Yesterday I wrote a long post about a new advocacy group for a newly self-identified victim group. They displayed all the accoutrements of the typical psychology of newly minted societal victims; their shame was transformed into pride, their anger was projected and externalized onto the greater society, and their demands were that we all adapt to their congenital anomaly, so that they would not have to continue to feel damaged. As a bonus, they admitted to laying the groundwork now for lawsuits later against those Doctors and parents who had conspired to "assault" them in the quest to normalize their appearance.
However, before I could post the article, I was struck by an overwhelming lassitude mixed with a touch of dread. I chose not to post what I had written and deleted the entire piece.
What occurred to me was that my post would be taken as an attack on the rights of these "victims" and I was opening myself up to their attack, with very little to gain. I also realized that this has been the tactic of choice for the left/liberal side of the political spectrum for many years. The left/liberal social experiment has been underway for almost 40 years, and the fact is that on almost every measure, the experiment has been a dismal failure.
For the purposes of clarity and this essay, I am defining left/liberal as that political point of view that is exemplified by the New York Times. There is a large area of overlap with the anti-Bush and BDS segments of the political spectrum, but it is more than that. I will present a brief survey of some areas of modern liberal PC-thought, which includes "diversity" aka identity politics, anti-war, anti- (American) military, anti-Capitalism, covert and overt anti-Semitism, and point out how their still powerful monopoly position at the choke-points of news dissemination leads to undermining of Western democratic ability to recognize and react to changing realities.
Liberal ideas came into their ascendancy with the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960's. The premise was that poverty was caused by the lack of financial support to our most vulnerable groups and the goal was the eradication of poverty. Issues of racial disparity were inextricably bound up with poverty since a high percentage of minority, especially Black, Americans lived in poverty.
By the late 1960's, the counter-culture was questioning all social mores, aided by radical professors, including the early feminists who not only were interested in denying the existence of meaningful differences between men and women, but were also laying hate groundwork for Political Correctness, which at its core depicts the white male as the oppressor of all various designated victim groups. Traditional male roles were denigrated and devalued. Despite the pose, recapitulated by today's anti-war movement, of supporting the troops while opposing the war, in fact, the groups behind most of the anti-war protests were overtly anti-military and often anti-American. This fact remains true today. Christopher Hitchens, a man of the left, recognizes that groups like "International ANSWER" and "United for Peace and Justice" are overtly anti-American (in fact they are openly pro-war but on the side of the Baathists and al Qaeda) and anti-Semitic, though the LSM* (I have decided on LameStreamMedia as the most parsimonious acronym for what used to be the MainStreamMedia) support their subterfuge and carefully sanitize all news reports to avoid allowing any evidence of this to infect their stories about the "massive" anti-Iraq war protests going on today:
To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.
A third area in which the liberal ideology carried the day was in the educational system. By fusing with such disparate ideas as diversity (of skin color, though not of ideas), self esteem, and institutional racism, the left was able to change the goal of our educational system from teaching children the basics of a sound education to ensuring that no one's feelings were ever damaged by the reality of unequal intellectual endowments and outcomes. The perfect educational system to guarantee would guarantee equal outcomes whether or not the students actually learned how to think clearly and evaluate data in any particular way. Rather than swamping children with a mass of facts derived from the minds of "dead, white men" which were, of course, inherently oppressive to women and minorities, children could be taught that all arrangements between people were in fact power arrangements. Replacing fact based education by "feeling" based education has been a disaster for our students, and none suffer more than the poor and minority who are robbed of their chance to advance in life via education by being deprived of one. The unspoken assumption of the liberal elites is that Black children cannot learn, yet when we demand more from them than simple "feelings", they can indeed learn. Why is this story not told by the LSM but depends on Betsy's page to keep us informed?
About ten years ago North Carolina instituted a high stakes testing program and made a big push to get teachers on board by tying bonuses to their students' test results. In fact, our program was one of the models for No Child Left Behind. And guess what? It's working. The gap has been steadily narrowing between black and white students. Something is going on and it seems to be achieving slow, but incremental results. Maybe all that brouhaha about how bad it is to have testing and put pressure on both teachers and students is missing the point. Maybe this sort of program works in accomplishing the goal of helping low-achieving students improve. I'm not convinced that it does much of anything for the high-achieving student, but then that is not what it is aimed for. Perhaps the New York Times might want to do a follow-up story about how testing is raising student achievement for minority students in the entire state of North Carolina.
