Two very interesting essays worth pointing out this morning that deal with the ongoing Danish cartoon controversy in interesting ways.
First, here’s Steve Green, from “The Offensive Offensive”:
I never wanted this Terror War to escalate into Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” The way I figured it, going into Iraq was our one best chance to give someplace in the Arab World their one best chance to produce a civil society. And I mean “civil society” in a Western way. I mean it with an almost-jingoist, Anglospherical fervor. I mean, they need to learn to fight words with words and not with firebombs. I didn’t expect results overnight, but it’s obvious that we (and they) have a long, long way to go.
If the Arab World’s only effective means of fighting us is to threaten our authors and cartoonists, then it’s obvious that we’re already in a culture war. They can’t win a stand-up fight with our military, but they’ll for sure shoot back at our stand-up comics.
They want a culture war? Fine. Let’s give them one.
[…]
Threatening Salmon Rushdie didn’t get Hollywood on board, because they don’t read books. Forcing some Danish cartoonists into hiding won’t be much help, either. But someday, maybe soon, Hollywood will do something which they think is a positive – and suddenly Steven Soderbergh or someone will be camped out at Dick Cheney’s Undisclosed Location. When that day comes, we’ll gain a new ally.
The Bloggy Right has been fighting the good fight for four years now. But if this really is a civilizational war, then we’re going to need more allies. We need professional help in the effort to teach the Arab World that firebombs and fatwas are no match for free speech. And, like it or not, we need TV and movies and cable to help us get our message across.
Our message comes down to this: They’re just comics, you bullying bastards. Grow up.
And here’s Scribal Terror’s Gail Hapke, responding to yesterday’s Steve Gilliard post—which, in the course of scolding the west for its cultural insensitivity, only managed a few perfunctory declamations against the acts of violence and threats of vengeance coming from the carefully-orchestrated, and highly visible mob of the “aggrieved”. From “Is “Multiculturalism” Incompatible with Actual Diversity?”
[…] if Mr. Gilliard is shocked that people are shocked, then I am no less shocked that he is shocked that people are shocked. No one likes to be insulted, but surely flouncing off in a huff and saying, “Why, I’ve never been so insulted in my life!” is a more appropriate response to such an eventuality than setting fire to public buildings and threatening people’s lives. If the mailman told the pastor over at St. Pat’s that the Blessed Virgin wears army boots, the very last thing I would expect him to do is torch the Federal Building and vow to annihilate the postal workers’ union.
But be that as it may, if I were a Muslim, I think I would take much greater umbrage at being condescended to by Mr. Gilliard than I would at being insulted by the Danish press, and it is the condescension rather than the insult that I would like to address.
Where is the condescension? Why right there—in the overweening presumption that one has the right to determine what a Muslim is and what his or her feelings are and what he or she is bound to do about them. There is a tendency in the multicultural movement to see groups of non-European people as monolithic “cultures,” as if someone popped a bit of Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus into a great mass of people who happen to live in close proximity to one another and turned them all into an amorphous mass of ethnic yogurt.
But human cultures are not yogurt cultures; they are extremely diverse and dynamic social structures, full of thoughtful and not so thoughtful individuals who disagree with one another on a variety of topics. When pundits take it upon themselves to define cultures, they usually pick the loudest, crudest, most aggressive and domineering elements, for the simple, childish reason that they tend to stand out in a noisy crowd of foreigners.
[…]
Are “Muslims” setting fire to things and threatening people who disagree with them? Assuredly, some of them are. Very likely, though, the vast majority are cooking, washing, taking care of their children, going to work, or reading the newspaper. Very likely, the vast majority respond to insults the way anybody else would, by rolling their eyes and telling people to get stuffed. And, very likely, a number of more marginalized folk, like the gays and the flirts and the religious or anti-religious rebels, rather relish the spectacle of the Puritans having their skirts blown up in the wind. So whose “culture” is it? And if it can’t be everyone’s, whose side are you on?
