by hilzoy
Wretchard at the Belmont Club has a post about the very light sentence given by Indonesian courts to Abu Bakar Bashir. At least, that’s what it starts out discussing. He then segues into a discussion of Abu Ali, the Virginia student who was accused of plotting to kill the President after being held held in Saudi Arabia for 20 months. About that case, Wretchard writes:
“Presiding judge O’Grady issued the ritual apology which has become a standard part of treating with these men of the shadows. “I can assure you, you will not suffer any torture or humiliation while in the marshals’ custody”. Already the victims have become accustomed to craving pardon, in advance, for their unspeakable inferiority, before the emissaries of the madrassas. If US judges are halfway to their knees how likely is it that the Indonesians will hold themselves erect? “
For some reason, it would not have occurred to me to describe assuring a suspect that he would not be tortured in custody as being “halfway to (one’s) knees”, as if stating that federal marshals will follow federal law were some sort of craven concession. But the really offensive part of Wretchard’s post comes later:
“Who was it who said that all wars of consequence were conflicts of the mind? Without getting too metaphysical, it still makes sense to regard ideas as the foundation of historical struggles; the thing that animates the visible clashes. While an idea’s potency remains it will find adherents.
The casual outside observer would conclude, from the apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders, that it is not worth upholding. Radical Islam, on the other hand, must self-evidently be an idea of great worth, as so many are publicly willing to die for it. And to a limited degree they would be right, for something must be terribly wrong with the West to cause such self-hatred.
America has shown itself apt at striking the visible parts of its enemy but seems unable to touch its foundations. On the contrary, every blow it deals seemingly reverberates within it, spreading cracks throughout its own base. Sometimes I think this is fortunate because I am beginning to suspect that the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West and not within Islam.“
So, just to be clear: when America tries to undermine the ideology of radical Islam, it ends up harming only its own. And “sometimes” Wretchard thinks this is a good thing. And why is that? Because he suspects that “the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West.”
In an earlier post, I quoted C.S. Lewis on where hatred leads:
“Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
Wretchard began, as best I can tell, by hating the Islamists who attacked this country on 9/11 and the unspecified “Left” who, in his view, enable and support them. But now his hatred has circled back on itself. At least, that’s the only way I can interpret his saying that it’s a good thing that cracks are spreading through the ideology that supports this country, and that the West he began by defending contains “the foundations of Barad-Dur”. Even if we assume that he only means that we on “the Left” provide those foundations, what he actually says is that he “sometimes” thinks that it’s “fortunate” that America harms the ideological foundations on which it is built, since when our foundations are harmed, Barad-Dur’s are harmed as well. This is madness.
There are other things about this post that are also — I don’t know what word to use other than ‘delusional’*. Is it an “apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders”? Not in the world I live in. We can debate who those defenders are — those on the right might cite the President, for starters, while I might be more likely to point to those who have protested the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and the courts who have ruled that the President does not have the right to detain people without charges. But whichever side you take, the idea that ‘the Western ideal can find no public defenders’ is not just false; it’s so false that one has to wonder what planet Wretchard has been living on all this time. Likewise, he says that the madrassa system “has proved too powerful to shut down or even criticize”, in the course of a discussion of Abu Ali, who went to school in Virginia. But obviously the reason Islamic schools have not been shut down isn’t that they’re ‘too powerful’; it’s that pesky little First Amendment. And if Wretchard thinks that no one has criticized madrassas, I have to wonder once again whether he and I inhabit the same universe.
On reflection, I think we probably aren’t. He is trapped in Lewis’ “universe of pure hatred”, fighting enemies only he can see.
* To state the obvious: I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not using ‘delusional’ in a technical sense. I just mean: he is saying things that are not just false, but so obviously false that one has to ask what on earth is going on.
I think that the name of his site is a coy reference to the John Birch society, which began in Belmont, MA.
Some things never change.
praktike — you don’t say. I grew up in Belmont, and Mr. Welch lived near me. (Always gave out candies made by his family company on Hallowe’en, which was annoying to us as kids, since Welch didn’t make any of our favorites.) He never let us cut through his yard, either, which was both annoying and uncharacteristic, for the neighborhood.
I thought it was all about the Belmont Report.
Timmy: now there’s an unlikely thought: the Belmont Club as an unlikely reference to ‘Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research’. — I had always thought it was just another attempt to sound tony and British, but praktike’s idea makes a sort of horrifying sense.
We need a reprinting and mass distribution of Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style. Neiwert is doing very good work, but I think limits hisperspective to the twentieth century, and maybe too much to European scholarship to see the biggest picture. Hofstadter was trying to sum up his impressions of the McCarthy era.
Propaganda
Ezra Klein mentions tangentially the CIO movement in the post-WWII South, and Taft-Hartley. My point is the rhetoric of anti-communism was used as an instrument of domestic and economic policy. Now I have been called conspiratorial and paranoid myself, so when I say that Wretchard is using the WoT to sell Bush’s Social Security agenda, understand Wretchard and I both swim in deep muddy waters.
As to Neiwert, I can go back to the 1890’s war on anarchism, the Know-Nothings, Aaron Burr, the fear of the Spanish (who had made slavery illegal)in the late 17th century South. Bad this paranoid discourse definitely is, but not new, not a precursor to an inevitable fascism, and something that America seems to endure without permanent damage.
Now I don’t actually follow Wretchard’s connection of Islamist extremism to its source in analytic philosophy, but I am not the sharpest of dudes. Nor am I in the same service as he to his capitalist warmonger overlords.
A different view of fighting militants of Islam.
“As to Neiwert, I can go back to the 1890’s war on anarchism, the Know-Nothings, Aaron Burr, the fear of the Spanish (who had made slavery illegal)in the late 17th century South.”
Bob, if looking at the paranoid style, and specifically the Know-Nothings, I think one needs to go back to at least the 1850’s.
But I’m inclined to think that the paranoid style goes back to the Stone Age, and any variations unique to America are, while quite interesting and important, not truly immensely unique. (And, yes, I read Hofstadter around age 13 or so, and it’s a valuable work.)
I just figured that Wretchard was tired with judges. It is shame that he didn’t read this article which may have given him some comfort.
Read the rest, it is good stuff.
Gee, Timmy, thanks for following up on my link. Classy.
Well, Gary, take solace in the fact that what you referenced was read by someone, pity the point you make is too subtle for them.
Somehow I don’t consider it unclassy to fail to follow up every link in a discussion, esp. cryptic ones with no excerpt. The style of TtWD‘s comment above is more useful to me, though I probably often go the cryptic route.
Incidentally, while I’m linking to myself, I trust Katherine (and others) have read the most recent Times piece on rendition.
(But perhaps such a description is also as “cryptic” as “A different view of fighting militants of Islam” and “british-muslims-are-fighting-radicals.html” — very mysterious, those words are, apparently.)
Hey isn’t Wretchard from New Zealand? So, TC cares more about what’s going down in Indonesia and the Phillpines for a very good reason.
Is there a John Birch society in NZ or OZ?
I’d like to add that Wretchard wrote some of the best analysis of Iraq when things were looking bad in summer 2004. SDB quality stuff.
By the way praktike, did you see that Bill Quick post where Den Beste is chiming in on various comments about what to do about SAudi Arabia?
Oh my God! TRENT TELENKO is saying to go slow on Saudi Arabia. I almost couldn’t believe I was reading it!
See rilkefan, I was going to bring up Alger Hiss to sooth Bob’s frayed nerves, but I thought the NYT post was better on the overall subject (whatever it actually is, the subject that is).
Perhaps Gary believes in the tooth fairy, believing, rather mysteriously, as he does, apparently, a number of odd things.
yep. Thnaks. There was also a 60 Minutes Special that just ended. I was before my time, I guess.
On the Times piece,
1. I don’t buy this for a minute, based on what I know of various cases:
I know mainly about cases from Syria and Egypt. Perhaps it is different in Jordan, where we seem to have a closer relationship with the intelligence services. But I know of only one possible “rendition”, involving 5 suspects, where the detainees have been released and have not made allegations of abuse or torture. Those suspects were taken from Malawi to Zimbabwe for interrogation before eventually being released from Khartoum. Based on our relationship with Zimbabwe and its atrocious human rights record, I am not certain that it qualifies of “rendition” at all; I would guess the suspects remained in U.S. or Malawian custody. Of the rest of those “rendered” since 9/11, there have been allegations of abuse or torture in the cases of Khaled el-Masri, Mamdouh Habib, Maher Arar, Ahmed Agiza, Muhammad Al-Zery, Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, Muhammad Haydar Zammar, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, Osama Nasr, one other detainee sent to Egypt whose name I don’t know, and two to three detainees sent to Uzbekistan whose names I don’t know. There are three other cases that are not renditions, as the suspect traveled to the country that held him voluntarily, but the evidence suggests the suspect was arrested & interrogated on behalf of the United States, and there are allegations of torture: Ahmad Abou El-Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and the Abu Ali case that hilzoy notes Wretchard’s response to. (Ali is a U.S. citizen who was studying in Saudi Arabia.)
