Jumping ship

The progressive left has many problems but one that is becoming ever more dangerous is that many "leftists" are tripping over themselves to justify warmongering. We all know how Hitchens jumped ship and became a neocon but what is worse is the well meaning, but not too bright, Sasha Abramsky, who claims still to be a progressive.

Where Abramsky goes wrong is apparent from the opening of his piece:

Over these four years, I have spent more time than is entirely healthy obsessing over the new realities.

What new realities? The world didn't really change on 9/11. The Bushistas like to say so but they know very well that it was just one more shitty thing in a world of shit. Yes, it marked a new phase: the people we've been shitting on for several centuries have found a way to strike back at us. But the reality is the same as it ever was: the rich West is fighting a war against the poor South. We do it by supporting fascists in small South American countries, by destroying crops in the name of the "war on drugs", by dumping our goods on their markets, by indebting their nations and allowing them to use the indebtedness to buy tanks instead of medicine, by helping suppress anything that has a hint of communalism (let alone communism) and might lift the poor out of their misery (and into a position to demand better wages, which would have the consequence of making goods more dear for us), and when we felt we needed to by assassinating their leaders, invading their countries, bombing them and generally menacing them. We have considerably more blood on our hands than the couple of thousand killed on 9/11, although the grinding daily pain of most of the world makes less spectacular TV.

Abramsky is "saddened by how utterly incapable were those same arguments [that the West brought the war on terror onto its own heads] of generating responses to the fanaticism of our time."

But Abramsky has already poisoned the well with the unspoken but clear notion that the only "response" worth talking about is a violent, coercive one. There are many ways to deal with the problems posed by Al Qaeda. We could meet some of their demands, which are not wholly unreasonable (despite Abramsky's hysterical, wildly wrong analysis of them). We could undermine their grassroots support by alleviating some of the problems that feed it. We could leave the Middle East to its own devices and cease our paternalistic approach, which has made the place a godforsaken mess.

Abramsky whines:
While being careful to denounce the bombers and their agenda, these advocates uttered variations on the same theme: Get out of Iraq, bring home the troops from all points East, curtail support for Israel, develop a more sensible, non-oil-based energy policy, and our troubles would dissipate in the wind.


I think that's a straw man but even so, Abramsky does not manage to knock it down. Even if it is true that these measures would not be sufficient -- and I agree that more would be needed, how would they hurt? How would actually being sensitive to the pain these things cause make things worse?

Abramsky is particularly unhappy about the notion that the 7/7 attacks were prompted by our illegal and savage destruction of Iraq (he doesn't give any credence, clearly, to the statement by one of the bombers that that was precisely what motivated him):

“These are Blair’s bombs,” Pilger, famous for helping to bring to light the genocidal actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, wrote while the bodies of the July 7 victims were still being identified.

Abramsky cannot even help being snide. We were all thinking it and some of us said it. Is there a truthfree buffer zone around terror attacks? Is there an amount of time after which we are allowed to give our opinions? Blair blamed the bombings on a desire to destroy our freedom on the very day of the attacks. Where was Abramsky's sneering then? The victims weren't even identified (or counted) and there was Blair, trying to use the attacks as more fuel for his crusade on Iraq, the "war on terror" that has so far made little progress in lessening terror but has shared it around.

Criticising the reference to Bin Laden's "We don't attack Sweden", Abramsky rides off to fairyland:

"And his reference to Sweden misses the point that Al Qaeda’s modus operandi involves attacking nodal points of Western power rather than peripheral regions."

Because Bali is so very nodal. And Madrid is famed for being central to Europe.

The analysis, as is often the case, is twisted to fit the thesis. AQ say "we will attack the nations who are attacking Iraq". They or their cohorts strike Spain, the UK and Indonesia (as a proxy for Australia). And they say, Denmark and Italy are next. A few days after saying that, a plot is foiled in Italy. Whose hypothesis fits better?

I won't even begin to address the boringly racist ignorance of Abramsky that doesn't allow that AQ have been most active in countries that far from being "nodal" aren't even in the West: Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia. Its cohorts have also been active in secessionary fighting in Indonesia, and in Malaysia and the Philippines.

Abramsky means to say, of course, that among AQ's targets have been nodal blah de blahs. They decided that one way to make us sit up, take notice and wildly overreact would be to attack New York. Well, Sasha, they too can do "analysis". They're not stupid.

They assume that groups like Al Qaeda are almost entirely reactive, responding to Western policies and actions, rather than being pro-active creatures with a virulent homegrown agenda, one not just of defense but of conquest, destruction of rivals, and, ultimately and at its most megalomaniacal, absolute subjugation.

Abramsky goes off the dial in his "analysis" of AQ. No one thinks they are entirely "reactive". Most analysts of the calibre of Fisk or Klein are well aware of how AQ grew and what it stands for.

But the notion, bruited about mostly by the unhinged neocons, that AQ wants to "subjugate" the world is demented. It's the offshoot of a social movement in the Islamic world, which is a great deal broader than just AQ, embracing as it does the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, Islamists of all hues and reformists in places as disparate as Turkey and Pakistan. Its agenda is not just "homegrown"; it's almost entirely internal. Far from seeing it as an achievable aim -- however desirable -- to convert the whole world to its vision of Islam, it seeks to purify the Muslim world.

