Seeds of Intellectual Destruction

I first posted this at my Alpha Site (Nod to Stargate Atlantis).

I hope this is not how the people at blogger intend to move everyone over to the beta site. I use three columns on my original site, Thunder Pig, and beta does not support three columns. Ok, enough whining. Time to post.

I found an interesting article on The American Thinker called "Seeds of Intellectual Destruction'" by J.R. Dunn.

Here are some interesting tidbits:


It's always amazed me how quickly the American left managed to twist the 9/11 attacks into a club with which to beat their own country. I recall watching the smoke from the towers late in the day, exhausted from stress and emotions I could scarcely identify, and thinking, "They'll never be able to defile this." It was the end of the postwar flirtation with apostasy, I thought, the end of political frivolity, the birth of a new kind of patriotism, one annealed by fire, one that would become part of framework of the country, one that would last.

Well - they proved me wrong. True, for a few days they kept quiet, scattering like roaches when caught in the public spotlight mouthing the old slogans. Michael Moore was forced to back up quickly after his first remarks, and there was that aide to Willie Brown ("What did you do, America?") never heard of before or since, and of course, Noam Chomsky, pleading that we "enter the minds" of Mohammed Atta and company, but apart from that, most of them kept their counsel. For a while, it really seemed that things had changed.

But after what in retrospect appears to be a pitifully short period, they were back, and in force, and they have never retreated since. Contrary to consensus belief, it didn't begin with Iraq. It began with Afghanistan, starting only a month after the attacks, and built up from there. Moore, the Dixie Chicks, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney, Durbin, Murtha... The list could go on for page after page, all of them speaking in identical terms, all repeating the same code words - Halliburton, blood for oil, Abu Ghraib - all tearing into their country in a fashion unseen even in the Vietnam era.

And where the trendsetters have led, the public has followed. If the polls can be trusted (a bit of a leap, it's true) something like over half the American people believe that the War on Terror, far from being a response to an unprovoked and atrocious attack, is a war of aggression fought on behalf on industrial capitalism in the form of George W's oil buddies.

This is not a natural response. Countries fighting legitimate defensive wars don't suffer this kind of erosion of public support in the midst of hostilities. Particularly as involves a war that began with an atrocity committed against fellow countrymen, an atrocity that could be (and eventually will be) repeated at any time. Such a reaction should not have occurred.

The reason it happened this time was the result of fifty years of conditioning that any and all American activities overseas, whether diplomatic, commercial, or military, are fundamentally illegitimate. American wars, no matter what their cause or nature, are viewed through the same prism, one created on the left for the purpose of undermining the country's commitment to the Cold War, but useful in any context. Call it the "Imperial" or "Hegemonist" doctrine. Simply put, it holds that no American war (and little in the way of any interaction on the international level) is ever justified. All such ventures are wars of imperialist aggression, commonly carried out against helpless innocents in defiance of the wishes of the American people (at least the true American people - that is, left-wing Democrats), on behalf of secretive, sinister interest groups.

Unlike most left-wing doctrines, this one is not a European import but fully home-grown. It was incubated in the universities, developing over several decades in response to U.S. efforts against the Soviet Union. Like any such doctrine it was the product of many hands over a considerable period. But for our purposes, two of the major figures, C. Wright Mills and William Appleman Williams, will serve as examples.

Williams was a revisionist historian based for many years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, one of the nation's premier radical campuses. His field was American diplomatic history. In works such as The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1958) and Roots of the Modern American Empire (1969) Williams depicted the U.S. as an imperial state basing its policies on relentless economic expansion and distracting the masses with a series of overseas military adventures. The Cold War, according to this view, was instigated by the U.S. to protect its markets, with the Soviets as much victims as perpetrators. It comes as no surprise to discover that Williams is Gore Vidal's favorite historian. (Ironically, Williams was eventually driven from Madison by the activities of the very New Leftists he'd done so much to influence.)




I continue with my assertion that Leftists are the first enemy that we will have to defeat before we can meet the Islamists on the Field of Battle, and destroy them.

I will copy and paste this post back into my Primary Blog as it becomes available. Bookmark this Alpha Site as a backup for when Blogger is down. You can check on the status of blogger by going here, although it says nothing about this problem now, I feel that is due to the early hour of my blogging, I may be among the first to notice.