Vomiting-Up Liberalism: Lies My Teachers Taught Me
How and why liberal intellectuals often distort political and social issues and arrive at conclusions which are illiberal, illogical and inane.
By
David Gottfried
Preface:
I haven’t discarded all my Leftist beliefs and sentiments. However, so many facets of the Left fill me with such unmitigated disgust I feel as if gusts of wrath make want to smash windows and smash heads. However, I am too physically ill to smash heads and so I am consigned to writing this. Of course, even if I say something wise, and even if I were to say wise things in abundance, this will get only an infinitesimal fraction of the audience listening to music along the lines of the WeatherGirls and Beyonce.
Speaking of bulbous, moronic trash like the WeatherGirls and Beyonce: Yesterday, I was reading Cynthia Ozick, and I came upon a most amazing factoid: In the late 1950’s, 15,000 people filled a stadium, in Minnesota, to hear TS Eliott recite poetry and talk about life. But TS Elliot is gone, and thumping, humping music, devoid of melody, is all the rage.
…
Being Intelligent and being an intellectual are two entirely different things.
Being intelligent means being able to think lucidly and logically. When one’s thought processes conform to the rules of Aristotelian logic, one is intelligent.
Being an intellectual means having a predilection to manipulate, play with or rearrange Ideas. Unfortunately, an intellectual does not always manipulate ideas in a reasonable or sensible fashion. Also, being an intellectual means using hyperbole to make one’s ideas seem that much more extraordinary. Very often, an intellectual does not fabricate an idea because it is credible or worthwhile. Sometimes he takes a fancy to an idea becasue it caters to his flair for the theatrical, as when Allen Ginsburg said he would levitate the Pentagon with specially selected Buddhist incantations.
For example, Susan Sontag, in 1968, said that the white race was the cancer of human history because she was always a crafty publicist, and she knew that by accentuating and dramatizing the iniquity of white people, by likening them to cancer, she could better ingratiate herself with the governing Maoists of the student intelligentsia. Similarly, Norman Mailer said that bureaucracies caused cancer, knowing that the zaniness of his prognosis made it more likely that he would be invited on the Dick Cavett show.
Of course, for those intellectuals who have not yet learned to exaggerate like the tony arbiters of taste and cultural commissars of the Upper Left Side of Manhattan, one can always name-drop. For example, I once was a member of a Marxist study group and a somewhat dull but ambitious Abbie Hoffman wanna-be exhibited his pseudo intellectual bona fides by consistently making speeches like this:
”Marx, who was of course a terribly brilliant thinker, who of course worked with Engels, who also quite assiduously adhered to the framework laid down by Hegal, and who blazed a path of righteous revolution, which drew upon Rousseau, Robespierre and Rocky Road ice cream, leavened with the most scintillating petite fours of all Paris, and dazzled us with delights divined in the boudoirs of Baudelaire…”
Consider some of the ways liberal intellectuals misinterpret life, politics and even their sexual anatomy:
A) Predictions of Imminent Environmental Catastrophe
I take climate change seriously, but I won’t get bent out of shape about it. I realize that Opinion writers of the NY Times are not scientists and can only quote what scientists have said. 1
Hence, I prefer to make my judgements on the basis of the actual science and data, not on the basis of histrionic, purple prose designed to illicit the proper political response.
I can remember at least four doom and gloom stories about imminent environmental catastrophes that never took place:
1) When I was a child in the 1960’s, we were often told, by the most eminent and dour men the NY Times and Walter Cronkite could assemble, that in ten years air pollution would be so bad that we would all be wearing gas masks.
2) In the 1960’s, we were told that over population would soon get so severe that there would be worsening food shortages, not only in the third world but also in America. The world’s population has grown enormously since the 1960’s, and the proportion of people going to bed hungry is down.
3) In the 1960’s, we were told that in about ten years Long Island, New York would be without clean drinking water.
4) In the 1970’s a national news magazine, either Newsweek or Time, had a front cover feature story warning of an imminent new ice age.
None of these four disasters materialized. I understand it. Media outlets, like Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, need attention; attention means money. Therefore, they bombard us with histrionic stories with a tenuous relationship to reality.
B) Liberal Intellectuals have said that the Western World is Persistently Aggressive and Selfish and that Western bad behavior is the sole cause of enmity toward the West
On some occasions, I do think the West has erred by being excessively aggressive. I think America made a mistake in prosecuting the Vietnam War. However, the biggest wars America ever suffered came about because of Western docility and concessions to the enemies of the West. With respect to the worst wars we fought, our problem was our insufficient aggressiveness.