There will always be “wars” between cultures because cultures will always be at war with themselves. Don’t be shocked if that’s the way things are. And for God’s sake, stop iconifying the ugliest and noisiest part of a culture in preference to the subtlest and most sublime. Do what’s right according to your own conscience and take the consequences. The alternative is to do what’s wrong according to your own conscience and take those consequences instead.
It’s easy to take the thrust of Gail’s point from the moral and ethical standards both of western liberalism and the idea of individualism implicit such a system.
The problem comes when the outliers—the loudest and most vocal, the most extreme, the most violent, what have you—manage to wrest from the greater mass of individuals who comprise a culture the identity of the culture, and that identity is then perceived as the “official” identity of culture, the one with which critics most deal directly, because this is where the political power of the group resides.
Without such a mechanism in play, we could not talk about “race traitors” or “inauthentic blacks” or “apostate Muslims”—because the variety of individuality that truly compromises a group in toto almost always negates the official narrative of that group’s political incarnation.
And such is the case here. So while it is important to remember—and repeat, as necessary, that not all Muslims are responsible for the current attempt at sparking an cross-civilization conflagration—it is nevertheless important, from our own position of pragmatism and political necessity, to recognize that our fight is with an organized group that has presumed to speak for an entire religious / ethnic community.
And so much like many of us finding ourselves doing battle against Jesse Jackson as self-styled leader of the “Black community,” we should take care here to fight back forcefully against the current self-styled leadership of this latest identity politics gambit—which, at base, is an attempt to use the west’s own increasingly embraced (though steadily faulty) notions of “collective agency” against it. Only by doing so will we be presenting our arguments to the vast non-homogenized mass of Muslims who have not joined the dominant narrative, nor have they committed themselves to a specific iteration of Islamic identity politics.
As I mentioned in a previous post, however, the real clash of cultures—the one that actually matters, when all is said and done—has been taking place within the philosophical evolution of classical western liberalism, which has turned, increasingly and dangerously, toward adopting bits of collectivism that have resulted in the dilemma of having to prove tolerance by embracing the intolerant, if only as a way to keep the charade of self-righteousness and respect of Otherness alive.
What we fail to allow ourselves to face, however — out of fear of being called arrogant, or out of fear of asserting our own considered rectitude with an absolutism that is decidedly unfashionable in a transnational world—is that some social organizing principles simply do work better when applied to specific global goals. And if the global goal happens to be peace between nations and individual autonomy governed by rule of law—a real and useful tolerance—than liberal democracy is and should be promoted unapologetically.
****
related: Daniel Schwammenthal, “Europe’s New Dissidents” (from the Opinion Journal, h/t Terry Hastings); see also, Sigmund, Carl & Alfred, for an alternative perpsective.
Yep.
Virginia Postrel and Stephen Green to muslims:
See what i mean about how we suck at propaganda?
Exactly. Its like we say to our lunatics that advise us to blow up al-jazeera: its just TV, grow up.
Ooh, quickly! Over-under on Actus citing the “blowing up al-Jazeera” meme! Three m…… … …
Damn it. He outpredictable’d me.
The only thing I would add to what I said in my post is that Muslims should be a hell of a lot more offended at having their entire culture caricatured boiled down to its lowest common denominator and condescended to by people who want to be progressive and nonjudgmental than by having a Danish cartoonist draw a picture of the prophet.
ok, Iraq is awesome propaganda.
but everywhere else we suck.
we aren’t even trying in the meme wars.
Funny, I said the same thing to some buddies of mine, even though I deeply sympathized with their desire to drop some Mark 84s on the Al-Jazaeera corporate HQ. Only I said it back then. I didn’t hold it for a gotcha moment.
Oh, and my buddies listened and learned to what I said. Maybe the rioting Muslims can do the same thing here, eh? Or are you more interested in that gotcha moment, actus?
Although I understand why the American liberal left has allied themselves with radical Islam. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend“. They hate Bush, we hate Bush, so we’re allies”. Radical Islam, for now, appreciate the liberal left for carrying their water. But the reality is that the Hollywood Left much more typifies the decadence of the West that all of Islam decries, than does the “religious right”. In fact, George Bush lives his life more in keeping with the fundamental precepts of Islam, than does Barbara Streisand.
