Excerpt from Part 1 of The Day Reality Hit Home:
In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a ‘liberal’. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn’t question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn’t try to understand myself.
In a sense 11 September was the ultimate mugging, a murderous assertion of a new reality, or rather a reality that already existed but which we preferred not to see. Over the years I had absorbed a notion of liberalism that was passive, defeatist, guilt-ridden. Feelings of guilt governed my world view: post-colonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt, British guilt. But if I was guilty, 9/11 shattered my innocence. More than anything it challenged us all to wake up and open our eyes to what was real. It took me far too long to meet that challenge. For while I realised almost straight away that 9/11 would change the world, it would be several years before I accepted that it had also changed me. I had been wrong. This was my story, after all.
Der Spiegel, and now Teh Graun? The joint is out of time!
UPDATE: More reality, from Wizbang (Regular):
Zimbabwe used to produce enough grain to feed most of sub-Saharan Africa; after three decades of neo-Marxist rule it cannot feed its own people. Even the undying admiration and friendship of Jimmy Carter isn’t helping.
Over at Normblog today there’s another excerpt from Anthony’s book, a particularly juicy smackdown the author delivers to Frederic Jameson, one of the biggest and most pernicious charletons in the American academy.
Is that a small, minuscule nanobyte of common sense in a tinfoil hatted leftist brain developing? OMG!! There may be a tiny hope of salvation yet. No, not religion but cultural salvation.
Sue, if you read it, it looks more like a terabyte.
I’m stealing this from Jules Crittendon’s comments here:
# tinknorati Says:
August 18th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
It’s striking how crafted that comment is, but what I want to highlight is the bit about how “the right has always been at war with liberals and Democrats.” It’s a formulation that completely elides Al Qaeda and September 11 and the idea that there are forces actively working to thwart the establishment of a non-totalitarian Iraq, and I think Anthony’s piece suffers a bit in not better illustrating the contortions the left endorses in its desperation to protect the pre-9/11 narrative. Anthony’s relatively benign sketch of the liberal pathology, limited here to a look at Guardian columnist’s Seumas Milne’s initial reaction to 9/11, may help explain how the Guardian found his narrative appealing. I wonder but that the Guardian doesn’t see Anthony as an object lesson that illustrates how September 11 did indeed have the power to break liberals whose commitment to the narrative was… insufficient. Don’t let this happen to you. Gird thyself!
Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia!
Soylent people is green!!
Nope. Fuck this liar.
These “self-hate” / “post-colonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt” self-diagnosis-and-bravely-achieved-cure stories are all preening bullshit.
The only people leftists admire are their rich, white, colonial-minded selves — as such. The rhetoric of self-hate is the aristocratic style of self-love (and, in a Straussian-deceptive way, an example for their nearest lessers, to help them help themselves go under).
Disclaiming that rhetoric, falsely claiming to have lived it, to have been “governed by” it but now to have seen the light, or to have lost that “innocence” (hello!), is only more of the same. Is he not congratulating himself?
Is a leftist ever not congratulating himself? No. Because the “self,” the “we” he hated and still hates and always will is you, degenerate trash and mud people, vulgar kikes and strivers. They hate you because you don’t know your place. They point at you and laugh and say “It thinks it’s people!”
They don’t change. They just change the way they tell you they’re better than you.
Fuck them.
“Fuck them.”
– No thanks. I’ll pass. They do their damn level best, what with all their self hate guilt ridden bullshit, to ruin everthing else enjoyable in life. I’ll be damned if I let them ruin my sex-life too.
– Besides. Hippy chics smell funny.
I remember where I was working on that day. The CEO called in late to see how things were in the office.
“Sam,” I said. “Have you turned on your television?”
“No, I never do in the morning.”
“Sam, the whole world is coming apart,” I instinctively blurted out.
And it was.
I can put up with the stupid superiority complex if it’ll help the Left embrace reality.
Psychologizer,
The change we’re seeing in the Euro-media reportage on Iraq has to be tactical.
From a purely tactical standpoint, over the period lasting from 2000 all the way thru to the 2006 elections, it was crucial that the leftist global media collude to push the globe’s political discourse in the same “Anti-Republican” direction.
This was to assist the Democrats by providing a “popular,” (albeit contrived) global rebuttal to American Republican-ism. As portrayed by its media propagators, this “rebuttal” was broadcast in such shrill, anti-intellectual tones in global fora that Murtha, Feinstein, Durban, Reid and Pelosi appeared sane, engaged and electable by comparison.
