Hate-Filled Stupidity from Right-Leaning Academics

the most depressing thing about the book [if it has been fairly reviewed] is the inevitable arguments that will follow along the lines of “if conquest is wrong about this [which he clearly is], then maybe he was also wrong about stalinism [which he clearly was not]”.

it makes me want to cry.

To avoid unnecessary misunderstanding and vitriol in comments, I should make it clear that the title of this post is a reference to Reynolds’ original post – not by any stretch of the imagination a slur on right-leaning academics in general.

Basically, so what if they did? The Bolsheviks read Marx, which led to the horrors of Stalinism. Does that mean that Marx should never have written Capital or the Communist Manifesto? No.

Or. Some people read Animal Liberation and go and intimidate scientists involved in animal experimentation. Does that mean that Peter Singer should not have written Animal Liberation? No, of course not!

In other news, the US military blames a hospital in Fallujah for setting off an insurgency in the rest of the country, saying “they were releasing casualty figures. If they hadn’t done that we would’ve gotten clean away with it, god damn it!!”

Ridiculous, eh?

Oh wait – that really did happen!

Conquest is blaming Western universities for the anti-Western mindset of the September 11 bombers.

More precisely, he’s saying “some” of them “adopted” their anti-Western mindset at universities. By my reading. (CMIIW) One suspects he’s thinking of things such as the “Hamburg student cell”.

This necessarily implicates professors in 9/11 because….?

And given the previous two sentences, he’s saying that Marxism, and “the abstractions of fashionable academics” are root causes of terrorism. It’s a very clear slur.

Whoa. Heh. Let me see if I understand.

Identifying memes that can help attract people to terrorism (if, indeed, that’s what Conquest is doing in this intro excerpt) is a “slur” against the meme-carriers?

I guess you just can’t combat bad memes then. It’s disallowed because to do so is to “slur” people.

And here I’d always thought that ideas were open to critique… guess not. All things being equal I’d have thought that a refutation of Conquest’s point (if that’s what it is) would consist of identifying his chain of reasoning and demonstrating why it is wrong.

Apparently it’s sufficient to just complain that he’s “slurring” the people who, he asserts, have the ideas he’s identified and purports to show are bad. Who knew?

By Conquest’s logic, as cited in the review, the blame for the rise of al Qaeda belongs to America, because the intellectual underpinnings for it are attributed to Sayyid Qutb’s writings following his revulsion at what he saw of “the West” during his time in the USA in the late 40s. His “anti-Western mind set” came simply from Americans being Americans, as he saw it. Also, the 9/11 hijackers seem to have had a similar reaction during their time in the US and Germany. It’s hard to see what policy implication Conquest could draw from this — burkas for everyone?

I would guess that the argument he’s trying to make is that leftist academics tend to promote an anti-Western views (which I think is pretty clearly true)

Oh, this is fun! Let’s try on an equivalent rhetorical tactic: it’s pretty clearly true that Republicans are Klan members.

That sentence is factually accurate, I think. There are, after all, probably a fair number of people out there who vote Republican and are Klan members. So, blixa, xavier — that’s not a slur, right?

In what way was Conquest “right about Stalinism”? That he thought Stalinism was bad? Well, yes, and I suppose that makes him right in comparison to Sartre and asundry other Communists and sympathizers, but it’s a position shared by millions and millions of intellectuals, including the vast majority of liberals. What makes Conquest particularly “right”? Certainly not his historiography, which was unbelievably shoddy and credulous even by the standards of the sources available at the time, much less by what we know now (and he refuses to correct egregious errors even when we have solid evidence now). His claim that the 1933 famine was intentional genocide against Ukrainians and other nations has not held up; it was peasanticide. His claim of ten million victims of the great terror was provably false at the time and he will not admit it even now that we have solid numbers (is 1.5 million not ‘evil’ enough??). One could go on and on and on. He is an awful historian. It’s pretty pathetic when not being a communist counts as being ‘right’. Bertrand Russell, who went there in 1920, and smelled a rat can be said to have been right. Roza Luxembourg, who smelled out Lenin’s totalitarian impulses before 1917, has a right to claim to have been right. From someone writing the overwhelming majority of his prose after Khrushchev’s secret speech, we might ask for a bit more.

And here I was hoping that a Crooked Timber review of a book called Dragons of Expectation would open up another SF-fantasy thread.

So is it a good thing or a bad thing that Reynolds doesn’t mention Churchill’s a redskin? Doesn’t that give him an in on the long hair thing? Churchill I mean. Also the resentment angle. Doesn’t Churchill’s native identity overpower his left/right position? In a media sense I mean.

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.

What the hell is so freaking ambiguous? Muslim terrorists adopted anti-Western mindsets at Western universities? What the hell does that mean?

Maybe after we finish up in Iraq Bush should invade the Western universities, to eradicate this breeding ground for terrorism and terrorist ideals. Let’s weed out the true enemy.

Another commenter wrote: “I’m afraid I don’t see much distinction between the charge that “Western ideas percolating through into radical Islam in some indirect fashion,” which apparently is acceptable, and the charge that some 9/11 terrorists absorbed those ideas because they attended a university in the West.”

