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I think I'm going to be sick.
Honestly, I find these so-called 'liberals' (translation = preserve social freedoms for rich white people!), the ivory tower centre-left, respectable middle-class 'moderates', war-would-have-been-right-with-UN-backing, apologist-for-mass-murder fuckers (see also Hitchens, Aaronovitch, etc) more disgusting than even the most hawkish, right-wing elements of the pro-war camp.
Savage seems to be living in cloud cuckoo land in a couple of key respects. The first is the sheer arrogance that believes that such a war could ever be fought and won. It's just such a vague, divorced-from-reality concept - take over "the Middle East - how fucked-up and ill-informed is the idea that there's just one 'Middle East', one big bad alliance of nasty "Islamo-fascist" dictatorships - I mean what the FUCK? I assume that, although his knowledge of war itself is clearly that of a 12 year old who's played too much 'Command and Conquer', Savage grasps the idea that the only way such a campaign or series of campaigns would *not* be a complete bloodbath is if the majority of the populations of the states he's referring to (again, which ones exactly, who knows) rise up and join with their 'liberators', defect from their national armies, etc. In this respect, the date of this article is telling, as the way the war's unfolded has demonstrated to the pro-war camp some very basic and universal aspects of human nature - eg, if someone invades your country with a massive display of military force, bombs your city or town, kills your friends and neighbours, the tendency is to fight back rather than welcome them with open arms. So the arrogance here is primarily the idea that whoever these people of the "Middle East" are, they will realise "Oh, so you made me homeless and destitute, without access to food, electricity or clean water, but it was for my own good, so I could embrace the liberal and progressive values of dating advice columnist Dan Savage! My eternal thanks!" once they have been 'liberated' (by overwhelming military force) and whatever's left of their country has been forcible 'reformed'.
The second delusion Savage buys into is the conceipt of "changing course" - a concept I first saw identified by Noam Chomsky, but it's so omnipresent now you'd have to be pretty blind to miss it - basically the idea is that those in power and their lickspittles in the media say "OK, we did some bad things to other countries in the past, but that was long ago and things were different then: from now on, we will only use our powers for good" - then you go ahead and do pretty much the exact same thing you did last time, because the power structures in your country haven't changed all that much since then, nor have the motivations/interests of those in power... I swear, the next person who tries to tell me that the fact the US/UK backed Saddam Hussein for so many years, and generally fucked-up the Middle East for countless decades, means we have a "responsibility" to make up for all that... by engaging in further colonial/imperialist aggression! Splendid, splendid. Read the ideology of the arhcitects of this war in their own words and then come back and try that shit.
In addition, I really dig the way Savage says the West fucked up the Middle East was only by sponsoring tyrants in the Arab world - obviously, to suggest that a 'civilised', 'democratic', 'secular' state massively sponsored and in fact virtually created by the West (Israel) might be in any way to blame for conflict in the Middle East would be, you know, anti-semitic.
The bit that *really* made me physically sick, however, is here:
Bombs just make more terrorists." Really? We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped on Europe during World War II. Where are all the Vietnamese terrorists?
The implications of this are staggering and monstrous - the sheer contempt for human life - is this guy even human? Does he have any kind of moral compass? Does anyone reading this need me or anyone else to even bother putting forward an argument as to why this is horrifying, and makes me want to cry?
He's also guilty of misreporting very basic facts - You don't hear much from the left about the pain that Saddam Hussein inflicts and War at times is the only hope for an oppressed people--as each Iraqi refugee quickly informs the first Western reporter he can find - you don't me to find links referring to the large number of expatriate/refugee Iraqis who don't support a US/UK war on Iraq as a solution (do you? it's been well documented in the mainstream UK press at least), or the fact that opposing Hussein's regime is one of the most common uniting factors among the antiwar left, regularly restated in interviews and speeches in an attempt to combat the persistent untruth spread by the prowar camp (a blatant smear).
Ultimately, Savage's basic position differs little from that of neoconservative hawks like Rumsfield/Perle etc - in their view the US is self-evidently righteous, and is deeply threatened by aggressive, non-compliant or 'rogue' states and stateless international terrorism: it can therefore take whatever measures are felt necessary to consolidate its power - the only difference with Savage is that he extends this to cover the whole of 'the West' (good liberal, nice liberal, liberal want a bone?). 'We' are morally, culturally and politically superior (and conveniantly, militarily superior too), we should remake anyone we perceive as a threat in our image, by force. As ever, the power differential at play is presented as exactly the opposite of the one that exists in reality. Cities in the US and Europe risk utter destruction if the West does not forcibly take over the entire "Middle East", a process which is presented as *not* involving the utter destruction of major cities (or it could just be that Savage doesn't care as long as it's *their* cities, those nasty "Islamo-fascists"; as per his view of Vietnam).
I could go on, but part of me wonders why I'm wasting so much time on this guy, when I could just have pointed out that anyone who uses the phrase "Islamo-fascism" is a fucking moron. "Lucid"? I mean, he's just about literate, but really... |
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