Response to “Solitaire” on OhMyNews
I still remember that “liberalism” once stood for compassion toward the innocent and supportive for individual liberties.
Where are the liberal voices today? We heard them for a moment when men like Rep. Tom Lantos and Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Museum of Tolerance lent their weight to the North Korean Human Rights Act and helped it pass both houses of Congress without opposition. You can still see a liberal conscience at freenorthkorea.net, which probably influenced hundreds of people to write their representatives to support that legislation.
Increasingly, however, the publications and organizations that spoke for liberalism have been hijacked and shouted down by the likes of Solitaire, whom I will call “nihilists,” for the sake of this discussion (you could argue that the Korean version are ethno-nihilists, but I’ll save that for another rant). OhMyNews represents the nihilist view nicely in its unspoken editorial policy on any discussion of human rights in North Korea. There are just two rules. First, any mention must consist of four lines or less. Second, it must end with the word “but.”
Two important differences distinguish nihilists like Solitaire from liberals. First, instead of respect for individual life and liberty (except their own), they harbor deep contempt. Instead of pleading for understanding of all views, they elevate hatred–alternatively of globalism (whatever the f*ck that one means) and America–to the pinnacle of morality. Instead of supporting the voices of the oppressed, they conspire to silence them. Instead of offering even words for the liberation of those oppressed by their own rulers, they defend the right of despots to enslave them. Instead of acting as an honest and credible conscience for free thoughts and free people that fight to survive, they offer themselves as shrill shills for those plotting to exterminate them. Instead of standing for the peaceful expression of views at the ballot box, they applaud those who murder peace and silence free expression with gulags, hijackings, and beheadings. Our discourse has exchanged “let it be” for “death to America.”
Second, nihilists lack the liberal gene that insists on a logical, even-handed analysis of each set of facts in a greater, universal context. Nihilism also translates well to societies that are deeply nationalistic or bigoted, where it adopts a tribal, us-versus-them weighting of the moral scales. This shows itself in an astonishing absence of proportion and a focused determination to ingore damning facts proving that evil really does exist. You could literally lock a guy like Solitaire in a gas chamber with a family of innocent North Koreans. He’d still spend his last gasps accusing John Foster Dulles of farting in a crowded elevator.
Thus deprived of the verbal weapons of proportion, logic, compassion, or restraint, the nihilists cannot process the mounting reports of mass atrocities in North Korea, or in the Sudan. This is particularly true given that the United States Congress has noted those reports. That last fact is all it takes to smite a nihilist with selective blindness.
Indeed, the North Korean Human Rights Act is the nominal provocation for this piece of work (by which I mean the article, I suppose). Funny, there isn’t a word in the entire thing about what appears to be happening in North Korea today. As Solitaire tries to distract readers with rhetorical hand puppets, two million North Koreans, one-tenth of the entire population, are lying in mass graves. More than one percent of the North Korean population is currently in concentration camps. North Korean “authorities” are killing kids in gas chambers, murdering babies of repatriated refugees, selectively starving people and forcing them to resort to cannibalism. Those facts don’t merit one keystroke to Solitaire, although they dwarf every single example he cites in his regurgitation of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t non-sequiturs, unimaginitive adjectives (Reaganesque, anyone?), and self-parodying declarations (“I hold imperialistic Britain responsible . . . “).
Yes, and if I shared a Left Bank apartment with six other 40-year-old grad students, I too could have written your blather for you by rearranging a few refrigerator magnets. How does that save North Korean lives, or give the Iraqis back their oil and a free vote?
I have a little quiz for Solitaire. Of the examples of American interventions you cite (Grenada, Iraq, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia, Chile, and just for good measure, let’s throw in Afghanistan, Bosnia, El Salvador and especially FRANCE) how many have either had free elections in the last five years or will have them in six months or less? Answer: all of them but Somalia, where we joined a dozen or so other countries in a fairly typical U.N. fiasco. And in how many of those same countries does the U.S. have significant military forces today? Just Iraq, Afghanistan, and as part of a NATO force, Bosnia. This hardly suggests that the U.S. has left a trail of despotism in its wake.
Yet none of this will persuade a determined nihilist. Confront a nihilist with an alleged crime, and his first act is to suspend compassion. He will not ask you how many victims suffered, how much, whether they themselves had hurt anyone, or how old they were, or whether a terrorist had chained them to his bedpost. He will not even ask you what evidence proves that the crime occurred. He will only want to know who hated America more: (A) those who pulled the triggers; or (B) those who lie in the unmarked graves. If the answer is B, watch his eyes redden with righteous indignation as he asks the interrupted questions to fill his OhMyNews screed. He’ll be photoshopping a Hitler moustache onto Rumsfeld’s face before you can blurt out “Kein Blut fur Ol!” If the answer is A, however, you can safely summarize his screed in just four words: “Hey! Look over there!”
In the final analysis, you need a vast reservoir of ill will toward humankind to consider that “progressive.”