Defenders of the faith

Lots of it cast in four-stages speak too — those people haven’t got to where we are, so those people can’t shine in the light yet. Bomb them for a while, and instruct them simultaneously, and maybe they’ll climb up that social evolutionary ladder high enough that they can be stop being bombed and engage in some effeminizing cross border trade. It’s not just that they are barbarians, it’s that they are backwards barbarians, and little stern discipline will give them a boost. Not only can you justify Guantanamo this way — you get credit for it.

Reading this wikipedia article I get a clear impression that they were enlightened long before being enlightened became cool, and you can see them gradually becoming un-enlightened as western attempts (similar to the current one) to ‘enlighten’ them gain strength.

These people don’t want the Enlightenment. In fact, to channel A Few Good Men inappropriately, they can’t handle the Enlightenment!

That would involve critical thinking and the possibility of being wrong. What they’re after is the Dialektik der Aufklärung, which when I read it I took to be a buncha German handwavey relativism of the sort annoying fellow students obsessed over.

Had I read it around two years later, I suspect my views would be significantly different.

I had that Enlightenment in the back of my cab once. Lousy tipper.

But whether “Enlightenment” “values” are a satisfactory mytho-historical basis for one’s contemporary geo-political prejudices or otherwise interests me much less than whether they (for whatever value of “them”) are coherent as a project, outside of the historical contingencies they arose (to the extent that they did) in.

For example, science and the various allegedly associated blends of rationalisme and empiricisme are all very well, but neither establishes political egalitarianisme to my demanding satisfaction. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an argument for political egalitarianisme — even the FDR’s founders were reduced to claiming it was “self-evident”.

It strikes me (probably erroneously) that the Enlightenment is a somewhat dubious banner for our times because it is so pre-democratic. It seems to lend itself to elitism, given the emphasis laid on leisured ratiocination. Almost by definition, it excludes from the competent political nation those non-enlightened; particularly sociological groups resistant to dissolution (C18 catholics; C19th classes dangereux; C21st Muslims, prole ‘nomenkaltura’ or whatever).

I would have thought that modern democratic sentiment owes a lot more to romanticism, in that it defines the legitimate polity as an organic body that confers inalienable birthrights on its constituents, not a community of letters open only to those who earn authority.

Zdenek: but ad hominem is so much more fun.
As for the “ever-pompous Oliver Kamm” throwaway, I don’t think ‘pot calling kettle’ quite covers it…!

Speaking of Kamm, what in the world ever qualified this singularly obnoxious character to speak in the name of the left as if he were some kind of latter-day version of George Orwell who had actually dodged fascist bullets. I get the impression that this oily investment banker might have read Karl Marx 20 years ago when he was an undergraduate but that’s about it, I’d say.

mark eli kalderon & Hektor Bim,

I agree that Romanticism can be seen as a seed-bed of racialist essentialism (though Enlightenment left its own bastard traces in C20th social engineering projects). My point would be that the nation is an imagined and essentially irrational construct, but to date no functional democracy has existed without it.

‘Surely “extraordinary rendition” is precisely sending someone from a country with an Enlightened Western etc. legal system to one without such a thing?’

Well, for a start it’s not just that. As you should know, one of the places that those ‘renditioned’ (or what we in the West used to call ‘kidnapped’) are taken to include (yes!) Afghanistan, which, last time I got my fix of the ‘news the liberals are afraid to print’ at Harry’s Place, was in fact ‘part of’ the ‘West’, given that it has now been ‘liberated’ and given a ‘democracy’ (and a ‘Western legal system’) etc. etc. etc.

Secondly, the reason that some countries have better conditions (in terms of torture) than others, is not due to Voltaire or Diderot but due to the United Nations: specifically, the ‘United Nations Convention Against Torture’. The distinction is not between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’: it is between countries that have signed this convention and countries which have not. I take it you don’t need reminding of what the Bush administration make of the United Nations.

