Language Matters

Pondering the legacy media’s dour coverage of Operation Epic Fury in Iran, we wonder whether the disjunction between reality and rationalization has ever been greater. The reality is that the United States and Israel have crushed Iran and its proxies. The rationalization, supported by a fervent anti-Trump animus, is that America has somehow lost the war that it just won. “Advantage Iran,” declared a headline on the cover of The Economist after that country’s entire official navy had been sunk, its air force and air-defense systems obliterated, and almost its entire leadership eliminated twice over. Those commentators who have compared the bluster from the Iranian regime and our complicit media to the Monty Python skit about the Black Knight are closer to reality. King Arthur slices off both of the knight’s arms; then he chops off both his legs. The knight continues to insist that he is winning the fight. “It’s just a flesh wound,” he cries.

The world witnessed similar follies in the 1960s and 1970s. Think of the biased coverage of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. Reading The New York Times, you would have hardly known that the South Vietnamese and American forces repelled the offensive in a rousing victory. The media presented it as a defeat. The sage of Ecclesiastes was right: there is nothing new under the sun, though many of our most prominent cultural figures seem to believe that they occupy a unique perch at the very apogee of virtue and moral rectitude and are therefore entitled, oh how entitled, to discard the achievements and admonitions of the past as so many false starts and dead ends on the way to true enlightenment, which is to say to whatever they happen to believe at the moment.

It is important to remember how general was the assault on our civilization in the Sixties. It wasn’t just protests against the Vietnam War, or the sexual revolution, or the new hedonism. What was aimed at was nothing less than what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of all values.” Among other things, that project represented a categorical repudiation of the American consensus, not just its engines of prosperity and individual liberty but also the basic tenets of our self-understanding, ideas that went back through English liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment to the political meditations of the Greeks and the Romans.

We see something similar today in a different modality. In some ways, indeed, the assault on the fundamental values of our civilization is more thoroughgoing now than it was in the 1960s. This is partly because those conducting the assault are not launching their fusillades from outside the establishment but are themselves well-integrated and often highly placed members of the establishment. They are, in a word, the elite.