Posted on 01/29/2007 5:19:20 PM PST by Sam_Damon
Jimmy Carter's timing is dorky, as always. The same sanctimonious ineptitude that made him the least successful president in US history prompted him to wager the remains of his reputation on advocacy for the Palestinians, precisely when the Palestinians have shown themselves to be their own worst enemies. Carter's obsession with justice in Palestine has the same source as George W Bush's obsession with democracy in Iraq: horror in the face of the alternative has overwhelmed their better judgment.
Horror is the ultimate weapon of the Muslim world against the West, I long have argued. [1] Traditional society is crumbling, and with it identities of peoples who comprise a good one-third of the world's population. Many rather would perish than give themselves over to a world that offers them neither hope nor consolation. Suicide bombing is the least expression of their despair, which impels them toward perpetual war. If entire peoples are bent on self-destruction, no outside agency can prevent it. But the destruction of whole peoples overwhelms the Western mind.
Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness gave us the archetype for fatal abhorrence: the degenerate Belgian colonial official Kurtz, who dies muttering, "The horror! The horror!" T S Eliot referred to Kurtz' horrible end in the epigraph to his poem "The Hollow Men", which concludes with the unpleasant thought: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." The difference between Bush and Carter is that Bush is horrified by the prospective fate of the Iraqis, whereas Carter is horrified by his own history. Bear with me, and I will try to make this clear.
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
Ping
Great article bump.
I read it through and think he got a few things wrong, but I liked all of his observations on Carter.
This time, I agree with Spengler more than I disagree. Here is a choice quote:
"Think of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings explaining to Samwise why he cannot give up hope for Gollum's redemption from the curse of Sauron's ring, because that would weaken Frodo's hope for his own redemption. This form of obsessive self-pity produces the unctuous forms of expression that make it so painful to listen to a Jimmy Carter or a Bill Clinton talk about political morality, with a lip-sucking, voice-throbbing, eye-tearing, fixed-staring, self-pitying, and downright creepy form of bathos that is painful to watch. The difference, of course, is that Bill Clinton is an utter hypocrite, while Jimmy Carter is quite sincere - which makes him all the more nauseating. "
By the way, is there are restriction on quoting the whole article from Asia Times?
This is pure krap. Most Southerners are nothing like what this fool describes, and Carter is not a Southern nationalist of any kind. While he may be anti-Semitic (I'm not sure), that doesn't explain his position on the Middle East. He is a pacifist and a leftist, that's all.
Yeah, I'm from the south, and lived as a kid in Alabama when the civil rights movement started up. I do not think his analysis was meant for all southerners-just a dork like Jimmah.
The author's a dork.
The two are glaring examples are incompatible. Palestine doesn't deserve justice because they have not earned it. The Middle East can use some democracy to stablize an otherwise unstable environment. Iraq is a starting point. Carter never did any of that because Carter never believed in the policy of "peace through strength".
The author is either a Bush hater, clueless, young or possibly "all the above".
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