Finally, the REAL distinction to be made here is even more fundamental: it’s between countries that have signed up to convention on torture and which attempt to live up to its strictures and countries (like the US and the UK) which pay lipservice to it and then which try and get round it any way they can. In other words, the US and the UK are against torture in the same way Uzbekistan is a democracy: on paper.

Finally, extraordinary rendition does not exist on its own, but is part of the US/UK onslaught against international law, and their own attempt to justify and legitimise torture when it suits them. Cf Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc. etc. etc.

The distinction is not between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’: it is between countries that have signed this convention and countries which have not.

Good point — and I stand corrected.

Well Doctor Slack, since we are massaging each other’s egos…..

‘It might also be nice, for that matter, if people who were going to proclaim that “multiculturalism” is “muddled” could offer a definition of “multiculturalism” that actually fits what real-life multiculturalists advocate, and could offer some compelling reason to believe their own anti-multiculturalism is un-muddled and morally “clear.”’

This is another excellent point. There seems to be an assumption amongst the ‘decents’ that multiculturalism is exactly the same as extreme cultural relativism. But I have never, in my life, heard a multi-culturalist argue that ‘Hitler was entitled to do what he did’ (or whatever) which is the sort of thing a real cultural relativist might say. Instead, multi-culturalism exists purely in societies with large scale immigration, and is a practical philosophy that attempts to deal with the consequences of this. It says nothing about cultures outside the national borders.

Incidentally, the opponents of multi-culturalism are ‘melting pot’ theorists, who argue that the original (‘traditional) culture of a country should be adopted as the ‘best’ or at least as the benchmark, and that all new immigrants should adapt themselves to this original culture of the country they are moving to.

Great! Since we all know who the original inhabitants of the US and Australia are, I look forward to new immigrants to the US being forced to learn Anishinaabemowin and having to perform the ‘sun dance’ to demonstrate their commitment to their new country, and immigrants to Australia being forced to learn Mbariman-Gudhinma and being tested on their skills on the didgeridoo.

Re: #21: “Incidentally, the opponents of multi-culturalism are ‘melting pot’ theorists, who argue that the original (‘traditional) culture of a country should be adopted as the ‘best’ or at least as the benchmark, and that all new immigrants should adapt themselves to this original culture of the country they are moving to.”

Actually, they also include people who think that individual rights are more important than any sort of group right, or more strongly, that group rights are somewhat incoherant.

How can a group have rights that are not held by any one of the individuals within the group?

That asked, I would like to get one of those submissive chicks from one of those backwards countries next time around. My current model is too uppity. The people who imposed feminism on my society totally screwed everything up.

#25 — from the fact that two actions have same consequences it does not follow that the actions have same moral standing . This shoud be obvious . Take self defence that results in death of an intruder and murder that has the same consequence : as you say the end result is the same however and obviously it is patently obvious that there are circumstances where we cannot say that the two actions are morally on all fours ( many examples available ). That is self defence is morally ok but murder is not.
Kamm is obviously making just such a point . actions taken by Democracies will be in accordance with just war doctrine and hence morally there is difference and the fact that the consequences are same as the action of an Outlaw state is ( from that point of view ) irrelevant. If you want to dissagree with Kamm at least be charitable with his position , no ?

The ‘democratic violence is good’ argument is, of course, completely illogical.

To make this argument half-way presentable one could modify it like this: violence perpetrated by a democratic government against individuals who voted for this government is justifiable, as these individuals have no one to blame but themselves. IOW: don’t be an idiot, don’t elect assholes.

People who didn’t vote for this government and especially those who live in far-away countries have no reason to feel any admiration towards this government’s characteristic of being democratically elected. At least if they aren’t fools.

Now, if one were to accept this slightly modified proposition, then one could expand the argument by saying that the people who voted for this particular government should accept consequences of their government’s actions (such as the London bombings, for example) without complaining, while those who voted against it have a perfect reason to bitch and moan.

Isn’t enlightenment just being used as a shorthand for whatever started to change in the 1750-1850 range that led to the economic differences that characterize the Western vs. Non-western stereotypes.

