The first thing that warrants saying is that we are and were in Afghanistan in part FOR the Afghan people. Clearly, the stated and presumably actual goal was denying Al Queda the sanctuary the Taliban granted them for training and organizing missions of death and destruction against civilian targets. But to this must be added that the Taliban were oppressive oligarchs disliked by most Afghans, who seem to me to mainly value being left alone by everyone outside of their valleys. I have in the past used the analogy of hillbillies, and I think it is pretty close.
Thus, when people want to put a racist tint on the movie, this itself is racist, as I said in the previous post. Leftist critics seems unwilling to separate the violence we do to one set of–I will use their implicit term–“darkies”–from the violence one set of “darkies” does to another.
Put another way, because they are unwilling to grant the categories “relatively better”, and relatively worse–which in turn depend upon granting the utility of a continuum grounded on one end in Goodness and the other Evil–they turn a blind eye to atrocities of the most horrific variety, if they are committed by one group of darkies against another, and they call the efforts of American soldiers to defend one group by attacking another evil.
This is racism. It is considering a group both homogeneous, and inferior; inferior, because unworthy of ordinary human rights; inferior, because violence and death visited on them does not matter; inferior, because they are utterly foreign to the rich, smug, elitist sacks of shit that write for papers in LA, New York, and elsewhere, people who suffer little, fear no violence, and face neither consequences for the ideas they propagate, nor any reckoning, in which their victims confront them with the atrocities they aided through their complicity.
There is little difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan, at least in the racism of the Left, and utter indifference to the suffering inflicting on cultural others: “darkies”, as they would call them if they were honest.
Read this piece on the Communist atrocities in Vietnam: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page21.html Click on the picture for a very partial listing of their crimes, which were much, much more vicious than anything Calley or others committed, and which differed significantly in being matters of official, high level policy originating in Hanoi.
Likewise, the Taliban have often killed civilians, have decapitated women and children, shot babies at point blank range, murdered homosexuals. None of this gets any play in the leftwing press because they DON’T CARE. Again, they are all darkies until they need them for political purposes, then they are quite good at acting like they care.
The issue came up as to whether or not those lives were wasted. What I kept thinking was that our men deserve a better war and better missions. As I have said before, I believe that 9/11 was a larger conspiracy, even though I can’t pretend to know who all the bastards were who were involved. It seems clearly to have involved Islamic terrorists, but it remains my strong belief that American and possibly international financiers, or shadow elites played a role as well. It is indisputable, in my view, that Tower 7 had to have been brought down by explosives, and that fact alone makes it necessary to consider a quite large scale conspiracy.
For simplicity, here is my take on this again: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2010/10/plausible-911-conspiracy-theory.html
It’s not great, not my best, but remains in my view good enough for the large picture.
As far as the quality of the deaths, their meaning, let me say this: that meaning is not yet written. What did they die for, in the grand scheme of things? Love. Love of country, of family, of freedom, of the Navy, of the Teams, of their jobs, of their brothers.
This movie has moved a lot of people. It has stirred patriotic fires. And in my own view, things have not changed that much since Gettysburg. Does our task not remain the protection of freedom, of decency, of the rule of law, of the rule of, by and for the people? As Lincoln put it:
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It
is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us —
that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
I have been saying for years that we consecrate the deaths of our soldiers by choosing to live engaged, active, useful, responsible, informed lives. We curse them by living self absorbed, frivolous, cheap lives.
And I think we forget easily the less obvious costs of military service. I have talked to a number of Navy SEAL’s, and it is a hard life on families. The wives have to be tough as nails. Their men are gone sometimes a year or more at a time, doing they have no idea what, no idea where, and no idea when they might get informed their loved one died in a “training exercise.”
And I remember one career Teams member who said all he wanted was to build a better world for his kids, to protect them, to protect America, and who in his subsequent career was exposed on a daily basis to idiocies I have no idea how he endured. I don’t want to cite specifics, but it was a government job, and they had a serious mission they could not begin to perform adequately because of restrictions placed on them due to leftwing ideology/ cultural nihilism.
Remain awake. This is to my mind a principle way of honoring our dead. Serve them both by furthering the specific mission for which they gave their lives–denying Afghanistan as a terror training zone–and the more general mission of protecting liberty.
Sitting there in the theater, I have to say that I felt a sense that gets called surreal. We sit there, comfortable, fat dumb and happy, and don’t realize that our HVAC, popcorn, running water, physical safety are all things which much of the world would consider luxuries. We sit there and WATCH movies, watch other lives, but we don’t feel them. We don’t understand them. Normal Americans can’t begin to truly understand both the difficulty of lives in other nations (were you not amazed by that elderly Afghan who walked over a mountain to hand deliver a message? I don’t know if this literally happened, but it is certainly possible. I have heard stories about how tough these folks are.), and those of our military.
A year or two ago I was talking with some Army guys just back from Afghanistan, and they did two 36 hour patrols a week for most of the year they were there, and 2-3 more 12 hour patrols. They averaged about 4 hours of sleep for the year, which is pretty damn amazing given how physically demanding their work was. And these were just normal grunts.
In my own view, our wars have ruined too many lives of brave, sturdy Americans. I am not anti-war, but we all suffer from the fact that despite having by far the most powerful military ever created, we cannot deter vastly inferior nations like Iran because of the constant internal sabotage by people within our political order I have called Cultural Sadeists, who actively seek to bring about our downfall, not to improve human life, but out of hatred, greed, and spite.
Our principle enemies, therefore, are within our borders. They are not just politicians, but the intellectuals and educators (propagandists) who continue to facilitate the moral sophistry which characterizes our public discourse, to the extent we have any.
These are my enemies, and I do what I can to fight them every day.