So only a few months after France saw out-of-control rioting comes mass protests by students and unions against a new labour law that would make it easier (horror of horrors!) for employers to fire new employees in the first two years - something that is now next to impossible. As someone from Canada where such a reality is so commonplace as to merit not the slightest mention were France not at present so worrisomely convulsed, it is hard to feel much sympathy for the protesters. France's economy is in desperate need of reform; that such a minor and obviously needed change as this could arouse such indignation reveals a great deal as what has gone wrong with this formerly great country.
A couple days ago in The Washington Post anyways, Claire Berlinski wrote a great op-ed piece about the situation deserving of a read. (Found in its entirety at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032402401.html)
This is the second time in four months that France has been seized with violent protests. And in an important sense, these are counter-riots, since the goals of the privileged students conflict with those of the suburban rioters who took to the streets last November. The message of the suburban rioters: Things must change. The message of the students: Things must stay the same. In other words: Screw the immigrants.
The issue at stake is not, of course, the CPE, which in addition to being unknown in its effects would apply only to a two-year trial period, after which employees would still, effectively, be guaranteed jobs for life. The issue is fear of a real overhaul of France's economically stifling labor laws. While some of the suburban hoodlums have joined in these protests -- after all, a riot is a riot -- it is clear that unless this overhaul proceeds, the immigrants are doomed. If so, last year's violence will seem a lark compared with what is coming.
Curiously, however, no French politician will say this openly. They will not even say these obvious words: France is a representative democracy; if you don't like what your elected leaders are doing, you can vote against them. Some more words you will never hear in France: Students who continue to disrupt civil and academic life will be expelled. Strikers will be fired. We are calling in the troops.
Instead, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is nightly seen on television, earnestly proposing one compromise after the other, even as his supporters scuttle for cover. The powerful barons of the labor unions, on the other hand -- the puppet masters of that golden flock of imbeciles now on the streets -- can scarcely be bothered to give interviews. Compromise? Only when the law is repealed. By then, of course, compromise would be unnecessary. Instead of negotiations, they call for a general strike.
That's because France is still in the grip of precisely the political mentality that has prevailed here since the Middle Ages. As the protesters themselves cheerfully declare: It's the street that rules. Today's mobs, like their predecessors, are notable for their poor grasp of economic principles and their hostility to the free market. Only wardrobe distinguishes these demonstrations from those that led to the invasion of the national convention in 1795, when first the mob protested that commodity prices were too high; when the government responded with price controls, it protested with equal vigor that goods had disappeared and black market prices had risen. Similarly, the students on the streets today espouse economic views entirely unpolluted by reality. If the CPE is enacted, said one young woman, "You'll get a job knowing that you've got to do every single thing they ask you to do because otherwise you may get sacked."
Imagine that.
Update:
On today's Slate.com is an article by Elizabeth Eaves entitled "March Malaise" about the protests. She discusses the law they're ostensibly protesting against, but also offers a interesting, if rather depressing, window into the mentality of the protesters. (http://www.slate.com/id/2138949/)
There appeared to be three kinds of demonstrators. Some, like the group dancing around a bongo drum at the Place de la République, or the dreadlocked kids swigging beer and smoking joints as they ambled through the Place de la Bastille, had apparently come for a big day out. Then there were the casseurs, troublemakers in from the suburbs, looking for opportunities for mayhem. The morning news had reported that police would be monitoring inbound trains to keep the casseurs out of the city center; this would presumably involve targeting black and Arab young men.
The third and largest group was comprised of people out for the cause—or causes. Members of ACT UP Paris marched with signs pointing out that "AIDS is still with us." A Marxist group sold Che Guevara T-shirts. And everywhere, on stickers, signs, and T-shirts, and shouted through bullhorns, the demonstrators declared themselves to be "contre la précarité!"
Against precariousness, instability, uncertainty. I'm trying for the kindest translation here, but even so, the sentiment is hard (for an Anglo-Saxon capitalist) to take seriously. Except, if more than a million French citizens take to the streets to demand that the government protect them from uncertainty, something must be seriously wrong, even if it's not the CPE.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Sunday, March 26, 2006
On Music and Traditions
In the world of classical music (most notably with the piano) there is a long history of performance styles passed down from their innovators by teachers from their general codification in the 19th century. In the non-classical music world, on the other hand, there is an inherent resistance to such a tradition of styles as originality (or at least the pretense of) is of such primary importance. Yet as the innovators in these popular musical styles recede into the past it would be of great service to the musical community, and to the listening public in general, to not let their musical innovations disappear along with them.
One notable example, especially relevant to those who play the electric bass, is the playing of Phil Lesh, the bassist in the Grateful Dead who now performs mostly with his own group Phil and Friends. Though the Dead were (and still are by some) dismissed as an inconsequential group of 60’s “hippy” leftovers, the devotion of their so-called “Deadhead” followers was perhaps matched only by the originality of their sound; a large part of which had to do with Lesh’s unique approach to the bass guitar.
Eschewing the finger plucked, “playing the root” style of most electric bassists, Lesh crafted a distinctive, contrapuntal approach (usually always using a plectrum), that was of crucial importance to the development and delivery of the Dead’s sound. Whereas nearly all other popular music groups in the history of the genre have played their songs (as well as their set-lists and indeed entire concerts) as similarly as possible each time they performed, the Dead, influenced as they were by directions in modern jazz, self-consciously tried to never duplicate themselves: “to never play a song the same way twice” was their unofficial motto. Not only did individual songs find themselves being constantly re-invented, however, but their concerts as well. Planned set lists were avoided in favor of getting on stage and figuring things out as they went along, which often meant (and deliberately so) not the usual practice of individuated 3-5 minute songs, but rather long stretches of unbroken music involving improvised segues between their always already partially improvised songs. Lesh’s relation to this can best be understood through a brief digression into the specifics of his playing style, and how different it is from the vast majority of other electric bassists.
The traditional approach to playing the bass in popular music can perhaps best be understood as having a primarily vertical role. As all beginning bass players are usually—and, I agree, should be—taught, the function of the bass, as the lowest pitched instrument, is to define the harmony; meaning that all other notes played at the same time are related by the listener’s ear to the note played by the bass. Thus, a piano player playing an A minor chord (A, C, E) with his left-hand and soloing using an A natural minor scale with his right can find both the chord and the scale he is playing instantly re-defined as soon as a bass player plays an F note; causing the A minor chord to be heard instead as a F major seventh and the A natural minor scale (or Aeolian mode) to respectively become a F Lydian mode (the fourth modal inversion of a C major scale).
Lesh’s style, in contrast, is best understood as functioning much more in terms of the horizontal elements of music. Instead of focusing primarily on defining the vertical harmony by emphasizing the roots and fifths of chords, his playing acts very much like a bass lead guitar in melodic counterpoint to the higher melodic lines; whether sung or played instrumentally. Using thirds and sixths (all the notes of the chord/scale in fact) to a much greater degree than most bassists—often beginning a melodic pattern on a higher pitch and then working down to the chord fundamental—he is able to realize more melodic, and thereby contrapuntal, bass lines than are usually found in popular music.
The problem with this approach, and the justification for the traditional emphasis on roots and fifths, is that it leads to aural instability—harmonies lacking definitive grounding. As the Grateful Dead showed, however, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
As explained above, the Dead’s performances were uniquely characterized by long stretches of music (often lasting an hour or more) made up of alternating rehearsed (at least partially) and non-rehearsed (i.e. improvised) sections. A notable early example of this would be their second set performance from November 8, 1969 at the Fillmore West Auditorium in San Francisco (the entire concert has been officially released as Dick’s Picks 16). The set list (“>” indicating a musical segue) is: “Dark Star>The Other One>Dark Star>Uncle John’s Band Jam>Dark Star>Saint Stephen>The Eleven>Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)>The Main Ten>Caution (Do Not…)>Feedback>We Bid You Goodnight.” Notice the recurrence of the same song more than once. This is a common happening for the Dead that means not the same song played twice (or three times as “Dark Star” seems to be here so indicated), but rather different portions, verses or even just the tonal/modal and rhythmic qualities of a song being segued into (and eventually out of) as their temporary improvisational “space.”
In a context like this, Lesh’s melodically-horizontal—yes contrapuntal—bass playing fits perfectly. Indeed it would be hard to imagine the Dead’s musical explorations developing as they did with a more conventional bassist. Though the bass in popular music lacks the inherent “star” quality of the lead instruments (usually vocals and lead guitar) it is arguably of more crucial importance in determining the overall “sound” of an ensemble due to its functionally structural role: helping to define both the rhythmic and harmonic basis (no pun intended) of a song . The harmonic instability due to Lesh’s more horizontal style is then precisely what gives the Dead’s music its sense of momentum, of directionality that is so integral to their extended playing approach. Paradoxically, the other interestingly unique aspect of his playing is his sometimes playing of chords—something most bassists avoid because of the bass’s low pitch and its difficulty when not using a plectrum. (For an excellent example, see the officially released Dick’s Picks 12, first disc, track 7, from approximately 1:06 to 2:23.)
Alright, you might be saying, but why is this important for other bass players with their own styles and methods? The answer is that the more conventional vertical style of bass playing, while highly effective in some contexts, presumes an end result—music with stable, “grounded” harmonies—that should by no means be accepted as necessary or even always desirable. In fact, I would argue, the emphasis on the importance of stable harmonies and the subsequent necessity of therefore playing “vertically” reveals a musical mindset that is characterized by its own kind of stability—utter predictability. For other than musical groups influenced by the Dead (the now defunct Phish, String Cheese Incident and Widespread Panic among others) and those now involving former members of the Dead (Ratdog with Bob Weir and the previously mentioned Phil & Friends), live popular music is for the most part now typified by a total avoidance of risk-taking.
That most performers want to do the best they can each and every performance is an obvious truism. Yet in the past unrepeatable human action, with its inevitable foibles and imperfections, guaranteed that not only would every performance not be perfect, but that indeed sometimes they might fail altogether. In the case of music, the “perfections” that are made possible with all-digital (therefore totally manipulable) recording software such as Pro Tools, and (for live performances) real-time pitch correction effects — the TC Electronics “Intonator” being one of the most popular— (among other things) as part of already completely choreographed shows, however, reveals a performance reality defined by its mechanization and necessary elimination of as much subjective initiative as possible.
The political or broader sociological significance of this should not be hard to see. Art is, I would argue, by definition an expression of human subjectivity; a placing of an order, or at least understanding, around an expression or physical state. For our civilization to have therefore realized an artistic (at least as defined functionally) performance reality that is so fundamentally at odds with this essence of art should be of at least some concern to intelligent people.
An instrumental performance practice that helps counteract this mind-numbing predictability should therefore not be taken lightly, or easily forgotten. And though I think it important to try to develop one’s own “voice” on an instrument, this should not be taken as an emphatic, self-justifying quest for originality. Though it does sometimes happen, the vast majority of legitimate musical (and more broadly artistic) performances have, in fact, nothing, original about them. If originality is supposed to be the criterion of art then few things would indeed so qualify. It is rather the exemplification of a certain skill that is generally sought in artistic performances. When true originality does occur, it is by incremental evolutions—syntheses of what has come before—rather than the supposed inspiration of a lone tormented genius—an overall nefarious idea, still sadly with us, due to the continuing influence of Romanticism, especially in the popular music world, and its veneration of Beethoven’s famous “Heiligenstadt Testament” that was written by him in 1802 at the outset of the hearing loss that would eventually render him completely deaf.
I am by no means here arguing that Lesh’s style should be slavishly imitated by other bassists. Whether anyone could ever, in fact, realize a convincing copy of his playing is itself perhaps doubtful. Yet, that should not discourage musicians, bass players in particular, from learning what they can from one who has made such an original, and so far more or less unique, contribution to the performance practice of an instrument less than sixty years old; as well as to seriously consider what kind of extra-musical political and social effects their performances might have on themselves and on those who listen and watch.
One notable example, especially relevant to those who play the electric bass, is the playing of Phil Lesh, the bassist in the Grateful Dead who now performs mostly with his own group Phil and Friends. Though the Dead were (and still are by some) dismissed as an inconsequential group of 60’s “hippy” leftovers, the devotion of their so-called “Deadhead” followers was perhaps matched only by the originality of their sound; a large part of which had to do with Lesh’s unique approach to the bass guitar.
Eschewing the finger plucked, “playing the root” style of most electric bassists, Lesh crafted a distinctive, contrapuntal approach (usually always using a plectrum), that was of crucial importance to the development and delivery of the Dead’s sound. Whereas nearly all other popular music groups in the history of the genre have played their songs (as well as their set-lists and indeed entire concerts) as similarly as possible each time they performed, the Dead, influenced as they were by directions in modern jazz, self-consciously tried to never duplicate themselves: “to never play a song the same way twice” was their unofficial motto. Not only did individual songs find themselves being constantly re-invented, however, but their concerts as well. Planned set lists were avoided in favor of getting on stage and figuring things out as they went along, which often meant (and deliberately so) not the usual practice of individuated 3-5 minute songs, but rather long stretches of unbroken music involving improvised segues between their always already partially improvised songs. Lesh’s relation to this can best be understood through a brief digression into the specifics of his playing style, and how different it is from the vast majority of other electric bassists.
The traditional approach to playing the bass in popular music can perhaps best be understood as having a primarily vertical role. As all beginning bass players are usually—and, I agree, should be—taught, the function of the bass, as the lowest pitched instrument, is to define the harmony; meaning that all other notes played at the same time are related by the listener’s ear to the note played by the bass. Thus, a piano player playing an A minor chord (A, C, E) with his left-hand and soloing using an A natural minor scale with his right can find both the chord and the scale he is playing instantly re-defined as soon as a bass player plays an F note; causing the A minor chord to be heard instead as a F major seventh and the A natural minor scale (or Aeolian mode) to respectively become a F Lydian mode (the fourth modal inversion of a C major scale).
Lesh’s style, in contrast, is best understood as functioning much more in terms of the horizontal elements of music. Instead of focusing primarily on defining the vertical harmony by emphasizing the roots and fifths of chords, his playing acts very much like a bass lead guitar in melodic counterpoint to the higher melodic lines; whether sung or played instrumentally. Using thirds and sixths (all the notes of the chord/scale in fact) to a much greater degree than most bassists—often beginning a melodic pattern on a higher pitch and then working down to the chord fundamental—he is able to realize more melodic, and thereby contrapuntal, bass lines than are usually found in popular music.
The problem with this approach, and the justification for the traditional emphasis on roots and fifths, is that it leads to aural instability—harmonies lacking definitive grounding. As the Grateful Dead showed, however, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
As explained above, the Dead’s performances were uniquely characterized by long stretches of music (often lasting an hour or more) made up of alternating rehearsed (at least partially) and non-rehearsed (i.e. improvised) sections. A notable early example of this would be their second set performance from November 8, 1969 at the Fillmore West Auditorium in San Francisco (the entire concert has been officially released as Dick’s Picks 16). The set list (“>” indicating a musical segue) is: “Dark Star>The Other One>Dark Star>Uncle John’s Band Jam>Dark Star>Saint Stephen>The Eleven>Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)>The Main Ten>Caution (Do Not…)>Feedback>We Bid You Goodnight.” Notice the recurrence of the same song more than once. This is a common happening for the Dead that means not the same song played twice (or three times as “Dark Star” seems to be here so indicated), but rather different portions, verses or even just the tonal/modal and rhythmic qualities of a song being segued into (and eventually out of) as their temporary improvisational “space.”
In a context like this, Lesh’s melodically-horizontal—yes contrapuntal—bass playing fits perfectly. Indeed it would be hard to imagine the Dead’s musical explorations developing as they did with a more conventional bassist. Though the bass in popular music lacks the inherent “star” quality of the lead instruments (usually vocals and lead guitar) it is arguably of more crucial importance in determining the overall “sound” of an ensemble due to its functionally structural role: helping to define both the rhythmic and harmonic basis (no pun intended) of a song . The harmonic instability due to Lesh’s more horizontal style is then precisely what gives the Dead’s music its sense of momentum, of directionality that is so integral to their extended playing approach. Paradoxically, the other interestingly unique aspect of his playing is his sometimes playing of chords—something most bassists avoid because of the bass’s low pitch and its difficulty when not using a plectrum. (For an excellent example, see the officially released Dick’s Picks 12, first disc, track 7, from approximately 1:06 to 2:23.)
Alright, you might be saying, but why is this important for other bass players with their own styles and methods? The answer is that the more conventional vertical style of bass playing, while highly effective in some contexts, presumes an end result—music with stable, “grounded” harmonies—that should by no means be accepted as necessary or even always desirable. In fact, I would argue, the emphasis on the importance of stable harmonies and the subsequent necessity of therefore playing “vertically” reveals a musical mindset that is characterized by its own kind of stability—utter predictability. For other than musical groups influenced by the Dead (the now defunct Phish, String Cheese Incident and Widespread Panic among others) and those now involving former members of the Dead (Ratdog with Bob Weir and the previously mentioned Phil & Friends), live popular music is for the most part now typified by a total avoidance of risk-taking.
That most performers want to do the best they can each and every performance is an obvious truism. Yet in the past unrepeatable human action, with its inevitable foibles and imperfections, guaranteed that not only would every performance not be perfect, but that indeed sometimes they might fail altogether. In the case of music, the “perfections” that are made possible with all-digital (therefore totally manipulable) recording software such as Pro Tools, and (for live performances) real-time pitch correction effects — the TC Electronics “Intonator” being one of the most popular— (among other things) as part of already completely choreographed shows, however, reveals a performance reality defined by its mechanization and necessary elimination of as much subjective initiative as possible.
The political or broader sociological significance of this should not be hard to see. Art is, I would argue, by definition an expression of human subjectivity; a placing of an order, or at least understanding, around an expression or physical state. For our civilization to have therefore realized an artistic (at least as defined functionally) performance reality that is so fundamentally at odds with this essence of art should be of at least some concern to intelligent people.
An instrumental performance practice that helps counteract this mind-numbing predictability should therefore not be taken lightly, or easily forgotten. And though I think it important to try to develop one’s own “voice” on an instrument, this should not be taken as an emphatic, self-justifying quest for originality. Though it does sometimes happen, the vast majority of legitimate musical (and more broadly artistic) performances have, in fact, nothing, original about them. If originality is supposed to be the criterion of art then few things would indeed so qualify. It is rather the exemplification of a certain skill that is generally sought in artistic performances. When true originality does occur, it is by incremental evolutions—syntheses of what has come before—rather than the supposed inspiration of a lone tormented genius—an overall nefarious idea, still sadly with us, due to the continuing influence of Romanticism, especially in the popular music world, and its veneration of Beethoven’s famous “Heiligenstadt Testament” that was written by him in 1802 at the outset of the hearing loss that would eventually render him completely deaf.
I am by no means here arguing that Lesh’s style should be slavishly imitated by other bassists. Whether anyone could ever, in fact, realize a convincing copy of his playing is itself perhaps doubtful. Yet, that should not discourage musicians, bass players in particular, from learning what they can from one who has made such an original, and so far more or less unique, contribution to the performance practice of an instrument less than sixty years old; as well as to seriously consider what kind of extra-musical political and social effects their performances might have on themselves and on those who listen and watch.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
On Liberalism
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
"The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats
Recently The New Republic published a response by Leon Wieseltier to an article by Stanley Fish that appeared in The New York Times Opinion pages concerning the global protests over the publication of the cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Both deserve to be read as exhibitits in the debate over liberalism vs fundamentalisms of all sorts. First the Fish article:
(Found in its entirety at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12fish.html?ei=5090&en=8c94e41b68113a9a&ex=1297400400&partner=rss&pagewanted=all)
The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously. This is managed by the familiar distinction — implied in the First Amendment's religion clause — between the public and private spheres. It is in the private sphere — the personal spaces of the heart, the home and the house of worship — that one's religious views are allowed full sway and dictate behavior...
Strongly held faiths are exhibits in liberalism's museum; we appreciate them, and we congratulate ourselves for affording them a space, but should one of them ask of us more than we are prepared to give — ask for deference rather than mere respect — it will be met with the barrage of platitudinous arguments that for the last week have filled the pages of every newspaper in the country.
One of those arguments goes this way: It is hypocritical for Muslims to protest cartoons caricaturing Muhammad when cartoons vilifying the symbols of Christianity and Judaism are found everywhere in the media of many Arab countries. After all, what's the difference? The difference is that those who draw and publish such cartoons in Arab countries believe in their content; they believe that Jews and Christians follow false religions and are proper objects of hatred and obloquy.
But I would bet that the editors who have run the cartoons do not believe that Muslims are evil infidels who must either be converted or vanquished. They do not publish the offending cartoons in an effort to further some religious or political vision; they do it gratuitously, almost accidentally. Concerned only to stand up for an abstract principle — free speech — they seize on whatever content happens to come their way and use it as an example of what the principle should be protecting. The fact that for others the content may be life itself is beside their point.
This is itself a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors.
Got that? The protesters--because of their deeply held beliefs that bring them to burn down embassies, Christian churches and offer money to those who would kill the cartoonists who drew the pictures as well as those who published them--should be respected more than those liberals who defend the right to free speech, because they, as opposed to the "wishy-washy liberals," really believe in their religion and prove it by their aggressive actions. Fish is, for those who don't know, what some might still call (though it's SOOO cliche...) a post-modernist for whom there is no truth, only "discourses" within "relations of power." Rejecting liberalism as but a bourgeois ideology, POMO has had a long love affair with violence as Michel Foucault, one of its founding fathers, revealed in his, at least initial, exuberantly positive reactions to the Iranian Revolution (discussed very well in an article in The Boston Globe found online at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/06/12/the_philosopher_and_the_ayatollah/?page=1) even though as a homosexual it meant that his life would have been at risk had he been an Iranian citizen.
Though those of a POMO persuasion and those on the Left have some common ground in their critique of capitalism and of established positions of power, POMO's lack of belief in any truth often leaves it susceptible to a dangerous fascination with those who are full of a "passionate intensity" though of the most violent and reactionary kinds. So it was with Foucault and Khomeini, and so it is again with Fish and the anti-cartoon protesters. Wieseltier responds:
Forgive my tardiness, but last month The New York Times published an article that compared liberals unfavorably to fundamentalist mobs. The piece appeared on the paper's fun op-ed page, on the occasion of the "cartoon riots" that were provoked by the publication in a conservative Danish newspaper of scornful images of the Prophet--no, that's not accurate. The riots were provoked by Muslim politicians and diplomats for whom the Western blasphemy was an Allah-sent opportunity to divert the attention of various Muslim societies from what ails them. What would modern Arab satrapies do without medieval Muslim masses? A bloodletting, then, followed by brandy and cigars; and the robed zealots in the streets are glad to do the work of the suited cynics in the private planes. Scores of people died in the cartoon riots. It was not the cartoons that killed them; it was their conviction that violence is a variety of cultural criticism. The intensity of their feeling about their faith was all that they (and in their view, anybody else) needed to know in the world.
And there in the Times was Stanley Fish, extolling them precisely for this. How contrarian. Fish is the author of a book called The Trouble With Principle--now there's a danger!--and has made a handsome career as a cheap button-pusher; he is one of those intellectuals who prefers any kind of radicalism to any kind of liberalism. (The flourishing of such intellectuals is itself a great tribute to liberalism.) In this particular prank, the kind of radicalism that Fish preferred was the Islamist kind. He lauded the "strong, insistent form" in which the rioters maintained their convictions. They believed that there are ideas "worth fighting over to the death." This, he declared, "is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors." Liberals, by contrast, believe only in such "abstract" principles as free speech, which makes them contemptibly indifferent to "the content of what is expressed." He adduced as his example of this timidity the culture editor of the Danish newspaper, for whom what seemed to matter was not the substance of what his paper said but its right to say it. In the liberal "religion of letting it all hang out," Fish sneered, "everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas)
is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously."
This is an ancient slander against liberalism. "I'm liberal," declares a character in one of Frost's poems, and explains: "I mean so altruistically moral / I never take my own side in a quarrel." That is a benign version of the complaint that liberalism is invertebrate, purely procedural, lacking in fervent beliefs about what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil. There were malign versions as well. Fish's exhilaration at the vitality of the crowd, his contempt for the restraints of reason, his discovery of personal integrity in physical violence--in another time, these were the ejaculations of fascists. Fish's piece has that ni droite, ni gauche quality. It put me in mind of some rhapsodic pages in Among The Thugs, Bill Buford's report on his arousal by the violence of English soccer hooligans: "Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and, for those capable of giving themselves over to it, is one of the most intense pleasures.... What was it like for me? An experience of absolute completeness," and "being in a crowd in an act of violence ... [n]othingness is what you find there ... [n]othingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity," and similar garbage. One is supposed to admire the honesty of such confessions, I suppose. But why should the drama of the confession matter more than the substance of the confession?
It is certainly true, as Fish worries, that a liberal order exasperates certain types of "strongly held faiths." The believers in an open society always have some adjusting to do. Yet not all strongly held faiths are alike. Often the aforesaid adjustments are made, for the sake of principle or social peace. And a faith held so strongly that it acknowledges no legitimacy to other strongly held faiths, so that it seeks to suppress or to destroy them--surely such faiths must not be allowed to hide their depredation behind our toleration. They deserve all the exasperation that we can visit upon them. Moreover, not all strongly held faiths are held for reasons worthy of respect. (I mean intellectual respect. About political respect, there must be no doubt; but political respect is not a promise of intellectual respect.) Usually they are just the unexamined promptings of tribe and tradition. But then Fish is not exercised by the intellectual quality of the bellicose dogmatisms that he wishes upon us. Quite the contrary. What excites Fish about fervent belief is the fervor, not the belief.
For this reason, it is Fish's geeky paean to people who are happy to hurt other people, his anti-liberal envy of muscles, that is perfectly contentless. He recommends the radicalism of the Islamist protesters, but he does not care whether there is no God but Allah or whether Mohammed is His Prophet. The philosophy means nothing to him. He wants only the action. He mocks liberals as editors, but he is himself just a spectator. And he is demanding his thrills. He is living vicariously through the absolutism of others. Those are not the jollies of a democrat.
Liberals are not editors, even if some editors are liberals. And fairness is not lifelessness. And free speech is the beginning of a liberal order, not the end. And rights are not the enemies of passions, and passions are not most stirringly represented by violations of rights. Where does Fish--not to put too fine a point on it, but in this respect he resembles some of our most virulent enemies--get the idea that liberals cannot fight? From the Democrats, perhaps; but that is liberalism's problem, not liberalism's fate. Anyway, Fish is not seeking political satisfaction, he is seeking emotional satisfaction in politics. And the history of emotionally satisfying politics is often a tale of crimes and abuses. The refusal to burn a book or a flag or a person, the renunciation of brutality in political expression, is not a sign of infirmity of purpose. Not at all. I wish to assure Fish, by example perhaps, that liberals can be--in the name of Kant, in the name of Jefferson, in the name of Mill--assholes. (Found at http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060320&s=diarist032006)
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
"The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats
Recently The New Republic published a response by Leon Wieseltier to an article by Stanley Fish that appeared in The New York Times Opinion pages concerning the global protests over the publication of the cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Both deserve to be read as exhibitits in the debate over liberalism vs fundamentalisms of all sorts. First the Fish article:
(Found in its entirety at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12fish.html?ei=5090&en=8c94e41b68113a9a&ex=1297400400&partner=rss&pagewanted=all)
The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously. This is managed by the familiar distinction — implied in the First Amendment's religion clause — between the public and private spheres. It is in the private sphere — the personal spaces of the heart, the home and the house of worship — that one's religious views are allowed full sway and dictate behavior...
Strongly held faiths are exhibits in liberalism's museum; we appreciate them, and we congratulate ourselves for affording them a space, but should one of them ask of us more than we are prepared to give — ask for deference rather than mere respect — it will be met with the barrage of platitudinous arguments that for the last week have filled the pages of every newspaper in the country.
One of those arguments goes this way: It is hypocritical for Muslims to protest cartoons caricaturing Muhammad when cartoons vilifying the symbols of Christianity and Judaism are found everywhere in the media of many Arab countries. After all, what's the difference? The difference is that those who draw and publish such cartoons in Arab countries believe in their content; they believe that Jews and Christians follow false religions and are proper objects of hatred and obloquy.
But I would bet that the editors who have run the cartoons do not believe that Muslims are evil infidels who must either be converted or vanquished. They do not publish the offending cartoons in an effort to further some religious or political vision; they do it gratuitously, almost accidentally. Concerned only to stand up for an abstract principle — free speech — they seize on whatever content happens to come their way and use it as an example of what the principle should be protecting. The fact that for others the content may be life itself is beside their point.
This is itself a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors.
Got that? The protesters--because of their deeply held beliefs that bring them to burn down embassies, Christian churches and offer money to those who would kill the cartoonists who drew the pictures as well as those who published them--should be respected more than those liberals who defend the right to free speech, because they, as opposed to the "wishy-washy liberals," really believe in their religion and prove it by their aggressive actions. Fish is, for those who don't know, what some might still call (though it's SOOO cliche...) a post-modernist for whom there is no truth, only "discourses" within "relations of power." Rejecting liberalism as but a bourgeois ideology, POMO has had a long love affair with violence as Michel Foucault, one of its founding fathers, revealed in his, at least initial, exuberantly positive reactions to the Iranian Revolution (discussed very well in an article in The Boston Globe found online at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/06/12/the_philosopher_and_the_ayatollah/?page=1) even though as a homosexual it meant that his life would have been at risk had he been an Iranian citizen.
Though those of a POMO persuasion and those on the Left have some common ground in their critique of capitalism and of established positions of power, POMO's lack of belief in any truth often leaves it susceptible to a dangerous fascination with those who are full of a "passionate intensity" though of the most violent and reactionary kinds. So it was with Foucault and Khomeini, and so it is again with Fish and the anti-cartoon protesters. Wieseltier responds:
Forgive my tardiness, but last month The New York Times published an article that compared liberals unfavorably to fundamentalist mobs. The piece appeared on the paper's fun op-ed page, on the occasion of the "cartoon riots" that were provoked by the publication in a conservative Danish newspaper of scornful images of the Prophet--no, that's not accurate. The riots were provoked by Muslim politicians and diplomats for whom the Western blasphemy was an Allah-sent opportunity to divert the attention of various Muslim societies from what ails them. What would modern Arab satrapies do without medieval Muslim masses? A bloodletting, then, followed by brandy and cigars; and the robed zealots in the streets are glad to do the work of the suited cynics in the private planes. Scores of people died in the cartoon riots. It was not the cartoons that killed them; it was their conviction that violence is a variety of cultural criticism. The intensity of their feeling about their faith was all that they (and in their view, anybody else) needed to know in the world.
And there in the Times was Stanley Fish, extolling them precisely for this. How contrarian. Fish is the author of a book called The Trouble With Principle--now there's a danger!--and has made a handsome career as a cheap button-pusher; he is one of those intellectuals who prefers any kind of radicalism to any kind of liberalism. (The flourishing of such intellectuals is itself a great tribute to liberalism.) In this particular prank, the kind of radicalism that Fish preferred was the Islamist kind. He lauded the "strong, insistent form" in which the rioters maintained their convictions. They believed that there are ideas "worth fighting over to the death." This, he declared, "is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors." Liberals, by contrast, believe only in such "abstract" principles as free speech, which makes them contemptibly indifferent to "the content of what is expressed." He adduced as his example of this timidity the culture editor of the Danish newspaper, for whom what seemed to matter was not the substance of what his paper said but its right to say it. In the liberal "religion of letting it all hang out," Fish sneered, "everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas)
is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously."
This is an ancient slander against liberalism. "I'm liberal," declares a character in one of Frost's poems, and explains: "I mean so altruistically moral / I never take my own side in a quarrel." That is a benign version of the complaint that liberalism is invertebrate, purely procedural, lacking in fervent beliefs about what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil. There were malign versions as well. Fish's exhilaration at the vitality of the crowd, his contempt for the restraints of reason, his discovery of personal integrity in physical violence--in another time, these were the ejaculations of fascists. Fish's piece has that ni droite, ni gauche quality. It put me in mind of some rhapsodic pages in Among The Thugs, Bill Buford's report on his arousal by the violence of English soccer hooligans: "Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and, for those capable of giving themselves over to it, is one of the most intense pleasures.... What was it like for me? An experience of absolute completeness," and "being in a crowd in an act of violence ... [n]othingness is what you find there ... [n]othingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity," and similar garbage. One is supposed to admire the honesty of such confessions, I suppose. But why should the drama of the confession matter more than the substance of the confession?
It is certainly true, as Fish worries, that a liberal order exasperates certain types of "strongly held faiths." The believers in an open society always have some adjusting to do. Yet not all strongly held faiths are alike. Often the aforesaid adjustments are made, for the sake of principle or social peace. And a faith held so strongly that it acknowledges no legitimacy to other strongly held faiths, so that it seeks to suppress or to destroy them--surely such faiths must not be allowed to hide their depredation behind our toleration. They deserve all the exasperation that we can visit upon them. Moreover, not all strongly held faiths are held for reasons worthy of respect. (I mean intellectual respect. About political respect, there must be no doubt; but political respect is not a promise of intellectual respect.) Usually they are just the unexamined promptings of tribe and tradition. But then Fish is not exercised by the intellectual quality of the bellicose dogmatisms that he wishes upon us. Quite the contrary. What excites Fish about fervent belief is the fervor, not the belief.
For this reason, it is Fish's geeky paean to people who are happy to hurt other people, his anti-liberal envy of muscles, that is perfectly contentless. He recommends the radicalism of the Islamist protesters, but he does not care whether there is no God but Allah or whether Mohammed is His Prophet. The philosophy means nothing to him. He wants only the action. He mocks liberals as editors, but he is himself just a spectator. And he is demanding his thrills. He is living vicariously through the absolutism of others. Those are not the jollies of a democrat.
Liberals are not editors, even if some editors are liberals. And fairness is not lifelessness. And free speech is the beginning of a liberal order, not the end. And rights are not the enemies of passions, and passions are not most stirringly represented by violations of rights. Where does Fish--not to put too fine a point on it, but in this respect he resembles some of our most virulent enemies--get the idea that liberals cannot fight? From the Democrats, perhaps; but that is liberalism's problem, not liberalism's fate. Anyway, Fish is not seeking political satisfaction, he is seeking emotional satisfaction in politics. And the history of emotionally satisfying politics is often a tale of crimes and abuses. The refusal to burn a book or a flag or a person, the renunciation of brutality in political expression, is not a sign of infirmity of purpose. Not at all. I wish to assure Fish, by example perhaps, that liberals can be--in the name of Kant, in the name of Jefferson, in the name of Mill--assholes. (Found at http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060320&s=diarist032006)
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Winston on the Iron Curtain
(To the melody of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band")
Well it was sixty years ago today/That Winston Churchill he began to say/Joseph Stalin was going out of style/And he's never going to raise a smile/So may I introduce to you/The act you've known for all these years/The Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri!
Well it was actually sixty years ago yesterday that Churchill made his famous speech that gave a name to the Soviet Union's swallowing up of Eastern and Central Europe and that dominated global politics for the next four decades. On the BBC International News website, Willian Horsley has a great article discussing it in its original context of post-war 1946 and for today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4776444.stm)
It was a heroic but troubled time. The world was in turmoil after the most terrible conflict in human history.
On 5 March 1946 Churchill was no longer the UK's prime minister but he still enjoyed a giant reputation around the world.
So US President Harry Truman himself travelled 1,000 miles to Fulton, Missouri, to hear Churchill give a speech after receiving an honorary degree at Westminster College there.
It would become one of the most famous speeches of the century.
Churchill had been mocked in Britain in the 1930s for warning of the menace of war from Nazi Germany, but had been proved right in the end. Now he was about to do it again.
After expressing his admiration for the valiant Russian people and "my wartime comrade, Marshall Stalin", he spoke the words which came to define the oppression, fear and confrontation of the Cold War era:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.
"Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia - all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."
It was vintage Churchill - grave, eloquent and ruthlessly honest.
It was a plea to America, already the world's greatest superpower, to acknowledge the harsh reality about Stalin - that on his orders the Russians were in the process of imposing totalitarian rule by communist governments in all the countries under their military control.
America had long been reluctant to accept this conclusion. But by the following year President Truman had decided on a policy of containment of Soviet power.
In 1948 any remaining doubts were removed by the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, when the Russians tried but failed to starve West Berlin into submission.
Churchill was indeed prescient of the two great totalitarian dangers of the 20th century: Nazism in the lead-up to World War II from Hitler's accession to power in 1933 and Stalinist Communism's - and what survived of it even after Stalin's death in 1953 and Krushchev's 1956 famous "Cult of Personality" speech - engorgement of so many countries in Europe after the war. Though George W. Bush sometimes pretends to such insight, the paucity of his historical understanding, combined with rhetorical skills of the most insufferable kind and a now-proven fundamental lack of seriousness when dealing with issues of global importance make a politician - no statesmen - of Churchill's calibre that much more missed today. If only there was someone in the USA, still the world's superpower whether anyone likes it or not, who had even a glimmer of Churchill's character I would feel much more hopeful about the future of this world.
Well it was sixty years ago today/That Winston Churchill he began to say/Joseph Stalin was going out of style/And he's never going to raise a smile/So may I introduce to you/The act you've known for all these years/The Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri!
Well it was actually sixty years ago yesterday that Churchill made his famous speech that gave a name to the Soviet Union's swallowing up of Eastern and Central Europe and that dominated global politics for the next four decades. On the BBC International News website, Willian Horsley has a great article discussing it in its original context of post-war 1946 and for today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4776444.stm)
It was a heroic but troubled time. The world was in turmoil after the most terrible conflict in human history.
On 5 March 1946 Churchill was no longer the UK's prime minister but he still enjoyed a giant reputation around the world.
So US President Harry Truman himself travelled 1,000 miles to Fulton, Missouri, to hear Churchill give a speech after receiving an honorary degree at Westminster College there.
It would become one of the most famous speeches of the century.
Churchill had been mocked in Britain in the 1930s for warning of the menace of war from Nazi Germany, but had been proved right in the end. Now he was about to do it again.
After expressing his admiration for the valiant Russian people and "my wartime comrade, Marshall Stalin", he spoke the words which came to define the oppression, fear and confrontation of the Cold War era:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.
"Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia - all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."
It was vintage Churchill - grave, eloquent and ruthlessly honest.
It was a plea to America, already the world's greatest superpower, to acknowledge the harsh reality about Stalin - that on his orders the Russians were in the process of imposing totalitarian rule by communist governments in all the countries under their military control.
America had long been reluctant to accept this conclusion. But by the following year President Truman had decided on a policy of containment of Soviet power.
In 1948 any remaining doubts were removed by the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, when the Russians tried but failed to starve West Berlin into submission.
Churchill was indeed prescient of the two great totalitarian dangers of the 20th century: Nazism in the lead-up to World War II from Hitler's accession to power in 1933 and Stalinist Communism's - and what survived of it even after Stalin's death in 1953 and Krushchev's 1956 famous "Cult of Personality" speech - engorgement of so many countries in Europe after the war. Though George W. Bush sometimes pretends to such insight, the paucity of his historical understanding, combined with rhetorical skills of the most insufferable kind and a now-proven fundamental lack of seriousness when dealing with issues of global importance make a politician - no statesmen - of Churchill's calibre that much more missed today. If only there was someone in the USA, still the world's superpower whether anyone likes it or not, who had even a glimmer of Churchill's character I would feel much more hopeful about the future of this world.
Monday, February 13, 2006
About those cartoons...
The insanity over the cartoon drawings of the prophet Muhammad, originally published in a Danish newspaper, show no sign of abating though god-only-knows how many words have been so far spent debating the issue. A few points to make my viewpoint clear:
To say, as has been repeated ad nauseum since this controversy began, that freedom of speech is not the freedom to offend or insult is completely, totally and maddeningly wrong. It gets things, in fact, completely backwards. Freedom of speech does not exist without the freedom to insult and offend. It seems almost too obvious to have to point out, but to tolerate only those opinions and expressions that you agree with is to make the right to freedom of speech completely meaningless. There is, and there should not be, any right to not be offended in a democratic country. Yes, there are restrictions on the right to free speech in many free countries (in my own, Canada, it is "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society"), but hardly can this case be an example of a justifiable restriction. Holocaust denial and blatant anti-Semitism are the most common examples of limitations on free speech, but the difference between those cases and the publication of these cartoons should be obvious enough even though I am admitedly not even completely comfortable with those justifications. In the case of anti-Semitic (meaning, of course, anti-Jewish, though somewhat of a misnomer since Arabs are as semitic as Jews) or other rascist material, the offence is not directed at the beliefs of someone, but rather at their unchangeable identity.
It must be remembered that for Hitler and the Nazis (and those who continue to propagate views similar to theirs to this day), "Jewishness" had nothing to do with believing in Judaism, but was a racial signifier that could not be escaped by simply converting to Christianity. To even have a sole jewish grandparent meant one was "tainted" and was considered enough justification to end up in the gas chambers, though this managed to be avoided by many of those with mixed ancestry. To be a Muslim, however, is not an unchangeable identity (even though according to the Koran, and many Muslims today, the punishment for apostasy from Islam is death), but a religious set of beliefs that deserves no special respect as compared to any other set of beliefs. To back down in the face of the violent intimidation that has so far been propagated is to give up on this such important right.
Here is Charles Krauthammer's take with which I couldn't agree more:
As much of the Islamic world erupts in a studied frenzy over the Danish Muhammad cartoons, there are voices of reason being heard on both sides. Some Islamic leaders and organizations, while endorsing the demonstrators' sense of grievance and sharing their outrage, speak out against using violence as a vehicle of expression. Their Western counterparts -- intellectuals, including most of the major newspapers in the United States -- are similarly balanced: While, of course, endorsing the principle of free expression, they criticize the Danish newspaper for abusing that right by publishing offensive cartoons, and they declare themselves opposed, in the name of religious sensitivity, to doing the same.
God save us from the voices of reason.
What passes for moderation in the Islamic community -- "I share your rage but don't torch that embassy" -- is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.
Have any of these "moderates" ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis? The sermons on Palestinian TV that refer to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys? The Syrian prime-time TV series that shows rabbis slaughtering a gentile boy to ritually consume his blood? The 41-part (!) series on Egyptian TV based on that anti-Semitic czarist forgery (and inspiration of the Nazis), "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," showing the Jews to be engaged in a century-old conspiracy to control the world?
...
There is a "sensitivity" argument for not having published the cartoons in the first place, back in September when they first appeared in that Danish newspaper. But it is not September. It is February. The cartoons have been published, and the newspaper, the publishers and Denmark itself have come under savage attack. After multiple arsons, devastating boycotts, and threats to cut off hands and heads, the issue is no longer news value, i.e., whether a newspaper needs to publish them to inform the audience about what is going on. The issue now is solidarity.
The mob is trying to dictate to Western newspapers, indeed Western governments, what is a legitimate subject for discussion and caricature. The cartoons do not begin to approach the artistic level of Salman Rushdie's prose, but that's not the point. The point is who decides what can be said and what can be drawn within the precincts of what we quaintly think of as the free world.
The mob has turned this into a test case for freedom of speech in the West. The German, French and Italian newspapers that republished these cartoons did so not to inform but to defy -- to declare that they will not be intimidated by the mob.
Read the whole thing at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020901434.html
To say, as has been repeated ad nauseum since this controversy began, that freedom of speech is not the freedom to offend or insult is completely, totally and maddeningly wrong. It gets things, in fact, completely backwards. Freedom of speech does not exist without the freedom to insult and offend. It seems almost too obvious to have to point out, but to tolerate only those opinions and expressions that you agree with is to make the right to freedom of speech completely meaningless. There is, and there should not be, any right to not be offended in a democratic country. Yes, there are restrictions on the right to free speech in many free countries (in my own, Canada, it is "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society"), but hardly can this case be an example of a justifiable restriction. Holocaust denial and blatant anti-Semitism are the most common examples of limitations on free speech, but the difference between those cases and the publication of these cartoons should be obvious enough even though I am admitedly not even completely comfortable with those justifications. In the case of anti-Semitic (meaning, of course, anti-Jewish, though somewhat of a misnomer since Arabs are as semitic as Jews) or other rascist material, the offence is not directed at the beliefs of someone, but rather at their unchangeable identity.
It must be remembered that for Hitler and the Nazis (and those who continue to propagate views similar to theirs to this day), "Jewishness" had nothing to do with believing in Judaism, but was a racial signifier that could not be escaped by simply converting to Christianity. To even have a sole jewish grandparent meant one was "tainted" and was considered enough justification to end up in the gas chambers, though this managed to be avoided by many of those with mixed ancestry. To be a Muslim, however, is not an unchangeable identity (even though according to the Koran, and many Muslims today, the punishment for apostasy from Islam is death), but a religious set of beliefs that deserves no special respect as compared to any other set of beliefs. To back down in the face of the violent intimidation that has so far been propagated is to give up on this such important right.
Here is Charles Krauthammer's take with which I couldn't agree more:
As much of the Islamic world erupts in a studied frenzy over the Danish Muhammad cartoons, there are voices of reason being heard on both sides. Some Islamic leaders and organizations, while endorsing the demonstrators' sense of grievance and sharing their outrage, speak out against using violence as a vehicle of expression. Their Western counterparts -- intellectuals, including most of the major newspapers in the United States -- are similarly balanced: While, of course, endorsing the principle of free expression, they criticize the Danish newspaper for abusing that right by publishing offensive cartoons, and they declare themselves opposed, in the name of religious sensitivity, to doing the same.
God save us from the voices of reason.
What passes for moderation in the Islamic community -- "I share your rage but don't torch that embassy" -- is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.
Have any of these "moderates" ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis? The sermons on Palestinian TV that refer to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys? The Syrian prime-time TV series that shows rabbis slaughtering a gentile boy to ritually consume his blood? The 41-part (!) series on Egyptian TV based on that anti-Semitic czarist forgery (and inspiration of the Nazis), "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," showing the Jews to be engaged in a century-old conspiracy to control the world?
...
There is a "sensitivity" argument for not having published the cartoons in the first place, back in September when they first appeared in that Danish newspaper. But it is not September. It is February. The cartoons have been published, and the newspaper, the publishers and Denmark itself have come under savage attack. After multiple arsons, devastating boycotts, and threats to cut off hands and heads, the issue is no longer news value, i.e., whether a newspaper needs to publish them to inform the audience about what is going on. The issue now is solidarity.
The mob is trying to dictate to Western newspapers, indeed Western governments, what is a legitimate subject for discussion and caricature. The cartoons do not begin to approach the artistic level of Salman Rushdie's prose, but that's not the point. The point is who decides what can be said and what can be drawn within the precincts of what we quaintly think of as the free world.
The mob has turned this into a test case for freedom of speech in the West. The German, French and Italian newspapers that republished these cartoons did so not to inform but to defy -- to declare that they will not be intimidated by the mob.
Read the whole thing at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020901434.html
Thursday, February 09, 2006
And they expect us to believe them?
So what must surely be some of the dumbest words to ever come out of an Attorney General of the United-States were in fact uttered this last Monday. The present holder of that position, Alberto Gonzales, was testifying before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Commitee concerning the Bush Administration's use of the NSA (National Secutriy Agency) domestically to spy on Americans electronic communication without a warrant. This despite the explicit criminalizing of such activity by a 1978 law, entitled the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, that established a secret court to review, and give warrants for, any such activity. FISA, as it is commonly known, was enacted in response to revelations of judicially unchecked government wiretapping of citizens during the Nixon Administration. The rules by which authorities could get a warrant for a wiretap were made easier in the PATRIOT Act passed after 9/11, but any electronic surveillance still required approval by the court.
Though the Bush Administration has repeatedly endorsed the changes made to FISA since 2001 and never challenged the law's constitutionality till they were caught breaking it, it now claims that they are not legally required to even follow the law because of the "War on Terror" going on - Bush's inherent executive authority supposedly overriding Congressional statute. This is a completely specious argument as anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the philosophy behind the U.S. Constitution should know; this being, the division of powers between the three branches of government - Executive, Judicial and Legislative. For any of these branches to claim exclusive authority concerning the rights of American citizens is obviously unconstitutional.
Yet Gonzales was on Capitol Hill to defend what is completely undefensible and is undoubtedly, in my mind, and impeachable offence. The following remark was the stupidest thing he said, but the everything was said was shameful for someone who is supposed to be the USA's highest law enforcement official. His slavish obediance is in sharp contrast to the actions of Elliot Richardson who as Attorney General in 1973 was ordered by Nixon to fire Archibald Cox, the Special Prosecutor appointed by Richardson who was investigating the 1972 Watergate burglary. Richardson resigned rather than obey orders that went against his understanding of law and justice, and his promise to Congress to not interfere with Cox's investigation. This kind of courage is sadly in short supply in Washington D.C. today, but must be found if Bush's abuses of power are to be stopped and the USA's democracy to be preserved.
Key Gonzales quote (via Crooks and Liars): President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.
The mind staggers at the stupidity...
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/02/06.html#a7043
Though the Bush Administration has repeatedly endorsed the changes made to FISA since 2001 and never challenged the law's constitutionality till they were caught breaking it, it now claims that they are not legally required to even follow the law because of the "War on Terror" going on - Bush's inherent executive authority supposedly overriding Congressional statute. This is a completely specious argument as anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the philosophy behind the U.S. Constitution should know; this being, the division of powers between the three branches of government - Executive, Judicial and Legislative. For any of these branches to claim exclusive authority concerning the rights of American citizens is obviously unconstitutional.
Yet Gonzales was on Capitol Hill to defend what is completely undefensible and is undoubtedly, in my mind, and impeachable offence. The following remark was the stupidest thing he said, but the everything was said was shameful for someone who is supposed to be the USA's highest law enforcement official. His slavish obediance is in sharp contrast to the actions of Elliot Richardson who as Attorney General in 1973 was ordered by Nixon to fire Archibald Cox, the Special Prosecutor appointed by Richardson who was investigating the 1972 Watergate burglary. Richardson resigned rather than obey orders that went against his understanding of law and justice, and his promise to Congress to not interfere with Cox's investigation. This kind of courage is sadly in short supply in Washington D.C. today, but must be found if Bush's abuses of power are to be stopped and the USA's democracy to be preserved.
Key Gonzales quote (via Crooks and Liars): President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.
The mind staggers at the stupidity...
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/02/06.html#a7043
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The perniciousness of paranoia
The tendency of so many to view the problems of the world in all their complexity as the evil machinations of a "them" in sharp contrast to an eminently virtuous "us" itself explains a great deal of what is now wrong in the world today. For the Nazis it was the Aryans vs the Jews; for communists, the Proletariat vs the Bourgeoisies; for David Icke and his eco-fascists (google his name if you're at all curious), humans vs shape-shifting part-human, part-lizard are instead the dichotomy. In the Islamic world of today, a similar tendency has become increasingly evident and in an article I just read today, though it was originally posted back in 2004, Nick Cohen describes this sad situation very well.
EVER SINCE 11 September 2001 reasonable people in liberal democracies have concluded that their enemies must at some level be reasonable, too. Surely such hatred must have been provoked by the west. Surely the solution must be for western governments to stop being provocative. Their rational opponents would then have no reason to commit homicidal attacks, and we would be safe. Unfortunately the belief in a rational motive is an illusion. To sustain the rationalist fallacy, you must ignore vast amounts of evidence. In the Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan and Algeria, millions have died in Islamist wars and massacres that make Srebrenica and the World Trade Center appear paltry affairs. Islamist movements dedicated to persecuting Muslims who believe in the separation of church and state or the emancipation of women are not rational on any terms but their own. This seems a simple point to make. If you pay al-Qaeda and its imitators the compliment of reading what their leaders say, you find a cosmic dream of an Islamic empire dominating the world.
But the point is rarely taken, in part because Afghanistan and the Sudan are faraway countries of which we know little. How many people, for instance, have heard of the slaughter of the “heretical” Shia Muslims in central Afghanistan by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, let alone asked themselves what foul ideology drove them to do it? Yet there is a link closer to home which ties Islamism to the mass irrationalist movements of the west. You can hear it like a faint drumbeat, a background noise behind the bombings and the propaganda that alerts the listener to Europe’s baleful history. On 9 March, to take the most recent example, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a restaurant in Istanbul. If their victims had been British, American or Jewish, right-thinking people would have said that the overthrow of the Taliban or the invasion of Iraq or the humiliation of the Palestinians was the “root cause” of the murders. As it was, the dead were members of a party of diners from a Masonic lodge, and the story died as quickly as they did.
In November 2003, 32 people were killed and more than 400 injured when the British consulate in Istanbul and the (British) HSBC bank were attacked. Every right-thinking person agreed that the suicidal assaults were a punishment for the war on Iraq, and no one dwelt on the oddity of the statement given by the caller who claimed responsibility on behalf of a Turkish Islamist group and al-Qaeda. “We will continue to attack Masonic targets,” he said. “The Muslims are not alone.”
Type “Masons” and “Islam” into Google and you get about 14,000 hits. The Masons, you learn, hide subliminal messages in The Simpsons as well as the music of the Eagles, Michael Jackson and Madonna, the better to brainwash the world. (Should you be inclined to play “Hotel California” backwards, you will hear “yeah Satan”, apparently.) Abu Hamza, who extolled the glories of martyrdom from the Finsbury Park mosque in London, told the Independent: “I am not saying every American government figure knew about [11 September 2001]. But there are a few people [in the US government] who want to trigger a third world war. They are sponsored by the business lobby. Most of them are Freemasons, and they have loyalty to the Zionists.”
...
To British eyes this is all howling mad. Every now and again, journalists receive unprovable accusations that the Masons have tied up a plum job or fixed a planning decision, but on the whole British Freemasonry has become a Pythonesque joke - “the mafia of the mediocre”, as a character in Our Friends in the North exclaimed. Men who roll up their trouser legs and exchange silly handshakes are many things, but a conspiracy for world domination they are not. That tyrants and religious fanatics see them as such is revealing. It shows that the paranoias of fascist Europe have spread to many of the third world’s reactionary movements.
...
The rest can be found at http://www.nickcohen.net/?p=71
EVER SINCE 11 September 2001 reasonable people in liberal democracies have concluded that their enemies must at some level be reasonable, too. Surely such hatred must have been provoked by the west. Surely the solution must be for western governments to stop being provocative. Their rational opponents would then have no reason to commit homicidal attacks, and we would be safe. Unfortunately the belief in a rational motive is an illusion. To sustain the rationalist fallacy, you must ignore vast amounts of evidence. In the Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan and Algeria, millions have died in Islamist wars and massacres that make Srebrenica and the World Trade Center appear paltry affairs. Islamist movements dedicated to persecuting Muslims who believe in the separation of church and state or the emancipation of women are not rational on any terms but their own. This seems a simple point to make. If you pay al-Qaeda and its imitators the compliment of reading what their leaders say, you find a cosmic dream of an Islamic empire dominating the world.
But the point is rarely taken, in part because Afghanistan and the Sudan are faraway countries of which we know little. How many people, for instance, have heard of the slaughter of the “heretical” Shia Muslims in central Afghanistan by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, let alone asked themselves what foul ideology drove them to do it? Yet there is a link closer to home which ties Islamism to the mass irrationalist movements of the west. You can hear it like a faint drumbeat, a background noise behind the bombings and the propaganda that alerts the listener to Europe’s baleful history. On 9 March, to take the most recent example, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a restaurant in Istanbul. If their victims had been British, American or Jewish, right-thinking people would have said that the overthrow of the Taliban or the invasion of Iraq or the humiliation of the Palestinians was the “root cause” of the murders. As it was, the dead were members of a party of diners from a Masonic lodge, and the story died as quickly as they did.
In November 2003, 32 people were killed and more than 400 injured when the British consulate in Istanbul and the (British) HSBC bank were attacked. Every right-thinking person agreed that the suicidal assaults were a punishment for the war on Iraq, and no one dwelt on the oddity of the statement given by the caller who claimed responsibility on behalf of a Turkish Islamist group and al-Qaeda. “We will continue to attack Masonic targets,” he said. “The Muslims are not alone.”
Type “Masons” and “Islam” into Google and you get about 14,000 hits. The Masons, you learn, hide subliminal messages in The Simpsons as well as the music of the Eagles, Michael Jackson and Madonna, the better to brainwash the world. (Should you be inclined to play “Hotel California” backwards, you will hear “yeah Satan”, apparently.) Abu Hamza, who extolled the glories of martyrdom from the Finsbury Park mosque in London, told the Independent: “I am not saying every American government figure knew about [11 September 2001]. But there are a few people [in the US government] who want to trigger a third world war. They are sponsored by the business lobby. Most of them are Freemasons, and they have loyalty to the Zionists.”
...
To British eyes this is all howling mad. Every now and again, journalists receive unprovable accusations that the Masons have tied up a plum job or fixed a planning decision, but on the whole British Freemasonry has become a Pythonesque joke - “the mafia of the mediocre”, as a character in Our Friends in the North exclaimed. Men who roll up their trouser legs and exchange silly handshakes are many things, but a conspiracy for world domination they are not. That tyrants and religious fanatics see them as such is revealing. It shows that the paranoias of fascist Europe have spread to many of the third world’s reactionary movements.
...
The rest can be found at http://www.nickcohen.net/?p=71
Monday, February 06, 2006
Worthy of a read
Not much to say today. My thoughts of late have been mostly focused on the insanity going on on account of the drawings of Muhammad that originally appeared in a Danish newspaper but have since been re-printed elsewhere. Apparently two people died in Afghanistan during anti-Denmark and Europe protests today and in the last two days the embassies of Denmark in Damascus and Beirut, as well as the Norwegian embassy in Damascus, have been burned in protest. All this over 12 cartoons. It boggles the mind. I don't agree with Noam Chomsky about much, but he did once say quite truthfully (to paraphrase) that you don't believe in freedom of speech if you don't tolerate things that you personally despise. What is it about the Muslim world today that can go to such extremes over so little is a question to wonder. Perhaps more thoughts later, but in the meantime here's a couple of exerpts and links to the entireties concerning this issue. First from one of my favourite writers, Mark Steyn.
Last year, a newspaper called Jyllands-Posten published several cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, whose physical representation in art is forbidden by Islam. The cartoons aren't particularly good and they were intended to be provocative. But they had a serious point. Before coming to that, we should note that in the Western world "artists" "provoke" with the same numbing regularity as young Muslim men light up other countries' flags. When Tony-winning author Terence McNally writes a Broadway play in which Jesus has gay sex with Judas, the New York Times and Co. rush to garland him with praise for how "brave" and "challenging" he is. The rule for "brave" "transgressive" "artists" is a simple one: If you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked.
Thus, NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom "Will & Grace," in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes -- "Cruci-fixin's." On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of "respect" for the Muslim faith.
Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.
Jyllands-Posten wasn't being offensive for the sake of it. They had a serious point -- or, at any rate, a more serious one than Britney Spears or Terence McNally. The cartoons accompanied a piece about the dangers of "self-censorship" -- i.e., a climate in which there's no explicit law forbidding you from addressing the more, er, lively aspects of Islam but nonetheless everyone feels it's better not to.
That's the question the Danish newspaper was testing: the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam.
One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want -- including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.
No doubt he's similarly impressed by the "sensitivity" of Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, for prohibiting the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and thus is offensive to Muslims. And no doubt he's impressed by the "sensitivity" of Burger King, which withdrew its ice cream cones from its British menus because Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word "Allah" in Arabic script. I don't know which sura in the Koran says don't forget, folks, it's not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name, but ixnay on both just to be "sensitive."
And doubtless the British foreign secretary also appreciates the "sensitivity" of the owner of France-Soir, who fired his editor for republishing the Danish cartoons. And the "sensitivity" of the Dutch film director Albert Ter Heerdt, who canceled the sequel to his hit multicultural comedy ''Shouf Shouf Habibi!'' on the grounds that "I don't want a knife in my chest" -- which is what happened to the last Dutch film director to make a movie about Islam: Theo van Gogh, on whose ''right to dissent'' all those Hollywood blowhards are strangely silent. Perhaps they're just being "sensitive,'' too.
And perhaps the British foreign secretary also admires the "sensitivity" of those Dutch public figures who once spoke out against the intimidatory aspects of Islam and have now opted for diplomatic silence and life under 24-hour armed guard. And maybe he even admires the "sensitivity" of the increasing numbers of Dutch people who dislike the pervasive fear and tension in certain parts of the Netherlands and so have emigrated to Canada and New Zealand.
Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight, pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the rough-and-tumble of a "diverse" "tolerant" society, and, when one gently raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which makes the question somewhat moot.
Read it all at http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn05.html
Next is a much deserved "fisking" of this literary forms anti-patron saint; Robert Fisk's own recent column about this controversy. No surprise he thinks it's all the West's fault. Scott Burgess at The Daily Ablution disagrees and with him I couldn't agree more.
"So let's start off with the Department of Home Truths. This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam."
An interesting hypothesis - one which, having stated, Mr. Fisk proceeds to immediately
disprove:
"For Muslims, the Prophet is the man who received divine words directly from God. We see our prophets as faintly historical figures, at odds with our high-tech human rights, almost caricatures of themselves. The fact is that Muslims live their religion. We do not. They have kept their faith through innumerable historical vicissitudes. We have lost our faith ever since Matthew Arnold wrote about the sea's 'long, withdrawing roar'. That's why we talk about 'the West versus Islam' rather than 'Christians versus Islam'- because there aren't an awful lot of Christians left in Europe."
So let me get this straight. "This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam" - the reason being that Europeans are secular and Muslims are not. "That's why we talk about 'the West versus Islam' rather than 'Christians versus Islam'". He's really not doing his point any favours here, is he?
In the next paragraph, Mr. Fisk sinks his dentures into the meaty flesh of Western hypocrisy. We, not the innocent Muslim faithful, are the wrongdoers in all of this:
"Besides, we can exercise our own hypocrisy over religious feelings. I happen to remember how, more than a decade ago, a film called The Last Temptation of Christ showed Jesus making love to a woman. In Paris, someone set fire to the cinema showing the movie, killing a young man. I also happen to remember a US university which invited me to give a lecture three years ago. I did. It was entitled 'September 11, 2001: ask who did it but, for God's sake, don't ask why'. When I arrived, I found that the university had deleted the phrase 'for God's sake' becuase 'we didn't want to offend certain sensibilities'. Ah-ha, so we have 'sensibilities' too.
"In other words, while we claim that Muslims must be good secularlists when it comes to free speech - or cheap cartoons - we can worry about adherents to our own precious religion just as much."
Verily, the mind boggles. Is Mr. Fisk really equating the best examples of excessive Christian sensitivity that he can come up with - the action of a single nutcase over a decade ago, and the inconsequential censorship of a university jobsworth three years ago - with the threats, violence and worldwide "Days of Anger" we've been seeing over the last few days?
"We can worry ... just as much" about Christians? On a day when the streets are full of fanatics chanting "UK you must pray ... 7/7 on its way"? It's rare for words to fail me, but this is such a time.
[Continued]...
"For many Muslims, the 'Islamic' reaction to the affair is an embarrassment. There is good reason to believe that Muslims would like to see some elements of reform introduced into their religion. If this cartoon had advanced the cause of those who want to debate this issue, no-one would have minded."
Once again, the obtuseness is simply breathtaking. Mr. Fisk is seriously stating that "no-one would have minded" if the cartoons had advanced the cause of reform-minded Muslims. It is, however, quite obvious that many Muslims would have minded - specifically, those who do not want to see reform debated or pushed forward. Those individuals would still have done all in their power to stir up fundamentalist anger, just as they're doing now. And guess what? They're the dangerous ones.
Continuing:
"This is not a great time to heat up the old Samuel Huntingdon garbage about a 'clash of civilisations'. Iran now has a clerical government again. So, to all intents and purposes, does Iraq (which was not supposed to end up with a democratically elected clerical administration, but that's what happens when you topple dictators). In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 per cent of the seats in the recent parliamentary elections. Now we have Hamas in charge of 'Palestine'. There's a message here, isn't there?"
Why yes, there is. The message is that the Muslim world is turning increasingly to theocracy, with all of its strictures on speech and action, medieval punishments and the like. Meanwhile, as Mr. Fisk himself points out, free Europe has become increasingly secular (except for the burgeoning Muslim communities in its midst). As all but the willfully blind can now see, this is precisely the clash that Mr. Fisk denies so stubbornly, and so ineffectually.
And why is the Ummah turning to theocracy to the extent that it is? Come on, you know the answer to that - as always, it's our fault:
"[The message is] That American policies - 'regime change' in the Middle East - are not achieving their ends. These millions of voters were preferring Islam to the corrupt regimes we imposed on them."
Remind me - which "corrupt regime" did we impose on Iraq? On Palestine? Have we "imposed" Mubarak, or the Iranian government just prior to this new clerical one?
The whole thing can be found at http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2006/02/fisk_in_a_barre.html
Last year, a newspaper called Jyllands-Posten published several cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, whose physical representation in art is forbidden by Islam. The cartoons aren't particularly good and they were intended to be provocative. But they had a serious point. Before coming to that, we should note that in the Western world "artists" "provoke" with the same numbing regularity as young Muslim men light up other countries' flags. When Tony-winning author Terence McNally writes a Broadway play in which Jesus has gay sex with Judas, the New York Times and Co. rush to garland him with praise for how "brave" and "challenging" he is. The rule for "brave" "transgressive" "artists" is a simple one: If you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked.
Thus, NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom "Will & Grace," in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes -- "Cruci-fixin's." On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of "respect" for the Muslim faith.
Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.
Jyllands-Posten wasn't being offensive for the sake of it. They had a serious point -- or, at any rate, a more serious one than Britney Spears or Terence McNally. The cartoons accompanied a piece about the dangers of "self-censorship" -- i.e., a climate in which there's no explicit law forbidding you from addressing the more, er, lively aspects of Islam but nonetheless everyone feels it's better not to.
That's the question the Danish newspaper was testing: the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam.
One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want -- including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.
No doubt he's similarly impressed by the "sensitivity" of Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, for prohibiting the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and thus is offensive to Muslims. And no doubt he's impressed by the "sensitivity" of Burger King, which withdrew its ice cream cones from its British menus because Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word "Allah" in Arabic script. I don't know which sura in the Koran says don't forget, folks, it's not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name, but ixnay on both just to be "sensitive."
And doubtless the British foreign secretary also appreciates the "sensitivity" of the owner of France-Soir, who fired his editor for republishing the Danish cartoons. And the "sensitivity" of the Dutch film director Albert Ter Heerdt, who canceled the sequel to his hit multicultural comedy ''Shouf Shouf Habibi!'' on the grounds that "I don't want a knife in my chest" -- which is what happened to the last Dutch film director to make a movie about Islam: Theo van Gogh, on whose ''right to dissent'' all those Hollywood blowhards are strangely silent. Perhaps they're just being "sensitive,'' too.
And perhaps the British foreign secretary also admires the "sensitivity" of those Dutch public figures who once spoke out against the intimidatory aspects of Islam and have now opted for diplomatic silence and life under 24-hour armed guard. And maybe he even admires the "sensitivity" of the increasing numbers of Dutch people who dislike the pervasive fear and tension in certain parts of the Netherlands and so have emigrated to Canada and New Zealand.
Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight, pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the rough-and-tumble of a "diverse" "tolerant" society, and, when one gently raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which makes the question somewhat moot.
Read it all at http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn05.html
Next is a much deserved "fisking" of this literary forms anti-patron saint; Robert Fisk's own recent column about this controversy. No surprise he thinks it's all the West's fault. Scott Burgess at The Daily Ablution disagrees and with him I couldn't agree more.
"So let's start off with the Department of Home Truths. This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam."
An interesting hypothesis - one which, having stated, Mr. Fisk proceeds to immediately
disprove:
"For Muslims, the Prophet is the man who received divine words directly from God. We see our prophets as faintly historical figures, at odds with our high-tech human rights, almost caricatures of themselves. The fact is that Muslims live their religion. We do not. They have kept their faith through innumerable historical vicissitudes. We have lost our faith ever since Matthew Arnold wrote about the sea's 'long, withdrawing roar'. That's why we talk about 'the West versus Islam' rather than 'Christians versus Islam'- because there aren't an awful lot of Christians left in Europe."
So let me get this straight. "This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam" - the reason being that Europeans are secular and Muslims are not. "That's why we talk about 'the West versus Islam' rather than 'Christians versus Islam'". He's really not doing his point any favours here, is he?
In the next paragraph, Mr. Fisk sinks his dentures into the meaty flesh of Western hypocrisy. We, not the innocent Muslim faithful, are the wrongdoers in all of this:
"Besides, we can exercise our own hypocrisy over religious feelings. I happen to remember how, more than a decade ago, a film called The Last Temptation of Christ showed Jesus making love to a woman. In Paris, someone set fire to the cinema showing the movie, killing a young man. I also happen to remember a US university which invited me to give a lecture three years ago. I did. It was entitled 'September 11, 2001: ask who did it but, for God's sake, don't ask why'. When I arrived, I found that the university had deleted the phrase 'for God's sake' becuase 'we didn't want to offend certain sensibilities'. Ah-ha, so we have 'sensibilities' too.
"In other words, while we claim that Muslims must be good secularlists when it comes to free speech - or cheap cartoons - we can worry about adherents to our own precious religion just as much."
Verily, the mind boggles. Is Mr. Fisk really equating the best examples of excessive Christian sensitivity that he can come up with - the action of a single nutcase over a decade ago, and the inconsequential censorship of a university jobsworth three years ago - with the threats, violence and worldwide "Days of Anger" we've been seeing over the last few days?
"We can worry ... just as much" about Christians? On a day when the streets are full of fanatics chanting "UK you must pray ... 7/7 on its way"? It's rare for words to fail me, but this is such a time.
[Continued]...
"For many Muslims, the 'Islamic' reaction to the affair is an embarrassment. There is good reason to believe that Muslims would like to see some elements of reform introduced into their religion. If this cartoon had advanced the cause of those who want to debate this issue, no-one would have minded."
Once again, the obtuseness is simply breathtaking. Mr. Fisk is seriously stating that "no-one would have minded" if the cartoons had advanced the cause of reform-minded Muslims. It is, however, quite obvious that many Muslims would have minded - specifically, those who do not want to see reform debated or pushed forward. Those individuals would still have done all in their power to stir up fundamentalist anger, just as they're doing now. And guess what? They're the dangerous ones.
Continuing:
"This is not a great time to heat up the old Samuel Huntingdon garbage about a 'clash of civilisations'. Iran now has a clerical government again. So, to all intents and purposes, does Iraq (which was not supposed to end up with a democratically elected clerical administration, but that's what happens when you topple dictators). In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 per cent of the seats in the recent parliamentary elections. Now we have Hamas in charge of 'Palestine'. There's a message here, isn't there?"
Why yes, there is. The message is that the Muslim world is turning increasingly to theocracy, with all of its strictures on speech and action, medieval punishments and the like. Meanwhile, as Mr. Fisk himself points out, free Europe has become increasingly secular (except for the burgeoning Muslim communities in its midst). As all but the willfully blind can now see, this is precisely the clash that Mr. Fisk denies so stubbornly, and so ineffectually.
And why is the Ummah turning to theocracy to the extent that it is? Come on, you know the answer to that - as always, it's our fault:
"[The message is] That American policies - 'regime change' in the Middle East - are not achieving their ends. These millions of voters were preferring Islam to the corrupt regimes we imposed on them."
Remind me - which "corrupt regime" did we impose on Iraq? On Palestine? Have we "imposed" Mubarak, or the Iranian government just prior to this new clerical one?
The whole thing can be found at http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2006/02/fisk_in_a_barre.html
Sunday, February 05, 2006
So about that election...
I've been feeling quite uninspired of late to write anything and for those who might have been cheking in here every so often - surely having given up waiting for me to post something undoubtedly - I'm sorry for this lack of literary output. It comes in waves and so when the sea is calm the idea of forcing myself to write something for the sake of writing has little appeal for me. Hopefully this will soon change.
I should have written more about the recent Canadian election during and in its immediate aftermath, but whatever my opinions were seemed to have been more eloquently put by others. So it is with a commentary I just had the fortune to find online by the inimicable Rex Murphy concerning a certain American's intrusion into the Canadian electoral debate. I expressed the same opinion to various friends, but he says it so damn well that I'll defer to him (thanks to Google News for bypassing the Globe & Mail's subscriber wall):
Well, it was a narrow escape. But we did it. Canadians have preserved their liberties and independence against the always rapacious American beast.
We knew there were powerful elements in the United States that wanted us to kowtow and genuflect to a simplistic worldview, that knuckle-dragging Good-versus-Evil script they have been remorselessly propagandizing all over the world since 9/11.
They have been trying to drag Canada into this simpleton's game for years, mauling truth and banishing nuance with a continuous stream of invective posing as reason, and caricature passing itself off as accuracy.
It's a difficult thing to resist the mighty United States at any time, and especially difficult in all the dust and storm of a national election. But we did it.
It was a close-run thing. But on Monday night, Canada fought back and won. On Jan. 20, just three days before our vote, Michael Moore, entrepreneur, fabulist, philosophe, issued a broadside to the citizens of this country warning us sternly, and with the imperious irony of which he is so fully a master, against the perils of electing a Stephen Harper government:
Do you want to help George Bush by turning Canada into his latest conquest? Is that how you want millions of us down here to see you from now on? The next notch on the cowboy belt?
I was worried at first that the subtlety of the pitch might obscure its wonderful impertinence — worried that the charm of Mr. Moore's address might distract Canadians from the consideration that an American millionaire celebrity pitchman was interfering in, and attempting to influence, the Canadian vote.
I was worried, too, that this one-man shock-and-awe “documentarian” might be leading a charge, that the other bright bulbs of international busybodyism were massed behind his formidable massed behind. Was Sean Penn on the way to monitor the vote in Etobicoke? Was he planning one of his patented fact-finding junkets like the visits that brought such comfort and peace to the citizens of Baghdad? I could see the headlines: Penn in Halifax. Visits Bar. Reads Construction-Site Posters. Warns Harper is Christian. Says “God Bless Canada.”
Well, that didn't happen. We're were spared the fast-food internationalism of Mr. Penn, and that probably meant we were spared assorted sermons from Alex Baldwin, Janeane Garofalo, Al Franken and that whole posse of celebrity dilettantes who see the whole world as an audience for their inch-deep, paint-by-numbers, cause-a-day homilies. Maybe they were off somewhere saving a seal.
Or, what is much more likely, maybe he concluded there was really no need for the secondary battalions. We, the respectful, bland and polite citizens of a country that is really only a farm team for the U.S. entertainment industry — hello Céline, Jim, Dan and Avril — would naturally be flattered into sheer insensibility that the portentous Mr. Moore even knew we were having an election. He has a taste for insolence, referring to Stephen Harper, who has more brain than Michael Moore has girth, as someone “who should be running for governor of Utah,“ and whose election would “reduce Canada to a cheap download of Bush & Co.”
One size fits all — that's our Mikey. Because he thinks he has a problem with George Bush, that must be the script for the rest of the world. This is the very essence of imperialism. To believe that your story is everyone else's. To believe that your political drama is the template for every other political drama in the whole wide world. Michael Moore could go to Fogo Island, Nfld., for the municipal elections and find them a perfect parable of the Halliburton super-conspiracy. He'd see Dick Cheney's influence in the selection of the town clerk.
Ego turns the world into one big mirror, and nothing looks back at the celebrity narcissus but the vacant monomaniac staring in. News flash, Mr. Moore: Our election wasn't about Dick Cheney. Or George Bush. Paul Martin (thank God) isn't Bill Clinton. Stephen Harper doesn't own a decoder ring sent him by Karl Rove. Considering the success you've had in stopping George Bush in the country where he actually runs — and on last report he is in his second term — do you really think you should be sparing the time and the shavings of your wit to offer advice to others?
George Bush got three million votes more than John Kerry in the last U.S. presidential election. Karl Rove is on bended knee every day in thanks for the contribution Fahrenheit 9/11 made to that surplus. If you can't win your own elections, Michael, what made you think you had anything to say about ours?
Other than that, I'm glad you called. But we defied you. Stephen Harper is prime minister, and I suppose that tells you all you need to know, which is: Canadians don't care what you think you think.
I know this will annoy all my friends on the Left, but I am indeed glad that the Conservatives won. For me it came down to my belief that the Liberals had to lose; they'd be in power too long and it had obviously corrupted them far past the point to anymore deserve the trust of Canadians. Though I am a supporter of same-sex marriage (and some other policies usually thought of as leftist), that's not what this election was about. Rather, the absolute importance in a democratic system for there to be at least two competing parties with a realistic chance of forming the government. Ever since the Progressive Conservative's 1993 blowout, through over 12 years of Liberal party rule (mostly having a majority in Parliament), that has not been the case. Nothing, in my opinion, was more important in this election than helping to restore this so necessary balance. And in the year and a half or so that Paul Martin has been Prime Minister, he has shown indecision instead of decisiveness, desperation instead of leadership and dishonesty instead of directness. All of these negatives were only made more obvious in the pressure of the campaign as the Liberal's scare tactics (being the entirety of their message) - vote for us because Stephen Harper's scary! - were found wanting. The Liberal Party has for years now been almost devoid of any passion other than holding onto power at all cost. A few years on the opposition benches should give them time and space to do some much needed thinking as to what exactly they stand for instead of madly careening from Left to Right saying whatever they think will offer the best political advantage as Paul Martin has shown himself wont to do.
