St. Patrick:
(also posted here)
Patrick wasn't born in Ireland. As a matter of fact, his first encounter with the Irish was being taken by a war-party.
The war-party had been out raiding along the coast of the English isle, and brought Patrick back to Ireland as a slave. The next six years of his life were spent as a slave, herding his mster's flocks.
During that time, Patrick became very fervent in his prayers and pursuit of the religion of his youth. Those beliefs served as a solace while he lived as a stranger enslaved in a foreign culture.
After an escape, Patrick returned home to fervently study Christianity--the faith of his youth, and solace of his captivity. Eventually, a series of dreams drew him back to Ireland as a missionary.
Patrick went to Ireland, and set about to preach Christ wherever he could. Though not the first missionary to attempt this, he was the most successful. Perhaps his years of imprisonment on the island gave him a better understanding of the people. Perhaps his mastery of the Gaelic tongue was better than previous missionaries.
Patrick's mission turned Ireland upside-down. The Emerald Isle became home to a vibrant community of believers.
There are even historians who claim that these Irish believers helped sow the seeds for the growth of a new civilization in northestern Europe, after the decay and death of Roman civilization in that part of the world. Apparently Irish monks played a significant role in seeding northwestern Europe with monasteries. Those monasteries became centers of learning and culture. Cities grew up around the monasteries.
Without a doubt, Patrick left a lasting legacy in his adopted land. The most visible part of that legacy is the way in which the people of Ireland celebrate his feast-day every year. It is celebration of all things Irish, especially the legends that grew up around St. Patrick and his life's work.
This year, as I celebrate St. Patrick's Day, I'll remember the young man who didn't know he was leaving a mark on history. All he knew was that he had once been a captive in Ireland, and that in his dreams the people of Ireland were calling him to return and teach them his faith.
Patrick did leave behind an autobiographical work entitled Confessions, which tells most of the story that I tell above. The Catholic Encyclopedia also has a good summary of his story.
Fighting & Chess
The Fighting Spirit:
For most people, that is probably precisely right as it is written. For most people, including almost all students of marital arts, the right mindset remains: focused aggressive intent, "pushed down" to a level where there is no conscious thought to get in the way. Training has to be repeated and practiced to the point that there is no conscious thought necessary to act on it.
Nevertheless, the most dangerous man I ever met believed that fighting was precisely like chess. Speed chess, but chess.
This position is entirely compatible with finding your inner Viking, as a matter of fact. The Vikings were great fans of both chess and an earlier board came called tafl. Try it, if you like -- there's a downloadable version there. My experience is that it's an easy game to win from the center, and very hard to win from the sides.
In any event, Ken Caton taught me to fight. Take a look at the picture. Doesn't look like much, does he?
Well, he was a former Marine sergeant, instructor of jujitsu and ryu ku kempo -- and he believed that fighting was like chess in three dimensions. A man's arm, like a rook or a bishop, can only move in certain directions without breaking. Based on where it is, and where you are, you can predict its entire possible range of movement. The body to which it is attached, likewise, can only move in certain ways. Each movement creates openings in the defense. Furthermore, striking the body in certain ways will also create openings with complete certainty. If you know how to hit someone, you can strike their arm so as to open their neck. If you know in advance that your first move will create the second opening, you can be moving to attack that second opening before it is even there. By the time your attack arrives, the opening is created, and there is no possibility of defense.
All that sounds very complicated, and one of the most certain rules of combat is that complicated things break down. Nevertheless, I saw it work often enough that I believe in it.
All kinds of people came by to the dojo in the back alley of Gainesville, GA -- Ken referred to his school as the "Alley Ryu" -- to try Ken. We had boxers come by, knife-fighters, stick-fighters, and the like. I never saw anyone win; I never saw Ken try very hard.
They might have been warned by the framed letter he had on the wall, on official stationary from the Army Rangers who train at Camp Frank D. Merrill. It read, simply, "Dear Mr. Caton: Thanks for coming out and showing us we weren't as tough as we thought."
After class, we would often sit and play chess for hours, five or six games running at once all night and well into the morning. I was in college then, and I liked to play chess. I'd won my high school's chess tournament, and at Georgia State University I would occasionally go off with friends to the Groundhog Tavern, drink three rounds of Guinness interspersed with three rounds of tequila shots, and then come back to the rec room and challenge all comers on the chessboard.
Even so, one night I remember surrendering a game at the dojo, and Ken walking over and berating me. "Never surrender!" he said.
"Yeah, but look at it," I answered. "Can't win it; why waste time on it?"
"You don't know you can't win," he replied. "Your opponent may not be as smart as you. He may not see what you see. He may make a mistake. Never surrender."
And just to prove the point, he took over my position and played it out. He won, of course: my opponent made not one but several mistakes, and lost from a position that should have been an inescapable victory.
It's still a matter of training to the point that thought is not necessary; the "empty mind" that the martial arts pursues is exactly the right road. But, like the chessmaster, you can learn to see angles and avenues, to predict and to control, to fight several moves ahead.
A final aside -- if any of you knows how to reach Ken, I'd love to be put back in touch. Neither the address nor the phone number works. He vanished a few years ago, and none of us know what's become of him. I suspect he went "walkabout," as I can't imagine anything except an unforseen accident claiming him.
LawDog was talking the other day about aikido, and what he thinks of its ideas about fighting spirit:
Both dojos were big on instilling the idea that aikido was, for lack of a better description, a way to make fighting civilized.I would like examine that idea further.
I can't wrap my mind around that concept. Civilized behavior is what happens prior to a fight, and after a fight.
A fight itself is the antithesis of civilization, and should remain so. A fight is savage, brutal and barbaric. It should tweak the reptilian hindbrain and draw out your inner Viking.
If it doesn't, and you go up against a foe for whom it does -- you're going to lose.
For most people, that is probably precisely right as it is written. For most people, including almost all students of marital arts, the right mindset remains: focused aggressive intent, "pushed down" to a level where there is no conscious thought to get in the way. Training has to be repeated and practiced to the point that there is no conscious thought necessary to act on it.
Nevertheless, the most dangerous man I ever met believed that fighting was precisely like chess. Speed chess, but chess.
This position is entirely compatible with finding your inner Viking, as a matter of fact. The Vikings were great fans of both chess and an earlier board came called tafl. Try it, if you like -- there's a downloadable version there. My experience is that it's an easy game to win from the center, and very hard to win from the sides.
In any event, Ken Caton taught me to fight. Take a look at the picture. Doesn't look like much, does he?
Well, he was a former Marine sergeant, instructor of jujitsu and ryu ku kempo -- and he believed that fighting was like chess in three dimensions. A man's arm, like a rook or a bishop, can only move in certain directions without breaking. Based on where it is, and where you are, you can predict its entire possible range of movement. The body to which it is attached, likewise, can only move in certain ways. Each movement creates openings in the defense. Furthermore, striking the body in certain ways will also create openings with complete certainty. If you know how to hit someone, you can strike their arm so as to open their neck. If you know in advance that your first move will create the second opening, you can be moving to attack that second opening before it is even there. By the time your attack arrives, the opening is created, and there is no possibility of defense.
All that sounds very complicated, and one of the most certain rules of combat is that complicated things break down. Nevertheless, I saw it work often enough that I believe in it.
All kinds of people came by to the dojo in the back alley of Gainesville, GA -- Ken referred to his school as the "Alley Ryu" -- to try Ken. We had boxers come by, knife-fighters, stick-fighters, and the like. I never saw anyone win; I never saw Ken try very hard.
They might have been warned by the framed letter he had on the wall, on official stationary from the Army Rangers who train at Camp Frank D. Merrill. It read, simply, "Dear Mr. Caton: Thanks for coming out and showing us we weren't as tough as we thought."
After class, we would often sit and play chess for hours, five or six games running at once all night and well into the morning. I was in college then, and I liked to play chess. I'd won my high school's chess tournament, and at Georgia State University I would occasionally go off with friends to the Groundhog Tavern, drink three rounds of Guinness interspersed with three rounds of tequila shots, and then come back to the rec room and challenge all comers on the chessboard.
Even so, one night I remember surrendering a game at the dojo, and Ken walking over and berating me. "Never surrender!" he said.
"Yeah, but look at it," I answered. "Can't win it; why waste time on it?"
"You don't know you can't win," he replied. "Your opponent may not be as smart as you. He may not see what you see. He may make a mistake. Never surrender."
And just to prove the point, he took over my position and played it out. He won, of course: my opponent made not one but several mistakes, and lost from a position that should have been an inescapable victory.
It's still a matter of training to the point that thought is not necessary; the "empty mind" that the martial arts pursues is exactly the right road. But, like the chessmaster, you can learn to see angles and avenues, to predict and to control, to fight several moves ahead.
A final aside -- if any of you knows how to reach Ken, I'd love to be put back in touch. Neither the address nor the phone number works. He vanished a few years ago, and none of us know what's become of him. I suspect he went "walkabout," as I can't imagine anything except an unforseen accident claiming him.
To read
Things You'll Like Reading:
You should probably be reading Dennis the Peasant's guide to blogging, including the introduction to the introduction linked above, plus parts actual introduction, and parts one, two, and three. Not only is it funny, it's an insightful critique of blogging as a mechanism for thinking things through. I believe Grim's Hall violates every one of his rules, with the result that our traffic hangs around 185 hits a day.
It's possible to post informed, intelligent analysis and succeed as a blogger -- two examples of people who do are Winds of Change and The Belmont Club. Indeed, I'd like to think that almost anyone on the blogroll here is among the "good guys" who post up top stuff... nevertheless, a lot of people are doing just what he says, and it seems to pay off. I think he's hitting a lot of the reasons right on the head.
Second, you should definitely like The LawDog Files, to which I was kindly directed by Gwa45. There is some truly worthy storytelling going on over there. Any Southerner will appreciate the stories about folks moving in from Liberal states; but anyone at all should appreciate the story about poor Desmond. "Smarter, not harder," aye.
Angel & The Badman
Angel & The Badman:
For example, early in Quirt's transition, he rides up to talk to a selfish landholder who is restricting the Quakers' water rights. He uses no violence to convince the man to give them more water -- at least, no actual violence. He very plainly does, however, trade on his reputation, and the assumptions the landholder will make about what kinds of methods he would employ. What the Quakers could not accomplish, he accomplishes using their methods: but the nonviolent methods only work because of the implied threat behind them.
By the end of the film, Quirt has been transformed by the love of a beautiful young Quaker woman. He refuses to draw on the evil Laredo, in spite of the fact that it should mean certain death. Yet the film's message is true, at least in the film: Laredo's violence harms only himself, as the Territorial Marshal -- unseen but nearby -- kills Laredo with a rifleshot when the black-hat gunfighter draws. Because Quirt refused to attempt violence, he is not punished in any way; he rides off, not mounted astride a horse but in the back of a wagon, leaving his gun in the street.
The film ends with the Marshal watching the wagon ride away, and retrieving the discarded weapon:
Unspoken but obvious is the fact that, except for the marshal on the hill, evil would have triumphed. Quirt can go and live his new life of peace, rejecting anger and violence, because the Marshal rides the territory to defend it from evil. It is not clear that the Quakers mind whether they live or die; expecting heaven, they may go to their grave as if to bed. Yet, insofar as they live to serve as an example to us in this world, they do so because of the marshal.
