Eteraz on Muslim reforms in the last year..

Posted on July 25, 2007 by L

“So let’s think about the reforms we’ve seen in the one point five years I’ve been blogging about Islamic Reform: Liberal Democracy affirmed, death penalty for apostasy dealt huge blow, global Muslim scholars reaching a consensus that one Muslim cannot declare another non-Muslims, outlawing of female genital mutilation, Pakistan’s Women’s Protection Bill, UAE outlawed lashing, Kuwaiti women got right to vote, Saudi religious police got taken to court by a woman and lost, Moroccan women were allowed to become clerics and muftis, domestic violence was declared un-islamic in those countries where it is illegal (I still don’t understand why it wasn’t just made forbidden outright)…these are just the big ones. I’ll compile a list of the small ones later.

Postscript 2:

The fight is not over, not even close. All of these rulings now need to be *implemented* into the legislative systems of various countries. We saw how hard getting the Women’s Protection Bill through the Pakistani parliament was. We also saw that reformists couldn’t get the death penalty for blasphemy abolished via the Parliament in Pakistan.

Reality is, that getting prominent scholars to support reforms was only the first step. The harder part will be to convince the masses. God, but at least we are getting the scholars on our side. Also, even within apostasy, the issue of civil penalties to be done away with is important…..”

From the indefatigable Ali Eteraz.

Comment:

So, while the Islamic world wises up and begins (note, begins) liberalizing religious thought, are we going to be content to lose the political achievements of the last 400 years of AngloAmerican common law and jurisprudence?

The Race Thing: Derbyshire on McDonald

Posted on July 24, 2007 by L

If you are going to link my posts link them with the caption AS IT REALLY IS or indicate that ITS YOUR caption.When the issue is so inflammatory, the way you link my post can create the impression that your opinions are somehow endorsed by my blog.Please link appropriately as requested.My post:

I went back and looked for the Derbyshire review of Kevin McDonald. That’s the piece the Jewcy interview I referred to in my previous post started from.Derbyshire’s criticism of it seems right to me. Which is why I think that tabooing discussions like that doesn’t do any good. A bad argument can usually be shown up for being bad.

Besides that, JD’s own criticism isn’t free from a couple of errors: for one thing, that reference to the 1924 immigration restrictions as being non-racist but only raciaLIST.

(And I will need to go back and research it a bit more).

But I recall it had a color component in it, not just a fear of the destabilizing effects, as D says.

Read the Thind decision, based on color (1923).

Anyway, here’s D in his usual blunt words:

The American Conservative
March 10th, 2003

[Couple of notes here. (1) The review title, like most titles of pieces, was not mine. It was thought up by the editors of The American Conservative. For the record, I submitted this review under the suggested title “The Jew Thing.” (2) This review generated a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with readers and commentators. I have put some of this, with my own responses to it, in my “Notes” pages.]

The Marx of the Anti-Semites

The Culture of Critique
By Kevin MacDonald
1stBooks; 466 pp. $9.00

One evening early on in my career as an opinion journalist in the U.S.A., I found myself in a roomful of mainstream conservative types, standing around in groups and gossiping. Because I was new to the scene, a lot of the names they were tossing about were unknown to me, so I could not take much part in the conversation. Then I caught one name that I recognized. I had just recently read and admired a piece published in Chronicles under that name. I gathered from the conversation that the owner of the name had once been a regular contributor to much more widely read conservative publications, the kind that have salaried congressional correspondents and full-service LexisNexis accounts, but that he was welcome at those august portals no longer. In all innocence, I asked why this was so. “Oh,” explained one of my companions, “he got the Jew thing.” The others in our group all nodded their understanding. Apparently no further explanation was required. The Jew thing. It was said in the kind of tone you might use of an automobile with a cracked engine block, or a house with subsiding foundations. Nothing to be done with him, poor fellow. No use to anybody now. Got the Jew thing. They shoot horses, don’t they?

Plainly, getting the Jew thing was a sort of occupational hazard of conservative journalism in the United States, an exceptionally lethal one, which the career-wise writer should strive to avoid. I resolved that I would do my best, so far as personal integrity allowed, not to get the Jew thing. I had better make it clear to the reader that at the time of writing, I have not yet got the Jew thing — that I am in fact a philosemite and a well-wisher of Israel, for reasons I have explained in various places, none of them difficult for the nimble web surfer to find.

If, however, you have got the Jew thing, or if, for reasons unfathomable to me, you would like to get it, Kevin MacDonald is your man. MacDonald is a tenured professor of psychology at California State University in Long Beach.. He is best known for his three books about the Jews, developing the idea that Judaism has for 2,000 years or so been a “group evolutionary strategy.” The subject of this review is a re-issue, in soft cover, of the third and most controversial of those books, The Culture of Critique, first published in 1998. Its subtitle is: “An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement in twentieth-century intellectual and political movements.” The re-issue differs from the original mainly by the addition of a 66-page preface, which covers some more recent developments in the field, and offers responses to some of the criticisms that appeared when the book was first published. The number of footnotes has also been increased, from 135 to 181, and they have all been moved from the chapter-ends to the back of the book. A small amount of extra material has been added to the text. So far as I could tell from a cursory comparison of the two editions, nothing has been subtracted.

The main thrust of this book’s argument is that Jewish or Jewish-dominated organizations and movements engaged in a deliberate campaign to de-legitimize the Gentile culture of their host nations — most particularly the U.S.A. — through the twentieth century, and that this campaign is one aspect of a long-term survival strategy for the Jews as an ethny. In MacDonald’s own words: “[T]he rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC.” He illustrates his thesis by a close analysis of six distinct intellectual and political phenomena: the anti-Darwinian movement in the social sciences (most particularly the no-such-thing-as-race school of anthropology associated with Franz Boas), the prominence of Jews in left-wing politics, the psychoanalytic movement, the Frankfurt School of social science (which sought to explain social problems in terms of individual psychopathology), the “New York intellectuals” centered on Partisan Review during the 1940s and 1950s, and Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy.

MacDonald writes from the point of view of evolutionary psychology — a term that many writers would put in quotes, as the epistemological status of this field is still a subject of debate. I have a few doubts of my own on this score, and sometimes wonder whether evolutionary psychology may eventually turn out to be one of those odd fads that the human sciences, especially in the U.S.A., are susceptible to. The twentieth century saw quite a menagerie of these fads: Behaviorism, Sheldonian personality-typing by body shape (ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph), the parapsychological reseaches of Dr. J.B. Rhine, the sexology of Alfred Kinsey, and so on. I think that the evolutionary psychologists are probably on to something, but some of their more extreme claims seem to me to be improbable and unpleasantly nihilistic. Here, for example, is Kevin MacDonald in a previous book: “The human mind was not designed to seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals.” This trembles on the edge of deconstructionist words-have-no-meaning relativism, of the kind that philosopher David Stove called “puppetry theory,” and that MacDonald himself debunks very forcefully in Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique. After all, if it is so, should we not suppose that evolutionary psychologists are pursuing their own “group evolutionary strategy”? And that, in criticizing them, I am pursuing mine? And that there is, therefore, no point at all in my writing, or your reading, any further?

