Mr. Bell Jar found me a series of articles that give a quick and dirty history of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the Asia Times: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. It also presents a pretty good round-up of the ideological and operational ties between Nazi Germany and both secular and Islamic fascist movements in Egypt in the 30s-40s. I don't agree with all of the analysis here, but it's a good summary of the facts.
I had thought that the TNR story a few weeks ago about Palestinians turning on Hamas was too good to be true, but now I see this: Abu Mazen: "The Whole Intifada Was a Mistake".
Admittedly the history of the Islamization of the Palestinian movement is a bit of grey area for me, so for all I know this is just some kind of power struggle or something, but on the other hand it could be very good news. Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to link to this rather reassuring assessment of the state of Islamism from Gilles Kepel. (I’m still working my way through his excellent Jihad; his new book will just have to go on the wish list for now.
M. said: Abbas: ...we asked [then State Attorney] Elyakim Rubinstein about the Absentee Property Fund, and he admitted that Israel 'axed it' in a cabinet decision. I said to him: 'If that's the case, then Hitler's decisions were right.' This tells you something about the kind of reasoning and dialogue that went on with the Israeli side at Camp David..."
Uh, yeah, it does. Note to Abbas: what you carry around in your head is your affair, but as a friendly word of advice there is no context, when speaking to an Israeli or American audience, in which suggesting that the some Israeli policy retroactively justifies the Holocaust is going to be helpful in your negotiations. (Of course, given that Abbas is himself a Holocaust denier who wrote a book that attempted to tie the Nazis in with the leaders of the Zionist movement, maybe that's not what he meant by "Hitler's decisions were right." Regardless, the fact that the moderate who was going to be a credible replacement for Arafat can't even figure out when he should perhaps not give voice to his less acceptable views is indicative of the magnitude of the problem.)
"Then there was the issue of the refugees. The Israelis' idea was the following: 'there were 150,000 refugees that left, of which 100,000 died, and we are considering allowing the remaining 50,000 to return.' We started to try to convince them that the number of those who left stood at 950,000, and we reached a stage [where we agreed on] 600,000-700,000. The Israeli side said that Jews from Arab countries came in their place [i.e., in place of the Palestinian refugees] 'so it's one-for-one and we want 40 million dollars in reparations, of which half will go to you, the Palestinians, and half will go to the Israeli side.' We presented them with evidence and documentation that the Jews took all of their property before leaving the Arab states
And the giant holes in the ground where that property was remain to this day throughout the Middle East. (Perhaps he meant only personal property, but that seems odd considering that he seems to be concerned primarily about land where the Palestinians are concerned.)
and that I, as the Palestinian side, have nothing to do with any Arab state from which Jews emigrated and that that is not my responsibility.
Uh huh. Well, the territory Israel is currently occupying previously belonged to Jordan and Egypt, so I guess that's not his concern either. It's not as if there was some sort of grand coalition of Arabs in which the Palestinians participated that led to the current facts on the ground or anything.
That Abbas has sort of figured out that the intifada didn't work is somewhat heartening. But it's not clear to me that he's accepted the idea of a permanent settlement that doesn't require Israel to be a willing partner in its own destruction, or that he would continue to have anyone following him if he did so. He already seems to have been unable to stand up to Arafat, who in turn doesn't seem to be able to deliver an end to violence if he chose to. If Abbas got everything that he seemed to be asking for from Arafat in terms of reforming the PA, it's not clear to me that it would really help much.
D. replied: I read "Hitler's decisions were right" as applying primarily (or perhaps solely, given what you said about him being a denier) to his depriving Jews of their property without just compensation. Not--as you point out--that this changes much. This is why I always get a headache when the Israelis and Americans talk about removing Arafat so that a more "moderate" politician can take his place.
I'm currently reading New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper, a political philosopher by trade who is looking at a variety of 20th Century violent religio-political cults through the lens of a framework developed primarily by Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt to describe the totalitarian impulse. I think it would be of great interest to anyone who found Lee Harris' essay on fantasy ideology persuasive, because it provides a more precise and consistent conceptual framework for what the true believer is actually doing emotionally and intellectually. It also avoids the main weakness of Harris' argument, the assumption that the political goals of such actors are necessarily fantastic.
Put very crudely, Cooper theorizes movements like Islamism as an effect of a spiritual disorder he calls pneumopathology, a term he borrows from Voegelin. The essence of the disorder is a conscious act of "honest dishonesty," an adoption of a "second reality" independent of commonsense reality (although the second reality is often adopted in response to real grievances). Once the second reality is adopted, the imaginator finds the conflict between commonsense reality and the second reality unbearable; instead of containing this conflict within himself, the imaginator will seek to externalize the second reality, making the conflict the world's problem instead of his own. This sounds kind of airy and Freudian or whatever, but will make immediate sense to anyone who's ever had an "Hello, earth to Joshua/Heather/whoever" moment when talking to a member of, say, the Spartacist Youth League. (My vivid memory of the almost irresistible urge to snap my fingers in front of their eyes to awaken them from what seemed like a hypnotized daze is part of why, I think, I feel that I already kind of know people like al-Zarqawi, and why it makes such sense to me that Islamist terrorist tend to hail from the educated upper crust of their own societies, rather than being the superstitious medieval peasants that the idea of religious fanaticism suggests in the modern West.)
I'm not sure I completely understand the more theoretical part of Cooper's justification for regarding this as an essentially spiritual disorder, but what I do get is the way he explains that fully adopting a second reality involves the destruction of the imaginator's moral self, which was bound by the precepts and limitations of commonsense reality. The act of replacement of commonsense with second reality grants permission to actualize that second reality; methods of attempting to do so are understood as predictions rather statements of intention. For example, Stalin says that the Kulaks are a dying class. In commonsense reality, this means that he is about to have them all killed. But to Stalin this is merely a prediction about the future, which was already true when he made the initial statement. In the same vein, the Aum Shinrikyo cult turned the Buddhist concept of pao, which refers to a course of spiritual reflection undertaken near death, on its head by making it an active verb: they were pao-ing "enemies" of the cult, not murdering them. To cult members, their prediction that the time for the entire world to be paoed had come was being partially fulfilled by their act of planting nerve gas on Tokyo subways, whereas in commonsense reality, they had merely decided they wanted to kill everyone outside the cult, and proceeded to attempt to do so. In this way the essential connection between intention and action is lost, and is instead ascribed to the workings of a fictional reality; commonsense morality is abandoned absolutely.
