One Hand Clapping

The pro-fascist Left
Paul Berman, an old-style leftist, recounts a conversation with another Leftist who insisted that the Iraq war was not an anti-fascist war as Berman said it was (via Dean Esmay).

Berman makes six main points in rebuttal, so elegantly and eloquently put that you really should just click here and read the piece without bothering with my summary. But in case you're pressed for time today, here they are:

The visceral hatred of the Left for G. W. Bush without regard to what Bush is actually doing as opposed to what the Left has decided he stands for.

"... a lot of otherwise intelligent people have decided, a priori, that all the big problems around the world stem from America. Even the problems that don't."

"... any sort of anticolonial movement must be admirable or, at least, acceptable."

The Left has "... concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won't be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs."

The Left thinks that Israel represents "... a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else."

"... They cannot get themselves to recognize the degree to which Nazi-like doctrines about the supernatural quality of Jewish evil have influenced mass political movements across large swaths of the world. It is 1943 right now in huge portions of the world-and people don't see it."

As for subsuming American foreign policy and military might under the authority of the UN or other "international structures" to confer "legitimacy:" "... Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice-but one does have to choose, unfortunately."

There's more. This essay is going into my permanent index of writings by other authors, joining essays of similar themes: "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee," by self-described "anti-materialist liberal Democrat" Ron Rosenbaum; The Ideological War Within the West, by John Fonte and "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing" by Lee Harris.

by Donald Sensing, 2/16/2004 01:53:18 PM. Permalink |

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