Leftism

Talk About Cognitive Dissonance

by

Count up the innocent dead. Measure human misery, pain, and despair. Pile the corpses high.

The accounting makes it very clear that Communism is the greatest tragedy, the most murderous blight, in all of human history.

And yet, for some reason, the Left doesn’t seem to care. Liberal ideology is always worthy no matter the body count. It seems that the only real crime is in opposing their pet political philosophies.

Joseph McCarthy is a demon in their eyes, an odious and insidious monster. The fact that history has proven that some of his charges were valid is carefully ignored, as are the mountains of stinking corpses left behind by their favorite dictators and totalitarian regimes.

To be completely candid with you, dear reader, I have a hard time understanding why. How obvious does it have to be, anyway?

A recent article at The American Thinker sheds some light on this puzzle. It seems that the majority of educators, people who should be smart enough to know better, simply refuse to mention these undeniable historical facts to their students.

“This stuff isn’t rocket science. It is easy to teach, if the professor desires. The problem is that it isn’t being taught. Consequently, Americans today do not know why communism is such a devastating ideology, at both the level of plain economic theory and in actual historical practice. It is a remarkably hateful system, based on literal hatred and targeted annihilation of entire classes and groups of people.”

The author of the article, Paul Kengor, also explains why this refusal to pass on important details concerning the recent past has done much to create the situation we find facing us today.

“What does it all mean for November 2008? It means that millions of modern Americans, when they hear that Barack Obama has deep roots with communist radicals like Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis, don’t care; they don’t get it. Moreover, the leftist establishment — from academia to media to Hollywood — will not help them get it. To the contrary, the left responds to these accusations by not only downplaying or dismissing them but by ridiculing or even vilifying them, given the left’s reflexive anti-anti-communism. The left will create bad guys out of the anti-communists who are legitimately blowing the whistle on the real bad guys.”

I never had a problem telling good from bad. It is a pity the Left does.

Obama the Stuffed Duck

by

Instapundit comments on a link to an article:

EVEN TO HIS SUPPORTERS:  Weeks Before the Election, Obama Remains an Enigma.

I think that is very true. I don’t see a lot of Obama supporters who know much about his voting record or can address any of the questions raised about his radical and corrupt associations.  

I’ve come to the conclusion they simply do not care one way or the other. Obama could be a drug lord or a stuffed duck and they would still support him.  

Read more

Guilty Men?

by

It has been intriguing to read complaints on the right about the Democrats and their supporters blaming the Republicans for the financial mess, when, they argue, so much of it was the Democrats’ fault what with bad legislation, pressure on banks and refusal to agree on any kind of control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How is it possible to be that cynical and for the populace to be that credulous?

I suppose we shall not know just how credulous the populace is until the results start rolling in on November 4 5 but I could not help thinking back to the 1945 General Election in Britain, the one that Churchill’s Conservatives so shockingly lost.  

There is a great deal of rather vague historical rationalizing along the lines of people wanting a new order and the war democratizing the British society to an extent not known before. This rather clashes with what we know about the fifties but let that pass. There may have been a feeling that something new was required after a war of that magnitude, though the feeling did not last.  

What is far more rarely discussed is the dishonest Labour Party campaign that focused on the issue of “guilty men”. In not very subtle terms this was a campaign that blamed Britain’s unpreparedness for the war and, indeed, the fact that the war even happened on the Conservatives who had refused to rearm in the thirties, thus finding themselves unable to stand up to Hitler in 1938 and fighting a losing battle in 1939. After he had lost the election Churchill added his own version of the tale, which was substantially the same as the Labour one.

Read more

Quote of the Day

by

Conjuring images of the medieval church or the Kremlin persecuting dissidents is delicious, but it comes from times and places where very few people even had access to the information that the academy was exposed to. Those controlling authorities could actually hope to keep certain opinions from spreading by applying pressure at a very few places. That world has been disappearing for years. Anyone can get ahold of the ideas of Foucault, or Trotsky, or Derrida at the touch of a button now. Where unavailability is still a problem, ironically, are precisely those areas where those ideas are in ascendance.
 
This is why online learning and other consumer-driven postsecondary education is pushing them out. Prestigious universities are losing prestige, not because Americans are anti-intellectual, but because they are anti-intelligentsia, anti-academy. Even George Bush reads Camus nowadays. The figure of The Professor in comic books and Gilligan’s Island, a person who knows much about all important subjects, does not even work as comedy or stereotype anymore. People chuckled about the comedic exaggeration of Russell Johnson’s character then – now they would fail to find it funny at all, except as some sort of retro thing. People have access to the information themselves and know that humanities professors are often not all that smart. Smarter than average people, perhaps, and trained in particular specialties, but not dealing with subjects far beyond the ken of mortals. That is in fact why these disciplines have developed their own coded vocabularies, to identify outsiders rapidly. They can no longer rely on their superior knowledge to do that for them. It’s too easy for a talented amateur to join the conversation after a little work.
 
There is no need to censor the academy. They are making themselves increasingly irrelevant. The entrenched, government-funded educators at younger levels is more worrisome.

–Assistant Village Idiot

Sad and Disturbing…but not Surprising

by

McCain/Palin supporters walk through the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Affluent liberals and “progressives” respond with the grace, class, and tolerance that we have come to expect of them.

(via Neptunus Lex)

UPDATE: See also my 2004 post an incident at the movies. I’d bet there is a 90% overlap between the kinds of people booing this recruiting film and the kinds of people snarling at the McCain supporters in the above video.

Also, be sure and read Ginny’s post.

UPDATE 2: Bookworm writes about another example of “progressive” rage at anyone who dares disagree with them.