Limits of the wingnut comfort zone

Sometimes they can't face a real argument


Deep Blade banned! A troll to him, I guess...

Over the years I have often enjoyed a good argument with my conservative, even borderline-wingnut friends, neighbors, colleagues, and online acquaintances. I spent much of the Reagan Administration teaching at a high school that was loaded with knowledgeable conservatives (and some not so knowledgeable). Even in animated discussions, I have always respected and learned from their views, especially the ones who had much more experience and knew much more history than I did.

In online discussions over the last couple years, I've had periodic spars with Toby Petzold who runs an anti-Muslim reactionary blog called Neognostikos. Now Toby and I utterly despise many views held by the other. But not all. We even share an interest in football and I like his taste in music. And neither of us has ever ventured into territory where we felt banning was called for.

Now the last couple days I've run across (through Neognostikos) a blog called Mike's America. It's full of Republican orthodoxy, emotional jingoism, lots of unexamined acceptance of radical statism masquerading as moral conservatism, and a gigantic dose of leftist bashing. In other words, typical semi-intellectual red state politics. Sometimes I'm a glutton for punishment, when I see this, so I like to try to see if I can engage it in a meaningful way.

Now I feel that the rift in American propelling its electoral divisions is not insurmountable. We can in fact learn to talk with each other without totally pussyfooting around our widely varying perceived truths about important concepts, issues, and lessons of history. Why bother, some of the liberal/left bloggers might ask. Those people are incorrigible. Maybe. But I'd like us all to see each other's humanity and learn to argue in a respectful way, so as to avoid the kind of purging that in a more desperate future could result in a lot of unnecessary pain -- a lot more punishment born of jingoism for a lot more people than the mild stuff experienced by the Dixie Chicks in 2003, or Ward Churchill this year.

One of the beauties of America, in my opinion, is the freedom to look at hard truths about ourselves and address them. It's never easy, as the American civil rights campaigners of the 20th Century know.

So here is a reproduction of the discussion that led Mike to ban Deep Blade:

I'm all for democratic self determination. If you read my postings over the last month or so, I think you'll see that I too found the election in Iraq very meaningful, the Iraqi voters incredibly courageous. But they voted for self determination, not for continued occupation and American interference with the process that has followed the election. Sadly, there are signs that interference is exactly what they're getting.

Meanwhile, let's watch what the US does if Bush starts getting what I think he's saying he wants -- widespread democratic ambitions in the Arab monarchies. Would we witness the sort of unrest some predicted the invasion would bring, in response to Bush's own call for democracy? What an irony! I'm all for it.
Deep Blade | 02.24.05 - 2:20 am


Deep Blade:

So far, none of the dire predictions from "the sky is falling" crowd have come true in Iraq.

And you likely will not agree with the analysis about the number of lives SAVED by our intervention.

You may also have a different take on the notion that PEACE is not possible absent JUSTICE.

But as someone who has stood on the ground within the barbed wire fences of Dachau and stared into the ovens where the murdered were cremated... I take seriously the declaration: "NEVER AGAIN!"

Will our Iraq keystone strategy succeed? Too soon to tell. But thus far, the benefits being seen in Lebananon and reported in other nations in the Middle East are encouraging.

FREEDOM + JUSTICE = PEACE
Mike | 02.24.05 - 12:28 pm


You're right, I do not believe that the best way to save a village is to destroy it. On the matter of democracy breaking out in Mideast monarchies, let's watch how the US reacts if Bush is taken seriously and it really starts happening. Like I say, I'm all for it, as long as it isn't imposed at gunpoint.
Deep Blade | 02.25.05 - 9:09 am


I would have thought the image of purple stained fingers waving in the air as happy Iraqis danced home from the polls would have caused you to rethink the "destroy a village to save it" stuff...

Oh, but I do realize how difficult your position is... If even HALF Bush's keystone strategy succeeds, there are going to be a lot of people in a similar spot.
Mike | 02.25.05 - 10:52 am


Yes the purple fingers image is powerful. There is a strong reflection of the will of the Iraqi people there. That is good, I accept it. The election did not turn out to be 100% the occupier's demonstration, as I did suggest could be the case. I am glad I was wrong. The US lost more than I may have suggested in some of my immediate blog postings.

But what is the will of the people? Certainly not perpetual occupation. In fact, I believe the message is they want to start seeing the US on its way out pretty soon.

Can you even see the destruction wrought by a decade+ of US support for Saddam; destroyed infrastructure in the 1st Gulf War, followed by a costly double-cross of the anti-Saddam resistance; then 12 years of devastating sanctions and bombing featuring slow starvation and death of perhaps a million people (many children) due to lack of clean water, food, sanitation, and proper health care (in a country that by the 1980s had the best health system in the Middle East/Southwest Asia); then a 2-year occupation where the country has been bombed, looted, cities flattened, and estimates showing 20,000 to 200,000 civilian casualties with the best estimate about 100,000? If not, you do not know much about about Iraq, its people, or its history.

I see from your postings you'd like to blame it all on Saddam. Speculative figures based on out-of-context "averages" of the number of alleged deaths Saddam caused then extrapolated to the last two years just don't cut the cheese. Cause and effect due to US policy is inexorably linked to the entire period.
Deep Blade | 02.26.05 - 9:21 pm


Oh goodness deepblade.... Must be an unusual celestial alignment tonight because you're launching into outter space...