2. I don’t know why the officials quoted think these things make it better:
“The transfers were portrayed as an alternative to what American officials have said is the costly, manpower-intensive process of housing them in the United States or in American-run facilities in other countries.”
“The officials said that most of the people subject to rendition were regarded by counterterrorism experts as less significant than people held under direct American control, including the estimated three dozen high ranking operatives of Al Qaeda who are confined at secret sites around the world.”
CBS link here.
Timmy — the original subject was the amazing revelation that I am in fact a small part of the One Ring, foundation of the Dark Lord’s power and a source of corruption to all who touch me. Which no doubt explains why I’m single.
Sorry to continue with the threadjack, but the Saudi ambassador was just on Wolf Blitzer and some of the questions concerned Abu Ali and the possibility of torture. The ambassador made (I think, I was getting ready to go to work) the assertion that he was being held because of US requests as well as asserting there was no torture. The ambassador also claimed that doctors accompanied him on the release and another US doctor ‘sat next to him on the plane’ and Ali did not complain of torture or ill treatment. I think this might present an interesting window into all of this, if the doctors were brought before certification boards to investigate their role. Here are some link to previous discussions of this
a conference and an article about it, and the NYTimes article that I think first mentioned the complicity of medical professionals from the IRC report.
Here is the link to Blitzer’s transcripts page but it will take a couple of days to appear.
While we don’t seem to have rendered people to SA, finding the doctors who supervised the transfer might be a thread to pull at here.
I am in fact a small part of the One Ring, foundation of the Dark Lord’s power and a source of corruption to all who touch me.
Aha! hilzoy reveals the true source of her antipathy to Wretchard the Hobbit (whose capitalist warmonger overlords -bob- are probably sheep herders or something:)
I feel like we are living within an Orwellian lie. We are all supposed to be afraid of terrorism. We are supposed to assume that terrorism is of such overwhelming threat to us that we must unite behind the Leader and allow the Leader to do things which normally we would oppose, including compromising our own values and undermining our own institutions.
Bush appeals to fear. (which isn’t a whole lot different than appealing to cowardice–we wants us to be afraid).
The biggest threat to us of terrorism isn’t the terrorists at all. It’s the use to which the fear of terrorists is being put by our own government. The article sited by Hilzoy is an example of how fear is used to promote hate which is used to promote a domestic political agenda.
Terrorists killed three thousand Americans. I went to high school with one of the victims. But terrorists are not promoting hatred of one American for another, they are not responsible for the torture done by our government, they are not responisble for people being imprisoned without charges or trial, and they are not responsible for the abuses of the Patriot Act.
Terrorism is a police and intelligence problem, containable through normal, conventional means and best “fought” through hearts and minds approaches. If Bush was serious about combatting terrorism we would have stayed in Afganistan and made it a model of small farm and herder prosperity. We would be co-operating with prosecutions in places like Indonesia. We would be focused on securing stashes of chemicals and nuclear materials. We would be devising ways to check the cargo holds of container ships. And so on, practical stuff.
I’m not afraid of terrorists. They kill fewer people here than drunk drivers. The war in the Sudan is much worse than anything Al Quaida ever dreamed of. The problems we face now will be made minor shortly by the problems caused by global warming anyway.
The best way to stand up to the hatemongering is to refuse to buy into the fear.
Am I the only one who finds Wretchard to be particularly annoying when he’s doing his Brilliant Thinker With Big Ideas schtick?
If you’re part of the one ring, shouldn’t you have three elves, seven dwarves, and nine men following you around?
Heck, I thought the original subject was selfhatred but then someone brought up birchers and trick or treating and some how we got off track.
Isn’t the “Dark Lord” a bar down in SoHO, change venue to the “West Side” to advance one’s social life.
And yes, I’m pretty sure you don’t live in New York but somewhere on the east coast.
Katherine: I don’t buy this for a minute, based on what I know of various cases …
Katherine, you are much better informed than I, so perhaps my agreement is superfluous, but let me stick in my two cents:
It doesn’t pass the laugh test. This extaordinary rendition is vital for our security, we’re getting intelligence that’s preventing terrorist attacks, but we’re taking care to assure that human rights are respected? Why do we need to send people to Egypt to interrogate them? Can’t we do it ourselves? Please.
They’re not even pretending to make sense any more.
I live a few miles north of Baltimore. And I didn’t reveal my part-of-the-foundations-of-Barad-Dur-hood; that was Wretchard.
It’s not just that he’s pretending to be a big thinker with big ideas; it’s that he’s living in this alternate universe in which no one sticks up for our country’s values and judges grovel and our real enemy is within. — Actually, I might sign on to that part if I thought he meant that that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — fear, and our willingness to let it lead us into hatred of one another, and to toss aside Constitutional principles that have served us well for several centuries. But somehow I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.
rilkefan writes: “Perhaps Gary believes in the tooth fairy, believing, rather mysteriously, as he does, apparently, a number of odd things.”
?
Hilzoy, I’d probably want to ask if you were familiar with the old Usenet usage of “marry me?” before saying “marry me?”
The war in the Sudan is much worse than anything Al Quaida ever dreamed of.
1) AQ terrorist trainees are “practicing” killing people with the janjawid.
2) IIRC, AlQaeda was based in Sudan until it got hot in 1998, then moved to Afghanistan.
3) Pres Bush pressed for and got a cease-fire in the south of Sudan by backing the Sudan Peace Act.
Hard to say what’s most bogus in the anonymous official’s defense of extraordinary rendition, but I’d have to vote for this that Katherine quoted:
“The transfers were portrayed as an alternative to what American officials have said is the costly, manpower-intensive process of housing them in the United States or in American-run facilities in other countries.”
Saving nickels in the War on Terror? For what? Social Security “reform”?
I mean, How Stupid Do They Think We Are? “Well, 51% of you *did* vote to re-elect our boy.” Doh! He’s right!
(Though doubtless, Egyptian torturers are much cheaper than American ones. Lower pay, no benefits, etc.)
it’s that he’s living in this alternate universe in which no one sticks up for our country’s values and judges grovel and our real enemy is within.
I’ve set myself the task of trying to figure out where Wretchard is from, but I don’t see anything in his archive that explains much (the closest thing is this which explains the name). My best guess is that he is an American living in the UK. (if you would like the evidence I use to support this assertion, please ask, but I don’t want to spoil the fun of the chase for anyone else.) so the possibility of a shout-out to the Birchers is possible.
It’s actually quite impressive that he seems to have been able to avoid virtually all traces that could even hint at his personal life in his blog. There are a few other things to investigate that I will take a pass on, as I’m not really interested in ‘outing’ him, just curious how much one can surmise from a set of writings someone makes.
lj: jeez, what an awful poem. If rilkefan hasn’t already clicked this link, we should warn him off. But thanks for undertaking your quest: I really, really hope that the Belmont Club is not named after my hometown. The fact that the John Birch Society was founded there (and used to have its headquarters right next to the Post Office) is bad enough. It’s really quite a nice town otherwise, though recently its overgrown raggedy woods (the same woods that used to be most of Zeptorland) have been decimated to make room for houses that should have stayed on the set of Dynasty where they belonged.
Gary: I never got into usenets. So, um, what does ‘marry me’ mean in that context?
L J, I think his name is actually “Stephen Den Worst”
Anderson–yeah, opponents of rendition thought calling it “torture outsourcing” was our clever framing.
Dennis Hastert’s using it too:
I’m sure the private jet operations are a bargain compared to a prison cell.
As for Barad-Dur, as I’ve pointed out before, and Kieran Healy pointed out before me, it’s in Nashville.
Tolkien really is endlessly “applicable” I guess. In the books I remember reading (and the movies I remember seeing), one of the main themes was that there are some means that the ends cannot justify, because they are intrinsically evil and inevitably corrupt those that use them.
thanks for the warning, hilzoy, taking your word for it.
… and Katherine, that’s some good commenting over at Kevin Drum’s blog re Casey – props.
Of course the reference to plutocrat overlords was meant to be funny. The Ezra Klein link link has examples of vehement leftist polemic…would that there were more.
hilzoy, I think you may have slightly misinterpreted the bold passage of Wretchard’s. I would paraphrase it as
“Every victory in the War on Terror seems to embolden the Western domestic enemies of [whatever], and it is a good thing that these hidden divisions are brought to light, for these domestic enemies may actually be the greater threat.”
