The inhumanity of one "anti-imperialist".
I began this week by writing a piece about the ructions on the pro-war left, linked in with Johann Hari's attack on Nick Cohen's polemic on the failures of the left and Oliver Kamm's article on the same day claiming that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shouldn't be viewed as a crime. I'd never of imagined (although I perhaps should have) that by the end of this week I'd be writing about how one anti-war supposed leftist seems to have been trying his best to be as inhumane as those who cheered on the "shock and awe" in the first place.It's well known that Neil Clark, rather than being an anti-imperialist as he describes himself, has a tendency to be apologetic towards such human rights defenders as Slobodan Milosevic, but even by his low-grade of rhetorical standards today's piece on Comment is Free scrapes the very bottom of the reactionary, unpleasant, nauseating barrel. Titled "Keep these quislings out", it's the first, and probably will be the only article to attack the growing campaign for Iraqi employees of the British armed forces to be given refuge here.
The entire basis of the article seems to be based on the mind-numbing, idiotic belief that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Despite the fact that the blogging campaign for the Iraqi employees' plight to be recognised was started by Dan Hardie, who opposed the war and opposes the continuing presence of British troops in Iraq, and that the vast majority who have wrote about it were all anti-war, the simple fact that some of those who supported the war are also now supporting the campaign has been enough for Mr Clark to aim his limp arrows against the translators in their entirety. There's nothing wrong with chucking vitriol at Harry's Placers or that fat turd Stephen Pollard, but doing so for the purpose of denying those with the threat of murder hanging over their heads is the moral equivalent of refusing to even piss on someone who's on fire because you don't like them.
Clark then compounds the insult by referring to those who have worked with the British forces as both "quislings" and "collaborators". It's quite clear what Clark's pointing towards: that those who dared to believe they could rebuild Iraq, regardless of how Saddam was overthrown, are the modern equivalent of the fascist apologists and enablers of the 1940s. This is all the more hypocritical because of a recent posting on Clark's own blog, entitled "There was only one Nazi Germany", where he agrees with Jonathan Cook that it's impossible to paint Iran as a modern-day fascist state. It seems it's fine to bring up the inescapable Nazis after all, as long as they help along your own twisted argument. Perhaps Clark ought to have read the accounts of three interpreters who were interviewed in yesterday's Guardian, especially the first:
I chose to work for the British because I love their democracy and passion for human rights and I want to see it in Iraq.
And who could possibly disagree with those sentiments, even if you disagree with the method which brought the British into Iraq? Iraq is a hellhole now, and it's a hellhole of our own making, but what kind of inhumane bastard would deny the Iraqis the opportunity to rebuild their country in our image purely because of who supported the war in the first place, or as the case is, their escape from murderers who share none of the democratic sentiments they do? It's also not as if Clark has only recently taken to throwing the "quisling" tag around: back in 2003, he wrote a comment piece on the murder of the Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, calling him the quisling of Belgrade.
Clark ends his flatulence with this especially noxious, illogical blast of wind:
If that means some [the Iraqi employees] of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war, and not those of us who tried all we could to stop it.
But this is a false dichotomy. The responsibility doesn't just lie with the warmongers, it also lies with the murderers executing those they see as collaborators, a view that Clark himself seems to share. It's up to those of us who tried to stop it to now redirect our efforts to ensure that as few more people die as a result of what was done in our name as possible. Clark instead would prefer that more blood is spilt rather than giving "self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain out of Britain" the opportunity of a life away from the constant threat of death purely because of the job they chose. As Jamie points out, if you don't oppose cold-blooded murder, how can you oppose war? Or is it, to come back again to the quisling charge, that Clark views such men and women as untermensch?
As others have suggested, maybe it's a good thing that such a disgusting, despicable piece of writing appeared on CiF. If this doesn't motivate more people to sign the petition and write to their MPs on behalf of those we've abandoned to a unimaginable future, then very little else will.
Labels: cunts, inhumanity, Neil Clark, refuge for Iraqis
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