4

The Left’s Moral Record

THE ENDURING MYTH OF modern life is that the Left has been the greatest force for good in the world since its inception. That it has done some good is undeniable, and we will address this issue. But the reason for the endurance of this myth is not that it is based on truth but that the Left’s story is told…by the Left. It is related in almost all schools and in almost all the media of the Western world.

On balance, the Left’s moral record is among the worst of any organized group or idea in history. In the relatively brief period of time it has existed it has brought more death and misery to more people in more places than any other doctrine.

Of course, the greatest of the Left’s evils have been committed by the far Left, by Communists. But much of the non-Communist Left supported the far Left until its atrocities became too well-known to deny. Even excluding Communism, the Left’s record is one of almost continual moral confusion.

Virtually everything Leftism has touched it has made worse—morals, religion, art, education from elementary school to university, and the economic condition of the welfare states it created. There is a very real question of whether Western Europe is viable—and it is a question largely because of what Leftism has wrought there.

Communism: One of History’s Great Evils

NOTHING IN WORLD HISTORY has equaled in such a short period of time the suffering brought about by Communism. Listed below are the numbers of civilians murdered by Communists in the twentieth century. These are civilians, not military casualties; and they are not civilian casualties of war. They are innocent civilians murdered by Communist regimes. The statistics are taken from the work of French scholars who wrote The Black Book of Communism, first published in France in 1997 and two years later in the United States. For those who assume that the book was published by some Right-wing press, it should be noted that the American edition was published by Harvard University Press (though one wonders how many courses at Harvard or any other university assign this book).

The numbers are generally considered conservative:

 

Soviet Union:	20 million
China:	65 million
Vietnam:	1 million
North Korea:	2 million
Cambodia:	2 million
Eastern Europe:	1 million
Latin America:	150,000
Africa:	1.7 million
Afghanistan:	1.5 million

 

“The total approaches 100 million people killed.”¹

These figures do not include the civilians enslaved, tortured, and raped. And they certainly do not include the billion or so people whose lives were ruined by deprivation of basic necessities of life and of elementary human rights.

Some will object to including Communist totalitarianism and mass murder in a book on the Left. They will argue that the vast majority of people on the Left outside of Communist countries cannot fairly be saddled with the crimes of the Communists.

There are a number of responses to this objection:

First, I am not saddling all people on the Left with what Communism has done. There were always individuals on the democratic Left who were in the anti-Communist camp. But it is fair to hold Leftism responsible for Communism and what it has wrought because Communism is a direct, though not necessarily inevitable, product of Leftism. Were there no Left, there never would have been Communism. On the other hand, were there no Right, there still would have been Nazism. Nazism was produced by racism, nationalist chauvinism, and it was specific to Germany.

Second, while not all Leftists supported Communism, and some strongly opposed it, most Leftists supported it (unlike many liberals, who, until the Vietnam War, were strong anti-Communists). Very many leading artists, writers, professors, and other intellectuals in non-Communist countries admired Communist regimes. And among those who did not, very few were anti-Communist. The Left successfully demonized anti-Communism as a Right-wing movement—which, to the everlasting credit of the Right, turned out to be largely true.

Third, there is no Right-wing equivalent to Communism’s record of enslavement and murder. The only competitor was Nazism, which murdered, according to the latest data compiled by Yale professor Timothy Snyder, about 12 million civilians.² Even if one labels Nazism “Right-wing”—and the truth is that it was neither Right-wing nor Left-wing; it was a uniquely German form of murderous racism—non-democratic Leftist regimes murdered about ten times as many innocents as non-democratic Rightist ones and enslaved hundreds of times more.

Fourth, while major figures on the Left supported Lenin, then Stalin, then Mao, then Castro and other Communist tyrants, there were virtually no conservative or Right-wing figures of any prominence who defended Nazism. And after World War II, there were no Nazi parties beyond a few cranks in some societies, while there remain vibrant Communist parties throughout the world.

The number of innocents killed by Leftist movements dwarfs the numbers killed by any other movement in a comparable period of time at any time in history, and certainly in the modern world. The Church, a favorite target of the Left, hardly competes. For example, in its nearly five hundred years of existence the Inquisition killed approximately five thousand people. And that ended more than five hundred years ago, when barbarity was the norm.

WHY DOESN’T COMMUNISM HAVE
AS BAD A NAME AS NAZISM?

Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused, why is Communist so much less a term of revulsion than Nazi? When people describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, why do they use the terms Nazi or fascist but almost never Communist? And, unlike Hitler, Communist mass murderers are rarely used as examples of evil incarnate. Sometimes, in fact, they are used in a heroic or even entertaining way. There are “Mao” restaurants in various cities in the Western world. It is unlikely that there are any “Hitler” restaurants in the West. So, too, while Che Guevara T-shirts and posters are ubiquitous, there is nothing similar celebrating a Nazi, or fascist, or perhaps any non-Communist killer.

Here are some reasons: 1. Communists murdered their own people; the Nazis murdered others. Mao was responsible for the deaths of about 65 million people—nearly every one in peacetime—all of them Chinese. Likewise, the tens of millions of people that Stalin had killed were nearly all Soviet citizens. The Nazis, on the other hand, killed relatively few fellow Germans. Their victims were Jews, Slavs, and other “non-Aryan” groups.

“World opinion”—that vapid, amoral concept—deems the murder of members of one’s group less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in Congo elicits virtually no attention from “world opinion.” Between 1998 and 2008, according to the International Rescue Committee, 5.4 million people in Congo were killed, and virtually no one in the world knows this.³ But if a few Iraqi prisoners are sexually humiliated in an American-run prison, or if one Palestinian dies at the hands of an Israeli soldier, the story is on the front pages of the world’s newspapers.

2. Communism was based on altruistic-sounding theories while Nazism was based on heinous-sounding theories. Communism’s words are far more intellectually and morally appealing than the unintellectual racism of Nazism. As a result, the monstrous evils of Communists and Marxists are dismissed as perversions of a beautiful doctrine.^*

Nazi atrocities, on the other hand, have been perceived (correctly) as the logical and inevitable results of Nazi ideology.

3. There is widespread ignorance of Communist atrocities compared to those of the Nazis. As Barry Gewen, an editor of the New York Times Book Review, acknowledged, “We are all familiar with personal accounts of the Holocaust and the Gulag, less so with descriptions of the torture chamber that was Mao’s China.”⁴ Whereas both Right and Left loathe Nazism and teach its evils in detail, the Left’s dominance of the teaching profession has meant that Communist atrocities are rarely taught.

Moreover, when Communist atrocities are taught, they are rarely labeled “Communist,” let alone “Leftist.” Soviet atrocities are attributed to “Stalin” or “Stalinism”; Chinese atrocities, when they are noted at all, are attributed to “Maoism”; Cambodia’s genocide is attributed to Pol Pot, and North Korea’s autogenocide through starvation and concentration camps is blamed on Kim Il Sung and his successors, never on Communism. Nazism, on the other hand, is blamed by name for its atrocities—rarely “Hitlerism”—and often labeled “fascism” so as to lump Nazism with Right-wing groups the Left labels “fascist.”

Another reason for the relative ignorance of Communist atrocities is that Germany has thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, taken responsibility for them, and attempted to atone for them. Russians have not done anything similar regarding Lenin’s or Stalin’s horrors. Indeed, an ex-KGB operative, Vladimir Putin, became the most powerful man in post-Soviet Russia; Lenin remained widely revered; and, in the words of University of London Russian historian Donald Rayfield, “people still deny by assertion or implication, Stalin’s holocaust.”⁵ China is even worse. That country has thus far exposed no crimes of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. The image of Mao is ubiquitous in China, and the greatest mass murderer and enslaver of all time remains officially revered in China. Until Russia and China—and the world’s Left—do what Germany has done and acknowledge and report the monstrous evils they—and Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Cuban Communists—have committed, humanity will remain much less aware of Communism’s evils than those of Nazism.

4. Communism won and Nazism lost World War II. The victors write history.

5. Nothing exactly matches the Holocaust. The rounding up of every possible man, woman, child, and baby of one ethnic/religious group and sending them to die is unparalleled. The Communists killed far more people than the Nazis did but did not match the Holocaust in the systematization of murder. The uniqueness of the Holocaust as well as the enormous attention paid to it since then has helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than Communism.

6. Finally, in the view of the Left, which is the prevailing view in the Western world, the last “good war” America fought was World War II, the war against Nazism and against Japanese fascism. The Left does not regard America’s wars against Communist regimes as good wars. The war against Vietnamese Communism is regarded as immoral and the war against Korean (and Chinese) Communism is largely ignored.

The Decline of Europe

SINCE 1960, THE LEFT has always pointed to Europe in order to prove how effective Left-wing policies are. The American Left has sought to transform America into the image of Western Europe. We are living, however, at precisely the time during which Left-wing European dreams are crumbling. The Left-wing assault on God and religion, specifically Christianity, has left Europe morally weakened—why fight for anything or for anyone?—and secularism has bred a crushing materialist ennui.

Moreover the Left-wing welfare state is financially unsustainable. The president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, acknowledged in 2010, “We can’t finance our social model.”

European debt—the result of the welfare state and of far too many government employees—will either lead to the end of the European Union, the end of the welfare state, a depression, or all three.

And the third pillar of Left-wing Europe—multiculturalism—also failed. In 2011, the three major European leaders—British prime minister David Cameron, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and German chancellor Angela Merkel—all declared multiculturalism a failure.

Cameron: “Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream…”⁶ “We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values.”⁷

Sarkozy: “‘We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him,’ he [Sarkozy] said in a television interview in which he declared the concept [multiculturalism] a failure.”⁸

Merkel: “The approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side by side and to enjoy each other…has failed, utterly failed.”⁹

Multiculturalism is a Left-wing-induced failure in the United States as well. Here is a perfect example of where the American value system, with “E Pluribus Unum” as one of its pillars, is needed in every society.

All these Left-wing ideas have led to the decline of the great European civilization.

Outside of sports and popular entertainment, how many living Germans, French, Austrians, or even Brits can any outsiders name? Even well-informed people who love art and literature and who follow developments in science and medicine would be hard-pressed to come up with names. In terms of greatness in literature, art, music, the sciences, philosophy, and medical breakthroughs, Europe’s creativity is a shadow of what it was less than a hundred years ago. If you asked anyone the same question then, a plethora of world-renowned names would have flowed. Obvious examples would include (in alphabetical order): Brecht, Buber, Cezanne, Chekhov, Curie, Debussy, Eiffel, Einstein, Freud, Hesse, Kafka, Mahler, Mann, Marconi, Pasteur, Picasso, Proust, Strauss, Stravinsky, Tolstoy, Zeppelin, Zola. Not to mention the European immortals who lived in the century before them: Beethoven, Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Hugo, Kierkegaard, Manet, Monet, Mozart, and Van Gogh, to name only a few.

What happened?

What happened is that Europe, with a few exceptions, has lost its sense of purpose, and therefore largely lost its creativity, intellectual excitement, industrial innovation, and risk taking. Europe’s creative energy has been largely sapped. Europeans are marrying less and less and are having so few children that most European countries’ populations are in decline. There are many noble European individuals, but there aren’t many creative, dynamic, or entrepreneurial ones—and many of them have chosen to live in America. The issues that preoccupy most Europeans are overwhelmingly material and self-centered: How many hours per week will I have to work? How much annual vacation time will I have? How many social benefits can I preserve (or increase)? How early can I retire? How can my country avoid fighting against anyone or for anyone?

