The war from over here, part 12
Kissinger and the end of intelligence, Palestino-Nazism, and the surprising paucity of progressives.
As if to put another nail in the coffin of the era of intelligence, American statesman Henry Kissinger has died at 100. I have no interest in encomiums or denunciations, so I will only give my personal reflections on Kissinger’s work.
I grew up in a very progressive community, so I was raised to hate Kissinger. We were taught that he was the scourge of Chile, the decimator of Vietnam, the slaughterer of Indonesia, and generally speaking History’s Greatest Monster.
Even after I escaped from the progressive cult, I never gave Kissinger much thought until recently. My curiosity piqued by the media coverage of his 100th birthday, I picked up a biography written by Walter Isaacson. I realized fairly quickly that, when Isaacson quoted Kissinger, what Kissinger had to say was far more interesting than anything Isaacson had to say about him.
So, I decided that my time would probably be better spent by reading Kissinger himself. The first book of his I read was Diplomacy, a sweeping history of foreign relations in modern Europe and the United States. The only thing I could think after finishing it was that, whatever one might think of Kissinger, he was clearly the smartest man in the world.
This is, of course, a bit hyperbolic, but if anything defined Kissinger, it was unquestionably his intelligence, which may be why so many stupid people hated him so violently. Certainly, not everyone who hated him was or is stupid, but those who embraced the History’s Greatest Monster narrative clearly did so as a substitute for thinking. I think it very likely that many of them were profoundly intimidated by a man whose policies were driven by analyses of the world that they were simply incapable of understanding.
For me, however, the most striking thing about Diplomacy was Kissinger’s skepticism regarding the idea that nations should be judged by the same moral standards as individual human beings. I had been taught to believe that this idea was axiomatic and had never really thought to question it. But Kissinger asserted not only that it was a dubious or at least questionable proposition, but might well have led to several horrendous disasters, such as the Versailles Treaty and the world war it made inevitable.
I later discussed this subject with a friend of mine, and he pointed out that when a person sacrifices themselves for another, it may be noble and admirable. But when a nation does so, it may be horrific, since it means millions of people will die who were never asked whether they wished to be sacrificed. Moreover, an entire culture and way of life would be destroyed in order to preserve another, when there is no guarantee that one was superior to the other or even whether superiority ought to enter into the equation.
I do not know whether I fully accept the idea that nations should be judged by wholly different moral standards than individuals, but Kissinger’s skepticism towards the idea made me think, and there is very little out there today that makes us think. For this alone, I am grateful for his legacy.
I was heartened to see that on the anniversary of the UN vote to partition then-Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, “Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan will launch an exhibition in the entrance hall to the building showing photos of meetings in Berlin during the Holocaust between Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini.”
This is important for two reasons: First, today’s Palestinian nationalism cannot reconcile itself to Israel’s existence largely because, early on, it was profoundly influenced by Nazism. It is not a coincidence that Mahmoud Abbas was—and possibly still is—a Holocaust denier, that Palestinian culture in general has a very positive view of Hitler, and that over 90% of Palestinians are antisemitic.
This Palestino-Nazism is one of the major factors behind both the Palestinians’ consistent refusal to make peace with Israel and the total dehumanization of Israelis and Jews that has become a defining aspect of Palestinian culture. Above all, however, the Palestinians adopted from their Nazi allies the idea that the struggle against the Jews is to the death. The only acceptable outcome is final. Thus, the Palestinian insistence that “peace” and “justice” must equal genocide is one of Hitler’s most potent, if usually unremarked, legacies.
If peace is to be achieved, the denazification of Palestinian society is required, and Israel must at last begin to insist on it.
One thing I’ve noticed in recent years, and particularly over the last two months, is that media coverage of progressive activists, politicians, organizations, and the progressive movement in general is wildly disproportionate to the actual number of progressives in American society.
This is, admittedly, a somewhat difficult thing to quantify. The most recent data I was able to find lumps everyone on the center-left together in the vague category of “liberals,” which could mean almost anything to the left of “conservative.” But a Pew Research Center study from 2021 specifically sought to measure the “progressive left,” and the numbers, at least then, were striking.
The bottom line was that only 6% of Americans and 7% of registered voters were progressive leftists. That is a vanishingly small number of people. As Pew noted, this group is overwhelmingly white, affluent, and over-educated, which means they socially and culturally punch above their numbers. Nonetheless, we are clearly talking about a minority within a minority within a minority.
Why then, is the media coverage of the 6% so massively disproportionate? Why are we constantly being told that they and their political representatives like AOC and Ilhan Omar are the wave of the future? Why are they portrayed as the Democratic party’s “base” when there is no conceivable way that 6% of the public can constitute the “base” of any major party?
My guess is that there are several reasons:
1) Most media outlets are based in progressive-leaning urban areas and staffed by progressives who were educated by progressives to be progressives. In other words, they live in a hermetically sealed environment and, as a result, think that everyone else in the world thinks exactly like they do.
2) The smarter among them know this isn’t true, but continue to exaggerate the progressives’ numbers and importance in order to create the illusion of an enormous, unstoppable popular uprising that will intimidate Americans into submitting to their demands. It must be said that, in this regard, they have been fairly successful.
3) The only way to legitimize a movement that includes factions that support all manner of things anathema to most Americans—including, as we have now seen, support for terrorism and genocide—is to attempt to portray it as the will of the people. The fallacy that vox populi, vox dei, “the voice of the people is the voice of God,” has served the dangerous and the demagogic very well for centuries, and it is not surprising that progressivism makes use of it as well.
What all this means, however, is that progressivism is a paper tiger. It may seem overwhelmingly massive and powerful, but it is in fact a movement dominated by a tiny vanguard of fanatics who, because they are mostly from the upper-middle-class elite, command a very large megaphone. No one, despite the media’s best efforts, should be intimidated by them.
I am thrilled you are writing about this. I've tried in comments or notes and have had not much response. I felt like a voice crying in the wilderness. I also thank you because ai just broadbrushed but you've filled in so much more. Hopefully people will read yours more than mine, stop with so much "what about'ism." and recognize the absolutes about the "too much indoctrinated and very long standing Palestinian-- not all, but too many and too-Hamas-enabling" Palestinian Jew-Haters. *I prefer to call "anti-semitism" "Jew Hatred": it cuts to the chase better / stops trying to protect "the delicates" that too often ask, "But aren't others than Jews also "semitic?". Maybe they are, but how many of those through out thousands of years were gassed or thrown out of countries, or had shtetl villages burned, or in more recent times burned in their "Nazi-locked" synagogues or shot en masse in forests?
Thank you for your article . First time I managed to understand the relationship between the Left and antisemitism in the Middle East was when I listened to a Francesco Gil-White interview on YouTube where he describes the strong relationship between the Grand mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis. And how Al-Hussaini passed on the baton of the Final Solution to his disciples Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, who in turn have similarly educated the subsequent generation including Sinwar. And now we have the useful idiots of the West parroting the antisemitic propaganda broadcast by the minority Left elite who in fact are the new Fascists. As you say, the only way Israel can have peace is by reeducating the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza . In my opinion, Israel should also ensure the same in those countries who have signed the Abraham accords. But how does one stop the growing antisemitism in the West? By ensuring our governments put an end to Chinese and Qatari funding !