A verse from “The Candle Indoors,” in ‘Poems’ (1918), by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

“Come you indoors, come home; your fading fire

Mend first and vital candle in close heart’s vault:

You there are master, do your own desire;

What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault

In a neighbor deft-handed? Are you that liar

And, cast by conscience out, spendsavor salt?

Ali Eteraz, a young human rights champion turned blogger, has a piece at Huffington Post, calls on Noam Chomsky to voice more criticism of Islamic extremism. He invited me to comment and I will be happy to do so, as it touches on an extremely crucial and sensitive issue for antiwar activists.

Eteraz lists sundry crimes – from honor killings to censorship and 9-11 – that he places at the foot of a politicized Islamic extremism funded by Muslim industrialists:

” Yet, the fact is that today, globalization, which Chomsky always said was the handmaiden of neo-liberalism, and a construction of powerful Western governments, has an equally sordid evil twin, and this is the globalized monstrosity of extremely extreme extremist Islam. By the way, when I talk about extremists, I am not referring to terrorists alone. Would it were that this globalized undercurrent of violence was merely political! There exists today a form of globalized lifestyle and cultural extremism galvanized and organized and idealized by millions. This extremism, where it is not suffocating art, scholarship, freedom and love, it is murdering, killing, and beating to death. It must be identified and spoken out against with the same gusto reserved for neo-imperialism and corporatism. Dissent against all three is not inconsistent as they each mutually feed one another and leave vast numbers of human beings without a voice, without life.”

And this:

“I just read that Hezbollah is now operating in South America (quite distant from Lebanon, no?), recruiting and drug-running like common thugs, and we have known this since 2002. I just read of “ninjabis” in Pakistan – veiled women who with sticks and rage beat brothel owners, music store owners and video store clerks. I just read of Iranian police officers who kick and beat women for daring to wear earrings. I just read that in some places (Saudi Arabia) women are being beaten so they will wear the veil; in other places women are being beaten (Mogadishu) so they will not wear the veil. I just read that in the world there are over 5,000 (reported) honor killings every year including in places as forward and progressive as Turkey, Italy and England, and in most places courts routinely fail to prosecute offenders. I just read of a German judge affirming that Muslim men are supposed to beat their wives (alternate view here). I just read of a British school where the Jewish Holocaust is no longer discussed because it hurts the feelings of the Muslim students. I just read of imported Muslim brides in the West who are shackled at their new home and beaten and expected to behave like slaves, and this behavior is given legitimacy by male and female scholars of Islam that they purport to follow. I just read that a powerful Iranian cleric called for the death of a journalist who published the Danish cartoons, while an American cleric on a mosque payroll wished that a popular female thinker should be removed to a Muslim country so she could be killed for being an apostate. I just read that a journalist in Canada was beaten with cricket bats after he questioned a Pakistani cleric’s metaphysical ability to reveal the face of the Prophet Muhammad on the surface of the moon.”

My Comment:

It’s an interesting post and one with which I agree on many points. However, it sets up an equation that I’m not entirely comfortable with. Is Islamic extremism really the “evil twin” of empire? To begin with, that denotes a measure of equality and power that Islamic extremism doesn’t seem to me to have. It’s also important to remember the extent to which this extremism was brought to the center of the political stage by systematic policy decisions and covert actions undertaken by the United States. In that sense, it’s a reaction — which is probably one of the reasons Noam Chomsky doesn’t engage it in the same way he does American foreign policy. One shouldn’t forget that there are many influential human rights organizations funded by the United States (to one degree or other) that are already busy evaluating and criticizing the abuses about which Ali writes.

Chomsky ‘s silence is meant to balance those pretty loud voices, I think. Voices that sometimes use human rights as a cover for imperial policies, as a number of observers have noted.

It would be as if a activist in Indonesia (to take an example), were to criticize the Indonesian government’s foreign policy in, say Island X, which involved killing a large number of Xers, and the criticism of the activist was that, well, various Xers are also involved in dope-smuggling in Country Y, why don’t you criticize that too. It’s essentially a red herring. If you object to the government bulldozing a neighborhood, it is no defense for the government to argue that the home owners weren’t that nice. It’s strictly beside the point. It’s even less relevant if the government’s defense is that some people who share the same beliefs of those home owners, somewhere else on the planet, are beating their wives.

