Too good to check
Mark Steyn reflects on the phony NYT crazed veterans story (and its sequel), and compares the cheapness of its anti-war sentiment to the famous 1933 Oxford Union resolution:
Seventy-five years ago, in February 1933, the Oxford Union passed a famous resolution, by an overwhelming margin, that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” The Union was the world’s most famous debating society, in a great university of the dominant global power; its presidents have gone on to serve as prime ministers at home and overseas, from Gladstone in the 19th century all the way to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s.
So the debate and its resolution sent a message to Britain’s enemies: As Churchill saw it, the vote was a “disgusting symptom” of the enervation of the ruling elites. Clifford May sees that same syndrome today around the Western world, but, in fact, it’s worse than that.
The Oxford debate took place a decade and a half after the worst carnage in human history. World War I cost the lives of some 20 million people. Do you remember in 2004 when Ted Koppel devoted one episode of “Nightline” to reading out the names of everyone killed in combat in Iraq? If he’d attempted a similar task with the British Empire’s war dead in 1919, the half-hour episode of “Nightline” would have had to be extended to 10 months – or longer if Ted took bathroom breaks. The war reached into the smallest English hamlet and culled a generation of young men. It swept through the glittering palaces, too: The brother of Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the present queen) was killed on the Western front in 1915.
It would be a statistical improbability to have been at that Oxford Union debate in 1933 and to have come from a home in which on some mantle or bureau there was not a photograph of a son or uncle or fiance forever young. It would be as if millions upon millions had been slaughtered in the first Gulf war, and, 15 years later, Harvard or Yale were debating whether we should do it all over again. In other words, we don’t have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever…
Phoniness and cheap anti-war sentiment abound. Steyn notes another notorious study: “The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 percent victims of the U.S. military. That’s 500 civilians a day…Why aren’t there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath? Because it’s fake. It didn’t happen.”
What unites the phony stories of a crazed veteran epidemic, a homeless veteran surge, and the mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians is that they apparently are, in the minds of the media, stories too good to check. None of them can withstand a moment of serious reflection and a minute of Googling. But still they appear. Indeed, some speculate that this latest journalistic atrocity just might win a Pulitzer Prize.