August 10, 2006
"Peace for our time"
John Podhoretz, writing in The Corner:
The quote that begins the article just cited by Michael Rubin is so astonishing it deserves its own separate blog entry. It's the Israeli novelist Amos Oz speaking in March 2000, just before Israel pulled out of its security zone in Lebanon: "The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hizbullah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hizbullah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly will no longer be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border."
Amos Oz is no crank. He's perhaps Israel's foremost intellectual, the grand old man of Israeli letters. This deserves to go down in the annals along with "peace for our time" and the notorious headline on a 1975 New York Times story: "Indochina Without Americans.: For Most, a Better Life."
I hadn't encountered the "Indochina Without Americans" quote, but it certainly encapsulates the sheer evil of our leftish "elites." They are on the other side. And from their twisted selfish point of view, they are perfectly correct to be on the other side. They are reflexively opposed to ordinary Amricans and their values, because they know, or sense, that the more the American people know about them, the more decisively they will be rejected, and sent to the ash-heap of history.
Posted by John Weidner at August 10, 2006 06:06 PMAnd how do you propose to deal with them?. Just educating American?. Leftists are in such dominance
right now because they educated the entire world.
In India right now an entire generation is growing up with the Left worldview.
Soviets used to sell Maxist literature dirt cheap
in India. Did US ever did it?
Is any conservative orgainzation sending subsidized
conservative books to the Rest of the World
I can't imagine how to get leftists out of the field of education, since they gravitate there in great numbers--the petty tyranny, feeling-of-superiority, and isolation from the marketplace of a teacher is just what they like. But their strength is offset by the fact that their ideas are no good.
In general, the leftist worldview is in decline in the world, because it just doesn't work. It has failed in India, and now we see pro-freedom policies growing there, and the result is vibrant economic growth and hundreds of millions of Indians entering middle-class prosperity. (Yes I know there are still vast numbers who are very poor. But the trend is clear.)
And the Soviet Union and its cheap boring Marxist literature is gone. Even leftists no longer read that stuff. Whereas good conservative books and ideas remain fresh, and people still cherish them. The Federalist Papers arre just as interesting and profitable now as they were 200 years ago.
I would love to see conservative ideas spread more vigorously by us, but in fact they are all available now to anyone who has an Internet connection...
Posted by: John Weidner at August 11, 2006 09:25 AM
I think that headline, was right around the marines had evacuated Saigon, and Year Zero
was beginning in Cambodia
