Jun
23
Andy McCarthy has a post up at The Corner in which he expresses his belief that Obama is comfortable not engaging in Iran because he shares a common anti-American cause with Ahmedinejad I don’t want to comment on that particular part of his post, it’s too polarising a point that cannot be proven and results in circular arguments. What I did want to comment on though was this particular passage:
The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).
Andrew Sullivan, unsurprisingly takes issue, calling it “seriously unhinged”. But here’s the thing, leaving aside the Obama bit which I admit is subjective and for which the evidence is certainly contestable, the rest of what Andy McCarthy says in that statement is true.
The left were apologists for Stalin and soviet communism; just look at the furore at Nixon’s exposure of Alger Hiss. The Congressional Black Caucus did go to meet Fidel Castro, Bobby Rush found him “endearing”. Bill Ayers thinks that Hugo Chavez is creating something “new and humane”, whilst Sean Penn thinks Chavez is a “great man”. But this is not a new tradition for the left. As I’ve stated in a comment thread, the pre-war progressive left in America idolised Benito Mussolini, who literally knocked heads together to get the trains to run on time. And let us not forget the ubiquitousness of Che Guevara posters, not only in student bedrooms, but on the walls of Obama campaign offices. And then, of course there is the ‘noble’ leftist George Galloway, who not only fawns over Saddam Hussein but acts as an apologist for Ahmedinejad too.
Now before anyone starts shouting at me, I’m well aware that the right have historically reached accommodations with despots too. But I believe there is a difference. For the right, these are pragmatic accommodations, either for foreign policy realpolitik reasons or for economic ones. But the left have a much more idolatrous relationship with dictators. They admire the rigid adherence to socialist doctrine, they empathise with the anti-Israeli and anti-American stance of self-proclaimed anti-Imperialists and they get very excited by despots who profess to be fighting the class struggle, who thumb their noses at global capitalism whilst all the time enjoying the opulence of power. But to admire the perpetrators of despotism means closing ones eyes to the realities, the oppression of the people and this is where the integrity of socialists and liberals falls down. They uniquely claim to represent the downtrodden and oppressed. But this representation is a sham, because when faced with a real world personification of their ideologies and values, the oppressed suddenly become irrelevant, sacrificed to the righteousness of class struggle.
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48 Responses to “The Left’s Comfort with Dictators.”
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Now before anyone starts shouting at me, I’m well aware that the right have historically reached accommodations with despots too
Yep here is a good one:
Rumsfeld & Saddam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTldYbqlJc8
Mr Cabbie,
This is a can of worms.
For example those frothing at the mouth concerning the current Iranian elections probably are unaware, though I did start to write remember here, but then recalled the rightwing singularity of never remembering,
From the 1950s there is Ngo Dinh Diem, US favoured Prime Minister in the South of Viet Nam. Diem, who in 1955 referendum, instigated by by himself asked the people in the south to choose between Bao Dai , the Emperor as to whether he should be President of a “new” Viet Nam or Bao Dai should remain as Emperor.
Voters arriving at polling stations found Diem’s supporters waiting. They, the voters, were told to put the red ballot paper, Diem, into envelopes and throw away the green one, Bao Dai. Those that did not comply were followed and beaten by Diem thugs.
Diem then claimed he had achieved 98.2% of the vote. In Saigon, Diem apparently received more votes than there were registered voters! Following this in 1956 was the refusal to hold election under the Geneva Agreements of 1954. All this backed by the US.
Dear me, this goes with the fact that the Left eat babies too.
Ronnie
Fair’s fair, I never said the left eat babies, just that they ideologically support those that do.
Mr Cabbie,
Delving further into the can of worms.
“I’m well aware that the right have historically reached accommodations with despots too. But I believe there is a difference. For the right, these are pragmatic accommodations, either for foreign policy realpolitik reasons or for economic ones.”
So that makes the accomodaion more of a “noble cause”
The fact that the West, for to be honest it was not just the US, reached accomodations with “our SOBS makes it somehow less heinous.
In an outstanding example, earlier explained to An American. one that had me called an American hater by shockwaver, Pol Pot the mass murderer was supported for fifteen years by the US.
