On the eve of the historic democratic Iraqi elections, five-hundred thousand demonstrators marched in New York City’s Central Park on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Iraq’s beleaguered voters. Another two-hundred thousand marched that same day in Washington, D.C. despite the snow. Smaller but equally demonstrative marches occurred in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Iraq’s first democratic election in fifty years was threatened by an insurgent coalition of Islamo- and Ba’athist fascists determined to destroy that nation’s fledgling democracy. Most of the American demonstrators were aware of the danger Iraqi voters faced. Marchers carried signs reading “Long Live Iraqi Democracy,” “No to Terrorist Insurgents,” “Voting Yes, Violence No,” and a creative, “Give Al-Qaeda the Purple Finger,” a reference to the purplish ink that Iraqi voters were to mark their index finger with as an anti-fraud measure. One demonstrator, dressed as Jesus, held a sign that asked “Would Jesus Bomb a Polling Station?”
Why did the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, CBS Evening News, ABC News, NBC Nightly News, Fox News Channel, NPR, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and CNN all collectively fail to report these incredible displays of solidarity with millions of Iraqi voters? Why were the marches and the nearly three-quarters of a million American demonstrators ignored by American media?
The answer is simple: There were no such solidarity marches, no massive demonstrations by those who purport so much concern for peace. Leftist, so-called “anti-war” activists like Brian Becker, Leslie Cagan, C. Clark Kissinger, Medea Benjamin, Jesse Jackson, Ramsey Clark, and Clara Webb were all but invisible, and their “anti-war” organizations like Win Without War, Not In Our Name, International ANSWER, International Action Center, Code Pink, National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, The Rainbow Coalition, were nowhere to be found or heard. Martin Sheen, Sean Penn, Jessica Lange, and the Hollywood Left Coast elites were missing in action. Where were the youthful collegiate sycophants of Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, William Blum, Ward Churchill, the readers of The Nation, Mother Jones, The Progressive, the web-nuts of Moveon.org and DemocraticUnderground.com as well as the collectivist publicists of Boston’s South End Press? Missing…without a trace.
Where were the Deaniacs, those mindless youthful harbingers of the demise of the former Democratic Party, now known as the Party of Obscenely Obsessive Pessimists© or P.O.O.P.? Where were the feminists of N.O.W. and similar organizations? Iraqi female voters were threatened by Al-Qaeda’s murderer-in-residence, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with slaughter and their children faced threats of public beheadings if their mothers voted, and somehow, American feminists managed not a word of empathy. I am woman…hear me snore.
The same coalition of mostly campus-centered anti-war protestors — a cornucopia of the anti-American Left that includes cultural and moral relativists; the hyperventilating totalitarians of political correctness mixed in with the equally obnoxious devotees of French “deconstructionist” theory; admirers of the Parisian Left; degenerate hangers on of the Old “New Left”; Sixties’ nostalgia-worshipping McGoverniks; well-meaning but woefully naïve peace-lovers; Left-leaning liberals like the Michael Moore-admiring conspiracy-mongers and the George Soros-loving Deaniacs; the identity-politics exploiters of unfounded ethnic-racial grievances; Anarchists, Maoists, Marxists, Socialists, Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists, and Post-Marxists that form the remnants of the excremental legacy of Rousseau and the irrational side of the Enlightenment – that mustered into massive demonstrations in opposition to the war that liberated Iraq from the death-grip of Saddam Hussein, could not produce a single activist gathering, spokesperson, or politician calling forth a single demonstration in solidarity with Iraqi voters. If ever one had a doubt that the anti-war movement has always been, is, and will remain a repository of anti-Americanism, let the recent deafening silence over the stunning Iraqi democratic elections provide irrefutable evidence.
The modern-day American Left’s “anti-war” stance actually masks what is in fact a pro-totalitarian politics rooted in the rot of an irrational fear of modernity, competition, and change. The harbinger of that modernity, competition, and change is the capitalist economic system and its foremost expression found in and protected by the democratic liberty of the American Republic. The modern-day American Left has moved from an ideological movement among its adherents to a mostly psychological moment of psychosis and pathology for which no immediate cure is readily available.
So what was the reaction of the Party of Obscenely Obsessive Pessimists© (P.O.O.P.) formerly known as the Democratic Party? “No one in the United States should try to overhype this election,” said the Mr. Ed look-alike contestant from Boston’s Brahmin class. If the words of former Presidential candidate Senator John F. Kerry are representative of the P.O.O.P.’s position on the successful Iraqi democratic elections – and given the Party stalwarts’ deafening silence, they appear to be — then the Party best symbolized by a jackass will soon go the way of the Whigs. Just two days after the Iraqi people demonstrated a level of courage unseen perhaps anywhere in recent memory, the P.O.O.P. is on the verge of selecting avid appeasement and anti-war freak Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic Party. On to oblivion! Yeah!!!!
Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff, writing in the New York Times, noted the silence among American and European Leftists as Iraqi voters were confronted by ongoing threats to turn election-day into a bloodbath:
“Never, not even in the dying days of Weimar Germany when Nazis and Communists brawled in the streets, has there been such a concerted attempt to destroy an election through violence –with candidates unable to appear in public, election workers driven into hiding, foreign monitors forced to ‘observe’ the election from a nearby country, actual voting on election day a gamble with death… Americans and Europeans who have never lifted a finger to defend their own right to vote seem not to care that Iraqis are dying for the right to choose their own leaders. Why do so few people feel even a tremor of indignation when they see poll workers gunned down … [why no] applause in the press for the more than 6,000 Iraqis actually standing for political office at the risk of their lives?” Michael Ignatieff, “The Uncommitted,” New York Times, January 30, 2005
There has been a run on crow lately. The Bush-bashers and America-haters have had to eat their share of crow; after the woefully under-reported, equally historic democratic elections in Afghanistan; the day after the November Presidential Election, and now again, after the stunning success of the Iraqi election.
The American Left and its cowardly mendacious ally in the P.O.O.P. will not bring themselves to praise America in this instance. Some have argued because to do so would be to embrace President Bush or at least admit his moral vision is right. However, I have a different take, one best articulated by Christopher Hitchens in 2001:
“Members of the left, along with the far larger number of squishy ‘progressives,’ have grossly failed to live up to their responsibility to think; rather, they are merely reacting, substituting tired slogans for thought. The majority of those ‘progressives’ who take comfort from Stone and Chomsky are not committed, militant anti-imperialists or anti-capitalists. Nothing so muscular. They are of the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals… all the learned and conscientious objections, as well as all the silly or sinister ones, boil down to this: Nothing will make us [meaning the American Left] fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the same corner as our own government.” (Christopher Hitchens, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” The Atlantic Monthly, December - 2001).
The American Left cannot bring itself to side with the United States in the fight against the Islamo-Fascist alliance of the Wahhabi-Salafist, Jihadi terror network. This failure will forever mark a great stain of irredeemable shame for the Left. September 11, 2001 and all that flows from that terrible day marks beginning of the rupture of the Left, the moment when the irrational components of a Utopian phantasm met with the crushing force of reality. As Jacques Julliard, an editor of Le Nouvel Observateur noted, modern-day anti-Americanism is now the “socialism of imbeciles.” He also could have added that it is the socialism of the pathologically insane.