[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 133 (Friday, October 5, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1815-E1816]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         THE AGONY OF THE LEFT

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. MICHAEL G. OXLEY

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 4, 2001

  Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, for those who might have missed it, I would 
commend to the attention of my colleagues a piece by Andrew Sullivan 
from today's Wall Street Journal.
  Mr. Sullivan skillfully delineates the egregious errors of many on 
the radical left who would dare to blame the recent terrorist attacks 
on our nation's policies--even as other liberal groups recognize and 
properly condemn the atrocities of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban 
regime that supports him.

              [From the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 4, 2001]

                         The Agony of the Left

                          (By Andrew Sullivan)

       One of the most telling things I have seen since the Sept. 
     11 massacre was an early ``peace movement'' e-mail. It listed 
     three major demands: stop the war; stop racism; stop ethnic 
     scapegoating. A liberal friend had appended a sardonic 
     comment to the bottom. ``Any chance we could come out against 
     terrorism as well?''

[[Page E1816]]

       One of the overlooked aspects of the war we are now 
     fighting is the awakening it has spawned on the left. In one 
     atrocity, Osama bin Laden may have accomplished what a 
     generation of conservative writers have failed to do: 
     convince mainstream liberals of the illogic and nihilism of 
     the powerful postmodern left. For the first time in a very 
     long while, many liberals are reassessing--quietly for the 
     most part--their alliance with the anti-American, anti-
     capitalist forces they have long appeased, ignored or 
     supported.


                            collective knee

       Of course the initial response of left-wing intellectuals 
     to Sept. 11 was one jerking of the collective knee. This was 
     America's fault. From Susan Sontag to Michael Moore, from 
     Noam Chomsky to Edward Said, there was no question that, 
     however awful the attack on the World Trade Center, it was 
     vital to keep attention fixed on the real culprit: the United 
     States. Of the massacre, a Rutgers professor summed up the 
     consensus by informing her students that ``We should be aware 
     that, whatever its proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the 
     fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.'' 
     Or as a poster at the demonstration in Washington last 
     weekend put it, ``Amerika, Get A Clue.''
       Less noticed was the reasoned stance of liberal groups like 
     the National Organization for Women. President Kim Candy 
     stated that ``The Taliban government of Afghanistan, believed 
     to be harboring suspect Osama bin Laden, subjugates women and 
     girls, and deprives them of the most basic human rights--
     including education, medicine and jobs. The smoldering 
     remains of the World Trade Center are a stark reminder that 
     when such extremism is allowed to flourish anywhere in the 
     world, none of us is safe.'' The NAACP issued an equally 
     forceful ``message of resolve,'' declaring, ``These tragedies 
     and these acts of evil must not go unpunished. Justice must 
     be served.''
       Left-wing dissident Christopher Hitchens, meanwhile, 
     assailed his comrades as ``soft on crime and soft on 
     fascism.'' After an initial spasm of equivocation, the 
     American Prospect magazine ran a column this week accusing 
     the pre-emptive peace movement of ``a truly vile form of 
     moral equivalency'' in equating President Bush with 
     terrorists. Not a hard cell, but daring for a magazine that 
     rarely has even a civil word for the right.
       Most moving was Salman Rushdie's early call in the New York 
     Times to ``be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American 
     onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder 
     of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse 
     such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to 
     deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are 
     responsible for their actions.'' Whatever else is going on, 
     the liberal-left alliance has taken as big a hit as the 
     conservative-fundamentalist alliance after the blame-America 
     remarks of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
       It's not hard to see why. Unlike previous Cold War battles, 
     this one is against an enemy with no pretense at any 
     universal, secular ideology that could appeal to Western 
     liberals. However, repulsive, the communist arguments of, 
     say, Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro still appealed to a secular, 
     Western ideology. American leftist could delude themselves 
     that they shared the same struggle.
       But with Osama bin Laden, and the Islamo-fascism of the 
     Taliban, no such delusions are possible. The American liberal 
     mind has long believed that their prime enemy in America is 
     the religious right, what does that make the Taliban? They 
     subjugate women with a brutality rare even in the Muslim 
     world; they despite Jews; they execute homosexuals by 
     throwing them from very high buildings or crushing them 
     underneath stone walls. There is literally nothing that the 
     left can credibly cling to in rationalizing support for these 
     hate-filled fanatics.
       This is therefore an excruciating moment for the 
     postmodern, post-colonial left. They may actually have come 
     across an enemy that even they cannot argue is morally 
     superior to the West. You see this discomfort in the silence 
     of the protestors in Washington, who simply never raised the 
     issue of bin Laden's ideology. You see it is Barbara 
     Ehreneich's sad plea in the Village Voice: ``What is so 
     heartbreaking to me as a feminist is that the strongest 
     response to corporate globalization and U.S. military 
     domination is based on such a violent and misogynist 
     ideology.''
       You see it in the words of Fredric Jameson, a revered 
     postmodernist at Duke University, arguing in the London 
     Review of Books that the roots of the conflict are to be 
     found ``in the wholesale massacres of the Left systematically 
     encouraged and directed by the Americans in an even earlier 
     period . . . . It is, however, only now that the results are 
     working their way out into actuality, for the resultant 
     absence of any Left alternative means that popular revolt and 
     resistance in the Third World have nowhere to go but into 
     religious and `fundamentalist' forms.'' The only adequate 
     description of this argument is desperate. And, of course, it 
     ducks the hard question. What does the left do now that these 
     forces are indeed fundamentalist?
       The other rhetorical trope that is fast disintegrating is 
     the anti-racist argument. The doctrine of ``post-
     colonialism'' which now dominates many American humanities 
     departments invariably sides with Third World regimes against 
     the accumulated evil of the West. So the emergence of the 
     Taliban is a body-blow. If dark-skinned peoples are 
     inherently better than light-skinned peoples, then how does a 
     dark-skinned culture come up with an ideology that is clearly 
     a function of bigotry, misogyny and homophobia?
       One immediate response is to argue that the U.S. itself 
     created Osama bin Laden in its war against Soviet communism. 
     This isn't true--but even if it were, doesn't this fact, as 
     Mr. Hitchens has argued, actually increase the West's 
     responsibility to retaliate against him?


                           What Suppression?

       It may be, in fact, that one of the silver linings of these 
     awful times is that the far left's bluff has been finally 
     called. War focuses issues in ways peace cannot.
       Leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their 
     views raises the spectre of domestic repression. But in a 
     country with a First Amendment, no suppression from 
     government is likely, and in the citadels of the media and 
     the academy, the far left is actually vastly over-
     represented. The real issue, as pointed out this week by 
     Britain's Labour prime minister, is that some on the left 
     have expressed ``a hatred of America that shames those that 
     feel it.''
       The left's howls of anguish are therefore essentially 
     phony--and they stem from a growing realization that this 
     crisis has largely destroyed the credibility of the far left. 
     Forced to choose between the West and the Taliban, the hard 
     left simply cannot decide. Far from concealing this 
     ideological bankruptcy, we need to expose it and condemn it 
     as widely and as irrevocably as we can. Many liberals are 
     already listening and watching--and the tectonic plates of 
     politics are shifting as they do.

     

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