Wow, my post on Henry “I’m Going To Get The Darn Name Right This Time” Farrell’s post at Crooked Timber sure triggered a long and wandering thread.
A couple of things.
First, let’s not get back into race in this discussion, as that not what I’m trying to dig into. I’ll post something on it again soon, but for now, let’s stipulate that there’s enough shame and pride to go completely around both parties and all races regarding the history of race in the United States. Don’t comment on racein the thread below unless it’s germane to this issue, please.
Next, to the issue at hand. I do owe one serious apology for a lazy phrase – which was called out by commenter Thomas Nephew; I used “academic leftist” where I would have been better suited to have used “academic opponent of the West.” Now it happens that that Romantic philosophy has slipped into both the somewhat unhinged Left and Right, and in fact I’ll suggest that the more virulent strains are actually more anti-Western than they are left or right (which would suggest why a classical leftist like Norm Geras – or even myself – has so much trouble with them, and why the ideological gap between the sides – in that specific anti-Western arena – gets slippery as hell). My phrasing was lazy and inexact, and in my only defense, I’ll point out that the academics who fit into that part of the Venn diagram (academic, anti-Western) are today primarily of the left – although it takes no great feat of imagination on my part to imagine them switching sides.
Having said that, I’ll stand pretty solidly by my guns.The immediate issue is historian Robert Conquest’s assertion, which was quoted in a review, to which quote and review, Farrell reacted – to put it mildly – with sputtering outrage. Let’s go to the quote again:
“And we are told that a number of members of the Middle Eastern terror groups had originally been in the local communist movements – The members of [the Real IRA and the Shining Path], as with those in Italy or, for example, the Naxalites in India, were almost entirely recruited from student elements who had accepted the abstractions of fashionable academics. And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set.”
Correlation is not causation, and it’s not possible to simply assert that because Mohammed Atta (or any number of other Islamist and other radicals) became radicals at university or afterwards, while they were still members of the university community that the university made them radicals.
But it’s equally interesting to note that many (if not most) of the foremost figures in leftist and Islamist radicalism (including the Real IRA and the Red Brigades and the 9/11 cell) came to their radicalism at university, and to wonder if there is something about the university experience that facilitates the change from an activist to a terrorist.
Now I’ve argued for almost as long as I’ve been blogging that terrorism is not an exclusively Islamic tool (McVeigh), and that to defeat it, we must both find and forcibly control those who would use it and reduce the number of people attracted to it by creating and winning a battle of ideas – a philosophical war.
Given that the people actually attracted to and leading terrorist movements are not typically poor, and that they consciously choose this path, it’s certainly a worthwhile effort to discuss and explore why they made the choice that they did. I’m formulating a theory, based in my own limited reading, that the nihilistic, Romantic, anti-Western theme that runs through much modern thinking – and which is conspicuously more present in academe then in, say, the banking industry – may have something to do with it. And that these notions – when planted in the soil of the right personality – may help grow terrorists.
I’m not sure this is true, although the more I read and discuss it, the more convinced I am. I’m happy to see a debate about it spring up in the comments below (and here, I assume).
If what I say is true, does that mean I support re-education camps for progressive professors? Nope. Does it mean that we need to hold up this kind of thought to the light of discussion and see if it survives? Yeah, all day long. And interestingly, Mr. Farrell doesn’t. His response to Conquest’s quote – a single, edited quote presented out of any possible context by a hostile reviewer – was apoplectic, and designed not to demonstrate the error of Conquest’s idea, but to simply shut of discussion of it through the force of Farrell’s rage and contempt.
Bummer, because if that’s what academic thought has come to in this era, we may have bigger problems than the creation of a small population of violent terrorists.
Does that mean that you’d react with reasoned debate rather than mere disgust and contempt to the parallel suggestion that US foreign policy might have been to blame for 9/11? If not, why do you hold the two cases to be different?
You theory seems trivial. You write:
“I’m formulating a theory, based in my own limited reading, that the nihilistic, Romantic, anti-Western theme that runs through much modern thinking – and which is conspicuously more present in academe then in, say, the banking industry – may have something to do with it.”
So you are not asserting actual effect, or even possible effect? You are asserting, still more weakly, the bare possibility that x ‘has something to do with’ y? But surely every significant element of Western society and culture and economics, technology, communications, the media, etc. may have ‘something to do’ with terrorist attitudes. Is it possible that “American Idol” – the price of tea in China – may have something to do with anti-American attitudes that lead to terrorism? Yes. But don’t say it like it’s even the start of a thin edge of any wedge of accusation or blame. it’s just a sheer tautology of our small world, lo these last few centuries.
Would it be appropriate to formulate a theory about capitalism, analogous to yours concerning the “Nihilistic, Romantic, anti-Western theme that runs through much modern thinking”: Capitalism may have something to do with terrorism, since it seems most terrorists have had some exposure to capitalist societies. You could hasten to reassure that you do not favor re-education camps for capitalists. (Do you see why this is problematic?)
But “Nihilistic, Romantic, anti-Western theme that runs through much modern thinking” is much more specific than ‘capitalism’, you may object. To the contrary, I suspect it is either uselessly vague or else means a whopping great swathe of what has happened since the French Revolution. The number of thoughts Western folk have had to the effect that there is something seriously wrong with the world they live in is very great. The West is the world’s foremost manufacturer of anti-Western thought, going way back. We are a very self-critical civilization, bless us.
“And that these notions – when planted in the soil of the right personality – may help grow terrorists.”
For the sweet love of Karl Popper! What do you mean, ‘right personality’? Just: a personality that is predisposed to become terroristic when exposed to these notions? Then the answer is that indeed exposing such personalities to things that may make them terroristic may make them terroristic. But of course you didn’t mean anything so trivial. But then what did you mean? Again, please compare: could capitalist notions – when planted in the soil of the right personality – possibly help grow terrorists? Could MTV – when played before the eyes of the right personality – possibly help grow terrorists? How could any such question ever receive a disconfirming ‘no’ response?
You write as though your theory has some tendency to call Henry’s critical point in question. I don’t see how it possibly could.
If you have a substantive causal thesis, make it. If you have, additionally, proof of bad intent, malice, etc., lay it out for all to see, so you can start blaming individual thinkers, schools of thought, etc. If you can’t plausibly establish cause and malice, in any non-trivial way, don’t hint that you have a rebuttal to a post that complained about apparently non-trivial allegations against leftists. (Yes, Henry hasn’t read the book. You haven’t read the book. I haven’t read the book. We all haven’t read the book. Don’t blame Henry! He just posted a post about a book review.)
Sorry, I’m hopped up on coffee. Glad to meet you, armed liberal.
Regarding causation, the way to establish that is to look at the evolution of individuals over time, for instance to see if any become terrorists without exposure to counter-enlightenment ideas, or whether people are more likely to adopt a “pre-terrorist” orientation only after exposure to such ideas in a university context. And since you’d bias the study if you picked and looked at the lives of terrorists after the fact, you’d have to pick a large random group of individuals and hope that enough of them at least get to the pre-terrorist stage that you’d could have a statistically valid panel study.
All of which would be extremely expensive, and not the sort of thing that ever gets funded.
But the alternative is to believe that people become radicalized first, and only then study Romantic or counter-enlightenment phisolophy, or that the philosophy is correlated with something that unambiguously is a cause or contributing factor. The latter is a real possibility. These philosophical movements spawn organizational spinoffs that are everything from progressive church groups to crisis hotlines, and it’s easy to see how a terrorist network might easily become nested within these groups without the philosophy itself having played a causal role.
But if that were the case, you’d hardly expect to find vestages or remnants of the philosphy embedded within the terrorist ideology. Yet this is invariably exactly what you find. So, again, you’re left with the speculation that the terrorist conviction came first but then became attached to the philosophy… And replicating at least part of the panel study method, were that the case one would expect to find at least a few “primative” terrorist movements, uncontaminated by formal Romanticism.
Well, there are lots of “uncontaminated” terrorists (McVeih) but not very many uncontaminated totalitarian ideologies. A short list of those with determinate influences from the counter-enlightenment: Nazism, Marxism, Qutbism, the Phalange (Spanish Romanticism). If one could point to a counter-enlightenment linkage in the evolution of Japanese fascism of the mid-twentieth century I think I’d buy the idea hook, line and sinker. But I don’t know enough about the movements that led to Japanese fascism as an offspring to draw that conclusion. The sire was certainly the odd warrior cultism of the Samurai, but I just don’t know who the dame was. Perhaps one of your readers is familiar with that history?