To be fair to Kevin MacDonald, not all of his writing is as silly as that. The Culture of Critique includes many good things. There is a spirited defense of scientific method, for example. One of the sub-themes of the book is that Jews are awfully good at creating pseudosciences — elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content — and that this peculiar talent must be connected somehow with the custom, persisted in through long pre-Enlightenment centuries, of immersing young men in the study of a vast body of argumentative writing, with status in the community — and marriage options, and breeding opportunities — awarded to those who have best mastered this mass of meaningless esoterica. (This is not an original observation, and the author does not claim it as such. In fact he quotes historian Paul Johnson to the same effect, and earlier comments along these lines were made by Koestler and Popper.) MacDonald is very scathing about these circular and self-referential thought-systems, especially in the case of psychoanalysis and the “pathologization of Gentile culture” promoted by the Frankfurt School. Here he was precisely on my wavelength, and I found myself cheering him on. Whatever you may think of MacDonald and his theories, there is no doubt he believes himself to be doing careful objective science. The same could, of course, be said of Sheldon, Rhine, Kinsey et al.

It is good to be reminded, too, with forceful supporting data, that the 1924 restrictions on immigration to the U.S. were not driven by any belief on the part of the restrictionists in their own racial superiority, but by a desire to stabilize the nation’s ethnic balance, which is by no means the same thing. (In fact, as MacDonald points out, one of the worries of the restrictionists was that more clever and energetic races like the Japanese would, if allowed to enter, have negative effects on social harmony.) MacDonald’s chapter on “Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy” is a detailed survey of a topic I have not seen discussed elsewhere. If the Jews learned anything from the twentieth century, it was surely the peril inherent in being the only identifiable minority in a society that is otherwise ethnically homogeneous. That thoughtful Jewish-Americans should seek to avoid this fate is understandable. That their agitation was the main determinant of postwar U.S. immigration policy seems to me more doubtful. And if it is true, we must believe that 97 per cent of the U.S. population ended up dancing to the tune of the other 3 per cent. If that is true, the only thing to say is the one Shakespeare’s Bianca would have said: “The more fool they.”

Similarly with MacDonald’s discussion of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire and the many horrors that ensued. This was until recently another taboo topic, though the aged Alexander Solzhenitsyn, presumably feeling he has nothing much to lose, has recently taken a crack at it. I believe MacDonald was driven by necessity here. Having posited that Jews are out to “destroy” (this is his own word) Gentile society, he was open to the riposte that if, after 2,000 years of trying, the Jews had failed to accomplish this objective in even one instance, Gentiles don’t actually have much to worry about. So: the Jews destroyed Russia. Though MacDonald’s discussion of this topic is interesting and illuminating, it left me unconvinced. As he says: “The issue of the Jewish identification of Bolsheviks who were Jews by birth is complex.” Paul Johnson gives only 15-20 percent of the delegates at early Party congresses as Jewish. If the other 80-85 per cent were permitting themselves to be manipulated by such a small minority, then we are back with Bianca.

Since the notion of “group evolutionary strategy” is central to MacDonald’s case, I wish he had been better able to convince me of its validity. For instance: I happen to be fairly well acquainted with the culture and history of China, a nation which, like the diaspora Jews, awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities to young men who had shown mastery of great masses of content-free written material. Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China’s history knows that the guy who gets the girl — who ends up, in fact, with a bevy of “secondary wives” who are thereby denied to less intellectual males — is the one who has aced the Imperial examinations and been rewarded with a District Magistrate position. This went on for two thousand years. Today’s Chinese even, like Ashkenazi Jews, display an average intelligence higher by several points than the white-Gentile mean. So: was Confucianism a “group evolutionary strategy”? If so, then plainly the Chinese of China were, in MacDonald’s jargon, the “ingroup”. But then… what was the “outgroup”?

The more I think about the term “group evolutionary strategy,” in fact, the more I wonder if it is not complete nonsense. From an evolutionary point of view, would not the optimum strategy for almost any European Jew at almost any point from A.D. 79 to A.D. 1800 or so have been conversion to Christianity? Rather than learning to argue fine points of theology, wouldn’t a better strategy have been to learn, say, fencing, or Latin? Sure, the Jews held together as a group across 2,000 years. The gypsies held together pretty well, too, across many centuries; yet their “group evolutionary strategy” was the opposite of the Jews’ at almost every point. And the Jewish over-representation in important power centers of Gentile host societies became possible only after Jewish emancipation — which, like abolition of the slave trade, was an entirely white-Gentile project! Did the genes of 12th-century Jews “know” emancipation was going to happen 700 years on? How? If they didn’t, what was the point of their “evolutionary strategy”? There is a whiff of teleology about this whole business.

Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field. There is no disputing the fact that we need to understand much more than we currently do about how common-ancestry groups react with each other. Group conflicts are a key problem for multiracial and multicultural societies. Up till about 1960, the U.S. coped with these problems by a frank assertion of white-Gentile ethnic dominance, very much as Israel copes with them today by asserting Jewish ethnic dominance. This proved to be quite a stable arrangement, as social arrangements go. It was obviously objectionable to some American Jews, and it is not surprising that they played an enthusiastic part in undermining it; but they were not the sole, nor even the prime, movers in its downfall. It was replaced, from the 1960s on, by a different arrangement, characterized by racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense, accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering (“affirmative action”). This system, I think it is becoming clear, has proved less stable than what went before, and has probably now reached the point where it cannot be sustained much longer. What will replace it? What will the new arrangement be?

At times of flux like this, there are naturally people whose preference is for a return to the older dispensation. It is obvious that Kevin MacDonald is one of these people. If this is not so, he has some heavy explaining to do about phrases like: “the ethnic interests of white Americans to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.” Personally, I think he’s dreaming. The older dispensation wasn’t as bad as liberal commentators and story-tellers would have us believe, but it is gone for ever, and will not return. For America, the toothpaste is out of the tube.

And on the point of Israel having something very much like the old American dispensation, I am unimpressed by MacDonald’s oft-repeated argument — it is a favorite with both Israelophobes and antisemites — that it is hypocritical for Jews to promote multiculturalism in the U.S. while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel. Unless you think that ethnic dominance, under appropriate restraining laws, is immoral per se — and I don’t, and Kevin MacDonald plainly doesn’t, either — it can be the foundation of a stable and successful nation. A nation that can establish it and maintain it would be wise to do so. The U.S.A. was not able to maintain it, because too many Americans — far more than 3 per cent — came to think it violated Constitutional principles. Israel, however, was founded on different principles, and there seems to be no large popular feeling in that country for dismantling Jewish-ethnic dominance, as there was in Lyndon Johnson’s America for dismantling European dominance. The Israelis, most of them, are happy with Jewish-ethnic dominance, and intend to keep it going. Good luck to them.

