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The Daily Telegraph (UK) ^ | 9/19/2001 | Janet Daly Posted on 09/18/2001 10:50:33 PM PDT by 8 Utah Girl A WHOLE swathe of this country's educated class is unable to distinguish between right and wrong. There are apparently thousands of people out there (or maybe hundreds, or maybe it is just a few dozen with exceptionally good media contacts) who think that it is quite acceptable to see the mass murder of innocent people as a "message" that needed to be delivered. The puerile anti-Americanism of the British Left has seemed a harmless enough joke during the good, safe years when there was enough capitalist bounty to give socialists a good party. Now, in this moment of terrifying international crisis, we are discovering something in our midst that goes way beyond the rather cuddly imbecility that most of its critics have attributed to it. For how long exactly has the liberal conscience been this malignant? Has the hatred and foaming malevolence now rising to the surface been bubbling away under that smug, lazy facade for a generation, just waiting for the triumphal moment to gloat about what many of its spokesmen have called America's "defeat"? I am sorry to have to go on labouring the point about Left-wing newspaper comment which has already been so robustly addressed on these pages, but it is simply too deeply shocking to avoid. The pages of the Guardian, the British liberal intelligentsia's house journal, yesterday offered Paul Foot attacking "the Murdochs, the Conrad Blacks, the BBC foreign news chiefs and everyone else who refuses to understand the difference in the Middle East between the violence of conquerors, exploiters and oppressors on the one hand and the violence of the conquered, exploited and oppressed on the other". So mass murder might be justified then, if you are doing it on behalf of the "conquered, exploited and oppressed"? Does it matter, when you are committing this ultimate criminal act on behalf of the exploited, that you are financed by a billionaire born into one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia? After all, anything is acceptable if it helps to undermine the great United States plot to force American values on the rest of the world. Preventing the dissemination of free markets, with their corrupting prosperity and materialism, must be worth sacrificing a few mundane moral assumptions. Who is America, after all, to tell the world how it should live: if local populations prefer their Marxist tyrannies or their theocratic dictatorships, where does the United States get the right to bully them into personal freedom and private economic security? And when the theocrats and the dictators strike back, surely we should spare our sympathy for their tormentor. As Charlotte Raven puts it, on another page of yesterday's Guardian: "A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully": a theme so aptly taken up by the Guardian's political cartoonist, Steve Bell, who depicts George Bush and Tony Blair as two ape-like thugs with their knuckles scraping the ground, chanting a bellicose mantra which we are meant to see as mindless. But it is also a revelation, as fascinating as it is repulsive. On the one hand, it has the clear ring of elaborated neurosis: the extrapolation of your own adolescent rebellion into a cosmic political philosophy in which the most powerful country in the world personifies the domineering adult authority against which you pit yourself. But it also suggests an intellectual decadence that should be laughable - and was, in the innocent past of a week or so ago, laughed at. These are not champagne adventurists but salon terrorists who are excited - really excited - by this horrible event. Even when they contain their outright vindictiveness toward the country upon whose successful economy the developing world is utterly dependent, they suggest that there is something rational and meaningful in this "message" that has been delivered. At what point would these people decide that an action was so evil, so utterly beyond the pale of human conscience, that it was ruled out as part of the argument? In the meantime, grown-up politicians have suspended all disputation in favour of an absolutely unified stand. This is not some war-time reflex of nationalistic piety, or a casual downgrading of the idea of democratic opposition. It is an acknowledgement that in order to have a debate, there must be two sides to the argument. And, as any sane person should be able to say with ease, there are not two possible answers to the question: was the attack on innocent civilians in America justifiable? There may be differences of opinion about the appropriate tactics for dealing with this gross criminality which threatens the lives of free people (and the freedoms which make their lives so worth living), and those differences will certainly be aired in private. This is not a question - however much sniping there has been, and may continue to be, between the press enclaves of Farringdon Road and Docklands - of the Left- and Right-wing press having a ritual go at one another. The moral confusion of a whole section of opinion formers and well-educated British people is being exposed and tested. No one will forget what has been said and written this past week.
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