So I agree, it’s more likely that eventually Sean Penn will end up in hiding for his “insensitivity to Islam” than Samuel Alito.
Wait, do you think i’ve never broached this subject before?
It wouldn’t surprise me if some of these religious muslims would want al-jazeera bombed as well. But what does my interest in talking about our own lunatics have to do with what a rioting muslim does half a world away?
This can not be emphasized enough. It is very easy for the average mouth breather to generalize the entire Muslim faith.
I consider the Muslim community’s efforts to marginalize the fanatics to be lax. Either the international press coverage is poor, or the Muslim community is not pursuing it as much as they should. They need to take back their religion from the fanatics before too much damage is done.
And for God’s sake, stop iconifying the ugliest and noisiest part of a culture in preference to the subtlest and most sublime.
Exactly. Just because a few misguided Nazis were exterminating Jews, we shouldn’t iconify the ugliest and noisiest part of Nazi culture. After all, the majority of them were nice people who kept the trains running on time.
From this day forth, February shall be known as Nazi Awareness Month, when we shall celebrate
the subtlest and most sublime aspects of the Third Reich!
Of course, that’s self-evidently absurd; you can’t ignore the worst aspects of a culture in the name of “tolerance.” You must deal with them. Intolerance is intolerable.
Muslims should be a hell of a lot more offended at having their entire culture caricatured boiled down to its lowest common denominator and condescended to by people who want to be progressive and nonjudgmental than by having a Danish cartoonist draw a picture of the prophet.
If the majority of muslims can be convinced that the above way will get it done for them (as has happened with every other aggrieved group in this country), then why should muslims be more offended?
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. That’s what ALL of this identity politics B.S. boils down to.
TV (Harry)
tw: word. Nuff said.
How much time do you think we have, Nishizono? Because a subversive propaganda campaign takes a lot of it. (An overt propaganda campaign, like dropping leaflets, can be fast, I suppose – but how effective is it, when the message is not “Surrender or die” but “Try our way instead, even though your religious leaders have told you all your lives that our way is anathema”? If I understand your strategy correctly, you’re talking about winning hearts & minds, as they say – not about cowing the other side into submission.)
Back to my question on the way-down-there thread (I haven’t been back to check whether you answered it there – sorry): how do we propagandize effectively, when we have so little (though, thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, increasing) credibility among Muslims, and when our efforts to propagandize directly (such as paying for placement of authentic good news in Iraqi newspapers) are called out by our own countrymen and -women as not just “not cricket” but ludicrous, destined to fail, and probably criminal?
It is very easy for the average mouth breather to generalize the entire Muslim faith.
AND
I consider the Muslim community’s efforts to marginalize the fanatics to be lax.
The former happens because of the latter, in my opinion.
TV (Harry)
“Moderate Muslims” have a website up to apologize for not just the violent actions but also the “indiscriminate boycott of all the country’s firms”:
http://www.sorrynorwaydenmark.com/
<blink>
…and thank goodness for it. Will it be enough?
TW: future – which requires no comment.
I agree.
Jamie – You raise some good points, but I still think Nishi’s ideas about warring memes shouldn’t be ruled out of court. Although I might misunderstand her, I think she’s arguing for embracing more of Sun Tzu’s mindset and less that of Clausewitz in dealing with Islam.
Like you, however, I am worried by the prospect of epic levels of violence that any major Reformation of Islam poses. It doesn’t have to happen this way, of course, but so often in the past a bloodbath has accompanied major shifts in religious paradigms.
i think we have sufficient time to do something!
we should mount a counterpropaganda campaign against the cartoon outrage, show the additional cartoons added by the hardliners, emphasize the timeline, show the protests are being organized and not spontaneous. instead of yelling “grow up already” and getting all puffed up with righteous indignation, do what the blogverse does best, fact check and share.
reinstate the articles in the iraqi press. use wartime powers if need be.
let the qu’ran work for us instead of against us. fund qu’ranic discussion hour on al-iraqiya. don’t try to control the content, there is loads of good stuff in the qu’ran about tolerance, not killing other muslims, etc–give the moderate imans a platform.
publish comix and manga featuring heroic Muhammed (veiled) exercising some of the good things in the Qu’ran. ditto heroic manga of bedouin men and women as legendary poets and warriors.
publish the poetry of the jahilyyah, the pre-islam–it is unique and gorgeous, give arab culture literary works of art besides the Qu’ran…
that’s just some of what i think about–pretty wierd, huh?
