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Posted August 28, 2006
re: anti-imperialism

My enemies' enemies are my friends' enemies' enemies. If that were not confusing enough, they all sound alike.

On Remaining Unashamed
of Anti-imperialism

Wirkman Virkkala

Watching C-SPAN's BookTV last night, the TV flickered, and I wondered at the extent of George Lakoff's witless nincompoopery. He does see a few things that his fellow so-called progressives don't, yes. But he misses vast continents of thought that won't cram into his little model of the moral imagination. For instance: he neglects libertarians almost entire. They're not on his map.

It's not that Lakoff couldn't think his way out of a paper sack, it's that he won't think himself out of a simple one-dimensional mapping of thought. I suspect this is a matter of choice, not simple-mindedness; keeping the political spectrum simple is a way to continue to marginalize (as much as possible) libertarian, anarchist, and republican ideas. But perhaps I'm wrong.

Still, even discounting his reiteration of tired one-dimensionalism, how long can one really talk about the differences between political paternalism and maternalism as the sources of right and left respectively? How many books can one crank out repeating and elaborating the same theme? Yes, conservatives and progressives do not share the same outlook. Yes, one needs to learn to reach out beyond one's narrow vision to convince others. Progressives, the road to progress is clear: learn from conservatives!

I'm underwhelmed. Paternalism vs. maternalism? Both ideological sets are more complex than that.

But that's not his worst sin. Lakoff's new book Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea looks utterly witless. Lakoff, on a book tour, gave a talk on the subject of his book, which was presented on BookTV. He didn't entice me to purchase his book. What does he have to show for the effort? He merely demonstrated that his admittedly expansive understanding of freedom has expanded so wide that it no longer means freedom at all. Freedom from want becomes economic support, for example, economic security. So when he talks about the alleged trade-off between freedom and security, in the context of terrorism, his talk lurches preciously close to gibberish.

Still, Lakoff's enterprise came to mind when I received this strange mass email from Eric Dondero:

Subject: Huge embarrassment for Paleo & Anti-War libertarians; Larry Pratt says Lieberman win critical
Wow! What a HUGE BLOW to the Paleo-libertarian movement. One of the MAJOR HEROS of the Paleo-libertarians has come out STRONGLY in favor of the War on Islamo-Fascism.
In an Editorial Larry Pratt, Christian libertarian, and longtime Chairman of the well-respected libertarian group Gun Owners of America opines that a Lieberman win in November against the Islamist-friendly Ned Lamonter Leftists is critical to survival of America.
Pratt has been a diehard supporter of Congressman Ron Paul in his campaigns, and his daughter AnnaMarie has worked for the Congressman for 8 years. He's also a close friend of Lew Rockwell of LewRockwell.com.
Could a Paleo-libertarians for Lieberman be in the works?

I've come across this kind of writing from right-wing activists before. Dondero calls himself a libertarian, and his website is titled mainstreamlibertarianism.com, but his style is so rightist. (Of course, Dondero makes Lakoff shine like Aristotle.)

How do I mean?

It's not the paternalism. It's the macho honor-mongering. Perhaps Lakoff would call that a corollary.

Whatever it is, I've seen it a lot amongst the activists on the right. Shame is a big part of how they think, a big part of what they do. They want to embarrass their ideological enemies. And it's more than that: they conceive of winning as a shaming of the other. If something happens to bolster up their side or position (no matter how trivial), they immediately bring the shame element up to rub their enemies' noses in it.

It's so very weird. Every time I read Mr. Dondero, I get this feeling I've been transported back to sixth-grade recess.

Now, I'm technically an anti-war libertarian, one of Dondero's enemies. I'm not a Paleo, of course, but because I oppose imperialism and I oppose the war in Iraq I qualify, in his mind, as being on the anti-war side. Now, I do not now oppose (nor have I ever opposed) a calculated counter-offensive against Islamic terrorist support system that aided in the attack on the World Trade Center and other American sites on 9/11. I just oppose the war in Iraq, in part for being a muddying of the ideological waters, in part for being started for patently false and deceptive reasons, and in part for being simply imprudent, in both conception and execution.

