The Sword Is Mightier Than The Pen
By Mitch Berg
Edwin Bulwer-Lytton – the man who gave us the line “it was a dark and stormy night – also lent another classic line to the English language’s stockpile of quotations; he penned “The pen is mightier than the sword“.
Of course, he never had to bet his life on it.
I’m always astounded at the naivete of so many – too many – “peace” activists; their brains marinaded in a generation of “Give Peace a Chance” and legends of non-violence resistance and civil disobedience and Martin Luther King and Gandhi (who, need it be said, flourished under liberal democracies that were fundamentally friendly to change), and spoiled rotten by the largely-peaceful fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, too many think that “sending messages” and symbolic actions are all it takes to put a dictator in his/her place.
Sadly, it’s untrue.
Thousands of protesters are dead and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle, a former intelligence officer for Burma’s ruling junta has revealed.
The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win, said: “Many more people have been killed in recent days than you’ve heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand.”
The boot, it would seem, is right back on the throat of the Burmese people.
[Swedish diplomat] Liselotte Agerlid, who is now in Thailand, said that the Burmese people now face possibly decades of repression. “The Burma revolt is over,” she added.
“The military regime won and a new generation has been violently repressed and violently denied democracy. The people in the street were young people, monks and civilians who were not participating during the 1988 revolt.
“Now the military has cracked down the revolt, and the result may very well be that the regime will enjoy another 20 years of silence, ruling by fear.”
Mrs Agerlid said Rangoon is heavily guarded by soldiers.
“There are extremely high numbers of soldiers in Rangoon’s streets,” she added. “Anyone can see it is absolutely impossible for any demonstration to gather, or for anyone to do anything.
“People are scared and the general assessment is that the fight is over. We were informed from one of the largest embassies in Burma that 40 monks in the Insein prison were beaten to death today and subsequently burned.”
The diplomat also said that three monasteries were raided yesterday afternoon and are now totally abandoned.
No, Virginia, sometimes dictators don’t listen to reason.
Sometimes the village eats the children.
October 2nd, 2007 at 6:41 am
So I’m guessing you think it’s high time we invade Burma? What with your concern about bringing democracy to all the oppressed peoples of the world. Unless of course all the high-minded talk about freeing Iraq is a bunch of backward-looking crapola intended to rationalize Bush’s invasion once the WMDs failed to materialize.
So do we invade? Or are you pro-dictatorship?
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:28 am
Ghandi was the most over-rated person in history. He was challenging the British in 1947. Ewww tough guy. Of course he said the the Jews should kill themselves instead of fighting the Nazi’s. Hmm, no wonder Western liberals like him so much.
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:57 am
No, we should not invade Burma. The US has no strategic national interest in Burma (or Sudan, either). We do in the Middle East, and Iraq is smack in the center of our area of interest, WMD’s notwithstanding.
Specifically, the US has a strategic national interest in access to affordable oil; but only because certain idiots won’t let us drill for our own oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska even though our entire economy runs on it.
So no, we won’t invade Darfur or Rangoon, and shouldn’t have invaded Kosovo or Haiti.
We no longer have a strategic national interest in South Korea or Europe so those troops should be redeployed home but won’t be because of entrenched political interests.
Everybody agrees that the concept of national defense is larger than our geographical borders and includes safe passage in off-shore waters, sea lanes, and air routes, because there’s ample historical precedent. It’s not as easy to see why access to markets is in the same category but it is (and partly explains Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in response to the US interfering with Japanese access to oil).
Short answer, AC, is YES, the war is now about oil. The nation absolutely must have it and Certain People I Won’t Name refuse to let us use our own, so we’re willing to buy it where it’s available and we’re willing to use military force to make sure it stays available throughout the region.
And given that definition of National Interest, Old Hugo Baby might start looking over his shoulder.
.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:23 am
Nate, good response. And the reverse to that is that the left in the U.S. only wants our country to be involved in areas that we have no interest in.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:27 am
Thanks Nate. So you agree that the human rights talk is all bullshit, Mitch?
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:03 am
I need not answer for Mitch since he’s perfectly capable of speaking for himself, but let’s just note that the President most famous for basing his foreign policy on human rights rather than US national interest was . . .
