To the editor
Much has been made of the troop of superannuated hippies who have been haunting street corners in Hillsborough and surrounding towns with their anti-war signs and defaced American flags.
All eight eight! of them have received fawning coverage in the local media. The larger gatherings of the lunatic left nationally have received equally uncritical coverage in the major media.
Those without a specialized interest in such goings-on, would remain ignorant, based on media coverage, of the far-left, radical anti-American nature of the leadership and organizers of these protests. Amongst the ridiculous paper mache’ puppets and giant pig balloons so favored by the puerile mass of dread-locked suburban college kids, you will find the directing cadre of new left holdovers and old left wannabes.
As absurd as it may seem, amongst those holding the "Free Mummia" and "No Blood for Oil" signs there remain committed, old-fashioned, Marxist revolutionaries. Their opposition to the prospective war is not based on an even-handed consideration of American interest or on a sincere devotion to our mutual defense and security in the wake of Sept. 11.
Rather, it is a reflexive rejection of all American policy, based on the deep conviction that the government, social system and economic structures of the United States are the font of all the evils that plague mankind in general and the impoverished masses of the third world in particular.
This is the root of their widely expressed notion that U.S. policy in particular U.S. support of Israel engendered the, to them understandable and justifiable, terrorism of Sept. 11 and before.
The doctrine of American culpability in the oppression of all of the world’s indigenous peoples is most notably promoted by a cadre of tenured faculty holding court at America’s most favored campuses. A quick perusal of the Marxist-Socialist ideology expressed on the Web sites of such notables as Noam Chomsky quickly reveals the extreme radicalism of their views.
Views which are obscured by under-reporting in the mainstream press, and by the dilution of their coherence as they are spread by successive waves of ill-educated graduates.
These are the people who can’t find Afghanistan on the map, but are sure we shouldn’t be there; can’t tell you when the Civil War occurred, but are sure Lincoln was a racist; haven’t spent a single hungry, frozen night in their lives but have the presumption to reduce Washington and his Continentals to the despised caricature of "dead white males."
Their views are based on a charming sort of naive optimism married to an almost total lack of historical perspective. Their ideological utopianism consists of a sort of Christianity without Christ, but puts itself at the service of far more cynical, tyrannical and murderous regimes than they ever, in their own lives, have experienced or even imagined.
These beliefs have their origins in the poisoned seed of obscure European academic disputes whose import would be nil, if they had not been adopted by the totalitarian criminals of the "peoples republics."
In brief, these modern inheritors of Marx have had to shift their thinking from the author’s original analysis. Marxism presents itself, not as a point of view, a conviction or a faith, but rather as a scientific description of immutable political, economic and social processes. To the Marxist, the march of history toward socialism has the inevitability of scientific progress or mathematical proofs. The United States however has presented a tremendous obstacle to the fulfillment of the Marxist doctrine.
The seemingly incomprehensible spectacle of children born in the nation victimized by Sept. 11 cheering calls for Islamic resistance in the shadow of the rebuilt Pentagon, or filling the streets of a still-haunted Manhattan with abusive slanders on Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens their Marxist/Leninist professors have so carefully crafted for them. They are convinced that they are on the side of the angels, as long as they stand with Che in defense of the "people’s" right to "self-determination."
What is most fascinating, of course, is that the anathema which is attached to the fascism of the Nazi regime, and which is completely absent in the eyes of those who look so kindly on Castro and his cohorts. Fidel, after all, only murdered 18,000 fellow Cubans for politically incorrect behavior. What a piker beside the likes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and Saddam.
From a safe distance we decry the sins of the slave-holders, and insist their rebel flag be banished. The Holocaust is our epitome of evil, and we despise not only the SS and their helpers, but also, the wizened WASPs of our state department; who would not recognize the fleeing Jews of Europe as worthy of American sanctuary. In our own time we have been ineffectual witnesses to the murdering rage in Cambodia, Rawanda, the Sudan and East Timor.
We had often said "never again," but now many of us cannot be moved even by the murder of three thousands of our own, and are able to ignore not only the piles of bodies in the distance but the corpses laid on our own doorstep.
Pembroke Terrace

