VDH Watch 16: And just what "left" is that, Vic?

Many are the mysteries presented by Bush's favorite historian, überhack Victor Davis Hanson. For instance, there is this interview he did with David Horowitz's McCarthyist online Frontpage Magazine: The Iraqi War and All with VDH 11/13/05.

There's Vic's usual baggage of grand and superficial historical references, like how the Iraq War is pretty much like the Peloponesian War in ancient Greece. In one of his more creative pieces of hackery, he sneers at "the Clintonian strategy of appeasement with cruise missiles". Appeasement with cruise missiles?

In addition to such nuggests of VDH wisdom, we get this comment from him:

FP: What are your thoughts about the Left’s role in the terror war?

Hanson: I am baffled by it. After all, al Qaeda, Dr. Zawahiri, Zarqawi, and others are not 1960 communist icons like Fidel, Che, and Mao, mass murderers who deceived the gullible with their fashionable veneer of radical egalitarianism.

No, what we saw on September 11, Madrid, London, Washington, Kabul, and Baghdad is a horrific fascism — anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-modern — that is at war with all the Enlightenment had achieved. So I felt a Chomsky, Moore, and the European intellectuals would hate fascism more than they disliked the United States, and this was at last a war against real fascism that the Left could get behind.


In that, I was in error, and now grasp that whether we recall Michael Moore's comparison of the killers in Iraq to "Minutemen", or former Clinton advisor Nancy Soderberg musing about hoping we "lose" in Iraq, or recent accounts that French ministers thought a rapid U.S. victory in Iraq would be disastrous, we can detect a broad desire on the part of the left that we should lose in Iraq. Some are candid about that, others more subtle, but it is clear that U.S. defeat would be welcome to a variety for a variety of reasons. Maybe if Al Qaeda were to go after Fidel or Hugo Chavez — in the way Hitler turned on Stalin — they would eagerly at last join the fray against the Islamic fascists.

Speaking of being baffled, I understand the FrontPageMag style of McCarthyism. (I have no sympathy for it, but I understand it to a point.) They and their fellow Freepers took the 9/11 attacks as the beginning of open season on their domestic enemies, which apparently includes a large part of the American population. As Newt Gingrinch says, their war is against the Democrats.

But what "left" is there that admires rightwing Islamism, much less jihadism? The examples he uses mainly illustrate that he doesn't really have any examples. He uses literally one-word quotes to illustrate that Michael Moore ("Minutemen") and Nancy Sonderberg ("lose") are somehow "leftists" who admire radical Salafist Islam. I suppose I could Google for those names and the single words he quotes. I'm guessing it would turn up a slew of rightwing Web sites regurgitating the same claim. And maybe if I waded through enough of them, I could locate the original quotes in the original contexts.

But why bother? I hardly recognize Sonderberg's name. And I'm familiar enough with Michael Moore to know that the claim in nonsense.

And why are rightwing polemicists so obsessed with Norm Chomsky? Thirty-plus years ago when he first began writing about politics, he was published in prominent liberal journals like the New York Review of Books, hardly a mass-market publication in itself. But he has long since degenerated into being a one-trick pony: he uses quotations from mainstream media to show bad consequences from American foreign policy and this reads malicious intention into the actions of US policymakers based on the results. Any outlook that doesn't make ample allowance for blunders and just plain old stupidity on the part of government decision-makers is just too limited a view. And how many Democratic voters have ever read a single word of Chomsky outside of rightwing articles quoting him? I don't agree that Chomsky is quite the devil the Freepers like to portray him. It's just that lumping him together with Diane Feinstein and John Murtha as "the left" is just plain silly.

I was reminded of this enigmatic passage from Vic's interview when I came across this over the weekend. It's from an essay called "'Papers of a Dangerous Tendency'" by Maurice Isserman and Ellen Schrecker in the collection Cold War Triumphalism (2004). They are discussing specifically how conservatives, from the pseudo-sober George Will to the raving loony Mad Annie Coulter, took revelations from the Soviet archives in the 1990s that showed some American Communists to have spied for the USSR - which wasn't in itself a new revelation to anyone remotely familiar with the subject - to somehow be a discrediting of liberal Democrats. Or of a more amorphous entity that the VDH's of the world call "the left". Isserman and Schrecker write:

And one of the things that future historians may find puzzling is just who and what this late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century "left" was thought to consist of by its opponents, and why its discrediting seemed of such momentous import to them. The Soviet Union was gone and its memory discredited. American communism survived only as a decrepit sect. Never in its entire historical existence had American capitalism enjoyed greater prestige, or confronted fewer ideological challenges at home or abroad from the political left. (Obviously the United States still had enemies in the world, but the Al Qaeda network did not target the World Trade Center because of anything its adherents encountered in the collected works of Marx and Lenin; Osama bin Laden got his start in the jihad business as an anti-Soviet warrior in Afghanistan, backed by the largest covert operation in the history of American intelligence.)

Those future historians will have to come to their own conclusion. But to us it seems as if turn-of-the-century conservatives could not bring themselves to let go of a former adversary who had served so well and so long to stoke the fires of their purifyingly self-righteous anger.

Not that self-righteous anger in itself is necessarily a bad thing. Given revelations of sadistic, criminal torture in the Bush Gulag, of the country being taken to war on the basis of forged documents and otherwise cooked intelligence, of very senior administration officials recklessly exposing an undercover CIA agent, one might expect much more of such outrage among both Democrats and Republicans in the Congress. They're slowly getting there, it seems.

But that would be anger directed against a real target. When VDH and his McCarthyist friends rant about a "left" that supports radical-Salafi jihadist terrorism, they are making up a fantasy to smear their enemies with. And, as I quoted Sid Blumenthal in a recent post:

"We are at war," insisted Gingrich. "With whom?" he was asked. "The Democrats," he apparently replied without hesitation.

I wish our Big Pundits would remember that when they start wringing their hands in "even-handed" fashion about the distressing increase in partisanship, as though The Reps calling the Democrats traitors and the Democrats objecting to it were somehow mirror-image examples of "partisanship".

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