What Harris' articulation of this phenomenon lacks is Cooper's recognition that sometimes commonsense reality is actually altered by imaginative religious and political movements. Aum Shinrikyo failed to murder the world, but Stalin did do a pretty good job on the Kulaks. Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, about Nazi death squads populated by middle-aged non-ideological family men, presents a good account, I think, of how non-cult members will naturally adapt to a consensus reality created by cult members, if the cultists manage to accede to political power and impose it upon everyone. Among the examples of "second reality" movements cited by Cooper--Aum Shinrikyo, bolshevism, Nazism, the Witch Craze in Europe, Christian Identity, Heaven's Gate, Islamism, the revolutionary in general as a type, etc.--are of course many that succeeded in actually altering political reality for long periods of time; arguably in the cases of Nazism and bolshevism the alteration may have been permanent in the absence of powerful external enemies.
Cooper has avoided mentioning the American Revolution so far, but it is interesting to look at it through this framework. The central assertion of the Declaration of Independence amounted to standing the then-governing assumption about the relationship between divine and political authority on its head; the Divine Right of Kings was replaced by God's endowment instead of every man with inalienable political power. Note that we date the birth of the USA from this simple assertion of a new reality; the actual expulsion of the King's authority through the War of Independence and concretization of the new order in the Constitution followed much later. We have been living in this reality for so long that it is as if the previous one never existed; we are nearly incapable of conceptualizing the pre-Revolutionary mindset that accepted monarchy as the natural and divine order of things. The tendency of Westerners today to make movies about the history of Europe like King Arthur and Braveheart that project our current understanding of justice infinitely backwards is I think a consequence of that. In these types of movies, good men and true were always rebelling against authority in the name of "freedom," because that is what good people who have accessed the "real" nature of things always do (in a sense, they can't actually be good unless they are good within our reality). But of course this is revisionist nonsense.
The revolution that replaces existing reality with one that turns out to be actually better on a practical and moral level is a rare bird indeed, as 200 subsequent years of revolutions worldwide have clearly demonstrated. But how do you know your revolution isn't just such a good revolution that will be blessed by history? Apparently, you don't.
I'm skipping over Cooper's discussion of the tendency of religious "second-reality" movements in particular to assume an increasingly annihilatory character over time, because I'm just tucking into the part where he's going to talk about Islamism in particular (and, evidently, some specifics about the Abrahamic tradition in general, beginning with the implications of the Israelites' understanding of their covenant with God as history, which I imagine will connect up with the similar Islamic sense of history in some interesting ways.)
Update:
A reader objected that the idea of the divine right of kings was already pretty much dead by the time of the American Revolution.
C. replied: Predictably, it's even more complex than that. The Divine Right of Kings, formally speaking, is a rather late development of the theory of monarchy, going along with the appearance of absolutism and monarchies that were a great deal more powerful -- both in theory and in practice -- than the prior medieval types. Opposition to it crops up in odd places, like the Spanish political theorist (I'm blanking on the name) who published a justification of tyrannicide (and dedicated it to the newly crowned king, which I believe was Philip II's successor).
This should not denigrate the accomplishment of the Founders. The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance. And it certainly does seem to be true that it's hard for Americans to grasp other political mentalities, now that ours is so firmly established.
One could also look for examples of a revolutionary "replacement of reality" in religious history: the rise of Christianity for sure; possibly the Protestant Reformation.
I replied: The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance.
And indeed I did not mean to suggest that there was anything particularly sudden about the Declaration; obviously it was the outgrowth of a particular line of thought that had been developing for some time. I was noticing instead the fact that real-world actualization of it followed rather than preceded the assertion of its reality in the real world (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, etc. etc.) in precisely the same fashion Cooper finds in the methodology of many other imaginitive political and religious movements.
C. added: ...though of course there are obvious differences between the American Revolution and the Rise of Christianity on the one hand, and Stalin and Aum Shinrikyo on the other, even apart from the level of success. For starters, that business about abandoning commonsense morality and confounding predictions of the future with statements of intent has no obvious parallels.
And: I'll have to look up Cooper: it's a promising line of analysis. I've never read anything by Voegelin, but the strand he pulls out of Arendt is certainly present in The Origins of Totalitarianism (the bit about Stalin and the "dying" kulaks is taken directly) and seems like it might well apply. Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions, I'm not sure that's crucial to her argument.
(If the phrasing is too much in terms of "new realities" and "altering reality" I will have to wince a lot in the process of mental translation. Oh well.)
I replied: Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions,
As it happens, it seems likely to me that Islamism is a response to modern conditions, most specifically the particularly totalitarian and repressive character of movements that managed to acquire and hold on to power in the Middle East. There are antecedents to the basic theology of Islamism going back to the very beginning of Islam--indeed it understands itself as reproducing the original project of Muhammad in the modern era. But as Cooper points out, the most logical and literalist methodology suggested by the Koran for reenacting the early years of Islamic history would be a new hijra, and in fact early versions of Islamist movements did center on withdrawing from society to perfect a "pure" Islam in a committed community, often literally in the desert. But it is impossible to have a wholly separate self-governing society within a totalitarian state, or in any version of a modern nation-state, really, and these communities were uniformly attacked and repressed wherever they arose. Time to cut straight from hijra to jihad!
Of course, there are many other ways of looking at this; objectively the hijra movement was short-lived and pretty spotty, and would have been viewed suspiciously by any type of formal government; the original hijra occurred within the context of warring tribes each controlling their own patch, so all Muhammad had to do was find a host tribe. But it does seem that the justification for jihad, now, rests heavily on the sense of constant and pervasive attack on Islamists by the state, which objectively is very much the case.
