The "New Left" Has Finally Won--Big Time

One of the enduring myths of the Sixties, of the Vietnam War in particular, is that of the anti-war and other "New Left" activists having successfully toppled two presidents (LBJ and RMN) as well as having forced an end to the American efforts in Southeast Asia. The contemporary documents, particularly those which were originally classified drop a flag on that particular play.

Now as the always pompous and pretentious Paul Harvey used to say in his patented portentous tones, "For the rest of the story."

While the "New Left" failed to heave out presidents or end a war, it did ultimately succeed at something far more important. The final testament to the dedication and effectiveness of the aging survivors of the demos and barricades, of Days of Rage and "Bring the War Home," is the current anti-American convictions of so many members of the American hoi oligoi.

As many of the constituent parts of the "Movement" left the streets, the protests, the rallies, the teach-ins, the sit-ins, the communes, they found comfortable and highly influential positions in the groves of academe. It was as if they took the hoary Jesuit mantra, "give me the child and I will have the man," very much to heart as they took to the lectern.

As the Geek observed repeatedly during his years in the academy, the vast majority of those teaching in departments of English, history, sociology, philosophy belonged to a strain of thinking (the term is used generically only) which can be best entitled, "Blame America First." In the eyes, mouths, and computers of these folk the US was and always had been the prime fountainhead of evil on the planet's surface. There was not the smallest doubt in the minds of any of these professors (the Geek will not degrade the honorable term, "teacher," by applying it in this case) that the American republic and people stood in the dock not only accused but prima face, convicted of racism, sexism, imperialism, a nation and a state awash in greed, exploitation, repression, and related manifestations of the most base of human actions.

Students in the tens of thousands trooped into the indoctrination centers run by these militant exponents of all-sin-is-made-in-America. Year after year the kids born in the Sixties and following decades sat and took in the "wisdom" of these paragons of academic virtue. The message of America-is-the-bane-of-humanity was repeated with the remorseless repetition of a Chinese Communist self-criticism session. And, with the same result.

The result?

The message was accepted. Believed. Taken to heart. Reified. Even deified.

At the same time other aging veterans of the Sixties streets were rising to prominence in politics, the media, the law. Sharing the same intellectual heritage, the same zeitgeist as their cohorts in academia, they spoke the same Blame America First theme reinforcing the indoctrination of the classroom.

The normal processes of aging assured that finally products of the ever reinforced message would place their hands on the levers of power in our country. One such product is the current occupant of the Oval, Barack Obama.

It is not surprising that his profound expressions of Blame America First are so much a daily part of his rhetoric and policy alike. More than those of the "older generation," the now grey and wrinkled "kids" of the "New Left," such as Ms Clinton or at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Ms Pelosi, and Mr Reid, the President, and others of his age both spout and act upon the America-is-evil theme. This is to be expected, the elders merely lived through the time, those younger were heavily and repeatedly indoctrinated, intellectually marinated as it were in the bitter and poisonous wine trampled out by the "New Lefties."

There is little if any reason to doubt that Mr Obama sincerely believes that the world, the human race, would be the better if the US were humbled, less powerful, less able to lead--and be followed. Certainly his policies both foreign and domestic seem to predicated on that sort of view.

Todd Gitlin a distinguished member of the "Movement" some years ago bemoaned the fact that while the Right, those horrid, icky-poo Republicans had taken the White House, the Left had captured the English department. Dr Gitlin must have rethought his gloomy view during the administration of George W. Bush as the opposition refought the battles of the Sixties.

Except for receding hairlines and expanding abdomens the "antis" of the W. Bush years were reprising their glory days of forty years earlier. Often they were cheered on by media types of similar vintage, background, and worldview. They were supported by politicians who were likewise bonded by age and experience.

The new feature of the Bush period was the support provided to the "antis" by the younger generation, the folks who had successfully passed through the indoctrination programs run by the Blame America Firsters of academe. If anything the younger component outdid their progenitors in both volume and vitriol.

High on the list of the younger generation of "antis" was an Illinois state senator and later, US senator from the Land of Lincoln, the Nice Young Man From Chicago, Barack Obama. He may have known nothing of foreign relations, military policy, diplomacy or war but he knew one thing very, very well. He knew America was inherently evil and needed to be changed not only in and for itself but for the good future of humanity.

