Something for the Seniors

Google has archived all of Life's photographs in a searchable database.

Lieberman Prevails

Ha! The Democrats are so milquetoast and pusillanimous that they let Senator Joseph Lieberman keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee after he trashed their presidential nominee. Of course I'm glad they are weak and cowardly since I admire Sen. Lieberman's position on Iraq and his independence and his refusal to let that dolt Ned Lamont have the final word in their Connecticut Senate race two years ago. It is also gratifying that the liberal blogosphere was ignored on this issue. Their defeat is America's victory.

Clinton in the Cabinet

A reader writes about the possibility of Senator Hillary Clinton becoming the Secretary of State:

After reading the news today, it seems more apparent than before that this pick is a mistake. I think it's distracting from other transition efforts and causing unnecessary tension among staff members. Politico even reported that the decision was "greeted with ambivalence" by members of the transition team.

This story has taken over the news cycle, and whether or not this 'ambivalence' actually exists, the press will continue reporting it over the next week. As an Obama supporter since early 2007, this is a discouraging first impression of his presidency.

Clearly time has not healed all wounds from the epic Democratic primary, but I noticed the audience on "The Daily Show" applauded enthusiastically when Jon Stewart mentioned Sen. Clinton might become Secretary of State. I think it's a good choice because she has a knowledge of the bureaucracy and of foreign affairs that is rivaled by none, she is universally known and respected, and she has been a longtime advocate for oppressed women in the developing world and for education in Africa. Still, it seems almost self-destructive that President-elect Obama would want her in a position that in terms of its visibility is second only to the President's. Maybe he subscribes to the adage, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

Hitchens and Beinart on the Clinton Selection

Christopher Hitchens, a writer of unparalleled wit and acumen, and Peter Beinart, the editor-at-large of The New Republic, appeared today on "Hardball with Chris Matthews" to be shouted at by the host and allowed very abbreviated opportunities to answer questions. They weighed in on the prospect of Senator Hillary Clinton becoming the Secretary of State. Hitchens was against; Beinart was for.

A Unified Theory of a Frightful Phenomenon

In all the literature produced since 9/11 on the acquiescence to Islamic fascism by some parts of the Left there have been very few theoretical explanations. Nick Cohen, a British social democrat who was an indefatigable critic of Tony Blair from the Left, put it this way: “The obvious conclusion to draw at the moment is that we are living in a rerun of the 1930s, and the liberal left is once again sucking up to tyranny.” Fleming Rose, the Danish cartoonist whose caricature of Mohammed forced him into hiding and elicited a bloody orgy of sadism and misery, ventured that the Left “somehow view[s] the Koran as a new version of Das Kapital and [they] are willing to ignore everything else.”

These are legitimate statements, and I agree with them, but a more lengthy and studious approach has been needed and has now been proffered. In the British online journal Democratiya, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., a visiting professor of American studies at UC-Santa Cruz, has written "The Post-Left: An Archaeology and a Genealogy." It is essential reading for people who doubt the Left has been unwilling to denounce Islamic fascism.

Clinton as Secretary of State

The Guardian is reporting that Senator Hillary Clinton will accept President-elect Barack Obama's offer to become the Secretary of State. He is the least petty politician in recent memory, and his immersion in Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals, about President Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, is evidently affecting his decisions. Now let's see which Republicans he invites to join him.

Rejected

Kelly Shaul, the opinions editor of The Red & Black and a proud ignoramus, has rejected yet another of my submissions. In its stead she printed a series of unrelated fragments and run-ons entitled "Let's leave the Left behind" and a childish column whose titled declared, "Vampires no longer scary, but sensual." I am reminded of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby: "There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind." What is so awful about it is that everyone but the confused simple mind is aware of it and embarassed by it. The confused, simple-minded Shaul seems not to know what an opinions page in a college newspaper should be or do, yet she is oblivious as her readers feel the shame and ridicule of her work. Shaul should be embarassed, but her obtuseness protects her from reality while the rest of us turn to the opinions page and read with blushed faces and quizzical snickers.

