Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Mark Steyn had an excellent piece this week discussing the new morality prevalent among the liberal intelligentsia. Instead of condemning actual evil deeds, they condemn made-up quotes.
If you say, “Chairman Mao? Wasn’t he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?”, you’ll be hounded from public life for saying the word “Chinks.” But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any school room in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it’s so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.
Which is odd, don’t you think? Because it suggests that our present age of politically correct hypersensitivity is not just morally unserious but profoundly decadent.
Twenty years ago this fall, the Iron Curtain was coming down in Europe. Across the Warsaw Pact, the jailers of the Communist prison states lost their nerve, and the cell walls crumbled. Matt Welch, the editor of Reason, wonders why the anniversary is going all but unobserved: Why aren’t we making more of the biggest mass liberation in history?
Well, because to celebrate it would involve recognizing it as a victory over Communism. And, after the Left’s long march through the institutions of the West, most are not willing to do that. There’s the bad totalitarianism (Nazism) and the good totalitarianism (Communism), whose apologists and, indeed, fetishists can still be found everywhere, even unto the White House.
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But don’t worry, the new Fairness Doctrine will take care of the problem.
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So true. China is actually the world model for a successful negative eugenics program, essentially population control by means not related to mass murder and including forced sterilization, infanticide, and the notorious one-child policy. The United Nations has funded these programs via the United Nations Population Fund, or in some cases they just looked the other way, or made enough of a fuss so it doesn't look bad on them. "Human rights! Yeah, that's the ticket."
Eugenics, though now having escaped the traditional political paradigm, is mostly a leftist ideal. To this day, that's why you see so much support for abortion on the left - it's a traditional liberal stronghold masking as compassion. So while most liberals - the common folk at least - are compassionate people, you'll find the most intensely evil things being overshadowed by things like politically correct speech. It's a distraction to mask all that evil. If the debate can be made over comparatively trivial matters related to semantics, all the better for...well, the devil.
In fact, most politics is that way. People have been conditioned to be topics-oriented, not even really issues-oriented. So you never get down to the actual political philosophy at work. And generally, when core values are expressed from one side or the other, it is pretty shallow.
For instance, on the right, "life" and "fiscal conservatism" are supposedly traditional values, but that quickly morphs into "rights of the unborn" and "supporting the troops" - translation: war and death, no matter the cost or debt. (Gotta get al-CIA-da, ya know.) At least that has been the case. I suspect that will change to the extent Obama and the Democrats will be forced to own the wars.
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