Fantasy Life - I love

Fantasy Life - I love this this editorial in the relatively-liberal Die Zeit. The translation from the German is via Google; I could have done a better job, if I'd had an hour or two to spend on it.

This paragraph - which I'll translate myself - sums it up:

To replace unpleasant historical realities by denial of the facts, and arbitrarily making up fictitious events - that is not new. So far the "Geschichtsleugner" (History Liars) had however always used a certain spatial or historical distance, a certain time at least, until the primary memory of the material facts had already faded a little, before they dared take their fabrications public. Now the events are already denied and expunged, as if they never happened. These falsifications made for preaching to the choir: those convinced of the fact from the beginning that everything that comes from American side must be a lie.

Google translations are amazingly bad at times (and at the same time miracles of of technology), but this one gets the basic idea across; many of the Anti-Americans live in a fantasy world, where US troops mow down Iraqi children like cordwood and where the Iraqi Street seethes with resentment against us.

I'll be here in six months to compare reality with this fantasy. I'll be naming names - and sending emails.

Count on it.

Posted by Mitch at April 7, 2003 05:25 PM