Animal Rites

You know what PETA, Veganism and the Animal Rights movement strike me as? Ideological one-upsmanship among Progressives. People join them and espouse their rhetoric because it raises their status among the NPR crowd.

Think about it: All good, progressive-thinking men - excuse me, PEOPLE - already embrace the "struggle" against sexism, racism and whatnot. Nothing special there. So why not take it to the next level and extend your Liberation Politics beyond humanity? NOW we're talking.

Why settle for White Guilt when you can lament your entire species?

Anyone can march at some protest for equal rights for gay people, but you're well beyond that. You march for equal rights for NON-people!

Why confine yourself to discussions of Privilege and Patriarchy when you can make deep statements about the oppression caused by most animals not having opposable thumbs?

Also, since the production of cheap and plentiful food - like pretty much everything in the modern world - operates on the vast economies of scale and technological efficiencies made possible by modern industry... you get to be mad at Big Evil Corporations for yet another reason!

Finally - and this is really sweet - animals are the ideal "victims" against whose "oppression" you can "struggle." It's the Liberation Politics version of job security - like a college professor getting tenure. Unlike those Eastern European proletarian ingrates who finally told the international Left to stick Marxism up its collective ass, dolphins and factory-farm chickens will never tell you to go screw yourself.

(Side note: I'd be interested to know how many hardcore PETA-types have ever refused critical medical treatment on the grounds that the drugs and/or surgical procedures to be used had been developed with animal testing. I'd bet you could fit them all in my car.)

I suspect that many liberationists - not ALL, mind you, but many - really don't give a rat's ass about those on whose behalf they are supposedly fighting. Like all moral crusaders, they're out to feel better about themselves.

There is also a heavy element of self-aggrandizement and the sense of being part of some kind of Consciousness Elite. This leads them to ever-more-extreme positions, in order to remain in the avant-garde.

For these folks, it's just no fun anymore to focus on human suffering. There's a "been there, done that" feel to the whole thing.

Anti-racism, for example, has succeeded to a degree where it is the dominant thought-mode - more people agree than disagree - and therefore it no longer distinguishes one as a member of the Consciousness Elite.

Which does not for a moment mean that the fight for racial equality is over, only that it's just not as politically sexy as it once was. How, as a good revolutionary, can you epater les bourgeoisie when they hate the Klan as much as you do?

So you move onward and outward to animals or "the Earth," adopting lifestyle politics and nutritional practices which most people will never be able to follow. Presto! Romantic marginalization and revolutionary purity is yours again! You're a rebel, maaan!

Good Night and Good Riddance

I tried to sit through a showing of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. I really did. I had to leave when it became apparent the film was just another example of the American Left's historical mythology.

I should have expected as much. Honestly, the Left has such a hold on Hollywood that when I hear some director blathering on about how his next film is going to be "political" or about "issues," I pretty much assume it will be Left propaganda.

Don't hold your breath waiting for a balanced (or even honest) film about McCarthy, et alia. Remember what recently happened when Kazan finally got his due recognition? The white-lipped anger and venom on display? Decades later, when even the Russians have admitted McCarthy was not jumping at shadows, the American Left cannot admit the truth.

I mean, really... would it kill Hollywood to make a movie about McCarthy that acknowledges the reality of Soviet espionage and subversion?

McCarthy & Co. made their share of mistakes, to be sure, but the enemy they were fighting was real and dangerous. Following the end of the Cold War, mountains of espionage and intel documents became available from the former USSR. That, plus now-declassified materials from the USA (such as the Venona transcripts) show that if anything, Americans weren't paranoid enough about subversion and infiltration. McCarthy was not perfect - not even the best man for the job. But he did quite a bit of good. First, and most obviously, the mere act of going on the offensive against Red infiltration put the Soviets on the defensive. They were forced to become much more careful, cut certain recruitment operations altogether, and did in fact lose a number of key operatives to McCarthy and HUAC's investigations. In the end, he was not the best man for the job because he cast his net too wide and wasn't patient enough.