For after creating the conditions that brought Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge to power in 1975 by an illegal bombing campaign that critically destabilised Cambodia and enabled the Khmer Rouge to take power, the US then actively supported this mass murdering force, politically and financially.
By January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pot’s exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support — $85 million from 1980-86 — was revealed 6 years later in correspondence to congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)
In 1980, under US pressure, the World Food Program handed over food worth $12 million to the Thai Army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. According to former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke,’20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerrillas benefited. This aid helped restore the KR to a fighting force, based in Thailand, from which it continued to destabilise Cambodia for more than a decade.
And in 1981, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. The US”, he added, “winked publicly” as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge(KR) through Thailand.”
Then in 1982, the US and China, supported by Singapore, invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was neither a Coalition, nor Democratic, nor a Government, nor in Kampuchea. Rather, it was what the CIA calls a ‘master illusion.’ … Cambodia’s former ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was appointed its nominal head; otherwise little changed. The KR dominated the two “non-communist” members, the Sihanoukists and the Khmer Peoples’ National Liberation Front (KPNLF).
Pragmatic accomodation? Those are weasel words for collaboration in mass murder in the closing years of the 20th C.
You have hit it on the head cabbie, there is a common vein between left-wing politicians and despots and that is the desire for or strict adherence to socialist policies. They are usually both totally uncapitalist in nature, but have dachas and mercs in the garage. In other words, they are hypocrites. They keep for themselves what they deny others. I personally despise them. Hate may be a better word.
mr. mayberley
the point i took from cabbie’s post is that the intelligentsia, press, entertainment community and the rest of the politically elite support base for the democrat party routinely side with leftist despots. and i believe that to be true. you argue a different point having to do with leadership.
by the way, for someone as accurate as you with the facts you have attributed something to me that never happened. i have not called you a hater nor would i and i would be pleased if you refrain from saying so again.
shockwaver,
Here is my proof concernng the term “american hater”
June 15 Bush, Obama and Iran
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy
shockwaver on June 18th, 2009 5:19 am
addressed to me.
“you are well versed in history but you use history in a selective way as a cudgel to bludgeon the U.S. more or less consistently. i do not think america hating is too strong a term for your points of view although i might use a different designation.”
Well OK you did not use the term itself , but in the extract above you concurred very strongly with the American Hater expression that An American used.
So what about Pol Pot?
And then might we say the the GOP, all the biggies Business, Oil, etc tend side with the right wing despots. A long list which I provided way back in the blog.
To name just three who are at the top as as both despots and kleptocrats were Marcos, Mobutu & Soeharto.
Conservative Cabbie,
It would be interesting if everyone would just look at recent history and see who is supporting whom…you’ve nailed it.
The American left loves…adores despots. And I’ll go a little farther than you. Obama is far-left and I believe will do everything in his power to impose his socialist will on Americans…it all goes with the territory.
mr. maberley,
i will not deny what you say about past business and gop support for despots although i do not think they can claim exclusive credit for doing so, either nationally or internationally.
however, the focus of my comment was on a different point dealing with the intelligentsia that you have chosen to sidestep.
shockwaver,
So were my facts wrong concerning your assertion of my being an “american hater”?
Yes you are correct the poor old GOP cannot shoulder all the blame. Much of the support for a number of despots did occur under the Democrats. There was Marcos, Mobutu and the whole sad sorry Viet Nam Farrago, with Kennedy following down Eisenhower’s path. Then LBJ going all the way!
As for sidestepping I aimed my argument to show that the it was not the left that had supported people like Pol Pot.
I will now step back in.
The problem with picking on the centre to left intelligentsia is that they do not actually put or assist the SOBS in power nor do they support them in the physical realms as have been done in supporting the SOBs in areas such as finance, funding, cooperation in military/policing, military training, trade etc. These are apart from the moral support and the arguments by the intelligentia of the right on what a good thing it is to support these despots.
