By BNW Contributor, January 15, 2012
There’s been a lot of mea culpas from the government recently over a video of some Marines pissing on some dead Taliban.
First off, I don’t condone this fairly routine “gallows humor” that just happened to occur at the point in history when pocket cameras became pervasive, nor do I dramatize and “big up” the incident, to use a British expression. My position is pretty much identical to Congressman Allen West’s analysis—the Marine Corps should simply apply non-criminal UCMJ punishment to the Marines involved, i.e., put a permanent letter in each of their records which may hurt their careers, but will not destroy their lives. And as for those who are outraged, as West said, “Shut your mouth”, unless you’ve been fired on by the enemy.
Indeed, the same lot of critics cheered, as did I, during the film Saving Private Ryan, when American G.I.s shot the German soldiers raising hands in surrender. Now they are outraged by pissing on dead enemies who were previously shooting at these young Marines?
Granted, there are some technical reasons one scene is initially more shocking than the other. Shooting the live, surrendering Germans seemed more of a spontaneous outburst of anger, while pissing on the Taliban dead, without a lead-in, seemed more premeditated. The media is rarely that thoughtful, so fine details are generally lost, and the apologizers rarely have the guts to bring them up. Still, it’s an interesting contrast to compare these two battle scenarios.
The Taliban are primarily volunteers who view non-Muslims as filthy and unworthy of life. These jihadists have chosen to kill and be killed to further the goal of Islam, which is to dominate the world.
Now, let’s assume the Ryan movie example was based on real incidents, as I’m sure it was. The German soldiers were likely conscripts, not full-blown Nazis who architected the Holocaust, or even manned a concentration camp. They were probably clueless, hungry and scared. They were surrendering, following legal conventions by raising their hands. BANG!, they’re dead, and everyone in the theater is cheering, but for different reasons. Freedom-lovers are cheering for American soldiers and liberty. On the other hand, by 1998, when the film came out, leftist hatred of anyone “white” and Christian had matured to such ritualistic forms that the mere sight of killing them elicits cheers from leftists. America’s demise will come later, but in WWII America was needed as the lesser of two evils, in other words. If you don’t believe it, imagine if the scene was of American soldiers pissing on dead German ones. I can hear the audience laughter already. Or, imagine it was of Americans gunning down Japanese or communist Russian soldiers who were surrendering. First, it would likely not have been filmed in such a way as to beg for cheering, and second, if it had been, it would have been criticized as bad taste, jingoistic or racist. But killing Germans and other unprotected groups? Leftists say, bang on.
Hatred of common enemies is a stronger neural pathway than the obvious lack of common cause. And so it is with leftists and jihadists, both enemies of traditional Western liberalism, i.e., modern conservatives. Indeed, the left is morphing before our eyes, as the cancer of Islam metastasizes the body of secular progressivism and melds it into Islamic fascism. It’s very sad to see old school secular liberals at human rights rallies that have turned into anti-Semitic jihads against Israel, looking bewildered and uncomfortable among the rabid Islamist “friends” they earlier dragged home and gave succor. They seem to be wishing they were someplace else, like a bar, arguing over beers with their old school American enemies, the polite and non-lethal Christian right.
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