It is not for the sake of art alone that I mention this movie today. Sadly, it has become relevant, through the example of another rifleman -- every Marine is a rifleman -- who laid down his gun for a life of peace:
But likewise, it may be that we have been told one that they have not. The West has room for Quakers and Marshals alike. Wretchard asks whether it can ever be right to expect someone else to do the dirty job for you. I answer that it is not a question of whether it is right or not to expect it: it is not clear that the Quaker would ask, and in any event, the marshal volunteered.
The Quakers of the movie would not have wished Quirt to use even his unvoiced reputation for violence to pursue their interests, but that does not mean that they must refuse the water. They didn't ask him to go, any more than they asked the landholder to come and dam the stream.
I have chided the Christian Peace Teams for failing to make a distinction between those who are wicked, and those who may be wrong in spite of good intentions -- I do not say they are wrong, and in fact believe them to be right, but the Quaker faith holds them to be wrong. We who stand on the other side must also make a distinction, between those who want to destroy us, and those who we think are wrong but who are trying likewise to defend us in their way: to look after our souls, to spread kindness in the world. These are not the enemy, not even if they stand in the way.
It may be, in fact, that we need them. Not all of us, but some of us: perhaps some future Quirt Evans, who has done his duty in defense of the West, and finds himself hurt by it. I have known such men, especially veterans of Vietnam, and surely many of you have also. The Friends may have a home for some where, amid a people who refuse violence in any form, they can find a kind of peace we do not know in the rest of this world.
For that alone, the marshal is glad to stand between them and what evil he can. Why not volunteer to dare Hell, as Wretchard says, protecting a kind and innocent people as you would protect a beloved child?
That is what warriors are for. I do not know precisely what Quakers are for; but I am sure there is a reason.
In 1947, a young man named John Wayne -- already the star of many movies, including the classic Stagecoach -- decided to produce a movie of his own. He also starred in it, as the gunfighter Quirt Evans. The movie's real theme was the beauty of the Quaker faith: the role of the gunfighter was first to serve as a contrast with the Quakers, and then, to be converted by them.
Quirt Evans [looking at a cross-stiched plaque]: Is that Quaker stuff?The movie is a remarkable one, and deserves to be seen if you've not seen it. It is a Western in the old style, a black-and-white hat feature film, but it manages to use that model to provoke sophisticated philosophy. On the surface, Quirt Evans starts as a bad man, and turns into a Friend of Man; but, in spite of the film's pacifist message, it makes clear that there are deeper issues at stake.
Penelope Worth: Uh huh.
Quirt Evans: You mean that nobody can hurt you but yourself?
Penelope Worth: That's a Friend's belief.
Quirt Evans: Well, suppose someone whacks you over the head with a branding iron? Won't that hurt?
Penelope Worth: Physically, of course. But in reality it would injure only the person doing the act or force of violence. Only the doer can be hurt by a mean or evil act.
Quirt Evans: Are there very many of you Quakers?
Penelope Worth: Very few.
Quirt Evans: I sort of figured that.
For example, early in Quirt's transition, he rides up to talk to a selfish landholder who is restricting the Quakers' water rights. He uses no violence to convince the man to give them more water -- at least, no actual violence. He very plainly does, however, trade on his reputation, and the assumptions the landholder will make about what kinds of methods he would employ. What the Quakers could not accomplish, he accomplishes using their methods: but the nonviolent methods only work because of the implied threat behind them.
By the end of the film, Quirt has been transformed by the love of a beautiful young Quaker woman. He refuses to draw on the evil Laredo, in spite of the fact that it should mean certain death. Yet the film's message is true, at least in the film: Laredo's violence harms only himself, as the Territorial Marshal -- unseen but nearby -- kills Laredo with a rifleshot when the black-hat gunfighter draws. Because Quirt refused to attempt violence, he is not punished in any way; he rides off, not mounted astride a horse but in the back of a wagon, leaving his gun in the street.
The film ends with the Marshal watching the wagon ride away, and retrieving the discarded weapon:
Bradley: [the marshal picks up Quirt's gun] Hey, Quirt might need that!The beauty of the Quaker faith, and its way, are the subject of the film. Yet the film is clear about the reality of evil, and more than that: it distinguishes between three different types of moral violence. There is the kind the Quaker model can and ought to help, the violence of Quirt Evans, which arises from recklessness and selfishness and an insensitivity to love. There is the kind that the Quakers cannot help, the violence of Laredo, which is in love with its own cruelty. And there is the violence on which the Quakers survive: the violence of the Marshal.
Territorial Marshal Wistful McClintock: No. Only a man that carries a gun ever needs one.
Unspoken but obvious is the fact that, except for the marshal on the hill, evil would have triumphed. Quirt can go and live his new life of peace, rejecting anger and violence, because the Marshal rides the territory to defend it from evil. It is not clear that the Quakers mind whether they live or die; expecting heaven, they may go to their grave as if to bed. Yet, insofar as they live to serve as an example to us in this world, they do so because of the marshal.
It is not for the sake of art alone that I mention this movie today. Sadly, it has become relevant, through the example of another rifleman -- every Marine is a rifleman -- who laid down his gun for a life of peace:
We forgive those who consider us their enemies. Therefore, any penalty should be in the spirit of restorative justice, rather than in the form of violent retribution.Cassandra compares him with the case of a Muslim apostate, now a psychologist in California, Dr. Sultan. She draws the lesson that Tom Fox's beliefs were helpless in the face of evil, whereas Dr. Sultan's example may change the world.
We hope that in loving both friends and enemies and by intervening non-violently to aid those who are systematically oppressed, we can contribute in some small way to transforming this volatile situation.
(Signed)
Tom Fox, Springfield, VA
Interestingly enough, Tom Fox was in Iraq to help Palestinian Iraqis against what he saw as an unjust American occupation. He refused to condemn, opppose, or otherwise speak out against Islam or the insurgency....I think Mr. Fox was participating in bad philosophy, by not distinguishing between the service of the soldier, bound by a code to defend the noncombatant as much as to pursue victory in his cause, and the murder of the terrorist, who seeks the death of the innocent at the first moment it becomes useful to him. This is a failure, I think, even within the Quaker tradition: pacifism still must distinguish between those who are wrong although they are trying to help, and those who are wrong because they love evil. The failure to do so is not devotion to a higher truth, but closing your eyes to the truth. It is a truth that they were told to expect:
The irony of Tom Fox's death is that it shows that peace was not the answer either. Nor was silence. Or tolerance. All Tom Fox's enlightened tolerance gained him was an agonizing death at the hands of zealots who viewed his determination to forgive them as confirmation that Western culture is rotten to the core....
The other is Dr. Wafa Sultan, a woman whose voice, had she stayed in the land of her birth, we should never had heard. No one knows better than she the risks she takes by speaking out. And yet she does so anyway, in defense of that which is beyond price. Dr. Sultan is the West's answer to radical Islam: a living sword thrust into the beating heart of terror.
Out of darkness has come light, and it seems somehow all the more fitting that it should be a woman who dares to say, "You will not silence me and mine. Some things are intolerable."
If only her courage were a universal value.
Then he told them many things in parables, saying: "A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. He who has ears, let him hear."Yet I will not go so far as others have gone, and say that the Quakers were wrong. I do not think that. I think the Quakers represent something true and beautiful, but which I do not understand. Chesterton wrote of what such truths are like:
I have found Europe and the world once more like the little garden where I stared at the symbolic shapes of cat and rake; I look at everything with the old elvish ignorance and expectancy. This or that rite or doctrine may look as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but I have found by experience that such things end somehow in grass and flowers. A clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his existence. I give one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity. But when I look not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high human nature in many spheres. The Greeks felt virginity when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence -- the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is universal. It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day.This is the point of departure for me from Wretchard's account, which like Cassandra's contrasts Tom Fox with Dr. Sultan. Yet I depart from him although I agree with every word of his argument, which is subtle and beautifully wrought:
I knew a man once who rushed to church in tears of gratitude over the fact that he didn't have to kill someone. It was at the height of Ferdinand Marcos' power and his secret agents were taking a tremendous toll of the underground. Two men in this mans' cell had disappeared. The first had taken a Greyhound-type bus to the Cagayan Valley and had never gotten off. Another had gone by outrigger from Luzon to the island of Mindoro, where it was said, he had been killed on a beach upon landing by a .45 pressed to his nape as he walked unsuspectingly on the sand. The suspected betrayer was a small, bucktoothed man with almost childish enthusiasm for basketball, given to hysterical fits of laughter. But he was certainly the informer and had to die before he betrayed a third. As it happened, someone else killed the informer and man whose job it was to shoot him was everlastingly grateful that God had arranged for the cup to pass away. Someone else had done the deed and he could go from out the darkness of the Marcos dictatorship with only sweet memories upon his soul.What I think it is necessary to believe is that there are Quakers for a reason, and that reason may be Quirt Evans: the young man, of good heart but reckless life, who might be rescued by their example. There may be some other reason. Like the apparently useless cat, there is something likewise beautiful about it; if we do not understand, the flaw is in us. It may be they have been told a truth we have not heard.
The question that always bothered me was whether that person -- or any man -- had any right to expect someone else to do the dirty job for him. Can we ever simultaneously acknowledge the necessity of a deed and the absolute immorality of doing it? That in a nutshell is the Problem of Evil: that evil exists and that by and by we will have to face it. The question Tom Fox should have posed is "how do you stand firm against a car-bomber headed straight for a schoolbus?" And if you say, "shoot to save the children" ask yourself if it ever justified to be glad that God had sent someone else to shoot the bomber and go hell in your stead.
But likewise, it may be that we have been told one that they have not. The West has room for Quakers and Marshals alike. Wretchard asks whether it can ever be right to expect someone else to do the dirty job for you. I answer that it is not a question of whether it is right or not to expect it: it is not clear that the Quaker would ask, and in any event, the marshal volunteered.
The Quakers of the movie would not have wished Quirt to use even his unvoiced reputation for violence to pursue their interests, but that does not mean that they must refuse the water. They didn't ask him to go, any more than they asked the landholder to come and dam the stream.
I have chided the Christian Peace Teams for failing to make a distinction between those who are wicked, and those who may be wrong in spite of good intentions -- I do not say they are wrong, and in fact believe them to be right, but the Quaker faith holds them to be wrong. We who stand on the other side must also make a distinction, between those who want to destroy us, and those who we think are wrong but who are trying likewise to defend us in their way: to look after our souls, to spread kindness in the world. These are not the enemy, not even if they stand in the way.
It may be, in fact, that we need them. Not all of us, but some of us: perhaps some future Quirt Evans, who has done his duty in defense of the West, and finds himself hurt by it. I have known such men, especially veterans of Vietnam, and surely many of you have also. The Friends may have a home for some where, amid a people who refuse violence in any form, they can find a kind of peace we do not know in the rest of this world.
For that alone, the marshal is glad to stand between them and what evil he can. Why not volunteer to dare Hell, as Wretchard says, protecting a kind and innocent people as you would protect a beloved child?
That is what warriors are for. I do not know precisely what Quakers are for; but I am sure there is a reason.
HuT traitors
Dissent & Treason:
We simply do not speak of treason anymore, except rhetorically. Yet I speak of it now. This is what treason means: to levy war against the state, to give its enemies aid and comfort, to try not merely to defeat but to destroy it. We are at the point at which Hizb-ut Tharir is ready to throw away its long-accustomed mask, to set aside peace and declare for war. Who has the courage to look on their true face? Who remembers how to answer this challenge?
