UC Berkley

January 19, 2003

A few days back on the Chris Matthews show I saw Christopher Hitchens from Vanity Fair make an interesting point about the current antiwar movement.

His comments revolved around the controversial Daisy ad, a remake from an ad from the sixties that shows a possible consequence of going to war by showing a little girl followed by a mushroom cloud.

He mentioned the fact that such an ad illustrates two facts about the current antiwar movement, illiteracy and conservatism. Illiteracy, because of the extremely poor memory of the movement since such ad was used by Lyndon Johnson to lie and bully the American public and congress to go to war with Vietnam. Conservatism, since it seems that the goal is to keep the status quo in the Middle East and have America take a non-active roll in the area.

He mentioned the fact that a movement with a memory of appeasement as bad as that and a propaganda instinct as poor as that, hardly deserves to be taken serious. There are many good arguments for not going to war but certainly appeasement should not be one