I don’t either. Both ideas are laughably ridiculous. The 9/11 terrorists did not decide to use terrorism BECAUSE they attended university in the west. I think it’s the sloppy use of a causal relationship where none can be shown to exist, that usually dooms right-wing arguments, and this is a particularly egregious case in point.

Disclaimer: I obviously haven’t read the book, so all I can go on is the quote:

“And we are told that a number of members of the Middle Eastern terror groups had originally been in the local communist movements”

I don’t know if this is true. Seems like a resolvable factual dispute.

“… 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.”

This is definitely true.

“And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men,”

Definitely true.

“some having been to Western universities”

Definitely true

“and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set.”

Is this the slur? It is quite possible that they developed at least a portion of their anti-Western mind-set before they got there. Anecdotal evidence suggests that attending Western university can cause a retrenchment among some Muslims who see horrors like women actually doing things. But this comes right after the communist sentence, so I would infer that Conquest intends at least some linkage. The linkage between Communist philosophy and 40 years of the rise of Islamism–as distinct from Islamism’s specific beef with the Soviet Union over Afghanistan–is undeniable. But whether they picked that up any large part of that in a Western university culture is certainly subject to speculation. Since they are dead it might be tough to come to a firm resolution. But surely it isn’t completely ridiculous to suggest that anti-Western sentiment might have been strengthened in Germany. Isn’t the German university culture (note culture not classes) famously anti-American? Am I wrong about that?

Last night on the Western Channel I watched The Professionals, at the end of which the hard-bitten heroes ride off to join the Mexican Revolution, leaving behind their $100,000 fee.

Upon being called a bastard: “Yes, sir. In my case, an accident of birth. But you, sir, are a self-made man.”

Perhaps the jihadists embraced these familiar romantic Western values rather than the more recently won and more tenuously held encroachments of feminism and multicultural tolerance.

To the extent that Western skeptical and anticlerical attitudes affected them, it would seem that they were rejected.

“The linkage between Communist philosophy and 40 years of the rise of Islamism—as distinct from Islamism’s specific beef with the Soviet Union over Afghanistan—is undeniable.”

Oh, I see, that Islamic jihadis flocked to Afghanistan from all over the world to fight the atheist godless perverted communists they hated so much does not disprove any linkage nonsense, nah, because that fight between Islamic fundamentalists and the biggest Communist empire on earth was only “specific”.

The fact those fundamentalists were also gratefully receiving overt help and support from the US because of their common enemy is not getting in the way of claiming the above Communism-Islamism linkage as “undeniable”. Nope.

The fact also that in current Iraq, the Communist Party is the only one that’s completely removed from and opposed to any form of religious fundamentalism is not a problem for that claim of linkage. Or that communists have always been a significant part of the dissidents within Islamic dictatorships like Iran.

Don’t let any of that get in the way of seeing direct ascendancy linkages.

Cosmologically speaking, after all, there’s an undeniable link between everything. All matter and energy is connected at some level. You know?

Nurse, please…

“Isn’t the German university culture (note culture not classes) famously anti-American? Am I wrong about that? “

Famously anti-American? Famously, as in “supported by empirical evidence and personal experience” or famously as in “subject of numerous near-identical blogospheric rants”?

There are two questions to ask in connection with the subject under discussion:

1. Do German-based al-Qaeda sympathizers attend liberal arts classes taught by radical anti-American Marxist lesbians and full of wanton female undergrads? Or do they attend engineering/business/hard science classes where there is a traditional surfeit of both political talk and women?

2. Do German-based al-Qaeda sympathizers hang out after classes with wanton female lesbian Marxist liberal arts undergrads, from whom they absorb their anti-Western ideals? Or do they tend to hang out with fellow co-religionists and radicals?

I think one could plausibly argue that Afghan mujahideen turned 9/11 terrorists do represent an evolutional off-shoot of Western Enlightenment ideas. Clearly not all of the ideas, and clearly in a kinda perverted way, but certainly some ideas, to the extent these guys represent a national liberation anti-imperialist movement.

It would’ve been difficult to hide those dangerous ideas from them, though, even if all the leftist professors have been sent into concentration camps. Bummer.

So you haven’t read the book, but don’t know the context of this passage, yet have promised an apology if you are being too rash. So if this quote is from the introduction where the main points of the book are summarized, then more clearly explained in the rest of the book to your satisfaction, we can expect an apology in the J section on page 186 in the lower right hand corner?

May your critics treat you the same.

This thread has turned hilarious. A bunch of fanatics (can anyone say X) so threatened by this mans 50 words they are making up things to attack him with. None of you appear to have read his book, but certainly are on the war path. It isn’t like this excerpt stands on its own. It is part of a complete book and you are all acting like twittering 14 year olds over the latest gossip about what Sally said about Jennifer.

Why does this seem so familiar? Visions of Lomborg and people quoting people who were quoting people who’s brother’s dentist had actually read the book start running through my head.

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.