The aspect of Macdonald’s thesis that I find least digestible is his underlying assumption that group conflict is a zero-sum game, rooted in an evolutionary tussle over finite resources. This is not even true on an international scale, as the growing wealth of the whole world during this past few decades has shown. On the scale of a single nation, it is absurd. These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena that The Culture of Critique is concerned with — Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School and so on — were they a net negative for America? Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were. Now conduct the following thought experiment. Suppose the great post-1881 immigration of Ashkenazi Jews had never occurred. Suppose the Jewish population of the U.S. in 2003 were not the two to four per cent (depending on your definitions) that it is, but the 0.3 per cent it was at the start of the Civil War. Would anything have been lost? Would America be richer, or poorer? Would our cultural and intellectual life be busier, or duller?

It seems incontrovertible to me that a great deal would have been lost: entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists, entertainers, publishers, and legions upon legions of scholars: not mere psychoanalysts and “critical theorists,” but physicists, mathematicians, medical researchers, historians, economists — even, as MacDonald notes honestly in his new preface, evolutionary psychologists! The first American song whose words I knew was “White Christmas,” written by a first-generation Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant. The first boss I ever had in this country was a Jew who had served honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps. Perhaps it is true, as MacDonald claims, that “most of those prosecuted for spying for the Soviet Union [i.e. in the 1940s and 1950s] were Jews.” It is also true, however, that much of the secret research they betrayed to their country’s enemies was the work of Jewish scientists. The Rosenbergs sold the Bomb to the Soviets; but without Jewish physicists, there would have been no Bomb to sell. Last spring I attended a conference of mathematicians attempting to crack a particularly intractable problem in analytic number theory. A high proportion of the 200-odd attendees were Jews, including at least two from Israel. Sowers of discord there have certainly been, but on balance, I cannot see how anyone could deny that this country is enormously better off for the contributions of Jews. Similarly for every other nation that has liberated the energies and intelligence of Jewish citizens. Was Hungary better off, or worse off, after the 1867 Ausgleich? Was Spain better off, or worse off, before the 1492 expulsions? “To ask the question is to answer it.”

Now, Kevin MacDonald might argue that he, as a social scientist, is not obliged to provide any such balance in his works, any more than a clinical pathologist writing about disease should be expected to include an acknowledgment that most of his readers will be healthy for most of their lives. I agree. A scientist, even a social scientist, need not present any facts other than those he has uncovered by diligent inquiry in his particular narrow field. He is under no obligation, as a scientist, to soothe the feelings of those whose sensibilities might be offended by his discoveries. Given the highly combustible nature of MacDonald’s material, however, it wouldn’t have hurt to point out the huge, indisputably net-positive, contributions of Jews to America, right at the beginning of his book, and again at the end. MacDonald has in any case been fairly free in CofC with his own opinions on such matters as U.S. support for Israel, immigration policy, and so on. He is entitled to those opinions: but having included them in this book, his claim to dwell only in the aery realm of cold scientific objectivity does not sound very convincing.

This is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the term, an antisemitic book. Its entire argument is that the Jews, collectively, are up to no good. This may of course be true, and MacDonald is entitled to say that the issue of whether his results are antisemitic is nugatory, from a social-science point of view, by comparison with the issue of their truth content. I agree with that, too: but given the well-known history of this topic, it seems singularly obtuse of MacDonald not to keep a jar of oil close at hand to spread on the troubled waters his work is bound to stir up. From my own indirect, and rather scanty, knowledge of the man, I would put this down to a personality combination of prickliness and unworldliness, but I am not sure I could persuade less charitable souls that my interpretation is the correct one, and that there is not malice lurking behind MacDonald’s elaborate sociological jargon.

When you link my posts, link them with the caption AS IT REALLY IS or indicate that ITS YOUR caption.

When the issue is inflammatory, the way you link my post may create the impression that your opinions are endorsed by my blog. That would be unfair.

If not, please change as requested.

Noah Feldman on tradition and modernity among conservative Jews

Posted on July 23, 2007 by L

Joey Kurtzman refers me to a remarkable and relevant article in the New York Times:

“Quite a coincidence: I discovered your interlocutor Scimitar just last night, when I was up late reading a discussion he had in the comment thread to a post on a white nationalist website. Very interesting stuff, though totally outside the realm of accepted discourse. I’m eager to get back into some of these issues, and I’m going to try to grab a chunk of time to read your interaction with him.

At this very moment I’m in the middle of doing an e-mail interview with Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law school and observant Jew who had an already-controversial article titled “Orthodox Paradox” in today’s NY Times Magazine. He states his professional interest as “the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition,” and in the article he discusses (among other things) some of the ugliest aspects of the theology of traditional Jewish communities, the sort of Judaic dirty laundry I’ve not seen discussed before in the mainstream media. Very interesting.

If you read the article any time today or tomorrow, and have any questions you’d like him to answer, just send them to me and I’ll bounce them off him.”

Well, here’s an excerpt from the piece for publishing which the New York Times deserves a round of applause:

“Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.

This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God’s directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too.

Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” The Jews’ enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.

To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, “Clean of hands and pure of heart.”

It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment — said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs buried below.

Supporting Ward Churchill’s academic freedom

Posted on July 19, 2007 by L

James P. Sterba, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame (excerpt from letter to University of Colorado Acting Chancellor DiStefano):

“I have been familiar with Professor Churchill’s work for a number of years now. I have cited his work approvingly in an essay I wrote for the journal Ethics in 1995 published by the University of Chicago. This journal is probably the oldest and most prestigious journal in the field of ethics and political philosophy published in the the United States. Later, I revised and published a portion of this essay which included the parts that referred to Professor Churchill’s work in my book, Three Challenges to Ethics, published with Oxford University Press in 2001. At the time, I asked Professor Churchill to write a blurb for the back of this book which he graciously did. Both Oxford and myself were pleased to have his endorsement of my book. All of this is evidence of my belief, and the beliefs of the editors of Ethics and Oxford University Press in the excellence of Professor Churchill’s work. There is not even the hint of incompetence here. It is excellence all the way down.”

Not quite as much the fringe lunatic that talk radio would have you believe he is…….or even some of the left-liberal mainstream.

Funding Islamic creationism….

Posted on July 18, 2007 by L

A fascinating post from Ali Eteraz on the origins of Islamic science and its present day funding:

“Suddenly, I took another investigative turn and found that none other than Mustapha Aykol, the Turkish writer who believes in the compatibility of liberalism and Islam and human rights and is all over the place on Daniel Pipes’ Frontpage Magazine, American Enterprise Institute (Wolfowitz and Rummy), National Review (Kristol and Right-Wingers like Bernard Lewis), and the Washington Times (right-wing, establisher as conservative alternative to Washington Post, founded by this Church, see Wiki), is massively connected to Islamic Creationism (the link to his website is below)…..

