Last week, Rush Limbaugh had a caller who was back in the USA after a period in Iraq with an army unit. He was expecting to return there shortly. Limbaugh had a lengthy interview with this soldier, as he usually does with soldiers who phone in and have frontline news.
There was no doubting the authenticity of this caller, as he was too knowledgeable about Baghdad and the military activity there to be phony. He was intelligent and articulate and he refused to be drawn into opinions on some more political issues that Limbaugh tried to lead him in to. The soldier was a very sane voice and fully committed to the war he was fighting. He was also optimistic about the Iraqi army and its development. His expert on-the-spot reporting and his facts and optimism were a complete contrast to all of the reporting one reads and hears in the Mainstream Media. The purpose of his call was to complain about the Media reporting on Iraq.
There have been any number of similar calls from serving soldiers on Talk Radio and there are a number of websites where one can read daily reports from military personnel that paint an entirely different picture than the one the wider public gets from the Press and TV. A number of reasons have been put forward for this situation, including the explanation that reporters in Iraq do not venture far from the safety of the Green Zone and therefore do not discover the upbeat facts.
On this website we do not buy such explanations. We argue that the Media Class is committed to the US and its allies losing the war against the Islamic terrorists and indeed to losing to anyone else who gets into a fight with the USA. This might change a little should Mrs. Clinton get into the White House in 2008 and find herself having to lead the US against an enemy, but as long as George Bush is President the Media will undermine the war effort by dishonest reporting.
At the moment there are many people both in the US and in Europe who want the US to be defeated. They range from the Leftists whose allegiance was to the old Soviet Union and who cannot forgive the US for causing that experiment in Socialism to collapse, to those who graduate from self-loathing to loathing their own country and culture, to those wine-sipping tenured intellectuals who feel morally superior when supporting an enemy and to those who hate this war because it has been instigated by a self-confessed Christian President. Some or all of these motives are at work in war opponents. The Media Class, now so powerful in the Western World, is composed of all the above, though I suspect that hatred for Bush and traditional Christian morality is one of the most powerful motives for wanting the US to lose in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When one’s country gets into a war, its citizens and allies have to choose sides. War is not one of those situations where one can sit on the sidelines. There can be no true neutrality. This has been a dilemna for people since the advent of Nation States. It is a particular dilemna for people with prior internationalist leanings such as (democratic) Socialists, Catholics, Jews and immigrants. Genuine pacifists, of whom there are very few, must dread the choice. I knew a British Quaker who had refused to fight in the Second World War and he volunteered to be a medical worker in the army. He did not hope for Hitler’s victory though, and did not stay at home trying to undermine the war effort.
Most British Labour Party members ultimately supported their nation from 1940 onwards when the real fighting began. So did some who had been on the Far Left like George Orwell. They did not wait to follow the Soviet line like the Communists did. The small dedicated Trotskyite groups worked against their country to the bitter end, trying to foment strikes in key industries, even though a Hitler victory would have taken them into the gas chambers – an example of ideology replacing common sense. There is much to be learned from history and rarely is there something that is new under this sun. The US with its many immigrant citizens had to fear a Fifth Column of German, Italian and Japanese resident minorities. In the event most proved loyal to their adopted nation though there were fears of the Japanese and this led, rightly or wrongly, to internment of many.
The British Labour Party members, Orwell and all the others who chose their nation, chose correctly, as did those many Germans, Japanese and Italians who joined the US armed forces and fought against their old countries. Some were no doubt motivated by disapproval of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, but most probably instinctively recognized that being a citizen meant being loyal at such a time.
As I said earlier, neutrality is not an option and ‘my country right or wrong’ has much to commend it. There must have been many in the UK in 1939 that questioned why their country went to war with Germany over Poland, a far off land with no links to Great Britain and its people. When the war went badly, as it did for a long time, such people could have marched for peace but they did not. Even many in Oswald Moseley’s Fascist Movement ultimately took their country’s side.
The alternative (opposition to your Nation’s war effort) has to lead to hoping for national defeat and welcoming every casualty and every piece of bad news. Those who march for “peace” in San Francisco, those who write dishonest dispatches and slant the news and those who work in Congress to pass resolutions for withdrawal from Iraq CANNOT welcome news of success from the war front. Good news for the Nation and its troops HAS to be bad news for them, for they have condemned the war as illegal, unjustified and not winnable.
The people that we are fighting are not by any stretch of the imagination, better than Hitler and Mussolini. In fact, Mussolini was a bleeding heart compared to the Islamists who saw off heads slowly on camera and plant bombs in schools and market places.
On this website we believe that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were justified by the events of 9/11 and events before that when Clinton was preoccupied with Monica. We have many criticisms of the way that the war has been conducted and of Bush’s lethargic leadership at home and we most certainly have no liking of Blair and his Labour Party, but we want victory.
Those who want US and Allied defeat are despicable and plain wrong. Nick Griffin would become a statesman overnight if he renounced BNP opposition to the war and told the British people that in time of war nothing is acceptable that gives comfort to the enemy. As it is, he occupies the same ground as the BBC, George Galloway and all the other traitors, for there can be no neutrality when one’s country is at war.