Timmy above seems at first not to take the passage at all seriously, referring to Wretchard being upset at judges. Later he talks of “Self-hatred”. I actually do take “the argument” very seriously, whatever “the argument” might actually be. Wretchard may actually be thinking along vague Jane Fonda/Ward Churchill lines, Fonda had little in common with Ho and the Communists, Churchill little in common with Islamists, Wretchard might say simply “They hate America.” Or not, people who speak in parables and metaphors are particularly hard to mindread.
Someone of greater depth (or logorrhea) might say that a totalitarianism of libertarian pluralism (or a decadent distortion of the Enlightenment Project or whatever) has weakened the West in its ideological struggle against any competing fanaticism. This can filter down to a simplistic “We got trouble in River City” demagogic sloganeering, but that doesn’t mean the feeling has no justification.
I think the left (which does not include Fonda or Churchill, at least my side of the left) needs a competing patriotic ideology so as to reassure the people in River City that their values will be defended from threats domestic and foreign.
Oh, and that I might take “the argument” seriously doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with it. I don’t. I usually think the stuff the right believes to be our weakness is actually our greatest strength, and best weapon against our enemies. You don’t fight fire with fire, you fight fire with water.
Jenna Jamison against Osama will win every time.
Hilzoy sez: “Gary: I never got into usenets.”
It’s a singular proper noun, but don’t worry about it.
“So, um, what does ‘marry me’ mean in that context?”
Typically, some variant of “I muchly muchly loved that post of yours” to whatever is being responded to; an expression of great admiration and agreement. I thought I’d offer it in somewhat more generic fashion, since you gave the irrestisible opening.
Another variant might be “may I have your baby?”
Hilzoy sez: “Gary: I never got into usenets.”
It’s a singular proper noun, but don’t worry about it.
Not anymore.
Katherine: As for Barad-Dur, as I’ve pointed out before, and Kieran Healy pointed out before me, it’s in Nashville. (the Batman Building)
Do you remember the President’s Analyst? It’s funny how the phone company has these weird buildings. There’s also the “Chippendale Building” in New York.
Tolkien … there are some means that the ends cannot justify, because they are intrinsically evil…
I believe Tolkien himself identified nuclear weapons as our “ring of power.” Would that we had the wisdom to cast them into the fire.
ral: I believe Tolkien himself identified nuclear weapons as our “ring of power.”
I had exactly the opposite in my head – that The Great War (and the triumph of the Industrial Revolution) was behind The War of The Ring, not WWII.
Odd. Now I can’t find the quote but I have a distinct memory of it. Evidently Google isn’t everything.
Pretty sure that people pestered T with the ring==bomb interpretation and he disagreed – that the text was gestating during the 30s and in large part written before Hiroshima. Anyway, Gary will surely chime in with an authoritative take if no one else does.
L J, I think his name is actually “Stephen Den Worst”
I’m a pretty link driven reader (I don’t have that many blogs I read regularly, but when I find a post, I tend to burrow through the archives) and after having a chuckle, I realized I hadn’t clicked through to anything by Den Beste recently, and so hit google. I was a bit saddened to learn of the reason he stopped blogging. It’s not that I agreed with very much he said, but it just pulled me up a little. This is not to give praktike a hard time, just a FWIW.
It wasn’t that Lord of the Rings was an allegory of WW II. Rather, the sense of it was that we face our own test, to abjure means that if we use them will lead to our own destruction.
Oh well, perhaps I’m misremembering.
“I believe Tolkien himself identified nuclear weapons as our “ring of power.” Would that we had the wisdom to cast them into the fire.”
I’m pretty sure you are wrong about that. He hated direct allegory enough that I would find such a quote highly unlikely.
Wretchard provides lots of great information, but is sometimes overwrought. I’m surprised that Neiwert is mentioned positively while Wretchard gets a negative treatment. I’m not just playing the your side does it too game when I say that they are almost exact mirror images of each other. Both provide useful information from time to time–enough that they can’t be totally written off–both have a huge following of people who want to complain about their disfavored group, but both see their boogeymen underneath every rock.
In my mind the distinction is that Wretchard reports on a huge danger and sometimes overdoes it while Neiwert is focusing on at most a medium-level danger. Although, of course I would think so wouldn’t I? 🙂
But both are at their worst when they try to generalize from the actually awful groups to the political movements that they want to tar. Wretchard does it by suggesting that ‘The Left’ doesn’t know how to fight real threats and Neiwert does it by suggesting that pretty much everything Republicans do is furthering a new American fascism. Ugly. His “The Rise of Pseudo Fascism” series (which I see beat out Katherine’s series) has huge elements which exactly parallel what Hilzoy says about Wretchard here:
Neiwart plays the 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon game and links everything remotely conservative into a huge conspiratorial ‘network’. He demonizes almost every possible conservative as a neo-fascist. I can’t find the quote now (it was from a post about two years ago) where he goes on and on about some local political corruption proving that conservatives were fascists who are taking over the south, but a little independent research reveals that all the actors he was talking about were Democrats. When I saw that one I realized that he would and could find his hated enemy everywhere, and every bad thing was a sign of his enemy in action.
SH – I don’t read Orcinus that much currently but I’ve always found it to be very evidence-based if a bit less optimistic about human nature than I am. If you have a solid case against Neiwert’s objectivity that might disabuse me of the above, you ought to consider putting up a post. It would be fair to him to have quotes etc to look at and if nothing else a service to this mote of the left blogosphere.
And I should note, about Neiwert, that he’s usually quite careful about distinguishing between what bothers him about some parts of the right and genuine fascism. I also recall, but can’t find, a post from him (maybe sometime around last May?) in which he was very exercised about the fact that someone had described him as thinking that fascism was alive and well in America, and went to considerable lengths to show that he had not. Iirc, his main point was:look, fascism really, really scares me, and precisely because I take it seriously, I try to be really, really careful about distinguishing genuine fascism from things that share some tendencies with it but are also importantly different.
Was being cryptic – “evidence-based” was intended to encompass hilzoy‘s 02:09 AM point.
There was a very interesting essay about LoTR as being on Arts and Letters Daily a while back, but a google search doesn’t turn it up.
Googling about, there was these two MIT Opencourseware videos by Prof. Anne McCants. Rather undergraduate-y (I love the passing the potato chips around), but discusses Lewis in addition to Tolkien, with Braudel, Beowulf and heroism thrown in so it may be of interest.
Neiwart is anything but careful about circumscribing his arguments. See part five of his fascism series for instance:
This exhibits Neiwart’s favorite game: “right wing extremists”. It is used in exactly the same was as “left-wing extremist” is used by Reynolds when he complains about nasty pseudo-Indian professors in Denver. You take an idea from the most extreme fringe and then generalize it via tenuous connection to 50% of the population. He then engages in pop-psychology for the next few paragraphs eventually reaching the conclusion that the American public was suckered into overreacting to the threat of Islamic terrorism and gets to make constant allusions to one of his biggest boogeymen “The Christian Right” by defining everything under apocalypticism–which he showed was a big deal with his silly mention of Y2K apocalyptics who in reality represent the utter-most fringe.
He does it in Part One as well. Here he is quoting another reporter, but he goes with the conclusion as the basis for his whole methodology:
The exact same type of reporting could be done with respect to the Democratic Party–with links to the modern Communist Party via anti-war protests with links to MoveOn.org which heavily funded all sorts of pro-Kerry and pro-Democrat campaigns. Throw in Dan Rather and you have the makings of a vast pseudo-Communist conspiracy. And if I had about 20 hours free I would make a parody that did exactly that. The frustrating thing about Neiwart is he sometimes comes up with interesting stuff, but you have to be willing to play his conspiracy games to get it. His reporting on the Dan Rather fiasco was especially awful. I still don’t think he acknowledges that the memos were fraudulant. I suppose I have more tolerance for Wretchard doing the same thing because he isn’t attacking me.
“I still don’t think he acknowledges that the memos were fraudulant.”
I still don’t know that they were, actually – last I heard this was still a matter under investigation.
The material you quote seems innocuous out of context – will have to check the context.
Sebastian: I really have to go to bed, but two minor points: first, in the post you cite (and my impression is, in general) Neiwert calls the people he’s talking about ‘right-wing extremists’. He does not conflate the extremists on the right with the right per se. In this he’s very different from Instapundit. Second, in line with my last post, it’s his series on pseudo-fascism, which he says is not fascism.
I believe that the post hilzoy is thinking about is this one. I also agree with rilkefan, that’s a pretty big accusation against Neiwert, and I think it needs to be backed up with a cite, not a simple “it was from a post about two years ago”. In fact, Neiwert points to the fact that a mindset that sees conspiracies everywhere is what forms the foundation of fascism, and I would also note that Niewert has bumped heads with Raimundo (who no one would ever connect to the conservative movement under any definition of 7 degrees of separation) precisely on that point.
