{"id":275755,"date":"2016-10-26T20:14:23","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T19:14:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-the-left-loves-the-new-cold-war\/"},"modified":"2016-10-26T20:14:23","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T19:14:23","slug":"why-the-left-loves-the-new-cold-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-the-left-loves-the-new-cold-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Left Loves the New Cold War"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Clinton campaign\u2019s full-scale effort<\/a> to turn this election into a referendum on Vladimir Putin is causing liberals like Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation<\/i>, and Glenn Greenwald<\/a>, the energizing force behind The Intercept<\/i>, much heartburn. Here is Ms. van den Heuvel wondering what the heck is going on<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cHow does new Cold War \u2013 which ends space for dissent, hurts women & children, may lead to nuclear war \u2013 help what Clinton claims she is for?\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

According to both vanden Heuvel and Greenwald, the Clintonian assault on Russia \u2013 the crude, J. Edgar-Hooverish smear campaign conducted against WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and especially Donald Trump \u2013 is an opportunistic deviation from \u201ctrue\u201d progressive values. It\u2019s a corruption of American liberalism that has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with winning the election. As Greenwald puts it<\/a>, in answer to vanden Heuvel\u2019s question:<\/p>\n

\u201cExploiting Cold War rhetoric & tactics has helped her win the election. I guess the idea is: deal with the aftermath and fallout later.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Yet this evades what Mrs. Clinton and her supporters have clearly stated about the alleged immediacy and seriousness of the \u201cthreat\u201d represented by Russia under Putin.<\/p>\n

Clinton has likened Putin to Hitler<\/a> \u2013 and hasn\u2019t that always been the prologue to a regime change operation by the United States? Remember that Saddam Hussein was supposed to be the Iraqi incarnation of Hitler<\/a>. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was also another \u201cHitler<\/a>.\u201d If we go back far enough, we can recall how George Herbert Walker Bush said that Manuel Noriega was \u201cworse than Hitler<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The ideological underpinning of this nonsense is part and parcel of the American liberal canon, which valorizes World War II as the \u201cgood war\u201d \u2013 \u00a0 a heroic struggle against fascism by the forces of progressivism and Goodness \u2013 which was only opposed by anti-Semitic cretins and Hitler apologists (a.k.a. \u201cisolationist\u201d conservatives). And it goes deeper than that, for progressivism is an ideology that seeks universal moral \u201cuplift\u201d \u2013 not only on the home front but on a global scale.<\/p>\n

Woodrow Wilson\u2019s argument for getting us into World War I \u2013 arguably the most futile and unjustifiable conflict ever to be engaged in by the United States \u2013 was that it was a \u201cwar to end all wars,\u201d a struggle to bring the benefits of democracy and national self-determination to the long-suffering peoples of the world. And this was echoed by the collectivist intellectuals<\/a> who provided the amen corner for Wilson\u2019s war. One such cheerleader was the philosopher John Dewey, who hailed the war as the beginning of the end of laissez-faire because \u201cprivate property had already lost its sanctity\u201d and \u201cindustrial democracy is on the way.\u201d The revered avatar of American liberalism, Walter Lippmann, in a speech uttered as America was entering the war, enthused:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe who have gone to war to insure democracy in the world will have raised an aspiration here that will not end with the overthrow of the Prussian autocracy. We shall turn with fresh interests to our own tyrannies \u2014 to our Colorado mines, our autocratic steel industries, sweatshops, and our slums. A force is loose in America. Our own reactionaries will not assuage it. We shall know how to deal with them.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Tied in to the campaign for progressive \u201creform\u201d was a religious factor: the\u00a0postmillennial pietist movement<\/a> that swept the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Stamping out \u201csin\u201d and stamping out the alleged evils of capitalism were sentiments inextricably intertwined: thus we saw the advent of the \u201cSocial Gospel<\/a>.\u201d The Prohibitionist movement was a key source of the early progressive movement. Yet as the educated classes \u2013 the political class \u2013 shed the remnants of religious belief, their determination to stamp out \u201csin\u201d was hardly extinguished: it just took on new, secularized forms.<\/p>\n

The modern definition of \u201cvice\u201d was shifted to conform to the new religion of political correctness: instead of drunkenness, prostitution, and other avenues of self-gratification, the new vices have been redefined as \u201cracism,\u201d \u201chomophobia,\u201d \u201cxenophobia,\u201d and all the rest of the \u201cphobias\u201d and \u201cisms\u201d denounced by Hillary Clinton in her infamous \u201cbasket of deplorables\u201d speech<\/a>. Indeed, her condemnation of Trump supporters as \u201cirredeemable\u201d is couched in the very language used by the old-time religionists who saw their political and social enemies as instruments of Satan headed straight for the lowest rungs of Hell.<\/p>\n

And this messianic impulse to cleanse humanity of \u201csin\u201d wasn\u2019t limited to a single country, the United States: if the human race was going to be made ready for the Second Coming it first \u2013 according to the postmillennial pietists \u2013 had to undergo the reign of virtue for a thousand years. The Kingdom of God on earth \u2013 the entire<\/i> earth \u2013 \u00a0 had to be established: then and only then would the redeemed by saved and ushered into Eternity, whilst the \u201cirredeemables\u201d would burn in hellfire forevermore.<\/p>\n

Read the Whole Article<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The Best of Justin Raimondo<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Clinton campaign\u2019s full-scale effort to turn this election into a referendum on Vladimir Putin is causing liberals like Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, and Glenn Greenwald, the energizing force behind The Intercept, much heartburn. Here is Ms. van den Heuvel wondering what the heck is going on: \u201cHow does new Cold War […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-275755","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}