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December 21, 2005
Sympathy for the Devil
Mark Helprin has written an essay for the Claremont Institute's Review of Books, wherein he poses a few questions, and by so doing highlights the growing divide between Americans.
Why does the Left so often abstain from defending not only American interests but, after September 11th, the United States itself?
During the Cold War, one could always suspect that democratic socialists lusted in their hearts for Leninism, and might have given themselves over had the balance of power shifted eastward. This was at least a plausible explanation for their opposition to virtually any measure of Western defense, and their perpetual horror of anti-Communism.
But no force, it would seem, should be capable of transforming even a lifetime of socialist ardor into sympathy for absolutist mullahs, 10th-century tribal warriors, decapitators, and circumcisors of women.
It would make no sense. And yet as the immense plumes of smoke and dust still were rising in strength from the ruins of the World Trade Center, and not a single shot had been fired or a single soldier sacrificed in what was to become the War on Terrorism, the worldwide Left mobilized instantaneously to assert that such a war — the particulars and extent of which it could not know — would be unjust. . . .
Most remarkable is the initial and continuing indifference both to those who perished and to the country itself as it came under attack.
On a political level, the Left could summon no indignation after assaults upon America's capital, defense headquarters, civil aviation, embassies, warships, and chief city, any one of which would be a classic and unambiguous casus belli, while in strange contrast it seemed to regard the mere presence of Americans in Saudi Arabia, the trade in oil, and the Arab world's exposure to American popular culture as unpardonable aggressions.
Irrationality on a political level from these quarters has never been a shock. On a personal level, however, the predominant response of the intellectual Left was a mystery.
It was as if the thousands of crushed and incinerated men, women, and children — those who threw themselves into a quarter-mile abyss rather than have the flesh seared off their bones as they stood in the wind at glassless walls, the small children who died in terror after watching hysterical fanatics slit the throats of screaming stewardesses, and so on, for there are almost three thousand stories — simply did not exist.
How does one explain such an egregious absence of sympathy (much less assertions that "they" deserved it, or that it was a work of art) among endlessly self-proclaiming empathetics whose stock in trade is to milk compassion even from the Rock of Gibraltar? This is a real rather than a rhetorical question, because it is significant of a great division.
Helprin says he'd like an answer, and so would I. The apparent sympathy for our enemies, and the heard-hearted, dry-eyed contempt for our dead countrymen is chilling. Will Durant said that no great civilization could be destroyed from without before it had destroyed itself from within. I fear many are trying to prove him right.
Read the whole thing.
Hat tip: Vanderleun.
Posted by Mike Lief at December 21, 2005 08:02 AM
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