Curiously Silent

The Chinese test an ASAT weapon, and Bruce is nowhere to be found.

Maybe he’s just slow getting around to it, what with his preoccupation right now with refurbing the house for his new commune.

I?m sure when he does mention it, however, it will be to point out how it’s all our fault — that innocent China merely perceived the US? own ASAT programs as a threat to which it had to respond in kind. After all, the US is the wellspring of all evil, ill-will, and bad things in the universe, especially under the fascist, jackboot rule of Chimpy McBushhitler. China’s actions are simply a regrettable response to the U.S.’ provocative moves to militarize space. After all, non-Western countries — being peaceable, sharing, spiritual, and in every way morally superior by nature — are simple stimulus-response organisms, incapable of undertaking such tut-tuttable actions of their own free will and in furtherance of their own self-selected goals.

Oh come on now, you know he’ll say something like that…if he says anything at all, which is more likely to be the case. If it’s not the U.S. doing something he doesn’t like, it’s doubtful whether it even registers on his radar — much like terrorism committed against the West. He rails repeatedly against the war in Iraq, for example, but never acknowledges why it is being fought (except to mindlessly regurgitate the “oiiiiiiilllllll!” canard). He works up a lather over any alleged atrocities by U.S. servicemen (or the IDF), no matter how spurious or distorted the details, while remaining silent about actual, documentable atrocities committed by those being fought against. So why should China testing anti-satellite weapons prompt outrage from Bruce? If it’s not the U.S. developing space weapons and cluttering up the “space shipping lanes” with debris, why would he care?

There is a tendency among people in Bruce’s camp to see “The Other” as both morally superior and absolved from moral considerations at the same time. Being oppressed and exploited by the greedy, corporatist, racist, militaristic, imperialist U.S. relieves the The Other of any moral responsibility for their actions, leaving them free do as they wish — to commit violence against whomever they please, for whatever reasons they choos, employing the most morally questionable means at their disposal. Whatever the acts of The Other, they will invariably escape the notice of the utopian pacifists. Yet when the U.S. (or Israel) take any military or intelligence-gathering action, it just as invariably registers in the microscopes of such “peace warriors”, signalling them to gather together the peace community for a protest vigil and organic vegan potluck, and triggering yet another round of melodramatic handwringing about the death of democracy under the jackboot heel of corporate fascism and the insatiable war-hunger of the Military-Industrial Complex™.

It’s always America’s fault. Even, I suppose, the selective outrage and moral blindness of peace-radical moonbats.