Regards, Ivan
Posted on 09/08/2002 12:45:29 AM PDT by MadIvan
‘There’s just too much anger, too much ruptured vanity, too much shock, too much identity crisis. And, worst of all, too much patriotism.” With this scathing analysis the great novelist Norman Mailer, self-appointed shrink to the American people, celebrates the first anniversary of the attack on the twin towers, adding for good measure that “we have a pre-totalitarian situation here now”. Mailer’s rumbustious rhetoric, displayed in an interview in today’s Sunday Times Magazine, is certainly undimmed by the years.
Yet from my own modest travels in America and conversations with Americans since September 11, he might be describing a different nation on a different planet. I have never met people with less of an identity crisis. Shaken yes, sorrowful certainly, and angry, too, but with a patient, settled anger, accepting that it will take years to contain and eventually defeat the terrorists and that the campaign will have tragic costs for the innocent as well as the guilty.
Mailer, though, is not alone in sounding crosser with his fellow countrymen than with the terrorists. I have just been leafing back through the stack of effusions after September 11 from the world’s leading writers. Everyone had a go: Susan Sontag, Jeanette Winterson, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, John Updike, Simon Schama, Peter Carey, not excluding old Uncle Norman himself.
Most of them started with a breathless rehearsal of What I Was Doing: “I had just dropped the kids at school and stopped to buy some catfood when the guy in the store said . . .” This was followed by a fascinated examination of What I Felt, usually followed by some suggestion, more or less delicately phrased, that They/We Had It Coming to Them/Us, signing off with the verdict that We Have Entered A New Dark Age.
What they didn’t seem to be much fussed about was the murder of 3,000 (we then thought 7,000) of their fellow human beings. Much of the intelligentsia appeared to react in a scary, disconnected way, as if discussing something spectacularly nasty that had happened to a species that they were only slightly acquainted with and had mixed feelings about, like frogs, say.
Now and then I catch something of the same moral numbness in the intelligentsia’s view that the Iraqi people should be left to stew in Saddam’s juice. Yes, they say, of course he is a monster who has murdered thousands of Kurds and Marsh Arabs, not to mention his own rivals and cronies. He has certainly developed chemical and biological weapons and, in the four years since the inspectors were thrown out, may have gone some way towards developing nuclear weapons. Yet still a “pre-emptive” war to depose him would be “illegal” and “immoral”, to quote the bishops.
Each of these adjectives seems a bit shaky to me. How “pre- emptive” would further military action be in a Gulf war that never really ended? Sanctions remain in force and US and British jets continue to bomb Iraq’s air defences (100 aircraft were involved in last Thursday’s attack) and, oddly enough, the Iraqis shoot back.
How “illegal” would it be to take action against a country that, according to the British government, stands in breach of 24 international obligations under nine separate UN resolutions? And as for “immoral”, would we feel fortified in our moral self-esteem if we let Saddam linger on until in one final spasm of bile he unleashed his nastiest weapons on his weakest opponents?
I am as apprehensive as anyone about the outcome and the costs. To secure a fresh specific UN resolution for action would be a help, and we should not lose sight of the proportionality argument advanced by Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, that the evil of war must not be greater than the evil it seeks to prevent. You can also criticise the logical coherence of the “war against terror”. It is a loose, catch-all term. There is, after all, no evidence that Saddam has anything to do with Al-Qaeda. And “regime change” must be Washington’s most glorious euphemism since “collateral damage”.
Perhaps the critics may turn out to be right in their fears that we are about to be embroiled in a long and bloody war and then bogged down in the desert sands. But then they said the same about the hills of Kosovo and the mountains of Afghanistan, and indeed about the first Gulf war. Surely the critics might at least concede that the record of western military intervention in the past decade has been — how can I put this nicely? — not quite as disastrous as they feared.
And looking back, are we really so pleased now that the allied troops did not press on to Baghdad in 1991? The conventional view is that the UN resolution made it quite impossible to go beyond ejecting Saddam from Kuwait. But was it just a proper concern to play by the book that stopped us? Or did we prefer to feel that we were behaving gracefully rather than put the welfare of the Iraqi people first?
