On Apr 19, 6:51 am, Sound of Trumpet
mailhaven.com>
quoted, in part:
> I am not a progressive, but I'm not a conservative either.
Oh, dear. I voted for Bob Stanfield, so that makes me the opposite of
you.
> Where does this idea that, if NPR is wrong, Fox News must be right,
> come from? They can't both be right, because they contradict each
> other. But couldn't they both be wrong? I don't mean slightly wrong, I
> don't mean each is half right and each is half wrong, I don't mean the
> truth is somewhere between them, I mean neither of them has any
> consistent relationship to reality.
Each of them could be right occasionally. Yes, that is something I do
agree with.
> Think of conservatism as a sort of mental disease. Virus X,
> transmitted by Fox News much as mosquitoes transmit malaria, has
> infected the brains of half the American population - causing them to
> believe that George W. Bush is a "regular guy," global warming isn't
> happening, and the US Army can bring democracy to Sadr City.
Global warming definitely is happening.
> There's a seductive symmetry to this theory: it solves the problem of
> how one half of a society, which (by global and historical standards)
> doesn't seem that different from the other, can be systematically
> deluded while the other half is quite sane. The answer: it isn't.
Yes, conservatives and liberals are wrong about different things; at
any particular point in history, the things about which one or the
other of them are deluded may be more important.
> (It's interesting how much simpler American politics becomes once you
> look at it through this tribal lens. You often see this in Third World
> countries - there will be, say, the Angolan People's Movement and the
> Democratic Angolan Front. Each swear up and down that they work for
> the future of the entire Angolan people. But you notice that everyone
> in the APM is an Ovambo, and everyone in the DAF is a Bakongo.)
>
> The status relationship between Brahmins and Townies is clear:
> Brahmins are higher, Townies are lower. When Brahmins hate Townies,
> the attitude is contempt. When Townies hate Brahmins, the attitude is
> resentment. The two are impossible to confuse. If Brahmins and Townies
> shared a stratified dialect, the Brahmins would speak acrolect and the
> Townies mesolect.
Quite accurate.
> Look at the entire lifecycle of conservatism. The whole thing stinks.
> Virus X replicates in the minds of uneducated, generally less
> intelligent people. Townies are, in fact, the same basic tribe that
> gave us Hitler and Mussolini. Its intellectual institutions, such as
> they are, are subsidized fringe newspapers, TV channels, and weirdo
> think-tanks supported by eccentric tycoons. In government, the
> bastions of conservatism are the military, whose purpose is to kill
> people, and any agency in which corporate lobbyists can make a buck,
> eg, by raping the environment.
>
> Whereas virus Y, if "virus" is indeed the name for it, replicates in
> the most distinguished circles in America, indeed the world: the top
> universities, the great newspapers, the old foundations such as
> Rockefeller and Carnegie and Ford. Its drooling zombies are the
> smartest and most successful people in the country, indeed the world.
> In government it builds world peace, protects the environment, looks
> after the poor, and educates children.
>
> The truth of the matter is that progressivism is the mainstream
> American tradition. This is not to say it hasn't changed in the last
> 200 years, or even the last 50: it has. However, if we look at the
> ideas and ideals taught and studied at Harvard during the life of the
> country, we see a smooth progression up to now, we do not see any
> violent reversals or even inflection points, and we end up with good
> old modern-day progressivism. Of course, by "American tradition" we
> mean the New England tradition - if the Civil War had turned out
> differently, things might have gone otherwise. But when you realize
> that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a novel about a hippie commune 150
> years ago, you realize that nothing is new under the sun.
>
> As Machiavelli put it: if you strike at a king, strike to kill.
> Conservatism, which is barely 50 years old, which has numerous shabby
> roots, can be mocked and belittled and scorned. The difference between
> criticizing conservatism and criticizing progressivism is the
> difference between criticizing Mormonism and criticizing Christianity.
> You can't doubt progressivism just a little. You have to doubt it on a
> grand scale.
One could be a disappointed progressivist - one that feels the
progressivists of 50 years ago had it right, but those of today have
gone too far.
> One: what's up with the Third World?
>
> Here, for example, is a Times story on the fight against malaria.
> Often, as with politicians, journalists speak the truth in a fit of
> absent-mindedness, when their real concern is something else. If you
> read the story, you might notice the same astounding graf that I did:
>
> And the world changed. Before the 1960s, colonial governments and
> companies fought malaria because their officials often lived in remote
> outposts like Nigeria’s hill stations and Vietnam’s Marble Mountains.
> Independence movements led to freedom, but also often to civil war,
> poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care.
>
> Let's focus on that last sentence. Independence movements led to
> freedom, but also often to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and
> the collapse of medical care.
>
> I often find it useful to imagine that I'm an alien from the planet
> Jupiter. If I read this sentence, I would ask: what is this word
> freedom? What, exactly, does this writer mean by freedom? Especially
> in the context of civil war, poverty, and corrupt government?
>
> What we see here is that independence movements - which the writer
> clearly believes are a good thing - led to some very concrete and
> very, very awful results, in addition to this curious abstraction -
> freedom. Clearly, whatever freedom means in this particular context,
> it's such a great positive that even when you add it to civil war,
> poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care, the
> result still exceeds zero.
