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No Tears

This is a belated response to something Michael wrote last week.  Michael said: MARs were not interested in protecting ancient Orthodox monasteries from molestation, because that’s just the right thing to do. MARs wouldn’t shed a tear if American bombers wiped every single one of these off the face of the planet if they thought […]

This is a belated response to something Michael wrote last week.  Michael said:

MARs were not interested in protecting ancient Orthodox monasteries from molestation, because that’s just the right thing to do. MARs wouldn’t shed a tear if American bombers wiped every single one of these off the face of the planet if they thought it was in the legitimate security interests of the United States [bold mine-DL]. MARs (and many others) were more concerned that American kids were being involved in a war that no one seemed to understand, in a country they didn’t care about, and didn’t pose a threat to Americans.

The sentence in bold jumped out at me at the time, and it kept nagging me for days afterward, because Michael was absolutely right, and I found this observation to be so profoundly depressing that I couldn’t think of anything to say about it.  Likewise, they wouldn’t shed a tear if some of the most valuable antiquities in the world were looted and/or destroyed in the wake of the initial invasion of Iraq, and probably do not much exercise themselves over the destruction of Christian communities in the Near East, and at the same time seem disposed to support military actions that they can be deceived into thinking are in the security interests of the U.S.  It seems to me that this is why arguments against unjust wars–at least when they are being waged in the name of “national security”–continually fall flat with most of these voters, even though the war in question is “a war that no one seemed to understand, in a country they didn’t care about, and didn’t pose a threat to Americans.”  More depressingly, I have the sneaking feeling that these voters would have supported laying waste to Serbia if the man in the White House hadn’t been Bill Clinton.  At that point, paleo opposition to the war would have gone from being quixotic and “weird” to being labeled unpatriotic or worse.  As I said before, “I’m not sure what can be done about it.”

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