Yes granted the left may give some moral and intellectual support. But they ain’t shipping weapons, other materiel or putting people through The School of The Americas to go back to terrorise, torture and kill their own populations.
mr. maberley
your facts are right. your assertion is wrong. furthermore, if you diagram my sentence you will notice the word strong modifies “term” and not any endorsement of it’s use. so you are wrong on two counts.
i am not into calling people names. i simply noted that your posts seem to selectively disparage the U.S. if pressed i suppose i view you as an America disparager.
don’t we have better things to discuss than this silly stuff? how about cap & trade. it is running under cover of the high profile healthcare bill and is about to pass one of the legislative houses with essentially zero public scrutiny yet its impact on the economy will be enormous.
OT,
You are quite right about the Nomenklatura in the USSR and their replacement the Siloviki in the RFSR.
Here is a wonderful joke, Russian in origin, told about Leonid Brezhnev, himself an avid collector of cars. You may have heard it before, but it bears retelling, I think, for others may not have.
One day Leonid calls his mother , Natalia Denisovna Brezhnev, in Dniprodzerzhynsk in Ukraine and invites her to come to visit him.
So the following day she is picked up and taken to the airport and his personal plane flies her to Moskva.
Natalalia arrives in Moscow and a car conveys her to Brezhnev’s apartments in the Kremlin. They sit down to a wonderful lunch, then after a rest Leonid takes his mother to the Bolshoi to see a ballet. Afterwards they go for supper to a restaurant reserved for Presidium members, Party bosses and Nomenklatura. Leonid tells his mother that tomorrow that will go for out for lunch and an overnight stay at his dacha.
Over dinner at the dacha that night Leonid suggest that his mother might like to go down to the Black Sea Villa at Livadiya, for a day or two. This was the site of the 1945 Yalta Conference.
So in the morning the motorcade sweeps out to to the airport and they are off in Leonid’s personal plane to the Black Sea. Over lunch out on the terrace overlookiong the Black Sea Natalia says to her son. “Leonid, thank you my darling. I am having a such a wonderful time. You have that wonderful apartment in Moskva, the dacha, all these cars and your very own aeroplane. We had a wonderful time at the Bolshoi and the supper with all your friends was wonderful. This Villa is beautiful, the furniture, the artwork and the gardens are all so wonderful”
Then she lowered her voice and said ‘But I am worried Leonid. What will happen if the Communists come?
shockwaver,
OK I will agree with you on a point of semantics, call me a disparager of the US and its leadership in much of its political and military behaviour in its dealing with its own despots and its overseas military adventures.
But I do not disparage the USA a a whole. As I said before, but for which myself I was disparaged, I have relations, friends and acquaintances and at some time co workers who are/were citizens of the US.
I admire much about the US, its contributions to the world in art,music, medicine philosophy, science, technology and many other fields of human endeavour.
Not to forget the major contribution the nation as a whole and its armed forces in particular made in the struggle against the Axis powers in WWII.
“don’t we have better things to discuss than this silly stuff?”
Well Mr Cabbie introduced the topic I believe, I just picked up on it.
Mr Cabbie,
I boggled at Andy McCarthy and this statement ” The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama…”
This just goes to show how far out and out of touch with reality many of the pundits and opionionators on the right have travelled.
And it is good to see that you more or less concur
Hayward
I suppose that depends on how you define “hard left”. Is Obama a died in the wool traditional socialist? No. But he has raised taxes on the rich, not for economic expediency but because it’s “the right thing to do”, he has socialised GM, he’s about as pro-choice as anyone can get, he empowers trade unions at the expense of industry and he adopts a very relativistic approach to foreign policy. Maybe by European standards he isn’t hard left, but by modern American standards he certainly is.
Having said that, I do think much of the rhetoric aimed at Obama is over the top and actually detracts from the real substantive arguments that can and should be used against him. Calling him names is not going to endear the American public to his critics. It didn’t work during the election cycle and I see no evidence that it will work now.
Mr Cabbie,
You put it well, and I have to agree, but if you are using the current President to represent “Hard Left” in US terms, where does that place FDR.
“Calling him names is not going to endear the American public to his critics. ”
But that is what so many of pundits and opinionators do including some of my fellow bloggers on your site. Free speech is a wonderful thing, but so is rationality.
