Seeker Blog

Another great essay by Keith Thompson - a short, sharp critique of postmodern relativism.

When the notorious vehicles of death assaulted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, American leftists found themselves standing on strange and uncertain ground — but in a way that differed substantially from the experience of most Americans that day.

Most of us didn’t blame America for the pilots’ murderous acts.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, self-styled progressives got used to automatically assuming the worst about U.S. foreign policy, defining themselves as permanent dissenters from a cultural center they loved to hate. Charmed for decades by Third World revolutionaries mouthing pious clichés against the accumulated evils of the West, the left faced in Osama bin Laden an enemy who shared their chronic contempt for the U.S. but made “no pretense at any universal, secular ideology that could appeal to Western liberals,” as Andrew Sullivan wrote at the time.

This was new terrain for America’s self-willed exiles in residence — but not exactly a deal breaker. Just because bin Laden didn’t inspire feelings of solidarity among reflexive critics of America’s global presence was hardly a reason to lose sight of the true culprit — America herself.

It didn’t take long for the “Not in My Name” left to settle on a two-pronged strategy: Exercise discipline by muzzling those hard to resist “America had it coming” sentiments, while staying on the outlook for opportunities to equate America’s use of force in the world with the nihilistic mayhem of Islamist terror.

The movement’s first full-dress drill in moral equivalence came just after the White House and Congress resolved to strike at the heart of bin Laden’s Afghanistan operations. Leading left intellectuals responded that when the number of civilian who died as a result of the war in Afghanistan exceeded the number of casualities caused by of Qaeda’s September 11 mayhem, the Afghanistan war would wrong, irrespective of all other factors.

This masterwork of moral blindness neglected to ask two rather basic questions. What did the Al Qaeda pilots intend to accomplish when they commandeered airplanes and crashed them into the Twin Towers? What did American soldiers intend to achieve when their actions resulted in the deaths of Afghani civilians?

…

When the president of the United States asked Americans to volunteer blood to the Red Cross after September 11, it’s worth remembering that he didn’t also ask us to volunteer for suicide missions or to enter American mosques and start taking hostages. Here’s the money question: Even if asked to do such things, how many of us would say yes? The fact that America’s apostles of equivalence can’t answer this question without stammering pretty much says it all.

This is not to say the radical cultural left doesn’t deserve the title "loyal opposition." Their opposition to America is increasingly clear. To whom or what they are loyal is rather more murky.

For more analysis of the transformation of the postmodern left see "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left" by David Horowitz, reviewed by Jay Nordlinger:

Politically speaking, it’s probably the most explosive suggestion you can make today: that the Left has joined hands with radical Islam. That it is fellow-traveling with it. Such a suggestion will get you branded a McCarthyite, immediately. But is it true (the suggestion, that is)? Afraid so. And this case is powerfully, sickeningly made in David Horowitz’s new book.

And for the “taxi driver’s perspective”, see my post on the Haim Harari Speech: A View from the Eye of the Storm.