He Has Friends in Tehran, Gaza, Beirut, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Cairo
And, naturally, he writes for The Nation:
I will not pay my income tax if we go to war with Iran. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran–which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election–will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d’état that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic…
…I will put the taxes I owe in an escrow account. I will go to court to challenge the legality of the war. Maybe a courageous judge will rule that the Constitution has been usurped and the government is guilty of what the postwar Nuremberg tribunal defined as a criminal war of aggression. Maybe not. I do not know. But I do know this: I have friends in Tehran, Gaza, Beirut, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Cairo. They will endure far greater suffering and deprivation. I want to be able, once the slaughter is over, to at least earn the right to ask for their forgiveness.
Those friends of the writer, Christ Hedges, are not likely to be IDF soldiers in Jerusalem, democracy advocates in Beirut, Cairo and Tehran, or Iraqi policemen in Baghdad. Other than that, we’ll leave it as an open question as to just who the writer’s friends are.
Be that as it may, this absurd shreik of fear is just all too typical on the left these days…absurd because to think that our Republic is in danger from President Bush is just stupid. There are more than a dozen people contending to replace President Bush representing a wide variety of political opinion. President Bush’s party, just a year ago, lost control of both houses of Congress. People like Hedges freely write dissenting articles which say everything you can imagine against President Bush…if this is a “slow-motion coup d’état”, then it is so slow that it’ll be a few hundred years before President Bush makes it to dictator. This sort of opinion would be laughable except for one thing - its not a small number of people who believe this. The number of kooks who think such things are true probably numbers in the range of tens of millions of people…people who will view anything other than a complete route of the GOP in 2008 as proof positive that America is no longer a democratic republic…and if you really think you’re living under a dictatorship making cruel war against your innocent friends in Tehran, etc, just what won’t you do to help them fight against this horrible government of Fascist Amerika?
This sort of thing really needs to stop - get a grip, lefties. You’re not living in a dictatorship. Not an iota of your civil rights have been taken away. President Bush isn’t evil - he isn’t stupid; he’s none of the things you think him. Believe he’s wrong all you want, but get over the paranoid, conspriacy-theory thinking.
14 comments November 23rd, 2007