I wager the Australians do. The title of the article is, "Jihad on troops a duty, say fanatics." Let us prepare to support them.
An article in The Australian outlines the tipping point between dissent and treason:
The Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is being investigated by ASIO, said fighting Australian troops and the other occupying forces in Iraq was a "universal right and religious duty".... Mr Doureihi's comments come after The Australian revealed yesterday the inflammatory pamphlet disseminated by the group outside of Sydney mosques, urging Muslims to rise against Australian troops in Iraq and support the insurgency.The Hizb-ut Tahrir, "Party of Liberation," was founded to pursue the peaceful establishment of the Caliphate. This is the point at which you cast away the "peaceful" part, and begin actual incitement to violence. Australia, like America, is a part of the free West. It is that kind of state I was talking about below:
"We urge you to make the calamity of Samarra as a motivator to repel the invaders and that you take them as enemies," the flyer says, referring to the bombing of the Samarra mosque last month.
Mr Doureihi said the group stood by its belief that attacking the occupying forces in Iraq and other Islamic nations was an "Islamic obligation".
What is not -- is never -- acceptable is undermining the nation's security or stability in order to pursue what you prefer. As a point of philosophy, it is bad philosophy; as a point of ethics, it is unethical. It is wrong whether or not it is criminal. Neither Aristotle nor Socrates thought of undermining Athens' defenses in order to advance their philosophy. They were serious minded for a good reason: city-states were wholly destroyed sometimes, in ancient Greece.And indeed, that is just what Hizb-ut Tahrir desires.
Mr Doureihi said banning Hizb ut-Tahrir in Australia, as it has been banned in Britain, Germany and other countries, would reflect the Government's appetite for repressing discourse and dissent.That is treason.
"If anyone was to be proscribed it would be the Australian Government itself," he said.
We simply do not speak of treason anymore, except rhetorically. Yet I speak of it now. This is what treason means: to levy war against the state, to give its enemies aid and comfort, to try not merely to defeat but to destroy it. We are at the point at which Hizb-ut Tharir is ready to throw away its long-accustomed mask, to set aside peace and declare for war. Who has the courage to look on their true face? Who remembers how to answer this challenge?
I wager the Australians do. The title of the article is, "Jihad on troops a duty, say fanatics." Let us prepare to support them.
Overpraised Dissent
The Overpraising of Dissent:
I'm going to write a bit more about happiness and ethics. This post picks up where yesterday's left off.
Yesterday's post considered the possibility that ethics includes a "duty to unhappiness" -- that our inherited biological reasons for feeling happy must often be set aside in order to be a good citizen. I cited the example of Socrates, whose devotion to the pursuit of truth led to his execution. This tradition of dissent and its protection, informed by the examples of both Socrates and Jesus, is at the core of Western culture.
Yet I think it is very much possible to overpriase dissent -- and on reflection, I think it's necessary to explore that idea as well. The duty is to set aside happiness in favor of good citizenship, not to pursue your own happiness in favor of what society needs. It is the case, furthermore, that personal happiness must be set aside for the survival and prosperity of the nation.
The best way to explore this is by beginning with the problem posed by Aristotle: that he said, and I have always believed, that happiness is the goal of ethics. How, then, can there be a duty to be unhappy in ethics?
The answer is to realize that what is meant by "happiness" is very different in Aristotle than it is in modern American language. For Aristotle as for Socrates (who took his turn as a soldier in Athens' wars), defense of the nation was an absolute ethical duty, for philosophers as much as anyone else.
The short primer on Aristotle's ethics and politics, linked above, makes the following points:
1) The end of ethics is happiness, which is right-living in accord with reason. That needs to be said twice, because it's such an alien concept for most Americans. Happiness is not an emotional state, it is an activity. "Right-living in accord with reason" is happiness.
2) Politics and ethics exactly mirror each other. The primer reads: "Thus, nourishment and exercise, etc. are means to the end of bodily health. The health of the body is a means for the performance of moral actiions, which are in turn a means for the moral health of the soul. Moral actions aim at personal and social stability. Personal and social stability aim at scientific inquiry. Scientific inquiry aims at the possession of knowledge (and knowing that one knows) that imitates the best activity in the universe, the activity of God."
By the same token, the activity of the soldier and policeman is meant to be directed by the ruler, to achieve the end of security, both from external threat and internal disruption. That security is, in turn, a means to provide stability for a class of scientists and thinkers. Scientists and thinkers aim at the possession of knowledge, not only for themselves but for their society; and that brings the society, in theory, in closer alignment with the truths revealed by the science and thought about the structure and order of the universe. That is how it is supposed to work, in any event.
3) In America, unlike in ancient Athens, the "thinking class" includes all Americans -- at least, all Americans who are interested in participating.
THEREFORE:
A) The maintenance of the stability and security of the nation is a necessary function, not only of the soldier and policeman and political rulers, but of the thinking class. The thinking class cannot achieve its goals without that security and stability, and so it must make sure that nothing it does undermines the nation's stability and security.
B) The balancing point is where security and stability start to clamp down on the thinking class' ability to pursue its goals of increased scientific knowledge and wisdom. Activity designed to support security and stability, but which seriously impacts freedom of inquiry, speech or thought, is justified if and only if it is necessary to preserve the community through an emergency.
This includes not only government action, but also action by the thinkers -- say, campus speech codes designed to improve campus stability by lowering the likelihood of someone being offended. Unless it is necessary for the survival of the university through an emergency, such codes are not justified.
C) In cases where there are real emergencies, defense of the nation is the primary duty. In American jurisprudence, this is captured in the SCOTUS ruling that "The Constitution is not a suicide pact." When there are critical threats, we first preserve the nation. We do this even in the face of temporary losses of liberty because, if the nation falls, there will be no foundation on which to rebuild a life of liberty. We must first uphold America at any cost.
D) The quality of nonscientific thinking can be judged according to these principles. A clumsily-worded tract that correctly upholds the principles of security balanced with liberty is "good philosophy," in its way. A brilliantly-written essay full of shining prose and thought is bad philosophy if it ends up advocating draft-dodging, unilateral disarmament, failure in war, internal revolution in order to establish a state on principles other than liberty (for example, Communism), or the undermining necessary social institutions.
It is one thing to seek to correct an institution that you think is failing its purpose: to point out ways in which the military or the police could function more successfully. That kind of dissent is what dissent is for! But it is something else to try to prevent the function of those institutions, as Los Angeles does when it refuses to enforce Federal laws on immigration; as certain law schools have done, when they have tried to block military recruiters from their campuses; as certain officials have done, when they have leaked secrets in defiance of their oaths.
Dissent remains a noble thing, as long as it is practiced also according to these principles. Both Aristotle and Socrates came under fire from Athens' ruling class; Aristotle went into exile to avoid Socrates' fate. When I said that, "You have, in effect, to be ready to go into exile, to drink the hemlock, to enter the monastery, or to start the war," I meant that the best kind of person will sometimes have to actually do one of those things.
What is not -- is never -- acceptable is undermining the nation's security or stability in order to pursue what you prefer. As a point of philosophy, it is bad philosophy; as a point of ethics, it is unethical. It is wrong whether or not it is criminal. Neither Aristotle nor Socrates thought of undermining Athens' defenses in order to advance their philosophy. They were serious minded for a good reason: city-states were wholly destroyed sometimes, in ancient Greece.
We are not serious-minded about those who undermine the nation, whether they are John Walker Lindh or CIA officers who betray their oaths and reveal our secrets in order to pursue their personal preferences about how, or whether, the war should be fought. We do not as a nation believe, even after 9/11, that there is a genuine threat to the American nation. 9/11 is seen now as a tragedy, not an emergency.
That means we prefer to set the balance in favor of maximizing liberty, instead of worrying about security and stability. If there is no danger to security or stability, there is no reason to make even one small sacrifice of liberty. That is true enough, if indeed there is no danger. Even in such times, however, we can recognize bad philosophers and unethical ethicists by these principles.
Thus we pass the time while we watch Iran on the horizon, and ponder how long we can continue to avoid an emergency.
Spec Ops Embassies
Ahem:
We can't have the military keeping secrets in small matters like special operations directly targeting terrorists, can we? Won't do.
Our Mr. Burns was also cited in another recent article, called "The Dysfunctional Relationship Between the Military and the Media." As it is a media piece on the media, the media is given first licks, and the opening paragraph charges the Army with lies and distortions. But a military speaker eventually is allowed to reply:
I note one more item of interest from Burns' writeup of the Times article: "The Times reported that the move is opposed by some in the Central Intelligence Agency who view it as treading on their turf."
How would the Times know what CIA officers think about a secret pro... oh, right.
The Times is acting badly by reporting these stories, but the intelligence officers leaking them should go to prison.
A short article from the Associated Press, by a writer with the glorious name of Robert Burns. It begins:
The U.S. military command in charge of counterterrorism campaigns is putting small teams of special operations troops in U.S. embassies to support the global war on terror, officials said Wednesday.Of course it was.
The presence of these teams, which began at least two years ago but has not been publicly announced by U.S. Special Operations Command, was first reported in Wednesday's editions of The New York Times.
We can't have the military keeping secrets in small matters like special operations directly targeting terrorists, can we? Won't do.
Our Mr. Burns was also cited in another recent article, called "The Dysfunctional Relationship Between the Military and the Media." As it is a media piece on the media, the media is given first licks, and the opening paragraph charges the Army with lies and distortions. But a military speaker eventually is allowed to reply:
"There's an irony here, because when you had embedding, there was a sense that the reporting was better than ever," says Dan Goure, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute. "But since the end of major combat operations, the relationship has really gone to hell. There is a strongly held perception in the military – particularly the Army – that the media is doing the enemy's work. You guys are seen as the Jane Fondas of the Iraq war. And so the military attitude is, 'why should we level with you, because you're going to screw us.'"Where would they ever get that idea?
I note one more item of interest from Burns' writeup of the Times article: "The Times reported that the move is opposed by some in the Central Intelligence Agency who view it as treading on their turf."
How would the Times know what CIA officers think about a secret pro... oh, right.
The Times is acting badly by reporting these stories, but the intelligence officers leaking them should go to prison.
Some Good Reads
Some Good Reads:
This is one reason for thinking that the electoral failure of liberal politics is related to liberal levels of unhappiness: if you are successful at the ballot box, the sphere of things "you can control" or "you can influence" is much larger. Assuming you are doing your duty as a citizen to be aware of political issues, the presence of a political movement sympathetic to your goals, responsive to your efforts, and able to effect real change, is thus going to mean that you are happier than someone who lacks such a movement. Assuming you are convinced of the rightness of your views, however, you can't just sit out the political process because it's making you miserable. You have, in a sense, a duty to be unhappy. You have to work, even in constant failure, to change things according to what you feel is right. That's what citizens are meant to do.
Still, you will find greater happiness among even minority political movements -- the political movement associated with the Mormon Church in Utah, say -- who focus on the level of politics small enough for them to control. In Utah, they can be happy. If you concentrate your efforts on a town or a state where you can build a majority, you can be genuinely happy even though the national level politics may be permanently beyond your particular political movement.
Yet, even there, by concentrating on what you can control, you will improve your ability to lever the larger politic: control of Utah, to continue with the example because it is a neutral one, means a greater say due to its presence in the Senate and in the Electoral College than if you spent your efforts trying to influence the national debate instead of concentrating on capturing and controlling the state. Not only do you get local laws that mean you can live the way you want (another source of happiness), but you find -- almost by accident -- that you actually end up with more power that way.