It's not that I don't take Islamic terrorists seriously. It's actually that I take them very seriously. My complaint about the Bush administration's neo-con, neo-imp contingent is that they don't take the threat from Islam seriously enough.

The basic idea that justifies Islamic radicals' terrorism is a principle of imperialism. I oppose imperialism whether promoted by our side or theirs . . . or anyone's.

So, what to do?

Well, it's interesting to see how narrow-minded rightists weigh off on this tricky subject. Take the writing of this Larry Pratt whose support for Lieberman is somehow supposed to embarrass me (because I'm against the current war, implies Dondero):

The Democrat Left's support of terrorists derives from self-hatred. They are convinced that Americans, and Westerners in general (but also including African Christians who were slaughtered without a peep from the Left), are the source of violence and resentment in the world. Because we have caused the problem, they believe, we deserve to be attacked. This belief is so deep set that the Left believes self defense and retaliation are morally unacceptable.

I suppose somebody somewhere conforms to this view. The Democratic Left, though, lock, stock and barrel? Well, that would make them easy to oppose and vote against, wouldn't it? The position as above described is so embarrassingly stupid that it would be easy to vote for anyone who opposes them. Vote Lieberman! Yeah!

But an honest person has to wonder whether Pratt's analysis might not be something more akin to psychological projection than the result of careful analysis.

Since I'm not a Democrat, or on the Left, it would require a great deal of research for me to verify or disverify Pratt's outrageous thesis. But I do share with the anti-war left an opposing viewpoint on the Bush administration's foreign policy, so I'll recast the calumny as if against me:

support of terrorists

Doesn't this really mean opposition to American counter-terrorism methods? I don't support terrorists, and I don't know any leftist who does, either. But we do, not infrequently, attack various Bush administration counter-terrorist practices, such as torture, detainment without Constitutional protections, spying on American citizens without warrant, etc. These attacks on counter-terrorism are intrepreted (nothing more) as support of terrorists. But the interpretation does some violence to both the intention and the wider meaning of our oppposition. I approve of quite a number of anti-terrorist measures. To say that because I oppose some forms of anti-terrorism I thus become a supporter of terrorism is the argument of a hyperbolist, if not a liar.

derives from self-hatred. They are convinced that Americans, and Westerners in general (but also including African Christians who were slaughtered without a peep from the Left), are the source of violence and resentment in the world.

I have a simple rule: when someone uses the concept of self-hatred, my nostrils flare for the tell-tale whiff of a base argumentative gambit; when someone talks about self-hatred, that person is alsmost always grasping at straws . . . or foisting a strawman into the argument. To hate one's government because of its foreign policy is not an example of self-hatred. I am not the government; neither are you. It is, after all, possible for a person to stick to standards of justice with greater constance and clarity than do the people in power. To make the charge of self-hatred, here, is to engage in a collectivist sense of identification. You are defined by the group you belong to, and can have no values outside that group. This is such a vile transvaluation that it must be attacked by all reasonable men.
As for America being a source for violence, and the cause of much resentment, of course this is true. To deny it is to deny that the sky is blue and the sea, wet. But is it the only source? That, too, is so absurd that one wonders whether anyone can hold it, even on the numskull left.
Perhaps some, by only opposing American violence and injustice, are perceived by others to believe this, even if they don't. Such are the perils of democracy. There's not much a citizen in America can do about injustices in Iran. But we do have a say about our own government. So it is practical to protest our own government's actions, not so practical to protest Iran's. And because of this there arises an illusion that you'd expect intelligent people to discount when dealing with critics of American policy. And yet they rarely do.

Because we have caused the problem, they believe, we deserve to be attacked.

