"I Ain´t Playing Your Hate Game No More"

UPDATE/WARNING: This post bears the hallmarks of a raving rant sans mucho humor, but I will leave it as written. If you struggle through it - or even if you don't - please read this excellent piece on American Future. It does a much better job of explaining where I am coming from.

Even better, if you can access the long Paul Berman essay on recent French books that AF links to, do so. His exposé's clarity and brilliance truly puts the icing on the cake. Finally, this classic Dissent Magazine musing (and the others in the Wikipedia entry) by the leftist Berman adds further insight, especially for those on that end of the spectrum.

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As expected (please see my two previous posts on this, here and here) the media today is chock-a-block with outrage pieces on CIA flights, renditions and the obsession with the U.S. lack of perfection. The twist is that they have now realized – I (somewhat fortuitously) hinted at this yesterday when mentioning that the German Interior Minister knew – that the German government was involved and informed. Schröder the swinging and campaigning anti-American was a hypocrite of the first order. Nothing new there. More interesting: not only did journalists here fail to accurately convey the debate in the U.S., they also came up short domestically. Investigating your own government usually ranks quite high in the journalistic creed, but sometimes an obsession sidetracks you. End result: bad reporting across the board.

Down, boy! OK, here are some links with minimal comment. Selection criteria: that they mention the role of the German government and are NOT hysterical (that proved hard.) A cursory search for “CIA, Germany etc.” via Technocrati or Yahoo! results in a lot of moral outrage, characterized by relativism, i.e. jabberwocky that merits no attention. Anyway, I hope you find these posts informative, even if you do not agree with their thrust. There is still hope for reconciliation if all of us chill just a little.

• Over at American Future and David’s Medienkritik, the German government’s role is highlighted. They also link to some mainstream media stories on this, including a couple in English like this piece from Spiegel Online.


• Ripclawe on Narcissistic Views details the strategy of Captain Renault


• That’s it. How pathetic. Feeling like the major odd one out. This tells me something (see below)
  

What can I say? People seem prone to thinking that anyone not accepting their belief that the U.S. has finally been exposed as the main human rights violator in the world, and that President Bush and Secretary Rice are threats to humanity, are deluded. So if a blog belittles this their truism, it is suspect. How upside down things have become! The polarization, as I see it, begins with the absurd accusations vis-à-vis the United States that people like me must then counter. For that effort, we are besieged by Michael Moorists and respond in kind etc. etc.

And all the while, sane criticism of our governments AND manifestations of real injustice get lost in this rabid discourse. And for that we can thank the Crazies. In the U.S., these are the people that hate President Bush enough to say and do just about anything; and in the rest of the world, these are the people that hate the U.S. enough to say and do just about anything. I am not about hate, never have been and never will be.

Real injustice? I just saw the documentary on North Korea mentioned here. You can find it online if you know your bit torrents etc. The suffering will make you cry, and if you then understand that nearly none of the outrage is directed at North Korea, you will feel as deflated as I do.

How very, very sad that people choose to spend ALL of their time on other matters that I then feel obliged to respond to. Even when I try employing some attempt at humor, I can hardly laugh at this alternate reality. It is so disproportionate as to begger belief. Billions across the globe are deprived of basic liberty and security. Yet the baying of these self-righteous folks - who speak for no one but themselves and whose ideal societies would seem to be the bastions of ivory tower intolerance they stew in - is directed elsewhere.

Lewis Carroll and George Orwell realized that people would sink this low...I still cannot really believe it. But it is from these people that I fear authoritarianism, from the people who once tried to relativize Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler. From the leader-yearning fundamentalist elites - who now cannot see the true nature of Bin-Ladenism for all the rotting peat in their murky swamp homes - who claim to care and know what's best for you.

I do NOT fear the elites that believe that the people know what is best for themselves. If you believe in the people you are part of, how could you?

Don't people read their history? Don't they look around the world they live in?

I live in a city that was home to a fascist dictatorship just sixty years ago, and then half of the city had that replaced by a cheap Stalinist imitation. If you read about what those days were like, or how it came to be that way, and you still rave about U.S. fascism, I can only pity you.

My brother has been to North Korea, and my uncle once met the craziest of them all, Kim Il-sung. His son is not much better. I have personally been to the SLORC's antimatter Myanmar/Burma and Communist Laos. Unfortunately, these regimes are not history. They are for real and represent hell on earth.

And if that's too abstract, the latest creeping dictatorships can be found in Venezuela and Russia. If you read about these places or have the chance to visit, you can sense the asphixiation of freedom. These infernos are not figments of anyone's imagination, and when their people are free they will confirm this for today's apologists of fascism.

For now, the only appropriate response would appear to be to not waste any more time, leaving the crazies to wallow in their Wonderland. No more rants concerning their useful idiocy from me. I urge others to resist the temptation as well. Focus on real injustice instead, at home and abroad. That’s the master plan. From here on in.

But when a real danger rears its ugly head, I will be there.

jo


Subjects: Angela Merkel; Germany ; Current Affairs ; Politics; europe; europe us; anti-americanism; anti Americanism; hypocrisy; u.s.; relativism; morality; outrage; human rights; civil liberties; extremism; dictatorship