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Some of the most prolific letter writers to my local weekly newspaper are the folks for whom the Sixties and Seventies were a period of intense meaningfulness in their lives. It was all peace, love, and rock’n roll, followed by their rejection of the war in Vietnam.
The reality, of course, was that we were still hip-deep in a Cold War that started the day World War II ended. Proxy wars in places like Korea and Vietnam were fought as Soviet-style Communism tried to replace the freedom that Americans knew could only be protected with blood and money. The stakes were high.
The stakes are high again as the entire world slowly concedes that a whole new war must be fought. This time the enemy is Islamofacism and the enemy is not polite enough to put on a uniform. This time the enemy blows up people in trains, buses, and, yes, the World Trade Center.
So, while I normally just try to ignore the pathetic bleating of the anti-war protesters, telling myself they have no sense of history and often no sense of decency as regards the sacrifices of good men to defend America, my eye was caught by the typical letter crying about the horrid treatment of "several members of (the) Committee to Stop the War" who stood outside the local high school last week to hand out leaflets. These folks were approached by a police officer and asked to stand across the street because "the Principal didn’t want us there."
Well, good for the Principal! One can only hope that the history courses in the local high school teach about the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean conflict, the Vietnam War, and, who knows, maybe even Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom gets discussed too.
"It is now well-reported how military recruiters give children false promises to recruit them. Legalities aside, it is misguided when salesmen for the military are allowed into the lunch room to try to convince students to kill and be killed in an immoral war, while those offering a different view are prevented from talking to students in front of the school."
Get out your crying towels! First of all, I haven’t read anything of late about military recruiters except that, in the midst of a war in a faraway place, they still seem to be able to find enough courageous and patriotic young men and women to join up for the cause of freedom. When they talk to students, presumably those students, raised on television shows and movies about war, understand it involves combat and that combat involves killing the enemy and possibly being killed. The military does not want to recruit idiots.
Lastly, who except the letter-writer thinks it is "an immoral war"? Was it immoral to remove Saddam Hussein from power, along with his Baathist regime that had filled the sands of Iraq with mass graves, had prisons with rape rooms and torture chambers, gassed a city filled with Kurdish men, women, and children? Wasn’t that immoral? Or was it moral to restore a nation to the thousands who came out to vote for the rule of law despite the threat of death?
And here at home, were the anti-war protesters clubbed, shackled, and hauled off to jail? No. They were asked to do their protesting across the street from the front of the school. Across the street!
This benign request that they do their protesting across the street was the direct result of the sacrifices of those who lie in graves in the Arlington National Cemetery, in a vast cemetery near Normandy Beach in France, and elsewhere here at home and around the world where the forces of evil wanted to deny the right to protest and blow out the flame of freedom.
Those graves are filled with men and women in the military. Some volunteered, as is the case with today’s all-volunteer military, and some were called by the nation as conscripts. Either way, they summoned their courage, they examined their values, and they gave their last full measure of life to insure that those protesters could protest.
And these protesters still just don’t get it. They think they can talk reason to people who kill the innocent, behead "unbelievers", blow themselves up in Jordanian wedding parties, in mosques, and in a school house in Beselan, Russia, to kill children. These protesters think they are doing something good when they tell our children there’s nothing worth fighting or dying for.
Deliberate Liberal Ignorance
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (Corinthians, 1-11)
Like many conservatives, I started life as a liberal. I understood events through the prism of liberal perceptions, but as I grew older those perceptions no longer afforded a realistic or even logical explanation for the way the world worked. Huge welfare programs did not eliminate poverty. Being for peace did not end wars. Loving history, my reading revealed that there were and are enemies of freedom forever seeking to enslave the peoples of the world. Throughout the last century and into this one Communism and Islamism was the name applied to the wholesale slaughter of innocent people.
During a stint as a journalist, I discovered that many of my colleagues frequently were appallingly ignorant of history. Others had a version of history that came with a distinct political bias. The result was and is journalism that too often ill-serves the public.
I was reminded of this when a column of pure opinion was offered on a page supposedly devoted to "news" in my local daily. Clearly, it was opinion, but it was not identified as such to the reader. The author was a reporter whose work I was familiar with dating back to the 1970s when I was employed by a leading institution of higher education in my home state.
