Liberals Trivialize Evil

A CONSTANT theme of conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager is clarity. Let’s agree to disagree, he’ll say, but let’s try to understand exactly why we disagree.

This week Prager is trying to achieve clarity on the meaning of two liberals (or maybe lefties) who have compared their opponents to Nazis.

First, there was Ellen Goodman who in a now famous article compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. She writes:

I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

As thousands of conservatives have already noted, to question the authority of a UN panel of experts is not quite the same thing as denying the evil genocide of six million Jews. Whatever happened to the liberal injunction to “Question Authority?”

Also, there is the little problem that everything with regard to the future is uncertain. But it is easy to appreciate that a union journalist with lifetime tenure would not understand that.

But Ellen Goodman’s tiresome use of words was mere bagatelle compared to George Soros’s comment up at Davos. Lefty billionaire Soros said at the World Economic Forum that it was going to be necessary to “de-nazify” the United States. As reported in the New York Times, he said:

“America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany,” he said. “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process.”

More recently he has backed off, writing in The New Republic of a “bad choice of words.”

For clarity, we have to go to Dennis Prager.

[T]he equation of global warming denial to Holocaust denial trivializes Holocaust denial. If questioning global warming is on "a par" with questioning the Holocaust, how bad can questioning the Holocaust really be? The same holds true with regard to Nazism and the George Soros statement. Claiming that America in the Iraq War is morally equivalent to Nazi Germany in World War II trivializes the unparalleled evil of the Nazis.

The left has enjoyed remarkable access to the public print ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. It has abused that access in many ways, not the least in its reflexive habit of calling its enemies evil capitalists and evil fascists.

But now with the internet it has become easier to fight back.

But thoughtful counterattack and exposure of everyday calumny is the least of our project.

What we really intend is to smash the injustice and the cruelty of the progressive project, to give ordinary people the power and the freedom to run their own lives once again. We wish to restore to them the power and the freedom taken so ruthlessly by the progressive elite—people like Ellen Goodman and George Soros.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
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Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
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