On the day when Ann Coulter and Pat Robertson finally send the death squads to kill you and me and our families and everyone we know, whose fault will it be? Well, that’s obvious: it will be our fault.
Glenn Reynolds learnedly explains this for us here:
Peter Ingemi writes that the antiwar left has made Haditha morally irrelevant:
There is one aspect about Haditha that seems to be ignored by everybody.
Our press and the anti-American left both in this country and outside of it has been reporting “Hadithas” over and over again over the last three years.
Time and time again our friends have accused us of every possible atrocity that there is to the point that internationally people are already able to believe this or the 9/11 stuff or all the rest.
Because of this, internationally it is totally irrelevant if the Marines actually violated the rules of war. Our foes are going to say that we’ve done things if we do them or not, so the only people that it really matters to will be the people killed (and family) and the people in our own country who support the military.
The real danger is that we who support the war will reach the point that we say “we might as well be taken as wolves then as sheep”. At that point the left can celebrate that they have made our military and those who support it the people they claim we are. Once that happens however any compunction about respecting them will be gone, and remember one side is armed and one is not.
That is a fate that I don’t wish on any of us.
Neither do I.
It would be easy to say this is straight out of Nazi propaganda. So let me say it: this is straight out of Nazi propaganda. If anyone with time on their hands wants to look through this archive, I guarantee you’ll find a dozen statements just like it—the same weepy self-pity and righteous sense of victimization from people with all the power, the same warnings that the powerless are soon going to get what they’ve been asking for FOR SO LONG, etc.
However, in fairness to Professor Reynolds and Mr. Ingemi, I’m sure you could also find this in the propaganda of the Soviet Union, the Iraqi Baathists, the Ottomans during World War I, etc. There are only so many ways to be dangerous authoritarian psychopaths. It’s really not right to expect Reynolds and Ingemi to come up with anything new.
(Via Matt Barganier at Antiwar.com.)
HOLY CRIPES ALMIGHTY: Reynolds has updated the post with this:
Some people, judging from my email, are misjudging — or deliberately misconstruing — Ingemi’s point. Ingemi’s point, as I took it, is that crying wolf leads in the end to moral callousness, as people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway. This seems rather uncontroversially obvious to me.
I almost never look at Instapundit, so I actually had been concerned I might have been a little unfair to Reynolds. But, uh, not anymore.
It would take five years to untangle every strand of his Crazy Yarn, so let me just concentrate on this: what kind of person believes it’s “uncontroversially obvious” that human beings work like this? Read that again: “people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway.”
You know, Professor Reynolds is welcome to call me a babykiller every day until the sun explodes. Yet somehow I still won’t come to his house and shoot his children.
That’s just the way my species is, here on the planet we call “Earth.”