Your post is entirely reasonable, and about the only flaming I feel like doing would be directed at politicians and government leaders.
But I'm afraid that Bush's promise of war without end is the insidious hole in an otherwise reasonable analogy with martial law. A temporary emergency is one thing, but a permanent emergency is a dangerous thing. Suspending laws, rights, and principles on an open-ended basis is the same as making fundamental permanent changes to America. And not changes for the better.
If this really is to be a "long twilight struggle", then we'd better figure out how to fight and win that kind of long war without sacrificing our principles or values, otherwise we concede defeat from the beginning. Permanently suspending Western values is the same as destroying them, and I cannot accept that we should be the agents of our own defeat.
Flame » in reply to That's about it.
"a long twilight struggle..."
The whole thread (78 posts)
- Reactions
- Moral equivalency
- "Civilization won't stand long when when the self-proclaimed good guys use war as an excuse to take a holiday from civilization"
- And our side won't last long when we're the only ones using a rule book.
- "The soft nihilism of low expectations"
- Smoothly done, Robert...
- One for the road...
- We *should* know better.
- "the people in the marches have a deep and abiding hostility to the West and its values."
- The right-wing reaction to the story was faster.
- re: Nations
- Revisionist history of the highest order.
- Heh, heh. Phony point.
- Moral equivalency