Why Intellectuals Love Defeat...Really

The initial portion of the above title has been borrowed, intentionally, from the original post under that headline on TCS Daily. It's a commentary by Josh Manchester on a piece by James Carroll that appeared in the Boston Globe, one of many left-wing house organs posing as objective daily newspapers.

The reason we borrowed the title of this piece is because we can't come up with a better one. It's a topic we've dealt with in brief before, but it gets the full treatment it deserves in Manchester's short, power-packed piece.

Comparing the U.S.'s current situation in Iraq to that which occurred in Vietnam, Carroll poses the following questions—which, of course, in true 5th column fashion, already presuppose the answers:

But what about the moral question? For all of the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge that there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted? Can we admit that the loss of honor will not come with how the war ends, because we lost our honor when we began it? This time, can we accept defeat?

Manchester has a quick and easy answer for Carroll:

To be frank, no. In Mr. Carroll's fantasyland, the United States is deserving of defeat, and through some sort of mental gymnastics, that defeat is honorable, because it smacked of hubris to ever have fought in the first place.

I contend instead that the ultimate dishonor will be to leave hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of Iraqis to violent deaths; and that this is far too large a price to pay for Mr. Carroll to feel better.

Right answer. Unlike our friends on the left, however, Manchester documents his thoughts, citing some earlier commentary from a German scholar, Wolfgang Schivelbusch. In the latter's book, "The Culture of Defeat," Schivelbusch concludes that for many today:

To see victory as a curse and defeat as moral purification and salvation is to combine the ancient idea of hubris with the Christian virtue of humility, catharsis with apocalypse. That such a concept should have its greatest resonance among the intelligentsia can be explained in part by the intellectual's classical training but also by his inherently ambivalent stance toward power.

Having pondered this, Manchester comes back with his money graf:

The only problem for those such as Mr. Carroll is that we have not yet lost. It is difficult not to conclude that there is a class of well-intentioned individuals in the United States like him who don't merely feel as they do upon witnessing a defeat, but instead think this way all the time. Like it or not, this mentality of permanent defeat plays a large part in the Democratic Party.

Italics are Manchester's. Indeed, earlier in his own article, Carroll unintentionally buttresses Manchester's rebuttal to his defeatist attitude. First, he praises the notorious Fulbright hearings—conducted by a duly-elected 5th columnist—as the ne plus ultra of intellectual thought. Which then leads him to an astounding non-sequitur:

Of all the acts of opposition to the war in Vietnam, none was more consequential than the hearings presided over by Senator William Fulbright -- a Democrat challenging a Democratic administration. The Fulbright hearings served as the nation's classroom, with a visceral uneasiness about the war evolving into informed opposition. The decisive election year was 1968, and, sure enough, voters cast their ballots for peace.

Italics this time are Wonker's. Note that Carroll provides no proof of his observation here. He just jumps to the predictable conclusion, an observation, not a fact, cut directly out of the of the left's treasure trove of "known facts." Talk about hubris!

Wonker was around in 1968, in his first year of college in Washington, DC, and knows better. Voters voted against Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson's hapless potential successor in 1968, largely out of hatred of Johnson and revulsion over the Democrats' failure to do anything about the increasingly violent student revolutionaries (re: Chicago 1968) that Carroll never even references.

Americans voted for Richard Nixon not because he promised us defeat in Vietnam but because he promised to "end the war" (not lose it) and, not coincidentally, bring the force of law back to our own city streets, blasted by Vietnam protests and racial violence and rioting brought about, at least in part, by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, also in that year. Carroll simply dispenses with those portions of history that are not germane to his already weak argument.

Nixon already knew that the war was being prolonged by the aid and encouragement that leftist demonstrators were providing the enemy, encouraging Uncle Ho to get more GI's sent home in body bags so the U.S., like France before it, would fold its tent and ship its remaining soldiers home. (And they were rewarded for it. Which in turn, last month, inspired Iranian and Syrian funded radicals as well as Al Qaeda-funded terrorists to enrich body bag manufacturers last month in their successfull attempt to use the leftists and the media to influence the 2006 elections here.)

