On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 15:00:40 +0000 "Carl Remick" <carlremick at hotmail.com>
writes:
> [A couple of items here about Peter Beinart, champion of a resurgent
> liberalism that recognizes the evil of the new totalitarianism
> emanating
> from radical Islam, which requires liberals to take all actions
> necessary to
> combat this evil "even when their moral purity is compromised in the
>
> effort." Beinart is an excellent example of what irredeemable
> assholes
> liberals are, and he is a timely reminder that liberalism remains
> perhaps
> the greatest lasting threat to peace and democratic values the world
> has
> known.]
That was one of the great discoveries of the 1960s New Left. For all their faults, one positive achievement of the New Left was their realization that it was the liberals who were the main enemy, and that liberals were more dangerous than the rightwingers because of their capacity for cloaking military aggression abroad and repression at home under a veneer of progressive sounding rhetoric. It was liberal presidents, JFK and LBJ who escalated the Vietnam War, in case anyone here needs to be reminded. A couple decades earlier, it was the Truman Administration that initiated the cold war and that Administration also initiated domestic repression against the left. While, returning to the much more recent past, it was the liberals who pushed for the 1999 war against Yugoslavia, so helping to create the precedent for Dubya's war in Iraq.
And we should not neglect the role that the liberal intellectuals played in this. The pieces by Beinart and Radosh hark back to the post-WW II writings of Rienhold Niebhur and Arthur Schlessinger, Jr., which I guess goes to show that the Bearded One was right when he said that history repeats itself, the first time being a tragedy and the second time, a farce. Beinart and Radosh's handwringing about "original sin" and how great America is because "we" believe in its reality, is even more pathetic this time around than it was sixty years ago.
>
> May 31, 2006
>
> How the Left Lost America
>
> BY RONALD RADOSH
>
> The thrust of Peter Beinart's powerful and well-argued message in
> "The Good
> Fight" (HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25.95) is straightforward: The
> liberal
> left in America has abandoned its own best heritage for what Arthur
> Schlesinger Jr. once called "doughface liberalism." These liberals
> oppose
> terror and totalitarianism but recoil against taking any necessary
> steps to
> defeat it, fearful that their moral purity might be stained in the
> process.
>
> Mr. Beinart first took up his case in a lengthy article in the New
> Republic,
> where he was editor from November 1999 until March 2006. He has now
> sought
> to explore how and why a once vital and dynamic American liberalism
> -
> devoted to asserting American power on behalf of democracy abroad as
> well as
> at home - went soft and, in Mr. Beinart's words,"preferred inaction
> to the
> tragic reality that America must shed its moral innocence to act
> meaningfully in the world." He asks nothing less than that liberals
> (and
> Democrats) hark back to the much besmirched Cold War liberalism of
> President
> Truman, George Kennan, Hubert Humphrey, and others - and move away
> from the
> anti-interventionism of Michael Moore, George McGovern, and Howard
> Dean. The
> philosophical hero of "The Good Fight" is Reinhold Niebuhr, a man
> who gave
> up on pacifism. Niebuhr posited that Americans have to recognize
> their own
> capacity for inflicting evil by building restraints on un mitigated
> power,
> but not hesitate to act to prevent greater evils.
>
> Niebuhr wrote about the crisis of the 1940s and 1950s, and Mr.
> Beinart
> asserts that Niebuhr's careful balancing act still holds. Many
> liberals
> today focus all their anger on the Bush administration and the
> right,
> seemingly unaware that the major threat to liberal values is from
> the new
> totalitarianism emanating from radical Islam - which requires
> liberals also
> to "support military as well as economic and political efforts to
> fight it,"
> Mr. Beinart writes, even when their moral purity is compromised in
> the
> effort. ...
>
> <http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=33568&access=419126>
>
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------
>
> June 5, 2006
>
> Our Terrorism, and Theirs:
> Liberal apologetics for American atrocities
>
> by Justin Raimondo
>
> We expected Bill Kristol and the usual neocon suspects to dismiss
> the
> atrocities committed by U.S. troops at Haditha as nothing to get too
> excited
> about. After all, these guys don't believe in any morality but that
> which
> comes out of the barrel of a gun. So what else is new? Yet there
> are,
> perhaps, a few among us – not me, however – who somehow expected a
> little
> less knee-jerk defensiveness from the likes of liberal Peter
> Beinart, editor
> of The New Republic. Alas, no:
>
> "This horrible story from Haditha powerfully underscores the liberal
> vision,
> which is this. We are not angels: without sufficient moral and legal
>
> restrictions, and under conditions of extreme stress, Americans can
> be as
> barbaric as anyone. What's makes us an exceptional nation with the
> capacity
> to lead and inspire the world is our very recognition of that fact.
> We are
> capable of Hadithas and My Lais, so is everyone. But few societies
> are
> capable of acknowledging what happened, bringing the killers to
> justice, and
> instituting changes that make it less likely to happen again. That's
> how we
> show we are different from the jihadists. We don't just assert it.
> We prove
> it. That's the liberal version of American exceptionalism, and it's
> what we
> need right now in response to this horror."
>
> To begin with, all meaningful moral and legal restrictions on
> American
> behavior were swept aside with the illegal and immoral invasion and
> occupation of a country that had never attacked the United States,
> and
> represented no threat to us. Having embarked on a war of aggression,
> it
> wasn't too long before we began to slide down the slippery slope all
> the way
> to the bottom, wherein dwelled the subterranean horrors of Abu
> Ghraib.
>
> Now more monsters from the American id are uncoiling, and we stand,
> aghast,
> in horror. All except Beinart, who sees this as the perfect occasion
> for a
> little self-congratulation. Certainly his sense of timing is off. He
> comes
> off as almost a caricature of the archetypal Ugly American, a poster
> boy for
> the unselfconscious display of American arrogance. ...
>
> <http://antiwar.com/justin/>
>
> Carl
>
>
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