
> most generous and expansive program of rebuilding the world has ever seen.
>
> Once America did, indeed, invade a communist country without provocation or
> a declaration of war. Can you name it?
>
> In the 1960s, Yugoslavia was stricken with an earthquake in the south in
> what is now the independent state of Macedonia. The main city, Skopje, was
> devastated. After failing to reach anybody in the terminally confused
> capital of Belgrade, America just went in: troops, doctors, hospitals,
> mobile operating chambers, food, clothing, blankets, medicine.
>
> We've always chased fire engines around the world, bringing aid, comfort,
> hope and help. Still, campuses from Chapel Hill to Berkeley insist WE are
> the ones who have to change our ways.
>
> Funny how the very same people who blame America for Sept. 11 insist that
> NOTHING could have justified the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -
> not Pearl Harbor, not the rape of Nanking, not the death marches, not the
> kamikazes, not the all-out attempt to own Asia and America by violent
> takeover. NOTHING, the line goes, could possibly justify the atomic bombs on
> two Japanese cities.
>
> Apparently, though, there ARE some things that CAN justify the murder of
> 7,000 random Americans and citizens of other countries in New York,
> Washington and Pennsylvania.
>
> Were I to come face to face with those Americans who say it's all America's
> fault and hooray for the courage of the terrorists, I would not shake a fist
> at them or utter an obscenity.
>
> Why use dynamite when insect powder will do?
>
> [Barry Farber's daily radio program is heard on more than 65 stations across
> America on the Talk Radio Network.]
>
>