In preview, I see that you have pulled some points from his series. You choose the opening statement from part 5, but you do not note that Niewert is discussing not right wing extremists, but the present situation where Americans are susceptible to “apocalypticism”. You choose the fact that he notes that there were people who were arguing about this were from the right. Well, if you read this link, that gives you a taste of it.
Your second quote (which was made by another person and you are using it as a stand in for what you infer Neiwert to believe) is followed immediately by this
I truly appreciate that you are, in a real sense, defending Katherine’s work, but doing it by misrepresenting quotations is really not acceptable. I do not think Katherine would like to be defended in this way.
I well recall Bush’s gaffe, and have enjoyed many plays on it. However, it was “internets,” and not at all in reference to Usenet (which is also sometimes put in all caps, as if it were an acroynm, which it is not, and which is also incorrect).
“I believe Tolkien himself identified nuclear weapons as our ‘ring of power.’ Would that we had the wisdom to cast them into the fire.”
I don’t recall him using those words, or speaking directly about nuclear weapons, though I could easily be forgetting; what I do recall is his stating that were LOTR an allegory of WWII (which it isn’t), the Ring would have been taken by the West and used. Possibly that’s what you’re thinking of, ral.
And, yes, LOTR isn’t an allegory of either war, as should be plain by any superficial examination. It was, however, very influenced by Tolkien’s experience in the infantry, particularly during the Somme, in the Great War, where he lost his closest friends, who had formed an extremely close-knit club they called “the Tea Club and Barrovian Society.” (I’ve not yet read this, though I likely will sooner or later.)
Liberal Japonicus, sometimes I honestly can’t tell what you are arguing for or against. Is the passage you quote intended to contradict my interpretation? Because it doesn’t even address my point–that from the very beginning of his series he plays that game that you dislike so much when Instapundit played it with Summers. Complaints about that were everywhere on this board, and Neiwart does exactly the same thing. Both take extremists and then pretend that the entire other side of the debate is essentially the extremists. If it is ridiculous when Reynolds does it, it is ridiculous when Neiwart does it. The principle difference between the two is that Neiwart hides some of it behind pop-psychology and fake sociology while Reynolds is straightfoward about it.
“Second, in line with my last post, it’s his series on pseudo-fascism, which he says is not fascism.”
This is a big cop out and a classic Neiwart conceit. You don’t choose inflammatory terms and then back away slightly as if you didn’t use them. If every time I talked about people on the Left I called them “psuedo-Communists” and pointed out that while they ‘formally’ renounced Stalinist excesses there were a number of ‘disturbing’ parallels with Communist movements, that would be insinuation. In any case, he doesn’t back away very far, he suggests that the worst parts of fascism are prevalent in American conservatism–his main exception is the “rise of the phoenix” trope.
He does it with “apocalyptic” as well. For many reasons, apocalyptic is not the proper word for what he is describing. The most obvious being that the Christian apocalysm that he is trying to invoke would imply a US loss in the War against terrorism if it were applicable. But apocalyptic has a great advantage over any other term–it lets a writer whose contempt for conservatism drips out every pore allude to one of his boogeymen–the Christian Right–at numerous opportunities without naming them.
Introduction to Part III: “Its whole purpose being the acquisition of raw power through any means necessary, the discrete “conservative movement” and its dealings can at times be extremely disorienting.”
He isn’t describing fringe groups. He believes this is an accurate description of the whole conservative movement.
The quote from Part I that I initally used is (contra liberal japonicus) never backed away from, and in fact represents the core of Neiwart’s argument–that everything he later identifies (from Fox News to the WSJ to the 700 Club to anti-abortion groups to people who believe that Y2K was about Clinton trying to sieze power permanently) forms a vast neo-fascistic cabal. His argument is specifically about NOT making distinctions between conservative groups and relies almost entirely on the idea that talking about any one is talking about all of them.
“This fist-shaking style of response to normative political discourse, in fact, was one of the real hallmarks of fascism. It signaled, above all else, the rightness of power by virtue of its naked use to intimidate and silence dissent. To the fascist leader, diplomacy is a parlor game for the weak; what counts is the raw will of the man of action. Whether he is right is moot; what counts is his strength and resolve in the exercise of power.”
To call the above a ‘hallmark’ of fascism is to reveal a complete ignorance of human politics. Sometimes I wonder if he has ever heard of Stalin or Mao. Both are perfectly described by that sentence and neither could fairly be called fascist. They would be known as Communist–which I could easily link to the modern Democratic Party using Neiwart’s insinuation and guilt by association techniques.
In that paragraph we get another of his favorites–liberal as martyr. “It signaled, above all else, the rightness of power by virtue of its naked use to intimidate and silence dissent.” Excuse me? I believe there is a guy named Neiwart who hasn’t been thrown in jail for speaking against the Bush administration. I’ve heard of this Michael Moore guy who gets rich off of the same. There are rumors of an ‘Atrios’ who hurls invective at the administration and yet avoids capture–perhaps he should publish a book outlining his many near escapes from police that wanted to send him to a concentration camp so that idealistic young people can learn his escape techniques.
“The flash of Cheney’s signal to the troops illuminated clearly the fact that the conservative movement had developed an architecture to its argument — that is, the core of its appeal to the masses — that was indistiguishable from that of fascism.” (Here Neiwert is talking about Cheney’s use of the four letter curse word beginning with ‘F’).
Neiwart is not talking about extremists, he uses extremists to tar every part of what he calls the conservative movement which under his definition is almost everything that to the right of the Democratic Party.
Really his 7 part series is just the culmination of his previous years of conspiracy mongering. In almost every post he peddles his characterture of the conservative movement.
BTW this is certianly not a ‘defense’ of katherine’s work–it doesn’t need a defense. If one thing is true on the left, right and center in American politics, it is that innuendo is more popular than solid reporting.
I grant that, in this case, Wretchard was more poetic than clear; however, I think Hilzoy is far off base in interpreting him.
Quite simply, every significant blow struck by the West against our Islamist enemy is accompanied by defeatist warnings before the fact, second-guessing during the process, and recriminations (often based on an unrealistically rosy view of the alternatives) after the fact. The Iraq war shows this phenomenon writ large; the trial of would-be murderers educated at madrassas in Northern Virginia shows it writ small.
This internal dissent as to means is an inevitable part of democracy. What baffles and angers Wretchard is the apparent dissent as to ends — the unwillingness to robustly defend one’s own way of life or realistically evaluate the alternative on offer. (What irritates me is the vacuity of the objections, which so seldom take the form of viable counterproposals.)
Btw, praktike’s puerile name-calling at Steven den Beste is the most childish and frankly stupid comment I have seen in months.
Liberal Japonicus, sometimes I honestly can’t tell what you are arguing for or against. Is the passage you quote intended to contradict my interpretation? Because it doesn’t even address my point–that from the very beginning of his series he plays that game that you dislike so much when Instapundit played it with Summers.
OK Sebastian, where have I commented on the Summers thing? $100 dollars to any charity you name if you can find me making one damn comment about Summers. If you want to link this to my discussion of Instapundit that I had with Gary, fine, but take the time to know what I was talking about rather than making crap up.
I’ll try and put my thesis a little more clearly. You are constructing a false version of Neiwert’s thesis. You are misrepresenting, you are taking things out of context, your interpretation is of some version of Neiwert that you have constructed in your head. Clear enough for you?
The next quote is from Hilzoy (if you can’t assign who says what, why should anyone believe that your interpretation has any basis in what is actually being said?), so I will let her defend it, but suffice it to say that people give things a different name when they think they are different things. That you believe that this is just a ploy so Neiwert can accuse conservatives of being fascists does not make it true.
Rather than try and disentangle what you think was written from the actual content of what Neiwert wrote, let’s start over. You said that Neiwert and Wretchard are ‘almost exact mirror images of each other’ If that is the case, please find the equivalent Neiwert quotes to these Wretchard quotes.
Finally, I suggested that this was a defense of Katherine’s work not because I felt her work needed a defense but to try and give you a decent motive as to why you are trafficking in innuendo yourself.I’m hitting the hay, and looking forward to those mirror image quotes when I wake up. O-yasumi
Were you responding to me? Did I mention Summers? Why yes I did. You have a lot F!@#@%#%ing nerve accusing me of making stuff up and misrepresenting people’s point. Please read the following:
That is what you were responding to. Did you read my comment?
You may now apologize to me, or you will never hear another response from me on any of your comments. I am done with you. I realize that isn’t much of a threat, because it will be relieving not to have to deal with your incessant inability to comprehend basic textual communication.
Um, just for the record, the “nasty pseudo-Indian professor” is named Ward Churchill. Larry Summers is the President of Harvard. So if
is supposed to refer to someone named “Summers,” how in heck was LJ supposed to realize that? If you didn’t know who you were talking about, how do you expect LJ to?
