Dennis Prager
Posted on 11/21/2005 10:21:45 PM PST by goldstategop
If you want to understand the Left, most of what you need to know can be summarized thus: The Left hates inequality, not evil.
As one raised as a New York Jew (who, moreover, attended an Ivy League university) and therefore liberal -- it took me a while to recognize this fatal moral characteristic of the Left. But the moment I realized it, it became immoral not to oppose leftist values.
It is neither possible nor virtuous to be devoid of hatred. Even those who think it is always wrong to hate must hate hatred. The question therefore is not whether one hates but what (or whom) one hates.
For example, on the basis of the value system that I hold -- the Judeo-Christian -- I try to confine my hating to evil. By evil I mean the deliberate infliction of unjust suffering on the undeserving; cruelty is the best example of such evil.
Those who hate evil hated the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, after all, was a made-up country, created by a band of gangsters called Bolsheviks and Communists. They murdered between 20 million and 40 million innocent people, spread their totalitarianism around the world, and thereby rendered hundreds of millions of people slaves and automatons.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, liberals and social democrats vigorously opposed communism. But the rest of the world's Left, especially its intellectuals and artists, not only did not oppose communist governments, they were the greatest defenders of communism.
By the end of the Vietnam War (begun and prosecuted by liberals), however, most liberals abandoned anti-tyranny, anti-evil liberalism and joined the rest of the Left. Since the late 1960s, with almost very few exceptions (one is Sen. Joseph Lieberman), "liberal" and "Left" have become synonyms. (That is why The New York Times characterizes the Nation, a far-left journal, as "liberal.")
Thus, when President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," the liberal world condemned him. The Cold War, once regarded as an epochal battle between freedom and tyranny, came to be regarded by liberals as an amoral battle between "two superpowers."
Likewise liberals almost universally mocked President George W. Bush when he labeled Saddam Hussein's Iraq, North Korea and Iran an "axis of evil." It takes a mind that either has little comprehension of evil or little desire to confront it to object to characterizing three of the worst regimes in modern history as "evil."
How else can one explain the Left's enchantment with Fidel Castro, the totalitarian ruler of Cuba? Clearly his evil is of little consequence. What matters to people on the Left is that there is free health care and almost universal literacy in Cuba. Whereas non-leftists believe that it is far better to be illiterate but free, leftists believe that it is better to be a literate slave.
Today, this inability to either recognize or to hate evil is manifested in the liberal opposition to the war in Iraq. As I pointed out in a previous column, opponents of the war should be asked to at least acknowledge that America is fighting evil people and an evil doctrine in Iraq. But even that is difficult, if not impossible, for most people on the Left.
As noted above, everyone hates someone, and that includes people on the Left. The problem is that because they don't hate evil, they hate those who oppose evil. That is how liberals went from anti-communist to anti-anti-communist. To paraphrase one of the greatest moral insights of the Talmud, those who show mercy to the cruel will be cruel to the merciful. So, George W. Bush, not the Islamic terror world, is the Left's villain; life-embracing Israel is the Left's villain, not their death-loving enemies; and religious Christians who note moral weaknesses within the Islamic world are the real danger, not the moral weaknesses within the Islamic world.
To be fair, it should be noted that confusion over evil and insufficiently hating it are not confined to the Left. There are religious people who conflate sexual sin with evil and/or advocate automatic forgiveness of all evildoers, even when no repentance has taken place.
But the inability to acknowledge the greatest evils, let alone to join in fighting them, is the defining characteristic of the Left. That is why former Vice President Al Gore just announced that global warming was a worse threat to humanity than terrorism. He really believes that. As do the great many people on the Left whose moral passion focuses more on gasoline prices, drug prices, health care prices, and other expressions of material inequality than on people and movements dedicated to murder. That is why Robert Redford and friends from Hollywood can celebrate Fidel Castro. Castro may imprison political opponents, and most Cubans may have no right of dissent, but they are economically equal.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Thanks for posting this article, it was a great read. I believe the reason why the Left are so obsessed with 'equality' but have no hatred for evil, is because they are pro-socialist and communist, believers in systems where everyone is 'equal' but no one is free. This system is coming into being right here in America, today. "Equality" is rising, personal and religious freedoms are waning.
