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Selective Civil Libertarianism and Your Reprehensible Nationalist Racist Religious Hatred

Yeah, you.

I’m reading Victor Davis Hanson on why people who are worked up about the duly enacted Patriot Act don’t seem to give a damn about actual law-breaking and civil rights trampling.  Then I look around to see who he’s talking about, and I trip over a Fourth-of-July bashing piece by Howard Zinn, who wants to have a chat with you about your reprehensible nationalist racist religious hatred.   

Here’s Hanson:   

If we are to lose our civil liberties, it won’t be all of sudden due to Patriot-Act zealots in sunglasses and flattops, but rather insidiously and incrementally by egalitarian professors, moral crusaders, muckraking journalists, and government utopians all unhappy that constitutional justice is too little and too late for their ever impatient desire to ensure heaven on earth.

He’s talking about the defense of illegal border crossing/system-sponging; prosecutorial excesses; insistences on the so-called Fairness Doctrine; the trampling on property rights.

Now here’s one of the banner carriers of the selective civil libertarianism Hanson is refering to. Howard Zinn, dissing flag-waving in an anti-Fourth of July piece: 

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

Well, no.  National socialism was one of the greatest evils of the last century, as was racism, which has been legislated, educated and socialized into a subordinate position, such that the great challenge now is liberating the former targets of racism from the corrective measures that were applied and have become crutches as they try to overcome the economic legacy of centuries of racism. Religious hatred is one of the great evils of our time, but contrary to the history that Zinn misinterprets and belabors, the religious evil of our time is something of which we are the targets, not practitioners.

No mention of the “I” word. Zinn also deviates from his themes of nationalism, racism and religious hatred to bash “liberty” and “democracy” as motivations for acting in the world, which is a little confusing. 

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?

Zinn does not trouble to explain how this war is either nationalistic, racist or the product of religious hatred, so I will attempt to divine his meaning.  I thought it was supposed to be a “blood for oil” thing, but that’s economic. Can’t be that.

There was all that flag-waving after the September 11 attacks, so I guess that’s nationalistic.  Saddam Hussein had the audacity to be a crazed dictator who murdered his own people, used chemcial weapons and was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, but because he was an Arab, I suppose taking him out was racist.  As for the religious hatred, I’m scratching my head.  George Bush did use that word “crusade,” which of course has much broader applications in our world than the narrow understanding of it in the Muslim world, and given that George Bush has bent over backwards to avoid blaming Muslims for Osama bin Laden, it seems unfair to stick him with the “religious hatred” label on that count. So Zinn must be refering to the Great Satan’s refusal to submit to Islam.  OK, I think I get it now. 

Topics: GWOT, Islam, illegals

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:59 am on Monday, July 2, 2007

5 Responses to “Selective Civil Libertarianism and Your Reprehensible Nationalist Racist Religious Hatred”

1. MikeH Says:
   July 2nd, 2007 at 2:50 pm

   If Mr. Zinn is against Nationalism and patriotism, why the hell did he put his ass on the line in WWII as a bombardier? I believe that Mr. Zinn has come down with the Murtha Syndrome which causes the sufferer to sell out to the highest bidding power broker. The only thing to do in cases like this is to put the sufferer out of his (or her) misery by sending them to a place with more money. Saudi Arabia comes to mind. Maybe Iran would be happy to buy Mr.Zinn’s heartfelt support.

2. Dave Surls Says:
   July 2nd, 2007 at 5:27 pm

   “Howard Zinn”

   Possibly the biggest liar on planet earth today. It’s a rare Zinn paragraph that doesn’t contain at least one bald-faced lie.

   Needless to say, he’s an honored member of the academic profession.

3. TBinSTL Says:
   July 2nd, 2007 at 9:46 pm

   I hate to say this but I see it at my Legion Post. Some of the “Greatest Generation”, and I don’t use that phrase lightly, are exhibiting signs of jealousy. I hear things like “They don’t know what fighting is like” or “They don’t have it hard, we had it hard” or “We had to fight a real army”.
   It breaks my heart to have my image of men that I know and have always considered to be beyond heroic to behave like this. It’s only a few and they usually get shouted down but it genuinely frightens me.

4. TBinSTL Says:
   July 2nd, 2007 at 9:48 pm

   Sorry, worst sentance I’ve ever typed right there. ^^^

5. The Thunder Run Says:
   July 3rd, 2007 at 12:14 pm

   Web Reconnaissance for 07/03/2007

   A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.

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