Heroically, George
Will Slams
Europe’s
Anti-Americanism
by
Seth Sandronsky
Dissident Voice
February 25, 2003
George
Will sets a new standard of heroism in a recent column on the anti-Americanism of
Europeans opposed to a U.S.-led strike against Iraq.
He began by linking Europe’s
anti-Jewish past to fools who support socialism. This might be news to persecuted European Jews who were also
socialists.
Muddy waters do run
deep. Will then draws a parallel
between Europea Jewry persecuted for centuries and the current opposition to
Washington’s war hawks pressing to attack Iraq.
In his view, the U.S.
government is pursuing a resistance movement of sorts to topple a tyrant that a
wrong-headed Europe losing economic power fails to see as public enemy number
one. Presumably, such clear-eyed
recognition of the Iraqi threat to global peace and prosperity is the province
of Americans like Will.
For him, U.S. might makes
right now and during the Vietnam War and Cold War. Europeans who had protested these examples of U.S. military power
fail to grasp that their past flirtation with communism has rendered them now
vulnerable to subjugation by the forces of oppression, personified by Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein.
Who said red-baiting was
dead? Quick, there’s not much time left
to rally round the flag of U.S. capitalism and its global battering ram of
military force to make markets safe for freedom, boys and girls.
According to Will, the one
million anti-war protesters in Britain recently displayed a “moral infantilism”
about the central role of U.S. power in making the U.N. disarm Iraq. The U.S. policy of arm-twisting weaker
nations such as Turkey to make them parrot the line that Hussein is a menace to
the Middle East requiring U.S.-led armed forces to topple him from power,
without or with a second U.N. resolution, is not newsworthy.
Likewise, the properly
indoctrinated know that nuclear-armed Israel poses no security threat to the
region. Perhaps Arabs and Jews who
recently united for peace and justice in the streets of U.S. cities and in Tel
Aviv are just wimps ready to appease evil.
Just like anti-war Europeans
expressing anti-Americanism. Don’t
politics makes strange bedfellows in Will’s moral universe?
His ideological diplomacy
versus European opposition to the war hawks in the Bush administration is a
wonder to behold. Accordingly, Israel’s
nuclear weapons are simply a non-issue.
Also unmentioned by Will is the
lethal U.N. economic squeeze of Iraq over the past 12 years that has led to the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Weapons of mass destruction, indeed.
In contrast to Will’s
ideology of U.S. imperial integrity, people in Europe and elsewhere around the
world who are entering the public arena to protest a U.S. invasion and
occupation of Iraq are trying to civilize global society. No matter that the names of these everyday
folks probably won’t be recorded in the history books.
They don’t write columns for
mass media. They don’t regularly appear
on corporate talk TV.
Will does both. But ordinary people in Europe and globally
are making their views on war and peace between the U.S. and Iraq known to the
broader public without such access to corporate-owned media.
In fact, those now rallying
in European streets are trying to craft the answers and questions to the U.S.
stalemate in the U.N. over Iraq. These
protesters, with and against their elite leaders, aren’t buying the military
aggression being sold by the Bush White House as a war of self-defense for the
security of the American people.
Will echoes the president’s
statement that worldwide anti-war protests wouldn’t change his timetable for
war. He drips vitriol for the “peaceniks”
of Europe.
The prospect that the
European anti-war camp is quite relevant, perhaps more than is now understood,
in its unity with like-minded people worldwide discomforts U.S. elites and
their mouthpieces such as George Will.
So be it.
Seth Sandronsky is a member of Sacramento/Yolo Peace
Action, and an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive
newspaper. Email: ssandron@hotmail.com