One unintended effect of the September 11 attacks is that it put a defining question to different modes of American political consciousness. Until then it was possible to treat many ideologies respectable since the 1960s as harmless forms of iconoclasm, posing "provocative" but fundamentally hypothetical views. But when attacks on the US homeland made it categorically necessary to answer the question: 'are you willing to fight our assailants', many sincere ideologues paused, shook their heads and said: 'No. In fact I am morally obligated to help our assailants'. When Noam Chomsky went out of his way to support Hezbollah it wasn't inexplicable, it was logical. His long articulated hypotheticals have simply become actuals.But now, Belmont's Wretchard gets to the meat of the matter, the rotten core of today's phoney intelligentsia, the dirty secret of the left's all-too-Gramscian penetration of our cultural institutions which have been gradually robbing us of our tradition and our heritage:
The murky concept of sedition [emphasis HazZzMat], with which freedom of speech must uneasily coexist, is founded on the notion of a threat. Radical Marxist thought derives protection from its status as a defeated mode of political action. The Cold War was fought against armed Marxism on every continent and clime for half a century. But when the Cold War was over, or in places where Radical Marxists did not actually take up arms they were allowed to keep their narratives and tolerated, as the Muslim Ottoman Empire once countenanced Jews and Christians for as long as they posed no threat. No physical threat. But although Marxism was defeated by the largely economic process of Globalization it flourished -- even dominated -- in the cultural institutions of the West at a time when Islamism was triumphing over secularism in the Middle East. From the Marxist perspective at least, the Cold War ended not in defeat, but in a negotiated armistice; with surrender on the economic front offset by a capitulation to it by the West on cultural matters. People might have to work in private companies, it's true, but all the accompanying baggage of traditional culture like religion, sexual mores, notions of objectivity, etc were forfeit; and that was more than compensation. That was the tacit 'deal' and the EU, UN and cultural institutions were going to carry it out. By slow degrees the Western world was going to be politically corrected, multiculturalized and transnationalized. "Imagine there's no countries/It isn't hard to do". And as the 1990s drew to a close it didn't seem all that far away.Wretchard hits the nail on the head here, and we've emphasized the most important parts. One of the reasons the left gets so hysterical about Joe McCarthy is that they know full well that that drunken bully of a Senator was actually onto the essence of what was then known as Communism. When Communists complained that they were being persecuted for pursuing their First Amendment "right to free speech" they were being deliberately ingenuous. They were, in fact, as are the Islamofascists of today, using the tools of Democracy to destroy it. Far from exercising their "patriotic" duty to dissent against allegedly bad policy, they were cynically using the First Amendment as a cover for treason and sedition, words they have somehow succeeded in purging from the language, even though the former is specifically cited in the Constitution as a crime against the U.S.
Of course, the Communists were indeed "patriots" as they often claim they are. But they were (and are) patriots of the ideal socialist collective state whose evolving world government was (and perhaps still is) located not in Washington but in Moscow. In trying to drive the U.S. into extinction, they claimed to be "patriotic" in the larger sense that they were (they felt) in the vanguard of a new world order. So they used "patriotism" for cover, conveniently forgetting to tell anyone just which entity they served as "patriots." Now we know, but still they employ the verbiage, and still it works. It is fantastic how successful they have been in concealing their obvious message in plain sight. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
This is why leftist control of the media, of culture, and of education became increasingly important in the 1950s and beyond. Controlling modes of expression, shaping the way arguments were made, and exterminating religion (largely delegated to the ACLU) would prevent the rise of any new McCarthy who might further thwart their aims. Hollywood and the media, bastions of genuine intellectual ignorance that the Communists successfully infiltrated and co-opted, provide further insurance against the materialization of any new, non-drunken Samson who might arise to slay these modern Philistines.
Latter-day Communists in Europe and in this country (largely but rather inaccurately referred to as "the left" or "socialists") have never ceased fighting the Cold War they lost, and they have experienced continued success due to their domination over the media and thus the political message. This control continues unabated, thwarted only by talk radio and certain bloggers on the Internet whom they now seek to "regulate" into submission.
Today's Commies, whether you call them leftists, socialists, collectivists, or allow them cover by using weak-kneed and inaccurate descriptions like "activist" or "progressive"—all are in an absolute tizzy that they have been found out before they've succeeded in completely rotting out the culture and politics of this country the way they've done so successfully in Europe. They were within striking distance here (no pun intended) of achieving the same goal, but now they're being outed and people are starting to examine more carefully what they're doing and saying as well as the thuggish and murderous company they keep and regularly excuse.
So now what? Let's get back to Wretchard, to whom we'll leave the concluding idea:
Until September 11 it was possible for the more "enlightened" segments of society to regard patriotism, religion and similar sentiments with the kind of amused tolerance that one might reserve for simpletons. Nothing that a little institutionalization and spare change couldn't straighten out. The problem for the Democratic Party is that the Great Polite Silence is over. People like Chomsky and President Bush have stopped being hypothetical and become all too real. Bring it on.
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