The ever great James Lileks has a great piece on the contradictions of the anti-globalization crowd. At the same time they deride the US for imperialism, they support a regime that wants to commit genocide against a free state. Lileks notes something shocking about the protests in DC:
heard some clips today from a rally held by the Washington Monument in support of the PLO and Hamas. Part of the merry anti-Globo puppet parade. It’s just so charming to hear rudely amplified voices calling for the death of the Jews again. It’s just so . . . bracing to hear a speaker take the mike beneath the two-toned obelisk named for America’s Cincinnatus, and demand the destruction of of a small democratic state in a sea of technocrat tyrannies. And it gives you such a warm feeling to hear the crowd bay their approval. A speaker demanded that the borders of the Middle East be returned to 1947; the crowd cheered.
Death to the Jews, death to Israel.
Stated and applauded.
In America. In Washington. On the Mall.
I had a sudden flash of Martin Luther King Jr. standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, beholding this rally, and thinking: I have a nightmare. And here it is.
The kind of brazen support of totalitarianism shown by the left is shocking. While they claim to be fighting for civil rights, they can’t seem to stop supporting horrendous regimes like Castro’s Cuba or Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. It’s a contradiction that the Left doesn’t seem to understand at all.
Many of the people at the rally are just kids, and they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s fun to go to Washington and chant. It’s fun to burn a flag, and it shows what a serious person you are. Serious, and brave! (Note how you never find one chap burning a flag outside a VFW hall; it’s the sort of thing you do only when you have police protection.) On one hand, they’re just silly – one story I read described how the same crowd that held up anti-Starbucks banners later queued up 20 deep to use the bathrooms of – you guessed it! Starbucks. (The Man didn’t provide a row of portable toilets for the demonstration, which just shows you how screwed up the system is.) But when the standard, predictable rebellion of pampered college youths becomes compatible with a group that doesn’t just want American changed but wants America dead, then we have a problem.
Or rather, they have a problem. They preach an end to war, but include in their number people who wish to destroy, violently, a democratic nation. They agitate against racism, but include in their number people who wish to exterminate the Jews of Israel. They rage against globalism, but support the work of terrorists who operate in every hemisphere. They are the useful fools who end up on the wrong side of concertina wire a year after the revolution; besotted by their communal self-regard, enchanted by the allure of the flame, they have thrown in their lot with the enemies of civilization. And this will be the death of their cause.
I certainly hope so, because if these loonies ever got there way, civilization would be circling the drain in no time. As with any totalitarian society, the beginning of oppression often comes with calls for greater social justice – usually meaning greater protection of one group at the expense of another. These protestors see only the world view that they’re given by people like Chomsky or their radicalized university professors. They see the world as nothing but power and oppression, and see themselves as the idealistic saviors who will deliver us from ourselves. However, they are willing to support murderous ideologies to support their twisted views of justice. In the end, they are the ones supporting injustice, and civilization needs to defend itself against those who would prefer to see it collapse.
