A sinister trend
We are all, I hope, disgusted, and perhaps grimly amused, at the vile conference convened by Iran's criminal President to "discuss" the Holocaust. Not everyone, however, seems to realize that this is only the last, and not even the worst, of a growing tendency by politicians and rich men to simply refuse the assured conclusions of scholarship and
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As to the conspiracists, what I find most troubling is that they have raised questions that have not been answered. For example, why were both the members of Osama bin Laden's family and the close to 70 Israeli spies arrested in the wake of the attacks quietly gotten out of the country? How was it possible that a passport was found in the rubble when the black boxes from the planes - *all* the planes, mind you! - were never found? Why was a group of Israelis celebrating and filming the twin towers as they fell? Why was the scrap metal from the fallen buildings melted down so quickly, rather than being analyzed to determine what actually stressed it so much? And, most of all, who benefited from these attacks? Not most of us Americans, definitely; not most Israelis; and, most definitely, not most Arabs and Muslims. The overwhelming majority of the people everywhere were shocked by these attacks, but there *were* a few small groups who benefited. Why is it crazy to want to look at such people more closely?
It's also true, unfortunately, that our present government is the most corrupt and power-hungry we have had in years. I do not choose to blindly trust what that government tells me, nor to think what it tells me to think. I do not believe that makes me crazy or foolish, either. Of course, you may disagree.
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I never even heard of half the lies, stupid questions and twisted rewritings of facts you quote as fact; and your response is symptomatic of the very insanity I had written this to denounce. You seem determined to believe the worst crap about your own government, while completely ignoring the existence of real enemies - enemies who have been killing Europeans and Americans at least since the seventies. I am now seriously wondering whether I should advise you to defriend me; I doubt whether, given your bizarre frame of mind, we have anything to say to each other.
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These are my core beliefs. They flow from the fact that I am (1) a Catholic, (2) an American, (3) a woman, and (4) of Irish descent. As a Catholic, I believe we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. It is wrong to have prejudice or hate for *anyone* merely because of their race, sex, religion or lifestyle (assuming that lifestyle hurts no one else.) Any government which bases itself on prejudice of any kind is therefore also wrong. Again as a Catholic and a woman, I believe the role of government is to allow people to live their own lives in freedom and security, and also to help people provide for each other. I think it is true that a society is judged by how it treats its weakest members, and for that reason I do consider myself a socialist/democrat. I'm fairly left wing. But I also believe, as an American, that government is a necessary evil, because power corrupts. Therefore it is important that the power of the government be limited. It is not only our right, but our duty as Americans, to question our government constantly. If what it tells us does not make sense, or if it intrudes on or threatens us, we have both the right and the duty to overthrow it - so said Thomas Jefferson. Finally, as an American *and* as a Catholic, I believe theocracy of any kind - Christian, Muslim, Jewish or an Atheist 'structural theocracy'/cult of personality like Stalin's Russia - is the most harmful and dangerous type of government possible. I believe very strongly in the right to dissent and in the separation of Church and State. Now to the question I did not bring up in the above post-
Iraq. What the *hell* (if you will pardon my language) are we doing there? If the official story is to be believed, we were attacked by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi extremist operating out of Afghanistan. There seems to be no reason to disbelieve that story - didn't we all hear and see bin Laden boasting about the attacks? But,five years later, and the Taliban (my idea of a truly evil theocracy) is again resurgent in that country, and Osama bin Laden is apparently still threatening us. Why? Why attack Iraq, a secular state (however truly awful Saddam Hussein was and is) which had not attacked us and was no threat to us? Our government knew, or should have known, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that there was no alliance with Al Qaida, and that Iraq was no threat to us. We went to war anyway, and hundreds of thousands of innocents are now dead, including about as many Americans as died on 9/11. I still am in shock about 9/11. Most of us are, and most of us would like to know that the people who did it have been brought to justice. But that has not happened. Instead of focusing on capturing bin Laden and stabilising Afghanistan, we are in Iraq. Why should I trust the government that got us into a bloody awful mess like that based on lies?
So that's who I am. That is the thought process that led to the above post. I feel that you have condemned me as an antisemite and a crackpot. That, of course, is your right. I think I would be happy if you defriended me, actually. I don't really feel comfortable as a friend of someone who makes such judgements about me.
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The first thing that struck me - leapt at me - was your complete failure to understand the basics of what I was saying, that is, how I was arranging any possible debate. You did not seem to realize that, in terms of what I had said, of the categories I had set out, of the direction I had taken, your comment would have been the verbal equivalent of a hand grenade. It is not that you presented a re-statement of what I had described, in the plainest possible English, as insanity; so much as that you did not give the least evidence of having noticed that I had done so. If you come into a debate whose basic terms you reject, you have to show that you understand them, and you have to say why you reject them. You did nothing of the sort; you spoke as though what you were saying was a consequential contribution to the whole course of the argument. You brought in notions I had condemned from the word go, without leaving any impression that you even realized I had condemned them, and that in spite of the fact that condemnation of conspiracy theories was pretty much the backbone of my whole entry.