1) Japan before World War Two: Japan was the favorite Asian nation of all the colonizing Western powers. We loved the Japanese because they copied us so assiduously. They weren’t the least bit under the sway of multiculturalism. They aped the West so they could be as powerful as the West and some day stick it to the West.
And the West did everything it could to assist and encourage the Japanese:
a) When President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, he ruled that Japan would be entitled to rule Korea in perpetuity and we consigned Koreans to lives of slavish servitude under Japanese Sadists. (In return, Japan recognized American sovereignty over the Philippines)
b) At the end of World War One, the West gave the Japanese Chinese provinces along the Pacific Coast.
c) The British refurbished the Japanese Navy.
And the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and tortured, starved and killed thousands of Americans on the Bataan death march.
2) Germany after World War One: Most people have the idea that the West imposed terms, on the Germans, that were far too severe and eventually prompted the hellish German wrath of World War two. However, most people don’t know that Britain, France and America pretty much buried the Versailles accords before the ink was dry.
Very simply, Europe and America were split into three camps:
i) The Western Camp of Britain, France and America
ii) The German Camp
iii) And the Soviet Camp
The three camps distrusted one another. Because the West and the Soviets distrusted one another, Germany was never subject to a united anti German front. Rather, Germans played the Soviets and the West off against one another, all to the advantage of Germany. The upshot of this is that the West was extremely good to, and supportive of, Germany:
a) In the Locarno Pact (signed in the early 20’s), the West agreed that Germany could re-arrange its Eastern boundaries and take land that had just been ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union.
b) America implemented the Dawes Plan to rescue Germany from hyperinflation caused by Germany’s reckless printing of Marks to make reparations payments to Britain and France. First, a new mark was instituted because the former currency was riddled by inflation. Second, America simply gave Germany money with which to pay reparations to Britain and France. The German economy expanded at a rapid pace from 1925 until the Great Depression.
And for the generosity of Americans, for American goodwill which saved the lives of hungry German children, the Germans claimed that American Jewish industrialists were persecuting and annihilating Aryan, German youth. And American POWS were put to death at Malmedy in violation of the most basic rules of warfare.
c) Britian and France also let Germany remilitarize the west bank of the Rhine, take control of the Saar, Austria, the Sudetenland, Bohemia-Moravia, set up a puppet Nazi state in Slovakia, take the free city of Danzig, the Polish Corridor and Memel – all before Germany invaded Poland. (Of course, much of this was not a reflection of western softness; rather it reflected a desire to see the Nazis break the Soviet Union)
3) If the preceding seems ancient, let’s look at the Mideast today: In 2000, Israel withdrew its forces from Southern Lebanon, withdrew its forces and its settlements (it ousted Jewish settlers by force) from Gaza in 2005, and offered to give the Arabs 97 percent of the occupied territories in 2000. The Arabs responded by putting rockets into Gaza and Southern Lebanon, which they frequently rained down on Israel, and a new intifada, replete with suicide bombers galore and anti-personnel weapons which, upon explosion, spew thousands of nails into the surrounding streets and the Jews on those streets.
The Upshot: When you offer the Arabs land, they smell weakness, they detect a humanity which they deem contemptible, and they are more inclined to respond with violence and terror.
Indeed, Bernard Lewis of Princeton University said that the Iranians took our embassy because of their withering contempt toward reports that Carter wanted to reach a peaceful accord with Iran. They spit on peace. When they profess an interest in diplomacy, that is only a subterfuge ala Hitler’s numerous pledges, that he did not seek war with any European nations, only a few years before he bombed and occupied most of Europe.
C) Yes, there is poverty and agony in Black America, but the Frenzied Liberal Demand that White People do more to help blacks is questionable, particularly when white people don’t know what they are doing, what they should be doing and don’t know what black people need.
1) In 1965, about one quarter of black babies born in Central Harlem were born out of wedlock.
Then, the War on Poverty was Ramped Up and the Civil Rights movement went into high gear.
In 1979, close to 70 percent of babies born in central Harlem were borne out of wedlock.
Given the demolition of the black family, we must ask whether civil rights and welfare interventions are alleviating black disadvantages or pouring gasoline on the fire.
Do the lords and Ladies of Martha’s Vineyards liberalism really know what they are doing. Perhaps they are sure that they do, and their misandry makes them want to annihilate marriage.
2) In the early 60’s, many young whites were attracted to the movement for black civil rights. In 1966, one of the prime black civil rights organizations in America, SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, told white students to leave the movement.
Why should whites re-enter movements for black progress if they are only going to be thrown out yet again.
