Now I realize we are not ever to learn anything from Noam Chomsky, since he is “anti-American,” but his description of the left-liberal elite, based on Charles Kadushin’s The American Intellectual Elite (1974), sounds kind of familiar. They were being asked for their position on the Vietnam War in April 1970, the very time that opposition was peaking.
“This is from memory, so I may not have it exactly, but as I recall, he divided them into three categories. There were those he called ‘pragmatic’ opponents of the war, such as Anthony Lewis, who basically said we are not going to get away with it, and it is costing us too much. Then there were what he called ‘moral opponents,’ who basically said, look, it is getting too bloody; napalming one hospital was okay but not ten hospitals. So that is ‘moral’ opposition. The term is interesting. Then he had what he called the ‘ideological opponents,’ who said aggression is wrong. I think there were two out of two hundred — I’m not sure who the other one is, but every statement he quoted I recognized as my own.
“Now, Kadushin did not do it, but suppose he had asked people what they thought of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. That was bad enough, but they did not kill millions of people; they killed virtually no one. Well, everyone would have been an ‘ideological opponent,’ but he or she certainly would not have called it ‘ideological’ — that would have been simply normal decency. On the other hand, among the American intellectual elite, at the peak period of opposition to the war, virtually no one opposed it on principled grounds, and those few are dismissed as ‘ideological,’ not really serious folk. At that time, about two-thirds of the public were condemning the war as immoral….”
(From The Cold War and the University, 1997)
10:45 am on October 18, 2006
