FACES AND PLACES: Blinded by ideological hubris (03/05/00)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Blinded by ideological hubris

One of the benefits of being on the left politically is that one need never apologize for blunders. As long as one is ideologically pure of heart, as long as one "cares," "feels your pain" and has the "best of intentions," there is no need to repent for promulgating ideas whose consequences lead to catastrophe and human misery.

There is a kind of solipsistic hubris that dominates the scale of those anxious to remake the world in their own image at your and my expense. Thomas Sowell calls such miscreates the "anointed." They have a "vision" and believe it is their duty to make the rest of us, the "benighted," "more aware of their ideals. They want to "help us grow," to "raise our consciousness."

One challenges the anointed at one's own peril. "Disagree with someone on the right, and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope," writes Joseph Epstein. "Disagree with someone on the left, and he as likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil," almost certainly an "extremist."

During the 1930s and 1940s Ukrainian Americans were vilified for portraying Stalin as a tyrant and mass murderer whose goal was world domination. We were "deluded, misguided nationalists" at best, "Nazis" at worse. We were spoilers who were disrupting the Soviet-American love-in. Joseph Davies, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador in Moscow, once described Stalin as a "democrat." A host of academics such as Harold Laski and Sir Bernard Pares in Great Britain, French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, and, more recently, Prof. Jerry Hough of Duke University willfully overlooked the gulag and other Soviet horrors because Soviet actions were "understandable." "You can't make an omelet," The New York Times' Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty once said, "without breaking a few eggs." While denying Ukraine's famine in print, Mr. Duranty was secretly informing the British foreign office that some 10 million would die of hunger.

Soviet behavior, the anointed told us, was a response to Western hostility. To demonstrate our good will, we were urged to disarm unilaterally or at least not to behave in a "bellicose" manner. Throughout most of the Cold War every American administration but one was careful not to "offend" the Soviets, especially the "hardliners" in the Kremlin.

The notion of an amoral, anointed class is not new. Fredrich Nietzche's concept of a superman, a person who was above the morality of the lumpenproletariat, the herd, was popular among some 19th century intellectuals as an antidote to Victorian morals. In her book "One Nation, Two Cultures," Gertrude Himmelfarb quotes Adam Smith's description of the "people of fashion" whose are prone to "vices of levity - luxury, wanton and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of intemperance, the breach of the two sexes ..." Among people of fashion vices are treated indulgently, while the common people (that's us) view them with "the utmost abhorrence and detestation."

The anointed are notorious for maintaining a double standard, one for themselves and another of the benighted. Consider, for example, the way the media treats African-Americans of the left compared to African-Americans of the right. When Jesse Jackson ran for president, he was lionized as a "black Moses." Although he holds no seminary diploma, and heads no religious congregation, his title is "reverend." Mr. Jackson is a man of the left who has marched against Western civilization studies at American universities and zero tolerance in American high schools, and in support of busing, abortion and affirmative action. Today, another African American, Alan Keyes, is running for president. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard, is steeped in American history and Western culture, opposes affirmative action, abortion and busing. Currently a talk-show host, Dr. Keyes is an author and a former ambassador. The press barely acknowledges his presence. Dr. Keyes is a man of the right and like other blacks with conservative views - Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams - they are consistently portrayed as "Uncle Toms."

When Vice-President Dan Quayle misspelled potato, the press wouldn't let him forget it. When Vice-President Al Gore misrepresents his family background by saying that his father lost his Senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - when his dad actually voted against it - the press gives Mr. Gore a pass. When Mr. Gore suggests that he invented the Internet, that his romancing of Tipper inspired the novel "Love Story," that he was against tobacco interests when he and his father voted for tobacco subsidies, and that he was always pro-choice when he wasn't, this too is largely ignored. Message? Misspelling is wrong, dissembling is not.

Patrick Buchanan supported John Demjanjuk and was called an anti-Semite. Mr. Demjanjuk was exonerated, but Pat received no apology. Fidel Castro destroyed Cuba's economy, shot thousands and established a totalitarian Communist regime. General Pinochet saved Chile from a Communist dictatorship and pushed his nation towards unparalleled prosperity. Fidel Catro visits Spain and receives a royal welcome. Spain indicts General Pinochet for war crimes and demands his extradition from England. If the general is to stand trial, it should be in Chile not Spain.

Nazism is dead and buried, and yet hardly a week passes without a book, an article, a monograph, a film or a History Channel presentation on Hitler and the crimes of Nazi Germany.

Communism, meanwhile, is alive and well in North Korea, China and Cuba, and yet there is scarcely a mention of the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot or Lazar Kaganovich. They're dead and no longer news, we are told. The liquidation of 6 million Jews is widely accepted as a genocide. The annihilation of 7 million Ukrainians is not. The Nazis were responsible for 25 million deaths. Communists killed four times as many people but remain merely a blip in America's memory bank.

Although the Soviet empire has collapsed, the anointed of the left will remain, fiercely unrepentant, enjoying their days on university campuses, in the media and in Hollywood, far "above" the hopelessly witless, huddled masses. The "people of fashion" will continue to ridicule the religious right while worshipping at the altar of Karl Marx; profanity and pornography will be depicted as free speech; perversion will be characterized as an alternative lifestyle.

Yesterday's abominations, it seems, have become today's celebrations. Excuse me if I skip the party!

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: mbkuropas@compuserve.com

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