This justified teaching that since all are created equal, that therefore all outcomes must be equivalent and therefore all lifestyles are equivalent. Children must be trained form an early age to respect gay lifestyles, single mother families, and all other arrangements as exactly equivalent. In effect, Fathers are not only oppressors by their very nature, but are in no way necessary tot he proper rearing of children. This ushered in the long term social experiment of single mother's raising children without benefit of paternal involvement in the lives of the children. John Leo supplies the data to support the contention, only controversial to those whose ideology continues to blind them, that children need both mothers and fathers to develop into healthy, well functioning, adults:
Two decades of research produced a consensus among social scientists of both left and right that family structure has a serious impact on children, even when controlling for income, race, and other variables. In other words, we are not talking about a problem of race but about a problem of family formation or, rather, the lack of it. The best outcomes for children--whether in academic performance, avoidance of crime and drugs, or financial and economic success--are almost invariably produced by married biological parents. The worst results are by never-married women.
Having a single mother increases the risk of impoverishment in all spheres. In one fell swoop, much of the basis of political correctness has been devastated by reality.
In these areas, and multiple others, the LSM acts as if their job is to weaken the American experiment by actively hiding the news that brings their ideology into question and slanting whatever news they can force into heir ideological mold to enhance the appearance of support for thier positions.
If your only source of news if the LSM, all you know about the War in Iraq and the War on Islamic Terrorism is that we are losing, and losing badly. Iraq is a quagmire much like Vietnam and the War on Terror is a disaster that is making us less safe; the only alternative is to use the police and the legal system to fight these criminals, despite the evidence that this does not and can not work. After being convicted of being part of a group which carried out a campaign of bombings, one defendant served half of a ten year sentence, came out of prison and promptly became involved in attempting to repeat his earlier exploits! As Dafydd points out:
The French and Spanish approach of all judicial, all the time simply does not work. There are too many procedural safeguards for criminal defendants, too many soft-hearted, soft-headed judges who simply feel sorry for "the chained-up dog," without bothering to ask why it was chained in the first place. These tendencies are bad enough for ordinary defendants accused, say, of carjacking or income-tax evasion; at least that's understandable. But for terrorist suspects who consider themselves in a "holy war" against "Jews and Crusaders," such an approach is a suicide pact.
If you read the blogs, you would recognize how these are not merely alternative views of the news, but are based on ongoing lies and distortions perpetrated by the LSM. Captain Ed describes what is going on within Iraq without the blinders imposed by the LSM:
The intelligence keeps getting better and better, and the noose grows ever tighter. Zarqawi may replace these positions as fast as we capture or kill the incumbents, but each time that happens he has to use people with less skill and experience as replacements. That means more mistakes, less communication with external units, both of which forces the terrorists to simplify strategy and tactics to remain successful on their missions.
....
They (the insurgents-SW) want to keep the children of Iraq ignorant and ill led, all the more to recruit them later on. Ignorance is their stock in trade, after all, just as with any other bigots and racists. This demonstrates the "plan" that the foreign terrorists have for the future of Iraq: a blighted, ignorant mass under the thumb of an autocratic caliphate that will cough up its children for suicide missions because they have no hope of any better life. The Iraqis have better plans for their children, and they know that the Americans do as well.
Bill Roggio has the more details on the degradation of the insurgency in Iraq:
The past month has been exceptionally hard on the upper management of al Qaeda in Iraq. The death of al Qaeda’s number two in command, Abdullah Abu Azzam, highlights this fact. Security Watchtower documents the heavy losses. In the Anbar and Diwana provinces, sixteen leaders, including six “emirs”, five senior facilitators and 5 brigade or cell leaders have been killed or captured. This list excludes the Coaliton’s success in dismantling the al-Ahwal brigade in the city of Hit. The Lincoln Tribune provides the details, summarized below. Note the cascading effect of capturing a senior leader of the al-Ahwal brigade. Within two weeks the leadership is rounded up.
Wretchard shows how American casualties in Iraq over the last three months, at a time of an increased tempo of offensive military operations against the terrorists and insurgents, have fallen very significantly from the corresponding period a year ago:
...the number of killed and wounded is 73% of last year's figures. In the last three months, the number has been 50% of the same period last year. This was quite an interesting result, considering news accounts that Iraq is 'descending into chaos' and that things are going 'from bad to worse'. Counting the wounded, the figures for September 2005 so far are lower than for any month in 2004 and 2005. Yet the mood conveyed in the press is that things are sliding into the abyss. That may be true for other reasons, but with US casualties at a quarter to a seventh of their historical values in a month full of offensives and important dates, the honest analyst must at least ask himself if something is changing on the battlefield.
