Monday, July 31, 2006

We know what you are against, but what are you for?

Hat tip to Dougal Paver at www.dougal.org.uk for his wise words on the war in Lebanon.

It got me wondering why Western liberals and so called progressives find it so easy to condemn the US, Britain and Israel. At the same time they see only what they want to see in the threat to our way of life from the virulent strain of militant Islam that lobs rockets into Israeli cities, flies planes into downtown New York and blows up the London Underground. I was reminded, however, that things were ever thus:

"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ..."
George Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945.

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