But all these movements are influenced by the Enlightenment, too. Put it this way: there are those who blame instrumental reason run mad for Fascism. (All the terrifying efficiency of the camps). Others blame Romanticism. All that blood and soil hoo-ha. So the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment are both to blame for Hitler. You just end up with a universal violation of Godwin’s Law. That’s not worth having.
Actually, Demosophist, Buruma makes exactly that connection (between the mid-20th Century rise of the Japanese militarist state) in Occidentalism, and further suggests that – as an example – kamikaze pilots were most frequently university students (he goes further, to claim that they were students with backgrounds in philosophy), and quotes a number of their letters to support the exact linkage you’re questioning.
A.L.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that Atta became radical at his university?
Anything?
Do you know what he wrote his thesis about?
praktike:
Atta’s thesis was on the conflict between Islam and modernity as reflected in the planning of historical cities.
“Armed Liberal” – I’m sorry, but this is a post that you should be really rather ashamed of. You’re not putting up a “theory” – you’re putting up a prejudice. A lazy, ill-informed prejudice, backed by pretty well no evidence. Theories are testable – they can be confirmed or disconfirmed by evidence. They have causal arguments. Your speculations have neither – indeed you’ve framed them in such a way as to insulate them from the need to be tested against reality. If somebody else put up a post using this kind of logic, but blaming say Israel or the US for terrorism and 9/11, you and others would quite rightly be up in arms about it. The “license to speculate” argument is used to provide cover for an awful lot of unpleasant expressions of prejudice – do you really want to lump yourself in with this crowd?
If you’re going to make an extremely broad-reaching claim that puts a large part of the blame for one of the worst events in recent history on a broad group (leftist academics), you need emphatically convincing smoking-gun evidence. “Equally interesting”s, “wonder if”s and “may have something to do with it”s don’t even begin to qualify. They seem designed to provide a protective armour under which you can set out your own, rather unpleasant prejudices, without having to prove them or defend them. I said yesterday that I’d be interested in which way you jumped after having been called to defend a specific factual claim – I’m genuinely sorry to see that you’ve chosen the path that you have.
AL: you might make a more credible case if you stopped talking about “nihilism.” None of the major Islamic militant groups, and very, very few of the left-wing or right-wing terrorist groups of the 1960s-1990s, can plausibly be described as “nihilist.”
I also suspect that you’re taking the wrong lesson from Buruma and Margalit (sidenote: it is bad form to only reference a co-authored book by its first author). Regardless, you’ve moved from a perfectly interesting discussion of continuities and borrowings in anti-western discourse to defending a very tenuous argument accusing left-wing academics who teach, for example, post-colonial theory of somehow being culpable in instances of terrorism.
I’ll pose the same counterfactual I mentioned in the last iteration of this thread: in a world without Fanon, Foucault, Heidegger, etc., do you believe the 9/11 attacks wouldn’t have happened? This strikes me as a very difficult argument to advance, given that you can induce the same arguments that motivate Al-Queda without any reference to these theorists and their ilk. Indeed, Buruma and Margalit (the book is co-authored) make clear in their own historical sketches that Islamic militancy had plenty of autonomous sources of development.
Also – fwiw, I don’t anticipate responding further to what you have to say here; I really don’t see that it’s worthwhile engaging you in argument.
An addendum to Henry’s post. AL: the closest parallel I think of to your argument is, ironically, Said’s Orientalism. One of the fundamental flaws of that book is that, having identified a knowledge regime of anti-eastern thought, Said then reduces all interactions between east and west, all intellectual activity about the “orient,” to instances of Orientalism.
It isn’t that Said can’t find parallels in different areas of though, representational systems and so forth. Of course he can: there are intellectual currents and connections that link almost almost all aspects of thought and representation in “the West.” The problem is that once you’ve accepted his framework, you wind up seeing the dualism he poses everywhere you look. A lot of the worst work on Orientalism is this kind of pattern matching, which is ultimately what you’re doing here. But pattern matching isn’t etiology.
Foucault, by the way, absolutely rejected this kind of binary approach to structural analysis as reductionist and misleading. This is why Said, supposedly influenced by Foucault, is a terrible Foucaultian.
On the original quote, the point about abstractions is blindingly obvious–if you’re going to devote your life to killing people thousands of miles away you have and will never meet, you’re obviously dealing with some abstractions. It turns out much academic work deals with abstractions as well. Ditto for religions. Nationalism and patriotism on the abstraction front. So it philosophical liberalism. If the point was that they became comfortable thinking in abstract manners at the university, fine. I’ve made the same point myself.
But the abstract thought at the university happens across the curriculum and across the political spectrum. It’s the unsupported notion that it’s the particular “fashionable” abstractions of the left that lead to this. As someone who takes accusing people of complicity in the deaths of thousands rather seriously, I’d look for actual evidence on that front before inserting that little zinger.
If this has gotten down to the specific motivations of the 9/11 hijackers, based on one line that Conquest wrote, then it seems to me that the larger point is being missed.
I think it’s safe to say that the Ward Churchills of this country don’t pose much of a domestic security threat. The worst terrorist organization our universities ever produced was the incompetent Weather Underground, which was mostly good only for blowing itself to Hell. Japanese and German student terrorists are somewhat more capable, but still small in number.
Isn’t the damage they’ve done to the Arts and Humanities enough? Isn’t the culture of cowardice and intimidation they’ve created enough? Haven’t they ruined the lives of enough people by teaching them nothing but hatred and simple-minded pseudo-Marxist claptrap? And the best rationale anyone can offer for this is a false appeal to “free speech”, which is so disingenuous and hypocritical (the First Amendment is supposed to protect vile speech, not promote it at the expense of everything else) that it fools nobody. It certainly doesn’t fool the public, which has lost all faith in non-technical higher education.
It isn’t the liberal establishment’s tolerance for rabid leftist professors that’s the problem, so much as their disregard and contempt for the students of those professors. Our culture has gone completely to waste, and more and more young people are mostly good for watching television and playing video games. Thanks, ironically, to the enemies of capitalism. Seems like enough damage to me.
Glen,
Your initial point was solid. As I’ve noted, to say that “Mohammed Atta didn’t get his ideas in university,” even if true, is somewhat like the argumentative reputation the Jesuits used to have. “If you claimed they murdered 3 men and a dog,” goes the saying, “they’d try to defeat your argument by proving that the dog was still healthy.”
The rest explains the “3 levels of analysis trhat look at the links between anti-Western ‘Bad Philosophy’ and modern international terrorism.”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006239.php#c44
Now…
“Our culture has gone completely to waste, and more and more young people are mostly good for watching television and playing video games.
Buck up, it’s not as bad as all that. On the battlefield, I’ll take a Limp Bizkit-listening, video-game playing, TV watching American kid over a bloodthirsty, scary, supposedly-tough al-Qaeda jihadi any day. And if you’ll give me a choice between 20 of each, my level of certainty goes up.
Victor Davis Hanson is with me on that one, 100%, and his discussions of The Western Way of War explain why.
This younger generation places more value on families than their parents, believes in work and entrepreneurship, is fully wired, thinks in global terms, and is used to multi-tasking and navigating huge streams of information. They’ve also spent a lot of time on those video games, which ought to worry other powers who contemplate facing the worldf’s most advanced military that offers them the real thing with similar interfaces.
I think the kids today are fantastic. Not to mention the fact that their music beats the hell out of the stuff that was out there when I went to college.
“Our culture has gone completely to waste, and more and more young people are mostly good for watching television and playing video games. Thanks, ironically, to the enemies of capitalism.”
Actually, as a parent of teenagers I would argue that the video games/television watching addictions have much more to do with successful capitalism than any of the “enemies of capitalism”. Grand Theft Auto has sure made at least a few capitalists successful, as has Girls Gone Wild. Foucault had nothing to do with it.
Cultural conservatives have a cognitive dissonance problem, since they argue that the “market knows all” but yet reject the products of that market as decadent and undesireable.
Of course, when you consider that Atta was a student in that hotbed of anti-western post-modern deconstructionism that is Urban Planning, well, then the connection is just obvious.
Terrorism is a tactic; it is neither a philosophy nor a movement. Just look at “Wild Bill” Casey or Menachim Begin if you want to consider disparate individuals who used terrorism in their attempts to further their own ends.