You've all heard my Federalism rants before, but here it is again anyway. That was observation #1.
Observation #2 relates to the degree to which happiness is hard-coded. To a large degree, being happy means learning what has been written into you, by evolution or God: the things that set off the right chemical triggers in the brain are the sources of happiness. Yet the underlying hard-code is antithetical to happiness. We are happy when we obey Stone Age triggers; but the same triggers never permit you to be too happy, as the Stone Age man who settles in comfortably and stops fearing for his survival did not survive. The eye tracks Cassandra's silver Mercedes (not my eye, I hasten to add, which prefers Chevrolets) because it is hardcoded never to accept that it has enough, that it should stop striving for more. Learning to feel otherwise is not practical work, but mystical work: it is what people spend their entire lives in monasteries to accomplish.
Here is a piece called "The Stone Age Trinity," which holds that there are three basic interpersonal drives that arise from our long history as hunter-gatherers:
The Scrivener piece on female-female relations suggests that there is yet another structure at work in those relationships: Just as men look at each other with a different structure than they use in considering women, so too do women seem to regard each other differently than they regard their relations with men. This is true, as the article makes clear -- indeed, it is the article's main point -- even with women who have spent a lifetime studying the issue and trying to "correct" it. Yet, as the subjects admit, it is simply hard code. The best you can do is try to override the programming consciously -- the underlying feelings do not go away.
The Chesler piece cited overlaps with the Scrivener piece at exactly that point. After a lifetime on the front lines of feminism, attempting the very "corrections" that the above article mentions, Chesler has reached the point at which she feels the need to offer a partial critique of modern feminism. It is really a mild critique. In spite of her hostile title (which was probably chosen by an editor, not her), she has very positive things to say about the movement that has involved her life's work -- but expects that this critique will be regarded as a "betrayal," that her attempt to criticize the status of the movement will result in her being thrown out of the movement.
What's do be done about that? Not very much -- and it isn't happy work. We feel happiest when we do what comes naturally to us, and what comes naturally to us includes thrusting out of the group those who depart in sharp ways from the underlying social dynamic. The preservation of that dynamic is often seen as being more important than the truth value of the claims being made by those thrust out -- witness the trial of Socrates, which makes the point that this is a human rather than a female issue. Yet the best kind of person can't accept that, and go along with what is common but is not right.
Again we see that there may be a "duty to be unhappy" in ethics -- you have to be mindful about thrusting aside your happiness if necessary to uphold the truth. You have, in effect, to be ready to go into exile, to drink the hemlock, to enter the monastery, or to start the war.
The Monday-Wednesday corridor is a very busy time for me, so I will have to direct you to other reading today. Wretchard has an excellent review of the new Kaplan article, "The Coming Normalcy."
Winds of Change has an article on the "Barbarians" gang in France, and its attempts to replicate Iraq's anarchy (as per the Kaplan article above) in the Cites of France.
And since my calendar says this is "International Women's Day," whatever that means, I'll replicate Arts & Letters Daily's recent links to this article on Islam and feminism, and this one on women, biology and inter-relationships. They are interesting to confer with Cassandra's piece on happiness from yesterday.
UPDATE: Lunch break, so I can finally take a few minutes for myself. I'd like to talk a bit about the paragraph above. There are two things I'd like to discuss.
Although the connecting thread is that all three pieces are by women, about women, the real enlightenment is not on the subject of women, but happiness. This is the second time Cassidy has taken up on the topic of happiness lately, on both occasions referencing studies and polls suggesting that liberals are constitutionally less happy than conservatives.
I don't find either study convincing, to be honest: I can't see how either polling or the dubious "science" of psychology could control for external factors (such as the relative success of conservative policies, and the relative collapse of the political party most associated with liberal ones -- it would seem that might impact happiness in ways that could reverse if the political fortunes did also). Yet I think Cassandra has some excellent advice on how to be happy, regardless of your politics (or your sex):
Conservatives don't expect life to be fair. This is critical to understanding the happiness gap. Because we don't go through life thinking the world owes us a fair shake, when life treats us unfairly we don't tend to take it personally. We don't get angry at government, society, or the system. We just realize we need to try harder.Accepting personal responsibility for improving your own condition is key to happiness, because it concentrates your attention on what you can do to make things better. This is true even if, in fact, you aren't the one responsbile: even if you have had genuine bad luck, even if the government ought to be helping you and isn't, you will be happier if you focus on how you yourself can make things better in your own life. The less attention you focus on what you can't control, the happier you will be.
This is one reason for thinking that the electoral failure of liberal politics is related to liberal levels of unhappiness: if you are successful at the ballot box, the sphere of things "you can control" or "you can influence" is much larger. Assuming you are doing your duty as a citizen to be aware of political issues, the presence of a political movement sympathetic to your goals, responsive to your efforts, and able to effect real change, is thus going to mean that you are happier than someone who lacks such a movement. Assuming you are convinced of the rightness of your views, however, you can't just sit out the political process because it's making you miserable. You have, in a sense, a duty to be unhappy. You have to work, even in constant failure, to change things according to what you feel is right. That's what citizens are meant to do.
Still, you will find greater happiness among even minority political movements -- the political movement associated with the Mormon Church in Utah, say -- who focus on the level of politics small enough for them to control. In Utah, they can be happy. If you concentrate your efforts on a town or a state where you can build a majority, you can be genuinely happy even though the national level politics may be permanently beyond your particular political movement.
Yet, even there, by concentrating on what you can control, you will improve your ability to lever the larger politic: control of Utah, to continue with the example because it is a neutral one, means a greater say due to its presence in the Senate and in the Electoral College than if you spent your efforts trying to influence the national debate instead of concentrating on capturing and controlling the state. Not only do you get local laws that mean you can live the way you want (another source of happiness), but you find -- almost by accident -- that you actually end up with more power that way.
You've all heard my Federalism rants before, but here it is again anyway. That was observation #1.
Observation #2 relates to the degree to which happiness is hard-coded. To a large degree, being happy means learning what has been written into you, by evolution or God: the things that set off the right chemical triggers in the brain are the sources of happiness. Yet the underlying hard-code is antithetical to happiness. We are happy when we obey Stone Age triggers; but the same triggers never permit you to be too happy, as the Stone Age man who settles in comfortably and stops fearing for his survival did not survive. The eye tracks Cassandra's silver Mercedes (not my eye, I hasten to add, which prefers Chevrolets) because it is hardcoded never to accept that it has enough, that it should stop striving for more. Learning to feel otherwise is not practical work, but mystical work: it is what people spend their entire lives in monasteries to accomplish.
Here is a piece called "The Stone Age Trinity," which holds that there are three basic interpersonal drives that arise from our long history as hunter-gatherers:
The late philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out that when people compare themselves to one another, they are disposed to feel one of two emotions -- guilt or envy. Guilt when someone has a lower station than you; envy when someone has a higher station than you. I would add a third to this mix: indignation. That's when you compare someone of a higher station to someone of a lower station, and feel that something is wrong. I refer to this complex of emotional responses to unequal life-stations as the "Stone Age Trinity."I suspect that there are rather more than three such drives, which creates a more complicated picture than the piece admits. Cassandra's first-cited article has to do with one such complication, which arises from the fact that men and women relate to each other differently from the way that men relate to other men. To whit, it is not clear that a man looking at a woman feels either guilt or envy or indignation when considering her status: there is an entirely different emotional structure at work.
The Scrivener piece on female-female relations suggests that there is yet another structure at work in those relationships: Just as men look at each other with a different structure than they use in considering women, so too do women seem to regard each other differently than they regard their relations with men. This is true, as the article makes clear -- indeed, it is the article's main point -- even with women who have spent a lifetime studying the issue and trying to "correct" it. Yet, as the subjects admit, it is simply hard code. The best you can do is try to override the programming consciously -- the underlying feelings do not go away.
The Chesler piece cited overlaps with the Scrivener piece at exactly that point. After a lifetime on the front lines of feminism, attempting the very "corrections" that the above article mentions, Chesler has reached the point at which she feels the need to offer a partial critique of modern feminism. It is really a mild critique. In spite of her hostile title (which was probably chosen by an editor, not her), she has very positive things to say about the movement that has involved her life's work -- but expects that this critique will be regarded as a "betrayal," that her attempt to criticize the status of the movement will result in her being thrown out of the movement.
What's do be done about that? Not very much -- and it isn't happy work. We feel happiest when we do what comes naturally to us, and what comes naturally to us includes thrusting out of the group those who depart in sharp ways from the underlying social dynamic. The preservation of that dynamic is often seen as being more important than the truth value of the claims being made by those thrust out -- witness the trial of Socrates, which makes the point that this is a human rather than a female issue. Yet the best kind of person can't accept that, and go along with what is common but is not right.
Again we see that there may be a "duty to be unhappy" in ethics -- you have to be mindful about thrusting aside your happiness if necessary to uphold the truth. You have, in effect, to be ready to go into exile, to drink the hemlock, to enter the monastery, or to start the war.
R.T.Alamo
Play Deguello, If You Dare: Back in Eighteen Thirty-Six,
Houston said to Travis
'Get some Volunteers and go
'Fortify the Alamo.' On the sixth of March, 1836, Mexican forces under General Santa Anna overran and slaughtered a band of volunteers and adventurers defending the mission at the Alamo. Theodore Roosevelt wrote its history, and I will not try to better him.
It was a fascinating band that took up the defense. Though he was not there himself, Sam Houston gave the orders. Houston was a man from Tennessee who had spent much of his life living among the Cherokee. He was so much a friend of the Cherokee nation that he abandoned American society for their company a second time, going into the West to join them after they were forced from their lands by the Jackson administration. Yet he left them, again, and came -- not again to Tennesee -- but to Texas.
The commander of the Alamo was William Barret Travis, who is here treated to an old-style biography, which begins: "Travis, WILLIAM BARRETT, Military Officer, Commander at the Alamo, Hero." It speaks poorly of us that we don't still write biographies in just that way.
There was the adventurer Jim Bowie, who gave his name to the finest type of fighting knife in the world. His biography ends: "During his lifetime he had been described by his old friend Caiaphas K. Ham as "a clever, polite gentleman...attentive to the ladies on all occasions...a true, constant, and generous friend...a foe no one dared to undervalue and many feared." Slave trader, gambler, land speculator, dreamer, and hero, James Bowie in death became immortal in the annals of Texas history."
And of course there was Davy Crockett, who gave the language almost as many idoms as Shakespeare, though fewer took hold on the language, more's the pity.
It is the mark of the greatest men that they inspire other great men to follow them. Teddy Roosevelt thought enough of Davy Crockett to name his hunters-and-conservationist association The Boone and Crockett Club. It still exists today, and is open to public membership. "Past Club member accomplishments include: the protection of Yellowstone, Glacier, and Denali National Parks; the foundation of the National Forest Service, National Park Service, and National Wildlife Refuge System...." A fitting legacy for an American hero.
Remember the Alamo, and the thirteen days of glory. "Be sure that you are right, and then go ahead!" So may we always, America.
Houston said to Travis
'Get some Volunteers and go
'Fortify the Alamo.'