Ron Paul Road Show: Libertarians versus Communitarians

Posted on July 15, 2007 by L

I’m continuing the discussion on the previous post here.

To recap, it started up because of an abusive letter from a reader who repeated the ongoing canard that Ron Paul is a racist, who has the support of racists. Libertarians, like those at Mises, are frequently the target of these sorts of guilt-by-association charges.

Here’s a link to Paul’s own writings. Judge for yourself.

The blogger, at Occidental Dissent, whom the writer cited, then showed up on this blog and pointed out that racialists were opposed to Paul.

He pointed out that libertarianism undermines both racialism and racism and tends to make them irrelevant, as this piece on racial mixing and libertarianism by Winston D. Alston suggests. Racists tend to be opposed to libertarian ideas.

This led to a debate about several things:

1. Is there a distinction of any worth between racialists and racism (an issue fraught with the subtext that ‘racialism’ is simply a code word under which racists operate). My position is that this is not so, or at least, that it does not have to be so.

The distinction is valid and useful.

It think it is possible to look down on groups of people and yet not actively hate them. I don’t know what you would call this. This poster at Reason, makes that point about conservative commentator, John Derbyshire,

( I presume the poster is referring to Derbyshire in his personal life and not in his advocacy of torture or of civilian bombing in Iraq. If not, is the poster suggesting that it’s the fact that the targeted group is the enemy, and not any feeling of racial contempt, that makes D advocate what he does?).

One certainly can look down on individuals and not hate them or wish them harm, I admit. Only look at any leftwing or rightwing forum. It usually crawls with contempt for the opposite ideological set, and yet, for the most part, I imagine these partisans aren’t actually bent on wiping out their foes…..

At least, I hope not.

However, a developed theory of racial superiority, coupled with certain beliefs (social Darwinism, for instance), given the right set of circumstances, would be a highly incendiary combination…

On the other hand, not hating someone (or at least, thinking one doesn’t) is just not a very high bar. One could do harm, without hating, obviously. So, although the distinction should be made between those who are merely contemptuous of a group and those who advocate harm toward it, I think a high degree of contempt for individuals – based purely on their group affiliation — would get in the way of treating them empathically or ethically. It would create a bias in your mind that would misinterpret any data about them, for one thing.
The second debate centered around the issues of community and individual — does libertarianism undermine the community by sanctioning license, rather than real liberty — a favorite criticism of communitarians.

2. Is license inherent in libertarianism or is that a misreading of libertarianism?

Some of the racialist-communitarians on this thread seem to think that libertarianism needs the addition of state- sponsored virtue.

JH and I both feel that libertarianism proper already assumes ethics, as this paper by Aeon Sikoble of Temple University notes. We locate the corruption of many things primarily in the state itself.

In fact, I would argue that state-sponsored virtue is always murderous, like the current foreign policy hallucination called humanitarian intervention, which is only another variant of “standing up to terrorism” (Post Cold War, US), “reviving the caliphate” (Post Cold War, Al Qaeda), “defending our freedom,”(Cold War, US), “spreading the revolution” (Cold War, USSR), “Cultural Revolution” (Cold War, China), “lebensraum,” (WWII, Germany), “liberating Asia,” (WW II, Japan), “bearing the white man’s burden,” (Imperialism, Britain), etc. etc….

Some estimates of the number of people killed by the virtuous state in the 20th century alone run to a quarter of a billion, as this libertarian blogger at Freedomain points out. Moreover, unlike private crime, government crime is something you can’t get away from:

“State crimes are also qualitatively different from private crimes. There are many steps that a citizen can take to reduce the likelihood of being victimized by private criminals. From security systems to doormen to moving to a better neighborhood…Contrast that to government crimes. What can you do to protect yourself against taxation? Nothing. Everywhere you go, you are taxed. Want to take up arms against the Gestapo? Good luck. Want to escape senseless regulations? Pray for a libertarian afterlife….”

However, I differ from JH in seeing some gaps between libertarian theory and its articulation and practice.

Scimitar, the communitarian blogger, felt that libertarian permissiveness corrupts the body politic and cited, “Defending the Undefendable,” by libertarian Walter Block, a book that according to its Amazon site, “argues that some of the most socially offensive members of society–including prostitutes, libelers and moneylenders–are ‘scapegoats’ whose actual social and economic value is not being appreciated” ( Robert Nozick). I haven’t read it but invite people who have to post.

3. One of the racialist-communitarian bloggers then brought up the issue of the censorship of ideas surrounding race and immigration.

Two controversial points were made:

That there is a correlation between racial type and levels of social freedom and social violence

That there is a racially and politically motivated agenda to mongrelize society.

[Since propaganda and mindcontrol are central issues on this blog, I decided to summarize these elements in my own words and censored the original comment. I did this only in order to avoid giving a troll the opportunity to associate this blog or libertarians for Ron Paul with ideas that neither supports].

******************

I am reposting these relevant parts of my previous post for reference:
I. On Communitarians versus Libertarianism:

Lack of liberty in one area (which JH cites) can coexist with license in others (which Scimitar cites), I think,There is a need for balance and for seeing things as they are, not worshiping abstractions. Liberty and license are two different things. But there is also a lack of liberty.
Both operate today, but in different realms and in different ways.

A concrete example: small business is overregulated, while big international businesses – also technically regulated by the same laws – are often able to elude them – because of their privileged relation to the state (i.e. they become a rentier class). You have lack of liberty and license together.

The Language of Empire book dealt with a lot of that — License can even operate through the law I argue. Here’s what I wrote:

[I am writing about how “patriotism” today is really the unabashed support of corporate-state interests.

I am not talking here about the virtuous citizen defending the res publica.

“This “patriotism” feeds off a a type of radicalism that uproots shatters, homogenizes and perverts the traditional values of community and individual and replaces it with the mass.”

(Ch 8., p. 132 “Virtual Violence”)
That part of my analysis agrees with what S is saying, I think.

As you can see, I don’t really find S (community) and JH (individual) at odds intrinsically, except that S is willing to use the government to further his ends.

Instead, what I find is artificially constructed individuals and artificial communities (produced by mass culture) at odds with real individuals and real communities…

I don’t know if you’d agree or find it convincing but you can see the kinds of games language plays on us…

That’s why we have to deal with human beings and not be confused by the language the empire uses.

II. On Racialism and Racism

Update: I went back and looked through dictionary entries for racialism and racism and it seems from them that my distinction between the two is not held by all in the same way.

Here is Merriam-Webster, which is what I grew up with:

Main Entry: ra·cial·ism
Pronunciation: 'rA-sh&-"li-z&m
Function: noun
: a theory that race determines human traits and capacities; also : racism
– ra·cial·ist /-list/ noun or adjective
– ra·cial·is·tic /"rA-sh&-'lis-tik/ adjectiv

Note, that this definition of racialism (that human characteristics are defined by race) is not mine – it is too broad and would obviously then include racism.

