Isegoria

Leave it to an expatriate Finn to explain the true meaning of Columbus Day.

Meanwhile, speaking of dead men, both North and South Americans celebrated Columbus Day after the famous explorer who brought the gifts of diversity and multiculturalism to an indigenous bunch of bitter clingers who wanted to maintain their “traditional” lifestyle and thought that they actually “own” their historical homelands and could exclude all others from moving in, just because their ancestors used to reside there. Seriously, people actually used to believe that and spout hateful rhetoric of how these immigrants were dirty “invaders” who brought in “diseases”! Amazingly, such backward view still prevails in many places on Earth… at least until we all join our hands and “Imagine” no countries or possessions, and tear down all borders and walls that prevent people and workers from moving wherever they want.

(Hat tip to Foseti.)

Shannon Love (angrily) cites Richard Cohen’s recent “vile little diatribe” as an example of leftist hagiography. It addresses the 1970 Kent State shooting:

Bullets had killed those kids, sure — but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians. The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protesters. They were “worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element…. We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent.”

There are two things that are delusional, Love says, about Cohen’s perspective on Kent State:

First, he assumes that the National Guard opened fire because they hated the college students’ ideology and not because they feared violence. Second, he leaves out the fact that the protesters were actually acting like Brownshirts and were protesting in de facto support of totalitarian communist superpowers. Indeed, many of leaders of the Kent State and other protests considered themselves to be communists fighting for world revolution.

In the leftists’ hagiography, the Kent State protesters were completely peaceful. They “performed a sit-in” in college campus buildings and were singing and putting flowers in the barrels of the Guardsmen’s guns when the Guardmen’s ideological hatred of the pure and noble leftists finally overwhelmed the Guardmen’s humanity and they brutally opened fire. All those killed at Kent State are martyrs to the evil of the American right. Therefore, Cohen argues by implication, since the left is so good, wonderful and infallible in all things, anyone who argues with leftists today is just as evil and hate filled as the governor and the Guardsmen were back in 1970.

Unfortunately for Cohen and his hagiography, the shootings at Kent State were preceded by a month of increasing violence. The “peaceful sit-in” of the ROTC building was violent with doors kicked in, desks and filing cabinets destroyed, burned or tossed through windows. ROTC officers and students as well as school officials were physically attacked. All this culminated in a riot the night before the shootings in downtown Kent, that resulted in broken windows, arson, stonings and beatings that overwhelmed the Kent police force. That pattern of increasing violence and destruction, not the governor’s ideological opposition to the protesters’ support of communist goals, caused the governor to call out the National Guard. The violence continued the day of the shootings with rock throwing and shouts of “kill, kill, kill”. The Guardsmen were on edge because of the violence, not the ideology.

Cohen and other leftists always dehumanize non-leftists such as the Guardsmen, turning them into caricatures. In the minds of Cohen et al, the Guardsmen are evil Nazis salivating to kill the pure and noble leftists. In reality, the Guardsmen felt exposed and frightened. They did not have full anti-riot gear or support and could not have withstood the human wave attack of an enraged mob. They were all too aware of how easy it would have been for the mob to overwhelm part or all of the Guard’s line and pull out and beat to death individuals. Worse, they all knew they were tightly bunched together making them an easy target for anyone with a firearm in the crowd or surrounding buildings. Given the previous pattern of escalating violence and the frothing anger directed at them, they had every right to expect they might be attacked with lethal force.

The Kent State shootings should have never happened but the moral onus for the deaths ultimately lies upon those who initiated the violence in the first place. Had the protesters not tried to impose their will on the governance of the university by force, had they not attacked people and destroyed property, the Guard would have not have been called out in the first place and would have never been in a position to overreact and make a mistake.

In the end, the idea that the Guard opened fire out of ideological hatred of all that is good and pure is really just a manifestation of the left’s own narcissism and megalomania. They are so convinced not only of their rectitude but of their critical importance to the world that they convince themselves that they are actually important enough for non-leftists to want to kill them. The thought that the Guard saw them not as world changing revolutionaries but just as spoiled, violent children just doesn’t play into the self-hagiography of the individual leftists.

In the end, the real story of Kent State was that of radical leftists directing violence on their fellow citizens in order to advance and inflate their own egos, and as a side effect to advance the interests of totalitarian, communist superpowers. Their egoism, moral blindness and self-delusion caused them to create circumstances in which lethal mistakes where probable. That is the reason, and the only reason, that five people died at Kent State.