I picked up a remaindered copy of Sacred Rage: the Wrath of Militant Islam by Robin Wright last weekend; it's one of those insta-books that appeared shortly after 9/11. I've gradually realized that avoiding this particular publishing category in the assumption that it was likely to be hysterical and unhelpful was probably a mistake, for one thing because it has meant that I don't know what everybody else believes about Islamism based on that type of publication, and am continually flummoxed and irritated by what seems to me to be the extremely weird and beside-the-point sort of things people say about it in the media and in conversation. But it turns out this is actually a book originally published in 1985 by a journalist who had spent a lot of time in Iran, with a couple of new chapters about Al Qaeda slapped on at the end.
It's from the era people are talking about in publications from the 1990s when they say "Everybody expected the Islamic revolution in Iran and Khomeinism to have huge influence and impact throughout the Muslim world, but then it didn't so much." Not least, it appears, because the Sunni version of Islamism draws heavily on the theology of medieval-era Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyya, who considered Shiism a form of apostasy. So it is that a 1981 conference Wright is warming up to do a chapter on, between Khomeinists and Sunni Islamists from several nations, which he describes as having been unjustly neglected by journalists at the time who only now are beginning to realize how important it was, has apparently been forgotten again, or at least hasn't been mentioned in any of the other more recent books and articles I've read.
The book begins by carefully noting that, even though Khomeini and the Iran-sponsored Shia Islamist group Hizbollah in Lebanon are at the top of the news right now for all of their attacks on Americans, Islamism doesn't really "come from" Iran or Shiism, then goes on to obsess about them anyway, much in the same way a current book might duly note that Islamism isn't merely an emanation of Saudi Arabia or Wahhabism before going on to talk about nothing else. (Incidentally, Wright does not use the term Islamism, which possibly had not yet been coined at the time. Instead he refers to "the Crusade," the nearest English language equivalent to jihad. The question of what effect different linguistic approaches to translating Islamic concepts has on how outsiders understand them would be an interesting one for somebody with a lot more time on their hands than myself). I wonder if the average person picking up this book would notice how it illustrates the contingent and ultimately self-preoccupied way Westerners tend to approach this subject, or simply conclude that Islamism "really" came mostly from Iran. (A book has recently been published on just that theory, actually, tracing it a little further back to mid-20th Century U.S. foreign policy there; it passed across my desk at the library a few weeks ago but I haven't read it).
In any case, we seem to have a persistent not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees problem in grappling with Islamism. It's a little dispiriting to me that, three full years past the point when this ideology finally captured the rapt attention of the Western public, many intelligent and educated people still consider "capturing Osama" and "destroying Al Qaeda" to be the alpha and omega of the war on Islamism and Islamist terrorism. It would of course be beneficial to capture Osama in particular; he is a very charismatic leader and therefore quite useful to the cause. But the primary contribution of Al Qaeda to the movement--that of bumping everything up one organizational tech level in terms of finally figuring out how to make the movement as transnational operationally as it has always been ideologically, in a way that greatly multiplies its effectiveness--is a permanent one that cannot be undone by capturing any number of Al Qaeda members, or even all of them.
There's a default sort of way of thinking about this, which tends to treat Al Qaeda as some kind of extremely insane and evil mafia or James-Bond-style supervillain organization, instead of as merely the latest iteration of a broad political movement that's been forming up for at least 100 years, and a major player in Middle Eastern politics since the late 1960s. I liked this quote Robin Wright uses from Marvin Zonis:
The message from Iran--no matter how bizarre or trivial it sounds on first, second, fourth, or thirty-ninth hearing--is in my opinion the single most impressive political ideology which has been proposed in the 20th Century since the Bolshevik Revolution … If we accept that Bolshevism is a remnant of the 19th Century, then I want to argue that we've only had one good one in the 20th Century--and it's this one … This powerful message will be with us for a very long time--no matter what happens to Ayatollah Khomeini.
… mostly because it partly illustrates why it's hard to talk honestly about how powerful Islamism really is. Clearly there's a bit of a danger that one's abstract admiration for it as an ideological construct--the way it answers every question, and ties up every loose end of Islamic history into a very neat and attractive package, and twists the lens on Islam itself, bringing the background suddenly into the foreground, in an oddly compelling way that makes many say "Ah, yes, this is what is always has been and was supposed to be all along," the way it neatly enlists the logic and rhetoric of secularist revolutionary movements and re-deploys it to denounce their perfidy and failure in the Muslim world--can turn into real approval. Zonis of course was not alone in seeing Khomeinism at the time as an "authentic" Muslim liberatory politics. (Events have largely overtaken that interpretation in the West, but not so much in the East). To me the really interesting question is not why any Muslims in the Middle East have embraced Islamism to the extent of being willing to kill and die for it, but instead, why haven't they all?
I don't really know the answer to that question, but I suspect part of it might lie in how extensively Westernized the Arab and Muslim world already is. And it turns out we're in pretty deep denial about that as well. A friend sent me a link a while back to an essay by Ian Baruma, in which the author, in discussing the civilizational aspects of the Western-Islamist conflict, simply puts Nazism in the "non-Western" category, which allows a fairly interesting discussion of Eastern perceptions of the West to end up a nonsense. What has the Middle Eastern experience with Western secularism actually been? How much does this experience account for Eastern "ignorance" of Western virtues? Because of course Nazism and Communism are no less iterations of Western thought and history for having been ultimately defeated within it. We are accustomed to thinking of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as "ours" because that's the way the Cold War sorted them, when the "other" was the Westernized Soviet Union rather than the East, but in any intellectual honest notion of a "clash of civilizations," Assad and Saddam and Nasser have been "ours" as well, along with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. I do understand the ideological need to define 20th Century Western totalitarianisms as "not us" for the purpose of preserving the gains we've made by defeating them, but it makes for one hell of a big blind spot (and perhaps a crucially enabling one) when discussing Middle Eastern politics in terms of "us" and "them." It also, I think, helps to obscure the obvious influence of the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th Century on Islamist thought; the eerily familiar tone and vocabulary of Islamist rhetoric jumps so clearly off the page when you read unvarnished quotations that you would think this would be impossible to conceal. Yet we still seem to prefer to see Islamists as "medieval" or "savage." I once answered a person who said to me "The terrorists are just not like us, you know," with "No, they're pretty much like us, it's just that they're like the Nazis of us," which certainly ended the conversation. I think we like to think of Nazis as almost supernatural devils too, or the outcome of some unaccountable episode of German mass hysteria, or something local and containable like that, rather than as part of our collective history as Westerners, emanating in a logical way from risks posed by our secular and rationalist world view. Perhaps our habitual trivialization of the Islamist enemy (whether as confined to a single shadowy group, or as consisting of a purely reactive phenomenon that we can somehow control with our own behavior) ultimately serves as a similar type of false comfort.
