The epistemic environment that made the Utøya attacks possible

Part of the problem is that mass media in Scandinavia (and elsewhere) allow massive quantities of hatred by anonymous/pseudonymous commentators to be attached to almost any article in the web editions of their publications. That is a marked shift for the publishing standards previously used for letters columns. True, you can’t stop hate speech on all of the internet. But there is arguably a big difference between hate speech on fringe sites populated mostly by violencemongering racists/islamophobes and giving such individuals space in the comments section of large papers. That only gives them a sense of breakthrough and the comment section format makes robust counterargumentation not very likely. Papers ought to either ban anonymous comments altogether or hire enough commentators to be able to keep up with a very strict moderation 24/7.

>> they didn’t pull the trigger, but they helped to build an epistemic environment in which someone did

It seems that he read and admired Locke and Kant among others. Did they also help to build this ‘epistemic environment’?

wolfgang: No, they did not. Glad I could be hear to clear up any confusion.

“Obviously the killer is in some sense crazy, though whether that is technically true is a matter for the professionals”

What is this sentence supposed to mean?
There’s nothing obvious about his mental state whatsoever.
It may well be that he is suffering from a paranoid delusion, which as you say, should be determined by professionals; this does not include his lawyer.
But at the moment, writing that he is “in some sense crazy” is both lazy and stigmatising to people who do have mental health problems and are not in the habit of butchering kids.
It’s a particularly annoying statement in the context of an article about epistemic environments.
Fanaticism and extremism are not the same as mental health problems and the collapsing of politics on to health is a dangerous trend that should not be encouraged or endorsed.

I’ve been reading the book War without Mercy recently, with a few reviews up on my blog, and the lessons that book has about the role of propaganda in constructing atrocities and mass murder are quite salient to this case, I think. To follow up on dsquared, it’s perfectly possible for propagandists to convince reasonable, non-insane people (Westerners, even) to do horrible things for their cause. I think the right-wing propaganda on the web is heading in that direction – maybe it’s only affecting those of vulnerable mindset now, but there’s something toxic and insane about it that can have a lot of power, even over the sane.

I think political debate has changed over the past 15 years. Where previously there was a genuine debate about political direction, the right has made a shift toward wanting to take power. Their propaganda reflects that.

They may also believe that working peacefully, if not obnoxiously, through existing institutions is the most effective way to achieve their goals. Not everybody is a freedom fighter, some folks need to quietly shuffled papers about until the regime changes.

Alternatively, they might just be moral cowards, which I suppose is another way of saying people who “fail[…] to own [their] bullshit.”

As usual, D^2 makes a point I’ve often made, but has done so more articulately. If abortion is murder, then western society is committing mass murder; if western society is complicit in mass murder, then shooting a few mass murderers is a fucking good start, even if you end up in jail forever.

In this context to Charlie: ii) definitely isn’t an excuse, as above. i) is only an excuse if you *also* believe iii). iii) is a legitimate reason for inaction. iv) is questionable – surely there’s a point where you live in a regime of Infinite Evil where you can’t just say “well, yeah, but if I shot Stalin then I’d be as bad as him”.

On Mad Mel, it’s not a “if you don’t like the country, get out” argument, it’s a “if I lived in a country that I genuinely believed to be full of people who hated me and wanted me and people like me dead, then I’d probably move to one about which I didn’t, if I could, which I can” argument. Not the same thing.

I agree with you wholeheartedly on the excellent way in which Norwegians, including those on the political right, have handled the tragedy/evilness/appropriate noun; it does instill hope in humanity.

There is a much more direct name for the epistemic environment: the big lie, political slander and plagiarism. It is not coincidence that the notorious anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was also a forgery and a plagiarism. This is how these folks do business. Breivik plagiarized almost his entire “manifesto” but even his plagiarism was not original. I broke the story a couple of days ago at Ecologicalheadstand that his framing introductory chapter was copied almost verbatim from a tract edited by William S. Lind. Lind, in turn stole his idea from a Larouchite screed whose author now regrets having written it.

Chip Berlet has more on the background, as do I at Ecologicalheadstand: here and here.

I would like to cite a fairly long piece from Berlet about origins:

Breivik in his Manifesto, incorporates whole sections of other authors’ work. The Manifesto is a compilation and compendium with Breivik’s comments, text, and a self-interview included.

According to Dennis King, the original party line in the LaRouche cadre organization was set in an essay by LaRouche himself in 1977, “The Case of Walter Lipmann”. A long examination of LaRoucher’s conspiracy theory appeared as “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and `Political Correctness'” in Fidelio, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 1992 (KMW Publishing, Washington, DC). Fidelio was LaRouche’s culture and arts magazine. But since LaRouche considers himself an extension of Marx, Marxism itself is not critiqued, but a plot by the Frankfurt School ideologues to create a “New Dark Age” which crushes Christian nations. LaRouche wrote a book: The Science of Christian Economy, and other prison writings, by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., 1991, 506 pp, which expanded the framework for the attacks on the Frankfurt School theoreticians.

Some 20 years later, around 1997 William S. Lind and Paul Weyrich (unwittingly or wittingly) expanded on the thesis of LaRouche. Much of this discussion appeared on the website of the Free Cngress Foundation, but has now been removed. An example of Lind’s work is an essay on “What is Cultural Marxism?”

The document that Breivik cribbed from Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology is still floating around in the internet. The chapter authors were Lind, Raymond V. Raehn, (“The Historical Roots of ‘Political Correctness'”), T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., (“Political Correctness in Higher Education”), Jamie MacDonald (Political Correctness: Deconstruction and Literature) and Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson (“Radical Feminism and Political Correctness”). These authors deserve “credit” for their fabrications. Of course, the general theme goes back to such neoconservative hacks as Dinesh D’Souza and Samuel P. Huntington but Lyndon Larouche amplified slanderous polemic into conspiracy theory.

But here’s a really weird twist to the story: for many years William S. Lind was a contributor to CounterPunch, the “muchraking leftist newsletter edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.” What muck hath CounterPunch raked! I have sent an inquiry to Cockburn and St. Clair and hope to hear from them soon.

(There’s another uncanny twist that I save for later.)

People who perceive themselves as powerless tend to engage in petty behavior.

Charlie:

(i) they see no chance of success (ii) they’re afraid of the potential personal consequences of taking action (iii) they genuinely believe that current anti-abortion lobbying strategies are likely to work (iv) they disapprove of the nature of activity that might have to be undertaken to stop abortion, leading to some variation of the always available argument of ‘two-wrongs-don’t-make a right’.

Thing is, at least (i) and (ii) were definitely true of people considering resistance to the actual nazis, and arguably (iii) and (iv) in many cases. I would just have expected a lot more people to decide on the direct action route, since this is an ongoing horror – every day of delay, several thousand more abortions take place, so I would have thought that gradualism wasn’t really an option.

Also: I don’t think suggesting Mad Mel leave the country if she doesn’t like it here is perhaps the message you meant to convey but your wording drifts perilously close to it.

Happy to confirm that (although “if” is a boat that has pretty much sailed – it’s obvious that she doesn’t like this country and she says so every day on her blog) I honestly believe that on the basis of her published writings, Melanie Phillips (who I don’t think is mad, just very wrong about an important subject and has very poor judgement) would be a lot happier if she lived in the USA or Israel where the local culture is much more in tune with her values. I suppose I don’t know much about any family, friendship or emotional ties that keep her in Britain, but this is because she never writes about them, or anything else good about the place. So if I am missing some really good reason why Melanie Phillips is still staying in a country amid neighbours who she believes have gone mad and hate her, it is at least partly her fault. At the end of the day, this isn’t some minor “well if you don’t like speeding cameras why don’t you go and live in Soviet Russia” disagreement – MP actually believes that Britain is a culture that has gone mad, actually believes that the majority of Britons hate her because of her religion, and actually believes that Western Europe is currently in a state similar to Germany in the 1930s. At the end of the day, “if you don’t like it why don’t you leave?” would have been excellent advice to the Jewish population of Germany after Hitler took power, and as far as I can tell, Melanie Phillips believes herself to be in a similar world-historical position.

(or, rather, for #19 was so dense and poorly written that the satirical thread might have been lost, because MP remains in London, continues to work for the BBC and still even goes to those fucking dinner parties, I conclude that therefore at some deep-down level of rationality, she does in fact know that Britain in 2011 is nothing like Germany in 1934, and that she is in fact very safe indeed from genocidal persecution, pretty damn safe from terrorist murder and in general as safe as anyone could reasonably be expected to be from everything except harsh criticism of her amazingly bad and irresponsible journalism. Sadly, with respect to this last, she appears to be very very thin-skinned.)

We may be, now, in the world that Cass Sunstein worried about, a world where people select themselves into groups which ramp up their more-or-less internally coherent belief systems into increasingly extreme forms by confirming to one another their perceived “truths” (about Islam, or Obama’s birth certificate, or whatever) and shutting out falsifying information

Isn’t that just the world we’ve always been in, tho? I think it would be very difficult to argue that this sort of political violence us more prevalent today than, say, one hundred years ago. Technological change has increased the means of destruction available to an individual or small group, yes. But were the belief systems of John Brown or Gavril Princip any less closed, coherent or “extreme”?

d^2 in #8: ‘[P]eople who spend huge amounts of time arguing that particular racial groups are systematically less intelligent and more prone to criminal activity than others, but who act all indignant if they are referred to as “racist” – if you really believed in genetic stupidity and criminality, why wouldn’t you be racist?’

An example of someone weaseling on just that is Geoffrey Sampson – former Wealden councilor, professor (I think emeritus) at the University of Sussex computer science department, and someone, alas, that I have had to read a lot of lately. He’s not hard to google. Modernize his vocabulary, substitute “cultural Marxists” for “metropolitain elites” and he sounds like Breivik. To be fair, he has not attempted any mass murders that I’m aware of.

But I felt somewhat unclean having to cite him positively in my dissertation because I agree with him, in part, about the subject of his professional career.

As for the abortion example, I think it fails because there are quite a few people who sincerely believe that abortion is a moral wrong on par with the Holocaust or worse, and still don’t care enough to actually do anything important about it. The Holocaust, of course, took place in an environment where protesting could well mean being sent to a camp. But even if it hadn’t, would there have been people who knew and cared, but not enough to do anything? Probably.

No one has seriously tried to assassinate Obama, but I assure you there are *millions* of Americans who regard him in complete sincerity as a figure on par with the worst dictators of all time, who believe that his election is a catastrophe beyond all words. But not one has been arrested trying to sneak a gun into a public appearance, much less actually taking a plausible shot. Even Clinton was the object of a plausible assassination attempt – that guy who tried to crash the Cessna into the White House, but Dubya had to go to Georgia to face any real risk. Americans have been trained to believe in their personal powerlessness for a long time, and never underestimate the power of lethargy.

Brown was absolutely justified. If he had waited a few more months, he would be the hero of the Union, the man who put the Federal army to shame. John Brown attempted to have the slaves rise up against their masters, a right slaves must everywhere have. Now, can one believe the state is involved in immoral activities without rebelling against it? Sure, Kant offered a theory to justify that.

On the epistemic environment, see recent piece on Islamophobia in the Boston Review by John Bowen; Bhikhu Parekh’s work on the Muslim Question and European liberalism; and Joan Scott’s work on the veil. I think Chris B’s point about the dangers of homophily, if that is the spelling, is quite correct.

One difficult of aspect of this is how nativism is presented not only in Breivak’s mythic right-wing nationalist terms (the Knights of Templar, he forgot, were not only holy and heroic Crusaders but money grubbing bankers) but also in terms of tolerance insofar as the foreigners are accused of not sharing tolerant Western attitudes towards women and gays and lesbians.

It has been my understanding that immigrants have been subjected to tolerance tests, for example shown pictures of men kissing to judge their attitudes; and found unworthy just by adverse reaction. This kind of guilty by mental state seems to be a very precedent.

One assumption is that Muslim migrants will always maintain loyalty to the global umma before the laws and norms of the society in which they live. It’s their alleged uniquely hardened extra-territorial loyalty that makes them objects of attack for both right wing nationalism and, ironically enough, ‘tolerant’ liberals. But as Parekh points out, not only are these suspicions of their behavior empirically ungrounded, they are ungrounded in the interpretation of the Koran which recommends to most Muslims obedience to the laws of the state in which they live because it provides them with an orderly society in which they live.

dsquared, I don’t think the germans had gone insane. When I read Ordinary Men I got a sense of ordinary people doing what they had to do because that’s what they thought had to be done. The same for War Without Mercy. Machine-gunning Japanese sailors in a lifeboat? Killing Japanese prisoners in cold blood? It’s necessary because I’ve been told they’re vermin, and anyway they won’t surrender (Churchill told me so). But the people who did these things returned to civilian life without any difficulty.

The role of propaganda is to make ordinary people into killers. The shockjocks are supplying the propaganda, it’s just up to the rest of the world to provide the human resources. Enter … Breiviks.

#27 But the population of Germany really had gone collectively insane, in more or less exactly the way in which Islington hasn’t

Had they? Or were the majority of them severely cowed, or just moral pygmies? But this otherwise important point is mere quibbling in the context of this current discussion: I obviously agree there is no comparison between Nazi Germany and Britain today. (which is not to say I think anti-semitism doesn’t exist in the UK today, because it does, and may even be slightly on the rise, but tackling it is not helped by apocalyptic rhetoric adopted all too often by Ms.Phillips.)

But…. Breivik is what we’re substantially talking about. & I have yet to see any analysis which improves on his relationship to wider right wing rhetoric than this succinct summing up @ Blood and Treasure:

“the mainstream right wing opinions he imbibed after he discovered his initial rationale for mass murder did nothing to discourage him. Quite the reverse: Post 9/11 he thought that he was operating at the fringe of a large political movement which would be able to take advantage of his methods to reach the goals that they jointly shared. People were coming around to his point of view, and being encouraged, he provided encouragement. Anders believes that he is a Knight Templar. He’s a real, old fashioned chivalrous male. He wouldn’t dream of letting Melanie plant her own bombs and kill red kids. She probably doesn’t see that it’s necessary, poor, foolish woman that she is. But he likes those hankies he sees fluttering from the castle window and off he goes into the lists.”

I think the view of the world in #32 (which is as far as I can see about as good as the contrary position to mine gets although I still think that there is something at a deep level wrong with a belief which can’t really be sustained as a motivation for behaviour in the real world; this was of course Hume’s final argument against scepticism) can be summed up by the old joke “tell a man that the sun is a ball of gas lit up by a constant nuclear explosion 93 million miles away and he’ll believe you. Tell him that the paint on a door is wet and he’ll check”.

No charlie, they weren’t “moral pygmies.” They were victims of unrelenting propaganda – like the allies in world war 2. It’s enormously short-sighted to suppose that you wouldn’t behave badly if subjected to years of the same race-hate propaganda. The issue here is the propaganda, not the person.

