The Courage To Be Free
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I have not been posting nearly as much as I’d like lately, and I’ve had a lot I want to say, mostly about the shocking efforts by the neocons to foment a genuine anti-Muslim frenzy in the wake of the Fort Hood incident and the announcement of the 9/11 trials – so much is happening that I can’t even collect my thoughts on the subject.
I’m finally moved now to post after seeing this excellent polemic against the most oft-recited totalitarian credo in the world today, the Pledge of Allegiance, by Michael Lind. In doing so I realize this is not at all unrelated, as the hysterical admonitions by Cheney, Giuliani, Kristol, and Krauthammer that contra Obama we are “at war” with al-Qaeda, or some other Islamofascist conspiracy against our precious bodily fluids, resembles nothing so much as the dictator in V for Vendetta screaming “I want everyone to remember why they need us!!!!!!”
I would in passing just link to this excellent dissembling of the neocon logic by Glenn Greenwald, explaining that the fear ostensibly motivating the opposition to 9/11 trials is the textbook definition of “surrendering to terrorism”. I would also add that in this case as well as that of Nidal Hassan we are dealing with an arbitrary conclusion (Hassan was motivated by Jihadism) leading to an arbitrary classification (Hassan is a terrorist). Or as certain friends of the neocons might put it, A is A.
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Everyday, since 911, on radio, t.v, and in print these scoundrels have continued their propaganda effort in favor of perpetual war, perpetual fear, and ubiquitous paranoia. Every effort to return sanity to the debate- even the smallest injection of reality- has resulted in even more fear mongering, name-calling and character attacks. I have discovered the best solution is to just ignore them as they are entirely incapable of understanding anything besides the next “threat” against our precious freedoms.
“I would also add that in this case as well as that of Nidal Hassan we are dealing with an arbitrary conclusion (Hassan was motivated by Jihadism) leading to an arbitrary classification (Hassan is a terrorist). Or as certain friends of the neocons might put it, A is A.”
An arbitrary conclusion? What are we to make, then, of Hasan’s powerpoint presentation delineating the punishments designed for infidels, which was obviously inspired by Jihadism? Hasan was clearly moved to rage by more than America’s entanglements in the Middle East. If Hasan was not a terrorist per the current classification, he was a jihadi who acted alone and whose ideology is akin to that of Islamic terrorist groups.