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03.23.03

This week I will respond to a post made in my guestbook .

"Planning to watch the Oscars, Ms. Diabolique? To sneer at the antiwar sentiments of vapid celebs? Hope I'm not spoiling the suspense, but the Academy Award for 'Dirtiest Face Behind The Make-Up' goes to the Ocean's Eleven gang: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Don Cheadle, Steven Soderbergh, and (long-time friend of Bush I & Bush II) Jerry Weintraub-- who all flew to the Incirlik US Airbase in Turkey, to premiere their film in December 2001."

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything, but I would like to comment on the Oscars. Although every year I vow not to, I watched again this year. I found them, as always, self-important and boring. I'm all for self-important, but never boring.

I must tell you that if I find an actor I like (rare), I try my hardest to avoid finding out anything about him. I avoid interviews. Indeed, I don't even want to see this person out of character, because invariably he'll say something that makes me hate him. Gael Garcia Bernal, the hot cutie from Y Tu Mama Tambien, a movie that I loved, crossed that threshold at the Oscars.

Gael said that were Frida Kahlo alive today, she would "be on our side, and against the war."

Indeed, she might be.. But saying Frida Kahlo would oppose a war against Saddam Hussein means very little once you know what her politics were. There is much in Frido Kahlo to admire; but there is also much to despise.

Frido Kahlo worshipped Saddam Hussein's hero , Josef Stalin, even after learning that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, one of whom was Kahlo's ex-lover, Leon Trotsky. One of Kahlo's last paintings was called "Stalin and I," and her diary is full of rantings about her love for Stalin and desire to meet him.

Late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, another Mexican, noted that Kahlo was both a great artist and a "despicable cur". Because of her questionable politics Paz suggested that she and Diego Rivera, her artist friend and lover, "ought not to be subjects of beatification but objects of study and of repentance... the weaknesses, taints, and defects that show up in the works of Diego and Frida are moral in origin."



Sanitizing an artist's life deprives the world of a full appreciation of their art, and Kahlo has been sanitized like no other. This may be why Gael would make such a ridiculous statement. Kahlo's political point of view is nothing to be proud of. She supported a repressive dictator who killed millions.

I'd still fuck you, sweetheart.

As for Michael Moore, I haven't seen Bowling for Columbine yet, and I'll surely review it here when I do. Sometimes Michael Moore has good things to say. At the Oscars, however, he behaved like an ass.

Complaining so stridently about a "fictional" president (get over it), and a "fictional" war (tell that to the dead, or the families of the POWs, you insensitive prick) fought for "fictional" reasons (see my last entry on Iraq ) caused even a crowd of Hollywood liberals to boo him. His ill-chosen words certainly must have depressed any Allied soldiers in Iraq who happened to be watching.
 
There are compelling arguments against the war. Couldn't Michael Moore have picked one?

Other anti-war celebrities had articulate things to say. Michael Moore, on the other hand, played into the hands of everyone who thinks he's a big fat buffoon , and maybe he is.

"It is easier for the frustrated to detect their own imaginings and hear the echo of their own musings in impassioned double-talk and sonorous refrains than in precise words joined together with faultless logic."
- Eric Hoffer, author of The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Indeed!

Back to the guestbook:

"The recent history of Incirlik Airbase offers a small window on the moral incoherence and dubious alliances that characterize US foreign policy in the region.
The most scandalous of these compromises involves the US role in northern Iraq. The ostensible humanitarian purpose of the northern no-fly zone is to safeguard 3.3 million Iraqi Kurds. Unfortunately, US concern for the Kurds extends only to those being attacked by our enemy Saddam, not to those being attacked by our ally Turkey. Over the past fourteen years more than 23,000 Kurds fighting for greater autonomy and self-determination in southern Turkey and northern Iraq have died at Turkish hands. When Turkey sends US-made F-16s or thousands of troops to attack the Kurds across the border, Washington looks the other way. It's an 'obscene piece of hypocrisy,' writes John Nichol, the British pilot who was shot down in 1991 and tortured by Iraqi forces. 'Turkish authorities ground our aircraft so that their own can attack the very Kurds that [we were] protecting just a few hours before.'
One investigation by Air Force Times revealed that the Turks were grounding more than 50 percent of US missions...' "

He goes on but I should point out that this entire bit was copied word for word from an article that appeared in the Nation . Heaven forbid one should think for oneself.

The plagiarist continues, at last in his own words:

"Given this history, how can you dismiss as mere 'American liberal self-hatred' the concerns of antiwar protesters that this is a war of power-expansion, not liberation? You ask "Where were these 'peace' protesters then? [When previous oppression was carried out.]" The answer: actively working to fight the oppression. The vegan/Nader contingent that you mock is not a mere fashion movement. Your superficial dismissals omit these peoples' vigilant role in documenting and fighting such abuses. But you don't care."