It was a fascinating band that took up the defense. Though he was not there himself, Sam Houston gave the orders. Houston was a man from Tennessee who had spent much of his life living among the Cherokee. He was so much a friend of the Cherokee nation that he abandoned American society for their company a second time, going into the West to join them after they were forced from their lands by the Jackson administration. Yet he left them, again, and came -- not again to Tennesee -- but to Texas.
The commander of the Alamo was William Barret Travis, who is here treated to an old-style biography, which begins: "Travis, WILLIAM BARRETT, Military Officer, Commander at the Alamo, Hero." It speaks poorly of us that we don't still write biographies in just that way.
There was the adventurer Jim Bowie, who gave his name to the finest type of fighting knife in the world. His biography ends: "During his lifetime he had been described by his old friend Caiaphas K. Ham as "a clever, polite gentleman...attentive to the ladies on all occasions...a true, constant, and generous friend...a foe no one dared to undervalue and many feared." Slave trader, gambler, land speculator, dreamer, and hero, James Bowie in death became immortal in the annals of Texas history."
And of course there was Davy Crockett, who gave the language almost as many idoms as Shakespeare, though fewer took hold on the language, more's the pity.
It is the mark of the greatest men that they inspire other great men to follow them. Teddy Roosevelt thought enough of Davy Crockett to name his hunters-and-conservationist association The Boone and Crockett Club. It still exists today, and is open to public membership. "Past Club member accomplishments include: the protection of Yellowstone, Glacier, and Denali National Parks; the foundation of the National Forest Service, National Park Service, and National Wildlife Refuge System...." A fitting legacy for an American hero.
Remember the Alamo, and the thirteen days of glory. "Be sure that you are right, and then go ahead!" So may we always, America.
Geek Girl
A Geek Girl:
Gwa45 is a very proud father.
And so he should be. It was only the other day that I bought Beowulf's first toy gun, after all.
AT&T
History & Irony:
A small item of today's news: AT&T to purchase BellSouth. I can't help but notice how nearsighted the article is. "AT&T was formed by San Antonio-based SBC's acquisition of AT&T Corp. in November," it says.
Well, yes, sort of. The details are right, if your only interest in the question is in tracking the here-and-now status of the telecommunications industry.
AT&T is one of those few American companies -- like Colt or DuPont or Smith & Wesson -- whose corporate history is old and interesting enough to be worth knowing. Their corporate website has a history section, although the milestones page is better. AT&T "was formed... in November" only in the worldview of investment traders; for the rest of us, it was founded in the nineteenth century by Alexander Graham Bell. "AT&T became the parent company of the Bell System," the history page tells us, "the American telephone monopoly... The system broke up into eight companies in 1984 by agreement between AT&T and the US Department of Justice."
That's a little sleight of hand there: 'by agreement with the Justice Department,' as if AT&T had really been in favor of the idea. In any event, one of those companies was Southern Bell. I know because, when I was a boy, my father worked for AT&T; and later for Southern Bell; and later for BellSouth, but that gets ahead of the story.
Southern Bell broke up not too long after AT&T was forced to divest itself of the Bell System. The corporate structure, used to monopoly protections, started tossing out everything that wasn't immediately profitable. Three major spinoffs: the Southern Bell Corporation, BellSouth, and BellSouth Advertising and Publishing (BAPCO), which runs the Yellow Pages.
AT&T purchased the Southern Bell Corporation some time ago. Now, it's set to repurchase BellSouth. I recall the period of the breakup reasonably well, and I remember listening to many stories about how it was screwing up everything for everyone -- that the market wasn't being well served by forcing the divestiture.
Well, my father was apparently correct. After twenty years, AT&T will be back in charge. Was the exercise in free markets worth the chaos? That's hard to say; but the system worked, apparently and eventually, just as he said it would.
Defending the First
Defending the First:
Imagined by whom? Having not seen any comment by the cartoonist himself, I can think of two possible answers.
1) It is possible that the cartoonist himself imagines Muhammad this way. Influenced by the violence carried out in Islam's name -- not in some distant Reformation or Crusade, but now today and worldwide -- he has come to imagine that Muhammad is a poisonous influence, a time bomb that turns men into murderers.
2) It is also possible that the cartoonist is not attempting to depict Muhammad as he, the cartoonist, sees Muhammad. He could be attempting to depict 'the Muhammad of the terrorist.' Having read quite a bit of the literature put forward by various Islamic terrorist groups, it does seem almost as if they themselves envision Muhammad in these terms: a figure whose primary commandment is to carry on a war, with the goal of bringing an Islamic state across the world. Whatever else exists in Islam became secondary long ago, as the case of the 9/11 hijackers demonstrates: the injuctions against alcohol and rampant sexuality are cast aside, by "martyrs" who dallied in strip clubs. The laws that were meant to promote civilization fell away; all that was left was the bomb.
If the cartoonist were trying to paint a critique of al Qaeda's vision, this is a telling one. It might also be shocking, as this post by a co-blogger at Cassandra's hall was shocking to me:
Yet, on reflection, I realized that the joke was likewise pointed commentary -- and their point was not one with which I had an argument. The complaint is of Kofi Annan taking massive payoffs from Dubai (most recently), while millions of children starve. Annan, an African himself, might be expected to feel something for these fellows, and if '22 cents a day' can save a child (as we used to be told), what could his millions do?
Fair enough: but couldn't that be said without the offensive, shocking cartoon?
Of course it could. And if it had been, I would have passed over it without stopping to think the matter through at all. Having written Annan and indeed the UN off long ago, I would have passed on to something else as soon as I realized it was a comment on one or the other. For the author to get me to consider his point, he needed my attention.
For those reasons, I think the Muhammad cartoons -- in spite of the turmoil associated with them in the short term -- have been a service rather than a crime. We are now thinking things through that are difficult: consider the several recent posts on Islam, which I have tried to defend and uphold. Sovay, at least, felt that I did a poor job of it; but as I said, Islamic history is not my field. I can only speak of the good things I have seen, and the Muslims I have known, the pleasure I have had in their company and the valuable insights I have gained from their conversation.
In addition, Muslims are now thinking through some difficult things. Mr. Junaid Afeef is coming to terms with the fact that there is what he calls 'irrational hatred' for Islam in the West even among 'enlightened people.' Yet he knows as well as we do what the source of those feelings are -- and I think he is wrong to call them irrational, or for that matter "hatred." There are rational reasons to be concerned about Islam as it appears to be practiced today: this map, for example, was composed by someone who has apparently come to a point of opposition to Islam, but it is not an irrational opposition. It is the result of a study of data, the very data encoded into the map.
If we are going to address this feeling that concerns Junaid Afeef, we can't do it by trying to sneer it down as "irrational hatred." There are very rational reasons for the concern, and it therefore deserves a rational response rather than emotional argument. This is a practical issue for those who want to defend Islam: even if emotional argument silenced those who are concerned -- for example if the use of shaming language like "irrational hatred" were to cause people simply to stop voicing concerns about Islam in public -- the effect would not be to put an end to the feelings of concern. It would be to leave those concerns, which are based on empirical observations, to fester. You might silence dissenters, but you would not end the dissent.
It would also serve to mask the degree of discomfort, so that the case for Islam would always be worse than it appears. No one might say anything in public, but their unspoken concerns would play out in ways that drive policy -- in the privacy of the ballot box, for example. Chester argues that it is precisely this which is driving the politics of the ports deal: that the Democratic party, by voicing concern about Arabs having control of the ports, has tapped a huge sentiment among the American people (indeed, the very one Junaid Afeef is talking about), a sentiment that has been hidden in our politics because neither party has heretofore been willing to say anything negative about Islam or Arabs. Yet the sentiment is there, hidden and lurking and unaddressed.
If that sentiment is to be lessened, it cannot be by silencing those who feel it. It has to be done by openly discussing and examining their concerns, the reasons that underlie those concerns, and by proposing both reasons for holding the alternative view, and plans for improving the situation. Out of that kind of a discussion, a better relationship can emerge.
In silence, we risk the dynamic that Chester forsees: a festering concern that worsens among Americans until someone realizes how successful they can be politically if they tap into it. In that case, the model of thinking -- an anti-Islamic model -- could shoot from being something people were ashamed to say in public, to the model that governs the nation, without a real debate on the merits of the model. Today, we have the opportunity to debate these questions without them driving policy. Leave it to fester, and we may find the policies are being enacted while we try to debate whether the model that underlies them is valid.
For what that might look like, see this other Chester post. "Internment" is already being suggested by some -- but that brings me back to the letter with which we started:
Government action, however, is a reality. I mentioned below my Scottish Muslim friend. He called to report having been questioned by the FBI -- if he is accurately reporting the facts (which I always doubt with this fellow, whose talent for storytelling often seems to run away from his devotion to pure truth), he was reported for having a heated political discussion with an Air Force NCO over the question of whether Muslims shouldn't just be interned in the fashion of Roosevelt's dealing with the Japanese during WWII. Apparently the NCO didn't know he was a Muslim, and so spoke his mind openly and without the self-censorship of potentially offensive ideas that we are debating here today.
There are several things to be said about this case:
1) The FBI is right to investigate such claims. My old friend occupies what is a minor but sensitive position on a US Air Force base. As a civilian contractor, if he becomes a counterintelligence concern it is an FBI rather than a Military Counterintelligence problem. The FBI would be derelict if they did not pursue a complaint of this type.
2) Nevertheless (again, if he's correctly reporting the facts) he is entitled to his political opinions, and ought to be able to have a debate of this type without fear. The FBI may need to investigate him if there is a report, but he needs to have confidence that such an investigation will get to the truth of the facts, and if the facts are as he states them, he needs to have confidence that the FBI's investigation will lead to exoneration.
3) The military NCO is a difficult case. The military man does not enjoy the same rights of free speech that other people do; as an officer of the military, he has to be conscious of his duty to defend all Americans. In an appropriate context, he should be able to express whatever ideas he has -- even ones we might consider impolite or shocking -- but he can't do it in just any context. Under the circumstances (again, if the facts are correct), this could be taken to be a creation of a hostile work environment: that is to say, as a matter of law, that the contractor's rights not to be offended at work take precedence over the NCO's rights to think out loud.
4) However, as I've tried to argue above, we do need to leave space for the expression of these ideas. If he were engaged and challenged rationally, it is entirely possible that the right spokesman could convince him that his ideas were wrong and dangerous -- indeed, I suspect Chester could. Most likely, they are ideas that haven't been thought through: and they won't get thought through unless they are challenged from outside his mind, which they can't be if he's not allowed to express them.
My respects to Junaid Afeef for his devotion to freedom of speech, and his recognition that defending Islam requires defending that freedom -- even, or perhaps especially, when it is being used to say negative things about Islam. I look forward to a day when he does not have to feel concern about his fellow citizens' intentions. I trust, and do believe, we can get there: and, like him, I think that open and honest discussion is the only road.
Junaid Afeef is a Muslim lawyer defending the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in the Daily Illini -- or, rather, defending Acton Gorton, the man who published them. It's unusual for the lawyer to have a more interesting story to tell than his client, but on this occasion, it's the truth. He has composed a thoughtful letter, and it deserves some thought in return. I suggest you read all of it, via the link; I want to respond only to certain parts.
