- Oct 9, 1999
- 12,513
- 50
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Tom Teepen
Cox News Service
The rallies protesting the campaign against terrorism have so far been small, few, and largely confined to Berkeley or Greater Berkeley, wherever the latter may be at any given moment. That, and suspended somewhere between the quaintly nostalgic and the crudely intitiative.
On the photographic evidence, they are peopled by a mix of '60s holdovers caught in a time warp and the inheritors of hand-me-down protest who are checking old news clips and video tapes as prompts for the present.
There's an important distinction to be made here. Genuine pacifism has a long and honorable history. Whether religiously or ethically based, if held as a coherent and committed philosophy, it deserves respect. It is brave after its fashino. US policy customarily makes an acommodation with honest pacifism. We're a big enough people for that.
Most of the second-dub protests we've seen to date, far from being coherent, first misremember history and then misapply it.
Though same later legends have it otherwise, the demonstrations that eventually upended US policy in Vietnam were never much of a peace movement. They were anti-war - and at that, Vietnam-specific rather than generic.
In a nutshell, policy planners who had been scare young by the appeasement at Munich that let Hitler loose on Europe thought they saw a Cold War Munich in Vietnam.
A new generation that was paying for the suspicion that their lives came to judge that the game wasn't worth the candle. And they were right. Gain and cost were out of wack, and we won the Cold War anyway.
This is different, folks. This is not a rerun of Vietnam, a policy waer fought on a misaligned analogy and dubious geopolitical agenda.
Osama bin Laden and his command have repeatedly called for war against Americans anywhere, and wherever they have declared the iminencde of new death, they have been as good as their word; six in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, 19 in the US military barracks in Saudi Arabia, 12 Americans - and lest we forget, 224 Africans - at our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, 17 aboard the USS Cole in a Yemeni harbor.
And now this: some 5,000 dead in a couple of hours - and more promised since.
We are under attack in a fight we didn't seek or provoke. We have to fight back - intelligently, to be sure, with canny diplomacy and agressive but rock-solid information as much as with military force, but fight back firmly and fully.
In the circumstances, protests that mindlessly mimic those of the '60s are just political slapstick. More poignant are the aging vets of the civil rights movement recommending their old nonviolence. Whatever the flaws of imperial Britain and Jim Crow America, Ghandi in India and King here were challenging fundamentally decent societies. You're not going to free Al-Qaudia's terrorists by singing "We Shall Overcome" at them.
Cox News Service
The rallies protesting the campaign against terrorism have so far been small, few, and largely confined to Berkeley or Greater Berkeley, wherever the latter may be at any given moment. That, and suspended somewhere between the quaintly nostalgic and the crudely intitiative.
On the photographic evidence, they are peopled by a mix of '60s holdovers caught in a time warp and the inheritors of hand-me-down protest who are checking old news clips and video tapes as prompts for the present.
There's an important distinction to be made here. Genuine pacifism has a long and honorable history. Whether religiously or ethically based, if held as a coherent and committed philosophy, it deserves respect. It is brave after its fashino. US policy customarily makes an acommodation with honest pacifism. We're a big enough people for that.
Most of the second-dub protests we've seen to date, far from being coherent, first misremember history and then misapply it.
Though same later legends have it otherwise, the demonstrations that eventually upended US policy in Vietnam were never much of a peace movement. They were anti-war - and at that, Vietnam-specific rather than generic.
In a nutshell, policy planners who had been scare young by the appeasement at Munich that let Hitler loose on Europe thought they saw a Cold War Munich in Vietnam.
A new generation that was paying for the suspicion that their lives came to judge that the game wasn't worth the candle. And they were right. Gain and cost were out of wack, and we won the Cold War anyway.
This is different, folks. This is not a rerun of Vietnam, a policy waer fought on a misaligned analogy and dubious geopolitical agenda.
Osama bin Laden and his command have repeatedly called for war against Americans anywhere, and wherever they have declared the iminencde of new death, they have been as good as their word; six in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, 19 in the US military barracks in Saudi Arabia, 12 Americans - and lest we forget, 224 Africans - at our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, 17 aboard the USS Cole in a Yemeni harbor.
And now this: some 5,000 dead in a couple of hours - and more promised since.
We are under attack in a fight we didn't seek or provoke. We have to fight back - intelligently, to be sure, with canny diplomacy and agressive but rock-solid information as much as with military force, but fight back firmly and fully.
In the circumstances, protests that mindlessly mimic those of the '60s are just political slapstick. More poignant are the aging vets of the civil rights movement recommending their old nonviolence. Whatever the flaws of imperial Britain and Jim Crow America, Ghandi in India and King here were challenging fundamentally decent societies. You're not going to free Al-Qaudia's terrorists by singing "We Shall Overcome" at them.
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