Who's this we, Kemosabe? Once again, the danger of the inclusive pronoun when dealing with something so foreign as the U.S. government. But hey, I'm an American, so I'll admit to being a part of the we of American society, and thus glibly talk of our government. But the acts of said government are in no part mine. Too bad the Islamic radicals can't see that. But then, our government tends to unwarranted lumping of disparate groups, elsewhere.
Surely some realism is called for. American government policies have caused problems in the Mid-East. Had we not supported this regime over that, discouraged democracy in this case, encouraged it in that, and in general riled up the locals, we would not have been attacked. It's pretty simple. But it gets complex, I agree. Those riled up with resentments latch onto the worst elements of their vile religion, and thus embrace a theocratic imperialism. Because they are comparatively powerless, they resort to terrorism. Once this dynamic is started, it's not easy to stop. One could escalate it, but when dealing with fanatics, this can lead to Armageddon scenarios (just ask the FBI guys responsible for the destruction of the Branch Davidians at Waco). The best thing to do is to remain a tight focus on one's enemies, and then back off from giving more reasons for offense.
That is, the best thing to do is the opposite of the Iraq strategy, a conquest doomed from the start.
But did America deserve to be attacked on 9/11, and in that manner? No. I don't know anyone who believes this, though there might be some anti-Americans amongst us who do so hold that opinion. What most of us anti-imperialists believe, though, is that, though not justified, the attack was explicable and avoidable. There's a big difference here, but right-wingers have a great trouble in seeing that difference.

This belief is so deep set that the Left believes self defense and retaliation are morally unacceptable.

I believe in self-defense, of course. I even support this in the intercourse of nations and states. But I don't pretend that any offense conceived as retaliation amounts to self-defense. And this is where the right so often errs, in indiscriminateness of counter-attack.

I don't know the Left nearly so well as Larry Pratt and Eric Dondero pretend to. But, witnessing their skewed logic, I suspect they know the Left less well than I. To people so little accustomed to careful argument, one wonders if they know anything.

Certainly, directing their criticism of the anti-war Left to little-ol' anti-imperialist me, I detect the basest of rhetoric and the most simple-minded oppositional mentality in their stance. As usual with warmongers, we see simple-mindedness run amok.

Their method is clear: They suspect the worst, and impute that worst to their opponents. It's quite fun, and makes one feel so good. They're evil, we're good, nyah-nyah-nyah. But what is the reality, here? The old danger of in-group/out-group dynamics all over again; the tropes are so cliché that there's no excuse for a civilized person not to be on guard against them.

How dangerous is such thought? Very. It is even dangerous to impute the worst to our enemies. How do I mean?

Well, our current enemies are not leftists, they are Islamic fundamentalist radicals. They are a vile bunch, holding to a religion evil at core, one that supports an imperialism of conquest and hegemony. But it is one thing to hold, in one's mind, one vile notion amongst many. Every person I know is guilty of this. Nearly any person can be cajoled by a clever dialectician into horrid positions of murder and mayhem, for nearly every person holds that some coercion is fine. Everything else is context.

So we have to keep control of our contexts.

With our enemies, we have to gain some purchase on their contexts.

With regards to disgruntled Muslims, we have to make sure we are not the most obvious targets of their religious ire. That we have supported the unjust, terrorizing Saud government alone has spurred many a poor, beleaguered Muslim into a more radical stance. All Muslims, it may be, hold opinions that could lead them to support imperial conquest. But most do not emphasize that portion of their religion. They emphasize other portions.

Same goes for Christians, to a lesser extent. Any fundamentalist Christian holds dangerous ideas about witches, for example. It would be easy to whip them up into an eradication policy regarding pagans: suffer not a witch to live; here's a self-proclaimed witch; let's kill her! It's possible. It's happened in the past, numerous times.

But, nicely, most Christians have been civilized by a rule of law and the plenty of capitalism. They are too committed to this world to make waves and try to institute some sort of theocracy. After all, why hasn't Gary North stoned his adulterous neighbors? Well, he'd have too much to lose!

That's what we want to happen to Islam. Civilize it. To fundamentalists, that may look like corruption, but that's OK. Once their own lands are civilized and prosperous and the people have too much to lose by sticking to the medieval notions of Mo, the First Stooge, then mass terrorism becomes a non-starter.

