Thomas Wictor

I was surfing around, waiting for next week to begin so I can start up the next phase of my publicity campaign.

On a blog that’s run by two brothers whose work has appeared in The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, I found a post on the movie Lone Survivor. In the piece the authors decry the film’s attempt to mislead audiences about the nature of the Taliban and the war our troops are fighting against them.

One of the “facts” that the authors state is that “Ahmad Shah would never have attacked fellow Afghan villagers.”

Total rubbish. The Taliban attacks fellow Afghans all the time. In fact, in the first half of 2013, the Taliban was responsible for 74 percent of all civilian deaths, while pro-government forces were responsible for 9 percent. The bloggers didn’t know that the Taliban kills far more civilians than do pro-government forces.

I was asked why the Taliban didn’t attack Sabray, the village that saved Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. The answer is simple: The villagers are too heavily armed. Sabray villager Muhammed Jan explains.

In our area we protect ourselves with our own guns and strength. There is no government, no Americans and no Taliban because we keep them away.

The bloggers are experts on warfare and counterinsurgency, yet they didn’t know this?

Initially, one of the bloggers—a self-described pacifist named Eric—tried to argue with me, but then he resorted to the much easier expedient of deleting my comments. A notice under the comment box says, “Finally, we’ve also developed a policy: no personal attacks. If you want to insult us or another commenter, do it somewhere else.”

But when I posted a link to the statistic that the Taliban were responsible for 77 percent of civilian deaths in 2010, Eric the pacifist wrote, “Well, that’s disingenuous.” An incomprehensible explanation of why I was lying followed, but I pointed out just for fun that calling me disingenuous was a personal attack. Eric then changed his accusation to this hilarious Gandhi-istic parody.

Well, that statistic appears misleading to me, though I don’t believe you intended it that way.

A commenter named Sven got into it, telling me I was wrong about everything, even though he didn’t have the slightest clue what he was talking about. For example, he said he’d intensively studied the Allied bombing campaign of Germany in World War II, but he didn’t know that bombers were sent in waves, sometimes hours apart. He’s an idiot, in other words.

The blog promotes the usual anti-Americanism that George Orwell correctly pointed out has nothing to do with pacifism.

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States.

Sven insisted that there was no need to bomb Japan during World War II, and that the Allied demand of unconditional surrender prolonged the war in that it inspired the Nazis and Japanese to fight harder. In reality, the formula of unconditional surrender was adopted in order to keep public support for the war in place—What are we fighting for?—and to maintain Allied cohesion. The war aims of every Allied nation were different.

Besides, the Japanese and Germans were the first belligerents of World War II to use the unconditional surrender formula, something that rabid anti-Americans conveniently omit to mention.

I then looked around the blog and found that Eric the pacifist thinks we were unjustified in fighting World War II because of World War I. He doesn’t actually explain why the fighting of World War I meant that World War II was unjustified, but his knowledge of both conflicts is vestigial. Here’s how he ends his incoherent piece on World War I.

To put it more bluntly, how can a soldier who fought in World War I justify what he did? You killed other men, took lives, for no reason. How can you justify that?

He makes no connection between the two world wars, but I responded with a long post full of typos. The first line is me quoting him.

It was deleted within a minute.

Returning to the discussion of the Allied bombing campaign of Germany: The British favored area bombing, while the Americans preferred what was called “tactical” or “precision” bombing. The British goal was to destroy military targets and industry and kill civilians to impact support for the war. The Americans were not only ethically opposed to area bombing, they also thought it was ineffective.

As I predicted, Eric didn’t reply. Pacifists usually avoid addressing all difficult challenges to their philosophy. That’s why Eric says he’s not interested in World War II. Morally, it was a completely justified war on the part of the Allies, and Eric can’t handle that. So he simply refuses to talk about the war. Sven stuck in his oar, though.

After my posts began being deleted, I wrote one to Eric the pacifist. For some reason the whole site had gone italics at this point. I think the blogger-brothers were panicking and pressing lots of buttons or something.

Deleted. But Sven answered with the fallacious debating technique of proclaiming yourself to be morally superior to those who disagree with you. In Sven World, anyone who thinks the way I do is objectively scum and a war criminal, but he said he didn’t personally attack me; I just happen to be scum and a war criminal by virtue of the way I think. He was only pointing out my scummy war-criminality.

I responded to his response.

Deleted.

My point is that in war, you have to make hard decisions. During the D-Day invasion that began the liberation of millions from Nazi tyranny, we killed about 25,000 French civilians. Does that mean liberating millions of Europeans was immoral?

The blogger brothers present themselves as experts on counterinsurgency and war, but at least one of them is a fraud. He’s no expert, because he doesn’t know anything. Frauds are destroying our quality of life. They cost me my careers in both music journalism and literature. Their goal is to control how you think and profit off you. Well, I’m no longer shy about calling them out.

Hand in hand with cronyism is rigidity, to which I’m now violently allergic. In fact, the reason people succumb to cronyism is because they’re too rigid to deal with opposition. Nobody likes learning that they’re wrong; I get that. But the fraudulence that’s become endemic in our culture is starting to impact our daily lives. And when you’re wrong, you’re wrong. Pretending you’re still right won’t change cold, hard, dispassionate truth.

The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times hire these two imbecile-brothers simply because they say things that the papers want to hear. That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in. Too many people filter out all that doesn’t comport with their arbitrary worldviews.

After deleting just about all the factual information I’d posted, Eric wrote the following.

Yes, citing facts that don’t fit into the narrative is insulting people’s intelligence.

Thanks, Eric, but on your blog there’s no intelligence for me to insult. You guys go ahead with your, uh…