Anti-Climacus

LINK: The Hitch writes up the dissimilarities between The Battle of Algiers and the current situation in Iraq. If there's one element of leftism in the last 50 years that I find distasteful enough to consider giving up on the left entirely over, it's the various hero worship of third-world revolutionary figures (this sort of attitude is well-chronicled in Irving Howe's seminal essay "New Styles in Leftism"). Call this attitude 'socialism in any country:' a conflation of the (occasionally well-meaning) desire to see x form of ideology spread more widely and the desire that the U.S. get what's coming to it. Sometimes, I think the road to America-bashing, at least if you're an American citizen, runs right through Che Guevara.