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The Left's Crimes of Silence
August will mark the anniversary of the needless death of tens of thousands of innocents, of callous disregard for the widespread suffering of the weak on the part of imperious governments. No, the anniversary has nothing to do with Iraq: It will have been one year since a heat wave swept Europe, killing more than 25,000 of the elderly and unprotected (15,000 in glorious France alone). The death toll wrought by nonchalant neglect in Europe last August remains considerably higher than the total number of fatalities in Iraq since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom—friendly, enemy and civilian combined. The American Left never blinked as the real "old Europe" perished in the multitudes. There wasn't a whisper of criticism of those "more humane" European governments whose apparatchiks refused to interrupt their summer vacations to respond to the mass dying among Europe's pensioners. Those admirable European health-care systems failed horrendously—yet they remain, of course, the models to which we should aspire (no matter that every European I know prefers private care, if they can afford it). Had the Bush administration allowed over 25,000 elderly Americans to die while our president cut brush at his ranch, howls of outrage would have shaken the heavens. The Left would have reminded us all of the virtues of Euro-socialism and the evils of a marketplace society. No matter that, with far higher temperatures routine in the U.S., such a massacre-by-neglect has never happened here and never will. Reality has no weight for the ideologues who cannot live without the conviction that only the United States is ever guilty. The silence of the Left in the face of uncomfortable truths is a hallowed tradition, of course, dating back to the earliest crimes of the Soviet Union. When the reality confronting the Left contradicts the theory, the theory must be preserved at any cost. And there's no sign of improvement, not a glimmer of the least scrap of conscience or integrity on the Left. It's all about revenge against a democratic system that gives a blue-collar worker a vote equal to that of a university professor's ballot, about hatred for the free market for providing better lives for the great majority while Marxism drowned in the bile of its victims. There's no one the new American Left so despises as the working man or woman who continues to believe in the United States. Posted by: tipper 2004-07-29 |
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