Posted on 02/13/2006 6:35:54 AM PST by Valin
Re what Frenchie said "What do such killjoys make of the Norman Mailer of the 1960s? Of the Arthur Miller of The Crucible?"
Here's some history The Nation will never publish ...
A Conference in New York
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."
The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet organized and articulate opposition.
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II.
Stealing the Show
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an authentic "left" in the United States, in the European sense.
But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking.
No,we have a left and a center. </sarcasm>What we have, of course, is a left which calls itself "objective journalism," and what that left calls a "right" which would be entirely happy not having to concern itslef with such things as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And would now be able to do so, if not for the Jimmy Carter left which pulled the plug on the Shah of Iran and gave North Korea uranium.
"For a European intellectual used to the battlefield of ideas..."
The struggle between total communism and national socialism. That is his "battlefield of ideas". What a putz!
In the end, it comes across as a mildly poetic rant by a self-proclaimed "intellectual", filled with grandiose-sounding phrases, liberally sprinkled with the catch phrases most often found in the current Liberal talking points.
Like cotton-candy, it boils down to a small, sickenly-sweet morsel, that is nutritionally worthless, overpriced, and not really good for you anyway.
Yawn
Who is Bernard-Henri Lévy and why should I pay any attention to his drooling blather?
If you took away vituperation against Bush, we would only hear crickets from the Left.
couldn't have said it better myself.......
Only one answer, however, is required.
BECAUSE LIBERALISM'S FOUNDATIONAL TENETS ARE ALL LIES.....lies which are proven as such by daily events.
Example: "tax cuts will harm the economy". The verdict is in, folks, this is a lie!
Another example: "Katrina exposed that the government ISN'T DOING ENOUGH for poor people". Katrina exposed that what we all winced at was GOVERNMENT CREATED!
Etc., etc., etc.
The American Left may be considered comatose perhaps. It is more accurate to say that it is vacuous.
The European "intelligensia" is hubritic, blinded by denial, pretentious, and shallow, possibly as vacuous as the American Left.
The American Heartland is healthy, alive, vital, awake, energetic, optimistic, ascendant, and ripe with new ideas. It is the world's best hope. Its value is apparently lost on Lévy (who can't even see through the flimsy Democrat-propaganda catchphrase "Bush lied" and certainly can't be expected to see deeper truths right before his eyes).
Europe has no equivalent of the American Heartland.
And the European leadership is as comatose as the American Left.
I won't even mention Bush's gross lies about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction,
Because there weren't any "gross lies", and even most Democrats understand that hey, Just about every reputable source thought there were WMD in Iraq. Not just that, but the final chapter on WMD has just started to be written, hold that thought....
And yet the United States nearly impeached Nixon because he had spied on his enemies
Is that about the wire tapping? Either this Euro doesnt understand Watergate (Nixon went after his POLITICAL enemies, not terrorists), or he is simply equating these wiretaps with something nefarious. If thats the case, I'd like to point out to mr. Euro that many European countries have laws which allow the governments to do things that would have made J. Edgar Hoover salivate!
What a toon the writer is! The left can't call for the "abolution of this civilized barbarity" because they'd have to call for the "abolution" of baby killing too. And that's something they will never do because they need to keep killing kids for the votes. Because without the votes of the "pro choice" morons the Democrats would be in worst shape.
All head... no beer.
Thanks for the enlightenment.
I should have known.
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