Just as an interesting note, I did one fast pass on Technorati (which sucks, BTW) looking for feedback from the leftish blogs for Mr. Arkin – BTW, he’s done another non-apology, about which I’ll try and comment tomorrow – and found only one, from a smallish blog called Dymaxion World:
It’s funny that such a mild rebuke (to my ears) should be getting Arkin raked over the coals. It seems that some people are so in love with the rhetoric of war that it causes them to lose their senses, and make profoundly undemocratic — anti-republican, if you will — arguments. To say that we can’t criticize a war because it would risk hurting the soldiers’ feelings is insane. Soldiers serve the public. We owe much to them — most importantly, not to waste their lives on shitty unwinnable wars — but at the end of the day, we call the shots.
Why the politically inopportune silence? Well, there’s a lot more to it than that…but I want to make a better argument, so it’ll wait a bit.
I’ll leave you with a final quote, from Charles Brown, a former anti-sanction protester:
To be perfectly frank, we were less concerned with the suffering of the Iraqi people than we were in maintaining our moral challenge to U.S. foreign policy. We did not agitate for an end to sanctions for purely humanitarian reasons; it was more important to us to maintain our moral challenge to “violent” U.S. foreign policy, regardless of what happened in Iraq. For example, had we been truly interested in alleviating the suffering in Iraq, we might have considered pushing for an expanded Oil-for-Food program. Nothing could have interested us less. Indeed, we even regarded the paltry amounts of aid that we did bring to Iraq as a logistical hassle. When it suited us, we portrayed ourselves as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization and at other times as a political group lobbying for a policy change. In our attempt to have it both ways, we failed in both of these missions.
The problem I have with much of the progressive antiwar left – the soil from which Mr. Arkin sprung – is that the fundamental challenge to them remains maintaining a ‘moral challenge’ via-a-vis the U.S. and the West. It’s liberation theology, writ small.
I’m a Leftist, a pragmatic Democrat, and I have a similar view at the domestic level. It has bothered me, and I’ve thought about it quite a bit. I don’t give much to charities because I think that they are just bandaids. I want solutions, and I view government as the entity of adequate size.
I support charity on government tax breaks, and I definitely support the estate tax. America is not about dynasties. I believe that without an estate tax we will lose our symphonies and museums, since these superwealthy people will balance symphony versus dynasty, and our society will lose.
But I digress …
I have no problem with charity doing some of the applications, as long as we keep the religion out of it. Bushs policies have soured me even more on charity. Give me a career bureaucrat!
I want large scale solutions, and that is government action.
“I believe that without an estate tax we will lose our symphonies and museums, since these superwealthy people will balance symphony versus dynasty, and our society will lose.”
Not to change the subject — good post, AL — but what is the evidence for that proposition? It’s called “Carnegie Hall” for a reason; my understanding is that most of our symphony orchestras exist precisely because of America’s “superwealthy.” To the degree that the modern superwealthy are less likely to support orchestras, it’s probably to do with changing tastes in music rather than selfishness. (And who can blame them there? In an age that was still producing Wagners, it made more sense to support the symphony.)
bq.the fundamental challenge to them remains maintaining a ‘moral challenge’ via-a-vis the U.S. and the West. It’s liberation theology, writ small.
So much of what we see coming from today’s Left is recycled Heideggerian piffle. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) promoted a philosophy that:
bq.a) worshipped nature
bq.b) opposed most new technology
bq.c) despised Western Civilisation
Typical results of following such a philosophy are that people actually believe that when something goes wrong in nature it is becuse humans have offended nature and/or nature gods. The very definition of a primitivist religion.
Of course their opposition to genetically modified foods becomes a litmus test for acceptable orthodoxy. Or nuclear energy, or SUVs, or, or, or.
Finally, we get to the ‘moral challenge’ against the USA as a proxy for the West … Europe having already largely adopted Heideggerian philosophy.
There’s only one little problem. Martin Heidegger was the preferred philosopher of the Nazis. The echoes within the modern Left are chilling, especially at the level of attempting to silence those who disagree.
Their emotionally intensity, OTOH, is well explained by Heidegger’s contemporaty, the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), who said “Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith, but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.”
It is therefore unsurprising that in light of the Left’s repeated and consistent tendency to get things 180 degrees bass-ackwards wrong, compared to the reality of life and the world, that they have become so frantically orthodox in their ‘moral challenge.’
Oh well, for once I screwed up the block quote, because I forgot the space. Sorry about that.
Yeah more “oil for food” that’s the ticket /snicker
I thinb that there is a desire in the hearts of some people to look for a way to pretend that “the Left” is anti-soldioer, and lacking any real basis for this conclusion, the Arkin article is being used as a jumping off point for a lot of rationalizing and over-generalizing. Why aren’t left blogs posting about it? Because there is no reason to. Arkin speaks for himself. Is this blog required to rebutt everything said or written by Limbaugh, Coulter, Pam Atlas, Malkin, Hannity…..? Mostly people post about the things that matter to them. Arkin matters a lot more to people looking for some scrap of a way to smear “the Left’ than he does to any actual anti-war posters.
“Think” “acquire” Did I miss any other typos?
Their moral challenge to US foreign policy?
Embracing every fascist creep who happens to oppose the US (Hussein, Chavez, Ahmadinejad – to name only the last three) is an arguably sound strategy for a Bolshevik-like party that seeks to maximize the destruction and defeat of its own society, in order to seize power for itself. A good Bolshevik, however, would not describe such a strategy using a bourgeois adjective like “moral”.
But mycat, I do (even though I’m the site leftist) hammer Savage, Coulter etc. Go do a search for those names in the site and see.
A.L.
The reason the superwealthy supported (past tense) the symphony is because they would lose the money to taxes, so they got to donate it. Donations brought fame and perhaps a good feeling, but it was totally subsidized by the tax break. Without the tax break, the consideration is family dynasty or symphony.
Grim is just assuming that the past is the same as the future, even if you change the motivations. Grim, you got no logic there.
Well, Carnegie seems to have had a separate logic from tax breaks and dynasty. Perhaps you aren’t familiar with his story, which ought to be inspiring.
As for today’s super rich, I can think of Bill Gates, who has given away money left and right to various charities; and Ted Turner, who promised to give fully a billion dollars to the United Nations. I can hardly think of a worse cause for charity, but you can’t doubt that the man is sincere about his charity work.
Grim, ALL of your instances have taken place with a tax subsidy. I’m talking about how I think things will go downhill for civics if we don’t keep the estate tax. Your examples are my examples. There are no examples for your case, and I’m saying there won’t be.