1,200,000 people dead as a result of the U.S. and sanctions???... Well I suppose if that oil for food money waas spent on FOOD and not bribing the UN and the French we might have saved some.

But after they opened the mass graves and we got the story about the chemical attack on Halabja... I simly can not see how any thinking, feeling, intelligent person can blame the U.S.

I understand that there are still people who believe the revelation of the NAZI holocaust was propaganda ... but I SINCERELY hope you would not be among them.

Again, I would direct you to my experience at the first German Concentration Camp, Dachau, and ask if you can point me to FACTS! Over SIXTY MILLION PEOPLE DIED in World War II because Pacifists thought the abscence of war was MORE important than facing down the horror which took their lives.

History revealed that World War II could have been stopped with minimal bloodshed on at least three occasions when early on, Hitler's ambitions became evident.

If there is blood on any hands for the evil inflicted on the world in the last century... it is on those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.

The lesson of history is clear... and we promised at Dachau.. .NEVER AGAIN!

I have no more to say on the subject...I'm sorry.. but you are WRONG!
Mike | 02.27.05 - 12:25 am

At this point I'm banned, and that is Mike's right. But my reply would proceed something like this:

If you care to take a look for even one minute at the CASI website, the book Out of the Ashes: the resurrection of Saddam Hussein (Harper Collins, 1999), or the writings of Joy Gordon (here, here) you'll find a heartbreaking story of slow death and destruction in Iraq due to sanctions and bombing from 1990 to 2003 -- done with tenacious American insistance, a level of UN complicity that was in fact disgusting, and often to the benefit of Saddam. (Oil-for-food scandal mongers have some of these aspects of the story correct, but always leave out the truth about "tenacious American insistance.") Yes the excess toll from these very American policies was death in the neighborhood of 1 million people and immeasurable ruination of the lives of the Iraqi people. Yes, both the Democratic and Republican administrations in the US were criminally to blame along with Saddam, despite the constant bleating of Clinton and his successor that it was only Saddam.

More recently, the Lancet study gave a central estimate of 100,000 excess dead since March 2003 largely from US aerial bombardment. Here is a good post on the issues raised by the Lancet paper, and the reaction to it. Briefly, 100,000 is the central estimate, the number with the highest probability of being true, given statistics gathered in a well-designed, scientifically sound study of Iraqi households. Politics, unfortunately, intervened in both dissemination and rational discussion about this study.

The upshot is I stand by the figures I quoted.

The majority of Americans who have absorbed the emissions of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, and others over the last few years and uncritically taken them to heart seem to think that all of sudden in late 2002 before and onward into mid-2003 after the invasion there was a revelation about how Saddam used chemical weapons against the Iranians and the Kurds -- notably in the massacre of thousands of Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Oh, how can ``intelligent", ``feeling" human beings not jump to a consensus behind Bush's war after this?

The obvious contrary moral argument is that additional war upon Iraq has compounded the destruction, not brought "justice" for Saddam's crimes. However, let's take a look at whose side America was on at the time of Saddam's Anfal campaign and when the atrocities in Halabja occurred. Yes, America firmly backed Saddam. We unintelligent, unfeeling leftists knew more about this and opposed more strenuously at the time the so-called "tilt towards Iraq" than any present-day jingos. Today's warbloggers and Republican shills are clueless about how badly Bush has duped them on this one.

To wit, by September 1988, enough news had come out about Saddam's atrocities (this news was not a 2002 revelation) that the United States Senate unanimously passed The Prevention of Genocide Act, a set of comprehensive sanctions against Saddam. How did Saddam's supporters in the Reagan Administration handle that? To the disgust of human rights campaigners (like us) everywhere, they got ag. state Republicans in the House to block the measure. I guess rice sales and weapons sales to Saddam were more important to Shultz, Weinberger and House Republicans than a few thousand gassed Kurds.

To argue that the US war on Iraq is based on "peace" and "justice," in response to a Hitler/Saddam motif proven by invoking the chemical attack on Halabja, is hypocrisy of Biblical proportions. It's downright Orwellian. It's even much, much worse if we look into the history of Iraqgate and the entire period of the Iran-Iraq war. There were oil pipelines on the drawing boards, sales of chemical/biological/nuclear weapons components using illegal financial schemes, secret US cooperation with Saddam on intelligence and battlefield logistics for attacking the Iranians, and on and on. I'll leave more for another post.

Oh, and finally I do strenuosly object to even an off-handed suggestion that my views are so "into outter[sic] space" that I might be a holocaust denier. Please.

Here we see the danger of not being able to talk to each other about the narrative of world history. Left and right views are utterly divergent. But I believe Mike does have a point, even if he does not know how to apply it, that a rigid pacifist point of view against threats real (not phony) quite possibly would be disastrous. On the other hand, as in the case of the Bush attack on Iraq, taking trigger-happy action has certainly led to a lot of unnecessary death and destruction -- for both our own troops and the Iraqis alike. There must be a point-of-view somewhere in between, one centered in robust international cooperation, that both recognizes the undesirability of war, yet addresses the very real competitions and dangers faced by every country in the world. So let's keep talking.