The Nobel Peace Prize has long been beyond the grasp of rational criticism, Anomaly UK says, but this year’s award can’t be let by with just the usual cynical chuckle:

Timothy Garton-Ash says in the Grauniad CiF that the prize “hits China’s most sensitive nerve”. In fact, the offence that the Chinese government has taken is all the result of a misunderstanding. They really do have difficulty understanding the level of the West’s hypocrisy and stupidity.

To the extent the award means anything at all, it is a declaration of intent, by the Nobel Committee and all those that speak in support of it, to overthrow the government of China and replace it with a Western-style government. Garton-Ash explains that Liu Xiaobo “has consistently advocated nonviolent change in China, always in the direction of more respect for human rights, the rule of law and democracy”. It is possible to advocate respect for human rights and the rule of law within Chinese politics, but to advocate democracy is to advocate the destruction of the Chinese government and its replacement with a Western-style one.

To make such a warlike declaration in the name of peace is, of course, just the usual annual joke.

Therefore, it is reasonable for the Chinese authorities to react to the award as a declaration of outright enmity. Their reaction is, nevertheless, wrong. There are two things they do not understand.

The first is that this declaration is purely ritual. In calling for the overthrow of the PRC, the Western intelligentsia have not the slightest idea of any actual program of action; they are merely showing each other how virtuous they are. It is the equivalent of the prayers for the conversion of England that used to be said by Catholic congregations — a creed that had to be regularly affirmed, without the slightest reflection on its actual meaning.

The second is that, because of the lack of such reflection, the self-declared enemies of China actually have no inkling of what they are actually saying. “Democracy”, in the mouth of someone like Garton-Ash, is just something that goes with human rights and rule of law — it is a minor adornment of a political system, that can be increased here and there without killing millions of people.

In Britain, that is indeed what it is — as democracy crept gradually into the British system over a couple of hundred years, the system absorbed and to a great extent neutralised it, producing a comfortable and moderately stable synthesis. That is not what happens when it is introduced in one go. Then it destroys one regime and produces another, usually very short-lived, replacement. Then there is generally a settling down into some kind of civil war. France is the model, not Britain.

Shannon Love (angrily) argues that leftists take a simplified, cartoonish view of their ideological predecessors that can only be described as hagiographic:

Here is a representative example of Guevara’s hagiography from the current (as of today) Wikipedia entry for him.

Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included instituting agrarian reform as minister of industries, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism.

Contrast this with eye witness accounts of Guevara’s role in the mass executions that followed the communist victory in Cuba:

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez, to your humble servant here, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.” As commander of the La Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work.

Compare the hagiographic Wikipedia entry on the Guevera’s infamous “Motorcycle Diaries” with some of what Guevera actually wrote:

“My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido [surrendered/captured enemy] that falls in my hands!”

Guevera’s military tactics were ruthless and vile. In Bolivia, he perfected the strategy of “fighting to the last peasant” by intentionally forcing peasants into the line of fire in order to “radicalize” them. He conducted fighting retreats through peasant villages intending that the following army would destroy the village and kill villagers in pursuit of his forces. Worse, he committed atrocities against military personnel, even killing their families, and then framed innocent peasants for the acts for the sole purpose of drawing down a horrific vengeance down on the innocent peasants. Needless to say, he had no compunctions about killing any peasants in his zone of control who did not kowtow to him.

Guevara was a vicious, megalomaniacal sociopath who wanted to be the next Stalin or Mao. (Indeed, Stalin in his younger days was a figure very much like Guevara.) He overtly and clearly stated his desire to destroy America and to exterminate millions of Americans in the process.

Yet today he is considered to be a figure worthy of admiration by the far (20% most) left in America. Go to any college campus and you will see admiring posters and t-shirts. Even Robert Redford, one of the few leftists who actually spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money on charitable causes, made a hagiographic movie about Guevera.

The vast majority of leftists, however, know nothing about the real Guevera. All they know is the hagiography that came straight out the Cold War-era Soviet propaganda mill. Worse, they don’t even bother to question the hagiography at all. If you try to confront them about their mindless adoration, they will reflexively change the subject to some real or imagined evil of non-leftists somewhere in the world’s history. They are emotionally incapable of thinking about Guevera in anything but positive terms.