A message to the Left: grow up, this isn't a game

The Daily Telegraph (UK) ^ | 9/19/2001 | Janet Daly

[Utah Girl]

A WHOLE swathe of this country's educated class is unable to distinguish between right and wrong. There is no other possible conclusion. There are apparently thousands of people out there (or maybe hundreds, or maybe it is just a few dozen with exceptionally good media contacts) who think that it is quite acceptable to see the mass murder of innocent people as a "message" that needed to be delivered.

The puerile anti-Americanism of the British Left has seemed a harmless enough joke during the good, safe years when there was enough capitalist bounty to give socialists a good party. Now, in this moment of terrifying international crisis, we are discovering something in our midst that goes way beyond the rather cuddly imbecility that most of its critics have attributed to it. For how long exactly has the liberal conscience been this malignant? Has the hatred and foaming malevolence now rising to the surface been bubbling away under that smug, lazy facade for a generation, just waiting for the triumphal moment to gloat about what many of its spokesmen have called America's "defeat"?

I am sorry to have to go on labouring the point about Left-wing newspaper comment which has already been so robustly addressed on these pages, but it is simply too deeply shocking to avoid. The pages of the Guardian, the British liberal intelligentsia's house journal, yesterday offered Paul Foot attacking "the Murdochs, the Conrad Blacks, the BBC foreign news chiefs and everyone else who refuses to understand the difference in the Middle East between the violence of conquerors, exploiters and oppressors on the one hand and the violence of the conquered, exploited and oppressed on the other". So mass murder might be justified then, if you are doing it on behalf of the "conquered, exploited and oppressed"? Does it matter, when you are committing this ultimate criminal act on behalf of the exploited, that you are financed by a billionaire born into one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia? (That is just the sort of association that Mr Foot is so eager to point out when it involves Western interventions.)

Nor does it matter, presumably, that the international terrorist alliance into which these murderers in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland are locked is part of a global criminal network which is tied to Colombian drugs traffic and old-fashioned low grade murder and money laundering.

After all, anything is acceptable if it helps to undermine the great United States plot to force American values on the rest of the world. Preventing the dissemination of free markets, with their corrupting prosperity and materialism, must be worth sacrificing a few mundane moral assumptions. Who is America, after all, to tell the world how it should live: if local populations prefer their Marxist tyrannies or their theocratic dictatorships, where does the United States get the right to bully them into personal freedom and private economic security? And when the theocrats and the dictators strike back, surely we should spare our sympathy for their tormentor. As Charlotte Raven puts it, on another page of yesterday's Guardian: "A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully": a theme so aptly taken up by the Guardian's political cartoonist, Steve Bell, who depicts George Bush and Tony Blair as two ape-like thugs with their knuckles scraping the ground, chanting a bellicose mantra which we are meant to see as mindless.

This is grotesque. But it is also a revelation, as fascinating as it is repulsive. On the one hand, it has the clear ring of elaborated neurosis: the extrapolation of your own adolescent rebellion into a cosmic political philosophy in which the most powerful country in the world personifies the domineering adult authority against which you pit yourself. But it also suggests an intellectual decadence that should be laughable - and was, in the innocent past of a week or so ago, laughed at. But they aren't funny any more. These are not champagne adventurists but salon terrorists who are excited - really excited - by this horrible event. Even when they contain their outright vindictiveness toward the country upon whose successful economy the developing world is utterly dependent, they suggest that there is something rational and meaningful in this "message" that has been delivered. As Martin Amis puts it in (where else?) yesterday's Guardian: "Terror is political communication by other means."

What kind of discourse is it that includes this kind of utterance? At what point would these people decide that an action was so evil, so utterly beyond the pale of human conscience, that it was ruled out as part of the argument? In the meantime, grown-up politicians have suspended all disputation in favour of an absolutely unified stand. This is not some war-time reflex of nationalistic piety, or a casual downgrading of the idea of democratic opposition. It is an acknowledgement that in order to have a debate, there must be two sides to the argument. And, as any sane person should be able to say with ease, there are not two possible answers to the question: was the attack on innocent civilians in America justifiable? There may be differences of opinion about the appropriate tactics for dealing with this gross criminality which threatens the lives of free people (and the freedoms which make their lives so worth living), and those differences will certainly be aired in private. But we have turned a corner.

This is not a question - however much sniping there has been, and may continue to be, between the press enclaves of Farringdon Road and Docklands - of the Left- and Right-wing press having a ritual go at one another. The moral confusion of a whole section of opinion formers and well-educated British people is being exposed and tested. No one will forget what has been said and written this past week.

[Utah Girl]

Spot on article. After some of the tripe I've read from some of the British press, this article is a breath of fresh air.

[Texasforever]

It is an acknowledgement that in order to have a debate, there must be two sides to the argument.

If last Tuesday was a "debating point" then the terms of "debate" have been set. It is NOW TIME FOR OUR REBUTTAL!

[okie01]

After the past few days, I was beginning to believe the whole damn mother country had gone barmy.

Thanks for the post. My faith in Brittania is restored.

[GeronL]

Big BUMP!!!

If this happened in London would they say the sanme thing in the Guardian? (if yes- then thats really pathetic)

[Travis McGee]

These leftists would gladly cheer our being marched into the gas chambers. They truly would.