Tall Dave, I think you missed my point. I was saying that you shouldn’t assume that all members of a culture can’t be expected to behave any better than their lowest common denominator and therefore excuse that behavior (as Gilliand seems to do). The logic (or illogic) works this way: Some Muslims are behaving like goons. They should be excused for this because they are representative of the Muslim culture (mainly because they are the most visible and audible). Therefore, the assumption is that all Muslims can be expected to behave like goons because it is somehow native to their culture. If you want to use the Nazi analogy, it would be, Nazis are behaving in an evil manner. Nazis are representative of German culture. Therefore they should be excused for their behavior because Germans can be expected to behave in an evil way.
Here’s how not to appeal to the non-homogenized mass of Muslims: 1.Posts titled “Protest pics that might not make etc. dipicting the bloddothirsty elements as if they spoke for everyone.
2. Giggling everytime you or your fellow-travellers type the words religion of peace.
3. Listen to prattle like TallDave’s post above.
Nishizono –
I’ll give you “time to do something,” and I’d argue that we’re trying to do something, something both positive and positively subversive, by fostering representational government in the Middle East. What I wonder about is twofold: first (again), why would the Islamic world give any credence to anything we say about Islam (or, adjunct, do we have any Islamic allies sufficiently willing to be perceived by some as our “tool” to do the talking for us), and second, given the sense of accelerating timeline that seems apparent from events like the Hamas election and “spontaneous,” simultaneous demonstrations, embassy-burnings, death threats, etc., etc., on what other fronts do we fight this war?
Because enough time to do something is not necessarily enough time to win. Every suggestion you’ve made is great – I just question whether, alone, they’d be enough. I suspect that you’re not advocating doing these things and nothing else, but I don’t know what else you would go for. The ideas you list are all carrot, no stick: do you have a stick in mind?
TW: I could read this stuff for hours. Oh, wait, I already do.
And the rest like Marcel Marceau.
The silence is deafening among the “moderate” Muslims.
Speaking of Salmon Rushdie….
Things are definitely looking up with the new wife, who’s if nothing else…”perky”.
Funny what death threats from lunatics can do for a man’s love live.
Let’s try again… Mrs. Rushdie
jamie, we won’t have to persuade moderate imams to plead our cause, they will do it willingly and much better than if we scripted them.
why should there be sticks if carrots work?
there is a popular program running on al-iraqiya now, a reality show where the relatives of dead iraqis get to publically accuse the captured terrorist that killed them.
it is great propaganda for the arab world, but i think it should be shown here as well.
shouldn’t we devote some attention to propagandizing the left?
Have you ever broached any other subject???
Other than bombing al-jazeera? Nope. I’m a one trick pony.
I got news: most won’t listen, and those that do, most won’t believe.
We’re filth, remember? Naji.
In other words, you want us to run the jihadi’s western propaganda factory?
I’m sure a collection of manga extolling the virtues of the “perfect man”—known for marrying an eight-year-old, ordering massacres, and encouraging slave-taking and rape of same—will do a lot to modernize the Muslim world.
How about, instead of extolling the virtues of their culture, we forcefull assert the virtues of our own? I think we have a hell of a lot more to be proud of, and, frankly, self-confidence is more likely to deter the Islamists than praising them.
Or………
Let me add a wrinkle. A wrinkle in the form of the new 8:30 slot in “Must See TV” Thursday.