Yet the New York Times and its derivatives scream out the headlines of American casualties and Iraqi deaths caused by the growing, more confident insurgency. al Qaeda themselves report that they are failing in Iraq, but they know that they still have a chance to win as long as their fellow propagandists in the Western LSM do their work for them of demoralizing the American public.
If your only source of news is the LSM, you would be forced to believe that the poor black population of New Orleans was abandoned to their doom by the indifferent racism of George W. Bush, who morphs from Hitler into Bull Connor when race enters the picture:
Some sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome have grown tired of Fourth Reich analogies. They've Moved On to embracing NY Rep. Charlie Rangel's comparison of President Bush to Bull Connor. (Audio at The Political Teen in case you missed it last week.)
Fellow Democrats have done nothing to distance themselves from Rangel's insane remarks.
There were countless murders, rapes, torment of the poor victims of Katrina, some of whom were forced into cannibalism! Yet now when the waters have receded, we find that at best these were exaggerations and irresponsible rumor mongering by the LSM, and at worst something more insidious. Michelle Malkin points out:
Remember all those rapes and murders that supposedly took place in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? By and large, according to a new report, they didn't happen. (Original report at NOLA. com)
According to Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan, "authorities have only confirmed four murders in the entire city in the aftermath of Katrina — making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year."
Officials now say there were only six deaths inside the Superdome. Of those, "four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide." No murders.
At the Convention Center, four bodies have been recovered. Only one of the four deaths appears to have resulted from murder.
An earlier report said that none of the reported rapes in the Superdome and the Convention Center have been substantiated.
John Hinderaker naively, perhaps, wonders:
With the passage of time, it has become apparent that most of the "evidence" on the basis of which the Democrats launched their hysterical post-Katrina attack on the Bush administration was wrong. As the facts come into focus, the dominant question that emerges is: how could the mainstream media have done such a poor job in reporting on Hurricane Katrina?
Perhaps you have noticed a pattern here. If we were to allow the LSM to control the governance of our nation, we would abandon Iraq to the gentle ministrations of al Qaeda as a lost cause; we would abandon our poor, Black children to undereducated poverty that they would not even be able to recognize as caused by their own lack of an adequate basic education, (but at least they would feel good about themselves); we would continue to have our technological edge erode by the insistence that women must be discriminated against by oppressive white males as the only explanation for their relative dearth in the sciences and engineering fields, while ignoring that boys are rapidly becoming an endangered species on many of our elite college campuses; our military would be maligned and starved of their ability to fight against enemies, then brutalized when their poor equipment renders them ineffective at saving lives during the next catastrophe, here or abroad; in short, on almost any issue, the liberal/left elite, represented so ably by the New York Times gives every appearance of being not just in opposition to the Bush administration in everything it does, but in opposition to best interests of the very people it claims to care the most about. We have met the enemy and it is the LSM.
Which brings me to my final point. The LSM has effectively taken the side of our enemies in a much broader sphere than most would be comfortable acknowledging. It is certain that the vast majority of those who write propaganda for the enemies of civilization are unaware of just how much work they are doing to advance the agenda of the very people who would delight in decapitating them, however, the suspicion that there is some malevolent design at work along side human avarice and stupidity is difficult to combat. The LSM can attack Western Civilization (the very term and concept are anathema to the left/liberal mind set) with an endless series of nicks and cuts, moving from Iraq to Katrina to distortions about John Roberts with equal facility. It is exhausting to read the blogs and compare and contrast with what is purported to be "news" as filtered through the anti-American eyes of the BBC, AP, Reuters, New York Times. A conservativattack on one's sense of reality.e who supports our attempts to increase freedom and respoonsibility (rather than license and irresponsibility) must continuaaly blot up the drops of blood leaking from the body politic. It is exhausting to masintain one's vigilance and equilibrium in the face of such a constant barrage of "paper cuts."
The LSM still controls the frame of the news and will continue to do so, forcing the blogosphere to be reactive instead of having the initiative, until such time as the blogosphere matures and has its own sources on the ground and its own access to the means of disseminating information. That day is coming, with PJ media and the Powerline news site at the forefront, but in the immortal words of Michael Ledeen:
Faster, please.
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