The latest rejection:

Barack Obama punctuated his scintillating victory on Election Day with a stirring speech to 200,000 people at Grant Park in Chicago. I find the following lines his most important: “To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: we support you.” He proclaimed that “a new dawn of American leadership is at hand” and cited the provenance of American strength as “the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.” These are not the fulminations of a radical, as recent letters to this newspaper have warned. To the contrary, President-elect Obama is uniquely equipped to unite the polarities of American foreign policy and forge a doctrine that is credible, idealistic, and responsive to the world’s desire for American engagement.

There is remarkable consistency in American foreign policy from president to president. Support for engagement and trade with China is a consistent bipartisan policy, as is support for the security and integrity of Israel, the preeminence of the NATO alliance, and our military pacts with countries like Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Yet there are polarities in the foreign policy debate at an intellectual level that need not exist and that an Obama presidency can negate. For example, if one supports the war in Iraq it is assumed he opposes munificent aid to Africa or an international convention on climate change. Similarly, if one supports American accession to the International Criminal Court it is assumed he opposes using force to prevent Iran’s nuclearization or confronting Russia on its backslide into authoritarianism. Though these assumptions are widespread, they are also false.

By juxtaposing these dichotomies I mean to point out that a humanitarian foreign policy and an antitotalitarian foreign policy are congruent, not oppositional. Providing medicine to AIDS patients in Africa is just as important as halting the genocide in Darfur and arraigning the Sudanese leadership on charges of crimes against humanity. Destroying the crazed Iranian theocracy is just as important as rendering a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and providing for a contiguous Palestinian state. Ending our gratuitous agricultural subsidies so poor farmers in the developing world can turn a profit is just as important as supporting dissidents in Burma, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and North Korea. Ending America’s diplomatic isolation by closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and ceasing torture is just as important as demanding equality for women and religious tolerance in the Muslim world and not accepting their self-pitying excuses.

Mr. Obama’s rhetoric calls for a diminution of partisan and ideological fealty. Those on the right and the left should examine their views on foreign policy to see if they really find that solidarity with the exploited and oppressed is in opposition to the forced removal of exploitive, oppressive regimes. I say that an honest assessment of this false dichotomy will be quite illuminating and that it will yield Mr. Obama a mandate for pursuing a foreign policy that is in turns humanitarian and antitotalitarian. American ideals and the world’s approval of them will be better for the fusion, not the exclusion, of these two worthy principles.

The Right-Wing Left-Wing

One of the most important functions of this blog will be my thoroughgoing documentation of the reactions of the Left to Islamic radicalism, which span from blase toleration to obsequious endorsement. The proof of this assertion is manifold and multitudinous. Take the following as a mere introduction:

1. At a 2006 teach-in at UC-Berkeley, post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler said, "Understanding Hamas and Hizbullah as social movements that are on the global left is important." This, despite what its founder and leader Hassan Nasrallah said to The Washington Post that same year: "I am against any reconciliation with Israel. I do not even recognize the presence of a state that is called 'Israel.'" She then called for boycotts of and divestment from Israel as a means of "resistance."

2. In a paroxysm on his website on April 14, 2004, Michael Moore wrote, "The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win." He wrote this knowing the insurgency was led by former members of the Ba'th Party and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a senior associate of Osama bin Laden and the chief of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

3. George Galloway, one of the leaders of the antiwar movement in Britain, met Saddam Hussein in 1994 and told him, "I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigably." In 2003, following the intervention in Iraq, he simultaneously called for British troops to mutiny and for holy war against them. Last year in an interview with GQ he said it would be justified if a suicide bomber assassinated Tony Blair.

These are not new examples, but as the Left continues to advocate on behalf of Islamic radicalism I will be posting it here.