A specialist in foreign policy is – unless he is exceptionally arrogant – going to stick to foreign policy. A self-avowed anarchist like Chomsky is going to be concerned with matters of the state, not of society. Honor killings are a social evil, just as child abuse in the US is. Chomsky also does not discuss child porn or sex abuse of children in the US or alcoholic wife beating or gang violence or any number of other social ills, as far as I know. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t evils too. They just aren’t very central to a discussion of foreign policy. Nor is honor killing, although some people would like it to be – liberventionists.

So – no. Of course, not all evils in the world are the fault of the US. That’s never been argued by any activist I know. But night after night, we see American and European TV journalists covering human rights abuses all over the world (quite selectively), with all the financial clout their huge networks have, making the opposite case — that all of the world’s ills stem from Islamic terrorism. So, if a few alternative journalists debunk that claim and actually have the cheek to hold the US government to its own standards, so what? That doesn’t mean we support Islamic terrorism, from which, I of Indian origin, have suffered about 20 times as much as anyone here in the US has (over 60,000 people killed by terrorist attacks) – I’ll check that figure – at the hands of Pakistan, a country whose military dictatorships have been funded and supported by – guess who? – the US.
So anti-Americanism is often ( I won’ t say always – because of course, there are always activists whose criticism of the US government camoflages their own political agendas, but they are not necssarily any more likely to be foreigners or immigrants as native born) simply a way to discredit activists and can reflect an inability to answer criticism.

Another point ( I just added this) – who do you suppose shapes the U.S. government? Lobbying groups – many of them from all over the world, representing all sorts of interests, from financial to human rights to imperial. Our policy in Afghanistan was motivated by a Pole’s (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s secy of state) extreme distrust of the Soviets (stemming from Polish history) and his willingness to trade luring them to a debacle in Afghanistan by financing Islamic militants there against a world wide increase in Islamic militancy. Which is what we have now. So, it seems a bit thick to blame Islam for this, even though now Saudi financiers are probably fuelling what is already out there.

What I ask Americans is – why are you identifying with a bunch of people who are not acting much in your interests at all? The government – the state – is not America. Not in my view. It’s a part of it. A mechanism to protect the people and culture. It’s not the same thing.

And by the way, although my interest in foreign policy first came from reading Professor Chomsky, I am a right libertarian, and interested in Austrian economics — which is diametrically the opposite of Chomsky, in some ways. It’s simply that Chomsky’s critique of US foreign policy is, in fact, substantially the same as the libertarian right critique of Murray Rothbard or Garet Garett – nobody would call them anti-American would they? And also – apart from the statism – of the old right.

But unfortunately it’s not a well known tradition. This blogger also wonders about the influence of anti-Americanism in this debate. As I said, that’s a word that can sometimes have purchase, but in relation to US foreign policy, I believe it’s more than a little misplaced.

I’ve made the argument about liberventionism, by the way, in a piece about the abuse of Iraqi female prisoners. The condition of Iraqi women deteriorated on every count after the US invasion, despite a lot of prewar rhetoric from female commentators that the invasion of Iraq was motivated by a desire to liberate women from Islamic fundamentalism. That rhetoric overlooked the fact that Iraq under Saddam was a secular state with a well-educated female population. (“Iraqi Women and Torture: Part IV Gendered Propaganda, the Propaganda of Gender,” Dissident Voice, August 9, 2004).

Chomsky himself argues – more controversially – that US aid is often inversely related to human rights abuses.

I have n’t studied that proposition myself in any systematic way, so I won’t go there.

But in brief, I would say that Islamic extremism may be a foundling child of empire, but descent and equivalence are two different things.

Let me make it clear that, as an individualist, I have a special antipathy toward all forms of thought control. Other forms of coercion – physical or legal – seem far less intrusive and dangerous than power over our thought processes. In fact, I started this site hoping it would become a forum for dissecting some of the mental blinkers we routinely wear. So I do share Ali’s repugnance at what extremist Islamic clerics are demanding from their flock. Nobody could watch these pictures of the stoning of this poor girl in Kurdistan without horror.

That said, however, I think that, at least with regard to honor killings and proscriptions on brothels or sexually explicit imagery, he is comparing two incommensurate things.

Honor killings, to repeat, are more aptly seen as social evils, similar in type to female foeticide in India or of infanticide (the US, for example, has a high rate of infant homicide), or in some people’s view, abortion. Whatever we think of any of these practices, they are a coherent part – even if we think of them, depending on our point of view, as an appropriate or vile part – of a world view.