But, the Dem’s know they need a garment-change now. It is dawning on the party that, with the departure of Bush, Cheney and Rove from the political scene, Sarkozy’s election in France, and increasing good news from Iraq, there is message-decay in the party’s constellation of anti-Republican talking-points.
So, their media “tailors” are just gettin’ busy stitching a new gown. New colors, new players, new tactics.
Happyfeet:
The interesting thing here with that comment is the projection.
Because it is the Left that has long believed that homegrown American conservatives are far more dangerous than the other. Consider the interplay between Communists, anti-Communists, and anti-anti-Communists.
You have the Communists, such as the Rosenbergs and their ilk.
You have the anti-Communists, ranging from the hard-right folks such as Joe McCarthy and the John Birchers, through the middle of the American polity (consider how anti-Communist JFK was) to the anti-Communist American liberals and Left (e.g., Sidney Hook and Irving Howe).
And you have the anti-anti-Communists. This was the New Left, the Gabriel Kolkos and William Appleman Williams, Susan Sontags and all the rest, who eagerly and fervently argued that the Communists couldn’t destroy America—but the anti-Communists could. That anti-Communism was a sentiment shared by all parts of the American political spectrum was elided into “McCarthyism,” as though the only people who thought Communism was a threat was Tail-Gunner Joe.
Complementing this was the belief that the greatest traitors weren’t the Rosenbergs, but the Elia Kazans, Sidney Hooks, etc., those of the Left who concluded that Communists really needed rooting out.
It is for this reason that neo-cons have long been especially derided. The original neo-cons were “liberals who had been mugged.” The Podhoretz’s and the like, members of the Left, who having seen what Communism did in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, concluded that this was a “god that failed.” When the first wave of “neo-cons” were gathered by the elder Bush as part of the “Team-B” exercises of the late 1970s (aimed at determining whether the CIA was accurate in its assessments of the USSR), they were derided as excessive and alarmist and fear-mongering. Academia hated them as much as academia hates them now.
That the Team-B exercise was arguably far more on the mark than the standard CIA analyses suggests that many of the debates we see today were already in play thirty years ago.
Today’s neo-cons, the second generation, is therefore equally viciously attacked and derided. And they are held up by folks like tinknorati as the ones in perpetual war—as their predecessors were attacked for nostalgia for McCarthy and excessive fear of the USSR, for seeing the “nuclear freeze” movement as infiltrated by the USSR and failing to see that “the Russians love their children, too.”
Jim in Chicago:
It’s interesting that Frederic Jameson should be so thoroughly chastised. The idiotic lawyer in Santa Monica who decided to set up an anti-Fred Thompson site smearing Thompson as a racist (as detailed by Captain Ed Morrissey at captainsquartersblog.com) eventually redirected to a site discussing Frederic Jameson.
If we were to take Tinknorati’s mode of “analysis,” I suppose one might conclude that there is a moronic convergence among this sort?
The sad fact is that we can absorb degradations like the Iraq war without blinking. So what if we knocked off 300,000 little brown men? We are awfully good at knocking off little brown men.
O brave new world, that hath such people in’t!
— The Tempest, Act V, Scene I
What can I say? People that think America is some great all-devouring beast, intent on world domination haven’t, y’know, been paying attention…
SB: assume nourished
So is the “Bush has made us less safe” meme employed to counter the obvious difficulty anti-anti-terrorists would have to effectively elide anti-terrorism if (when) terrorists strike again? That’s a trap Instapundit of all people is very angsty about today. (Check out what the links he chooses.) It seems there’s a tension between dogma and policy this time around that was less pronounced in the Cold War. In the Cold War, if they were wrong, and say, the Soviets were emboldened, the conflict remained in the geopolitical ether, and had less immediate bearing on Soccer Mom, who probably wasn’t much concerned about what may be going on in Nicaragua. This time around, the entirely unpredictable nature of our adversaries leaves them at a considerable disadvantage, and also it doesn’t help that our adversaries are demonstrably evil. Withdrawal from Iraq would have immediate consequences.
This is all a question… this is out of my comfort zone, but what you write about does describe a lot of what the left seems to be about.
[…] blogging about this: Jules Crittenden, Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom, Flopping Aces, USS Neverdock Posted By: Sister Toldjah in: War on Terror, International, United […]
Oh, we’re so evil. You can tell by the way we rebuild everybody’s countries and give so much foreign aid and charity away. I mean, who else but someone truly evil would do so much good to try and hide it?
