Dialoguing with Ahmadinejad.

Moral clarity on dialoguing with evil. Read Ron Rosenbaum:

I read one laughable attempt at a historical argument on a conservative-oriented blog, a pro-“dialogue” post which seemed to imply that Richard Nixon’s “dialogue” with Khrushchev in that silly “kitchen debate” (America’s true superiority lies in our material goods; we’re better because we’re have better refrigerators!) changed Khrushchev’s mind. And that the Berlin Wall fell because Reagan changed Gorbachev’s mind about its presence. Through dialogue of course.

“Hmmm,” you can hear Gorbachev saying, “Reagan says, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down the wall!’ Maybe I should! Why didn’t I think of it?”. But the point is he didn’t tear down the wall. No, the wall fell because the courage of Solidarity in bearing moral witness against the Soviet-style police state regime in Poland was contagious, and spread to East Germany. To deny that, to rob those brave Eastern Europeans who really did tear down the wall—truly fearless people—in order to use this denial as an argument for think-tanky dialogue, is a sad disservice to those those brave souls.

I just don’t get the desperate need for so many commentators left and right to twist themselves into knots of such clueless sophistry to trivialize a fascist regime, to prove somehow that by failing to speak out against Iran’s Stasi like regime that tortures and murders dissidents and heretics, they are somehow being braver and more sophisticated than the “fearful” who actually did speak out.

global war on terror Islam Ahmadinejad Berlin Wall Poland Solidarity