| Wednesday, October 22, 2003 |
17:43 - Temba, his arms open
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2003/10/me_and_my_musli.html
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Matt at Blackfive:
At first, I was so damn angry after the experience you are about to read that I didn't trust myself to write something coherent. Then, I calmed down and figured that it was an anomaly. I wasn't going to write about this experience, but, with the recent comments coming out of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Malaysia, I thought that I might be able to shed some light on what we are up against in the world...
Go read his story.
How the hell can we ever convince people like Masood that "the Jews" aren't the problem - that his blindness is the problem? And if we can't convince the likes of him, how can we reach countless millions that don't have Masood's liberal education, facility with English, or access to our mediums?
Simple answer: I don't think we can penetrate that kind of cultural and religious brainwashing.
Which is why, when I saw this article on the Malaysian Prime Minister's hateful words, I wasn't shocked. Not in the slightest.
It really is us against them. Us and the Israelis and a few others against 1.6 billion zealots.
Get used to the idea.
A simplistic thought, yesno? Good and evil? Us against them? How infantile!
...Except that, as Steve Antler (via InstaPundit) points out, it really is a different world that we're up against. A different experience of humanity.
Our cultural reflexes admonish us to find common ground above all else, and to allow our own interpretations of reality itself to fluctuate, to ebb and flow, to conform to whatever mode lets us all "just get along".
It's what comes naturally to us these days, just like the irresistible urge to find tortured parallels between historic or even mythical events and what's going on in the present world. Stratfor, the other day, posted an analysis that painted Bush today in terms that equated him with the Kennedy that faced down Krushchev over Cuba: inexperienced, irresponsibly belligerent, unfocused, tharn (to use a Richard Adams word). Hey, the Russians called JFK a "cowboy" too! Sunrise, sunset... sunrise, sunset...
(Not saying the piece was without merit. It had plenty. It just strikes me as very telling that even a news analysis organization like Stratfor can't seem to resist the temptation to speak in the language of historical metaphor-- because, hey, they know it's what catches readers' imaginations. More so than just shooting straight with an analysis of the situation in a vacuum.)
But the Left, it seems to me, is so deeply ingrained with this idea of describing the world in poetic, metaphorical terms, that they leap to even the most ludicrous levels of hyperbole just to get on record with the All-Important Parallel. That's how Bush gets to be Hitler. It's how Iraq gets to be Vietnam. It's how the Israelis get to be the Nazis. It's how America, the nation that has done more than any other in the history of the world to lift humanity out of its millennia of anonymously skulking in mud huts under the whips of the elite masters, gets to be the Evil Empire. Historical parallels, mixed with a rich helping of shocking irony... why, that's how to make truth! ...Right?
Hence this widely held impression, espoused by so many high-school and college liberals, that conservatives are either a) fascistic or b) stupid, or most likely both. They must be fascistic because they have flags, and Hitler had flags! They must be stupid because they see things in black and white, and as we all know, the world is all shades of gray!
What seldom seems to be stated is that yes, the world is all shades of gray... but those who support the WoT have not denied this fact. They have, instead, analyzed the gray of our situation, and they've made a judgment as to whether it's closer to black or to white.
That's the trap that this guy fell into, in that thread at IMAO: he strode confidently into the fray, sure that he was facing down a bunch of uneducated hicks who had never set foot outside their home counties except to buy new coonhounds. It clearly hadn't even occurred to him that anybody could be intelligent, eloquent, educated-- and yet conservative and/or pro-war. Does not compute!
For the Left, analysis begins and ends with the acknowledgment of grayness. It's both the default condition and the epitome of perspicacity to see how multifaceted everything is. The beauty of it is that you don't have to do any work to come to that conclusion, because that's where everybody starts out these days, right from the cradle. What children's books are being written today that feature a struggle between Good and Evil? How many, by comparison, are all about characters of all backgrounds coming together to overcome a nonspecific hardship?
(This is speculation... but somehow I think my suspicions wouldn't turn out too far off the mark. And yes, I know all about those studies that describe how you can foretell a country's political atmosphere by looking at the rhetorical slant of children's books written fifteen years beforehand.)
So conservatives who take sides automatically fall under suspicion. After all, if they see things as black and white, it must mean they just haven't thought things through, right? They just haven't yet arrived at the inevitable conclusion, the Truth of Gray?
And if they have arrived there through rational thought, well... you know what that means. Evil!
That same Stratfor article warned against losing historical perspective when faced with the temptation to presume that today's situation is unprecedented. Well, okay, concern noted. But we really are in a unique period in history. World cultures are interacting physically and intellectually in ways never before seen on planet Earth. And something like 9/11 really hasn't ever happened before.
Oh, sure, historical parallels can be drawn, with some mental gymnastics. But are they really likely to be helpful? Even if the reactions of the world to, say, Pearl Harbor, or to Sherman's March to the Sea, or to Carthage can be judged to have been "correct", who's to say that those same reactions have any applicability to today?
This war we're fighting is a war of ideas far more than it is one of bullets. It's a common foe, one we've fought before, in many guises: the recurring specter of a philosophy that simultaneously absolves a people of its sins and blames its hardships on an external "other". We once called it monarchic tyranny; then we called it Naziism; then we called it racism; then we called it communism; now we call it radical Islamism. We've used the same fortress of ideas to fight each one of these foes-- freedom, democracy, secularism-- and while we change from it a little each time, we keep winning.
But that doesn't mean we can allow ourselves to slip into historical overanalysis regarding today's situation. We have to develop a new vocabulary, because the old one will just get us tongue-tied.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
Mirab, his sails unfurled!
Seems to me we'll get a lot further by calling a spade a spade... and paranoid Jew-hating xenophobes by their true name.
The Bad Guys.
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Brian Tiemann
