RIGHTS FOR WRONGS

Dan Choi Wants Back Into The Anti-Gay Military So He Can Kill Innocent Civilians

More recently, Choi was on Democracy Now, in a debate with the queer radical anti-war activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and said, “…war is a force that gives us meaning. War is a force that teaches us lessons of humanity and allows us to realize something about our society and teaches us the lessons that we probably should have learned before we went to war.” Neither [the show’s host Amy] Goodman nor Juan Gonzalez, her co-host, blinked an eye. Goodman has not simply featured Choi’s views on her show, she has explicitly endorsed them in her op-eds outside her role as show co-host.

Within today’s left, or what passes for the same, it is actually possible to have someone like Goodman, who has spent many hours among commentators critiquing the devastation caused to Iraq, listen to Choi talk about “rebuilding” a country that he is helping to bomb and destroy, without a single question about his politics. In this case, identity – and its efflorescence under a neoliberal war – becomes the excuse for war and it erases the possibility of a critique of Choi’s ideology.

Even further, the war on Iraq becomes a staging ground for Chois’s personal dramas, a backdrop to the possibility of a doomed romance. As Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore puts it, “How many Iraqis died in order for him to express the ‘truth of who I am?’ What about the truth of the war?…Did you hear that? He’s not worried about dying in an atrocious war, or killing innocent civilians, but about whether his boyfriend will be notified.”

– Yasmin Nair discussing Dan Choi’s politics in her article entitled, “Dan Choi Is No Hero: Rage, or the Lack Thereof.”

Image via Boss Tweed

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