Sunday, May 11, 2008

The right history of the Left

Kathy Shaidle reviews Daniel Flynn's new book:
[T]he Left has always attracted very peculiar people who’ve preached very peculiar "solutions" to life's "problems." In fact, the sameness of the Left as chronicled by Flynn actually illustrates the conservative view of life: that human nature is fallen, universal, and cannot be permanently altered for the better through education or engineering.
Certain leftist types turn up again and again through the centuries, brought back to colorful life in Flynn's book: fanatics, altruists, adventurers, splitters, spiritualists, free spirits, and one particular type Flynn dubs the "puritanical perverts": Alfred Kinsey, Timothy Leary, and other "overbearing personalities whose zeal for sex, drugs, or whatever other pleasure made them paternalistic libertines."
What they all have in common, Flynn writes in Conservative History, isn't a "laundry list of complaints and wishes" so much as "an attitude": "It is, in its simplest form,
scorn for what is and hopes for what could be. The ideology's appeal exists in neither the experienced past nor the concrete present, but in the imagined future."
By all means, read the whole thing. I first encountered Flynn through his excellent 1999 pamphlet, Cop Killer: How Mumia Abu-Jamal Conned Millions Into Believing He Was Framed. That pamphlet demonstrated Flynn's deep understanding of how liberal media engage in what can only be called propaganda -- dishonest communication intended to propagate false belief. In Cop Killer, Flynn explains the facts of the killing of Officer Daniel Faulkner, facts that Mumia's media enablers routinely ignore. No honest person can read Cop Killer and still buy into the "political prisoner" nonsense promulgated by the "Free Mumia" idiots.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the author of Cop Killer should win praise for his latest work.

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