If one replaces enlightenment with “G7-ness” don’t the arguments work out about the same.

Then the issue is whether there is anything that characterizes “G7-ness” that one can make an invidious distinctions about or whether it is just the luck of who got where first.

I’d say its about 50-50, with half of the cultural difference being the luck of history and half being cultural components that are causally related to the economic and power differences.

Yes, the enlightenmentistas have it hisorically wrong, but the anti-enlightenmentistas won’t put a name on what it is about the Other countries that makes them so Other.

Would they not still be Other were they not so Other named?

Like the Montague’s and the Capulet’s its only after the tragedy that we can see the commonality.

I kinda agree with this “Liberal States” vs. “Outlaw States” thing.

It’s sad, though that the US and UK happen to be two Outlaw States; perhaps some day they will join the community of more enlightened Liberal States, such as Canada, Scandinavian states, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, etc. Yes, some day…

What does “outlaw” mean if the US and GB are outlaw?

Not quite up to the standard provided by the majority of the countries in the UN?

Not quite as enlightened as countries with lily white populations, strict immigration controls, and a strange tendency to have a very short “1932-1945” chapter in their high school history books?

“Not quite as enlightened as countries with lily white populations, strict immigration controls, and a strange tendency to have a very short “1932-1945” chapter in their high school history books?”

Posted by Jaybird ·

Meaning Germany? Perhaps their section is a bit longer than in your country, and certainly my section in the USA was longer than in your country; we covered that whole ‘regime change’ thing.

I’m all for the Enlightenment–and the melting pot, and individual rights. But last time I looked invading and bombing in the interests of spreading “democracy” doesn’t get people to adopt Enlightenment values.

It’s also hard to understand the current administration as an agent of the Enlightenment since, at least domestically, they’re promoting religious obscurantism and socially conservative policies that are inimical to what I understand the Enlightenment was all about.

Is there some double standard I don’t know about? Secular democracy in Iraq but theocracy in the US? Feminism for Afghanistan but family values for the US?

I’m left wondering how all this snarkiness about “reason and civilization against the barbarians” could possibly lead to a cogent analysis of, for example, action against Melosevic or the Taliban. It seems to me to lead to incation.

Jaybird:

Hey, I’ve heard of a parallel universe that gets no news from South Dakota and where everyone left of Attila the Hun thought the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas was hunky-dorey. It’s called “talk radio.” Maybe you should try one of the classic rock stations instead. Just a thought.

It’s also kind of funny that you imagine “the Left isn’t frothing enough about X” constitutes “cogent analysis” of when to go to war. Not funny “ha-ha,” mind you, but… funnny.

Jaybird

you are mad.

I just thought you ought to know that.

Lurker,

Any particular continent you most want the West to stay out of?

Doctor Slack, I’m not saying that the Left isn’t frothing enough about X.

What I am saying is that the frothing of the Left is not intended to result in action being taken.

Lemuel, I am well aware that KP railed against the Taliban’s treatment of women for years before 9/11. I am an ex-subsciber of The Nation. What I find interesting is what The Nation did *AFTER* 9/11 and went into Afghanistan. The attitude was *NOT* “finally! The government is doing something about this issue I’ve been yelling about!” It was, instead, complaints something like “Oh, so *NOW* you’re interested?”

My problem with “the left” is that it seems that their views on rights have “the culture” as where rights are held. You see it in statements like “you shouldn’t force Iraq to be a democracy”. I hold that rights are held by the individual, not by the culture and, as such, my views are that it’s not an issue of forcing Iraq to be a democracy, but forcing the government of Iraq to stop being totalitarian.

On top of that, the view that cultures somehow have rights is never extended to the cultures contained in the US. (Maybe the culture of South Dakota says that abortion is wrong! Should we really be forcing South Dakota to hold our so-called “enlightened” views on women’s reproductive rights?)

Brendan: I am well aware, thanks.

Lemuel, what was Pollitt’s attitude toward the US getting rid of the Taliban? I’m sure we both devoured the same magazines in the months both preceeding and following 9/11. It was even especially covered in that jaw-dropping column where she explains that “The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.”

Let’s look at the paragraph:
“Bombing Afghanistan to “fight terrorism” is to punish not the Taliban but the victims of the Taliban, the people we should be supporting. At the same time, war would reinforce the worst elements in our own society–the flag-wavers and bigots and militarists. It’s heartening that there have been peace vigils and rallies in many cities, and antiwar actions are planned in Washington, DC, for September 29-30, but look what even the threat of war has already done to Congress, where only a single representative, Barbara Lee, Democrat from California, voted against giving the President virtual carte blanche.”

I repeat your question to you: “And if Pollit (one of the most widely read writers in the most widely read left magazines) isn’t the left, then who is?”

Dude, I am not trying to say that every member of “the left” is bad. That’s crazy talk.

What I am saying, however, is that I have regularly seen the refusal to give the benefit of the doubt to the US by “the left” when the same benefit of the doubt is given to others.

I’d call it “false consciousness” but, well… that’d be just too cute.

What I am saying is that the frothing of the Left is not intended to result in action being taken.

I’m sorry, but your tacit assumption that “action = war” does not qualify as cogent analysis. Certain events in recent years should just maybe have clued you into this.

Lemuel, what was Pollitt’s attitude toward the US getting rid of the Taliban?

More importantly, was Pollitt’s attitude self-evidently crazy or hypocritical, at least one and probably both of which you appear to be trying to imply?

In answer to “self-evidently crazy,” I’d say no. On the plus side, Afghanistan hasn’t turned out as terribly as Iraq (though that isn’t saying much). On the other hand, the actual action changed the Taliban-to-non Taliban warlord ratio, upped opium production and stuck the Mayor of Kabul on top like a cherry on a sundae, legitimating the whole process with a couple of cosmetic elections and in the process killing at least as many people as died on 9-11 (that being just from the brief air war). And it proved the opening gambit in an assault on the Middle East and Central Asia that now looks set to extend, with probably catastrophic results, to Iran.

People like Pollitt were in a decided minority of leftists at that time in opposing the Afghanistan venture; with rare exceptions, even those who had misgivings mostly didn’t voice them. And events may yet prove them right and the rest of us “reasonable” folks wrong on the issue, perhaps even as disastrously wrong as the so-called “decents” were about Iraq. (Will that rekindle my desire for a subscription to Adbusters Probably no. But I can’t discount the possibility.)

On the hypocrisy front: is there reason to believe that Pollitt would have cheered on, say, Russia or India if either of the latter had launched a war in response to a terrorist attack? I somehow doubt it. Is there reason to believe, however, that there are leftist groups who would be less hard on non-Western actors than American ones? Sure.

But then, since the numbers of such leftists are relatively minor, it’s hard to see why you would bring them up as a significant factor in cogent analysis. Especially at a time when their influence is negligible compared to the broad swath of “clash of civilizations” junkies who have since made an industry of refusing to give Muslims the benefit of the doubt in circumstances where they’d readily extend it to others.

Especially at a time when their influence is negligible compared to the broad swath of “clash of civilizations” junkies who have since made an industry of refusing to give Muslims the benefit of the doubt in circumstances where they’d readily extend it to others.

Can I ask what country you are talking about? I’m guessing USA, but as you are using universal unqualified language, and the topic is a UK newspaper article, it’s hard to be sure.

Jaybird: how do you suggest we take care of Darfur? . . . Let’s take “killing people” off of the table.

I couldn’t honestly do so, since I support intervention in Darfur along with broadly supporting the measures that HRW has been recommending for months. (Admittedly how the US fits into this is much more of a question mark for me now than it would have been in the Nineties.)

Opposing militarism does not mean opposing all applications of the military. Do you understand the difference?

Do you mean to say that we should not have overthrown the Taliban?