There is a lot of sloppy connections in the extract cited, wrt the Naxalites specifically, the charge is quite distorted and reveals more about the person making it, than the subject supposedly under scrutiny. Although certain sections of the urban middle-class student body in India were attracted to and joined the Naxalites; the bulk of the latter’s cadre from the beginning and continuously so came from the poorer peasantry and landless labourers along with other marginalised rural groups, such as adivasis. The whole university student-Naxalite connection gets blown well out of proportion because the latter coming from relatively prominent backgrounds and deciding to practise highly visible forms of urban militant action, terrorised vocal sections of the chattering classes and were often used as a shorthand by what one could describe as the fearful element of the proprietary classes of what would happen if the Left ever got real power. The actual reality of the countryside, in those areas where class-caste conflict has become incredibly polarised between militias of the landlords and various Naxalite guerrilla outfits has become obscured; in places like Jharkhand where about 10% of districts are completely outside police control; there is a very nasty near-Hobbesian war of attrition going on between these two antagonistic groups.

As has become fashionable of late, Conquest, seems to be following in the trend of identifying Islamist fundamentalism with the favourite bugbear of the Right. Usually one sees this in the by now, well worn comparison between Radical Islamist movements and Soviet totalitarianism (propounded by those belonging to the so-called ‘neo-conservative’ stream), most critiques see this with justification as just another way of trying to substitute one enemy for another by disorientated Conservatives; who despite their brave rhetoric, can’t seem to fully adjust to the realities of the present. There is also a Leftist variant of this, as espoused by Hitch et al., which persists in comparing extremist Islamist movements with Fascism. I find it amusing that these two supposedly divergent elements of the Right and the Left both see in Islamic Fundamentalism, the spectre of alternately Stalinist or Fascist totalitarianism. It doesn’t fill one with confidence that either of them know what they are talking about.

As others have noted Qutb and his successors were going down a line of thought quite before, ‘academic abstract’ thinkers arrived on the scene in an influential way. The comment about many radical Islamist members being ex-Communists is quite laughable given the hostility between these two streams of politics in the region. They may frequently have been persecuted by the same regime (i.e. Nasser in Egypt) but that hardly made them bedfellows; a look at what the Islamists did to the Tudeh and the Afghan civil war during the 80s is a more accurate picture of how these two contending groups treated each other in practise.

As a final note, I also don’t see what is so great about Conquest’s condemnation of Stalinism. Okay, he may have done it early on; but his was hardly the only voice – even from the quite Far Left, that attacked Stalinism and I am unsure as to what exactly is meant to be ‘new’ or ‘original’ about his critiques. From what I know a lot of this stuff was being debated in the 1950s in one fashion or another. The fact that most people don’t contest the real nature of Stalin’s regime, is a definite move forward in the debate but how far this is due to the efforts of Conquest, is not clear to me.

Hitching a ride on Elliot’s wagon, would the training given to the like of OBL by the CIA not also be an influence on terrorists?

Also should we, by extension of Mr. Conquest’a apparent argument, be on the alert for armed insurrection by post-structuralist philosophers? Once in power would they make it compulsory to criticise the government? I can imagine a lot of people finding that extremely unpleasant.

But surely it isn’t completely ridiculous to suggest that anti-Western sentiment might have been strengthened in Germany. Isn’t the German university culture (note culture not classes) famously anti-American?

Fascinating.

It’s just that the right has done a better job of muzzling and marginalizing its idiots, while the Left has embraced them.

Patently ridiculous. Jerry “You Made This Happen” Falwell was “guest-hosting” CNN’s “Crossfire” just last December. And I don’t recall anybody on the right expressing concern about this. If that’s marginalization, I’d love to see what constitutes a place at the table for the right.

Jet,
I was only asking. You did exactly that to Henry.

I assume I would find your dinner plans unappetising and the air conditioning ineffective.

You think CNN is one of the “tables” of the right.

Fascinating uncle.

ARGH

Aum, not Falun Gong! Duh.

But my point stands :)

“You think CNN is one of the “tables” of the right.

Fascinating uncle.”

giles,

it would have been if that is what he had said.

Yeah, I have to agree that ‘slur’ is a wrong word here.

It’s perfectly reasonable to observe that intelectuals criticizing the West may have affected some people – slightly. And “Natural Born Killers” movie may have instigated some violence. But so what? What’s the point of this? What are you going to do – burn books, lynch the dissidents? This is not ‘slur’, it’s just a trivial and irrelevant observation.

Mostly off topic, but are you guys going to say anything about the new Peter Huber/Mark Mills book that’s making the rounds? Their argument (that there’s no such thing as an energy shortage) seems quite audacious, and will likely be waved triumphantly by righties, even if that isn’t the authors’ precise intent.

I’m not a scientist, and I’m not likely to read the book. But I’d be interested to know what respectable opinion on the left (ie, CT) may think of it.

This is somewhat off-topic, but I really must protest the mischaracterization of Ward Churchill’s comments as suggesting that the US somehow deserved 9/11. Ward’s point (and this is perhaps too fine a distinction for the cable and radio bloviators) was that it shouldn’t be surprising, based upon American military and economic policies, that someone would launch an attack against America.
—
When the there is a concerted media campaign to destroy Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and all the rest of the highly-paid apologists for genocide and fascism, then I’ll acknowledge the possibility that Ward’s critics might have a point. Until then, this is just one more proto-fascist attempt to silence dissent and constrain the range of debate.