Now I am probably going to be howled down for saying this but could President Obama really be worse than President Bush. For after all when Bush took office he had a surplus and a national debt that was slowly shrinking plus low unemployment and an economy in reasonably good shape. And what is more there had been no really serious attack by any major terrorist organisation on US soil, following the February 1993 attack on the WTC.
I am amused by the Right’s moral relativism here, particularly in Cabbie’s case where it seems to be OK to support despots for profit. A fine case study being the Pinochet regime in Chile.
Is there ever a case for supporting despots anywhere for whatever reason?
Unfashionably, I say no.
Hayward
But everyone plays that game, not just the right. Do I need to say “five deferment Dick” to you
Well of course he could. If he triples the deficit, if he weakens the quality of healthcare by insisting on a public option, if he hedges on international matters like he has done on Iran and did do on Georgia then I think that makes him worse than Bush. As for the question of attacks on US soil, if one blames Bush for 9/11, then is Obama is just as culpable for the spate of “right-wing terrorism” that Israel likes to comment on. Why hasn’t Obama’s FBI prevented it? Your statement also does neglect the USS Cole bombing, which although not on US soil was against US interests and as Obama is only a few months into his Presidency, I’d hardly use the lack of a terrorist incident on his watch as a yardstick for anything.
As for FDR (and LBJ), I think they represent a different time. A time when socialism and governments ability to control the economic cycle were much more accepted than they are today. Yes, by Obama’s standards (so-far), FDR was economically further to the left but that was in an environment of progressivism – even Hoover was probably further to the left than Obama economically. But Americans are in a conservative phase right now, even Clinton had to follow the third way to get elected. If Obama is successful, he may further the cause of liberal progressivism, but if all that is left of an Obama administration is a lot of spending for very little real gain, he could severely damage the progressive cause in America in a long time. After all, if Obama can’t achieve anything with all the political capital and public trust he has been given, what hope anyone else?
Ronnie
Actually I don’t think doing deals with the devil is appropriate for economic reasons or for diplomatically pragmatic reasons. I do think however that there is a difference between supporting a despot as part of a calculation (even if the result of that calculation is wrong) and ignoring the heinous activities of despots for ideological reinforcement reasons. Particularly when as a group the left are so condemnatory of certain aspects of perceived despotism, like Israel in Gaza, Lebanon and The West Bank.
I kind of regret that piece now, more for the way it came out than for my intention in writing it. I was keyed in on Andrew Sullivan’s comment that referring to the lefts obvious relationship with dictators was unhinged. It just isn’t, there is plenty of evidence that they are prepared to reach an accomodation. However, perhaps the post got away from me a little as I wrote it. For example, I should have made the point that there are many on the left who would have nothing to do with dictators, and I should have focused more on the rights relationship and not dismissed it as much as I did.
I still think however, that micro decisions made during a macro conflict like the Cold War, whilst short sighted as they were, are more pardonable than ideological support for vile regimes.
Hayward…no, not heard that one before! Good joke though, thanks
Mr Cabbie,
5DD is a fair cognomen for this was a chickenhawk who in hindsight said that the Viet Nam Farrago was a noble cause but somehow he had better things to do. In other words it was alright for others to be sacrificed but he was not going to put his body on the line. Even you must see that as an example of extreme double standard.
As for that right wing terorism yes by all means hold the current President responsible if he has not made it clear to all Federal Law Enforcemnt Agencies and by analogy to those in each state that they must do their utmost to both find culprits and to prevent futher attacks. And to assist in this with funding and resources.
But you mentioned that you had been a policeman at one stage in a blog, You would be aware of the effort, resources and time it can take to assemble evidence that will be convincing in a court.
Those micro decisions you referred to in your response to Ronnie still amount to a macro in the sense of the plundering of various economies and their resources by those great kleptocrats plus the disappearing/killing/torturing of people who could be named “communists” when many of them were people seeking some sort of representative government even some sort of democracy.
As I said before to shockwaver granted the left may give some moral and intellectual support. But they ain’t shipping weapons and other materiel or putting people through The School of The Americas to go back to terrorise, torture and kill their own populations.
