Lileks writes a scathing column today. Although I generally have found him ironic and sometimes sarcastic, this column is a bit more heated. I don't agree with everything he says, but I find his style amusing and effective.
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Beware the banner over your protest
Wednesday January 22, 2003
James Lileks
Of all the absurdities on display in the Washington rally, one stands out: The organizers supported the massacre at Tiananmen Square. True.
Rally organizer ANSWER is a front for the Workers World Party. Their Web sites reveal them not only as Marxist-Leninists, but utter suck-ups to tyrants everywhere.
Slobo? They love him. North Korea? They blame the United States for famine, and want you, the taxpayer, to pay reparations to every victim of the regime.
Does this mean that all the protesters are Stalinists? No. Stalinist dupes, perhaps, but there's a difference.
There are many good reasons to oppose the war: You're a pacifist, you think we should concentrate on terror cells instead of their sponsoring states, you're French and don't look forward to everyone learning that your company sold car batteries and leg clamps to Saddam's "Persuasion Brigade."
Reasonable people can hold principled objections. It seems odd that we even have to point that out.
The reason it must be pointed out, however, is to remind these well-intentioned souls that their movement is becoming inextricably linked with people who'd volunteer for the Iraqi army if they saw Saddam wearing a "Free Mumia" button. That's the strain that has infected the "peace" movement -- deluded, unfocused, addled by rage and ferociously bitter because the frowsy mass of modern Americans won't join their moral betters and start hating America with their heart, brain, spleen and larynx.
This isn't the blame-America-first crowd. It's the destroy-America-first crowd.
The Democratic Party, in short, has a problem with the anti-war crowd. For every hawkish Joe Lieberman there seem to be two equivocating Tom Daschles, a quisling David Bonior and a blowhard Al Sharpton.
When liberal celebs stammer out a litany of shopworn bleats about the administration's attempt to turn America into a theocratic prison state, people can't help but notice that these buskers and mummers seem unmoved by the horrors of actual prison states.
Who wants to join these dismal souls? They might make you stand up and shout, but so does a bowl of hot soup in your lap. They're amusing fools; harmless, really, inasmuch as nothing they did will stop the war.
They see themselves, as one reporter noted, as the heirs of Paul Wellstone, unsullied by politics, just pure-hearted people making a stand for peace. But Wellstone supported Bill Clinton's war on Iraq in 1998. Wellstone supported a war to oust Milosevic, a murdering thug ANSWER defends on its Web site. You want to ask his acolytes: Would Paul have attended the rally? If so, what does that say about him? If not, what does that say about you?
One more question. If you cannot publicly repudiate people in your ranks who prefer Arafat, Saddam, Slobo and Kim Jong Il to Condi Rice and Colin Powell, why should we trust you with national security?
Sorry, sorry. There we go again, stifling dissent. Apologies, comrades. Ten Hail Lenins in penance.
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James Lileks writes for Newhouse News Service. He can be contacted at james.lileks@newhouse.com.
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