I picked up Ronald Radosh’s Commies: a Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left during a bout of insomnia last night. I was enjoying it mainly because Radosh’s family is like a cookie-cutter duplicate of the family of an old boyfriend of mine, right down to residence in the ILGWA coop in Chelsea and the dad (or uncle in Radosh’s case) in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. It was from the top of a pile of books my husband had assembled after I’d asked him earlier last night about what was up with those pro-fascist lefty intellectuals of the 20s-40s, anyway? before optimistically going off to bed.
Most intriguing fact so far: Pete Seeger and his Almanac Singers somewhat unfortunately released an album of anti-war songs the exact same week Hitler broke the Hitler-Stalin pact and invaded Russia. Whoopsy! The album was quickly recalled and Seeger published an apology to FDR, explaining he was "ready to turn my banjo in for something that makes a little more noise," i.e. a machine gun. Apparently only a few copies of Songs for John Doe survived the recall, but through the miracle of the net you can read a complete set of lyrics here. My personal favorite:
WASHINGTON BREAKDOWN (PETE SEEGER/LEE HAYS) (1941) (Tune: "Ida Red")
Franklin D., listen to me,
You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea,
'Cross the sea, 'cross the sea, You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea.
You may say it's for defense,
But that kinda talk that I'm against.
I'm against, I'm against,
That kinda talk ain't got no sense.
Lafayette, we are here, we're gonna stay right over here...
Marcantonio is the best, but I wouldn't give a nickel for all the rest...
J. P. Morgan's big and plump, eighty-four inches around the rump...
Wendell Wilkie and Franklin D., seems to me they both agree,
Both agreed, both agreed,
Both agree on killin' me.
You gotta love the big FU to France just dropped right in the middle there. Some things never change! The web page itself is worth reading, both for an explanation of references in the lyrics and for quotes from people describing how Seeger was breaking various anti-sedition laws with this record. Different times.
The Struggle of Muslim Women
Another one from the Manchester haul. I've written about this book before, but I don't think I got around to mentioning the collection of contributions from other writers at the end. The one that jumps off the pile is from a Muslim woman who works in social services in New York City, complaining that Muslim women who go on welfare rather than give up their face veils are making everybody look bad, and are probably kinda lazy too. Curioser and curioser.
Semites and Anti-Semites: an Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice
A concise overview of the history and practice of anti-Semitism, including the nature of anti-Semitism in Europe, the somewhat nonsensical meaning of the word "Semite" (and its coinage, along with "anti-Semite," by a social Darwinist in an attempt to put a "scientific" gloss on Jew-hating), the traditional position of and attitudes towards Jews in Islamic civilization, the importation and flowering of European-style anti-Semitism in the Middle East at the time of the creation of Israel and the end of WWII, and some notes on distinguishing anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism in the current discourse on the Israel/Palestine issue. Extremely useful for anyone trying to follow this discourse in the media and academia.
Mr. Bell Jar pointed me to this blog entry about whether or not Bush is demogoguing the war in an unseemly and unprecedented fashion with his latest batch of 9/11-related campaign ads (none of which I’ve seen yet: Bless you, TiVo). My own pulled quote from the David Broder article (which is hidden behind the Washington Post’s new super-annoying required registration) about the 1944 presidential election:
Item: FDR did not go to the Democratic convention in Chicago where he was nominated for a fourth term. A few days before it opened, he sent a letter to the chairman of the Democratic Party explaining his availability for the nomination. And what an explanation!
"All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River, to avoid public responsibilities and to avoid also the publicity which in our democracy follows every step of the nation's chief executive."
But, he wrote, "every one of our sons serving in this war has officers from whom he takes his orders. Such officers have superior officers. The President is the Commander in Chief, and he, too, has his superior officer -- the people of the United States. . . . If the people command me to continue in this office and in this war, I have as little right to withdraw as the soldier has to leave his post in the line."
Item: Roosevelt delivered his acceptance speech to the convention by radio from where? From the San Diego Naval Station, because, he said, "The war waits for no elections. Decisions must be made, plans must be laid, strategy must be carried out."
Item: If FDR's politicizing of his wartime role seems blatant, what does one say of the main speakers at the convention? Keynoter Robert Kerr, then governor of Oklahoma, declared that "the Republican Party . . . had no program, in the dangerous years preceding Pearl Harbor, to prevent war or to meet it if it came. Most of the Republican members of the national Congress fought every constructive move designed to prepare our country in case of war." So much for bipartisanship!
Item: Kerr was restraint personified compared with the convention's permanent chairman, Sen. Samuel Jackson of Indiana. As he contemplated the possibility of a Republican victory, he was moved to ask: "How many battleships would a Democratic defeat be worth to Tojo? How many Nazi legions would it be worth to Hitler? . . . We must not allow the American ballot box to be made Hitler's secret weapon."
As Mr. Bell Jar explains: "Thomas Dewey had a little mustache, Hitler had a little mustache. You do the math!
G. said: I wonder whether there was any real partisan split in war-fighting strategy in '44. Surely the opposition Republicans were not calling for the League of Nations to impose sanctions on Hitler instead of all this divisive combat.