I’m not nearly on the point of disavowing the mission in Afghanistan, but this is mainly because of the close ties the Taliban regime had with al-Qaeda, not because I see the present state of affairs as all that promising. I’m simply saying that opposing it was not a sign of obvious madness. Should the Afghan mission end in strategic failure — which isn’t impossible — it could prove unfortunately prescient.

When I think of “The Left”, I’m a lot more likely to think of Kos/Drum/CT than The Nation.

Then your remarks are even more disingenuous.

soru: Can I ask what country you are talking about?

No specific country, since “clash of civilizations” enthusiasm crosses national borders, though emphases and specific dynamics vary.

Many of the Afghan refugees returned because Iran and Pakistan seized on the fall of the Taliban as an excuse to forcibly repatriate them (particularly in the case of Iran) and to seal their borders to any further refugees who might be fleeing conflict and instability in Afghanistan. (Both countries had, somewhat understandably, gotten heartily sick of hosting multiple millions of refugees with virtually no support from the international community.) Since the returned refugees have nowhere else to go, despite the fact that many faced serious problems on return (in many cases apparently finding that Kabul was basically the only secure area of the country), obviously the latest conflict there isn’t going to create millions of new refugees (at least not internationally). Using tis as a measure of “success” seems stupid to me.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t deny that many probably did return, at least in the initial instance, out of genuine optimism. And as pathetic as the Mayor of Kabul’s standing may seem, at least Kabul is a reasonably secure centre in a way that can’t be said of, say, Baghdad. But if I’m not prepared to completely condemn what’s happened in Afghanistan, I’m not waving my pom-poms just yet, either. Sorry.

With regards to Iraq, remember the 400,000 refugees that our war over there was supposed to create in the first few months?

Yeah. I also remember people predicting that the Iraq War would lead to chemical weapons attacks on Israel which would retaliate with nukes etc. Didn’t happen.

Speaking of failed predictions: Remember the WMDs we were supposed to find? The oil revenues that were supposed to pay for rebuilding? The stable pro-Western democracy that was supposed to emerge in “cakewalk”? The civil war that wasn’t supposed to happen, but is?

Thanks for the link, guys.
Commenters here may be able, with some inventive effort, to read a charitable gloss into Kamm’s words, but I was responding to what he has actually written.
Best wishes,
SP

Reading that link, it looked like Iran and Pakistan were well into the whole “send them back” thing well before September 11th.

The pressure had been building for some time — Iran, for instance, had suspended government benefits to Afghan refugees in the mid-1990s as part of a general push-back — but the article pertains largely to events following the toppling of the Taliban and the pseudo-“voluntary” repatriation programmes that resulted. (The border closures did precede this by a few months and would probably have happened whether or not the Taliban regime had folded.)

Again, I’m not denying that the UNHCR has done the best it can in the circumstances it has to work with. But that’s a separate question from whether the number of repatriated refugees is a viable measure of success in Afghanistan.

Is the issue really one as simple as “we killed the Taliban but it’s 2003 and the country isn’t stable yet!”

Actually, from what I can glean from the human rights reportage that periodically emerges, it’s 2006 and the country isn’t stable yet. At least if one believes those provincial Afghans who are periodically quoted as saying their lives have not materially improved and they hate the warlords (see numerous examples from a few months ago here for instance). Which one would think is something of a problem, yeah, and perhaps a problem that derives from the decision to empower and legitimize a group of drug-dealing warlords as the de facto government for the bulk of the country.

What were the alternatives to doing so? Well, it might have been nice if that much-ballyhooed Marshall Plan for Afghanistan had actually materialized instead of, say, the Iraq War. Of course, that would have taken serious planning, follow-through and a commitment of both human and material resources — not to mention some of those pansy liberal virtues like learning about and working within Afghan culture — and we know the Bushistas don’t do that sort of thing, so it’s basically moot to bring it up. Given that, the real redeeming feature of the action would be the operational value of its breakup of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The jury remains out on that, since we really don’t know enough about the Global War and Struggle on Terror and Against Violent Extremism (or whatever it’s called these days) to assess how necessary full-scale war really was to such an objective or how significant Bin Laden’s apparent escape really was.