Cabbie.
Regimes that suppress their people are, at the end of the day, all the same. They all end the same way because, however they portray themselves, they are simply groups of thugs who benefit from the control of their captive populations.
They are unpardonable in any sense and supporting them, from whatever perspective makes you an accessory.
Hayward
I’m speaking to the irony of you criticising the ad hominem nature of rightist attacks whilst you do exactly the same over Bush and Cheney. You make very good points when arguing against them over substance but referring to 5DD and Chickenhawks is no different to An American calling Obama a socialist, or Andy McCarthy calling him “hard left”.
Those ‘micro’ decisions may have been ‘macro’ to the populations and governments of the countries involved, but at that time, America’s interests, along with the Soviets, was much bigger than that. It was an unfortunate time but I’m not sure how else America could have prevented soviet influence from sweeping the planet. America had to act to stop it, perhaps those reactions were wrong or too machiavellian and they might very well have been made for reasons of self-enrichment but I still think the underlying reason behind their actions was to stop the spread on international communism.
I was really thinking about prevention, and the time and resources needed to prevent an attack like 9/11, particularly after the parlous state Clinton left the security services, are so much greater when it comes to international rather than domestic terrorism. That is why I think your attack on Bush is unfair on that matter.
You’re final point is one well made.
Mr Cabbie,
So what do you suggest that President Obama do concerning Iran. Is it to invade, well if the Iraq Fiasco was not the cakewalk that it was supposed to have been and do not forget the US$3 trillion and counting all on credit, any invasion of Iran would be close to disasterous, even though it has oil!
As for Georgia think of the Monroe Doctrine Russian version. The US gets hot under the collar about Cuba, which is no threat and Venezuela which is on the other side of the Caribbean. Georgia abuts the RFSR
Hayward
No I don’t think he should invade Iran, but he should have got down off the fence a lot earlier than he did. Bashing protestors heads should not be called “debate”. I would just like to see a bit of moral backbone from him.
As for Georgia, Obama started off by saying “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint” and also “no matter how this war started”. You and Ronnie will probably call it diplomatic nuance, I call it fence-sitting and, unsurprisingly, I don’t approve.
Hayward,
If you were in the streets risking your life for your country’s future…would you be happy with the way Obama has responded to your sacrifice?
I wouldn’t want Obama in a foxhold with me or watching my back if I was being robbed or assaulted…he’s a coward, first class. A real ‘girlie boy’.
Ronnie,
Are you saying that Obama is an accessory to the thugery and murders that are going on in Iran?
If so, I agree. Obama’s lack of courage has emboldened the Iranian regime to come down even harder on the protesters instead of a change of leaders and perhaps somewhere down the line, government.
Obama has finally come through with a few harsh words for the Iranian regime…too little, too late!
Mr Cabbie,
But did he not manage to wangle five deferments saying that “he had better things to do” And chickenhawk has been used as a common descriptor for some time, since the mid 1980s concerning people like that. Those who trumpet about how noble a cause is for others to go off and fight and die in, but not for themselves. Another example of this descriptor which ended up as a joke was.
What do you get when you cross a chicken with a hawk?
A Quayle.
Funny how many of these strange creatures come from the GOP.
An American,
Think back to that CIA coup that removed Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 installed The Shah and his wonderful CIA and Mossad trained SAVAK.
They were all really nice people to be sure. The number of SAVAK’s victims is also difficult to establish. In 1976 Amnesty International, estimated that 25,000 to 100,000 political prisoners were being held in Iran.
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a member of Khomeini’s Revolutionary Council, described how SAVAK agents in 1964 lashed the soles of his feet with electric cable: “The flesh was torn apart, and the bones jutted out. There were multiple fractures.” The agents, he says, also held a knife to his throat for hours, making small nicks and telling him to guess “when the blade might go all the way down and sever my head.”
There are much more gruesome descriptions but I think them unnecessary.
Yes what is going on in Iran is not pleasant but what may be the origin of it?
Hayward,
Why go over old history…it’s the here and now that really matters to Iranians and frankly, Israel and the West, if and when Iran gets their bomb…
An American,
You and many others still do not get it.
Another gteat citizen of the United States George Santayana said
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,”
Which echoes what was sad by a German Ceorge, Georg Friedrich Hegel
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
These aphorisms are trueisms when applied to these situations.
An American,
If you think that the Iranians have frogotten about the coup against Mossadegh and the installation of the US puppet Shah, you need to think again.
An American.
‘Why go over old history…?’
If we don’t understand how we got to where we are, we will never understand where are.
Each day becomes an entirely new event without reason, consequence or any real purpose.
That’s how animals live.
Ronnie/Hayward
Yes, but if we constantly rehash the past for the purposes of scoring political points, we don’t get anywhere.
.
Hayward
Well that says something about how pathetic they are then doesn’t it. We don’t harbour ill will towards the Germans or the Soviets, so what makes them so bloody precious.
Cabbie:
“Well that says something about how pathetic they are then doesn’t it. We don’t harbour ill will towards the Germans or the Soviets, so what makes them so bloody precious.”
Erm……………….
Maybe it’s because the Germans or the Soviets never gave control of our country to a brutal dictator and his US trained secret police service after removing our elected leader?
I’m just guessing at that one.
Then again if events DID happen here in the UK like that l know that a lot of people, me included, would do more than just throw a hissy fit. Of course, that’s just the left winger in me showing empathy, not a popular concept on the right as l recall.
Israel
Well the Germans tried to give control of our country to a dictator didn’t they? Shall we just ignore the thousands of soldiers killed by the Germans, the thousands of civilians killed in the bombing raids. How can you suggest that what the Americans did in Iran is worse than that?
But left wing empathy only seems to go so far. Those bad Americans, those nasty jews – and yet silence on Sri Lanka, silence on Islamic terror (sorry not silence but apologia), silence on Sudan, silence on Rwanda. There’s no such thing as left wing empathy – just a dislike of America and Israel.
Mr Cabbie,
Your take on history is very strange, if you can consider the overthrow of a legitimate leader and his government and the backing of a puppet Shah who then has the CIA and Mossad train the incredibly brutal SAVAK to assist in the removal of opposition and the repression of a population as comparable to WWII.
Prime Minister Mossadech and the people of Iran had not threatened let alone attacked any country. In fact the last time Iran then Persia invaded anyone was at the tail end of the Safavids in the mid 18th C.
As for what you call the silence on Sri Lanka, Sudan and Rwanda you are obviously too involved in US politics.
And as for Islamic terror don’t make me laugh!
Carter started it at the behest of Zbigniew Brzezinski but it was Reagan who really got it going. For this is the man whose gift to the world was those “brave freedom fighters” in Afghanistan. They were trained in camps established and funded jointly by the US, through the CIA then headed by William Casey, the Saudi GID, headed by Prince Turki of the House of Saud, and run by the Pakistan ISI
From Chapter 13“ Buda’s Wagon : a brief history of the car bomb” by Mike Davis.
At Car Bomb U, one of the facilities, they were trained by CIA operatives whose experience came from their “work” in Viet Nam and other parts of Indo China, Central and South America and Europe. How to kill with pipe bombs, car bombs and even camel bombs! This was to enable them to attack the Soviet occupation force in Afghanistan, as the Reagan Administration had determined to turn Afghanistan into a “Viet Nam” for the USSR.
It worked but the ensuing civil war was won by the Taliban. Who then had to be kicked out of power by alliances with some very nasty warlords
And now?
Reagan’s “brave freedom fighters” are the Sunni Wahabi-Salafi “terr’ist” who have taken their skills and training to the Iraq Fiasco and other places.
Read “Blowback” the Chalmers Johnson book and the 2 sequels he has written.
Hayward
And as for Islamic terror don’t make me laugh!
Ah, so the two attacks on the WTC, the bombing of the USS Cole, the attacks in Mumbai this year – they were nothing to do with Islamic terror. That the people who carried out the attacks don’t have the ability to make choices for themselves. I said that the left were apologists for Islamic terror – thankyou for proving my point.
as for Iran vs WWII. – We were subjected to 6 years of war, nightly bombing by the luftwaffe, having thousands of our brave soldiers killed and we don’t hold a grudge against Germany. So why the hell should the Iranians hold a grudge for something that happened almost as long ago.
