by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n T<\/span>he publication of the CIA\u2019s \u201cfamily jewels\u201d \u2014 the record of its domestic spying, hare-brained plots against Castro, and mind-control experiments, among other oddities \u2014 is sure to add fuel to that roaring bonfire of a myth that so-called \u201cprogressives\u201d have been warming their egos at for forty years.<\/p>\n You know the story, since it continues to be told non-stop by the media, television, movies, and half the curricula in schools and universities: evil American corporations and their lackeys in the government were (and still are) brutalizing the Third World in order to maximize profits and strengthen their hold on power. This nefarious capitalist plot was sold to the oafish American people under the camouflage of Cold War rhetoric about resisting Communism (now \u201cterrorism\u201d) and protecting American \u201cfreedom,\u201d which was in fact an illusion masquerading the uptight, repressed American\u2019s servitude to consumerism and mindless entertainment. A handful of doughty college professors, \u201cactivists,\u201d and journalists, however, bravely unmasked this wicked conspiracy, and despite the counter-attack unleashed by corporate government henchmen in the FBI and CIA, eventually exposed the capitalist conspiracy. A neo-imperialist war in Southeast Asia was ended, the crypto-fascist Nixon regime brought down, and limits placed on the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon. Pulitzer prizes, tenure, flattering movies, and six-figure book deals followed, not to mention what\u00a0South Park<\/i>\u00a0calls the \u201chuge cloud of smug\u201d polluting the bicoastal liberal enclaves and every university campus.<\/p>\n Indeed, this melodrama continues to provide the template for the way popular culture and the mainstream media interpret the current war against Islamic jihad. From Vietnam and Watergate derive the plot and formulas into which current events are shoe-horned. The harping on pre-war intelligence mistakes and the missing WMD\u2019s, for example, can be traced back to the alleged lies that justified the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The hysteria over Scooter Libby and the attention lavished on the duplicitous Joe Wilson are incomprehensible without Watergate and its beatified \u201cwhistle-blowers.\u201d The sophomoric anti-war movement and its shrill saints like Cindy Sheehan are taken seriously only because of the inflated mythic paradigm of the protests against the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n The problem is, subsequent history has uncovered the facts that expose the hollowness of these myths. The war in Vietnam\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0started by a communist regime attempting to extend the revolution throughout Southeast Asia. The war was not \u201clost,\u201d but won and\u00a0then<\/i>\u00a0lost when the U.S. Congress lost its nerve and abandoned South Vietnam to the tender mercies of the communists. Journalists like the recently deceased and lionized David Halberstam were\u00a0not<\/i>intrepid truth-seekers exposing the lies of a corrupt government, but opportunists and ideologues driven by their vision of \u201csocial justice,\u201d which in the event turned out to be suspiciously similar to the communist version. Watergate was\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0a triumph of justice but a disastrous inflation of a political misdemeanor, crippling the Nixon administration at a critical moment and emboldening America\u2019s enemies, as subsequent Soviet adventurism throughout the seventies proved. And the anti-war movement\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0riddled with communist ideologues beholden to Moscow and manipulating the herd of sappy idealists, sophomoric utopians, and other useful idiots.<\/p>\n The net result has been a four-decades-long projection of American weakness and self-loathing that has convinced the jihadists that we believe in nothing other than our own physical pleasure and psychic comfort. Having heard our own elites tell the world for decades that we are corrupt and our freedoms an illusion, why shouldn\u2019t they despise us and find us worthy of contempt? And when our major media, our icons of popular culture, and the Democratic leadership all are competing to declare the war against jihad a corrupt failure, why shouldn\u2019t the jihadists continue to fight on, since they are winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the blue half of the United States? The jihadists are excellent students of history, which has taught them that the road to September 2001 in New York passed through Saigon in 1975, Tehran in 1979, and Beirut in 1983.<\/p>\n But don\u2019t confuse \u201cprogressives\u201d with the facts. Their melodrama of moustache-twirling capitalists and their Republican minions controlling the oafish masses with God, patriotism, and Wal-Mart is too flattering to the typical liberal\u2019s elitist pretensions. In fact, this leftist narrative performs a debased religious function for the otherwise Godless. It identifies the wicked and the good and puts both into a justifying narrative replete with the promise of salvation (vote Democratic), holy writ (Michael Moore and the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>), thundering prophets (Al Gore), messiahs (Hillary, John, or Barack), the blessed saved (liberal Democrats), the evil damned (Republicans) and even apocalypse (global warming or another Republican president). And let\u2019s not forget, it bestows status value as well, giving the liberal-progressive an exalted moral perch from which to look down on the masses stupefied by the machinations of their corporate overlords.<\/p>\n The proliferation of such pseudo-religions \u2014 faith-based narratives of meaning and value disguised as rationally derived political systems \u2014 is the tragic story of modernity, polluted as it is with the mountains of corpses sacrificed to failed gods. The 21st<\/sup>-century progressive church may appear less lethal than fascism or communism, but its eagerness to don the hair shirt of Western guilt and self-loathing is in the end as suicidal as the rants of Jim Jones in Guyana.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a92007 Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CIA’s new revelations fans the flames of “progressive” myths of our past by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The publication of the CIA\u2019s \u201cfamily jewels\u201d \u2014 the record of its domestic spying, hare-brained plots against Castro, and mind-control experiments, among other oddities \u2014 is sure to add fuel to that roaring bonfire of a myth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,757],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1q5","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8093,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/sloppy-thinking-about-torture\/","url_meta":{"origin":5461,"position":0},"title":"Sloppy Thinking About \u2018Torture\u2019","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 17, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 Torture is one of those topics that often overwhelm sober reason with lurid emotion. Even people who usually are clear-eyed and rational sink into sloppy thinking and incoherent argument when it comes to torture. Peggy Noonan\u2019s recentWall Street Journal column about the Senate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/mccainfein-450x282.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":5461,"position":1},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":718,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/brennans-testimony-and-waterboarding-misinformation\/","url_meta":{"origin":5461,"position":2},"title":"Brennan’s Testimony and Waterboarding Misinformation","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage The Senate Intelligence Committee last week grilled Obama\u2019s pick to head the CIA, John Brennan, on all sorts of issues. Democrats worked him over about the CIA\u2019s interrogation, detention, and droning of terrorist suspects, while Republicans were concerned about leaks of classified information. But the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3107,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/imprecise-language-breeds-dangerous-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":5461,"position":3},"title":"Imprecise Language Breeds Dangerous Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 12, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society In his classic essay \u201cPolitics and the English Language,\u201d George Orwell identified a \u201clack of precision\u201d as the besetting sin of politicized writing, either through incompetence or indifference as to whether \u201cwords mean anything or not.\u201d The liberal media have illustrated the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2298,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/holders-destructive-investigation\/","url_meta":{"origin":5461,"position":4},"title":"Holder’s Destructive Investigation","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Whether for partisan advantage or out of delusional utopianism, the jihadists win. We can speculate endlessly on why Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a special prosecutor to investigate interrogation techniques and detainee abuse by the CIA, a charge already investigated by the Justice Department\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":868,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/appeasement-bode-war-not-peace\/","url_meta":{"origin":5461,"position":5},"title":"Appeasement Bode War Not Peace","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 3, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review A review of\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama's America\u00a0by Bruce S. Thornton. 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