Terry Glavin skewers the broad elements on the left who (in my view) hate their own societies more than they care about actually existing people:

The Heart Of The Matter: A Corrosive, Reactionary Parochialism On ‘The Left’.

The headline on Stephen Kinzer’s unintentionally self-incriminating display of the rot that has eaten away at the rich world’s “left” spoke sufficient volumes all by itself last week: “End Human Rights Imperialism Now”.

Apart from being a classic study in deception masquerading as revelation and self-deception masquerading as reflection (and a workshop-worthy specimen of straw-man argument, besides), what was exceptionally useful about the spectacle Kinzer made of himself was the service he provided in presenting a textbook example of the madhouse delusion that will inevitably result from the muddles of moral, epistemic and cultural relativism.

There’s no point in resorting to empirically-derived evidence if you’re trying to talk sense to someone whose very arguments rest on the absence of such universal standards if not their wholesale rejection. The dialectic, as we used to say, is simply not going to move forward. There will be rot in both form and content. Some people are just numpties.

But today, also in the Guardian, in an essay well-titled Beware those who sneer at ‘human rights imperialism’, our friend Sohrab Ahmari does yeoman service in exposing the bankruptcy of the pseudo-left orthodoxy that Kinzer so helpfully distilled. Sohrab does so by simply raising this question:” If the isolationist, provincial left manages to convince us that the blessing of liberty is to be allocated randomly – along geographic lines and according to the accident of birth – will the heart still beat on the left?”

It’s my own view that on the so-called “anti-imperialist” left, the truly progressive heart had already stopped beating at least a decade ago. True enough, the zombies have been stumbling around for much longer than that…

The thing about the contemporary iterations of that decadence that gets at me like fingernails scratching on a blackboard is its cynical disregard for the bravery of hundreds of thousands of Afghans, especially, who every day take greater risks and make greater sacrifices in the struggle for the rule of law, free speech, womens rights and civil liberties than any of the rich-kid “anti-imperialists” have undertaken in their entire lives. It’s the arrogance of it all that I can’t abide. It’s a distinctly “western” kind of arrogance, parodoxically, that would assert that “western” values are what these brave Afghans are fighting for, but to which – owing to their nature, their “race,” their religion, their “identity” or some dang thing – they are somehow disentitled, and we in the west must not stand with them or support them because to do so is to engage in “imperialism.”..

Be not a numptie. Read the whole dang thing.  I think the difference between many of our progressives and 1890 Tories is that those Tories actually liked their own country.

Mark
Ottawa