Sasha, they really do just want us to fuck off. It really is that simple. They see us as invaders who want to impose our values and destroy theirs. They see us as having done that in the Crusades. They see us as having plonked Israel into the middle of the Muslim world, and to have supported it even beyond any notion of justice or equity.

Yes, they hate democracies. But fuck it, I hate democracies too. I hate corporate control; the huge gap between rich and poor; the rampant corruption and injustice. They hate what is bad about us and they struggle to see any good. When Karen Hughes went to talk to Saudi women, she told them that she was fighting for them to be allowed to drive. They told her they simply didn't care about that; they are not so interested in the small stuff as they are in the major issues of the security they feel in their tradition. The "rights" we insist are important: to vote for whoever will disempower you and put your share of your nation's resources into someone else's pockets for four years; to have "free speech" in media that are controlled by corporations; to be free to consume at the expense of our world and everything and everybody in it; well, they don't really see the benefits of any of that.

Our way has been to steal, to pilfer, to destroy. To fuck the place up. And it's not made us happy.

Simply blaming the never quite defined, yet implicitly all powerful “West” for the ills of the world doesn’t explain why Al Qaeda slaughtered thousands of Americans eighteen months before Saddam was overthrown.

There's no canard unturned for Abramsky. This is one I first heard from Blair: "how can you blame it on Iraq when 9/11 preceded Iraq?"

But we don't blame it on Iraq. We blame it on the occupation of Palestine, the Mandate, the support for the Sauds, the creation of nonsense states to serve our ends, the corruption that we have engendered in the Middle East, our armed forces in their holy lands, our support for corrupt families that sell us oil at a price we like, the crippling sanctions that we imposed after we had attacked Iraq and destroyed much of it the first time, our rampant hypocrisy in denying nuclear technology to Iran while allowing our Israeli friends to possess the bomb. And so on.

Nor does it explain the psychopathic joy this death cult takes in mass killings and in ritualistic, snuff-movie-style beheadings. The term “collateral damage” may be inept, but it at least suggests that the killing of civilians in pursuit of a state’s war aims is unintentional, regrettable; there is nothing unintentional, there is no regret, in the targeting of civilians by Al Qaeda’s bombers.

One has to pinch oneself when reading this stuff. Three things spring immediately to mind: one, that both Abramsky and I are citizens of nations that murdered many, many civilians perfectly intentionally in World War Two, and in other conflicts (have we forgotten Hiroshima, Sasha? Tokyo? Dresden? In the latter, we killed the emergency services so that it would be even more horrific); two, that "collateral damage" is a myth -- if you drop a 500-lb bomb on a street, you know people will die, pretending you didn't "intend" it is the worst kind of sophistry -- Sasha, if AQ claimed that they destroyed the WTC to kill a CIA operative, would that make it okay? They could claim the other 2000 were just "collateral damage" and that would all be regrettable but c'est la guerre, yes?; and third, AQ are terrorists! They are attempting to terrify us. They are saying not only will you risk being killed if you go to Iraq as a mercenary, but you will be desecrated. It's horrible and it's meant to be. We used to hang people from gibbets as an example. We don't think our ancestors were psychopaths for doing it.

Indeed, what Al Qaeda apparently hates most about “the West” are its best points: the pluralism, the rationalism, individual liberty, the emancipation of women, the openness and social dynamism that represent the strongest legacy of the Enlightenment.

How is this "apparent" though? Certainly, AQ never says this. It never says it hates these values. It is apparent because talking airheads like Abramsky keep saying it's so. They repeat one another so often that they believe it's true. It's true that they dislike the outcomes of some of these things, but as concepts they are so numinous that they are pretty much meaningless: "pluralism" is frowned on by AQ because they believe Allah frowns on it; "rationalism" is scarcely in evidence in the West, let alone one of its best features, given the support in its leading nation for "intelligent design" and other "faith-based" modes of thought; "individual liberty" means no more, no less than "liberty to consume", which you largely have in an Islamist paradise, except that you can't buy booze, porn or men's arses (well, it's their paradise, not ours); "the emancipation of women" means freeing them to work, not to care for their children, and to work at emulating men in all the venality and corruption the latter indulge in -- not everyone sees that as wholly positive; "openness" does not mean that everyone has an equal chance to be open -- the rich are a lot more open than the poor, and consensus can be just as deadening of dissent as religion -- one notes Abramsky's comment about Pilger that I quoted supra; "social dynamism"? They think of it as upheaval. They think that striving to get up the greasy pole inevitably involves fucking others over, clambering over the bodies to get up there.

Neither vision is perfect but neither is either wholly irrational or wrongheaded. Pretending that their views have no merit is just another instance of the blinkered, racist arrogance that they hate us for.

In his 1945 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper, who had fled to New Zealand to escape the Nazis, argued that a defense of rationalism, a refusal to kowtow to totalitarian ideologies and belief systems, was a moral imperative. He believed that utopian political visions tended to demand absolute loyalty and submission from their subjects, a submission generally enforced through state-sponsored coercion. By contrast, he argued, in the Open Society flexibility and dissent were the norm, and progressive social change could be brought about incrementally without wholesale violence and oppression.

The irony is lost on Abrams. He is unable to see that "liberal democracy" is an ideology like any other, of course. He is unable to understand that to the ideologue, everyone else is in the grip of a murderous ideology while he himself is a beacon of reason in a sea of madness.

posted by Dr Zen @ 4:09 pm