The liberalism of fools

Unlike antisemitism, the sort of anticatholic rage described in this article was a pretty marginal phenomenon, the hobbyhorse of a few intellectuals. In America, at least, popular anticatholicism was bound up with Protestant rhetoric and inherited English political attitudes–John Adams letters to Jefferson contain of plenty of such traditional denunciations of the Papists. Of course these days many of the Protestant fundamentalists have made their peace with Rome. Pity.

I don’t think it’s quite fair to compare anti-catolicism to anti-semitism, because while it was never true that every jew was a capitalist, in the 30-40s or anytime else, the catholic church was a lot more focused on behaviour. The catholic clergy opposed, almost to a man, a lot of policies that were regarded as progressive at that time. For example contraception, abortion, and eugenics. As an ideological organisation people can join or leave as they please, the catholic church can take a lot more of blame (and credit) for their actions than an ethnic group can.

Didn’t it have something to do with the Spanish Civil War; wasn’t the Church leading the anti-socialist rebelion there? I’m not sure how it’s related to ‘liberalism’, though…

Perhaps it’s self-evident to everyone reading it, but in light of the comments here, I’ll assume not: It seems to me that what Macleod is getting at is the idea that perhaps Islamophobia is the liberalism of fools.

I was enchanted to discover that “Avro Manhattan” was a real person. I have his _Catholic Terror in Yugoslavia,_ picked up, I think, in a bookshop in Belfast, and it occupies a place of honour beside Baron ?Leon de Poncin’s _Freemasonry and the Vatican,_ which is an early work of Hutton Gibson-ism proving that the Catholic Church has in fact been run for years by Jewish Freemasons, rather as James Jesus Angleton believed that the CIA was entirely infiltrated by the KGB.

Does anyone know any more about this mysterious figure? (Avro)

There was a 1930’s Catholic authoritarian clericalist (catholicofascist?) regime in Romania, with a militia called the League of the Archangel Michael. They did their share of killing, I see no reason why given the opportunity they might not have been up there amongst the leaders of the massacare league.

Um. The League of the Archangel Michael wasn’t Catholic. Romania is an Orthodox country. The League was Orthodox.

If you want an example of an authoritarian clericofascist regime in Europe, you want to check out Ante Pavelic’s Croatia, 1941-5. You can quibble (and believe me, people do) about the degree of the Church’s collusion in the regime’s genocidal activities, but not about the hyperclericalism of the regime generally. The Ustashe killed several hundred thousand people, far more than the Romanian League ever dreamed of.

(Of course, the League only held power for a few months. They were then overthrown by the more conventionally authoritarian General Antonescu. Who later became Marshal Antonescu and led Romania into war alongside Nazi Germany… but that’s another story, to be told another time.)

Anyway. As is often the case, I think Ken has an interesting, thought-provoking point that is, in the final analysis, dead wrong. Liberal dislike of Islam does not map well onto old-fashioned anti-Catholicism. No, not even after you do a Structuralist inversion of the actors.

The anti-Catholics Ken is talking about seem to have fallen into two categories: those who were personally affected by mouth-breathing clericalism (i.e., the Irish) and Americans drawing on that country’s ancient wells of Protestant contempt for the Whore of Rome. (Wells which have, in the last generation or two, finally run blessedly dry. But that two is another story.)

To make the analogy work, you’d need to have outrage from liberals who were living either under or right next to Islam. And that’s not what we’re seeing here.

Doug M.

This article seems strangely relevant to Doug M’s and Soru’s points:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53018-2002Sep22.html

As does this one

http://www.afrol.com/Countries/Rwanda/backgr_cross_genocide.htm

(Note: I have absolutely no idea as to the veracity of the Afrol link, although I have heard rumours about Catholic complicity in the genocide).

And that’s not what we’re seeing here.

Perhaps you need to clarify what you are seeing, because I can certainly think of examples of both essentially religiously-inspired judgements pronounced on Islam, and liberal exiles from islam-flavoured unpleasant regimes.

There are, of course, a bunch of other things out there, including:

cross-talk between the democratic conversations of different countries

Malkin-style ultra-partisanism

Dawkins-style ultra-secularism

anti-arab racism

generic xenophobia and resentment of immigrants

34 flavours of nationalism

reaction and counter-reaction to all of the above.

There are even some people talking sense.

soru

Doub M.:

“Americans drawing on that country’s ancient wells of Protestant contempt for the Whore of Rome. (Wells which have, in the last generation or two, finally run blessedly dry. ”

Or rather, wells whose output has been temporarily diverted against secularists.

