Liberalism

Ouch!

Published on November 30, 20091 Comment

Louis Proyect puts the boot into Michael Bérubé:

He would not have time in his busy schedule to roll up his sleeves and organize like-minded people to build a coalition conforming to his own ideals. If you read his blog, you will learn that when he is not writing articles on cultural theory or redbaiting the left, he is playing hockey or the drums. In other words, he is not actually sufficiently motivated to put his crappy politics into action, the way that a serious political person might. Fundamentally, we are dealing with a dilettante who enjoys shitting on people whose views he disagrees with. Like Walter Mitty, he must have fantasies about leading people into a more just world but like most liberal intellectuals he does not bother since the Democratic Party does all the work that is necessary to rout the Taliban and al-Qaeda. After all, the Obama administration that Berube genuflects to has all the guns and money it needs to kill Afghans. Why would they require any kind of volunteer activism from a college professor who has better things to do with his spare time?

I’ve had my runins with Bérubé as well; he fancies himself as somewhat of an enforcer of acceptable leftwing behaviour but suffers from the usual liberal blinders. Especially in the early years of The War Against Terror there were quite a few liberals like him as much or even more outraged that resistance against it was largely organised by socialists, anarchists and other dirty fucking hippies than by the war itself. Hence those huge rants against Chomsky, ANSWER and such targets, who, no matter how outrageous their statements, never actually killed anybody or ordered bombardments on civilian targets in the name of freedom, but who did have the temerity to find good things to say about America’s officially designated enemies. All part of the policing political debate so that only serious people get to participate. The irony is, people like Bérubé got exactly the same treatment from the “respectable” right, but thought that the correct response would be to offer them better targets…

like lottery winners preaching enterprise to the starving

Published on September 14, 2009

Jamie on the moral hypocrisy of Decentists and other Western Triumphalists

Ah, fuck ’em. Stalin’s their daddy. Everyone’s wrestling with the uncomfortable but persistent suspicion that it took Stalin to beat Hitler: it’s the big open dirty secret of World War two historiography. Stalin murdered millions of people to get the Soviet Union in some sort of shape to resist Hitler, millions more died in the struggle and his price was the life, liberty, and property of the people of Eastern Europe, which we were in no position to refuse him but which we gave him anyway. And then the Palestinians get stiffed with the bill for hundreds of years of European anti-semitism. Now we sit on top of this huge pile of corpses crowing about how our liberty makes us an example to the world, like lottery winners preaching enterprise to the starving.

I really do dislike the whole tribe of Westernists, right or pseudo left, even when I’m not drunk.

Notorious war criminal Robert McNamara dead at 93

Published on July 6, 2009

McNamara’s whole life was an illustration of the limits of American liberalism, the way in which a man who tought of himself as a decent person could convince himself to support and plan atrocities against foreign peoples in the name of national interest. Educated in the best liberal traditions at Berkeley, he spent World War II helping Curtis LeMay lay waste to Japan more efficiently, to which the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just a coda. He then went from warfare to business using the same methods to help Ford become profitable again, became president of Ford, the first outside of the Ford family before joining the Kennedy administration as the Secretary of Defence, as which he was largely responsible for shaping the American strategy in Vietnam and the escalation of the war there with all that entails. When he left (or was kicked out) in 1968, he then joined the World Bank until his retirement.

As the 2003 documentary Fog of War makes clear, McNamara throughout his career was driven by his own moral convictions, doing what he thought was right for America. He genuinely believed in the ideals on which America was supposedly founded, was never driven by greed or vanity as much as the idea of doing your duty for your country, of noblesse oblige. He was honest enough to understand when he was wrong and why he was wrong when it came to the War on Vietnam and to admit to it, even if the doubts he had about the whole war only surfaced once he was out of office. But in all this he was limited by his ideological background, more so because he never realised it was there. He believed he was a rational, pragmatic man, that the things he believed in where just the facts of life, that what was best for America was what was best for the world, that paternalistic capitalism was the best system in the world, that communism was threatening world peace and needed to be stopped and that what happened in Vietnam was the US defending itself. The limits of his vision meant that he could only recognise this last error, but not the errors in his own world view that lead to it.

He wasn’t a bad man, a genuine monster like the ones found in the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations, who only paid lip service to America’s ideals but only truly believed in American power. But his humanity wasn’t enough. He still served the system.