Let me clarify, that I am not directly equating the killing of a woman with abortion, here. I am simply saying that certain issues have to be discussed in cultural, societal terms rather than purely as legal individual rights. Otherwise, our ability to either understand them or effectively reduce them becomes limited. I, personally, am firmly pro-choice, and iterate that view in this piece on the right to death.

However, one part of opening a dialogue that enlarges human sensibilities is understanding the world views of those who differ from us. To dismiss anti-abortion activists as deluded fools or misogynists simply won’t do, any more than denouncing Islamic theocracy as nothing more than oppressive patriarchal chauvinism. That is, we cannot refuse to see the people we criticize solely in our own terms.

When a considerable number of intelligent and well-intentioned people believe something radically at odds with your belief, it pays to try to understand things first before acting. You have to affirm your common humanity with the other – and isn’t the religious world view most completely the other of the secular? – before you differentiate yourself.

If you subscribe to the idea that a woman’s sexual purity is part of her family honor and if that honor is given a premium in your society, then, putting to death a woman who violates that honor would be a coherent act, even if it were abhorrent to others who didn’t buy your world view. It would probably also be coherent to the victim, even if she rejected it.

It is that coherence that enables us to attack – or defend – infanticide, honor killings or euthanasia or other similar practices as social evils rather than simply criminal acts. In a similar way, if you believe that a woman’s bodily integrity and volition as an adult is of more consequence than a conglomeration of living cells in her body that you believe lacks ‘personhood,’ then abortion will not strike you as morally wrong.

That is, the participants in something like an honor killing genuinely subscribe to the set of beliefs from which the practice arises. Of course, I’m not talking about murders from some other motive (say, financial) that are simply palmed off as honor killings.

In India, the closest phenomenon would be dowry killings, I think. (On rereading this, I don’t think dowry kilings belong here as they are motivated by financial reasons primarily. The old practice of widow immolation – sati – is a better choice. Dowry killings don’t belong to a coherent moral universe).

In European history, something similar, perhaps, might be the old practice of killing wives found in flagrante delicto or, more recently, the passage of lesser sentences for crimes of passion.

A human rights expert writes, “In countries where Islam is practiced, they’re called honour killings, but dowry deaths and so-called crimes of passion have a similar dynamic in that the women are killed by male family members and the crimes are perceived as excusable or understandable. The practice, goes across cultures and across religions.”

I strongly condemn these abominable practices, but I also think that they often predate the presence of Islam. They are socio-economic in nature and are exacerbated by poverty, war and economic dislocation as this Counterpunch piece describes.. I think the right way to effectively end them is through cultural critique, the empowerment of women (and men) through education and vocational training (the perception of economic dependence is one reason women are devalued), as well as the modification of religious laws or traditions shielding perpetrators. An extended and empathic approach has to supplement a purely legalistic one.

If you wanted to help, here is a site, Madre, which works to empower women in Iraq and other places to stand up to violence against them.

You can come out of an ethos of ‘universal values’ and find human rights at stake in such practices, but you should remain aware that they are at stake in what is also a universe, only one that has defined its values differently from ours. You could then undertake the difficult and delicate task of engaging and enlarging that world view, but only while being aware, simultaneously and humbly, that it is a coherent one and that your own position as arbiter of universal human rights is fraught with ambiguity and not quite Olympian.

I have written about this in an article on female foeticide, “Missing Women, Missing Selves” (Gowanus Review),
where I argue for leniency toward women who commit infanticide in India and compare it as a practice to abortion – rather than murder – in the West.

On the other hand, imperial war, The Global War on Terror, to give it its full capitalized dignity, is not a coherent project in the same way. Those who direct it, those who enact it and those who suffer from it are not equally participants in any coherent world-view. They are mechanically enmeshed by propaganda, inertia, ideology, lies, ignorance, greed and a host of fragmentary forces that arise from the nature of the state and its bureaucracy.

The state is not society…. nor culture.

One last point, I should note that my field of training was in Anglophone intellectual history, international relations and US foreign policy – I feel comfortable dealing with issues of the state and of politics for which I am equipped. I have no special expertise in Islam that would enable me to say something useful on the subject. Besides, being what I call a Christo-Hindu, I feel that the cultural or religious critique of a major religion like Islam, which is already at loggerheads with Christianity and Hinduism in many areas, is better left to liberal Muslim voices, such as Ali’s. There is thus the matter of who says what that needs to be considered here. I can feel comfortable criticizing the policies of a country in which I have been resident for over twenty years and with whose language and cultural traditions I am completely conversant. I am less happy to criticize a tradition to which I do not belong. That seems less than civil to me. It is entirely consistent and not to be taken as selective at all.