I find it interesting that "McCarthyism" is a voodoo word coined by the very same American Leftists who spent the entire Cold War bending over backwards to avoid confronting the true nature of the Soviet Empire - a political system that raised repression, paranoia and persecution to an art form.

From the first, McCarthy was loudly criticized by his foes - both CPUSA fellow-travelers and patriotic Americans who honestly thought he was wrong. People against him - common citizens as well as political figures - made speeches, wrote books and newspaper articles, went on TV and radio and readily availed themselves of every inch of their 1st Amendment freedoms.

How many were "silenced?" How many doors were kicked in at midnight, the entire family being dragged away for "questioning?" How many hundreds and thousands of journalists, political opponents, artists, scholars and intellectuals were marched away to re-education/work camps - many to never return? How many were tortured or summarily executed?

Even at the height of "McCarthyism," you could slam Joe McCarthy in a New York Times op-ed, published in your own name, go home that night and sleep like a baby. That's what Edward Murrow did, and if George Clooney considers such efforts to be "courage" on the level of some Russian telling Lavrenti Beria to kiss his ass, he is simply delusional.

I'm also getting tired of hearing about all these supposed "victims" of McCarthy and the anti-Communist effort in general. Who were/are these people? How often did the spotlight fall on good Americans whose words and deeds gave no grounds whatsoever to raise suspicion?

Is the existence of actual sedition among CPUSA members, leaders and sympathizers incidental or irrelevant to how McCarthy and the anti-Communist movement more generally are to be viewed?

Or, let me put it this way: Why is the word witch hunt used so often in conjunction with McCarthy or Anti-Communist unless the intent is to suggest that there were as many seditious Communists as there were actual witches in Salem - that is, none?

Why is this? Witch hunt, we hear, over and over again. Could it be that the American Left - and especially their Arts & Crafts contingent in Hollywood - doesn't want anyone to look too closely at just how taken they were with Communism, up to and sometimes including placing themselves in service to the USSR?

If the CPUSA had been a bona fide domestic reform movement, if the anti-communists really were chasing phantoms, that would be one thing. Then I, too, would demonize McCarthy and his allies.

But that's simply not true. The problem was real.

(For how real it was in Hollywood, check out Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left by Ronald Radosh.)

Witch hunt, my ass. There were no witches in Salem, but there sure as Lenin were Commies in Hollywood and the State Dept.

Every serious discussion of this subject must begin with the recognition that the CPUSA was a subversive fifth-column movement controlled by a hostile foreign power. That is an objective fact.

Having recognized this, the question is (and was): What to do about it? The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact; our society has both the right and need to defend itself from those committed to its destruction.

It fits the romantic self-image of the American Left to see those investigated by HUAC, the FBI and McCarthy as martyrs to Cold War hysteria and the eee-vil Right Wing, but the facts do not support that story and never did. Of course, Hollywood is the land of dreams, the American mythology factory, and the Leftists who populate it do their best to keep slicing the baloney.

On a more general note, I would call out both the American Right and Left for their respective blind spots regarding 20th century Communism.

The Right saw Commies behind every tree and was tone-deaf to the real social and political injustices that made Communism so appealing to many suffering and oppressed people.

The Left, on the other hand, bent over backwards to avoid noticing just what all that rhetoric about workers and peasants and liberation actually resulted in once the Reds took over a country.

Many on the Left spent the decades from the October Revolution right up until the whole thing collapsed in late '80s hoping against hope that the USSR or some other Red State (heh heh) would incubate the long-awaited socialist utopia and lead humanity into a new and better age.

Marxist Communism is a remarkably "religious" ideology in this way, and those Americans who went beyond hoping and decided to lend a hand - Hiss, Fuchs, Rosenbergs, etc. - were not villains; they were True Believers. They honestly thought they were on the right side of history and human morality. (All the same, this doesn't excuse treason or change the propriety of their punishments.)

