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February 10, 2012
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Mark Clayton: How did Anonymous hackers eavesdrop on FBI and Scotland Yard?
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Edmund Sanders : Israeli official says Iran is creating missile that could reach East Coast of US
Victoria Kim: Immigrant-smuggling ring used black drivers to avoid racial profiling
February 2, 2012
Jim Carney: Wrong number call may have saved her life
Reza Kahlili : Ex-CIA spy in Iran's Revolutionary Guard: What Obama doesn't grasp about striking deals with Tehran
Tina Susman: For woodchuck rescuer, every day is Groundhog Day
February 1, 2012
Brian Bennett: US officials see increasing threat of domestic attack from Iran
Emily Brandon: How to Take Advantage of New 401(k) Fee Disclosures
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January 30, 2012
Paul Richter and Ramin Mostaghim: Misreading Teheran's limits -- deadly and economically devastating as they may be -- is a risk administration, Europe seem willing to take
Suzanne Bohan: Warning: Nap-deprived tots missing more than sleep, study finds
Meg Handley: Banks Revamping Rewards Programs to Woo Customers
January 27, 2012
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Yochonon Donn: In liberal New York City, fervently-Orthodox Jews may soon be getting a district to call their own
Jeannine Stein: An inflated ego and thinking you're 'all that' doesn't just make others sick of you, it can make you ill
Katy Hopkins: New budget rules may affect how much money you get for college
January 26, 2012
Ed Koch: To the New York Times, calling for the murder of Jews by those capable of having their incitement taken seriously isn't news
Jeannine Stein: Mental illness struck one in five U.S. adults in 2010: Report
January 25, 2012
Richard Simon: House passes two bills endorsing the use of religious symbols at military memorials
Fred Weir: Putin: Multiethnic Russia cannot survive as a US-style 'melting pot'; must find its own way
Susan Johnston: 5 Sneaky Coupon Strategies Consumers Should Watch Out For
January 24, 2012
Carol Clark: The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'
Caroline B. Glick: America lost most in 'Arab Spring'. Sadly, many voters still don't grasp the extent
Warren Richey: Drug criminal scores win in GPS ruling from conservative-leaning high court
Erika Bolstad: Black conservatives gather to talk about gaining strength
January 23, 2012
Melissa Dribben: Jewish voters to play a key role in Florida's Republican primary
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Ali Safi: U.S. envoy gives Taliban terms for peace talks
January 19, 2012
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January 17, 2012
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: No-kidding red lines: U.S. response to an Iranian nuke may be bluster, but Israel's won't be
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January 13, 2012
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January 12, 2012
Warren Richey: Landmark Supreme Court ruling a 'resounding win' for religious groups
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January 11, 2012
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David G. Savage: High court signals it won't be loosening TV's 'indecency' rules
Stephen Ceasar: Oklahoma's Islamic law amendment can't go into effect, court rules
January 10, 2012
Reza Kahlili: From an ex-CIA spy: US must exploit new split in Iran's Revolutionary Guard
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January 9, 2012
Michael Doyle: Put through legal hell over dream home, couple fought back hard --- all the way to Supreme Court
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Jewish World Review
March 17, 2005
/ 6 Adar II, 5765
America's new discontents
By
Victor Davis Hanson
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Sometime in the 1960s there arose a new home-grown distrust of the United States, followed by an erosion of faith in the values of the West. Perhaps the culprit was the fiasco in Vietnam or the rise of a trendy multiculturalism that followed from it.
Our schools often insisted that all cultures were to be roughly the same. History devolved more into melodrama than tragedy. America was no longer exceptional — and thus in no position to criticize a Cuba as undemocratic or condemn the Iranian mullahs as murderously theocratic.
The enormous wealth and leisure that followed from global capitalism and democracy insulated us — creating an unreality about the sources for our privilege and naiveté about why life was so bad outside our shores.