McLeod is not making a convincing point. The gist of his essay is that progressive hatred of the Catholic Church was such that it led them to embrace an even more repugnant ideology – Stalinism. Now how does he propose to map that analogy onto today? Progressive hatred of Islam has led leftists to embrace Bush? With the exception of Hitchens and a few others, I don’t see a lot of that happening, on the contrary one could argue that progressive hatred of Bush has led far too many leftists to excuse the reactionary politics of Islamic radicals.

Furthermore, their inexcusable embrace of Stalinism does not mean progressives in the 1930s were wrong about the Catholic Church. In much of the world it was a major force for anti-semitism, the repression of women and repression of any free thought or dissent. Go read Father Coughlin’s speeches, look at the theocratic rule in Quebec in the 1930s, the reactionaries in Mexico, Spain, France,Poland etc. etc. Almost anywhere a progressive in the 1930s looked there was the Catholic Church supporting large landowners, favoring the interests of the rich over the poor, helping crush autonomous worker movements, insisting that women be servants to their husbands, and diverting working class anger about economic conditions toward Jews and foreigners. The role of the Catholic Church in the 1930s was very similar to “Bushism” (reactionary Christianism plus crony capitalism)today. So is McLeod telling us that progressive anger towards Bush is blinding them towards the greater danger of a spreading Islamic National Socialism? That would be a more apt analogy, but I don’t think he’s making that point.

The liberalism of fools is the notion that if one welcomes, encourages, and supports violently illiberal movements, one’s life and liberal ideals will be spared when they have won.

Part of the liberalism of fools is pretending that the target has and can have no legitimate grievances. In this case, we are to believe, apparently, that it doesn’t matter that Islam generally is under attack by immoral, incompetent, and capricious enemies, or that the drumbeat is even now sounding for an attack on yet another Muslim nation with the misfortune not to be led by buddies of our junta. The hundreds of thousands dead in a war fought deliberately without restraint, law, or principle, the nation ruined and the nation now targeted, none of this should affect how they respond to calculated provocation, nor has any relevance to understanding how it is that a lot of them might fall for deliberate lies intended to stir them up more.

Because, you see, they’re the enemy, so the truth can never be with them, or even basic human impulses we excuse in ourselves all the time. I am sensible, you are comprehensible or at least pitiable, they are monstrous. Another irregular verb.

I suspect that MacLeod’s third forumlation of the phrase was actually the best-at least the most fitting to his actual argument. ‘The libertarianism of fools’.

Which provides some explanation to how persons claiming to have been or still be libertarians can support a seemingly endless stream of expansions of state power in the name of the War on Terror [or …on Militant Islam, etc]

Giovanni, on you point 3 he says:

Granted all the good reasons there were, in that age of the dictators, for identifying the RC Church with militant reaction, the fury seems oddly disproportionate.

Otherwise, I agree that this is probably more of a smartass witticism than serious analysis.

One hesitates to bring it up, but the harping on the quite marginal Fr. Coughlin, as opposed to (say) Msgr. Ryan, gets a little boring.

Stronger language might be required for equation of 30’s Catholicism with Bushism.

‘Islam generally is under attack’

Do you acknowledge, in principle, a difference, between something that someone might think, and something that is true?

soru

Islam generally is under attack

Yup. In Bosnia. In Kosovo. In… oh, wait, I’ve got it, in Iraq. By the Kurds. No, by the Sunnis. No, no, by the Shiites. Hold on, by cartoons in a (conservative) Danish newspaper! Yes, that’s the ticket: cherchez les libéraux!

Nice one from Giovanni.
Hitchens and his ilk are minor players. The ex-Trotskyite Neo-cons however…
And the there’s this.

As a general comment:
Freedom of speech is the result of a very specific sort of social contract. Does the European contract include the muslim population?
Tell me how easy it is to become a Danish citizen.

Islam is the last unconquered territory.

Not any more – look at Latin America. That’s the problem with having an empire: you go pacify bastards to the East – they start misbehaving in the West. Dammit.

I’m sorry that I launched my misguided missive at such a large angle to the linked article and the point of the post, but I simply couldn’t locate myself along the axis running between anti-semitism and (possibly stalinist) anti-catholicism, and none of the ensuing commentary has led me to think that this is a useful avenue of investigation (which is not to say that it hasn’t been informative and entertaining).

My problem is that a question like

Is there some religion or people that has come to represent all that is backward in the world, and in need of a sound and salutary thrashing from the forces of progress?

sounds exactly backwards from the point of view of a liberal American, whose own government and much of whose society seems determined to deliver a thrashing to the sort of decadence which many enjoy and some of us used to deem progressive.

My first reaction to the was frustration. They get shat on for decades and now what gets them finally to rise up is… a fucking cartoon. A cartoon, for Christ’s sake!

