The security forces of Bashar Assad — a thug whom Hillary Clinton deemed a “reformer,” and with whom Barack Obama was determined to restore diplomatic relations — are slaughtering hundreds in the streets of Syria’s major cities. I know that the Turkish government will express no outrage. It will not help to sponsor a flotilla of private ships to sail into the port of Latakia to protest the government-sponsored barbarity. European “human rights” activists will not fly into any Arab city to board a freighter, Gaza-style, that would bring humanitarian assistance by sea to those being blown apart by the Assad regime. I know that.
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Recently, Palestinian teenagers, in service to a Palestinian terrorist organization, massacred — in the literal sense of the word — the Fogel family of Israel, a savagery replete with the throat-slitting of toddlers and infants. The Palestinian police authority — U.S. trained and equipped — just shot down Jewish worshippers at Jacob’s Tomb. This comes amid the Palestinian Authority’s commemoration of the 2002 Passover Massacre of 30 Israeli civilians, apparently a national moment of honorific reflection on the West Bank. Yet I know that no one in Europe and few in America will protest to the Palestinian Authority, which the West subsidizes, that it seems to commemorate butchery in its midst.
This week President Obama ordered Predator drone attacks against Libya, as NATO and American forces began re-targeting the Qaddafi clan personally. I know that there will be no outcry that the U.S. is a party to targeted assassinations of a foreign leader and his family, an act once deemed illegal for an American administration. I also note that the use of Predator assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan has increased fourfold since January 2009, and that we have blown up five times more suspects in the last 27 months than we did in the prior 96 months. I know that the U.N. and the Arab League are both praised by the Obama administration for authorizing us to impose a no-fly zone over Libya and ignored by the administration when we must go far beyond a no-fly zone to end the Qaddafi regime, which we seek to destroy even as we declare that is not our aim. And I know there will be no outcry from the American Left over a third Middle East war against an Arab Muslim oil-exporting nation (even though this one posed no threat to the security of the United States), over the complete bypassing of the U.S. Congress in launching that war, or over the efforts to blow up a foreign leader and all in his vicinity. I know that.
The past week a sensationalized video of a transgendered female in extremis went viral on the blogosphere. Two young African-American women beat her senseless at a McDonald’s restaurant. The African-American staff is shown in the clip as mostly passive bystanders to the brutality. Yet I know this nationally viewed abhorrence is not a teachable moment about much of anything. Unlike the Professor Gates mix-up, this public spectacle will not be used by the president to warn us about the wages of incivility or the need for a new racial tolerance and understanding. Nor will there be, among the homosexual community, much of a national Matthew Shepard moment seeking to present the public beating as a symbol of a wider hatred of the sexually ambiguous among us. There is about as much chance of a Hollywood movie about the incident as there is of a sequel to Rendition. At best, we are to accept such violence as inevitable, as the powerless sometimes thrash out against the more privileged classes and races; at worst, these are the tragic wages of prior oppression that must be contextualized and constructed in the proper narrative of the centuries.
So what are we to make of the past week’s news?
We are living in another Soviet, a 21st-century sort in which we nod to official pieties and mouth politically correct banalities while in our private lives, for our safety, well-being — and sanity — we conduct ourselves according to altogether different premises. In the Soviet Union, the anonymous masses turned out to hear boilerplate praise for socialist comradeship, while those of them who were lucky enough to have a car took off the windshield wipers when they parked it — accepting both that their utopian state could not supply affordable replacement auto parts and that their comrades would steal almost anything they could from other suffering subjects.
