Tuesday, December 10, 2013
The only way to understand what is happening to America
in our time -- and for that matter, in Europe since World War II -- is to
understand the left.
And one way to understand the left -- and its enormous
appeal to many decent people -- is to understand what it learned from World War
II and the Nazi experience. The lessons people draw from history go a long way
toward explaining how they view the world and how they behave.
Unfortunately, virtually everything the left learned from
the unique evil known as Nazism has been wrong.
The first lesson was that the right is evil, not merely
wrong. Because Nazism has been successfully labelled "right-wing,"
virtually every right-wing position and leader has been either cynically or
sincerely characterized by the left as a danger to civilization. That is why
the right is so often labelled fascist and compared to Nazis. Vast numbers of
people in the West truly believe that if the right prevails, fascism will
follow.
Of course, Nazism was not right-wing -- certainly not in
American terms. How could it be? Right-wing means less government, not more.
Nor was it left-wing, even though "Nazism" was an abbreviation for
National Socialism.
Nazism was sui generis. It was radical racism combined
with totalitarianism; and racism as a doctrine is neither right nor left.
We have no contemporary movement of any major
significance that is Nazi-like. The closest thing we have is Islamist hatred of
non-Muslims -- but even that is mostly religion- rather than race-based.
The association of Nazism with right-wing is one reason
many Jews loathe the right. In the Jewish psyche, to fight the right is to
fight incipient Nazism.
The second lesson the left learned is directly related to
the first. If the right is so evil that, if allowed to prevail, Nazism will
follow, then surely the left must be beautiful and noble. And that, of course,
is how the left sees itself -- as inherently beautiful and noble. After all,
how can the opposite of Nazism be anything but noble?
The third erroneous lesson is a deep fear and loathing of
nationalism. Since the Nazis committed their crimes in the name of nationalism
(race-based nationalism, to be precise), nationalism must be curbed. That
explains much of the left's contempt for Americans who wave the flag -- indeed,
the left has rendered the term "flag-wavers" a pejorative term.
How else to explain the fact that on American national
holidays one finds so many more flags displayed in conservative areas than in
liberal ones? The trauma of World War I had already killed nationalism in much
of Europe. And World War II did that for the left in America.
The left regards any assertion of American national
identity -- not merely flag-waving -- as chauvinism bordering on fascism. When
the left charges Americans who fear the dilution of American national identity
that could follow citizenship for tens of millions of illegal immigrants with
"xenophobia," and "racism," it is not only a cynical
attempt to cultivate Latino votes for the Democratic Party. It is also a
sincere belief that conservative concerns about American national identity are
reminiscent of chauvinist bigotry.
The most obvious example of left-wing opposition to
American nationalism is its cultivation of "multiculturalism" as a
replacement for American national identity. For the left, American citizens are
no longer Americans first and foremost; we are African-Americans,
Asian-Americans, Hispanic- or Latino-Americans, Native-Americans, etc. The left
celebrates what precedes the hyphen far more than the "American" that
follows it. As a result, America no longer instills traditional American values
and an American identity on either those born here or in its immigrants, which
is the reason for the right's concern over illegal immigration, not bigotry and
xenophobia.
A fourth lesson the left learned from Nazism has been
that no judging of cultures is permissible. Because the Nazis deemed Jews and
others as inferior, we are no longer allowed to judge other cultures. In the
post-World War II world of the left, all cultures are equal. To say that the
contemporary Islamic world, or that black inner city culture, has serious moral
problems that these cultures need to address is to be labelled dangerously
racist -- again reminiscent, for the left, of the Nazis who declared other
groups (inherently) defective. For the left, the only cultures one may judge
adversely are white American and religious Jewish and Christian.
Fifth and finally, the left has affirmed pacifism as an
ideal. One would think that the most obvious moral and rational lesson to be
learned from the Nazi experience is the need to fight evil. After all, if
decent nations were not as militarily strong as they were, and were not as
prepared as they were to use that might, the Nazis would not have been
defeated, and many millions more "non-Aryans" would have been
enslaved and murdered. But the left, including, sad to say, Germany, did not
draw that lesson. Instead of learning to fight evil, the left has learned that
fighting is evil -- and it has taught this to two generations of Americans.
To amend Santayana's famous dictum, it is those who learn
the wrong lessons from history who are condemned to repeat it.
No comments:
Post a Comment