A Difference in Strategy

We would like to take a moment to respond to some more unfounded criticism of the GNU Public Dictatorship. Last week a columnist in the Waycross Journal-Herald compared the GPD's Board of Dictators to Al Qaeda, and argued in very inflammatory language that we are trying to force our will on the people of the world. (Oh, and don't be surprised if you can't find the offending article online--they received so many negative comments about it that they have probably just removed it altogether to conserve bandwidth). As we have repeatedly told our supporters it is generally best to ignore unfounded criticism rather than to lend it credibility by refuting it, but once again our inboxes are full of requests from concerned supporters to defend our reputation.

To be fair, we do have certain things in common with Al Qaeda. We share three letters in common with them, and we are an organization with supporters across the world. When we get down to the fundamentals of ideology and methods, however, we find that we have very little in common with our angry brothers.

As for ideology, Al Qaeda believes that anyone who believes differently from them has no right to live. They take this belief into action when they perform terrorist attacks and when they intimidate more moderate muslims by releasing videos in which they rant about the evils of everyone else. They recently released a message criticizing President-Elect Barack Obama for not joining in their fight. While we applaud their whole-hearted dedication to their beliefs, we do not share many of them. We believe that everyone is entitled to have his or her own opinion about any topic that can be imagined. We believe that merely having a belief is not grounds for summary execution, and we do not believe in using terrorism to intimidate people into supporting us. We believe that people will support us without our having to use force. We know that there are those out there that would call us "unjustifiably optimistic" for this belief, but we cling to it nevertheless. We are, however, nothing if not pragmatic, and understand that certain actions must be taken to ensure that people "choose" to support us, and we do not apologize for these actions.