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The Front Page ‘discussion’ with Norm and Nick is hilarious in a sad sort of way – sad if only because of the waste of time and effort and attention. Norm and Nick might as well have conversed with two nice four-foot lengths of solid brick wall, for all the good it did them.
Here’s FP’s Jamie Glazov starting things off, for instance:
The Left has a long, depressing, ugly and blood-stained record of worshipping the most vile and barbaric tyrannies of the 20th century, including Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam and Castro’s Cuba…But if you are on the Left, are you not part of an ideology that holds that human redemption, accompanied by human equality and a classless society, is possible and that it can be engendered through social engineering?
No. Why? Because the left covers a lot more ground than that, as both Nick and Norm patiently explain over and over again. But…
After everything that the Western Left has perpetrated in the 20th Century, including the facilitation of the bloodbath in Indochina after forcing an American withdrawal from Vietnam, that you would represent the Left with a reference to an effort in a free society to improve the quality of public schools . . . . leaves me somewhat speechless. Stalin’s, Mao’s and Pol Pot’s killing fields were spawned by the notion of the possibility of earthly redemption. Those who believe that earthly redemption is possible and work towards such a reality, having learned nothing from the past, are complicit in the earthly incarnations of their ideal. I remained somewhat puzzled as to what is so complicated about this.
Nick tried gently and sweetly to explain it to him.
Here you are up against a psychopathic totalitarian ideology. You ought to have the sympathy of democrats around the world. But if you, like the Bush administration, refuse to understand that there are different currents in democratic thinking and say with no self-consciousness of what a fool you sound that ‘the Left has been totalitarian throughout its history’ you alienate your potential allies. Democracy is a little more than one notion of the free market from America, which in practice America follows more in theory than in practice. Now get a grip and read some history.
Then another round of the same thing, then Horowitz, amusingly, plays the religion card.
Your refusal to answer my question as to why you choose to belong to a movement in which the views you represent have been consistently marginal for a hundred years suggests that your commitment to the left has a religious rather than a rational basis.
Norm offers another gentle retort:
If I want an exchange with someone who tells me that my commitments have “a religious rather than a rational basis,” and puts the word “explanation” in scare-quotes to refer to a view I’ve expressed, I can drop into some rabid comments box somewhere. But I have better ways of spending my time.
See? This business of charging that someone’s commitments have ‘a religious rather than a rational basis’ is a rhetorical ploy used by some unpleasing characters; Philip Johnson springs to mind (because I’ve just been reading an article by Robert Pennock disputing just such accusations). So it’s a little puzzling when people who have no great fondness for the Horowitzes and IDers of the world say the same thing. There’s a mystery here, and some day I will get to the bottom of it.
Oh crap. You mean earthly redemption isn’t possible? I would have given it a “don’t know but worth a try”…
The religion card. Sounds like a fancied up version of a tack some of my schoolmates would take, where if you like something the least bit more than someone else does, or than they can understand, they up and accuse you of worshipping it, or loving it, or getting your rocks off over it. Pleeeeeease. All right, I’ve done the same time myself a few times, but I’d like to think I wasn’t then pretending to be anything other than snarkastic.
Somebody gimme a refresh, what’s the exact philosphical name for that sort of fallacy/move/trick, is it a form of ad hominem?
Well that “discussion” was certainly a frustrating read. The implication throughout from Glazov and Horowitz was that Geras and Cohen have an irrational, quasi-religious commitment to the Left. Very insulting. And JG & DH kept repeating themselves, as though NG & NC were just dense, and somehow didn’t understand the questions.
What especially got me was Glazov’s use of the phrase “earthly redemption,” as though it’s an established fact that there’s some other kind. Venusian, perhaps? Apparently, he thinks that those of us on the left are unreasonable in our impatience for our pie in the sky.
I hold Horowitz in the same contempt now that I held for him when he was with Ramparts; he wishes to compress the world into a simple distinction of black and white, ally and enemy. Everything evil is part of THEM, everything good is part of US. His shift in allegiance has not changed his character one wit–same shit, different pail. And apparently he’s a student of Goebbels: repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
Still, it’s not a surprising tack. The right is trying to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy, and the claim that everyone not on the right is a staunch communist. In any case, I’m not even sure anymore that the distinction of right vs left means anything anymore. On the left we have some people supporting Islamofascism, and on the right we have PNAC embracing the idea of the end of history, a Marxist-Hegelian doctrine by which all they had to do was knock over Saddam Hussein and democracy would be the magical result. Conservatives spend like drunken sailors and run up record deficits, while liberals balance the budget. Conservatives enact sweeping anti-privacy measures and suspend due process, against liberal protests (I’m so glad the right opposes totalitarianism, yessiree!) And now, according to Horowitz, the right claims to be the architect of all social progress, even the staunch advocates of feminism.
Now, what was it the right was supposed to stand for again? I forget…
Yeah. Horowitz is a real piece of work. There was that time he “debated” Michael Bérubé: he dropped huge pieces of Michael’s responses and then – upbraided him for not answering the questions!
I emailed them to point out that the British Labour Party had opposed Soviet communism, the Labour Government was a founder of NATO in 1949, published the secret Soviet Penal Code after the Second world War, was a member of the Coalition Govt when The Nazis made war with the help of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, how the US union movement was anti-communist , the SPD in germany had consistently opposed Hitler AND Stalin, unlike the KPD. But their ears and mind are shut. I got no response.