Why the Left Loves Our Enemies

Nothing Christian about it:

Liberals are old hands at apologizing for despots and dictators, but they are curiously unable to recognize and take responsibility for their own peccadillos -- such as, say, their constant need to apologize for despots and dictators. These days, however, self-criticism is all the rage. Nick Cohen started off this round of soul-searching with his book What's Left? How the Left Lost its Way. Todd Gitlin followed up with The Intellectuals and the Flag. Now Dissent editor Mitchell Cohen is asking why so many of his comrades insist on apologizing for Islamic extremism.

Cohen, who achieved a sort of Warholian notoriety for his support of the Iraq invasion, recently told the German magazine Jungleworld that he is "struck at how parts of the extreme left apologize for Islamic extremism in ways reminiscent of how an earlier generation found ways to apologize for Stalinism. The objects excused are different, but the patterns of apologetics are sadly similar. It shows that there really is something I once called 'the left that doesn't learn.'"

If only the apologists were confined to the "extreme left" -- they at least would be easier to isolate, like some particularly whiny TB patient. Instead they are to be found across the spectrum, and easily identified by their persistence in blaming the U.S. for forcing al Qaeda to attack America in 2001, and Madrid in 2004, and London in 2005, etc., etc.

One of the great, perennial questions is why leftists so despise the free market -- a system that has created unprecedented levels of freedom and prosperity -- that they would see it destroyed rather than, like the rest of us, accept that all economic and political systems are imperfect. Indeed from the birth of "bourgeois society," that is, from the rise of the institution of private property, the bourgeoisie proved to be a problem for the chattering classes. How to eradicate the bourgeoisie and liberate the masses?

Cohen suggests that the left too often views Islamic extremists as part of a "liberating multitude" that opposes imperialism, refusing to see Islamofascism for what it really is: yet another totalitarian ideology. "Some folks in an earlier generation of leftists were quite able to be anti-imperialist and also to be against the Stalin-Hitler pact," Cohen says. The Stalin-Hitler pact is, of course, a red herring. Not even Stalin and Hitler supported the Stalin-Hitler pact. What is more, the generation of leftists Cohen refers to is not simply anti-imperialist (who would disagree with that?), but are anti-capitalist, anti-private property and anti-liberal democracy.

The Left loves our enemies because the Left hates America. For them, America is not a shining city on a hill, but an evil empire. For them, America is not the bulwark of freedom, but a backwater not European enough in its morality. For them, America is the enemy.

Thus, they make common cause with those who seek America's destruction.