That, after making such an intervention, you should feel hurt and offended because I reacted harshly, only redoubles the impression. If you deny the most basic terms on which another person bases his or her argument, you must at least understand that "them's fighting words". I find it truly frightening that you should expect to be all but patted on the back and welcomed to the party, after making a clear statement that the party does not deserve to exist. You seem to be living at two levels: one in which you can treat with contempt, indeed ignore, the views of others, and another in which you expect to be treated as a friend and a collaborator. This also suggests that your view of what you are allowed to do to others is most unlike your view of what they are allowed to do to you; and that, I hardly have to add, does not suggest sound psychological health.
Your complete inability to understand the terms of others also underlies your bizarre self-display. How long have you been reading this blog, not to realize that I am not impressed by pieces of paper? And on what grounds do you imagine that I should handle you any better only because you happen, for whatever reason, to belong to the Catholic Church? So did Pinochet, for the love of Heaven! We have not mentioned that little matter so long ago that you should have forgotten it.
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What is more, you are uneducated at the most basic level: you never learned to think. That was the second and deeper source of that subtle sense of horror that struck me when I read your comment. Your thinking is not constructive: that is, it is not reason. You do not present theories. You do not debate hypotheses. You just accumulate a series of unrelated questions, not to demonstrate anything - because they don't - but to give yourself leave to deny whatever it is that you wish to deny. That is to say, your thinking faculty is enslaved to your will. That is the procedure of all cranks, piling up grassy knolls upon extra bullets, not because they prove anything, but because they want to believe that "the truth has not been said".
My favourite philosopher, Karl Popper, used to say that the most basic task of education is to teach people to distinguish between an expert and a charlatan. For you, the process you call education has done the very opposite: it has taught you to be a charlatan, to mishandle evidence, to subject perception to desire. And this failure is a systematic failure, in the same way that the difference between expert and charlatan is a systematic difference.
The darkness of your mind is such that I do not know whether I can render this difference in any way that will make an impression on you, without being swatted away by another parade of mishandled cliches and half-understood platitudes. But I will try.
The point about expertise in any field is that it is itself authoritative. It is authoritative because it is coherent and answers to the facts. The scientific mentality does not "challenge authority"; only cranks do that. The scientific mentality, if it finds need to challenge current assumptions - and that is a big if - conceives alternative theories which it tests. That is, it conceives different systems of authoritative explanations; which, once accepted - and they may be rejected, according to whether or not experiments on the subject succeed - acquire that same quality of authority that the previously held theory had. Indeed, even discarded theories are part of the weave of scientific and scholarly authority, because it is important to know what a successful theory rose to challenge and in what ways it improves upon previous ones.
The same goes for politics. Nobody ever got anywhere by "challenging authority". Both Washington and Lenin were not interested in "challenging authority"; rather, they had their own views of how political authority should work, and they were damn well going to enact them. In a sense, tsarism had as little relevance to Lenin and Trotsky as the rule of George III and his ministers had to the authors of the Federalist Papers; neither was rising merely against an existing kind of rule, so much as insisting on forming a wholly different one. In fact, in the American Revolution, much of revolutionary politics consisted in defending local institutions that the British were trying to tear down for no reason that the Colonials could see.
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Lenin, as I said, was quite clear about killing people. You, on the other hand, are an anti-Semite and do not know it. You suggest that Jews danced with joy at the sight of the Twin Towers burning, and that the enormous number of seventy Israeli agents were smuggled out of the country after that; classic anti-Semitic fables, well known to anyone who has dabbled in that odious phenomenon. And yet you get angry at me when I point it out. That is another part of that disassociation I pointed out earlier - your having two very different standards, one for the way you are allowed to speak and act, and another for how others are allowed to speak and act to you. At least David Irving and John M.Allegro are quite clear that they do not like Jews. You walk in total delusion and think you are in the light.
Your views on the Middle East are so fabulously ignorant that there would be no point in even commenting on them, were it not that there is no excuse for a graduate to be ignorant in these matters unless the ignorance in question is a choice - that is, unless she refuses to know because any actual facts would conflict with her will. Your will is to believe that Bush and the Neocons and the Jooooos conspired to send America to war in the Middle East, and that they committed a peculiarly horrible crime - even rejoiced in it - for the purpose. That your imagination naturally gravitates to this kind of scenario, that you find it natural that people in politics should do this sort of thing, says all that needs to be said about your mental balance. After this sort of display, I cannot but regard your "excuse me" before using the word "Hell" as the rankest kind of hypocrisy. You are willing to accuse George W.Bush of deliberate mass murder, but you pretend to be ashamed to use strong language. Again, psychic disassociation.