#pageIn our version of the Soviet, we know that Israel is supposed to be culpable and that we are asked to praise the “aspirations” of the Palestinians, but if we were to go to the Middle East we most certainly would not stay in Gaza or the West Bank or visit unescorted a Christian shrine. We would wish to dine with people like the Fogels, but not their killers or the people who ordered them to kill. We are also to understand that the Arab and Turkish worlds abhor Israeli violence, and so we nod our assent; but privately we know that the issue is really Jews, not savagery per se, and that an Arab dictator can murder 1.000 Arabs with less worry about Western condemnation than an Israeli soldier can shoot one Arab on the West Bank in self-defense. Publicly we accept that tiny Israel, a country of 7 million, is an overdog, the foreign-policy equivalent of the demonized “them” here in America, the people who make over $200,000 a year — too successful, too Western, too unquestioning of their culture. Privately, we sort of admire Israel’s courage and understand that anti-Semitism, oil, fear of terrorism, and demographic calculus construct Arabs as sympathetic victims and Israelis as neo-colonialists.
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We say that we are worried about the legality and morality of Predator strikes, Middle East wars, preventive detention, tribunals, Guantanamo, renditions, and the like. But we really aren’t. Privately we accept that these are merely tags that we pin on an evil Texas-drawling George Bush, the scapegoat on whom we placed all our collective angst and cheap moralizing. We accept either that these measures keep us safe and so should continue, or that to maintain consistent criticism against them would endanger the agenda and career of Barack Obama, the manifestation of all our postmodern pretensions.
In our daily lives we avoid places like a McDonald’s restaurant in a so-so neighborhood, as we avoid direct association in the nocturnal hours with certain members of the supposed underclass, who appear not merely capable of violence but capable of violence without any remorse. Yes, we avoid all that privately as much as publicly we deny that we do. We accept that a Professor Gates breaking into his own home and being mistakenly arrested as a burglar is as timely a reflection of the pathology of a racist America as a transgendered woman being beaten to a pulp is symbolic of not much of anything other than being in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Whatever — stuff happens.
In the American Soviet, we publicly praise Obamacare as we seek desperately and privately to obtain an exemption from it. Our politicians talk loftily of the need to pay our fair share of taxes, as the secretary of the Treasury, the secretary of labor, the attorney general, and the then head of the House Ways and Means Committee seek to delay or avoid entirely paying their family’s tax obligations. In terms of modern sin — from plagiarism to sexual harassment — we accept publicly that they are the most serious of transgressions, while privately we know that they are only sort of the most serious, since the particular circumstances, the profile of the offender, the real intent of the transgressor — all that and more can reconstruct a felony into a minor lapse, a premeditation into an accident, a crime into a tragedy with all of us as victims.
In the American Soviet, only two questions remain. Do these double lives of ours make a sort of sense: Is it that the official utopian rhetoric about love among the masses offers psychological compensation for our private self-interested skepticism about the nature of man? Or is the daily lie a modern Western rather than an enduring human phenomenon — our 21st-century leisure and affluence infecting us with intellectual and moral boredom, in which we long ago outsourced our collective morality to our bureaucratic overseers as we busied ourselves with far more enjoyable private indulgences?
Hansons articles sometimes have a habbit of striking me right in the gut and leave me panting for air for a few minutes afterwards, thinking were we went wrong.
The "American Soviet" concept has legs. For examples, Thomas Sowell's article today on racial misconception of economics and Jonah Goldberg's article on global warming discussing the divide between Obama's energy policy and economic reality highlighted by the decline of global warming rationale.
I wonder (rhetorically) if there is any connection with the teachings of the political science professors feverishly proseltyzing "Amercian socialism" during the not-so-great student uprising after Kent State in 1970. After all, they have done nothing but gain influence since then and are Obama's friends and mentors. There was a great deal of hypocrisy between the acceptance of violence in protesting "violence." And they deceived even themselves in calling for their own elitist control with high sounding concern for the common man.
Any reference to Russian shortcomings was expained to us students as misapplied socialism with assurances that American socialism would get the thing right. I doubted that then and I know it's wrong now.
One problem is that they are self-deceived and that makes them impervious to reason. Another problem is that "nannyism" is quite popular and yields the same American Soviet results. Remove primacy of the individual and you make government "... by the people and for the people" one of those American Soviet lies.