He knew these things because his professors had told him so--again and again. He knew it because it had been told him by the age cohort of his professors, those in media, those in community organizing, those in assorted help-the-people organizations. He had heard it, read it so often, so convincingly, that it must be true.

His view of "hope and change" was simply that the "hope" of the world would be found in a basic "change" in the US. The change would necessitate a diminishment of US status, influence, and, yes, power in the world.

The results of the Obama version of "change" is all too evident in the foreign policy of the US as well as its conduct. Whether kicking old allies in the shin (the UK) or the groin (Israel) or cozying up to hostile states or ducking, bobbing, weaving in practice while talking tougher than a South Side gangsta, it has become apparent to any not under the influence of the Blame America First ideology that the US is acting weak, trying desperately to resign its status as a Great Power.

This is not to imply that past American foreign policy is above reproach. The Geek has enjoyed pulling the wings off the American foreign relations butterfly for decades. We have made mistakes aplenty in the past. We have allowed ourselves to become blind to the requirements of realpolitik. We have pursued threats which did not exist, chased after illusions, sought unachievable goals. All of these, and, lots of times.

The Obama administration reflecting the views of the now elderly "New Left" has gone far beyond mere miscalculations, simple blunders, quotidian stupidity, expectable ideological blindness. As a direct consequence of believing deeply in the America-the-sinful school of history, politics, and economics, the president and what he proudly calls, "his team" have sought to lower the role and responsibility of the US in global affairs while doing everything possible to remove any traces of "American exceptionalism" at home.

Fortunately the fallout of the Sixties "New Left" is not universal. More importantly not everyone exposed to the indoctrination centers swallowed the approved line. Very few of us in the American hoi polloi agree with the (not atypically) anonymous administration official who said, "We were elected to preside over a graceful American decline."

Mr Obama's vision of "change" involves the historically unprecedented voluntary rejection of Great Power status by the US and We the People. Considering that we Americans have never been comfortable with being citizens of a Great Power, of shouldering the unwelcome burdens which can come with that status, the hope of this sort of change is not preposterous.

The other side of the coin is that the US as Great Power has been, on balance, good for the world generally. The US has been the "last best hope" on all too many occasions over the past seventy years. Despite our errors, regardless of our blunders, the US has done more than any other state to promote stability, reduce threats to peace, provide assistance to people in great need of such, and, far from least, serve as an example of possibility, of liberation, of genuine change for the better.

Insofar as there exists a genuine "human potential movement" it is resident in the US. We have been and remain what John Winthrop called us over four hundred years ago, the city on a hill holding the beacon of authentic hope, genuine change on high.

Not what the Blame America First crowd wants to admit. Or the president it manufactured either. But, that is the way it is and will continue to be--if We the People want it to.

If We Forget Our Past, We'll Have Less Future

Terror is a boring subject. Except in the size (both actual and potential), there is utterly nothing new about terrorism.

It's all happened before. To us. In our recent past. As usual, we Americans have forgotten it all.

If the Geek had a mind to (and if he believed you would have the patience to read through it), he would go back to the late 19th Century when the noise of bombs exploding in pursuit of political goals nearly overpowered the sound of industry in American cities. It was a great time for terrorists of varying sorts, shooting and bombing their way to one presumed utopia or another.

Or the Geek might go back to the days immediately following the Great War (World War I, if you prefer.) Once again political objectives were pursued by bombs. Anarchist attacks on government and business figures killed few (other than inept bomb throwers) even though history of a sort was made one day in 1920 when a vehicle bomb (a horse drawn cart filled with dynamite) tore a good sized hole in lower Wall Street near the House of Morgan.

The bombing campaign at war's end had only one result. It propelled a politically ambitious US Attorney General named Palmer to initiate a highly publicised series of raids against supposed foreign subversives. This Red Scare constituted an assault against civil and constitutional rights far surpassing any committed to date under the badly mis-named USA Patriot Act.

Since the Geek spent some years teaching US history at the university level he is aware of the limited attention span of Americans regarding the past. So, we'll take only a very small step into our collective experience.

We'll go back not quite forty years. To the last (literally) explosive years of the Fabled Sixties. Specifically, the sixteen months between January 1969 and April 1970. The first of the Nixon years. The peak of the Vietnam War and its opposition.

The Long Year of the Bomber.