I am offended by the rude and vile depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. I am disturbed that so many enlightened people in the West fail to see that these bigoted caricatures maligning the entire Muslim community are symptomatic of a rapidly growing, irrational hatred for Muslims. I also am dismayed by the idiotic and shortsighted response to these cartoons by Muslims all over the world.I have to express both sympathy and support, but also disagreement with some of his fundamental assumptions. As a Muslim, he may be disturbed by a depiction of Muhammad with a bomb for a brain. As a Westerner, though, he should be able to see that the icon speaks for its maker, and nothing else. A picture of Muhammad is not Muhammad -- "Ceci ne pas une pipe," or "The Treason of Images" is surely one of the core insights to arise from Western visual art. The cartoon does not depict Muhammad, but only the cartoonist's own thoughts about Muhammad. They say nothing about Muhammad as he really was, and only something about Muhammad as he is imagined.
Imagined by whom? Having not seen any comment by the cartoonist himself, I can think of two possible answers.
1) It is possible that the cartoonist himself imagines Muhammad this way. Influenced by the violence carried out in Islam's name -- not in some distant Reformation or Crusade, but now today and worldwide -- he has come to imagine that Muhammad is a poisonous influence, a time bomb that turns men into murderers.
2) It is also possible that the cartoonist is not attempting to depict Muhammad as he, the cartoonist, sees Muhammad. He could be attempting to depict 'the Muhammad of the terrorist.' Having read quite a bit of the literature put forward by various Islamic terrorist groups, it does seem almost as if they themselves envision Muhammad in these terms: a figure whose primary commandment is to carry on a war, with the goal of bringing an Islamic state across the world. Whatever else exists in Islam became secondary long ago, as the case of the 9/11 hijackers demonstrates: the injuctions against alcohol and rampant sexuality are cast aside, by "martyrs" who dallied in strip clubs. The laws that were meant to promote civilization fell away; all that was left was the bomb.
If the cartoonist were trying to paint a critique of al Qaeda's vision, this is a telling one. It might also be shocking, as this post by a co-blogger at Cassandra's hall was shocking to me:
Every year, over 12 million young children die before becoming United Nations Secretary Generals, many perish without ever having the opportunity to save the planet or publicly condemn Israel. To put this number into perspective, one child who has never been a UN Sec Gen dies approximately every 2.6 seconds, or almost 33,000 per day.This post goes on for some time, and (as it happens) includes a cartoon with the potential to shock a Westerner. I was going to snarl about it: no fan of Kofi Annan am I, and indeed I believe we should end our participation in the UN once and for all. Nevertheless, surely the suffering of the children in Africa is no matter for jokes.
Yet, on reflection, I realized that the joke was likewise pointed commentary -- and their point was not one with which I had an argument. The complaint is of Kofi Annan taking massive payoffs from Dubai (most recently), while millions of children starve. Annan, an African himself, might be expected to feel something for these fellows, and if '22 cents a day' can save a child (as we used to be told), what could his millions do?
Fair enough: but couldn't that be said without the offensive, shocking cartoon?
Of course it could. And if it had been, I would have passed over it without stopping to think the matter through at all. Having written Annan and indeed the UN off long ago, I would have passed on to something else as soon as I realized it was a comment on one or the other. For the author to get me to consider his point, he needed my attention.
For those reasons, I think the Muhammad cartoons -- in spite of the turmoil associated with them in the short term -- have been a service rather than a crime. We are now thinking things through that are difficult: consider the several recent posts on Islam, which I have tried to defend and uphold. Sovay, at least, felt that I did a poor job of it; but as I said, Islamic history is not my field. I can only speak of the good things I have seen, and the Muslims I have known, the pleasure I have had in their company and the valuable insights I have gained from their conversation.
In addition, Muslims are now thinking through some difficult things. Mr. Junaid Afeef is coming to terms with the fact that there is what he calls 'irrational hatred' for Islam in the West even among 'enlightened people.' Yet he knows as well as we do what the source of those feelings are -- and I think he is wrong to call them irrational, or for that matter "hatred." There are rational reasons to be concerned about Islam as it appears to be practiced today: this map, for example, was composed by someone who has apparently come to a point of opposition to Islam, but it is not an irrational opposition. It is the result of a study of data, the very data encoded into the map.
If we are going to address this feeling that concerns Junaid Afeef, we can't do it by trying to sneer it down as "irrational hatred." There are very rational reasons for the concern, and it therefore deserves a rational response rather than emotional argument. This is a practical issue for those who want to defend Islam: even if emotional argument silenced those who are concerned -- for example if the use of shaming language like "irrational hatred" were to cause people simply to stop voicing concerns about Islam in public -- the effect would not be to put an end to the feelings of concern. It would be to leave those concerns, which are based on empirical observations, to fester. You might silence dissenters, but you would not end the dissent.
It would also serve to mask the degree of discomfort, so that the case for Islam would always be worse than it appears. No one might say anything in public, but their unspoken concerns would play out in ways that drive policy -- in the privacy of the ballot box, for example. Chester argues that it is precisely this which is driving the politics of the ports deal: that the Democratic party, by voicing concern about Arabs having control of the ports, has tapped a huge sentiment among the American people (indeed, the very one Junaid Afeef is talking about), a sentiment that has been hidden in our politics because neither party has heretofore been willing to say anything negative about Islam or Arabs. Yet the sentiment is there, hidden and lurking and unaddressed.
If that sentiment is to be lessened, it cannot be by silencing those who feel it. It has to be done by openly discussing and examining their concerns, the reasons that underlie those concerns, and by proposing both reasons for holding the alternative view, and plans for improving the situation. Out of that kind of a discussion, a better relationship can emerge.
In silence, we risk the dynamic that Chester forsees: a festering concern that worsens among Americans until someone realizes how successful they can be politically if they tap into it. In that case, the model of thinking -- an anti-Islamic model -- could shoot from being something people were ashamed to say in public, to the model that governs the nation, without a real debate on the merits of the model. Today, we have the opportunity to debate these questions without them driving policy. Leave it to fester, and we may find the policies are being enacted while we try to debate whether the model that underlies them is valid.
For what that might look like, see this other Chester post. "Internment" is already being suggested by some -- but that brings me back to the letter with which we started:
There is evidence of the erosion of First Amendment rights of Muslims everywhere. Muslims are increasingly being forced to suppress deeply held beliefs, candid political observations, and personal convictions for fear of governmental and vigilante reprisals.In fairness, I don't think I've seen any evidence of vigilante reprisals against Muslims in America (nor Europe, that I can call to mind); although we have seen some examples of Muslims in America taking matters into their hands. Still, Muslims could be feeling fear of vigilantes, even if there are no vigilantes.
Today, imams who speak to Muslims about matters of self-defense and jihad as Qur’anic injunctions are in jeopardy of criminal prosecution for incitement. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, anyone who dares to link U.S. policies with Al-Qaeda sponsored terrorism is vilified and demonized. At this rate non-violent civil disobedience by Muslims very soon will be characterized as providing material support and aid to terrorists.
Government action, however, is a reality. I mentioned below my Scottish Muslim friend. He called to report having been questioned by the FBI -- if he is accurately reporting the facts (which I always doubt with this fellow, whose talent for storytelling often seems to run away from his devotion to pure truth), he was reported for having a heated political discussion with an Air Force NCO over the question of whether Muslims shouldn't just be interned in the fashion of Roosevelt's dealing with the Japanese during WWII. Apparently the NCO didn't know he was a Muslim, and so spoke his mind openly and without the self-censorship of potentially offensive ideas that we are debating here today.
There are several things to be said about this case:
1) The FBI is right to investigate such claims. My old friend occupies what is a minor but sensitive position on a US Air Force base. As a civilian contractor, if he becomes a counterintelligence concern it is an FBI rather than a Military Counterintelligence problem. The FBI would be derelict if they did not pursue a complaint of this type.
2) Nevertheless (again, if he's correctly reporting the facts) he is entitled to his political opinions, and ought to be able to have a debate of this type without fear. The FBI may need to investigate him if there is a report, but he needs to have confidence that such an investigation will get to the truth of the facts, and if the facts are as he states them, he needs to have confidence that the FBI's investigation will lead to exoneration.
3) The military NCO is a difficult case. The military man does not enjoy the same rights of free speech that other people do; as an officer of the military, he has to be conscious of his duty to defend all Americans. In an appropriate context, he should be able to express whatever ideas he has -- even ones we might consider impolite or shocking -- but he can't do it in just any context. Under the circumstances (again, if the facts are correct), this could be taken to be a creation of a hostile work environment: that is to say, as a matter of law, that the contractor's rights not to be offended at work take precedence over the NCO's rights to think out loud.
4) However, as I've tried to argue above, we do need to leave space for the expression of these ideas. If he were engaged and challenged rationally, it is entirely possible that the right spokesman could convince him that his ideas were wrong and dangerous -- indeed, I suspect Chester could. Most likely, they are ideas that haven't been thought through: and they won't get thought through unless they are challenged from outside his mind, which they can't be if he's not allowed to express them.
My respects to Junaid Afeef for his devotion to freedom of speech, and his recognition that defending Islam requires defending that freedom -- even, or perhaps especially, when it is being used to say negative things about Islam. I look forward to a day when he does not have to feel concern about his fellow citizens' intentions. I trust, and do believe, we can get there: and, like him, I think that open and honest discussion is the only road.
Elect. College
Another Wide-Ranging Debate:
Cassandra is writing about a proposal to eliminate the Electoral College, and invites bloggers and commenters to consider the question.
Personally, I'm for keeping the college and doing away with Presidential elections; it seems to me the same logic allows for either option. All you Campaign Finance Reform supporters can jump on the bandwagon here: we can eliminate the need for campaigns all together! Or possibly also the existence of the states, as Mr. Spd Rdr suggests...
The possibilies are endless, when you take up tinkering with the Constitutional system for no particular reason.
Still More Islam
Still More Islam:
Sovay has come back around to have another go in the comments to the first post. As often happens, the comments are now much more interesting than the original post. Here is a direct link to the comments section.
Paycheck Penalty
A Great Idea:
This business about not paying lawmakers who don't do their jobs, though, that's good thinking. You wouldn't pay anyone else who failed to perform, and if you consistently can't meet your deadlines in the civilian market, you're out of a job entirely -- not just facing a missing paycheck. It'd be good if the folks in Congress had a few market-disciplines ensuring they perform their duties.
Credit where credit is due: even Senators come up with something sharp once in a while. This is a brilliant idea:
U.S. Senator George Allen (R-VA) tonight will use his keynote address to the CPAC Convention to announce a three-point plan to force fiscal discipline into the federal budget process including a call for a “paycheck penalty” that withholds salary from members of Congress unless all appropriations measures are passed by the start of the fiscal year, October 1.The other two points of the "three point" plan I'm not so happy with: the balanced-budget amendment seems like a good idea most years, but it's the fact that it would keep you from making exceptions in emergencies that concerns me. The line-item veto? I have some concerns about how it would be used -- not so much by Bush, who never vetoes anything, but by future Presidents.
“It is absurd that full-time legislators can’t get their job done on-time by October 1—then several months later—all kinds of unknown, unchecked spending occurs. They pass it in the dead of night, thinking nobody will notice what’s in these appropriations bills,” Senator Allen will tell hundreds of delegates to the CPAC convention being held in Washington, D.C.
“What my measure will do is say very clearly, ‘if you fail to pass appropriations bills by the start of the fiscal year—which is your job, which is what you are paid to do—your paycheck will be withheld until you complete your job, period.
This business about not paying lawmakers who don't do their jobs, though, that's good thinking. You wouldn't pay anyone else who failed to perform, and if you consistently can't meet your deadlines in the civilian market, you're out of a job entirely -- not just facing a missing paycheck. It'd be good if the folks in Congress had a few market-disciplines ensuring they perform their duties.
