Cindy Sheehan has been able to demonstrate just how naked the Emperor is, and thus demonstrate the lie of Empire.
No one else could, because everyone else was afraid. Howard Dean said "we broke it, we own it." John Kerry supported it and couldn't back away from it.
This is how Democrats felt forced to respond, because they'd been stuck into a political wilderness for a generation by Vietnam. They were afraid to equate Iraq with Vietnam, fearing that political wilderness, and its chains, which bound liberalism and the cause of human rights for a generation.
Well, Cindy Sheehan broke through that fear. She lost her son. It transformed her. (It didn't transform her husband , but everyone's journey is different.)
By putting that transformation in our face, and in the face of George W. Bush, Cindy Sheehan is also making a change in us. Damn the past, damn the present, our kids are dying. Scales fall from the eyes.
There is no way at this point for the Emperor to appear clothed again, and his supporters know it.
That's why they're acting as they are toward Sheehan. It's like the crowd in the story, at first. Of course the Emperor's New Clothes are beautiful. You're just a stupid little boy. You just can't see the big picture.
Stupid. Little. Boy.
Stupid Little Boy, says Cindy Sheehan? Look at him, look at the Little Boy. Look at Casey. You call him Stupid, you call me Stupid?
Maybe we were. We were stupid because we believed in you. And look at what it's gotten us. My son is dead! And this is no fairy tale.
Khattam-Shud. Completely finished, over and done with. You did that to him. I say that to you. The end to the past, the end to the Empire, the end to the fear.
You see, we have to get past Vietnam in order to deal with Iraq. The whole 2004 campaign was a failure on that score. God, the Democrats wound up nominating a decorated Vietnam veteran -- a veteran of the War and the War Against the War -- creating a campaign that fought that war (and that War Against The War) all over again. With the same result as before. History wasted on irrelevancy.
The clothes of the Emperor, you see, are based on a powerful magic called Denial. Denial that Vietnam was deservedly lost, necessarily lost, fairly lost. It was those others, you see -- the press, the pundits, the academics, the kids, the peaceniks, the hippies, the Hollywood elites -- they stabbed us in the back, like the Jews did to Germany in World War I.
The Empire places Denial against those enemies and seeks to destroy them all. By talking about Vietnam, by allowing that to become the issue, Democrats walked right into Denial. They deserved to lose.
Democrats went right after Republicans' thick metaphysical hide. It takes a different, more powerful magic, a magic of today, to make that armor disappear, so people see the naked truth.
Cindy Sheehan has that magic. It is in the face of her son. Her dead son. Our dead son. Our dead sons, and daughters. And others’ as well. The horror, the horror....
My stand on all this is simple. (But I'm just a blogger.) Acknowledge International Law. Give Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the whole lot, to the International Court of Criminal Justice. Throw our entire nation on the mercy of that honorable court. We can no longer sort it out -- let others more dispassionate have at it.
Then get out. We've lost. We were the Bad Guys in this one. We ran the Blitzkrieg and got the Resistance. We are worse than Saddam, worse than Osama. Never liberators, only Empire Builders. Imperialists. We have met the real Evil Doers and he is us.
That's the truth. It’s the hard truth everyone was afraid to see, and say, until now.
And that truth shall make you free.
May our country not pull the whole temple down on its head before it understands this truth, and acts upon it. Already the pillars of oil drums are trembling, the roof of dollars over our heads is coming down.
Say it. Admit it. The Emperor is Naked! The Empire is a Lie!
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Gene Williams on August 17, 2005 07:39 PM writes...
Sir:
Saigon fell to an all out assault by 19 regular army divisions. Laos and Cambodia fell...well..like dominoes. Millions of South Vietnames fled in small boats; hundreds of thousands were imprisoned for years; millions died in indo-china on the killing fields. As Hemingway said, "I have seen war and hate it profoundly; but there are worse things and they all begin with defeat." No sir, You need to look yourself in the mirror, as revolting as that act might be, and say slowly, "On Vietnam, I am either a dupe...or a traitor." Only the truth will set you free.
From one who defended your right to be an idiot
Permalink to Comment2. Mike Sierra on August 18, 2005 09:38 AM writes...
I have to agree with the above comment, and can only add that "like the Jews did to Germany in World War I" is a particularly ghastly piece of rhetoric. As long as you draw such false parallels and insist that America deserves to lose, Americans will disagree with you.
Permalink to Comment3. Mike Sierra on August 18, 2005 09:42 AM writes...
I have to agree with Gene's comment, and can only add that "like the Jews did to Germany in World War I" is a particularly ghastly piece of rhetoric. As long as you draw such false parallels and insist that America deserves to lose, Americans will disagree with you. Talk about denial!
Permalink to Comment4. Eric Niemandt on August 18, 2005 11:44 AM writes...
Well said, Mr Blankenhorn. Living outside the United States borders, I am bewildered and dismayed by US actions in Iraq. You went to war on a lie, and have so far killed more than 100 000 innocent civilians. You've pulverised the country's infrastructure, broken the health and education systems. You've orphaned many thousands of children, and traumatised millions of people. You have made an absolute and bloody mess. And still your war machine grinds on; what next for your public bloodletting and savagery? In the binary world of good and evil that your president exhorts you to live in, know that your demons have you in their thrall.