Slavery was an abomination. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was oppressive.

Of course. And as Watson Ladd says, John Brown was a hero. But surely the difference between a Brown and a Breivik is in the substance of their beliefs, not their epistemologies, no?

(beheading videos are extremely popular amongst online radical Islamists apparently)

But “talking big and never actually doing anything” is also extremely popular amongst online radical Islamists, as is “claiming responsibility for things that other people did in the name of made-up jihadi groups”. I am not sure (although I have no evidence otherwise) whether this self-radicalisation route is prevalent among actual bombers to the same degree as Islamist Internet Tough Guys.

Nick L, that doesn’t explain the extensive atrocities committed by allied soldiers in the Pacific. It also doesn’t explain the behaviour of the Japanese in the Pacific. Propaganda is a more powerful force than we in the enlightened era like to recognize, especially when a whole population is exposed to it. This man was obviously fermenting in Pam Geller’s most potent juices. Who knows what that can do to the human soul?

“Following the Norway massacre many of the elite scribblers of this spectrum—many of whom have played the guilt-by-association game to the max over the last decade—are disclaiming all responsibility. Well, of course, they didn’t pull the trigger, but they helped to build an epistemic environment in which someone did.”

Isn’t the *exact* formulation used by the anti-Islam crowd in response to 9/11? I thought this was the kind of reasoning we very specificially weren’t supposed to be using.

Charlie at #12 pretty well covers the abortion analogy, but maybe it is easier to see here if we use a left wing example. A fairly large percentage of the people here believe that the US is engaging in a large campaign of mass murder in Afghanistan and recently Iraq, yet so far as I can tell, none of you have gone shooting up the Pentagon, bombing US soldiers in their beds, etc, etc etc. Do you not really believe that the evil you chat about here exists? Or are you stopped by one of the things Charlie mentions? If you are stopped by one of those things, isn’t it possible that people you disagree with (pro-life on abortion thinkers for example) are stopped by the exact same things? Isn’t it possible that they are in fact, people just like you in that respect?

John Brown? Ends and means – he and his sons beheaded a few people, too.

Oliver Wendell Holmes survived the Civil War and came to loathe the moral abolutism favored by Brown and his adorers, who included Emerson, if I recall. If one wants to avoid certain things a bit of moral skepticism always comes in handy.

bq. dsquared @19: I suppose I don’t know much about any family, friendship or emotional ties that keep [Melanie Phillips] in Britain, but this is because she never writes about them

She’s married to Joshua Rozenberg, a face off the telly.
He’s back to being a BBC regular now, with Law in Action.
They have two kids. With luck, they’ll take after him.

bq. Jon Rubin @#7: Fanaticism and extremism are not the same as mental health problems and the collapsing of politics on to health is a dangerous trend that should not be encouraged or endorsed.

I’ve often used the ‘Mad Mel’ nickname on her, since there’s clearly something screwed up in her circuitry. It mocks her hairtrigger willingness to accuse others of insanity, too. But, assuming it’s an intellectual knot she’s tied herself in, I think Jon Rubin puts the case well. It’s a nickname that leaves you applying a double standard when you use it. I shan’t be using it again.

Up above, Sebastian H said,

Isn’t the exact formulation used by the anti-Islam crowd in response to 9/11? I thought this was the kind of reasoning we very specificially weren’t supposed to be using.

I don’t think this is the case at all. There’s nothing wrong with holding specific radical Islamic leaders responsible for contributing to the atmosphere that led to 9/11. The kind of reasoning we’re not “supposed to be using” is holding an entire undifferentiated mass, like Muslims as a group, responsible for the actions. It would be like blaming all Christians responsible for the guy in Norway.

#49 – you’re quite right Bert and I regret using the nickname ‘Mad Mel’, at least in the context of this discussion.

Here’s one of Atran’s papers where he emphasizes the psychological normality of suicide bombers–

link

I think a lot of people are REALLY missing the point on the abortion analogy.

The claim isn’t that murder sprees are the only rational thing to do if one believes the rhetoric of anti abortion ideologues.

The claim is that political violence would, at the very least, be on the table.

You can’t defeat that analogy by claiming that people might believe that political violence is justified, but not pragmatic in terms of advancing their political goals. That’s not debating the point, its conceding it.

Matth–Chris was talking about Islamophobes, people who treat all Muslims as possible terrorists or terrorist supporters.

Are you saying that the category of “Muslim” and “Islamophobe” are equivalent?

How much of this can be explained in terms of different levels of discourse? When momentarily pissed off, we might yell “I’ll bloody kill you!” but often this is meant in jest, and even when it isn’t, we rarely go on to commit murder. A late-night barroom rant is offered in a different context to a Sunday sermon on the same topic, and generally taken as such.

We also have political/entertaining speech which exists in an ecology of text, itself sometimes better explained in terms of demand than in terms of supply. Perhaps MP is in fact merely delivering a series of rants which are clinically designed and scientifically crafted to raise the heartbeat of Daily Mail readers. I love to spread a rumour in which Jeremy Clarkson, crying inside as he accepts every in-character booking his agent forces on him, retires to his cellar every night to play with dolls (in doing so, I of course say something which entertains the people I’m likely to talk to). Neither of these scenarios are likely, but I still have a sense that there is a Clarkson-shaped niche in the public sphere – just as there was a niche for Owenite anticlerical speakers in the 1840s, or Murphyite Catholic-baiters in the 1850s.

What might have changed over the last couple of decades is that rather more communication is being carried out in decontextualised ASCII. Thus, our late night ranting, filling the headspace that we have for political speech designed purely to reinforce internal group solidarity – a kind of verbal grooming – is more easily mistaken for a ‘to do’ list. With bad effects.

If you think we’re missing the point of the abortion analogy, you seem to be countermissing the point of the Iraq war counteranalogy.

If you believe that the US government during the Iraq war caused 600,000 excess deaths and you additionally believe that to be something akin to mass murder, then whatever you aren’t doing against the US government (and most of you certainly are not doing much) may be explained by *exactly* the same reasons why most pro-lifers on abortion aren’t doing crazy shit. It doesn’t mean that they don’t believe that lots of abortions are murder any more than you don’t believe that much of the Iraq war ended up being senseless murder. They aren’t that different from you. They believe variously things like a) 2 wrongs don’t make a right, b) my political efforts make more sense, c) violent efforts will be counterproductive, d) they are afraid of the personal consequences.

Why aren’t you personally shooting people in the Pentagon? D-squared, how about it?

On this business of creating a certain rhetorical environment: a senior member of Italy’s Northern League has claimed that “Breivik’s ideas are in defence of western civilisation.”

“

people select themselves into groups which ramp up their more-or-less internally coherent belief systems into increasingly extreme forms by confirming to one another their perceived “truths”

Isn’t this just a description of…politics? In any case I don’t think it’s new, but maybe something is new about the access to and participation in these competing publics.

may be explained by exactly the same reasons why most pro-lifers on abortion aren’t doing crazy shit.

The practical efficacy of taking down Planned Parenthood by means of amateur violence is somewhat different from the potential for taking down the military of any developed country by the same means.

Cultural historian Roger Griffin has a long talk here on the psychodynamics of becoming a utopian terrorist. His archetype seems to fit Breivik very well, even if it is hard to believe at first, that quite sane people can escalate mere existential angst into going postal.

To whit: Breivik describes himself as growing up in an anomic environment run by muslim street gangs. He is from a broken family. He wants something beyond bourgeouis “cynical careerism”, as he puts it. He yearns for a ‘sacred canopy’ which will give life meaning, patriarchal christianity, in his case. He dabbles in politics, but becomes disappointed. In a state of confusion, he stumbles upon a worldview in which things start making sense again, from his own spiritual problems or problems with women, to geo-political reality. He is initiated into a cult. In a neglected passage of his manifesto, he describes meeting the “Templars” after contacting a Serbian Nationalist. They are a small international group, mostly Christian, which wants to defend Europe against Islam. He is mentored by an Englishman he calls Richard.

After his initiation, the world splits into Good and Evil. Evil is projected outward. Breivik understands that his task will be to go ‘beyond good and evil’ to make the rebirth of Europe possible. He can give his life for this task, for it will give him immortality. He is the avant-garde of the Eurabian civil war of the next generation, which will finally end in “2083”. He prepares for years, following Nechayev’s advice and gradually shutting himself off from normal society. He studies the “science of destruction” (Nechayev). He strengthens his faith by meditating. When he is ready, he strikes at a symbolic target which represents “the Enemy”. It is not personal. He does not specifically hate the individuals he is killing and knows his act is heinous, though necessary. They are killed for what they are: the future leaders of the wrong side in the Eurabian civil war. They are killed as a “marketing operation”, to get the truth of his manifesto into the world. He feels a sense of calm bliss, having given his life to his cause. In his manifesto, he urges co-believers to realize that they are not alone.

Clearly many ideologies can capture people like Breivik. But to drive him into terrorism, they need to a) posit an overwhelming threat and a future rebirth b) describe a world devided into good and evil, where you are either with us or against us c) provide a total weltanschauung, ersatz for religion, ersatz for political engagement.

I think, D^2, Sebastian H’s point was less that the analogies are exact (abortion = right wing Iraq war), but rather to highlight how reasonable it is to sincerely believe “X is a grave evil” without taking up arms to stop X. Was John Brown the only sincere abolitionist? The only one who regarded slavery as a terrible and grave evil? Obviously not.

Regardless of what you personally may have thought about the Iraq war, there are many people who did, in fact, claim it amounted to something akin to mass murder by the US. It seems you are committed by your ‘abortion’ argument to questioning the sincerity of *those* people, if they did not take ‘some radical’ action (more than, say, contributing politically to anti-war politicians).

Now, as it happens, I’m generally on board with your point. A person’s behavior in opposing activity X is a relevant indicator of his sincerity in regard activity X as a grave evil. But as noted by many people above, there are lots of complicating conditions — maybe you feel helpless/don’t know how to help, maybe you think all the ways to oppose the activity involve morally questionable means, or would completely disrupt your life, or simply won’t be effective. Per Lizardbreath’s comment above, it’s not like most of us can convene the Justice Society of America and put our plans into action.

But as noted by many people above, there are lots of complicating conditions—maybe you feel helpless/don’t know how to help, maybe you think all the ways to oppose the activity involve morally questionable means, or would completely disrupt your life, or simply won’t be effective.

All very sensible reasons for not taking up arms against a normal, everyday action in a democratic polity which you just don’t believe is right. But as a response to the literal genocide of literally millions of literal babies? Come on. It’s perfectly OK and indeed even sensible to say that you can’t join in the fight today because you are wearing your best trousers. But if that’s your view, then you are demonstrating by your actions that, to you, the cause you are talking about is not as important as it was to combat Hitler, and so if you claim otherwise you are going to look silly. I am reminded of another joke:

Three old men in a Swiss retirement home. The Frenchman says “Ah, I remember the war. I fought with De Gaulle’s Resistance – once I took a machine gun and killed seven Nazi soldiers!”. The Yugoslav says “Ah, the war! I was with Tito’s partisans – once we blew up a railway track and killed a hundred Nazi soldiers!”. The Dutchman says “Oh you guys, you were so lucky – in Holland, that was not allowed.”

Got it. Except ‘Harry’s place’ which I have no idea what that is.

I think it’s not accurate to think of the of the “revealed sincerity” of belief as to take the form: “yes or no, are you shooting abortion doctors?” Rather, it’s a conclusion that can only be drawn from looking at a number of factors. Otherwise, it’s too easy for people with generally moderate views (like me, for example) to basically call any idealist or extremist out for failing to turn into St. Francis. Most ‘radical action’ that would be efficacious against abortion, 3rd world poverty, the Iraq war, the vivisection of animals in cosmetics research, etc. would, have the effect of *really disrupting your life.* That’s a high bar to clear to absolve yourself of insincerity.

LeeEsq,

It is a fact that any number of hate groups–in Canada, the U.S., and England–found the best way forward after 9-11 was to repurpose themselves as being anti-Islamic, often with an exaggerated Pro-Israel slant thrown in, rather than anti-Semitic. I am not sure you can characterize their support of Israel as being feigned (which is what I think you believe)–or at least a few of these racists are obsessed enough that, amongst all the bullshit they crank out, they occasionally DO find some raving on-line jew-hater and bring them to the attention of the press. They are useful to the point where the more mainstream Jewish organizations pay some attention to them, and some of the orgs on the right side of the political spectrum (B’nai Brith Canada, Israel Canada Coalition, JDL Canada) have actually made alliances, the last two noted especially. So for example the JDL actually hosted a tele-conference with EDL leadership figure Tommy Robinson. A friend is an enemy of my enemy, I suppose. Almost everything ELSE is forgiven, alnost to the point where DOUBTING THE REALITY OF THE HOLOCAUST is acceptable as long as you are sufficiently zealous in the cause of Israel. Quite dangerous stuff, as far as I’m concerned.

Speaking of Harry’s Place, I actually think that that the they are some of the few people that are properly analyzing Brevik’s relationship to Christianity. Many anaylists and bloggers are just treating him as a sort of fanatic but Brevik’s Christianity is a bit more complicated. He didn’t seem to be much of a believer or even a moderate practitioner. Brevik embraced Christianity as representing something of the self-assurance that he believed European civilization lost. Christianity isn’t really a religion to Brevik but a symbol of what he wanted. Its pretty much how some of the Neo-Nazi groups embrace the Norse pantheon without actually believing in Oden or Thor.

The thing is, even a mass-murder is not such a big deal, unless it emotionally affects you. You think Nazism was the greatest evil imaginable, but an ordinary Chinese is much more impressed by imperial Japan and the rape of Nanking. Different folks, different strokes, different indoctrination.

Or, #80.

@soru: “some other country’s newspapers”

I’m not sure about this. In Europe in WWI every country’s newspaper was beating on the same pro-war drum, and it might not have mattered which they read. Every national paper in Europe could have been beating out the beat Breivik heard, and I question whether it would have affected him that way if there wasn’t something going on locally too.

(also an application of the schema in #6: people who spend huge amounts of time arguing that particular racial groups are systematically less intelligent and more prone to criminal activity than others, but who act all indignant if they are referred to as “racist” – if you really believed in genetic stupidity and criminality, why wouldn’t you be racist? In general, I’d refer to it as “failure to own one’s bullshit”).

Funny thing, that, but I have members of my family[1] who aren’t afraid to be called racist. They’re old school, real old school – the younger ones in this tribe are in their 70’s.

[1]This would be in SE Missouri down near the bootheel.

As usual, D^2 makes a point I’ve often made, but has done so more articulately. If abortion is murder, then western society is committing mass murder; if western society is complicit in mass murder, then shooting a few mass murderers is a fucking good start, even if you end up in jail forever.

