Besides working for 10 hours every day, the classes I’m taking this quarter require me to read somewhere between 400 and 600 pages every week and spend about 5 hours a day on campus. It’s not like I’m digging ditches or anything, but I am short on sleep and pressed for time.
So I hope you’ll forgive me if I mention something that’s been discussed to death in the blogosphere. It seems that there are people who think that the US deliberately withheld warnings about the tsunami. They say that we wanted to do this because not only would thousands upon thousands of innocent people (mostly Muslim) die, but we could then gain valuable PR and foreign relation credibility by springing into action and providing aid for the survivors.
And, of course, there are those who think that the US is all powerful and that we somehow tripped the tsunami-causing earthquake off.
What is the “proof” for these allegations? Well, it would seem that our naval base at Diego Garcia escaped major damage from the tsunami. The fact that the tsunami hit Indonesia hours before reaching DG, so the Navy had plenty of time to prepare, is ignored.
I’m wondering why no one points out that the US could easily conquer the world and silence all critics if we had this kind of unstoppable power. (By “no one” I mean none of the conspiracy theorists, since I’ve just pointed it out myself.)
It’s easy to dismiss this as a bunch of slack-jawed fools with too much imagination. But blog goddess Natalie Solent goes one better. She’s discovered that the BBC, a news organization that enjoys a completely undeserved reputation, is considering these allegations of sinister plots to be an open question.
So the US military either has plans in place to take advantage of natural disasters in order to gain advantage, or else we can cause natural disasters at will in order to be seen as the savior after we give aid. And Europeans claim that Americans are unsophisticated and lacking nuance.
The best ammunition against the “blame America…blame Bush” crowd is their own nonsense..it follows along the same lines as the “stolen election crowd”.
Just ask them…
“So what you’re telling me is that A: Bush is a moron….and B: You got duped by a moron in 2 elections in a row? So that’s what you’re telling me?”
which nicely becomes:
“So what you’re telling me is that A: Americans are all uneducated, lazy, rednecks….and B: they put together a more powerful, productive, and influential society than your country and they are able to create vast conspiracy’s to ravage the rest of the world and there is nothing you can do about it? So that’s what you’re telling me?”
I find the resulting dance amusing…
Actually, the reason nothing happened to DG was because of the shape of the seafloor around the archipelago.
In this context you might enjoy this. Raving lunacy and production values. What more can you ask for?
Dave, that is really cool. Thanks. I think the author has star quality. This thing will circulate the world and everyone will “know” that the United States caused the tsunami on purpose. Fat lot of good it will do us to send our sailors and marines to put bandaids on a wound which the Jews of Wall Street caused ON PURPOSE.
I jest. But, I do think that a very large number of people will cling to anything that allows them to blame this on the United States. So this guy is the tip of the iceberg.
These stories don’t just come out of the ether. The spin machine spits these stories out like wood chips from a chipper.
The US can’t be allowed to look good. No matter how ridiculous it sounds, something had to be put out there to color the news.
Look, guys, there exists a large and loose coalition of media/propaganda groups dedicated to making the US look like the world’s satan. The BBC is just a part of the coalition, with Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya two others. The news services of all European countries, latin american countries, many asian countries, and of course all communist countries happily participate.
James, Victor Davis Hanson has good words on your topic at today’s NRO. (Brilliant, but remember to draw a deep breath before one of his all-encompassing, run-on sentences!)
I filed the BBC under “Blurred Lens” due to their “Sexed-Up” media reportage prior to the Iraq war. They’re part of the same anti-intellectual, patronage-driven, media beast that’s been revealed by the Dan Rather fiasco and the “Gilligan Report.”
The market of ideas has to prevail. All this anti-intellectual, tabloid sputtering leads me to ask if the market hasn’t been corrupted. Is the press truly free, in France for instance, to loudly criticize its own government? Can they challenge the statist party line? Or do they fear the loss of some state-mediated benefit?
Wondering, Steve
Dave, that Vialls character has been around for a long time. He’s a real prize. He’s also been pushing 9/11 conspiracy theories we’re all familiar with. He claims that the US was lying about having captured Saddam in 12/2003. Oh, and you may not have realized that the Bali explosion was caused by an Israeli “micro-nuke” unless you’d been reading his site.
One other underlying cause may be absence of religion, particularly in Europe. It strikes me that there is a certain type of person who has to believe in something and if they cant have a God they’ll make one.
In theses peoples minds America seems to have become a sort of ancient god like Zeus, who mindlessly visits destruction on various people.
Anyone else tempted to ask which company they got their tinfoil hat from cos you want to get in on the ground floor and make some money?
Or did they just purchase the triple-layer version to block Karl Rove’s mind rays?