This happened thanks to secularism, the big and powerful welfare state, and the war against national identity and culture. Any one of them alone is destructive to society. Together they are lethal. Even if one holds that religion is false, only a dogmatic and irrational secularist can deny that it was religion in the Western world that provided the impetus or backdrop for nearly all the great artistic, literary, political, economic, and even scientific advances of the West.

Religion in the West raised all the great questions of life: Why are we here? Is there purpose to existence? Were we deliberately made? Is there something after death? Are morals objective or only a matter of personal preference? Do rights come from the state or from the Creator? And religion gave positive responses: We are here because a benevolent God made us. There is, therefore, ultimate purpose to life. Good and evil are real. Death is not the end. Human rights are inherent since they come from God. And so on.

Secularism drains all this out of life. No one made us. Death is the end. We are no more significant than any other creatures. We are the result of chance. Make up your own meaning (existentialism) because life has none. Good and evil are ultimately euphemisms for “I like” and “I dislike.”

When religion dies, creativity begins to die. Take Russia, for example. Christian Russia was backward in many ways, but it gave the world Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky. Once Christianity was suppressed, if not killed, Russia became a cultural wasteland (with a few exceptions like Shostakovich and Solzhenitsyn, the latter a devout Christian). This was largely the result of Lenin, Stalin, and Communism, but even where Communism did not take over, the decline of religion in Europe meant a decline in human creativity—except for nihilistic and/or absurd isms, which have greatly increased. As G. K. Chesterton noted at the end of the nineteenth century, when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. One not only thinks of the violent isms—Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, fascism, Maoism, and Nazism—but of all the non-violent isms that have become substitute religions, such as feminism, environmentalism, and socialism.

The state saps creativity and dynamism just as much as secularism does. Why do anything for yourself when the state will do it for you? Why take care of others when the state will do it for you? Why have ambition when the state is there to ensure that few or no individuals are rewarded more than others? America has been the center of energy and creativity in almost every area of life because it has remained far more religious than any other industrialized Western democracy and because enough of its citizens, until recently at least, have rejected the welfare state model and its mentality.

The Left argues that the state is essential to artistic excellence, but if this were the case, we would be living in a golden age of art. We aren’t.

 

EUROPE’S NON-AMERICAN VALUES

The Large Welfare State

Europe believes in socialism—meaning the large welfare state, not pure socialism, which very few people believe in and which, in its pure definition, differs little from Communism—while Amxerica believes in free market capitalism. That is why Left-wing parties in Europe are nearly all named “Socialist” or “Social Democrat”—not because they advocate pure socialism, but because they advocate the welfare state in which the state is by far the most powerful force in society. The Left in America, and especially the Democratic Party, take offense when called or compared to socialists, but the critique is not meant literally. It refers to the way Western Europeans use the term. The proof is that one would be hard-pressed to name a single significant position about which the socialist parties of Europe and the Democratic Party in America differ.

Most Western Europeans believe in socialism as fervently as religious Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe in their respective religions. To many Americans, socialism may be only an economic system, but for Western Europeans and for the Left in America, it has largely replaced Christianity as their faith. That is why George Will calls Britain’s National Health Service “the established religion” of Britain. How could it not be? It became, as he notes, the sixth-largest employer in the world—behind the Chinese army, Walmart, China National Petroleum, China State Grid Corporation, and Indian Railways.¹⁰

The United States not only rejects socialism, but it has been the chief obstacle to its spread—because of its power culturally, militarily, religiously, and economically.

Opposition to Nationalism

As a result of the massive bloodshed of the nationalism-based world wars, Western Europeans concluded that the abolition of national identities is a moral necessity. Europe’s elite decided to believe in Europe and in the United Nations rather than in their individual nations. An English protestor quoted in the Los Angeles Times explained his protest of the war in Iraq in terms of support of the United Nations, not Britain: “[British prime minister Tony Blair] has totally misjudged how dangerous this has been to the United Nations. And we believe in the United Nations.”¹¹

While Europeans were losing faith in their national identities, Americans continued to affirm their faith in their national identity as vigorously as ever. While Europeans and the American Left have more faith in the moral judgment of the United Nations—where Libya under Qaddafi chaired the Human Rights Commission and where dictatorships like Syria and China vote in the Security Council—most Americans have more faith in America.

Pacifism

In Europe, another major ideological consequence of the two world wars was widespread belief that war is wrong. America, on the other hand, believes that morality often demands fighting evil.

The German example is particularly telling. Given how much the Germans, to their credit, have faced up to their terrible past—specifically the Holocaust and World War II—one would assume that Germany had learned great lessons from that past. But it seems that with all their knowledge about Nazism, Germans have learned little about good and evil. They cannot confront and often cannot even recognize evil. A nation that saw Nazism defeated solely by armies has essentially embraced pacifism. A nation that saw what appeasement of evil leads to has come to embrace appeasement.

After 1945, one would have expected German leaders to stand up and say, “My fellow Germans, we know a Hitler when we see one; therefore all decent people must confront Leonid Brezhnev, or Saddam Hussein, or the Ayatollah Khomeini.” But no German leader stood up to say this. Instead, a German minister of justice compared an American president to Hitler.¹² So, too, we would have expected German leaders to stand up and say, “My fellow Germans, we know genocidal anti-Semitism when we see it, and we see it in the Arab world.” But no German leader stood up to say this, either.

Instead of learning to fight evil, Germans concluded that to fight is evil.

Unlike the United States, where members of the military are highly esteemed, German troops, when they return home, are warned not to wear their army uniform in public lest somebody beat them up:

“A staff sergeant, who had been risking his life almost daily outside Kunduz [Afghanistan], recalled a trip to Berlin during which he was wearing his uniform at a train stop. He was told to make himself scarce or he would be beaten up. ‘It was shocking,’ said the sergeant, Marcel B., who, according to German military rules, could not be fully identified. ‘We’re looked down on. With American soldiers, they tell me how they receive recognition, how people just come up to them and say they’re doing good.’…Reinhold Robbe, the German Parliament’s military commissioner, said he remained impressed by the memory of seeing on trips to Tampa and Washington and El Paso that ‘complete strangers are buying soldiers beer.’”¹³

Secularism

European values affirm secularism and a godless life, while America remains the most religious among the industrialized democracies. That is a major reason that the predominance of America, a religious country that affirms the religion the European elites have rejected, infuriates many Europeans. One consequence of Europeans’ secularism is a disdain for moral absolutes and moral judgments. Whether it was President Reagan calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” or President Bush labeling North Korea, Iran, and Iraq an “axis of evil,” most Europeans (and the American Left) found such moral labeling contemptible.

Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin suggested that the Great Seal of the United States depict the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Just as the Israelites needed to leave Egypt, they and the other Founders knew that America had to separate from Europe. It is truer now than ever.

The Left’s Moral Confusion

Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing.

—Miecyslaw Kasprzyk, Polish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust ¹⁴

IT TOOK A POLISH RESCUER of Jews in the Holocaust, cited sixty years after the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp, to best describe those people who cannot recognize, or refuse to acknowledge, the difference between good and evil.

Since the 1960s, with few exceptions, on the greatest questions of good and evil, the world’s Left has been supportive of, or opposed to the opponents of, great evils. Though not necessarily pro-Communist, the Left was overwhelmingly anti-anti-Communist. Much of the Left would not identify Communist regimes as evil, and leading Leftists would offer strong support for Left-wing dictators from Ho to Castro to Chavez; have supported the terror-supporting, corrupt Palestinian Authority against the liberal democracy of Israel; and opposed the war against the Islamist-Baathist terrorists in post-Saddam Iraq. Within the United States, the Left has undermined the religious bases of American society, damaged universities, nearly ruined public education, and come close to bankrupting many local and state governments. As for Europe, as noted above, that once-great continent may simply not survive what the Left has done to it.

Leftists were morally confused when they admired Communist tyrants; when they condemned American arms as the greatest threat to world peace during and after the Cold War; when they condemned Israel’s destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor; and on and on. The Left frequently does “not know the difference between good and evil.”

One reason is naïveté. From Communist evil to the evil of Islamism to the evil of violent criminals, naïveté about evil has been the key ingredient of Left-wing moral confusion. The day after Hamas, the Palestinian organization committed to Israel’s destruction, won an electoral landslide in Gaza, the Los Angeles Times editorialized, “Most Palestinians, like most Israelis, want peace.”¹⁵

That was wishful thinking. Most Palestinians have not wanted peace with Israel; they have not even recognized Israel as a Jewish state. To the extent they want peace, they have wanted peace without the Jewish State of Israel. In the words of an Israeli ambassador to the United States:

Two Israeli peace proposals, in 2000 and 2008…met virtually all of the Palestinians’ demands for a sovereign state in the areas won by Israel in the 1967 war—in the West Bank, Gaza and even East Jerusalem. But Palestinian President Yasser Arafat rejected the first offer and Abbas ignored the second, for the very same reason their predecessors spurned the 1947 Partition Plan.

Each time, accepting a Palestinian State meant accepting the Jewish State, a concession the Palestinians were unwilling to make.

That is the issue. Not settlements. Not boundaries. The Palestinians, like most of their fellow Arabs and like many Muslims elsewhere, have never acknowledged that the Jews came home to Israel because they have never acknowledged that the Jews ever had a national home there. And they don’t even acknowledge that the Jews are a people.¹⁶

In September 2011, in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, I interviewed Ghassan Khatib, director of government media for the Palestinian Authority and the spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. He reiterated the same point: There is no Jewish people (only a religion called Judaism) and therefore there should be no Jewish state.¹⁷

But to the naive Left, “Most Palestinians, like most Israelis, want peace.”

Another example of the Left’s morally confused worldview is its tendency to blame many of the victims of Islamic terror.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, one widespread reaction among academics and in the media was to ask, “Why do they hate us?”—the implication being that America had done bad things to Muslims to arouse such hatred. The Left’s response was not to absolve the terrorists from all moral blame, but to have America share it.

Was the Danish newspaper at least partially at fault for the deadly Muslim riots that followed its printing of cartoons depicting Muhammad? On the Left, the answer was yes. To fully blame the Muslim mobs who killed and burned and maimed would be to engage in Islamophobia.

Was Israel partially responsible for the terror unleashed against it? For many on the Left, the answer has been yes: Given the fact that Palestinians have no conventional weapons, what else are they supposed to do to rid themselves of Israeli occupation?

Was Spain at least partially responsible for the Islamist terror attacks on Madrid trains, killing 191 people and injuring 1,500 others? That is what the Spanish Left argued—that the attacks were the result of Spain sending troops into Iraq—and the argument led them to electoral victory and to removing all Spanish troops from Iraq.

Was France at least partially responsible for the mostly Muslim rioters who burned and looted for a month in 2005? For the Left, the answer was, of course. As the BBC reported on November 5, 2005, then interior minister “Sarkozy’s much-quoted description of urban vandals as ‘rabble’ a few days before the riots began is said by many to have already created tension.” Calling rabble “rabble” caused them to act like to rabble.

A man named Michael Berg, a Green Party candidate for Congress from Delaware, provides an excellent example of Left-wing moral thinking. Like many others on the Left, Berg expressed more antipathy toward President George W. Bush than toward the Islamist murderers Bush was fighting. Indeed, in Berg’s view President Bush was “more of a terrorist than Zarqawi,” the leading terrorist in Iraq at the time.

