Gamblor
12-03-2003, 02:32 PM
Marxism incorporates, at the verbal level and the intellectual level, the values of liberal democracy in its assault on liberal democracy and this is precisely why it entraps so many Western intellectuals who are themselves serious liberal democrats. Thus the slightest restriction on, let's say, the presumption of innocence of the accused is said to demonstrate the absence of the rule of law. The slightest failure of an electoral system demonstrates contempt for political equality. Any use of force in international affairs establishes the lawless character of the society. Now, it is a short step from having demonstrated that a country like the United States is not a law-abiding society to demonstrating that it is lost and that it is like any other lawless society. The Soviets can always claim "We are no worse than you. Even if we are a lawless society, you too are a lawless society, we are no worse than you." This is the "logic" of the doctrine of moral equivalence. If practices are measured by abstract, absolute standards, practices are always found wanting. The communists who criticize liberal democratic societies measure our practices by our standards and deny the relevance of their practices to judgments concerning the moral worth of our own society.
...It's perfectly clear that the tendency to self-debasement, self-denigration which has been so brilliantly commented upon by the French scholar Jean Francois Revel and others recently is rooted in this practice of measuring Western democratic societies by utopian standards. There is simply no way that such measurements can result in anything but chronic, continuous self-debasement, self-criticism, and finally, self-disgust. The problem of dealing with this is complicated by the fact that the values in question are our own values. The response, of course, must be that it is not appropriate to judge actual social practices by utopian standards of political values.
- from The Myth of Moral Equivalence, by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Imprimis, January 1986, Vol. 15, No. 1
Israel's enemies appear to be poised to secure through skillful use of moral equivalence and other techniques of ideological warfare what they could not do with tanks, missiles and warplanes. The Arabs' goal remains the acquisition of territory vital to Israel's security and, in the process, the delegitimation of the underpinnings of Zionism -- that is, the 'historical connection of the Jews to Palestine....'
...The Israeli leadership and many in the American Jewish community have unintentionally played into this latest bid to establish moral equivalence between the principally Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the so-called "victims of Zionist aggression."
- Frank J. Gaffney, Center for Security Policy Director, U.S. Senate Caucus Room, 16 March 1994
At the end of the [Pope's] historically significant visit [to Israel], the bystander's conclusion must be that the pontiff was admirably evenhanded. He urged an end to "anti-Jewish feeling among Christians and anti-Christian feelings among Jews" - as if persecutor and persecuted can be considered on the same moral plane.
He likewise seemed to balance the suffering of the Palestinians, which he judged as excessively prolonged, with the suffering of the Jews at Christian hands, which had gone on for 2,000 years and which culminated in the Holocaust.
Even if only remotely implied, this equation is in itself a colossal affront. It not only dwarfs the Holocaust but imposes culpability on its Jewish survivors. It sins by omitting the basic fact that the Arabs were belligerents, and cruel aggressors at that. The Jews never harmed Germany.
- from ANOTHER TACK: Masters of our fates, by Sarah Honig in The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, April 7 2000
In the United Nations, of course, genocide is regularly charged against Israel and only Israel is regularly described as violating the Geneva Convention. Along with the terms go the documents in which the values are enshrined and codified. What further complicates this is the effort not only to redefine values but to eliminate any epistemological standard - any standard of proof - by which events might be objectively observed and through which we might have appeal to the double bind in which the semantic falsification puts us. Totalitarian ideologies, including Marxism, are inevitably, invariably, anti-empirical. Not only do they deny that there is any sort of objective truth, they deny effectively empirical verification and procedures of empirical verification because they make truth, and not only truth, but reality, dependent on power relations, i.e., truth and objective reality are ultimately defined in a totalitarian ideology by those people who hold power.
- from The Myth of Moral Equivalence, by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Imprimis, January 1986, Vol. 15, No. 1
...It's perfectly clear that the tendency to self-debasement, self-denigration which has been so brilliantly commented upon by the French scholar Jean Francois Revel and others recently is rooted in this practice of measuring Western democratic societies by utopian standards. There is simply no way that such measurements can result in anything but chronic, continuous self-debasement, self-criticism, and finally, self-disgust. The problem of dealing with this is complicated by the fact that the values in question are our own values. The response, of course, must be that it is not appropriate to judge actual social practices by utopian standards of political values.
- from The Myth of Moral Equivalence, by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Imprimis, January 1986, Vol. 15, No. 1
Israel's enemies appear to be poised to secure through skillful use of moral equivalence and other techniques of ideological warfare what they could not do with tanks, missiles and warplanes. The Arabs' goal remains the acquisition of territory vital to Israel's security and, in the process, the delegitimation of the underpinnings of Zionism -- that is, the 'historical connection of the Jews to Palestine....'
...The Israeli leadership and many in the American Jewish community have unintentionally played into this latest bid to establish moral equivalence between the principally Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the so-called "victims of Zionist aggression."
- Frank J. Gaffney, Center for Security Policy Director, U.S. Senate Caucus Room, 16 March 1994
At the end of the [Pope's] historically significant visit [to Israel], the bystander's conclusion must be that the pontiff was admirably evenhanded. He urged an end to "anti-Jewish feeling among Christians and anti-Christian feelings among Jews" - as if persecutor and persecuted can be considered on the same moral plane.
He likewise seemed to balance the suffering of the Palestinians, which he judged as excessively prolonged, with the suffering of the Jews at Christian hands, which had gone on for 2,000 years and which culminated in the Holocaust.
Even if only remotely implied, this equation is in itself a colossal affront. It not only dwarfs the Holocaust but imposes culpability on its Jewish survivors. It sins by omitting the basic fact that the Arabs were belligerents, and cruel aggressors at that. The Jews never harmed Germany.
- from ANOTHER TACK: Masters of our fates, by Sarah Honig in The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, April 7 2000
In the United Nations, of course, genocide is regularly charged against Israel and only Israel is regularly described as violating the Geneva Convention. Along with the terms go the documents in which the values are enshrined and codified. What further complicates this is the effort not only to redefine values but to eliminate any epistemological standard - any standard of proof - by which events might be objectively observed and through which we might have appeal to the double bind in which the semantic falsification puts us. Totalitarian ideologies, including Marxism, are inevitably, invariably, anti-empirical. Not only do they deny that there is any sort of objective truth, they deny effectively empirical verification and procedures of empirical verification because they make truth, and not only truth, but reality, dependent on power relations, i.e., truth and objective reality are ultimately defined in a totalitarian ideology by those people who hold power.
- from The Myth of Moral Equivalence, by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Imprimis, January 1986, Vol. 15, No. 1