Eric Johnson: November 2005 Archives

This Veteran's Day, it's worth remembering the sacrifices that veterans have made, in America and in other free nations. It is also worth remembering that many groups on the Left, and not a few Democrats, are terrorist collaborators who are trying to undermine those sacrifices.

Before you click away in exasperation, let me explain what I mean. "Collaboration" is from the Latin cum + labore, literally "to work with." Left-wing groups don't have face-to-face strategy sessions with al Qaeda, nor do they share information and tactics. They do not carry out terrorist attacks themselves. But Western left-wing activists and the terrorist networks function as complimentary halves of the same whole.

Al Qaeda's strategy in Iraq is simple and coherent: wreak enough mayhem and kill enough U.S. servicemen to convince the American public that the Iraq War is "unwinnable." Then they will move, in conjunction with their Baathist allies, to convert the country into a vast terrorist training camp from which they can ship jihadi thugs into the moderate Gulf states, Israel, Europe, and the U.S.

The Left doesn't agitate for the overall strategic goal of creating a new Taliban-like Islamofascist state (though I note that according to their own noninterventionist principles, if such a state became reality, they could do nothing other than wring their hands.) However, their proximate goal is the same as al Qaeda's: get the U.S. out of Iraq, and humiliate the Bush Administration so thoroughly that no future American government will consider a similar foreign venture.

Consider two groups that get a decent amount of press coverage: Code Pink and Veterans for Peace. The former group has protested regularly outside of Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, carrying messages like "You were maimed for a lie." Walter Reed is where servicemen go to recuperate after being wounded in Iraq. On Nov. 17, they are promoting something called "NOT YOUR SOLDIER: National Student Day of Action." "We demand for our schools and communities to be military-free zones," their Web site screeches. The next day, they are participating in "National Stand Down Day," where they will block the entrances of military recruiting stations.

It goes without saying that Code Pink claims to "support the troops."

Catholic Light readers may recall my confrontation with two members of Veterans for Peace last May. One of the men, Marcus Eriksen, told me that the display they were setting up -- a thousand white crosses next to the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial -- was non-political, and contrary to my concerns, it did not use the names of the dead as if their families gave their endorsement.

Marcus was lying to my face. As this Web site demonstrates, their display does include photos and names of the fallen (something I didn't know until I read about it in a news account). Furthermore, Veterans For Peace supports the non-political idea of impeaching President Bush. They have a prominent link to thoroughly non-political funnyman Michael Moore's Web site. Another link is to a group that helps people escape their military service. A huge graphical banner promotes "BEFORE YOU ENLIST!," aimed at discouraging young people from joining the military.

As Marcus said, this is how they "support the troops."

If al Qaeda could run a negative advertising campaign in the U.S., it would probably try to undermine our country's leaders, discourage people from signing up for military service, encourage the belief that the Iraq War is futile, and downplay the idea of defeating terrorism by building a more just order in the Middle East. Lucky for them, they don't have to run an advertising campaign. The Left is making al Qaeda's points for them every day, through activist groups and through the mainstream media.

As I have said repeatedly here on CL, if you believe the Iraq War to be unjust, that's your right. It would also be, as far as I understand, your Christian duty to attempt to stop it. But to do so in such a way that encourages this country's enemies is worse than irresponsible, it is reprehensible. And I don't see too many Democrats standing up to denounce that.

Maybe the man is getting loopy in his old age, in which case somebody ought to gently shuffle him out of the broadcast studio permanently. You may recall that Rev. Pat Robertson blamed the ACLU and feminists (among others) for the September 11 terrorist attacks. I yield to nobody in my disagreement with both of those groups, but since Mohammad Atta and his merry men were not First Amendment fetishists, nor did they believe in "equal work for equal pay," that remark was more than unfair.

Pat has also expressed support for nuking the State Department. Today, Pat thinks that the little town of Dover, Pennsylvania might get smited for throwing out politicians they don't like:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday that disaster may strike there because they "voted God out of your city" by ousting school board members who favored teaching intelligent design....

"God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever," Robertson said. "If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."

Having worked for a company owned by an eccentric religious megalomaniac, I feel like I have some insight into Robertson's mentality. He has been around for so long, commands such a vast not-for-profit empire, and has absorbed so much criticism (deserved and undeserved), that he knows he can say pretty much whatever he wants without any consequence. Otherwise, why would he presume to know God's motivations for permitting a particular evil?

Reverend Robertson, for the sake of the religion you profess, I beg you: please shut up.

Update: Blogs4God expresses similar thoughts at greater length, with a bonus critique of a cretinous editorial by USA Today that "intelligent design is the scientifically untestable theory that life forms and the universe are so complex that a higher being must have been involved in making them. Put another way, it's creationism with clever new packaging."

Creationism is the belief that the earth is only a few thousand years old and that all life sprang de novo from the hand of God. Intelligent design accepts that the earth is millions of years old, but attempts to show that it is mathematically improbable that mere chance can explain the emergence of new species, or the formation of complex biological processes at the molecular level. In that sense, it is falsifiable: orthodox Darwinians simply have to show that all of the staggeringly complex biochemical reactions within higher organisms could be the result of chance.

