My Fear of the Liberal Position Confirmed

In rare moments I feel like I'm headed towards Dante's worst level of hell for betraying my supposedly liberal views when it comes to my opines about American foreign policy and specifically about the Iraq war. But then it becomes revealed to me how vastly different I see the world that the uber left establishment...and it is exposed though a simple thought experiment that I did not invent.

James Lileks blogged the other day about his liberal friends preferring to see Bush lose the election than Osama Bin Laden being caught. I thought - Noooo, that's just crazy hawk-talk, no liberals actually think that.

But at my internship yesterday I was chit-chatting with the other intern, a nice girl, going into her senior year at USC, a critical studies major. We were talking about our friends and their political ideologies and our own...I posed to her the big question (not that one - the other one): what you you rather see happen, OBL caught or killed, or Bush gone in 2004?

She paused and thought about it for awhile and said simply and reasonably that she would rather see Bush gone and that many of the liberals she knows feel the same way.

She argued that OBL isn't much of a threat - so long as we keep chasing after him. She argued it would be nice if both things happened - but that's not the point of the thought experiment. OBL, dead or caught, she said, wouldn't stop terrorism. Bush, not reelected, however, would make the world like us again, or so the reasoning goes...

And while I can respect this opinion because, well, this is America, I also must respectfully say it is a freaking ludicrous, preposterous, and frightening position for reasonable people to take.

Using a Hitler/Nazi analogy is intellectually cheap, but emotionally persuasive, so I'm going to delve in here...

What amazes me in highsight of Nazism is that the Nazi's didn't ever really hide their agenda. Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925. He laid himself out for the world to see what kind of man he was. Nazi films are rife with anger and propaganda. They came out and said it: Germany's woes were because of the Jews. They started rounding them up - this was no secret. It was only a matter of time and logistics before the "Final Solution" was proposed. Now, nearly 60 years later, the world still has fewer Jewish people than prior to WWII. That's the effect of killing 6 million people of a single race. Not to mention the lost culture and art of Warsaw prior to the war, as depicted in Roman Polanski's the Pianist. 90% of Polish Jews were killed and nearly made existinct.

We look back at that time and cringe when we hear tapes of Neville Chamberlin declaring peace in our time. We embarassingly know that while France was overrun by Nazi's, there was a pro-Nazi French government in Vishay and that 10,000 French were arrested after the war for colloboration.

And we were not much less guilty...we knew about concentration camps. We also knew about Japanese atrocities against the Chinese and the Koreans. But we sat around, not wanting to get involved with a war that wasn't about us and didn't concern us and years later 50 million people were dead.

We never could have stopped all of that, for sure. In fact, we may have never even got involved had not Pearl Harbor happened. And we had our own evils here and abroad. The Japanese internment camps (although it's worth noting no one was systematically murdered or treated as sex slaves in them) as they were in China and Germany. We bombed civilian populations in Dresdan. If we had lost the war, our generals would have been guilty of war crimes. Without question.

And after knowing all of this, we still know in our gut that despite our fuck-ups, we were right and they were wrong. Looking back on history we don't ask: why did we get involved, we look back and say: how did all that happen not that long ago?

Today we have another insane ideology that doesn't hide itself.

Hizbollah is very clear in their statements: They do not want to talk, they want to eliminate. Hamas is no different. They've yet to declare war on the US, only Israel and the Jews.

But, Al Queda has. They declared war on us and said they consider all US Civilians legimate targets. They don't hide in the least bit, with their writings, their words. They say with each videotape to us - if we could, we would chop of the heads of every single one of you. There is no doubt, no compromise, they're aren't even sneaky about it at all. They come right out and say it to our faces.

And for some reason the far left (in America, Europe, elsewhere) likes to push this problem towards the back burner, because the bigger problem is this behemouth country run by a crazy, stupid texan.

Now I'm all for the arugment that GW Bush isn't the man to get OBL and that we need a new boss, a new sheriff that can get our intelligence and our diplomatic relationships in order to get that bastard. But that's not the argument I hear. I hear the argument that America and Bush is the problem with the world. I hear that we, lefted unchecked are the festering brewing Nazi's, wanting to take over the world. And I think that is both ludicrous and deeply irresponible to think that way.

After 9/11, we looked back and saw the signs of it happening. There was a steady escalation of attacks that we didn't take seriously. We didn't take the Arab and Muslim's world complicity with the attacks seriously. And instead of retreating into a hole of self-blame for the whole thing, we instead took the position that "This shit is wrong and shouldn't be happening. To us, or to anyone." So we made a checklist of assholes.

Hitler had a checklist- with Charlie Chaplin on it. Our lists was Saddam, Ayatolla A and B, and Kim Jung the II. That's the difference. And in time, we should and will deal with all of the assholes, in different ways...and for me, if it takes sending our assholes to deal with their assholes, well I'm happy to do it.