Those are my rather unfinished, not-completely-thought-out reactions to Ali’s thoughtful and heart-felt piece…

Meanwhile, I came across this wonderful piece that describes the accomplishments of Islamic scientists in the middle ages. I am linking it here, because the relentless association of Islam with only its most extreme elements fails to give the average American reader a fair picture of the past or present of this religion. It’s as though we were to judge Christianity only by the worst excesses of the Conquistadors or by the Atlantic slave trade.

Callimachus at his blog responds and a reader from foreign policy in focus adds a link: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4249

which is an interview with Chomsky about the rise of Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic terror groups.

Well – I have not quarrel with any of that and it shows that Chomsky is fair and not one sided. But I don’t see that he focuses on honor killings or any other societal issues that are exacerbated, no doubt, by war.

I certainly have never denied the existence of Islamic terrorism. India has suffered about 60-65000 deaths from it – from both Pakistani groups and others. Here is a link referencing some of the groups and where they are funded.

Here are some pieces of mine that reference that terrorism; no one’s denying it exists but is it an equal and evil twin of empire?

http://www.counterpunch.org/rajiva01042006.html

and again here, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb06/Rajiva23.htm

and here: http://www.counterpunch.org/rajiva02272006.html

I don’t think that any of that sounds like I don’t think terrorism exists.

But this is the problem: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=4624

selective human rights focus – taken out of context and used incorrectly. And I think HuffPo and other places do that all the time. As an antiwar activist, I will devote my time to providing the context.

Here are some insights from a spectrum of writers, excerpted from a lengthy piece here in the American Conservative.

Reading it, I found a lot of support for some of the things I’ve always thought we needed more of – less partisanship; less politics and more of the fundamentals behind politics; secession from the state, metaphorically and literally; conserving the past and the environment. And most of all, opposing the state and the pretensions of the group. That would be my starting point for a “new world order” that wouldn’t be either imperial or collectivist but a network of small, free-wheeling, self-selected communities, like nodes in a network.

Andrew Bacevich:

The real divide today occurs between those who buy into the myths of the American Century and those who see those myths for what they are: once useful contrivances that have become a source of self-delusion endangering the national interest.

The American Century is a morality tale. It instructs and inspires but also warns. It tells of how Americans, having lost their innocence on Dec. 7, 1941, rose up in righteous anger to smite a succession of evildoers. The American Century began when the nation finally embraced its providentially assigned mission to spread liberty around the world. Present-day adherents to this school—self-described liberals like Peter Beinart no less than self-described conservatives like William Kristol—do not doubt that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 simply inaugurated the next phase of this grand undertaking.

James Beer:

If there is ever to be truth in our political labeling, we need conservatives who will go home, or at least make homes somewhere, conservatives who will abjure Washington and New York and pick up the struggle in their own burgs to help (re-)build real communities, work to conserve the land and its resources, and ally with their naturally like-minded brethren in order to revive—locally—the religious and historic traditions that might sustain us. In fact, those are the only conservatives we need.

Austin Bramwell:

Rather than feeling responsible for the consequences of its actions, it may be that the conservative movement today, in Weber’s words, “feels responsible only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quelched.” One may think of this attitude what one will. It is not, however, right-wing.

Patrick Buchanan:

In the foreword, Donald Davidson wrote that his friend had, upon reading John Crowe Ransom’s God Without Thunder, been taken with the idea that an “unorthodox defense of orthodoxy” might be feasible.

Weaver “was suddenly troubled by his realization,” wrote Davidson, that “many traditional positions in our world had suffered not so much because of inherent defect as because of the stupidity, ineptness and intellectual sloth of those who … are presumed to have their defense in charge.

John Derbyshire:

I am much taken with modern theories of brain function that describe our mental processes in terms of functional modules. One theory postulates (1) a “socialization” module that handles membership of groups: being accepted, defending the group, being aware of other groups, and (2) a “status” module that evaluates and promotes our status in the group (and other people’s statuses too), handling emotions like envy, ambition, humiliation.

