With all the tidy rationales against war in Iraq finally boiling away, the foundations of the anti-war movement, especially in Europe, are being shown to be primarily rooted in a blind, unreasoning hatred of America, and George W. Bush, not necessarily in that order, and with varying degrees of overlap.

Even the media are beginning to realize that this long ago stopped being about opposition to war or what to do about Saddam Hussein.

...The immediate focus might be U.S. policy toward Iraq, but the larger emerging theme is an abiding sense of fear and loathing of American power, policies and motives.



"What shocks someone like me, who's lived here 19 years, is the depth of prejudice and suspicion," said Gary Smith, executive director of the American Academy, a nonprofit institute of advanced studies in Berlin. "People impute the worst possible motives for American behavior. The arguments I'm hearing sometimes are beyond logic, beyond reason."

...Smith, the director of the American Academy, recalled the prosperous and sophisticated German couple who sat next to him on a recent train ride to Berlin. Creators of a successful pharmaceutical research company, they were the kind of people he assumed would be most comfortable with American ideas and values. Instead, he said, they railed against American arrogance and imperial ambitions and refused to concede there might be two sides to the argument.

"I was making the case that if we go into Iraq and discover weapons of mass destruction, then the world would come to realize we'd been right," Smith recalled. "And they told me, 'If that happens, it's only because the CIA planted them.' I was floored."



As we get closer to closure on this, the sanity of the movement is beginning to collapse. I get laughed at when I describe the massive collectivist/socialist indoctrination our kids get in many universities. It's twice as bad in Europe. And what you are seeing is the result of generations of this shit being pumped into students who then go out into society with this rot in their brains. And in Europe, the rot is stewed further in the massive envy they have for America.

Pay attention, folks. The rational Marxists dropped the philosophy like a handful of dogshit decades ago. The ones who are left, especially the ones who hold positions as educators, are no longer rational, even using the simplest definition of irrationality: a person who tries the same thing over and over again expecting to get a different result.

There will be protests next weekend. If you're close enough, go to them, especially the ones in major cities like San Francisco or New York. Don't pay attention to the grannies carrying signs. I'm not talking about them, and you know it. Listen to the organizers. Listen to the invited speakers. Then come back here, and tell me this is only about war and peace in Iraq. If you do, I'll call you a liar to your face.