NPT/India
India and the NPT:
There is, then, no question of whether we are allowed to do what is proposed. The question remains of whether we ought to do it. Yet it is critical to recognize, in order to prevent the debate from being conducted dishonestly by opponents of the transfer, that there is no issue of law here. What remains is an issue of policy: a question of whether this or that action would be wiser, and more likely to achieve good things and minimize bad ones.
Well, what about that?
We have three reasons to consider adopting this plan: the reduction of the Indian economy's need for oil, which reduces oil prices; the development of strategic ties with India, which is an excellent candidate for developing a US alliance similar to NATO in the increasingly critical Pacific / Asian region; and the development of India's economy, which will not only improve the lives of tens of millions who live in poverty, but increase the relative power of a free nation in a region increasingly under the sway of China's unfree political model.
We have two reasons not to: criticisms that transferring nuclear technology to a state which has made an end-run around the NPT will discourage other nations from adhering to the NPT; and general concerns about the development of nuclear power.
Factors that should influence the discussion: NPT signatory China is in favor of the US making this "exception," if that is the right word; developing nations like the Philippines are indeed watching, though the lessons they are drawing don't seem alarming to me, at least; Pakistan wants a similar agreement with the US, and we may open ourselves to charges of favoritism by not offering one; and the question of whether nuclear energy is safe and environmentally friendly compared to oil and coal energy production, which are India's other likely models.
As to the question of Pakistan, it is an important US ally in the GWOT, and we have long attempted to maintain a balance of sorts between them and India. It seems we may be reaching the point at which we cannot do that. India's rising importance and wealth mean that they will have to be dealt with on a different level from the way we deal with Pakistan. Just as China's increasing power and wealth has bought it an increasing number of US tolerances for things we wish it wouldn't do, so shall India's. The question is only how long we can, and should, continue to try to maintain the balance.
In winning India as an ally, we benefit from early signs of favoritism. We ought to want to convince India that we are their friends because we approve of and admire their devotion to freedom and human liberty. Pakistan is a dictatorship, and one we support only because the alternatives are worse (for now). India is a free nation based on an excellent model, and a friendship between our countries -- like the friendship with our most reliable ally, Australia -- can be one of the heart. We need friends like that in Asia.
Is there a political risk of losing Pakistan at this critical time? Possibly. They have been pursuing a closer relationship with China, and it is possible that they could be driven to prefer Chinese aid to US aid in the future. They would remain tied to the international system, though, rather than becoming a new Afghanistan: the Chinese are also threatened by the Islamists taking over a country they are depending on for naval access to the Persian Gulf, and will support the government in much the same fashion as we would. We benefit from getting a dictatorship off our tab, as it were; if it is necessary to prop up an unfree state, as it may be on occasion, by all means let China do it instead of us. It is proper, that the US should find a way to be on the side of freedom even in this difficult situation.
So: on balance, I think this nuclear deal is a good idea. I suggest to the readers that we give it our support.
We are long accustomed to seeing the concept of "international law" misused. There is no such thing as international law, of course, but there are treaties: treaties which say only what they say, and are binding only if you choose to opt into them, and until you choose to opt back out. There is a legal process for doing so in each country, and it is that country -- not the international bodies overseeing the treaties -- which have all the power and sovereignty. From the American perspective, we believe that power arises from consent of the governed, through a lawful constitution; but, to simply matters, we often (and probably mistakenly) deal with "nations" that are mere dictatorships of force as if they had the right to be treated as actual nations.
An example of the misuse I mean comes in the recent "White Phosphorous" controversy; we saw a similar example in the early days of our operations in Afghanistan, over cluster bombs. Many NGOs and political groups wailed at the US use of "internationally banned" weapons. Yet the US was not a signatory to any treaty banning cluster bombs; and the treaty invoked to explain why WP should not be used actually said nothing of the sort. The "law" is only an agreement; it binds only those who agreed to it, and it says only what it says.
So today we are hearing from advocates of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) over proposed US plans to transfer nuclear energy technology to India.
First of all, India isn't a signatory to the NPT; but the US is. The provisions thus bind us, but not them.
Second, what exactly does it say? The Federation of American Scientists, a group founded to monitor and attempt to control the spread of nuclear weapons, has a website devoted to the NPT:
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, also referred to as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), obligates the five acknowledged nuclear-weapon states (the United States, Russian Federation, United Kingdom, France, and China) not to transfer nuclear weapons, other nuclear explosive devices, or their technology to any non-nuclear-weapon state.Thus, we may not transfer nuclear technology to, say, Cambodia. India, however, is a nuclear-weapon state: it has demonstrated this adequately. So, the NPT does not ban us from doing what we are proposing to do.
There is, then, no question of whether we are allowed to do what is proposed. The question remains of whether we ought to do it. Yet it is critical to recognize, in order to prevent the debate from being conducted dishonestly by opponents of the transfer, that there is no issue of law here. What remains is an issue of policy: a question of whether this or that action would be wiser, and more likely to achieve good things and minimize bad ones.
Well, what about that?
We have three reasons to consider adopting this plan: the reduction of the Indian economy's need for oil, which reduces oil prices; the development of strategic ties with India, which is an excellent candidate for developing a US alliance similar to NATO in the increasingly critical Pacific / Asian region; and the development of India's economy, which will not only improve the lives of tens of millions who live in poverty, but increase the relative power of a free nation in a region increasingly under the sway of China's unfree political model.
We have two reasons not to: criticisms that transferring nuclear technology to a state which has made an end-run around the NPT will discourage other nations from adhering to the NPT; and general concerns about the development of nuclear power.
Factors that should influence the discussion: NPT signatory China is in favor of the US making this "exception," if that is the right word; developing nations like the Philippines are indeed watching, though the lessons they are drawing don't seem alarming to me, at least; Pakistan wants a similar agreement with the US, and we may open ourselves to charges of favoritism by not offering one; and the question of whether nuclear energy is safe and environmentally friendly compared to oil and coal energy production, which are India's other likely models.
As to the question of Pakistan, it is an important US ally in the GWOT, and we have long attempted to maintain a balance of sorts between them and India. It seems we may be reaching the point at which we cannot do that. India's rising importance and wealth mean that they will have to be dealt with on a different level from the way we deal with Pakistan. Just as China's increasing power and wealth has bought it an increasing number of US tolerances for things we wish it wouldn't do, so shall India's. The question is only how long we can, and should, continue to try to maintain the balance.
In winning India as an ally, we benefit from early signs of favoritism. We ought to want to convince India that we are their friends because we approve of and admire their devotion to freedom and human liberty. Pakistan is a dictatorship, and one we support only because the alternatives are worse (for now). India is a free nation based on an excellent model, and a friendship between our countries -- like the friendship with our most reliable ally, Australia -- can be one of the heart. We need friends like that in Asia.
Is there a political risk of losing Pakistan at this critical time? Possibly. They have been pursuing a closer relationship with China, and it is possible that they could be driven to prefer Chinese aid to US aid in the future. They would remain tied to the international system, though, rather than becoming a new Afghanistan: the Chinese are also threatened by the Islamists taking over a country they are depending on for naval access to the Persian Gulf, and will support the government in much the same fashion as we would. We benefit from getting a dictatorship off our tab, as it were; if it is necessary to prop up an unfree state, as it may be on occasion, by all means let China do it instead of us. It is proper, that the US should find a way to be on the side of freedom even in this difficult situation.
So: on balance, I think this nuclear deal is a good idea. I suggest to the readers that we give it our support.
More on Islam
More on Islam:
Yet he has also closed newspapers in Malaysia that have printed the Danish cartoons, stories about the Danish cartoons, or even cartoons about the cartoons. His government has asserted that it means to be equal-opportunity about this: it will close newspapers that say bad things about Jesus, too. That is a moderate position, but it is not a position consistent with liberty, or likely to lead us to mutual understanding. It attempts to avoid flashpoints, by silencing anyone who would explore the underlying problems.
On what foundations, then, are these bridges to be built? If what underlies them is not solid -- if people have reservations they have not been allowed to voice and have answered, or even considered -- how will such bridges bear any weight?
Badawi himself invokes a long set of complaints against the West, both past and present, in his speech. Perhaps he was playing to the crowd, which included a number of what pass for "dignitaries" these days, including figures from Zimbabwe and Iran. Some of these complaints are ritual (as the Malaysians themselves are aware), rituals that have to be performed so that you can get to the business at hand -- not only in the Muslim world, but closer to home as well. In Mexico, for example, the government has so long encouraged anti-Americanism in state education that it now has to frame issues as 'shoving our independence in the eye of evil America' even when what it desires to do is move into closer cooperation with America. Americans by and large don't notice, and so the anti-American rhetoric functions as a lubricant. It makes it easier for the Mexican government to do what it wants, but what it has taught its people to suspect as servile submission to a domineering neighbor. They still cooperate, but they have made their prominent display of independence, so their people don't notice so much that they're doing just what America would want.
By the same token, we don't really notice in America when even genuine moderates like Abdullah invoke "global hegemony" and accuse us of "systematically caus[ing] innocent children, women and men to be killed[.]" It is only grease for the wheel, which allows his audience to be receptive when he says that "I hold the strong view that in the case of Islam, those who deliberately kill non-combatants and the innocent; those who oppress and exploit others; those who are corrupt and greedy; those who are chauvinistic and communal, do not speak on behalf of Islam."
He has established his independence with the posturing display of rhetoric, and now can move them closer to us. So long as we do not notice the display, it will not push us further away.
Yet now we have noticed, this and other similar things. We have to make a choice about them. We can choose to be pushed away, which will keep the chasm open between Islam and the West. Or, we can choose to take the blow for what it is worth: to "turn the other cheek," that is to say, and pursue the good that these moderates are trying to create in spite of the ritual insults.
As this is the West, we cannot do that through silence and pretending not to notice. That is not our way. But we can do it by saying, "I feel those charges are unfair (for these reasons); but I understand you are attempting to lay the foundation for furthering good will, and so I will not respond with attacks of my own." We can point to the genuine concerns we have -- free expression and inquiry are our right and heritage, and we both can and should speak plainly -- without using language like "evil religion."
When others who do feel that they can only speak plainly by saying such things, Westerners should not silence them. Instead, we reply, and try to say -- as BlackFive and I have tried to say -- that it is not a fair, nor a complete picture.
None of this is easy, but many things that are best in life are not easy. I mentioned Richard and Saladin before, but let me try another one closer to home. In the South we tell our children that the great Robert E. Lee went about before war became certain, arguing against it and trying to keep it from breaking into ruinous conflict. He did, and many others did also; and when they failed, at last, the South found in them its staunchest defenders.
BlackFive, likewise, is a warrior who should be heeded. He does not say these things out of fear of Islam, or ignorance of it. If Richard and Saladin failed to make their peace, and General Lee could make his only after terrible war, let us learn instead, and show our strength by honesty and forgiveness in the hope of avoiding a greater, wider war. There may still be time.
Another quote from the BlackFive piece:
But rational, tolerant people do live in Muslim countries. I know they do. I have friends in Turkey, Jordan, India, and Indonesia (and here in the States) that are socially liberal moderates who are devoutly Muslim. Not to mention muslim soldiers of countries that I've served with and trained with...And they are terrified of both the extremists in their lands and our deaf ears here in the States.Today, Wretchard of the Belmont Club puts together a few stories that show a Left-Right unity in Europe on that Tipping Point:
How in the hell did we get here?