I think that’s why ‘racism’ is placed next to it as a variant – which, to my thinking, ought not to be.

Take an example.

Let’s say your research finds that ethnic puddleducks (just to make up a group so as not to be inflammatory) are more likely to get their feathers wet than regular ducks. Are you then a ducka-phobe or duck-ist? Even though your intention in researching may be to save puddleducks from wetfeatheritis, are you now the same as someone who commits duckicide? Gee, someone who might even want to wipe out the duck population?

Give me a break! But that seems to be the position of these dictionaries.

Still, at least, a distinction is recognized.

A similar but not so clearcut distinction is also maintained in the American Heritage Dictionary, which at least gives the second usage a separate entry as it should. It then points out that racialism is also a British usage for racist (something I wasn’t aware of before):

ra·cial·ism (rsh-lzm)

n.1.a. An emphasis on race or racial considerations, as in determining policy or interpreting events.

b. Policy or practice based on racial considerations.

2. Chiefly British Variant of racism.

racial·ist adj. & n.

racial·istic adj.

Now, that makes more sense.

If there was not distinction between the two, all the people who tell us that the Indian population as a whole (I am talking about sub-continentals) show a higher frequency of one blood-type than, say, the French population would have to be deounounced as potential Nazis.

But, apparently, there are other dictionaries that DO NOT agree with me but with John Howard on this:

An online dictionary (how good, I don’t know) even inverts the meanings and makes the term racialist more malign in meaning. That doesn’t seem right to me.

Wikipedia (which judiciously prunes and alters things, as anyone knows who has watched the appearance and disappearance of material, defininitions, and so on…) sees no distinction. Now, that could simply mean that the distinction is no longer made routinely or is being erased or that most people are not aware of it.

I will research this a bit more, but if there is no distinction being made any more, there needs to be one.

Or we will be practicing self censorship unwittingly.

Anyway, that this distinction appears all the time in articles, as here:

“While thwarting all majority efforts to weaken minority gains, it would reject the kind of “benign’ racialism that we increasingly take for granted. ” (that’s from an article in the Washington Monthly).

Elsewhere, David Horowitz ( not especially my best friend), makes that distinction when discussing alleged (I am using the qualifier not to disparage the notion but because I haven’t personally studied the media coverage of it) media black out of black-on-white crime.

Don’t be surprised when such usages, which people born outside this country are accustomed to making without controversy, start disappearing or changing, leaving us without a vocabulary to discuss what is plainly a crucial topic.
In any case, after having had the time to read his blogs, I find that Scimitar, I think, rather mischaracterized his position.

He is not only a raciaLIST (one who thinks racial considerations have a role to play in government policy – a position that is not necessarily malign) but rather a racIST (one who believes in the genetic, biological, and civic superiority of one race over another).

(However, I let his comments on my blog stay, since he worded his argument reasonably and without abuse).

He implies clearly that he “does not believe in racial, civic, or biological equality” whereas Ron Paul does.

Obviously, at one level, there really is no such equality – not all people or all races are mathematically equal. But to say that something is not mathematically exactly like another is not the same thing as saying that they are inferior or superior to each other on the basis of an arbitrary quantification that is simply delusory.

Why delusory? Because, the criteria that are used to establish superiority have varied to suit whoever does the selection, and have been shown to change (IQ tests, for example) and use samples and methodology that are – when you look at them closely – somewhat questionable..

The problem is a confusion of language again.

For me, even this corruption of our language stems from the state because the state’s used language so extensively as a tool to indoctrinate and treat people as masses rather than individuals that our vocabulary is showing less and less precision in definitions and distinctions. More and more, things are homogenized, blurred, made indistinct.

Take what people call capitalism. If you look back over the last 400 years, what people think of as capitalism has always been state-driven mercantilism. Even the enlightenment grew up around mercantilism.

You don’t have to reject the good that came out of the 17th-18th century to realize that there may be some negatives involved with that development. We have to learn to reject certain misuses of logic and rationality in contexts where their use must be embodied to have any value.

Verum factum. Truth is an act.

“All nations begin by fantasia, the power of imagination and the age of gods which are needed to comprehend the world. After that, there comes a second age in which fantasia is used to form social institutions and heroes are used to inspire moral virtues. The third and final age is the age of rationality, in which humanity declines into barbarie della reflessione — barbarism of reflection. According to Vico, this is a cycle — gods, heroes and humans — which repeats itself within the world of nations, forming storia ideale eterna — ideal eternal history.”

That’s a brief account of the thinking of Giambattista Vico, an Italian philosopher of language….

I talk about this in my new book (with Bill Bonner), “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets,” this misperception that if we don’t have a state telling us what to do, society will degenerate into chaos .

It’s also the subject of an earlier Lew Rockwell article “Katrina and the Fishy Logic of the State.”

(Another shameless plug, but I gotta eat and I don’t want to get my bread from the powers that be — or I won’t be able to blog freely on anything I want)

Human beings self organize in all sorts of complex ways that the state can never hope to imitate. They communicate in ways that the state can never quite control. That’s why state propaganda inevitably fails.

But that’s also why censorship and free speech, propaganda and mind control are the crucial issues. And that’s why I am a libertarian. Only libertarians have made this issue central in their thinking.

The Ron Paul haters….

Posted on July 13, 2007 by L

Updated:

I updated this post, after having read one of the posters blog entries. I also deleted the abusive comment because it made me rather ill to re-read it and I don’t know why I have to give such wretched specimens of humanity space on my private property. So out, out, you nasty trolls, go back to the backwoods and swamps you were infesting. Begone!

A letter from a reader who apparently hates Ron Paul: Why should I bother? | nunya@aol.com | IP: 76.103.124.111

“Ron Paul is a right wing protofascist populist. Lew Rockwell has more than a few racists. CounterPunch has it’s share of oddballs. Dissident Voice has it’s share of politically naive and clueless children. You are either a naive fool or a hopeless utopian simpleton like the fellow who wrote the pathetic missive you have chosen to copy and paste. I assume you have a darker complexion than the average northern European. You had better hope and pray Congressman Clueless never becomes President. I thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that there is little chance of that happening. Racists love Ron Paul, you dimwitted schlep. David Duke supports him. I think he was a Grand Dragon in the KKK. What the hey? Ghandi didn’t think much of blacks,

either

.http://blog.occidentaldissent.com/category/ron-paul/

This, BTW, is a real journalist:

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/man-of-hour.html

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/ron-paul-vs-new-world-order.html

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/six-impossible-things-before-breakfast.html

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/trouble-with-ron.html

If you read through this material and you remain unconvinced, you are blind, stupid and hopeless. I’m getting too old to care anymore. You fools deserve what you ask for. I just hope you aren’t the first dark-skinned person on your blog to enjoy a nice cross-burning or to get dragged behind a pick-up truck. And you call yourself a “journalist”?