In this context to Charlie: ii) definitely isn’t an excuse, as above. i) is only an excuse if you also believe iii). iii) is a legitimate reason for inaction. iv) is questionable – surely there’s a point where you live in a regime of Infinite Evil where you can’t just say “well, yeah, but if I shot Stalin then I’d be as bad as him”.

Heh, you want to see some real retch-inducing behaviour, check out this video. I despise these people – check out the smirk on the first woman being interviewed.

To say that these types are doing anything but showing the courage of their convictions is an understatement – my own ignirnt and unapologetically racist uncles cut a nobler figure than these malicious, mischievous, and malevolent twits.

In Europe in WWI every country’s newspaper was beating on the same pro-war drum, and it might not have mattered which they read. .

In WWI, I don’t think they were many Frenchmen who read German newspapers and as a consequence volunteered to fight _for_ the Boche.

WWII is more when that kind of thing got started (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_French_Volunteers_Against_Bolshevism).

Every national paper in Europe could have been beating out the beat Breivik heard, and I question whether it would have affected him that way if there wasn’t something going on locally too.

And I am claiming that the thing going on locally was ‘Norwegian life and politics’. Of all the people who came into contact with Beck’s rantings, a tiny minority would live in Scandinavia. But that’s where the violence took place, precisely because it has the largest gap between local reality and American ideology.

Your adopted/chosen culture tells you, say, ‘gun control is evil’. Norway has gun control, and ten other features US culture stereotypically rejects. So either you abandon your cultural identity, or you conclude Norway is evil.

Similar considerations apply, obviously, to the equivalent ‘self-starter’ Islamist terrorists.

The power of the argument turns on abortion being basically a second holocaust. If abortion = murder really means into ‘abortion is a grave moral wrong that should be stopped’ (a point of view that Rosalind Hursthouse plausibly argues is what most people who are anti-abortion really believe), then the argument loses lot of force

It doesn’t lose a lot of force – it loses all its force when dealing with people who think that “abortion is a very grave moral wrong that must be stopped”. People like that are totally sincere, even as they go on to say “and stopping it is by a very long way the most important thing in my political beliefs”. But if you believe “Abortion is a very great moral wrong”, but say “Abortion is murder, and therefore I believe that millions of murders of babies are being carried out every year, but am not really doing anything about this”, then you are saying you believe something other than what you actually believe, and that sort of thing is bound to have an effect on your reputation for sincerity.

and similarly to Sebastian:

But then you pretty much lose the force of your argument about pro-lifers unless you are willing to conceed that your target (above) is vanishingly small. The number of pro-lifers who believe that every single abortion is literally unmitigated murder from the very moment of conception is fairly small.

I am sure this is true. But the number of pro-lifers who say that they believe that every single abortion is literally murder is much larger, and the fact that, as noted by Uncle Kvetch in #76 above, they invariably back down from this claim when challenged on its practical implications, does not really do much to rescue the old credibility. This is why I coined that snappy phrase “own your bullshit”. Pro-lifers are happy to bullshit that life begins at conception and that abortion is child-murder, but when you ask them if they are prepared to own that bullshit, they don’t want to know.

It seems that the EDL has told the AP that the killer’s mentor “Richard” is Paul Ray, a former EDL member that claims to be the head of a “templar” organization. Paul Ray, in turn says that the mentor in question is Alan Lake, bankroller of the EDL and that he is being set up to take a fall.

I think the “Lone Wolf” narrative is about to take a beating.

1. I believe that the Iraq invasion was a very great moral wrong.
2. I’m a pacifist, who came of age watching other pacifists oppose two similar great wrongs: segregation and the Vietnam war.
3. I don’t have the intellectual difficulty figuring out which terrorists are really freedom fighters, that people who countenance violence have. I may be more sympathetic to John Brown’s cause, but I don’t think the violence was right.
4. Ah, you may say, non-violence doesn’t work. I’m not convinced violence does, we can start that argument.
5. The Pentagon is safe from my violence, but I’d like to see it out of business.
6. Yossarian said it best, “I’d be a damn fool to think any other way.”

“Pro-lifers are happy to bullshit that life begins at conception and that abortion is child-murder, but when you ask them if they are prepared to own that bullshit, they don’t want to know.”

And pro-choicers don’t really mean that the government can’t regulate anything nor are they strict libertarians.

Fascinating.

What does that have to do with your “key point” contention? It isn’t a key point in the abortion debate just as Bush=Hitler isn’t a keep point in the Iraq debate and “No War for Oil” isn’t a key point in the larger debate about the Middle East. Hooray you can shoot down slogans. If you *really* believe that doing that is dealing with the key points in the various debates, you’re a lot more provincially narrow minded than I would have thought. Slogans are almost never the key point in any long running political debate. They mostly function as quick ways to preach to the choir. They are intended to let you identify what side you’re on, not as arguments. No one who says “Stop the imperialist war” is arguing with the other side. “Your government off my body” isn’t intended to be an actually convincing argument. It is a self-identifier: I’m anti-this-war, I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-life. It is weird that you think knocking that down is saying anything in particular about the underlying argument.

People are windbags. Bully on you for noticing that one!

Whatever else you might say about d-squared, you certainly won’t say that he eschews windbaggery. ;)

Or perhaps this is just another irregular verb.

I engage in amusing over the top fun, you engage in sloganeering for a good cause, they viley create an epistemic envioronment for terrorists while not even believing their own morals.

Following the Norway massacre many of the elite scribblers of this spectrum—many of whom have played the guilt-by-association game to the max over the last decade—are disclaiming all responsibility. Well, of course, they didn’t pull the trigger, but they helped to build an epistemic environment in which someone did.

Going back to this original comment and tying it in with the abortion nutcases; I suspect here that “epistemic environment” here is one where the elite scribblers let go unquestioned the notion that it’s okay to bypass the institutional mediators for these sorts of conflicts if you happen not to like the results.

Iow, it’s one thing to disagree with the Supreme Court in re it’s ruling on Roe vs. Wade. It’s quite another to disregard that decision as the settled law of the land just because you happen to disagree with it.[1]

And it is this which our cadres of scribblers let (selectively) pass unremarked.

[1]Of course, one-offs that you happen to disagree with are one thing; having those mediating institutions systematically subvert and undercut previous rulings is quite another.

@ wolfgang:

>>It seems that he read and admired Locke and Kant among others. Did they also help to build this ‘epistemic environment’?

given what Locke thought of the native americans or what Kant said of the south sea islanders, Breivik’s alleged admiration comes as no surprise here.

Because your definition of “one side” is pretty unnuanced, you understanding of “claim to be the basis” is crappy and your understanding of “their moral reasoning” is poor.

I’ve just re-read Chris B’s original post, and noticed one more thing: “the adoption of extreme pro-Zionism by the formerly anti-semitic right ”
I’m not sure that the extreme right can be properly described as ‘formerly’ anti-semitic even following its adoption of extreme pro-Zionism. An extreme antipathy to ‘multiculturalism’ necessarily involves antipathy to observant Judaism (note for example the implications of the One Law for All campaign). And there is alas no necessary contradiction betweeen support for the existence of Israel and wanting to deport Jewish people there. There is a worrying parallel in the attitude of the interwar Polish right, which was happy to allow the Zionist movement to organise, on the basis that both groups wanted Jewish people out of Poland.

I appreciate that mainstream Zionism, and supporters of Israel outside the extreme right, do not share this attitude, of course.

ScentOfViolets: “They are also most assuredly evidence against yours.”

On the contrary, pointing to people who are not x does not prove the impossibility of being x. However, I share your animus towards the people in that video, and the anti-abortion movement more generally. I was trying to make a more general point: that you can’t infer the inscincerity of people who say they think the world is seriously out of joint from their failure to make a serious effort to put it right.

dsquared… what you’re forgetting is that the pro-life movement is heavily, thoroughly influenced by the views of the Catholic and various Protestant churches. Those same churches insist, as strongly as they do on abortion, that violence to end the practice would be wrong. So the very implication you think to be obvious (if abortion is murder -> violence against clinics is justified) is an implication explicitly and repeatedly condemned by the most influential organizations in the pro-life movement.

I don’t claim that Catholics or Protestants follow edicts of non-violence well or consistently, but this certainly weakens the notion that – especially for those who hold pro-life positions – violence is justified, much less obligatory.

What bothers me, somewhat, about Chris’s post is the vagueness of the charge he presents. This vagueness is actually evident here in this slightly OT discussion of the pro-life position. Did the Catholic Church help create the “epistemic environment” in which violence against clinics occurs? Sure. Does that mean that the Catholic Church did anything wrong? No.

“Epistemic environment” is way, way too vague a term to sustain the accusatory implications of the post.

favourite books: Mill On Liberty, Locke Essay, Burke Reflections

I believe this may make Breivik the world’s ONLY mass-murderer to claim inspiration from Mill, Locke, and Burke. One has to wonder what he got from them, and whether he was reading them in very poor translations. And thank god he didn’t lay hands on Hume!

The left had two options

Views on complex political issues which start with the premis “[X] has two options”: also unlikely to be loadbearing structures.

The Left’s options were heavily circumscribed by the disappearance of an Arab left, the rise of SWP style anti-imperialist rhetoric, and lastly the creation of an anti-clerical liberal movement in England. That created a bind: calls for reform in the arab world could only be interpreted by the SWP as imperialist, due to the absence of a domestic left in the arab world, whereas their absence would mean acquiescence to the status quo. Much as Adorno’s anti-partisan position on Vietnam lead to him being miscast as conservative, the critique of Islamism became proimperialism in the imaginations of the ISO etc.

the creation of an anti-clerical liberal movement in England

Wait, what? When did that happen?

Wow d-squared at 124 is freaking *amazing* considering his explanation of the two options about what pro-lifers really believe.

Here is what the enormous majority of pro-lifers believe:

Abortion at some stage or other is a very serious moral wrong. Certainly as bad as torturing animals, probably as bad or worse than armed robber and *in some cases* something akin to murder. Nearly all of them believe that it is murder at or near the viability phase unless there is some compelling self defense reason. (This btw is the location of your deep misunderstanding about Abortion = Murder. The Supreme Court in Constitutionalizing the issue pushed it into a discussion almost exclusively about late term abortions. For all your blah blah blah, there actually is a serious discussion to be had about late term abortions being a serious moral wrong that pro-choicers don’t like to engage with. Abortion=Murder isn’t as silly a slogan, though it still isn’t philosophically tight, when the political discussion has become focused on late term abortions. The fact is, certain late term abortions actually look very akin to murder to most normal people.) Yes, a very large majority of pro-lifers think that late term abortions might be murder if there isn’t a compelling chance of serious physical injury (i.e. something akin to what might get you off as self defense in a murder trial). This isn’t that ridiculous of a position, as it appears to be what the majority of Americans think, and so far as I can tell ALSO the majority of what people in the EU think (see also various EU laws RE abortion which are both more strict about timing than those in the US and more strict about oversight of abortion doctors.) Kermit Goswell’s decades of abortion and actual infanticide is the clear result of the hands-off “trust the doctor and patient” regime that NARAL et al. prefer. (Preemptive note, I said it is the result of their preferred legal structure, not that they would actually defend him–I hope).

Yes some percentage of pro-lifers think that the murder concept extends all the way back to conception. They are the minority, and have zero chance of getting their agenda into law because while a majority of Americans believe that abortion should be quite a bit more restricted than now, they don’t believe it should be outlawed. These pro-lifers are of course just as useful as Muslim jihadists are for certain people,which Chris does not name in his post above, when left-wingers want to scare people into their own agenda about abortion.

Furthermore Andrew makes a good point about the taught non-violence in the Catholic side of the pro-life movement (which is mirrored in the Quaker-inheiriting and Pennsylvannia-Dutch strains of Protestant pro-lifers). That further undercuts your argument.

That is the actual state of the abortion debate in the US from the pro-life side.

In general, it isn’t nearly as simplistic as you portray, it isn’t nearly as confused as you portray, and it isn’t nearly as intellectually/morally inconsistent as you portray. Are there strains that are? Yes. So fucking what? Anyone can make any strain of thought look horrible if you insist on engaging only its silliest proponents.

Depends on which civilians. Sure, they might say that “attacks against civilians are bad” but then go ahead and praise suicide martyrs as heros and Osama bin Laden as a freedom fighter. 25% of youth in Malaysia said suicide bombers are needed to defend Islam, 70% that the headscarf is obligatory, and 40% agree with the barbaric punishment of maiming. The report is here.

Certainly as bad as torturing animals, probably as bad or worse than armed robber and in some cases something akin to murder […] Yes, a very large majority of pro-lifers think that late term abortions might be murder if there isn’t a compelling chance of serious physical injury (i.e. something akin to what might get you off as self defense in a murder trial).

No, I don’t agree that they do. Because they don’t believe that women who have late term abortions should be tried as criminals and subject to long terms of imprisonment for doing so. Armed robbers and people who torture animals are tried as criminals, and are subject to custodial sentences, while the USA has either death or life-without-parole as the maximum sentence for child murder. But pro-lifers don’t, in general, when pushed, say that they want women who have abortions to be tried as the serious felons that they claim them to be. They don’t want to “own” the real-world implications of a rhetorical claim that they want to make.

And of course, neither the Quakers nor the Catholics are religiously opposed to the imposition of prison sentences for murderers; the degree of bad faith is so huge here that I can weaken my claims massively and still establish my conclusion.

Without presuming to speak for Chris:

what else have you got?

Melanie Phillips (subject of “The Normblog profile no. 155”). Cited at length in the Oslo gunman’s manifesto.

Andrew Bostrom (interviewed in Democratiya, Winter 2008). Frequent co-author of Bat Ye’Or on “dhimmitude” and “Eurabia”.

Anthony Browne (“Our new man in town to fight political correctness”, Nick Cohen, Evening Standard 23 Jul 2008). Believes that Britain is overwhelmed with immigrants, that asylum seekers carry disease and that London will be minority white in 2010 (changed to “minority British-born white” at a later date, still wrong).

I have a few more hanging around the shop actually.

“Depends on which civilians. Sure, they might say that “attacks against civilians are bad” but then go ahead and praise suicide martyrs as heros and Osama bin Laden as a freedom fighter.”

Pretty much the same as Americans then. The people we support are freedom fighters and our enemies who do the same things are terrorists and our military actions are always justifiable and torture is the same as fraternity pranks. Not all Americans by any means, but enough to make the claim that there is some big distinction between us and Muslims on this issue look pretty silly.

