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In times like these : Comments
By Richard Hil, published 7/10/2014Previously derided for his errant pugilism and relentless negativity as well as his penchant for wearing skimpy Speedos and a swim cap, our PM has shown what a prolonged regime of physical fitness can achieve.
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Posted by Constance, Monday, 13 October 2014 8:48:02 PM
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Last Friday, the cranky comedian, aided by atheist author Sam Harris, enraged actor Ben Affleck by calling Islam, in Harris’s words, “the mother lode of bad ideas.” Then on Monday, Maher condemnedliberals for being so afraid of being called Islamophobes that they won’t denounce brutality committed in Islam’s name. “We’re liberals!” Maher declared about himself and Harris. “We’re liberals … we’re trying to stand up for the principles of liberalism! And so, y’know, I think we’re just saying we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group that] people perceive as a minority.”
Schlesinger would have been able to relate. In his 1949 manifesto, The Vital Center, the Harvard historian and future Kennedy administration aide attacked what he called “doughface” liberals. Borrowing a term for pre-Civil War northerners who had refused to denounce slavery, Schlesinger deployed it against liberals who refused to denounce Soviet communism. “The infiltration of contemporary progressivism by Communism,” he wrote, “has led to the same self-flagellation [that prevented doughfaces from denouncing slavery], the same refusal to take precautions against tyranny.”
Schlesinger’s point then, and Maher’s now, is that the enemies of liberals do not reside only on the right. In the 1930s and 1940s, some liberals grew so focused on the struggles against fascism and racism—struggles in which communists proved staunch allies—that they refused to acknowledge Joseph Stalin’s crimes. Today, some liberals are so focused on the struggle against American militarism and Islamophobia that they can’t muster much outrage against ISIS. According to Schlesinger, occupying the Vital Center means opposing totalitarianism wherever you find it, regardless of whether it claims the mantle of progressivism, as the Soviet Union did during his time, or anti-imperialism, as jihadists do now."