I replied: It almost has to be a "don't change horses in midstream" argument on FDR's part, doesn't it? It's my impression that dissent was suppressed (for real) during WWII effectively enough that the Republican presidential candidate couldn't have been any kind of an anti-war candidate. On the other hand, what I actually know about Thomas Dewey couldn't fill a thimble.
A friend sent a link to a What He Said article for me from Paul Berman. I particularly like this bit (the article is presented in the form of a conversation):
”A lot of people honestly believe that Israel's problems with the Palestinians represent something more than a miserable dispute over borders and recognition--that Israel's problems represent something huger, a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else.
"I mean, look at the discussions that go on even among people who call themselves the democratic left, the good left--a relentless harping on the sins of Israel, an obsessive harping, with very little said about the fascist-influenced movements that have caused hundreds of thousands and even millions of deaths in other parts of the Muslim world. The distortions are wild, if you stop to think about them. Look at some of our big, influential liberal magazines--one article after another about Israeli crimes and stupidities, and even a few statements in favor of abolishing Israel, and hardly anything about the sufferings of the Arabs in the rest of the world. And even less is said about the Arab liberals-our own comrades, who have been pretty much abandoned. What do you make of that, my friend? There's a name for that, a systematic distortion--what we Marxists, when we were Marxists, used to call ideology."
And I got around to reading this excellent essay by Omer Bartov last night, ostensibly reviewing the new English translation of Hitler’s second book (unpublished during his lifetime). Bartov does a better job than I ever could of connecting the dots between Nazism and Islamism, primarily by quoting liberally from both. There are many quotable quotes but I liked this one best (probably because I tend to be preoccupied with academia for obvious reasons):
Throughout campuses in the United States, students associated with Arab and Islamic organizations, Christian groups, and the left carried flags, banners, and posters that were mostly focused on one theme: the equation between Zionism, or Israel, and Nazism. Banners portrayed a swastika joined by an equal sign to a Star of David and an Israeli flag featuring a swastika instead of a Star of David. Placards issued the call to "End the Holocaust," and proclaimed that "Zionism = racism = ethnic cleansing," and that "Zionism is Ethnic Cleansing," and that "Sharon = Hitler." A particularly ingenious sign asserted: "1943: Warsaw 2002: Jenin." While some summarized their views with the slogan "Zionazis," others warned, "First Jesus Now Arafat."
What makes this virulent anti-Semitism respectable is that it presents itself as anti-Nazism. To accomplish this sinister exculpatory purpose it needs only to declare that Zionism equals Nazism, just as the old canard of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world is legitimized by its association with American imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. That the vocabulary of this rhetoric is taken directly (whether consciously or not) from Nazi texts is so clear that one wonders why there is such a reluctance to recognize it. In part this is owed to ignorance, which is as rampant today in journalism and political commentary as it always was. In part this is owed to the fact that those who would most readily identify the provenance of these words and ideas are largely liberals, some of whom also happen to be Jewish, and thus are likely to be most harmed, both personally and ideologically, by making this identification. By exposing the anti-Semitic underbelly of this phenomenon, they would expose themselves as Jews and friends of Jews, and would open themselves to the argument that precisely their opposition to this phenomenon is the best proof of Jewish domination in the world.
Update: A reader asks, what is an appropriate comparison to Israel?
I replied: I tend to think of the creation of Israel in terms of the displacement of Native Americans with the European and then U.S. conquest of the North American continent. Except without the genocide, with a UN Charter, and smaller. Well actually maybe there's a better analogy out there. (Nearly every existing nation is chock full of people who shoved somebody else out at some point in history, so there's gotta be something).
D. replied: I've had my ass handed to me for proposing analogies in the past. Since there are no close analogies, what you pick depends entirely on what you're trying to emphasise. Rightly or wrongly, Native American removal immediately equates to "genocide" in most people's minds, so that's flat out. Actually, most people-shoving analogies founder on the fact that the Hebrews originated as a people in Palestine (or thereabouts), so, according to them, they're merely returning from exile rather than colonising new territories.
Of course, arguments like these are greatly complicated by the kind of interbreeding and acculturation that follows in the wake of most significant migrations. The wholesale replacement of peoples, like what happened in the New World and the Antipodes, was uncommon in the ancient world where there wasn't such a huge mismanage in tech levels and disease resistence. I wouldn't be in the least surprised to find that modern Palestinians have more genetic material in common with Moses' little band than most European Jews.
However, the kind of protesters you're talking about aren't interested in historical analogies for the greater situation or they wouldn't gravitate to the Nazis in the first place (who were seeking primarily to expand their "homeland", which they'd never left, not "reclaim" it). They want negative comparisons for the Israeli's behaviour. Their ideology won't let them choose the ethnic cleansers nearest to hand--Ba'athists and Stalinists (and, in both cases, you end up invoke genocide again)--so I'm not sure what that leaves. No other villain--not even Bolshies--excites the imagination as generally and as forcefully as the Nazis.
M. replied: Of course, arguments like these are greatly complicated by the kind of interbreeding and acculturation that follows in the wake of most significant migrations. The wholesale replacement of peoples, like what happened in the New World and the Antipodes, was uncommon in the ancient world where there wasn't such a huge mismanage in tech levels and disease resistence. I wouldn't be in the least surprised to find that modern Palestinians have more genetic material in common with Moses' little band than most European Jews.
Though genetics doesn't necessarily map to the way peoples are defined (by themselves or others) in any case. To pick an obvious example, Americanness has nothing to do with a genetic connection to previous generations. Traditionally, Judaism has defined membership primarily in terms of female descent, so that people of identical genetic relationship to previous Jewish generations may or may not be automatically Jewish depending on which line of ancestry the relationship runs.
However one gauges the connection of the Jewish people to Israel, percent of genes that came from around there seems like a weird way to do it. It's not, as far as I know, the basis of anyone's claims to the area. (Even if you look at it as a modified version of inheritance, there's no requirement that an heir be a genetic descendant, or that genetic descendants be heirs.) There's no serious question that modern Judaism is a community with a continuous history tracing back to pre-diaspora Israel/Judah/Judea.