My Comment:

Dear Reader –

First, here is an example of the protofascism behind Ron Paul: here, in this letter – sounds just like Hitler to me.

I wish I had more time to answer in detail your interesting letter. And especially to argue those pieces on Ron Paul, filled with careful research and even more meticulous dissembling….

Let me just say: thank you for the links. Despite your abusive and ugly language, I think you are trying to save me from myself. So a hat tip to you, too.

But, I may not be in need of it. I am not courting the favor of opinion-makers here or anywhere. I am trying to still some voice in my own heart.

Let me just say that had David Neiwert written a study of a left-wing sub-culture, he would not have been awarded an alternative online award. The corporate awards in these areas go to people who trash the left, the alternative awards go to people who trash the right. Usually. Those who are not trying to undermine anyone, but only trying to understand things are left to blow soap-bubbles on their own since they won’t squabble in the sand-box with all the other nice kids.

And much of Molly Ivins’ rhetorical style was taken from the equally clever right-leaning journalist Florence King, I hear.

Meanwhile, does the liberal-left need to be exposed on anything, you might ask?

And I would answer, yes, indeed.

Is there any bigotry on the left?

You bet.

To my mind, as this article shows, it is covert but as deep and in some ways as dangerous as that on the right. Only, it does not show its face as clearly and may show us its fruits only in time to come. And unfortunately, the exposure of left bias is being done by people like David Horowitz who have their own dangerous political agenda (in relation to Middle Eastern politics, I mean).

I am more interested in the dangers of today, than in those of the past. White Christian males (how’s that for a racist category just there) are presently not the only or the most racist people I know, I can assure you.

They (hmm…I can see the whole lot of them – Poles, Irish, Anglos, rich and poor, taking their marching orders from Gary North and Ron Paul, no doubt in between burying gold in their backyards and laundering their multiple wives’ burqas) seem to be reacting defensively.

That’s how I see it right now, anyway. What they might do in the future is anyone’s guess, but that is my perception. The evils of white racism, however, have been so extensively criticized and constrained that I think at times public opinion today (not public culture or institutional bias, I agree – but that’s another more convoluted story) borders on a form of reverse racism. It’s surely wrong to focus solely on white chauvinism and ignore the chauvinism in other communities (to wit. the Duke lacrosse team case, anti-Christian bigotry among Muslims and Hindus, intra-Asian racism, recent black- on- white murders), although, this has to be negotiated with sensitivity to different levels of power and capacity to do harm.

In any case, if I am mistaken on this, it behooves me, as a person of color (not a phrase of my choice but to be polite to cultural norms here), to extend my hand and open my sympathies precisely to those who historically might have been associated with the oppression of my racial group (in the case of Indians, it would be the British empire, of which the American government is the self-styled successor). I have to be generous to white, Anglophone Christianity simply on that score – to be credible as some one who is fair-minded.

To imply (by your last remark) that that morally sensitive position is equal to racism toward blacks is simply laughable, diversionary, and smearing-by-inversion.

As a long-time student and admirer of European culture I am in the peculiar position of having to reach out in generosity to those elements in it which I admire as well as those I identify as having been oppressive to people like me (a moral task), while at the same time being critical of both (an intellectual task).

To do either only would be false.

Besides that, if we are going to go on about racism, white racism is not the most sanctioned bigotry today. Anti-Arab, anti-Muslim rhetoric; bigotry against certain forms of Christianity (not all Christianity, Christianity which genuflects to power, is highly favored today); targeting and harassment of isolated individuals who do not have the institutional support to fight back or even defend themselves; anti-male bias among opinion-makers (combined with misogyny in the general culture..an interesting combination); hatred for anarchists and non-statists and unaffiliated libertarians of all kinds: these are the most respectable forms of prejudice today in this country. In other countries, the dangers might lie elsewhere, I don’t deny.

I am not trying to pass for white…but I am not interested in passing for black or Jewish either. I don’t even want to pass for Indian. Or Chinese (so sorry, great grandma). I think human will do, and is hard enough.

We need to be aware that beliefs are like medicine. Different kinds work in different doses on different ailments. What kills in one place and at one time heals in another.

Your frequent references to dark-skin lead me to believe you too live in a racial glass-house from which it would be unwise to cast stones. Jews, blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, Muslim, can all be guilty of racism and chauvinism…to one degree or other. The consequences of their racism (i.e. how dangerous it is) mostly depends on their relative histories and positions of power.

Your letter undermines itself. Gandhi expressed certain feelings (reflective of his age and culture) toward black South African workers, as did Jefferson toward his slaves, as did even Jesus toward the Samaritans, and as many Jewish prophets toward non-Jews. (I bring that up, because I think from your letter that you are Jewish).

That does not make me despise Gandhi, Jefferson or Jesus or the Old Testament prophets. It makes me realize that “no man is good except God (or Goddess)”

It makes me more inclined to deal fairly with all opinions and to open my mind (and heart) to the whole human race…to all voices. But especially to the voiceless. People change, they open, grow….why be so transfixed by labels, so crucified by crucifying time?

I am not naive at all. I am aware of all the guilt-by-association tactics employed by “mainstream” writers to weed out which opinions and which people get heard. I just don’t think I want to be part of any of it. I think it is morally corrupting.

I avoided academics for that reason.

Having been published (punished) on the right and left and having established some journalistic creds that way, I will now try to avoid publishers too. When I have enough to retire on comfortably, I will write for myself and avoid readers, as well (chuckle).

I write to clarify my own thoughts and to interact with others who can contribute to that process.
If I have to, I’ll wait for another generation (should there be one left after our own insane one passes away) or some future non- human but literate creature to figure out who was in the right or wrong (assuming that anything we write has not long vanished); if not, I will be happy to join the unoffending dust and the meek silence of the void.

PS: It’s GandHi, not GHandi. I don’t know why that bugs me so much.

By the way: Originally, I took out the abuse because I wanted to address the comment without putting filth on my site. And because I wanted to see whether a soft answer indeed “turns away wrath”. But, lookit, Jesus, you turn the other cheek, and you get it in the neck….

But apparently the “gentleman” (irony! irony alert!) took that in the wrong way (sigh).

No matter how "inclusionary" "diverse" and "sensitive"

this man's public positions and opinions may be, his

private attitudes are pretty nasty.  And maybe

THAT is how we should judge people. Not by random

remarks made when they are being provoked; not by

unpopular political positions that they may have

good reason for holding; but by their day to day

treatment of people who have not injured them.

The fine talk doesn't impress me, at any rate.

Summing Up Comments:

We had a very lengthy discussion on this post between Scimitar (from a communitarian perspective) and John Howard (from a libertarian perspective).