Aha, you caught me ranting inappropriately. For which I apologize.
So on that note, I should probably retreat in shame. But I’m an evil conservative so in response to LJ’s other points:
I already have made the mirror quotes–before you even wrote. Neiwert suggests that the entire conservative movement is about will to power and explicitly compares it Nazism. He does that time and time again. He is calling me a neo-Nazi. He is calling my father a neo-Nazi. He is calling my sister a neo-Nazi.
And I apologize for going off on you–I just spent the last hour going through Neiwert’s ‘work’ where he calls me (a member of the conservative movement) a pseudo-fascist about 50 times.
I can see why you don’t like Wretchard’s rhetoric–he is attacking you. I’m surprised you can’t see the same in Neiwert. But here is an experiment. Find in that 7-part essay the places where he clearly discriminates between the non-pseudo-fascist modern conservative movement and the pseudo-fascist part. Point it out to me. The best I can find is a hint that at some time deep in the past there might have been a non-fascist conservative movement.
Sebastian,
I think that reading of Neiwert’s essays as attacking *you*, your father, sister, etc is a defensive interpretation. I see much the same reaction from people on the left when it comes to communism and socalism. To me, Neiwert is clearly discussing an extreme fringe and how it has invaded the conservative movement, but NOT saying it IS the conservative movement. Thats a ver subtle disctinction which maybe Neiwert should do more to elucidate, but why not give him the benefit of the doubt, and email him personally with your concern? Point him to thisthread and invite his to respond to your reading. Any lefty with an ounce of sense will see from your posts that you’re not a fanatic; I think if you approach Neiwert (who also posts at The American Street) rather approachable because of what I perceive as your essentially shared moderate natures.
Sebastian – do you really mean that you are a member of the conservative movement in the sense of “conservative movement” that Neiwart clearly explains at the opening of the piece?
My impression was that you were not.
As someone who’s been following Neiwert for three or four years now, I have to say that while the language he uses is sometimes unnecessarily inflammatory, his dedication to definitions — both their explication and his adherence to them — is admirable. You absolutely cannot read his articles (or series of articles) inside-out; if you read them top-to-bottom, however, they’re not prey to the various accusations that Sebastian et al have been making.
Aziz,
“To me, Neiwert is clearly discussing an extreme fringe and how it has invaded the conservative movement, but NOT saying it IS the conservative movement.”
I don’t think so. He suggests that the Wall Street Journal ought to be considered part of the pseudo-fascist conservative movement in his explanation. He suggests in his posts that the entire Christian right ought to be considered part of the pseudo-fascist conservative movement. He suggests that Iraq-war supporters are either part of or dupes of the pseudo-fascist conservative movement. He suggests that the leadership of the Republican Party are part of the pseudo-fascist conservative movement. He suggests that the beneficiaries of the Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Coors foundations are part of the pseudo-fascist conservative movement. He is absolutely not limiting himself to an “extreme fringe”.
JerryN,
He distinguishes conservatism as an ideology from conservatism in practice. But his view of the practice is that it is pseudo-fascist. He does not limit himself to saying that fringe conservative movements are pseudo-fascist. He says that “the conservative movement” is pseduo-fascist. That term was not forced upon him. Since he includes almost every facet of political conservatism in “the conservative movement” your quoted passage does nothing to make me think he is not attacking me.
Sebastian – it’s clear to me that Neiwert is not talking about conservatism in practice. He is specifically talking about “movement conservatives” and how they have 1) initially aligned with more extreme elements for tactical reasons, 2) allowed these fringe elements to gain prominence within the movement, and 3) that the result over time has been a shift in both substance and temperament in the movement. Perhaps his use of “conservative movement” is leading to some confusion. I’m pretty sure he means it in the same sense that AndrewSshi does in this post. Does this make any sense or are we just talking past each other?
“Btw, praktike’s puerile name-calling at Steven den Beste is the most childish and frankly stupid comment I have seen in months.”
You haven’t been reading a lot of blogs, have you? In any case, I’m sorry about his health problem, but I still find his views and those of Wretchard’s to be absurd.
“I’m pretty sure he means it in the same sense that AndrewSshi does in this post. Does this make any sense or are we just talking past each other?”
I’m pretty sure that they are not talking about the same thing at all.
In the first part of his pseudo-fascism he strongly suggests that includes almost the entire active Republican Party in his definition of the conservative movement.
I’ve quoted part of this already, but here I go again (bold is my empahsis of his words):
In this passage, Neiwart says that “the conservative movement” as he defines it includes everything from the 700 Club, to Fox News, to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, and to the beneficiaries of the named trusts. That covers a huge amount of ground. It implicates all the National Review conservatives, all the Heritage Foundation conservatives, potentially Reason conservative/libertarians and many others. This is not just extremists. Later on in the essay he directly suggests that nearly all of the leadership of the Republican Party counts as “the conservative movement” for purposes of the essay.
If we want to talk about nasty extremist elements of either party, or even just one, fine. But talking about essentially the entire intellectual and political system of American conservatism as pseudo-fascistic is just a smear game. And that is the game Neiwert is playing.
Sebastian – we are just talking past each other. I think that I’ll just let this one drop, if you don’t mind.
Ok, but I don’t understand in what sense we are talking past each other. You suggest that Neiwert is talking about a fairly limited subset of conservatives when he uses the term “conservative movement”. His own words suggest that he talking about almost every single public conservative in America and then accusing them of being pseudo-fascists. We aren’t talking past each other at all. We are disagreeing about a specific issue–the number of people in and the specifications of “the conservative movement” as used in Neiwert’s charge of pseudo-fascism. I quoted him. I don’t know what more you would want as evidence for what he thinks of us the conservative movement. If you believe I have misquoted, or selectively quoted, just show me where you think he limits the above.
My take on it is that Neiwert is describing the influence and behavior of the groups that he believes have risen to prominence within the “movement”. These folks have come to dominate the message that is put forth both through the media and the, for lack of a better term, water coolers and barstools. Where you and I probably disagree is his notion of the extent to which these groups (as represented by the advocacy groups that are dominant voices within the Republican Party apparatus) are now indistinguishable from the larger “conservative movement”.
I don’t know what he thinks, I only know what he writes. When he writes “the conservative movement” he uses a specific definition which includes almost everything anyone would include in the phrase “the conservative movement” if they were using it without a precisely delimited definition. He then applies to all of those people (which certainly includes me and my whole family) the label pseudo-fascist–a term which is not at all far from ‘traitor’ which people on the left are so worried about being labeled in terms of negative connotations. His use of the limitation ‘pseudo’ is limited only by the fact that we are not YET a dictatorship and not YET using violence to crush our political opponents. Note he does not merely say that I am not aiming for a dictatorship or do not desire to use violence against my political opponents, he says that I do not yet have a dictatorship and do not yet use violence against my opponents.
The insinuations in that alone are as serious as what Wretchard says.
OK, I just did a quick scan of all of the series to refresh my memory and, to me, Neiwert is clearly talking about the influence of the leadership of the current Republican Party and many of the prominent voices on the right in the media. If you and your family are part of that group, then you should take it personally. But, and this is where I feel that he differs from Wretchard, I don’t see him painting the entire right with that brush. Perhaps I’m misreading, perhaps the distinction is unimportant, but I don’t think so.
Well, I guess I get to keep my $100. Some people who have a bit more distance on this than I do have answered your points better than I could have. For my part, I will realize anytime I use the word conservative, no matter how carefully I attempt to define it, you will take it to mean that I am talking about directly about you and your family’s personal beliefs. Thanks for the warning.
“For my part, I will realize anytime I use the word conservative, no matter how carefully I attempt to define it, you will take it to mean that I am talking about directly about you and your family’s personal beliefs.”
No, if you attempt to define it as practically all conservatives, as does Neiwert, I will take it personally. Just as many on this board take attacks on ‘the left’ personally.
“Neiwert is clearly talking about the influence of the leadership of the current Republican Party and many of the prominent voices on the right in the media.”
Neiwert is talking about leadership and prominent voices no more than Wretchard is.
I would first like to note that earlier in this discussion I was assured that Neiwert was only talking about fringe groups.
You can argue that they both are talking about all of the left or right. You can argue that they are both talking about the fringe groups. You can argue they they are both talking about the leadership. But they are doing the same thing with the same type of free-form evidence so saying that one of them is doing a bad rhetorical thing while the other one is doing a good rhetorical thing doesn’t make sense. I suspect that both are doing bad rhetorical things, but that both have interesting information from time to time because their bad thinking causes them to seek out information that wouldn’t normally come to light from other people.
But make no mistake, I am implicated in Neiwert’s rhetoric every bit as much as Hilzoy is in Wretchards. That can be bad or good or neutral. But it is.
