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Posted April 12, 2002
Why No Advertising?
If Antiwar.com is in as perilous a financial condition as your current fundraising appeal says, why, may I ask, do you no longer carry advertising? Does it have to do with past pressure on editorial stands from advertisers? With the tax-exempt status of the Center for Libertarian Studies? Or with some other reason?
I have bought several books and videos through your links to Amazon.com (and through those of Lew Rockwell's site), generating commissions for you. And I will shortly send the few dollars I can afford, once again, through your PayPal link. Yet your removal of all other advertising, given the shortfalls you're talking about, leaves me puzzled.
Webmaster Eric Garris replies:
The advertising issue is practical, not principled. As you may notice when you go to many news sites today, web advertising has taken on some very obtrusive qualities. The amount of money we could make from simple banner ads is negligible. We could make a few hundred a month if we had pop-up ads, ads that take over the screen as you are reading the page, ads with sound, and other things that are just too much of an interference with our message.
Another reason is that we have found people much less willing to donate to us when we had ads.
Postrel and Cato
Justin Raimondo's . . . article on Virginia Postrel and Cato hit the nail right on the head, and it's about time somebody said it!
I think a deeper critique of Postrel's "dynamism vs stasism" theory may be in order too. My own opinion is that in her case, the source of her prowar views can be found right there, in her us-Vs-them worldview in which the Old Right and the New Left are both seen as enemies of progress.
Is it any coincidence that those are the same groups which have historically been antiwar?
In the case of Cato, I suspect that their motivation is more pecuniary; namely, they don't want to offend any more big contributors the way they did back in 1991, even if it means abandoning libertarian principles.
Principles Can't be Compromised
Justin Raimondo said: "as far as we're concerned, libertarianism never changed."
That's exactly right. People accuse me of being inflexible, incapable of compromise. Principles can't be compromised; if they are, then they were something else -- strongly-held convictions, possibly -- but they weren't "principles."
Stop Aiding Israel
Of all the right-wingers on the Antiwar.com site (whatever happened to Cockburn, anyway?), Alan Bock is the one I find myself agreeing with most often. However, I take objection to [his column of April 3, "Middle East Bloodshed: the US Role"]....
The proposition that the US should do something to stop the Israeli assault in Palestine is not the result of imperialist thinking. George W. Bush can simply tell Sharon to pull out, by threatening to cut off military aid. The US is already involved through our continued contributions to Israel's military; all we have to do to stop the violence is to stop supplying the weapons.
This is why the Israel-Palestine conflict (and others in which we are the main benefactor of the aggressor, such as the Turkey-Kurdistan conflict, the Indonesia-East Timor conflict, etc.) is fundamentally different from others such as Iraq, Serbia, etc. We are already involved in the former; all we have to do to stop the war is to stop actively aiding one side.
I fail to see how even a libertarian right-wing free-trader could claim that a weapons embargo against a country at war is a bad thing.
Stop Funding Indonesia
On January 18, Justin Raimondo wrote the following about Chomsky:
"The power was always there – and the US should use it. No one is fooled by the way Chomsky frames his answer: clearly he was asking for the US to intercede on behalf of the rebels, and threaten Jakarta with the possibility of sanctions. Certainly Australian leftists weren't fooled: the 'Green Left' and socialist groups mounted demonstrations calling for the Australian army to 'save' East Timor. By doing nothing, in Chomsky's view, we were 'participating in atrocities.'"
Actually, Noam favors nonintervention in Timor. He would have been happy if we merely stopped training, equipping, and funding the Indonesian occupation armies and paramilitarities. By "participating in atrocities" he is referring to our active political, financial, and military support of the Indonesian government during the genocidal invasion itself.
Noam has
many problems -- his economic ideas aren't very good and those of his
pals at ZNet are much worse. However, he's on our side on this issue in
that he looks at U.S. foreign aid and intervention with extreme
suspicion.
Go read his other stuff on Z and you'll quickly find this to be true.
Another Contrived War
The world's ruling elite, through their puppets George W. Bush and Tony Blair, are about to orchestrate another contrived war against Iraq and former (current?) CIA asset Saddam Hussein in an effort to maximize profits for the war machine (the military/industrial complex) and as a way to spend our way out of the current global recession.
As the Israeli military pushes further and further into Palestinian territory, President Bush puts forth his phony demand for Ariel Sharon to stop the aggression. This is intended to deceive the world into believing that Bush is the voice of reason. He and Blair met over the weekend to rattle the sabers and beat the war drums against Iraq. The next segment of this contrived scenario will be for Iraq to lob a few scud missiles into Israel and then "the battle will be joined" all over again. And the stock market will go through the roof and everyone will be happy. Except, of course, for the thousands if not millions of people who will suffer needlessly and/or die because of it.
Suicide
The pro-Israel mouthpieces we see paraded on TV, including those so called journalists on cable news (mostly Fox), never fail to dehumanize the Palestinian people by somehow suggesting [the tendency to become a suicide bomber is] inherent in their psyche.
To ask a Palestinian representative, "Are suicide bombers born or do they become one" surely can't be taken seriously but that's the crap these so called news networks peddle.
What's amazing is that in America we have over 42,000 suicides happening on a annual basis; not even mentioning the thousands of failed attempt. California alone has over 2,000 a year. That's right, the rough life of California, with the sunny skies and all those beaches is just too unbearable for some. What's missing is a few hundred checkpoints, tanks and soldiers making life more livable for people on the West Coast.
[If] you take out Palestinian resistance against Israelis and measures against collaborators, you will not find a more crime free place on planet earth despite their poor economic hardships, cramped and poor living conditions. There is virtually no crime and no acts of suicide even under the conditions of occupation. In America, we don't have a foreign army occupying us. We are free to live and move about as we please across a vast landscape. We are prosperous, and yet our crime rate and suicide rate are the highest in the world.
What accounts for the high [rates of] violence that we see daily on our local news and the high suicide rate in America? Are these homicidal and suicidal Americans born this way? Two can play this game.
~ Joe M.