The Left and the Islamists

The 'this' in the first sentence refers to the identification in the parts of the Left with Islamism.

All of this is – at least to those with historical awareness, sceptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory - disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the US-declared “war on terror” and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against “the west”.

This claim is a classic example of how a half-truth can be more dangerous than an outright lie. For while it is true that Islamism in its diverse political and violent guises is indeed opposed to the US, to remain there omits a deeper, crucial point: that, long before the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadis and other Islamic militants were attacking “imperialism”, they were attacking and killing the left - and acting across Asia and Africa as the accomplices of the west.

From 'The Left and the Jihad' by Fred Halliday.

Does this argument remind you of others? For example, the 'deeper, crucial point' that Al-Qaeda, when it was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, was financed by the CIA? Or 'deeper, crucial point' that Saddam was armed by the US when he was slaughtering Iranians? Oh, the unfathomable hypocrisy of the perfidious Yankees!

It is a simple point: times change. As do people, political systems, economies and enemies. For how long was France the Great Enemy of Britain? 500 years? Did anyone point to the hypocrisy of fighting by their side during WWI? Halliday goes on to list the occasions on which the Islamists were 'used' to fight the Left (there have been a good number)and to conclude that the "modern embodiments of this left have no need of the 'false consciousness' that drives so many so-called leftists into the arms of jihadis". This he counts as "disturbing", but does not seek to explain why it is happening. It may be that he suspects the truth: that the Left is now nothing more than a cracked sounding brass that may deafen but will never again ring.

Everything is politics (if that's all you've got)

An attitude born of a successful political system. Charles Moore in The Telegraph speaking (well) of Tony Blair.

No political party should ever be anyone's life. Its value is only instrumental – that it can mobilise enough people, ideas, money and interests to run things that need running and get things done that need doing.

And further, I just came across this.

For the essence of totalitarianism is contained in the great helmsman's injunction to "put politics in command". This is not just Communist Chinese baby talk. What it means is this: that you are to take over every institution, whatever it may be, and empty out everything which distinguishes it from other institutions, and turn it into yet another loudspeaker for repeating "the general line". Destroy the specific institutional fabric of -- a university, a trade union, a sporting body, a church -- and give them all the same institutional content, viz. a political one. Contrapositively, the essence of resistance to this process by liberal-democrats must consist in trying to maintain the specific institutional integrity of different institutions.

-- David Stove, "Santamaria and the Philosophers", Honi Soit, 43 (32), 29 October 1970, p 11

Boris apologises

I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I'm sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity in common with the rest of us.

My remarks were inspired by a Time Life book I have which does indeed show relatively recent photos of Papua New Guinean tribes engaged in warfare, and I'm fairly certain that cannibalism was involved.

I'd be happy to show the book to the high commissioner but I'm of course also very happy to take up her kind invite and add Papua Guinea to my global itinerary of apology.

Boris Johnson's official apology for implying that cannibalism is still praticed in Papua-New Guinea. Long may he offend.

21st Century Revolutionary

Theodore Dalrymple concluding a consideration of John Updike's Terrorist.

All in all, then, Updike has produced a more convincing and subtle, and, in my view, accurate portrait of a young Islamist terrorist than he has generally received credit for — even for all his book’s literary faults. He rightly sees Islamism in the West as culturally hybrid, rather than as a pure product of Islam: a reaction, albeit one consonant with certain Islamic traditions, to a very severe and, indeed, overwhelming cultural challenge from without rather than as something arising purely or spontaneously from within Islam itself. He understands the deeply human, but also deeply destructive, desire for a simple solution to all existential and practical problems at once. He is sufficiently imaginative to understand that our imperfect societies have more than enough within them to appall sensitive outsiders and marginals (as surely all conservatives should appreciate). He also realizes that violent repulsion can be the consequence of illicit attraction. And all this without for a moment suggesting that Islamic terrorism is other than a terrible scourge.

Theodore Dalrymple can at times be a little trying, can seem the old codger at the village well who is unable to see value in anything that has happpened since he got over his first adolescent crush a few years before the deluge. But it is precisely his disenchantment with the world we live in that affords him a view of terrorism, and of the home-grown terrorist in particular, that is nuanced and credible. After all, so much of the modern world that enrages the conservative, especially if he has religious convictions, is fuel as well to the new revolutionary that is the modern Islamist. Both look with disgust on the tawdriness of lives lived without means of ennoblement by art or belief, of a public life that has no room for honour and repels any soul that can feel a higher calling, of a daily life in which sex is degraded and work merely time spent earning money. Obviously, Dalrymple has intellectual and psychological means at his disposal that are unimagined by most of those whose minds he seeks to examine and explain. More importantly, he has what conservatives imbibe with their natal milk: low expectations. Or rather, he has not illusions of goodness, truth or justice coming soon to any place you can go to without dying. He has been immunised against 'the deeply human desire for a simple solution' by that most useful myth: Original Sin.

