Nick Cohen is a author, a columnist for The Observer, The New Statesman and has written for The Guardian. He explains how he came to realize he was looking at the world “through the wrong end of the telescope”;
Terror and Liberalism is an essay rather than a history and its arguments come from the almost forgotten tradition of the anti-totalitarian left. Its central point is that Islamism and Baathism are continuations of Nazism and communism, not only in their fine points – founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Baath Party were admirers of Hitler and Franco – but in their fundamentals. Once again we had the promise of earthly paradise, but now the paradise wouldn’t be the paradise of unexploited labour or the paradise of an Aryan Europe, but the paradise of the early days of the prophet or a reunified Arab nation, pure and free. Once again there were great leaders who were semi-divine as they led the faithful into cosmic struggles. And once again their programmes were insane.
[…]
To see the old process at work, one only has to look at how a large chunk of the world’s liberal opinion has got itself into the position where it can’t support Iraqi and Afghan liberals, socialists and feminists. You think the worst thing in the world is the developed countries because they brought the First World War, which to be fair is a charge worth making, or globalisation and McDonalds, which to be fair is a charge that is infantile. You are confronted with totalitarian movements, which are worse, and your first thought is to blame them on the West. Your second is to make excuses for them. Your third is to betray your comrades. Your fourth is to go up to the totalitarian movements and shake them by the hand.
Speaking of which: I recently listened to Paul Berman’s book called “Terror and Liberalism”. Well worth it. Too bad he voted for Kerry.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/wi04/berman.htm
He has a new book coming out called Power and the Idealists which sounds cool:
“In January 2001, a scandal erupted when a series of photos from 1968 emerged showing German foreign minister Joschka Fischer and a group of leftist street toughs assaulting a cop.
“Paul Berman, one of the leading essayists and intellectual historians of the New Left, uses this event as a springboard to reflect on a crucial question for Western democracies today: was the violence-tinged radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s a force for social good or for social ill?”
The left liberals:The same: yesterday, today, tomorrow.
http://www.fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Memory Lane
When Hitler’s troops reoccupied the Rhineland in violation of its treaty obligations to restore German dignity, stormtroopers parading before the Reichschancellery sang “for today we own Germany and tomorrow the entire world”. The echo of that refrain reverberates in the United Nations. The Jerusalem Post has this Associated Press story:
The United Nations is embroiled in a dispute with American Jewish organizations over the funding of Palestinian banners in Gaza, and US Ambassador John Bolton on Wednesday protested the “unacceptable” payments.
The dispute centers on the UN Development Program’s payment for materials produced by the Palestinian Authority for Israel’s disengagement from Gaza which include banners saying: “Gaza Today. The West Bank and Jerusalem Tomorrow.”
The irony is exact. The French Left remained passive in what Churchill called the last moment in which Second World War could have been prevented. Instead it allowed that Hitler had a legitimate grievance and met him with renunciations of militarism and expressions of understanding. For what, they asked, could be more German than the Rhineland? One could have rhetorically asked whether a Nazi Rhineland was the same thing. But then:
Plus �a change, plus c�est la m�me chose.
Baathism = Intolerant Stalinism
Islamic fundamentalism = fanatic cultural despotism
Western liberalism = a mental disorder
“Nature abhors a moron.” HL Mencken
LOL WLM!
exactly mazz. Berman’s book goes into the twists and turns of the French pre-war Left. It makes your hair curl.
Quoting Mencken (who was a classic western liberal) as an argument against liberty is a mental disorder.
“The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.” -H.L.Mencken
The problem isn’t liberals, it’s Liberals and other assorted communists.
maz2: Excerpts from the article further to your comment:
”A chapter – ‘Wishful Thinking’ – explains why so many are reluctant to see clearly and in their blindness end up on the far right. It deals with the Chomskys and the creeps who were to dominate the anti-war movement; but to my mind the best part of the chapter and the book is when he uses the history of the French Socialist Party in the 1930s as a parable for our time.
Leon Blum, the leader of that party, knew that the Nazis had to be fought. But a large faction, supported by the teachers’ unions and many left-wing intellectuals, was horrified by the prospect of a conflict which could exceed even the carnage of the First World War.
If they had looked the Nazis in the face, they would have realized that war was inevitable. Rather than see clearly they allowed the best of motives to convince them that the German people hadn’t fallen for an insane cult. Why would they? Wasn’t it almost racist to believe that they were anything other than as rational and decent as the French?
Take Hitler’s demands to expand the German Reich. In a certain light these could be seen as a menacing expansion of the Nazi state, but (the anti-war socialists asked themselves) was it not the case that the Treaty of Versailles had imposed punitive conditions on Germany at the end of the First World War? Was it not reasonable for Hitler to ask that Germans should be freed from control by the Poles and the Czechs and returned to their mother country? Hitler may have been from the extreme right and they may have been from the democratic left, but an argument wasn’t necessarily wrong just because Hitler made it.
Many socialists were therefore enthusiastic supporters of the Munich agreement which dismembered Czechoslovakia and brought the German-speaking Sudetenland back under Nazi control.
They believed, says Berman, in the ‘simple-minded optimism’ of nineteenth century liberalism – a liberalism of denial. Human beings were essentially rational. Politicians and polemicists who pretended otherwise were the tools of the arms corporations that were leading France into an unnecessary pre-emptive war…
Then there were the Nazis’ Jewish victims. As good men and women of the Enlightenment, the anti-war socialists couldn’t tolerate anti-Semitism. Yet they were determined not to let their sympathies get out of hand. Weren’t the Jews always showing their wounds and trying to make others feel guilty for their past suffering? Hitler might be going a bit far, but wasn’t it true that a disproportionate number of industrialists and financiers were Jewish? And wasn’t it also the case that their leader, Leon Blum, who was urging France to enter a bloody and worthless confrontation with Germany was, well, Jewish, too?
It was a short step from this line of reasoning to asserting that war was being forced on them by Hitler’s victims rather than Hitler.
In 1940, Hitler gave irrefutable proof of his intentions when he invaded and occupied France…’
Mark
Ottawa
Yes, too bad some here don’t understand the difference between liberal and Liberal.
It is in fact Western liberalism that is hated and attacked by the islamists.
Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
by Murray N. Rothbard
The famous betrayal, during World War I, of the old ideals of revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’ Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on, socialists and quasi-socialists joined Conservatives in a basic amalgam, accepting the State and the Mixed Economy (=neo-Mercantilism=the Welfare State-Interventionism=State Monopoly Capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality). It was in reaction to this collapse that Lenin broke out of the Second International, to re-establish classic revolutionary Marxism in a revival of Left Socialism.
http://www.mises.org/story/910
maz2: Fat lot of good Lenin did humanity.
Mark
Ottawa
When a country gets most cylinders working and begins to cook, they can be tempted to start grabbing more than they need.
Our unmotitivated spirit will come alive when Americans, US and Canadian both become aware of how China is moving quietly but ruthlessly to control key economic / industrial levers of power.
China knows we are fully distracted with the Jihadist threat and the corruption and fraud of our Liberal government.
Could they wish for any more opportune time to effect industrial mergers and gain results of millions worth of R&D at no cost? Knowledge is power and they are getting it big time.
Google searches of China+merger, China+Canada or other China+* combinations you can think of will yield surprising results.
These are times when the US and Canada should be focused and alert.
The people of China are generally very good folks but the over ambitious leadership is making me very nervous. 73s TonyGuitar [BendGovt.blog.ca]