Same-sex marriage is here to stay. Harper has commited to allowing a free vote if the issue is debated by Parliament and those who would like to preserve the "traditional" definition of marriage don't have the votes to make that happen; let alone use the Not-Withstanding clause of the Charter. As for implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, another reason given to not vote Conservative, the Liberal's hypocrisy knows no bounds in criticizing the Bush Administration for not going along with it and the Conservatives for not wanting to go along with it when they themselves have so far done little to reduce carbon dioxide emmisions. Even though the USA hasn't signed onto the deal they've done a better job than Canada has in reducing CO2 emmisions since the Liberal's have been in power.
The Canadian political scene just got a whole lot more interesting anyways. The question is now whether Harper will follow in the footsteps on John Diefenbaker - turning a minority into a massive majority in a year - or Joe Clark - losing a minority in nine months to a resurgent Pierre Trudeau. We can only wait and see...
I should have written more about the recent Canadian election during and in its immediate aftermath, but whatever my opinions were seemed to have been more eloquently put by others. So it is with a commentary I just had the fortune to find online by the inimicable Rex Murphy concerning a certain American's intrusion into the Canadian electoral debate. I expressed the same opinion to various friends, but he says it so damn well that I'll defer to him (thanks to Google News for bypassing the Globe & Mail's subscriber wall):
Well, it was a narrow escape. But we did it. Canadians have preserved their liberties and independence against the always rapacious American beast.
We knew there were powerful elements in the United States that wanted us to kowtow and genuflect to a simplistic worldview, that knuckle-dragging Good-versus-Evil script they have been remorselessly propagandizing all over the world since 9/11.
They have been trying to drag Canada into this simpleton's game for years, mauling truth and banishing nuance with a continuous stream of invective posing as reason, and caricature passing itself off as accuracy.
It's a difficult thing to resist the mighty United States at any time, and especially difficult in all the dust and storm of a national election. But we did it.
It was a close-run thing. But on Monday night, Canada fought back and won. On Jan. 20, just three days before our vote, Michael Moore, entrepreneur, fabulist, philosophe, issued a broadside to the citizens of this country warning us sternly, and with the imperious irony of which he is so fully a master, against the perils of electing a Stephen Harper government:
Do you want to help George Bush by turning Canada into his latest conquest? Is that how you want millions of us down here to see you from now on? The next notch on the cowboy belt?
I was worried at first that the subtlety of the pitch might obscure its wonderful impertinence — worried that the charm of Mr. Moore's address might distract Canadians from the consideration that an American millionaire celebrity pitchman was interfering in, and attempting to influence, the Canadian vote.
I was worried, too, that this one-man shock-and-awe “documentarian” might be leading a charge, that the other bright bulbs of international busybodyism were massed behind his formidable massed behind. Was Sean Penn on the way to monitor the vote in Etobicoke? Was he planning one of his patented fact-finding junkets like the visits that brought such comfort and peace to the citizens of Baghdad? I could see the headlines: Penn in Halifax. Visits Bar. Reads Construction-Site Posters. Warns Harper is Christian. Says “God Bless Canada.”
Well, that didn't happen. We're were spared the fast-food internationalism of Mr. Penn, and that probably meant we were spared assorted sermons from Alex Baldwin, Janeane Garofalo, Al Franken and that whole posse of celebrity dilettantes who see the whole world as an audience for their inch-deep, paint-by-numbers, cause-a-day homilies. Maybe they were off somewhere saving a seal.
Or, what is much more likely, maybe he concluded there was really no need for the secondary battalions. We, the respectful, bland and polite citizens of a country that is really only a farm team for the U.S. entertainment industry — hello Céline, Jim, Dan and Avril — would naturally be flattered into sheer insensibility that the portentous Mr. Moore even knew we were having an election. He has a taste for insolence, referring to Stephen Harper, who has more brain than Michael Moore has girth, as someone “who should be running for governor of Utah,“ and whose election would “reduce Canada to a cheap download of Bush & Co.”
One size fits all — that's our Mikey. Because he thinks he has a problem with George Bush, that must be the script for the rest of the world. This is the very essence of imperialism. To believe that your story is everyone else's. To believe that your political drama is the template for every other political drama in the whole wide world. Michael Moore could go to Fogo Island, Nfld., for the municipal elections and find them a perfect parable of the Halliburton super-conspiracy. He'd see Dick Cheney's influence in the selection of the town clerk.
Ego turns the world into one big mirror, and nothing looks back at the celebrity narcissus but the vacant monomaniac staring in. News flash, Mr. Moore: Our election wasn't about Dick Cheney. Or George Bush. Paul Martin (thank God) isn't Bill Clinton. Stephen Harper doesn't own a decoder ring sent him by Karl Rove. Considering the success you've had in stopping George Bush in the country where he actually runs — and on last report he is in his second term — do you really think you should be sparing the time and the shavings of your wit to offer advice to others?
George Bush got three million votes more than John Kerry in the last U.S. presidential election. Karl Rove is on bended knee every day in thanks for the contribution Fahrenheit 9/11 made to that surplus. If you can't win your own elections, Michael, what made you think you had anything to say about ours?
Other than that, I'm glad you called. But we defied you. Stephen Harper is prime minister, and I suppose that tells you all you need to know, which is: Canadians don't care what you think you think.
I know this will annoy all my friends on the Left, but I am indeed glad that the Conservatives won. For me it came down to my belief that the Liberals had to lose; they'd be in power too long and it had obviously corrupted them far past the point to anymore deserve the trust of Canadians. Though I am a supporter of same-sex marriage (and some other policies usually thought of as leftist), that's not what this election was about. Rather, the absolute importance in a democratic system for there to be at least two competing parties with a realistic chance of forming the government. Ever since the Progressive Conservative's 1993 blowout, through over 12 years of Liberal party rule (mostly having a majority in Parliament), that has not been the case. Nothing, in my opinion, was more important in this election than helping to restore this so necessary balance. And in the year and a half or so that Paul Martin has been Prime Minister, he has shown indecision instead of decisiveness, desperation instead of leadership and dishonesty instead of directness. All of these negatives were only made more obvious in the pressure of the campaign as the Liberal's scare tactics (being the entirety of their message) - vote for us because Stephen Harper's scary! - were found wanting. The Liberal Party has for years now been almost devoid of any passion other than holding onto power at all cost. A few years on the opposition benches should give them time and space to do some much needed thinking as to what exactly they stand for instead of madly careening from Left to Right saying whatever they think will offer the best political advantage as Paul Martin has shown himself wont to do.
Same-sex marriage is here to stay. Harper has commited to allowing a free vote if the issue is debated by Parliament and those who would like to preserve the "traditional" definition of marriage don't have the votes to make that happen; let alone use the Not-Withstanding clause of the Charter. As for implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, another reason given to not vote Conservative, the Liberal's hypocrisy knows no bounds in criticizing the Bush Administration for not going along with it and the Conservatives for not wanting to go along with it when they themselves have so far done little to reduce carbon dioxide emmisions. Even though the USA hasn't signed onto the deal they've done a better job than Canada has in reducing CO2 emmisions since the Liberal's have been in power.
The Canadian political scene just got a whole lot more interesting anyways. The question is now whether Harper will follow in the footsteps on John Diefenbaker - turning a minority into a massive majority in a year - or Joe Clark - losing a minority in nine months to a resurgent Pierre Trudeau. We can only wait and see...
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
So about this supposed "War on Christmas"
If you're foolish enough to listen to/watch any of the various blowhards on that paragon of intellectual idiocy, FOX News (O'Reilly and Hannity among others) you might be under the impression that the dark forces of liberal secularism, including the ACLU and the NewYork Times, are waging a not-so secret campaign against Christmas as part of their agenda to destroy all that is good and holy in America. The preposterousness of this is, I hope, obvious to all even semi-intelligent people. Yes, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) has filed suit against some governments for allowing nativity sets, an obvious Christian symbol, in public buildings, but then the 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution is very clear: "Congress [by most taken to mean not just the Federal legislature, but all levels of government] shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." For any level of government to privilege Christian religious symbolism above Judaic, Islamic or any other is to go against, if not the letter then definitely the spirit, of this very important constitutional principle. To exagerate this necessary process as a "War on Christmas" or Christians in general is to engage in the most ridiculous and shameful demagoguery - seemingly a specialty at FOX News.
Okay, so some corporations have opted to go with more generic pronouncements like "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," but then why is this a problem? There are a lot of people who aren't Christian whether they, she or anyone else likes it or not so why not use words that include those celebrating Hannukah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice or the non-religious just enjoying a holiday?
What I find most ironic about those who complain about businesses not celebrating Christmas though - with some even encouraging people to boycott those that do not - is that, if anything, Christians should be thankful for this happening. After all, haven't many Christians (including members of my own family) been decrying for years the rampant commercialization of Christmas? That this date meant to celebrate the birth of Christ has become instead a time for businesses to boost their profit margins by selling things to people buying gifts? Think of the Macy's Christmas parade in New York City made famous in the movie Miracle on 34th Street. Was it really to celebrate the birth of Christ or simply a way to improve their financial bottom line by using Christmas to promote their stores and thereby sell more products? The answer is of course obvious. Rather than lamenting the lack of Christmas references in society, Christians should be thankful that Christmas is no longer being as much used by those who care nothing about Christ in order to make money - rather sacriligious don't you think?
No one is proposing getting rid of Christmas, but in a largely secular society where the real meaning of Christmas has, whether one likes it or not, been largely lost in the "sinfulness of modern society(here in Taiwan being a great example; very few Christians here, Christmas isn't even a holiday from work, few people know what any of the symbols mean, yet the songs are played, the trees are put up and I got stuck being Santa Claus for school class Christmas pictures and for handing out candy), Christians should be glad to have it back from those who would self-interestedly profit from it. Was it not Christ himself after all who cleansed the Temple of the money-changers and traders?
Okay, so some corporations have opted to go with more generic pronouncements like "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," but then why is this a problem? There are a lot of people who aren't Christian whether they, she or anyone else likes it or not so why not use words that include those celebrating Hannukah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice or the non-religious just enjoying a holiday?
What I find most ironic about those who complain about businesses not celebrating Christmas though - with some even encouraging people to boycott those that do not - is that, if anything, Christians should be thankful for this happening. After all, haven't many Christians (including members of my own family) been decrying for years the rampant commercialization of Christmas? That this date meant to celebrate the birth of Christ has become instead a time for businesses to boost their profit margins by selling things to people buying gifts? Think of the Macy's Christmas parade in New York City made famous in the movie Miracle on 34th Street. Was it really to celebrate the birth of Christ or simply a way to improve their financial bottom line by using Christmas to promote their stores and thereby sell more products? The answer is of course obvious. Rather than lamenting the lack of Christmas references in society, Christians should be thankful that Christmas is no longer being as much used by those who care nothing about Christ in order to make money - rather sacriligious don't you think?
No one is proposing getting rid of Christmas, but in a largely secular society where the real meaning of Christmas has, whether one likes it or not, been largely lost in the "sinfulness of modern society(here in Taiwan being a great example; very few Christians here, Christmas isn't even a holiday from work, few people know what any of the symbols mean, yet the songs are played, the trees are put up and I got stuck being Santa Claus for school class Christmas pictures and for handing out candy), Christians should be glad to have it back from those who would self-interestedly profit from it. Was it not Christ himself after all who cleansed the Temple of the money-changers and traders?
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