The Weather Underground was making and planting bombs. So also was the Puerto Rican nationalist group, FALN. Joining in the fatal fun were Croatian nationalists, right-wing Zionists, and other, smaller groups too numerous to reference.

During this sixteen month period there were more than 35, 000 bomb threats. Actual bombings numbered 4,330 and 1,175 attempted bombings. Most of these were small devices, many of a purely incendiary nature. The vast majority killed no one. Even so, forty-three people were killed across the country.

The bombers were complemented by the assassins. The Black Liberation Army and the various Black Panther groups preferred retail level killing, particularly of policemen.

Between the pistol shots and bombs (384 in New York City alone), it was hard to get a good night's sleep in most large American cities.

The motivation behind the bombs and bullets differed from group to group. The intent of all was the same--to terrorise. It didn't matter if the end goal was revolution or simply to end the war, the means employed was the same--terror.

The bombs and bullets did cause fear. The incidents were widely publicised in the media of the day. Some, such as the bombing of the Army Math Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which killed one graduate student, became major stories with long legs.

Long legs or not, the bombs and bullets and the transient anxiety they produced didn't bring about the results hoped for by the shooters and bomb layers.

The Nixon White House howled with outrage. Nixon's constitutional rights hating Attorney General, John Mitchell, grunted and threatened. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI lumbered into action. Local police forces received more Federal money with which to purchase new cop shop goodies including automatic weapons. (The relationship between M-16 toting cops and bombers in the night has always eluded the Geek.)

Congress funded the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and similar programs of dubious utility in that period's War on Terrorism, which had great benefit to recipients in the form of fatter paychecks and the aforementioned goodies.

Overall, life went on as before. We the People read the headlines, watched the if-it-bleeds-it-leads TV coverage and got on with our lives.

Barely more than a decade ago, a pair of loonies from the farthest fringes of the survivalist shore of our domestic political scene took it upon themselves to demonstrate frustration with the federal government by blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in what was, up until 9/11, the highest body count act of "terror" in US history. The Geek put quotation marks around the word terror because the act had no definable political purpose or goal.

The net effect was simply that law enforcement at all levels did what its members are paid to do. The act was investigated, perpetrators arrested, tried and convicted. Case closed.

The Unibomber of the Eighties and Nineties had, if his "Manifesto" is taken at face value, a political goal. He didn't like technology and thought it should be stopped. (If this constitutes a goal, it is in the same league with King Canute's attempt to roll back the tide.) The FBI blundered around for years getting nowhere slowly as the Unibomber's packages arrived from time to time. Before Uni's brother ratted him out, a few were wounded, one killed, and no one terrorised.

Since the first attempt on the World Trade Center, the scale of terrorist actions has shifted radically. So has the scale of the US response.

Other than those two complementary features, no other aspect of terrorism has altered. Before you object by bringing up foreign sponsorship, the Geek will engage in preemption.

Earlier waves of terror had foreign links as real as that provided by al-Qaeda. The anarchist terror attempts of a century ago were part and parcel of European anarchist movements. The post-WW I attacks were at least inspired, if not directly linked, with the leftest revolutionary groups in Eastern and Southern Europe.

The Croatian bombing at LaGuardia Airport 29 December 1975 was foreign. The US had no involvement with internal problems of Yugoslavia. We hadn't manufactured the country. Nor had our policies contributed to the internal frictions. Still, the Croatian Liberation Forces in a post-attack statement held the US responsible as it hadn't acted to force Belgrade to give Croatia its independence.

Go figure.

There is no doubting the responsibility of Libya for the downing of an American airliner over Scotland. This was a clear act of state sponsored terrorism. It didn't gain Libya anything positive.

Americans weren't terrorised even though passenger loads on transoceanic flights fell sharply for awhile. The US government changed its policy toward Libya to be sure. We got tougher.

In short, there is nothing new. We've seen it all before. As a nation we've lived through it all before. The events of 9/11 were tragic. The butcher's bill was greater than the aggregate of all previous terrorists acts.

Even with the oft-repeated warnings of worse yet to come, there is little reason to totally lose our collective cool. There is little reason for We the People to demand--or even allow--our government to engage in over-reactions whether these take the form of further reductions in rights and privacy or more ill-advised adventures in regime change.

During World War II there was a slogan. It was, "We did it before--we can do it again!"

Looking ahead from the vantage point of history, the new slogan should be, "We lived through it before. We can live through it again."