Sometimes, you can gain amazing insight into a person’s whole mentality from merely a simple phrase, a snatch of conversation or a casual comment. A little crack in the curtain can allow you to peer through and shudder at the desolation that lies beyond.
I have had such an experience while perusing the website belonging to those purveyors of fine aluminium millinery antiwar.com. The thing that caught my eye was a headline which reads: “Latest US Menace to Okinawa: Falling Jet Parts”
For a moment I did a double-take. Was I reading that correctly? Yes, I was. I clicked on the link to find this prosaic bit of reportage concerning some bits which fell off a US military jet whilst it flew over Okinawa. This monstrous ‘war crime’ resulted in:
“…no injuries or damage and said the incidents posed no threat to the local community.”
Oh the inhumanity! Oh the oppression! How long can the poor Okinawans be expected to put up with being ‘menaced’ in this way? Weep, WEEP, for Okinawa!!
On the other hand, don’t bother. I may be no expert on aviation but even I know that bits periodically fall from all flying aircraft and I think it is safe to say that it is one of the less worrisome perils of modernity for most normal people. Not so the antiwarriors. No, for them it is a heinous act of US imperialist aggression. I suppose that it easy to do provided you have already settled in your own mind that the USA cannot but be wrongful (despite all the demonstrable evidence to the contrary).
Much of the thrust and complaint of the antiwarriors is directed at the extent to which traditional civil liberties in the USA have been traduced. In this, their complaint is meritorious and noble but I cannot help wondering if they are actually a part of the problem and not the solution. In order to win arguments about civil liberties (or anything else for that matter) the first requirement is to be taken seriously by serious people. But when your outlook is so jaundiced that you brazenly attempt to construe some minor workaday incident as murderous conspiracy then you can only be taken for a crank. Cranks do not help good causes; they pollute them by sheer dint of their crankiness.
Small wonder then that the antiwarriors are left to plough the lonely furrow of providing intellectual succour to vile thugocracies and tinpot demagogues. Like them, the antiwarriors have trapped themselves in a straightjacket of hate and crippled their own faculties with delusions of persecution.