Sure there are some egregiously nonsensical polemics on the left in academia. But remember, the late Senator John East (R-NC) was an academic who, along with his mentor, Jesse Helms, denounced Martin Luther King, Jr. as a communist sympathizer.
All this twittering over “terrorism” and “islamofacism” conveniently ignores sizeable chunks of our own history. Wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan a terrorist organization?
It was.
See my comment from A.L.’s previous post to see “what you’d have to show, in order to demonstrate a parallel.”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006239.php#c44
Joe: Buck up, it’s not as bad as all that.
I know it isn’t. Sometimes it just seems that way to me. But to Tom Volckhausen I would say: Capitalism doesn’t run our schools and universities, it just pours in the cash. Not that it should run them, but current attitudes and procedures are unacceptable. They’ve created a permanently alienated and hostile class, with no agenda other than their own alienation and hostility.
Science and technology, on the other hand, continue to soar. Instead of emulating their spirit, the “Humanities” have declared war on them. How long will the brain live without the body?
In the Dark Ages, scholars gave up any idea of advancing culture. They figured that the Greeks and Romans had achieved the pinnacle of civilization, and it would be all downhill from there. So they set about making as many copies of Aristotle as they could, to save some of it. I guess that sums our ambition: Protect Dante and Shakespeare as best we can while the Franks and Visigoths do their revolution thing, and wait for another Enlightenment.
many (if not most) of the foremost figures in … the Real IRA … came to their radicalism at university
Now that is really most extraordinarily interesting. You see, my own impression is that many, and quite possibly most, members of the Real IRA had never been to university to begin with. And even if they had been, what ‘radicalism’ they possess they certainly did not get there. You may call the Real IRA ‘radicals’ if you like, but there is precious little of Academic Leftist Radicalism in it. (Or of any sort of radicalism, really. Basically, they just kill people. British people and protestant Irish people for preference, of course, but anybody who gets in the way will do. They are radical in about the same way that your Ku Klux Klan are radical, if rather better at bombmaking.)
There is of course no reason why you should be expected to be au courant of the intricacies of splinter republican* theology. Unless, that is, you choose to prattle on about them to bolster some argument you’re making. In that case, you’d be better advised to have at least some vague clue as to what you’re prattling on about. When (as in this case) you don’t, it suggests strongly that one should dismiss the rest of what you say as similarly worthless. And, oh yeah: it shows you up as a bit of an ass to boot.
Better luck next time, a mhic.
* Given your profound knowledge of Irish affairs, I should probably explain for your benefit that ‘republican’ in this context has nothing to do with George Bush and his mates.
Glen W.
Sor Alghieri remains well protected. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate may be written above the door of many lecture halls but those who will advance civilization see it, read it and heed it. The “intellectual” movement that AL addresses is dying of ridicule as we write. Time is ever on the side of truth.
Mrs. Tilton: my own impression is that many, and quite possibly most, members of the Real IRA had never been to university to begin with.
I think you’re entirely wrong about that. Traditionally, IRA members learned republican violence about the same time they learned how to eat solid food. The “Real” IRA is a new ultra-radical splinter faction opposed to recent reconciliation efforts, well organized, and I’ll bet their educational level is higher than your average Belfast sniper.
If you think the IRA is all about killing British soldiers and Protestants, you don’t know the IRA. Their leadership has been dominated by Marxist-Leninists since the 70s, when they began a long history of collaboration with the PFLP and other PLO factions. Those bomb-making skills you refer to were learned at camps in Libya and Lebanon, alongside educated middle-class terrorists from FARC, ETA, and the extinct Baader-Meinhof gang.
Sor Alghieri remains well protected
But not correctly spelt, alas. And the protection isn’t good enough to keep you from turning him into a Spanish nun.
I’m heartened, though, to learn that those who will advance civilisation can see that invisible quotation over the doors of their lecture-halls, and can read Italian. But I worry: if they heed the message, surely they’ll be too despondent to be much use at civilisation-advancing.
Or perhaps you mean they’ll heed the message by turning round and giving the lecture-hall a wide berth? There’s a lot to be said for avoiding lecture-halls, to be sure. But sadly those who do usually don’t become very good at Italian (unless they be Italian lecture-hall-avoiders, of course), and they’re even worse at protecting Messer Alighieri. (Or as he is called by a few people, ‘Dante’. But to call him that is doubtless a pretentious affectation.)
While Mr. Farrell has taken his ball and headed home, I think there’s an interesting topic in this to debate nontheless.
It seems, at first blush to break down into several issues:
1) is there an intellectual (as opposed to cultural or economic) foundation for the act of converting to Islamist terrorism?? (which isn’t the only kind, but is the kind we’re concerned about today)
2) is there a locus (causal connection) between the kinds of anti-Western theories that tend to preoccupy a significant fraction of the academics at universities in the West and this intellectuial foundation??
3) How would we demonstrate it if it was there? How would we disprove it if it wasn’t?
I’m genuinely interested in how to proceed on this question…
A.L.
So, if I read you correctly, the cause of terrorism is the academic left (or “anti-american academics), because some students who may have attended classes in which these “anti-Western” ideas were being propagated, or read books by the propagators of this “ideology” become terrorists? I’d suggest that you make better use of your Venn diagrams.
I could use the same logic to suggest that being born to a woman is the root cause of terrorism, since I defy you to name one terrorist who wasn’t born to a woman.
Traditionally, IRA members learned republican violence about the same time they learned how to eat solid food.
Republicans traditionally learnt republican cant at a very early age, it’s true. But by the time they got round to the violence bit, they’d usually been at the solids for quite a long time.
The “Real” IRA is a new ultra-radical splinter faction opposed to recent reconciliation efforts,
‘New’? They might fairly have been called new in 1997. (Perhaps they are new to you, but that is not the same thing.) Similarly, it’s amusing to hear the events culminating in the Good Friday Agreement called ‘recent’. But if by ‘new’ you imply that the Real IRA (unlike all those bomb-tossing traditional republican toddlers) were rugby-playing middle-class boys named Tarquin who heard a few lectures about postmodernism and were suddenly transfigured into bloodthirsty revolutionaries, that is even more amusing. They are for the most part border-country hardmen.
well organized,
True, if by ‘well organised’ you mean ‘thoroughly infiltrated by the Garda and PSNI and with their ability to mount operations reduced to very nearly nil’.
and I’ll bet their educational level is higher than your average Belfast sniper.
A bet you’d win, given that it’d be hard to find an ‘average Belfast sniper’. Sniping wasn’t really a very big tactic in Belfast; more of a border thing. But then of course, you are an expert on the IRA so you already know that. If by ‘Belfast sniper’ you just mean mainstream PSF/PIRA, though, then you’d lose.
Their leadership has been dominated by Marxist-Leninists since the 70s
You really need to stop reading Claire Sterling or whomever it is you’re getting this nonsense from. (And you need to get some more recent books.) The chucks certainly went through their marxy-farxy phase back in the day. They’ve hardly become converts to economic liberalism since then, but World Revolution simply isn’t a dominant theme these days, and hasn’t been for a long while. If you’re looking for a convenient pigeonhole for modern republicanism, it isn’t Marxism-Leninism; it’s Violent Ethnic Nationalism. Those nice earnest Marxist-Leninist young men who used to run the IRA were ousted years before the Real IRA were a glimmer in Mickey McKevitt’s eye. And who ousted them? Chaps name of Adams and McGuinness, among others. And where’d they go then? Well, some are now in something called the Workers’ Party, and some ended up (through a circuitous route) in Labour. Both sets are keen condemners of republican violence these days.
If you think the IRA is all about killing British soldiers and Protestants, you don’t know the IRA.
You’re probably right. After all, I’m merely Irish, with connections on both sides of the border. When it comes to analyses of republican theory and practice, I’ll defer to ill-informed American bloviators every time.
Mrs. Tilton,
Thank you so much for correcting the spelling error. It was such an important point.
Just a minor quibble – if you google sor and signor you may learn something. I have my doubts, but almost anything is possible.
I do take your point about pretentious affectation. It’s wise to pay attention to an expert.
Mrs. Tilton: “Those nice earnest Marxist-Leninist young men who used to run the IRA were ousted years before the Real IRA were a glimmer in Mickey McKevitt’s eye. And who ousted them? Chaps name of Adams and McGuinness, among others. And where’d they go then? Well, some are now in something called the Workers’ Party, and some ended up (through a circuitous route) in Labour.”