In a sense, we didn't win the Cold War fully like we won World War II. Of course Eastern Europe gained its freedom for the most part, and the Soviet Union imploded. But Marxism should have been discredited to the degree that Nazism was. Apologists for Marxism today should receive the same severe stigma that Holocaust deniers receive, yet many of them still tend to be lionized and celebrated amongst our Ruling Classes--especially in academia. Look at how successful Howard Zinn was, and look at the influence his horribly fallacious books have had. The Left has been successful in winning much of the culture, just as Gramsci intended. And their opponents tend to cower in fear from a mainstream media that still succeeds in setting the agenda and promoting Political Correctness. In discrediting Marxism we shouldn't stoop to creating another PC atmosphere, but we should never be ashamed of pointing out the crimes committed by left-wing totalitarianism.
On a tangent, if you have never seen it, find the Russian documentary "Russia's War," about the sufferings of the Soviet Union during the Stalin years. We often see images of the Nazi Holocaust, and are rightfully reminded of its horrors, yet we rarely see images of the logical conclusions of Marxism. "Russia's War" provides many such striking images. As the historian Richard Pipes pointed out, Stalin was not an aberration--he took Communism to its logical conclusion, and we in the West will go down the same road eventually if we don't make a major course correction.
Most ironic of all is the large base of the democratic party which would secretly agree with everything Mr Hansen has written, point by point, yet disagree with his thesis as a whole, learn nothing from the conversation, nor even understand their role in the grand scheme of it all. They simply drone on, deny and project.
The level of dishonesty and hypocrisy displayed by the current administration and its enablers (i.e. the media, elitists, the left, the Democratic Party, etc.) is extraordinary. How ironic that I was bemoaning the same sorts of things just this morning while listening to a national news “report” on the Lybian and Afghanistan wars. Where was the outrage? Where were the protesters? Where are the incessant body counts? Is this the inevitable result of a crumbling educational system and decades and decades of moral relativism being crammed into the brains of millions of kids?
The state requires all of us to be sacrificial offerings on the altar of progressivism. Some will go willingly. Others will need to be forcefully reminded and controlled by political correctness until such time as the state deems their sacrifice to be at hand, to be carried out either by authentic youths, or by an IPAB death panel.
This is why I say politics and science and all other ways of looking at the universe and humanity's place therein are religions. With a religion, you can recite the official line even if you don't understand it; you can try to believe it through faith even if it seems inconsistent or unrelated to reality; you can excuse excesses committed in its name because it serves the greater good of reducing public dissent. You can fool yourself, and you want to, because that's a path to survival.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to live, even under a brutal dictatorship, rather than rise up and try to overthrow it. Our current dictatorship is of public opinion, in which we behave like the anecdotal monkeys who would allow none of the group to climb up and get the bananas, even though none of them had ever been sprayed with water. We enforce standards of behavior we don't really understand the justification for and often don't agree with, in an attempt to achieve harmony.
And where else can we go? Pioneers could move beyond the influence of government but that path is closed to us.
The one thing I wish writers for NRO (and other sources) would do is not stop at pointing out the problem, but also suggest what we can do *now*. I know we can try to vote out the people in charge next election. But what can we do now?
I echo rimfrel. The dichotomy between our publical statements and our private beliefs and actions is a clear sign that we live in an upside down world. How can we act to right it? (Heh heh...no pun intended!)
If enough people risk public condemnation to 'tell it like it is', can we bring a little commonsense into the forum of public life? National Review is one such platform - what about the rest of us?
The answer to how this strange 'doublespeak' came about, is PC, political correctness. I know it's not a new term but it very accurately describes a set of rules that governs us all: it decides what we can and can't discuss publicly, what stance we have to take on every issue. It's ultimately a political rulebook, no matter if the issue is scientific or religious or cultural. The 'Correctness' name further betrays what it really aims to do: it decides by fiat what is right. It doesn't reason, or offer alternatives, or seek to foster new innovations. It seeks to divide all people into two camps: The Correct, and everyone else on the outside; fear of being outcast will keep us all in the camp.
