NYT History 101
NYT ed board needs a Chomsky session. The doctor is Zinn. Because NYT ed board this morning looks a little rusty on NYT ed board’s lefty history:
Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.
The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.
It’s appropriate enough that NYT begins its fairytale with the words, “Once upon a time … ”
Never mind NYT’s … how to put this … rather liberal definition of what constitutes torture. NYT ed board poses the question: “Is this who we really are?” A little disingenuous, when this is who NYT has been painting us to be for decades. NYT ed board really needs to read its own newspaper and WaPo, watch a little public television, for the Cliff Notes on its own version of American History 101. All any American war needs is a “defining atrocity.” NYT cleverly quotes archfiend Reagan, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and credits him with a bloodless victory … which is odd, I thought the approved view of the Cold War from stage left is that Reagan just put a cherry on it. NYT, unsurprisingly, overlooks the bloody wars that preceded the Berlin wall’s fall. Wars that kept communism, only just, hemmed in for decades.
But it would be awkward for NYT to acknowledge that Vietnam may have been necessary. Vietnam is supposed to be remembered as an extended-play American atrocity that diminished us in the eyes of the world and made a mockery of our values. Military-industrial complex, etc., mass slaughter of innocent Vietnamese, illegal detentions and torture, atroci-palooza. Then there are the dirty wars to stop the advance of communism in Central America, as the Soviet Union sought to encircle us with client states. Long litany of Yanqui imperialist misdeeds that brought opprobrium upon us. Korea, another war to stop communism, we’ve lately learned produced its own atrocities, the machine-gunning of civilians. Never mind that those incidents were engineered by North Korean agents who used civilians as cover, a favorite technique that remains popular with our enemies today.
The Good War, World War II, doesn’t bear up well under scrutiny with head tilted left, either. Ken Burns recently reminded us it was a rolling death machine that turned racist Americans into murderous animals who executed prisoners. WaPo informs us FDR maintained black detention sites where prisoners were held in secret, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Not to mention those concentration camps for Japanese Americans. WWII, of course, set the conditions for all the American imperialism and atrocities that followed.
NYT’s America is the nation of Joe McCarthy and witchhunts. America is the nation of segregation and slavery that we have yet to be sufficiently dunned for, a nation of unabated racism … according to some people who sound a lot like racists themselves, but that’s another issue. America for decades has been despoiling the world with Coca Cola imperialism … the one world culture the transnationalists reject. America for decades has been poisoning the world with technology that doesn’t make life better, but dooms it.
Myopic NYT ed board needs to remember where it put its lefty history goggles, then go back and have another gander at the picture of America drawn by the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, a smear-job still clumsily fingerpainted by of North Korea, that was acclaimed in Europe and on college campuses across America, ultimately ended up hanging on the walls of the well-heeled offices, cocktail parties, living rooms haunted by NYT. A picture of racist, imperialist, rights-trampling America.
But I’m glad to see that today, if only as a matter of editorial expediency, NYT is looking past that wretched version of American history. Because up until the ascendancy of Chimp McHitlerburton, NYT tells us, America was respected for its values. America, beacon of freedom and justice.
NYT deserves praise for correcting its view of history, for recognizing that in those difficult days of war against Nazi evil, against Communist evil, right-minded people everywhere recognized that America, for all her faults, stood for something noble, something better, a chance in this violent, horribly flawed world.
It is probably too much to ask in these days of world war against Islamic extremism, NYT would acknowledge that clear-minded people around the world also know which nation represents freedom, justice, and the willingness to combat evil. Odd that the NYT ed board, which sees genocide as preferable to combating terrorism with an increasingly successful counterinsurgency, would have the gall to talk about American values at all.
It is a difficult fight and, once engaged in earnest, often dirty and disturbing in its execution. Young men and women who answer the call to fight this war are transformed. They are ennobled in the fire of just, necessary if often dirty and bloody war even while, if they are lucky enough to be left whole in body, they may be injured on our behalf. Not least by the rejection of the value of their sacrifice by those whose freedoms are bought with it.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:12 am on Sunday, October 7, 2007
6 Responses to “NYT History 101”
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October 7th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
It’s appropriate enough that NYT begins its fairytale with the words, “Once upon a time … ”
Great line :-)
Lotta “clinging” in that nytimes piece, too.
Bush and his aides are clinging to “rationalizations” on torture, further clinging to Bush’s policies will only hurt our “global image” and legal system…
…he author of the editorial is clinging to the same ‘o, same ‘o
October 7th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
These people are such self righteous, sanctimonious, moralizing, asses. They really are.
Why yes indeedy back when Clinton was President the US would never have said so much as boo to some nice terrorist.
October 7th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Thank you Jules,
That is a masterpiece.
October 7th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
You Stay Classy, Old Media!
What an astonishing series of media moments have occurred just within the last couple of weeks. The New York Times are profoundly disappointed that they have no “defining atrocity” to pin on Americans in Iraq. Both Robin Wright of the…
October 7th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
What would anti-American propagandists do without the NYTimes. They would have to make up their own slanders.
October 7th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
“Once upon a time” says it all. I know I harp on it, and I hope I don’t just bore you all to death, but “once upon a time” is what one is left with when one considers reality to be subjective–contained within the mind. That article is what comes from deconstructing the world from your own constructs. Q.E.D. They really can’t help themselves.
That author is extremely self-righteous, but I’m hanged if I can figure out upon what principle he defines that which is righteous. Is it just what happened to the indigenous peoples when Europeans first came to America? Then why doesn’t his wrath reach into every country, every civilization, every people, since there are few peoples in the history of mankind which has not conquered others. The European colonials certainly didn’t come into the country slaughtering people right and left, as others have done. I know Columbus is denigrated for the terrible sin of being curious while European. He is blamed for bringing disease as though he planned it all out. But of course, none of the Europeans completely wiped out the people of the new world.
Slavery? It was Enlightenment ideas that finally did away with slavery in the West–but of course, it is still a “cultural” thing in the Middle East and elsewhere. So we are blamed for being too close in time to some of man’s worst history. I guess. I’ve never owned a slave. No one of color born in this country has ever been a slave–thanks to being born in the country of the Enlightenment. Perhaps it is that our Founding Fathers didn’t manage to make a perfect society using new ideas of individualism and liberty which is the problem. Of course, they were not social engineers who were attempting to remake man in their own image. They were men who said that men had a mind and reason and owned the freedom to use them by right, and would prosper at least as well as those who lived under some degree of slavery, owing their lives to the kind, the church, the state. After the religious wars, the wars of the kings, the wars between this feudal lord and that aristocrat, the wars of invasion, all of which oppressed and destroyed everything in their path, they decided to try something different by contracting to men an unprecedented power over their own lives. Shame on them.
The slaughter of those tagged for human sacrifice by the South American Indians is just a cultural thing. The modern day slavery, oppression, and sudden death on a daily basis among Muslims is also excused. The slavery, murder of the next generation, blah, blah, blah of the Chinese–fine and dandy. Russia? Egad. Self-determination. Zimbabwe, and almost the whole of Africa? It’s our fault. Like the North American Indians, they all lived their wonderful lives in perfect harmony with nature and man, until Europe showed up.
Ever notice that a certain kind of mind talks about primitive people like they do any animal in the wild? Only men who have progressed beyond the primitive are guilty. Only those who define man as a rational animal are guilty. At bottom, it is reason they hate.
My cigar is out and my snifter empty, so that’s all. I beg you to excuse my thinking out loud.