Ross Terrill: A Political Strife...

Yowza, who knew that Ross Terrill was a freeper?
Or that all the world’s problems are caused by irresolute liberals?
Or that (John) “Kerry has not approved a major projection of American military power abroad since Vietnam”?
(Note to the Globe’s Ombudsman, didn’t Senator Kerry formally “approve” the Iraq War Resolution? Do those guys even CHECK woozy screeds like this anymore? )
Yipes, until now, Humble Elias just knew Terrill through his biographies of Mao and his wife Jiang Jing. Clearly though, his inner freeper though has come through roaring on today’s op-ed page of the Boston Globe. For such an erudite man, though it is a crude cliché ridden exercise in rightical chic polemics-hardly worthy of even the famously undiscriminating Dartmouth Review.
Back in the 1970’s former Treasury Secretary William Simon set out to create a counter-Marxist political culture in the USA via think tanks, subsidies, political action groups etc. Hence counter-Marxist politics have over time become the norm on the so called “new right”. These are people who hated communism so much they became shrill conspiratorial ideologues of the worst type. Mr. Terrill is well within this tradition with howlers like this “Not so to a left whose eyes bulge with self-entitlement and whose pale hand is estranged from physical labor.”
“Estranged from physical labor” Good God Lavrenty P. Beria couldn’t have put it better! Either the whole of the American Right has gone Bolshevik, or else studying the Chinese Communist Party has unhinged Ross Terrill’s wits such that he is now writing like a grey bearded Stalinist.
Stylistically, there is not much that separates Stalin’s Comintern with Grover Norquist’s Wednesday Group. The old time communist and today’s freeper shares one goal, the destruction of liberalism as the prerequisite to a glittering vista of total power. Given the degraded nature of modern US conservatism with it’s big intrusive government, record deficits, and arrogant sense of entitlement, nothing much holds the ideology together save their relentless hunt for reactionary Kulaks…er…liberals.

Sick
Demented
Typical!