Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

If you thought things had changed over on the left in the past 60 years, you were wrong. I'm reading Joshua Muravchik's Heaven on Earth : the Rise and Fall of Socialism, a book that traces socialism through the lives and thoughts of its chief proponents. While reading about the British Socialists in the 1930s, and their inability to grasp facist totalitarianism, Muravchick wrote the following:

The socialists, who measured the world around them against the standard of an imaginary utopia, were ill-prepared to face squarely the grim choices that global politics now presented. And, judging their own society harshly, they had difficulty supporting dangerous and costly measures to defend it. In Parliament, the Labour Party routinely voted against military expenditures, claiming that the Conservative government could not be trusted to use weapons for the right reason. Labour's position was that it would be right to resort to arms on behalf of the League of Nations but not on behalf of narrow national interest. [p. 187.]

Muravchik, publishing in 2002, could have been writing about today's Democrats and their inability to understand the war on Islamofacism. Indeed, in that last sentence, you have John Kerry's global test and his dependence, not on the failed League of Nations, but on the equally failed UN. Socialists see the world go by, but are incapable of understanding what they see. And of course, that's precisely the point Dennis Prager makes in his most recent ethics article. In the article, he takes on people who watching evil happen and do nothing. Prager acknowledges that he can understand how a Muslim raised with fanatic hatred could carry that into violent action. It's the others -- the ones who don't have this excuse -- whom he finds unforgivable:

But the non-Muslims who fail to acknowledge and confront the evil of Muslim terror and the evil of those monsters who cut innocent people's throats and murder those trying to make a democracy — these people are truly worth nothing. Unlike the Muslims raised in a religious totalitarian society, they have no excuse. And in my lifetime, these people have overwhelmingly congregated on the political Left. Since the 1960s, with few exceptions, on the greatest questions of good and evil, the Left has either been neutral toward or actively supported evil. The Left could not identify communism as evil; has been neutral toward or actually supported the anti-democratic pro-terrorist Palestinians against the liberal democracy called Israel; and has found it impossible to support the war for democracy and against an Arab/Muslim enemy in Iraq as evil as any fascist the Left ever claimed to hate. There were intellectually and morally honest arguments against going to war in Iraq. But once the war began, a moral person could not oppose it. No moral person could hope for, let alone act on behalf of, a victory for the Arab/Islamic fascists. Just ask yourself but two questions: If America wins, will there be an increase or decrease in goodness in Iraq and in the world? And then ask what would happen if the Al Qaeda/Zarqawi/Baathists win.

One has to wonder if socialism/leftism creates these moral blinders, or if the morally blnd are drawn to the left? UPDATE: As David Limbaugh points out in what I call a "Thank Goodness he's not President" article, John Kerry is holding true to his socialist roots, and still hating and fearing his own country more than the enemy. UPDATE II: The same point about John Kerry's inability to abandon his distrust of (and hatred for) the values of his own country pops up in a Thomas Sowell article. Hat tip: Power Line.