You will inevitably ignore everything I say, if indeed your self-love has allowed you to plough through this far. You do not want to know that the US would sooner or later have had to re-start the never-properly-ended war against Saddam Hussein; that Saddam was leaving them no choice. You are bent on believing that the invasion of Iran was a pointless crime. Well, go on, if you insist. The facts are different, but that will not bother you.
The Middle East is one thing I have no desire to write about, but let us be clear on one thing: Saddam Hussein had to be put down. He was a throwback to Bismarck's nineteenth century, or indeed to the Dark Ages, a man who believed that making war was the natural business of a state. He came to power in 1978. Within a year, he was invading Iran, hoping that the Khomeini revolution had disorganized the country enough to wage a war of conquest. The plan failed (not least thanks to his military incompetence) and the two countries fought a purposeless war of attrition for eight years, losing over a million men. Untaught by this bloody lesson, as soon as the war with Iran was over he turned against his other neighbour, Syria, and I well recall that in the summer of 1990 he seemed fully about to go to war - he had even been building up a casus belli by supporting the losing side in Lebanon. However, he was distracted by an apparently weaker and juicier morsel - rotten strategy, again - and, by his stupid invasion of Kuwait, brought down the wrath of the world on himself.
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Hussein signalled in every possible way that he did not regard the business of the war as closed. He regularly sent aircraft up in defiance of Allied no-flight zones, even though this could only result in more destroyed aircraft and more dead or wounded pilots; he deliberately targeted Allied airplanes with missile-guidance radar, though he knew that they had the tools to detect it react. But he also waged a war of a subtler kind, corrupting journalists, NGOs and UN functionaries in what has become known as the oil-for-food scandal - in financial terms, the most colossal scandal of all time. By controlling the flow of oil out of Iraq, he built up enormous financial reserves (even while the world's media were taken on guided tours to see the poor starving Iraqi children) which he used to strengthen his repressive apparatus in Iraq and extend his diplomatic reach outside. By 2000, he had managed to whittle down the opposition to Britain and America alone. If the mailed hand of the Alliance had been removed from his throat - and that looked within sight by then - nobody who had followed his clumsy but incredibly bloody career could doubt that he would have thrown himself into war again.
As for the "no WMDs" nonsense, quite apart that by 2000 every intelligence service worth the name, including the French and the Russians, was certain that Saddam had them, some curious facts (and a great deal of gas cylinders) have emerged since the invasion, which the American mass media - who are Democrat by inclination - did not broadcast. The one I personally find most significant is that until the end of his rule, Saddam kept on the Government paybook no less than 300 nuclear scientists, apparently doing nothing. An expensive luxury, one would imagine, even for a corrupt oil-rich tyrant. The obvious conclusion is that these 300 eggheads were kept on the payroll - and, no doubt, kept thinking and doing theoretical work - waiting for the moment that the Alliance would finally withdraw, after which they would have been put to work with all the resources they needed.
By his constant whittling away at the Alliance, and by his evident hostility - his was the only government that publicly rejoiced at the fall of the Twin Towers, when even Gheddafi and Castro sent public declarations of support and offers of help - Saddam had, by September 2001, placed Britain and America in front of a most unpalatable choice: either leave the Middle East and allow him to run amock as he pleased, or start the war again. And though American governance after the invasion has been quite amazingly inept, the choice made by the two governments was the only sensible one. Imagine, if you will, what would have happened if America and Britain had quit the Middle East, as Saddam intended, some time in 2002 or 2003. Kuwait would not have lasted long, and I doubt that Saudi Arabia would either. Much of the world's oil would have fallen to Saddam, who would then have attacked any one of three possible targets - Iran, Egypt or Israel. As war gripped the oilfields, an economic crisis of 1970s if not 1930s proportions would have seized the industrialized world. The growth of China and India would have been checked, with unpredictable results for their very unstable internal balance. And then, quite likely, the West would have been forced into the war anyway. By this time, one or two of the participants would have had atomic weapons, and might have used them.
But of course, people like you would find some way to blame the West and America for it all anyway.
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I believe I may help you with this one.
You see, in the USA there is a set of rules agreeded upon, call the laws, and among them them there is one very important law, called the Constitution. The Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendment to this Constitution stipulate that "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."; additionaly the Eighth Amendment, part of the U.S. Bill of Rights, prohibits excessive bail or fines.
In this concrete case it means that the persons in question, even though they were somebody's kinsmen or belonged to a particular ethnic group, could not be kept imprisoned, unless concrete charges were brought against them. Since according to the US law, being a related to a known criminal or being a member of a particular ethnic group does not constitute a crime in itself, they had to be released. Otherwise it would violate the above mentioned Amendments of the Constitution.
As far as I know - not being an American I can be mistaken, of course - that there are no regulations stipulating the amount of noise which should accompany given person, when he or she leaves the country. Therefore they were absolutely free to get out quietly.
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But, of course, I am assuming that Mr. Moore, who was certainly persuasive, was telling the truth. Maybe he wasn't. I don't know.
In any case, you didn't really have to be so insulting.
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