The real cancer within

I respect Mrinal Sharma. He's a patriot, for better or for worse. As far as he's concerned, if it's in India's interest, it works - no ifs and buts about it. He also claims to be a centrist. Though if his blog had more readership, he would have made a number of friends on the neoconservative right in the past couple of days.

For reference, here's the original post. I suggest you give it a read before continuing on with this post.

Ordinarily when I write rebuttals, I prefer quoting lines or paragraphs from the original article and picking apart the given argument. In this case though, I'll respond to the piece as a whole, because there's a larger point to be made. So here goes.

I really enjoy it when the hawks invoke Jane Fonda. Her activism with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the protests she organized, and of course, 'Hanoi Jane' - the shot of her on a North Vietnamese AA battery. She's taken a lot of flak for that shot - and rightly so. Put simply, it was stupid. It's also something she's apologized for. So my question to you is - when do you guys intend to stop beating that dead horse?

There's a reason the Nixon administration lost out on the PR front. I'm probably grasping at straws here, but it might have had something to do with, oh you know, the war not being all that rosy and all? If I were the least bit patriotic (full disclosure: I'm not, and never have been for as far as I can remember), I know I would immediately condemn the real atrocities of that war. Dike bombing? How about Tiger Force? My Lai ring a bell perhaps? An American platoon leader orders the massacre of innocent villagers. A commando unit that commits indiscrimate attack, torture and mutilation. The Commander-in-Chief (Nixon, et al) orders bombing runs on Red River Delta dikes that lead to flooding and the destruction of farmland, the intended objective being the starvation of civilians.

And we're debating what... Jane Fonda?

Anti-war activism is inexcusable, but war crimes on such a scale can be put down to 'every war has its killers'? You can hide behind cliches all you want. That doesn't change the facts.

Let's not even go into Iraq. Except to say this. When your justification of American occupation is that they "don’t go around butchering civilians for being 'infidels' or 'great Satan’s'"... that says a thing or two about what you expect. Especially when you consider the shooting of cars filled with innocent civilians at roadblocks, the 'accidental' wedding massacre (being accidental sure makes it excusable now doesn't it? Those uninformed civilians were 'accidentally' driving towards roadblocks too. They ended up paying the ultimate price. Helps to put it in perspective sometimes...) and of course, Abu Ghraib.

Ah, Abu Ghraib. The pictures you saw were the least outrageous of the lot. Stripping people, forming naked pyramids, forced masturbation... the right wingers liked to dismiss these as being 'not as bad as the Nazis'. The same 'not as bad as the terrorists' standard they hold the US troops to. The pictures and other evidence the administration is witholding is evidence of forced rape and other such... activities.

And who takes the fall? Lyndie England, and a couple of other low ranked scapegoats, even with the overwhelming evidence, circumstancial as it may be, that the conspiracy goes all the way up to Rumsfeld himself. No 'inquests' were ordered. The Republican Congress took care of that.

And that's that. Mrinal goes on to draw some pretty vague lines of comparison between this and India. A couple of things did draw my attention.

Outcry's over issues such as whether terrorists are given human rights or how a possibly hostile civilian populace is treated are becoming common.

Terrorists are humans. They deserve the same level of treatment you would expect for your own captured troops. Nothing less. This is not debatable. If you disagree, you forfeit whatever moral high ground you had, and it seriously hurts your arguments and your own credibility.

As long as these viewpoints, put across by the 'intellectual elite' are taken seriously, India will be forever taking one step forward and two steps back, and we will cede supremacy to the rapidly growing Chinese, forever to remain in second place.

Viewpoints will always be put forward. That's the price you pay for living in a democracy. And if a given viewpoint has any credibility, it will be taken seriously. If people are against economic reform because it could be a corporate plot, chances are it is. Take a good look the recent pieces of legislation passed by Congress.

Attemping to stifle opposition and opposing viewpoints is the single most damaging thing anyone could do to a democracy.

Bottom line? Jane Fonda isn't a problem. War crimes are. Human rights violations are. And the biggest problem is when you're willing to trade your freedom and ideals, however little, for extra security. That's the real cancer within.

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