If one isn't an alien from Jupiter, one would know that the freedom
being spoken of is the freedom of not being under the control of a
foreign power. That is only real freedom for the people who live there
if a democratic government comes into being. A conscientious colonial
regime is better than a dictatorial regime.
But some colonial regimes weren't conscientious as to the well-being
of their people. The Belgian Congo, now Zaire, might be considered as
a case in point.
> In the sense of doing its own thing and never, ever needing a bottle,
> there is actually one remarkably independent country in the world.
> It's called Somaliland, and it is not recognized by anyone in the
> international community. The Wikipedia page for Somaliland's capital,
> Hargeisa, achieves a glorious level of unintentional high comedy:
>
> Aid from foreign governments was non-existent, making it unusual
> in Africa for its low level of dependence in foreign aid. While
> Somaliland is de-facto as an independent country it is not de-jure
> (legally) recognized internationally. Hence, the government of
> Somaliland can not access IMF and World Bank assistance.
This is unusual. I remember seeing Somaliland on maps. I will have to
read up on this.
> Unlike independence, I think everyone pretty much agrees on the
> definition of nationalism. Nationalism (from the Latin natus, birth)
> is when people of a common linguistic, ethnic, or racial heritage feel
> the need to act collectively as a single political entity. German
> nationalism is when Germans do it, Vietnamese nationalism is when
> Vietnamese do it, black nationalism is when African-Americans do it,
> American nationalism is when Pat Buchanan does it.
> How
> can you be a nationalist, even a contemporary nationalist, if you
> believe that national identity supersedes biological attachment to an
> ethnic group? If nationalism isn't plagued by racist chauvinism, in
> what sense is it nationalism at all?
You could live in Belgium or Canada, among other nations.
> And so: if I'm a Czech and I live in Austria-Hungary, do I have a
> right to my own country? Should I make violence and terror and bomb
> until I get it? What if I'm a German and I live in Czechoslovakia?
> Should I make violence and terror and bomb?
>
> A number of Germans noticed this very odd thing in the '20s and '30s.
> They noticed that America and her friends were very much committed to
> national self-determination, that is, unless you happened to be
> German. Czech nationalism was good - very good. German nationalism was
> bad - very bad.
Let's move ahead...
> Since this subject is so touchy, I will let my feelings on it slip: I
> don't believe in any kind of nationalism. Of course, being a Jacobite
> and all, I also believe in Strafford's Thorough, so you might not want
> to be getting your constitutional tips from me.
>
> Third: what's so bad about the Nazis?
>
> Okay, they murdered ten million people or so. That's bad. There's
> really no defending the unprovoked massacre of millions of civilians.
>
> On the other hand, I really really recommend Nicholson Baker's new
> book, Human Smoke. Baker is a progressive and pacifist of immaculate
> credentials (his previous achievement was a novel which fantasized
> about assassinating President Bush), and what Human Smoke drums into
> you is not a specific message, but the same thing I keep saying: the
> pieces of the picture do not fit together. They almost fit, but they
> don't quite fit. The genius of Baker's book is that he simply shows
> you the picture not fitting, and leaves the analysis up to you.
>
> For example: we are taught that the Nazis were bad because they
> committed mass murder, to wit, the Holocaust. On the other hand...
> (a): none of the parties fighting against the Nazis, including us,
> seems to have given much of a damn about the Jews or the Holocaust.
> (b): one of the parties on our side was the Soviet Union, whose record
> of mass murder was known at the time and was at least as awful as the
> Nazis'.
>
> And, of course, (c): the Allies positively reveled in the aerial mass
> incineration of German and Japanese civilians. They did not kill six
> million, but they killed one or two. There was a military excuse for
> this, but it was quite strained. It was better than the Nazis' excuse
> for murdering the Jews (who they saw, of course, as enemy civilians).
> In fact, it was a lot better. But was it a lot lot better? I'm not
> sure.
Ah. I'll help straighten the mess out for you.
Hitler was known to be bad because he invaded Czechoslovakia after he
said he wouldn't. We put up with that because we really didn't want to
fight a war - to save Czechs any more than to save Jews.
But then he went and invaded Poland too.
Poland happens to have lots of coal mines in it.
Since Hitler showed that he wanted to grab and grab, and he _was_ bad,
even if we really didn't want to go and fight and get killed to stop
him if we could help it, once he had the coal mines of Poland in his
hands, Germany would have been big and strong enough to conquer all of
Europe. And, indeed, it did exactly that - which is why it took D-Day
to turn the war around.
So it was Poland that told France and Britain that they had to wake up
- they had to stop Hitler, because he was getting into a position
where he could gobble them up next when he felt like it.
They hadn't invented the slogan "No Blood For Coal" back then.
> And as Baker does not mention, our heroes, the Allies, also had no
> qualms about deporting a million Russian refugees to the gulag after
> the war, or about lending hundreds of thousands of German prisoners as
> slave laborers to the Soviets. The idea of World War II as a war for
> human rights is simply ahistorical. It doesn't fit. If Nazi human-
> rights violations were not the motivation for the war that created the
> world we live in now - what was?
Not having Nazi human-rights violations *in our own backyard* was the
motivation. Not having Stalin's human-rights violations *in our own
backyard* became an issue later, hence the Cold War.
John Savard