But none of this is germane to Carroll's simplistic argument. He already drew his conclusion years ago regarding ANY war the U.S. might fight, and he's sticking to it, once again parrotting the left's longstanding, phony "lessons of Vietnam":

But if the past has ever offered instruction to the present, here is one lesson that must not be missed: The Vietnam War dragged on for nearly seven more years after that critical election. Why? Because public uneasiness with the course of the war was not enough. The only way out of the disaster was to accept defeat, and that America was loath to do....The killing continued, the air war came into its own, and more people died in Vietnam after 1968 than had died before.

Yep, it was just those damned pesky yahoos in flyover country that simply were not smart enough to "accept defeat." It's smart people on the East Coast that are wise enough to "accept defeat." Too bad that the Dumbos of this world have more votes, eh, Mr. Carroll? The condescension in the above paragraph is beneath contempt, as is Carroll's fatuous observation that "the killing continued..." And who did the killing, Mr. Carroll? If the North Vietnamese had laid down their arms—taken up illegally in defiance of the internationally-brokered border between North and South Vietnam—mightn't THEY have prevented all this killling?

The use of the passive voice is often viewed as bad writing in English 101, where students are encouraged to use constructions in active voice. But journalists and policy writers know that in the right writerly hands, passive voice is a lethal weapon, sometimes allowing politicians to get off the hook ("mistakes were made"), and at other times, to employ ambiguity to lay blame on the side one opposes (in this case the U.S.) while maintaining plausible deniability ("Well, I never SAID that the U.S. was responsible for all the killing.")

Manchester—and Wonker for that matter—need to call out leftist apologists and history rewriters whenever they foist phony history on the reading public as "known facts." Leftist advocacy writers of at least 3 generations, hiding behind the ruse of "objective journalism," have perpetuated a ruinous, adolescent 1968 mentality for nearly 40 years now. They are doing it again, as Carroll proves and Manchester observes.

They made major strides in codifying these "known facts" into universal truths in last week's elections, which they are attributing "voter repudiation of the Administration's Iraq policies" rather than the Republican and independent voters' revulsion toward Republican corruption and massive overspending on pet projects that actually characterized major aspects of this election. Aided and abetted by the leftists at the MSM, actively cheerleading on the sidelines for America's (and thus Bush's) defeat, the Iraq War played a part, of course, as the respected thinkers at Stratfor have pointed out. But to them, it's still not clear, as it was not in 1968, just what that means:

What is clear is that the U.S. electorate has shifted away from supporting the Bush administration's conduct of the war. What is not clear at all is what they have shifted toward. It is impossible to discern any consensus in the country as to what ought to be done.

(No Stratfor link. Paid subscriptions only.)

What has in fact happened is that, in 2006, as in 1968, voters are dissatisfied not with what we've done in Iraq, but by the fact that there is, as of this date, no discernable outcome. Writers like Carroll, and a fundamentally unserious party like the Democrats, have now seized upon this opportunity to regain power and mold yet another "defeat narrative," helping perpetuate the one that's served them well for 40 years.

We need to remain vigilant 24/7 to intercept and deflect the neverending campaign by America's leftist "intellectuals" to derive the wrong history from the right actions of the United States. The ruinous Vietnam legacy of the radical Boomers, which has devastated American foreign policy for roughly 40 years, needs to be countered and destroyed before it turns Americans into the same kind of dejected, defeatist wimps that the Europeans have become. The left would like nothing more than this, as it would make their own job of creating one socialist-Marxist paradise eminently more achievable. But it would also bring to a close, perhaps forever, this country's ability to positively influence events rather than be carried along by them in a permanent downward spiral that can only end in national oblivion and the end of liberal democracy.