Whether that in itself functions as a right to that land is a reasonable question, but it's one that was asked and answered in 1948. (Taking into account other factors in addition, of course.) That answer may no longer be convincing to some, but if we start disestablishing countries based on how and why they they began, I'm not sure where we're going to stop. (Compared to "it's empty except for all these Indians, so we might as well take it," Israel has a pretty solid legal title.)
D. replied: However one gauges the connection of the Jewish people to Israel, percent of genes that came from around there seems like a weird way to do it. It's not, as far as I know, the basis of anyone's claims to the area.
As I understand it, claims to territory are usually based, as you say, on legal inheritance and continuous occupation. On those criteria, the Israelis don't have much of a claim to most of the territory they're occupying, so it has to be based on some other factors. I've never been completely clear on what those are. Whenever I mention that other peoples (however defined) with historic possession of a territory aren't considered to have a legitimate claim to it anymore I've gotten, as I said, my ass handed to me.
But the history of the Jews really is unique in the world and, as I said, any attempt to relate it to that of other groups is going to founder somewhere. The closest analogy I can think of is the Armenians and they still haven't gotten Ararat back.
M. replied: Whenever I mention that other peoples (however defined) with historic possession of a territory aren't considered to have a legitimate claim to it anymore I've gotten, as I said, my ass handed to me.
The most recent historic possessors of Israel's territory prior to its establishment were the Ottomans (unless you're counting the League of Nations or the Brits). Its successor state, AFAIK, hasn't shown any recent problems with the existence of Israel. (Not that I'd expect them to have much of a brief for giving land back to its previous possessors, though there are probably a number of Greeks, particularly of Ionian ancestry, who wish they did.)
There are reasonable questions about what sorts of financial compensation, if any, are owed to people displaced by changing borders. (*If* said people choose to avail themselves of legal means of conflict resolution. If they resort to arms first, then arms will generally settle the matter. Cf. CSA sympathizers who make a big issue of the legal right of secession. The choice to assert the right by firing on Ft. Sumter rather than by bringing a Supreme Court action was the South's, and once you choose to try your cause by war I don't think you can go back to legal action just because the war went badly for you.) I note that thus far, we've rather limited our interest in compensating the previous owners of our own territory. In any case, changing the borders back is pretty much a nonstarter everywhere else in the world. Germany isn't getting East Prussia back. Oklahoma isn't going to be turned back into Indian Territory. Independent Granada isn't going to reappear on the map of Iberia. Despite grave temptation from all the relevant countries, it seems unlikely that we're going to put Kurdistan on the map either. Why is this one slip of land subject to so much more scrutiny than all the other involuntary border changes and population movements in the last couple of centuries?
D. replied: Why is this one slip of land subject to so much more scrutiny than all the other involuntary border changes and population movements in the last couple of centuries?
Probably because people are dying daily because of it. The Basques' grievances at being incorporated into the Spanish state used to get a lot more airtime when they were blowing up things regularly. Likewise Northern Ireland. Compensation for displaced Germans was a very emotional topic after the fall of the Wall and has had a huge impact on post-Communist relations between Germany and the Czech Republic and Poland. The organisations of Sudeten Germans, Danubian Swabians, East Prussians, etc. have powerful lobbies, but they're not in the habit of denotating themselves on buses, so their actions aren't reported on in the USA. (Also, they're quietly dying off, whereas Palestine, with its pre-modern demographics, is producing more hotheaded teenagers every day.) Issues of self-determination and territorial claims in ex-Yugoslavia pushed the Middle East out of the headlines for a time due to their higher body counts; I suspect they will again when the simmering conflict there inevitably turns hot.
None of these other issues has become a cause célèbre in the West (and I think you have your own suspicions why that is), but that doesn't mean they've been forgotten and ignored.
Mr. Bell Jar said: As sound as Bartov's argument is in sum, in fine he does need to deal with the fact that Zionism did, in fact, equal ethnic cleansing, in the aftermath of the 1948 War (see, for example, Binny Morris' books, and his recent interview with Haaretz, IIRC, which was all over the web), and in the minds of many of the "Eretz Israel" wackjobs it still does.
It's also important to remember that ethnic cleansing does not necessarily equal genocide: there was no genocide of Germans during their ethnic cleansing by Czechs and Poles from the Sudetenland and Silesia in 1946, and I don't think the evidence supports genocide against the Palestinians in 1948, so "Zionism = Nazism" is still completely invalid, not to mention obscene. (Although there is a disturbing trickle of Nazi-fascination in some right-wing Israeli circles, it's not remotely representative of the Israeli polity, and it's nothing compared to the full-blown Hitler-worship in mainstream Arab culture.)
Any comparisons with, say, our Indian Removal policies in the American West I'll leave for another day.
(Note: I started this entry back in October, and just got around to finishing it this morning. I was putting it off because I was going to go into the role of anti-Semitism in Islamist and Arab politics, but wandered so far off course that I've decided it would just be easier to do a separate entry about that sometime).
So the other night I read Dr. Kaukab Siddique’s The Struggle of Muslim Women, and it was being all wonderful, pitched to the level of an ordinary Muslim and with all the relevant authorities persuasively cited in the cause of Islamic feminism, and doing, I might add, an excellent job of smacking down the alleged wife-beating sura that gave Amina Wadud such a problem. His argument was so good that I was reflecting on how, if they had freedom of speech in most Islamic countries, the feminist interpretation of the Koran could win so easily in a fair fight; it’s all there in black and white, after all, straight from the mouth of the Prophet, crystal clear. And what a beautiful religion Islam is, really, when you understand it properly, and how much more auspicious for women the Koran was, in the beginning, than the Old and New Testaments were, and how all of this really can be put right, eventually.
