Take that stinkin' Smurfs!

Ok – first post after returning from Germany. I’ll post again soon with pictures and descriptions of my time overseas but first another bit of politics. It seems UNICEF has produced a piece that’s airing in Belgium and depicts Smurfs be blasted to bits by warplanes which some are interpreting as American aircraft. This was simply too….. odd (?) to ignore. The projected goal of the cartoon is to raise money for the child soldiers of Barundi but again, many are taking this cartoon as a not so thinly veiled swipe at the USA and its war effort in Iraq. The link to a British article on the cartoon is below as is the commentary from a member of the site where I discovered the article. I wanted to run his commentary because I feel it’s dead on accurate whether or not the cartoon is intended to portray US military aircraft. The commentary neglects to mention the Holocaust or any of the Japanese atrocities like the Rape of Nanking, Pearl Harbor or the Bataan Death March…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/08/wsmurf08.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/10/08/ixhome.html


“If there was any justice in the world the U.N. would at least produce another skit with some of the smurfs sawing the heads off other cartoon characters for trying to register voters -- but naturally, I won't be holding my breath.

I live overseas and just today found myself criticizing a Japanese academic after he skipped over 90% of all the atrocities committed in the past century to focus on the bad deeds of the United States. What really surprised me about the conversation though was his total inability to respond when I started throwing out what I thought were universally recognized examples of far worse massacres -- The Soviet Union under Stalin, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, North Korea even now, etc. It wasn't that he wasn't able to converse with me either. The whole exchange took place in Japanese and the best response he could muster was "Americans just can't take criticism." No, Dipshit. We take it every day. In fact, our system encourages it. What pisses me off is the intellectual dishonesty coming from so-called academics like you who either ignore or excuse the massacre of millions under socialist governments to spout revisionist garbage that always -- always -- leads to the preordained conclusion that everything is really America's fault.”