Why the left willblame America

While rescue workers were still pulling survivors from the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center, Colorado University professor and department head, Ward Churchill, wrote and posted online his own assessment of events. Titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," Churchill's essay hailed the "gallant sacrifices" of the terrorists and mocked the deaths of the victims.

"If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers," wrote Churchill from his own tenured sanctuary, "I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

Within days of the terror bombings in London, Churchill's friends in the international left will perform a comparable autopsy. At the end of their cursory exam, they will blame America, in general, the Bush administration, in particular, and "Bush's poodle," Tony Blair, as an addendum.

They will cite proximate causes like Iraq and prisoner abuse, real or imagined. They will cite global causes like America's Middle East policies and our presumed oppression of the Third World. But they will not cite the real reason for why they feel compelled to blame America. They will not cite it because they no longer know it. Truth be told, few of them ever did.

The roots of the blame-America movement can be traced with some precision to 1924, when Lenin died and Stalin replaced him as top dog in the Soviet Union. Always the realist, Stalin had no illusions that the Soviet's worldwide propaganda arm, the Comintern, or the fledgling Communist Party in America could inspire an American revolution. He focused his American efforts instead, notes Steven Koch in his excellent book, "Double Lives," "on discrediting American politics and culture and assisting the growth of Soviet power elsewhere."

With Stalin's blessing, Comintern propagandists set out to find a case that would undermine the idea of America, which at the time held great sway throughout the world. With justification, America was widely perceived as the land of opportunity, the ever-beckoning home of the free and the brave. For the Soviet experiment to prevail, the American experiment had to yield. The world had to see America through fresh, unblinking eyes, not as the great melting pot, but as a simmering stew of xenophobic injustice.

In 1925, the Comintern found the posters boys for this strategy in Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a pair of Italian anarchists conspicuously guilty of a lethal payroll robbery in Massachusetts. Indifferent to the facts, the Comintern quickly built a worldwide myth around the fate of the killers.

Almost immediately, "spontaneous" protests sprung up throughout the world. Europe's great squares filled with sobbing, shouting protesters, declaiming the innocence of the immigrant martyrs and denouncing the vile injustice of their American persecutors. As the Comintern had planned, the case also attracted a rash of literary giants. One of them was John Dos Passos. The lack of punctuation and capitalization reflects his democratic style:

all right we are two nations

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America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch

This gloomy Manichean divide has devolved downward over time to become a standard Democratic stump speech, but at the time it was shocking. America's leftists were unwittingly doing just what the Comintern had hoped.

In the end, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, but it had never been the Comintern's job to save them. In her memoir, "The Never-Ending Wrong," published on the 50th anniversary of the pair's execution, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Katherine Ann Porter relates how she first came to understand this. As the final hours ticked down, Porter had been standing vigil with others artists and writers in Boston. Ever the innocent liberal, Porter approached her group leader, a "fanatical little woman" and a dogmatic communist, and expressed her hope that Sacco and Vanzetti could still be saved. The response of this female comrade is noteworthy largely for its candor:

"Saved," she said, ringing a change on her favorite answer to political illiteracy, "who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?"

"The whole point," argues Koch, "was that 'justice' in the world's leading liberal democracy was a murderous lie. The men had to die."

Today, the left cares about the people of Iraq or the Middle East or even the Third World no more than it did about Sacco and Vanzetti. Unlike the Soviets, however, contemporary leftists have no larger purpose to their rage. They have no goal, no vision of a better society. They blame America largely because it has become part of their cultural memory.

True, they can make an oppressed innocent out of convicted cop-killers like Mumia Abu Jamal or Leonard Peltier just as readily as the Comintern could of Sacco and Vanzetti. True, too, they can romanticize Iraqi insurgents with all the passion that their ancestors lavished on Castro's thugs or the Spanish anarchists. They can do all of this because their vestigial contempt for America provides a near perfect response mechanism and spiritual guide. It is, alas, merely pointless.

No American better embodies this unholy nihilism than Noam Chomsky, the world's most influential leftist intellectual. "No party claims him," writes acolyte James Peck of Chomsky. "He is a spokesman for no ideology." Peck perpetuates the fraud that the radical nature of Chomsky's dissent "fits nowhere" and that the real target of his righteous wrath is "the violence of the world."

This is nonsense. Chomsky has proven himself the international master of the Comintern shell game: deny Marxist horrors; imagine and expose Western ones. A week after 9-11, for instance, Chomsky was decrying America as a "leading terrorist state" whose "crimes against humanity" had left behind a "colossal number of victims."

Yet two years after the onset of the most devastating mass slaughter post-Holocaust, the murderous ultra-communist rampage in Cambodia, Chomsky was publicly doubting whether it had ever happened. Why he does this, however, even he does not fully understand. The reflex is embedded in the memory.

That reflex is powerful. If Chomsky or Churchill or the left's clown prince, Michael Moore, have not already blamed America for the London bombing by the time this article sees light of day, I promise to buy the director's cut of Fahrenheit 9-11 and actually watch it.

Editor's note: For a more complete account of this phenomenon, read Jack Cashill's amazing new book, "Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture."

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