Monday, August 20, 2007

Great Peaceniks

From the City Journal:

Call it the Peace Racket.

We need to make two points about this movement at the outset. First, it’s opposed to every value that the West stands for—liberty, free markets, individualism—and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values. Second, we’re talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations. It is also waging an aggressive, under-the-media-radar campaign for a cabinet-level Peace Department in the United States.


We already have one of those. It's called the State Department. But I digress.

Their founding father is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research five years later. Invariably portrayed in the media as a charismatic and (these days) grandfatherly champion of decency, Galtung is in fact a lifelong enemy of freedom. In 1973, he thundered that “our time’s grotesque reality” was—no, not the Gulag or the Cultural Revolution, but rather the West’s “structural fascism.” He’s called America a “killer country,” accused it of “neo-fascist state terrorism,” and gleefully prophesied that it will soon follow Britain “into the graveyard of empires."

Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America’s arrogant view of itself as “a model for everyone else,” he’s long held up certain countries as worthy of emulation—among them Stalin’s USSR, whose economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West’s. He’s also a fan of Castro’s Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for “break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron grip.” At least you can’t accuse Galtung of hiding his prejudices. In 1973, explaining world politics in a children’s newspaper, he described the U.S. and Western Europe as “rich, Western, Christian countries” that make war to secure materials and markets: “Such an economic system is called capitalism, and when it’s spread in this way to other countries it’s called imperialism.” In 1974, he sneered at the West’s fixation on “persecuted elite personages” such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Thirty years later, he compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany for bombing Kosovo and invading Afghanistan and Iraq. For Galtung, a war that liberates is no better than one that enslaves.


There's plenty more, but you get the idea. How is it that communism still isn't discredited with the lefties?

Update, 9/2/07: The LA Times posts this. Doesn't look all that different.

2 comments:

allenm said...

Lefties see themselves as the natural leaders of "the masses" so they're drawn to any system of governance in which the superior aren't required to consult with the inferior.

Why do you think the Kennedy administration was Camelot and the Clinton administration Camelot Revisited? Why do you think *all* communist regimes suffer from the cult of personality?

That's also why lefties, uniformly, hate the U.S. so desperately: we're the embodiment of the classless society. When you see yourself as a cut above, representative forms of government are your enemy.

Ellen K said...

I find it fascinating that when extreme liberals don't win it is because the electorate is "stupid". Witness there labeling of anything between New York and LA as some sort of vast cultural wasteland peopled with inbred hillbillies and the traveling road show of "Cops".But when they win an election, the same folks are discriminating connoisseurs of political thought. In reality, most people shut their eyes and pull the lever-metaphorically speaking. People don't know the issues, or only know one side of it. They waiver until right before they vote and even then,it's not a sure thing. The best thing that could happen is that the networks and newspapers lose power on election day leaving people to actually vote their convictions rather than waiting for the biggest payout.