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D) Poverty in the Third World cannot be blamed on Western Colonialism as it is often a consequence of Third World behaviors with are inimical to industry.
Consider Egypt:
Egypt ceased being a British colony more than seventy years ago, but some time-warped student radicals are still telling us that Egyptian poverty is a product of Western Imperialism. (Never mind that the biggest imperialists visa visa Egypt have been Muslims as the Muslim Ottoman Empire ruled Egypt – and Libya, Saudia Arabia, the other gulf states, Iraq, Syria, Greece Lebanon and much of Southeastern Europe from the 1400’s until World War One)
In the 1950’s, Egypt tried to solve its economic problems by turning to Moscow. The Soviets built a brand new, state of the art automobile factory in the environs of Cairo, the capital city. After several years of operation, the factory still could not produce more than a few cars per month.
I don’t want to sound like a bigot, but Egyptian incompetence at that auto plant was caused, in large measure, by something that black people called “colored peoples’ time.”
When something complex is being constructed, different things must be built at different times. Work must be synchronized so task B can be done immediately after task A is completed. For example, if one is building an edifice, the concrete must be poured shortly before it is ready to be used. If one waits too long, the concrete will harden and be useless. Apparently, the Egyptians failed so abysmally at the construction of automobiles because they did not know how to conform their schedules to the hands on a clock. But, of course, liberal intellectuals accept as gospel truth that everything from the third world is an Edenesque tropical paradise where everyone enjoys pineapples and papayas and that sin was only introduced when the rapacious, ribald West reared its reactionary head.
E) The Gender Identity Wars
Many feminists insisted that Gender identity is socially constructed. They held that if you tell a child that he is a pretty, prissy princess, he will soon be as soft as a jelly doughnut and enjoy wearing frilly panties and designer dresses. Likewise, they held that if you tell a child that he is a rough and tumble little John Wayne in training, he will soon be a rambunctious, aggressive boy well on his way toward being a football player. What was between one’s legs, and what one’s genes may have decoded in one’s mind, was quite besides the point.
Dr. John Money of John Hopkins completely agreed. He finally got a guinea pig in the form of David Reimer, an infant from Canada whose penis was negligently destroyed during an extremely botched circumcision. Money decided that since his penis was destroyed, he should be raised as a girl. They created a very, very poor hole which they stupidly imagined was a vagina (This is sexist as it is anti-female to believe that a woman is nothing but a castrated male), chopped off his testicles, pumped him up with estrogen, and sent him to a female psychiatrist to make him enjoy being a girl.
Money periodically saw the boy and produced numerous reports which said that his thesis was entirely correct. He said that the boy had become a very fashionable and poised little girl because gender identity was entirely a function of socialization and that biology was inconsequential. 2
Indeed, I remember that when I was in college I had a somewhat crazy professor, one Shirley Langer, who would get very excited when she very stridently exclaimed that biology was irrelevant because Dr. John Money’s little boy had become a svelte and alluring girl.
And then the truth came out:
A book, entitled “As Nature Made Him,” told the true story of David Reimer. The book revealed that David Reimer never felt like a girl. 3 (Reimer hadn’t been told the truth, i.e., that he had been born male, until sometime in his adolescence)
When he started school, he said that he wanted to “be a garbage man” after he had grown up. He proved to be a schoolhouse terror, routinely beating up both boys and girls. He hated everything about being female. Nevertheless, Dr. Money, the urbane castrater in chief of what is supposed to be one of the finest medical institutions in America, said the boy was turning out to be a pert and pretty and thoroughly lovely little lady. Finally, sometime in adolescence, dejected and miserable, he went to his mother who told him the truth.
F) The Glorification of Homosexuality
Some professors, for whatever reason, want to glorify homosexuality. I am thinking, chiefly, of Herbert Marcuse. He said that he wanted to weld Marx and Freud together, and while hammering his new ideological construction into place he seemed to negate much of what both Marx and Freud said.
I am all for tolerance toward homosexuals – I am gay -- but I am also keen on not disseminating abject lies. Marcuse, while playing around with Marx and Freud, came up with the fallacious idea that homosexuality and socialism were positively correlated.
Marcuse noted that Freud had said that the pre genital sexual stages, namely the oral and anal stages, were succeeded by the phallic and later still the genital stage. Marcuse also correctly noted that Freud said that when we entered the genital stage, we repressed the oral and anal stages.