I sum up one central difference (as I saw it) and add my take on it, here. I think it might help:

FIRST: I found myself partly in agreement with both on one point. How so? Because lack of liberty in one area (which JH cites) can coexist with license in others (which S cites).

So, Scimitar – I agree with you (and with communitarians) on the need for balance and for seeing things as they are, not worshiping abstractions. Liberty and license are two different things.

But, JH is right to say there is also a lack of liberty.

As I see it, both operate today, but in different realms and in different ways.

I think the Language of Empire book dealt with a lot of that — to put in a plug (chuckle!) but hey, it’s true. License can even operate through the law as I argue in it. Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

[I am writing about how “patriotism” (i.e. support of the state’s globalist policies) is really the unabashed support of corporate-state interests. Not talking here about what Scimitar referred too – the virtuous citizen defending the res publica, for the good of the community)

“This “patriotism” feeds off a a type of radicalism that uproots shatters, homogenizes and perverts the traditional values of community and individual and replaces it with the mass.”

(Ch 8., p. 132 “Virtual Violence”)
That part of my analysis agrees with what S is saying, I think.

As you can see, I don’t really find S (community) and JH (individual) at odds…

Instead what I find is artificially constructed individuals and artificial communities (produced by mass culture) at odds with real individuals and real communities…

I don’t know if you’d agree or find it convincing but you can see the kinds of games language plays on us…

That’s why we have to deal with human beings and not be confused by the language the empire uses.

Comment on Racialism and Racism

Update: I went back and looked through dictionary entries for racialism and racism and it seems from them that my distinction between the two is not held by all in the same way.

Here is Merriam-Webster, which is what I grew up with:

Main Entry: ra·cial·ism
Pronunciation: 'rA-sh&-"li-z&m
Function: noun
: a theory that race determines human traits and capacities; also : RACISM
– ra·cial·ist /-list/ noun or adjective
– ra·cial·is·tic /"rA-sh&-'lis-tik/ adjectiv

Note, that this definition of racialism (that human characteristics are defined by race) is not mine – it is too broad and would obviously then include racism.

I think that’s why ‘racism’ is placed next to it as a variant – which, to my thinking, ought not to be.

Take an example. Let’s say your research finds that ethnic puddleducks (just to make up a group so as not to be inflammatory) are more likely to get their feathers wet than regular ducks. Are you then a ducka-phobe or duck-ist? Even though your intention in researching may be to save puddleducks from wetfeatheritis, are you now the same as someone who commits duckicide? Gee, someone who might even want to wipe out the duck population?

Give me a break! But that seems to be the position of these dictionaries.

Still, at least, a distinction is recognized.

A similar but not so clearcut distinction is also maintained in the American Heritage Dictionary, which at least gives the second usage a separate entry as it should: racialism, it seems, is also a British usage for racist (something I wasn’t aware of before):

ra·cial·ism play_w(“R0006500”)

(rsh-lzm)

a. An emphasis on race or racial considerations, as in determining policy or interpreting events.

b. Policy or practice based on racial considerations.

2. Chiefly British Variant of racism.

racial·ist adj. & n.

racial·istic adj.

hm();Sources=Sources | 2;

Now, that makes more sense, otherwise all the people who tell us that Indians (sub-continentals) have a different blood-type from Caucasians would have to be deounounced as potential Nazis.

But, apparently, other dictionaries DO NOT agree and go with John Howard’s position:

An online dictionary (how good, I don’t know) inverts the meanings and makes racialist more malign in meaning. That doesn’t seem right to me.

I will research this more, but if there is no distinction being made any more, there needs to be one or we will be practicing self censorship unwittingly.

Anyway, that the distinction exists is apparent to anyone who had read extensively in the area – it appears all the time, as here:

Elsewhere, David Horowitz makes that distinction when discussing alleged (I am using the qualifier not to disparage the notion but because I haven’t personally studied the media coverage of it) media black out of black-on-white crime.

He is not a raciaLIST (one who thinks racial considerations have a role to play in government policy – a position that is not necessarily malign) but rather a racIST (one who believes in the genetic, biological, and civic superiority of one race over another).

(However, I let his comments on my blog stay, since he worded his argument reasonably and without abuse).

He implies clearly that he “does not believe in racial, civic, or biological equality” whereas Ron Paul does.

The problem is a confusion of language and different meanings of equality that are used in a fungible way inaccurately. Again, I honestly see that as an outgrowth of the whole statist mentality. The use of language as a tool – whether it is to educate (indoctrinate) or propagandize necessarily involves the simplification of ideas — which means the misuse of ideas. Equality is first misunderstood and then misapplied, leading to false ideas of mathematical equality and inequality that do not obtain.

Why the Ward Churchill affair is important

That's also why this Ward Churchill fracas is so

instructive - you  get to see opinion makers position themselves

carefully as they go for the jugular - isolating

Churchill from the mainstream left and then letting

the steam-roller of public opinion do the rest....it's

Machiavellian alright..that's the morality of statists,

just there. Then when the right does that to them, they

start whimpering - no fair.

That's what happens when you adopt statist mentality

 and the tactics of power politics with individuals.

Now, here's my comment on Josh Frank's recent piece on the

trashing of Churchill by liberals in DV (which I

agreed with).

My Comment on the Churchill trashing:

People who consider themselves “free-thinkers” and “dissidents” shouldn’t be involved with turning people into pariahs for their thoughts. Free thinking and free markets together. Propaganda and rigged markets go together.

People don’t consider politicians pariahs for the things they actually do, do they?

If society doesn’t shun Bush or Clinton or Brzezinksi or Kissinger (sticking to American pols alone, for the minute) – who are directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundereds of thousands of people – millions…or Jeff Sachs or Alan Greenspan or any other economist whose policies have ruined whole economies… then why on earth are we picking on someone for something they just said? Did Churchill kill anyone? Did he bomb, or poison anyone? Did he steal, plunder or rape? Did he connive and lie?

No, he was voicing an opinion…
Ah!

You don’t have to agree with the guy. I don’t. Refute him. Don’t lie about him and trash him. And about his rudeness to somone one day: the guy is under a lot of pressure.

Talking about himself? I guess he’s feeling a bit persecuted these days. Understandable, I think.

Personally, there are many days on which I ‘ve blown off steam for much less.

I have a bit of a story on this because my publisher had sent out for a blurb request from Churchill (whom I had not read and whom I had heard about only in relation to his delineation of Native Indian history) before the controversy developed.

Not remembering this, I wrote a piece on Churchill’s article — “Little Eichman’s and the Harijans” for Counterpunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/rajiva02152005.html).

“That’s the perverse logic of binary inversions of black and white and it’s what the radical rhetoric of the right and left both miss. In the immediate aftermath of an event as emotional as 9/11, was the public debate really served by comparing ordinary money managers to the arch-Nazi Eichmann? Would Churchill also be willing to argue that some Iraqis citizens in Fallujah may have tacitly supported Saddam’s oppressive policies and might therefore also be little Eichmanns meriting extermination?

