Content area
Full Text
CSZESLAW MILOSZ USED THE TERM "political correctness" to describe the coUapse of metaphysical and political levels of argument into a singular "New Faith." This fusion seems to be going on in American intellectual circles. I refer to the multiplying uses of the phrase, "anti-American."
To be "anti-American" seems to mean to violate decency, to do violence to absolute truth. Understood in this way, the phrase realigns the conventional left-right groupings in the United States around the axis of state power. Thus does Norman Podhoretz range liberal internationalists, Republican realists, and the "anti-American left" into "de-facto allies" merely because each group doubts the wisdom of the Iraq occupation.
Podhoretz views modern American history as a succession of noble wars, a view that has the advantage of simplifying things into good and evil, winners and defeatists, patriots and subversives, free societies and "swamps" that must be "drained." Since violence, in his view, is the instrument of historical change, diversity of opinion is the main threat. "Facing a conflict that may well go on for three or four decades," Podhoretz writes in his recent book, World War IV, "Americans of this generation are called upon to be more patient than 'the greatest generation' needed to be in World War II, which for us lasted only four years; and facing an enemy even more elusive than the Communists, the American people of today are required to summon at least as much perseverance as the American people of those days did - for all their bitching and moaning-over the 47 long years of World War III."
Why morale should be so important to a war that is so manifestly just and necessary Podhoretz...