At a turning point early in World War II, Winston Churchill famously remarked, “Now this is not the end. No, it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Many attribute the occasion to England's victory in the Battle of Britain. But the remark was delivered a year later than that, after General Montgomery's Eighth British Army had wreaked decisive defeat on Rommel's vaunted Afrika Korps at El Alamein in 1942.
Today, after the Charlottesville fiasco, and especially after Donald Trump's remarks on the subject, the Left believes it is celebrating a Churchillian moment. They see a perfect storm forming, and are anxious to declare, as Churchill did, that the tide has turned. As just one example, CBS News devoted its entire television broadcast one evening last week – 100% of its airtime – to the single subject of Trump's remarks on Charlottesville. NBC nearly matched, with 75% of its news airtime spent on Trump's press conference. Not since 9/11 has any topic received that sort of blanket coverage.
The message is drilled home time after time, commentator after commentator, “reporter” after “reporter.” The evil Right (alt-right) has done murder to an innocent woman in broad daylight. Donald Trump is supported by the evil Right. All that went wrong in Charlottesville – including most especially murder – is the fault of Trump's Right. Donald Trump won't even admit that his staunchest supporters committed murder in their cause.
Of course, the true message is that the Right is wrong, irretrievably evil, and the Left is beyond criticism, untouchable, in fact holy, literally consecrated in the blood of an anonymous woman who happened to be crossing the street at the wrong time.
How remarkable it is that the Left's memory of James T. Hodgkinson is so short. Just a couple months ago, Hodgkinson – a Trump hater and a campaign worker for Bernie Sanders – set up his shop in another Virginia town, Alexandria. His game was murder too. He armed himself with an SKS-type semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He stalked his intended victims for weeks. He launched his attack from a position of cover against a bunch of Republican congressmen (he had asked to be sure of their political affiliation) and their aides, who were practicing for a baseball game. During his attack, he fired at least 60 rounds.
Understand, dear gun-dumb Leftist, that this means Hodgkinson consciously and deliberately pulled the trigger on one or both of his firearms at least 60 times. In other words, he tried at least 60 separate times to kill somebody in a nine-minute span. Hodgkinson had never met or had the merest contact with a single one of his intended victims. They were unarmed and completely unaware of his intentions, as he knew they would be. We can thank God that Hodgkinson's aim was so awful that no one was killed, but we cannot simply ignore that he had gone there with the intent – and the wherewithal – to kill a great many people, and he made every effort to commit murder for political reasons on a grand scale.
Since the mess at Charlottesville, the media has rediscovered Nazism in a very big way. No opportunity is lost to paint Trump and Republicans and the Right in general with the Nazi colors. The irony seems to be lost on the Left that Nazism was a Leftist ideology. The name itself was short for “Nationalsozialistische”, but in English, it was the National Socialist German Workers Party. The legendary battles between the German Nazis and the German Communists took place because they were so much alike, not because they were irretrievably opposite. Once in power, Hitler and the Nazis banned the Communist Party in order to eliminate their most effective rival – the two parties had always been courting the exact same supporters.
The Left is forever dancing its endless jig to paint hard-line Leftism as the doings of the Right. (This is a psychological phenomenon called “projection.”) Wikipedia, for example, a dependable and incorrigible Leftist organization when it comes to documenting anything with a political slant, describes Nazism as a “far-right” ideology in the very first sentence of its article on the subject. But in its article on communism, the word “left” is used only to describe minor historical groups within the movement, and the word itself doesn't appear in the text until the 30th paragraph. The Wikipedia article on socialism follows a similar pattern – the word “left” is used to refer to an obscure sub-sect of socialism, and doesn't occur at all until the 13th paragraph.
State control of industry and transportation, secret police, speech codes, violent repression of unfavored minorities, extreme nationalism, suppression of religion, executions of “enemies of the state,” sanctioned torture of political prisoners – these are the hallmarks of both Nazism and communism. It is historical fact that Hitler was able to begin his hot war in Europe because he had cut a deal with Stalin beforehand to partition Poland. The two ideologies are hardly mutually exclusive, and in fact share similarities that far outnumber their differences.
Through its control of academia, Hollywood, black and LGBTQ America, and most of the press, the Left is taking its Hail-Mary shot at dominance. It is seeking its Churchillian moment.
I think the Left is doomed to fail.
