This evening I was reading one of my favorite weblogs - Belmont Club - and came across a striking passage in which Wretchard is commenting on Al Franken labeling life long civil right campaigner David Horowitz a “racist”:
At first David Horowitz’s A Look at Al Franken’s Liberalism, Fair and Balanced had a kind of grim slapstick about it. Horowitz was struck by the ease with which Al Franken could characterize anyone who offended him as being a “racist” with impunity and wondered whether liberals had an unlimited license to tar and feather…
After After Franken labeled him a racist, Horowitz pointed out his superb civil rights movement credentials then paid Franken back in his own coin by putting his likeness on the cover of FrontPageMag.com with the caption ‘Al Franken,: Racist.’. Wretchard continues:
Yet the source of Franken’s unlimited powers of vilification remained a mystery to me until a Belmont Club reader pointed out Robert Kaplan’s magnificent essay The Media and Medievalism. Kaplan had been struck by Elias Canetti’s observations in Crowds and Power, his study of the rise of oppression in interwar Europe. Canetti thought that the real tools of totalitarians were not simple brutality but “the right to question and to demand answers, the right to judge and condemn, and the right to pardon and show mercy.” And it these precise powers that, with the fall of the Communist International, Kaplan believes the modern media has arrogated unto itself.
While quite a few regimes, particularly in the Middle East, employ that secrecy and brutality invoked by Canetti as their ordinary means of control, he is far more interesting when he writes about the power to question and to demand answers, to judge and condemn, to react swiftly, and to forgive. After all, secrecy and brutality are so obviously elements of control that they require little explanation. But listen to him on another element:
‘All questioning is a forcible intrusion. … The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light. He sets to work with the sureness of a surgeon, one who … stimulates pain. … The situation is most dangerous for the person questioned when short, concise answers are demanded …’[Source: Policy Review]
Kaplan well understands that the right to question, judge and condemn are commonly regarded as virtues. But he also knows that all modern tyrants appear on the world stage in the garb of saviors.
To the extent that the left is still vibrant, I am suggesting that it has mutated into something else. If what used to be known as the Communist International has any rough contemporary equivalent, it is the global media. The global media’s demand for peace and justice, which flows subliminally like an intravenous solution through its reporting, is - much like the Communist International’s rousing demand for workers’ rights - moralistic rather than moral. Peace and justice are such general and self-evident principles that it is enough merely to invoke them. Any and all toxic substances can flourish within them, or manipulate them, provided that the proper rhetoric is adopted. For moralizers these principles are a question of manners, not of substance. To wit, Kofi Annan can never be wrong.
Superb.
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