Unfortunately, Marcuse did not understand what Freud meant by “repression.: For Freud, repression simply meant confining something to the unconscious mind. For Marcuse, repression was the hateful suppression of liberty and happiness and everything that the word might mean to a radical. Therefore, Marcuse said that we needed to rebel against genital sexuality because it cruelly repressed infantile sexuality. Marcuse wanted us to regress to his romanticized oral and anal stages. Marcuse said that when we fully embrace our oral and anal sexuality, we would become unselfish socialists.
Although Marcuse was, in some instances, quite brilliant, I think that when he tried to achieve his grand synthesis of Freud and Marx, he made an exceptional and embarrassing mess. If one ever suffered the company of a clique of carping, coupon-clipping cunty men who worship at the altars of Bloomingdales, Bergdorf’s and Barbra Streisand, one would realize that they are as socialistic as Communist China, whose rabid hyper capitalistic ethos constitute a complete disavowal of socialism.
G) The Slander Against Pregnancy and Womanly Women
Obviously, being pregnant and giving birth is an arduous job. And the preceding sentence seems like a preposterous understatement. It’s a phenomenon in which one’s body is captured and exists to serve a fetus.
However, liberal intellectuals, while excoriating male sexism, portrayed pregnancy as not only difficult, taxing and tedious but as inherently unhealthy. If religious puritans had once said that the wages of sin were death or suffering, feminists seemed to be saying that the wages of pregnancy were crippling, disfiguring illnesses.
For example, in “Terms of Endearment,” a 1983 film starring Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson, pregnancy is portrayed as an inhuman ordeal, only suffered by wimpish women who were doormats, that will often lead to fatal illnesses. In the film, a young woman gets cancer and dies after her third child is born; the young women’s gutsy, empowered Mother had urged a “simple abortion.”
In fact, some evidence suggests that women who get pregnant, and who get pregnant on multiple occasion, staring at a young age, have less breast cancer. 4
And sometimes, the scientists the NY Times quote exaggerate progress because they want to create the impression that they have conquered a disease. I distinctly remember that about 15 years ago the NY Times said that a new drug, which inhibited the ability of a cancerous tumor to construct blood vessels to feed cancerous tissue, had just been synthesized and would probably work wonders. About 10 years ago, the NY Times had an article saying that exact same thing. If the new drug was about to cure cancer 15 years ago, why was it still on the precipice of curing cancer 10 years ago and not yet being given to masses of people. Very simply, the staff on the Times changed and they had not recalled what previous writers had said.
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/david-reimer-and-john-money-gender-reassignment-controversy-johnjoan-case
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/david-reimer-and-john-money-gender-reassignment-controversy-johnjoan-case
Pardonne mon français . . . Je suis obligé d'écrire dans plusieurs langues parce que : 1. La plupart des gens aux États-Unis ont subi un lavage de cerveau leur faisant croire que les Juifs sont leur salut ; et 2., leur anglais est de la merde et ils ne peuvent pas rester silencieux assez longtemps pour entendre ou voir ce qui se passe évidemment autour d'eux.
Le judéo-messianisme répand parmi nous son message empoisonné depuis près de deux mille ans. Les universalismes démocratique et communiste sont plus récents, mais ils n’ont fait que renforcer le vieux récit juif. Ce sont les mêmes idéaux.
Les idéaux transnationaux, transraciaux, transsexuels, transculturels que ces idéologies nous prêchent (au-delà des peuples, des races, des cultures) et qui sont le subsistance quotidienne de nos écoles, dans nos médias, dans notre culture populaire, à nos universités, et sur nos rues, ont fini par réduire notre identité biosymbolique et notre fierté ethnique à leur expression minimale.
L'exil comme punition pour ceux qui prêchent la sédition devrait être rétabli dans le cadre juridique de l'Occident . . . Le judaïsme, le christianisme, et l’islam sont des cultes de mort originaires du Moyen-Orient et totalement étrangers à l’Europe et à ses peuples.
On se demande parfois pourquoi la gauche européenne s’entend si bien avec les musulmans. Pourquoi un mouvement souvent ouvertement antireligieux prend-il le parti d’une religiosité farouche qui semble s’opposer à presque tout ce que la gauche a toujours prétendu défendre ? Une partie de l’explication réside dans le fait que l’Islam et le marxisme ont une racine idéologique commune : le judaïsme.
Don Rumsfeld avait raison lorsqu’il disait : «L’Europe s’est décalé sur son axe», c’est le mauvais côté qui a gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et cela devient chaque jour plus clair . . . Qu’a fait l’OTAN pour défendre l’Europe? Absolument rien . . . Mes ennemis ne sont pas à Moscou, à Damas, à Téhéran, à Riyad ou dans quelque croque-mitaine teutonique éthéré, mes ennemis sont à Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire