Category: Attitude

Manufacturing Enemies

It is necessary sometimes to ask questions just so they’re not forgotten in the miasma war-mongers, who know that war is the health of the state, consciously create. Pat Buchanan obliges:

[I]s it not time to put al-Qaeda in perspective and consider whether our Mideast policy is creating more terrorists than we are killing?

…

But by having fought a “war on terror” overseas in [Lindsey] Graham’s way — invading, occupying, nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq — we lost 6,000 soldiers and brought back 40,000 wounded Americans.

Were the wars in which we suffered such casualties, and that cost us $2 trillion and counting, really worth it? Did they make us more secure?

…

Ten years ago, anti-interventionists warned that a plunge into the Islamic world would produce what it was designed to prevent. We could create more terrorists than we would kill.

For the root of 9/11 was Islamic hatred of America’s perceived domination and a fanatic determination to drive us out of their world.

They were over here because we were over there. And if we went over there in even greater force, even more Muslims would rise up to expel us from what is, after all, their neighborhood, not ours.

So the anti-interventionists argued.

…

After 58,000 dead we left Vietnam. How many Americans have the Vietnamese killed since we left?

William Pfaff agrees, but in different terms:

The war against terror now being conducted from the White House, with the increasing use of drones, obviously is a self-perpetuating and self-enlarging undertaking that of its nature guarantees that the United States is the creator and perpetuator of the very war it fights.

…

What has happened to this administration? We know that the Republican Party is now institutionally deranged. The government bureaucracy has since 9/11 been purged of dissent, militarized, securitized, all of its members now under orders to spy on all of their fellows to report any suspicious move anyone might make. Washington is thereby rendered increasingly immobile when confronted with a need for thoughtful action. The world regards the American government today with amazement and no little fear.

…

The George W. Bush administration, the neo-conservatives, the Zionist movement and now the Barack Obama administration, have out of colossal ignorance and lack of prudence gone to war against this fundamentalist movement. It is this upheaval that Mr. Obama thinks he is going to conquer, with his drones and his talismatic technological modernism of mass information—and supposed mass omniscience.

These tools now tell American governments about everything except the essential facts. These facts are that Islamic fundamentalism will fail because theocracy cannot survive in the post-Ottoman world. This already is being demonstrated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. Despite that, Islamic society will in the end settle its own history—which may prove only another tragedy. The other fact is that an arrogant and foolish United States, as exists today, can only harm itself by interfering, and become part of the tragedy.

Were I to travel abroad today, I’d have to say repeatedly “I love my country but detest its government.” Because I write blogs like this, I could add “and oppose it openly.” And I can tell my grandchildren that I did not sit idly by as the Great Hubris played out.

History, insofar as it cares at all, will presumably find plenty to fault in my positions (I am reflexively opposed to violence).

But I very much doubt that history will say “Islamic fascism arose spontaneously and the United States of America fought valiantly against it.” The judgment, I fear, will be more like “Islamic extremism arose in response to the insouciant American crypto-Empire, and America fanned the flames, to keep the voters scared and compliant, until the Great Collapse of the American Hegemon, which the world greeted with a sigh of relief.”

In other words, I think we’re living in an unfolding tragedy, wherein America’s tragic flaw – the felt necessity of being about something, of needing a grand-if-not-grandiose mission, of being a “nation with the soul of a [fundamentalist] Church” – plays out in folly, perversity, and collapse.

And then … it will be some other empire’s turn, until Messiah comes (again).

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

A Joe Sobran Story

In Glen Arbor, Michigan Thursday, I saw Sobran Gallery, and indulged my curiosity, engaging the man who appeared to be the owner:

Me: I have to ask this. I’m a great admirer of the late Joseph Sobran, and I know he was from Michigan. Do you know if you’re related to him?

Artist (rising from his sofa): He was my brother.

Greg Sobran and I then engaged in some pleasantries, and I recounted when I met Joe, when he shared the dais with Attorney General C. Everett Koop in the early 1980s. Koop bantered that he was trying to get Joe to give up his cigars – which in my book captured a lot about both Koop and Sobran.

