Progressive Hypocrisy

The main complaint about Iraq couldn't be uttered in America without inciting the hew and the cry of progressive thinkers and rightfully so, because the main complaint is patently racist. The idea goes like this: the Iraqi people, Muslim people, Arab people, are inherently incapable of living in a free, democratic society. Their tradition, intelligence, culture, history, family structure, and to a less extent, their religion inhibits their evolution as a people. In a sense, they are, like so many inferior cultures, condemned to the bottom of the world's rubbish heap.

Now, imagine these sentiments being used to describe, say, black people or women (remember the outrage at Ann Coulter for her thoughts on American women and voting?) or even Muslim Americans.

The second complaint, like unto the first, is essentially: Why should we care? If the people of the Mideast want to kill each other and be stupid, it's their own damn fault. This argument is easily undone by that little inconvenient truth--the Twin Towers crashing down in Mid-town Manhattan. The burnt out hole gapes there even now, a hollow reminder that what happens there, can affect what happens here.

There was a time, and even now, when progressives fought for the rights of everyone no matter their location or citizenship. There have been many urgent (and to my thinking, valid) pleas to save the Sudanese people--to save the black Christians and Muslims there from genocide imposed by lighter-skinned racist Muslims. So, it's still possible for progressives to claim those ideals, but they don't embody those ideals consistently. They learned from Gandhi's struggle for a free India. They learned by watching their fathers fight WWII to maintain a free West. These experiences planted the seed for the American civil rights movement. This Baby Boomer generation used Flower Power, sit-ins, resistance, etc. and they misused it, too. The valiant struggles of people like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi became tools for rebellious, amoral, narcissistic, spoiled, privileged young people more enamored with sex and drugs than freedom, man.

The sons and daughters of the Free Love generation didn't leave their hypocrisy behind. In this generation, they've honed their language of oppression but forgotten the truly oppressed. If the victim group doesn't meet their special criteria or if the oppressed is liberated by a perceived enemy (anyone remotely conservative or with the initials G.W.B.) the victims aren't worth saving. A genocide would be preferable to people being freed by someone who doesn't have the proper credentials or, more importantly, language of The Movement.

That George Bush has been one of the most progressive presidents in history galls the so-called progressives. Todays progressives want to conserve the past. Attached to a Ma Sheehan version of the world, they strive to protect and look inwardly. Some even doubt the reasoning to liberate Europe during World War II. Why This perverse reasoning is as narcissistic as it is suicidal.

The only oppressed people worth saving are those who won't matter to America's own self-preservation. Today's progressive would rather America shrivel and die than reach out and spread the seed of democracy. Saving, of course, means using strength and power and fighting and dominating over enemies.

Power over is the language of oppression, but it's also the action of the liberator.

What this means is that the Left will never acknowledge an Iraq success. It will, at the first opportunity, attempt to rob George W. Bush of any success. Genocide is preferable to the President being favorably viewed in history's light.

Who is the true progressive? Who is liberal? It's been a long time since the Left has qualified as either.