[lbo-talk] Re:nyr "just" warriors

Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 29 07:24:19 PDT 2005


http://frum.nationalreview.com/
>...It's not just Dick Durbin. Here is another distinguished liberal,
Professor Tony Judt of New York University, who also has difficulty telling the difference between the United States on the one hand and Nazi Germany - or is it the Soviet Union? - on the other:

"For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national 'values'; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not 'democracy.'"

The supreme irony here is that this same Professor Judt once wrote a very fine book about the moral imbecility of French intellectuals - in particular their ability to delude themselves that American democracy was the moral equivalent of Soviet totalitarianism. Now the professor has succumbed to the very same disease he diagnosed a decade ago. 11:28 PM



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