My congratulations to any Marxist IRA killer who has gone straight, if joining the Labour Party is going straight. But it is the opinion of our State Department (among others) that many of them went straight into the “Real” IRA, taking their terrorist expertise with them. And that, furthermore, RIRA has gotten assistance from dissidents in Sein Finn and the (Unreal?) IRA, and maybe the government of Libya, too.
But let us call them an ecumenical bunch, since they have never been above associating with racists and White Supremacists (or “Ethnic Nationalists”), either. Not to mention any Irish-American idiot who will give them money to buy guns.
Since you (correctly) recognize that groups like the IRA are weak and marginal – especially since Soviet funding for anti-imperialist hooliganism disappeared – why do you deny their international connections?
AL: there are commonalities in the critique of western liberalism offered by a variety of different intellectual movements, including militant Islamicism. A quick analogy: Marxist-Leninism and Fascism also shared common criticisms of capitalism but that did not, pace Hayek, mean that they were of the same ilk.
Exploring these common assumptions and noting instances of direct borrowing making strange bedfellows, as Occidentialism does, is extremely interesting and potentially very informative, but it does not provide a causal account of the rise of militant Islamicism or its terroristic subset.
You’ve also set up the problem wrong: of course there are intellectual reasons why individuals adopt ideologies and why they embrace terrorism as a strategy to bring about their preferred world. It isn’t a matter of testing the variables “Ideology,” “economics,” and “culture” against one another (since ideology is part of culture, this would be hard to do anyway, but I think I know what you mean here). It is a matter of establishing the counterfactual claim that, in the absence (insert approach here) academics, would we still have a militant Islamic movements, and would we still have subsets of those movements that embrace terrorism?
The fact that so many critics of “the West” converge on the same ideas suggests that we would, as does the fact that anti-western Islamicists are perfectly good at coming up with reasons to hate the west independent of, say romanticism.
Given that terrorism is a strategy that tends to be embraced of sub-groups of sub-groups of sub-groups who become frustrated with the failure of other strategies (think about the anti-abortion movement or the militia movement here), given the size of the Islamicist base, and given the many reasons why an Islamicist might feel that his or her grievances weren’t being solved by non-violent means, the adoption of terrorism by significant numbers of people isn’t that hard to explain.
And, as I’ve tried to point out to you, you don’t help your case by being somewhat sloppy in your discussion of intellectual currents and beliefs. Al-Queda is not “nihilist,” it wants (or wanted to, given how little apparently remains of the Al-Queda network as such) to re-establish the Caliphate and bring about a new, revived, pure, Islamic empire. That’s not nihilism. Nor is it post-modern. Nor post-structural. Etc. etc.
if you google sor and signor you may learn something. I have my doubts, but almost anything is possible.
O ye of little faith. In fact, from a quick Googling I do learn something: that ‘sor’ is a variant in the Roman dialect of standard modern Italian’s signore. Cognate, to be sure, with the ‘ser’ and ‘messer’ that Dante, a Tuscan speaker, would have used; but not a term with which he would normally be addressed. Perhaps your choice of ‘sor’ alludes to Dante’s fidelity to the Roman church, for all his dissatisfaction with various Roman pontiffs. If so, your sense of subtlety is admirable. And here I’d thought you were just putting on the dog.
I do take your point about pretentious affectation. It’s wise to pay attention to an expert
Indeed it is, and I look forward to further lessons at the feet of a master.
Glen, you’re making a real idiot of yourself here about the IRA and you would be well advised to stop digging. A glance at the pattern of operations of the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The IRA” would demonstrate that Mrs. Tilton is right and you are wrong; they control next to no territory in Belfast or Derry and are quite clearly based in the kind of border towns where a postmodernist intellectual might find it quite difficult to get his hands on a copy of the New York Review of Books without a frankly unacceptable delay.
Your State Department also doesn’t believe that the pre-Provos Marxist-Leninist IRA provided leadership to the RIRA, mainly because your State Department is not yet completely off its cake. This idea is actually laughable; anyone with a subscription to an Irish newspaper could have followed the careers of the Official IRA for the last thirty five years, mainly into mainstream politics, with (allegedly) occasional departures into passing off counterfeit US dollar bills for the mafiya. Any “terrorist expertise” they might have possessed predates the invention of Semtex.
Lee Scoresby: It is a matter of establishing the counterfactual claim that, in the absence (insert approach here) academics, would we still have a militant Islamic movements, and would we still have subsets of those movements that embrace terrorism?
Is anybody arguing that militant Islam is powered by Western academics? I’d say that violates the laws of thermodynamics.
But leaders like bin Laden are more attuned to Western thinking than some people give them credit for. They say that bin Laden became an Islamist while he was studying economics at King Abdulaziz University, and probably not from reading John Maynard Keynes.
Our response to terrorism is certainly tempered by academic culture. Al Qaeda is not nihilist, but what other than nihilism would excuse Al Qaeda? What is it that prevents people from looking Jihadism in the eye, the way Christopher Hitchens does?
dsquared: “A glance at the pattern of operations of the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The IRA” would demonstrate that Mrs. Tilton is right and you are wrong; they control next to no territory in Belfast or Derry …
Who said that they did? RIRA probably has less than 100 people, and they haven’t done much since they earned the hatred of everybody by murdering 30 people in Omagh. Who made that bomb? Mrs. Sands-McKevitt, in her spare time at the little yuppie print shop?
As for following their careers in the newspaper, give me a break. The “Official” IRA spent the last thirty-five years standing for Parliament and (allegedly) laundering money for the Mafia? Would that it were so, because there are a hell of a lot of people who would still be alive.
Glen,
I’m glad that you recognise the idiocy of Americans who give money to the IRA. And Labour are pretty straight all right. Don’t have much time for them myself, but they’re well within the bounds of civilisation.
But your reply confuses me. Why do you think I deny an ‘international connection’? Various versions of the IRA have got arms from various places abroad (you’ve indentified two of these: Libya and the United States; and there are others). And three shinners recently found themselves in an embarassing position in Colombia, though of course they were only there to see the pretty jungle birds. (I understand they are currently ‘on the run’ in the best old republican tradition, and do hope they will get to see quite a lot of the jungle now.)
But that sort of international connection doesn’t look to me much like International Marxist-Leninist Revolution. It looks like an organisation that acquires materiel and support where it can. Pretty smart of them, too, if you leave the whole morality thing to one side.
Yes, people from PIRA went over to RIRA. (Not many though, apparently; estimates vary, but every one I’ve seen suggests RIRA is rather small, and a significant number of its adherents are enjoying the hospitality of the state.) The point is, by the time those people went over, republicanism’s brief romance with Marxism-Leninism was long over. I’m grossly oversimplifying here, but that ‘P’ in PIRA tells part of the story, and the fact that you can just as well leave off the ‘P’ these days tells the other half. The provisional IRA (and provisional Sinn Féin) arose as an ethnic-nationalist reaction against the ‘official’ SF/IRA schoolgirl crush on Marxism-Leninism. And ‘official’ figures like Goulding and de Rossa were shunted rudely to the side by people like Adams and McGuinness, who were having none of that. Essentially, the official IRA no longer exists; official SF survive in the barely recognisable and highly mutated form of the WP. (De Rossa, BTW, is a Labour MEP these days and you’ll find few people fiercer against the IRA.)
And all that happened years and years before even the faintest first stirrings of RIRA and CIRA. The current republican splinter groups arose out of the part of republicanism that had no time for Marxism-Leninism. Indeed for practical purposes the entire republican movement today is, or else derives from, the provisionals. Certainly that is the tradition whence RIRA’s members come. (It’s where CIRA come from too, though unlike RIRA they split away for purely internal, essentially theological reasons.)
It’s interesting, you know. There was an undeniably Marxist group in NI, the British & Irish Communist Organisation, that evolved into a reactionary apologist for unionism. Fascinating story, but not really on point here.
On the broader issue, RIRA are not notably informed by postgraduate critical studies. As both posters and commenters at CT and Unfogged have pointed out, even those terrorists from al Qaeda who did have university backgrounds tended to have spent their time in engineering and sciences faculties, not in political studies or literary theory. And RIRA are not very academic. (You will find university-educated people in mainstream republicanism, though typically as envelope-lickers in a Sinn Féin office and the like.)
