Leftists Pretend To Be Indifferent About America
By Bruce Walker (05/18/04)
Leftists pretend to be indifferent about America. When bad things happen to America, Leftists pretend to be dismayed and when America does bad things, Leftists pretend to be disappointed. Leftists pretend to be indifferent about America, but Leftists hate everything that America represents and they rejoice in its pain and in its flaws.
They eschew patriotism as venial vice, but this is only true if the patriotism or even nationalism is the emotional impulse of anyone but Americans. America has always been the "main enemy" of Leftism, and American patriotism has always been the greatest sin conceivable in the secular religion of Leftism.
The Soviet Union explicitly called America the “main enemy” even when much closer, much more well armed and much more hostile nations like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan objectively were more threatening. Why was America then the “main enemy” in the internal lexicon of the GRU and the KGB (or its organizational predecessors)?
Soviets hated America for the same reason that all other Leftists of Old Europe, whether traditionally considered “Leftist” like Robespierre or inaccurately considered “Rightist” like the Royal House of Bourbon which men like Robespierre overthrew hated America: this truly novel polity was based upon the notion of universal human equality before a Blessed Creator and upon all the mandates of liberty and of kindness which inexorably proceed from that notion.
The divine right of kings is not no different than the Hegelian right of the classes or the gender right of the Womenists or the patriarchy or the racial rights of Aryans or bigots of any racial character. Which nations, besides America, never had kings? Which polities, save the American system, includes within its basic law an absolute bar on titles of nobility?
Despite the logic of making George Washington monarch of the first or second or third American government, he rejected a kingship which no person in human could have claim with greater moral legitimacy or sound political reason.
When final sovereignty rests only with the Blessed Creator and when the only righteous devolution of that sovereignty is a granting of that part of Him, the human soul, which resides within each of us, then limited government is not simply nice, but necessary. Violence, which is the compulsion of the soul to act against its will, fails in two vital ways.
First, humans cannot pummel morality into the souls of others. The penitentiary was a uniquely American creation. It was intended to cure the evil of crime through penitence. Law enforcement necessarily involves the incapacitation of criminals through incarceration and the discouragement of criminality through the presence of police, but the criminal heart is changed by choice.
More than any other nation in human history, America has grasped the fundamental concept that coerced profession of faith in this or in that is counterfeit. That is the primary reason why America is the only nation which for centuries has had a problem with too much immigration. The world, whether rich or poor, is filled with “huddled masses yearning to breath free.”
Faith, of course, means much more than religion or metaphysics. Marxism is the least tolerant, least rational and most dogmatic of all human faiths. Its grotesque offspring - Fascism, Baathism, Maoism, Nazism and Peronism - share that demand for utter obedience which George Orwell saw so very well fifty years ago.
The second reason why violence so often fails to accomplish good is because violence tends to beget violence. People can relate to one another in many different ways. Those of us on the right are often absurdly described as homo economus, creatures whose lives are governed by money. Conservatives and other normal people, however, understand that money and material wealth are a minor part of life.
Love, faith, friendship, health and wisdom are each vastly more important than money. Indeed, money used for any purpose except to promote those five virtues and other associated virtues is like money used to buy property in a game of Monopoly. Material wealth is naturally created by people who embrace those higher virtues and societies dominated by those superior values inevitably become rich.
It is not coincidence that Medieval Jews, who possessed pathetically weak martial power, still prospered. It is not coincidence that the Society of Friends or Quakers in America were among the most wealthy, and charitable, of all the myriad religious groups who settled here.
It is also not coincidence that America, the only nation that could have established in 1945 or in 1989 a genuine global empire, rejected that choice and remained peaceful and prosperous. It is not coincidence that America won its global war, the Cold War, without bloodshed, mercifully substituting treasure and rhetoric for blood and iron.
Those who hate America, like those who love America, exist in every country in the world. Whether they call themselves Baathists, Wahabbists, Marxists, Feminists, Progressives, Environmentalists, Secular Humanists or some other pseudonym does not matter: fear and venom for America is their only common value, and indeed, their only value at all.
Leftists who live in America are the worst of the lot. While all the world is better, safer and healthier because of America, those who live in privilege within America receive blessings which Cubans drown in the waters of the Caribbean Sea to reach. The debt these Leftists owe America, its fighting men, and its Founding Fathers is more than they can bear.
Gratitude is not a virtue compatible with Leftism. The inverted Decalogue of Leftism does not simply prohibit the sin of coveting, but it screeches and scolds that we all are required to envy our neighbor. The image of Leftists thanking God, thanking veterans, thanking parents or thanking other Americans who love America is inconceivable.
Leftists lie constantly, and they lie most often and most passionately to themselves. So they must lie about the proportionality of good and of evil when America and its enemies are involved. What would think about a Jewish officer who punched a Schutzstaffel officer after liberation of the death camps? Would have been morally comparable to the extermination of six million innocent Jews?
What if a Nazi stormtrooper had been punched by an angry Jew in 1933? Would that have been the catalyst for the Holocaust? Does the mistreatment of a handful of Iraqi prisoners, who were probably torturers themselves, equate to the systematic torture of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis by their own government?
Only if the iota of vice if American and the galaxy of vice is anti-American. Life is imperfect and hope without faith is doomed. Heaven does not exist on earth nor will it ever exist on earth nor can it ever exist in a material universe of fallen souls, but the amelioration of evil - the very essence of America and of Christendom - is not only possible but morally mandatory.
The crimes committed against Iraqi prisoners was real and should be punished, but false comparisons of crimes one billionth as bad as the crimes of Hussein and his henchmen are not just luxuriant mendacity: these phony analogies are a cynical effort to capriciously merge all existence into a cesspool of evil.
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