The Left Side of History
Once again, the political Left, a term increasingly synonymous with today’s Democrat Party, is on the wrong side of history.
It’s nothing new. Whereas they’re accustomed to winning micro-political battles, they have yet to prevail in a macro, geopolitical struggle. Their closest approach to victory was in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution with its Soviet Union and near worldwide spread of socialist and communist governments. You remember. The world was to be transformed into a worker’s paradise. There are still plenty of commies—mostly in the universities teaching your young adults—but now they lack the requisite political power.
Both National Socialism (the Nazis) and Fascism were rooted in the labor movements that have always been the hallmark of the Left—the first and foremost seed they sow. But the Left downplayed Hitler’s atrocities until the tide was too strong to resist. They picketed the White House in opposition to our involvement in WWII.
They opposed our crucial mission to keep the Korean peninsula free. They didn’t understand its import to world morale, of standing up to communists and their adventurous spread, or of keeping a growing and increasingly important partner in global freedom and trade (Japan) stable. They never got it. They still don’t.
The Left saw president John F. Kennedy’s line in the sand during the Cuban Missile Crisis as reckless endangerment. They didn’t understand how America would have been geopolitically hamstrung in opposition to the worldwide spread of communism—with nuclear ballistic missiles 90 miles away. America would have been demoralized and the democratic process would likely have yielded pacifism. The Left still doesn’t get it, even today.
When the need to halt the worldwide spread of communism again presented itself in Vietnam, the Left (and John Kerry) not only opposed the mission, but also turned America into the bad guys and communist North Vietnam and China into the good guys. China was busy carrying out a "Cultural Revolution" in order to stamp out all vestiges of individuality, aesthetic beauty, and entrepreneurial spirit, which involved destroying untold riches in art and imprisoning or killing anyone who might be capable of sowing discontent among the comrades. Millions were starving. The purpetrators of these atrocities were the Left’s good guys.
When president Ronald Reagan stood up and challenged the communists, both morally and materially, he was condemned on both counts: his rhetoric unbecoming; his military buildup strategically destabilizing. When the Soviet Union fell, it was the military buildup that was touted, but it was the moral stand that ultimately did it. The Left opposed both.
The Left stood against everything required to prevail against the greatest threats to freedom in the 20th century. All told, the Communists, the Nazis, and the Fascists murdered close to 200 million innocent people. Two-Hundred Million. 200,000,000. The Left was on the wrong side of every single effective measure we undertook to defeat these murderous psychopaths globally—to relegate their "intellectual" cheerleaders to our universities, environmental organizations, and diplomatic corps.
But like a beautiful Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor being turned into an explosive inferno, or a convoy of ships steaming forth to plant instruments of heinous death and destruction in your backyard—like a cold slap in the face—September 11, 2001 was the day we learned that Islamic Terrorism was a global threat, as geopolitically destabilizing as anything we’ve ever seen. Those who fully understand the nature of this threat in the context of history and radical religious fervor* fully understand what we are up against and what it will take to defeat this threat. The Left and the majority of today’s democrats do not number amongst those who understand the nature of the radical Islamic threat to freedom. Plenty more don’t care, and some even hate America and long for its destruction through whatever means will do the job.
The Left cares for people only to the extent they are useful toward a political end. They "care" for laborers because laborers with menial jobs have little to lose and can be persuaded to risk their menial jobs and lives for the chance of a promised "paradise." It’s a ready-made army in ideological harmony—that adds up to morale.
Today, the Left cares for the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq only to the extent that they can be useful in defeating the most effective leader against the further spread of Leftism that we’ve seen in some time, president George W. Bush.
Voting and democracy are overrated, to be sure, and certainly not the ideal. But we should be willing to accept it, any day, over the abject cultural squalor that is the modern Middle East. Their religious-based culture requires renaissance. Democracy and free markets are a logical first step. Following marvelously successful elections in both Afghanistan and Iraq, elections in which people risked their lives and enthusiastically participated, they have a good chance at that.
The citizens of these two countries, God bless them, have inserted themselves in geopolitical history by subjecting the Left to a swift kick in the teeth. And this time, to the democrats as well. Democrats used to distinguish themselves from the hard Left by setting moral limits to their politics. That sort of democrat is typified by an FDR, a Truman, a JFK, a Zell Miller, and a Joe Lieberman. I’ll curse each one of these politicians for their immoral and economically impractical social programs, but when the future of the free world is at stake, they’re going to stand by my side, and I theirs. There’s no doubt about that. More important, the’re going to stand up for the right reason—for moral reasons—not just to cater to some political faction.
Let there be no further doubt that none on the Left, and few democrats, anymore, can be entrusted with safeguarding American freedom. And certainly, none of them are charitable enough to spread it—even when doing so is America’s first and most effective line of defense—and uplifting millions in the process. How long will they remain on the Left side of History?
* Communism, though "atheist" and "scientific," was as radically fervent a religion as the world had ever seen.
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