The Left’s Reflexive Anti-Americanism, Release 2.0

The American left never misses an opportunity — or to seek an opportunity where none exists — to display its reflexive anti-Americanism. When the United States does something in the world of which they disapprove, it is quick and loud to condemn it. When another country does something of which it  disapproves, it is quick to say … how much it reminds them of what the United States does and that “we” have no standing to condemn it.

Take, for example (please!),  the Washington Post‘s (and MSNBC’s) Eugene Robinson. After perfunctorily insisting that “My sentiments, to be clear, are with the legitimate Ukrainian government,” Robinson proceeds to say what he really thinks about Russian aggression — that it reminds him of us.

Is it just me, or does the rhetoric about the crisis in Ukraine sound as if all of Washington is suffering from amnesia? We’re supposed to be shocked — shocked! — that a great military power would cook up a pretext to invade a smaller, weaker nation? I’m sorry, but has everyone forgotten the unfortunate events in Iraq a few years ago?

My sentiments…. But the United States, frankly, has limited standing to insist on absolute respect for the territorial integrity of sovereign states.

2 December 2004

In a remarkable OpEd in the Washington Post yesterday, Anne Applebaum lambasted “The Freedom Haters,” by which she meant

a part of the Western left — or rather the Western far left — [that] is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States. Many of the same people who found it hard to say anything bad about Saddam Hussein find it equally difficult to say anything nice about pro-democracy demonstrators in Ukraine. Many of the same people who would refuse to condemn a dictator who is anti-American cannot bring themselves to admire democrats who admire, or at least don’t hate, the United States.

Applebaum was particularly incensed by an article in The Guardian that viewed the pro-democracy movement in the Ukraine as a CIA plot, and the sympathetic treatment that article and point of view received on a blog by Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation, who noted (“darkly,” as Applebaum points out) that the wife of one of the Ukrainian dissidents “worked in the Reagan White House.” Van den Heuvel was also incensed by the “rank hypocrisy” of the Bush Administration. [Full Disclosure: Katrina was an intern at The Nation when I was there, and I found her intelligent, charming, and articulate, as I still do even though I don’t agree with her much these days.]

When the Bush Administration rushed to celebrate the protesters’ courage and tenacity, I thought–what rank hypocrisy. These same officials have shown no respect for American pro-democracy protesters, and, if they have their way, they’ll probably lock their political opponents out of central Washington when Inauguration Day rolls around.

On the hypocrisy meter: Consider how the Ukrainian protesters’ charges of election fraud have been treated so seriously by Bush and his team, while they dismiss such charges when they are raised here at home.

I think Applebaum is correct to connect this knee-jerk suspicion of any indigenous movement that is not anti-American to a raging hatred of Bush, but the fact that a certain sensitivity to Russian feelings long preceded Bush gives me the opportunity to recycle yet another old piece of mine related to The Nation. (The last time I did so — the last half of this post — involved something that for reasons explained there I could not publish at the time. What follows below actually was published, as a letter, but it was in way pre-blog days so I can’t give a URL.)

Don’t misunderstand me here: The Nation has often been accused of being Stalinist, or pro-Stalinist, and (with the excecption of a few old, very old, commies who are still around as subscribers) I do not think that is the case. I do think, as Applebaum argues, that opposition to American foreign policy has for a long time engendered more sensitivity to the concerns and interests of the Russians, and others, than most Americans feel.

In any event, for those of you wandering around a research library with nothing to do, I call your attention to an article in The Nation of February 11, 1991 (Vol. 252, No. 5, Pg. 149) by the eminent Columbia historian and frequent Nation contributor, Eric Foner, who compared (favorably) Gorbachev’s resistance to secessionist tendencies in the then still-existing Soviet Union to Lincoln’s response to secession here at home.

Following is my letter in response:

O Captains! Abe and Gorb

The Nation, Vol. 252, No 11

March 25, 1991, p. 362

As someone who taught American history in one of my former lives, during which I published an article arguing that everyone should have sat out the Civil War, I was intrigued by Eric Foner’s recent editorial, “Lincoln’s Lesson” [Feb. 11]

As far as I can tell, the lesson seems to be that political, moral and even historical arguments are irrelevant to secessionist controversies because great powers will always stamp out separatist movements if they can. Thus, Foner argues, Gorby is no worse for bashing the Baltics than Abe was for crushing the Confederates.

This is a position put forward most eloquently a number of years ago by Edmund Wilson in the introduction to Patriotic Gore, where he treated Lincoln, Bismarck and Lenin as all of a piece and described wars, especially wars like the Civil War, which put down internal separatists, as “stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of a sea slug.” While the implication of Wilson’s (and my) argument is that Abe was no better than Gorby, however, Foner argues that Gorby is no worse than Abe. Coming from someone who in one of his former lives wrote so powerfully of the moral appeal of the Lincolnian platform, Foner’s view is curiously amoral.

Because the argument is amoral, it is also profoundly apolitical. Foner does touch on some of the theoretical dilemmas of self-determination, such as who gets to decide what political “self” deserves determination and what happens to minorities within the seceding units who want to remain with the larger union. But, perhaps because of those dilemmas, he seems to conclude that political debate and judgments are irrelevant. He asserts that Lithuania has even less justification for secession than Texas had in 1861, but that is almost an aside. His larger point is that the historical, political and moral justifications of the secessionists don’t matter. Whether in Soviet Georgia or Savannah, Georgia, secession “is something no leader of a powerful nation can be expected to allow.”

That is a curious standard by which to judge political movements, especially in a journal of the left. Would Foner be so quick, for example, to condemn separatist movements launched by Native Americans or Southern slaves? Should the Palestinians pack up and go home, if they have a home, because the Israelis “can be expected” to reject their demands as disruptive of Eretz Israel? Perhaps in trying to annex Kuwait, Saddam Hussein should be regarded as simply a premature anti-secessionist.

Foner does present one concluding argument besides the predictable response of Presidents, Chairmen, Prime Ministers, etc., for opposing secession. Lincoln passionately believed that, as stated in his first inaugural address, “the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy,” and Foner concludes by noting that “Gorbachev would surely agree.”

So he would, but then so would George III.

Say What?