Faramir
Posts: 1043
Joined: 2/12/2005
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SirWaverider
I to have seen the recentment but not necessarily in the boards.
I didn't mean here at the boards. I mean the kind of hostility I hear articulated by the radical left, and I suspect is secretly held by some more mainstream liberals:
Full Article
quote:
All Federation members and sympathizers, if they have not done so, should loan or purchase Noam Chomsky’s 1969 anti-Vietnam War classic, American Power and the New Mandarins. In this work, Chomsky delineated two strains of anti-war thought: 1) radical strains that repudiated the war on principle for its imperialist assumptions and original stated raison d’etre (all regardless of outcome or level of success) and 2) the pragmatic-practical liberal-bourgeois strains that escalated protest because the war became increasingly unsuccessful, prolonged, expensive, or politically costly. With slight modification, we can apply this model for analyzing the motivations of those who purport to be against war to the present imperial excursion into Iraq.
It is imperative that we not be hoodwinked and fooled by the unprincipled “anti-war” thought of organizations and characters like MoveOn.org and former partisans of Howard Dean and John Kerry. Equally important is the development of immunity to the nonsensical “Support Our Troops” mantra emanating from many center-right, liberal, and establishment left circles. Regardless of personal or familial ties, it is impossible to “support” direct agents and executors of a racist-imperialist war crime.
Consider this:
quote:
The second tendency of Racist Anti-war Thought (RAT, which is what it resembles) is the excessive emphasis placed on American troops, who in the past year have been directly implicated in systematic torture, humiliation of enemy combatants who have surrendered, and activities defined clearly as war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law. The political devolution of sell-out filmmaker Michael Moore, who supported war criminal Wesley Clark for President before becoming a Ralph Nader-baiting partisan automaton for war criminal John Kerry, is a useful lens to examine this second RAT tendency. Moore deserved accolades for including brutal images of US military terror and its Iraqi civilian consequences in his recent film, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Unfortunately, the overarching framework of that film and sell-out filmmaker Moore’s subsequent web site pronouncements and book projects leave much to be desired. Moore, like so many people in the center-right-liberal-establishment-left spectrum, places undue or total emphasis on American troops, but makes little mention of the far higher level of Iraqi civilian casualties and injuries the imperial project has caused at the hands of these very American troops.
I read an atricle at Slate last year where the author pined for the good old days in the 60's when you didn't have to constantly proctect yourself from opprobrium by protesting loyalty "to the troops."
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. It may be a very minor thread in American discourse - I wondered if other folks had gotten the same vibe.
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Resentment Against the Military - 
Profile
- anyway - I would say that for most people, especially the 'liberals' I am familier with, support the troops with full gusto. 
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