You deal with the political climate you have and try to work with it. Why don’t progressives constantly harp on their wish lists for the ultimate state of the government/private balance? Because (except for the idiots) they realize that doing so gets in the way of the concrete gains that can be had. It isn’t a matter of *revealing* or *concealing* the deep agenda. For the most part, the most important deep agenda is to talkable what is reachable and reach it. The state of political play on abortion is such that we have trouble punishing even abortion doctors who perform many late term abortions under what would be questionable circumstances if we even bothered to hold routine levels of medical evidence on the question (which for the most part we do not). The reachable step is doctor accountability (doctor punishment for failing on the accountability probably isn’t even much of a reachable step at this point).

The reasons for not punishing the woman are ironically well out of step with modern feminism (something to do with doctors pushing weak willed women, or just so stories about how hard it is to make rational decisions when 8 months pregnant) but well within the modern understanding of pregnancy. (Preemptive note: I’m not saying it is *right* but I certainly think I’m stating a widely held belief about women and late term pregnancies, and it isn’t even exclusively held by Republicans if my ears don’t deceive me). In any case, the popular opinion is nowhere near interested in that, while punishing the repeat offendor doctor is much closer to public opinion (and likely to be even closer if Gosnell gets much press and the pro-choicers don’t get some good talking points along the lines of “we don’t support his clear infanticide at all” going).

It is like trying to start peace talks with “a moral person would let the Palestinians become full Israeli citizens and allow a full right of return”. The pro-life/Palestinian supporter *might* be right from some idealistic perspective, but it is going to derail any practical hope for a better situation than the current one, right?

Watson Ladd: “Sure, they might say that “attacks against civilians are bad” but then go ahead and praise suicide martyrs as heros and Osama bin Laden as a freedom fighter”
They might, but in order to substantiate your claims of “massive popular support for the murder of civilians” in the Arab world you would have to produce some evidence they had actually done so. For example, opinion polls showing massive popular support for Al Quaeda and Osama bin Laden. As I noted before in a previous discussion, you really can’t grasp the distinction between what you would like people to have said and what they have actually said, can you?

“They might, but in order to substantiate your claims of “massive popular support for the murder of civilians” in the Arab world you would have to produce some evidence they had actually done so. For example, opinion polls showing massive popular support for Al Quaeda and Osama bin Laden.”

In 2003, over 70% of those surveyed in the Palestinian Territories said that Osama Bin Laden was “doing the right thing,” as did close to 60% of those surveyed in Jordan and in Indonesia. I don’t what your definition of “massive” is, but that certainly suggests there was sizeable popular support in at least some Muslim countries for the murder of civilians. (http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/05/public_opinion_osama_bin_laden?page=1)

@ajay

I’m thinking of Dawkins and Hitches as examples. Liberal in the values they have, and anti-clerical should be obvious. That suddenly made a critique of principles claimed to be revealed seem anti-religious.

@Sebastian H

Sure, pro-lifers condemned the man who shot Tiller. But he was very useful to them, doing what years of legal harassment could not. The EU also provides abortion services to the poor, regulates the clinics as medical practices, both which didn’t happen in PA. The preferred legal structure is one in which abortion is like any other procedure, not something the state can ignore.

Chris Williams at 114: Yes, this is what I was trying to say in my earlier post but a lot clearer.

This has always struck me as a key point with respect to the abortion debate – if you really believed that abortion was the moral equivalent of infanticide, and thus really believed that the society you were living in was exterminating babies at a much worse rate than Nazi Germany, surely this would mandate some quite radical action on your part? And therefore, I’ve always presumed, that given the tiny minority of people holding the anti-abortion position who even do so much as to give up a Saturday afternoon holding up a protest sign outside what they believe to be a mass murder camp, it must surely be the case that at some deepest level of rationality, the anti-choice side of that debate must be aware that they don’t really believe that life begins at conception, and that their views about the wrongness of abortion have some other basis.

Nah. Their definition of what it means to “really believe” something is different (for an appropriately restricted meaning of “they” of course). They are not evaluating the truth of their assertions by the descriptive “is this verifiable,” they’re evaluated the truth of their assertions by the emotive “does this feel right to say?” They’re substituting emotive validity for descriptive validity. (Sour grapes revisioned as “those other less deserving foxes are probably swimming in delicious sweet grapes.”)

As a deeply disturbed person immerses themselves in this sort of environment, they consistently develop intent to go the other direction: purely emotive statements about what feels like it ought to be true (e.g. Obama should hang) become descriptive statements about what should literally be brought about. (A purely emotive statement like “something needs to be done about those grey foxes impoverishing our entire community by lavishing sweet grapes on themselves” becomes “I should prepare to terrorize and kill the grey foxes, in the name of justice.”)

P.S. If anyone reads this and thinks, oh right, the thing these folks “really believe” in most is not the rising of the sun or some verifiable fact, but the selective benevolence of an invisible omnipresent God concerned with mundane details of their lives, well, I can’t blame you, but neither is it especially relevant.

P.P.S. This is also why the non-deeply-disturbed members of such a community are genuinely shocked and horrified when someone goes out and does the things they’ve said a hundred times ought to be done. They were speaking emotively. (This is also why when you ask abortion = murder people what the minimum sentence for an abortion should be, most of them stumble over some half-conceived statement about fining and locking up doctors, and almost to a person none of them say the death penalty. Talking so specifically about the death penalty is too raw and specific to be emotive.)

Pretty much the point dsquared has been making but on a less contentious issue

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/the-guilty-parties/

Rupert Murdochs a c$$t

“If the US or Great Britain were occupied by some Muslim country I suspect the number of Breiviks would skyrocket, and they would have widespread popular support.”

This is the wrong analogy — no one was occupying Indonesia or Jordan. So your argument would be that if, say, Saudi Arabia invaded and occupied Canada, there would be widespread public support in the UK for deliberately targeting and massacring Saudi civilians? Again, possible but not damn likely.

But the only opposition to all these things is rooted in a Western philosophical tradition.

Yes, it really is a damn shame that no non-Western philosophical system ever devoted itself to karuṇā, ahimsa, or metta…..er…..compassion, nonviolence, or benevolence.

“By your logic, if I asked someone in 1940 whether Hitler was “doing the right thing,” and they said yes, that might mean they just supported his stand on vegetarianism”

Somehow I thought Hitler might come into this. Instead of speculating about what “doing the right thing in world affairs” might mean, perhaps we can look at a study which asked Muslims what they thought about attacks on civilians.
“A study of public opinion in predominantly Muslim countries reveals that very large majorities continue to renounce the use of attacks on civilians as a means of pursuing political goals. At the same time large majorities agree with al Qaeda’s goal of pushing the United States to remove its military forces from all Muslim countries and substantial numbers, in some cases majorities, approve of attacks on US troops in Muslim countries.
People in majority-Muslim countries express mixed feelings about al Qaeda and other Islamist groups that use violence, perhaps due to this combination of support for al Qaeda’s goals and disapproval of its terrorist methods. (….)
The survey is part of an ongoing study of Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia, with additional polling in Turkey, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Azerbaijan and Nigeria. It was conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org with support from the START Consortium at the University of Maryland.
In nearly all nations polled more than seven in 10 say they disapprove of attacks on American civilians. “Bombings and assassinations that are carried out to achieve political or religious goals” are rejected as “not justified at all” by large majorities ranging from 67 to 89 percent. There is a growing belief that attacks on civilians are ineffective, with approximately half now saying that such attacks are hardly ever effective. ”
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/591.php

@Ben Alpers: Good catch. I don’t see that many Buddhist commentators online so I forgot about it. Then again, is abstention from the world even possible in one as radically implicated in evil as this one?

“That doesn’t tell us anything, obviously, about what people were saying in 2003.”
Yes, but the question of what people were saying in 2003 is not of crucial relevance to anybody but your good self. My comment was in response to Watson Ladd’s claims of “massive popular support for the murder of civilians” among them there pesky A-rabs, not presumably limited to 2003 but on an ongoing basis, and I asked for any evidence of this. I still haven’t seen any, although what the 2008 poll brings out is precisely the “combination of support for al Qaeda’s goals and disapproval of its terrorist methods”, the latter being evidenced in massive rejection of attacks on civilians. I have no reason to think this situation would have been that different in 2003, had a direct question about attacks on civilians been asked.

By your logic, if I asked someone in 1940 whether Hitler was “doing the right thing,” and they said yes, that might mean they just supported his stand on vegetarianism.

Well, I imagine in 1945 almost everybody in the US thought that Truman did the right thing annihilating 200,000 civilians of all ages in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I bet most Americans still do. Hell, you will probably have no problem rationalizing it. So what. You’re a product of your environment, like everybody else.

I will retract the massive as potentially ambiguous. I think even 5% support for the murder of civilians by mingling with them and exploding oneself is too much. There seem to be very different sets of statistics being thrown around: does anyone have a definitive study to link to? Anyway, this is all very far from the origin: Chris is arguing that calling attention to the barbarism of Islamism was somehow justifying nativism, whereas I don’t think it is. Some people are arguing that there isn’t this barbarism, but I’m more interested in the question of if this justifies nativism.

I think even 5% support for the murder of civilians by mingling with them and exploding oneself is too much.

How about by bombing them from jets, or blowing them up with cruise missiles? What’s the threshold there?

(Of course I know Watson Ladd’s answer: You can kill as many civilians as you want with a clean conscience, as long as you really, truly, sincerely wish you had some magic bombs that only hurt tanks and soldiers.)

“This is the wrong analogy—no one was occupying Indonesia or Jordan. So your argument would be that if, say, Saudi Arabia invaded and occupied Canada, there would be widespread public support in the UK for deliberately targeting and massacring Saudi civilians? Again, possible but not damn likely.”

Well, I won’t speak for the Brits, but I’m pretty sure many of my fellow Americans would cheer. Especially if it were done by plane. Americans supported the civilian bombing campaign in WWII, for instance. Many would also support torture. If they lived in a world where Saudi Arabia was the superpower and was occupying Christian countries, I think we’d get pretty darn bloodthirsty. I even wonder if we might consider using some of those nukes we went to all the trouble of building, given an occupation of Canada by the Saudi Arabian hordes.

“I even wonder if we might consider using some of those nukes we went to all the trouble of building, given an occupation of Canada by the Saudi Arabian hordes!”
Well if the analogy is with the Jordanian case, you would have to factor in the fact that more than half of the US population would be made up of people who had been expelled from Canada as a result of this Saudi invasion, and had been prevented from returning to their homeland.

“John Brown? Ends and means – he and his sons beheaded a few people, too.”

No. With JB, the phrase you need is ‘tit for tat’. His actions were an in-kind response to a previous attrocity. Doesn’t make them right. Just that this is not a good analogy. Where is the ‘tat’ for which Breivik’s action was the ‘tit’? In fact there was none and believing there was is Breivik’s delusion.

and you want a cite

SoV didn’t ask for a cite, Sebastian, I did. Because your “intimate personal knowledge” isn’t nearly as impressive as you seem to think it is.

I’ve lived as an openly gay man for 25 years now, but if I were presumptuous enough to write several long, detailed paragraphs about “what the enormous majority of gay men believe” based on nothing more than my “intimate personal knowledge,” I’m pretty sure someone would (rightly) call me on it.

I learned some time ago not to expect good faith from you, so I won’t be following you into the usual thicket of diversionary tactics, question-begging, and goalpost-shifting. Knock yourself out.

It’s dispiriting and tiresome to see every thread on CT turn into a troll and counter-troll argument, especially on serious and interesting topics.

mds @129: You are apparently entirely, blissfully ignorant of American fundamentalist Protestantism. In a way, I envy you. But it does detract ever so slightly from the weight of your arguments.

Most fundamentalist Protestant churches that I’m aware of do not advocate violence as a means of stopping abortion, much less advocate killing to stop abortion.

My point is not that there are groups which do believe in such violence – of course there are – but rather my point is that “we should commit violence to stop abortion” is not compelled by the proposition “abortion is wrong” according to the most influential authorities among the pro-life movement.

This dramatically weakens the argument that a pro-life position, logically, compels violence.

dsquared @134: No, I don’t agree that they do. Because they don’t believe that women who have late term abortions should be tried as criminals and subject to long terms of imprisonment for doing so.

That’s a complicated question that goes well beyond whether abortion is wrong. I actually do believe that, at a certain point, under certain conditions, late-term abortion is wrong – but I wouldn’t support lengthy prison sentences for doing so. It puzzles me, frankly, that you think a conclusion about the appropriate criminal sentence follows so absolutely from a conclusion that a given act is wrong.

And given the incredibly broad brush Chris paints in his post, I guess RIGHT NOW I am contributing to an epistemic environment that contributes to acts of violence against abortion clinics.

I think Chris has the germ of a good idea in the post, but it’s so broadly stated as to be almost more innuendo than argument.

Nice use of statistics. I suppose you are interpreting the abortion is murder statistics as meaning that 50% of people in the US believe that all abortions from the very moment of conception to the moment of birth are murder.

You are of course totally wrong.

How do I know this? Because I, unlike you or d-squared, am intimately and personally knowledgeable about people in the pro-life movement because I am damn well in it.

Now if it makes you feel better to believe that you, who are not in it, or d-squared, who is not even in this country, can add better context to the general question I’m certainly not going to be able to prove to you that you’re wrong because you’re approaching the question from such a point of view of extreme confirmation bias as to make disproving it nearly impossible.

But you are in fact wrong.

D-squared chooses to believe, and I’m sure it is great for his sense of superiority about ‘others’ whom he doesn’t need to intimately deal with, that this is because they don’t have sincere moral beliefs on the topic. I’m giving a counter explanation. My explanation, from personal experience with the people in question, is that for the most part they believe that late term abortions are murder and that given the Constitutional rulings of the Supreme Court taking earlier abortions well off political compromise, they fully understand that the political questions of abortions tend to turn around questions of abortions on the later part of the scale.

Now you don’t *have* to believe my explanation. But if you are being fair, you should probably admit that it is pretty darn plausible. It requires that pro-life people act pretty much like everybody else you know–with tensions of belief and various ideas about what appropriate responses look like and with beliefs that are more nuanced than YES/NO UP/DOWN. D-squared’s explanation is fantastic for demonizing a group and making it ‘other’, but is certainly not MORE likely than mine. And mine comes from personal experience, while his does not. But even discounting my personal experience to nothing, his explanation is not MORE likely than mine.

Which is exactly why I feel like you are trolling. His highly speculative explanation is not MORE likely than my explanation. Yet mine is the one that requires “cite please” trolling while his gets nods of agreement from the crowd. That is because of confirmation bias and in-group thinking–not your highly vaunted logic.

And this plays EXACTLY into the Muslim question. Yes there are Muslims who say awful things. But using them to demonize the large majority of people who have far more complicated beliefs than “Death to America” is either completely misunderstanding the complexity of their beliefs, or a cynical attempt to unfairly take advantage of the fact that demonizing the “other” is a great (but logically illegitimate) method of garnering support for your side. And the reason people get away with it is because they continually use the “Death to America” Muslims as stand ins for all Muslims. They continually use the most extreme Muslims as proxies for Muslims who may not agree with them, but are nevertheless not frighteningly extreme or nearly as scary when seen as actual humans with normal desires and responses.