[Fester Chugabrew]

"Who is America, after all, to tell the world how it should live: if local populations prefer their Marxist tyrannies or their theocratic dictatorships, where does the United States get the right to bully them into personal freedom and private economic security?"

Egads. This question is not all that unreasonable. Our heritage can no more be forced upon an unwilling world than a naked Janet Reno could be forced into my bed. Sheez. Our own citizens have a woeful ignorance and disregard for liberty, let alone the camel-jockey thugs of the world. Yet we are willing to believe the world will welcome "personal freedom and economic security" with open arms.

Call me an isolationist, but I truly believe the larger part of mankind is dumber than our forefathers.

[Friedrich Hayek]

For how long exactly has the liberal conscience been this malignant?

First of all, these people aren't "liberal," they are left-wing. And the Left has always hated America and eveything she stands for. They hate America every bit as much as Osama does. They have spent the last century defending one maniacal mass-murderer after another, from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Ho Chi Mihn to Castro.

The Left's defense of mass terrorism this week is really not out of character in light of their past actions. It's just that those other tyrants murdered their victims in the shadows, whereas the latest butchery was broadcast in living color to every television in the world.

Apparently, the Left's reaction to WTC has finally opened a few eyes. Hopefully people will begin to understand the true nature of the Internatioonal Left.

[Texasforever]

Egads. This question is not all that unreasonable. Our heritage can no more be forced upon an unwilling world

Just exactly where on this earth are we "forcing" our heritage on other countries?

[Paleo Conservative]

These leftists would gladly cheer our being marched into the gas chambers. They truly would.

Hell, they would cheer their own being marched into the gas chambers

[Waco]

The typical leftist has always wanted to throw his neighbors kids to the queers,,,,or the terrorists,,,,,that's all. Just that.

[GeronL]

You can't 'force' freedom on someone.

[Bernard Marx]

On a couple of recent trips to Great Britain I discovered just how much some (not all, by any means!) of the English and Irish hate us. For many it's just a reflex, no thought or logic required: "American -- loud, uncultured, stupid, barbarian, bad." Until then I'd been an admirer of things English. No more. I met many fine people and thoroughly enjoyed the museums, art collections and local bitters among other things. But I met a lot of dreadful condescending imbeciles, too, and won't be anxious to spend any more money there.

[vox1138]

The left's also trying to play games here by squabbling over defense in terms of the budget. Instead of funding both an anti-terrorist program and a missile defense system, they're trying to cause problems by saying that it has to be either one or the other, even though both are necessary and even part of each other.

[Travis McGee]

Not to mention makeup applied with a trowel and hockey rink smiles!

[Coyote]

For how long exactly has the liberal conscience been this malignant? Has the hatred and foaming malevolence now rising to the surface been bubbling away under that smug, lazy facade for a generation, just waiting for the triumphal moment to gloat about what many of its spokesmen have called America's "defeat"?

He's got it. THAT'S precisely what they've been doing, some with intent, some from spite, and some because they really are ignorant useful idiots. HERE'S a simple layman's piece that ties it all together for Americans. It's one of the best articles on the pop history behind the intentional destruction of America from within by a vicious and well entrenched faction of the radical left through the use of sheer, willfull deception. I encourage people to read it.

[FOMTY]

Great article.

[CWOJackson]

Excellent.

[Mel Gibson]

Great Article

"If there is no black and white, there can be no gray, since gray is a mixture of the two." - Ayn Rand

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"When you put your faith in big government for any reason, you end up an apologist for mass murder" - Karl Hess (very timely, quotation)

"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." - Robert Frost

"Facts are like Kryptonite to liberals." - Larry Elder

"Having decreed egalitarianism, having discarded religion and morality, modern liberalism's only answer to Nature's obvious inequality is to lower standards on everything and to declare everything is permissible." - Charley Reese

"Thomas Jefferson wanted to replace an aristocracy of birth with an aristocracy of merit. Today's liberal wants an aristocracy of mediocrity." - Charley Reese

"The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep." - former Clinton aide George Stephanopolous

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." - P.T. Barnum

"In my experience, people who are truly compassionate rarely use the word "compassion." Those who do talk compassion generally intend to be compassionate with your money, not their own. It's wrong for someone to confiscate your money, give it to someone else, and call that 'compassion'." - Harry Browne

"How many more sob stories must I read about some troubled young thing who visited a museum/art gallery/library/school and felt badly because she didn't see more depictions of people who "looked like me"? Shall we also, in the name of inclusion, erect a mural of draft dodgers on top of the Vietnam Memorial? Construct granite likenesses of the first ladies behind the four presidents at Mount Rushmore? Or mandate a new paint job and name change at the "White" House every month for equal opportunity's sake?" - Michelle Malkin

[driftless]

If the free world expects leftists to get on board, it better not hold it's breath. I remember reading an anecdote about Mary McCarthy during WW2 and that she realized after about four years into it that she did want the Allies to win. These people are so obtuse and so drenched in their hatred of capitalism that they will rationalize mass murder from anti-Western civilization maniacs. In the long run they are just as dangerous as the actual killers because they will sap the moral strength from a free society.