Quick sidebar to the whole "the entire world hates America" bit, which is, at best an exaggeration and at worst a deliberate and knowing lie (not, on the other hand, that there's no one in the world with a legitimate reason to resent us, not by a long shot):

When, exactly, did it become New Left canon to believe and insist that the United States was wrong to fight in World War II? I've seen this trotted out several times in the last two months on Mudcat, but even before that in other online fora, books, articles, etc.

In the years immediately leading into and after the war, you'd be hard pressed to find significant numbers on the American political left who thought that fight was wrong. (Sidebar within a sidebar: yes, I know that there were anti-war people at the time, too, few as they were, and I don't have a problem with that, though I disagree with a great deal of their reasoning. I do have to respect the courage of their convictions, and I think the world would probably be a whole lot better off with a whole lot more ethical, principled pacifists, be they Mennonite, Quaker, Buddhist, or atheist.) For a broad panoply of reasons, pretty much anybody on the American left, from the most milquetoast-liberalish-Hubie-Humphrey centrist to the Reddest of Bolsheviks agreed that this was a good fight, especially the fight against Fascism. Remember the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? Remember that American communists, of whom many who were still foolishly looking to Stalin for inspiration, would have been well aware that in Russia, this was The Great Patriotic War?

I was trying to explain this phenomenon to my mother, from whom--along with my father who is both more liberal and more conservative than her, depending on the issue--I learned many of my liberal/progressive/populist/antiracist principles, bless her heart. Her response was "I didn't know that it had," and she, not having been aware of it before, felt it must just be a tiny minority fringe of the left that feels that way. I tried to explain to her that it might be more widespread on our side of the political spectrum than she was willing to believe, but she wasn't buying. This is a woman who grew up under the shadow of World War II, and has probably been opposed to every war we've been involved in since then. But she supports the current military effort--she hates to see our country killing anyone, but as with Pearl Harbor doesn't see that we have any choice but to respond.

And I agree with her, even though it's with sadness and trepidation, not with rah-rah flagwaving, and even though I grieve for the innocent dead of Afghanistan, just as I would have for the innocent dead of both Germany and Japan, and do grieve for the innocent dead of both Israel and Palestine. But that's not the issue I'm trying to raise with this post, it's the World War II thing. I've always thought our role on the Left was to oppose the wrong, not just to be reflexively anti-American (and it's worth noting that the Trotskyite World Socialist Website calls anti-Americanism "the anti-imperialism of fools"). Silly me.

Shad