That’s why hippies never use deodorant… they don’t want people to think they’re trying to hide something, because, after all, inauthenticity is the worst crime of all!
You know what they say, Arion, you can’t make a Constitutional Republic without breaking a few little brown men.
Oh, dear God. I’m blinking!
Uh-oh, I think he’s counting the tsunami.
Cheezit, Rove, they’re onto us!
I nominate Psychologizer as commenter of the day. Top-shelf, mate.
TW: genuine constancy. Just so
Arion, you ignorant, ignorant tit.
Isn’t he just dreamy?
or she, whatever
not Arion, psychologizer… Arion still has the training wheels on on his little trollcycle. I thought it was kind of cute, like on the tv when the little kid gets mad and you put your hand on the little kids forehead and there he is, still swinging away.
“Comment by Arion on 8/19 @ 1:53 pm #
The sad fact is that we can absorb degradations like the Iraq war without blinking. So what if we knocked off 300,000 little brown men? We are awfully good at knocking off little brown men.”
Lair.
I don’t consider Arion so much a lair as a refuge. That said, I don’t think it’s about offing brown folk. Nor do I entirely buy psychologizer’s blanket analysis of the left. Granted, some are seizing the apotheosis of a divine revelation. Some of us were disgruntled from the get-go; please give us our due.
happyfeet (#14):
I think a couple of factors are at work.
1. I think that the Left has never really believed in the main threat. Not from the Communists, not from the terrorists. Thus, any success serves as an opportunity to deride the “anti” crowd. “I thought NATO was supposed to make us safer?” “I thought more nukes were supposed to make us safer?” “I thought NSA monitoring was supposed to make us safer?”
2. The omelette argument. If there’s a few who die, pace Michael Moore, they’re probably people who deserved to die—hence Moore’s bewildered cri de coeur about New York not having voted for Dubya in the first place. Eventually, of course, it’s folks who are closer to home who die. Then you either become an “anti” (witness the Himmelfarbs and Hooks), or you become the Michael Bergs and Cindy Sheehans, mutilating logic into something that keeps the “antis” responsible.
3. Evil is both subjective—and objective. I’m sure we’ve all seen this. “Who are we to judge whether North Korea/China/the USSR/Iran/Syria is evil?” But if they ARE evil, are we not at least in part responsible? Thus, the idiocy of Bytkofsky’s bizarre hope that there’d be another 9-11. If the original 9-11 was going to lead, as Anthony notes, to Seumas Milne already concluding within 24 hours that the US was insensitive, why would any other attacks lead to a different conclusion?
4. They DO love America—just not this one. In the end, one of the key things that these folks argue from is that they love America, and wish to defend it from the “antis.” But the America they love is the America as it should be. The America that they perceive, the America that is, is the America that fits the descriptions of Ward Churchill and Susan Sontag and our own Arion in this thread. Their “love” is expressed by the hope of defeat, of Nicholas de Genova’s “Million Mogadishus” (which, btw, would lead to something on the order of 100 million dead brown people, but somehow, I don’t think Arion would begrudge de Genova his comment), in order that their America might come to pass. A humbler, quieter America that would deserve their contributions.
Finally, being wrong has no consequences. Look at those who defended the USSR, not only in the 1950s, but even through the 1970s and 1980s. Did Stephen Cohen, who wrote about “Homo Sovieticus” ever conclude that he was mistaken? Did the Left that supported the nuclear freeze ever come to terms with the reality that the Soviets did fund it?
Do you think Arion cares that the greatest slaughterer of brown people are often brown people themselves? (Consider who has killed more Muslims.) Or that the Communist system has produced more slaughter to no good end, compared with any other?
How about the defenses of ANSWER and their ilk today?
One observer has noted that, for the Left, the means justify the ends. That they are starting from the purest, best of sentiments alleviates them of any consequences of their ideology. If Stalin and Mao and Mugabe rise, well, the Left’s intentions were good. (And besides, Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong-il aren’t really socialists. The next one will get it right!)
[…] Debra tells Andrew Anthony to “grow a pair,” because his description of liberals fails to encompass her. Posted […]
Lurking Observer, that’s a ramble worthy of John Wayne.
Cynn opines:
“Lurking Observer, that’s a ramble worthy of John Wayne.”
Which does not change the fact that he’s 100% correct, sweetie. Deal with it.
