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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 16, 2011
\"Blood libel\"
The term "blood libel" has been in the news -- not, I think, because I used it in my Citizen column for Wednesday morning, but because Sarah Palin used it later in the day. A few others have as well. A number of tetchy commentators have objected, saying the term should be applied only narrowly to the monstrous charge that Jews use the blood of Christian babies in their religious rituals.As Christians were once accused of using the blood of Pagan babies in their religious rituals, we may drop forthwith the notion that this was a "medieval Christian" invention, or even that it is implicitly anti-Semitic. And as the term came to be associated with the dissemination of a fraudulent historical document, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" -- by which the Jews were accused not of merely killing babies, but of plotting to control the world -- we may drop the pretence that the term "blood libel" cannot be extended. The term is naturally extended to the suggestion that members of any identifiable group engage in behaviour that leads to the murder of innocents, and that all members of that group must therefore be shunned. And this is exactly what leftists have been doing in statements like the one I quoted on Wednesday: "The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords may lead to the temporary hibernation of right-wing rage, but it is encoded in conservative DNA." Case closed. Except, no case of this nature is ever quite closed, and the only antidote to blood libels -- short of the grace of sanctity -- is open discussion, in which all of the laundry can be hung on the line. This is how, for example, the "Protocols" document was exposed as a big lie, even after many fairly respectable newspapers had bought into it, early in the 20th century. Thank God the dissenters weren't silenced. Daniel Henninger, in the Wall Street Journal, cuts to the present chase: "The divide between this strain of the American left and its conservative opponents is about more than politics and policy. It goes back a long way, it is deep, and it will never be bridged. It is cultural, and it explains more than anything the 'intensity' that exists now between these two competing camps. (The independent laments: 'Can't we all just get along?' Answer: No.)" He recalls a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which appeared in the election year 1964, when a conservative presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, was being depicted by liberal media as a dangerous man. Hofstadter, says Henninger, "taught generations of young, left-wing intellectuals about conservatism and the right. After Hofstadter, the American right wasn't just wrong on policy. Its people were psychologically dangerous." While Hofstadter was not the ultimate source of this "meme" -- which goes back in some respects to the apes of Darwin -- he was there at the birth of a "New Left" in the sixties, a strange new slurry of Marxist, Freudian, feminist, and hippiesque notions which by increments seized the American liberal mind. And so completely that today, the attitudes of the Kennedy generation of American liberals seem indistinguishable from those of the Tea Party. Indeed, on plain policy as opposed to superficial style, I defy anyone to prove that John F. Kennedy was to the left of Sarah Palin. From tax-cutting to anti-Communist confrontation -- with all the Norman Rockwell in between -- his positions were generally those we now associate with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, though presented in the smoother suit of an age when men wore narrow ties, with two-inch collars. The rewriting of history is a necessary component of the world view in which the forces of "progress" are constantly warring with the forces of "reaction." It is necessary because, to make that view plausible at all, we must overlook the daisy chain of social, moral, demographic, fiscal, and associated disasters that have followed from triumphs of the left; and the retreat of traditional American values to what they ungenerously call "the flyover country." Yet "New Left" was simply the old left on drugs, and the formula "progressives versus reactionaries" was the very item laid bloodily down in the French Revolution of 1789. Given a choice only between these two positions, you bet I am a reactionary, as I think any fully sane person must be. We stand against the politics of the guillotine, or The Politics of Procrustes, as the British analytic philosopher Antony Flew explained, in a wonderfully clear book (1981). His title referred to the Greek myth of Procrustes, who assigned himself the task of making all who came his way "equal" -- either by stretching them on his metal bed, or by chopping down their limbs. And words, too, have come to be tortured, so that in current radical parlance, "diversity" means everyone must have the same opinions, or be subject to stretching or chopping by the machinery of the "human rights" industry. And "paranoia" means unwillingness to be so stretched, or chopped. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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