The "New" left in America

Time for another history lesson. The folks at moveon.org and countless other leftist organizations, which present their views as new and timely perspective for the 21st century, really are peddling the same old Vietnam era psychobabble. It has its origins in work done by The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. ( hereafter CFSDI )

CFSDI came up with an agenda back in 1967. (They also loved to rewrite the Constitution regularly) Here it is in a nutshell. Please stop for a moment and take the time to really examine these points. Do you notice any similarities with the leftist movement of 2004?

1. The United Nations must be strengthened and made more independent.
2. Membership in the United Nations must be made universal.
3. The war in Vietnam is at best a mistake.
4. Southeast Asia must be neutralized.
5. The Cold War must be ended.
6. Racial discrimination is intolerable.
7. The developing nations must be assisted and aid to them be multilateral.
8. The terms of trade are intolerable for the developing countries; the ratio of industrial prices to those of primary products must receive the most earnest, explicit and immediate attention.
9. No military solutions are adequate for the present day.
10. No national solutions are adequate for the present day.
11. Coexistence is a necessary but not sufficient condition of human life. Survival is not an ignoble aim but it is not a noble one either. We must move upward from coexistence to what Pope John called the universal common good. This is an aim worthy of humanity. It will require the organization of the world for continuous peaceful change and the revision of the status quo without war.

Exchange Vietnam for Iraq and Southeast Asia for the Middle East and you have a point for point match of the current agenda being touted as the panacea for the world's ills. Some of it sounds attractive, even quite rational, but the folks at CFSDI, whose political philosophy could best be summed up as global communism, failed to look closely enough at their first two points.

Here's what's wrong. The United Nations is a group composed of the individual nations of the world. Many of those nations have reprehensible governments. A child might think that he could make the ultimate drink by mixing his favorite drinks: coke, milk, fruit punch, Gatorade,7-up, Dr. Pepper, Lemonade and lastly Koolaid. He proceeds to mix the ingredients and gulps down the concoction without thinking. When he finds himself in intestinal distress and poised over a toilet bowl, only then does he learn his lesson. The UN is a noble idea manifested using idiocy. It is corrupt to the very rafters. It is impotent to provide any real security to the peoples of the world and is, sadly, no more than the sum of its parts -- which should be enough to damn it to oblivion..

If you have a group of kids in a room in ages from 5 to 18 and you ask them an addition problem, do you take their answers and average them to create a collective group answer? This distorted method of problem solving would only lead to the wrong answers almost every single time you asked a question. For over fifty years the UN has provided the world with the wrong answers. The UN presumes an equality of governments which does not exist.

This leads us to point 10 which declares national solutions inadequate. This is the dream leftist agenda, where nations hand over the reins of power to the UN and the world body in some grand motion brings peace and prosperity to all, destroy SUVS, make those with inferiority complexes hopeful that all those with more will be taken down so they can spit in their eye. To be quite blunt the UN vision is just masqueraded communism - nothing more. The laurels and the world on the UN flag might as well be the hammer and sickle. Such an event if it did transpire would bring far more suffering than did the Bolsheviks, Stalin or Mao. It would eventually establish global poverty and forced equality (except for the few UN masters). It would bring down lifespans for the most advanced nations and pull them up for the most backwards, returning to a 50 year life expectancy in short order as the global resources get reallocated by those anointed ones.

Limited perspectives and escape mechanisms. That is what brings such utopian visions to the mind's eye of the leftists and one-worlders. It is really just a childish response of someone harboring a substantial persecution complex. As if to prove that such an assessment is accurate, the CSFDI Senior Fellow, Robert Hutchins, once had declared that CSFDI was "like an island of sanity in a McCarthyite world."

Hutchins was wrong of course, just as the "new" left is wrong now.