Giles (and Jet), if Falwell on CNN isn’t convincing, allow me to offer a couple more examples. Maybe I’m flogging a dead horse here, but I find Reynolds’ garbage about the right successfully “marginalizing” its fringe elements so fundamentally dishonest that it screams out for rebuttal.

Consider the following two examples (these are just off the top of my head–I’m sure it would be easy to come up with more):

1) The opening invocation of last year’s Republican National Convention was presented by a Mormon minister by the name of Sheri Dew. In an article for a publication called Meridian Magazine in February 2004, the Rev. Dew explicitly compared Christians who don’t vocally oppose gay marriage to Germans who failed to speak out against Hitler in the 1930s. A choice quote: “At first it may seem a bit extreme to imply a comparison between the atrocities of Hitler and what is happening in terms of contemporary threats against the family–but maybe not.”

2) Senator Trent Lott, who was widely and rightly condemned for publicly bemoaning Strom Thurmond’s defeat in the presidential election of 1948, presented the opening remarks at President Bush’s inauguration last week.

Now, given these facts, I think you have three choices:

A) You can argue that one can be invited to give the opening invocation at the Republican convention, or to stand next to the President while he’s being sworn in, and still be “marginalized” by the right. (It wouldn’t make any sense, but you could argue it.)

B) You could argue that the Rev. Dew’s and Sen. Lott’s statements are not, in fact, “extreme.” If you’d care to argue that gay marriage really is comparable to the extermination of 6 million Jews, or that the United States really would have been better off had Strom Thurmond won in 1948, I’m all ears.

C) You can concede that Reynolds’ statement, which Jet cites approvingly, is unmitigated horseshit.

Blixa is right, nothing in the excerpt appears to be false. However, if Conquest really means to critique current western academics as a main source of terrorism, he is off his rocker.

The teaching of radical marxism at western institutions did have bad concequences in the real world. One would wish that Pol Pot took different classes in Paris.

The current college educated terrorists tend to be engineering students rather than misguided liberal arts students. Their professors have little to do with their radicalization.

This great article describes the sociology of the Al Qaeda terrorists:

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/20041101.middleeast.sageman.understandingterrornetworks.html

Actually, it is a very sweet screen. Osama bin Laden learned that attacking a superpower was a good strategy not from Karl Marx, but Bill Casey, who suggested that the Afghan jihadists attack the Soviet Union in 1984. The jihadists were packaged by the Saudis and the Pakistanis, and their weapons were paid for by Ronald Reagan’s administration, who, further, knocked down any effort on the part of on the ground observers to retrench the effort or find out where the Pakinstan ISI was distributing U.S. money. The general ideology of Moslem fundamentalism was enthusiastically embraced by the American foreign policy establishment in the Middle East since at least the fifties, when it was considered a neat weapon to field against both Nasser (socialist) and the godless communist conspiracy. If you want to blame 9/11 on a prominent Western figure — well, he was buried, with full honors, last year, even had a lying in at the White House. His name is Ronald Reagan.

Actually, it is a very sweet screen. Osama bin Laden learned that attacking a superpower was a good strategy not from Karl Marx, but Bill Casey, who suggested that the Afghan jihadists attack the Soviet Union in 1984. The jihadists were packaged by the Saudis and the Pakistanis, and their weapons were paid for by Ronald Reagan’s administration, who, further, knocked down any effort on the part of on the ground observers to retrench the effort or find out where the Pakinstan ISI was distributing U.S. money. The general ideology of Moslem fundamentalism was enthusiastically embraced by the American foreign policy establishment in the Middle East since at least the fifties, when it was considered a neat weapon to field against both Nasser (socialist) and the godless communist conspiracy. If you want to blame 9/11 on a prominent Western figure — well, he was buried, with full honors, last year, even had a lying in at the White House. His name is Ronald Reagan.

What does Chappaquiddick have to do with whether conservatives or liberals are better about silencing outrageous political positions taken by mainstream figures in their ranks?

Who is Falway? It’s Falwell, Dr. Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University.

‘“… The members of [the Real IRA,… were almost entirely recruited from student elements who had accepted the abstractions of fashionable academics.”’

If Conquest’s being quoted here correctly, then he’s talking out of his arse.

My impression of the Real IRA was that it was made up of the more trogodytic Irish Republican elements based around Dundalk, with a few South Armagh hard men thrown. The fashionable students elements in NI were if anything, helping Sinn Fein in their advice centers. Gerry ‘Armani’ Adams was far more fashionable than Bobby Sand’s sister.

Jet,

so Reynolds attacked Lott for his racist remarks (and for that, credit where due), but there has been no similar condemnation of Churchill issuing from ‘The Left’ (assuming that nobody on ‘The Left’ has in fact condemned him?) Well, I fear your parallel might be less than perfect.

For starters, who the hell is Churchill? I’ve certainly heard of Lott (and I live in Germany). But I’d never heard of this Churchill fellow before the past day or so.

Not that I could really fairly be described as being on ‘The Left’, but doubtless that is how many American conservatives would perceive me. So here, if it makes you feel better: ‘Bad Churchill, no biscuit’. Or even: ‘Dickhead’. (No, really; if he said anything like what it is suggested he said, he deserves the brickbats.)

That being said, it’s a bit hard to marginalise somebody like Churchill, who is (save perhaps to colleagues in his field) pretty well marginalised already. Lott, OTOH, is somewhat close to the centre of power, isn’t he? Senator or something, yes? I understand he had to resign some important post or other, but he is still in a rather important post, wouldn’t you say? Republican senator in a Republican-controlled Senate, chairs a couple of committees, that sort of thing? Invited (as somebody noted above) to play a conspicuous role in George Bush’s recent innauguration, and so on? If it be the margin that Lott has been forced off into, then the rightwing concept of marginalisation is a pretty indulgent thing.

It really isn’t the responsibility of ‘The Left’ to police the utterings of every obscure ranter, you know. And if by saying that I invite the disapprobation of somebody as manifestly intellectually dishonest as Glenn Reynolds, then I shall just have to try to be strong about it. When Republicans manage to muck out their own stable, or even to look as though they were aware it could use some mucking out, I’ll be more inclined to listen to their complaints about ‘The Left’.

dan simon, don’t be so modest, I was gratefully referring to your unforgettable ruminations on torture. They were more than enough for me to become your lifelong fan, no matter how much more brilliance you can contribute.

I feel sorry for the right wing, they’ll never get out of their terrible marginalisation if they don’t stop being so shy about everything.

A bit off topic: Roger, the person who deserves the credit is Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan. Aid to the mujahadeen began in 1979, not 1984.

Thanks Uncle Kvetch. I dream of the day I can cancel, edit, or delete my posts.

It’s funny how quickly some of the “moral clarity” types turn into Clintonian logic-choppers and literary critics of Derridean subtlety when it comes to parsing a bit of lazy sniping from someone they like.

Similarly, we often find committed individualists subscribing to the doctrine of collective guilt when the supposed guilty party is “the left.” Or defenders of truth and standards in education who start sounding like Jean Baudrillard when the evidence for global warming or excess deaths in Iraq is under discussion.

Yes, Kieran, that is what partisans do–they overlook the shortcomings and misdeeds of their allies, while magnifying and fulminating about the shortcomings and misdeeds of their opponents.

But this is Crooked Timber, where everyone’s a thoughtful, detached, contemplative intellectual. Why would you call attention to that kind of ugly nonsense here, of all places? Are you suggesting that some of it has managed to sneak, unbidden, into your noble sanctuary?

“And you apparently think that appearing on CNN as a representative of “the right” is a form of “marginalization.””

Uncle you say that Falawell is sitting at the table of the right – so its for you to give and example why that is the case, not for others to disprove it aint so.

All I said is that appearing on a left wing tv station cant be construed as evidence that someone is part of the mainstream right. I never made an assertion that he’d been marginalized. Why would anyone need to do that since he’s not considered part of the mainstream?

By contrast Michael Moores appearance and reception at the democratic conference seems to me pretty conclusive evidence that he isn’t marginalized but rather is pretty mainstream. Or at least thats the impression that the voters probably get.

I’m coming to this late, but it’s hard to get excited by this Conquest comment even if he means it the way Henry assumes, which I think likely. I think it likely because it’s pretty standard practice on the right, sometimes center, and even the center/left to equate harsh Chomsky-style criticism of American foreign policy with support for fanatical anti-American terrorists. The logic seems to be this–

A) We far lefties agree that the US has been guilty of supporting or committing many acts of immoral violence, some far exceeding the scale of 9/11. Rightwingers know we believe this.

B) America is a democracy, so to some extent its citizens are responsible for the crimes of its government. Rightwingers also know (and they’re right) that we Chomsky-types believe this.

C) Unspoken assumption–Here’s the sneaky part. Some people, probably including many rightwingers, think that if you are complicit in some evil policy, even in only a general sort of way or refuse to know what is being done in your name, then you deserve whatever act of violence comes your way. Some go further and would support collective punishment for everyone in the guilty country. Most lefties don’t accept this. Ward Churchill apparently does. So do many ordinary people, including a great many rightwingers and they assume that the left agrees with them on this bloodthirsty principle. They just don’t think the US is guilty of anything remotely as bad as 9/11 in the recent past.

D) So given all the above, rightwingers conclude that lefties must have been cheering when 9/11 happened.

I’ve been the target of this kind of thing a few times–in the months after 9/11 if you said anything like “Well, the US has also inflicted terror on people”, it was often assumed you meant that we had 9/11 coming. The unspoken assumption seems to be that one in part C–a belief that would have nearly all of us subject to the death penalty if you look hard enough for ways in which we as individuals might be complicit in some great evil.

So maybe Conquest meant it just the way Henry says. What else is new? Even center-lefties pull this kind of crap on the far left sometimes.

Has Michael Moore been called to testify before the United States Senate?

Last year, Senator Sam Brownback invited Dr.* Judith Reisman to testify on the possible addictive qualities of pornography–you remember, the junk science about “erotoxins”.

These are some of Reisman’s lesser known exploits:

In her research on gays, for instance, she has written that the “recruitment techniques” of homosexuals rival those of the Marine Corps. The Kinsey paradigm, she holds, created the moral framework that makes such recruitment possible. Reisman also endorses a book called “The Pink Swastika,” which challenges the “myths” that gays were victimized in Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party and the Holocaust itself, she writes, were largely the creation of “the German homosexual movement.” Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, she warns, the American homosexual movement is poised to repeat those crimes. “Idealistic ‘gay youth’ groups are being formed and staffed in classrooms nationwide by recruiters too similar to those who formed the original ‘Hitler youth.’”

*of Communications. No joke.

Donald Johnson, are you really responding to Conquest at all? At least in that introduction quote I don’t see him accusing leftists of cheering 9/11 or anything like that.

Donald J.-

“Some go further and would support collective punishment for everyone in the guilty country. Most lefties don’t accept this. Ward Churchill apparently does.”

I’m still not sure it’s acceptable labeling practice to call Ward Churchill a “left” anything. He’s an American Indian, and has been an activist Indian for decades.
I guess it’s accurate inasmuch as anyone in the ethnic bag(s) who doesn’t hold Rice and Gonzales and Powell, pere et fils, in awe, as paragons of minority assimilation and progress, is a “leftist” pretty much. But Reynolds elides that whole chunk of the mix when he barks and spits at Churchill.
Maybe you should read what Churchill wrote entire, including his comment on the reaction to what is a three year old essay – calumny, insult, slander, death threats etc. – because of Reynolds and ilk attaching themselves to it and doing that negative spin thing they do so well.
Churchill carefully separates the people who died in the WTC who were there as janitors and waitresses, the children and sight-seers – the servants and the innocent – from those who were there to stoke the fires of iniquity, or globalization rather, or maybe more accurately business-as-usual. And he very clearly compares the outrage at the deaths of 3,000 contemporary Americans to the placid acceptance of a long list of still-unaddressed, equally barbaric deaths of native Americans. It seems almost beyond politics to speak to that from his place as a descendant of the victims. Reynolds is, of course, speaking as an heir of the perpetrators in those cases, and defending the richness of his consequent inheritance against all comers.
Once again we have egregious villains, profoundly unbrave, hiding behind the massacred innocent and attempting to perpetrate cohesion with the somewhat befuddled but decent mass.
The American people weren’t attacked on 9/11, big creepy business was; Churchill goes to great length to make the distinction between those two – Reynolds devotes most of his simpering strut to conflating them. There are parallels in other parts of the world.
I can understand the reluctance of the self-identifying left to be associated with someone who had the spine to insist that some terrorist acts are the inevitable result of acts of injustice – these are dangerous times for honest men, after all.

Ajax Bucky,

a timely comment, that, reminding us as it does that assclownery is no monopoly of the right.

“The American people weren’t attacked on 9/11, big creepy business was; Churchill goes to great length to make the distinction between those two – Reynolds devotes most of his simpering strut to conflating them.”

Okay, so what’s the cut off size of a business beyond which it’s justifiable, or at least more understandable, to blow it up its headquarters and murder its employees?

Back to Robert Conquest: Part of Conquest’s critique of Communism involves tracing the way in which ideas are promulgated, promoted to Idea, and then turn into piles of stinking corpses. He has stated quite clearly that he sees a link between the university and the killing fields. The beginning of Chapter XII (“The Answer is Education”) of Conquest’s 2000 book, Reflections On a Ravaged Century reads:

” It has often been said that the ‘answer’ to most problems is ‘education’.

But it is obvious that a high level of education in a general sense has often failed to protect twentieth-century minds from homicidal, or suicidal, aberrations. As we have seen, these have often been generated by men of high educational standing. And it has often been in colleges and universities that the bad seeds first bore fruit. “

Any familiarity with Conquest at all would lead a reader of the passage from Dragons firmly in the direction of Henry’s rather tentative interpretation. This sort of unseemly railing against the academic culture which treated him shabbily is just something Conquest does and has done – not that there’s anything right with that. Despite this (and despite his rather serious mote-beam issues), people should read Conquest. He has some smart things to say about the totalitarian mindset and its damnable persistence into our time.

1. Do German-based al-Qaeda sympathizers attend liberal arts classes taught by radical anti-American Marxist lesbians and full of wanton female undergrads? Or do they attend engineering/business/hard science classes where there is a traditional surfeit of both political talk and women?

Ah yes, I remember the days when our prof used his class in Datenbanken & Informationssysteme as a pulpit for his radical pro-Palestinian views, and I also distinctly remember the droves of hot lefty engineering fräuleins who all couldn’t wait to hop in the sack with me after a hot night of coding in the Universitätsrechenzentrum…

The ship has already sailed on this, I think, but:

Racist psuedo-science was fairly widely taught at universities in, say, the 1880-1920 period, yes?

If Conquest’s passage were altered to be about the crimes of colonialism and the Nazis, would we find it a dangerous slur or a reasonable request for academic responsibility?

abb1:

people of good faith can differ over what, precisely, constitutes shit. But I don’t think any people of good faith would argue that shit, if shit it be, stinketh not.

Which is an appropriate segue to what bothers me about Ajax Bucky’s comments (and, by extension, Churchill’s remarks, assuming Bucky has accurately reflected them).

Bucky asserts that Churchill disapproves of murdering innocent people. (And certainly we should all give Churchill the credit he deserves for taking this brave and lonely stance.) But some of those in the WTC, it turns out, were not innocent. They were The Man, you see, and The Man should not be surprised when The Wretched Of The Earth rise up and kill him.

Indeed, that they do so is inevitable (so Bucky, and, apparently, Churchill). To which I would say: no, it’s not inevitable. The majority of South Africans during the apartheid era would have had as good a claim as anybody, I’d say, to rise up in violence against their oppressors. By and large they did not. And (not before time, but in a manner that gives some reason for hope) they succeeded in destroying that vile system. Poles and East Germans and Czechs and Hungarians were under the thumb of The Man as certainly as were non-white South Africans, and they too deposed The Man without going to the length of killing individual men and women who The Man might be seen as comprising.

So much for inevitability. What about justification? Hard luck on all those toiling charwomen and messenger-boys in the WTC, of course, but a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald had it coming, I suppose. Well; if Bucky finds that adequate conscience-salve, it would be churlish of me to begrudge it. But why stop there? Nobody is innocent, after all. This all smacks rather of the IRA. Yes, they’ll tell you: they’ve killed and maimed. But they only go after Legitimate Targets, so it’s all right. Look into the things they’ve done, though, and you will see that, past masters though they are at terrorising both their own community and The Others, they are even more adept at target legitimisation. If you were a British squaddie or a policeman or a unionist politician, your legitimacy went without saying. But if you weren’t, don’t worry: all you needed do was sell fruit to the army or paint a barracks, or be a woman who comforted a British soldier as he lay dying on the street before your house, and you too were legitimate.

But all this talk of inevitability and justification is anyway empty if these categories were not part of the thought process of the people who actually blew up the WTC. Are you really certain that what al Qaeda was about was attacking ‘creepy big business’? You might dislike creepy big business, and I daresay al Qaeda does too, in some abstract way. But I doubt creepy big business as such was high on their enemies’ list. And I really do not think you want to be arguing that the suicide pilots were rising up against the Capitalist Oppressor. That would put you in Reynolds’s corner, you see.

Are there some on The Left who apologise, weaselishly or otherwise, for what happened at the WTC? Apparently there are. And there are patently those on The Right who maintain that we are engaged in a Great Civilisational War aginst essentially evil Muslims. Both subgroups are stupid, malevolent and annoying. But I think it unfair to tar the entire broad spectra of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ with the brush of their respective cretins. (And though I would add that the trogs of the right seem to me to make up a larger and much less ‘marginalised’ proportion of their ‘side’ than do those of the left, this perception is doubtless highly subjective, and rightwingers of good faith could easily think the opposite.)

But it is this ‘marginalisation’ to which we must return. ‘The Left’ is but Ward Churchill writ large, Glenn Reynolds concludes (with ‘regret’, he hastens to add; a regret surely similar in substance to Churchill’s regret over those inevitably murdered Cantor Fitzgerald traders). I think it’s pretty plain that Reynolds is wrong. And I also think it’s pretty plain that people like Reynolds have beams of their own to worry about before they turn their attention to motes like Churchill.

As for what started all this: Henry has been quite clear that he will need to see Conquest’s assertion in its full context before reaching a definitive judgement that it is a vile slur (and just as clear that he will retract the charge if it prove unsupportable). But it certainly looks like a slur. At any rate, it is plainly daft. As though al Qaeda flew the planes into the tower, their hearts aflame with the doctrines of Marx and Derrida; as though the ‘Real IRA’ were inspired to devastate Omagh by reading Social Text. Well, as somebody pointed out above, Conquest is an old man, and perhaps one may dismiss his mutterings gently. I don’t see any reason why Glenn Reynolds merits such indulgence.

I’m afraid Henry’s missed an important point here, which is that it is simply not worth one’s time to pay attention to, must less debate, Glenn Reynolds, a man who, in the post you link to, says the following:

“Various lefty readers email to say that Ward Churchill is not the authentic face of the Left.
I wish I agreed with that. But, sadly, he is its very image today….
There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn’t a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone. Don’t believe me? Listen to Naomi Klein: [Klein quote which describes zero self-hatred or idiocy]…There’s an endless supply of guys like Churchill. And I’d love to believe that they’re marginal figures. But then I see the embrace of Moore, and the behavior of major Democrats like Boxer and Kennedy, and it’s just hard to believe. There certainly are some well-meaning people on the Left who don’t like that, but I”m afraid that they are the marginal figures nowadays.” etc. etc. ad nauseum.

That’s right, Ward Churchill, Democratic party, the Left, same thing, no difference, all seething, self-hating idiots.

Ignore him, Henry.

a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy

Wow. Even worse than I thought. Not even at attempt at a reasonable argument, just the usual parade of feces-flinging and strawman-tipping. Truly hacktacular. Somebody please explain to me how his man ever came to be taken seriously.

A question that never fails to pop into my head when I read this kind of thing: if the “left” that Reynolds is so exercised about is, in fact, “shrinking,” then why on earth is he so exercised about it?