Consequently, some utopian elites forgot the free-market origins of their own riches and why they had the freedom and leisure to be so censorious of their own culture. Maybe they were guilty over our bounty. One way of enjoying an upscale American lifestyle, while simultaneously feeling pretty terrible about it, is to castigate the history and global conduct of the United States in the abstract — without ever giving up much in the concrete.
How else could the currency speculator George Soros — whose 1992 financial manipulations almost destroyed the Bank of England and thousands of its small depositors — win praise from leftists for comparing President Bush's conduct to Nazism? The angry architects of Moveon.org were neither poor nor oppressed. Nor were they bothered that their Soros millions originated from the financial losses of others. But they did reflect that the most strident anti-Americanism is largely found among our unhappy upper-middle classes.
September 11 laid bare more of this three-decade-old pathology. Islamists were hardly romantic communists. Indeed, they were about as anti-liberal as one could imagine — murderous, patriarchal, hating liberated women, persecuting homosexuals, anti-democratic to the core and intolerant of all different ideas and religions.
Yet al-Qaida, along with its sympathizers, had studied America well — and thus was wise enough to cloak a fascist agenda in our own clichés of "colonialism," 'imperialism" and "no blood for oil." That way such nihilists tapped into the self-doubt and anti-Americanism among many of our discontented advantaged, thus earning a pass if not praise.
That indictment is no right-wing caricature or exaggeration. University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill extolled the terrorists, libeling the dead in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns." Michael Moore applauded the beheaders and bombers of the Sunni Triangle: "Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 'insurgents' or 'terrorists' or 'The Enemy.' They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win."
Of course, a tenured full professor like Churchill (with no Ph.D., a fraudulent resume, a litany of plagiarism — and a six-figure salary!) would not want to live under the Taliban or al-Qaida. Nor would Michael Moore under the Baathists — if his current high life is any indication. Such virulent public anti-Americanism, however, served a psychological need to reconcile a leftist's own life of largesse, through either cost-free disdain for what produced it or (safe) sympathy for those who hated it.
The wages of cultural relativism were not limited to such extremists. Legitimate disagreement and necessary debate about invading Iraq were quickly overwhelmed by a deeper furor that grew out of decades of this fuzzy relativism.
Ted Kennedy pronounced that Abu Ghraib "reopened under new management." Yet, the senator must have known that a few rogue American guards were not comparable to the systematic genocide of Saddam Hussein.
John Kerry's campaign slurred Prime Minister Ayad Allawi as a "puppet" — although he was the victim of Saddam's Gulag and a democrat willing to risk his life for the promise of a free Iraq.
Bill Clinton also seemed fuzzy about the true nature of tyranny, and thus was clueless about murderous theocratic Iran. Recently he cooed, "Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency" — as if theocrats there allow truly popular government.
Other elites wished outright that we would fail in the Middle East. Perhaps our defeat would prove that in a postmodern world American force can only be counterproductive or destabilizing to multilateral protocols.
Thus it was not the slur of a Joe McCarthy clone, but President Clinton's own National Security Council member Nancy Soderberg, who recently lamented on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" of George Bush's developing success in the Middle East: "It's scary for Democrats, I have to say. … Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's still hope for the rest of us. ... There's always hope that this might not work."
"Not work"?
How sad that our most educated and sophisticated cannot fathom that an Iraqi Kurd, an Afghan woman or a Lebanese shopkeeper simply wants the same freedom and opportunity for their children that so many of the most blessed — but bitter — in America either take for granted, feel guilty about or so cynically dismiss.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading."
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Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Comment by clicking here.
03/11/05: A world gone by
03/04/05: Blood for oil?
02/24/05: Common ground
02/17/05: California: Last action state?
02/10/05: Nuclear Poker
02/03/05: Barbara Boxer's metaphor moment
01/27/05: The hard road to democracy
01/20/05: Illegal immigration is a moral issue
01/13/05: Islamicists hate us for who we are, not what we do
01/06/05: Pledging blood and treasure for popular reform in a death struggle with Islamic fascism
© 2005,
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