Too Much To Dream

Just like prison

So Robert Fisk is feeling the Iraqi's oppression and pain again -- at the hands of the coalition forces, what else? It seems that "the Americans" (the heck with the other member nations of the coalition, they're just dupes and fools, I guess) have issued a request to people in Baghdad to not leave their homes at night since fighting is still going on and, you know, someone might get hurt. At least, that's how it reads to me, but Fisk Knows Better:

So now – with neither electricity nor running water – the millions of Iraqis here are ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn. Lockdown. It's a form of imprisonment. In their own country. Written by the command of the 1st US Marine Division, it's a curfew in all but name.

Gasp! Curfew. The most dreaded word in the English language to someone like Fisk. I left this in Steven Chapman's comments, but I figured I might share my wisdom with you all:

[...]here we have an example of what really frightens those that are pleased to call themselves the "progressive left" -- the idea that anyone's personal movements should be subject to any restriction whatsoever, no matter how temporary and how much for one's own good, and no matter if it is in effect nothing more than a request and a caution. I still remember my friends and I back in our own "progressive" days getting shriekingly indignant over a city-imposed curfew on Miami's teens, even though we were already in our twenties at the time and so the law didn't even apply to us, and even though it was in an effort (only semi-successful) to cut down on teen crime and gang warfare inside city limits.

I know it's a cliché now to refer to P.J. O'Rourke, but something he said about the essentially toddler-like philosophy of modern-day "liberals" still stands: freedom to them means the right to "put anything in their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums." (From Give War a Chance.)

Posted by Andrea Harris at April 17, 2003 01:02 PM