Likelihood of Success

Ticket to totalitarianism

Nov 25, 2007 Americana, Ars Longa, Medialites, O Mores!

NewsBusters prints this excerpt from the transcript of NPR’s review of “Redacted” (via Instapundit):

The rape scene has led to a familiar charge, that De Palma is a misogynist who relishes violence against women. . . .
Another charge is that he’s anti-American or anti-troops. But it’s an act of sympathy to suggest that soldiers on their third tours of duty in a place where they have no knowledge of the culture, where they can’t tell who’s on their side and who wants to blow them up, stand a good chance of losing both their moral compass and their minds. Here, and in “Casualties of War,” De Palm[a] is dramatizing the idea that even decent people in such circumstances can convince themselves they’re entitled to do anything.

Here lies the road to the complete inversion of morality. As an “act of sympathy” for the troops, DePalma is supposedly taking the position that even the worst actors in the world — U.S. troops committing atrocities while on an imperialistic mission — are no worse than morally exempt from blame for such atrocities because of the moral incoherence all around them. The logic is unassailable:

1. Bad guys might be good guys.
2. Good guys might be bad guys.
3. Hey, this is hard!
4. Let’s rape someone.

This aligns well with the leftist conception that people the world ’round do not make their own choices at all, but rather are zombies. In America, choiceless voters are under the sway of Rush Limbaugh, religious fundamentalism, and Karl Rove. In the Middle East, suicide bombers are compelled to murder housewives and schoolchildren by their plight or by their rage. But it is relatively novel to see the left apply this to the faceless, heartless automatons of the U.S. military, even in the commission of their fictional outrages. Naturally we can expect NPR to lobby for the release of all soldiers incarcerated for improper conduct in the Iraqi theater immediately.

Soon we will recognize that everything — everything! — is George W. Bush’s fault, and that individual conscience is merely a bourgeois construct of kapital. It is so much simpler.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.