kerkko.fi

It certainly feels uncomfortable to watch American, British, and French planes enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya, bombing Libya’s anti-aircraft defences, and destroying Libyan tanks. Certainly the hypocrisy of the West and the Arab dictators is as galling as ever. The fact is that the Libyans have not had the leisure to discuss politics and choose good leaders -- their priority now is to get rid of the tyrant and to simply stay alive.

Many people are crippled in their judgement by ideology: leftists who think Gaddafi is an anti-imperialist hero, non-Arab soft Islamists who have a problem admitting the Arabs are connected to each other beyond the borders drawn by imperialists, Zionists who tell themselves the revolutions have nothing to do with Palestine, Americans who tell temselves that the invasion and destruction of Iraq started the democratic ball rolling.

It is the stupid fringes of the left who have the most to answer for at the moment, as they not only express logical concerns about the extent of Western intervention but actively support Gaddafi. They say the UN "aggression" is designed to ease Western access to Libyan oil, as if Western companies did not already exploit Libyan oil under Gaddafi’s regime. They talk about Gaddafi’s great "victories" against imperialism.

These leftists are ignorant of the stagnation of Arab societies under dictatorial regimes and of the enormous suffering of those imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. If they are not ignorant, they simply do not care. They are the kind of people who supported Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe in 1956 and 1968, who think the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was a liberation, and that Mao's cultural revolution was progressive.

These people are posers, for whom ideas and facts are useless except as adornments for the sexy self. They are an insult to leftism and anti-imperialism. Fortunately, their residence in fantasyland makes them entirely irrelevant to the real world.