That is why he is able to write a paragraph like the one above. I think it is politically important to recognise that the Jihadists are not merely primitives, 7th Century ideologues with Western weaponry and the Internet. Without in any way minimising the perculiarly Islamic traits in their revolt, it is nonetheless one that both 'all too human' (ie born of needs that all of us have) and ideologically grafted with the revolutionary creeds of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Inasmuch as those creeds twisted religious ideas of salvation into political goals, so too do these modern variants of the anarchists and Trotskyists of yore renew the old dictum 'Everything is politics' with their 'Islam is all'. They, too, will be grown out of.

After Blair?

An excellent post by harry on what may follow Blair in foreign policy and on the limits of Atlanticism.

May I just say here that the Labour Party in the last week has shown just why it was unelectable for so long and why it may become so again. I don't like a lot of Blair's domestic policies and I think public spending has to come down again, but in foreign policy and in stature, Blair stands above his colleagues, adversaries and European counterparts from the guts up. I admire the man.

Never failing to miss

Arabs 'never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity', observed Abba Eban, ex-Israeli foreign minister. The latest example came after the Israelis vacated Gaza, giving the Palestinians an opportunity to establish the infrastructure of a working state and a productive economy. Instead, and with unerring precision, Hamas set off in the opposite direction and, proclaiming victory, merely carried the war further into Israel.

All of which merely reinforces the view that it is useless, if not actually retrograde, to concede anything to the Palestinians because they will see it as weakness and encouragement to go for more. And given their conviction and avowed political aim of annihilating Israel, just what they were under pressure to renounce when the latest round of hostilities broke out, this approach does have a certain insane logic. It also reminds me of the mindset of the radical Left for whom Revolution was the strategic sine qua non of every tactical move. There could be no final agreement that did not result in the overthrow of the capitalist order. The perennial improbability of this victory made them incapable of opening their eyes to reality with the result that their policies were invariably guided and sustained more by fantasy than by the observable consequences of their actions. And so the possible improvements in the lives of those they claimed to fight for were squandered, every opportunity that could be missed was missed. It is the logic of the Revolutionary and it looks very much like what is happening in the Palestinian Authority right now, and in Lebanon as well.

Picking up the bill

Nicolas Sarkozy.

(The generation of 1968) inculcated everywhere — in politics, in education, in society — an inversion of values and a political correctness of which today's young people are the principal victims.

The truth is that the students of May '68 were the spoiled children of 30 years of prosperity. You are the children of crisis. They lived a life without constraints. Today you are picking up the bill.

(via Tim Blair)

Problematical Otherness

Australians have their taxes spent on people who say such things as this:

in Australia, Muslim identity is increasingly constructed as the problematic (Orientalist) Other. The post-September 11 period has reinforced this ... The juxtaposition of faith with apocalyptic violence in the 'war against terrorism' has only deepened this connection and cultural Othering of Islam and Muslims.

Michael Humphrey, the head of the school of sociology at the University of NSW.

Apart from anything else, imagine having to listen to an entire lecture, 45 minutes of such language.

(via Instapundit and Andrew Bolt)

Old Fakes

Bush lied? Regarding an editorial from the Washington Post.

Buried in this editorial is the fact with the most far-reaching implications: that Joe Wilson falsely claimed that he had "debunked" White House charges that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium in Niger. It turns out that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium, so that Iraq could build nuclear weapons.

Thus, it turns out that the White House stands vindicated on one of its key arguments for going to war against Saddam: that this thug and his regime were actively pursuing a WMD program.

So...where are all the headlines about this? Except for this editorial admission by the Post (which implies that the newspaper had been taken in, rather than played a key roll in disseminating the lies), where are the media mea culpas, retractions, and apologies for many months of false, anti-Bush "conspiracy" stories?

Don't hold your breath.

(Via Samizdata)

What you don't want

Why democracies are always, somehow, weak.

Chandrahas Choudhury quoting Javier Marias.

People who know what they want "will always have the edge over those who don't know what they want or only know what they don't want. Those of us in the latter group are defenceless, we are afflicted with an extraordinary weakness of which we are not always aware and so we can easily be destroyed by a stronger force that has chosen us, and from which we only temporarily escape…"