If that is right, I would guess that liberals have more strength in their socialization module. They are more focused on co-operative action, group values, leveling, assigning importance to subgroups. Conservatives are stronger in the status module, not minding that some individuals stand above others and emphasizing individual action to enhance status.

Ross Douthat:

The picture is further complicated by the fact that because conservatism only really exists to say “no” to whatever liberalism asks for next, it fights nearly all its battles on its enemy’s terrain and rarely comes close to articulating a coherent set of values of its own. Liberalism has science and progress to pursue—and ultimately immortality, the real goal but also the one that rarely dares to speak its name—whereas conservatives have … well, a host of goals, most of them in tension with one another.

Rod Dreher:

Buying your meat directly from a local farmer might just be a more noble and useful political act than writing a check to the GOP. The work my politically liberal friend David Spence does in Dallas—buying abandoned historic properties in the inner city and restoring them lovingly for office and residential space—strikes me as one of the most authentically conservative things anybody in the country is doing. There is nothing ideological about it, either, but to grasp the real meaning of what David is doing, and what the Hale and Hutchins families—Christian fundamentalist farm families who raise meat organically, as they believe God intended—are doing out in rural east Texas, you have to think beyond superficial ideological categories.

Mary Eberstadt:

However it is ultimately judged by posterity, the war in Iraq is not, and cannot properly be called, a conservative war. It was dictated and justified in the first instance not by political principles but by an extra-ideological perception (correct or incorrect) of imminent threat. Thus the war, controversial though it is, does not re-draw the red-blue state divide that exists independently of it and for other reasons.

Nick Gillespie:

In his underappreciated 1955 masterpiece, The Decline of American Liberalism, Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. wrote that American history from the colonial period on has been a struggle between forces of centralization and decentralization in politics, economics, and culture. He fretted that the “liberal values associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—and especially that of individual freedom—have slowly lost their primary importance in America life and thought.”

Paul Gottfried:

The Left assumed a new identity when its working-class base began to dwindle and when it traded that base for yuppies and self-assertive Third World constituencies. The Left then proceeded to move in a culturally radical direction, a development whose consequences we are now seeing.

Jeffrey Hart:

In the Reflections, more than a year earlier, Burke had not been Burkean enough. The complexities of society can include, as well as complex institutional structure, complex social forces that become irresistible: the French monarchy had been doomed by the accumulation of such forces.

Burke was a conservative in the sense of William Buckley’s definition of conservatism as the “politics of reality.” Unfortunately, many supposed conservatives—I will echo T.S. Eliot’s phrase—“cannot bear very much reality.”

Nicholas Von Hoffman:

In lieu of political parties based on stately essays by the great thinkers of the past, we can continue with what we have—which is crisis politics. Whoever comes up with the most frightening crisis wins. Of late it has been the Republicans, whether conservative or not, who have delivered the knockout punches. Dead babies, dirty bombs, men exchanging wedding bands with other men, toppling skyscrapers, evil Arabs, girl bishops—they’ve swept the Democrats, whether liberal or not, out of contention. Not that the D’s don’t have hopes. It has been said that the Democrats are but one Katrina away from seizing power.

James Kurth:

Nevertheless, what is true of all kinds of conservatives is that they are trying to preserve, to conserve, an existing and established state of affairs, be it involving the social, the security, or the economic realm. And what is true of all kinds of liberals is that they are trying to change this state of affairs, normally but not always in favor of more freedom for the individual (the exception being some kinds of regulation of the economy). The confusion arises from the fact that, as Tocqueville observed as long ago as the 1830s, in America what has always been the existing and established economic state of affairs has been free enterprise or the freedom of the individual. And, as Marx observed as along ago as the 1840s, it is the nature of this economic freedom, of capitalism, to undermine and eventually destroy the existing and established state of affairs in every other realm, including the social and security ones. Thus, in America, conservatism means conserving a liberal dynamic that is constantly in conflict with conservatism. American conservatism thus is simultaneously both conservative and liberal.

Michael Lind:

And what of ideologues in this ethnically-based political system? There will still be libertarians, social democrats, greens, populists, and others. If they have any strategic sense, they will not try to take over one of the two parties. Instead, they will organize themselves as non-partisan movements that seek to influence both of our identity-based national parties.

John Lukacs:

Most conservatives disliked liberals more than they liked liberty. Serial marriages, divorces, consumers of pornography, barbaric households with mannerless children were as frequent among conservatives as they were among liberals. Worse: conservatives came to believe in Progress even more than liberals; their inclinations to conserve shrank to near nothing.