It's the Marine Corps' 230th birthday today. Mackubin Thomas Owens has a birthday essay in NRO which is worth reading. Three institutions instilled in my whatever virtue I possess: my family, the Roman Catholic Church, and the United States Marine Corps. I am eternally grateful to them all, but today I will be lifting a glass in honor of the latter along with some of my brothers.

May the Corps continue to protect the United States with vigor and fidelity. May the enemies of freedom continue to fear and hate the name "Marine."

It looks like Virginia has its very own weasel-Judas governor! I know you guys for you guys in the northeast, you're used to this kind of thing, but down here we were hoping that our first Catholic governor would be, ya know, Catholic. I know, Kaine was a missionary and all that, but now he will be the Defender of the Faith -- the faith of the Culture of Death. He promised it.

Luckily, Kaine won't have many people to work with, since the legislature is overwhelmingly Republican. No pro-abortion legislation will be submitted for his signature.

France continues its nightly bouts of rioting and mayhem, perpetrated by "youths" (i.e., north African Muslims). The French assumed their vastly superior culture would overawe the backward immigrants. They assumed wrong.

Some articles worth reading on the subject: First, there is always, always, Mark Steyn. Ever his own best publicist, Steyn points out that he predicted this "uprising" in February of this year. (At the time, I thought he was extrapolating too far, but as he notes, he was being optimistic.)

Second, Israeli professor Steven Plaut recommends that France ought to take its own advice that it gives to Israel: give up large parts of its territory and capital city in exchange for vague promises of "peace." His words are bitter, but his logic is compelling. I would add that we should refer to the Muslim thugs as "freedom fighters."

Finally, Newsweek has a good overview of the riots.

What is France supposed to do? From the reports, it sounds like most of the rioters are citizens, and as such they cannot be deported back to north Africa. Even if they could, how would the authorities go about deporting that many people?

The "nice" approach doesn't seem plausible, either. Unemployment surely fuels the rioters' anger, but if the French government knew how to create economic opportunities it would have done so already. It cannot hand out jobs because there are no jobs to be had in France.

The smart money says the French will do what good leftists always do when confronted with evil on the march: blather and capitulate. If the jihadis are smart, they will present "community leaders" to the French government, to receive the customary promises of government money, slobbering declarations of "respect" for Islam that they would not dream of applying to Christianity. They will say things like....

Please don't incinerate 1,300 cars every night. A few dozen would be acceptable.

Didn't you notice that we hate America just as much as you do?

When you are done with all the other infidels, please slit our children's throats last.

A tornado in Indiana killed 22 residents of a mobile home community yesterday. It's safe to say that given a choice, most people wouldn't live in a mobile home, and so the residents lived there because of economic circumstances. My grandparents used to live in a mobile home due to the high cost of living in southern California, and it was quite nice, but probably not what they might have wanted.

The only way to prevent these tragedies, therefore, is to work for an ever-growing economy to make mobile homes obsolete. In economically advanced societies, houses don't have thatched roofs or walls made of bundled sticks; people also don't live in caves or mud huts. Those materials and structures are undesirable and often dangerous, so they aren't used anymore.

The more economically productive the lower segments of society are, the more wealth they can create and hang onto — including the wealth in the homes where they live. Creating wealth isn't seen as a social-justice issue, but it can frequently mean the difference between life and death.

Members of the Religion That Dare Not Speak Its Name have been rioting in the Paris area for the last week. Perhaps they were upset about France's support for the Iraq War, who knows?

The Left reflexively tries to explain such things in terms of "root causes." Very well: France has marginalized Christianity and aggrandized the state's power for two centuries; imported large numbers of unskilled or low-skilled immigrants for the purpose of exploiting their cheap labor; and tried to buy the immigrants' loyalty with multicultural pieties and generous welfare benefits.

Far from being grateful, the immigrants figure that France is so enervated that it will probably not defend its own culture. If some reports are right, and these riots are organized by someone (or a loose network of groups), then these aren't because of "frustration" — they are a show of strength designed to intimidate the French public into accepting Islam's ascendance in their society.

Pushing multiculturalist relativism, giving welfare to the able-bodied, and pushing God out of the public square is a toxic mix for a culture. As execrable as France's leaders are, let's hope they take the hard steps necessary to regain control over their own country. And it should sober us to realize that the same conditions — relativism, welfare, de facto atheism — are alive and well in the USA, too.

Don't forget to pray for the souls of the dead today. Here's a refresher on the doctrine of purgatory from Catholic Answers.

Far from being a medieval invention, praying for the dead was a Jewish practice that pre-dated Christ by at least a couple of centuries. The early Christian Fathers believed in purgatory, though they did not treat it in the detailed, systematic way that the medieval theologians did. C.S. Lewis believed in purgatory -- "The Screwtape Letters" contains a reference to it in the final chapter.

I know some of y'all out there are parents, and that most of you care about what gets dumped into your kids' souls. We gave the kids a hand-me-down computer a few months ago, and there are a few Web sites we let them visit. My question is this: What is the best Web-site blocking software? Our needs are simple: we want to block all sites unless my wife or I permit them.

Our oldest child is six, and I seriously doubt he can figure out how to defeat access-control software. The safest thing would be to filter sites at the router, which I could do, but it would be a pain for my wife.

Your thoughts?