California Conservative

On the heels of the breaking news of the ‘anti-war’ movement’s poster girl Cindy Sheehan getting arrested today in front of the White House (with a big smile on her face nonetheless - but no, they didn’t go there to get arrested … and this, therefore is an “outrage”!) comes this spot-on piece from a guy conservatives have come to love the last several years for his brutally honest assessments of sellouts like George Galloway and the rest of the ‘peace’ movement: Chris Hitchens. In it, he writes:

The group self-lovingly calling itself “United for Peace and Justice” is by no means “narrow” in its “antiwar focus” but rather represents a very extended alliance between the Old and the New Left, some of it honorable and some of it redolent of the World Youth Congresses that used to bring credulous priests and fellow-traveling hacks together to discuss “peace” in East Berlin or Bucharest. Just to give you an example, from one who knows the sectarian makeup of the Left very well, I can tell you that the Worker’s World Party—Ramsey Clark’s core outfit—is the product of a split within the Trotskyist movement. These were the ones who felt that the Trotskyist majority, in 1956, was wrong to denounce the Russian invasion of Hungary. The WWP is the direct, lineal product of that depraved rump. If the “United for Peace and Justice” lot want to sink their differences with such riffraff and mount a joint demonstration, then they invite some principled political criticism on their own account. And those who just tag along … well, they just tag along.

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

Some of the leading figures in this “movement,” such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what’s going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation—these thugs were cloned by the American empire for God’s sake—would lead to instant condemnation. But if you thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)

Nobody says it better.

So next time you hear the term “anti-war”, think about what Hitchens wrote about what it really means and then you’ll realize that the crowd is not really “anti-war” but “anti-THIS-war” and any other war in which there is an attempt at advancing a US-style democracy, which is just pure eeeeeevil to the hard left.

Now, I know not everyone who is a part of this ‘movement’ is like Cindy Sheehan and her legions of ’supporters’ and admirers - there are plenty of people out there who have serious questions about this war, wondering if we are fulfilling our objectives, and have doubts as to whether some form of democracy can be fully instilled in Iraq. But I don’t see many of those serious types in these photos, do you?

RELATED:
Cao’s Blog: The Peace Movement: A Leftist Tool

UPDATE:
Protein Wisdom: The pro-war “anti-war” left

Note: Thanks to the California Conservative for inviting me to be a contributor to this fine blog, of which I am a frequent reader. I should mention I’m not from California, but from North Carolina. Started out my political life as a Democrat, voted for Clinton the first time around, saw the error of my ways and switched parties about two years later and have been happy to announce being a conservative ever since. I have my own blog, but look fwd to contributing here as well. Thanks again, Cal, and hellooo Californians!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 26th, 2005 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Activism, Author: SisterToldjah, Liberals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.