I only wish I shared your confidence that the IRA have been marginalised. RIRA are pretty marginal, it’s true. But the mainstream haven’t gone away, you know. And, if you’ve been following recent events, you’ll have noticed that they are quite good at locating alternatives to Soviet funding.
Glen, just saw your reply to Daniel. In case my comment above didn’t make this clear, the ‘official IRA’ you refer to in your most recent post is not the official IRA. The official IRA have long been defunct; and were moribund for many years before that. The ‘IRA’ you are thinking of are the Provos; i.e., those who were impatient with the whole Marxism-Leninism thing.
(NB after the Provos took off, there was a subsequent split from OIRA – INLA, as they called themselves — who grew bored with OIRA’s increasing reluctance to cause the massive death of innocents. INLA were among the maddest of NI’s mad dogs, but they too have long since ceased to be relevant.)
dsquared: Any “terrorist expertise” they might have possessed predates the invention of Semtex.
Like hell it does. IRA factions smuggled 6000 kilos of Semtex into Ireland in the 80s. Half of it is still unaccounted for. The Omagh bomb used a Semtex trigger.
A.L.,
You sure try, but the snark can’t seem to help but bubble up when you post on topics like this. Left or right, I’ll assume I’m not the only reader who evaluates other posters at least partly on that basis.
Contra that point, it was refreshing to read Lee Scoresby’s rebuttal (#28) of one of your points. I don’t agree, but it’s a well-presented and thought-provoking argument. And on topic.
Glen,
let me try once again, as apparently you’re having trouble with the concept. Daniel was talking about Official IRA (the stream of republicanism that became defined by its attachment to Marxism-Leninism); you think you are too, but you are not. By the time the Provos (the stream of republicanism that rejected the Officials’ Marxism-Leninism) got that semtex, OIRA had long ceased to be a force in Northern Ireland.
Mrs. Tilton:
Then we will have to agree to disagree, because I don’t buy the ideological distinctions you make between the various morphs of the IRA, any more than I believe that those peaceful folk in Sein Finn are innocent of any knowledge about terrorism.
I saw IRA propaganda films in the 80s, long after the rise of the Provos. They were full of stuff about the Irish working class rising above religious sectarianism to join the international struggle against imperialism and neo-colonialism. Where I come from we call that Marxism. If these films represented the view of the “Official” IRA, they certainly bent over backwards to excuse the violence of the Provos. Likewise, the leftists I knew were sympathetic to the PIRA because they considered them to be progressive, though they did not always approve of their terrorism. (Unless it was terrorism aimed at Margaret Thatcher.)
I don’t really care whether leftists admired the Provos because they were progressive, or admired them because they were violent. And I don’t care whether the Provos were killing people to fight imperialism, or killing them for the fun of it. Irish terrorists in the 70s and 80s followed the same pattern as other European left-wing terrorist groups: Their operatives were a mix of “bourgeois” elements (usually students) and petty criminals. They identified themselves with revolutionary groups worldwide and operated accordingly, though they wore nationalist colors when it suited their purpose. And they collaborated with Middle East terrorists and with Soviet sponsors of terror, which is how they got Sagger wire-guided missiles and SAM-7 launchers.
And this legacy continues, as the 1998 Omagh bombing is thought to have been an expression of solidarity with the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
To return to the larger point, I do not support a causal connection between IRA violence (in whatever factional guise) and postmodernism – which keeps coming up for some reason. I don’t accuse people like Ward Churchill of creating terrorists; I accuse them of openly sympathizing with them, which I think is plenty bad enough.
Glen –
You accuse Ward Churchill of “openly sympathizing with” terrorists. So that’s not okay then. So is it okay if he sympathizes with the people/organizations/”things” the terrorists are fighting/attacking/terrorizing? I mean if we can dispense with jargon-derived names like neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism and Trotskyite-revanchists and imperialism? Or is the idea to have no “sympathies” at all when it comes to armed violence, except for the fallen?
Are you able to see at all clearly why an Indian – Native American, First Nations, choose one – might not be unambivalent, might even be a little down with the idea, that the perpetrators of what amounts to an ambulatory genocide on his “people” were getting pushed back at, hard?
But then that makes me a defender of terrorism too doesn’t it?
How about if I switch modes and become a supporter of all and any colonial activity? The heck with distinctions – glory to the strong, spoils to the brave, Darwin rules! How’s that? So now I’m only sympathizing with those who have things, even if they got them by violently taking them from other people who had them.
Because otherwise aren’t you and your erstwhile opponent Mrs. Tilton advocating a kind of jubilee on immorality? Once the invasion’s safely in the past it’s just the way things are, and anyone who keeps the memory alive, who refuses to accomodate, who enters the process of madness-inducing resistance to armed force, well they’re misbehaving aren’t they? And itemizing the extent of the carnage, as resistance segues into violence and violence into terroristic madness and the madness self-propagates, that just makes the rest of us feel more and more sane and rational doesn’t it?
–
The U.S. began in bloody turmoil. The unjust economic practices, theft of land goods, the legal resistance denied and suppressed, then the armed comflict, the atrocities, the butchery, families burned alive in their homes, torture, cruel imprisonment, ruthless merciless slaughter, it’s all there. But safely in the distant past and – key point – the rebels won. Ta da! Eventually.
Is it okay to be sympathetic with them? That’s like the flag and all right? Red, white, and blue?
Because if they hadn’t won, where would the Americans be? Under the British thumb after 200 years of resistance and suppression, and rising, and suppression, with each successive wave gathering its fire from the ones before, until something gives, one way or another.
Or we could I suppose just roll over and submit to the superior force, in the interest of social harmony and the good of one and all. Except we don’t have to, because we won.
There’s a kind of lacuna in the historical memory when it comes to the origins of most of these dust-ups.
The American patriots were the terrorists of their day. You can bend over backwards to get away from that, you can run from it all you want – it’ll still be there no matter what you do. But they won. For all the bloody good it did.
Here is my problem. I am a generation older than Messieurs Farrell and Scoresby. I have spent most of my time earning a living and raising three children. In my study time I have not focused much on the dismal history of the twentieth century or the toboggan ride to hell that is German philosophy, preferring to study religion and ancient history.
Above Scoresby wrote: “Marxist-Leninism and Fascism also shared common criticisms of capitalism but that did not, pace Hayek, mean that they were of the same ilk. . . The fact that so many critics of “the West” converge on the same ideas suggests that we would, as does the fact that anti-western Islamicists are perfectly good at coming up with reasons to hate the west independent of, say romanticism.”
If I were completely ignorant of 20th century history, I would say that he has made a decent argument. But I know enough to know that he is just plain wrong.
First: The ideologies of Europe in the middle of the 20th century grew out of the common base of revolutionary and syndicalist theorizing and agitating in the late 19th and early 20th century. Lenin and Mussolini did not diverge until WWI. Nazism was, we should remember, National Socialism.
When we accept the labeling of the Soviet ideology as left and the Nazi ideology as right, we are accepting the verdict of the victors of World War II. In fact both systems were pretty much the same and produced pretty much the same results for their victims.
The left right convention arose during the French revolution. The left was the revolutionary anti-royalist side and the right was the royalist pro clerical side. The liberals who favored private property and democracy were the center.
The socialist parties of Europe descended from the left of the French revolution as did the Soviet Communist party. Whether or not they admit it the “progressive” elements of the Democrat party derive from these same roots having learned many of their chops from WWII era immigrants.
What the Soviets and their fellow travelers did their best to obscure is that the struggle between Germany and Russia in WWII was not a left right ideological struggle. It was a great power war. The war propagandists did their best to mobilize their followers and possibly sympathetic potential allies by repackaging the struggle as ideological. But it just wasn’t. Both regimes were established on the basis of an ideology arising out of the 19th century Germany critique of liberalism.
They both denigrated the individual, glorified the state and the collective, hated Christianity, Jews and Judaism. Neither of them was royalist, aristocratic, traditionalist, religious, clerical, agricultural, rural or carried any other element of traditional European conservatism. Neither was humane, democratic, tolerant or otherwise in tune with American values. To label one as left and one as right or to claim that they were not whelped by the same bitch is both silly and contrary to fact.