Fine. You’re reading is correct in your mind. Mine is correct in my mind. And we are where we were several iterations back. I’m done. Peace out.
Oh no! Not a relativist! 🙂
JerryN & LJ,
Strictly speaking, you’re both correct — Niewert is attacking the conservative leadership, punditry, etc. But to see where Sebastian is coming from, try turning the tables for a second: imagine that someone was labelling CBS News, the NYT editorial board, MoveOn.org, the Democratic leadership, etc. as “pseudo-communists” and raising the specter of a nascent red menace. Wouldn’t you get the sense that s/he wasessentially accusing all liberals of being communists, since s/he basically covered every public representative of liberal thought?
Seb
Please be aware that while the first quote is mine, the second quote is not. And eventhough I can agree with a lot of what Jerry and others have said, I do not assure people of the meaning of what other people wrote. I can only assure them as to how I understand it, and that is what I have done. As aziz suggested and as Slarti often counsels, if you have a beef with what Neiwert wrote, please go over to his blog or to American Street and take it up with him.
kenB
If that had been the observation, I would like to think that I would have had no problem with that. If Sebastian had written “I’m not sure why Wretchard is attacked, but Neiwert is cited approvingly as I think he falls prey to the same problem” and left it at that, I don’t think I would have said anything. If he had left it at “Neiwart plays the 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon game and links everything remotely conservative into a huge conspiratorial ‘network’,” I might have said that I disagree, and we may or may not have had a conversation about what Neiwart’s linkages “mean”. But to say “He demonizes almost every possible conservative as a neo-fascist. I can’t find the quote now (it was from a post about two years ago) where he goes on and on about some local political corruption proving that conservatives were fascists who are taking over the south, but a little independent research reveals that all the actors he was talking about were Democrats,” bereft of proof is wrong, IMHO and I tried to gently point that out in the first part of my first post.
I do (and this is not snark) understand Seb‘s comments a bit more now that I realize that he feels that Niewert is attacking him and his family. Given that my father I am the product of a mixed marriage and I was raised and my family still lives in a real real red state, I really can’t imagine I would take someone attacking CBS, the NYTimes, the Dem leadership et al as a liberal conspiracy as attacking my family.
kenB – to echo LJ’s comment, I really can’t see it in the terms you present. To me, there is a qualitative difference between blanket statements about “the left” or “the right” and statements that are directed at the groups and individuals that actually hold power (political, media and otherwise). Again, this is only my take, but I thought Neiwart was pretty careful to avoid applying the broad brush or to provide some evidence for those times when he was more expansive. I also know that Sebastion does not agree with that characterization. As LJ said, it would be best for him to take it up with DN directly.
I was just looking to see if anything else had appeared, and I just noticed that in Seb‘s 1:19 had an apology that I missed, and so my 6:12 reply was overly harsh. I’m sorry I missed that and I wouldn’t have been so snarky had I caught that.
This is not the example I was thinking of, but it provides a good example of the fact that when Democrats are nasty, Neiwert is perfectly willing weave them into the conspiracy theory as if they were Republicans. Here he turns some nasty comments by a Democrat into evidence that his pseudo-fascists ‘transmit’ their ideas to the Republican Party:
Seb,
Please don’t take this personally, but I would ask you to consider that Neiwert, because he is (I hope we can agree) writing to an audience of liberals, is using this out of the possible universe of examples to suggest that this is not simply a Republican problem. I think it points to the problematic aspects of ‘agrarian’ politicians, a thread in US history that incorporates both nativism and progressivism, but setting that aside, don’t you think that the possibility is to have the reader say ‘damn republicans, damn republicans, damn, hey, that early? and a nominal Democrat? Geez, maybe this isn’t simply a question of partisanship. I better keep reading’
In fact, my reading is that the entire point seems to separate this group from Republicans and part of what you quote is (with my emphasis):
But the scene above took place four years before Monica, in 1994, long before Clinton handed his enemies a scandal on a platter that seemingly made such references acceptable. It was not at a Republican caucus or Christian Coalition meeting, but at a gathering of right-wing “Patriots” who had come to hear about forming militias and common-law courts and defending their gun rights — indeed, their families — from the New World Order.
I think (hope?) we can agree that the whole Clinton-Monica affair did no honor to either side, and Neiwert specifically notes that.
Furthermore, N specifically cites Chip Berlet’s model of the American right, which spcifically separates the secular conservative right, the theocratic right, and the xenophobic right. I don’t know how much clearer he can be.
This caught my eye:
Mack’s Clinton-bashing was mostly a gratuitous nod to one of the Patriot movement’s favorite themes: an almost pathological hatred of the former occupants of the Oval Office, manifested as a willingness to believe almost any slander directed at “Billary,” as they like to refer to the Clintons.
Again, you would have to go the Neiwert, but I read ‘occupants’ to be not simply the Clintons, but anyone who is president. In fact, Bush 1 came in for a lot of flak because of his CIA and UN ambassadorship, IIRC, but this was before the Internet.
I am not asking you to agree with me, I am just asking you to consider this possible reading. And take it up with him. As Aziz said, you may find that you share a essentially moderate nature.
Your reading of the passage as trying to warn people that even Democrats can be fascistic is not well supported in the text. My comments are in square brackets for the quoted text. And considering the huge level of anti-Repbulican snark on the site I don’t think I’m being over the top. I’m not a big fan of the fisking format, but it appears we need to go through this line by line:
So a Democrat is used to prove that fascism spreads to the Republican Party. It isn’t an indictment of Democrats at all.
My reading is much truer to Neiwert’s text than yours.
Uh, Sebastian? Do you recall the term “Hitlery”? I heard that, and others of its ilk, throughout the “meeting halls of conservativism” early in Clinton’s Presidency*; comparing the Clintons to Hitler was commonplace throughout Orange County in 1992-93 — at the time the most Republican county in the nation, as they’d proudly tell you, and generally considered to be the archetypal “mainstream Republican” stronghold — and I assume it was still done thereafter, although I can’t attest to that personally.
I’m not sure if you just tread in more civilized climes than I did, but Neiwert’s description is bang on the money IME.
* I think the motif went back to the middle of the campaign, but I must confess I don’t recall the exact moment when I first heard it.
Nope that isn’t true at all. In the meeting halls of mainstream conservatism, which I am well familiar with, many jokes about Clinton won’t raise an eyebrow, but comparing him to Hitler definitely would
I am going to assume, out of charity, that you make that statement out of ignorance rather than malevolence. A quick google search on “clinton hitler” reveals the following information:
Under the category “Some Comparisons Between Adolf Hitler and Bill Clinton” we find that:
And so on.
We find that:
We find that:
We find that:
Those were taken from the first 4 links in the 598,000 links returned. Do the search yourself. I apologize if I don’t have time to examine all 598,000 documents. Perhaps you would like to take the time to do so before you post such nonsense in the future. Again, I will take the most charitable stance possible and ascribe your post to mere ignorance, Sebastian. But some of us remember the Clinton years. We remember the hate that you wish to ignore.
felix, note the
“In the meeting halls of mainstream conservatism”.
felix, note the
“In the meeting halls of mainstream conservatism”.
598,000 results returned.
No further questions.
Ohh. Google Bush Hitler and you get almost a million and a half hits. So I guess the left is full of Communists, right?
I would avoid addressing the issue too if I were you, Sebastian. You said something stupid. Own up to it, deny it, the “you too” defense. Whatever.
You want to google the Earth is Flat and tell me that is a mainstream idea? You want to engage my argument? I doubt it.
Yo, felix, I suspect SH is wrong about Neiwert, and I would be somewhat surprised if there are no counterexamples to his meeting halls claim (clearly based on reasonable personal experience) out there, but you’ve done nothing like showing what you assert you have shown.
According to google: “Results 1 – 10 of about 4,290,000 for flat earth” Probably half are just the two words close to each other. Still more than your Clinton Hitler thing. Nice try. Care to engage the intellect or is yours unavailable?
SH, understand you’re annoyed, but you made your point clearly at 3:28…
Care to engage the intellect or is yours unavailable?
Wow. That insult is surely the shocker that will lead me to turn my life around and become a devout Republican. Thanks.
Now, in all seriousness, you are trying to pretend hatred of Clinton, to the point of comparing Clinton to Hitler, is a non-mainstream position. Sadly, the record does not support your assertions. Insulting me will not change that, though it will, admittedly, keep me amused. Keep working on the “Communists” angle, I get a kick out of that.
In the meantime, we will note that you have expressed no disapproval of those who I mentioned that compared Clinton to Hitler. And if you do, I’ve got 597,996 posts to work on.
Sadly, the record does not support your assertions.
Could you please actually prove this statement instead of merely alleging proof-by-Google-bomb? I mean, I think you’re correct and Sebastian isn’t — viz. my 3:03am comment — but you’ve done a remarkably poor job of demonstrating that fact.