What makes Berg’s opinion noteworthy is that Zarqawi had slit the throat of his son, Nick Berg, on an infamous Internet video. Berg’s Left-wing worldview led him to say, “Zarqawi felt my son’s breath on his hand as [he] held the knife against his throat. Zarqawi had to look in his eyes when he did it. George Bush sits there glassy-eyed in his office with pieces of paper and condemns people to death. That to me is a real terrorist.”

When asked two years later on CNN about his reaction to the death of Zarqawi, his son’s torturer and murderer, Berg responded: “Well, my reaction is I’m sorry whenever any human being dies. Zarqawi is a human being.”

The incredulous CNN interviewer, Soledad O’Brien, then asked Berg, “At some point, one would think, is there a moment when you say, ‘I’m glad he’s dead, the man who killed my son’?” Berg responded: “No. How can a human being be glad that another human being is dead?”

One might add, as a postscript to the upside-down moral world of pacifism, another awful doctrine that appeals to the Left, talk-show host Michael Medved asked Berg if he would have killed Zarqawi as the terrorist was about to cut his son’s throat. Berg said he would instead have thrown his body in front of the knife. As Medved noted, that would have only ensured that two innocent people would be murdered.

Like other Left-wing international and domestic groups dedicated to human or civil rights, Amnesty International (AI), which was founded largely to combat torture, devolved into another predictably anti-American, morally confused organization. That devolution was made apparent when Amnesty listed the United States as a major violator of human rights. On what grounds did the organization label the United States, perhaps the freest country in the world, with major protections of civil and human rights, a violator of human rights? On the grounds that the United States executes murderers.

To the world’s Left, every murderer has a human right not to be executed. Therefore a country that executes a mass murderer is in the same moral league as countries that execute political dissidents.

Whenever Amnesty International takes a position that is also held by the Left, it is likely to be morally confused, as occurred in 2005 when the then secretary general of the organization, Irene Khan, branded the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay “the gulag of our times.” After moral outrage in the United States and presumably among survivors of the Soviet Gulag, Amnesty International defended Khan. Among her defenders was the American head of AI, William Schultz, who said on the television show Hardball that there is a difference only “in scale” between Gulag and Guantánamo, but otherwise the comparison is apt.

Here is the scale. Is the comparison apt? At Guantánamo at that time, there were about 520 prisoners, the vast majority, if not all, of whom were rounded up in antiterror warfare. They were deemed nonuniformed terrorists and therefore not subject to Geneva convention rules on prisoners. But they were, as even Schultz acknowledged, provided with medical care, with a fine diet that honored their religious codes, and allowed to practice their religion.

On the other hand, the 20 to 30 million prisoners sent to the string of camps across the Soviet Union known as the Gulag Archipelago were innocent of any crime, obtained no medical care, were served portions of food often inadequate to human survival, and were frozen and worked to death in the millions. Every prisoner of the Gulag would have given anything to be a prisoner in Guantánamo.

Comparing Guantánamo to “Gulag” smeared America and trivialized the suffering and death of tens of millions of people. But smearing America and trivializing evil are characteristics of the Left. The New York Times editorial page defended AI’s Gulag-Guantánamo comparison, and I found no major Left-wing media, other than the Washington Post, that denounced it. The reason the Post condemned Amnesty International was that Anne Applebaum, author of a definitive work on the Gulag, sat on the newspaper’s editorial board. She knew how immoral the comparison was. She actually knew what happened in the Gulag. I believe that most members of the press do not, given the ignorance of Communist atrocities among most of the world’s journalists. Proof? An Associated Press report printed in the Washington Post and countless other newspapers described the Gulag this way: “Thousands of prisoners of the so-called gulags died from hunger, cold, harsh treatment and overwork.”¹⁸

“Thousands”? Having graduates of universities that rarely teach about Communist mass murder, it is understandable that the Associated Press would write of “thousands of prisoners of the so-called gulags.” Imagine, however, if a mainstream media organization had written about “thousands of Jewish prisoners of so-called Nazi concentration camps died from hunger, cold, harsh treatment, and overwork.”

For the record, here are some comparisons between the Gulag and Guantánamo as compiled from Applebaum’s book by David Bosco.¹⁹

Individuals detained: Gulag—20 million. Guantánamo—750 total.

Number of camps: Gulag—476 separate camp complexes comprising thousands of individual camps. Guantánamo—five small camps on the U.S. military base in Cuba.

Reasons for imprisonment: Gulag—Hiding grain; owning too many cows; need for slave labor; being Jewish; being Finnish; being religious; being middle class; having had contact with foreigners; refusing to sleep with the head of Soviet counterintelligence; telling a joke about Stalin. Guantánamo—Fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan; being suspected of links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Red Cross visits: Gulag—none that Bosco could find. Guantánamo—regular visits from January 2002.

Deaths as a result of poor treatment: Gulag—at least 2–3 million (Bosco inexplicably understates). Guantánamo—no reports of prisoner deaths.

Irene Khan’s comparison of Guantánamo to Gulag was morally grotesque. But it was not grotesque to Amnesty International, the New York Times, or others on the Left.

Another example of Left-wing moral confusion was its reaction to a lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI on September 12, 2006, at the University of Regensburg, in Germany. In the course of the lecture on the subject of faith and reason, Pope Benedict cited the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus (1350–1425). The emperor had some critical things to say about Islam, specifically about the relative unimportance of reason in Islam and the spread of Islam via the sword.

The speech resulted in riots in parts of the Islamic world and intense criticism of the pope by the world’s Left. The same people who have charged that Pope Pius XII was too silent about the evils of his time (specifically, the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry) took Benedict to task for even suggesting that something was morally awry within the Islamic world.

The New York Times editorial page argued that Benedict will create only more anti-Western Muslim violence. But that was exactly the excuse defenders of Pius XII offered for why Pius XII did not speak out more forcefully—that he was afraid it would engender only more Nazi violence against the Jews and others. Yet Pius’s critics understandably dismissed that excuse out of hand.

Karen Armstrong, a widely read scholar of religion as well as a former nun, wrote of Pius XII that his “apparent failure to condemn the Nazis has become a notorious scandal.” Moral and logical consistency suggest that she would welcome a pope who did confront today’s greatest evils. But she joined those condemning Pope Benedict. She wrote (putting these arguments in the mouths of affronted Muslims with whom she sympathized): “The Catholic Church is ill-placed to condemn violent jihad when it has itself…under Pope Pius XII, tacitly condoned the Nazi Holocaust.”

The argument can only be explained by the Left’s desire to condemn the Catholic Church and to defend Islam. How do you condemn the silence of one pope when confronted with evil in his time and condemn another pope when confronting evil in his time? And, if indeed the Church is guilty of condoning evil in the past, why does that render it “hypocritical” to confront evil in the present? If my grandfather was a murderer, am I a hypocrite for condemning murder?

John Cornwell, the author of a scathingly critical book about Pius XII, Hitler’s Pope, also condemned Pope Benedict. He described the pope’s words about Muhammad and Islamic violence as “incendiary” and “abrasive” (calling Pius XII “Hitler’s Pope” was not incendiary and abrasive?), and he criticized Benedict for “having said that dialogue with Islam was difficult.”

Another illustration of the Left’s inverted moral universe concerns Cuba.

For example, in April 2009, seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus²⁰ visited Cuba, where they met with the dictators of Cuba, Fidel and Raul Castro. They were impressed with Fidel Castro, the longest-reigning dictator in the world, the man who deprived generations of Cubans of the most fundamental human rights.

Representative Laura Richardson: “He looked right into my eyes and said, ‘How can we help you? How can we help President Obama?’”

Representative Bobby Rush: “I think that what really surprised me, but also endeared me to him was his keen sense of humor, his sense of history and his basic human qualities…. He drank water, we drank water, nothing else was served, but that was just fine! I was, after all, in the presence of history…. In my household, I told Castro, he is known as the ultimate survivor.”

Regarding this last comment, columnist Mona Charen pithily noted: “Funny how easy it is to survive when you don’t hold elections.”²¹

But most egregious was that these black members of Congress would not even meet with the leading black dissident in Cuba, who was on a hunger strike at the very time the CBC members visited.²²

On its website, the Congressional Black Caucus calls itself “the conscience of the Congress since 1971.” Another good example of Left-wing self-esteem.

The number of Leftists in the arts who visited and praised Castro was probably as proportionately large as the number of Leftists in politics who did so. Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, known for his noble work outside of filmmaking as well as for his morally significant films such as Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, visited Fidel Castro in November 2002. He described his meeting as “the eight most important hours of my life.”²³

Spielberg’s comment is an example of good men being misled because of their Leftism.^*

The Left and Israel is another area where the Left confuses moral norms.

Just as anti-Americanism finds a home on the Left, so does hostility to Israel. Virtually every Left-wing group in the Western world has been active in undermining Israel’s security, economy, and often even its legitimacy as a Jewish state. This is true of Left-wing labor unions (outside the United States), political parties (other than the Democratic Party in the United States), religious groups, media, and professors, as well as feminist, gay rights, and civil rights groups. Even the American Library Association has sponsored anti-Israel events.

Here is a small list of the many boycotts of Israel and/or economic divestment from Israel. All are Left-wing organizations.

• In 2004, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted to “initiate a process of phased selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel.”²⁴
• In 2005, a major regional council of Norway passed a motion calling for a comprehensive boycott of Israeli goods. The council, Sør-Trøndelag, includes Trondheim, Norway’s third-largest city.²⁵
• In 2006, the Ontario division of Canada’s largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, voted to support an international campaign to boycott Israel.²⁶
• Shortly thereafter the Congress of South African Trade Unions published a letter expressing their support for the Canadian union’s boycott of Israel.²⁷
• In 2006, the Church of England’s General Synod overwhelmingly voted to divest from companies whose products are used by Israel in the Palestinian territories. The Archbishop of Canterbury voted for divestment.²⁸
• In 2007, Britain’s biggest journalists union, the forty-thousand-member National Union of Journalists, voted in favor of “a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions, and to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government.”²⁹
• In 2008, Ireland’s largest public sector and services trade union, the Irish Municipal, Public, and Civil Trade Union, endorsed a boycott of Israeli goods and services.³⁰
• In 2009, Britain’s 6.5-million member labor federation the Trade Union Congress called for a consumer-led boycott and sanctions campaign against Israel. The Fire Brigade Union, Britain’s largest trade union, Unite, and the largest public sector union, Unison, all called for a complete boycott of all Israeli products.³¹
• Professors and students in most universities in the Western world regularly sponsor anti-Israel days, anti-Israel weeks, divestment seminars, etc.

The power of Leftist ideas such as hostility to Israel is so great that some of the most anti-Israel and anti-Jewish Leftist voices are those of Left-wing Jews.