Thank God that, as effective as the PC campaign has been, that people the West, even liberals, still largely hold reasonable self-preserving positions in private actions.
Political Correctness is a product --an extraordinarily successful product -- of international communists. It is no mere coincidence that its debilitating effects on the U.S. still aligns perfectly with the Soviet Union’s past goals. The dreams of communists did not die with the Soviet Union. Military victory as an option was permanently off the table in 1991, but the enemy could still be destroyed, or critically weakened, from within by the drip, drip, drip poison of Political Correctness.
How successful is Political Correctness? Ask a random person on the street their opinion of Joseph McCarthy. Then ask their opinion of Joseph Stalin. Which name is more likely to engender immediate indignation and scorn? These results have been carefully crafted by communists and their witless assistants for decades.
All of the examples of the “American Soviet” listed by VDH were also projects of the Russian/International Soviet, and are current projects of the Left. The Soviets simply leveraged the Islamic wish to expel an infidel from its lands to further their goal of destroying a key U.S. ally.
The moral decline of black America? A longtime goal of the Left. As Lenin said, “The worse, the better.” Contented people tend not to revolt and since that is the ultimate goal of communists, they engineer resentment, dependency, confusion, and anger at every possible opportunity. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to work.
Demonizing those making more than a certain amount of money? Does that really require elaboration? If so, do a web search for “Kulaks.”
I get frustrated with my fellow conservative for not grasping that the battle against communism (by whatever name) is still our primary burden. We have much work to do. All of the other perceived battles are simply a sideshow to the fundamental task of forever delegitimizing communism as a solution to the human condition.
No topic discussed by anyone on NRO (whether immigration, voter registration, education, English as an official language, reparations, the War on Terror, etc.) can be fully understood without examining it from the perspective of communist goals. Specifically the goal of weakening, degrading, and undermining the success of U.S. in every possible way.
One excellent example of how the Soviets operated is this interview with a KGB “journalist” which I consider required viewing for NR fans: External Link
Question: what can we do now?
Answer: the triumvirate of civil disobedience, nullification, and secession. But it must be organized with others, because being a single sacrificial victim avails nobody.
The key will be to work systematically to change the current power centers of the left. Education, the media, the entertainment complex. It will be a long term process, but only that will have any real staying power. Talk of seccesion will be dismissed as crazy and radical.
--fight for K-12 school choice and charter schools.
--defund higher education subsidies. Let leftwing "humanities" and social "studies" depts wither. Private companies can provide scholarships for hard sciences and engineering students.
--when it comes to media and entertainment, conservatives have to vote with their wallets and their feet. More conservatives need to become journalists, actors, writers, musicians and creative artists. Conservative groups and individuals should help support creation of an alternate hollywood, with investments, backing, scholarships, and viewership. We're in a culture war, not just a culture battle. Anything but a long term strategy ain't gonna get it.
You are so right. Sadly, communism was the beneficiary of history, and Nazism. Hitler's atrocities diverted public attention away from Stalins. Furthermore, the US government was riddled with Nazi German spies.
Sad but true. Comminism is tres chic in American intellectual circles.
The blatant hypocrisy comes to an end when the money runs out; then everybody starts thinking and acting rationally again because that is about all we can afford. This round of particularly egregious hypocrisy emanating from the progressives is coming to an end very soon indeed. Anybody who does not think we are headed back into recession as soon as Bernanke stops printing new currency (not money) is just fooling themselves.
Thanks Tristan the great. Our "Ruling Classes" have been filled with Fellow Travellers and Useful Idiots for many decades now. We saw it with the Communist sympathizers in FDR's administration, and we see it now with the Left/Islam marriage of convenience. This is not a very good advertisement for Ivy League educations.
The phrase 'Political Correctness' has been used in some of the posts and it is apt.
This is the 2007 winning entry from an annual contest at Texas A&M University calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term. The term was Political Correctness:
"Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstreammedia, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end."
