MAY 2004
by Barry Stagg
In this century, human intellectual frailty has not gone away but neither has the ability of many to effect near perfect self-delusion. Where the disciples of communism and the apologists for Nazi aggression were wholly discredited in the twentieth century, now the ideologues and true believers of that most sanctimonious ideology, postmodernism, remain convinced of their fundamental moral and mental superiority to those who would fight to defend and maintain Western society.
Nowhere is the vanity and waspish sting of the postmodernists more apparent than in the debate about the military reaction of America after the mass murders of September 11, 2001. The simplest explanation for their position is that they truly believe that this purportedly postmodern race of socially advanced humans will no longer fight to achieve anything. They hold to the idea that the meek have already inherited the earth and are busy rooting out the few remaining deviant warriors from the crowd. How else to explain the tight-lipped scorn that so many Western elitists have for the dedication of the Bush administration to orthodox military conquest of the offending terrorists. Indeed, how else do we explain the animus toward Israel among Western thinkers, a visceral identification of Israel as a pathological presence in a Middle Eastern sector full of tyrannical regimes.
Robert Conquest, eminent historian, places the postmodernist movement where it belongs, among the "sludge" of contemporary thought. For where else can we place the body of ideas that hold to the view that the foundations of Western civilization are so inherently biased and contradictory that they must be abandoned as intellectual first principles?
Charles Kesler had this to say about postmodernists , writing for the National Review on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001: "Postmodernists find everything ironic, including themselves (or so they say), and they delight in deconstructing structures of power even as they build powerful structures for themselves within our universities."
The whole premise that war is now a pursuit of the lesser humans who do not ascend to postmodern superiority is confirmation of the basic theorem advanced by Robert Conquest. His premise is that there are always a significant lot of thinkers who will see a train of thought and jump on it in the absolute expectation that its components answer all the nagging problems of this age. Postmodernists would have the West in general, but the United States and Israel in particular, disarm and disengage from the task of preserving territorial security through the force of arms.
This sort of bystander philosophy looks and sounds like the perfect
rationalization for inaction. The late Phil Ochs, an unlikely
conservative, wrote a song about this rank and cowardly behaviour,
away back in the 1960's. Here is a pithy little excerpt to redden
the ears of any comfy postmodernist within earshot:
" Oh look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends "
The world moves on now, in much the same way that it did a hundred years ago and as it did five centuries before that. In this world we live in today, the heirs to the ideology of utopian delusion still carry on the dubious traditions that brought us Stalin's "useful idiots" and Neville Chamberlain's quavering "peace in our time". Inaction and the craven comforts of the prosperous bystander are puerile currency today as they were in the 1930's when Hitler and Stalin festered into full malignancy.
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