Two factors explain the current growing hysteria over Iraq, and they transcend the complex nature of the war and even the depressing media reports from the battlefield. First is the strange doctrine of multiculturalism that has become one of our most dominant boutique ideologies of the last few decades, as the United States experienced unleveled prosperity, leisure — and guilt.
All cultures are of equal merit; failure and poverty abroad are never due to indigenous pathology but rather Western colonialism, racism, Christianity, and gender bias. The Other is never to be judged by our own "biased" standards of jurisprudence and "constructed" bourgeois notions of humanity; those poorer, darker, non-Christian, and non-English-speaking are to be collectively grouped as victims, deserving condescension, moral latitude, and some sort of reparations or downright cash grants. Senator Patti Murray gave us the soccer-mom version of this pathology when she once talked of the need to rival bin Laden's supposed humanitarian projects in Afghanistan, while Senator Durbin assures us from a private e-mail that poor suspects in Cuba (no longer terrorists who plot to butcher more thousands) suffer the similar fate of Hitler's victims.
As September 11 faded in our collective memory, Muslim extremists were insidiously but systematically reinvented in our elite presentations as near underprivileged victims, and themselves often adept critics of purported rapacious Western consumerism, oil profiteering, heavy-handed militarism, and spiritual desolation.
Extremists who would otherwise be properly seen in the fascistic mold were instead given a weird pass for their quite public and abhorrent hatred of non-believers and homosexuals, and their Neanderthal views of women. Beheadings, the murder of Christians, suicide bombings carried out by children, systematic torture — all this and more paled in comparison to hot and cold temperatures in American jails on Cuba. Suddenly despite our enemies' long record of murder and carnage, we were in a war not with fascism of the old stamp, but with those who were historical victims of the United States. Thus problems arose of marshalling American public opinion against the supposedly weaker that posited legitimate grievances against Western hegemons. It was no surprise that Sen. Durbin's infantile rantings would be showcased on al-Jazeera.
What the Left wants more than anything is a return to (in Hanson's words) the "Golden Age of Victimhood", where every other culture --other than American, that is--is conceptualized as the victims of American colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. They are even willing to repackage the Islamofascist enemy to be the poor, helpless victim of America.
Multiculturalism--which I believe started out as a sincere attempt to open everyone's eyes to the beautiful diversity (and I hesitate to even use that word because of its distortion by the ideologues) in our own country and in the world-- has become a virulent dogma that does not allow the exercise of critical judgement or rational thought. All must bow before it and obey.
Anyone challenging its omnipotent power is labeled as "racist", "sexist" and any number of other multipurpose derogatory terms bandied around liberally by the Left.
As a rational human being, I ask you to read the remarks of Senator Durbin; and then to read Karl Rove's observations on the behavior of the Left after 9/11.. Tell me, which do you think grotesquely distorts the truth, and inflames the discourse? Which one is unmitigated hysteria, and which one is genuine puzzlement at documented behavior? Which can be realistically classified as propaganda?
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