Anti-American Dogma

I've been reading Dr. Sanity's blog this weekend. I like the good doctor's posts very much, especially her generous links to earlier entries from the archives. After skimming this post, I checked a couple of the links, and came across an incisive entry on the left's anti-American dogma.

Dr. Sanity draws on a piece from the American Thinker, which outlines the etiology of the radical left's comeback after the end of the Cold War. J.R. Dunn, the author of the article, thought the 9/11 attacks would silence the anti-Americanism of the radical fringe, and for a moment he was right:

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.

Dunn argues after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the radical left's "hegemonic" paradigm dropped below the radar, but never went away completely:

Hegemonism was kept alive by people like Noam Chomsky in his endless series of books and pamphlets, Howard Zinn, whose "People's History of the United States" is the standard classroom history, and Oliver Stone's paranoid cinematic fantasies. It remained a central concept of the entertainment world and the media, was encysted within the Democratic Party, and acted as the motivating force of the anarcho-syndicalist anti-globalism movement.

When the towers came down and the U.S. went on war footing, it emerged intact and complete in every detail, as if it had never lain dormant. It has set the terms of the argument since late 2001 - unspoken, unacknowledged, and undebated. The conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, with their faceless mass murderers manipulating a cooperative military and intelligence sector, are purely hegemonist. So is the entire effort to undermine the Iraq War, with the endless echoes of Blood for Oil, accusations against Halliburton, and attacks on "neocons" by people who have no idea what neoconservatism is or could name a single one of its tenets.

The Iraq War was a godsend for the American left, something they'd have had to invent if it hadn't happened on its own. It allowed the entire War on Terror to be chopped and fit into the already existing intellectual template, enabled all the old slogans to be revived, all the dusty concepts to be trotted out anew. It has turned the overall war, one of the most justified conflicts in this country's history, a belated defensive response against an ugly and murderous enemy, into the traditional shadow play of murderous military officers, bloody-handed CIA operatives, and cackling businessmen, all overseen by a bulging-browed Karl Rove, operating from some Goldfingeresque headquarters buried far beneath the Crawford ranch. The result is a nation slowly edging toward the same paralysis that afflicted it during the 1970s.

The American Thinker article is good, but I especially liked Dr. Sanity's conclusion to the post:

Let us stop apologizing for being the greatest, most noble country in the history of the world. Let us stop apologizing for being the most productive and free people in historical memory; a people who willingly, generously and honorably shoulder the burdens and problems of the world-- and get little or no thanks for doing so; on the contrary, they are heaped with scorn and are the objects of unceasing malevolence.

It is time to go on the rhetorical and political offensive against the political left, before their strategies succeed in destroying the soul and will of our country, leaving us even more vulnerable to the Islamofascist enemy who--if they cannot possess or enslave our soul--intend to wipe us off the map.

As I've said before, I never cease to be amazed at the ahistoricism and irrationalism of the radical left forces. Indeed, I'm reminded of it each and every day.