(all) Abortion = Murder (all the time) is indeed a slogan which is indeed used by some pro-lifers. It is probably also used by some pro-lifers unthinkingly, who if called on it would realize that they are really just talking about fairly late term abortions. Using it to discredit the pro-life movement *in general* or to attack the moral understanding of pro-lifers *in general* is exactly the same awful argument that is identified about Muslims above.

“Seriously – this whole thread exemplifies why Crooked Timber is probably the best blog on the web.”

I would rate this particular comment thread as below the usual standard.

“But the only opposition to all these things is rooted in a Western philosophical tradition.”

I hear there is a jailed mass murderer who is making the same argument. Do you agree with Breivik that the Muslims should be expelled from the West?

“That is the bind that creates the horrible choice of anti-imperialism or anti-fascism.”

In the real world, imperialism and fascism go hand in hand.

shorter sebastian: who are you going to believe? me or your lying polling data?

Sebastian’s description of pro-life politics is utterly bizarre. Late-term abortions are already very rare and/or illegal. The pro-life movement is hardly indifferent to Roe v Wade, which says nothing about late-term abortions. “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” didn’t make Bill Clinton part of the pro-life movement. But yeah, the pro-life movement is just concerned with ending infanticide, and what a shame that evil irresponsible babykillers have misrepresented their political opponents.

Yes, the presence of soldiers makes a target legitimate depending on proportionality to war aims. This isn’t ideal but it is how war is fought.

I was going to write earlier that there was no moral difference between supporters of OBL, and Watson Ladd. I didn’t but evidently I should have.

Do you think there is no difference between suicide bombing and air bombardment of military targets? Besides, suicide bombers are not targeting military targets: they targeted Israeli civilians for many years. I’m not going to defend dehousing or anti-infrastructure bombing: they were horrible, horrible ideas.

Morally, there is no difference between suicide bombing and air bombardment that kills similar numbers of civilians for similar aims. Is that really so hard? I’m only bothering to reply to this because it’s so funny, in a dark way, that after you claim the difference is they target civilians while we don’t, in literally the very next sentence you admit that we target civilians too.

I won’t be talking to you any more.

So, the majority of pro-lifers…

1) Are politically astute enough to conceal their desire to imprison women who have an abortion at any stage of a pregnancy in order to make incremental gains in outlawing abortion.

2) Undercut said projection of moderation by routinely describing all abortion as murder even though this is a position they do not actually hold.

And this is a *defense* of the pro-life movement?

It requires that pro-life people act pretty much like everybody else you know—with tensions of belief and various ideas about what appropriate responses look like and with beliefs that are more nuanced than YES/NO UP/DOWN

“Tensions of belief”, I love it. The “tension” is between what the belief actually is, and what it is represented as being for purposes of silly, destructive, nasty and all too often dangerous rhetoric.

D-squared, who does not have personal knowledge of the pro-life movement in the United States

You may be aware of “the internet”, Sebastian? I am a person, and I’m on it. And people in the pro-life movement in the United States are also on it, which is where I can read them say what they believe. Do I have to spend some time holding a placard before I can get the nuance?

“Do I have to spend some time holding a placard before I can get the nuance?”

I don’t know what you have to do to get the nuance, but you certainly aren’t even trying thus far.

If a right wing nut said about Muslims, the things you say about pro-lifers, on ‘internet’ evidence, you would call him out.

And you’d be right.

If someone with actual experience of the people in question, said that you were probably wrong, and tried to explain why, and he didn’t even try to engage it or listen, but instead responded with the heavy handed prigishness that you exhibit, you would call him an ass.

And you’d be right.

You read about Muslims on the internet and now you’re such a freaking authority that you can call out the whole movement’s real moral understanding? Yeah, I think you realize how ridiculous that would look.

Seriously? Did you really just say that? Do you think that looking at internet porn is the same as having sex too? Well you are British I suppose…

Sebastian, one of the people who says that abortion is the equivalent of somewhere between torturing animals and murder, but probably worse than armed robbery is you. So stop tapdancing around that one. Furthermore:

1) Your own personal point of view appears to be that you would be happy with a world in which women were tried and given long custodial sentences for having abortions, but because this is politically impractical, the pro-life side should pretend that this isn’t what they want.

2) Lots of other people who believe (or claim to believe) the same things as you do actually don’t want, even in a perfect world, to punish women very harshly for having abortions.

Category 2) are clearly failing to own their bullshit. Category 1) are just liars. I don’t think the pro-life side are generally liars; I think they’re sincere people who believe that abortion is a serious wrong, and who use silly overheated rhetoric about how bad it is which they would drop if they ever seriously considered the practical implications of what they’re saying. I’m rather disappointed to find out that you’re in the category of “people who are actually concealing their true political agenda”.

I was tempted to get into the business of documenting specifics (X said Y on such and such a date) in response to Roger and Watson above, but it would have amounted to petty point scoring here

I don’t think it does, necessarily (that’s why I did it). I thought Roger was being totally absurd (and that the weakness of his argument wasn’t very well concealed by his use of overheated “shame!” “reprehensible!” language, on topic), but the point was actually very well made and not petty at all in the original post – that part of the epistemic environment is not just the Melanie Phillipses and the Andrew Bostroms who create the “We are at war and traitors are in our midst” propaganda, but the people in the mainstream who validate them and treat them as if they were a legitimate part of the debate. I seem to remember Henry once picked up the Volokhs for referring to Geert Wilders as a “critic of Islamism” in a headline and they at least realised that they were doing something wrong and changed it. Laundry lists of past offences are not massively edifying but it’s important to note (when challenged by people like Roger) that this does actually happen, and that people seemed to let their distaste for George Galloway and Ken Livingstone blind them to the character of some of their new mates.

Patrick @206: Those violent groups, to my mind, are much more a part of the ideological fabric that Breivik wrapped around his insanity.

Chris @202: I don’t think the toxic cross-fertilization between the extreme anti-immigrant groups, the neocons, and the Israeli right since 2001 is a simply my invention, and I think that it matters a great deal.

I don’t know Chris, the brush and the charge seem awfully broad to me. Lots and lots of things create epistemic environments. Lots and lots of things allow p to happen, for that matter. The drift of your post is that those who created the epistemic environment bear some measure of moral responsibility – but why and for what, I don’t know. As I said, allowing freedom of speech helps create the epistemic environment. Should its defenders bear moral responsibility for Breivik’s butchery? Look at a quick snapshot of the spectrum of discussion on critiques of Islam, for example:

At one end there are those concerned not about Islam in itself, but about radical Islam. Certainly discussion of these radical sects “helps create the epistemic environment” where sillier and alarmist denunciations of Muslim immigration and of Islam are possible – but then the charge of “helps create the epistemic environment” becomes meaninglessly broad. Hell, we’ve just charged every reformer and every liberal Islamic group who also thinks that radical groups in Islam are problematic.

At the other end there are violent racial purity/religious nutjob types, who preach violence, violent revolution, and love spinning tales thick with racial and cultural paranoia. THIS end also “helps create the epistemic environment” but in a much more direct fashion, and in a fashion that explicitly encourages violence. But the problem with these groups is not simply that they “help create the epistemic environment” where it is possible to urge terrorist actions; it’s that they explicitly create and nurture an ideology that justifies terrorist actions.

On the immigration front, there are those that are concerned about Islamist organizations and ideology but who view immigration as a strength; there are those concerned about the effects of immigration when not accompanied by cultural integration, but who view immigration itself as a good thing; there are those who view immigration as a bad thing entirely, and argue that it should stop, but who also abhor and condemn violence; and so forth.

Your broad brush doesn’t distinguish. “Neocons” for instance don’t advocate terrorist bombings, they don’t advocate the slaughter of children attending a summer camp, and they don’t suggest that violence be used to start a revolution in the West in order to “purify” the West of immigrant influences. I don’t think there is really a “neoconservative” (as I understand the term anyway) position, as such, on immigration. But somehow we’re attributing moral responsibility to them for Breivik’s actions.

So I think either the charge, to have teeth, must be limited to those who encourage this type of violence. Otherwise it’s simply another guilt by association smear the logic of which would be applied by the far right if the crimes in Norway turned out to be the work of an Islamist terrorist group.

What about people like George Galloway, who (back in 2005) I was suggesting should be actually put in jail for helping to create the epistemic environment in which suicide bombers grew up? GG wasn’t actually advocating violence and has always been scrupulous not to do so. But at that time, he was saying to the Arab world that “your beautiful daughters are being raped by the USA”. What sort of person lives in a world where that’s a reasonable thing to say; a maniac. Similarly, the people cited in Breivik’s manifesto were writing about the West being under threat of conquest, and the Norwegian Labour Party as being quislings who were undermining Christian Europe in preparation for abandoning it to the Islamic horde. What kind of a person hangs around at blogs like that? I don’t think they can at all avoid any degree of responsibility simply by saying that they were careful enough to avoid actually inciting violence to a criminal standard, no way. All those people cited are, hopefully, taking a long hard look at themselves and asking what it was about their writings of the last ten years that was so appealing to a homicidal maniac, and I think Chris is right that all the people who humoured those writers because it was politically convenient to do so (in exactly the way in which CT didn’t humour George Galloway) ought to be considering whether that was a really great thing to have done.

This isn’t a “smear” – if anyone was part of that cultural movement that overdosed on Eurabia rhetoric, and kept saying that “we are at war”, calling people traitors and so on, then well – somebody has finally taken you seriously and don’t you wish he hadn’t? And don’t you perhaps think that if you had the chance to do the last ten years again, then even if you took the exact same political views (as is your right to do so), you might tone down some of the hyperbole this time?

If you want to make a career writing factually inaccurate, childish horses%%t
http://www.steynstore.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Londonistan-Melanie-Phillips/dp/1594031444
and are lucky enough to live in a society that allows you to do so without prosecution, (which I have no problem with), then you can at least, in the words of dsquared, have the courage to ‘own your own bullshit’ when the company you keep decides to take matters into their own hands. If this sort of rubbish was a serious, thoughtful and well researched critique of the reality of Muslim immigration in Europe then there would be no ‘guilt by association’, but its not, its lazy hateful nonsense. Just because these f$$kwits shouldnt be legally culpable doesnt mean they dont share some responsibility, how much can be argued, as do those to gutless to call them out
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_urbanities-steyn.html
Stand by what you say fellas, no back tracking now. Theyv spent a decade telling us how hard they are now heres the opportunity to show us, whats the point of free speech if your not going to stand by your bulls%%t at the moment its most under attack. Breivik was the armed wing of these commentators ideology, and although they undoubtaedly find what he did reprehensible they are ‘our sides’ Abu Hamza al-Masri, just with a little less drive.

Finally, and briefly, Steyn himself acknowledges, although in his limited way, the potential consequences of ‘cultural strife’ in Europe

“My book isn’t about what I want to happen but what I think will happen. Given Fascism, Communism and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it’s not hard to foresee that the neo-nationalist resurgence already under way in parts of Europe will at some point take a violent form. That’s pretty much a given….. I think any descent into neo-Fascism will be ineffectual and therefore merely a temporary blip in the remorseless transformation of the Continent.”

Which begs the question of why if you ‘realise’ that the ‘Islamification’ of Europe is a sure thing and could provoke a violent reaction, would you spend your time discussing it in such a hyperbolic manner. My conclusion would be that he either doesnt buy his argument or he supports the reaction

Roger, I think that our debate, like philosophy in the 1950s, is about to take a “semantic turn” and become a bit of a waste of time, but reading the whole of the paragraph you extract from I would put more weight on the qualifier “This isn’t a single movement though, it is a spectrum” than you do. In my view Chris is saying (correctly) that the “anti-jihadi” movement contains all sorts of elements (of whom the f.a.s.f.r are only one) here. And so for his argument to have force, he only needs to show (as I hope I did on his behalf) that members of (or people totally compromised by association with) the “anti-jihadi” milieu as a whole have been given credibility (in the sense of dissemination of their views), cover (of those of their views which are objectionable to the majority of society) and respectability (ie implicit endorsement of them as suitable people for “the left” to be having debates with).

Sebastian: “My explanation, from personal experience with the people in question, is that for the most part they believe that late term abortions are murder and that given the Constitutional rulings of the Supreme Court taking earlier abortions well off political compromise, they fully understand that the political questions of abortions tend to turn around questions of abortions on the later part of the scale.”

Focus on the Family: “Focus on the Family opposes abortion under all circumstances, except in the rare instance when the mother’s life is threatened by continuing the pregnancy.”

Concerned Women for America: “CWA supports the protection of all innocent human life from conception until natural death. This includes the consequences resulting from abortion.”

National Right to Life Committee: “The life of a baby begins long before he or she is born. A new individual human being begins at fertilization, when the sperm and ovum meet to form a single cell. If the baby’s life is not interrupted, he or she will someday become an adult man or woman. Worldwide, millions of unborn babies are killed each year. In the United States over 40 million unborn babies have been killed in the 29 years since abortion was legalized and more than 1.3 million are killed each year.”

Live Action: “We are a youth led movement dedicated to building a culture of life and ending abortion, the greatest human rights injustice of our time.”

Would put in links but don’t want to get stuck in moderation. Sebastian’s comments here are staggeringly dishonest. Most Americans are opposed to late-term abortions, which are banned in most states; that doesn’t make them part of the pro-life movement, which believes that ALL abortion is murder. Good grief.

Breivik has roughly the same relationship to the cultural right that Kaczynski had to certain strains of environmentalism

The phrase “certain strains” is doing the work of Atlas in this sentence; carrying such a massive an unfair burden that it will surely end up going Galt. And when “certain strains” finally shrugs, it is going to be awfully difficult to find an actual environmentalist or movement to take its place, as straw is not a load-bearing material. I think Stella Gibbons would certainly have marked that one with *****.

More over the contemporary Right-winger extremist is, in the nature of things, more likely to be individualist and hence less prone to social conditioning

Bless.

@ Jack “It would be politically convenient if Left-liberals could quote one “elite scribbler” who actually promoted or condoned violence against Muslims”

John Derbyshire on Steyns book (in which Steyn is far more subtle)
“It is implicit in his argument that much of the Western world will submit to Islam. Okay, how about that portion, including one hopes the U.S.A., that does not? Option two—the destruction of Islam—“doesn’t bear thinking about.” I disagree with the author here. I find I can bear to think about it without really disabling distress, and I have even written about it. The “window” of time during which this is really an option for the West is closing rapidly though. One Islamic nation is already nuclear; another soon will be; and more will then surely follow. In any case, as Steyn emphasizes, the Islamists of Paris, London, Hamburg and Malmö are just as much, if not more, at issue here as those of Teheran and Karachi. Even the most ferocious nuke-’em proponent, which is certainly not me, will surely balk at nuking Finsbury Park or the 20e Arrondisement.”

