2014: The year liberalism died
Jack Cashill sees fingerprints of Soviet apparatus in Ferguson response
Katherine Ann Porter had been duped, badly. In her memoir, “The Never-Ending Wrong,” published on the 50th anniversary of the 1927 execution of convicted murderers Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Porter told how this came to be.
As the anarchists’ final hours ticked down, Porter had been standing vigil with others artists and writers in Boston. Ever the innocent liberal, Porter approached her group leader, a “fanatical little woman” and a dogmatic Communist, and expressed her hope that Sacco and Vanzetti could still be saved.
The response of this female comrade is noteworthy largely for its candor: “Saved … who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?”
As their predecessors did with Sacco and Vanzetti, progressives in 2014 falsified narratives and manufactured outrage to advance some ill-defined leftist agenda.
What is different now is that progressives no longer content themselves with claiming the guilty innocent. Dating back to the arrest of George Zimmerman in 2012, they are prepared to claim the innocent guilty, a darker turn altogether.
Their goal might be as grubby as enriching a race hustler or as grand as turning a presidential election, but no longer is it about justice, and always there is someone to accuse.
Nearly a century after Sacco and Vanzetti’s demise, crowds stood vigil outside the Ferguson, Missouri, police station waiting to hear whether a grand jury would indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of black 18-year-old Michael Brown.
In the crowd were many protesters as naive as Porter had been. In the crowd, too, were leftist agitators eager to see Wilson go uncharged. After all, what earthly good would Wilson do them in jail?
The Soviets called the practice “framing” – that is, taking a small kernel of truth and rewriting the history of a person or an event around it.
In Ferguson, that small kernel was the testimony of Brown’s partner in crime, Dorian Johnson. Immediately after the shooting Johnson told all who would listen that Brown raised his hands to surrender before Wilson shot him dead in a Ferguson street. The story could not withstand the least bit of scrutiny.
“It seems hard to come to any other conclusion,” the Washington Post finally conceded some months later, “than that Dorian Johnson’s version is simply made up.” In fact, Brown attacked Wilson in his car and then charged him when told to stop.
For the left, however, Johnson’s kernel trumped Wilson’s testimony, the corroborating testimony of a half-dozen eyewitnesses, the forensic evidence and the cautious judgment of a multi-racial grand jury.
Even while Brown’s body lay sprawled on Canfield Drive, activists were rehearsing his neighbors in the “Hands up, don’t shoot” gesture. With the help of an obliging media, this thoroughly corrupt iconography swept the world.
The seeds of Ferguson were planted 90 years earlier when Josef Stalin took control of the Soviet apparatus. More of a realist than Lenin, Stalin focused his American efforts not on a workers’ revolution but on discrediting the American dream.
For the Soviet experiment to prevail, the American experiment had to yield. The world had to see America through fresh, unblinking eyes, not as the great melting pot, but as a simmering stew of racism and xenophobia.
In 1925 the Comintern found just the victims of American injustice Stalin was looking for in Sacco and Vanzetti, a pair of Italian anarchists justly convicted of the murdering an Italian American payroll clerk five years prior.
While their capital murder case worked its way through the appeals process in the Massachusetts courts, the Comintern ginned up a worldwide frenzy around the fate of the convicted killers.
“Spontaneous” protests sprang up seemingly everywhere. Europe’s great squares – in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – filled with sobbing, shouting protesters, declaiming the innocence of the immigrant martyrs and denouncing the vile injustice of their persecutors.
Sound familiar? The reaction to the Ferguson grand jury decision was eerily similar. Hundreds gathered outside the American embassy in London with signs proclaiming “no justice, no peace” and “solidarity with Ferguson.” In Berlin, protesters waved signs that read “Ferguson is everywhere.”
The difference between 1927 and today, and this is critical, is that Wilson was transparently innocent. So was Zimmerman. The left no longer cares.
In their own minds, liberals still see themselves as Atticus Finch standing outside the jailhouse, shotgun reluctantly in hand, protecting the innocent within.
There are a few liberals for whom that image make sense, but not many. Most on the left have joined the mob clamoring for the mockingbird’s head, his innocence be damned.
Today, that mockingbird could be George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo or anyone with the potential to feed the mob’s mindless frenzy.
The mob has not yet seized control of the jailhouse, but no Atticus stands against it, not the president, not the attorney general, not the governor of Missouri, not the mayor of New York City, not any Democrat anywhere.
It is too early to predict the future of the mob, but is not too early the write the epitaph for liberalism. It died an ugly death in 2014.
By: Jack Cashill December 31, 2014 (WND)
