The ignorance of arrogance
By Bruce Walker
web posted September 6, 2004
Arrogance breeds ignorance. Few people in human history have been as arrogant as American Leftists. Pampered as anti-war protestors, when they were actually anti-courage protestors; spoiled by a generation that endured the Great Depression, won the Good War, and contained the Evil Empire; told by mendacious academicians that their gluttonous sensuality and grasping selfishness was some form of camouflaged nobility, American Leftists swirled down the maelstrom of proud indifference to truth for the last four decades.
Until now. Until facts and falsehoods caught up with them. Until Orwellian candidates like John Kerry spike their own books to hide from their own past. Until hollow heads like Howard Dean rant on and on about our need to engage the "Soviet Union" more than ten years after Ronald Reagan's crusade destroyed the Evil Empire (which explains, by the way, why American Leftists found honoring this greatest American leader so difficult and odd.) Arrogance until now guarded Ignorance in several different ways.
First, of course, arrogance requires no reflection to form its opinion: One hundred million souls consumed in that Greatest Holocaust, Marxism, cannot persuade Orthodox Marxists that their intolerant and jealous god is a false god, because Leftists and other sociopaths do not reflect, but revile.
Second, brimming with revulsion and ridicule, Leftists and other sociopaths destroy people rather than disprove principles. So the dark comedy that women are eternal victims of some hazy patriarchal cabal or that those who create wealth exploit those who consume wealth or that American soldiers who risk their lives to liberate Iraqi children from torture chambers are brutes or equally transparent lies have been allowed to live and to breed in some regions of public consciousness because the lash of Leftism rends flesh, not facts.
Third, although the brave voices of conservatives and other normal people have raised for all hearing ears to hear the clear call of revolution against the overlords of Leftism, no one has yet whispered to that aging aristocracy that no one takes its perverse silliness seriously any longer. So John Kerry feels that he really can - and should! - campaign for president as a war hero and as a war criminal, as a patriot and as a traitor, as a loyal comrade in Vietnam.
Perhaps Kerry simply does not know much history. Perhaps he does not know that Benedict Arnold was once a genuine American war hero - one whose courage in battle was never challenged at the time or at any later date by political friend or foe - because he became it most famous traitor. Perhaps he does not know that Hitler and Mussolini were genuine war heroes - men whose courage was not later questioned even by the many, decent enemies of National Socialism and of Fascism - whose betrayal of their nation trivialized their courageous wartime record.
Perhaps Kerry honestly does not know that the greatest preventable crime in his adult life - the extermination in horrific ways of millions of Cambodians - was committed by communists whose cause Kerry gleefully aided while their comrades tortured men with names like John McCain and Jeremiah Denton or that perhaps Kerry truthfully never heard anti-communists (once an invective in American political lexicon) desperately warn men like Kerry, as he casually lobbed grenades into the body politic of America, that if Indochina was overrun by the high priests and grand inquisitors of Marx, then millions would die because millions had always died when that iron, bloody cult gained power.
Perhaps as Kerry basked in the warm glow of fawning sycophants the screams of American POWs in the Hanoi Hilton or the wailing ghosts of a massacred Khmer nation were distant and dim noises in the back of his conscience, ignored because Mick Jagger had "empowered" him to ignore the truth when truth conflicted with hubris.
Perhaps, as Kerry slowly understands that the wealth of rich wives cannot purchase him a clean conscience or wash away comments casually given, "cool" when they were given, and which are now clearly ghastly crimes against human decency, the worm has turned. Perhaps God lives while the vain and vicious gods and goddesses of Leftism do not. Perhaps simple truth triumphs over titillating contradiction. Perhaps pride goes before the fall. Perhaps arrogance leads to ignorance, and perhaps the Left is the quintessence of arrogance. 
Bruce Walker is a senior writer with Enter Stage Right. He is also a frequent contributor to The Pragmatist and The Common Conservative.
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