For those of us who believe that the War on Terror is a war for our very survival and the survival of those we hold dear and who also believe that the war in Iraq is a battle in that war, there is a need, from time to time, to sharpen our remembrance and bring our blood to the boil again.
David Gelemter’s article The Holocaust Shrug in The Weekly Standard did it for me.
Here’s a sample:
Turning away is not evil; it is merely human. And that’s bad enough. For years I myself found it easy to ignore or shrug off Saddam’s reported crimes. I had no love for Iraq or Iraqis. Before and during the war I wrote pieces suggesting that Americans not romanticize Iraqis; that we understand postwar Iraq more in terms of occupied Germany than liberated France. But during and after the war it gradually became impossible to ignore the staggering enormity of what Saddam had committed against his own people. And when we saw those mass graveyards and torture chambers, heard more and more victims speak, watched those videotapes, the conclusion became inescapable: This war was screamingly, shriekingly necessary.
But instead of exulting in our victory, too many of us shrug and turn away and change the subject.
Walter Duranty’s falsified reports of Stalin’s regime, the silence of the Western press during Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and CNN’s trading silence for access all remind us that we cannot rely on the legimitate press to be honest witnesses to such horrors. Listen instead to the small voices.
