Thursday, June 23, 2005
(8:11 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
From dissenting speech to undermining speech
There has been some discussion of late in conservative media circles about certain types of "liberal" or "left-wing" speech that cross the line from "dissent" to "undermining." I'd like to set the record straight on this matter.As a card-carrying member of the ACLU (quite literally card-carrying), I think that I easily qualify as a bomb-throwing leftist for the purposes of this discussion. And I can testify that my friends and I were consistently disappointed that our scathing critiques of the war in Iraq consistently failed to affect the outcome. We had some of the scathingest critiques thinkable by the human mind, to wit:
- President Bush decided to invade Iraq even before he was elected and shamefully manipulated a grieving and frightened American populace into a war that was completely unconnected to 9/11.
- Every stated reason for the war, by the administration and by members of the mainstream media elite, is false -- in point of fact, it was motivated by a quest for vengeance against the rebellious former client Saddam, combined with a desire to tighten the US stranglehold on Mideast oil reserves in the face of explosive economic growth in China.
- The war proceeded with the most slapdash planning available, ignoring the opinion of those who have spent their career studying and implementing military ventures, in favor of the outlandish fantasies of men whose intellectual nourishment consists of a heady cocktail of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss, and Tim LaHaye.
- The government deliberately put the troops in harm's way without adequate armor and more importantly, without adequate knowledge of the goals of the occupation, which had to remain a secret, lest it offend the basic human decency of the majority of American citizens.
- The administration promoted brutal and immoral policies of interrogation, characterized by arbitrary indefinite detention and tortue, even of those prisoners believed to be factually innocent of any crime.
"Nonsense!" I said. "The problem isn't that words are ineffective, but rather that we are using the wrong type of words. We believed, mistakenly, that dissenting words would be adequate to affect the course of the war. We must look for words that will directly undermine the war effort by directly causing real effects in the physical world!"
The room was silent. Some hapless liberal terror-monger asked, "So are you saying we should pray that the troops fail?"
"NO!" I screamed, pulling out and waving aloft my ACLU membership card. "God is no fool -- he knows we hate him almost as much as we hate America, and he would never agree to be worshipped under false pretenses by those hungry only for political gain!"
Again, silence. "So, um..." said another storm trooper in the war on freedom, "what did you have in mind?"
"I'm glad you asked." I pulled out a large, leather-bound book. "What I have here is what you would call a 'magic book.' It's a simple item, something you can order off of Amazon. But the words inside this book hold the key to unimaginable power over the course of nature itself."
The crowd made crowd noises, and I called them to attention. "Look at these spells! Here we have a spell to cause young Iraqi men to join insurgent cells. This spell inspires its victim to plan and execute a car bombing in the Green Zone. And this -- this spell is my pride and joy. It causes its target to take pictures of his fellow soldiers abusing prison inmates and mail the photos home to his friends and family!"
And so there you have it. The conservative commentators are absolutely right. After we realized that dissenting words have absolutely no influence over the course of a war on the other side of the planet and that under the normal laws of physics, only those who physically fight in the war and command soldiers in the war can be held responsible for the conduct of a war, we turned from dissenting speech to undermining speech -- that is, we started casting magic spells to make the war go badly for America. That was the only way we evil liberals could think of to go about our daily lives here in America while simultaneously undermining a war effort thousands of miles away.
Thank you for your time.
