Viewpoint has an article on terror and liberalism. It is described as post which discusses a book by Paul Berman entitled Terror and Liberalism. The book was a New York Times bestseller and it addresses the odd fact that the ideological left has evolved over the last hundred years or so into the exact opposite of what it started out as. As Berman puts it the left "began as a champion of the poor and oppressed, [but has come] to ... passionately defend the most brutal of tyrannies, not just in Iraq, but in earlier times, also in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany." The book is his argument in defense of this claim. The author describes himself as one of maybe fifteen or twenty people in the United States who are both pro-war and ideologically liberal/left so his critique of the left is all the more interesting for having been written by a man sympathetic to his subject.
Posted by Simon at July 26, 2004 03:26 AM