Of course, your average Arab dictatorship is probably more “open” to the idea of protests about blasphemous cartoons than the idea of protests against their own tyranny and human rights abuses – and we’ve only heard about these particular protests because they are threatening “us” – there are plenty of protests that don’t get the same level of Western media coverage – so it’s not a terribly rational reaction.

But still, I think there is something to it. The protestors have a screwed up sense of priorities from my perspective, yes, but that’s hardly unique to Islam. My frustration is against basically the labour aristocracy of the West, the people who are living comfortably in relatively free societies – they don’t raise enough of a stink about the injustices of the world. The protests about something as silly and trivial as a cartoon about a prophet, just bring this into stark relief.

Jimmy, thanks for the Tigerhawk link. My feeling entirely; why has the Right been allowed to hijack this issue (and all we get is some weak satire)?

As a member of the “near” Left, I smiled, particularly, at this comment (from “Cakreiz”):

I’m sure the far Left is torn, recognizing the heavy-handed thuggery of intolerant religious radicals but unable to say anything nice about the US or Western Civilization. And worst of all, they face the ultimate quandry – how to make a moral judgment in our favor and against our enemies? Yikes.

It seems to me that the best way to deal with this quantry is through moral equivalence. “It’s not like both sides don’t have some good points… and a lot of bomb throwing fanatics!”

I’d also try to change the subject from “The Muslims are protesting the cartoons” to “The Muslims have a huge list of grievances (which, co-incidentally, is similar to a list of my own) and this cartoon issue is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Wait, I shouldn’t use that simile, I need to find one more inclusive…”

…how to make a moral judgment in our favor and against our enemies.

In our favor? I’m not one of those who insult Muslims gratuitously and why would I want to make moral judgment in their favor? Our enemies? I don’t have any enemies, especially not in this situation.

And still almost no one here says a damn thing about the position of muslims in Europe: generalizations on top of generalizations in response to an allegory.
Why aren’t muslims bahaving rationally?
Because most people don’t behave rationally under the best circumstances, and muslims in Europe are treated like shit.
The question is not: why aren’t they playing the game at our level? No one plays the game at that level.

Jimmy Doyle: “I only meant to imply that mainstream leftist opinion in the Europe and the UK at the time of 9/11 was antipathetic to the general culture of the Bush US.”

Oh, and why should any ‘mainstream leftist’ anywhere feel anything other than antipathy for the “Bush” US?
Is that similar to the “Thatcherite” UK?

And if you weren’t already aware, ‘mainstream leftist’ is entirely oxymoronic only in one country on this planet. I’d love to be a mainstream leftist, but we have no one but green-haired teenagers wearing T shirts that say “Noam Chomsky is God”
and then some people who call themselves ‘liberals.’ And they’re guilty enough about that.

What Macleod’s sly innuendo slips up on, it seems to me, is that back then the RC church was still a powerful influence tightly allied to dominant power centers in many countries, whereas Islam, in the West, at least, is not. (“Over there”, the situations are more ambiguous in that regard, but still, the terrorist component is both a small minority outside the mainstream and specifically directed against established dominant powers.) Now, I’ll admit I haven’t followed this whole extended “cartoon” incident/controversy with utter absorbtion, since I’m not hooked up with the electronic mass media, to keep up with the latest state-of-play, and the whole thing strikes me as a bit Yogi Berra-ish. But it’s baldly obvious that it has popped up in the overall context of a massively violent Western aggression against a predominantly Muslim nation, with threats of more to come, together with a more diffuse, but broader cultural/political aggressive pressure on the Arab and Islamic world, claiming that the West can and should “force them to be free”, that is, be more like us, in our absurdly idealized image of ourselves,- (and while we steal their oil)- without any regard for the heritages, internal balances or normative recognitions of their own societies, (however inadequate we or they might feel them to be). (That there is internecine conflict and violence amongst themselves only points to the direness and precariousness of the overall situation.) To deal with the situation in self-regarding fashion as a matter of “values” without regard for real conditions and, further, to deploy it as a self-confirming opportunities to affirm the superiority of one’s own “values” in the conflict is merely a denegation and reiteration of the whole FUBAR situation. Still more absurd is to assert that there is or ought to be a “unity” of “values” with respect to the “progressive” position of the West, since there are any number of cleavages and conflicts of “values” here: viz. freedom of speech/expression vs. tolerance vs. equal claim to respect and dignity vs. standards of justification vs. majority rule vs. minority rights vs. norms of civic participation vs. social exclusions vs. differentially distributed power-relations vs. solidarity with human sufferings, etc. There is no point to talking about “values” without first considering the real conditions and specific situations that would make for their possible application, and, I think, facing up to those real conditions and confronting the various ideological value claims that are ostensibly made on their behalf with interpretations and analyses that take into account the real bases and many-sidedness of the issues would be the only real and reasonable hope of advancing any mutual understanding amidst all the noise and violence. The reactive violence of the Muslims resembles nothing so much as a projective identification directed against the West that refuses to grant them any hearing or legitimate voice, amidst its own agressive self-preoccupation. One peculiarity I’ve noticed among the variously pained or triumphant attempts of Westerners to work out the “values” position on this issue, is the readiness with which they dismiss the Muslims’ complaint about blasphemy/idolatry,- (the two terms can not wholely be distingushed or separated),- as if that were completely unrecognizable, and an obscurely and repressively theological issue, which should not be allowed to be of any account. The oddity is that foundational Western traditions are build on some of the same or similar understandings and not just in religious guises. Even if the rioters’ might hold to narrowly theocratic strictures on the issue, what is fundamentally at stake, in their as well as our own traditions, in the prohibition against blasphemy/idolatry is the fundamental status and recognition of the “properly” human, as the “foundation” for any ethical compact.