Norman Finkelstein is one such example. The son of Holocaust survivors, he is a former assistant professor at DePaul University who has devoted his life to attacking Israel—which he has called, among other things, a “lunatic state” and a “vandal state”—and to attacking the “Holocaust industry,” the title of one of his books and his term for Elie Wiesel’s work and for Jewish organizations and individuals that are professionally involved with the Holocaust. He has written that Jewish organizations “steal, and I do use the word with intent, 95 percent of the monies earmarked for victims of Nazi persecution.”³²

Jews, he says, “are not Zionist by conviction, they are Zionist because it is useful for their political and more recently financial self-interest.”³³

In a lecture delivered in Beirut, Lebanon, Finkelstein likened Israeli actions to “Nazi practices” during World War II, albeit with some added “novelties to the Nazi experiments.”³⁴

The best-known example of an anti-Israel Jewish Leftist is MIT professor Noam Chomsky. He, too, has devoted his life to attacking America and Israel; he is alienated from, and vilifies, the two identities into which he was born, American and Jewish. In the late 1970s, Chomsky even signed a petition defending a Holocaust-denying French academic named Robert Faurisson. The petition contained this statement about Faurisson: He “has been conducting extensive research into the ‘Holocaust’ question.”

Note the quotation marks around the word Holocaust, and the use of word research. The latter refers to statements of Faurisson such as his denial of use of gas to murder Jews: “so-called gassings [are a] gigantic politico-financial swindle whose beneficiaries are the state of Israel and international Zionism.” Other Faurisson research has been devoted to “proving” that the diary of Anne Frank was a fraud.³⁵

In 2006, Chomsky traveled to Lebanon to appear with Sayyed Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, in order to lend his support to that group, which is committed to the annihilation of Israel and listed as a terrorist organization by the United States.

A third example of a Left-wing Jew who has devoted much of his life to weakening Israel (and the United States) is George Soros, the immensely wealthy financier. He, too, was born to Jewish parents, but affirms no Jewish identity. He is one of the many Left-wing Jews who do great harm to the Jewish people, even though not personally anti-Semitic.³⁶ As described by Martin Peretz, editor in chief of the New Republic, “George Soros is ostentatiously indifferent to his own Jewishness. He is not a believer. He has no Jewish communal ties. He certainly isn’t a Zionist. He told Connie Bruck in the New Yorker—testily, she recounted—that ‘I don’t deny the Jews their right to a national existence—but I don’t want to be part of it.’”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Joshua Muravchik reported that Soros has publicly likened Israel to the Nazis.³⁷ Though opposed to Jewish nationalism, Soros does support Palestinian nationalism. That is a consistent position of the Left: American nationalism and Jewish nationalism are bad; anti-Jewish and anti-American nationalisms are good.

He and others are what are called “non-Jewish Jews,” a term attributed to the Jewish historian Isaac Deutscher, who wrote an essay with that title in 1954. It describes the individual who, though born a Jew (Judaism consists of a national/peoplehood identity as well as a religious one), identifies only as a citizen of the world (therefore the appeal of Leftism), not as a Jew, either nationally or religiously.

There have been many non-Jewish Jews since Jews were allowed to leave their European ghettos and assimilate. But a small though significant percentage of them became radicalized. In effect substituting Leftism for Judaism, they came to loathe “bourgeois,” that is, traditional middle-class, values and Judeo-Christian society, Western national identities, and particularly loathed Jewish religious and national identity.

Karl Marx, the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis, wrote one of the most significant anti-Semitic essays of the nineteenth century: “On the Jewish Question” (1844). In it he wrote that “[m]oney is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist…. The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world…. The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry.”

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Bronstein, was the ideological father of Russian, later Soviet, Communism; along with Stalin and three others, he fought to succeed Lenin as leader of the Communist Party after Lenin’s death in 1924. In 1920, when Trotsky was head of the Red Army, Moscow’s chief rabbi, Rabbi Jacob Mazeh, asked him to use the army to protect the Jews from widespread anti-Semitic attacks (beatings, rapes, and murders of Jews). Trotsky is reported to have responded, “Why do you come to me? I am not a Jew.” To which Rabbi Mazeh answered: “That’s the tragedy. It’s the Trotskys who make revolutions, and it’s the Bronsteins who pay the price.”

How to explain Jews such as these? People without a strong, let alone any, national or religious identity will often seek to undermine the national and religious identity of others, especially those who affirm an identity they have abandoned. That explains, for example, the special animosity some ex-Catholics have toward the Church. Likewise more than a few Jews with no religious or national identity dislike Jews who have those identities, just as Americans who have become world citizens do not much care for Americans who wave the American flag.

In 2009, a thousand people from around the world went on a hunger strike and solidarity march on behalf of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Among them, as reported by the New York Times, was a Holocaust survivor named Hedy Epstein.³⁸ For a Holocaust survivor to go on a hunger strike on behalf of a regime that calls for another Holocaust takes a real commitment—to Leftism.

Support for Leftism among Jews has a long and unfortunate history. A Yiddish scholar, Professor Gennady Estraikh of New York University, has written, “It is hardly an overstatement to define Yiddish literature of the 1920s as the most pro-Soviet literature in the world.”³⁹ Two of the three leaders of the Polish Communist Party at the end of World War II were Jews (Hilary Minc and Jakub Berman). The leading radical in Weimar Germany was Rosa Luxemburg. Other examples of Jews supporting Communism and similar expressions of radical Left-wing evil are legion. And to this day, many Jews cannot bring themselves to believe that the Left is far more a danger to them and to society than is the Right.

Why so many Jews have so long supported the Left is a subject beyond the scope of this book. It is also highly complex, since it is a mixture of moral idealism emanating from the Hebrew prophets and fears—of the Right, of nationalism, and of Christianity. And, for all their secularism, Jews may be one of the most religious groups in the world—but for most, their religion is no longer Judaism; it is socialism, feminism, environmentalism, scientism, Marxism, secularism, and any other ism on the Left. On the other hand, Jews who do believe in God and in the Torah as revealed text—that is, in traditional Judaism—are overwhelmingly not on the Left: They have a religion—Judaism.

Another revealing example of the moral confusion of the Left has been its support for the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel. Why does the Left support the Palestinians against Israel?

The question is rarely asked. It is simply taken for granted. (To be clear, I am referring to support for the Palestinians against Israel, not support for a Palestinian state.) But the question should be asked because support for the Palestinians is inconsistent with the Left’s professed values. Just about every value the Left claims to uphold Israel upholds and its enemies, including the Palestinians, do not.

The Left speaks about its passion for democracy. Yet it is Israel that is a fully functioning democracy, as opposed to its Arab and Muslim enemies, including the Palestinians who have been led largely by terrorists, from Yasser Arafat to Hamas.

The Left claims to have a particular concern for women’s rights. Yet it is Israel that has as highly developed a feminist movement as that of any Western country. It is Israel that conscripted women into its armed forces before almost any Western country did. At the same time, the state of women’s rights among Israel’s Muslim enemies is perhaps the lowest in the world.

The Left’s greatest current preoccupation is with gay rights. Yet it is Israel that has annual gay pride days, while Arab and Muslim countries persecute homosexuals.

It is Israel that has an independent (and liberal) judiciary. It is Israel that has a Left-wing press. It is Israel that has been governed by Leftist, even socialist, parties. Israel’s enemies have none of this.

So, why isn’t the Left leading pro-Israel demonstrations?

Perhaps because women’s equality, independent judiciaries, liberty, gays, and a free press are not the primary concerns of the anti-Israel Left. The causes the Left speaks for are often noble-sounding covers for deeper concerns such as the weakening of Western, especially American, power in the world, the weakening of Judeo-Christian religions, the weakening of free market capitalism, and support for the “underdog.”

The Left tends to divide the world into rich and poor, strong and weak, and favorite and underdog rather than good and evil or right and wrong. Support for the “underdog” is the reason given by Richard Falk, a leading Left-wing anti-Israel (and anti-American) activist, who, owing to his support for the Palestinians, was appointed the United Nations special rapporteur to the Palestinian territories: “In reality, Falk told the Forward, his criticism of Israel is [due to]…his posture as an American leftist, perennially dedicated to history’s underdogs—in his eyes, the Palestinians.”⁴⁰

In order not to recognize Israel’s moral superiority to its enemies, one must use a different moral yardstick. The Left does.

Two weeks after the July 2005 terror bombings in London that killed fifty-two and injured seven hundred civilians, the then mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, a prominent Leftist, defended the Palestinian use of suicide bombers. “In an unfair balance, that’s what people use,” he said.⁴¹

 

ONE FINAL EXAMPLE OF the Left’s morally upside-down world: If something is good for America, aside from a good economy during a Democratic presidency, it is probably bad for the Left and the Democratic Party.

• If black Americans come to believe that America is a land of opportunity in which racism has been largely conquered, it would be catastrophic for the Democrats. The day that most black Americans no longer view America the way the Left and the Democratic Party portray it—as an essentially racist society—will be the day Democrats lose almost all hope of winning a national election.
• If women marry, it is bad for the Democratic Party. Single women are an essential component of any Democratic victory. To cite a close election, in 2004, unmarried women voted for the Democrat John Kerry by a 25-point margin (62–37), while married women voted for President Bush by an 11-point margin (55–44). After women marry, they are more likely to abandon Leftist views and to vote Republican. And if they then have children, they will vote Republican in even more lopsided numbers. When Americans marry, it is bad for the Democratic Party; when they marry and make families, it is disastrous for the Democrats. (On the other hand, when women have children without marrying, it is great for the Democrats.)
• If immigrants assimilate, it is not good for Democrats. The Democratic Party is invested in Latino separatism. The more Latino immigrants come to feel fully American, the less likely they are to vote Democrat. The liberal notion of multiculturalism helps Democrats, while adoption of the American ideal of E Pluribus Unum helps Republicans.

Aside from the state of the economy—which, when bad, always benefits the party out of power—there is no equivalent list of bad things happening to America that benefits Republicans. All these examples of good things happening to America being bad for a party are unique to the Democrats and the Left.

Does Leftism Make Good People?

ANY DOCTRINE, RELIGION, OR IDEOLOGY that seeks to make a better world must first have a way to make good individuals. Making good people is the single most important project any civilization, doctrine, or religion must engage in. In this regard, Leftism must be judged a failure—not because its methods of doing so are flawed, or because of its poor moral record. Nor is it because there are no people of good character with Leftist values; there certainly are. It is because inculcating moral character in individuals is not how Leftism believes a better world is made.

Religions such as Judaism and Christianity have emphasized character development because they see sinful human character as the primary source of evil. But the Left has always believed that evil—to the extent that the Left addresses evil as opposed to socioeconomic inequality—emanates first and foremost from material inequality and what the Left regards as its sources: big business, capitalist competition, and Western imperialism. Leftism is concerned with materially transforming society, not with morally transforming individuals.

This is one reason violent crime is attributed not to the moral defects of the violent criminal’s character but to poverty, environment, etc. Likewise white-collar crime is attributed to the flaws of capitalism that produce greed and a dog-eat-dog mentality, not to the moral defects of the white-collar criminal. As a result, there is no mechanism in Leftism for inculcating moral character in people.

Of course, any given individual Leftist may be an individual of great personal integrity and generosity. But it is not Leftism that has inculcated these noble traits in him. Leftism has no mechanism for doing so.

In truth, Leftism is more likely to promote narcissism than altruism. It has taught billions of people around the world to expect to be taken care of, and thereby bred a worldwide epidemic of self-centered entitlement. That is why millions of Frenchmen demonstrate, to the point of shutting down much of their society, against raising their retirement age by a mere two years; or half a million Brits take to the streets to protest proposals that college students pay more for their education. “What will others—the ‘rich’ and the state—do for me?” That is the attitude Leftism inculcates.

