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Monday, March 22, 2004

Protesting the Imperial US Hegemon

I was living in Boston for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and I saw my share of protestors, big puppets and ludicrous slogans and all. For the most part I ignored them. First, I was a Grad student at the time, so I lived in my own little world. Second, their timing was always horrible. Oh, they'd have plenty of time to protest before the war started, loudly speculating about the horrors the US would inflict, but once things got going, they could no sooner organize the protest than it was all over. I remember one protest, where they slept in tents to empathize with the plight of the Afghan refugees from the war. Of course, the protest took a couple of weeks to put together, and by the time it actually happened, the tipping point had taken place at Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul had fallen, food and medical supplies had begun to pour in now that the land routes were open, and thousands of refugees, including those who had fled the Taliban years earlier, were beginning to return. The Tech article describing the protest did not deign to mention any of these things. Reading that article, I felt sorry for the protestors, who apparently had their talking points planned in advance and didn't really have time to adjust to the new realities on the ground

Ignorant and mistimed protesting is little more than annoying and amusing. This is evil:

(From this website.) This image has been circulating around the web, and well it should. I know these people love to complain about the crushing of dissent and trampling on their first amendment rights whenever someone calls them "unpatriotic" and makes them feel bad. Granted, I've never heard anyone actually called unpatriotic--I've never done it myself--but in this case I'll make an exception. This person is unpatriotic. I'll go further: he (or she, it's hard to tell) is hateful, anti-American, narrow-minded, and bigoted. As Glenn Reynolds says, they're not anti-war, they're on the other side.

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