Writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens provides the kind of context for Saturday’s “anti-war” demonstrations that Jennifer Kerr, The New York Times, and myriad other media outlets wouldn’t—and that Reason asst editor Julian Sanchez finds it strange even to expect in news accounts of “anti-war” protests. From “Anti-War, My Foot…”:
Here is how the New York Times (after a front-page and an inside headline, one of them reading “Speaking Up Against War” and one of them reading “Antiwar Rallies Staged in Washington and Other Cities”) described the two constituenciess of the event:
The protests were largely sponsored by two groups, the Answer Coalition, which embodies a wide range of progressive political objectives, and United for Peace and Justice, which has a more narrow, antiwar focus.
The name of the reporter on this story was Michael Janofsky. I suppose that it is possible that he has never before come across “International ANSWER,” the group run by the “Worker’s World” party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the “resistance” in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a “wide range of progressive political objectives” indeed, if that’s the sort of thing you like.
[…] The group self-lovingly calling itself “United for Peace and Justice” is by no means “narrow” in its “antiwar focus” but rather represents a very extended alliance between the Old and the New Left, some of it honorable and some of it redolent of the World Youth Congresses that used to bring credulous priests and fellow-traveling hacks together to discuss “peace” in East Berlin or Bucharest. Just to give you an example, from one who knows the sectarian makeup of the Left very well, I can tell you that the Worker’s World Partyâ€â€Ramsey Clark’s core outfitâ€â€is the product of a split within the Trotskyist movement. These were the ones who felt that the Trotskyist majority, in 1956, was wrong to denounce the Russian invasion of Hungary. The WWP is the direct, lineal product of that depraved rump. If the “United for Peace and Justice” lot want to sink their differences with such riffraff and mount a joint demonstration, then they invite some principled political criticism on their own account. And those who just tag along … well, they just tag along.
To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.
Some of the leading figures in this “movement,” such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what’s going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusationâ€â€these thugs were cloned by the American empire for God’s sakeâ€â€would lead to instant condemnation. But if you thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)
The two preferred metaphors are, depending on the speaker, that the Bin-Ladenists are the fish that swim in the water of Muslim discontent or the mosquitoes that rise from the swamp of Muslim discontent. (Quite often, the same images are used in the same harangue.) The “fish in the water” is an old trope, borrowed from Mao’s hoary theory of guerrilla warfare and possessing a certain appeal to comrades who used to pore over the Little Red Book. The mosquitoes are somehow new and hover above the water rather than slip through it. No matter. The toxic nature of the “water” or “swamp” is always the same: American support for Israel. Thus, the existence of the Taliban regime cannot be swamplike, presumably because mosquitoes are born and not made. The huge swamp that was Saddam’s Iraq has only become a swamp since 2003. The organized murder of Muslims by Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan is only a logical reaction to the summit of globalizers at Davos. The stoning and veiling of women must be a reaction to Zionism. While the attack on the World Trade Centerâ€â€well, who needs reminding that chickens, or is it mosquitoes, come home to roost?
In my criticism of Kerr’s AP piece on Saturday, I wondered why no contextual information whatever was provided either about the groups organizing the rallies or about any of the speakers or interviewees (beyond the most basic, innocuous descriptors, such as “daughter” or “anti-war Mom”). For my trouble, I was mocked by Sanchez for supposedly expecting Ms Kerr to tack on “a long disquisition about how crazy [International ANSWER and Cindy Sheehan] are”—an interesting leap from asking that Ms Kerr present their reasons for organizing or speaking at an anti-war rally by way of quoting their own words and statements on the subject.
But then, Sanchez, who is himself anti-war, knows exactly what those statements—and what that missing, inconvenient context—would do to his cause. Which is why he lets slip that were Kerr to present any kind of disquisition (lengthy or not, I’d suggest) on the positions of either ANSWER or Sheehan, the result would be not to “make them look” crazy (as Sanchez allows), but to permit readers to see, through the organizers’ own words, just how truly crazy they are.
Libertarians used to be for allowing the individual consumer to make such informed choices. But I guess some things are just too important to allow the great unwashed to decide upon for themselves…
The left isn’t anti-war, they’re anti-American, so the appelation is more accurate as the “pro-war, anti-American left.”
Don’t be silly. Context in the Mary Mapes Media is only for “far-right Republicans.”
Iowahawk brings it to ya straight from the “protest front” where the moonbats were speaking TRUTH to POWAH!
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2005/09/this_war_sucks.html
Cheers – DC
The fact that “libertarians” today would rather march with totalitarian commies and Chomsky instead of conservatives and true-lefties (such as Hitch) is only further proof that most of these “libertarians” are insane.
I blame Murray Rothbard, a self-declared Lenninist and so-called “libertarian anarhcist”—a priest of the “movement” who cynically declared the “libertarianism equals anti-war” talking-point in order to build a “revolutionary cadre” with the pro-VietCong movement in the 1960s.
Later in the 1980s, he tried to do the same thing with Pitchfork Pat’s paleo-nationalists, which led to the current “anti-neocon” hysteria.
Most libertarianism today is a mix of cynical Rothbardian lenninist politicking, smelly hippie ideas from the vile 1960s, old fashioned Southern-fried racist confederatism and a hefty does of cultism.
A pox on the whole thing.