On a Personal Note

I would like to make my Athens, Georgia readers aware that a new coffee shop, Two Story Coffee House, has opened across from Earth Fare in Five Points. It serves its coffee French Press style and has a warm, cozy ambiance. Its hours are Monday through Saturday 7am to midnight.

The Santa Ana

The wildfires currently incinerating large parts of Los Angeles are a result partly of the Santa Ana wind, one of the unique climatic features of Southern California. Joan Didion, a California native and former resident of Los Angeles and Malibu, wrote about the Santa Ana in several of her essays in the 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," she writes:

The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

In another essay, "Los Angeles Notebook," it is even more bleak and eerie:

For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today know its too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. ... The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

Photograph credit: Jay L. Clendenin, Los Angeles Times

Michael Crichton, R.I.P.

One of the news items lost in the deluge of election coverage was the death of Michael Crichton from cancer at age 66. After the film Jurassic Park came out in 1993 I read the book and also read two of his others, The Lost World and Congo. I tried to get through The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, and Timeline, but found them boring and suffocated by jargon. Still, he was clearly brilliant, multi-talented, and prolific, and I hope tributes to his career break through the political coverage in the coming days.

Big Tent Party?

Of the many important outcomes of November 4, this is one Republicans should ponder with great seriousness: there will not be a single Republican in the House of Representatives from New England when the new Congress assembles in January. Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, whose district in the southwest corner of that state included the New York suburbs and some of the wealthiest towns in the country, lost his bid for a twelfth term. He was a "Rockefeller Republican," a breed that many call dying but seems in fact dead.

The prevailing analysis among Republicans since the election has been that their defeat is attributable (besides to the financial crisis) to their abandonment of conservative principles. I say that the reason there is no longer a delegation of New England Republicans in the House is due to the party's embrace of conservative principles to a degree that moderates are no longer welcome. For Representative Shays and other New England Republicans, returning to their conservative roots is not a winning strategy.

For the first time since the G.O.P.'s early days in 1854 New England is without Republican representation in the House. The historical irony that the region that gave rise to the G.O.P. has now repudiated it must be addressed before additional election-losing ironies begin to appear.

Naipaul on the Clash of Civilizations

In 2005 The New York Times interviewed V. S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel laureate in literature. The article's author calls the British writer of Indo-Trinidadian extraction "a prophet of our world-historical moment." Regrettably I have read none of his books, but he did utter some essential truths about the clash of enlightenment and fundamentalism that now predominates our geopolitics:

What is of account, in Naipaul's view, is the larger global political situation -- in particular, the clash between belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies. ''I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery,'' he said. To what extent, he wondered, had ''people who lock themselves away in belief . . . shut themselves away from the active busy world''? ''To what extent without knowing it'' were they ''parasitic on that world''? And why did they have ''no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them''? Far from simple, the questions brought a laserlike focus to a central paradox of today's situation: that some who have benefited from the blessings of the West now seek to destroy it.

In November 2001 Naipaul told an audience of anxious New Yorkers still reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center that they were facing ''a war declared on you by people who passionately want one thing: a green card.'' What happened on Sept. 11 ''was too astonishing. It's one of its kind. It can't happen again,'' he said in our conversation. ''But in the end it has had no effect on the world. It has just been a spectacle, like a bank raid in a western film. They will be caught by the sheriff eventually.'' The bigger issue, he said, is that Western Europe, while built on tolerance, today lacks ''a strong cultural life,'' making it vulnerable to Islamicization. He even went so far as to say that Muslim women shouldn't wear headscarves in the West. ''If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture,'' he said. ''It's a form of aggression."

Despite his grim assessment Naipaul believes our victory is inevitable:

And yet, for all his laments, Naipaul is not invested in the notion that Western civilization is in decline. ''That's a romantic idea,'' he said brusquely. ''A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. . . . It's a university idea. People cook it up at universities and do a lot of lectures about it. It has no substance.'' The ''philosophical diffidence'' of the West, he maintains, will prevail over the ''philosophical shriek'' of those who intend to destroy it.