Cabbie, the difference between the two is THAT THEY DID NOT SUCCEED. If they had do you really think we would have let it go so easily. Some would say that the French are still trying to get us back for Agincourt.
We stopped Hilter taking over our country. We enabled the Shah to take over theirs. Why is it so hard to understand why they would be more than a little upset?
You also seemed to have misread my post. I said it was the left winger in ME showing empathy. Poeple on the left have spoken out on Sudan, on Sri Lanka, on Darfur, on Rwanda and on Islamic terrorism. The thing is that a lot of this doesn’t get the media it deserves. Who do you think the media focus’s on, the muslims who agree with the terrorist acts or those who don’t? How many times did we see the likes of Abu Hamza in the news but nothing from the Council of Muslim Clerics? Which gave the better news soundbites? Do you know just how many times l cringed as another brain dead muppet with a can of Special Brew or Suprt Tennents in his hands was interviewed in Brixton on race issues when the likes of Darcus Howe or Paul Boeteng or Trevor Phillips were available?
When was the last time we saw a major news channel on either side of the Atlantic do a piece on what is happening in the places listed above? We as people can raise our voices but if we are not heard or even worse, hidden from view by news media unwilling to report, what then?
I have no answer to it, prehaps you do.
Israel
Nope – but that is why the blogosphere will work. Because it gives a voice to ordinary people. And if their message is a valuable one, it will get out.
I know you’re a decent guy, I have no doubt that you feel as you describe. There is a lot that I take issue with you on, but I absolutely respect you and your intentions.
Your turn to misread me. Yes we stopped him, but Hitlers actions caused us untold suffering. Just because he wasn’t successful doesn’t mean that our suffering was lessened.
Cabbie:
“We were subjected to 6 years of war, nightly bombing by the luftwaffe, having thousands of our brave soldiers killed and we don’t hold a grudge against Germany. So why the hell should the Iranians hold a grudge for something that happened almost as long ago.”
Bill Hicks: “Well stop bringing up Jesus to me!! I mean, if we’re talking shelf life here.”
“But Bill!! He died for us!!”
Bill Hicks: “I know!! But it was a long time ago!! Forget about it!!”
Our suffering wasn’t lessend that is true, but our country STILL wasn’t given over to a brutal dictator and we DID win. That could be one reason why we do not hold a grudge. Then again, remember that football chant, “Two World Wars and one World Cup”?
Mr Cabbie,
I am not an apologist for the terr’ists and I certainly did not give their initial start in the skills and training needed to become a terr’ist. That was done initially by a Democratic President following the advice of someone who obviously did not know history and failed to think through what the outcomes might be. Blowback in fact!
It was then taken up by with ever increasing enthusiaism by a Republican President, who increased the funding and support. A President, who as I have said before welcomed the mujahadeen leaders to the White House Oval Office then introduced them to the White House Press Corps as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers”
Give us a break, Mr Cabbie, that would be a great comedy sketch , except it was the real President of the USA in his wonderful Great Communicator tones saying that!
Mr Cabbie,
The Left’s Comfort with Dictators is far out weighed by The Right’s Comfort with Dictators. A head count of the SOBs and other such personages given intellectual, financial, material, military, political, trade and worst of all moral support would far outnumber those on the left.
Who, as I have pointed out have not been given any support in the physical realm, possibly some intellectual and moral support misguided at times I will agree.
But not as adamant in its absolute certainty as those on the right and their own SOBs.
Hayward
I agree that that’s a very fair point – the rights relationship with dictators is tough to defend. However, I still think that the left should be held to account for their moral support, particularly when they claim to be so democratic and on the side of the little people.
Mr Cabbie,
Well thank you for that admission.
Moral support from the left still does not equate to the all that support from the right given in the phyical realm to all those SOBS.
For that was what enabled the various SOBs to stay in power, rip of their economy and their people, suppress any attempt at reform, let alone democracy?
Even to the extent of supporting Pol Pot?