Thanks for digging that up, Navigator. I don’t have the stomach to go picking through Reynolds’ droppings.

Gracious. Mohammed Atta studied civil engineering/urbanism, a tedious, technical, bureaucratic, stuffy subject if there ever was one. I’d be very surprised if he’d ever gotten within 100m of any professor who was in any way recognizably anti-American. (He probably never had a female professor either.) His final thesis topic was about some urban development project of a middle-eastern town. His thesis advisor was reacting in a very professorially-befuddled tone to the concept that his student became or was a radical islamist, let alone a terrorist.

It does appear significant that terrorists often come from a privileged background and have had the occasion to broaden their horizon. You need power and a trained mind to take any particular brand of extremism a step further. Untrained, poor, uneducated young men without the experience of the western lifestyle would simply have been unable to carry out (or plan) the 9/11 attacks.

Professor Reynolds is apparently more of an American Indian than Professor Churchill, according to various reports.

Hmm. I wonder if Mr. Farrell has ever engaged in “hate-filled stupidity” by noting that many graduates of the School of the Americas went on to engage in terror in their home countries, and thought that that was a telling argument? It seems to me that the arguments are quite similar, with similar rebuttals. (Would’ve done it anyway, the people who have the ability to go to either school are simply more likely to engage in such acts becaue they have the means and opportunity, etc.)

It is generally a sign of open societies that they have academics and others who openly question and attack the society. The US has many such. Overall this is beneficial, but it’s unremarkable when such criticisms get taken and used by those in other countries, and with other agendas.

Uncle Kvetch: Glenn Reynolds has written thousands of words of reasonable argument on the topic of the descent of the left, and posted hundreds, if not thousands, of examples on his blog.

Is he never allowed to allude to all his past work. Must he build the entire structure up anew whenever he repeats the point?

That would sure make it harder to criticize the left, wouldn’t it?

As to why the left is so important when it is shrinking: the point is that as it shrinks, it gets worse. It’s like a brine lake that is cut off from its water source. As the lake evaporates, it becomes more briny because the poisons become a larger part of the remaining whole.

Is he never allowed to allude to all his past work. Must he build the entire structure up anew whenever he repeats the point?

No. I never argued anything of the kind. All I’m saying is that the single most prominent political blogger in the blogosphere might attempt a reasoned argument, instead of talking trash.

If you look at my earlier comments, I’m taking specific issue here with Reynolds’ argument that the American right marginalizes its most extremist voices, while the left embraces its own. I provided several examples that, I think, serve to refute that notion, and Katherine contributed another one. If you care to respond to any of that, please feel free.

As to why the left is so important when it is shrinking: the point is that as it shrinks, it gets worse. It’s like a brine lake that is cut off from its water source. As the lake evaporates, it becomes more briny because the poisons become a larger part of the remaining whole.

Wow…very evocative imagery. Can I play too? Here goes: the right is like the crusty stuff that forms on my cat’s canned food after it’s been sitting out overnight. Your turn!

OK, I don’t really give a flip about playing the who’s-condemned-who-in-a-sufficiently-loud-voice pissing contest. Uncle Kvetch can play, but it’s a child’s game and I wouldn’t recommend it. You’ll just be drawn into an endless morass of demands for further denunciations of people you’ve never heard of before your opponents will agree to concede that you’re a decent human being. It’ll never stop, and if you don’t believe in guilt by association there’s no reason to let it start.

I just want to respond to the “Glenn Reynolds has written thousands of words of reasonable argument on the topic of the descent of the left, and posted hundreds, if not thousands, of examples on his blog” bullshit.

What Glenn Reynolds wrote, without irony or exaggeration, is that “There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn’t a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.”

IOW, he did not, as Jet implies, write that certain respectable leaders on the left have permitted the implication that they agree with Michael Moore. Rather, he wrote that the left does not oppose fascism, does not support democracy, and is a seething mass of self-hatred and idiocy.

There is no need to prostrate ourselves and beg forgiveness from such a juvenile taunter.

That anyone would think of putting Falwell and Moore on the same level, as if the only difference was left/right political association and degree of “marginalisation” or mainstream presence… A mysoginst homophobic reactionary fundamentalist preacher vs. an award-winning film-maker. I understand some sophisticated souls may not like to be associated with fat populists who make it big and are loved in France, quelle horreur. But that anyone should feel the need to “denounce” Moore as if he was anywhere near as insane as Falwell, well… It’s a bit like all the fuss about Kerry’s wounds, while the President gets away with desertion, nepotism, corruption, financial scandals that never actually made it to scandal status, and that’s only the activities before he became President. It’s always going to be a winning game for the right, as long as the opposition plays along. Deflect and conquer.

Ajax – does it matter to you that Native Americans denounce Churchill’s opinions when he pretends to speak for them? Check out today’s edition of Indian Country Today, article by Jim Adams. Churchill claims to be a Native American, only because his former in-laws had some ancestry. He exploits the Native Americans, and fraudulently claimed to be Native American in order to get a faculty position.
Regarding Moore and Falwell, the point is that both have political agendas. You cannot argue that Moore does not, he is very clear on that point. Both pretend to preach the truth-loving gospel for purely political profit.