Martin Amis
“There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people”

As for your final point on right wing terrorism(although i take your point that there is now the possibility of playing up right wing extremism, it seems to be more of a problem than Islamic extremism)
“Europol’s EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (TE-SAT) records a total of 249 terrorist attacks in the EU in 2010, in which seven people died and scores of others were injured. Most of these were related to violent separatist, nationalist, or anarchist activities. Three attacks were attributed to Islamist terrorist groups, of which two were aimed at causing mass casualties.”
https://www.europol.europa.eu/content/press/eu-terrorism-situation-and-trend-report-te-sat-2011-449

Henri, your claims about the conduct of modern warfare are dubious at best. The US air force with the exceptions of Southeast Asia (a criminal war conducted on the basis of a lie) and WWII (where millions of Germans were actively complicit in the ultimate example of evil) did not deliberately target civilians. If they did that would be wrong and those involved would be court martialed. So is targeting civilians with suicide bombing. Or do you seriously think the Geneva Conventions are not attempting to draw a line between the merely horrible and the truly depraved and barbaric?

@Norwegian Guy: Fascism portrayed itself as anti-imperalist. Lots of blood and soil nationalist movements would portray themselves as anti-imperialist. I don’t think we should expel people from our countries based on confession. I just don’t think we should refrain from criticizing viewpoints and beliefs that we find objectionable because they are religiously based. Or more pointedly: should we just ignore the barbarism of those around us out of some misguided ideal that we do not in fact know better what rights all are entitled to?

@puss: all good points. I was a bit sloppy with my equivocation of Arab states with Islamic states and majority Muslim states. But aren’t all the policies I listed ones espoused by Islamism? Would the rise of an Islamic state really be a positive thing for freedom? Or to put it another way: over the past 30 years why has the Israel-Palestine conflict gone from being a socialist revolution (in the guise of the PFLP) to an Islamic one (in the guise of Hamas)?

@Lemuel: the Twin Towers were a legitimate military target how?

@logern: Majorities can behave quite unjustly to minorities. The history of the 20th century bears this out in great detail. We should not pretend that majority rule is necessarily kind and just.

At Watson Ladd, 223:

Your second sentence baffles. Even if millions of Germans were complicit, the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg et al. resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people who were complicit in nothing other than being German. It’s not an accident that Bomber Harris was uniquely omitted from the post-war honors list. Similarly, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are explained away as avoiding millions more casualties in case of an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Nobody has ever pretended that they were not deliberate attacks against civilians, nor that the fire bombing of Tokyo was anything else but attacks against the civilian population. In all cases, higher causes were used to rationalized the morally repugnant. How is bombing Hanoi or Cambodia different?

It seems to me that most of this post and thread can be reduced into wondering how on earth X can do Y to us/them. Substitute terms for each and we are further reduced into an ox being gored. We all have our own.

Or to put it another way: over the past 30 years why has the Israel-Palestine conflict gone from being a socialist revolution (in the guise of the PFLP) to an Islamic one (in the guise of Hamas)?

Ooh, I know this one! Is it “because Israel promoted and encouraged Hamas in the hope of dividing the Palestinian side and undermining the then-dominant secular nationalist factions in the PLO”?

Your broad brush doesn’t distinguish. “Neocons” for instance don’t advocate terrorist bombings, they don’t advocate the slaughter of children attending a summer camp, and they don’t suggest that violence be used to start a revolution in the West in order to “purify” the West of immigrant influences.

“One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.”
– Michael Ledeen

Hey, you’re right, he doesn’t advocate the slaughter of children attending a summer camp! He only advocates the “cauldronization” of a part of the world in which tens of millions of children happen to live. Apples and oranges.

Everyone here knows that most pro-lifers are not at all concerned about babies. They are concerned about punishing “slutty” women for having sex. This is why most of them also opposed contreception as well as abortion, a position that would make no sense if they really cared about reducing the number of abortions. It has nothing to do with life and everything to do with control.

It’s dispiriting and tiresome to see every thread on CT turn into a troll and counter-troll argument, especially on serious and interesting topics.

Yes agreed. I understand why the abortion tangent happened here, but I don’t think it helped. I was tempted to get into the business of documenting specifics (X said Y on such and such a date) in response to Roger and Watson above, but it would have amounted to petty point scoring here. Ditto some of the pseudo-philosophical “what would you say about the parallel case where…” stuff.

Oh, I most assuredly disagree – to the contrary, you get to see the entire dynamic you’re writing about play out in vitro, as it were. And guess what? You’re part of the problem. What you should have done, and a while back at that, was to give Sebastian a yellow card for not playing by the rules of rational discourse. People like Sebastian need to told in no uncertain terms that they aren’t allowed to simply use their feeling or what they know to be true despite any evidence that’s presented to the contrary as a crutch to promote their own kooky agenda. And they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to get away with sneering at others what with their demands for proof and evidence. That sort of nonsense needs to be cut off at the knee before proceeding any further along a dubiously graded “spectrum”.

So why didn’t you do this?

Now ask yourself how this plays out in the larger world. Yes, I’m sure you have very noble reasons for allowing certain people to prattle on promoting very destructive agendas. I’m even willing to concede that they might even be good reasons.

But isn’t that what most people in charge of content will say as well?

dsquared @224

Oh what’s the use….

Of course we have the blood of all those teenage Norwegian social democrats on our hands.

With 76 victims at 10 pints each – or shall we say 8 points as a lot of them were teenage girls – that means each signatory of the Euston Manifesto gets a quarter of a pint each.

Or as we’re part of such a vast ‘spectrum’ maybe we’ll just get a tiny little vial each? – that’s hardly enough to do a full Lady Macbeth scene.

Happy now?

I’m not hiding the fact that in a perfectly just world I believe that a woman who kills her viable fetus should be investigated for murder.

So, if abortion from the time of conception is something roughly equivalent to armed robbery, would you think that a woman who kills her non-viable fetus should be investigated (in the absence of legal defenses, convicted and imprisoned) for a crime, with punishment about equivalent to that for armed robbery? Because assuming your beliefs are typical in some sense of the pro-life movement, it’s weird that this isn’t part of their public agenda.

Watson,look it up. http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB123275572295011847.html

I like your nice moral distinction between “deliberately killing civilians while disguised as a civilian” and “deliberately killing civilians while wearing a special military hat”. Apparently the former is “uniquely horrible” and the USAF retains the moral high ground because, when its members have killed civilians, they have always been careful to do so while wearing the correct sort of hat.

For all practical purposes, that means abortion is legal throughout the pregnancy, in all states.

Well, if we want to focus on practical purposes then approximately 1% of abortions are late-term abortions (past 20 weeks). And in reality it is really not impossible for a late-term abortion to be necessary to save a woman’s life (as a benchmark over 5% of pregnancies are affected by preeclampsia). So how many “bad” abortions are we talking about? And is this really what people are talking about when they talk about genocide or a holocaust?

This whole discussion is ridiculous; Sebastian is basically saying, “My position is quite reasonable and enlightened — I say so myself and who knows me better than me — and anyone who disagrees is a close-minded simpleton.” Discomfort with late-term abortion is widespread; while that gives the pro-life movement an angle to work with, it doesn’t identify the core beliefs of the pro-life movement.

So, if abortion from the time of conception is something roughly equivalent to armed robbery, would you think that a woman who kills her non-viable fetus should be investigated (in the absence of legal defenses, convicted and imprisoned) for a crime, with punishment about equivalent to that for armed robbery? Because assuming your beliefs are typical in some sense of the pro-life movement, it’s weird that this isn’t part of their public agenda.

Funny, but I get the sense that you don’t doubt it is most definitely part of their private agenda.

It also looks to undercut D^2’s point somewhat. It’s not that they’re refusing to own their bullshit – they will, so long as they’re off-camera, or in a venue or through a spokesman that the movement can claim does not represent their “official views”. No, what what these vermin are doing is not “refusing to own their bullshit”; what they’re doing – with absolutely no compunction – is tactically lying.

You can get a real sense of their character, how their moral system really works, when someone like Sebastian can claim that “this isn’t really a big deal”.

No, really, it is a big deal. And say what you like about me, but whatever else, I’m a pretty up front kinda guy – I don’t believe in hidden agendas, and if I don’t like you, I’ll tell you. I think even Sebastian would concede that ;-) And oddly enough, I can’t think of a single one of my friends that this characterization doesn’t apply to.

This whole discussion is ridiculous; Sebastian is basically saying, “My position is quite reasonable and enlightened—I say so myself and who knows me better than me—and anyone who disagrees is a close-minded simpleton.” Discomfort with late-term abortion is widespread; while that gives the pro-life movement an angle to work with, it doesn’t identify the core beliefs of the pro-life movement.

I think you’ve just described in a nutshell why this sort of attitude has no place in public discourse, and why it should be shut down in any public venue – along with a sternly worded letter from the editor rebuking the people peddling such hokum and why they are doing so.

This is the epistemic environment that Chris is speaking of. I think the Krug Man has even written something about it in the last week or so.

I not only haven’t expressed any opinion about abortions near conception, I don’t have any particularly strong ideas about them.

Sorry, I must have misunderstood this from your 131, describing the feelings of the enormous majority of pro-lifers, which I figured probably included you:

Abortion at some stage or other is a very serious moral wrong. Certainly as bad as torturing animals, probably as bad or worse than armed robber and in some cases something akin to murder. Nearly all of them believe that it is murder at or near the viability phase unless there is some compelling self defense reason.

It sounded as if you meant that almost all pro-lifers believed that abortion was murder at or near viability, and ” probably as bad or worse than armed robber[y]” if at an earlier stage.

Honestly, if you don’t think the Geneva Conventions matter that’s fine. All war is bad, and you’ll just wash your hands of the whole messy business of trying to make war slightly less beastly.

The Geneva Conventions also prohibit the deliberate killing of civilians, fool, whatever your state of dress.

What do people in the pro-life movement think about abortions near conception, you disingenuous tool?

Sebastian has already made it amply clear that the enormous majority of people in the pro-life movement agree with him.

(Sandwichman continues to piss historical pearls into the swinish wind of a hypothetical discourse.)

http://counterpunch.org/avnery07292011.html

“I was shocked to the core. These outpourings are almost verbatim copies of the diatribes of Joseph Goebbels. The same rabble-rousing slogans. The same base allegations. The same demonization. With one little difference: instead of Jews, this time it is Arabs who are undermining Western Civilization, seducing Christian maids, plotting to dominate the world. The Protocols of the Elders of Mecca.”

You don’t know the half of it, Uri.

“Is defending a distinction in principle something that just can’t be done, i.e. the distinction between suicide bombing and air bombardment of military targets because we always have to deal with actual historical actors? I”

Sure it can be done. In theory the US government could adhere scrupulously to the laws of war both in letter and spirit and I don’t doubt that sometimes it does. But there are a large number of cases where it (and its allies) have not and this is all we need to refute the idea that there is some vast moral distinction between Muslims and the West when it comes to killing civilians. I’ve never understood, for instance, how any American government official could keep a straight face while denouncing other governments for supporting terrorists given the sorts of people we’ve supported ourselves. But I guess they are paid to keep a straight face. What’s harder to understand are people who aren’t paid to do it.

This post needs repeating

Akshay 07.27.11 at 6:27 pm

Cultural historian Roger Griffin has a long talk here on the psychodynamics of becoming a utopian terrorist. His archetype seems to fit Breivik very well, even if it is hard to believe at first, that quite sane people can escalate mere existential angst into going postal.

To whit: Breivik describes himself as growing up in an anomic environment run by muslim street gangs. He is from a broken family. He wants something beyond bourgeouis “cynical careerism”, as he puts it. He yearns for a ‘sacred canopy’ which will give life meaning, patriarchal christianity, in his case. He dabbles in politics, but becomes disappointed. In a state of confusion, he stumbles upon a worldview in which things start making sense again, from his own spiritual problems or problems with women, to geo-political reality. He is initiated into a cult. In a neglected passage of his manifesto, he describes meeting the “Templars” after contacting a Serbian Nationalist. They are a small international group, mostly Christian, which wants to defend Europe against Islam. He is mentored by an Englishman he calls Richard.

After his initiation, the world splits into Good and Evil. Evil is projected outward. Breivik understands that his task will be to go ‘beyond good and evil’ to make the rebirth of Europe possible. He can give his life for this task, for it will give him immortality. He is the avant-garde of the Eurabian civil war of the next generation, which will finally end in “2083”. He prepares for years, following Nechayev’s advice and gradually shutting himself off from normal society. He studies the “science of destruction” (Nechayev). He strengthens his faith by meditating. When he is ready, he strikes at a symbolic target which represents “the Enemy”. It is not personal. He does not specifically hate the individuals he is killing and knows his act is heinous, though necessary. They are killed for what they are: the future leaders of the wrong side in the Eurabian civil war. They are killed as a “marketing operation”, to get the truth of his manifesto into the world. He feels a sense of calm bliss, having given his life to his cause. In his manifesto, he urges co-believers to realize that they are not alone.

Clearly many ideologies can capture people like Breivik. But to drive him into terrorism, they need to a) posit an overwhelming threat and a future rebirth b) describe a world devided into good and evil, where you are either with us or against us c) provide a total weltanschauung, ersatz for religion, ersatz for political engagement.

A point Roger and I raised at Dave Osler’s place was that the heritage of the “epistemic enviroment” of the anti-Islam spectrum is a modified version of neo-fascist meta-politics.

Sebastian at 260-

What I’m stuck on, in rereading your 131, is that it seems to both assert that most prolifers think that abortion is murder at or near viability, and that most prolifers think that abortion is bad but less than murder (in your words “probably as bad or worse than armed robber[y]”) under some other circumstances. What did the bad-but-not-murder part of what you said apply to?

I’m not asking just to be annoying, I’m asking because a possible alternative would be something like “Abortion is murder (or really close to murder) at or close to viability, but before that stage it’s not particularly wrong at all (maybe regrettable, but nothing you’d want to legally ban)”. If that’s your position, or what you’d represent as a common prolife position, though, it seems really disconnected from the actual political behavior of the prolife movement.

According to Wikipedia over 80% of Americans believe third-trimester abortions should be illegal.

That is, generally illegal, putting aside health exceptions and such.

Your idea of the culpability of the “epistemic environment” and those who craft it reaches its ultimate absurdity in the ideas of Ayn Rand cultist Leonard Peikoff (and Rand herself), who blame Kant for the Holocaust.

Plenty of ideas slosh around in the world. That is healthy. To think is not necessarily to act on one’s thinking; the two are distinct – else speech (and thought and mental experimentation) is to be subject to proscription. Thinking freely and is necessary to life; totalitarianism equals death.

