Dennis Prager Quotes
There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.
Prager, Dennis. "Moral Equivalence: The Left's Greatest Moral Failing." National Review, 27 May 2014.
At the time, the Red Scare was prevalent and many Americans were terrified of communists. It was a very effective political tactic to imply that an opponent was a communist or communist sympathizer. For another harsh smear of Stevenson, see {619523}.
For years the Nationalist Military under Chiang Kai-shek and other Generals like Ma Hongkui had murdered suspected communist politicians, and in the Civil War with the communists rarely took any prisoners. The Communists in turn, “tried” and executed landlords and other major capitalists who had previously in their view treated the peasants badly and were responsible for much starvation. Neither side had any scruples about ignoring human rights and committing war crimes.
The occasion was the visit to Washington of French Minister M. Jean Letourneau. The French were fighting the communists in Vietnam and the U. S., not yet in the fight, promised material and political aid, but no military participation. It was almost a decade later that America sent its first military personnel to Vietnam. The West was persuaded that the French could handle the situation. When they were defeated, America and Britain assumed that it was the notorious military incompetence of the French that accounted for the situation rather than the competence and commitment of the Vietnamese Communists and their support of the majority of the people.
Dennis Mark Prager is an American conservative radio talk show host and writer. His initial political work concerned Soviet Jews who were unable to emigrate. He gradually began offering more and broader commentary on politics. His views generally align with social conservatism. He founded PragerU, an American non-profit organization that creates videos on various political, economic, and philosophical topics from a conservative perspective.