Gramercy to Mark Vinson for apprising me of this illuminating piece.

The United Nations: "This Monstrous tragicomic scene"

Most people who do not admire Stalinism and genocide believe the UN needs drastic reform and accountability. Here are two brief assessments which belie its morality:

Which brings us to the United Nations--a failing, bloated, corrupt, and unprincipled institution whose very foundations compel it not to act justly. It is functionally the captive of three cynical permanent members of the Security Council and the wild mob of illegitimate states in the General Assembly. The next decade will find us preoccupied with the issue of how democratic societies succeed in this overstructured and overdetermined world disorder.

Martin Pertez, Editor-in-chief, The New Republic

The second is about the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001:

Zionism was condemned outright as the contemporary form of Nazism and apartheid, but so was "white viciousness", which had caused "one Holocaust after the other in Africa" through human trafficking, slavery and colonialism. Israel should disappear, its politicians should be brought before an international tribunal similar to the one in Nuremberg. Anti-Semitic cartoons were circulated, copies of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were handed out. Beneath a photo of Hitler were the words that Israel would never have existed and the Palestinians would never have had to spill their blood if he had been victorious. A number of delegates were physically threatened, there were calls of "Death to Jews". This farce came to a head when the Sudanese Minister of Justice, Ali Mohamed Osman Yasin, demanded reparations for historical slavery, while in his own country, people were being shamelessly thrown into slavery as he spoke. It was like a cannibal suddenly calling for vegetarianism.

And...

Europe must take a firm stand against this buffoonery: boycott it, plain and simple. Just as Canada has done. Perhaps we should also think about dissolving the Human Rights Commission or only letting truly democratic countries in. It is intolerable that in the year 2008 - like in the thirties - nations which recognize justice, the multi-party state and freedom of expression are being brought before the tribunal of history by the lobbies of fanatics and tyrants.

Pascal Bruckner, French philosopher, writing in Sign and Sight

Crazy and Off Base

Congressman Paul Broun, Republican of Athens, told the following to a radio station in Augusta:

It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force. I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.

This man is a physician, yet his powers of speech and thought apparently operate without consultation. He thinks radical socialism, Marxism, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union are indistinguishable. What a dolt! He should be expelled from the House of Representatives for illiteracy, but alas northeast Georgia voters overwhelmingly reelected him last week. After the shame of Cynthia McKinney, we must suffer it all again with Paul Broun.

Slavoj Zizek and Bernard-Henri Lévy

The former, the "Elvis Presley of cultural theory," and the latter, of whom was once written, "God is dead, but my hair is perfect," engaged in a discussion about the left recently at the New York Public Library. Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, argues from a more traditional Marxist perspective. BHL, as he is known in France, is more of a liberal internationalist. His denunciation of Marxism in the 1970s occasioned the founding of the Nouvelle Philosophie and the rightward drift of many French intellectuals.

If only discussions like this one were broadcast on television!

The Absurdity of Totalitarianism, Part II

I remembered my trip to China in January 1973 during the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. I became friendly with this woman assigned to be my interpreter. I wasn't very important, so I got this low-level person from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And obviously she was writing a report on me every day. She was a sweet but frightened middle-aged woman who had lost her husband during the Cultural Revolution. I asked her where she was staying. She said she was staying with friends. As it turned out, she was staying in this tiny room, which was more like a closet, in the basement of the hotel. I saw it because I insisted on seeing where she stayed--she wasn't supposed to show it. One day she invited me to go out for a walk, after indicating that the room was bugged. She spoke very slowly in her limping English: "Have... you... read... a... book...called... 19--" When I heard "19" there was a pain in my chest. I knew what she was going to say next: "84." "1984," I repeated, more upset than I wanted to let on. "Yes," she said, smiling. "China just like that."

