Krauthammer Reflected

Floats Like A Vulture

Instead of rescuing forgotten truths, neocons like Charles Krauthammer devise novel fallacies.
George Scialabba
May 20, 2014

http://www.thenation.com/article/179946/floats-vulture?page=full#

... He [Charles Krauthammer] is furious, for example, at the suggestion that the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World should be an occasion for “repentance and reflection” about the unhappy (for its inhabitants) sequel. “For the left,” he jeers, the anniversary “comes just in time. The revolutions of 1989 having put a dent in the case for the degeneracy of the West, 1992 offers a welcome new point of attack.”
True, mistakes were made. “The European conquest of the Americas, like the conquest of other civilizations, was indeed accompanied by great cruelty. But that is to say nothing more than that the European conquest of America was, in this way, much like the rise of Islam, the Norman conquest of Britain and the widespread American Indian tradition of raiding, depopulating and appropriating neighboring lands.” Besides, he concludes, “the real question is, What eventually grew on this bloodied soil? The answer is, The great modern civilizations of the Americas—a new world of individual rights, an ever-expanding circle of liberty.” ...

I left my psychopathological side back in adolescence... which lasted, in my case, about thirty years.

I hope that I would not write a paean to the efficiencies of irrigating new soil with blood, nor find inspiration in the transition from cruelty and oppression to love and liberty...

Anyone can undergo oppression and love the liberty denied them. The trick is to gather all those virtues of liberty and charity and beneficence into a bouquet of flowers without destroying the fragile growths which bear the blossoms.

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