I knew that Joe was an amateur Shakespeare scholar, but I wasn’t ready for this:

When we were in high school, he’d hand me his volume of the complete plays, and tell me to open it randomly and read a line. Then he’d quote the next line.

“I think I’ve got it memorized,” he said, a little sheepishly. “I didn’t mean to, but I think it’s happened.”

He’d started seriously reading Shakespeare at age 9. Greg says that more and more scholars seem to be adopting Joe’s “Oxfordian theory that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the plays generally attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon.” (Wikipedia)

The rest of our conversation tip-toed around the issue of Joe’s alleged anti-semitism, and Greg’s perception of Joe’s world-weariness, following his banishment from the increasingly neo-con pages of National Review, preceding his death at age 64.

Joe lived too late for one to shrug off any anti-semitism by attributing it to the spirit of the age – since philo-semitism was the spirit of his age. I like to attribute it more to contentiousness accompanied by a sort of Aspie cluelessness about how much trouble contentiousness on that subject can land one in.

I lamented his death at the time and I lament it still.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Priceless Chestertonia

I was grasping for how to say something when it occurred to me that G.K. Chesterton had already said it (see #1). Trying to look it up, I was reminded how much else he said so very, very well. Indeed, one of his comments inspired this blog’s name:

Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas.  He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer.  Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas.  The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.

Enjoy!
Continue reading “Priceless Chestertonia” →

Dietary Just So Stories

I was a husky boy. I realized that when they steered Mother to a particular section of blue jeans at Silver’s Mens and Boys Wear where the clothes were labeled “Husky.” They used to have stores like that, with real owners who lived in town, not on Manhattan’s Upper East Side or Bentonville, AR.

Whenever a movie theater (or anything else, but celluloid had a certain combustible je ne sais quoi that memorably forshadowed what awaited movie-goers in the hereafter) burned downtown, Silver’s would have a Fire Sale, though Mother insisted the only smoke damage was from the cigars the owner (I thought his name was Ben, but I think I’ve got the name confused with another haberdasher) smoked in the back room. Continue reading “Dietary Just So Stories” →

Declaration of Dependence

Holy smokes! I wasn’t going to stop to blog today, the Monday of Holy Week in Orthodoxy, when there will be too little time for professional duties. But this is too good not do share.

Scott Galupon on The Blind Spot of Conservatism, quoting Yuval Levin:

We are all dependent on others. The question is whether we are dependent on people we know, and they on us—in ways that foster family and community, build habits of restraint and dignity, and instill in us responsibility and a sense of obligation—or we are dependent on distant, neutral, universal systems of benefits that help provide for our material wants without connecting us to any local and immediate nexus of care and obligation. It is not dependence per se, which is a universal fact of human life, but dependence without mutual obligation, that corrupts the soul. Such technocratic provision enables precisely the illusion of independence from the people around us and from the requirements of any moral code they might uphold. It is corrosive not because it instills a true sense of dependence but because it inspires a false sense of independence and so frees us from the sorts of moral habits of mutual obligation that alone can make us free.

Galupo, though, thinks there are other false senses of independence, such as

a desire to escape the stifling atmosphere of rural America and discover the wider world; to pursue a life of the mind; to experience, as the British playwright David Hare put it in his screenplay for The Hours, the “violent jolt” of life in the metropolis.

Our culture stokes this desire, and in no small way our economy depends on it. When politicians tirelessly invoke the “American Dream,” when we celebrate social mobility and “churn,” we are encouraging millions of young Rod Drehers to leave their Starhills and become “boomers,” as the poet Wendell Berry (via Wallace Stegner) describes those whose ambition compels them to leave home.

To make the point in the context of our ongoing clash over immigration, do we not at least unwittingly celebrate the dilution of communities when we hold up as heroes those who leave behind their friends and extended families to pursue employment in America? To borrow the simple phraseology of Rod’s mother, a young man who leaves a village in Latin America or South Asia is no longer there.

This is not to dispute Levin’s point about a large and active state “pulverizing” civil society; the phenomenon is real and, as I’ve written before, a purportedly morally neutral state will always and inevitably tip its hand about what it believes to be positive goods.

My point is that big government is not the lone, or lately even the chief, pulverizer of civil society.

(Emphasis added)

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.