Civil Liberties and the Winds of ‘Change’
posted by Josiah Garber on June 16, 2009
in Politics
The latest threat to our freedom is coming from the “progressives”
by Justin Raimondo, June 12, 2009
Remember back in the bad old days, when the Bush administration and its amen corner in the flag-lapel button- wearing media were riding high, and Andrew Sullivan was denouncing anyone who opposed Bush’s crazed foreign policy as being part of a pro-terrorist “fifth column“? The atmosphere of those times is something everyone — or practically everyone — would like to forget. Because that’s when all the brave “liberals” and their “progressive” and even “radical” brethren were cowering over the covers, and under the bed, silent as the few who dared to speak out — Susan Sontag, Michael Moore, Phil Donahue, and, of course, the writers for this web site — were pilloried as being accessories to the murder of those who died on 9/11.
Back then, it was the left that was being demonized, and the methodology of the War Party was pretty gruesome to behold: like a wolf pack on the rampage, they would glom on to some lone wacko, or marginal group of wackos, who would be held up as exemplars of a broader tendency within the anti-Bush anti-war opposition. I remember an account of an antiwar rally by Andrew Sullivan that homed in on the fact that someone was hawking the edges of the crowd with copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Aha! screeched the Inquisitor-in-chief, an office Sullivan appointed himself to before the smoke had cleared from the ruins of the World Trade Building — the antiwar movement is anti-Semitic!
As unreasonable and downright weird as this seems, in retrospect there was a method to this madness: the rhetoric of Sullivan and his fellow “war-bloggers” was rich with implications of treason. After all, what nation allows an “fifth column” to operate openly during wartime? Civil liberties are the first items to be thrown overboard when the ship of state starts listing, a fact easily borne out by the history of this country, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the PATRIOT Act. The pro-war right-wing was clearly trying to create an atmosphere where no one would dare to speak out, for fear of the consequences — and, if anyone did speak out, they were intent on laying the political as well as the legal groundwork for shutting them up forthwith.
Email This Post