Heather Macdonald:

So maybe religious conservatives should stop assuming that they alone occupy the field. Maybe they should cut back a bit on their religious triumphalism. Nonbelievers are good conservatives, too. As Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has advised, it should be possible for conservatives to unite on policy without agreeing on theology.

Scott McConnell:

When the United States has embarked on a course that may blacken its name for a generation, one must acknowledge that illegal aliens and their supporters had absolutely nothing to do with it.

When one sits down with a liberal, the aforementioned issues become something that can be discussed without rancor or passion, or simply ignored. Next to the war, they hardly seem more important (though surely they are) than whether the Yankees return to their rightful place in the World Series. On the Right, one has good conversations with those who are either antiwar or good friends of long standing. But it has become hard to imagine striking up a new friendship with a pro-Bush “let’s invade the world to make it democratic” type.

Kevin Phillips:

There is, to be sure, some utility is seeing a division between supporters of the more or less triumphant Washington status quo and those doubters, erstwhile liberals and conservatives alike, who increasingly disdain a failed bipartisan national leadership and its policy handiwork. But this is not a broad enough definition either—and perhaps there really isn’t one

James P. Pinkerton:

So that’s how the two big lumps are subdivided. Mostly libertarian Republicans preside over a populist-conservative base on the Right, while on the Left, mostly libertarian Democrats preside over a motley crew—everyone from Luddite socialist Greens to what Europeans would call “right-wing social democrats,” a teeming mass united by little except, paradoxically, anti-libertarianism.

Justin Raimondo:

Yes, war is a great clarifier. As the Bush administration sinks deeper into the Iraqi quagmire and the neocons plot another foray, this time into Iran, the geopolitical, financial, and domestic political consequences of our war-crazed foreign policy are all too apparent and whatever else one may say about them, what one cannot say—with a straight face—is that they are conducive to conservatism in any way, shape, or form. As, one by one, the pillars of our old Republic fall away—or are hacked to pieces—and the bloated grandiosity of an Empire rises above the ruins, real conservatives (and libertarians, such as myself) look on in horror—and are labeled “extreme leftists” for our trouble.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell:

But it’s never been as bad as it is today. They sometimes invoke the names of genuinely radical thinkers such as F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. But their real heroes are talk-radio blabsters, television entertainers, and sexpot pundit quipsters. They have little intellectual curiosity at all.

In many ways, today’s conservatives are party men and women not unlike those we saw in totalitarian countries, people who spout the line and slay the enemy without a thought as to the principles involved. Yes, they hate the Left. But only because the Left is the “other.”

This is why they fail to see that the Left has been making a lot more sense on policy issues in recent years. It is correct on civil liberties, on issues of war and peace, and on the critical issue of religious liberty. By “correct” I mean that in these areas the Left is saying precisely what the liberals of old used to say: as much as possible, society ought to be left to manage itself without the coercive intervention of the state.

Claes G. Ryn:

The word “conservative” was always problematic. It seems to imply that conservatism is all about conserving something already achieved. But conservatism wants to conserve the best of the humane heritage because the latter is an indispensable guide to finding and promoting the good, the true, and the beautiful in the present. The spirit of civilization must forever adapt to new circumstances.

Today highly destructive social trends have themselves become traditions of a sort. Hence the spirit of civilization will have to assert itself in sometimes radical-looking ways, not least in politics. It must free itself of incapacitating habits. One such habit is the increasingly philistine obsession with politics.

Kirkpatrick Sale:

I am convinced, believe it or not, that secession—by state where the state is cohesive (the model is Vermont, where the secessionist movement is the Second Vermont Republic), or by region where that makes more sense (Southern California or Cascadia are the models here)—is the most fruitful objective for our political future. Peaceful, orderly, popular, democratic, and legal secession would enable a wide variety of governments, amenable to all shades of the anti-authoritarian spectrum, to be established within a modern political context. Such a wide variety, as I see it, that if you didn’t like the place you were, you could always find a place you liked.

Phyllis Schlafly:

Bush ran as a conservative, but he has been steadily (some might say stealthily) trying to remold the conservative movement and the Republican Party into the Bush Party. And the Bush Party stands for so many things alien to conservatism, namely, war as an instrument of foreign policy, nation-building overseas, highly concentrated executive power, federal control of education, big increases in social entitlements, massive increases in legal and illegal immigration, forcing American workers to compete with low-wage foreigners (under deceptive enticements such as free trade and global economy), and subordinating U.S. sovereignty to a North American community with open borders.

