OK, so call me retrograde, old fashioned, a bigot or the ever-popular ‘raaaaacist’ but I actually believe in free speech and free thought; for everybody, not just the ones that I agree with.
There is the caveat to this, of course. If you depend upon the larger public finding your persona, your manufactured or intellectual output appealing enough to purchase it … well, there might be potential customers disenchanted and disinclined to do so, should they find your exercise of free speech insulting or offensive. They are perfectly free to refrain from partaking in your product or purchasing it … it is, so I have been assured, still mostly a free country. Buy Chick-fil-A, or not. Listen to the Dixie Chicks … or not. Read the New York Times … or not. Watch Game of Thrones… on not, depending on how much you feel strongly about personal opinions. The right to speak is, has been, and ought to still be paramount.
Middle East
Romney Blasted for Saying What Needed to be Said
Mitt Romney has spoken out strongy about the embassy attacks in the Middle East, beginning with this statement:
I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.
Romney’s remarks were met with attacks, some of them quite vitriolic, from Democratic operatives, from Obama himself, from old-media members, and even from some old-line Republicans. These people are basically asserting that no candidate has the right to engage in real-time criticism of a sitting President which a diplomatic or military crisis is underway. Indeed, it seems that many of Romney’s critics are far more furious at him for speaking out than they are at the people who attacked the embassies and murdered an American ambassador.
I’m reminded of an episode I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Chamberlain administration waffled. Many members of Parliament were furious, and were not shy about letting their views be known. General Edward Spears, himself an MP at the time, described the scene:
Arthur Greenwood got up, tall, lanky, his dank, fair hair hanging to either side of his forehead. He swayed a little as he clutched at the box in front of him and gazed through his glasses at Chamberlain sitting opposite him, bolt-upright as usual. There was a moment’s silence, then something very astonishing happened.
Leo Amery, sitting in the corner seat of the third bench below the gangway on the government side, voiced in three words his own pent-up anguish and fury, as well as the repudiation by the whole House of a policy of surrender. Standing up he shouted across to Greenwood: “Speak for England!”
and
(Greenwood) hoped the Prime Minister would be able to make, he must make, a further statement when the House met at 12 next day, Sunday…Here many shouted “definite statement.” Every minute’s delay imperilled the foundations of our national honour. There must be no more devices for dragging out what had been dragged out too long. The moment we looked like weakening the Dictators would know we were beaten.
After the declaration of war, and following the British debacle in Norway, Chamberlain again came under attack in the House.
(Leo Amery) reviewed what had occurred since the fall of Finland, and in devastating sentences proved how clear and inevitable German action in Scandinavia had been, and how blind was the Government for not having foreseen the sequence of events…The house remained still and strained as it watched the redoubtable small squat figure of Amery smash the Government. It was as if he were hurling stones as large as himself, and hurling them with a vigour that increased as he proceeded, at the Governmental glass-house. The crash of glass could not be heard, but the effect was that of a series of deafening explosions. He concluded with the terrible words of Cromwell when he dismissed the Long Parliament: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say–let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
Had Romney’s critics been around in those days–and to the extent their arguments are meant seriously–then I guess they would have wanted all these MPs to simply shut up and allow the Chamberlain government to proceed with its feckless policies unhindered.
The Spears quotes are from his memoir Assignment to Catastrophe.
End Game In Syria
Each of the countries in the “Arab Spring” fell differently. Tunisia fell quite quickly, as the army stayed neutral and the government fled. Egypt held out longer, with the government deploying security forces, but the army stayed mostly neutral and in the end the government collapsed and Mubarek is on trial.
Libya was quite different – Gaddafi, the madman, employed every trick of his arsenal (including anti-aircraft weapons on unarmed demonstrators) before NATO intervened, allowing the rebels to fight back and eventually take back all the territory, including his home city of Sirte, which was pretty much leveled. While some parts of the country (Misrata and near the border with Algeria) suffered terribly, most of Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the east were relatively unscathed. We all know Gaddafi’s fate, to die with a knife in his rear end.
Russia and China learned from Libya, and have blocked all UN attempts to seriously end the strife. Those that pine for the “non-aligned” world and a “post-America” world order have it right on display – since the Russians and China have to be able to use disproportionate and overwhelming force on their own people should they demand real democracy, the new world order is “you can commit any atrocity as long as it stays within your own country”.
Assad is a REAL madman, up there with the likes of the dictators of yore. He employs the most brutal of tactics, which consist of destroying entire areas with massive artillery and helicopter gunships if they are held by the FSA, regardless of civilian deaths. He has a brutal militia of the scum of the earth called Shabbiha that come in afterwards, raping and killing all (men, women, and children) in the bombarded areas ensuring that they are a desolate shell and the local population is either dead or fled. While we watch the Olympics an INSANE orgy of violence is occurring in Aleppo.
Amid intensifying shelling and heavy weapon fire in Syria’s most populated city, a U.N. official — citing the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent — said that about 200,000 people have fled Aleppo over the past two days.
Assad is basically willing to BURN HIS OWN COUNTRY TO THE GROUND in order to save himself. He is also likely carving out a “pure” ethnic enclave along the western coast where his Alawite people can make a final stand, or carve out a “rump state” where they can survive.
Remember that before the Arab Spring started, “official” observers felt that there were no pending revolutions coming in the middle east, especially since Iran was able to put down their protestors successfully. Instead, much of the region rose in revolt.
These same observers also don’t think that the next step is likely to occur – the disintegration of countries. Syria is unlikely to remain one country, in my opinion, when this is done, unless everyone bands to push the Alawites into the sea (possible). There is no “glue” that holds together a people after this savagery, unless they have the willingness to work together. In Libya it appears that through elections the country will hold together (for the optimistic) even though their frontiers are pretty much wide open – but Syria and then likely soon Lebanon and possibly Iraq will fall apart at the seams. Don’t forget that much of Saudi Arabia’s oil is held in a region of their religious minorities, and Turkey is not far away from a possible spark with the Kurds in their long-running war. Also the Palestinian question is likely to erupt in Jordan and elsewhere – while they were the darlings of the “statist” world because Israel made a convenient scapegoat, today they are likely to be an annoying burden to countries trying to fix their own issues.
As we have all heard numerous times, in the rants of the left, that the borders left by the “colonialists” were arbitrary. I believe now these sorts of brutal civil wars like the ones in Syria are going to finish off those borders for once and for all. This won’t be a simple, fair or bloodless process, as Syria is showing us, but it is likely to be final, as final as the eviction of the Westerners in Egypt was in the 1950s. Resources (oil, water) will be paramount, and it will be a brutal struggle, determined primarily by violence and forces on the ground, with resettlement or death a frequent occurrence.
The Ruins of Athens
Actually, no not the ruins of Athens … that’s a Beethoven piece that popped into my head the Turkish March, from The Ruins of Athens … I’d always wondered in a desultory way, what would happen to me, if I played that classic music piece without comment, when I was stationed at EBS-Hellenikon, back in the day. I was never reckless enough to do the experiment and find out, actually. The Greeks were hair-trigger temperamental about any mention of Greece, Turkey, or the EEC (the forerunner to the EU) on the perilous airways of the American Forces Radio station where I worked mostly on the swing and mid-shifts in the early 1980s. As exasperating and sometimes as deadly as the political stuff got during those years and it did get deadly, for the N-14 organization and elements of the PLO were more or less targeting Americans on a regular basis I loved Greece unreservedly.