Useful Fools

Protest Speech

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8 Responses to “Protest Speech”

1. comment number 1 by: IXLNXS
   April 8th, 2004 at 1:49 am
   

   You don’t think they would have done things like this anyways John? And that our inaction sends the wrong message in a country that only respects the rule of an iron fist.

   How to explain.

   Now Japanese still have a very tight sense of honor. What it means. What is demanded.

   Mexicans have machismo. You can insult a mans machismo and his honor demands retribution.

   The people of the regions around the middle easy have always demand fierce brutal rulers. It is what they expect. It is what they respect. Their grandest dreams are to become as powerful and merciless as the leaders ruling them now. To them it is not immoral. Brutal ruthless dictaors are thier rock stars.

   As such the only way they can be dealt with is brutally. With force. Each and every time. Then they will smile and help us because to them the world is starting to look normal again.

2. comment number 2 by: John Moore (Useful Fools)
   April 8th, 2004 at 2:00 am
   

   9,

   You don’t have to lecture me about cultures. My sister-in-law is Japanese and I know a lot about the culture (and you oversimplify it a lot). I’ve also been to Japan (and Korea, and Vietnam, and all sorts of other places).

   My brother and his Japanese wife lived in Saudi Arabia. We know about that culturem too.

   One of my friends is a Saudi who grew up in Beirut. He and I have spent many an hour over coffee discussing these issue.

   Your views are overly simplistic and overly brutal. I think you are letting your anger overcome your logic. Or maybe you are just bloody minded.

   These people have different cultures from ours, but they are still people. It is important to remember both of those facts.

   Oh, and you might want to look a little closer at your generalizations. The Iranian people are desperate for democracy. Turkey has democracy. Not every group over there is the same.

   The Iraqi’s have been brutalized like few others, and yet if you read the Iraqi blogs, you find many who someone managed to maintain their perspective and their humanity and their good instincts in spite of all of this. I suggest you follow their example.

   You may also want to read the latest piece on the blog, which confirms my history of Tet and describes the Tet Syndrome (although not by that name).

3. comment number 3 by: Rhod
   April 8th, 2004 at 5:58 am
   

   The ongoing buffoonery of Senators Byrd and Kennedy, however difficult to watch, is the common intellectual currency of the Democratic Party today. (One has to believe that there is a subdued opposition among the Democrats for this treasonous madness, and that someday we will have justice.) But while our soldiers are engaged in combat, these two trembling degenerates are essentially telling them that their sacrifices are in vain and that they are already defeated. Kerry, much younger but no less depraved in his need for political power is a bit less obvious in comparing Iraq to Vietnam, but he, too, is aiding and comforting Sadr and his gangsters.

   Now, as for Sadr and his remarks, directed at the American people and predicting another Vietnam. How did this uneducated sadistic slob, who never travelled in the West, and whose circle of associates consists of a sweatstained gang of village murderers and religious fanatics compose a statement that sounds like it rolled off the DNC planning table?

   Ignoring the fact that two to six thousand thugs in a country of twenty-five million could never have the tactical or physical capacity to defeat the American military, who counselled Sadr that these remarks would resonate with the American public? It is too obvious, and even someone prone to the Tet Syndrome should be intelligent enough to see through this charade. It is, first of all, an open ADMISSION of Sadr’s weakness, and a propaganda measure designed to make us quit the field rather than do what we must do, which is to vaporize this shuffling lardbag. If we needed any reassurance that we are about to accomplish our mission there, this is it. Second, we need to identify the source of Sadr’s remark. It was prepared by someone else, someone probably in Iran.

4. comment number 4 by: IXLNXS
   April 8th, 2004 at 3:37 pm
   

   Always good chatting at you. Have had this topic on my mind alot most of the day.

   Yes I simplify. In blogs often simpler is better. Then you don’t have to explain what you meant because you assumed the other readers have already read up on as much of this as yourself, myself whoever.

   Yes the Turks. A border city. Trade througout the ages have caused it to take on a less fanatical view of Islam.

   While Iran, which may be filled with people wishing for democracy, I do have two Iranian blogs I keep up with one of which has gone missing for a few weeks which could mean something much more serious than loss of IP access, but they are still ruled by the religious order.

   Many, not all Muslim nations prefer the rule of law provided by the mullahs. They do indeed prefer their rulers to be strong and will not respect anything less. Often strength in a muslim world is displayed in a manner that Americans find horrible, inhumane. Beheadings. Stonings. They have their own sets of laws, and rules. What we could offer them they as a whole are not ready for yet. When we go into these countries and remove the leader, who steps into the vacuum created but someone just as ruthless and vile, in our standards, but in their standards this person shows strength, and a no put up with any camel shit attitude. In our country we would not vote for this person. Nor in many European nations. But there again we have the point being shown that Europians, and America since the majority of it is now the descendents of Europeans. We share similar taste, traits.

   Mark my words. Muslims, the majority of muslims. Those educated outside their countries are not in the majority. The majority will only respect an iron hand leading them, and will require displays of that stregth periodically.

   Did I say I think it’s right? No. I think it sucks. Being the hippy I am I feel we should all get stoned on the beach and love mother earth. Being the realist I am, I understand this isn’t gonna happen. If the US brought in a serious heavy hitter into Iraq. Someone who wouldn’t take any shit. They would try him for weaknesses, and then finding none would be happy, because they feel protected by a strong leader.

   Our way to them, is terrible. It shows no honor. It demands no revenge. It leaves them feeling like Pee Wee Herman is leading the country. When what they want is Hulk Hogan. Yes a simplification, but the fact remains they will not respect anything unless it comes with a force that cannot be questioned. Again this is the majority. The minority are those who could afford to be sent to better schools, to learn there was a world outside of their own, and to be rich enough to travel so as to understand the whole world does not believe as they do.

