micah holmquist's irregular thoughts and links |
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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Friday, November 22, 2002
Who's Hitler? President George W. Bush’s speech in Prague, Czechoslovakia on Wednesday was effectively the White House’s version of The War on Terror for Beginners. The President explained that the war is a globalist undertaking: We're making progress on this, the first war of the 21st century. Today more than 90 nations are joined in a global coalition to defeat terror. We're sharing intelligence. We're freezing the assets of terror groups. We're pursuing the terrorists wherever they plot and train. And we're finding them and bringing them to justice, one person at a time.Other countries are invited to participate in the war but as "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" makes clear they will always be junior partners and will have to submit to the economic, military and political dictates of the U.S. Bush also noted that the United States is a force for peace always even when waging war: America's goal, the world's goal is more than the return of inspectors to Iraq. Our goal is to secure the peace through the comprehensive and verified disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Voluntary, or by force, that goal will be achieved.In Newspeak Version 6.0 a country designated as a member of the “Axis of Evil” merely having weapons of mass destruction is a breach of the peace while the United States is peaceful for bombing and sanctioning Iraq to the point where a conservative estimate says 100,000 Iraqis have died prematurely since 1990 as a result. Because the U.S. is a force for peace there is no way that it could have ever foreseen threats against it, Bush said during this speech before the Prague Atlantic Student Summit in a passage that also connected the war to earlier wars: Great evil is stirring in the world. Many of the young here are coming up in a different world, different era, a different time, a different series of threats. We face perils we've never thought about, perils we've never seen before. But they're dangerous. They're just as dangerous as those perils that your fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers faced.This clear allusion to Nazism prompted The Sydney Morning Herald to write, “Saddam the new Hitler, Bush tells Europeans.” This may be going a bit far. Bush’s dad first likened Saddam to Hitler in 1990 so there wouldn’t be anything “new” about him. More importantly it is unclear who is more likely to try to commit genocide. Over at Warblogger Watch Amir Butler noted yesterday that University of Tennessee law professor and blogger extradinare Glenn Reynolds has recently been talking about genocide against Arabs. On Tuesday Reynolds wrote: Civilized societies have found it harder, though, to beat the barbarians without killing all, or nearly all, of them. Were it really to become all-out war of the sort that Osama and his ilk want, the likely result would be genocide -- unavoidable, and provoked, perhaps, but genocide nonetheless, akin to what Rome did to Carthage, or to what Americans did to American Indians. That's what happens when two societies can't live together, and the weaker one won't stop fighting -- especially when the weaker one targets the civilians and children of the stronger. This is why I think it's important to pursue a vigorous military strategy now. Because if we don't, the military strategy we'll have to follow in five or ten years will be light-years beyond "vigorous."If America doesn’t get its way with the savages now Reynolds says it will have to follow the example that lead to the formation of the country we now know as the U.S. Now tell me, who’d be Hitler? |