THE LEFT DESTROYS STANDARDS AND
STANDARDS-BASED INSTITUTIONS

Leftism not only does not address the issue of character development; it disparages and weakens values and institutions that do inculcate moral character, most obviously religion-based institutions, which have been the primary carrier of moral and ethical instruction in America and Europe.

The ostensible reason for Left-wing opposition to religious standards governing people’s lives in America has been to protect the “separation of church and state,” a phrase found in no official document of the United States: not in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or the Bill of Rights. The real reasons for the Left’s war against religion, especially Christianity, are that Leftism has always been an antireligious doctrine (though there is a religious Left, which is Leftism in values coupled with Christian or Jewish religious rhetoric) and that the Left understands that the more religious a Christian or Jew, the more likely the person is to oppose Leftism.

In America, the modern Left’s war against religion can be said to have begun with the 1962 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that all school prayer is unconstitutional. The specific prayer the court ruled on was a tepid, nondenominational, school prayer said voluntarily in New York state schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”

To rule such a prayer unconstitutional was truly an expression of secular extremism. And the results have been devastating. Within one generation, schoolchildren went from asking God’s blessing on their teachers to a level of disrespect for teachers that is unprecedented. Whether the end of praying for teachers led to the cursing of teachers can be debated, but what is clear is that the Left has successfully removed religious expression from nearly all of public life in America. Just to cite one more example, in 2011 the liberal governor of Rhode Island renamed the state Christmas tree, a “holiday tree.”

Given the indispensable role that religion has played in American history in forming character, the decline of religion has led to what one would expect—the deterioration of the moral character of many Americans. When added to the Left’s war on the Boy Scouts—ostensibly because the Boy Scouts did not allow openly gay boys or men to be in the Scouts—there was no institution outside of the home except for church and similar religious groups to teach young Americans character.

CURSING^*

At a Democratic Party fund-raiser in 2003 before two thousand people for then governor Howard Dean of Vermont, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for president, MoveOn.org, a leading Left-wing organization, featured a series of entertainers whose presentations were laced with obscenities. As described by the New York Post’s Washington bureau chief: “Pro-Dean comics…competed to see how often they could use the F-word in the same sentence.”

Two examples: “Comic Judy Gold dissed President Bush as ‘this piece of living, breathing shit’ and Janeane Garofalo ridiculed the Medicare prescription-drug bill that Bush had just signed as the ‘you can go fuck yourself, Grandma’ bill.”

The reporter also noted, “Just a few days before, rival [Democratic Massachusetts senator] John Kerry had used the F-word to attack Bush in Rolling Stone magazine in an apparent bid to sound hip.”⁴²

Most Americans regard public and deliberate cursing (as opposed to using expletives in private or in a public slip of the tongue) as a sign of a civilization in decline. But to the Left, cursing is “hip,” and opposition to it is a conservative hang-up.^*

The ACLU threatened Southwest Airlines with a lawsuit after the airline ordered a passenger off a flight for refusing to cover her T-shirt on which was printed “Fuckers,” referring to President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The ACLU position was not surprising. It had previously defended a high school student whose school had prohibited him from wearing to class a T-shirt that read “Big Pecker.”

During the George W. Bush presidency innumerable cars in liberal areas of the country sported a bumper sticker that read, “Buck Fush.” Given that there were many on the Right who strongly disliked former president Bill Clinton, to the best of my knowledge, no Clinton-hater put a “Cluck Finton” bumper sticker on a car.

In 2007, the editorial board of the Colorado State University student newspaper published an editorial containing just four words: “Taser this…Fuck Bush.”^*

In its special fortieth anniversary issue in 2007, Rolling Stone featured interviews with people the magazine considered some of America’s leading cultural and political figures. Examples included Al Gore, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Cornel West, Paul Krugman, Kanye West, Bill Maher, and George Clooney.

Most of the interviewees used curse words in their considered responses.

Some examples:

Comedian Chris Rock:

“Bush fucked up.”

“That’s a major fuckup.”

“I say some harsh shit.”

Novelist William Gibson:

“The shit you’ve been doing for the past four hundred years…”

Actor George Clooney:

“My sister and I were quizzed on shit.”

“Now you’re going to hear about all this shit.”

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“[China] doesn’t give a shit…”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“This war is bullshit.”

Rock musician Billie Joe Armstrong:

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“When you say, ‘Fuck George Bush’ in a packed arena in Texas, that’s an accomplishment.”

“I don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about.”

“All the fucked-up problems we have.”

“This girl was fucked-up.”

“Why did I worry so much about this shit?”

The Daily Show host Jon Stewart:

“We have a shitload of guns.”

“That fucked up everything.”

“We fucking declared war on ’em.”

“The whole fucking thing’s ours.”

“Two vandals…can fuck up your way of life.”

“I’ll take those odds every fucking day.”

Musician Eddie Vedder:

“Why the fuck is he doing that?”

Author and atheist activist Sam Harris:

“Any religious bullshit.”

Actress Meryl Streep:

“Oh, fuck, why me?”

Actor Tom Hanks:

“People have stopped giving a shit.”

“Where the fuck have you people been?”

Politically Incorrect’s Bill Maher (on Republicans and global warming):

“They’re selfish pricks by nature: ‘I’ve got my own air. What do I give a shit?’”

 

AMONG THE FIVE NOMINEES for the 2011 Grammy Awards Record of the Year was a song titled “Fuck You.”

Here are the song’s opening lyrics:

I see you driving ’round town

With the girl I love and I’m like,

Fuck you!

Oo, oo, ooo

I guess the change in my pocket

Wasn’t enough, I’m like,

Fuck you!

And fuck her, too!

It is also worth noting that the video of this song included children who appeared to be under twelve years of age, and all the performers are black—another example of how the Left undermines black life. The nomination of “Fuck You” as Song of the Year was no aberration. Two of the other four nominees were rap “songs” with similar lyrics.

Here are typical lyrics from Eminem’s nominated “Love the Way You Lie”:

And I love it the more that I suffer

I suffocate

And right before I’m about to drown

She resuscitates me

She fucking hates me

And I love it.

How deep is the decay in the music industry? According to the Los Angeles Times, these Grammy nominees were “decided on by about 12,000 voting members of the Recording Academy.”

THE ARTS

The Left’s record in the arts has been as destructive as elsewhere. It has largely taken over the arts and denigrated greatness in favor of diversity, political correctness, hostility to middle-class norms, and promoting Left-wing positions.

As Yale University professor David Gelernter has written, “Modern museums are devoted to diversity as opposed to greatness.”

“Stop any person on the street,” he wrote, “and ask them to name a living poet, a living painter, or a living composer. There will be complete silence. When I was a child, artists were heroes. Everyday people knew Robert Frost’s poems, and not only people like me, a respected Yale professor. Classical music was moving closer to the middle class, Leonard Bernstein concerts were broadcast on television. It was a marvelous thing to have poets, novelists, painters, and musicians representing the middle and working classes and giving them greater and greater artistic depth. All of this was killed or at least dealt a very serious blow by the encroachment of the universities.”⁴³

The general approach has been that if the middle class likes something, it is bad art. There is a snobbishness on the Left that is rarely noted but is one of the most significant animators of Leftism: a contempt for the middle class, and for middle America, that is essential to Left-wing identity. The Left sees itself as far superior to the churchgoing, Norman Rockwell–loving, flag-waving, Pledge of Allegiance–reciting American. So, if the average guy likes it, there must be something wrong with it.

Most Americans would be horrified to know that an opera was written about terrorists murdering a crippled man, which aimed to show, in the composer’s words, that “neither side is beyond reproach.” Yet that opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Adams, was revered by the musical elite. How could it not be? It features a chorus of Palestinian terrorists who in 1985 hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship, murdered American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer, and threw him overboard in his wheelchair.

In museums, works of scatological “art” are common. In Germany in 2010 a sculpture of a squatting policewoman urinating was awarded a thousand-euro prize by the prestigious Leinemann Foundation for Fine Arts. As described by the Agence France-Presse, “It depicts a young female police officer in full riot gear crouching to pee, with exposed buttocks and a small gelatin ‘puddle’ affixed to the floor of the gallery at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden.”⁴⁴

The amount of junk masquerading as “art” is immeasurable. In 2011, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles featured a work by “performance artist” Marina Abramovic. As described by the Los Angeles Times, people sat around a dinner table for eight, for three hours. At the table performers poke their head “up through a hole in the center of the table and spin around extremely slowly on a Lazy Susan and quietly gaze with intention but no particular emotion at the seated dinner guests.”

Patrons of the museum paid $2,500 per person to see the performance art.

The year before, Abramovic had created “her Museum of Modern Art retrospective, ‘The Artist Is Present.’…The show revisited some of the artist’s early extreme-sport-style hits in a range of media, including photographs of her 1974 performance in which she laid [sic] inside a burning sculpture of a star (she lost consciousness) and a re-enactment of the 1977 ‘Imponderabilia’ in which originally she and her then-lover/collaborator Ulay faced off, naked, within the frame of a doorway, leaving little room for people to squeeze by.”⁴⁵

Leonard Bernstein

The arts have been dominated by brilliant Leftists for nearly a century. Let’s begin with the foremost American musician of his time, Leonard Bernstein. With all his goodwill and charm, his moral compass was broken, another example of a decent man morally poisoned by Leftism.

On January 14, 1970, in his Manhattan penthouse, Bernstein threw what became probably the most infamous private fund-raiser in American history—for the violent, racist, America-hating Black Panther Party. Here is how Panther leader “Field Marshall” Don Cox began the evening:

“We call [the police] pigs…. We recognize that this country is the most oppressive country in the world, maybe in the history of the world. The pigs have the weapons and they are ready to use them on the people…. They are ready to commit genocide against those who stand up against them.”⁴⁶

Bernstein did not express a word of protest, let alone end the fund-raiser, after hearing police labeled “pigs” and America labeled “the most oppressive country in the world.”

Clarence B. Jones, speechwriter and counsel to Martin Luther King Jr., began the public contributions to the Panther Defense Fund with a donation of $7,500. Bernstein himself followed by pledging his entire fee for conducting the opera Cavalleria Rusticana. The film director Otto Preminger followed with a pledge of a thousand dollars. Smaller contributions came from lyricist Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof), lyricist and composer Burton Lane (Finian’s Rainbow), actor Harry Belafonte, and renowned art dealer Richard Feigen.⁴⁷

Norman Mailer

Another man of the Left was perhaps the most honored American writer of his generation, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Norman Mailer. His nonliterary legacy included working successfully to get a convicted murderer, Jack Henry Abbott, out of prison. Abbott was a self-proclaimed Communist, who corresponded with Mailer while in prison.

Mailer—along with much, if not all, of the literary Left—was quite taken with Abbott’s writing. That they were smitten by a man who described his own murder of a man says a lot about the literary Left. Here is an excerpt from Abbott’s book, The Belly in the Beast, a series of letters about prison life from Abbott to Mailer. It is important to remember that Abbott was in prison for doing exactly what it described—stabbing a fellow prisoner to death:

Here is how it is: You are both alone in his cell. You’ve slipped out a knife (eight-to ten-inch blade, double-edged). You’re holding it beside your leg so he can’t see it. The enemy is smiling and chattering away about something. You see his eyes: Green-blue, liquid. He thinks you’re his fool: he trusts you. You see the spot. It’s a target between the second and third button on his shirt. As you calmly talk and smile, you move your left foot to the side to step across his right-side body length. A light pivot toward him with your right shoulder and the world turns upside down: you have sunk the knife to its hilt into the middle of his chest. Slowly he begins to struggle for his life. As he sinks, you will have to kill him fast or get caught. He will say “Why?” Or “No!” Nothing else. You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand….

Thanks to Mailer’s efforts, Abbott was paroled. Six weeks later, Abbott stabbed to death twenty-two-year-old Richard Adan, an aspiring New York City writer who was working as a waiter. Adan had told Abbott that the restaurant’s men’s room was for employees only. They argued and Abbott stabbed him. “‘As Adan lay dying,’ [eyewitness Wayne] Larsen said, the ‘taller figure’ [Abbott] stood over him and taunted him ‘very sadistically.’”⁴⁸

Eight years after the murder, two Hollywood celebrities on the Left, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, named their son after Abbott (Jack Henry Robbins, born 1989).

The morally foolish Left has taken over the arts.

The Left’s Totalitarian DNA

ANOTHER MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR to Leftism’s moral problems is its embedded temptation toward totalitarianism. Virtually every totalitarian regime has been a Leftist one.

This needs to be explained. There have been many non-Leftist dictatorships, but there have been few non-Leftist totalitarian regimes. The only ones that come to mind are the Nazi regime and Islamist states such as Iran’s under the ayatollahs and Afghanistan under the Taliban.

With regard to Nazism, it is not intellectually honest to label Nazism either Right-wing or Left-wing. Nazism was sui generis in its race-based totalitarianism. However, Leftists have effectively labeled Nazism Right-wing since Hitler invaded the center of Leftism, the Soviet Union, and that label has stuck. The Left labels its enemies “Right” or “far Right” even when its enemies are on the Left, as many individuals on the democratic Left were in the 1930s and 1940s. This branding of Nazism as Right-wing has immeasurably helped the Left. It has made people fear the Right.

Nor were the handful of fascist regimes—Italy and Spain specifically—Right-wing in any meaningful way. Jonah Goldberg, in his book Liberal Fascism, has documented how many progressives saw the Mussolini regime in Italy as a progressive, not a Right-wing, regime.

The key difference between Leftist and Rightist non-democratic regimes is the difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. It was President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, in a famous Commentary magazine article, who best clarified the distinction between the two types of dictatorships. Totalitarian comes from the word total. The totalitarian regime seeks to control the total life of its citizens. The individual’s life is controlled in virtually every way.

In the typical authoritarian state, however, the citizen’s life is controlled almost only in the political realm. One can lead a life relatively uncontrolled by the authoritarian state so long as one does nothing to oppose the dictatorship. It is then that the evil nature of an authoritarian regime becomes manifest. Outspoken opponents are often imprisoned, tortured, and/or executed. Otherwise, the citizen in an authoritarian society is relatively free to do many things forbidden in a totalitarian state: practice one’s religion, travel both within his country and, if he has the funds, even abroad; live more or less wherever he wants; join all sorts of nonpolitical organizations with little or no government controls; and read what he wants, except for antigovernment writings.

The citizen in a totalitarian state can do none of those things. He cannot freely practice his religion; he cannot live anywhere in his own country without government permission; he cannot travel abroad; he cannot form or join any nongovernment-sponsored organization; and he can only read what the state allows.

A personal example: I visited authoritarian fascist Spain and the totalitarian Soviet Union in the same year, 1969. There was no comparison between the two. For example, in Spain, I was allowed to stay at any hotel I wanted, and to receive Spanish guests (though they had to leave by midnight). In the Soviet Union I was told what hotels to stay at, and no Soviet citizen (except for Soviet officials) was allowed inside the hotel. In Spain, I could purchase and read publicly just about any foreign newspaper. In the Soviet Union I could purchase and read only Soviet and other Communist Party newspapers. The list of differences between life in fascist Spain and life in the Soviet Union is endless.

Why is totalitarianism a Left-wing rather than a Right-wing phenomenon?

The most obvious reason is that Leftism is based on the principle of a big state; and the bigger the state, the more it controls. American and conservative values, on the other hand, are based on having as small a state as possible. Obviously, a doctrine predicated on having less power will be less likely to control others’ lives—and less desirous of doing so.

Another reason is that Leftism is close to all-encompassing. If the Left had its way, the citizens of the state would be told how to live in almost every way: what to drive and when; what lightbulbs to use; what temperature to keep their homes; what men would be permitted to say to women; what school textbooks must include; when God could be mentioned, and when not; how much of their earnings people may keep; what art would be funded and what art would not; what food children could be fed; how enthusiastically to cheer girls’ sports teams (see “Controlling People’s Behavior”); and much more. The list of Left-wing controls over our lives is ever expanding.

Committed Leftists are certain that they know better than others how people should live their lives. As I demonstrate repeatedly in this book, Leftists know that they are smarter, kinder, finer, more compassionate people than others—precisely because they are Leftists. Therefore, they have every right—indeed a duty—to control society.

Finally, Leftism is rooted in secularism, and the more secular a society, the more laws it needs to pass in order to keep its citizens from hurting one another. When more people feel accountable to God and to moral religion—as in the American value system—society can get by with fewer laws. The American Founders knew that a country with the amount of individual freedom Americans would have would be viable only if its citizens were individuals of integrity—an integrity they believed was dependent on affirming God-based morality, moral accountability to God, and religion that emphasized these values.

AIRBRUSHING HISTORY

In the Soviet Union, a famous dissident joke stated: “In the Soviet Union the future is known; it’s the past that is always changing.”

The reference was to the Communists’ constant rewriting of history. Under Stalin, for example, all references to Leon Trotsky’s seminal role in the Bolshevik Revolution and in the founding of the Communist Party were removed, as were all photographs of him. There is a photo of the early Bolsheviks in which Soviet censors removed Trotsky, but failed to airbrush his shoes, from the photo. One sees Stalin standing next to a pair of shoes.

The practice of rewriting history by doctoring photos has been taken up by the politically correct Left in the contemporary West. To cite just one example, photos featuring famous persons smoking:

• In 2003, the cigarette in Paul McCartney’s hand was airbrushed out of the famous Beatles Abbey Road album cover.
• In 1994, a U.S. postage stamp commemorating blues guitarist Robert Johnson removed the cigarette from the musician’s mouth.
• In the 2000 rerelease of the 1948 film Melody Time, the Disney Company removed the cigarette from the cartoon character Pecos Bill. (Instead of a cigarette in his mouth, kids now see him holding a gun by his mouth.)
• In 1999, the U.S. Postal Service removed a cigarette from a photograph of the artist Jackson Pollock.
• On the cover of the 2006 release of the Beatles album The Capitol Albums, Volume 2, EMI was pressured to remove images of band members smoking. The clumsy censors also removed two of drummer Ringo Starr’s fingers.
• In 2006, the BBC reported, “Children’s TV channel Boomerang is to edit scenes from Tom and Jerry cartoons where characters are shown smoking.”⁴⁹
• As reported by George Will: “A London museum, advertising its exhibit about Britain at war, used a picture of Winston Churchill with an oddly twisted mouth: The health fascists had airbrushed away his cigar.”⁵⁰
• In 2002, there were so many protests about the James Bond character smoking in Die Another Day that it was the last Bond film in which he smoked. (Bond films did continue to show murder, torture, semi-nudity, and drinking.)
• And not only tobacco: In 2008 the U.S. Postal Service released a Bette Davis stamp. Michael Deas, the stamp’s designer, acknowledged that he changed Davis’s coat from mink to velvet to avoid a protest from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Health issues frequently bring out the totalitarian instincts of the Left. In 2002, a New York Supreme Court justice, Robert F. Julian, banned a divorced mother from smoking when her son stayed with her. The thirteen-year-old boy, who lived with his father and grandparents, had overnight visits with his mother, but she was told that if she smoked while he was there, she would lose the right to have her son visit her. As reported by the New York Law Journal, Justice Julian himself said “he was unable to find any decision ordering parents to maintain a smoke-free environment absent an underlying diagnosis of asthma, allergy or another disorder.”⁵¹

Justice Julian simply expanded judicial power over parents by having the court assume the role of parens patriae (“government as parent”). It should be noted that the mother smoked only in the bathroom when her son visited. But to an activist liberal judge, it is better for a child not to visit his mother than to be in her home when she smoked.

CONTROLLING PEOPLE’S BEHAVIOR

Federal education officials, citing Title IX, the civil rights law that mandates equal athletic opportunities for both sexes, ordered that American high school cheerleaders cheer for girls’ teams as often as they do for boys’ teams. As reported in the New York Times, almost no one directly involved wanted this—not the cheerleaders, not the fans, not the boys’ teams, and not even the girls’ teams. But in true totalitarian fashion, the Left-wing education officials even mandated the level of enthusiasm the cheerleaders must express: “A statewide group of physical education teachers in California called for cheerleaders to attend girls’ and boys’ games ‘in the same number, and with equal enthusiasm.’”⁵²

In the name of gender equality, the Left has also forced school districts in America to end male-male wrestling and force high school males to wrestle girls.

If the contention that the Left has totalitarian DNA is true, the institution most controlled by the Left ought to exhibit the most restrictions on personal liberty. The university is that institution, and indeed there is no non-religious mainstream institution in America with as stringent rules governing speech, or where personal liberty is as restricted. Universities are probably the least free major institutions in the United States. Nearly all of them have instituted “hate speech codes,” which prohibit, among other things: “Discriminatory harassment which includes conduct (oral, written, graphic or physical) directed against any person or group of persons because of their race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran’s status and that has the purpose or reasonably foreseeable effect of creating an offensive, demeaning, intimidating, or hostile environment for that person or group of persons.”⁵³

In many colleges, incoming freshmen must attend sensitivity training seminars. These are extensive sessions on how to act and speak according to the latest rules of the Left. They are reminiscent of totalitarian regimes’ “reeducation” camps.

Harassment Laws

All reasonable men and women acknowledge that it is morally wrong for an employer to say to an employee, “Sleep with me or you will be fired.” That was the original meaning of sexual harassment and laws passed to ban such conduct were widely accepted. The Left has stretched the meaning of sexual harassment to such an extent that anything that might offend one person (usually, but not necessarily, a woman) is illegal.

The totalitarian temptation inherent in such laws should be obvious. Before providing examples, let us take a moment to analyze three words: might, offend, and one.

Might: Something does not have to actually offend anyone in the workplace. Some behavior or speech can be illegal solely because it might offend someone.

Offend: This is one of the most important words in the Left’s vocabulary. As noted elsewhere, the notion that a person feels offended is enough to render an act illegal because feelings are the basis of Leftism.

One: A hundred women might find nothing objectionable in a joke placed on the office bulletin board. But if one woman does, it is enough to render the joke impermissible or even illegal. Since it is likely that one such person works in just about every office setting, jokes, especially those with the slightest sexual content, cannot be told or posted at work.

The Left has ensured passage of laws banning harassment in the workplace based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identification, age, religion, national origin, disability, military membership or veteran status, marital status, political affiliation, criminal record, occupation, citizenship status, personal appearance, receipt of public assistance, and more. The result is that the American workplace is, with regard to speech, visual displays, and other personal expressions, an authoritarian place with totalitarian characteristics. I have often noted on my radio show that at my radio station, when I speak on the radio I have freedom of speech and the moment the microphone is turned off, I lose it.

Thanks to the Left, “emotional distress” is a legal category. And causing but one person to experience it can lead to the prosecution of an entire business. The banning of whatever will cause “emotional distress” again illustrates two major characteristics of the Left: its totalitarian temptation and its fear of life’s pains. Of course, the two are related. The Left yearns for a pain-free world, and it does whatever it can to achieve it.

• In 1995, a Los Angeles police officer was suspended for five days for saying, “Hi, babe” to a female police officer. When, two years later, the suspension was overturned, “women’s groups assailed” the decision.⁵⁴
• Courts have ruled that use of job titles such as “foreman” and “draftsman” may constitute sexual harassment.⁵⁵
• A Kentucky human rights agency ordered a company to change its “Men Working” signs (at a cost of over thirty-five thousand dollars) arguing that the signs “perpetuat[e] a discriminatory work environment and could be deemed unlawful under the Kentucky Civil Rights Act.”
• The Montana Human Rights Commission ruled that a workplace constituted a “hostile work environment” based solely on off-color jokes and cartoons displayed in the workplace. None of the jokes were said specifically to the women who complained; none referred to them; the cartoons were distributed by men and women alike, apparently once or twice a month over several years; and the cartoons weren’t even sexist or misogynistic.
• The Iowa Civil Rights Commission has warned that “jokes of a sexual nature and cartoons, drawings, or caricatures of a sexual nature” are examples of potentially harassing actions.

Freedom of speech has generally been considered to be the quintessential American value. To this day, there is more freedom of speech in America than in Western Europe. But America is catching up; the Left, after all, has governed Western Europe for a longer period of time. Preventing hurt feelings is one of the many considerations that the Left deems more important than liberty.

Schools Banned from Inviting Clergy Who Advocate Man-Woman Marriage

The Connecticut branch of the ACLU, the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union, “informed the Windsor Locks School District that it would face [legal] action if education officials chose to allow a presentation by clergy at Windsor Locks High School on homosexuality and related topics.”⁵⁶ The high school had previously invited a gay activist organization, the Stonewall Speakers, to address students on homosexuality and same-sex marriage. In order to attempt to present an alternate view, the school then invited clergy to speak to the students.

Because “the clergy was supposed to offer a view based on religious scripture,” Annette Lamoreaux, a legal director of the CCLU, “reported that the clergy presentation could violate the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution and the Connecticut Gay Rights Law, which prohibits discrimination based upon sexual orientation…. She added that it would have violated the rights of gay and lesbian students to equal protection.”

Aside from illustrating the Left’s controlling nature, this story also illustrates the secular and Leftist brainwash most American children receive throughout their school life. For no defensible educational reason—especially given the poor general education that so many American students receive—a public school may use precious school time to have gay activists address students on behalf of same-sex marriage. But clergy defending man-woman marriage are not allowed to address the students.

THE COURTS

In keeping with its controlling tendencies, the Left pays particular attention to using courts to achieve its goals. This was forthrightly acknowledged by leading Democrat William A. Galston, a former senior aide to President Bill Clinton and an adviser to the Al Gore presidential campaign. “Beginning in the 1950s,” Galston noted, “the Democratic Party convinced itself that, especially on social issues, the principal vehicle of advance would be the court.”⁵⁷

Whereas the Judeo-Christian and traditional Western understanding of the role of the court was that it be blind to everything but rendering a just verdict, the Left-wing view is that the court should be a vehicle for obtaining not justice, but “social justice”—the Left’s term for all social policies it seeks, especially the elimination of material inequality. As a Democratic senator, Herb Kohl, put it, in objecting to the confirmation of conservative judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court: “The neutral approach, that of the judge just applying the law, is very often inadequate to ensure social progress…”⁵⁸

Democratic senator Ted Kennedy acknowledged the same thing at the same Senate hearing: Average Americans “have had a hard time getting a fair shake in his [Alito’s] courtroom.”⁵⁹

And so did Democratic senator Richard Durbin: “I find this as a recurring pattern, and it raises the question in my mind whether the average person, the dispossessed person, the poor person who finally has their day in court…are going to be subject to the crushing hand of fate when it comes to your decisions.”⁶⁰

The prime Democratic objection to confirming Judge Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court was that he does not rule in favor of the Average Joe in his courtroom. But the purpose of a judge is not to rule in favor of the Average Joe. It is to rule justly.

SQUASHING LIFE’S LITTLE PLEASURES

Totalitarians hate joy. Totalitarian regimes attempt, often successfully, to extinguish as many of life’s little pleasures as possible. If the democratic Left possesses a totalitarian temptation, we would expect to find a similar killjoy mentality there. And indeed we do. The finding of actions, including life’s little joys, to condemn and ultimately ban is so pervasive on the Left that one never knows what the next joy to be banned will be.

Humor

Take activists’ reactions to a national television ad for the fast-food chain Burger King. The ad featured the company’s royal mascot running through a building, knocking a person over, and crashing through a glass window to deliver its newest food at the time, the Steakhouse XT burger. Called “crazy” by those present, the King was finally tackled by men in white coats. “The king’s insane,” the ad announced, for “offering so much beef for $3.99.”

The ad was innocuous and innocent. Under threats to life and limb, almost no viewer of this ad could imagine what could be offensive. But the Left, in every field from library science to mental health, is always vigilant, looking for offenses to decry and eventually ban. Consequently, the ad triggered a storm of criticism from mental health activists (activist is a term that, unless otherwise specified, almost always refers to someone on the Left). The Washington Post ran the headline, “Burger King ad featuring its mascot as crazy offends mental health organizations.”⁶¹ (Offends, as noted, is another giveaway as to the Left-wing nature of the opposition.)

Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the ad was “blatantly offensive…I was stunned. Absolutely stunned and appalled.” David Shern, president and chief executive of Mental Health America, echoed this assessment. And, of course, reporters from the Associated Press to the Washington Post all agreed.

They should read what a Los Angeles listener to my radio show wrote to me: “I am a father of a 24 year old son with a mental health issue. I am particularly tuned to protecting my son’s self-image. My son and I have both seen the Burger King Ad that you have referred to. It did not occur to either of us that the Burger King Ad was offensive in any way. Why would I raise my son to be hyper-sensitive about his disability? My objective as a parent is to strengthen him. Making him hyper-sensitive would have the opposite effect.” Obviously, this father was not a man of the Left.

This labeling of a good-natured, silly burger ad as “offensive” is typical of the Left’s squelching of life’s little joys in the name of the endless list of causes the Left pushes. Myriad joys (except regarding sex and drugs), not to mention opinions, are “offensive” to the Left—and ultimately, hopefully, banned.

The Automobile and the Home

For most Americans, the car is not only a source of much pleasure; it is also identified with individual liberty. But to the extent the Left is able, it will tell you what kind of car you can drive and, whenever possible, get you out of your car and into mass transit or onto a bicycle.

So, too, on the Left, a home is not a man’s castle; it is another place of too many joys—or, since Leftism is also a religion, too many sins. And the Left would like to exorcise them.

One such joy of the American home has always been the family fireplace. But in California, the state most controlled by the Left, environmentalist activists have succeeded in banning wood-burning fireplaces from all new homes. Another house-based pleasure is setting one’s home at the temperature one prefers and is willing to pay for. If the Left has its way, however, the temperature of every home would be set by a central authority.

The Left has abolished another pleasure: the way we light our homes. It has banned the incandescent lightbulb. Though most people prefer to continue illuminating their homes with it, the Left has pushed for national laws mandating that people use alternatives such as compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). These bulbs contain mercury, give a fair number of people headaches, emit less pleasant light in the view of many, are initially much more expensive, and if broken, they necessitate opening windows even in winter, and people and pets leaving the area. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency has issued a sixteen-point procedure to follow if a CFL bulb breaks.

School Games

Schoolchildren have also been increasingly deprived of many of the little joys American schoolchildren have experienced for generations.

Virtually every game that previous generations of American children played during school recess has been banned because activist organizations such as the National Program for Playground Safety deem as too dangerous all games in which kids are “running into each other.” Recess has even been ended in some American schools because the students may get hurt by running around too much.

Nor is the possibility of a player getting physically hurt necessary to ban a game. True to the Left’s preoccupation with feelings, if a player can feel bad, there is a good chance that that game, too, has been banned. In many schools that means no more dodgeball or ring-a-levio, or the possibility of losing a baseball or soccer game by large margins. “We consider it inappropriate to use children as human targets,” said Mary Marks, physical education supervisor for Fairfax County, Virginia, concerning dodgeball. Also, it may hurt the feelings of kids who are eliminated. For the same reason—potential hurt feelings of those eliminated—musical chairs is prohibited in many schools.

Smoking

One of life’s great little pleasures is tobacco. Just watch old war footage to see the serenity and joy a cigarette brought to a wounded soldier. Though I do not smoke cigarettes, I have been smoking cigars and a pipe since I was in high school (as I noted earlier, my father still smokes cigars daily at age ninety-three), and it would be difficult to overstate how much I enjoy both.

No rational person could oppose educating the public about the dangers of cigarette smoking. Cigarette smoking shortens the lives of up to a third of smokers, often in terrible ways, and that is what public health organizations should be saying. But the battle against smoking has become a religious crusade for antismoking activists, who are usually on the Left.

As a result, smoking has been banned in entire cities, outdoors as well as in, even though outdoor bans have no scientific basis. In Burbank, California, and other cities where Leftist politics predominate, one cannot even smoke in a cigar store. That the Left has contempt for Prohibition reveals a startling lack of self-awareness.

If the Left hated Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro as much as it hates “big tobacco,” the world would be a better place.

THE LEFT, ABORTION, AND SEX

The Left, as repeatedly shown here, wishes to control as much of people’s lives as possible. There are, however, two noteworthy exceptions—abortion and sex. In these two areas of human conduct the Left wants people to be left alone.

With regard to abortion, the Leftist view is that the human fetus has no rights at any point in its development. The mother has complete freedom to destroy it at any time for any reason. Not only does the Left oppose any legal bans on abortion, but pro-choice activists will not even morally condemn any abortion. If an affluent and married woman wishes to abort because she does not want another child, that is not morally wrong. If a woman wishes to abort one fetus of two she is carrying because she wants only one more child, that is not morally wrong. If a woman wants a boy and aborts a female fetus, that is not morally wrong.

For the Left, aborting human fetuses at any time for any reason is an absolute right over which society should have no authority. On the other hand, in almost every other area of life, as documented above, the Left seeks more and more governmental authority over the individual.

As regards sexual matters, the Left eschews making judgments regarding any consensual sexual behavior and opposes government involvement in such matters—a position that most conservatives also hold. But the Left goes further. For example, Europeans, who have adopted Left-wing values much more than most Americans have, did not understand Americans’ objections to President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair with a young female intern in the White House. As an editorial in France’s most prestigious newspaper, Le Monde, put it at the time, “We have a very French way of looking at things. We think a president who has affairs is charming.”⁶²

And the ACLU has gone to court arguing against porn filters in the computers of public libraries. To the objection of parents who do not want their minor children to see porn in the local public library, the ACLU responds, “Explicit sex information and even pornography do not themselves cause psychological harm to minors of any age.”⁶³ The American Library Association has a similar position on porn displayed on library computers.

Given the Left’s lack of standards regarding most sexual matters, it should not be surprising that, as documented in the chapter on universities, a Northwestern University professor would have a naked girl come to a postclass presentation in which she used a sex toy to bring herself to orgasm. Nor should it be surprising that the Chicago Sun-Times deputy editorial page editor wrote a column defending the professor. “The demonstration was not a mistake nor does it degrade a Northwestern education in any way,” she wrote. “The demonstration which featured a sex toy used on a naked woman fell well within the bounds of the academic freedom vital to any university worth its salt. Under that rubric, professors are free to generate controversy, to push students to question what they think they know, so long as there is an educational purpose…. I’m still standing behind [Professor] Bailey…because it is his right—and obligation—to provoke, as long as it has an educational purpose…” (emphasis added)⁶⁴

What About All the Good the Left Has Done?

THIS BOOK DELINEATES with scores of examples the toxic impact Left-wing thought and actions have had on civilization. From the far Left—with its virtually unparalleled mass murders and totalitarianism—to the democratic Left, nearly every area of life that the Left has influenced has been adversely affected. The culture has been debased, from the fine arts with their scatological exhibits and contempt for beauty and excellence, to the popular culture’s nearly omnipresent vulgarity. Education has been corrupted, with students learning less and propagandized more. Economies have been wrecked by the irresponsible accumulation of debt, almost entirely a result of government expansion and entitlement programs. Masculinity and femininity have been rendered archaic concepts. The will to fight evil has been almost eradicated in the Western world outside of the United States. The moral character of great numbers of people has been negatively affected for reasons noted in the chapter detailing the effects of the welfare state on the character of citizens. And in the United States, the Left has marshaled its influence in schools and universities, labor unions, news media, entertainment media, and the arts to undermine the bases of Americanism—liberty, small government, God-based ethics, and E Pluribus Unum.

Nevertheless, hasn’t the Left done some good?

The answer is that yes, of course, the Left has done good things. Most people acknowledge the good that social programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have achieved, and the role the Left played in pushing for them. So, too, the Left was the primary advocate for laws improving safety in the workplace, child labor laws, clean air and water legislation, and the like.

There is one huge problem, however, with some of these achievements: The entitlement programs are financially unsustainable. After all, any program that hands out trillions of dollars to its citizens will “work” for a period of time. Such programs take no effort and no thought: Just have younger workers pay for the retirement of older citizens, tax all other wage earners, and print money—then you can do all the good you want. What counts for success is the long-term viability of a program.

Then there is the perhaps unanswerable question of whether without liberal intervention America would have devised alternate ways of enabling the vast majority of its citizens to obtain good health care. I am certain it would have. And while that is not provable, America and most other countries will have no choice but to devise such alternate ways of providing affordable health care, now that these liberal programs have brought countries into near insolvency.

Beyond these unsustainable entitlement programs, the list of Left-wing achievements is short—unless, of course, one agrees with all, or nearly all, of what the Left has done to education, the arts, the tort bar, and in the unprecedented expansion of the state and government power.

What should not be put on the list of achievements is the identification of the Left with women’s suffrage or with civil rights legislation and concern for black America.

Regarding women’s suffrage, it was a Republican who introduced into Congress what became the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote. In addition, the 1919 vote in the House of Representatives approving the amendment was made possible only because Republicans had retaken control of the House in the previous election (prior attempts to get it passed through Democrat-controlled Congresses had failed). The Senate vote was approved only after a Democratic filibuster; and 82 percent of the Republican senators voted for it, while only 54 percent of the Democrats did so. Only 18 percent of the Republicans voted against the amendment, while 46 percent of the Democrats did so. Moreover, twenty-six of the thirty-six states that ratified the Nineteenth Amendment had Republican-controlled legislatures.

As regards to working for civil rights for blacks, ever since the antislavery Republican Party was founded, it has been Republicans, not Democrats, who have overwhelmingly led the cause of black equality.

Every vote against the 1960 Civil Rights Act came from Democrats; and in the House, even the future Left-wing Democratic candidate for president, then-congressman George McGovern—of South Dakota (not a southern state)—merely voted “present.” As regards the better-known 1964 Civil Rights Act, 82 percent of the Republican senators voted for the act, and only 66 percent of the Democrats did so. And in the House of Representatives, 80 percent of the Republicans and only 63 percent of the Democrats voted for the act.

The Left’s response? All the Democrats who voted against all these civil rights bills were conservatives.

This argument is entirely self-serving. For one thing, even putting aside the issue of southern Democrats, how does one explain the fact that nearly every Republican voted for women’s suffrage and for civil rights bills? Were the Republican all liberals? Of course not. They were nearly all conservatives. And while a handful of conservatives may have been racist, there is no racism in conservative ideology.

Even most of those Republicans who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did so solely on constitutional and liberty-related grounds. For example, Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican nominee for president that year, opposed two of the seven key provisions of the bill—those that interfered with property rights (by creating rules for privately owned housing) and those controlling public accommodations (he declined to vote for any legislation that, in his words, “tampers with the rights of assembly, the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom of property”).⁶⁵ But unlike the Democrats who opposed the bill, Goldwater was no racist. He was, in fact, a pro-black activist. He founded the NAACP in Arizona, donated large sums of money to the organization, and integrated the Arizona National Guard (even before President Truman integrated the armed forces).

In addition, the liberal argument that all the Democrats who opposed civil right laws were conservative means, among other things, that Senator J. William Fulbright, one of the most far-Left senators in the postwar period, was really a conservative.⁶⁶

The fact is that virtually the entire history of antislavery and other pro-black activity in America was lopsidedly Republican. The notion, taught to virtually every American college student, that Democrats have been the anti-racism party and Republicans the pro-racism party, is as false as the depiction of the Kennedy assassination as a product of Right-wing hate in Texas even though the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a Communist.⁶⁷

But whatever one’s interpretation of civil rights legislation, all the good, real or alleged, that the Left has done pales in significance to all the damage it has done.

Moreover, whatever good it has done does not change the evaluation. There is no mass movement in the modern world, perhaps in all of history, that hasn’t done good. Even evil movements and ideologies, incomparably worse than the democratic Left, have all done some good. That is why we do not morally assess a political or social or religious ideology by whether it did any good. If we did, no ideology could be assessed as bad or evil, since every ideology has done some good. What we need to assess is the totality of any movement or ideology: What is the net gain or loss to humanity because of its existence?

As we have seen, the most popular Left-wing historian, Howard Zinn, whose American history texts are the most widely used in American schools, believed that America “probably did more bad than good.” I believe, and this book provides the evidence and arguments to sustain this judgment, that the Left has done more bad than good. In other words, had Leftism never arisen, whatever good it did would have happened sooner or later (rarely much later); but much of the bad it did might never have taken place, and that bad dwarfs the good it has done.

Unfortunately, a great many people do not evaluate movements or ideologies on moral grounds, that is, on how much good or evil it did. They place a higher value on things other than good and evil—material equality, social programs, and national prestige are three common examples. This explains, for example, why, according to a 2009 poll, nearly 60 percent of the Russian people would like to see the Soviet Union reestablished. The Soviet genocide in Ukraine, the Soviet creation of the world’s largest concentration camp complex (the Gulag Archipelago), the tens of millions of Russian and other innocent Soviet civilians murdered, the peace pact with Hitler that helped bring about World War II, the support of foreign genocidal Communist regimes, the utter lack of freedom, and the violent suppression of religion in the Soviet Union—none of those evils matter to most Russians compared to the empire, the prestige, the social programs, and the appearance of material equality of the Soviet Union. As reported by the Christian Science Monitor, “Many [Russians] say they also miss being citizens of a huge, sprawling multiethnic superpower that seemed to command respect in the world.” And “[o]lder Russians invariably recall the Soviet era as a time of stability and social security.”⁶⁸

So, if your primary concerns are expansion of the state, material equality, reduction of American power in the world, making America and Europe secular societies, removal of Judeo-Christian influence, substitution of internationalism for nationalism, and making ethnicity and race important values, the Left has been a wild success.

On the other hand, if your primary concerns are fighting evil, making people nobler, morally elevating societies, and creating conditions for prosperity, the Left has been a failure.

Epilogue: Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals

ACCORDING TO POLLS such as those of the Pew Research Center and the National Science Foundation, conservative Americans are happier than liberal Americans.

Liberals respond that they are less happy because they “ruminate” more on serious issues than conservatives do and because they are troubled more by the existence of inequality. These are the explanations, offered, for example, by two psychology professors, Jaime Napier of Yale University and John T. Jost of New York University, in their academic paper, “Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?”

Needless to say, both explanations are self-serving. The first is another example of Left-wing self-esteem and Left-wing contempt for conservatives. Moreover, given how feelings-based Leftism is, it is difficult to ascribe “more thinking” to the Left. If the Left thought more, its track record in virtually every area of life would not be nearly as destructive as it has been. Spending governments into unsustainable debt, granting more and more citizens more and more entitlements, believing that “war is not the answer,” or that the worth of a human fetus is solely determined by a mother, or any of the other Left-wing positions cited in this book are not products of deep thought nearly as much as they are products of deep feelings.

The second explanation has more truth to it but does not explain why liberals are less happy than conservatives. It is entirely true that the Left is more disturbed by inequality than is the Right. Indeed, the Left is more disturbed, as I have tried to show, by material inequality than by anything else, including evil. But this doesn’t explain the happiness difference, because the Right is more disturbed than the Left about other issues—evil, for example, and the expansion of the state and the degradation of the culture.

Furthermore, while the Left may be more disturbed by inequality, conservatives are the ones who do more to alleviate it in their personal lives. Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks, published these data in his book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism:

• Although liberal families’ incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).
• Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood.
• Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did residents of states that voted for George Bush.
• George W. Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.
• In the 10 most conservative states, i.e, those in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated 1.9 percent.
• People who reject the idea that “government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.⁶⁹

Apparently, if one is to judge people by their behavior rather than by their political positions, the argument that liberals are less happy than conservatives because they care more about those poorer than themselves has no validity.

So, let’s consider some other explanations.

One is that perhaps we are posing the question backward when we ask why liberals are less happy than conservatives. The question implies that liberalism causes unhappiness. And while this is probably true, it may be equally or more true to say that unhappy people are more likely to adopt Leftist positions.

Take black Americans, for example. A black American who is essentially happy is going to be less attracted to the Left. People who see themselves as victims cannot be happy, and liberal blacks view themselves as victims of a racist America. Black Americans who are conservative—meaning, among other things, that they do not see themselves as victims, and do not regard their country as racist—are going to be considerably happier. For all intents and purposes, a black American might consider abandoning liberalism in order to be a happier person. It is very hard, if not impossible, to be a happy person while believing that society is out to hurt you. So the unhappy black will gravitate to liberalism, and liberalism will in turn make him unhappier by reinforcing his view that he is a victim.

The unhappy of all races will gravitate toward the Left for a second reason. Life is hard—for liberals and for conservatives alike. But conservatives assume that life will always be hard. Liberals, on the other hand, have utopian dreams. And utopians will always be less happy than those who know that suffering is inherent to human existence. Furthermore, the utopian compares America with utopia and finds it terribly wanting. The conservative compares America with every other civilization that has ever existed and walks around wondering how he got so lucky to be born or naturalized an American.

One upshot of all this is that there is a simple way to produce fewer Leftists: Raise children who are grateful in general and grateful to be American in particular (or grateful to be the citizen of any decent country), who don’t complain much, who learn to handle losing, and who are guided by values, not feelings. In other words, teach them how to be happy adults. That, more than any one other thing, will produce fewer Leftists—and a better world. Because the happy make the world better and the unhappy make it worse.