What Spielberg’s Munich tells us about liberalism

Talking about the Steven Spielberg movie Munich, a friend noted how sad and ironic it is that even Jews won’t take the side of Israel anymore. But this seeming contradiction is merely a logical outcome of modern liberalism.

Modern liberalism had its genesis in the false insight that the essence of the Nazi genocide, and therefore the essence of evil itself, is intolerance and discrimination. This idea led to the conclusion that to spare the world from future genocides, intolerance and discrimination must be systematically eliminated. This not only means, as I have frequently pointed out, that our own nation and culture must be eliminated, since as a distinct and dominant culture it is by definition discriminatory against others. It also means that any notion of objective morality, and especially Christian morality, must be eliminated, because to believe in objective morality means to be judgmental and discriminatory against that which is seen as immoral. Under the modern liberal dispensation, traditional Western morality becomes the equivalent of Nazism.

Thus, in the act of articulating the ultimate evil, modern liberalism destroyed the very concept of evil, and with it, the very concept of good. This led to a reconstruction of the world as radical and unreal as any Communist propaganda. Just as Communism had to erase from its presentation of human reality such things as individual reason, individual freedom, and the profit motive, modern liberalism had to erase from its presentation of human reality any facts that suggest differences of moral degree between different kinds of discriminatory actions. Under the liberal dispensation, a passive victim of evil (and those who rescue him, such as Oskar Schindler) is still virtuous, since a victim has no power to exert discriminatory power over others. But if a person, or at least a Western person, takes action against evil, especially non-Western evil, that means that he is discriminating against others, and therefore he is as bad as, or even worse than, the people he is fighting. To maintain this view, all facts showing actual moral differences between the two sides must be whited out. Thus the Israeli agents who tracked down and killed the monsters who captured and murdered in cold blood the Israeli athletes at Munich, must be seen as, at best, the moral equals of those monsters; which means that Israel has no right to defend itself; which means that Israel has no right to exist. Modern liberalism is nihilism.

A reader writes:

What you say only partially explains the reaction to Munich. What fits more and is fundamental to this world view is the need to “protect and empower the other.” Or anyone else who want to destroy “powerful” western man.

This has been the theme even before the Nazis. How do you explain the continued support for all other cultures no matter how discriminatory and vicious they are? To prove my point: now that China is capitalist, it is attacked for having 5,000 political prisoners, not when millions were killed under Mao. It was not the fight against intolerance that inspires the left, but the alleged empowerment of the “people.” In every example, you can predict whom the left will support by seeing whom they consider to be the “other”. This concept fits with Spielberg’s sympathies in Munich and in every other context. I can’t think of any exception.

My reply:

It’s tricky breaking this issue down, because “left” and “liberal” overlap and yet are distinct. Spielberg is a liberal. The liberal’s focus is on intolerance, judgmentalness, and nastiness. The liberal doesn’t like the nastiness of terrorists, and he doesn’t like the nastiness of Israel. He does not make power differentials and anti-Westernism the main thing, as the leftist does. For the leftist, those who have more power, those who are “us,” are bad, those who have less power, who are “Other,” are good. The left identifies with minorities and non-Westerners as having less power compared to the West and therefore good. But Spielberg has never particularly identified with minorities and non-Westerners in the leftist sense. He’s a liberal, who (as he’s indicated in his recent interviews) believes that if people just stopped doing nasty things, the world would be ok. While I have not seen Munich, everything I’ve read about it indicates that it does not attack Israel, in the typical leftist/Robert Fisk/Peter Jennings fashion, but shows Israel’s actions against the terrorists as roughly the moral equivalent of the terrorists’ actions, which are shown as shadowy rather than evil.

Leftism actively demonizes and seeks to destroy the West. Liberalism takes away the West’s moral right to defend itself. The two factions have the same end, yet are distinct.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 20, 2005 01:35 PM | Send