In relation to the actual topic of the post rather than the rabbit holes that have been wandered into

http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/emrc/publications/IAMHC_revised_11Feb11.pdf

Unfortunately RD many contributors and commentators at Crooked Timber seem a little too willing to sacrifice free speech.
Die Gedanken sind frei.

@ Lizardbreath 252
“I think most pro-lifers actually aren’t all that strongly bothered by the immorality of abortion, rather than the immorality of women getting to screw around without suffering for it.”

That’s just intellectually lazy.

If anti-abortion protesters were primarily interested in punishing women for having sex by forcing them to have children, then they would be against women having access to contraception. But there is a broad national concensus in favor of women having access to contraception.

Furthermore, support for making abortion illegal in all or most cases is relatively consistent across age groups and genders, so it is hard to argue that this opposition arises from a specific animosity towards women.

But there is a broad national concensus in favor of women having access to contraception.

Right, and the only thing opposing the broad national consensus are the scrappy underdogs that make up the pr0-life movement.

Henri I would say any version of “humanist ethics” would be incompatible with trying to control a women’s body.

@Sandwichman
Thanks for the link and the others youve posted as this thread went bizarrely off course. I’m coming at this from a significantly less informed position than you, (ie I just really dislike Mark Steyn), so your postings, links and website have been extremely useful, interesting and informative, which has always been the main strength of CT, the opportunity to learn from people that actually appear to know what their talking about. (Not that the current revival of Roe vs Wade hasnt been an eye opener)

Everyone here knows that most pro-lifers are not at all concerned about babies. They are concerned about punishing “slutty” women for having sex.

Every word of this is true, if you take “most” to mean “the most vocal segment of the pro-life movement.” Meaning the male-dominated segment, the Pope and all the evangelical patriarchs.

It has become apparent to me however that there is a less vocal segment of the population, made up largely of lower-middle-class women, who oppose abortion because it interferes with the central dynamic of the society in which they were raised, which is:

(1) Boy and girl have sex;
(2) Girl gets pregnant;
(3) Families cluster round and apply whatever pressure is required to insure that
(4) Boy marries girl, gets a job, settles down and starts supporting a family.

(4) is the objective; the concern is that abortion breaks the chain of causation that makes it happen. The people who think this way are under no illusions that teenagers aren’t going to have sex; they don’t worry about that. They worry that their daughters will have sex with somebody who is the wrong color, or the wrong religion, or will not settle down satisfactorily to harness when the inevitable happens.

This is why the revelation of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy bolstered her mother’s support rather than diminishing it. The central fact of the narrative, for these folks, was the timely appearance — as it appeared then — of the paternal shotgun. By (appearing to) choose forced marriage over abortion or single motherhood, Palin communicated that she was one of them.

“Of course, but “to control woman’s body” is a tendentious framing, a slogan. It’s certainly a dilemma, I agree with that.”

Actually Henri it is not a slogan. If you deny a woman the right to a legal and safe abortion you are exerting control over her body.

If you deny a woman the right to a legal and safe abortion you are exerting control over her body.

So then, you refuse to give any consideration at all to the ‘pro-life’ position; abortion to you is no different than removing a tumor. Well, fine, this means that you’re a ‘pro-choice’ fundamentalist. There’s nothing to talk about.

Where did I say that do not believe that women should have control over their own bodies? I didn’t. I said it’s a dilemma. Obviously.

You, on the other hand, keep insisting that abortion is about women having control over their bodies, and nothing else. Correct?

I thought you said we have nothing to talk about Henri?

MPA, I did, but you kept talking, and accused me of wanting to control women’s bodies. I felt compelled to clear up the misunderstanding. In fact, I don’t care about abortions; it’s just that I can see how someone might.

dsquared @ #219:

The phrase “certain strains” is doing the work of Atlas in this sentence; carrying such a massive an unfair burden that it will surely end up going Galt. And when “certain strains” finally shrugs, it is going to be awfully difficult to find an actual environmentalist or movement to take its place,

Douhat’s “certain strains” is bearing exactly the same load as Bertram’s “helped to build an epistemic environment”. His point was not to demonize democratic and law-abiding environmentalists, who are for the most part worthy folk. But rather to show how absurd and unfair it is to demonize democratic and law-abiding nationalists, who are equally worthy folk.

I would add that making vague hand-waving gestures towards vast impersonal forces does not add much to the sum of human knowledge. A bit of Popper comes in handy here.

I will grant you that the average eco-terrorist has a long way to go before they arrive at the mass-homicidal destination of Norway-nutter. But I put that down to a certain methodical obsessiveness in his Nordic culture rather than democratic nationalism’s supposedly demonic nature.

More generally, Darwinian group selection theory entails that the ying of in-group co-operation will forever co-exist with the yang of out-group competition. Its way past time for liberals to come to terms with this dualistic aspect of human nature rather than forever mounting their high horse to denounce it.

Of course we all want the out-group competition to express in non-destructive ways, so it would be nice if nationalists were more constructive in their criticism’s of multi-cultures. For one thing they should stop being mean to Islam which is after all a religion and therefore makes its adherents “better than they would otherwise be” (Evelyn Waugh).

But liberals should return the favour by conceding the obvious, that the political prospects for their social schemes depend on the strength of in-group co-operation. Its no accident that the democracy, nationalism and socialism all sit nicely together on the Enlightenment platter. And that the blessings of life in the Occident are no accident, no matter how much Jared Diamond labours mightily to prove that water can run up-hill and down-hill with equal facility.

I have no idea how the strikeouts got in there. Please read through them if you bother to read it.

@Wilfred, what would dynamic balance mean? The dictates of secular modernity are nothing more then the application of reason in all things. It is not that I have a problem with Islam or with Catholicism, or with any faith. It has a place in many peoples lives. It does not have a place in the lives of their neighbors.

@Jack: Nationalism was a response to the defeat of liberalism in 1848. Republican France set out to kill the kings, not simply confine the blessings of freedom to France.

Having covered my Right-wing flank on the nativist issue I will acknowledge that the main-stream Right-wing in the US and other Anglo-powers has lost the plot over the past decade or so, on just about every other main issue.

Obviously in strategic policy since 911 but also on economic policy with GFC and ecologic policy with AGW. The Tea Party is not especially xenophobic but it does show what happens when adult supervision (GH Bush, Scowcroft, Schultz) is no longer available and the fringe start to become main-stream.

I think that the problem with the contemporary Right-wing is that success went to their heads. By the turn of the millennium they had won the Class War against unions, the Cold War against commies and the Culture War against gangstas. So we had this huge and hugely successful Right-wing movement with no more policy mountains to climb. Naturally it turned to pure politics for its own sake, which can only end in tears.

And therefore, I’ve always presumed, that given the tiny minority of people holding the anti-abortion position who even do so much as to give up a Saturday afternoon holding up a protest sign outside what they believe to be a mass murder camp, it must surely be the case that at some deepest level of rationality, the anti-choice side of that debate must be aware that they don’t really believe that life begins at conception, and that their views about the wrongness of abortion have some other basis.

In this thread about the recent tragedy in Norway there are currently 300 comments. My web browser’s search count reveals some interesting word counts:

Norway/Norwegian occurs 31 times
Words containing “Euro” (e.g., Europe) occur 38 times
Israel/Israeli occurs 46 times

I certainly don’t know what this means, but I suspect you can guess how many readers might take it.

With a few notable exceptions, the Tea Party is not especially xenophobic.

Yes to you it is, to about 70% of the US population it isn’t.

@Jack297
I wasnt arguing that Derbyshire and Amis had helped create an “epistemic environment”, doing so in a convincing manner is probably above my paygrade, but was answering your statement that
“it would be politically convenient if Left-liberals could quote one “elite scribbler” who actually promoted or condoned violence against Muslims”
I think the quotes show that.
Your right that I did simplify and misrepresent the Europol report, although I did offer a qualifier which I guess was mealy mouthed, so I apologize for that. What the report does is highlight the stupidity of the remarks by the likes of Derbyshire and Amis, and Steyn and Phillips, by putting the threat posed by ‘islamic terrorism’ into context i.e its basically a f$$king nuisance rather than a reason to openly discuss nuclear armagedon or to make “The Muslim community…suffer until it gets its house in order.”
Whether theres a rise in Islamaphobia and attacks on Muslims, I think theres some evidence for this, as I linked above
http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/emrc/publications/IAMHC_revised_11Feb11.pdf
Why this might be Ill leave to others to decide. My problem with the opinions of middle brow pundits like Phillips Steyn Derb Bawer etc, is that their rethoric is stupid, over the top and factually innacurrate, rather than their creating an “epistemic environment”, and that they have some responsibility to think before they talk, especially if they actually believe the threat posed by Muslim immigration is so severe it could lead to bouts of genocide in Western Europe.

‘In 2010 611 individuals were arrested for terrorist-related offences, of which 179 were linked to Islamist terrorism, representing a 50% increase on the previous year. Meanwhile Islamist terrorist groups issued 46 threat statements to interests in the EU, which also represents an increase on 2009.’

Of course I’m sure we are all grown up enough to realise that this can be read both ways. Does the ‘50%’ increase mean that there has been, objectively, a 50% increase in Islamic terrorism? Or is it just that European law enforcement agencies have become much more effective in disrupting such Islamic terrorist networks?

The second statement of course is only frightening if

a: you care and
b: one is confident that European police agencies and politicians are fully capable of making an unbiased and objective judgement on what constitutes a ‘threat statement’ (a phrase I must confess I have never encountered before).

@286 I was thinking more about your citing International Jewish Antizionists as proof of the existence of left-wing antisemitism, but that other thing too.

“The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not forced. It was from the moment it happened regressive, and it revived Islamism across the Muslim world. Since that time liberalism has been on the decline in the Arab world.” (emphasis mine)

Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin with this. You are either trolling or horrifically misinformed about history and the Middle Eastern society.

Just to get some of the low-hanging fruit, Saudi Arabia, as someone above pointed out, (or even all the Gulf states put together) is a small and unrepresentative fraction of the Arab world. Liberalism is no more in decline in the Middle East or the Muslim world as a whole than it is in the rest of the world (which, maybe it is in general… it arguably has been throughout Europe, in Turkey, and in Iran; it definitely isn’t in Egypt and Tunisia). Obviously Middle Easterners are to a great extent responsible for whatever happiness or misery exists in the Middle East, but so are things like the invasion of Iraq (or is that also the Iraqis’ fault, somehow?), the bombing of Lebanon by Israel, foreign support of dictators, including coups d’etat to bring them to power (I’m not at all surprised you mentioned Iran 1979 and left out Iran 1953 and the Shah’s massive persecution of liberal political parties in the years between; if this was out of ignorance, it’s shameful ignorance from somebody claiming to be informed about the Middle East, and if it’s not out of ignorance, then it’s an extremely poor argument you’re making) (Saudi support for the Bush family and Rupert Mudoch is not on the same scale as US support for Mubarak)…

Seriously, I mean this in the nicest way possible: your views on the Middle East are very uninformed and/or misinformed. Do some reading and stop trying to have a discussion based on stereotypes, or whatever you heard from FOX News or read in JPost.

MPAVictoria,

Since we’re talking about abortion in the context of owning one’s own bullshit, it’s interesting to see where your view leads. For example, suppose a mother whose child is already born decides that she no longer wants to feed her kid. It seems obvious to me that if you believe without exception that women should have control over their own bodies, you have to balk at any legal restrictions on allowing one’s baby to starve. Are you prepared to say this?

(It’s not like this is a idiosyncratic view held by just a few online posters either — arguably the most famous and most cited pro-abortion article, Thomson’s “A Defence of Abortion,” has this consequence too. Will pro-abortion folks own their own bullshit? Let’s see.)

It seems obvious to me that if you believe without exception that women should have control over their own bodies, you have to balk at any legal restrictions on allowing one’s baby to starve.

What? This makes no sense. Once the child is born it’s no longer in the woman’s body.

“Norway/Norwegian occurs 31 times
Words containing “Euro” (e.g., Europe) occur 38 times
Israel/Israeli occurs 46 times

I certainly don’t know what this means, but I suspect you can guess how many readers might take it.”

I take your post to be a passive aggressive accusation of anti-semitism. Israel is mentioned in almost any discussion of Islamophobia, by both Islamophobes and anti-Islamophobes. This is because both sides see the I/P conflict as central to the topic.

“Norway/Norwegian occurs 31 times
Words containing “Euro” (e.g., Europe) occur 38 times
Israel/Israeli occurs 46 times

I certainly don’t know what this means, but I suspect you can guess how many readers might take it.”

But equally, how often has the word abortion been mentioned in a post about a massacre in Oslo, and how many of those Israel/Israeli references are connected to that conversation (ie ‘but what if your baby was an Israeli’)
If the answer is none, then give it time. Theyl find a way

@322 the strongest I’d go would be to suggest that there’s an odd obsession with Israel

Just to be clear, (and by the by, I should point out that my first post made no mention of Israel or any direct mention of the lobby) a lot of people, most notably Philip Weiss, have made the argument that a certain kind of pro-Israel and anti-Arab chauvinism, prevalent (especially) among Jewish Americans, is the emotional motivation for most of the chief professional purveyors of islamophobia (notably the neocons), at least those who are not Christian chauvinists (they have also been in the islamophobia business for a while, I think). The organizational and financial clout of the Israel lobby amplifies these voices and gives them political power and a megaphone. To give just one of many examples, Mortimer Zuckerman, editor in chief of US News since 1984, owner of that paper and Atlantic Monthly, has been writing bizarre and troubling screeds against multiculturalism since at least the late 90s (trying to find a link to one I read around 99, will post if I find it). He was also president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Associations, and editorialized for invading Iraq in 2002-3, and even now, the main “Jewish issue” CPMAJO is concerned with is Iran’s nuclear program. Marty Peretz is another good example, also major media mogul, also has a record of saying very racist things. Weiss also points out a lot of non-powerbrokers who simply have a blind spot for Muslim or Arab interests or suffering. I remember having enjoyed Roger Cohen’s reporting on the Green Revolution in Iran so much at the time, then being shocked to see him write an editorial titled “The Captive Arab Mind”. Find me an editorial in a major American paper about ANY other minority group’s “captive mind” (or even just “The [ethnic group] Mind”). Weiss has argued that it’s a combination of the cultural and institutional environment in some American media organizations that makes this possible (other major publications, such as the LA Times, are notably much less or not at all arabophobic/islamophobic).

