Shame On You American Hating Liberals!

[KrazyHorse]

Get my PM at CG, NYE?

[notyoueither]

Exhibit A.

/Edit. Unfortunate x-post.

[Gatekeeper]

The world won't give a damn until a nuclear weapon is set off by terrorists. And if it goes off in an American city, certain folks will rationalize it away: "They deserved it for their foreign policies!" or, "Ha! It's about time someone paid them back for Hiroshima and Nagasaki!"

Perhaps someone on this board will have a father, mother, sister, brother or some other acquaintance killed by a terrorist. Perhaps then it won't be so easy to rationalize the terrorists' as being some poor, misguided fools who merely need a liberal education to truly love the world.

Nobody is born evil. But it is eminently possible to become evil via the decisions one makes in life. History is replete with examples.

Gatekeeper

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Exhibit A.

/Edit. Unfortunate x-post.

You sure?

[KrazyHorse]

Perhaps then it won't be so easy to rationalize the terrorists' as being some poor, misguided fools who merely need a liberal education to truly love the world

Nobody has yet suggested (on this thread) that terrorists are anything better than murderers. I know that I certainly haven't (and wouldn't).

[Gatekeeper]

Frogger:

Not in this thread yet, as you indicate. The post was an observation on my part of not only Apolyton, but other parts of the Internet and IRL that I've experienced. Rest assured, people have made those rationalizations. Just not in this thread. Yet.

Gatekeeper

[ranskaldan]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper
The world won't give a damn until a nuclear weapon is set off by terrorists. And if it goes off in an American city, certain folks will rationalize it away: "They deserved it for their foreign policies!" or, "Ha! It's about time someone paid them back for Hiroshima and Nagasaki!"

Perhaps someone on this board will have a father, mother, sister, brother or some other acquaintance killed by a terrorist. Perhaps then it won't be so easy to rationalize the terrorists' as being some poor, misguided fools who merely need a liberal education to truly love the world.

Nobody is born evil. But it is eminently possible to become evil via the decisions one makes in life. History is replete with examples.

Gatekeeper

I assure you, the world is giving a damn. But they aren't giving it in a let's-shoot'em-all, let-god-sort'em-out way.

Admittedly, liberal idealism is sometimes too - idealistic. But American cowboyism suffers from the same fault - an equally misguided idealistic belief that gunning everyone down will somehow solve all problems. War can be part of a solution, but it isn't THE solution.

Y'know, if leftists and rightists could somehow sit down and come up with a plan that combines both liberal niceness and rightist firmness, American foreign policies would make a lot more sense. But I guess I'm hoping for too much.

[notyoueither]

rans. the Yanks aren't shooting 'em all. They have been very focused so far. That is where the bias becomes evident. The distortions of what has happened.

[Gatekeeper]

Originally posted by ranskaldan
Y'know, if leftists and rightists could somehow sit down and come up with a plan that combines both liberal niceness and rightist firmness, American foreign policies would make a lot more sense. But I guess I'm hoping for too much.

Heh. You're preaching to the choir on this point, pastor!

Gatekeeper

[KrazyHorse]

But that's it...it's not a case of "either you agree with the author or you're some pansyass who doesn't think that military force was an acceptable response to the terrorist attacks".

Are there America-bshers out there who get a hard-on every time they see footage from the WTC? Of course. Just like there are America lovers who can never see anything wrong with the US. I don't really think that one group is any more prevalent than the other. The author himself seems to belong to the latter group, what with his dismissals of civilian casualties and his disrepect for the Geneva convention. What I'm saying is that it's best to keep the argument between reasonable people who are willing to look at things from another perspective...

I've held my tongue for a long while on this. There are some people here who have felt free to spew the most outrageous nonsense for the past year (again, I'm not pointing to the thread-starter...just the article he posted). At first I put it down to shock, and then I dismissed it as unimportant hyperbole. But now it seems to be an permanent feature of discussion.

September the 11th 2001 was a black day for any civilised person. But not, unfortunately, the darkest day even in my memory. And not an excuse to behave like a spoiled child every time somebody disagrees with the US.

In other words, those with drums to beat have milked September 11th for as much as it's worth, as far as I'm concerned, and have done the victims enough disservice with their polemics against all those not quite as hawkish and chauvinist as themselves.

[notyoueither]

However, the author is not reacting against reasoned debate about the proper course of action to be taken.

He is writing about opinions formed by anti-American feelings. He is railing against the possibility that 9/11 will become a footnote in victims of terrorism studies.

So am I.

There was a certain amount of 'nuke 'em' rhetoric. That was going too far, yes. But there has also been a lot of 'they got what they deserved' crap floating around as well.

This guy chose to comment of the later. The former was buried for the most part within a few weeks of the event.

[CapitanGarlic]

Bravo, Frogger. My sentiments exactly.

They always say "never forget". HOW THE HELL CAN I? They remind me every five minutes...

[Urban Ranger]

This Anti-US feeling did not stem from people hating the US for being the richest/etc. nation on this planet. Rather, it is the unadulterated self-serving meddling under a thin veneer of feeble excuses that is the US foreign policy since after WWII.

The US has thus far caused an unfathomed amount of pain and sufferings among civilians of a large number of foreign countries. Right at this moment, in Afghanistan. Is the country faring better now? The euphoria was unfortunately shortlived, with the lives of your averge Afghani no better than before. There have been a lot of Afghanis killed, with al-Qaeda still largely unaffected, and OBL and Omar at large.

With all this still fresh, now Duyba is proposing that the same thing be done to Iraq. He must think the rest of the world is as stupid as he.

[notyoueither]

You want to forget? Perhaps I am mistaken in my estimation of the importance of the event.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
This Anti-US feeling did not stem from people hating the US for being the richest/etc. nation on this planet. Rather, it is the unadulterated self-serving meddling under a thin veneer of feeble excuses that is the US foreign policy since after WWII.

The US has thus far caused an unfathomed amount of pain and sufferings among civilians of a large number of foreign countries. Right at this moment, in Afghanistan. Is the country faring better now? The euphoria was unfortunately shortlived, with the lives of your averge Afghani no better than before. There have been a lot of Afghanis killed, with al-Qaeda still largely unaffected, and OBL and Omar at large.

With all this still fresh, now Duyba is proposing that the same thing be done to Iraq. He must think the rest of the world is as stupid as he.

Bullsh**.

A lot of people hate the US for whatever reason they can find.

That self-serving meddling from '45 to '90 kept most of us speaking freely. I would point out that a good many other governments engaged in that self-serving meddling.

OBL is dead, and the future of the Afghans is up to the Afghans.

No, Dubya is engaged in an international struggle for what the world will be like tomorrow and 10 years from now. You must be a stupid as he thinks you are.