"... The problem is that because they don't hate evil, they hate those who oppose evil..... To paraphrase one of the greatest moral insights of the Talmud, those who show mercy to the cruel will be cruel to the merciful."
DEEP...DUHHH(in my best homer voice)
After pointing out that the Soviet Union did not let its citizens leave the country, my former commie brother explained that these people had been given an education by the government and thus they owed, so therefore they were morally bound to stay.
So that is what communism offers....gov gives education...you give back your freedom. Commies think this is a good deal. I think it sucks. That is what divides us and that is why I will fight the bastards to my last breath. Although it looks now that it will be islamofascists instead of commies...no matter to me they are all evil sob's.
My brother made good in the stock market and retired nicely at 55....no thanks to his hero Karl Marx...:)
Dennis Prager is my first dose to newstalk radio every day. The best!
And why is this? Because (among other reasons) literate slaves will still be able to serve as audiences for the musing and posturing of their artistic betters, and throw a few pennies from their wages into the hat passed by the liberal artestes who are brought into the workhouse by their benevolent masters. And by so doing they will keep the liberal fantasy world of words and empty gestures alive, which is all that counts, in the end, for these people. The fantasy lives if it can be kept alive in the mind of even one silly fool, and if a million wise men must be kept in slavery, or consigned to mass graves, so that reality can be turned upside-down, it is worth doing.
This is interesting. I agree with him, but at the same time the lefts biggest nightmare is to be all-equal or the same. Like one of the old twilight zones.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
bttt
Excellent article. The only issue I would take up is the one about sexual sin. You need only see the trauma left to a child who has been molested to know that it can be evil.
ping
"This is interesting. I agree with him, but at the same time the lefts biggest nightmare is to be all-equal or the same. Like one of the old twilight zones."
Twilight Zone is an underestimate when we are talking of the left.
One minute they are fighting for the 'rights' of the foreign terrorists/enemy combatants...and claiming a constitutional right to our judicial system on the part of enemy combatants.....
And at the same time, they fight for the right to kill any baby in a USA woman's womb...without a trial..without a jury..without a care.
It is beyond strange.
I do not understand this statement. Is Dennis saying that Lieberman is both liberal and Left, or is he stating that democrates EXCEPT for Lieberman are "liberal and Left"? In my opinion there is no exceptions to "liberal and Left". If a person is other than liberal and left he would be conservative and left.(In my opinion this would be a misnomer)
This is what makes them inherently antisemitic. They cannot stand Jewish distinctions...and Christian ones too.
Yet they themselves aspire to distinctions of their own in total Orwellian "more equal than others" opinion maker hypocrisy. This is why they inwardly love Bin Laden and find him cool and that I find more and more feminists on campus going out with Syrians, Morrocans and what not.
The negative distinctions they seek in hate of genuine distinction is what makes them psychedelic brothers of Bin Laden, because Bin Laden also distincted himself through such hate...yet it does not prevent them from making Christian distinction a sin and calling the like of Robertson terroists.
"I can't get no satisfaction" is the liberal mindset too. They always stand in the way of people's commitments coz they have none themselves distinctly in their cult of death and murderous seeking of material satisfaction with a quiet greed beyond anyone's imagination....and yet they preach equality coz they are so jealous and paranoiac of what one's blessed ingenuity can do with little.
Liberals sin continuously in latent permanent state and cannot get out of this. It's what makes them evil and inherently insane.
Lieberman is a Haredi Jew against abortion personaly, assumably, but politicaly he is for abortion.
They want it both ways...
Terrorists are the poster boys for their fascist fn' it all, I'm the big vagina b!tch attitude, I don't need to commit to you, I'm fine...
Yet when in 'troubah', they whine and scream and plead for God and JudeoChristians' cmmitments to their lives, like pathetic mafiosos caught in cookie jar by their boss running to the cops pleading them after having sworn to blow their brains out the day before...
LOL
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