And if anyone doubted that this was really featured in the Grauniad, please note they mixed up Parts 2 & 3!
No, it’s much worse than that: we’re creating fertile soil for those little brown men to breed, so we can continue slaughtering them. Get with the program, already.
“Do you think Arion cares that the greatest slaughterer of brown people are often brown people themselves? (Consider who has killed more Muslims.)…”Great point LO. Twits like arion are not about to blame the people who are ACTUALLY committing the absolute majority of the killing. But, he will blame George Bush for creating the vacuum. Not much unlike the whole society made the killers, not the killers made themselves. Responsibility for one’s own actions is for suckers. Up is down. Black is white.
But how do you respond to to suggestions that Bush, (I’ll give him his well-intentioned motives) nevertheless opened this godawful pandoras box of insanity? Whither now, wise ones?
Well Cynn, How exactly do I say this so you get it?…HMMM…First we win I guess, THEN we untwist you’re panties…must be awful chafing there…
LO – it’s all just kind of depressing, when you lay it out like that. So that can’t be exactly right, but it’s all very well said.
I watched Soylent Green last night because everyone is always bringing that up. Some people are just all about rubbing other people’s faces into the ugly of the world, is what that movie said to me. They call it a warning, but it’s mostly about instilling cynicism and hopelessness. I intimate a lot about the boomers that these people want nothing more than to bring back the gloriousness of the 60s, but it seems more and more, it’s the aesthetic malaise of the 70s they want to reinvoke. A godawful pandora’s box of insanity, this world. Think Network. Think Katrina. Ick.
holyshit happyfeet, please remember the most important tool in your spritual chest. You have the power over every negative force if you just want to encounter it. Be strong and brave, and you will stand up to anything. God knows I have to deal with the bibliocracy.
What’s the answer you’re looking for cynn?
“Ooooo, look, big bad Dubya opened Pandora’s box!” What, you want an apology? Will that make you feel better?
No? How about if we accept the blame. “Dang that Dubya, what an idjit!” There, I said it. Or do we need some black helicopters to show up to complete the show?
Perhaps we could discuss how we got here? You know, root causes? Issues of Islamic fundamentalism, failures of the Arab culture, and a tribally oriented worldview that have led these countries, sitting atop massive natural resources, to fail to produce much in the way of science or jobs, but do produce a fair number of children, leading to a demographic situation that is abysmal. Couple that with irredentist sentiments blessed by “God” (or the nearest imam) and you have a dynamite combination!
Naah. Doesn’t blame us enough.
Hmmmm. I suppose we could discuss how the pandora’s box was being opened from the time that the West intervened in the region (at least World War I and the Balfour Declaration, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, courtesy of the German battlecruiser and the British high-handed decision regarding a battleship), but again, I suppose that’s not temporally or politically close enough, eh?
So, tell us, cynn, what is the answer you’re already looking for?
happyfeet:
“Exactly right”? Naah. Just some personal observations, after too many years of watching this sort of horse hockey pucks being batted around.
I’ve little idea of aesthetics or what these folks want to bring back. Flower power, free love, lots of grooviness? Tie-die and big hair? Maybe a feeling that the world was still one in which all was possible, if we all just loved a little more?
Personally, I think it’s the desire to prove that you don’t have to grow up. After all, the parents, they were all so, like, square, man! Those same square parents, of course, were, and are, the “Greatest Generation” that the same boomers now fall over themselves to praise. As though their derision, scorn, and contempt had been by somebody else, once upon a time, long ago and far away. BOY that must gall some of them!
As for movie descriptions, I actually kinda like Soylent Green. Part of Heston’s “campy” period, alongside “The Omega Man” or “Planet of the Apes.” S.E.R.I.O.U.S. in the way that only late 60s science fiction could try to be. Compare it to “Logan’s Run”! That it utterly failed in terms of logic (but, hey, that hasn’t stopped Paul Ehrlich!) is beside the point.
MUCH better than the incredibly surreal and pretentious “Candy,” or silly (but titillating) “Barbarella.”
I am very pro- anti-hopelessness, almost daily, but with the bibliocracy, you’ve seen what they’ve done to the literary canon.
That’s just hopeless.
Just to get the threads all tangled, here’s what Dr. Helen said to the guy that made that Alan Alda wannabe guy dissect his manliness…
I loved Omega Man, Arnold was going to remake it until the budget killed that idea I think.
But you’re right, who knows what they want to bring back, but this politics of hope thing? That’s not it.