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16 Responses to “Pirates and Emperors”
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Didn’t watch the whole thing, but I saw that the video glossed over the Sandinistas. They did not have clean hands. They came to power through a campaign of terror and intimidation. In the Nicaraguan civil war, the USA had to choose the sonsabitches friendliest to USA interests.
An even clearer example would be the late Shah Muhammad of Iran. He was a murderous bastard, as are all dictators and absolute monarchs. However, he was replaced by the current oligarchy of murderous bastards. They have been more bloody, but even if they were less so, they are hostile to Americans and American interests in the Middle East and everywhere else. Again, sometimes a country has to choose which sonuvabitch to back.
Happy Easter. Happy Purim.
chsw
> In the Nicaraguan civil war, the USA had to choose the sonsabitches friendliest to USA interests.
Or, you know, we could not back anyone and let the people there fight it out.
So why was it OK to team up with the communists in World War II, but it’s HORRIBLE HYPOCRISY to have teamed up with Saddam Hussein against Iran?
Oh, that’s right. The left is in love with communism, so they get a free pass for killing 20 million folks during World War II, and a 100 million people last century.
It doesn’t help the liberal little snots that FDR was a member of their own party does it?
I know its a hard concept, but we don’t have to chose sides and help. All this mucking about in other country’s business has helped no one. Well, ok, maybe it helped certain oil companies and certain oil company contractors.
And, outside of Afghanistan, it had nothing to do with 9/11.
The moral equivalency of pirates and emporers is dead-on, but it’s a little dreary that all the examples were about the U.S.
Good old “national greatness” libertarianism!
“Well sure, funding murderers, rapists, and torturers is bad in the abstract, I guess. But come on, the US has to look out for its own interests! I mean, I’m as idealistic as the next person, but the US clearly has to project its influence onto people in other countries through murderous proxies or the world as we know it will end!”
“Sure, the US has done some bad stuff, but why spend all this time beating up on a government that hypocritically holds itself out as a beacon of hope and freedom to the world? Why can’t we devote more resources to criticizing countries that we’re not citizens of and which are already universally reviled? That seems far more productive for the cause of liberty!”
We already had this exact argument about the video a while back at the Mises blog.
I have seen and spoken to refugees from the Sandinista regime back in the 1980’s. Ortega’s goons, in my opinion, were (and are still) just as corrupt and evil as the previous Samoza government.
Atrocities were committed by both sides in this conflict.
I do think the cartoon made some good points by showing the similarities between Emperor and Pirate.
The whole second part about the Sandinistas/Contras was a bunch propaganda.
Chris, the point was we didn’t pay for Ortega’s goons to commit atrocities. We paid for and helped the Contras commit acts of terrorism. That’s not propaganda. That’s just a fact.
The fact that the Sandinistas were terrible is irrelevant.
Pro-Sandinista corn-fed bullshit.
Some reflexive-type thinking folks will assert that to point out that the U.S. funded Contras were brutal terrorists is to support the Sandinistas. But this is a simplistic, emotional response.
Thinking adults can actually oppose the Sandinistas (and socialism in general) while pointing out that they had free and fair elections in 1984 which were monitored by a hundred different international observers and saw a 90% voter turnout. It’s even possible to oppose the Sandinistas while pointing out that when they were voted out of office in equally free and fair elections in 1990, there followed a peaceful transition of power.
Sometimes there is no option to just sit back and let the two sides have at each other. Sometimes, one side (e.g., Sandinistas) is backed by a powerful adversary intent on flanking the country by placing its allies in power in America’s neighbors.
(BTW, the 1984 elections were vetted by JC Himself, the first of several elections that he has pronounced free and fair)
chsw
(BTW, the 1984 elections were vetted by JC Himself, the first of several elections that he has pronounced free and fair)
And at least 90 other observers.
Your argument is that the Sandinistas were so dangerous we just HAD to help terrorists in the region kill innocent men, women, and children.
Not only weren’t they any threat to us, but had they actually been a threat, I believe in America enough to think that we wouldn’t need to resort to terrorism to defeat that tiny country.
Sorry, chsw. I see now that I said, “Your argument is…” when it wasn’t. You were just saying we shouldn’t have ignored the Sandinistas.
I shouldn’t have assumed that meant you agreed with how we dealt with them.
I’m glad we teamed up with the Soviets to beat the Nazis. The only mistake was not running the red army all the way back to Moscow and planting the American flag in St. Peter’s square.
Anyway, WWII was an exceptional circumstance and in my mind compares in no way to the brushfires we have been fighting for the last 60 years (which would have been largely resolved if the aforementioned plan had been enacted).
Can we just copy all the comments from and call http://www.theagitator.com/2004/10/17/bush-bashing-videos/ this thread over?