“But other countries have also known their bleak and terrible moments,” he said. “In any event, we have never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we have never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometers of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam.”
The temptation is to respond to these three charges on a factual level, to point out that it took not one but two atomic bombs to bring Japan to the decks of the battleship Missouri to surrender-the need for the second demonstrating the need for the first; to point out that chemicals were used to defoliate a jungle hiding guerrillas who murdered south Vietnamese who would not succumb to communism, a tactic gruesomely pioneered in the Soviet Union the evidence of which the article describes at Kashtak, and a tactic which the United States sought to put an end to in South Vietnam both by the use of defoliants and by heavy bombing. But to respond to these charges on extensive factual level is a mistake because it concedes to the left the high ground.
The left invariably argues by resort to relativism. Once conservative, democratic, capitalist America agrees to engage in the argument at all, we lose because we have given away the idea of American exceptionalism. We've given away the idea that a democratic, capitalist, conservative America is by definition a virtuous land which should be emulated by all other countries on earth.
The resort to argument by relativism, of course, is not limited to matters of international virtue but go to the very heart of political epistemology. If all values and realities are relative and nothing is absolute then the relativist gets to shade and shape the values. If virtue is absolute, he cannot redefine it. But if it is relative, leftist gets to play God. Since that is his ultimate goal, (whether he is possessed of self-awareness enough to know that or not is irrelevant because his impulse is what matters) he has won the game, the game of politics, in which he gets to rule.
