GHQ: Ideas

A fortnight ago I remarked on the sexual and ethnic prejudices of The New York Times Book Review. Those, it remains to be said, are of a piece with its political prejudices, which are liberal, in the sense that they reflect a Weltanschauung stitched together from Times editorials.

A lead review of a book about Nazism betrays something more than preoccupation with Jewish troubles. Liberals are still fighting World War II in the same way that the South, until recently, was still fighting the Civil War. The war against Hitler is more than a fact, it is a myth; the holy war of liberalism, defining all other conflicts as their archetype. That is why, for instance, liberals find it natural to compare their villains, like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, to Adolf Hitler; and why Hollywood, which is less ideological than merely obsequious to the regnant platitudes, still grinds out movies about surviving Nazis who lurk around waiting for the chance to do something nasty. The liberal cosmology is not among the grander conceptions of the human mind.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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William F. Buckley Jr.

A fortnight ago I remarked on the sexual and ethnic prejudices of The New York Times Book Review. Those, it remains to be said, are of a piece with its political prejudices, which are liberal, in the sense that they reflect a Weltanschauung stitched together from Times editorials.

A lead review of a book about Nazism betrays something more than preoccupation with Jewish troubles. Liberals are still fighting World War II in the same way that the South, until recently, was still fighting the Civil War. The war against Hitler is more than a fact, it is a myth; the holy war of liberalism, defining all other conflicts as their archetype. That is why, for instance, liberals find it natural to compare their villains, like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, to Adolf Hitler; and why Hollywood, which is less ideological than merely obsequious to the regnant platitudes, still grinds out movies about surviving Nazis who lurk around waiting for the chance to do something nasty. The liberal cosmology is not among the grander conceptions of the human mind.