But no ideological construct dies before its time. 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.
Our fatal flaw involves our national will, our apparent inability to take on any necessary task, however lengthy, dirty or unpromising, and finish it satisfactorily. Our enemies have noted this and target it as a matter of course. Our friends - to perhaps stretch a term - have learned to manipulate it to their advantage.
As we have seen, this is no natural turn of events. There is nothing inevitable or unavoidable about it. It is entirely synthetic, the byproduct of an effort by our intellectual elite to serve an ideology now long dead. Our belief in ourselves as a nation, in our role and mission on the international stage, has been undermined for fifty years and more. There is not a level of society, from day laborer to corporate CEO, who has not been touched by this dogma. Not a single institution (with the professional military perhaps excepted) has been unaffected.
There are politicians now serving in Congress, intelligence agents investigating overseas threats, diplomats working in embassies, bureaucrats handling the day-to-day business of the government, who fully believe that the country they serve is a criminal enterprise. And this is not even to mention the millions of students, professionals, housewives, officials, clergymen, and citizens of all types who labor under the idea that their country is an international tumor worthy only of defeat and punishment, because they have never heard it argued otherwise. The United States, the most powerful nation in the memory of man, is proving unable to correct a situation that led to the greatest crime ever committed against its citizens because of the doubts and anxieties engendered by this empty dogma.
You should read every word of this excellent piece. I have only one addition to his remarks: the revival of this leftist/socialist crap has been facilitated since the end of the Cold War by Postmodernism, a philosophical movement that made it possible for the left to be able to ignore the millions of people killed during the 20th century as a direct result of their ideological illness; and to be able to foist on the American public the concepts of political correctness and multiculturalism. The cultural and moral relativism advocated by these philosophical approaches effectively disarmed intellectual debate in this country, and the forces of reality, reason, and truth have yet to recover from the onslaught--let alone counterattack.
As Dunn notes, if the Iraq war did not exist, the left would have to invent it because it is a perfect vehicle for them to promulgate their irrational postmodern nonsense and achieve their political agenda.
Until and unless those of us still committed to objective reality, reason, and truth stand up to the empty dogma of the left and expose it for the destructive malignancy it is; it will continue to eat away at our national soul, and place all our precious liberties at risk. We must stop being on the defensive and cease catering to the dark, empty vision to which the left's dogma is utterly committed.
Clarity of thought, strength of moral purpose and unyielding adherence to the principles upon which this country was founded is all that is necessary to cure the spreading cancer of leftist ideology that threatens the very life of American values and ideals.
I can't say it any better than Siggy:
To add insult to injury, even as we fight our ‘war on terror,‘ choreographed so as to be as PC as possible, we seem to need to apologize in advance, in case our motives (the preservation of democracy) are ‘misunderstood.’ We seem to have the need to explain that freedom trumps totalitarianism, bigotry and racism- as if that were really necessary. On the other hand, we prop up and support corrupt regimes, out of necessity- and we pretend that those regimes are morally equivalent to our own.
We are put in a defensive position, having to explain to much of the Arab world that we are not responsible for their degradations and that we are not responsible for the hundreds of billions squandered and stolen by their leaders. We have to explain that neither we, nor Israel, are responsible for their abject poverty, failed economies and medieval educational systems. We have been put in this untenable position because we are seen as ambiguous when it comes to evil. It is because of that silence that we are asked to sit down with leaders of some of the most dysfunctional and corrupt nations in the history of mankind. We are expected to pretend that their blatant racism, bigotry and hatred are acceptable. We are asked to sit down with leaders of regimes that are comfortable with media, education and religious outlets that demand their citizens ‘finish the job Hitler started.’
[...]
We have no need to apologize for who we are and the freedoms we represent....
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.
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