Second: The Muslims might have thought of all of this stuff by themselves — but they did not. The connections are too well documented. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spent World War II in Germany. Arafat was put into business by the KGB. Fouad Ajami documents the intellectual journey of a generation of Arabs back and forth from the west to the east in The Dream Palace of the Arabs. It is not necessary to psychoanalyze Mohammed Atta to understand the impact of western anti-liberal ideology on the Arab world. Is there some irony in that? Yes. Does it excuse the Arabs? No. They are moral agents. They can know what is right and wrong. They can assume responsibility for their own lives.
It is indisputable that many members of Al Qaeda received some training in arms from the CIA, which trained them in order to assist them in opposing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Does that make the CIA or the US government responsible for Al Qaeda? No. Same answer.
However, labeling the Muslim terrorist ideology as Islamo-nazism or Islamo-fascism (I prefer the former), is, I would insist, clinically accurate.
Third: What is the responsibility of modern western intellectuals in this situation? Can the gunsmith be held responsible for the use of the gun?
The dominant philosophy among intellectuals inside and outside of academia over the time since the French revolution has been, for lack of a better term, leftist. It has rejected both traditional European conservatism and liberalism (and by liberalism I mean the affirmation of the worth of the individual, his rights of life, liberty and property and the importance of republican government). It has rejected religion altogether and affirmed only science as a source of knowledge, even when it had to invent faux-sciences such as anthropology, sociology and Marxist History.
The radicals of the early twentieth century who went on to turn Europe into a slaughterhouse learned their rhetoric from these teachers. Since then the poison has seeped into the Arab world. But even now the leftists continue to spout undeterred by the dark history of the twentieth century or the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apostasy of China. They have figured out how to spin straw into gold by blaming all of the worlds problems on the US.
The anti-Americanism of the leftists is essential. America is dedicated to a Proposition; it is religious and liberal. If they hated Bush’s second inaugural, imagine how much they should have hated Lincoln’s.
Most true leftists were cheerleaders and apologists for Stalin in the 30s and 40s, Mao in the 50s and 60s and Castro forever. To them the United States was wrong in Viet Nam not because of tactics, or because the war was not in the best interest of the US, but because the Viet Cong were the true heroes and communism was virtuous. Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky are just the most famous names.
Most others in academia are not as outspoken or as extreme in their views, but I would guess that the majority hold to the essential tenets of the leftist faith to this day. And this is why they are in a constant state of tension with the rest of the American people. They enforce this faith with the stringency of the Spanish inquisition. The reason why a second rate assistant professor, like Farrell, takes out after a distinguished elder academic like Robert Conquest is that Conquest is a known heretic, an anti-Communist before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Are they responsible for terrorism. No. Do they provide sound bites for the anti-American Media in Europe and the Muslim World? Yes. Are they doing a good job of educating your children. No. Why do I say this? Because, I think that a good education should ground our children in the classic works that are the basis of liberalism not in the diseased tenets of leftisism. Should they be fired. Yes. 95% of them are middle class white people who can find work other than miseducating our children, and few of them teach anything that anybody really needs to know. I would really hate it, if I were paying $45k/yr to have my kid study with a dogmatic leftwing dofus like Farrell.
we will have to agree to disagree, because I don’t buy the ideological distinctions you make between the various morphs of the IRA
I agree that you may believe anything you choose to believe, even if it flies in the face of the facts. Those members of OIRA/PIRA/INLA etc. killed by members of PIRA/INLA/OIRA etc. during their internecine squabbles might not agree about the lack of ideological distinction.
any more than I believe that those peaceful folk in Sein Finn are innocent of any knowledge about terrorism.
Oh, nobody believes that; probably not even the shinners who say it. But the Sinn Féin that you think is Sinn Féin hasn’t been Sinn Féin for a very long time. (Do note the spelling, BTW. In Irish, sinn féin means ‘ourselves’, ‘us’. Sein finn doesn’t mean anything, though it vaguely suggests ‘playing a witness in the sense one would play a violin’.)
the 1998 Omagh bombing is thought to have been an expression of solidarity with the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania
But not, I daresay, by anybody in Ireland; and certainly not by RIRA.
Look, Conquest and, in their turns, people like AL and you are using the RIRA example to back up a certain argument. Personally, I don’t think the lot of you have successfully borne the burden of that argument, but that’s not what’s important here. Believe it or not, I am trying to help you. You’ve made painfully clear that you just don’t know very much about Irish republicanism. Perhaps there is in the universe of murderous bad people some movement that would serve as a good example and carry your argument part of the way it needs to go. RIRA isn’t that movement, though; citing them as an example (to say nothing of then going on repeatedly to make even clearer that you have only a very sketchy and inaccurate grasp of who and what they are and of the broader tradition they spring from) harms rather than helps your argument. To anybody (whatever their own ideology) who knows anything about republicanism, you see, it suggests very strongly that you (i) don’t know what you’re talking about but (ii) won’t let that stop you.
Count Glenn Reynolds as another member of the Henry Farrell fan club:
Mrs. Tilton: You’ve made painfully clear that you just don’t know very much about Irish republicanism.
Maybe not, but I have a very definite opinion about it: Irish republicanism is what produced the Republic of Ireland – Good for them. The subsequent so-called republicanism – “Haul it down from the mast, you Irish traitors”, etc. – is nothing but terrorism, with mostly Irish victims.
I know that IRA factions sometimes kill each other, when they’re not busying killing British soldiers and blowing up school children. They also cooperate with each other – in particular, RIRA probably manufactures bombs for INLA. And they traffic with Libyans, FARC, ETA, and all the alphabet soup in the Middle East. Guns, drugs, and terrorism. And they lie to everyone about who they are and what they do. And when I say “they”, I mean Sinn Fein, the Provos, RIRA, INLA, Mrs. Sands-McKevitt, and all the rest of them.
My interest in the finer points of their dialectical reasoning runs out at that point. I bow to your superior knowledge of their political postures and impostures.
Ajax Bucky:
Are you able to see at all clearly why an Indian – Native American, First Nations, choose one – might not be unambivalent, might even be a little down with the idea, that the perpetrators of what amounts to an ambulatory genocide on his “people” were getting pushed back at, hard?
Sure, let me give you an example. In the 1870s the Crow tribe, bitter enemies of the Lakota Sioux tribe, were allied with the US Army. The Crow were outraged when the Sioux killed their friend Custer at Little Big Horn. When the Sioux were subsequently massacred at Wounded Knee, the Crow celebrated. They figured it was fine payback for Sioux aggression against the Crow, Mandan, and Arikara tribes. And vengeance for General Custer, “the Son of the Morning Star”.
Is that the example you were thinking of? I doubt it. It may be “understandable” when people celebrate mayhem because of some historical grudge – Greeks celebrating dead Turks, and vice versa – but it isn’t a very nice sentiment, is it?
Robert Schwartz,
You bring sanity to an insane world. Can I have your autograph? 😉
Mrs. Tilton,
If all you really wanted was to help, then why enter the conversation with your nose so high? Rhetorical question. No reply required.
Two posts relevant to this thread (the actual subject, not the nuances of Celtic terrorists’ ideologies). They are at Obsidian Wings. “Hilzoy has a piece sympathetic to Farrell,”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/02/who_exactly_is_.html pointing out that we should know the meanings of the generalizations we use (“The Left”), and often don’t. “Sebastian Holsclaw followed up”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/02/useful_distinct.html with observations on Useful Distinctions.
Both are worth reading.
Maybe not, but I have a very definite opinion about it
Yes, and that’s the problem. Your general opinion of republicanism is sound enough, and sign of a healthy mind. But your notion of what latter-day republicans think and are motivated by doesn’t bear the weight that you (and Robert Conquest) put on it in the service of the argument that annoyed Henry Farrell.
It’s a truism that the republicans of today are not the republicans of 1916. (BTW, it is a minor irony of Irish history that these republicans did not in fact produce the Republic of Ireland. They produced nothing; they were defeated. What they (or rather, the astonishingly stupid and hamfisted way in which the UK government reacted to their revolt) did achieve was to swing the majority of Irish people away from support for Home Rule (local parliamentary autonomy within the UK; essentially, what Scotland now has) towards something a lot closer to outright independence. Those Irishmen willing to compromise with Britain established the first modern independent Irish state, Saorstát Éireann. Republicans fought the Civil War against them for doing so, and were defeated again. And, many years later, the political decendants of the republicans’ ‘Free Stater’ enemies established the Republic.) Can you not accept that the republicans of today are not the republicans of the late 1960s and early 1970s?