Felixrayman and Anarch, Neiwert’s claim is not that somewhere you can find some crazy people who are willing to equate Clinton to Hitler. I am aware of the existance of Ann Coulter. His claim is: “A remark like that might hardly have raised an eyebrow in post-Monica America, particularly in the meeting-halls of mainstream conservatism, where it often seemed, by the end of Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House, that no hyperbole is too overblown in the campaign to depose him.”
That claim is false. I am quite certain I am better acquainted with the meeting-halls of mainstream conservatism than you are. Not raised an eyebrow my ass. I’ve attended meetings where less was said and the speaker was called out on it. You are merely reinforcing my point–that Neiwert engages in wholesale exaggeration while trying to pass off extremist statements as mainstream.
This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate. And you are now playing the part of Instapundit. I guess you don’t like him because he knows your tricks?
I am quite certain I am better acquainted with the meeting-halls of mainstream conservatism than you are.
I am not disputing that. I am, however, saying that I am not unacquainted with said meeting-halls; and that, in my experience, such remarks were commonplace. Should you wish to dispute this, please do so on the basis of what I actually say.
[FWIW, I suspect we’re about to go through round 2 of the great “What is ‘mainstream’ conservativism, anyway?”, which will likely consist of some variation on theme of “Well, *I’m* mainstream” in either the key of liberal or conservative major.]
PS: I’m glad you’re aware of the existence of Ann Coulter, I guess, but are you also aware about her frequent appearances in the media? It’s somewhat hard to label her an “extremist” (as opposed to “mainstream”) given her wretched ubiquity.
PPS, I guess:
This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate. And you are now playing the part of Instapundit. I guess you don’t like him because he knows your tricks?
Would you like an opportunity to retract that?
This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate. And you are now playing the part of Instapundit. I guess you don’t like him because he knows your tricks?
Sebastian, I’m not sure who ‘you all’ are, but if you are referring to me, Felixrayman and Anarch, well…
What I was complaining about was Gary Farber said that Reynolds was ‘has never…been anything other than a dogged critic of the Christian Right’ and we sparred over that (Gary, I’m really sorry to bring this up again but I just want to make the point to Seb) I did not mention anything about Churchill.
Felixrayman did not comment on that post. Anarch posted here, here and 3 other times. None of Anarch’s posts had anything to do with Instapundit.
There have been some other threads about Instapundit and ones about Ward Churchill, (the other likely possibility is this one, but I can find no comments made by the three of us concerning Instapundit and any comments about Churchill are pretty limited)
Please stop. It’s embarrassing.
“I’m glad you’re aware of the existence of Ann Coulter, I guess, but are you also aware about her frequent appearances in the media? It’s somewhat hard to label her an “extremist” (as opposed to “mainstream”) given her wretched ubiquity.”
Can I label Chomsky as a mainstream liberal? What about Michael Moore? I hear he has very popular political movies. Honestly.
Liberal Japonicus–you really seem to bring out the snarky in me but I’m going to try not to be. Reynolds is one of the two main subjects of the 200+ comment post on Who exactly is this left where you particularly agree with the ‘liberals are getting slammed unfairly’ subject of the post. Churchill also was the subject. Reynolds’ treatment of Churchill vis-a-vis the left was one of the main complaints being addressed. Neiwert is doing precisely the same by turning an extremist into a false representative of the class he wants to demonize. As is felixrayman.
Sebastian,
My point is that if ‘you all’ means us three, you are making crap up.
As for the thread you cited, Anarch commented, but wrote about the Churchill who wrote the book called _Complex Variables_. Here are all his comments
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I wrote a number of comments, but none of them can be construed as me ‘particularly agreeing’ with the thesis “‘liberals are getting slammed unfairly'”
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Felixrayman did not even post in that thread.
I realize that this is incredibly anal, but I know what I wrote and none of these comments can remotely be construed to have the content you attribute to them.
Just because you’ve apologized once for going off on me in this thread, it does not give you license to do so again. I’m sorry that I bring out the snarky in you, but I’m not going to change my handle for you, which is the only reason you could be upset from this thread, unless I should have known that Summers meant ‘nasty pseudo-Indian professors[sic] in Denver”. Maybe you are taking issue with something else I’ve said in some other thread. I have news for you, that makes it impossible to have a civil conversation. I cannot read your damn mind.
You got a beef with felix? Fine, take it up with him, don’t sling around this ‘you all’ crap. You want to claim that he’s got some grudge against Instapundit, call him out by name (hint, that means avoiding the use of ‘you all,’ ok?). You take exception to Anarch’s point about Ann Coulter (after you whale on him for disagreeing with your view of the Clinton-Hitler meme) Ditto. (note that in Anarch’s 9:41, he is taking issue with _Felixrayman_. But you are in such an incoherent sputtering rage, you can’t even see that) But if you pull me in again (and I’m from Mississippi, so ‘you all’ will be construed as a plural 2nd person), I will ask you to point to precisely which of my words you are talking about and cite them. I am not going to take any crap off of you for what you think I said. Good night.
If you don’t believe that the subject of “Who, Exactly, Is This “Left” About Which I Hear Such Strange And Dreadful Things?” is as I have outlined I can’t help you. If you don’t believe you expressed assent to the subject of the post I also can’t help you. You apparently want a statement saying “Some conservatives unfairly attack liberals.” You are apparently unwilling to accept that you were commenting affirmatively on a post which made that assertion (correctly) and which used the Reynolds-Churchill example of it (correctly). You apparently object to my summary of a 200+ comments thread. It is of course a one sentence summary of something which if printed would likely fill dozens of pages. That’s nice.
Do you understand the point of hilzoy’s piece?
Do you understand how it applies when I say: “This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate”?
Do you see your comments on the thread?
Do you see your comments on the thread as generally agreeing with the thesis of the post?
I suspect that the only problem area is question 4. If you want to claim that your comments were randomish babblings not pertaining to the thread, I’m certainly not going to argue with you. If you think they weren’t pertinent and broadly in line with both the thesis and theme of the post, so be it.
Of course that would make your point in this post something along the lines of “I didn’t personally agree that there is anything wrong with unfairly tarring people Sebastian, how dare you say that I did.” Is that what you are saying?
So as it pertains to this post and this quote: “This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate” are you complaining that my charge is incorrect because you don’t feel like ‘you’. Or are you attacking it substantively because you think my analogy between Neiwert’s attacks on pseduo-fascism tarring nearly all public conservatives with Reynold’s attack on the left is wrong?
You can nitpick or address the issue. Based on your typical responses, I have a prediction about which you do. I also have a prediction about how the next round of nitpicking will go, but maybe I’ll get lucky and you can try the substance for a change.
Seb
Do you understand the point of hilzoy’s piece?
I understood the point of the piece to be a discussion of an essay by one writer. I tried to find out more about that person. You, on the other hand, seem to think it was an attack on the fundamental principals of conservatism and therefore an attack on everything you believe
Do you understand how it applies when I say: “This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate”?
If you believe that any attack on some aspect of conservative philosophy is an attack on the whole, yeah. I don’t see where anyone has said that Wretchard is attacking *me* and my entire family, though.
Do you see your comments on the thread?
Which one, this one or the other one? If by this one, see question 1. If by the Reynold’s thread, yes, that’s why I gave you links.
Do you see your comments on the thread as generally agreeing with the thesis of the post?
Again, do you mean this one, or the other one? If it’s this one, I agree with hilzoy’s thesis as I’ve stated it. If it’s the Reynolds thread, the thesis I agree with is that Churchill is not a representative of the left. I didn’t see a link to a Reynolds series detailing how Churchill’s rhetoric has entered into the Democratic mainstream.
I’d also point out (yet again) that I am on the other side of the world, so I either get to a thread early or arrive late. If you have trouble remembering that, just look at my handle, as that is what the ‘japonicus’ part means.
Since you want to make this a comparison between Neiwert and Reynolds, (neither originally mentioned in hilzoy’s post) your thesis is that they are ‘exactly the same’. I don’t agree. Niewert has presented his viewpoint exhaustively, supporting them with illustrations and writings. And Reynolds has, well, I guess he hasn’t. Now, if he wrote a 6 part, bazillion word series on how extreme leftist ideas get transferred into the mainstream, using the rhetoric of Churchill and Chomsky, we could discuss what he says. We could note that he feels that Democracy is like sexual reproduction or we could note that he feels that interpretations of the 2nd amendments are incredibly slanted towards a states rights viewpoint or examine his views on patent law or legal versus scientific reasoning and see if he is being logically consistent. However, since Reynolds, to the best of my knowledge, has never posted such a thesis, fleshed out with examples, we can’t. That’s the difference. Is that clear?
