– Marcus Tullius Cicero 42 B.C 
Friday, November 14, 2008
The enemy is within
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor – he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
16 comments:
I saw the most astonishing thing this morning. I was on my way out the door to work when I glanced over at the little TV we keep on the counter in the kitchen. It was turned on, but the sound was down. I thought the guy on the little B&W screen looked familiar, so I paused to figure out who this guy was. Then, the little crawler at the bottom of the screen ID'd him. It was William Ayers. The crawler boasted that this interview was a "GMA exclusive."
Do you get it? Here was this innocuous easy-going TV program aimed mostly at housewives who stay home with their children bragging about their interview with a terrorist, an avowed communist revolutionary whose career has been marked by the most explicit and vicious condemnations of America that you could imagine.
I turned the sound up. Here was this monster, who plotted mass murder of his fellow citizens and wishes he had succeeded in destroying the nation as we know being politely interviewed by some morning show male model. Of course Ayers is a rhetorically gifted man and with his mild-mannered professorial demeanor, he was just the picture of reasonableness.
I'm telling you, we are going to smile and nod our way right smack into the dustbin of history.
Oh, my point in that previous comment was, I hope, obvious. What kind of nation is it that not only doesn't worry about the very real enemy within, but fetes him as a celebrity?
I guess the same kind of society in which T-Shirts emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara, a deranged coldblooded killer, are de rigueur.
Bill, it was actually worse than that. I listened to it on the Internet. This was the interview that should've been done before the election; it might have swayed some of those house moms. Ayers arrogantly portrayed himself as a hero and either tried to deny or spin what is in his own book, in a revised afterword.
Brian: Glad I didn't watch it then. I find in my advancing years, my digestion can't handle any excess bile.
Not bragging here but observing: I basically don't watch TV. I exercise every night on an elliptical trainer and watch DVDs from netflix to help pass the time. I see TV on that kitchen set in the evenings sometime if I'm cooking supper - I like to cook (that way we eat what I like. Then I watch Jeopardy. But I just plain don't watch regular TV except for the World Series and perhaps the US Open, Master's, British Open and PGA. I'm getting to a point here:
During the series, I darn near wore out the mute button because every time you turned around there was another Obama ad. It was just dreadful. What a price to pay to watch the series. (Hey, gotta love that Shane Victorino, though.)
Bill, I'm the same way. I could barely stand to listen, but I thought it was my duty to listen. I wanted to turn it off in disgust. I also hate TV because even if you're trying to watch a sporting event, the commercials for the other tv shows are so vile that I don't want to watch them myself, let alone let my precious five-year-old son see and hear them.
Ahem! *cough, cough*
And who spent years railing against TV? Hmmm...
*grins*
Angelique (aka, Mommy)
(FYI to Bill -- in case you didn't know, Brian and I are partners in crime...)
All right, all right; just don't take my sports away. Maybe they'll invent something that will allow us to just zap everything we don't want.
Angelique, tell Brian to put a picture on his profile. I keep feeling like one of us is invisible (unless he's just too afraid that it will help the Antichrist's goon squad ID him). BTW, I haven't had a TV in my home since 1981. I succeeded in raising three girls into adulthood without it and now none of them have one either, which is a true blessing to their children. Yes Brian, I gritted my teeth and gave up watching sports in the name of trying to have a more productive life (not judging anyone here, just informing). Perhaps I knew in my heart I couldn't limit myself the way you guys do. Regardless, I'm glad we all see the general bankrupcy of commercial TV.
Dave:
It's my fault that Brian doesn't have a pic up yet. I've been dilly-dallying about helping him set up the camera. Mea culpa! :)
Angelique
Since Dave has known me for 46 years, I suspect he realizes that my photo is offered up very much tongue in cheek; I'm the least formal guy in the world, and one of the least stuffy. (The photo was made on a wonderful cruise my wife and I took last spring, our second in two years.)
It hadn't occured to me to use a photo at all til I saw the Quoibler's (Angelique's) image in one of her responses. That led me to figure out how to do the same thing. At that point I fleshed out my profile a bit and found the photo in the tuxedo. Hey, it gives these comments a rather sophisticated air, right? Right?!?
Absolutely, Bill!
I just watched the Ayers interview and was surprised that he was so quick to justify his bombing activites by saying that it was the US government that was "murdering thousands of people." Of course, he was talking about the war in Vietnam. And certainly there were some cold-blooded murders in Vietnam by American servicemen (it was a difficult war to fight). But when a private citizen takes it upon himself to characterize war-time deaths as murder on the basis that he disagrees with the reasons for the war or the legitimacy of the war, we have a fundamental problem with maintaining a civilized society. Yes, we have the right to disagree with what the government is doing (and I disagree with much), but to claim that because we disagree we have the moral right/responsibility to engage in destruction of public property and putting at risk the lives of private citizens seems to me to be undermining our whole concept of law-based civilization. On the other hand, what would have been the morality of murdering Hitler in 1940?
By 1940 - heck by the mid-30s - Hitler had shed even the veneer of legitimacy that put him power in 1933. He was an illegal tyrant who was using fear and terror to control his nation. He was, in short, at war with his own people, an illegitimate ruler who, it seems to me, would have been fair game for an assassin.
Nothing remotely similar can be asserted about the American government during Vietnam or at any other time.
Ayers' ex post facto rationalizations ring false; he was a communist revolutionary, plain and simple. His goal was not to get America out of Vietnam and stop the killing; his goal was the overthrow of the US government, a goal he has finally attained. (That was my point in the post a week or so back called "The Ayers Coup.")
Well, as Ayers has said, he's an anarchist. Does each of us, then, have the right to blow things up if we don't agree with the government?
Hey guys, my point is purely one of principle. When do the citizens have the moral authority to take warlike action against their government? Ayers claims that it is whenever he and a few his Marxist cronies decide the government is engaed in an "illegal" war. Perhaps that was only an excuse to overthrown the republic; nevertheless, if the Ayers rule is valid, then we can justify violent revolution over nearly anything we disagree with or find morally objectionable. The point is, the Founders gave us a means for overthrowing the government: it's called the ballot box and Constitutional ammendment. On the other hand, though Ayers might propose that the Hilter situation is a justifiction of his own view, it falls short in that Hitler was the man calling the shots, not a symbol or colateral figure. It is one thing to take out the head of the evil regime, quite another to overthrow an entire government or cow the people through random acts of terror.
Dave, you hit the nail on the head. Communists and anarchists don't operate under constitutions or rules of any kind, and never have, at least not rules as we know of them.
Post a Comment