A number of my friends are liberals. Some of the goals and ideals that are theirs I share.
But too many of those on the Left now hold positions I find amazingly poor. Chalk it up to a combination of severe "I Hate GWB" disease and what I refer to as the bigotry of the Left.
We are all familiar, are we not, with the incredible hyperbole to which the Left resorts when discussing the "crimes" of this administration. Ron Rosenbaum, in this marvelous piece "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee", depicts how the Left finally went too far:
Over and over, one heard variations on the theme of, "Gee, it’s terrible about all those people who died in the towers and all"—that had already become the pro forma disclaimer/preface for America-bashing—"but maybe it’s a wake-up call for us to recognize how bad we are, Why They Hate Us." The implication was evident: We deserved it. It would be a salutary lesson. It was the Pat Robertson wing of the Left in full flower: Sinful America deserved this Judgment from the sky. Crocodile tears could be shed for those people who died in the towers, but those buildings were so ugly, they were such eyesores, they were a symbol of globalist hubris—it was as if the terrorists who flew the planes into the towers were really architectural critics, flying Herbert Muschamps, not mass murderers.
No, we must search for the "root causes," the reasons to blame the victims for their unfortunate but symbolically appropriate deaths. And on and on, until I felt myself already beginning to say goodbye to the culture that produced this kind of cruel, lockstep thinking. Until finally, the coup de grâce—the Big Idiocy, the idiocy di tutti idiocies. It came from the very well-respected and influential academic, who said that there was at least one thing that was to be welcomed about 9/11: It might give Americans the impetus to do "what the Germans had done in the 60’s"—make an honest reassessment of their past and its origins, as a way to renewal.
Reassessment of our past: Clearly he was speaking admiringly of the 60’s generation in Germany coming to terms with its Nazi past, with Germany’s embrace of Hitler.
It seems that this wing of the Left has no meter for discernment. A hangnail of a problem with civil liberties in this country means we are Nazis. Success makes us evil. Having power makes us fascists. They are incapable of comprehending that while not allowing gay marriage may be wrong, it falls far lower on the Evil-O-Meter than hacking gays to death - or plowing jumbo jets into skyscrapers because we do not hack our gays to death.
Recently, a bright and knowledgeable longtime friend finally admitted why he always sides with the Palestinians against the Israelis, irrespective of how obscene the actions of the Palestinians become.
"The Israelis should know better," he tells me. "They're wealthier than the Palestinians. They're better educated. Their culture is more civilized."
My friend doesn't realize how bigoted and unfair this is. Yes, he is correct on all points: Israelis are wealthier, less ignorant, more civilized. But where he is wrong is in assuming that because of all this, that the Palestinians are unable to become better citiizens of the world.
They can. They should.
None of the above should be an excuse for strapping explosives onto twelve year olds, nor an excuse for killing thousands of innocents with a jet or a train.
I do not look at Islamic terrorists or Hamas as sub-human. I view them as they are: people who have gone grotesquely wrong in their values and their actions.
As Rosenbaum states:
The point is, all empires commit crimes; in the past century, ours were by far the lesser of evils. But this sedulous denial of even the possibility of misjudgment in the hierarchy of evils protects and insulates this wing of the Left from an inconvenient reconsideration of whether America actually is the worst force on the planet. This blind spot, this stunning lack of historical perspective, robs much of the American Left of intellectual credibility. And makes it easy for idiocies large and small to be uttered reflexively.
The U.S. makes mistakes. Israel does, too. Why, however, can't the Left see that the errors of these democracies are tiny in contrast to the crimes of other nations and cultures? That if they condemn us, they must condemn the others tenfold?
Since the phrase was first used after 911, I have been saying that the "root causes" are the same as they have always been in recorded history and by implication pre-history -
. 1. Desire for power over the lives of others
. 2. Need to get food, by theft if necessary
and that most current conflicts are, as always, preponderately of type 1.
Posted by: John Anderson | Sunday, April 04, 2004 at 01:44 PM