More Fear

In a great Nation article (Sept.26 05) Corey Robin argues that "many liberals have concluded that evil in the world is so titanic that only US power can deliver us from it." Sound familiar Norm Geras, Chris Hitchens, Paul Berman etc? This "new" liberalism according to Michael Ignatieff "rests less on hope than on fear, less on optimism about the human capacity for good than on dread of the human capacity for evil, less on a vision of man as maker of his history than of man the wolf toward his own kind." Is this your liberalism Wiser Man than I?

So we need to not only overcome fear but aquire "an ideologically grounded hope for progress." . Richard Rorty :once liberals realize that they are "more afraid of being cruel than of anything else" they need not worry about more utopian goals. And yet these same liberals have hitched their wagon to the Great American Adventure, militarily democratizing the planet.What gives? These fearful liberals have decided to export revolution to the far flung corners of the globe in order to evade it here at home. In my own opinion, "liberalism is a bankrupt project, hopelessly compromised by it's alliance with capital and indulgence of empire." Frederick Douglass said it well in 1852 "Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocricy, America reigns without a rival."

"If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who posess power without compassion, might without morality and strenghth without sight" Martin Luther King

"for totalitarian is not only a terroristic political coordination of society but a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests". Herbert Marcuse

We have nothing to fear but fear itself