Normanising imperialism
Don at What is Hip? lauds whacko rightard Norman Podhoretz, who spewed some of his usual dribblings at the Opinion Journal. But why do you say he's mad, says Don?Well, this is why:
Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war.
Of course it did, Norman. The massed armed forces of Nazi Saudi Arabia invaded Poland and... hang on, no, it's not like that at all, is it?
A calmer observer might say that the situation now is rather like the seventies, when leftist groups carried out terrorist attacks across Europe. The difference being that we considered those as criminal acts, needing police action, not excuses for the invasion of other nations.
Like the Cold War, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism,
You always know you're confronting a nutter when the word "Islamofascism" is dropped like a wet turd into the guy's writing. Osama is not, of course, a fascist, by anyone's standards. His ideal world would look very different from Hitler's, or even Mussolini's. He's not a nationalist as such, definitely not a corporatist and, if Norman had ever read the writings that inspired him, or his own writings, he'd know that Osama is not a fan of a heavily centralised state either, far from it. Indeed, the Islamist militancy grew as a response to authoritarian governments, particularly that in Egypt, and its chief complaint against the States is not, as the right likes to shriek, that it is too free, but that it is too keen on making imperialist interventions to plunder other people's wealth, often at the cost of their wellbeing.
Indeed, the Americans far more closely resemble fascists proper than do the Islamists. Reprehensible though they are, it's a mistake to conflate womenhating and religious intolerance with fascism; it is also a mistake to bundle the authoritarians in Iran and Saudi Arabia with the resistance in Palestine and the Islamist militants that loosely make up Al Qaeda, particularly given that some of these people hate others among them more even than they do the States.
Norman goes on to mutter that "Islamofascism" is
yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is global in scope
but this is utter nonsense. Do these people really think this rubbish or do they just write it to stir up hatred? It's obvious why rightards want to connect Osama with Hitler. WW2 is one of the few wars America has fought in which it had any claim to justice. The world appreciates the sacrifice Americans made to help rid us of Hitler (although it wasn't so grateful for the much larger sacrifice Russia made), and it has enormous kudos for it. So it's in the interest of the war party to try to paint the Islamists as a similar threat to Hitler. Were they to more accurately compare him with Baader and Meinhoff, they'd have a lot less sympathy for the "collateral damage" to uninvolved parties.
What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right.
Of course they can be understood in that way, but that's the last thing the right wants. They have made strenuous efforts to paint the attack on Iraq as part of a bigger attack on "Islamofascism" because if it is not painted that way, it's revealed as an enormous act of piracy.
But there is no connection. Saddam and Al Qaeda were not linked in any way but being coreligionists. And only barely at that: Saddam was a secular leader, hated by the Islamists. They would have hanged him themselves given the chance. One reminds Norman that Hitler was nominally a Christian. Would that have justified an attack on other Christian countries under the notion that we were combatting "Christofascism"?
Norman goes on to claim that Iran is the "main sponsor" of terrorism. This simply isn't true. Were we discussing Israel alone, maybe you could claim that. But Iran has nothing to do with Islamist terror. It is involved with the fighting in Iraq but after all, Iraq is its neighbour, invaded it recently and houses a population with strong ties to Iran.
Norman says of Iran that:
Their first priority, as repeatedly and unequivocally announced by their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is to "wipe Israel off the map"
Where do you start with rantings like this? First of all, Ahmadinejad did not say it was a priority or even an aim of Iran to "wipe Israel off the map". He said the regime in Israel would be consigned to the pages of history given time. He said it once, although he has expressed the same sentiment in different ways. And it is not "unequivocal" that he stated that that was Iran's "first priority": it is simply a lie.
But Ahmadinejad's ambitions are not confined to the destruction of Israel. He also wishes to dominate the greater Middle East, and thereby to control the oilfields of the region and the flow of oil out of it through the Persian Gulf.
In Norman's invented world in his head, this is what Ahmadinejad wants. But the truth is that Iran wants recognition of its status as a regional player. It didn't fight Iraq for hegemony over the Middle East. That's ridiculous. Iran promotes Shia interests, but that's to be expected. After all, Saudi Arabia does the opposite, and we don't mind that. What the right fears here is that Iran will contest our attempt to do precisely what he accuses it of.
Nor are Ahmadinejad's ambitions merely regional in scope. He has a larger dream of extending the power and influence of Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war.
We all have dreams, Norman.
More of this bullshit will just hurt too much to dissect. This is what rightists do: they do not "think" about how the world is and how America should act in it. They invent a fantasy that fits how America already is acting. The only question is whether arseholes like Podhoretz are crazy or vile: whether they believe this utter shite or whether they say it to justify the bad things they like their nation to do. Look, I can deal with a bit of honest-to-goodness imperialism. We can argue over whether it's a reasonable thing for a nation to exploit others to maintain its own wealth. But don't let's pretend that if we're doing that, we have some other moral purpose. This witter, aimed at normalising imperialism, should not be allowed to pass unchallenged, as it so often is, and it definitely should not be signed up to by decent people, or those who aspire to be considered decent at least.
posted by Dr Zen @ 1:33 pm
18 Comments:
Excellent post Zen.
President, I have to say that I don't care whether Ishmael, Isaac or Muhammad himself were babies, 17 or anything in between. It's all bollocks. But thanks for commenting.
All land claims are lies.
It doesn't matter if it's land claims in Israel, England, America, Antartica, or the moon.
All land claims are lies.
The same applies to Cuba, Russia, China, India, Africa, Australia, etc..