Permalink to Comment5. Gene Williams on August 19, 2005 06:59 PM writes...
Dana,
Allow me an additional comment. I fought in the Vietnam war. I was an ideological war, part of a world-wide struggle between two philosophies which just couldn't coexist, just as this one is today. A good place to start trying to understand it is Harry Sumner's book "On Strategy" and/or LTG Palmer's book "Summons of the Trumpet." But make no mistake; we were idealists and the fact that we lost doesn't make our cause any less valid. The victory of the North was a disaster for liberal ideas about the place of man in society and for the Vietnamese people...they rapidly sank to the poorest-nation-in-the-world rank while being stifled by one of the most controlling-interfering nanny gulog government on earth.
Permalink to CommentNo, our defeat there was self inflicted; we thought the war was "revolutionary war" or "guerrilla war" when really it was a straight out conventional war against North Vietnamese imperialists, and in doing so, failed to adopt the strategies which would have won it. The problem in speaking of this war to Americans comes from dealing with three different levels of our society who "opposed" the war: Those who supported our defeat (ok, you can make a case for freedom of expression, if you pretend a war wasn't being fought, and those "supporting a withdrawal" didn't really want to kill enough US soldiers to defeat American foreign policy), those who supported/assisted the victory of our enemies (these are rightly called traitors), and those who woke up from their murderously utopian dreams after the fall of the South with the realization that they helped create a horror..and have subsequently tried to cover their actions by re-writing history/pretending there was anything at all admirable in that fascist-communist dictatorship and hiding their guilt bethind the pretense that the war was "immoral" (these persons are the intellectual cowards covering their tracks).
I recognize that your article was a polemic for true believers, not an intellectual piece, and thus you probably aren't open to an exchange on Vietnam. Yet, let me ask a question. You want to run from Iraq and Afghanistan?...then what?
6. Nate on August 19, 2005 09:40 PM writes...
Gene Williams,
I share your hatred of communism, and I share your sympathy with its victims (like the Vietnamese), and while I do not support my government's current policy in Iraq, I am sympathetic to some of the arguments for it. But you, Gene, speak as a true ideological imperialist, and just as many of the most offensive apologists for the war in Iraq do today, you argue your case by demagoguing those who disagree with you. What scares me the most about people like you is your proposition that those who disagree with our government (or with you, Gene), are motivated by disdain for America and/or sympathy for it's enemies. I feel it is attitudes like the one you displayed in your post that are a true threat to democracy. Allow me to demonstrate.
In defending your views, you neatly group those who would disagree with you into three categories:
1. "Those who supported our defeat..."
2. "those who supported/assisted the victory of our enemies..."
3. "and those who woke up from their murderously utopian dreams after the fall of the South with the realization..."
Is that it? Is this as serious as you are able to take those who disagree with you? Whatever; it really doesn't matter to me whether or not you take your idealogical opponent seriously. What is scary to me are things you say about these groups.
About group 1 you say, "Ok, you can make a case for freedom of expression, if you pretend a war wasn't being fought, and those "supporting a withdrawal" didn't really want to kill enough US soldiers to defeat American foreign policy"
This is appalling to me. Your little jab at freedom of expression echoes a timeless desire of oppressive regimes (and their supporters) to silence their critics. With this statement, those who disagree with a war are lumped in with the enemy in that war, and in it you have managed to ally yourself, in terms your method of debate, with many of the same totalitarian thinkers you claim to stand against.
About group 2 you say, "these are rightly called traitors", which I would whole-heartedly agree with, except that it seems pretty clear that you really consider groups 1 and 2 to be the same; if anyone who disagrees with you over support of an ongoing military action is trying to "kill enough US soldiers to defeat American foreign policy", then how can they not be assisting the enemy? Why make a distinction? So now, not only should I be compelled to be silent about my disagreement with an ongoing war, if I don't I am actually a traitor. Brilliant!
Group 3 is confusing. I am assuming that you mention it as a means to label some of your idealogical opponents as historical revisionists. You can certainly dig up authors and "teachers" who will try to justify the oppression of the North's regime, just as you can readily scrape up apologists and deniers of the holocaust, but I didn't hear Dana defend the Viet Cong or Saddam Hussein, and I don't hear too many people saying "That Saddam, you know, he really wasn't such a bad guy", so why make this a part of your argument? It would really be much clearer if you simply stated that some members of the first and second groups (the same group, really), are engaged in historical revisionism, and let that stand as your summary of the opposition.
Again, Gene, I am not someone who would say the America should not have intervened in Vietnam, and I would have supported military action against Saddam Hussein if it were done honestly and for the right reasons, with some assurance that America would not continue to breed monsters that will later require forced removal (if you take issue with my assertion that we are largely responsible for Saddam's rise to power, I would be happy to discuss it). But it is absolutely critical to the healthy function of our democracy that we be open to thorough debate over everything our government tells us, especially when it concerns war.
