Neville Chamberlain, the disgraced and humiliated former Prime Minister of Britain, has re-emerged in the person of film critic David Thomson, an Englishman whose recent review of United 93 for The New York Times opens up an as-yet unrecognized weapon of the enemy: distinguished postmodern critics. Only in such an unreal world as the one advocated by the Times could appeasement of such a pitiless foe be passed off as serious criticism.

Thomson is sitting on decades of postmodern tradition, from Edmund Wilson to Norman Mailer. Wilson didn’t appease, he actually wrote an ode to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin – To the Finland Station, a tribute to Communism constituting open collaboration with the Soviet enemy at the height of the Cold War. Within the first two paragraphs of Thomson’s review for United 93, I knew the postmodern smoke was rising fast.

Thomson ends his review with that unbeatable postmodern catch-all phrase "moral ambivalence." He even honors the film’s director Paul Greengrass for revealing the courage of the Islamist hijackers.

William Shakespeare has his greatest villain Richard III die a very courageous death. Ronald Reagan paid tribute to the courage of the Third Reich military when he visited the German veterans’ cemetery in Bitburg – much to the consternation of that humanist hypocrite Elie Wiesel, who protested the President’s visit in the same way he protested the mini-series Holocaust, even though it succeeded in lifting the statute of limitations on the hunt for Nazi war criminals still living in Germany. Das Boot shows the resolute courage of a German U boat crew. However, there is no moral ambivalence about which participants in World War II were the "bad guys."

How do these postmodern critics continue to live with themselves, let alone earn a living by aiding and abetting the enemy? What magic wand was waved over their intellects to allow them to protest Holocaust, yet applaud the Maoist Population Control Policy as increasingly entrenched by the United Nations? How can Wiesel, poet laureate of the Holocaust, turn the horror of genocide into his careerist’s religion, while acting as the UN’s virtual mascot, to be trotted out as window dressing for humanicide? Does Rev. Jesse Jackson’s defense of abortion as "without prejudice now" really hold in the minds of Harvard graduates like Senator Barack Obama? It must or Obama wouldn’t have patronized the pro-life candidate Alan Keyes so successfully in his victorious run for the Illinois Senate.

The smug face of Edmund Wilson – check the photograph of him accompanying my examination of his treason in Enter Stage Right [http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/1104/1104edmundwilson.htm] –is reflected in the faces of his disciple Norman Mailer and now Thomson – a Pauline Kael with a Janet Maslin delivery. Thomson and another Kael devotee, David Denby of The New Yorker, give United 93 two thumbs up. I’m looking forward to seeing it because for me it’s the American equivalent of the Tank Man at Tienanmen Square.

"Oh, please, Mr. Moriarty," they all might say dismissively. "Those passengers didn’t enter that plane as a protest. There’s no comparison."

At this point, I’m flooded with memories of William J. Clinton, his Renaissance Weekends, his Clinton Global Initiative, his visit to the actual Finland Station in Leningrad, his entry to Lumumba University in Moscow, his Leninist assault on Waco, Texas, his handing over of Elian Gonzales to Fidel Castro, his treatment of terrorist Yasir Arafat and IRA gunman Gerry Adams as equal to Prime Ministers Itzhak Rabin and John Major… oh, the list is building with all the money his Clinton Foundation is making off the back of natural and man-made disasters. Clinton has turned tragedy into his own form of oil, a commodity to profit from.

I hear the postmoderns laugh and joke about their increasing freedom to persistently infer that America is the enemy. Thomson, in his review, just loves to declare that America is "the purveyor of shock imagery." Like Anthony Blunt, Thomson is one of those English sophisticates who says we really shouldn’t diminish ourselves into the provinciality of any national sentiment. He wonders about those nervous nellies who ask if we are ready for United 93?

Thomson will accept American cultural history as his own. How generous to accept membership in our only real imperialism, the cultural one which was not a CIA plot but a force majeure. People the world over embrace American art, food, clothing, computer software and individual freedom.

After citing United 93 for its refusal to take sides in World War IV, Thomson ends with: "The really difficult film to make or offer in America will be the one that says no, the world did not alter its nature on 9/11, even if the worst politicians used that event to switch their reality. But on 9/11, we faced the first need to ask ourselves how other people — evil, alien, insane — could be so brave. The history of terrorism — and it includes the independence of this country — is that in the end you have to understand the grievance of the aggrieved, whether you agree with it or not. That film has still to come."

"The World." That did not alter its nature. "The worst politicians," read the subliminally inferred "American politicians… used that event to switch their reality."

Now here’s where it really gets postmodern: "But on 9/11, we faced the first need to ask ourselves how other people — evil, alien, insane — could be so brave."

The first need? These are the priorities of a postmodernist who embraces the dissolution of nation-states, especially those nasty western democracies! This terrorist-hugger would maybe prefer to write his reviews as an infidel dhimmi in the tolerant atmosphere of an Islamist theocracy? If Thomson couldn’t pay his monthly tribute to the London Caliphate, they’d cut off his writing hand.

Perhaps the human race should first ask how the psychotic can be so brilliant. Why does evil attract such genius? If evil is the only force to honor intelligence to the fullest, bestow upon it a Nobel Prize, and persuade conservatives that the indisputably gifted intellect of Dr. Henry A. Kissinger should guide American foreign policy, despite his obvious enthrallment with Mao Zedong. The French Revolution’s belief in human intelligence as the only reliable guiding intellect has engulfed our Free World universities and colleges, so the peculiar ethical standards and worship of evil terrorists displayed by film critics of Thomson’s stripe should come as no surprise. He deftly passes on the subliminal message that an "aggrieved evil" like Islamism demands that Americans cease their self-defence measures while examining the culture of the enemy.

Perhaps they can spend a few weeks in a seminar on the Koran while their homeland’s skyscrapers and power plants burn, while reexamining the exhortations of Hirohito to a racially supremacist Japan, or carry a paperback of Mao’s Quotations in their coat pocket to discover what in a capitalist democracy so aggrieved Mao Zedong that 30 million Chinese had to be starved to death to prove how a Great Leap Forward really is a more powerful formula for the human race than a free market.

It’s Chamberlain all over again, claiming "peace for our time… through further education." And we all know how history now judges Chamberlain, and how Clinton will be judged by post-postmodern historians. They will discover he was the best salesman Sir Francis Galton and Eugenics could ever find.