Nothing dies as hard as a dream, and it should come as no surprise that many on the Left (in Hollywood and elsewhere) were, and are, loathe to consciously and publicly confront the fact that the Bolsheviks and Maoists took them for a ride, used them and made a mockery of their democratic, egalitarian and emancipatory ideals.

That's why episodes like l'affaire Rosenberg is still so touchy for some. It's bad enough to have to admit that they were spies, after all, but to also acknowledge that they were naive stooges of a horrible tyrant is just more than some people can bear.

The Good War

First, read this post by the formidable Brian at Peeve Farm.

I've thought about this a bit myself. Here's my (somewhat edited) response to Brian:

I'm of the opinion that the modern Left loves to reverently invoke WW2 because its a safe way to claim they're not completely out to lunch when it comes to national defense and related issues. See, they can say, we were all for fighting Hitler!

It also doesn't hurt that the Nazis were/are the perfect foes for the Left, whose hive mind is notoriously emotion-ruled. Hitler and the gang were downright demonic - right out of Central Casting - and made to order.

The Nazis were also, let's not forget, the target of the "anti-fascist" united front preached by the CPSU and picked up by the American Left, echoes of which can be heard to this day in the Leftist habit of calling anyone to the right of them a "fascist." This is just plain weird, as the Bolsheviks were at least as fascistic as the NSDAP. Yet how many Leftists, past or present, would equate the Hammer & Sickle with the Swastika as a symbol of evil and oppression?

Of course, when Stalin and Hitler kissed and made up (with the corpse of Poland as a token of mutual friendship), most of the American and European Left turned on a dime and, well, so much for the united front.

I can't help wondering... if WW2 had never happened, and a Nazi-Bolshevik entente had gone on to swallow up most of Eurasia into totalitarian darkness, would the contemporary American Left still use "Nazi!" as their epithet of choice? Would "progressives" regard the Final Solution with the same almost-total silence and willful ignorance displayed whenever the subject of Communist mass-murder came up? Hmm. Topic for another day, I suppose.

There is also the issue of phony courage, something near and dear to many "progressives." Hating the Nazis and celebrating their destruction was the safest political stance once could take in the post-1945 era. In the past 200 years, no regime has ever been as comprehensively liquidated as that of the Third Reich. Even the most recent pre-Hitler European conqueror - Napoleon - escaped with his life and one of his Field Marshals founded a royal dynasty in Sweden!

The Swastikettes, on the other hand, were hung, shot, driven to suicide or chased to the ends of the Earth. GOOD, says I. But the point is that dancing on the grave of Nazism and idolizing the war that dug that grave was a pretty risk-free activity after WW2; no matter what you said about the Nazis, there was very little chance that Otto Skorzeny was going to show up at your door with a Luger.

On the other hand, being comprehensively opposed to tyranny - you know, like a true classical liberal - was another kettle of fish entirely. As we both know, a regime just as bad as Hitler's survived the war and its blood-soaked leaders mostly died in bed (unless killed by each other or by Stalin, the worst snake in the nest).

Add to this the decades-long, collective admiration and apologia by "progressives" for the Soviet State - for most of this period, 'Kremlin' was to 'Leftist' as 'Mafia' was to 'gambling' - and the right-thinking Leftist had a real dilemma.

Solution? More WW2 nostalgia, please. Big Red was an ally, the evil Nazis were the foe, and everything was ideologically comfortable.

Let's also not forget to notice the prevalence of the European theater over the Pacific in such nostalgia - even though we fought the Japanese for longer than the Germans. The German Nazis, being Caucasians (indeed, fancying themselves the Whitest of the White) pass the PC test whereas the Asian Japanese make for a somewhat less comfortable foe for the Sensitive.

There's also that messy Atom Bomb thing. And in terms of snappy uniforms, it's no contest.