Follow me, block me… run & hide?
So, because I dared to disagree with Mr Matthew J Dolezal, he’s blocked me. He hasn’t tried to engage the argument on an intellectual level or discuss alternative viewpoints expressed in a level-headed way. Read this for yourself — I’m not mean, pissy, condescending, or insulting. But he followed me; I read something he wrote and reacted to it. He ran and hid.
My response starts here:
You had me up until this point. There’s a lot of validity in most of your arguments, but your Korean War inclusion is faulty comparison that links to an article that significantly misrepresents the actual on-the-ground history.
The Norks were clearly, 100% completely, totally the aggressors in this war, and then when they realized they were likely to get their asses kicked, screamed for help from the Chinese. (Your linked article still falls prey to the myth of monolithic communism that assumes there’s no daylight between the Soviets and the Chinese and characterizes the Korean War as a proxy fight btw the US and Sovs). You don’t get pick a fight in the schoolyard, then plead for mercy when you get your face beat in. The Norks picked this fight, got their asses kicked, got bailed out by their Chinese cousins, and have spent the last 65 years trying to figure out how they’re going to ‘win’ round two, as the aggressor, again.
Trying to lump a tyke-sized tyrant’s temper tantrums into a broader narrative of American obliviousness to second– and third–order effects is stretching the evidence that, quite frankly, you didn’t even need to include given everything else that’s here.
Now, a second, tangential-but-relevant point. The American public is not merely ignorant of times when we were arguably a terrorist aggressor. They are startlingly unaware of the litany of attacks suffered by Americans, over the past decades, as well.
They have no recollection of the attacks on Marine barracks in Beirut, the USS Cole, and Khobar Towers, and those were the big ones. There’s not a chance in hell they’re going to remember TWA 847, the Achille Lauro, the Rome & Vienna airports, the Frankfurt PX, the Berlin disco, the Dozier kidnapping, Pam Am 73, Lockerbie, Oberammergau, the Nairobi embassy, or any of the litany of others I can’t recall off the top of my head. (Hell, how many of them even remember the Tehran hostages anymore, much less the 72 Olympics?)
So while we can bemoan the fact that the blissfully ignorant American public has no idea of the discord sown by their government since WW2, let’s also acknowledge that they’re equally under-educated on all the times we were the victims, too.
Too many of them think “terrorism” started with 9/11. They’re wrong about both causes and effects, in both directions.
Didn’t like my reply to his article; ran and hid in the other direction.
