Friday, October 21, 2011

Fit for a King

Over at The Angry Arab News Service, there's a link to Gaddafi footage. Go get it if you like. As'ad AbuKhalil writes:

I was thinking: if he was a Gulf potentate being tortured to death, I could have seen Arab liberals and Western governments decrying the brutality of the protesters and calling for humane treatment of long-standing American friends. But these are NATO rebels and we have to pretend that they are, like the Mujahideen of Afghanistan, peaceful freedom fighters.

Very well put, and completely true. I'm not expecting revolutionary upheaval to be a tea party, and maybe I'm naive to be sickened by any celebratory brutality, but I don't see this as a triumph of liberty. Not when I know what horror we continue to fund. Gaddafi happens to have been a bastard whose elimination became convenient for us. Bigger bastards remain, bigger torturers remain, and greater tyranny and arbitrary dealing of death remain, all propped up by those of us too callow, lazy, and uncaring to do anything to stop it.

1 comment:

  1. still three posts behind.. in my last few weeks ..off and on ..month or two .. ..of looking at your writing here .. , i didn't see the angry arab news ... .with a clip comment saying ..at the side of someone's pg til late last night ..and i only took a min. on seeing that to look at the timing on all of this .. / odd ..i live in the most mixed place on the planet ..of ..from all over ..living in a quiet way here together .. and i was sitting over in a fair trading cafe ,tinto,tor.,owned by a couple of my neighbours ..for the meeting mentioned .. and then later there again listening to another playing his guitar .. , so many passing through .. . but no one said a thing .. .i'm guessing that they were feeling something of what you were here .. / please tell me what you meant in your comment to me ..over at that somewhere in the eau station .. ...i'm wondering ..

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