Hey, have mercy, Goldstein. This is just politics, after all. When your meal-ticket is human misery, ya gotta do EVERYTHING you can to maintain the supply of it! Besides, you wouldn’t want Ramsey Clark to quit raising money for the GOP, would you? But i agree, as pointless and ridiculous as these people are, it’s hard to laugh and throw up at the same time.
When a fringe group in the British Assoc. of Univ. Professors cooked a quorum to block out Jewish and dissenting members to get in a nakedly anti-semetic boycott of Israeli universities (since overturned by a more representative vote), the most vocal group against the move was “ENGAGE,” which was for a two state solution, but also highly leftwing and included the same type of ideological “membership” oaths (albiet slightly more diluted) that the group in AUP was pushing. When people who opposed the boycott but and pointed out how their stance equally flew in the face of academic freedom as the anti-semites in AUP, the response was “well ‘we/they’ were the biggest group so we/you need to hang with them/us.”
The same holds for ANSWER. People who are anti war and may passionately oppose the true stances of ANSWER may still think they have to back ANSWER and its protests so as not to undermine the anti-war message and their own anti-war credentials. Thus, ANSWER pulled a catbird maneuver and hijacked the anti-war movement – with the explicit approval of those who would otherwise be able to provide more… tempered… arguments against the war. And they have no one to blame but themselves.
Don’t blame the press who have their own agendas and biases. Blame the willing tools who hang their hats happily on nails hammered through the victims of dictators by complicit Stalinists. They provide the numbers, inflated or otherwise, that the media reports, and they bloody well know who ANSWER is just by listening to their speakers. At this stage into the game, there is no excuse for ignorance of who their benefactors really are.
I wonder, and dread, what the end stage of this horrible press strategy will look like. At the time of the Civil War, after another press campaign of anti-war villification, it ended with the assassination of Lincoln. The press then turned on a dime and laid wreaths of praise at his feet. Is this what they want?
As I understand A.N.S.W.E.R, they are not ANTI-WAR, they are actually PRO-WAR, but support the confederation of terrorist organizations against the United States. PRO-WAR, ANTI-AMERICAN is actually a perfect description for the organization and its members.
Don’t let that dirty Sanchez bother you–he’s always got his head up someone’s ass. If he were a good libertarian he might trouble himself to read Ayn Rand’s Virtue of Selfishness and her declaration that any and all free nations reserve the right to topple any and all tyrannies.
Sanchez and Brian Doherty were two of the main reasons why I finally let my subscription to Reason lapse after many years.
It almost makes up for the $10 I sent, much to my later deep embarrassment, to an Andrew Sullivan pledge drive a few years back.
Almost, mind you.
I hate being labled a Libertarian! What I figure they stand for is anarchy and isolationism. A true “Randoid” will not hesitate to distance himself from the Libertarians. I took that silly “Political Quiz” and because I am basically a “Social Liberal” that damn thing labled me a Libertarian.
Context is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps Ms. Kerr will supply the missing context in a future article. Jeff is mind-reading Ms. Kerr’s intent yet castigates Oliver Willis doing the very same thing. It appears Jeff is embroiled in a narrative that is, oh, indelicate.
/frameone
Jeff, that Julian Sanchez post you linked to sounds like it was written by a child. And this from the comments section by some asshat called “Nick Danger” :
Right, folks, every time AP quotes someone, the quote must include an “in-depth investigation” about the group.
Such melodrama. Apparently, Nick can’t seem to comprehend that there is a difference between “in-depth investigation” and simply stating an organizations affiliation and political make-up in an article that is reporting on an event organized by that organization.
tongueboy (um, no nevermind) if that context does emerge from Kerr it will be in the nature of a correction. The facts should have been included in the original as they always are when the subject is to the right of Walter Mondale and discrediting in any way. As for the mindreading… well, it’s actually word reading with an analysis based on the journalistic ethics our correspondents so loudly and proudly claim to practice under. If there are obvious and repetitive departures from that, and they are predictably to the detriment of one political pole or the other, I think the observation is soundly made, whether it is by Oliver Willis or anyone else.
ex-libertarian,
One should not conflate a political party with a political philosophy.
A conservative should not find the GOP synonymous with conservatism, nor a liberal with the DNC, so why libertarians with the Libertarian party?
As to the editors of Reason, I haven’t seen any persuasive arguments tying pacifism to libertarianism, (please provide them if found). So I have to assume that these libertarians are not against war per se but this war in particular.
It is true that libertarians loathe the unjustified use of our armed forces, but there is nothing particular to libertarians to be found in this. Conservatives and liberals as well as many others share the same concern. So what we’re left with is the ongoing debate of justifications for war and appropriate use of force. Some see it, some don’t.
Finally, I am a libertarian and I am of the opinion that pacifism most definitely does not derive from libertarianism, that wars can be justified, that a casus belli did exist between the US and Iraq, that replacing tyrants with democracy is a net gain for libertarians, that a terrorist is the opposite of a libertarian and should be opposed. Is that more in line with what you thought a libertarian believes?
Old school libertarians were entrepreneurs with balls. Based on the reasonoide blather and the girly men commenting on hit and run, it is apparent that they are now just Peace and Freedom pot-smokers who want lower taxes.
The protesters would benefit from actually listening to John Lennon:
After reading Reason for some time, I get the distinct impression that for some libertarians, feeling superior is the #1 priority. Maybe the taste for smug self-satisfied posturing is bringing together the left and some segments of libertarianism.