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| To continue yesterday's rant... |
| 2001-12-27 |
| Sorry. It was late. I wasn't quite done yet. There really is racism in this world. There are within the USA groups like the KKK with their sheets, the "American Nazi" subintellects with their propensity for playing dressup, and the Aryan Nations with their impressively subneanderthal brows. The speeches and actions of Robert Mugabe and his henchmen show what racism, naked and unashamed, looks like. And the Arab press triggers the gag reflex on a regular basis. Trying to tag anything one doesn't like or agree with as "racist" cheapens the term. If the tagged item is set next to any of the above and can't be seen in the glare, there might be something wrong with either the definition or the definer. If an instance of "racism" can only be detected by trained observers then so also can its effects; people who lose a lot of sleep over it probably also lose sleep over being watched by the CIA and think they know who the other shooter was on the Grassy Knoll. They should consider getting some professional help and possibly medication. Calling something "racist" when no one else can make out even its outline also means that people aren't going to listen really closely the next time the speaker has a hissy fit. Eventually they won't listen at all, not even if he's being beaten up by armband-wearing Aryans. Afghanistan isn't a nice place, but except for the Hazaras and maybe one or two other tiny minorities that no one's ever heard of, its people are Caucasians. The Hazaras, descended from the Mongol hordes, are on our side, so what's the beef there? The northern tribes speak various Turkic languages - Uzbek, Tadjik and Turkmen - and use Dari, related to Persian as a lingua franca (as Alan Dershowitz will attest, that means they speak French). The Pashtuns are the same color, as close to the northerners physically as, say, Italians are to Greeks, and speak an Indo-European language. The place has been afflicted with tribal wars, not race riots. I guess the Pakistanis and "Arabs" who flooded into Afghanistan and colonized it could make some sort of a claim of racial motivation in our taking action against them to assist the real owners of the country, but they're the bad guys. And we never did sort them out by race - we bombed them all indiscriminately. Admittedly, as the kiddies of U of W whined, ''There are a lot of innocent people in Afghanistan." Usually there are a lot of innocent people in any given locality. The problem never was with them. The problem in fact lay with the gunmen, thugs, sadists and thieves who were preying upon them. The good ol' USA should take immense pride in killing as many of them as it could, so they would stop shooting, beating, torturing and stealing from the innocent folk. But racial motivation with regard to the Bad Guys is only visible to trained observers. If it was there at all (and I say it wasn't, but I'm not a trained observer), it was overshadowed by opposition to naked Evil. The Bad Guys' wives and kiddies? Ah, now that does represent a tragedy. The women and children were innocent. Trouble is, we didn't bring them to Afghanistan. Perhaps they should have left them home in Chechnya and Saudi Arabia and Yemen and Kuwait. Or at least someplace other than the front lines. A war against Muslims? Afghanistan is one of a tiny handful countries in the world which are effectively 100% Muslim, the other of comparable size being Saudi Arabia. If you stand anywhere in Afghanistan and throw a rock, you'll hit a Muslim. The Bad Guys were Muslims, the guys on our side were Muslims. What's the beef? The U of Washington kiddies' positions are really based on an antiwar philosophy and don't have anything to do with racism. Having short attention spans, they're pretty hazy on what happened three, now almost four months ago in New York, which is after all on the other side of the country and, like, close to New Jersey or Ohio or someplace. Having decided that war must be bad, they argue backward to find the reasons for its badness. Having started from a false premise ("all war is bad") they find themselves trapped in a balogna mine and attempt to dig themselves out using whatever materials are lying around, whether suited to the purpose or not. Hey, U of Washington kiddies! Grab your crayons and make note of the following: "Socrates was a man, therefore all men are Socrates." This is an example of faulty logic. "One war was bad. Therefore all wars are bad." Is there any similarity? (C'mon, now. Think hard...) |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |