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Sept. 17, 2006 As soon as someone pronounces up front that he is a “liberal” or a “conservative”, or identifies himself as a “Democrat” or a “Republican”, or professes adherence to any other party or persuasion, I begin to view his statements with caution. Corollarily, even if he does not identify his own preference, but starts attacking “liberals”, “conservatives”, “Democrats” or “Republicans”, I regard him with a measure of mistrust. I feel that professions of faith of this kind oblige the person who makes them to subscribe to all the articles of a preexistent creed, and not merely the ones that he personally has researched and conscionably endorses. On any issue that arises, he may not speak his honest opinion, but must instead make sure that his professed opinion is acceptable to others of his cohort. If the matter is a news item, he may broadcast it far and wide if it agrees with his fellow partisans’ credo, and smother it if it disagrees. The way that I prefer to view an issue or read a news article is to act as if I were a non-partisan fact-finder, a man from Mars, as it were. I don’t feel as if I should contact Republican or Democratic headquarters to see what I should be thinking. Let me instead do all the checking that my humble resources allow me and draw my own conclusions. My dictum is that nobody tells Thomas Keyes what to think. I noticed recently somewhere, for example, that Tom Pain quite foolishly remarked that I had been influenced too heavily by “pseudo-intellectuals”. The irony is that Pain is the quintessential pseudo-intellectual. His remark is preposterous. I’ve been following the discussions on the fraudulent invasion of Iraq daily since before the war began. I checked all the sources that exist, so-called “left-wing”, “right-wing”, American, European, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, “liberal”, “conservative”, online articles from newspapers, think tanks, government agencies, blogs, everything. I even read numerous articles in foreign languages. I do not have any mentors or gurus. All my opinions are my own. There is not a circle of thinkers to which I honestly feel I belong. It’s true that along the way I’ve read opinion articles by a number of people with whom I agree as regards the invasion, but in no case did I base my conclusions on those of a select circle of pundits. In a couple of my articles, I made honorable mention of a number of writers whose views on the matter I respected: Buchanan, Mearsheimer and Walt, Reese, Raimondo, Margolis, etc. This must be where Pain got his crazy notion. But no, I do not rush to Buchanan’s website to see what I should be thinking. Over the past three and a half years, I’ve read 15 or 20 of his articles on Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the US , and, as far as I can discern, he is correct—on that one subject. Still he’s a Christian; I’m an atheist. He’s anti-gay and pro-life; I’m indifferent. He’s a holocaust-denier; I’m a holocaust-agnostic. I consider even the opinions of very unpopular people, like Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Mahathir Mohamed, Ralph Nader, David Duke and Louis Farrakhan. That doesn’t mean I agree with them. I just weigh what they say, without bias. I feel that’s the way it should be done. On the other hand, I’ve read articles by Victor Hanson, William Buckley, James Taranto, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Ledeen and William Kristol. I visit the websites of all the pro-Israel groups: JINSA, AIPAC, WINEP, ADL, the American Enterprise Institute, PNAC, etc. I don’t merely dismiss anyone out of hand. If I find a statement on a little-known website or from some minor authority, I look for confirmation in the mainstream media online. It’s not so much that I trust the MSM so much more than the blogosphere, but I feel that in that way I am less open to criticism and error. And this is especially true since Pain, Haran and others often find it convenient to attack the integrity of a website that I link to, without bothering to do their own checking, even though the selfsame news may have been in 20 major newspapers throughout the world. My sole purpose is to get at the truth, not to show how conservative or liberal I am, not to let everyone see how jingoistic or pro-Western I am. I just want the facts. Incidentally, this article is not in reply to the one by Tom Pain that was just posted. I saw the title, but haven’t read the article. I wrote most of this article before Pain’s appeared. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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