Posted on 08/19/2007 8:18:23 AM PDT by ventanax5
In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn't question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn't try to understand myself.
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...
Uh, what?! The “danger” of America?!! We save your azz twice from the Germans and we’re a “danger” you ungrateful twit?!! Sod off!!
I am not surprised at Andrew Anthony’s attitude, as a self-admitted liberal. All you can say is “consider the source”. Many of our own liberals in this country have the same attitude.
Savage is right: “liberalism is a mental disorder”.
bump
America built the Royal Navy and the Royal Air force? I never knew that!
try reading the entire article ... this is his journey from being hard-lef to the realization that all that is wrong in the world is not Western culture, the UK or the US. It provides a window into the mindset of the left, in the way that David Horowitz and Orwell have done after their own conversions.
“There was no serious attempt to examine what kind of power the powerless wanted to assume, or over whom they wanted to exercise it, and no one thought to ask by what authority these suicidal killers had been designated the voice of the oppressed.”
This sentence says it all for me. The poisonous left do not ask this question when they celebrate the terrorists and tyrants of the world. Never is the question one of whether the ideology of the “oppressed” tyrants to be is the one that should be championed rather it is the simpletons surface analysis that can seemingly only comprehend a group of small men fighting a giant. It never comes to mind for the liberal that these are little hateful men that would have their liberal heads and stomp out their beloved freedoms as if they were rubbing out a crawling insect. That is why the left can not be left to their current position.
It should alarm all freedom loving peoples of the world that in America we have assembled in a major political party the single most Anti-American socialist group of candidates that world has seen in the United States. They do not understand the enemy because they believe their own nation and the economic freedoms that have allowed this country to rise to greatness to be the enemy. The terrorists are poor oppressed little men who if only America would treat them like the paupers they are and offer them trinkets would their thirst for blood be assuaged.
Yawn. Another liberal has an epiphany.
It only took two skyscrapers falling on him.
And 55 paragraphs and 8000 words to explain.
“America built the Royal Navy and the Royal Air force? I never knew that!”
To the tune of $31 billion or so under the Lend-Lease act.... Sort of, yeah.
:)
That's quite an admission from a liberal, isn't it? I'm going to go read the rest.
UK just finished paying us for WW-II in January.
You really are under the delusion that Great Britain stood alone against the Axis and won? Really?!! Funny, I seem to remember 50 lend-lease destroyers, American ships in convoy before December 1941, millions of tons of supplies to your island and much more. Not to mention 13 million Americans under arms, petroleum, tanks, ships, food, ammunition and etc... Remembering now?
Yes it is. I’ve seen similar revelations and it betrays a certain lack of depth on the part of liberals. It is as if they are scooting along on the surface of life not really comprehending the great pit to which they march. They judge goodness based on size and economy. The poor man is always the victim no matter how heinous the crime of the poor man. The big country is always the aggressor no matter how wretched and enemy they fight but of course this rule doesn’t always fit. There is Israel which always bad because of what is probably the core of liberal ideology which states that those who succeed must always have cheated or oppressed others to achieve success. This more than anything else seems to guide liberal thinking.
The “danger of America” is a very real thing to many non-Americans out there in the world, if for no other reason than simple jealousy. How come Americans seem to do everything so well and easily? Pretty largely because it has been demonstrated that ingenuity, the method of solving problems, is not thwarted or heavily censured in America, unlike most of the rest of the world, which lives through an established oligarchy. This oligarchy was largely dismantled and dissipated during the early years of this nation, and the legacy has largely endured, where some clever kid puttering around out in the garage could turn a germ of an idea into a multibillion-dollar empire, and countless others could extract a large fortune from their friends and neighbors by providing a service that needed doing, and would jump in and do it enthusiastically.
An existing oligarchy would not allow this, because somebody “might” threaten their established place. Well, guess what, the oligarchy is starting to form in this country as well, by the extension of various “social experiments” in schools and workplaces, that tend to deny credit for innovation, and sap initiative on a hundred different levels, from forbidding certain thoughts, to confiscating the fruits of labor and ingenuity.
It is our job to dismantle and sabotage this drive toward conformity, but sometimes it gets a little mixed up with a new demand for conformity to the old way of breaking up conformity. That is why the 1970’s are revisiting us today, as the erstwhile revolutionists of that time try to enforce their concept of correctness on the world of today.
But now THEY are the conformists, suppressing the least dissent. Take, as a prime example, the global warming dialogue. We actually do not know if global warming, or global cooling, is going on, because of some instances of cooked data being supplied. And we do not know if mankind is in any way responsible for global warming. And even if mankind IS responsible, there is no clear way to determine just what would be some sort of strategy to reverse it. There is no clear argument as to whether global warming (or global cooling for that matter), is beneficial or harmful to mankind and all other living things. The new oligarchy has a large and highly vocal faction that does not even WANT to discuss any deviation from their pronounced judgment in the matter.
And that is just one factor among so many that suppresses any dissent from the emerging oligarchy. This perhaps stems from the quirks of human nature, as mankind seems at times to have a herd mentality, even to the point of charging over a cliff, sometimes with a high degree of euphoria as they go into free fall. It isn’t the fall that kills you, it is the sudden stop at the bottom.
That’s the way I read the articles, too.
There's at least a vague agreement among progressive people that if you live in reasonable accommodation you are asking for trouble. To occupy a decent house, after all, is to provoke the less fortunate.
Uh Oh, this is not going to go over too well in The Guardian.
Some on this board will never be able to have a positive outlook on anything I guess.
They piss and moan about liberals constantly, yet when one makes what can almost be considered a miraculous change of mindset, they criticize that to death too, in the same manor that the liberal media criticizes our soldiers without ever recognizing the many good things they do.
I found those 8000 words to be enlightening and the fact that they were published in a liberal paper by a liberal means that more than a few liberals will read them, perhaps also seeing the light.
Particularly over that story in part III, about the gang of black girls that attack an Asian girl and permanently disfigure her with a broken bottle, while a bunch of people look on. Quite a story. He's a good writer and I'm glad he's speaking out. Reminds me of when John McWhorter wrote Losing the Race back in the mid 1990s.
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