Fred Siegel:

But 217 years after it accidentally imposed itself, a nomenclature devised for the semi-feudal society of late 18th-century France is bound to make a hash of describing American political life.
Taki Theodoracopulos:

But after the Evil Empire’s downfall, I saw a different America—not one dedicated to defending freedom but an empire out to exploit friends and imaginary foes alike. Why, for example, are we surrounding Russia with NATO bases? Why are we in Iraq? Why are we threatening Iran and Syria? Why are we not restraining Israel? Why is Bush inviting the Saudi head kleptocrat to Texas and holding his hand like a long-lost brother?

What are Right and Left any more? Who is a liberal and who is a conservative? When Madeleine Albright proudly announces that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children via the sanctions on Iraq were worth it, even God becomes suspect. Which liberal or conservative can explain to me the difference between an Iraqi insurgent’s roadside bomb that kills civilian passersby and a U.S. bombing raid that also causes the deaths of innocent women and children? Both are acts of savagery: in both cases one knows in advance that civilians will most certainly be killed. Bush and Americans in general claim the moral high ground, but both are terribly wrong. War is a barbaric business. Only defensive wars are justified.

Philip Weiss:

I marched against this war. I’m grateful for the company I’ve now gotten from American conservatives, and I see my own views as coming out of an estimable American tradition: tolerance, laissez-faire, don’t-tread-on-me values. There seems to be a lot of cross-pollination at work. Strands of isolationism and realism and fiscal conservatism have influenced me, while I sense that the Left has been able to persuade the Right on the importance of global warming and even affirmative action.

Those conservatives have other ideological baggage I don’t particularly care for. I think of myself as pro-Hispanic on immigration issues, and I’m pro-abortion. I can well imagine having clashes with my new friends over these issues some day. Not now. The country’s in crisis. Inasmuch as we can make any headway together, I don’t think we would allow these issues to jam the spokes. And by the way, when it comes to abortion, I’m distressed that so many Democrats seem to have whittled all their most urgent concerns down to that one issue. I don’t think it’s that important.

Chilton Williamson:

To the extent that “conservatism” is meaningless, that is because the word has been dishonestly used by modern conservatives with the conscious intent to deceive. Not so with liberalism, since liberals never attempt to pass themselves or their ideologically pure ideas off as conservative (except when they are running for something and want the conservative vote under false pretenses), since to do so would be to abdicate their intellectual and moral status as infinitely compassionate demigods and philosopher-kings.
Clyde Wilson:

On behalf of the imperial bureaucratic regime, the Democrats absorb and defang whatever liberal inclinations remain in their constituency, and the Republicans do likewise for the conservatives. The only difference is that the Democrats institutionally are wired to keep up the momentum of an already liberal state, while the Republicans’ conservatism has always been a pure fraud.
John Zmirak:

In one sense, the Left/Right dichotomy is like those chemicals that are so simple that they’re toxic. Why, when discussing the panoramic landscape of theories about how man shall live in community, should we choose a one-dimensional model—which offers no up or down, much less a diagonal? Can you imagine imposing such a primitive scheme on any other field of human life? Picture a Left-to-Right spectrum of painters, poets, or national cuisines. You could draw one up according to arbitrarily chosen qualities—such as realism, rhyme scheme, or wasabi content. It can be done, but why bother?

Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Powers is a book that you must read if you’re interested in crowd psychology. Here is a sample of what you get:

“There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.

Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unknown touch can amount to panic.

All the distances which men create around themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which no one may enter, and only there feel some measure of security.

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation into which the fear changes into the opposite.”

In my opinion the book is somewhat uneven, passages of great power and insight alternating with observations that are a little artificial…. even, at times, contrived.

But that’s an idiosyncratic response, since this is the book which won him the Nobel Prize in 1981. And the book’s style of argument is so suggestive that it makes up for that occasional weakness.

For the sustained complexity and richness that comes with a great work of literature, read his magnum opus, Auto da Fe — one of my favorite books. But really, the comparison of the two isn’t fair, or even viable, because this is a work of sociology, while Auto da Fe – with all its philosophical depth — is a novel.

And, despite all my quibbles, Crowds and Powers is filled with immensely fertile observations.

Worth a slow, meditative read.