Dalrymple on Liberals and Iraq

A headline in the British liberal newspaper, the Guardian, caught my eye recently: IRAQIS CAN’T BE BLAMED FOR THE CHAOS UNLEASHED BY INVASION....Let us grant, for argument’s sake, the article’s premise: that American policy in Iraq has been naive, rash, foolish, precipitate, and culpable. Yet still it would not follow that “Iraqis can’t be blamed”...The only other explanation of the non-culpability of Iraqis would be that they were not really full members of the human race—in other words, that they did not reflect upon their circumstances and act upon their reflections in the way that the fully responsible and therefore potentially culpable Americans do...The headline makes clear that double standards are about to apply, double standards that are not flattering to the Iraqis’ capacity for independent action...."Do Iraqis Have Free Will," Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, 12/19/2006

Theodore Dalrymple, formerly a pscychiatrist working in some of the worst sections of London, i.e., those areas most likely to be beneficiaries of socialist largesse, has a keen eye for liberal/Leftist hypocrisy. It's not a new message. It has been supported by evidence for generations. Why it needs repeating in the face of constant demonstrations of its truth is easy to guess. As discussed in an article referenced below on lying by elites and by the electorate, we often prefer imaginary worlds to the real one. Often, we would just as soon not know the history of a thing. That's too bad. What Dalrymple notes of leftist hypocrisy on Iraq can be found again and again by looking back.

Look back at the origins of the Labor Party among the Fabians in Britain, for instance. There, you'll find that condescending hypocrisy was no exception but a general Left/liberal trend. Condescension, and its dearest love, a sense of superiority were founding values of the Left in Britain, as they were in the United States. One of the Fabians'leading members, playwright George Bernard Shaw, was in favor of the same race laws in Britain that underpinned the "legality" in Germany of concentration camps. On birth control, a related movement, a famous remark by Shaw (echoed by Margaret Sanger a few years later) was that it would be a better world if fewer poor people were born. Not surprisingly, in government policy followups since, the biggest "markets" for birth control and abortion assistance from Planned Parenthood, the UN, or the US government, are Africa, India and South America, most of whose citizens are A) poor and B) richer in melanin content than their benefactors. Some descendant of GB Shaw at Planned Parenthood probably justifies this by saying that the "lesser state" of Africans, Indians and South Americans doesn't permit them to make rational decisions. The difference between such rationalizations and simply saying "let's make sure there are fewer n...ers in the future" is not very big.

Dalrymple doesn't say it, but it would be better if we reserved our propensity for fantasy for science fiction. As a group, reporters should be the first group to take this challenge.

Luther