Enemy Revisionism

Victor Davis Hanson provides some interesting insights regarding the prevailing public mindset on the Global War on Terror in his latest essay.

There are a number of fascinating, albeit debatable, points made in this piece. In particular, I've been ruminating on his notion that the United States has often been far more comfortable waging war against rightwing fascism than against leftwing totalitarianism. Hanson effectively supports this statement by pointing out that even though Stalin and Mao murdered millions more than Adolph Hitler, this fact is often obscured in the syllogisms espoused in the mainstream media. For some reason, Hitler is the mass murder "gold standard."

Similarly, Hanson argues, the justifications for wars waged by American conservatives are questioned in ways that are rarely raised in wars waged by liberals. A considerable swath of public opinion in this country believes it more likely that Republicans wage war for cynical or economic reasons while Democrats only wage war as a last resort and only for the most idealistic of reasons. These two interesting and interlinked concepts raise real questions about whether they emanate exclusively from some deep recess of the American political consciousness or whether they are molded and shaped by left-sympathizing forces in the media.

However, the real truth in Hanson's piece is his analysis of how those who murdered 3000 innocents on 9/11 and have a long tradition of indiscriminate killing have been transmogrified by the Left from the soulless, ruthless monsters that they are into "Victims of The West" who have a legitimate beef.

As September 11 faded in our collective memory, Muslim extremists were insidiously but systematically reinvented in our elite presentations as near underprivileged victims, and themselves often adept critics of purported rapacious Western consumerism, oil profiteering, heavy-handed militarism, and spiritual desolation.

On this point, he's dead-on. In the classic "Chickens coming home to roost" vacuity, many on the Left have been successful in creating the illusion that 9/11 was the sole result of something we had done. But those with legitimate concerns about US foreign policy or European colonialism or any other perceived or real wrongs have mechanisms for redressing those concerns. These mechanisms exist in a variety of international fora and at bargaining tables. But no matter how flawed U.S. policy regarding Israel or how difficult it is maintain Muslim and Arab culture amidst the irresistible forces of globalization, one cannot possibly justify indiscriminate mass-murder from a band of non-state actors whose worldview, is in part, driven by a desire to see a return of Spanish Andalucia to the Muslim world.

Ironically, as Paul Berman argued in his masterwork Terror and Liberalism it is this same sort of moral equivalence which has historically prevented Europeans from confronting great evils within their midst, just as it has prevented American policymakers from taking action in places like Rwanda. If you are interested in this idea and would like to learn more about the origins of the current Islamic fundamentalist death cult, I highly recommend Berman's book.