When I said "Where were these 'peace' protesters then?" I was referring to the throngs of people out there protesting the war against Saddam Hussein, not the activists who rightly bring atrocities to light.

I'd guess that none of the current "peace" protesters were out there protesting Turkey's atrocities against the Kurds, or Saddam's gassing of the Kurds, or Saddam's invasion of Kuwait or his near genocide of Shi'ite Muslims and Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq. I'd guess that these "peace" protesters weren't even aware of those atrocities, and still aren't. I've heard "peace" protesters on the news say that they weren't even interested in world events before this war. It shows.

"Peace" protesters subscribe to a false dichotomy, war and peace, as if Iraq were a happy, peaceful nation before this war. Our choice was not between war and peace but rather a choice between our war to end a tyrannical regime and Saddam's war against his own people, a war that has been raging for decades.

"Peace" protesters and "pacifists" are misusing those words because there would be no peace in Iraq were they to get their wishes. Unfortunately, this war is the only road to peace in Iraq.

In regards to Turkey, I applaud the contingent who brought to light the Turkish atrocities against the Kurds and our role in them. America was hugely, horribly wrong to allow Turkey to repress the Kurds so violently.

But our response to past mistakes should be to correct them, not to withdraw. Our errors become our responsibility. It is time for America to stand up for the human rights of all people, not just those who are our allies.

The human rights of Iraqis and safety of the world should not take a back seat to crippling liberal self-hatred, self-hatred that would tie our hands behind our backs as Iraq's torture chambers and rape rooms grow crowded. Death is the price the Iraqi people would pay for our inaction.

Doesn't "guestbook boy" understand that Saddam Hussein is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Kurds and just as many Shi'ite Muslims and over a million Iranians and thousands of Sunnis, not to speak of the 300,000 Iraqis of all faiths who have simply disappeared since his rule began, the million Iraqis who died in the Iran/Iraq war and the thousands more Iraqis who have been tortured, maimed or raped and left to live and suffer?

Saddam Hussein has killed more Muslims than Israel or America or Turkey ever has, or even the entire West combined. Why isn't that guestbook boy's priority? His hatred of Bush and resentment of American power blinds him. He would literally rather Saddam's atrocities continue than America put an end to it.

The Kurds, Shi'ite Muslims, dissidents, refugees and oppressed peoples of Iraq look at "peace" protesters with confusion and contempt. "Why do they support Saddam?" these Iraqis ask, and they are not kidding.

"Like every other Iraqi I know, I have friends and relatives in Baghdad. I am nauseous with anxiety for their safety. But still those bombs are music to my ears. They are like bells tolling for liberation in a country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp. One is not supposed to say such things in the kind of liberal, pacifist, and deeply anti-American circles of academia, in which I normally live and work. The truth is jarring even to my own ears."
- Kanan Makiya , an Iraqi professor and author

What would guestbook boy say to the women of southern Iraq who are begging our troops not to leave their villages?



"Sorry dears, America once sold weapons to Turkey and so we have no business being here. Have pleasant deaths at the hands of the Mukhabarat. Off we go!"

Guestbook boy goes on:

"As you phrased it yourself: 'It is of course impossible to argue logically with a person who is unable to...accept facts when they don't fit into a pre-supposed worldview.'"

I'm doing something right when even my detractors quote me.

To guestbook boy I say this:

I read the Nation regularly. I accept their facts, just not your conclusions.

A proper "peace" movement would advocate the proper use of American power for good ends, not inaction as dictators develop nuclear weapons and innocent people suffer and die. A proper "peace" movement would hold marches in support of a free Iraq, not "peace" at the cost of the continued subjugation of 23 million people. A proper "peace" movement would protest the atrocities of Saddam Hussein, not efforts to stop them. Above all, a proper "peace" movement would listen to the wishes of the Iraqi people, wishes that you and the misguided "peace" protesters ignore.

"The marchers, the protesters, the 'peaceniks', are fooling themselves if they think they are advocating any kind of 'peace' for the Iraqi people. Their compulsive obsession with opposing the use of force is akin to a type of religious fundamentalism. They refuse to consider that a future with war may be better in the long run for the Iraqi people than a future without war...
Even 'liberal' evidence points to the same conclusion: Amnesty International has documented Iraqi atrocities during each and every diplomatic effort made by the U.S.--diplomatic engagement, diplomatic isolation, economic engagement, and economic isolation. The U.S. has played every card in the deck with Iraq and still the atrocities continue. There is only one card left to play."
- Roger McShane, Politiscope

There is a massive liberal case for this war that you reactionary, ignorant, naive and dangerous faux-liberals miss entirely. I wouldn't ever go to one of your "peace" rallies. I wouldn't want to be responsible for prolonging the life of Saddam's fascist, murderous state, not even one second of it, and that is what your alleged "peace" would do.

"You're standing in your own shade, bitch."

It's dark in here. It's hot in here. I like it here .

until next week, remember..
when you dance, we are a part of what you feel.

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