I’ve been hearing a lot lately about an organisation that calls itself ‘Anti-war’ who operate a website called (not surprisingly) ‘Anti-war.com’ wherein a cabal of eminent writers and thinkers campaign vigourously against the foreign policy of the US government and, currently, its choice to respond militarily to the WTC attacks. Making quite a to-do they are
Chief among the ‘anti-warriors’, and apparently their poster boy, is one Mr. Justin Raimondo who seems to be postively incandescent with rage at the US government for launching a racist war to further the imperialist aims of the Washington elites. Mr.Raimondo claims that his views are informed by his libertarian, non-interventionist, principles based on which, the US should stop its foreign adventures, stop meddling in other countries, stop ‘putting pins in rattlesnakes, stirring up hornets nests etc, etc (By the way, foreigners are all ‘rattlesnakes’ and ‘hornets’? Just how racist is that?)
Nothing reprehensible about that position. Isolationism is not a principle I agree with but, when honestly debated, it is a defensible position. What is reprehensible are insinuations that the US brought this attack on itself and only has itself to blame. Reprehensible because (a) they are factually wrong and (b) brutally insensitive and (c) par for the course with Mr. Raimondo
That’s right. He’s flogged this particular ‘blame the victim’ horse before in an article that I’m quite sure he’d like buried now but, alas, it’s too late (thankyou, Google). The link below will take you something that Mr.Raimondo wrote in 1999 as an expression of his ‘libertarian principles’
Now before you go there, I feel it only fair to issue a product warning: it’s long. It’s long, it’s turgid and it’s full of details about who said what to who at the National People’s Democratic Conference of 1968 (or something). In other words, it reads like a Trotskyite student screed; the kind of thing that is so laboured and coma-inducing that you get the feeling it has been written with a view to bludgeoning you into submission by the sheer weight of it’s paragraphs. Not that I am, for even a moment, suggesting that Justin is a Trotskyite because he clearly isn’t. No, he’s worse than that, he’s a bore
But I always say that the truth is worth suffering for so, take some amphetamines, prepare a pot of strong coffee, tell your family you’re going to be away for a while and click here
You’re back! Well, brace yourself: it is the year 2025. Men have colonised Mars and… Okay, only joking
The article itself though is rather less of a joke and I knew something was iffy right away when I saw this breathtaking assertion:
“…the Chinese media has been relatively open for some time”
Really, Justin??!! Perhaps you could direct us all to the URL for the Chinese Anti-War.com then? Better still, take yourself over to Hong Kong and start ranting at the Beijing government in the same manner as you do Washington. Go on, Justin, I dare you. I double-dare you!!
But that’s the least of it. Justin goes on to assert just how reasonable the Chinese government is and that the Tiananmen Square protestors were nothing more than a contemptible rabble who were complaining about China’s progress towards capitalism and wanted a return to socialist purity and the true principles as espoused by Mao Tse Tung. Now, I am the first to admit that memory does not constitute history, but I clearly recall that the centrepiece of the protest was something called the Goddess of Liberty, a simulacram of the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps Chinese ways are just too inscrutable for this particular British dunderhead, but that would seem a very strange choice of totem for a bunch of Maoist fundamentalists to rally around
But that’s not important. Any public demonstration will invariably attract all manner of folks with all manner of sundry grievances and I wasn’t there so I don’t know. What is important is that they were unarmed civilians and the ‘enlightened’ Chinese government responded by killing them all
Or not, apparently. Because in the Gospel according to Justin:
“… Instead, the President engaged in an hour-long colloquoy with Chinese premier Jiang Zemin on the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, in which a few hundred rioters bent on self-immolation achieved their stated ends”
So there we have it. The protestors were a bunch of suicidal nutbags with stupid ideas who brought it on themselves. They were asking for it. Sound familiar? He even goes as far as to suggest comparison with Jonestown. What were all those tanks doing there then, Justin? Shipping in the laced vodka?
We all know what happened to those protestors because we damn welll saw it happen and what I’d like to know is where is Justin’s incandescence? His outrage? His grief? His condemnation? His concern? Does he even give it a mention? No. Nothing. Not a word. Not a peep. Must’ve slipped his mind
I don’t quite understand how someone can live through one of the most savage and brutal episodes of state repression in post-war history (not to mention the persecution of dissidents that goes on to this day) and not only try to pretend that it didn’t happen but actually try to convince us all that the victims commited suicide! Not only that, but ten years after, he goes on to write a fawning apology for that same regime while turning all his indignant guns on Washington. Some people call that historical revision: I call it being on the payroll. If you ask me, this guy is being given an easy time
The fact that he does champion capitalism and free markets, in a way, makes it worse because he clearly has a brain and either he’s delusional or downright mendacious. Either way, if that’s an example of libertarian principles then, damnitall, my application for membership of the Labour Party is in the post
I don’t know Mr.Raimondo and I’ve never met him and I daresay he would rather be hung by the thumbs than to consort with a warblogger like me. So perhaps someone would be obliging enough to pass on this piece of advice next time young Justin starts up on one of his ‘anti-war’ rants:
Mr. Raimondo, you live in a glass house, old chum. Stop throwing stones
Oh and, by the way, be careful what you publish: Google is watching you!