His commentary was titled "In our fear of terror, echoes of Vietnam." It reflected the obsessive desire of many liberals to desperately link the liberation of Iraq with the war that so dominated the 1970s. It reminded me of people like Walter Cronkite, the CBS-TV anchor touted as "the most trusted" journalist of his time. Only what I also recall is that Walter took a major US victory in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, and reported it as a major defeat. Much of the reporting out of Iraq reflects the same bias.
For the reporter, Vietnam reflected how "the nation and its leadership were obsessed with involvement in a civil war in some little country in Asia, a country that posed no obvious threat to us…obsessed enough to sacrifice nearly 60,000 young Americans to a losing cause." The problem with this neat assessment is that the reporter had conveniently forgotten America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union that had been ongoing since the end of World War II. He had forgotten (or choose to ignore) that America had clashed with a Communist North Korea that invaded South Korea in the 1950s, during which Red China had sent troops to engage in that conflict. Vietnam wasn’t some "little country" whose civil war could be ignored.
Vietnam was a nation in which the greater war, the Cold War, was fought in an effort to keep Communism from spreading to the whole of South Asia. After the US departed, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were "re-educated" and, in neighboring Cambodia, the Communist Pol Pot regime killed over a million of that "tiny nation’s" citizens. In my lifetime, Communism has been responsible for the deaths of millions around the world.
The lesson the reporter failed to learn was that freedom must be defended and expanded no matter where it is challenged because, if you don’t, it can lead to a world in which American freedom can be lost as well. We fought World War II to insure that the Nazis would not control the whole of Europe and, yes, to avoid the defeat of the Soviet Union. We fought to insure the Japanese Empire did not do the same throughout Asia. We expended our treasury and our blood and we continued the "Cold War" for nearly fifty years before the fall of the former Soviet Union eliminated a global threat to freedom.
"Sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the students (he had addressed at a local university) didn’t appreciate our pervasive fear of an ideology…" That ideology was Communism. It was the same Communism that had built the wall in order to keep East Germans from fleeing to freedom in the West. It is the same Communism that exists in Cuba and which is being imposed in Venezuela today. The reporter remembered that earlier era only as one of "paranoia."
The fear that Communism generated for several previous generations of Americans was not "paranoia" or simply a case of irrational fear. A movie produced by Hollywood heartthrob, George Clooney, is making the rounds seeking to demonstrate that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was nuts to think our government was shot through with Soviet spies and Communist sympathizers. McCarthy was, as we have since learned, correct. Declassified Soviet documents demonstrated the truth of Communism infiltration. Americans were not paranoid to fear their treachery.
"To understand how the post-World War II generation was raised to think of communism, think of how we react now to the fear of terrorism. Both are words that, each in their own time, ended arguments, justified extreme actions, distorted reality. And caused fear." Acknowledging that Communism was a threat, the reporter implied that the sacrifices of our troops in Korea and in Vietnam were a waste of their lives. No, those men and women were heroes in every sense of the word.
What the reporter fears now is that we may "follow an irrational path" in our new war on terrorism, better characterized as Islamofascism. "And must we fight yet another war in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons?"
Is it irrational to learn the lesson of 9-11? Is it irrational to conclude an enemy exists after the bombings in Madrid, London, Amman, and Bali? Is it irrational to take cautionary steps to protect the homeland, to marshal our forces and those of others around the world to fight those who justify the slaughter of innocents as acting in the name of Allah?
The reporter thought that "more than 2,000 dead" was caused by nothing more than "fear", the emotion, not the sensible, rational, courageous response to people who openly state their intention to kill us and dominate the world.
His little lesson to a classroom of bored collegians is worse than moronic. It is worse than simply having no sense of history. It is the liberal desire to think that people who are truly irrational can be induced to not pursue their mad dreams.
It is a liberal mindset that never learns or never wants to acknowledge that there is evil in the world and the failure to defeat it, no matter what form it takes, is to put an end to all that Western civilization has achieved, to forego any sense of moral fortitude in favor of surrender.
Politics
12-17-2005, 21:27
They, the Libs, Just Don't Get It 