Fighting terrorism is not a matter of tit for tat. It's a matter of being sneakier than the poor besotted bastards who would take their own lives in order to kill others. Escalation of violence merely plays into the hands of those who choose violence as the method to extend the empire of their religion. We are dealing with fanatics, and the most important thing is not to breed more fanatics. Fanaticism must be marginalized as much as possible. Its life blood must be sapped below the vine at the root.

Our enemies may be vile. Yes, indeed. That's why it is incumbent on our government not to turn potential enemies into active enemies.

I'm not sure if this is what the so-called Left understands when it opposes the Bush administration war on terror and the undeclared War Against Islamic Imperialism. I'd like to think that, but I'm really not sure.

My critique of the current war policy rests on a fairly complicated social theory, one that I see very little appreciation of on the Left. Their complexity in social theory tends to obscurantism, not sophistication. We must be aware of secondary and tertiary effects of policy. One must understand that not every regulation has its public, putative effect, and that many regulations get sub rosa support for reasons that look more malign than beneficent. In vast areas of human experience, the Thomas Theorem holds: unreal causes can have real effects; there is a power in belief, and that power must be watched like a hawk.

Especially when it comes to the perennial in-group/out-group alignments. This is not where humanity shines in its glory; it's where the gory triumphs.

Right-wing intellectuals pride themselves on their sophisticated understanding of social phenomena. Unfortunately, even one of their brightest economists, one who supports free markets because he understands the complexity of the social world and the limitations of human perfectability — that is, Thomas Sowell — regularly makes a fool of himself regarding foreign policy. Only the simple ideas strain through his ideological sieve on such issues.

Why bring up Sowell? It's not gratuitous. About the differences of left and right on a great issue such as the ideologies, Sowell has contributed no small part to our understanding. He does not distinguish between paternalism and maternalism, but between the constrained and unconstrained visions of human nature, and the social theories that rest upon these visions.

But, as he himself admitted in his book on the subject, the visionary gulf does not quite run clearly down the line, left and right. There are examples of both visions on both sides.

Which is what I would expect: Both sides partake of the same errors, only on different subjects. So what I see of Left and Right is that each engages in the same abuses of argument to support its less defensible positions.

Take the paragraph I dissected of Larry Pratt.

Both leftists and rightists regularly attack each other by hyperbolizing their opposition's ideas. Leftist critics of right-wing-approved counter-terrorism are called, by rightists, supporters of terrorism. And yet when their man wasn't in office, right-wingers complained of counter-terrorism techniques when Bill ("I lied and aspirin factory workers died") Clinton bombed a supposed Osama site near Khartoum. Put their own man in office, however, and they become unable to see any justice to any complaint about any American bombing for any reason any how.

Similarly with the self-hating charge. Here a right-winger engaged in this vile collectivist snarl. Usually we see this from leftists. This is most common when leftists try to keep black intellectuals back on the farm, ideologically. A black man who won't vote Democrat used to be dubbed, with some regularity, a self-hating black. Nonsense and poppycock, or course; he or she simply has enough independence of mind to see through leftist nonsense. Similarly, a Jew who opposes Israeli policy, or a woman who opposes some feminist organization, used to each receive the brand of self hatred. This kind of charge is often made with a pretense of a sophisticated psychology, but it rarely comes off as anything more than a whip to smack down dissent.

George Lakoff sees distinct mindsets when he looks at conservatives and progressives. Maybe there's something to this. But what I usually see is nothing other than loyalty to different groups defended by the standard tropes and fallacies of base rhetoric and slippery dialectic.

Am I ashamed of them? Well, if I used such techniques with frequency, I'd be ashamed of myself. But I try to avoid such techniques of argumentation. If others use them, the shame's not on me, but on them.

Similarly, if someone I once agreed with changes his opinion, my feeling is not one of embarrassment, unless I too change my mind (at which point I might be embarrassed for a past error). When I judge someone else in error, shame has nothing to do with what I feel. Usually I'm merely saddened by others' error . . . or else exasperated at their stupidity, or sheer cussedness. The idea that other people's opinions would directly bear on my own sense of self and standing strikes me as childish, odd in a thinking adult.

This is elementary individualism, Mr. Dondero.

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