Prostitution of the pen and the dark side of the free market

[fpb]

Four years ago, the government of the French Republic took the lead in refusing to support the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The French, who had taken a very active and successful part in the first Iraq war, simply did not think that an invasion followed by the occupation of an Arab country was a good idea. That was their prerogative (see under "sovereign state").

(My position was that I loathed Saddam Hussein so much that anyone who wanted to drive him out was fine by me. I would even have supported an Iranian invasion. But I would not have started to insult people who disagreed.)

The idiot part of the American right suddenly made France the bout of all their hatred. Someone spotted a market opportunity, as Americans do (the French do that as well, but when the French do it, that's evil!) and prostituted a certain amount of historical knowledge in the search for a quick buck, producing some sort of tract which rewrote history with the claim that "France have always been our enemy, but they have concealed it under a pretence of friendship".

I would dismiss this intellectually contemptible and factually fraudulent thesis in as many words, and not even bother about it, were it not that one of the finest minds in my f-list seems to have been taken in by it. As it is, I want to ask how you imagine you can trace a consistent attitude of hatred, and what is more, of subtly disguised hatred, in a nation that has, since the foundation of the United States, experienced three royalist constitutions, five republican ones, two bonapartist ones, and one fascist tyranny, and completely boxed the compass in terms of attitudes, views, and alliances. This is the kind of things that rabid anti-Semites postulate about Jews - attitudes consistent across the centuries, constant vicious subtlety in carrying them out, hatred fertile in invention but completely barren of reason. The French ought to be proud: they have been promoted to the rank of Chosen People, next to that other target of unreasoning, blind, stupid, despicable hatred. In case anyone had any doubts, I regard Jew-bashing as a stain on the face of mankind.

No doubt the prostitute or prostitutes who set out on this bit of free enterprise got out of it what they wanted - money, admiting letters from ignorami and fanatics, and the odd spot on TV talk shows; rewards that serious historians get rather less often. But as we are still free people here, I want to use my own freedom of expression, rather less despicably than the prostitute or prostitutes concerned: first, by calling whoredom by its proper name; and second, by stating clearly that there shall be no pity here for such views. The historical slag or slags who sold their integrity for popular success will not be treated as anything but filth, and anyone who takes them seriously is warned that I will do what is in my power to restore them to sanity.

Comments

Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

What is more, the French and European objection was not necessarily to war as such. It was to the notion of invading and occupying an Arab country. As everyone knows, all western secret services, certainly including the French and German ones, were convinced that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. Their point was simply that to invade and occupy an Arab country was to ask for trouble.

Why should Arab countries be granted special passes on account of their "Arabness?" Given the demonstrated military incompetence of the Arabs, I would argue the opposite -- and I think that Dubya's "Bring it on" was one of his few intelligent statements; it laid down a gauntlet that so far has resulted in a lot of Arab terrorists who might have hit New York or London and Paris leaving their bones sprayed into a lot of other Arabs, keeping the dying in dar al Islam -- where it BELONGS.

Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Because, invade one, and you will have to invade them all. And square or compel the rest of the Muslim world. Arab borders are porous, and it takes no effort at all for mujaheddeen and suicide bombers to cross them. Japan or Germany could be handled in isolation, having a cohesive and clearly recognizable population or culture: the borders between Arab nations, on the other hand, are almost entirely artificial.

Quelling the Infection

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Because, invade one, and you will have to invade them all.

Then ... given your assumption ... we should invade them all, and make the experience so unpleasant for them that the next time one Arab country is tempted to come to the defense of an Arab aggressor receiving its just punishment, the leadership thinks "Hmm, nope, I remember the last time we did this and we lost twenty years of economic development, we'll sit this one out.

But I find your assumption not borne out by history. Historically, Arab countries have repeatedly been defeated in isolation, with no or few other Arab states coming to their defense. Right now, in Iraq, our problems are with Syria (Arab) and Iran (Aryan), while Jordan (Arab) and Egypt (Arab), to take two examples, are not only not helping the rebels but are actively helping suppress attempts to aid them. In the Arab-Israeli Wars, non-frontline Arab states generally delivered only token and ineffectual aid to the Arab side: in some of the wars, no aid at all.

In Afghanistan, we do indeed have a problem with an "ally" actually providing sanctuary for Al Qaeda and the Taliban -- but that ally is Pakistan, an Aryan (not Arab) country. Indeed, one of the just critiques of the Iraq Campaign is that we should have finished off the Taliban first, and if we had not been involved in Iraq we could have exerted far more pressure on Pakistan to deny sanctuary to the foe.

Arab borders are porous, and it takes no effort at all for mujaheddeen and suicide bombers to cross them.

Neutral Arab states should act to capture and imprison such malefactors: those states which do not should be considered as our next targets. I see no problem with widening a war against those who believe that they can claim neutrality while aiding our enemies ... though, as I mentioned, that's a smaller problem than you're implying.

I think that the much-dreaded fanatical fury of the Arabs, and of Islam as a whole, is a gigantic bluff, with just enough reality behind it to cow the timorous. In fact the "fanatical" Arabs have been easy meat in both conventional and guerilla wafare, and even as terrorists mostly ineffectual, save against their own civilian populations. So far in Iraq we have taken very light losses and inflicted horrendous losses upon the enemy: and every young Terrorist killed in Iraq is a virus no longer able to spread.

Think of the US Armed Forces as the planet's white blood cells :)