The Danish government is a rightwing government that is de facto aligned with the originating newspaper and has been pursuing populist polemics against “multiculturalism” as part of its electoral agenda. Just so you get the particular Danish context for this hydra-headed monster. I wouldn’t advocate press censorship in Denmark, over here, or over there, but, not only is it absurd to claim that we have a disinterestedly “free” press over here, removed from the operations and influences of established power and its agendas, but claiming that freedom of the press, which is not endangered over here by foreign influences in any case, is the main consideration at issue is just the height of ideological hypocrisy.

Does he have to be talking about a particular religion here?

It could be American progressives railing against Christian conservatives and, liberals opposing political Zionism, or Europeans fearing Muslim minorities.

Look to American religious conservatives who criticize the boogeyman of “secular humanism” or communists who speak of “capitalist pigs.”

There is an unsettling human instinct to define an enemy and hate with an unreasoning, righteous rage. Progressive intellectuals are no more immune than anyone else, no matter how rational they think they are.

I’m startled at the number of readers who just don’t Get what Ken was saying. They read the words but missed the meaning, which is a not-terribly-obscure metaphor. Some folks thought “the liberalism of fools” was an attack on liberal values, or an assertion that liberal values are only held by fools, or lead inevitably to foolishness. Others thought he was literally talking about anti-clericalism or anti-catholicism. And others think … well.

Let’s put it in words of one syllable, shall we?

If your petit-bourgeois lifestyle is precarious and seems to be under attack, the temptation is to look for an external attacker rather than to consider the reasons why it is precarious. It’s a lot easier to swallow the idea that you’re being put out of business because of some conspiracy of evil international bankers than it is to swallow the possibility that you might just be screwed because the economic system is buggy — because the conspiracy theory holds out the promise of a quick fix (if you shoot the conspirators). When the economic or social pressure heats up, fools turn to conspiracy theories and prejudice instead of looking for underlying causes of the malaise.

Today we live in a globalized world. It costs about one month’s average earnings for a citizen of a developed country, and takes about 48 hours, to reach the antipodes. Back in 1806, that’s about what it would have cost (and taken) to travel halfway across England, or across one of the New England states, by stage coach. We are living cheek by jowl with people who we don’t know and don’t much care for, and in many cases they don’t care much for us, either. Meanwhile, actions taken at home reverberate around this shrunken world in much the same way that events happening in a town ten miles down the road would have reverberated back in regency England.

So we’re harvesting a bumper crop of conspiracies and racism, the liberalism of fools, as Ken put it. It’s easier to blame the strangers than to grapple with the possibility that the current world situation — for which we are partially responsible — puts their concerns square in our lap, or that big corporations working out of our capitals can upset them by tripling the price of drinking water or publishing offensive cartoons.

Finally, There’s the classic mistaken assumption that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. It’s an error that Hitchens and others, liberals who should have known better, fell into. Having decided that radical Islam was a direct threat (rather than the system that resulted in the production of a violent, radical Islamicist movement on our doorstep) they lent their support to the Strong Man who promised to hold the threat at bay — ignoring the evidence that his faction are largely responsible for the existence of the threat in the first place. It’s the same error as the 1930s liberals who backed Stalin unconditionally because he was opposed to fascism; or the 1930s conservatives who wanted to back off on that nice Mr Hitler because he was tough on communism.

“But still, there it was: a religion identified with reaction, and progressives with a blind spot about a powerful state that they saw as that religion’s most formidable foe.”

And there you have it. Nasty xenophobia being harnessed to support a strongly nationalistic, not to say racist, regime. Couldn’t happen here, could it?