How the Left Wins the Arguments by Narratives, Post-Modernism, and the Greater Moral Significance

by Norman Berdichevsky (August 2019)

The Chronically Aggrieved and The Super Touchy, Howard Sherman, 2017

Back in high school, I understood (or thought I did) the word “narrative” to mean the telling of a story from the standpoint of the third person. Film or theater credits often listed the “narrator,” who was used to present an eye-witness neutral account from a non-biased perspective rather than the personal views and feelings of the main characters. My God! How this has changed! It is hard to escape the contemporary meaning of the word that abounds all over the social sciences, politics, and its corollary of “post-modern.” The first time I saw this expression, it seemed a contradiction in terms. How can something be further in the future than “modern”? Both terms stress the importance of integrating new knowledge into an acceptable framework that confirms a group’s most cherished values. Otherwise, it is irrelevant.

For the past few decades, “postmodernism” has come to mean an attitude of skepticism or rejection of the reigning and previously accepted ideologies, and calling into question the assumptions of rationality and universalist notions of objective morality, reality, truth, reason, language, human nature and social progress. Modern Ideas.

assertion that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” proclaimed by Linda Sarsour (twice co-chair of the Women’s March and former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York). Congresswoman Ihlan Omar reaffirmed a similar statement namely that Jesus Christ, heralded by all Christian denominations as the Messiah, the fulfillment of Old Testament (i.e. Jewish) prophecies, was “Palestinian,” And the New York Times claimed (since corrected) Jesus was most likely a dark-skinned Palestinian, thereby cynically adding skin color. Identity politics obsessively dominates leftwing politics.

In this narrative, “Palestinians” are transported more than 2,000 years back in history and Jews are eliminated from 3,000 years ancient history, along with the longevity of their language and religion.

Was this the first time such a bizarre, unique, and utterly fantastic, totally implausible rewriting of history was advanced? Hardly.

Ludwig Müller, Hitler’s hand-picked candidate was “elected” as the new German Reichsbischof on 27 September 1933, after the Nazi regime had already imposed him a few months earlier. By 1937, nearly all the Protestant Evangelical churches of Germany had succumbed to the Nazi definition of the church’s mission as defined by Hans Kerrl, the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs. Its three major points were:

The promotion of the political objective of German national unity, to overcome confessional differences designed to diminish the influence of the Catholic Church in Germany) and unite Protestantism into a single unitary “positive” Christian church under the thumb of the Nazi state. It was no accident that the vote for the Nazis in all the elections of Weimar Germany had been notably lower in Catholic areas than in predominantly Protest ones. This became even clearer after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933.
Encouragement of followers to support the creation of a greater “Aryan Homeland,” extending over even a larger area than that of the Germanic speaking peoples in Central and Eastern Europe.

In contrast to the absence of outrage today against such a preposterous view by many that Jesus was a brown-skinned Palestinian, the German “Positive Church” provoked resistance on the part of those Germans with any conscience who were aware that such a maniacal assertion was throwing contempt on two thousand years of Christian tradition.

The Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) was a movement within German Protestantism in the 1930s in opposition to this government-sponsored effort to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi Protestant Church. In November 1933, Pastor Friedrich Niemöller founded the Pastors’ Emergency League, pledged to resist programs of the state-controlled church and its theological declaration. It transformed a defensive movement against Nazi control of the churches into an organized resistance. Sections of the Confessing Church remained active in protesting against euthanasia and the persecution of the Jews (even if it objected most strongly on the theological grounds that Jews who converted to Christianity could no longer be held accountable for their biological origin). Under intense Nazi pressure, the Confessing Church was forced underground. In 1937, Niemöller and 700 other pastors were arrested.

Through such American congressional representatives as Rashida Tlaib from Michigan and Ilhan Omar from Minnesota, working in tandem with Black Muslim leader Farrakhan, many American Muslims have gone along with what can be called an alliance with the political Left that views them all as “victims.” On an international level, this means identification with the intense anti-Israel campaign orchestrated by former Iranian President Ahmadinejad whose obsession is to “wipe Israel off the face of the map” and “imagine” (which is all they can do at the moment) a “World Without Zionism”.

Read more in New English Review:
• Trippin’ with Tim
• Defending the Indefensible: Why Holocaust Denial Should be Legal
As early as February 1941, in spite of the wholehearted desire of the American Protestant establishment not to risk involvement in World War II, Reinhold Niebuhr spoke out convincingly through the journal he founded Christianity and Crisis and sounded a clarion call of warning about Nazism. Its final goals were not simply the eradication of the Jews but the extirpation of Christianity and the abolition of the entire heritage of Christian and humanistic culture. Niebuhr based his views not on any literal “evangelical” interpretation of Biblical promises but the essentials of justice for the nations and also called for some form of compensation to those Arabs in Palestine who might be displaced if their own leaders refused to make any compromise possible.

The success of the alternative “narratives” promoted by many on the Left in both the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament and the mass media is very apparent. It has led to a crisis within the American Democratic Party and the British Labour Party, both of which have panicked and are looking in desperation for an electoral formula to defeat Donald Trump and prevent the ascendancy of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. They know that among young people and the various groups of first- and second-generation immigrants of Afro-Asian and non-Christian background, it is much easier to present the alternative “narrative” stressing over and over again their sympathy for “people of color” from which they can exclude the majority of Jews who live in both countries.

The electoral math is not hard to read. Muslims in the U.K. currently outnumber Jews by a factor of 10 to one. Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn can cynically proclaim that his hands are clean by appearing on platforms without the use of any anti-Jewish invective and continuing to use the straw man of the “Far Right.” Likewise, in the U.S., compliant Jews who suffer from several generations of a misplaced affection for the Democrats in the political establishment have always remained in the pockets of that party, aided by the penchant for a “new narrative” and the prevalence of postmodernism in much of the media.

Much the same logic has applied to the statements and claims of Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), implying that her view of the morality of an issue outweighs the actual “facts” as they exist on the ground or the black and white numbers that one expects as the right answer to a question in arithmetic. Of course, this stops far short of the absurd contentions that are historically false such as Jesus was a Palestinian, but they are sympathetically packaged in the wrapping of sympathy for the underdog.

The Washington Post recently awarded her four Pinocchios (“prizes” for lying, grossly misstating the facts or outrageous exaggeration and simple misstatements). In a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, the congresswoman AOC said:

she makes “a mistake,” it is not the same thing as President Trump being morally deficient or corrupt, and hence worse than lying. The Republicans cannot resort to using the same tactics as the Democrats. Although often tripped up by the President’s clumsy tactics and tweets that play into the hands of the Sarsour-Omar-Tlaib-Ocassio-Cortez quartet, they must rally the common sense of Americans who can understand that these four are prophets of dismay, doom and deception.

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