The greatest danger of magical thinking is not simply in the likelihood of such inversions boomeranging to hit you in the face – witness “reverse discrimination” and white or Brahmin backlash – but in the strengthening of exactly the passions and irrationality on which public support for war feeds in the first place…”

In the article, I spent some time – objecting for various reasons to Churchill’s use of the word “Nazi”

I did not say it was a morally indefensible argument – I said that it was tired and intellectually somewhat weak.

A month or two later, I got a blurb from Churchill in which he got his back with a two-handed jab that endorsed my work (He called it “excruciatingly precise” ) but also reiterated his own use of the word Nazi firmly.

Guess what? Having by then waded through a stack of Bush jurisprudence, I was overcome with Schmittean flashbacks…

Nazi still sounded wrong to me..but the legal justifications and military and nonmilitary acts of omission and commission were certainly similar enough that while my criticisms were good ones, Churchill’s rejoinder was apt…

Calling a country’s laws Schmittean (Promethean was the word I coined) is suggesting its government is similar to the Nazis, so why split hairs? Why be so excruciatingly precise?

I felt a momentary twinge. I had been temperate and said something which people might be able to digest without becoming enraged.

Churchill said something that discomfited people…

I am not now sure who took the high road…

I stuck the blurb on the jacket.
Distancing myself from it at that moment would have been wrong.

And distancing ourselves from Churchill, when we really are saying the same things, only in different or more subtle or more nuanced ways, is somehow not right.

Even though, prudentially, I agree, his style and tone might not help.

Intuitively, morally, it is the right thing to do.

On Neiwert and North

[I should add that I am not trashing David Neiwert’s work – I haven’t read it, but see from the reviews that it was carefully done research.

All I am saying is that were some one to do an equally carefully researched piece on (or subverting the opinions of), say, the sub-culture of NY-DC liberal-left opinion making, it would be studiously ignored, however carefully done.

So – please all Neiwert admirers. This has nothing to do with him. I am just saying there is bias on the side of liberal opinion-makers, too.]

(Another aside: I am also not defending Gary North. I haven’t read much of his writing and can’t speak about what he thinks or doesn’t think).

A Libertarian Valentine to Bush

Posted on July 12, 2007 by L

Anthony Gregory on life in the Clinton-Bush years:

“I’m perplexed by anyone who still hates Clinton more than Bush. I’ve seen this in libertarian circles.

I actually didn’t hate Bush right away. I didn’t like him or respect him. He was the president, after all. But I didn’t loathe him the way I did Clinton . So I can see why, at one point, people might have still hated Clinton more.

After 9/11, I told my friends I was glad Clinton and Reno weren’t in power, because the police state would come faster under Democrats. I also thought Republicans were less repulsive on economics. This is largely why I silently and with some shame rooted (but not voted) for Bush in 2000, just as I rooted for Dole in 1996, and for Bush the Elder in 1992 and 1988.

But after a while, something happened. Maybe it was the prescription drug program, which on one fell swoop expanded the welfare state more than Clinton could in eight years time.

More at Strike the Root.

A Comment on the Finkelstein tenure situation

Posted on July 6, 2007 by L

Arguments about the use of the Holocaust in public debate don’t constitute an “intra-Jewish fight.” It would be much more accurate to say that they involve questions of state policy in this country (and in Israel) and of propaganda in the west at large — an issue which affects ALL writers, journalists, thinkers, intellectuals, scholars and even citizens who just want to be informed accurately — not simply Jews.

It amazes me how so many Anglophone intellectuals (even well-meaning ones) feel completely qualified to analyze atrocities and abuses anywhere in the world, loudly and superfically (if not downright incorrectly), often with the sketchiest and most second-hand knowledge (gleaned from the English language writings of their own DC-N. York journalist buddies or from scholars at various “prestigious” universities, all sharing exactly the same myopic viewpoint ).

A notable recent example is Martha Nussbaum, whose latest book on India (preparatory, I imagine, to humanitarian bombing, somewhere down the line) can only annoy anyone who knows anything about the subject. When it comes to their own backyard, however, these soi-disant arbiters of universal values frigidly ignore views that aren’t self-selected, insular and distinctly obsequious to their pet theories about life outside hard cover. Prizes, tenures, sinecures, reviews, cocktail parties and the rest of the glitz of intellectual life follow in lock step. A nice system….

Now, good for those who make their living from it – I don’t knock them.
As long as they remember that’s all it is – a living. A way of paying their bills that has little do with the real life of the mind — which might sooner take place in some scorching megapolis abroad or ghetto stink-hole here than at one of their blow-dried soirees. And might take place silently as much as it does vocally.

On the outside, we know this. On the outside, we know it is their self-regarding attitude that makes mainstream idealogues less than credible, less than admirable in the eyes of ordinary human beings. The criticism of these “smatterers” is always within a select framework, in which they and they alone are true subjects.

A fitting response is to hold their opinions in equal disdain. A favorable review from one of them should be treated much as one treats an alarming bug of some kind….you hope you’ll get through, but it might be the beginning of a fatal contamination…

Is this a viable position for a struggling writer? Yes, indeed.

Blogging makes it possible for books to sell and sell well even without reviews from the establishment. Fellow bloggers and dissidents are willing to say a good word here and there. A reader. An unknown collegaue. The pleasure of having the good will and encouragement of those who share your sympathies and your aloneness is something surely far more satisfying than the brittle praise of people whose main concern is pleasing the right people and stepping on the obscure in their frantic rush to the limelight.

In fact, a new ambition — I hope to forego a publisher altogether and publish directly. Perhaps those two lengthy chapter on media ownership in this country that were cut out summarily (would offend too may people, they said), will see the light that way.

So, what has this to do with Finkelstein?

Everything.

The central issue in this country and in many western countries is not globalization or imperialism; it is not torture or the CIA; it is not humanitarian intervention…or realpolitik…or peacekeeping.. or even war.

The central issue is brainwashing. Whether it is at universities or in the press or in think-tanks; whether in war or in peace-time. Whether the subject is Israel or imperialism or the family or women or money or IQ tests or immigration or race.

The issue now is how we think. Or don’t. And what we get to think about. Who does it for us. Why. And where it is leading us.

Why “hate crime” laws are a bad idea

Posted on June 29, 2007 by L

From the Orlando Sentinel’s Kathleen Parker:

“The Duke and Knoxville cases cast serious doubts on that premise. It is human nature to resent groups and individuals deemed more special than others.

Signaling through laws (or media treatment) that one group’s suffering is more grievous than another’s — or that one person’s murder is worse than another’s — is also likely to fragment communities, as well as to engender the very animosities such laws are meant to deter.”

Page 44 of 50« First ‹ Previous 40 41 42 434445 46 47 48 Next ›Last »

The Mind-Body Politic

Individuals, Not Ideologies

Category Archives: Ideology