All land claims are lies.
And all land owners are liars.
They're true enough. I guess you mean they're ill founded. I agree, but it's of no account, given that the consensus is that they are not.
Concensus never changed a lie into the truth. And it never will.
Oftentimes, consensus creates truth, Zero. This is one of those times.
"Land claims are lies" can mean two things, I think: first, "land claims are not legitimate" and second, "land claims are not well founded". What is legitimate is decided by consensus. In this case, the second part simply doesn't affect that consensus, and is of no real account. You'll recall that I argued that it is true though, in re squirrels and peaches.
i think you're trying to equate theft with lies.
an eaten peach is neither a lie nor a theft.
OTOH, a squirrel who claimed that the peach was legally its to eat would be a lie.
all land claims are lies.
but not all property is theft.
You can't have it both ways.
Oftentimes, consensus creates truth, Zero. This is one of those times.
Concensus only "creates" consensus.
100% out of 100% of the people "in charge" may agree that you are a seven-legged Martian squirrel staeling peachs from the rest of the galaxy, but that consensus will never make it so merely by agreeing that it's so.
And it is not at all ironic that what is true is not at all decided like the definition of ironic words in a dictionary are.
Concensus may attempt to avoid land related conflicts but concensus never changed a lie into the truth. And it never will.
All land claims are lies.
But the rationalizations otherwise are quite persuasive.
Dude, there is no fact of the matter in land claims, the way there is with squirrels. I may think there is a squirrel in my loungeroom, and you may think there is not, and we might agree that there is a fact of there being a squirrel or not. (We might not but let's assume we do.)
When discussing whether a claim to land is legitimate, clearly there is no fact of the matter -- without God, at least. There is no absolute truth to claims of this kind. You're far too fond of thinking that the truths of concepts are as solid as the truths of entities.
You can't have it both ways.
point mine.
anyway, theft is not the same as lies. [*]
though they are often closely tied together.
[*] see my squirrel example above.
the squirrel did not steal the peach, but if it claimed that it had the legal right to it, it would be lying.
the existence of bogus legalities does not a liar create.
Sigh. Pointless to argue with someone who just can't get out of first gear, but here it is:
If land claims are a priori illegitimate, so are "legal rights" to any property.
i never said that eating a peach had ANYTHING to do with legal rights (let alone consensus).
instead, i have always maintained that eating a peach was an example of property not being theft.
you, OTOH, have always claimed that a squirrel eating a peach on nearth was stealing it from the Martians, etc..
recap:
all land claims are lies.
all laws are lies.
the truth is the truth.
that's so far out of first gear that you can't even remember reading my bumper sticker anymore.
You’ve not shown Norman to be mad. You’ve shown that his worldview differs from yours, and explained his worldview as based in cynicism and greed. Whether or not that’s true to any extent, he isn’t mad.
You’ve raised several points on which we both disagree with him. As I said, he only echoes my views at the strategic level. Bigger, in other words, than for example Ahmadenijad’s stupid-clever prods about Israel.
You wrote about someone as being mad, and said that what he, “fears here is that Iran will contest our attempt to do precisely what he accuses it of.” Here you assert that we would attempt to use nuclear threats and targeted assassinations to control in a very literal way the flow of oil, thus playing the global economy and the internal politics of many nations like puppets. As much as we’ve found it easier to support the Sauds, Mubaraks and Pahlevis of the region than to found some sort of stable “democracy”, our influence has been generally to keep the markets open. It is precisely the open market that best serves mankind, and that I at least would see preserved. You base your view on something else entirely. So if Norman is still mad, so are you.
This fear – paranoia if you prefer – that Iran is positioning itself to become a major player might not, I admit, reflect anything real. Iran might in fact be a stable and just champion of human rights and rational economics. Certainly many believed as much about Germany in 1938. But it wasn’t that long ago you yourself advocated the possibility of pre-empting Iran’s nuclear program with targeted strikes. Maybe you’ve changed your mind.
By the way, regarding Israel and our friend Mahmoud, the "countdown to the destruction of Israel has begun, and we will soon witness the destruction of the Zionist regime." More internal fire-stoking, I suppose, but he knows he has a global audience.
"The open markets best serve mankind" is exactly the kind of madness we're talking about, Don.
And Don, you don't think it's madness to describe Iran, the resistance in Iraq, the Palestinian resistance and any and all other Muslims with a bee in their bonnet as a vast "Islamofascist" conspiracy because you share in the lunacy.
And dude, there's a huge difference between "hooray, Israel's going down" and "yeah, let's take Israel down". I know you rightards like to smear the line, but it's there.
Comparing Iran with Hitler's Germany is also mad. I'm not even going there. It's so dim, so lacking in insight into either 1938 Germany or 2007 Iran that it doesn't bear the least scrutiny.
And I still do support airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities if they closely approach having a nuclear weapon. I would prefer another way though, and I don't feel that there's any need for that to be anywhere near on the table just now. I would like to see all the nations of the Middle East agree to remain nuclear-free in their own interests. Sadly, one of them has already gone nuclear. We never hear any condemnation of that. I also remind you of this, Don: Ahmedinajad might posture and Iran might fund proxies, but he hasn't carried out an aggressive action against anyone at any time. When you talk about Hitler, you have to remind yourself who has been prosecuting a war of aggression against a sovereign state for these past few years, and who is threatening to do it again if not appeased. And just as Hitler scapegoated Jews, you rightards scapegoat Muslims.
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