When antiwar protesters start to get on the nerves of a “Mother Jones” editor, some leaders of the protest movement would be wise to listen up.
Month: March 2003
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In support of an unjust war.
“My argument with the anti-war demonstrators hangs on the relative justice of two possible endings: an American victory or anything short of that, which Saddam could call a victory for himself.”
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Focus on the pictures.
“Just wars are also ugly wars. Fancy wars are also ugly wars.”
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Focus on the frame.
“Reliance on frames and paradigms and whatnot is not some kind of failure to be sufficiently open-minded, it’s a precondition of any sort of attempt to understand the world.”
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Where are the conscientious objectors?
“Maybe we need another name for people with no particular objection to war itself, who refuse to take part in military actions they feel to be immoral.”
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Practicing the news.
“Watching the news, critically and constructively, is a practice.”
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‘Mushball middle’?
“Fundamentalism is the real enemy of progress, and that includes both fundamentalist take-no-prisoners conservatives as well as fundamentalist America-is-a-sink-of-corruption lefties.”
The last time that liberalism confronted a radicalized philosophical challenge, that threat emerged from within Western civilization. Unitarians responded with not one but two major theological renewal movements.
A “naive fool” who went to Baghdad as a human shield discovers (gasp!) that Iraqis fear and loathe Saddam Hussein.
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War of ideas.
Paul Berman writes that Sayyid Qutb’s “deepest quarrel was not with America’s failure to uphold its principles. His quarrel was with the principles.”