Look: I carry no brief for republicanism; very much the opposite. But the very stream of republicanism that best fits Conquest’s scheme WRT Marxist-Leninist intellectual revolutionism is the worst fit WRT terrorist violence. They were pikers (no pun intended) compared with those who rejected all that intellectual bollocks; and they dissipated soon after that.
None of which is to deny that there is something very noble to the Irish republican tradition in its true sense. You might have a look at Hubert Butler to see 20th century republican thought, in the real tradition of Tone and Emmet, at its most noble.
AMac –
I can understand partly where Hilzoy is coming from, except when he writes stuff like:
Which is not right – not in the sense of being left, but in the sense of being absolutely false. (Both the first and second clauses are false.)
It is ridiculous to blame the words “left” and “right” for the confusion, and not the faulty concepts in right and left thinking themselves. Everybody knows that a political left and a political right exists, and abolishing the words we use to describe this universally recognized fact does not help anything. It’s useful to look for concepts that transcend left/right (I tried to do this with the concept of “politicism”) but in the meantime we go to war with the weapons we have.
Notice that it is the words “left” and “leftist” that are the particular problem. Why is the confusion so much less on the other side of the equation? Maybe because Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan aren’t running the show over there, while on the left it’s getting harder to tell who’s in charge. People who don’t like getting lumped with Ward Churchill need to realize that the problem is something more than semantic.
Finally, some people on the left would prefer that we stop talking about “the left” altogether, especially the embarrassing parts of it. They’d prefer we spend all of our time talking about the right – or rather, how the “wingnuts” and the neocons are plotting to poison children with arsenic and blow up the earth.
BTW – Having consumed so much space here, as if I didn’t have a blog of my own to clutter up, I’d like to say thanks to Armed Liberal for picking a fight with Henry Farrell; thanks to Henry Farrell for making himself a conspicuous target and drawing fire; thanks to everyone for their thoughts and patience; and thanks to Mrs. Tilton for the fun discussion. Long live the Irish Republic. Down with the traitors and the terrorists, be they Communists or Quakers.
In Number 42 above I quoted a post by the blogfather. Number 44 above seems to be premised on the idea that Ward Churchil is an American Indian. That is not a fact, as another portion of that same post makes clear.
February 03, 2005
WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE:
That’s got to hurt. One can, of course, be of Indian descent without being an enrolled member of a tribe. Churchill, however, appears to have misrepresented his status.
UPDATE: Indian Country Today has much more:
And the in the post [RTWT], the good professor touches on the point I was trying to make under my third in Number 40 above:
Honestly, the problem seems hard to deny — unless, that is, you’re in denial. Hostility toward America, and the West generally, is far too common in the academy, and members of the academy not only aren’t doing much about it, too many of them are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist now that people are pointing it out. This is doubly ironic in light of decades of PC efforts to purge the adademy of “hate speech,” efforts which seem to be applied with a rather sharp double standard in which the likes of Paulin and Churchill are seen as “provoking debate,” rather than as practicing hate speech. This certainly makes it appear that some kinds of hate speech are viewed as acceptable, or even
good. (Would C.U. have hired this guy?).
Glenn Reynolds
Lurker: Of course. May I quote you to my children?
I’m not a member of AIM or a legally defined Native American. But then I’m guessing neither are you.
Quoting the “Grand Governing Council” of AIM would be amusing if the hour weren’t so late, and the subject under discussion so treacherously fraught.
Here’s a quote from your source:
“Specifically, in regards to the revisionist writings of Ward Churchill, Glen Morris and Russell Means, they often use people such as Vine Deloria, LaDonna Harris, Gerry Spence, Noam Chomsky and many other Indian and non-Indian intellectuals and academics, some who naively play into their game plan.”
http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/USvAIMbackground.html
Russel Means and Vine Deloria – just a couple of dupes eh?
La ti da, on that.
And really you know what? I don’t care if Churchill’s pretending to be an Indian, considering how many tribally-registered Indians there are around pretending to be Indians themselves; who cares?
What he says makes more sense, and has more fire in it, than anything here or in the media, or just about anywhere else around, and what little there is around is winking out – it’s getting awfully late.
Your comfort levels are dropping, whether you admit or not. It probably still seems like you have a chance, if you just keep the truth at bay a while longer, but you know you don’t. What Churchill is standing against, or was standing against, is a firestorm now, sucking everything toward it and consuming all.
It may be unstoppable until it runs out of fuel but I sure do admire anyone with the backbone to stand up to it.
Churchill did that and I admire him for it, and there’s nothing in what he said that’s gloating or covetous or vindictive.
As opposed to…well hey.
That twaddle about the Crow is fascinating, or could be if I thought about it for more than a second or two – as though because there were blood feuds among the natives the genocide that took place was just an amplification of that factionalism. Horse pucky. It’s an anal right-wing trope that the Plains Indians were savages and therefore undeserving of civilized consideration; it relieves the guilt-atrophy of the complacent and defensive, but it’s still horse pucky. People recover from atrocities, they go on with what they have left and accomodate to their circumstances, including the chains of slavery; using that to muddy the waters of dispute is craven.
The California natives had almost nothing in common with the Kiowa or the Pottawotami, except that they lived on the continent when it was invaded. So what? Without a unified political structure and a constituted representative government they can’t be said to have existed – so therefore they didn’t get annihilated?
Read up on the Clear Lake Massacre in California, then talk some more about moral relativism.
“Grand Governing Council”
Yee ha.
With friends like Ajax Bucky, does Farrell really need enemies?
Jeff Jarvis consistently contends that we are not the enemy, and I think that’s right.
Unlike him, I think we are truly, deeply, bitterly divided – but not to the point where we we should be looking in a mirror to see where the Islamists get their ideas from, not unless Western acadmics came up with the Koran, hadiths, sharia, the savage history, traditions and culture of Islam, and the demographic surge and the flood of oil money that has put new muscle at the service of ageless malice.
Demography, in this case a relative superiority in numbers and youth, can provide fierce energy, impatience, and a confidence which it is our business utterly to beat out of our enemies. Part of that demographic surge is merely relative. You don’t have to do all that well to out-breed people who are producing barely more than one living child per woman. Our academics, their corrupted theories and their malign social innovations have something to do with that.
A big part of the threat of radical Islam is that the technology is increasingly available to negate the Western way of war. A nuke doesn’t care how motivated citizen soldiers are. And that was our science before it was A.Q. Khan’s.
The Islamist thrive above all on our weakness of will. Jimmy Carter – what a gift he was to Shi’ite Islamic clerical fascism! And our academics have had a lot to do with undermining our will to act when bold and prompt action was necessary, thus adding to the intransigence and ferocity of our enemies.
But when it comes to the actual doctrine of killing, no. If anything it’s the other way: the Armenian genocide was before the Holocaust. It was natural that a little later the Arabs ate up Fascism and Naziism: it was only the sort of stuff Muslims liked and had already put into practice, recited with a foreign accent.
It’s the Muslims, again and again, who innovate, who lead the way in terror. Which Western academics were calling for using retarded buys for suicide bombing, before Islamists developed this tactic?
We can see Islamists reciting Western leftist tripe from time to time. Osama bin Laden’s pre-election speech was the classic example. But I think it’s strictly pragmatic. They see our weaknesses, and they want to divide and conquer, for example by threatening the states that voted for Bush, and for a similar example by favouring the rhetoric of our least loyal influential people. That’s all it is.
Glen Wishard–
My first-time impression is that Obsidian Wings is trying to do something difficult, get a conversation going amongst people who see the world in different terms. A bit like part of Joe Katzamn’s mission here at WoC. I don’t have to agree with Hilzoy to respect him for participating in that effort. And his reminder is timely, that an important and obvious (to me) idea–that of a malign anti-Western Left entrenched in the Western Academy–is neither obvious nor real to other reality-based people. OK, we can take a step back and evaluate. J.K. and A.L. have done that here at times. Porphyrogenitus has had some good essays on the subject, from the Right (sorry, painful dialup today, no links).
Echo chambers, bad.
Ajax Bucky,
You seem to revel in sophisticated indictments. Incitements too? Wouldn’t surprise me. To read your screeds is to imagine Princip or Kropotkin or some 18th century nihilistic anarchist come to life. Burn baby burn. I imagine you’ll take that as a compliment, which is too bad. Last word to you if you want; we won’t be conversing further.
