That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.
That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.
If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?
What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.
But you never had the honesty—then or now—to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.
Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual—both of which you despise.
It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.
Despite the homage contemporary leftists pay to post-modernist conceits, despite their belated and half-hearted display of critical sentiment towards Communist regimes, they are very much the ideological heirs of Stalinist progressives, who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves as civil libertarian opponents of McCarthy and victims of a political witch-hunt. (Only the dialectically gifted can even begin to follow the logic involved.)
To appreciate the continuity of communism in the mentality of the left, consider how many recent Hollywood promotions of the industry Reds and how many academic apologies for Stalinist crimes (in fact, the vast majority of recent academic texts on the subject) have been premised on the Machiavellian calculations and Hegelian sophistries I have just described.
Naturally, today's leftists are smart enough to distance themselves from Soviet Communism. But the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?............."
"My April 5 column for the Trib, “Lies, damned lies & Hollywood communists,” elicited some strong reaction, especially regarding Joe McCarthy, who, despite perceptions to the contrary, did not lead the investigation of communism in Hollywood.
That investigation was spearheaded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (McCarthy was a senator), which was mostly chaired by anti-communist Democrats, including a remarkable Pennsylvania congressman named Francis Walter. In fact, the committee's first and last heads were Democrats: Martin Dies (Texas) and Richard Ichord (Missouri).
There is much history there. But I'd like to focus on Joe McCarthy.
“McCarthy ruined many careers and many lives,” one Trib reader emailed me. “His name is a disgrace to America and to the United States Senate. He was not right. ... McCarthy was a despicable human being.”
To be sure, there is no way that I can here, with very limited words, adequately convince either side that Joe McCarthy was right or wrong. I have colleagues I respect on both sides. My general judgment is that McCarthy certainly had failings, clearly was not always right, but also — we've learned — was much more right than his detractors ever imagined.
Communist Party USA, which secretly and illegally received an annual subsidy from Moscow, was not just another political party. Its members were committed to overthrowing the U.S. government and replacing it with a “Soviet America.” Congress, of course, is constitutionally tasked with investigating domestic threats. For elected Democrats and Republicans to not do so would violate their sworn oaths — to America. Joe McCarthy was one of them.
The question, however, is how McCarthy then proceeded in that task.........."
It’s always great to read some Salon scribbler using leftwing mythology to denounce rightwing mythology.
When the U.S. pulled out of S. Vietnam and Ted Kennedy led legislation to stop supporting them, the N. Vietnamese moved down and slaughtered over 1 million of them. That gave the Khmer Rouge everything they needed to kill even more. Democrats never batted an eye, as long as they couldn’t blame the deaths on American intervention.
The author should take his own advice. The reason the "GOP" (who are anything but "right" at the moment) insists on a narrative of betrayal is because it happens to accord with historical fact.
The United States won the war, that is, if one considers that our strategic objective was to stop the incursions from the north and the domestic terrorism. This we did. On 27 January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords kicked in and we withdrew from Vietnam with the South Vietnamese government and its territory intact.
In 1975 the North ran armored divisions down Highway 1 in what amounted to a blitzkrieg. The sense of betrayal that is part of what the author considers a false narrative had nothing false about it - Congress, deeply influenced by the "antiwar" (if only it really were) movement, declined to fund air support for the South Vietnamese defenders. End of story. And so now the U.S. "lost" the war although no troops or air assets were even in country, this according to a treaty we had negotiated. Score two for that sense of betrayal.
The author is regurgitating all the old talking points of the triumphant Left but there is that curious lacuna between the POW camps emptying of U.S. occupants and them filling again with South Vietnamese occupants, a Vietnamese Gulag that is also carefully ignored by the Left, for its adherents insisted that such a thing would never happen and resolutely ignored it when it did. Those very few honest figures on the Left such as Joan Baez who protested were silenced and shunned.
One simply cannot take seriously an author who insists on historical verisimilitude and then promptly ignores it. He need not take my word for it. He can ask the Vietnamese.
Yet another seething Salon idiot on parade.
Has the Left recognized that they are, at long last, losing? And, as a consequence, decided to go back and fight the Viet Nam War all over again?
John F. Kennedy’s legacy, the Vietnam War, unionized government, and the 1965 Immigration Act (passed in his honor, since it was his lifetime goal).
All that and more, creating the 1960s and this immigration death.
If only Eisenhower’s Veep had won that 1960 election, America would still exist.
wasn’t the US intervention in Vietnam begun by a Democrat regime?????
A big eye opener for many Americans was watching the media and the left do two things, one, instantly lose interest in Vietnam when the Cambodian death camps and the Vietnam executions and reeducation camps started, and that the media suddenly didn’t like some immigrants for the first time, the “Boat People”, until the Vietnamese started fleeing Vietnam by the millions, refugees and immigrants were all so special to the American left, even Eastern Europeans fleeing the communists were tolerated, but they didn’t like the “boat people”.
Peter Birkenhead is a writer living in Washington, D.C. …He also wrote a book back in 2010 about “growing up with an emotionally abusive father” as he puts it.
I see the leftists are still spitting on the Vietnam Vets.
According to Roger Stone, LBJ made about $30 Million on the Vietnam war.
This is like the left trying to blame Baltimore riots on Republicans.
When Nixon killed the draft, the Movement lost most of its members but by then we had Leftists in Congress.
Uh, no.
Peter Birkenhead is an unrepentant Communist apologist and stooge who supports and is complicit in their acts of mass murder, barbarism, and savagery...
“GOP’s”?
Read Jim Webb:
The likes of McCain, Bolton and Graham -still- haven't figured it out.
JFK and LBJ were Republicans?
Horowitz is always a prize.
Doesn’t it seem odd that the best the lefties can do is go back to their halcyon days of the Vietnam war to reassert their political relevance? Yet they claim to be the party of “new” ideas?
We won the Vietnam War in 1973.