Then I got to a collection of essays at the end, apparently articles from the New Trend magazine for American Muslims that Dr. Siddique publishes (the book itself was published in 1982), and the little drips and drabs of ignorable hints, scattered throughout the text, that he is something of an Islamist suddenly coalesced in a rather chilling interview (1979) with Azam Taleghani "on Women’s Role after the Islamic Revolution in Iran." The money quote:
Tell the Iranian students in America that this is part of the struggle against Zionism and Imperialism … Tell them also that we want to get hold of Mahnaz Abkhani of the so-called "Voice of Iranian Women" (under the Shah). She escaped to the U.S. They should help us to put her on trial.
For "trial" read "execution," if I’ve got the time period pegged correctly. Taleghani is the daughter of Ayatollah Taleghani, whose defense of the re-imposition of htjab is one of the primary documents included in the book on the women’s movement in Iran I reviewed earlier. When women were protesting the new hijab requirement just after the Revolution, he said:
The question of hejab is one of the manifestations of this movement and of this Revolution. No one forced women to come with hejab on demonstrations … But they themselves felt an Islamic responsibility to make this dress one of their Islamic and Iranian slogans, to show their genuine feelings and to show it to the world. And the world marvelled at them. And now whether they want to wear a scarf or not, no one is forcing them, we are requesting it. Ayatollah Khomeini has not expressed it in terms of imposition and force either. But we want to show that there has been a Revolution, a profound change, in our offices and ministries. For this reason I ask of our women not to be played upon by others, not to make such a hue and cry. And I repeat again and again that in Islam, and in Islamic Republic all their rights will be protected.
This being the initial "oh, no, it’s only for government workers" line the Ayatollahs adopted in the face of large protests, gradually extending the requirement to women in all spheres of life over the next year, failure of women to dress Islamically becoming punishable by 30 lashes in due course of time.
In a second interview, conducted in 1982, Azam asks Dr. Siddique what he thinks of the progress of the revolution, and he says, in part:
By and large the developments are positive. The Islamic militancy and general mobilization of the people seems to be at a qualitatively much higher level. Islam has become much more important. There are, however, certain negative trends which can prove very damaging in the future. 1. The MKO has created a situation where criticism of the government has become very difficult. Any criticism can arouse suspicion. The revolution is winning the war with Iraq, alhamdulillah, but after the war the government officials will be the heroes of the revolution and it will be even more difficult to criticize them. Unless the revolutionary institutions work hard to open channels for expression of genuine criticism, freedom, which was one of the three planks of the revolutionary platform, will be stifled permanently. Freedom has never survived the stages of counterrevolutionary terror and war in any revolution previous to this.
He goes on to complain also of the apparent evolution of a state Shi’ism, as opposed to unification of Sunni and Shia Muslims through the Revolutionary apparatus. Azam ignores the point about freedom, but acknowledges the influence of Shi’ism, concluding "However, you should know that Sunni in Iran are cooperating more and more with the revolution." For a given value of "cooperating," no doubt.
Many well-intentioned people clung to the idea that the Islamic Revolution in Iran was something other than what it was for a surprisingly long time. Reading progressives and feminists commenting on it through the early 1980s, I never know whether to condemn their apologism, or break my heart for their naivete and wishful thinking.
So what does Dr. Siddique think of the Islamic Revolution now? A Google search turns up a mostly unremarkable 9/11/03 interview in The Final Call, in which he voices opposition to U.S. policy re: Iraq and Israel and the imprisonment of certain Muslim activists by the U.S., but those sentiments appear to be nearly universal among politically active (and non-Iraqi) Muslim expats, so little may be deduced from it. The current web address of New Trend magazine, however, is given at the end of the article (www.newtrendmag.org) The web page of Jamaat al-Muslimeen, the organization Siddique endorses throughout his book, appears to have stopped updating early in 2001, and most of the links are dead, but the New Trend site is still very much alive. On this site, the "boycott" page turns out to be about Israel only (and what was I expecting, Amina Lawal? Well, yes, actually.) At the top of the page, an "in memoriam" photo of the mother of Wafa Idriss (the first female Palestinian suicide bomber--woo, feminism) holding a photo of her daughter. Beneath that, a large graphic illustrating the Blood Libel (a mutilated Palestinian baby between two halves of a hamburger bun, his/her blood draining into Coke and Pepsi bottles; bloody American and Israeli hands reaching into the frame to menace the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Ka’ba in the background). The Links page includes, nestled among links to al-Jazeera and this quite nice page about Arab contributions to the arts & sciences throughout history, a link to "Taliban & Mujahideen News," at www.allahuakhbar.com, no longer working, go figure. I don’t find any specific references to Iran at the New Trend site, but I think my question has been answered anyway.
So, is there really any such thing as a "moderate Islamist?" And by Islamist, I mean one who believes in instituting Islam as government and politics, not just one who adopts that perverse interpretation of Islam which has come to be known as "fundamentalist" (a very bad misnomer, given how far away from the Book it really is) or "conservative" (another misnomer, given how far away from actual Islamic tradition it really is). The two are frequently related, but theoretically separable. The Taliban and Khomeini were both; Dr. Siddique is the former only. Fatima says "no," and I am inclined to agree, not because I think all Islamists are lying about their real purpose or intentions--I have no reason to think Siddique is not perfectly sincere, for example--but because I think political Islam will inevitably trend towards the despotic and repressive no matter how it is begun.
(And actually if your definition of "moderate Islamist" is only "one who does not endorse the use of terrorism in pursuing Islamist political aims," I believe we may stop wondering about whether or not Dr. Siddique is one right now).