Weiss and others on his blog have done extensive research and writing about this, as have neocon watchers like Jim Lobe and others writing at Lobelog. The chief voices trying to make islamophobia acceptable in the US are neocons, and Israel is a major if not central concern for them. And of course, there’s direct references to some of these figures in Breivik’s writing. So making Israel a big part of the discussion is a reflection of the findings of the most careful, thorough journalism on the issue, not of the CT posters’ whims. If you want to challenge that consensus (which is what it seems to be, at least to me), you’ll need to do more than wonder why people are talking about Israel so much.

Otherwise, I agree the conversation could benefit from more attention to Europe- and Norway-specific matters, but the topic of the original post was about the intellectual side of islamophobia and extreme opposition multiculturalism (and note the title: “epistemic environment”), and that’s what I assume most people commenting here are well informed about, not about the particulars of Norwegian politics. As for the cartoons incident, it would be interesting to get into how different efforts to encourage public civility or crack down on hate speech are perceived, and what direct effects they have.

rm @ #305 said:

With a few notable exceptions, the Tea Party is not especially xenophobic.

The TP’s overwhelming priority is economic cutting, not ethnic cleansing. They mainly want to reduce the size of the US government, not rid the US of colored people.

Can you point to even one “hate crime” that a paid up member of the TP has committed? Can you point to any efforts the TP to shut-down government based on xenophobic program? No, I didn’t think so.

Of course the TP is opposed to illegal immigration. But when opposition to crime is considered a crime, well then we may as well draw stumps and all call it a day.

Kaveh, I am very aware of 1953. I’m also aware that Trudeh and the Trotskyist branch (forgot its name) went off and decided to try and off the Shah any way they could, then got themselves destroyed trying that. When 1979 came they were unable to seize power, and so the sole source of power did so with their help. Then they were murdered in return, and this is fairly unsurprising given how the ideology they represented failed.

Again, I’m not claiming there isn’t a history of modernizing political projects in the Islamic world, just that they’ve all ended very badly and no longer remain political forces. Trying to hang ones hope on the Egyptian spring is likely to result in disappointment: the Muslim Brotherhood is strong and disciplined, and can cut a deal with the army far more easily then liberals can.

Also, you will hear talk about a certain “will it play in Petoria” or “blue collar sensibilities” as terms of discourse. These are ideal types. Just as is “Islamism” or the “Arab Street”. What do we talk about without ideal types when it comes to discussions about ideology?

@327 That’s, like, a brief history of mid-century Iran based on CIA propaganda. I mean, you write as if the main activity of the Tudeh party (not “Trudeh”, there’s no R) was assassinating the Shah, and that Iran was about to turn Trotskyist if they took over. This is extremely silly, but it’s a perspective one encounters all too commonly–ignore any facts of Middle Eastern history that don’t involve violence in some way. Look at the language Watson uses: “seize power”, “murdered in return”, “the ideology they represented failed”. This is like summarizing the history of the Civil Rights movement in the mid-century US as “There were some protests, then King was assassinated, then the Black Panthers started to provoke violent clashes with the police, so the US imprisoned a whole bunch of black people over the next few decades because everybody was afraid of how violent they all were.” All the strikes and demonstrations, the ideological debates, don’t mention them, only mention who fought who and who killed or tried to kill who, and in such a context, no violent event seems particularly out of place. Maybe throw in a lament or two about how violent a “neighborhood” it is.

Not to mention that if your awareness of leftist and liberal politics in the Middle East is limited to “a history of modernizing political projects”, that doesn’t exactly reassure one about your historical knowledge.

Also (because even reasonable people might be confused about this due to the current media environment), here’s Juan Cole on the Muslim Brotherhoods’ and Salafis’ (learn the difference) prospects in Egypt (see #4). Every single one my several politically-involved and/or well-informed Egyptian friends has been optimistic about Egyptian attitudes towards the Muslim Brotherhood and their political prospects in the country (i.e., they are not taking power anytime soon). Also, most these friends are non-Muslim religious minorities who live or have family in Egypt. But maybe Watson Ladd wants to educate Egyptians about the Islamist danger lurking in their midst?

re Peoria and how things will play there, do you think they don’t watch The Jersey Shore or Bruce Lee movies in Peoria? Treating Peorians as simplistic yokels satisfies a combination of nationalistic xenophobia (wanting to imagine a pure, simplified “real America”), and educated people’s classism. This leaves us with an easy choice.

politicalfootball @318: By “quite radical action” and comparing the situation – given prolife premises – to WW2, I don’t think dsquared had simply a push for new laws in mind. If his position has evolved to that view, great – though I still think it’s in error.

As to what the prolife position permits, that’s a tricky question. For most prolifers – and for the others you provided – the set of premises is much broader than you describe. A Catholic prolifer, for instance, doesn’t bring to the table JUST the premise “abortion is wrong.” She brings a host of other premises as well, and taken together these do NOT render violence to stop abortion morally permissible.

What people like Breivik, or McVeigh, or other extremists, frequently do is carve out premises from other ideologies and arguments. What they carve out must fit their basic needs in some way, and must comport with some aspect of how they view themselves, but that’s really it.

Europe’s anxiety about immigration, anxiety which for various reasons seems to be on a different order of magnitude than in the United States, is real. It is a part of the epistemic environment in which Breivik wove together his sick narrative. Any discussion about that anxiety will include viewpoints about the impact of conservative Muslims on European culture – that’s unavoidable. Premises from some of those viewpoints can be carved out for savage actions like Breivik’s. That’s also unavoidable.

But it is a bridge too far to attribute moral blame to those worried about the impact of immigration, but who did not advocate violence or anything other than legitimate political means.

In the United States, there is much less paranoia about Muslim immigration than in Europe, but there is also a much stronger tradition of distrust of government. This distrust is healthy in many way, and strengthens important features of limited government. Premises from that distrust inform public conversation, and different ideologies – and some extremists can carve out premises to use to justify violence. That too is unavoidable – ideologies are easily hacked – and it hardly means that we should attribute moral blame for McVeigh to Thomas Jefferson or Patrick Henry.

The way to combat extremist ideologies is not by trying to smear other viewpoints (these other viewpoints may well be idiotic and wrong, but then they should be attacked on those grounds) with guilt by some degree of association.

Instead, those extremist ideologies should be countered by a unity of what other mainstream, and less mainstream but not violent, ideologies share: a condemnation of the violence, a commitment to change by democratic means, a respect for basic human rights, and an acknowledgement of shared opposition to extremist violence.

I think the US is much more welcoming, djr, but my opinion here isn’t based on personal experience, but on research like this: Pew Research Center: Global Attitudes Project

In the US the concern is not necessarily immigration so much as it is illegal immigration. Controversies in the US regarding immigration tend to be fought over whether to give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship while remaining in the country, over the efficacy of border security, and so forth.

My biased impression is that immigration is a greater part of American culture than it is part of European cultures, and that in the US immigrants and especially their children tend to integrate into society much more quickly.

But distrust of government is more prevalent in the US than Europe, imho (no poll data handy).

So – all ideologies being hackable but not all equally compatible with a lunatic’s base identity and concerns – I would expect lunatics like Breivik, if they exist in Europe, to focus more on immigration issues, and, if they exist in America, to focus more on explicitly anti-government issues.

We can find other examples of course that extend beyond European concerns about immigration or American concerns about government. Nidal Hasan, perpetrator of the mass murder at Fort Hood, borrowed arguments against the war on terrorism from several perspectives, mixed them with more extremist and violent premises, and eventually acted. Controversy about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly contributed to the “epistemic environment” in which Hasan acted, but Hasan did the ideological hacking and most importantly the acting himself.

My point is that any controversy about a deeply felt issue – regarding war, or identity, or values held important – will generate a range of viewpoints. Those viewpoints can be hacked – can be broken apart and recombined with other premises and values – to produce a violent ideology, or at least an argument for violent action. That’s unavoidable. Attributing moral blame to a viewpoint because it can be hacked into another viewpoint that supports an unethical action is erroneous – and, frankly, it is a tactic not alien to arguments used to justify the suppression of free speech.

Gah, second para. was supposed to be in the blockquote, too.

@Kaveh. If you hadn’t realized I would have welcomed Iran turning Trotskyist. Your acting as though there was anything to be gained in 1979, which there might have been. But whatever the result of 1979, it wasn’t emancipation. Those with a responsibility to emancipate Iran from the chokehold of tyranny delivered it once more to a tyrant. No matter how much the left regretted this development, it happened. The mass protests against the Shah were the time to strike, to lead the masses to the overcoming of capital.

So educate me: What explains a hard core communist party handing power over to a religious fanatic whose rule has undone whatever modernizations the Shah’s regime brought, and one who killed their comrades? Was this anything more or less then the final outcome of Stalinization, in which the Left assumed that it would passively win as capital went from crisis to crisis? It was Spain, 1936 which set the pattern. At the moment of victory, Stalinism would stab the left from behind.

“The EU has an approximate total population of near 500million, the US about 300million. So when comparing numbers you should note that the EU has a noticeably higher base.”

But the territory is 9,826,675 km^2 (3,794,101 sq mi) for the USA and the EU has 4,324,782 km^2 (1,669,807 sq mi), so interaction between inmigrants and inborns is stronger in the EU. Add it that the notion of foreign affects people from one EU member State that goes from one State to another in way that aren’t apparent in the USA, a German is foreign in Spain in a way that a New Yorker isn’t in Texas.

Strictly on-topic, this latest posting on Cole’s blog offers very useful info on the Norway attacks. It talks about a lot of European extremist “counter-jihadists” (not politicians or other people you’ve heard of, or already mentioned here).

Watson Ladd @338: On the left in Egypt, see this and this (both written a while ago, but their social analysis remains valid). Egypt has had a very strong labor movement, and the prospects of social democratic parties are thus good (over and above the fact that the MB is unlikely to get very far). In general, where the left is in more of a genuine crisis is countries that have been largely democratic throughout the last 20+ years (Turkey, Israel, the US and Europe).

re Iran, in fact, I don’t think there was much that could reasonably have been gained, given what people knew at the time, and given how badly the left had been beaten up by the late 70s. The left didn’t just hand power to Khomeini, it was (violently) weakened throughout the 60s and 70s and couldn’t stop Khomeini as a result. The clerical establishment had a vast shadow-government and financial independence, the importance of which were not appreciated by many people at the time. The marriage of pro-Islamic and leftist rhetoric in the writings of Shari’ati and Al-e Ahmad was a very different thing from what Khomeini et al delivered. And what else could the left have done in 1978-9? Not opposed the Shah at all? Focused mainly on opposing the clerics, rather than joining forces against the Shah? In 1977, that the Shah had a firm grip on power, and that a “traditional” Muslim clerical establishment couldn’t operate as a modern political faction both seemed completely, totally certain things (the latter being proved wrong ended a number of academic careers in drink, so I’m told). I guess they could have kept their powder dry in the 60s and 70s, preparing for the coming post-Shah scramble, but who could have foreseen that 20 years in advance? And there might not have been a post-Shah anything if the left hadn’t been active all those years.

And even then, Khomeini did borrow a lot from the left, and pre-1979 Iranian leftist politics did a lot to shape the way the clerical establishment ultimately governed, ironically probably prolonging their existence quite a bit–they have done a lot of good things in the way of economic justice, especially for the rural poor, which is the reason the government continues to enjoy some support.

What is Cultural Conservatism? Brief analysis of the Link “fourth generation warfare” (4GW) theory propounded by Breivik.

Andrew F. @343:

The argument hinted at in Chris’s post, and explicitly elaborated in this thread, is that if argument X contains a premise A that someone can place into argument Y, justifying violence, then proponents of argument X create the epistemic environment allowing argument Y and the act of violence it justifies.

And that’s not good enough. I agree that we don’t need an explicit call for violence for a speaker to become morally blameworthy.

Agreed, inserting premise A in argument Y is not good enough. But, leaving hypothetical cases aside, what about an argument that A. identifies a mortal enemy, B. outlines a specific type of warfare (non-metaphorical, i.e. guns & killing) and C. calls for “culture war.” Leaving hypothetical cases aside for the moment, wouldn’t it be incumbent on public discussion to name the proponent of that argument and hold that person, persons or organizations morally responsible?

Who here will defend — not what-ifs and unknowns — but specifically William S. Lind’s toxic brew of culture wars, “PC” scapegoating and “4GW” warfare, recited faithfully by Mr. Breivik? Not an epistemic environment but THE epistemic environment.

It’s somewhat strange how wide-ranging (arguably, off the point) many of the posts in this thread are.

Hardly anyone is arguing that this is a specifically Norwegian problem. (Olof Palme was Swedish, not Norwegian, but his assasination might be counted as a prior incident of Scandinavian political violence that probably wasn’t carried out by Muslims).

“Political violence by people influenced by American right-wing rhetoric” seems a more plausible category. In which case, there are a number of American incidents to which it might be compared (the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords; the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczinski; Timothy McVeigh; etc.)

Or maybe even, “politcal craziness in general”. In which case you might be a bit skeptical about the claim – often made other places than here – that right-wing terrorists are mentally ill but left-wing terrorists are rationally using violence to achieve political aims. You might start to wonder if left-wing terrorists are madder than they are usually credited as being, or if the right-wing terrorists have more of a coherent plan than we think.

Maybe hypocrisy is a virtue, although in the Western philosophical tradition it isn’t well regarded. People tend to get defensive if you suggest that their actions aren’t consistent with their stated beliefs, but possibly this hypocrisy is a necessary defense. The normal / typical / not diagnosably mentally ill individual can quit happily speak the left-wing revolutionary rhetoric/violent right-wing rhetoric/Christian theology [delete as applicable] shared by their peer group, without acting as though it is true. One model of terrorism is that it is only the “crazy” people who actually believe what they are saying. (Or to dress it up somewhat: clinical level of impairment in their ability to manage the cognitive dissonance caused by being socially required to say one thing, but act otherwise).

The nuber of terrorists is probably too small for good statistics, but if I was going to correlate it against DSM diagnoses I’d go for the pervasive devlopmental disorders (autism etc). or the personality disorders (narcisstic personality disorder etc.) rather than the psychoses (schizophrenia etc.)

The rise of total war and the justification of attacks against civilian targets are quite new. Clausewitz viewed war as political, inherently within the violence of the state.

I think this translates as “I have never heard of the Thirty Years’ War, Genghis Khan, Timur, the Crusades or the Roman Empire and I don’t think Clausewitz had either.”

QUOTE:

the adoption of extreme pro-Zionism by the formerly anti-semitic right is something new

New? Are sure? Find someone who can read italian and give a look to this article (2004) written by an analist of the italian central bank (Banca d’ Italia), Giorgio Gomel who by chance is a jew (hated by italian jews that recently wrote on the walls of Rome’s Ghetto that all jews are brothers but he is not). In this article you’ll find the origin of that “new fact” (remember that in Italy we don’t have evangelic christians).

http://www.iai.it/pdf/mediterraneo/Doc_Osservatio_pdf/Iraq_israele_Gomel.PDF