The communist international was succeeded by what has been called Progressive Internationalism, a quasi-one-world government ideology that is almost as dangerous as the communist ideology it has succeeded. Here is a definition of sorts found in a review of a book by someone by name of Alan Dawley. The book was titled, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution and this is from the review:

Despite their diverse interests and affiliations, he argues, progressives were fundamentally driven by a hope that the promotion of social justice and revitalization of public life in the United States would form the core of an international campaign. ‘In a world knit together by far-flung markets and the international state system,’ Dawley explains, ‘progressives confronted social problems that crossed national boundaries, and their solutions did the same’. . . .

Taking a strongly anti-militarist and anti-imperialist stance, they argued that social justice was a prerequisite for peace at home and abroad. In the aftermath of wartime violations, the resolute defense of civil liberties soon became the ‘shining light of progressive politics’. Returning to a hardheaded analysis of corporate power, progressives renewed their focus on the working class and defined imperialism as ‘a structural component of American political economy, not an aberrant policy’. Seen most clearly in the third party campaigns of Robert La Follette and Henry Wallace, progressivism moved toward the left of the political spectrum. Never able to recover the political power it once held, progressivism would nevertheless persist in movements seeking to ‘address the wrongs of the capitalist market and the failures of the international system’.

That’s the theory. And if you would like to hear these very thoughts put into print just this week, here is an article by Conrad Black in The National Post dated 4 January 2014. The title is, “Conrad Black: What would Woodrow Wilson say?” This is a sample of what he thinks Woodrow Wilson would say:

Wilson was the greatest prophet of the Twentieth Century, in many ways surpassing and even presaging Gandhi and Mandela: He was the first person to inspire the masses of the world with the vision of enduring peace, and of the acceptance and imposition of international law and of postcolonial institutions indicative of the equal rights of all nationalities and the common interest of all peoples.

How’s that for utopian moonshine! Gandhi and Mandela are about as far as possible from my mind as standards by which I would like the world to run. And it was FDR, according to Black, who continued this progressive internationalist agenda:

It devolved upon a junior member of Wilson’s administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president during the world war that Wilson sought to avoid, to revive the idea of a world organization, involve the opposing domestic political party fully in its creation, and have it in place even before that war ended in 1945.

FDR took the best of Wilson and of his chief rival, distant cousin (and uncle-in-law) Theodore Roosevelt, and united the latter’s ‘big stick’ with the former’s ‘new freedom.’ FDR was determined that the UN would not be reduced to a mere talking shop. He intended that it would serve to disguise in collegiality the fact that the United States, with half the world’s economic product and a monopoly on atomic weapons, effectively ruled the world, and would reassure his fractious and long-isolationist countrymen that the world was now a much safer place than it had been.

How weirdly wrong FDR was and how strange to see this vision being given such a positive review today when we know just how dangerous the UN has become. Black of course recognises that the hopes that had been vested in the United Nations have come to nothing, but this does not seem to have shaken him from his belief in a policy agenda through which Western civilisation is again placed under intense threat and may well this time succumb. I would be in a let’s-circle-the-wagons mode if it were at all possible. The following passage present our present reality, but here expressed by Black:

In 2013, the United Nations General Assembly elected China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, countries that have no regard for human rights at all, as members of the UN Human Rights Council; selected Hezbollah (a designated terrorist organization) apologist Jean Ziegler as senior advisor to the Council; and elected Mauritania, a primitive country that tolerates slavery, as Council vice-chair. Meanwhile, Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, blamed the Boston Marathon bombing on ‘the American global domination project’ and ‘Tel Aviv.’ Of the UN General Assembly’s 25 resolutions condemning individual countries in 2013, all but four were against the exemplary democracy, Israel, which only seeks recognition of the basis on which the United Nations founded it: as a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish people. The United Nations also elected the racist, terrorist-infested charnel house and Iranian proxy of Syria to its Special Committee on Decolonization; appointed Zimbabwe (a regime so odious it has been expelled from the Commonwealth, failing to clear an almost subterranean hurdle) to host its world tourism summit; and elected Iran president of its 2013 Conference on Disarmament, even as that country strove to put the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the shredder.

In this world with these kinds of international agents playing such prominent roles, progressive internationalism is a form of self-destructive madness and cultural suicide. Yet it is from this perspective that Conrad Black attacks Diana West’s American Betrayal from what is supposed to be the right. Who wouldn’t like to live in the kind of world these Progressive Internationalists imagine. But no one does because such a world is as utopian as your standard Marxist piece of rubbish, so why anyone would want to project this agenda knowing what we know is beyond me.

But at least based on what Black has written we can understand where Ronald Radosh and Conrad Black are coming from, and apparently David Horowitz as well. It is clearly very difficult to shed the progressive side of one’s mental structures so that even if one has finally recognised that the Marxist version of a utopian future is a totalitarian fantasy there is then the embrace of a totalitarian fantasy of another kind. Diana West has inadvertently fallen over a tripwire that has set the forces of this Progressive Internationalist cabal on her tail. With this part of the right as deluded as the left and almost exactly in the same way, I don’t know how we are to defend ourselves against the coming of the night.