I have never made a particular study of Marxism, or Soviet politics and history. But obviously there is something about Communism as a political system that produces, like clockwork, in every instance, the killing of people in numbers that strain human capacity to even conceptualize them. I used to wonder why that was, exactly, since obviously the agenda of socialism doesn’t kill people. You have all these democratic European countries, they have socialist parties that get elected from time to time, and the socialists tend to do a lot of wealth redistribution through taxes and welfare programs and work regulations and whatnot. It seems to cause economic stagnation, but if you prioritize the equality of the slices over the size of the pie, it’s all good, and anyway they are still free people who may change course whenever they want. So the problem is in the structure of power in a country that has constituted itself as a Communist state. And I think the X Factor of Evil there is the very notion of a government that, in itself, is supposed to always already embody the unitary will of the people, as the very basis of its legitimacy, because this is of course impossible. It would be impossible in a group of 20 people let alone 20 million. My old boyfriend, known as "anthro boy" to some of my friends, told me once that in every single tribe or group of people on the face of the earth, there is always at least one person who doesn’t buy the religion or general worldview of the group. You could be talking to some little bunch of people in the depths of the Amazonian jungle whose only contact with the outside world is through anthropologists, and there will always be one guy who takes the anthropologist aside and says "You know what they were saying to you earlier, about the river god? That’s all a load of crap that somebody made up a long time ago."
Since the government cannot actually be made to match "the people," "the people" must somehow be made to match the government that supposedly automatically embodies its will. Hence, some trimming is in order from time to time. The citizenry learns to attend the rallies, get the voting card stamped, keep its head down. Or else.
How does a government that is supposed to be enacting the will of God work, exactly? Well, it cannot really be democratic, for one thing, since obviously human beings cannot write the law better than God can. And obviously the selection of persons most qualified to discern the will of God cannot be left to the caprices of election politics, those popularity contests between scheming political parties and self-serving politicians. Instead they must be chosen from among the community of religious scholars, and their decisions may not be second-guessed by any secular human authority. Not that anyone would try to second-guess the will of God. As Ayatollah Taleghani explained, it is not that anyone would force Muslim women to wear hijab; it is that Muslim women want to wear hijab. If there are non-Muslims, apparently, in the Islamic Republic, then that is a separate issue altogether and will be dealt with in due course.
In traditional Islam, the concept of the Ummah lies, in Western terms, somewhere between "flock" and "nation." In political Islam, it becomes analogous to "Volk" or "proletariat," as well it might do, given the tremendous influence of Nazism and Marxism on Islamist intellectuals. The theory is that properly Islamic institutions will unleash the power of the Ummah, allowing it to unite politically and rule the word as God intended. Ultimately, then, the Islamist state derives its political authority from its supposed stewardship of the Ummah; its basis in God's law is both the justification and the proof of this stewardship. The role of force in maintaining political power, however, places the burden of maintaining this relationship on the ruled rather than the ruler. The Ummah must be the kind of Ummah that justifies the rule of the Mullahs, just as Hitler needed the Volk to be his kind of Volk and the proletariat had to act like the proletariat as theorized.
The centrality of personal status and sex laws in Islam make it an excellent instrument of totalitarian power, authorizing a limitless surveillance of private life by the state, or, more likely, by one's neighbors seeking favor from the state. Wielding this instrument is always job one in an Islamist state; doing so both places the citizenry in a permanent state of disadvantage and susceptibility to persecution by the state, and enacts the state's Islamic "authenticity," not only through the supposedly divinely ordained oppression of women and denial of personal freedom, but also through the resolutely and self-consciously anti-Western character of the revisionist "conservative" version of Shari'ah law. Dr. Siddique appears to believe that there would be some room for disagreement about what the law is in an Islamist state; I think this is naïve, and more importantly, ahistorical, as we now know what an Islamist state looks like in Shia (Iran), Sunni (the Taliban's Afghanistan) and even Sufi (Sudan) hands. Basically, all the goddamn same, at least as measured by the status of women. An actual Islamist revolution would transform Dr. Siddique from an ally in the Islamist cause into a dissident within its ranks, and he would likely be among the first to swing.
C. said: ...obviously there is something about Communism as a political system that produces, like clockwork, in every instance, the killing of people in numbers that strain human capacity to even conceptualize them. I used to wonder why that was, exactly, since obviously the agenda of socialism doesn’t kill people.... So the problem is in the structure of power in a country that has constituted itself as a Communist state. And I think the X Factor of Evil there is the very notion of a government that, in itself, is supposed to always already embody the unitary will of the people, as the very basis of its legitimacy, because this is of course impossible.
I don't disagree with this, I just don't think there's only one X Factor of Evil. One of the things I took away from Arendt on totalitarians is the idea that they disregard mere human laws in favor of a superior source of law and morality -- History, for communists; Nature, for fascists. This tendency is in tension with the idea of representing The People, and it fairly often ends up dominating. For communism, boilerplate about false consciousness, objective class interests and so forth is the bridge I remember seeing. God, of course, outranks even History and Nature.
There are probably other X Factors, too. The ordinary corrupting influence of power, for starters.
How does a government that is supposed to be enacting the will of God work, exactly? Well, it cannot really be democratic, for one thing, since obviously human beings cannot write the law better than God can.
This is the political legitimacy problem that has plagued Islam for pretty much its entire history -- if God is the legislator, where does that leave human-made laws?
You will commonly see talk of how Islamic civilization hasn't really had any generally-accepted idea of legitimate government since the Caliphate fell. I actually think it's worse than that: in my reading, the Caliphate had legitimacy problems too.
I replied: You will commonly see talk of how Islamic civilization hasn't really had any generally-accepted idea of legitimate government since the Caliphate fell. I actually think it's worse than that: in my reading, the Caliphate had legitimacy problems too.
That seems quite true to me; it was certainly implied in the historical review of the relationship between religion and political authority in the lands of Islam in that Zubaidi book that was ripped from my hands the other day.
And you know, really, even the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs had legitimacy problems, or so one may gather from all the assassinations and whatnot. I've read a few sources who consider the assassins from this period (and specifically the Khawarij (sp?)) the ancestors of Islamism and Islamic fundamentalism (but I'm not sure if I completely agree with that; it seems a little pigeon-holey). And Zubaidi was arguing that the Umayyads regarded themselves as properly Islamic Caliphs as well, and perhaps were only denounced as usurpers by later generations (perhaps, I speculate, as a way of fixing blame on someone for the Shia/Sunni split? Or for some other reason I can't even fathom right now?)
