Liberals are old hands at apologizing for despots and dictators,
but they are curiously unable to recognize and take responsibility
for their own peccadillos — such as, say, their constant need to
apologize for despots and dictators. These days, however,
self-criticism is all the rage. Nick Cohen started off this round
of soul-searching with his book What’s Left? How the Left Lost
its Way. Todd Gitlin followed up with The Intellectuals
and the Flag. Now Dissent editor Mitchell Cohen is
asking why so many of his comrades insist on apologizing for
Islamic extremism.
Cohen, who achieved a sort of Warholian notoriety for his
support of the Iraq invasion, recently told the German magazine
Jungleworld that he is “struck at how parts of the extreme
left apologize for Islamic extremism in ways reminiscent of how an
earlier generation found ways to apologize for Stalinism. The
objects excused are different, but the patterns of apologetics are
sadly similar. It shows that there really is something I once
called ‘the left that doesn’t learn.’”
If only the apologists were confined to the “extreme left” —
they at least would be easier to isolate, like some particularly
whiny TB patient. Instead they are to be found across the spectrum,
and easily identified by their persistence in blaming the U.S. for
forcing al Qaeda to attack America in 2001, and Madrid in
2004, and London in 2005, etc., etc.
One of the great, perennial questions is why leftists so despise
the free market — a system that has created unprecedented levels
of freedom and prosperity — that they would see it destroyed
rather than, like the rest of us, accept that all economic and
political systems are imperfect. Indeed from the birth of
“bourgeois society,” that is, from the rise of the institution of
private property, the bourgeoisie proved to be a problem for the
chattering classes. How to eradicate the bourgeoisie and liberate
the masses?
Cohen suggests that the left too often views Islamic extremists
as part of a “liberating multitude” that opposes imperialism,
refusing to see Islamofascism for what it really is: yet another
totalitarian ideology. “Some folks in an earlier generation of
leftists were quite able to be anti-imperialist and also to be
against the Stalin-Hitler pact,” Cohen says. The Stalin-Hitler pact
is, of course, a red herring. Not even Stalin and Hitler supported
the Stalin-Hitler pact. What is more, the generation of leftists
Cohen refers to is not simply anti-imperialist (who would disagree
with that?), but are anti-capitalist, anti-private property and
anti-liberal democracy.
THERE WILL ALWAYS be a reliable number of intellectuals ready to
support any extremist ideology whether it is communism, fascism,
Nazism or Islamofascism, as long as that ideology is opposed to
“imperialist capitalism,” as represented by America or, on a
civilizational level, the West. The left simply cannot imagine
itself opposing any anti-American ideology no matter how depraved.
And it is hard to imagine one more depraved than Islamofascism,
which seeks to do Hitler one better as regards the Jews and, for
good measure, enslave the rest of us. It is precisely the same type
of intellectual who once apologized for the Nazis and the
Bolsheviks, who is now able to apologize for the Bin Ladenists.
Apparently being a leftist means always having to say to you’re
sorry.
Not even the most foolish of these useful idiots wants to see a
return of the Caliphate, and few, if any, support forced
conversions, forced marriages, genital mutilation, honoring
killings and stonings (though the multiculturalists among them may
consider these quaint relics part of traditional Arab culture and
therefore beyond criticism). Anyway, few leftists are converting to
Islam. In fact they remain at heart die-hard socialists. Their goal
is simply to see “imperialist capitalist society” undermined,
disgraced, and if possible, eradicated. Combine this desire with
the puerile pleasure of anti-establishmentarianism, and you get
remarks like those made by Prof. Richard A. Berthold to his
University of New Mexico class on September 11: “Anyone who can
blow up the Pentagon has my vote.”
The glory days of the Marxist-Leninists are mainly behind us, so
if it takes a few hundred Islamofascists to undermine the
imperial-capitalist system, fine. What are a few thousand lives in
the big scheme? The 9/11 victims were just “little Eichmanns”
anyway, guilty of working for greedy and probably Jewish
capitalists. The left that found it so very easy to apologize for
Stalin and Lenin’s gulags, forced famines and mass murders can
certainly empathize with bin Laden.
Islamofascism came along just in time to fill the void left by
the collapse of the old totalitarian ideologies. And the left
scarcely missed a beat. As in the good old days of Stalin, they
will allow bin Laden and company to do the dirty work. All they
have to do is eulogize the Islamists as freedom fighters and
martyrs, then sit back and wait for bourgeois society to fall.