Susan Sontag, in a July 2000 interview

The Absurdity of Totalitarianism, Part I

"The Solution"

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had thrown away the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Bertolt Brecht, on the 1953 insurrection in East Berlin

My Innaugural Posting

I have at last resolved to grace the blogosphere with my presence. As my first entry in what I hope will become both an anthology of articles I have published and my hasty responses to the day's news, I present a column which was rejected by The Red & Black. The content of their opinions page tends toward the banal, the parochial, the vulgar, and the uninformed, so it is both an unwelcome venue for me and a natural fit for Zaid Jilani, whose October 6 op-ed I answer in this column. Enjoy.

On Monday Zaid Jilani contended, with ineptitude and moral obtuseness, that United States foreign policy is blameworthy for Islamic terrorism. This is an insidious lie, it makes sense if you are partially but not fully educated on the subject, and it is contradicted by a body of evidence that Mr. Jilani willfully ignored.

Consider this. When the wicked hijackers began arriving in the US to crash planeloads of civilians into gigantic office towers, the following was the case: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, supported by Bill Clinton, had offered Yasser Arafat 94 percent of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, and a capital in East Jerusalem—the most generous proposal ever extended in the history of that intractable conflict. Chairman Arafat turned it down, refused to make a counter-offer, and the Palestinians are still without a state because of that reptilian rejectionist, not US foreign policy.

Consider also this. In 1975 Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, invaded East Timor, a tiny Catholic country newly independent from Portugal, and for the next 25 years massacred and starved its people. In 1999 the United Nations sponsored a plebiscite that led to East Timor’s independence, supervised by the Brazilian diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello. In 2003 de Mello was dispatched to Iraq as the UN envoy, where he was killed a week later in a suicide truck bomb that took the lives of 21 others and destroyed the UN’s Baghdad headquarters. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, declared he had assassinated de Mello because he had overseen East Timorese independence from Muslim rule.

The former example, along with Osama bin Laden’s opposition to a Palestinian state (he believes all Muslims should live under a theocratic and imperial caliphate), proves the suicide assault on the US seven Septembers ago was motivated not by concern for the Palestinians but by a fascistic ideology. The latter example proves Islamic terrorists will haul their bloody vendettas across continents in order to blow up a respected international civil servant who opposed Muslim tyranny.

There are so many instances that belie Mr. Jilani’s simplistic analysis. These include the 1994 Hezbollah bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that left 85 dead and 300 injured; the 2007 quadruple suicide bombings by Sunni terrorists of two villages in northern Iraq populated by the Yazidi, a religious minority deemed un-Islamic, which caused such carnage an American general called it “an act of ethnic cleansing… almost genocide;” al-Qaeda’s threat of jihad against Japan for deploying civil engineers to rebuild Iraq and against Denmark because Danish newspapers caricatured the alleged prophet Mohammed; and the conspiracy to destroy India, evidenced by the 1993 stock exchange bombing in Bombay and the 2001 attempt to obliterate its parliament.

The crux of this question is that the fundamental source of Islamic terrorism is the dysfunctional, illiterate, backwards societies from which it comes, whether the repressed, messianic theocracy in Iran (which the US did not create) or the reactionary, medieval Taliban subjugation of Afghanistan (which NATO deposed and replaced with an elected government). In these societies the emancipation of women has not been realized, basic civil liberties are not guaranteed, and the dearth of scientific patents and works of literature indicate an isolated and degraded culture that is as psychologically damaging to its denizens as it destabilizing and threatening to its neighbors. Until there is an abandonment of seventh-century mythology and a reckoning with modernity, the Muslim world will continue to exist as a ruinous, self-pitying incubator of prejudice and paranoia.

That Mr. Jilani should know all this and still blame the US for provoking terrorism and that he should write that the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was “the opportunity to make peace with these people” (even as survivors were being pulled from the smoldering wreckage and the declaration of jihad innate in that ruthless crime was a fresh scar on world memory) reflects poorly on his character and his mind. To be simultaneously so foolish and so sinister is a unique feat, one that could be pulled off only by a supposed leftist whose principal pleasures are advocating defeatism and apologizing for jihad.