PRAGER: Those Who Don't Fight Evil Fight Statues
The left was AWOL against communism, and it's AWOL against Islamism. But it's in the vanguard of fighting statues.
All my life, I have known this rule about people: Those who don't fight the greatest evils will fight lesser evils or make-believe evils.
This happens to be the morally defining characteristic of the left. During the Cold War, many liberals and nearly all conservatives fought communism, but the left fought anti-communism. The left opposed American military buildups and regarded the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union as nothing more than two scorpions in a bottle fighting to the death. They loathed Presidents Nixon and Reagan, not Communist Party Secretary-General Brezhnev.
They regarded Reagan's labeling of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" with contempt. Typical was the reaction of one of America's best-known intellectuals, Henry Steele Commager, then a professor of history at the Amherst College. He said, "It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all."
With regard to fighting communism — which, aside from Nazism, has been the greatest evil in the modern world (it killed and enslaved far more people than Nazism) — the left was an obstacle, not an ally. The left in the West and elsewhere did far more to enable communist evil than to stop it.
The left was AWOL against communism, and it's AWOL against Islamism. But it's in the vanguard of fighting statues.
All my life, I have known this rule about people: Those who don't fight the greatest evils will fight lesser evils or make-believe evils.
This happens to be the morally defining characteristic of the left. During the Cold War, many liberals and nearly all conservatives fought communism, but the left fought anti-communism. The left opposed American military buildups and regarded the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union as nothing more than two scorpions in a bottle fighting to the death. They loathed Presidents Nixon and Reagan, not Communist Party Secretary-General Brezhnev.
They regarded Reagan's labeling of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" with contempt. Typical was the reaction of one of America's best-known intellectuals, Henry Steele Commager, then a professor of history at the Amherst College. He said, "It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all."
With regard to fighting communism — which, aside from Nazism, has been the greatest evil in the modern world (it killed and enslaved far more people than Nazism) — the left was an obstacle, not an ally. The left in the West and elsewhere did far more to enable communist evil than to stop it.