Jimmy Carter.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:33 am
I’d love to know the “strategic national interest” of Kosovo. And when we will stop sending troops THERE! Oh yeah, that’s right…Hillbilly Bill said they’d be home by Christmas. Reckon he didn’t say WHICH Christmas, did he?
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:43 am
Clinton won his war. How’s your boy doing?
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:38 am
Clinton won his war.
And yet our involvement there hasn’t shrunk one iota in nearly a decade.
So you agree that the human rights talk is all bullshit, Mitch?
The premise of the question is ridiculous, and I suspect you know it.
Please rephrase in the form of a question, as opposed to a strawman.
It might be easier to have you answer:
a) why Kosovo wasn’t in fact NATO’s job (it was Europeans that screwed up the Balkans, after all )
b) how big you’d like to make the military, so we can intervene in every human rights crisis around the world simultaneously and still be able to defend the US.
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:50 am
Actually some of the terrorists caught recently have come out of Bosnia. Did Clinton create more terrorists by meddling in their business?
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:30 am
Chuck, you are forgetting, Clintoon supported the wrong side… Yet again, liberal on a wrong side of history.
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Mitch, you forget. As long as the “give peace a chance” crowd is safe, and the people they know are safe, then what happens to the rest of the world is something that can be cured with dialog and giving peace a chance. All those killed in Burma the last few days? No one we know.
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Where were all these “the war is wrong because it is a war of choice!” “The UN did not approve this War!” people back in 1999?
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:39 pm
You wingnuts are truly comical. We have fewer troops stationed in Kosovo than there were kids in my high school. Oh, and we won. Compares favorably to the incompetent war in Iraq.
October 2nd, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Do you actually know how many US troops there are in Kosovo, Vobo?
I’ll save you a little panicky Googling: there are 1,500. And the “war” is “won” in the same sense that Saudi Arabia is “friendly”; the same ethnic hatreds still lurk underground, waiting for the next provocation that won’t be answered by US (and NATO) force.
OK, AC – now, riddle me this: How many troops did NATO send to Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina? From what nations, and how far did they have to travel to get there? How did they get there? How did they perform once they were there? What percentage of each NATO country’s GDP and defense budgets (including that of the US) were spent on that peacekeeping mission?
What, in your esteemed estimation, was the US culpability for the mess that eventually broke out in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina? Compared to the culpabilities of France, the UK, Germany and Russia?
Take your time.
October 2nd, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Inside the mind of a leftist who always uses reason & logic to determine his political positions:
We need to stop fighting against the Iraqi insurgents because they’ve already defeated us . . . three thousand American dead in a six-week war and four year occupation is proof of incompetent leadership . . . The Yugoslavian war was good because we won and the Iraq war is bad because we haven’t won yet . . . I mean lost yet . . . I mean it will be bad when we liberals withdraw our troops because then we will have lost . . . unless we had found stockpiles of WMD’s back in 2003 because then the war would have been okay but we would have lost anyway because we disbanded the Iraqi army and let the Shia vote their way into power . . . democracy is bad . . . no, wait, it’s good . . . Whatever. I know from Atrios & MM, though, that back in the 70’s Bush made his girlfriend get an abortion. And he didn’t choke on a pretzel, he was drunk! Drunk!
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:52 am
“Panicky Googling?” That’s pretty funny. I know how many troops we have in Kosovo and I know how many kids were in my high school (2,000) (not giving you Angryclown’s GPA, though. That’s a Swiftee move).
And the war was “won” in the sense that there’s “peace” and “Americans” aren’t being “killed” and there’s no more “ethnic cleansing.” Of course that’s slightly different from “Iraq” where American “troops” get killed “every” day because “the” “Administration” launched a foolish “war” which it has “incompetently” prosecuted.
Let me ask you some equally important questions. How many Polish troops are in Iraq? And did they get there in a tank that drives backward or a submarine with a screen door? What is the Zip code for the Green Zone? If you cut off a lizard’s feet, is it a snake?
Take your time.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
To a conservative, national interest is “meat” and human rights are “gravy”.
To a liberal, human rights is “meat” and national interest is “shit”.
If we don’t defend our national interest, our stand on human rights will be a “moot point”.