5. comment number 5 by: Rhod
   April 8th, 2004 at 7:24 pm
   

   IXLNXS:

   I’m am almost sixty years old. I was born before the Baby Boomer launch pad of 1946. I remember the 60’s as an adult. I had two years of college before I stumbled off to Vietnam and finished college in 1971 with a degree in Constitutional Law. And, as a born northeasterner, I lived in the South as a child and young man during the bad old years of Segregation, and witnessed the Civil Rights events on the scene. As a student I spent a lot of time hanging around northeastern cities.

   With my location, so to speak, in the generational stream, and my Forest Gump-like presence in most of the seminal events of those years, I was able to see a strange ideation developing in people only a few years younger than I was. It seem to crawl out of the beret, goatee and beaded curtain terrain of the coastal coffee houses. It was the “Progressive” set of ideas of novelists and poets like Kerouac and Ginzburg and Furlinghetti and Dos Passos, all tied up with a 1930’s mix of Marxism and social management that attracted the dark and confused political thinkers of that era. Those who fashioned the foundation for the New Left. It was this tangled mix of impressions, ideas and myths that hippies used to fashion a world view.

   But the hippy New Left was really the Old Left with some curiously parochial and immovable ideas of their own, which were very similar to the ones they found so contemptible in bourgeois society. One of these contemptible bourgeois ideas was that “negroes” just “weren’t ready” for, or capable of managing full acceptance in white society. Another, among the hippies was a really odd sort of post-activism mentality which was very close to anomie, or acceptance of “what is, man” rather than what could be or should be. It was a malignant type of passivity which, because it was
   hippy-inspired, gained a moral purity that it never really deserved. All justice, all progress, all everything that is good and worthwhile in Western Civilization emerged from effort, from dangerous enterprises, from risk, sacrifice and loss. Among the many things proven by this was the open, and not always passive, events called the Civil Rights Movement.

   You seem to be well meaning but knowingly or not incorporate your equivalent “negroes aren’t ready” viewpoint and apply it to Middle Easterners, and justify it with a passive acceptance of “what is” in the Middle East. Answer a question for me. The political gains accomplished by Ghandi enabled Indo-Europeans to regain control of a well-developed (by then) nearly modern country put together by the ruthless and driving British. But whose lesson do we draw from that? Ghandi’s or the Viceroys? How would Ghandi make out in Falujah?

   To openly state that Middle Easterners are neither capable or desirous of freedom, prosperity, pluralism and a piece of the 21st-century is perilously close to the “negro problem” argument. As a hippy, you ought to noodle on this one for a while. A peaceful Middle East which is at the same time a charnel house, is a permanent rebuke to the immutable values of The West and humanity in general and a terrible threat to us as well.

6. comment number 6 by: IXLNXS
   April 8th, 2004 at 8:30 pm
   

   “The political gains accomplished by Ghandi enabled Indo-Europeans to regain control of a well-developed (by then) nearly modern country put together by the ruthless and driving British. But whose lesson do we draw from that? Ghandi’s or the Viceroys?”

   The Viceroys, but it’s not applicable in this case for simple reasons. Hinduism is a much more accepting religion. Also…

   “How would Ghandi make out in Falujah?”

   He would have died quickly. Because peace lovers don’t do well in that region of the world. Only strength is respected. For him to offer his neck for principles there would have been suicide and nothing more.

7. comment number 7 by: Rob
   April 8th, 2004 at 8:41 pm
   

   I have trouble picturing democracy in the middle east.The problem is their willingness to put the church in charge of the state.In their world the imam rules over everything.These imams are not buying the seperation of government because they want the power for themselves.I don’t know how successful we will be getting them to betray the imam’s wishes.I just hope that our soldiers are given everything they need to complete this most challenging task.The Washington politicians who are playing politics with the war aren’t good enough to kiss the feet of our soldiers.

8. comment number 8 by: Rhod
   April 9th, 2004 at 6:02 am
   

   I have trouble envisioning democracy in the Middle East, too. But I also share Christopher Hitchens view, which is that the type of fundamentalism we see there isn’t just a local phenomenon which begins and ends in the mosque down the street. It is contaminated now by an extra-religious version of fascism, with a world view that extends far beyond the neighborhood.

   You can ignore Islamofascism, but it won’t ignore you. It has a millenarian feature to it now which envisions an end time when all of us are brought under its boot. Periodically in The West we become vain and acquiescent and assured of our superiority and continuity. Even though storms gather around us, some of which have the power to blow us away piece by piece, we comfort ourselves with the old its-a-big-world arguments that tell us there is room for everything, including evil.

   If we persist in seeing Iraq with a jeweler’s eye, and not as a piece of the total struggle, and abandon it with the false comfort of a 19th century EXCUSE for non-intervention, then we deserve what we get. Iraq was imploding BEFORE we landed on the ground. Extremists everywhere in the region were landing in-country to arrange for the use of its resources in the larger struggle against The West.

   Whether it was Bush or not, broad thinkers in his administration, probably the much maligned neocons, took the long view that we associate with Chinese Strategic Planning. The Middle East was rapidly becoming a pile of kindling with the potential to ignite the entire region and beyond. What might seem to be a high price in the short-term would be tiny in comparison to the long-term cost of doing nothing. This is not about local moods and tribal inclinations..power, strength, likes and dislikes or 11th century urges there and 19th century fantasies here.

   This will become clear sooner or later, because what appears to be so awful and urgent today on the television will fade to insignificance when this war really gets going. And this is inevitable.

   And XSLNXS, you answered the imbedded question without answering the charge. Should we do something over there or not. You can describe the local conditions, but is there a future in your view, and what is it?

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