Striving Against Opposition

If your not reading Victor Davis Hanson you should be.

Victor Davis Hanson is probably the most compelling voice on the right in the media. Mark Steyn is the only other journalist whose prose tends to reach the same level of eloquence when expounding upon issues both foreign and domestic. Happily enough they both cover a wide range of subjects. One of Hanson's latest pieces comes on the heels of the ruminating among Democrats in the United States concerning their loss in the recent election. Although Hanson is an American and his piece concerns American politics, the leftist ideology that he takes umbrage with is fairly "international" in its flavour. Hence it seems well worth visiting here.

Cracked Icons: Why the Left has lost credibility

" the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking — such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions “political correctness” or “progressivism,” the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence. "

If the expediency tenant of leftwing ideology isn't firmly rooted in Canada I don't know what is. A certain domestic situation regarding a minor little historical anomally like marriage comes to mind. Where its obviously too important to strike a "progressive" position, and to push the issue through the courts rather than dealing with something so tedious and ethical like "democracy".


"If in the 1950s rightists were criticized as cynical Cold Warriors who never met a right-wing thug they wouldn’t support, as long as he mouthed a few anti-Soviet platitudes, then in the last two decades almost any thug from Latin America to the Middle East who professed concern for “the people” — from Castro and the Noriega Brothers to Yasser Arafat and the Iranian mullahs — was likely to earn a pass from the American and European cultural elite and media. To regain credibility, the Left must start to apply the same standard of moral outrage to a number of its favorite causes that it does to the United States government, the corporations, and the Christian Right."

Ah yes, the left and its love of thugs whom are willing to strike up the chant of "solidarity forever", of course while living a live of luxury. After all aren't these men of the people entitled to a palace or 50? The willingness of the left to advocate on behalf of some truely dispicable people is almost mind boggling. Orwell clearly saw it when he wrote "Animal Farm". Now its strange to consider that Orwell was a socialist given that for the most part he's fetted by the right and libertarians especially. However, he was something of a voice in the wilderness among socialists as apparantly he thought governments which were suposed to be "for the people" really should be. One of my political theory professors considered himself an Orwellian Socialist, and he was rather fond of stating that "Far too much of the left is always looking for a dictator to defend." Yes, those lovely people like Arafat, Saddam, and Castro. Let's forget that they murdered scores of people, kept their citizens in abject poverty and were thoroughly disinterested in "peace" - they were 'revolutionaries' and "leftists". The same professor noted that "the same people defending Saddam today, would have been defending Stalin 40 years ago."

"So both here and abroad, the Western public believes that there is a double standard in the moral judgment of our left-leaning media, universities, and politicians — that we are not to supposed to ask how Christians are treated in Muslim societies, only how free Islamists in Western mosques are to damn their hosts; or that we are to think beheading, suicide murdering, and car bombing moral equivalents to the sexual humiliation and roguery of Abu Ghraib — apparently because the former involves post-colonial victims and the latter privileged, exploitive Americans. Most sane people, however, privately disagree, and distinguish between a civilian’s head rolling on the ground and a snap shot of an American guard pointing at the genitalia of her terrorist ward."

I truly find it disturbing how a number of people are willing to make the argument that because the US military isn't absolutely perfect that that somehow puts them on the same level as the terrorists. The lack of differentiation between an obvious abberation and standard practice is terribly dishonest and I think it betrays some sense of self-loathing towards the patrimony of Western Civilization and its succes. The fact that most news outlets are not willing to stand up and call a terrorist a terrorist but hide behind the PC labels of "guerrilla", "insurgent" or "militant" is the worse sort of moral cowardice. I share the concern of many conservatives about the drift of the papers now operated by CanWest but they move up one notch in my estimation by being willing to call a terrorist a terrorist.

Although in the words of Huggy Bear "You've moved up one notch in my mind, that puts you at one."

"Moreover, few of any note in the Arab Middle East speak out against the racial hatred of Jews. Almost no major Islamic religious figure castigates extreme Muslim clerics for their Dark-age misogyny, anti-Semitism, and venom against the West; and no Arab government admonishes its citizenry to look to itself for solutions rather than falling prey to conspiracy theories and ago-old superstitions. It would be as if the a state-subsidized Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi party were to be tolerated for purportedly voicing the frustrations of poor working-class whites who “suffered” under a number of supposed grievances."

To some statements you really can't do more than really state "I whole heartedly agree." But I'll add "Preach it Victor" to that. Quite frankly the intense hatred in the Middle East towards the Jews which is disguised as "anti-zionism" is horribly unseemly and evidently the world's left have reverted to their old form and decided "the Jews" were just a little too "burgeois" to qualify for victem status any longer. Hence the poor opressed Palestinians who strap bombs to their chest and target women and children, and any unarmed civilian they can find failing that are the "real victems". I really can't help but snicker at the comparison to the KKK, given that the only group of people that are automatically disqualified for victemhood are white males, unless they're gay.

VDH goes on the skewer the "blood for oil" crowd in a rather thorough manner and return to the previously discussed point of the left's seeming fondness for dictators. Its really worth reading the whole thing. I however, have to get back to studying.

posted by Chris @ 12/18/2004 07:18:00 p.m.