Boy does work get in the way at times but when I come back to WoC I always find something interesting from A.L. Not to mention a host of other regulars as they also deserve a lot of credit for insightful debate.
If I understand correctly the gist of the debate is that academe is responsible for breeding terrorists or any ill thinking maligned individuals or groups. To further the debate several questions started bulbs blinking in my own mind. That being the question of what is at the nub of allowance for such thoughts and actions. Once the allowance is satisfied other factors come into play. In order to align oneself with such thought the thought must be promoted or forwarded at some point then a following must be garnered and controlled to effect change and actions by others. Whether the thought comes from an elitist or the lonely of peasants is inconsequential. What is of importance is how the thought is fostered and acted on.
To lay it out in simple terms:
1) Thought conception
2) Advancement of thought to the populace
3) Movement of thought by the populace
It can certainly be argued that the conception can be forwarded by any individual regardless of academe or elitist status. The promotion or advancement of the thought comes from individuals of influence which lead to groups of influence. How one attains the status of influence is part and partial to the puzzle. Capitalism, fascism, communism or any ism for that matter can always be pointed to as the heart of the debate because ism forms the core of thoughts and beliefs.
Now lets get back the original questions? Are academic institutions and elitists promoting terrorism? Are academic institutions and elitists the cause for terrorism. In short yes to the first question and no to the second. This brings me back to the nub of what fosters the allowance for such thoughts as terrorism. Certainly ones most basic needs must be met in order to allow for preponderance and conception. Those within the academic community teachers and students as well as elitists certainly have the basics and much more. More to the point these institutions and elitists certainly have the influence to promote and foster such conceptions as terrorism.
By their very nature academic institutions foster thought. That thought can be either constructive or destructive. Centered within the academic institution is the debate of whether the thought has any credibility or validity with some reasoning and evidence to back it up. Unfortunately it seems the debate factor between students / populace and higher academia has been lost. All too often academia spouts its’ curriculum and denies the right to opposing debate.
Robert Schwartz: … he described tribal self government as a “cruel hoax”
Funny, “cruel hoax” is the very same term that actual tribal members have used to describe Churchill:
Firing Churchill from UC isn’t good enough for the American Indian Movement. They want all of his books and writings removed from circulation.
USMC (#58),
bq. “If I understand correctly the gist of the debate is that academe is responsible for breeding terrorists or any ill thinking maligned individuals or groups.”
A.L. summarized his notion:
bq. “…the nihilistic, Romantic, anti-Western theme that runs through much modern thinking – and which is conspicuously more present in academe then in, say, the banking industry – may have something to do with why people consciously choose the path of terrorism]. And that these notions – when planted in the soil of the right personality – may help grow terrorists.”
(my emphasis).
I think “lefty academics bear responsiblity for terrorism by their teaching and philosophizing” is a silly argument that’s not true. Even if it was true in a few Weatheresque ’60s incidents–and none come quickly to mind–it’s not generally true, and it’s particularly untrue in the case of the Salafist, Wahabbi, and al-Qaeda terrorists that are under the microscope here. For example, in two lengthy interviews of Mohammed Atta’s fellow students cited earlier in this or the preceding thread, one can see no evidence of influence by Ward Churchill types or their Hamburg equivalents. Clearly, their inspiration is Islamic, the Islamism of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamic Brotherhood, and the Wahabbis.
This hardly leaves the Western Left Academy in the clear. If ideas matter (presumbably they do), the Academy ought to be able to look at its own to see what echoes they have down the years. Fanon and Derrida as much as Carrel.
And it seems to me that the Academy has prepared the Bad-Philosophy soil in which International ANSWER and similar anti-West and pro-appeasement movements thrive. Given that the militant Islam terrorists play to their crowds, and that the media, its audience, the Academy, and the transnational progressivist left make up swathes of that crowd, it’s fair to wonder: what would the face of Islamism look like if MESA, say, had Richard Pipes and Martin Kramers represented in it to the same extent as Juan Cole and that Columbia “Million Mogadishus” professor?
#40 Robert Schwartz
Bravo, applause !
Even in China a major part of the cultural revolution was the battle between the Mao Socialists, and the “Capitalist Roader” Socialists that would resemble both the National Socialists of Germany and the Mousulini Socialists in italy named after the Roman logo. the Facis bundle of sticks and the axe.
And do those that try to present all those recipies for a marxist omlette as seperate think that Industrial Japan was somehow insulated from this current of thought?
Vietnam, the Red Kihmers, and Look at Mugbes “land reform” being on the brink of emulation by Hugo Chavez
“LGF, Moronic Convergence in Brazil”:http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14543_Moronic_Convergence_in_Brazil
bq. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wears a Palestine keffiya given to him by a fan during a visit to a Brazilian Landless Movement settlement in Tapes, 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Sunday, Jan. 30, 2005. Chavez arrived in Porto Alegre for a one day visit to the World Social Forum.
bq. Anti-Bush protester holds an effigy U.S. President George W. Bush during a protest the end of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, January 31, 2005. The Forum is one of the largest conventions of civil society and nongovernmental groups held every year.
bq. Protesters push down a wall that symbolizes the division of territories between Israel and Palestinians and shout pro-Palestinian and anti-Bush slogans, during a demonstration at the World Social forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on Friday
Meanwhile, “President’ Chavez “continues”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/177yckaw.asp to protect members of FARC while they continue to assasinate Columbian politicians, execute civlians and trade arms with the Venezuelan military.
bq. Since assuming the presidency of Venezuela in 1999, Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez has often sympathized with global terrorism. Not only has he proclaimed his “brotherhood” with Saddam Hussein and bestowed kind words on the Taliban, but he also maintains close economic and diplomatic ties with the leaders of Iran and Libya. Moreover, President Chavez is increasingly identified with the FARC terrorists.
And while their at it, the new Commie leader of Spain is racing to snuggle with Casto the same way the leftist pm of Canada is wasting no time snuggling with the Socialist leader of Lybia, Mr maximum Leader Gadafy.
Now, just who is atempting to make the case that Islam and leftism ner do mix ?
In any case, Japan wasnt much isolated from the west since the days of trade with portugal and if you looked at style of dress and such, even the 20s Flappers style invaded japan, right along with the Alfi Doria Hats for men that looked borrowed from the man that built the Flamingo in Vegas.
Dig up some contemporary photos of 30s Japan, you will find some kimonos, but mostly western suits. and the Female folk was certainly not behind in fashion sense.
I understand why the left want to disown the “Third Way” Leftism invented by the “Capitalist Roaders” of Germany China and Italy. Anyone to the right of a Bolsehvik or Red Kihmer isnt “left” right ? And heaven knows no leftist radical ever had the backing and financial support of business men right ? …. ahem.
Bravo Robert.
When I was in high school, long long ago, I attended an evening meeting of the John Birch Society, an organization whose genius loci must be creaming its toga these days. They had a few rousing preliminary speeches and stuff, then the high point of the meeting – a middle-aged African-American man in a mid-range suit, with mid-range shoes, neither erect nor bent posture, and a speaking manner that was absolutely outside my experience of adult behavior – it was as though he were eating oatmeal while he was talking.
He was testifying to the presence of direct communist influence on and in the leadership of the NAACP. Martin Luther King was still alive at the time.
There’s your modern-day AIM leadership, right there.
–
I’m not defending Henry Farrell, not even a little.
I’m not an anarchist by any definition of the term.
I’m not defending terrorism, or the deaths of innocent people at the hands of anyone. Though really, in all honesty – any destructive event that led to your humbling would be a mixed blessing in my view.
I’m not an advocate for nor partisan of any political movement you’ve ever encountered.
Morality is what I’m looking for in public expression these days, like a lot of other folks. That means gloating at the death of anyone, sneering at anyone especially the sincere, grinning with pleasure at anything at all that happens in this dark time; that means lying, and that wonderfully indefinite form of dishonesty that uses the letter of the law to shield itself from accusation – all those things are obviously immoral, and they’re all present in the Bush Administration, and in the media-drawn public face of America, and they’re here, in your hypocritical positions and arguments.
Whereas Ward Churchill has no sneering, no gloating, takes no pleasure in what he sees, and expresses himself with the tones and cadence of someone who’s trying to be as honest and forthright as he can.
It’s about cowardice, ultimately.
Churchill, whatever his faults, is not a coward.
I leave it to your own consciences whether or not that word causes you discomfort.