Read the following truly shocking piece all the way through, and then try to answer this question:
What the hell has happened to us?
As Obama Advisor Courts Radical Islamists by Agreeing with Them, Obama Administration Cuts Off Funds to Human Rights Monitoring Group
By Barry Rubin
“It has been reliably reported that Mohammad-Reza Ali-Zamani, a 37-year-old Iranian, was sentenced to death on Monday.†There are three things that make this sentence of great significance.
Technorati Tags: Iran, radical Islamism, Obama Administration, Mideast conflict
Did you know that Saudi Arabia owns 90% of the stock in CNN? You can check with Michael Savage on that. It seems it’s always about following the money. Also, I’m sure you read recently about Yale not publishing the Mohammed cartoons? One student said that it had nothing to do with sensibilities, but had to do with large Arab donations. Were you aware that at the Durbin Conference, Obama signed an “agreement” with Egypt to “curtail” freedom of expression? Do you suppose THAT is the reason Yale did not print the cartoons? Media and money, money and media, all connected with a driven agenda to destroy any other religion but Islam. What the hell happened to us? I suppose we will find out when all hell breaks loose in the middle east.
Stepping back a bit…..
Once upon a time (circa 45 years ago), we stood for something as a civilization. We had just fought some incredibly bloody wars – which we could have easily avoided at that time by appeasing/ignoring Japan, Germany, and soon after, North Korea – that affirmed what we stood for. Little things like democracy, religious tolerance, free speech, human rights, etc.
Then, we got involved in a war – largely, if imperfectly, in support of said principles – in a place called Vietnam. This war, like most wars, was not really about “bad guys versus good guys”, but “bad guys versus worse guys”. This kind of ambiguity is difficult for our rather idealistic polity to deal with. At the same time, we were in the midst of a kind of national soul-searching related to a very necessary civil rights movement, which revealed to ourselves and the world that we were not quite as perfect as we liked to believe ourselves to be.
Meanwhile, our allies in SE Asia were terribly corrupt. So much so, that in hindsight, perhaps it would have been best if we had let them fall early on before we got in too deep. But we did not, we chose to stand by them anyway for a variety of reasons, some more noble than others.
Our adversary was incredibly cunning, led by a singular military genious, General Giap. Despite being outgunned by the U.S. in every way that such things were normally measured, he discovered and exploited a new dimension of warfare related to the manipulation of public opinion through mass communications. While we were playing “chess” on a two-dimensional board that represented a clash of arms, our enemy was playing in three dimensions, in which there was also a “clash of perceptions” at play.
In this way, an outright invasion led by a ruthless army of guerrillas, fighting with no moral floor, using child warriors, combatants dressed as civilians, carrying all manner of terrorism (SOUND FAMILIAR???!!), became a “beleagered liberation movement” pitted against a big bad bully imperialist (that would be us). Idealistic young people, attracted to the civil rights movement (for example), and thus filled with self-doubt about the morality of the society in which they lived, were easily co-opted and recruited into supporting this narrative.
And so, our leaders are assumed to be liars (and, being mortal, sometimes they do lie), even as murderous totalitarians bent on self-aggrandizement become folk heroes. Atrocities like Hue are ignored, but the inadvertant civilian casualties (well, not so “inadvertant” when the bad guys are hiding behind them….SOUND FAMILIAR??) are splashed across all of our news media.
As the crowning achievement, a massive defeat of the enemy – the Tet Offensive” – morphs into a ‘victory’ for them in terms of public perceptions at home: the only place it counts. This was incredible.
In the end, even though materially we could have easily won, we walk away, we abandon our ally, we lose. We, who simultaneously defeated Nazi Germany and Japan a scant 30 years before (not even).
Since, per the American narrative, “good guys” are never supposed to “lose”, the only way we can make sense of this to ourselves is to tell ourselves that WE were the bad guys. So, as a political culture, a huge segment of our population, starting with the generation that fought and suffered through that war, passed this narrative down ever since, and it became particularly institutionalized in academia and the media: the organs of thought control. In effect, we have internalized that 2+2=5. White is now black. We have lost our moorings. When you do that, anything can be rationalized.
Self-flaggelation, contempt for anything resembling “patriotism” as this term was understood pre-Vietnam, a highly rationalized form of guilt-fed cowardice then passes for “enlightened” thought… this has even become a perverse kind of “patiotism” in it’s own right!
Fast forward to the present:
This is how someone like Obama can consider themselves as “patriotic” as John McCain. Objectively, this is simply absurd, but what I’ve described above is the dynamic by which he can convince himself of this lie, and how others can readily be persuaded to buy this garbage.
After 40 years of this crap, we don’t know what the hell we stand for anymore.
We have every advantage over our Islamist adversaries….except the one noted above. They know very well what they believe in, and horrendous though it may be (after all, the Nazis and Imperial Japanese were quite sincere in their “beliefs” as well), such naked commitment and confidence is very impressive to someone who believes in NOTHING.
Building on this, our enemy has adopted and fine-tuned General Giap’s tactics, and this is no coincidence. In fact, Yasser Arafat traveled to Hanoi during the late 1960s in order to glean tactics for defeating a materially superior foe. General Giap’s book on such tactics is widely translated and circulated around the Arab world. I am not making this up. What is worse, our enemy today has financial resources with which to pursue these tactics that Ho Chi Minh could have only dreamed of.
Again, we don’t know what we are about, except for being comfortable. We are loathe to make any genuine sacrifices for anything. A little personal illustrative anecdote:
I have a close relative who is a Vietnam-generation woman. A very nice lady, a Republican, even. She has three sons. During the buildup to Gulf War One, her oldest was draft age, and she was simply scared to death that he would wind up being drafted. At one point, she told me in exasperation, in all seriousness, that “…something has to be done about Saddam, but with somebody else’s kid, not mine!” By the way, her father was a Marine during WW2. Just loverly.
In the absense of integrity and values (those are for corny old fuddy duddys, or chumps), money dominates; everyone is for sale. If the object of the game is to have the most toys, why not have a Swiss bank account that the Arabs can dump petrodollars into, if all one has to do for this largesse is beat up on Israel, or make excuses for Islamists? Sure beats working!
THAT is how the hell we got here, Vic.
How do we get out? Keep trying to speak the truth about this everywhere we can, to anyone who will listen. Also, to the extent that the Saudi/Iranian money trail can be exposed, as “Grandma” notes above, this has to be top priority for anyone with the resources to do so. This kind of exposure is like lights to cockroaches, it deflates their “case” in the public eye faster than any amount of logic and reason ever could.
And here in the U.S., we HAVE to make the defeat of Obama in 2012 an absolute priority!!! We cannot abide this stooge in our White House! That doesn’t solve everything – not even close – but this is a BIG problem for us that must be addressed, or things will get MUCH worse (over the next three years, things will get plenty bad enough with this clown in charge – I for one have already written off Afghanistan – four more years beyond that and we really might as well hang it up).
A sound defeat of Obama in 2012 will go a long way, in my view, towards repudiating the whole sick, post-Vietnam ethos that has polluted our society ever since that time. That can mark a genuine beginning for ‘finding our way back’.