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The evil fruits of defining evil as inequality
The New York Times, having rationalized, excused, and covered up the unprecedented and unimaginable evil of the Palestinian suicide bomb attacks against Israelis, turns around and faults Russia for its anti-Semitism, including a horrible terrorist bomb attack on a young Jewish woman. What can explain the Times’s hypocrisy? It’s the fact that liberals understand all social phenomena in terms of the liberal “script” of oppressors versus oppressed, which in turn derives from the liberal redefinition of good as equality and evil as inequality. So, in the Mideast, liberals cast the Israelis as the “oppressors” and therefore as deserving of whatever the “oppressed” want to do to them. But when it comes to Russia, liberals cast the majority gentile population of that country as the oppressor and therefore condemn its anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior, which they excuse when Palestinians do the same thing. Having replaced the belief in objective good and evil by the belief in oppressors and oppressed, the liberals cannot see that they themselves have helped justify and fuel the evil anti-Semitism that they are now decrying. Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 01, 2002 12:02 PM | Send Comments
The headline was “Bomb Attack Shows That Russia Hasn’t Rooted Out Anti-Semitism.” I look forward to other similar headlines: “Pederasty Scandal Shows Catholic Church Hasn’t Rooted Out Homosexuality” “Unabomber Case and Fortuyn Murder Show West Hasn’t Rooted Out Radical Environmentalism and Animal-Rights Activism” “Poll Shows Schools Haven’t Rooted Out Atheism” Objectionable opinions are objectionable, but there’s something odd about treating “rooting them out” as a presumptive national imperative. Posted by: Jim Kalb on June 1, 2002 2:19 PMThe presumption that bad things are supposed to be, not just punished, suppressed or prevented, but utterly eradicated, and that any failure utterly to eradicate them puts the whole society under the severest condemnation, demonstrates the totalitarian mindset of liberalism. Thus you have liberals saying: “Any act of discrimination anywhere in this country is totally unacceptable.” Or you have the U.N. declaration calling for the “total elimination of racial discrimination.” Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 1, 2002 2:42 PM |