Thursday, July 03, 2008

"Because only Spartan women give birth to real men"

The comments filled with suspicion, skepticism, insults, and mockery, and others similar to them, in their reply to Christopher Cook's (belated but brilliant) review of 300, would be more inviting and more interesting (be sure to join the fray! — as Cook points out, "The lefties have found it [the review/article], and it's driven them mad! Thousands of visits and over 100 comments—a large number of which question [Cook's] sexual orientation, [his] lifestyle, or [his] intellectual credibility....and that of all conservatives") if their authors had left the same comments on the pages of such movies as Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911. Somehow, I don't really have reason to believe that many of them have. Indeed, I feel that if anything, many of the commentators probably felt elated by those movies. (In other words: double standards.)

As for the chickenhawk charge, it is dissected here and described exactly for what it is: an attempt to curtail free speech —
notice how this position can be turned against the so-called peace camp. If only a soldier can speak for the war, then how can somebody who is not a soldier speak against the war? If it so happened that (a majority of) the soldiers in Iraq were/are against the war, then yes, the anti-war position might make sense... In other words, my point is, shouldn't we be asking ourselves (and shouldn't the "pacifists" be asking themselves) what the soldiers themselves are saying about the war?
As Benjamin Duffy (a serviceman who, yes, did serve in Iraq) points out:
Military service is a prerequisite for supporting the war effort, whereas absolutely anyone can oppose it. If you have no military service, you can either agree with them or you can shut up. Forcing the other side to shut up is, in fact, the goal of the movement.
To quote one of No Pasarán's readers:
If you accept the "chickenhawk" premise that you can't support the war and ask the troops to put themselves into harm's way unles you yourself enlist, there are a couple of corollaries that I think apply:
1. if your house is being broken into, and you are not a police officer, you may not call the police; you have no right to ask them to risk their lives when you yourself are not willing to to do so.
2. if your house is on fire, and you yourself are not a fireperson, you may not call the fire department. You have no right to ask them to risk their lives when you yourself are not willing to do so.
(Be sure to read Penny's comment underneath…)

And here we can get a look at the gist behind all the comments here. They snicker, they snort, they bully, they insult, they ridicule, and it is quite obvious that they don't think that the opinions and comments by conservatives are worth much ink, space, thought, or debate. Unless I am mistaken, the gist of the comments betrays the attitude that conservatives should keep quiet and not be heard unless (or until the time) they agree with the liberals. Something like this, needless to say, is exactly what — on a much larger scale — we see in the mainstream media.

As the above list of liberal anti-war movies suggests — it is obviously far, far longer — the fact that there is one — one (!) — single movie that can be called conservative and/or pro-war is unbearable to them. That movie, too (and any like it), must be snorted about, pulled apart, maligned, and ridiculed.

And this brings us full circle to the other major topic of the Christopher Cook 300 post thread — the book Liberal Fascism — when Jonah Goldberg explains
how the liberal Gleichschaltung works; contrary voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not, Progressive voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified — in the name of "diversity,'' or "liberation," or "unity," and, most of all, "progress."
Let it be pointed out that Jonah Goldberg's book is not (and correct me if I am mistaken) a one-sentence screed of …sneering, name-calling, and ridicule, but over 400 pages filled with evidence for his thesis. Here are some more outtakes that illustrate this evidence:
Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state. "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State," is how Mussolini defined it. Mussolini coined the word "totalitarian" to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. It was an organic concept in which every class, every individual, was part of the larger whole. The militarization of society and politics was considered simply the best available means toward this end.

…In the liberal telling of America's story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and "America" writ large. Progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for.

Meanwhile, real or alleged "conservative" misdeeds — say, McCarthyism — are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight "hard enough" for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for their historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

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