Now, if you want to believe my participation in a thread about Reynolds as equivalent to the above, that’s your perogative. I’m not going to stop you. But if you write about what I think, quote the point I make. I realize that this may be tough, given that you seem to have attributed quotes by hilzoy and JerryN to me, and I’m sorry if you think that asking you to state clearly what you think I believe and then back that opinion up with evidence is ‘nitpicking’. But if you can’t correctly assign opinions to the people who hold them, then why should we take any opinion you have as being based in fact.
Aspects of Niewert’s discussion could be profitably applied to Huey Long and the Chicago ward machines, both of which are ‘Democratic’. Wouldn’t be very helpful for discussing aspects of our present situation, but we could. I suppose that ‘heh’ and ‘read the rest’ could be applied to Republicans or different periods in history as well, but to my mind, they somehow seem to lack the attempted explanatory power of Niewert’s thesis. But that’s just my reading and since you, speed reader that you are, have consumed the entire totality of both Niewert and Reynolds collected writings, “your reading is truer than mine”. Well, if that is the case, why are you so threatened when I disagree? Just walk away, secure in the knowledge that I am just another misguided soul.
You may not believe it, but I tried to let you have the last word(s) when you responded to my reading of Neiwert. I didn’t agree, but hey, that’s life. But then you say ‘This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate.’ I’m from Mississippi, so you all means you all. Given that you thought the person in question was Larry Summers, president of Harvard instead of Ward Churchill, former Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies and CU, maybe I should have just attributed it to a mental lapse, but I did want to know if you included me in that group and, lo and behold, you did. You have conflated my argument with Gary about Reynolds position changing over time with the discussion about Churchill and Reynolds. As I said, to my knowledge, Reynolds has not written a series (or even a long essay) detailing how Churchill’s rhetoric has entered into the Democratic mainstream, but if he does, please let me know. But hopefully on another thread, because this is the last post I’m going to make on this thread. I trust my response didn’t surprise you and I leave you the last word.
“If you believe that any attack on some aspect of conservative philosophy is an attack on the whole, yeah.”
Your whole analysis goes apart at this turning point. As I have quoted above, Neiwert is attacking almost every public conservative voice in America. The fact that you attempt to dramatically transform that into ‘any attack on some aspect of conservative philosophy is an attack on the whole’ is either brutally dishonest or a not very careful reading.
Can I label Chomsky as a mainstream liberal? What about Michael Moore? I hear he has very popular political movies. Honestly.
“Honestly”? Well, whatever; let’s tackle the substance, shall we? The key here, as I noted above, is whether we define “mainstream” as referring to the access a person has — mainstream people would be invited on major talk shows, have guest columns in major newspapers, and the like — or whether it refers to the tenor of their views.
So, Chomsky as a “mainstream” liberal? He’s not in the slightest bit mainstream-in-access. That I’m aware of: he’s never appeared on any major news show in the past decade; he’s never written a guest column in the NYT, the WaPo, the LA Times or the like; he’s not cited by name by any of the major columnists; nor has anyone identifiably “Chomskyite” done these things on a regular basis. I freely admit that these claims are contingent upon my knowledge and that it’s possible that I’ve simply missed a lurking mainstream Chomskyite influence for the past ten years… but my knowledge of the VLWC is decent enough that I find that unlikely. The onus is on you to find positive counterexamples, which you may do at your leisure.
[In a nutshell: if Chomsky’s contribution to the modern mainstream isn’t zero, it’s essentially negligible.]
Moore is a trickier one to categorize. He’s certainly very popular, but IMO one-shot popularity — and I’d say that that’s all he really has atm, Stupid White Men notwithstanding — is not a sufficient (or even really necessary) condition to be mainstream. His presence at the Democratic Convention, however, belies that: one would certainly think that such guests should certainly count as mainstream-in-access. You could certainly make a legitimate case that he, and F911, is mainstream. I’d say he’s something of a toss-up depending on the amount of actual access and actual power he wields, which I suspect is highly overrated (especially by him). So YMMV.
Ann Coulter? She’s a frequent guest on Chris Mathews’ crapfest, she was a regular on Crossfire IIRC, she’s a syndicated columnist for UPS, she writes for townhall.com — which I understand to be typical of the “mainstream meeting halls of modern conservativism”, although I will of course bow to your superior knowledge in that regard — and she is also a reasonably popular author. [Not to the same extent as Michael Moore, but nontrivially nonetheless.] Accesswise, I’d say she’s pretty much the definition of mainstream.
As for mainstream-in-views, there are two ways to measure this. One is simply to consider the disparity of the person’s views from our best estimate of the current political center in the country. The other is to try and hold them up to a quasi-Platonic political spectrum of where left and right “should” be, especially if you think (as I do) that the current political center is far from quasi-Platonically centered. The problem here is that the first is a popularity contest, pure and simple, while the second falls prone to the ever-popular “Well, *I’m* mainstream…” fallacy. [I’m sure we can think of people from all over the political map who’ve articulated such utterances, all evidence to the contrary; please, please don’t make me name names.] Considering those three in light of the popularity spectrum, I’d say that Chomsky is necessarily an extremist — how many Chomskyites are there in the real world, really? — and both Moore and Coulter are marginally outside the “mainstream-in-popularity” centers of liberalism and conservativism respectively.
[This is complicated, of course, by the fact that they’re often great big dicks, but inasmuch as I can get a sense of their public political viewpoints, that’s roughly where I’d locate them IRL. The blogosphere is, as always, a completely different matter.]
Finally, “mainstream-as-quasi-Platonic-ideal”. That’s a tough one and I don’t really have the stamina (or inclination) to tackle it in-depth right now. Long story short, I’d say that Chomsky is a die-hard leftist but probably not an extremist in the sense I’d use the term; Moore is a pompous, bloviating jackass who’s actually not as far to the left as he usually appears; and Coulter’s public persona — which I distinguish from Coulter herself because I’m frankly not sure how much of that persona is real and how much of it is a carefully cultivated shock-jock act — is an extremist to the right under pretty much any definition of the terms.
That’s all my opinion, natch. I’d be happy to debate it further except that I’m completely uninterested in doing so.
As I have quoted above, Neiwert is attacking almost every public conservative voice in America.
You cited him as attacking FOX News, the WSJ op-ed page, the 700 Club and the beneficiaries of the named trusts (Scaife, Coors et al). If that’s what you consider to be “almost every public conservative voice in America”, then conservatives in America are in serious trouble because he’s pretty much got them dead to rights IMO. Me, I’d like to think there are public conservatives — albeit fewer and further between — who don’t make scurrilous allegations without cause, who don’t treat news as WWE-lite, who don’t contradict their own news reportage to hew the ideological mainline, who don’t blame 9/11 on gay marriage, and who don’t maliciously fund some of the most rabid and, yes, anti-American voices on the right. If you or your family are part of that elite then yes, Sebastian, I hold you personally responsible for a good chunk of the problems in this country; if not — and, to the best of my knowledge, that is not the case — then no, you’re not the ones Neiwert or I are attacking.
To go one step further: having read Neiwert for a fairly long time — and no, I’m not going to get into a pissing contest about whether your experience with him is greater than mine, so please don’t bother — I think it’s fairly clear from his writings that a) he isn’t talking about you or, I presume, your family, b) he is talking about the leadership of the GOP and the party apparatchiks in the media (viz FOX News et al) and that c) his central allegation is that those tainted, politically-extremist elements (both people and memes) on the right are gaining more and more prominence and mainstream access. That’s his position, distilled as best I can: whether you like it or not, or admit it or not, your party is getting devoured by extremists who are getting installed into prominent, powerful positions… and unless people like you — which is to say, generally moderate-in-spectrum, generally conservative in philosophy, increasingly marginal-in-access, not in the least “pseudo-fascist” — do something about it, the country’s gonna get in a real bad way.
And with that, I’m done. I hope I’ve met your requirements for “substance”; I’d certainly like to think I’ve met them for length. If your purpose is dialogue, synthetic debate, or even plain old edification, I strongly recommend you contact Neiwert personally and ask him to explicate his position. If your purpose is to be aggrieved, have fun. Either way, the thread is yours.
Well said, Anarch.
An example (cited in TAPPED) of how a “generally moderate-in-spectrum, generally conservative in philosophy, increasingly marginal-in-access, not in the least “pseudo-fascist” ” formerly influential Republican officeholder views the transformation of the Republican party that Niewert is documenting from the other side:
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Sorry, you seem to have missed Wechart’s Metaphor. Barad-dur was the Dark Tower in Mordor, but its foundation was the One Ring, the Ring of Power, which was elsewhere; that is in the “West” and not in Mordor.
There is a second metaphor within the Wechart’s. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, used the “One Ring” as a metaphor for “sin”.
So does Wechart I beleive.