Permalink to Comment7. Gene Williams on August 20, 2005 11:35 PM writes...
I am going to take on this tendentious hyper-libertarian, quasi-socialist “sour-grapes-because-they-lost-the-cold-war,” the ”how-dare-you-insult-my-patriotism-cause-I’m-an-American-and-can-say-whatever-I-want” argument because, unless it is countered, it will lead us to civil war.
During the Vietnam War, the idea got around that one could help the enemies of America and still be a “patriot.,” that it was even one’s right to try to help kill US soldiers, because they were involved in an “immoral war.” That dubious proposition became a staple in “anti-imperialist” dogma for years...and now here it comes again in this article like a bad penny. Somehow the author and his fellow travellers have convinced themselves that, because they don’t like GW Bush or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or whatever, they have the “right” to do anything they want to insure their nation’s failure (anything short of shooting at American troops al la Johnny Jihad because they haven’t the balls for that?).
First, Understand that Dana’s article, if it were written in a time of war officially declared by the Congress of the United States, would have landed him in prison for sedition. In wartime even in the US the rules governing free speech change. Refresh your memory on this; its one reason commentators on the Vietnam War recommended an official declaration of war in future conflicts.
Second: In an “undeclared-declared war,” censorship doesn’t exist. But can you be against the war and support the troops (work for an American defeat); or be against the war and against the troops (work for an enemy victory) and still be a patriot? Neither proposition is intellectually tenable. Results of war are black and white; one side wins, one loses (measured against national objectives). and, admit it, those who actively work against our cause in a war duly authorised by the government of the people of the United States, de facto, are in effect trying to help our enemy win.
No, once the decision is made to go to war, even if it isn’t formally declared,...once the shooting starts, then we must/must make every effort to win it. To lose a war is horrible.
Take a second look at this article and its hate-laden fulmination's against America from the eyes of the troops in Iraq. They are American citizen soldiers. They are not hired Hussein's, and no American soldier can fight well without believing in his cause. In their view, the author is nothing more than a man trying to kill them as surely as if he was on the field pulling a trigger. Is that what he meant by his rehetoric..that he really wants to see the USA beaten down, humiliated, its armies slaughtered, its allies occupied, its friends sent to concentration camps or executed, and its leaders dragged before some international kangaroo court? If so, then at some point in this country there will be hell to pay...
Its been a long time coming since Vietnam mon cher; maybe its best for the two sides of my cursed Vietnam generation to have it out in the open now once and for all
Permalink to Comment8. Nate on August 21, 2005 02:13 AM writes...
Gosh, Gene, where do I start with this one? I am wondering if it's really even worth trying to debate, because you seem to be speaking entirely from your heart here.
We'll start with the easy ones:
"First, Understand that Dana’s article, if it were written in a time of war officially declared by the Congress of the United States, would have landed him in prison for sedition."
No, wrong. I don't know where you got this idea. The closest I can figure is that you are thinking of the Sedition Act of 1918, which was nakedly unconstitutional and was repealed after just three years.
"...once the decision is made to go to war, even if it isn’t formally declared,...once the shooting starts, then we must/must make every effort to win it."
You state this as though it's axiomatic, without backing it up logically. Does this apply to all nations, or only to Americans? Are the peoples of ALL nations obligated by your code of ethics to support their government's actions in war, no matter how destructive they are? Were the german people obligated to support their government's actions in WWII, and are they not now allowed to call the attempted assination of Hitler a patriotic act? Or would you call the german soldiers we fought against the real german patriots?
Let me approach you from a different direction, since the reference to nazi germany is likely to raise objections (and please understand that I dare not, and cannot, compare the U.S. of today to the nazis). Is there ANYTHING that our government could do that would cause you to question your support of it? Is there any cause or value that hold higher than loyalty to your government? There are, and there have always been, people who worship human authority as a god, and will give their lives for whatever purpose the government sees fit. Are you one of these, or is it simply the case that, so far, you happen to support every action your government has taken strongly enough to take that support for granted as a virtue?
"To lose a war is horrible."
Yeah, but somtimes winning is worse. Again, think of the germans. Winning WWII would probably not have been good for anyone, including them. I can't help but wonder if you would have made the same sort of comments as a german citizen in support of the german government during that war. The fact that the U.S. and the nazis are idealogical opposites is not important to someone who worships a government above all else. I am not accusing you of being such a person, I'm just asking you to examine your loyalties.
For what it's worth Gene, I speak as a Christian; my faith is the only thing that informs my logic on this matter. I place no authority higher than my creator, not my government, not my family, and not myself. Forgive me if I sound preachy here, that's not how I want this to sound. I merely want to test your motivations here. What is the highest authority that you recognize?
Right, I have to stop now and go to bed. There's more in me, but I can't type any more tonight. I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite people:
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
Permalink to Comment9. Byna on August 25, 2005 12:45 PM writes...
I just deleted my link to you because of your WWI Jew comment and the insinuations to the Republican party.
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