What useful metrics are there, then?

Saying that The Taliban was bad but the Warlordism is just as bad doesn’t seem to measure anything at all. Pointing out the poppy fields as a sign of decline in Afghanistan doesn’t particularly move me either… at least not in the negative direction. (People are finding work! They’re cultivating a product and selling it! Hurray!)

Can we say that since fewer people are walking miles and miles in crappy shoes to get to crappy camps for an indefinite period of time in order to stay alive that the people in the country think that they’re better off?

If we can’t even say that, then what useful metrics are there?

I am not asking for cheerleading.

I am saying that it looks like much of the carping on “The Left” is not helpful.

If they want to say that Afghanistan was not helped by the War (as it seems that you are implying… at least, you’re saying that we don’t have a way to measure whether it’s better), then it’s fair to ask them what we should have done otherwise.

They tend to react to such questions the way war supporters react to questions about why they haven’t enlisted.

As for the refugees, I am not saying that every single person who went back did so voluntarily… but it seems to me that there are much fewer people desperate enough to try to walk to Pakistan on foot the way that there were under the Taliban. Had the Pakistanian/Iranian refugee repatriatization programs been more vigorous than the Taliban’s Refugee Creation program, it would have shown up in Amnesty International or HRW or something. It hasn’t.

This is not “cheerleading” the war in Afghanistan. It’s recognizing the political realities that followed 9/11, looking at the realistic options that were on the table, and being thrilled that we’re actually able to discuss whether Afghanistan is better off, rather than wondering when it will once again be habitable. More than that, the argument that Afghanistan is *MUCH* better off in places and merely “just as bad” in others is a defensible one.

More than that, I think that it’s a lot more likely now that Afghanistan will be in a better place in 10 years than if we had done nothing.

There are still problems… but I have not seen a suggestion that would not have problems after implementation. I don’t see how these problems are worse than the ones left by sanctions, say.

As for measuring what is going on, my problem with your solution is the same as my criticism of failing to give the US the benefit of the doubt. Had we done nothing in Afghanistan, do you think that any of the problems you mentioned (“corruption and impunity by regional officials, rampant criminality, a thinly-stretched infrastructure and a short-term dependence on the unsustainable poppy cash crop”) would be lessened if we left the Taliban in charge? Maybe the poppy “problem” (though I still don’t understand why the poppy “problem” is a problem).

An example from the report:
“Power, roads, water, and dependable communications are inadequate, especially in rural areas in Afghanistan.”

Exactly how is this any different than how the country would look under the Taliban? It seems to me that now that the Taliban is gone, there’s actually a real shot at improving infrastructure where there wasn’t before.

Is pointing that out “cheerleading”?

This is one of my main assumptions:

Had we not overthrown the Taliban, life in Afghanistan would be the same in 2006 as it was in 2000.

If you don’t feel that that is a safe assumption, I’d like to know why. It’s the basic assumption I make when I compare Afghanistan now to Afghanistan in our alternate world where we didn’t invade.

It seems to me that the possibilities for Afghanistan are open wide, now. Before, under the Taliban, the possibilities were much more limited.

If you don’t even think that those assumptions are warranted, it’s no wonder we’re talking past each other.

One of the major differences I see between Afghanistan and the US is the whole “doing pretty much whatever you want” thing. In the US, I can do pretty much whatever I want. If Dubya was overthrown and replaced with Cheney, my life would be relatively unchanged. I could still go and do pretty much whatever I wanted. The set of things that I could do would remain pretty much unchanged.

In Afghanistan, however, that is not the case. There was a certain set of allowable things. The Taliban has since been overthrown. The set of allowable things is larger than it was under the old government. Women, overall, are better off now. Yes, there are still women in the country just as bad off. There are still men in the country just as bad off. Overall, however, things are better. The set of allowable things is larger than it was.