I have to laugh when a few readers tell me that I have gone “left.” It is as depressing a comment as it is idiotic. For me, the left was never an option – maybe you had to grow up in Britain in the 1970s with your eyes open to see that. I raised myself on Hayek and Orwell and Havel. In college, I greeted the arrival of American missiles in Britain with a bottle of champagne. And anyone who has read this blog knows how horrified I was by part of the left’s response to 9/11. But I’m reminded of it today by this wonderful polemic by Ron Rosenbaum in the New York Observer, forwarded to me by a reader. Yes, it’s old, but it reads as fresh today as ever. Rosenbaum makes me feel less lonely, which is why perhaps this piece gladdened me so. But I implore you to read it. The money quote:
Here’s the analogy: Heidegger’s peculiar neutrality-slash-denial about Nazism and the Holocaust after the facts had come out, and the contemporary Left’s curious neutrality-slash-denial after the facts had come out about Marxist genocides – in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, after 20 million, 50 million, who knows how many millions had been slaughtered. Not all of the Left; many were honorable opponents. But for many others, it just hasn’t registered, it just hasn’t been incorporated into their “analysis” of history and human nature; it just hasn’t been factored in. America is still the one and only evil empire. The silence of the Left, or the exclusive focus of the Left, on America’s alleged crimes over the past half-century, the disdainful sneering at America’s deplorable “Cold War mentality”-none of this has to be reassessed in light of the evidence of genocides that surpassed Hitler’s, all in the name of a Marxist ideology. An ideology that doesn’t need to be reassessed. As if it was maybe just an accident that Marxist-Leninist regimes turned totalitarian and genocidal. No connection there. The judgment that McCarthyism was the chief crime of the Cold War era doesn’t need a bit of a rethink, even when put up against the mass murder of dissidents by Marxist states.
Yes, it is possible to be dismayed, betrayed and depressed by this administration’s political catering to bigotry. But it is just as possible to be grateful that it had the balls to liberate two countries from unspeakable horror and to have had the clarity to name the real evil in our day for what it is. And to fight it.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I had to laugh at the Haiku:
Left the door open
for the Prophet Elijah.
Now our cat is gone.
In 1990, when I was 14, my family left the door open for Elijah and a stray cat my mother had been feeding, but never letting in the house, rushed in. From that day forth, he became our house cat, and we gave him the only name we could – Elijah.”
The Dish 