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| Europe |
| VDH: "Fallujah" fantasies |
| 2007-05-22 |
| I am always amazed at the variants of anti-Americanism in Britain, France, and Germany, because beneath the convenient left-wing sermonizing one always suspects lingers nostalgic angst, of the world of preeminence before the crass "swaggering" Americans took over. Compare the latest example of the play "Fallujah" now in London. Most strategic thinkers thought our pullback in Falluja, Iraq in spring 2004 was a costly mistake, a half-measure that necessitated a belated reentry by the post-election autumn. Then in the fall after renewed, far bloodier fighting, our soldiers found torture cells, bomb factories, and a veritable terropolis of sorts. Not so in Jonathan Holmes' play. Lest one thinks the drama's criticism is simply fringe left-wing, consider the review by the supposedly staid Economist of what it conceded was an "anti-war, anti-American" drama. The audience shuffles about his landscape while the action takes place around them. Soldiers push their way through, swaggering and malevolent; a roving stage light suddenly picks out two women in the audience as Iraqi aid workers. They weave gracefully through the crowd, telling their story, placing a hand gently on someone's shoulder. Again, lest one thinks that this is a fair and descriptive, rather than an opinionated, view of a British status quo magazine, consider the Economist's final assessment that follows disclaimers of the plays obvious bias: "...'Fallujah' can still be applauded for casting light on a shameful chapter in a disastrous war." "Shameful" and "disastrous"? This cheap sermonizing of Western elites reflects two unspoken truths: privately, no well-heeled British subject would prefer the world of beheading, gender apartheid, and Sharia law that flourished in lawless Fallujah to the legal system and audit that governs the American military. And yet most understand that their own professional advancement, psychological well-being, and political acceptance come from praising the former and damning the latter. Thus the war to establish democracy to replace Saddam Hussein's genocidal rule must be reduced to "swaggering Americans" threatening female "Iraqi aid workers." Swaggering indeed. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #7 The way this play stinks, he must have written it with the end of his ... |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-05-22 23:05 |
| #6 When did he find time? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2007-05-22 21:53 |
| #5 John Holmes wrote plays? Who knew? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2007-05-22 19:20 |
| #4 This cheap sermonizing of Western elites reflects two unspoken truths: privately, no well-heeled British subject would prefer the world of beheading, gender apartheid, and Sharia law that flourished in lawless Fallujah to the legal system and audit that governs the American military. And yet most understand that their own professional advancement, psychological well-being, and political acceptance come from praising the former and damning the latter. This sort of towering denial is what will amount to Europe's death knell. It they refuse to dismiss such abject flummery as this, there's little to no hope that they will ever recognize shari'a law for the tyranny it is. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-05-22 17:35 |
| #3 Falluja will go down in Marine Corp history as heroic. Besides, most normal people like to see deserving scum get a good as*kicking. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2007-05-22 13:16 |
| #2 Note that it is the media elite plutocrats, today's robber barons and bosses, who most cheer this insanely distorted presentation. The most astute observers, led by VDH, increasingly realize that the western cultural elites themselves are the real enemy in this war and that the forces of the anti-jihad, pilloried by enemy media as the dupes of authority, are in fact the revolutionary and subversive element in terms of their relationship to the genuine power centers of the western world, the corporate marketing and media complex. The entire leftist paradigm of the media culture is in fact misdirection, a Goebbels style Big Lie, designed to represent conformity as rebellion in a successful strategy to maintain the support of the masses whom they exploit so ruthlessly. The genuinely repressive authority, the pervasive cultural authority of the elites themselves, is presented as a subversive challenge when the opposite is true. This pattern, slavish conformity disguised as rebellion and individualism, has been the basis of commercial advertising since the early 1960s. Its purest symbol is the commercial canonization of the mass murderer and Stalinist authoritarian Ernesto "che" Guevara. See Thomas M. Frank's landmark cultural history, the Conquest of Cool, for more on this vital issue. I will say it plainly: We cannot win this war until the present media-industrial complex is recognized for the unaccountable shadow government it is, and wholly overthrown like the similarly unaccountable and arbitrary monarchist systems of the past. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2007-05-22 12:19 |
| #1 It will better for both Western European and American psyches for the Americans to completely leave Europe and take their trade concessions to Upper Volta. |
| Posted by: ed 2007-05-22 11:32 |