What the left wants

Regarding the ACLU’s extreme denunciations of U.S. authorities for the so-called racial profiling of Muslims, Jim Kalb writes: “It’s unclear why anyone who doesn’t resent the existence of this country and its people should think that in principle it’s a problem to treat a threat coming from within a definable foreign group as coming from within that group.”

The underlying idea here is that, since America is so deeply, iredeemably bad, any self-assertion by America, or, indeed, any act that America even takes in its own defense, must also be bad. The left’s essential demand is that America not be. There is no reasonable way to appease the left’s demands that we stop being racist, since any accommodation will only be met by further demands leading ultimately to suicide.

In the past I had seen this idea mainly in terms of the multicultural attack on our national culture. In an article about New York’s “Curriculum of Inclusion” in National Review in December 1989, I wrote:

Since “European American” culture is by definition exclusive and oppressive, it obviously cannot co-exist with the oppressed cultures that seek equality with it until it has been stripped of its hypocritical pretensions to universality and legitimacy—i.e., until, as a national culture, it has ceased to exist.

I echoed that passage in the chapter on racism from The Path to National Suicide that I recently posted at VFR:

America, whose whole past is racist, can only become good to the extent it overcomes the evil of racism. But since America is inherently racist, it can never succeed in doing that. It follows that America can only become a good country when it ceases to exist, i.e., when its European-rooted civilization is dismantled.”

Now, however, with the ACLU’s attack on the most vitally necessary police and national security measures, and with 35,000 antiwar Leftists (many of them prominent Americans) signing a petition saying, among other things, that America was “vengeful” even for invading Afghanistan and destroying the terrorist bases there, the left’s anti-American campaign has passed beyond an attack on our national culture and become an attack on our physical existence. The message is that We, the American People, can only prove ourselves to be non-racist by allowing ourselves and our families to be killed and our country destroyed by terrorist mass murderers.

But so great is our guilt that even mass suicide would not be enough to clear it away. The left in its unappeasable rage would try to hound us even beyond the grave.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 07, 2003 02:22 AM | Send