In any case, how did non-intervention become such a uniquely sacred principle, especially for “hairy lefties”, as Archbishop Rowan Williams likes to describe himself? From the Spanish civil war to the South African apartheid struggle, it was always the Tories who were castigated for their callous refusal to intervene against oppression and injustice in other countries.
We are told, too, that any further efforts to depose Saddam would only intensify anti-American paranoia in the Arab world. Well, it’s hard to get more unpopular than being the Great Satan. But there is, deep down, a certain defeatism in the view that it is vain and foolish for the West to insist on democratic change. Buried somewhere in there is a racist suspicion that Arabs simply couldn’t build a decent democracy even if they wanted to.
Yet why should this be so? Most people are by now aware that Islam, the youngest of the great religions, is also the most democratic. As the anthropologist Ernest Gellner pointed out years ago, far from being a medieval anachronism, Islam is “closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world religion”.
It remains a disagreeable fact that tyrants, great and small, from Hitler and Mussolini to Galtieri and Milosevic, are ejected only after military humiliation. It is a more agreeable surprise to see how often democratic, or at any rate relatively decent, regimes take root in the space they leave behind, if they receive continued western support.
Intervention of any sort has huge risks, both material and moral. But so does non- intervention. And you can well argue that over the past half-century the Middle East has suffered as much from the West’s refusal to pay sustained attention to the region in general, and to Palestine in particular, as from the occasional fitful and often misjudged intrusions. President Bush and Mr Blair are embarked on an extremely risky and difficult course. But I don’t think it is illegal, immoral or foolish.
Regards, Ivan
One should never forget, that old Norman M. championed a jailed murderer, helped get him out of jail, and the perp killed again !
Sigh, usualy these types are hypocritical undigestible vegetables themselves whining and crying martyrdom of their own sake while denouncing those who would attempt to raise the angry dead martyrs from under the rubbles of fascism.
That's the best way of making that point I've seen yet.
"Yet why should this be so? Most people are by now aware that Islam, the youngest of the great religions, is also the most democratic. As the anthropologist Ernest Gellner pointed out years ago, far from being a medieval anachronism, Islam is “closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world religion”."I just don't get it. How can anyone say such a thing about a wholly intolerant religion with an atrocious historical record that is run exclusively by bloodthirsty tyrants?
The writer of the article apparently could only bring himself to being partially right. Like I said, he's not on our side generally.
Regards, Ivan
Well, in a way, yes. It's a religion of rules. Socialists love rules.
"too much identity crisis. And, worst of all, too much patriotism.”
Well, I guess if you live in America but don't consider yourself an American, you are a walking "identity crisis"...
As for Normie, I glanced at his screed against patriotism. All I can say about it is, "Thank God we live in a country that's so free, even a washed-up, braindead, egomanical gas bag who hasn't written a page worth reading in 20 years can still express his opinion in public, no matter how laughably idiotic it may be! It certainly makes me proud to be an American!"
I hope that reaction gives the overrated old hack a brain embolism.
Most people are by now aware that Islam, the youngest of the great religions, is also the most democratic. As the anthropologist Ernest Gellner pointed out years ago, far from being a medieval anachronism, Islam is “closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world religion”.
What??
It's impossible for anyone who has even the most rudimentary understanding of reality or the use of the English language to connect those statements to the world as it is.
A totalitarian religion that denies the notion of a secular government, whose holy book prescribes literally the whole of life, including such momentous matters as the position one should take on the toilet, democratic? A creed that explicitly abjures all modern advances in concepts of rights and tolerance, the liberating gifts of technology, the requirement for honest and peaceful dealing among persons of differing faiths, close to the ideals of modernity?
This isn't simple deceit. This isn't even insanity. This is the use of deliberate, brain-reaving contradiction to induce insanity in the reader. As Ayn Rand put it, it's an attempt to shake the concept of rationality in others, the only pure crime against human reason. It leaves even one who knows better entirely speechless.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
Can't agree with all of the article (Islam "most democratic religion", etc.) but this pretty well encapsulates why we should take out Saddam, and I did enjoy the author's complete dissection of leftist intellectuals.
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