It’s a delightful little comedy about a young civil liberties attorney named Actus and his snarky, sharp-tounged gay lover Retief. They’ve just moved into an apartment next to four swarthy brothers who get into all sorts of screwball situations while shopping for Members Only jackets or trying to inject smallpox into an economy-sized can of Barbasol. High-larious!
The working title “You Mecca Me Crazy” starts with a gut-busting pilot where, Actus, dressed as Jafar to Retief’s Jasmine for a costume party, meets Achmed, the eldest brother, in the hallway. One of the funniest one-man-riot scenes in the history of television ensues when Achmed accuses Actus of making fun of Allah. And in a South Parkarian twist, Retief is beheaded, but then returns in the next week’s episode.
Don’t miss it!
This “meme war” is long lost. Pim Fortuyn was its last casualty.
Follow the origins of this cartoon insanity, how it was inflated into what it is todayâ€â€and look at the lefty reaction to that inflation (Fisk has been exemplary, as usual)â€â€and you can see that the Muslim clerics understand this well (because they are tactical, military thinkers): for reasons Jeff has gone on and on about here for…ever it seems, this a world where, in any battle over principle, victory can only go to the most strident, unmovableâ€â€and eventually violentâ€â€actor.
And that actor is not “us.”
But soon it will have to be.
(This is called irony. Y’all interleckshuls shoulda read yer Nietzsche better.)
Nishizono-chan – completely off-topic, but I’m curious: what field(s) of science do you specialize in?
ScapeGoatTrainee, USE THE HTTP:// TAG! THAT IS WHAT IT IS FOR!
Nishi, we need a stick because, if anything, Muslims are proud people. It will take a lot more than gentle kind prodding to engender trust enough to wage the culture war within Islam that we don’t want to fight ourselves (With good reason). They won’t take to our propaganda attempts. Our own media will even make sure of it.
Gail,
OK, valid point. But I think the nasty aspects of a culture still need to be criticized, regardless of what the end use of such criticism is.
Lord knows we do that with our own culture. And I think its unquestionably made us better.
Oh and mea culpa, I did miss your point, and should have read the whole thing before dashing off a comment.
Exactly my point, OHNOES. Nishizono, I defer to your familiarity with Islam, but so far I remain unconvinced that even moderate imams are going to do our work for us, except by means of (best case) polite but existential threats.
What’s their motivation? As it stands, if the radicals win, Europe morphs into Eurabia, and the Caliphate is reborn, the moderates come along for the ride as part of the new power structure. OTOH, if the radicals inflame the West sufficiently to get themselves killed or sent running, such that they’re no longer a significant threat, the moderates sit right where they are and say, “Thank goodness we no longer have to deal with that element! We were, of course, frightened for our own communities, which is why we couldn’t take more of an aggressive stand against those hotheaded sons of dogs” or whatever the appropriately insulting term would be – and I believe that there’d be a lot of truth to that statement, but regardless, it means they wouldn’t have had to confront their own worst “selves,” so to speak; they can leave that confrontation to us. Whether or not their intention is strategic, they can claim philosophical allegiance to the winning side right now, regardless of which side that is, with minimal risk to themselves and their congregations.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we should dash off and refresh ourselves by reading Freud’s “On Group Psychology” and then come back to this discussion with a little better understanding of how such a dynamic comes to be.
Ah, nice goal post moving, actus! You go for a gotcha moment by referring to our own lunatics:
And then retreat into your hole by claiming you ain’t talking about them.
But that’s OK, your gotcha was pretty sad in the first place.
TW: actus says ”I’m a one trick pony.” No argument there, but his trick ain’t what he thinks it is.
He’s not the only one….
Or, if you like…
http://pandagon.net/2006/02/05/were-all-batshit-crazy-crusaders-now/#more-2111
Roe v. Wade was somehow cut off from the process of weighing evidence and testing arguments by the canons of principled reasoning. Justice Blackmun did not subject to the test of principled reasoning his own assumptions about the nature of the fetus and its standing in the eyes of the law.
turing word/ Reason
ohayo, RS-san.
email me and i’ll tell you.
Wakarimasu.