A Jesusland of one.

John Hinderaker at Power Line has a post up today about Amnesty International that got me thinking. He posts a flyer from Amnesty that compares Bush to... guess what? Oh, you'll never guess. Go on, I dare you! Give up? A Nazi! Innovative, eh?

My cue to roll my eyes and scroll ahead to the next post. I believe I've heard this song before. But then he writes:

Amnesty International was once a great organization, notable for opposing tyranny of all stripes.

Really? Not in my living memory. But sure, I'll take Hinderaker's word for it. I've only really started paying attention to politics, foreign policy, and international organizations in the last few years after a lifetime of being a largely apolitical little-L libertarian. But I can say this: I can barely believe that Amnesty International was ever anything but a society with an Orwellian name and a brief for excusing dictators and rebuking America (or, as my vague impression had it, anything to do with the free market or capitalism). Watching the watchmen -- Amnesty and the UN, in particular -- was one of the factors that led me to wilfully turn my head from all things political early in my adulthood. The cognitive dissonance of knowing that groups like these were meant to be taken as the world's conscience disgusted me, until I learned to laugh with ironic detachment. (And then I had to unlearn that ironic detachment very quickly one morning at about 8:45. Now I'm back at "disgust.")

I'm not a kid. I can remember back a couple decades. So these sentences really struck me:

Whatever happened to the left? When did it give up on the cause of freedom? I don't know. But the American left's abandonment of the cause of liberty is one of the saddest facts of modern history.

The idea that the left ever championed liberty is unfathomable to me. I'll take it on faith, if my betters tell me it was so. Just as I take on faith that Manhattan was once a forest, and Broadway a footpath. But I can't really picture it.

I grew up surrounded by the left, in the heart of Manhattan. As a young teenager, I listened to Pacifica on WBAI. I read Mother Jones and the Village Voice. I was truly curious. I wanted to understand, and I wanted to believe as everyone else did. But I never could. There was such a dissonance between what I was told was true ("the left champions freedom") and what I knew from observation to be true (the left never met a form of tyranny, interpersonal or political, that it didn't like). This dissonance became more and more deafening, until I concluded (because I never met anyone who wasn't somehow on the left) that all of politics, and all of national affairs, and all international bodies, and all forms of political belief and action were based on an enormous lie that no one was allowed to question on pain of excommunication, and I became a laughing buddha of detachment.

(Until that morning at 8:45.)

All my friends, all my coworkers, still look with pious eyes to groups like Amnesty International and International ANSWER for moral guidance, and gratefully swallow the bromides they're given. I don't know anyone who would disapprove of the latest Bush=Hitler flyer.

I guess I'm a Jesusland of one.

 

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