You can blame our media for displaying the worst of the Islamic extremists daily (and for bowing to the pressure of the worst of them - they're cartoons for crying out loud), and you can also blame the theocracies for feeding the blood lust and keeping their followers uneducated and duped in order to retain or build power. You can blame their governments for not protecting the moderates and the socially liberal among their societies. You can blame the rich oil sheiks for playing geopolitical games with their billions. And you can blame the moderates themselves for being cowards, much like the cowards in our own country who acquiesce at the first sign of a fight - whether that fight is taking down a murdering tyrant or cow-towing to the Politically Correct Police.
Glenn Reynolds wrote an excellent short piece on Sunday about the Tipping Point where Americans just don't trust (all) Muslims anymore. Apparently, we've had enough.
Have we?
Have we had enough BS from the extremists to taint our feelings towards every Muslim in the world? Have we let the media influence us so?
twelve public figures have issued a Manifesto calling "Islamism" the new totalitarian threat of our time. Atlas Shrugs has the text of the declaration.... [which] has been signed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, Ibn Warraq....This morning I see a story from the University of California, Irvine:
Gateway Pundit points to a new ad campaign being undertaken in Poland by an organization called the "Foundation of St. Benedictus" which calls attention to ordinary men and women being killed for religious reasons all over the world by a militant Islam. They are plastering posters on Polish public transportation. Some examples are shown below.
Tensions quickly escalated when the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder of the conservative Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, said that Islam was an "evil religion" and that all Muslims hate America.Concern over this schism is not limited to the Western world. In Malaysia last month, there was a conference called "Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?" Some disagreeable characters showed up to speak there, too, but also some genuine moderates, such as Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi. Badawi proposed the building of bridges between Muslim and Westerner, with the hope that we might speak up for one another:
People repeatedly interrupted the talk and, at one point, campus police removed two men, one of them a Muslim, after they nearly came to blows.
Later, panelists were cheered when they referred to Muslims as fascists and accused mainstream Muslim-American civil rights groups of being "cheerleaders for terror."
"[W]hen the bridge-builders reign supreme, the people of the West will speak for Islam and the Muslims will speak for the West."I have tried to do so, below. But we cannot stop at just saying nice things, and trying to pretend the differences do not exist. Abdullah Badawi is a moderate, certainly: he has gone far and wide preaching for what he calls "Civilizational Islam," an Islam that devotes itself to technology and education and rejects violence.
Yet he has also closed newspapers in Malaysia that have printed the Danish cartoons, stories about the Danish cartoons, or even cartoons about the cartoons. His government has asserted that it means to be equal-opportunity about this: it will close newspapers that say bad things about Jesus, too. That is a moderate position, but it is not a position consistent with liberty, or likely to lead us to mutual understanding. It attempts to avoid flashpoints, by silencing anyone who would explore the underlying problems.
On what foundations, then, are these bridges to be built? If what underlies them is not solid -- if people have reservations they have not been allowed to voice and have answered, or even considered -- how will such bridges bear any weight?
Badawi himself invokes a long set of complaints against the West, both past and present, in his speech. Perhaps he was playing to the crowd, which included a number of what pass for "dignitaries" these days, including figures from Zimbabwe and Iran. Some of these complaints are ritual (as the Malaysians themselves are aware), rituals that have to be performed so that you can get to the business at hand -- not only in the Muslim world, but closer to home as well. In Mexico, for example, the government has so long encouraged anti-Americanism in state education that it now has to frame issues as 'shoving our independence in the eye of evil America' even when what it desires to do is move into closer cooperation with America. Americans by and large don't notice, and so the anti-American rhetoric functions as a lubricant. It makes it easier for the Mexican government to do what it wants, but what it has taught its people to suspect as servile submission to a domineering neighbor. They still cooperate, but they have made their prominent display of independence, so their people don't notice so much that they're doing just what America would want.
By the same token, we don't really notice in America when even genuine moderates like Abdullah invoke "global hegemony" and accuse us of "systematically caus[ing] innocent children, women and men to be killed[.]" It is only grease for the wheel, which allows his audience to be receptive when he says that "I hold the strong view that in the case of Islam, those who deliberately kill non-combatants and the innocent; those who oppress and exploit others; those who are corrupt and greedy; those who are chauvinistic and communal, do not speak on behalf of Islam."
He has established his independence with the posturing display of rhetoric, and now can move them closer to us. So long as we do not notice the display, it will not push us further away.
Yet now we have noticed, this and other similar things. We have to make a choice about them. We can choose to be pushed away, which will keep the chasm open between Islam and the West. Or, we can choose to take the blow for what it is worth: to "turn the other cheek," that is to say, and pursue the good that these moderates are trying to create in spite of the ritual insults.
As this is the West, we cannot do that through silence and pretending not to notice. That is not our way. But we can do it by saying, "I feel those charges are unfair (for these reasons); but I understand you are attempting to lay the foundation for furthering good will, and so I will not respond with attacks of my own." We can point to the genuine concerns we have -- free expression and inquiry are our right and heritage, and we both can and should speak plainly -- without using language like "evil religion."
When others who do feel that they can only speak plainly by saying such things, Westerners should not silence them. Instead, we reply, and try to say -- as BlackFive and I have tried to say -- that it is not a fair, nor a complete picture.
None of this is easy, but many things that are best in life are not easy. I mentioned Richard and Saladin before, but let me try another one closer to home. In the South we tell our children that the great Robert E. Lee went about before war became certain, arguing against it and trying to keep it from breaking into ruinous conflict. He did, and many others did also; and when they failed, at last, the South found in them its staunchest defenders.
BlackFive, likewise, is a warrior who should be heeded. He does not say these things out of fear of Islam, or ignorance of it. If Richard and Saladin failed to make their peace, and General Lee could make his only after terrible war, let us learn instead, and show our strength by honesty and forgiveness in the hope of avoiding a greater, wider war. There may still be time.
MilTracker
MilTracker:
Our friend Phil Van Treuren (who is now signing his emails "Officer Candidate" Van Treuren -- good for the Army, in recognizing his potential) has opened up a site called MilTracker. You might want to have a look at it, if you're interested in news that honors the American military.
Islam Talk
On Islam:
Pakistan worries about what might happen if the uneducated, tribal groups should gain control of the state from the educated class. They are right to worry: but we should also remember that the educated class exists, and are natural allies of ours. This is not to say that they have the same interests: as I just finished saying, they have almost always different ones. But it is to say that the parts of Islam that worry us also worry them, and are a bigger threat to them than to us. We, alike, want to see that population educated and lifted into what we think of as the modern world.
At my wedding, one of my groomsman was a Muslim: a Scot who had converted from Presbyterianism. Yet he did not refuse friendship with non-Muslims, any more than had these Pakistani Muslims, regardless of what prohibitions may be in Islamic law. We have all read of such things, and they have a hold on the imagination of the radicals. Yet I have seen that it is not always that way, and that there are many Muslims who wish to be, and can be, good friends.
In China, I lived in a foreign residence hall at Zhejiang University -- this is where many of the few foreigners in the city of HangZhou were kept. We came from all over the world, centralized in one building because China wanted to keep watch on any foreigners in their country. There was little in the way of a common language: most people there spoke little or no English; most yet spoke little or no Chinese. I could manage French with the West Africans, who spoke it far better than I did.
Buddhists and Hindus and Christians all lived there, but there was no obvious community to them. Not so the Muslims. We talk a lot about the tribal aspects of much of those parts of the Islamic world where there is trouble, and indeed, much of Islam is still tribal. Yet it is also the case that Islam is the bridge across that tribalism, and an effective one. The Muslims -- from Pakistan, from Africa, from island nations, wherever they came from -- banded together at once in a bond of friendship. They washed and prayed together daily; they never failed, that I witnessed, to share equally food or cigarettes or whatever was needed by their brother Muslims.
Christians said and did little in the way of such things, knowing how the ever-present authorities in Communist China looks with suspicion on faith; but the Muslims prayed fearlessly and in public. If they had lost their scholarships and been thrown out of the country, particularly the Africans, it would have meant real poverty and a collapse of their dreams: but they never let that stop them. That was a high and fine thing to see, prayer in defiance of fear.
There is much good to be said for Islam. I will not hesistate to say it. I do not think Islam is a true faith, but that is for me to decide only for me. The road forward for the West is not to tear down the Crescent, but to raise up our own banners again. We are called, not to defile what they believe, but to recover again our own faith. We must, if we are to see the freedoms and virtues of the West survive into the next century and beyond.
Yet, in becoming a defender of the West, do not make yourself an enemy of Islam. Richard the Lionheart fought against the Muslim warriors more than most of us shall ever do, and yet he came to respect and honor Saladin. No Muslim every fought harder or more successfully against the West's armies, yet Saladin came to love and honor not only Richard but Western knighthood. That must be the model for us: defiant to the very last against any tyranny, Islamic or otherwise; yet prepared to be friends, in honorable disagreement, if we are received in friendship.
It is not impossible. I have been so received, now and then, and am proud and glad to say it.
UPDATE:
I've gotten a couple of whole-mailing-list emails lately from Muslim co-workers, inviting me to learn more about Islam. One of them invited me to attend a seminar; the other, advertised an upcoming History Channel special (which I won't watch because I do not have television). I have to admit that my initial response to both emails was irritation.
In the first place, I was irritated because workplace evangelizing is normally in bad taste. Discussing religion with interested co-workers is fine; nothing wrong with a free discussion. Trying to get everyone to come to your church and hear The Truth, however, is annoying to people -- regardless of which Truth is on offer. For one thing, if I want to go to your church, I can probably find the way on my own. For another, a mass email or a flier distributed to everyone is plainly not the work of a friend who cares about you and wants your salvation; they aren't even thinking about you, in terms of preparing arguments and considering your particular case. They're just beating the bushes, to see if any game flushes -- and I don't like to be treated like prey. You flush a grizzly bear, you might wish you hadn't.
In the second place, it seemed to me that this wasn't the month to be evangelizing on behalf of Islam. This seemed like a good month for embarrassed silence on behalf of American Muslims, what with the US Embassy being attacked in Jakarta, embassies of Denmark burned along with American and Danish flags, Muslims blowing up each other's shrines and holy places in Iraq (and other Muslims blaming America for it, as if the 101st Airborne hadn't permitted fire from the Shrine of Ali to go unanswered rather than attack the shrine in the early days of the Iraq war; and as if the US Army hadn't continued to do so during the uprising in Najaf, to the point that Mehdi Army mortarmen didn't even bother to fortify their positions in the shrine because they knew there would be no counterbattery fire), torture and murder in France, a scholarly conference on Islam in Holland that is considered a national security emergency (with death-threats in the dozens for thinkers who participate), Islamic countries attempting to derail intervention in Darfur that might stop the killing (by Muslims) of minorites (who aren't), worldwide riots over cartoons, the recent election of a terrorist group to the leadership of Palestine, etc., etc.
One can go on essentially forever. If I were a Muslim, I'd be feeling pretty quiet just now. So, when I got instead a couple of mass emails directed at "educating" me about Islam, I was irritated by them. "This isn't the week," I thought, "for teaching me about the glories of Islam."
Yet as I think about it more, I believe I was being unfair. I have known these people for years. They're not evangelizing: they've never approached me before, nor to my knowledge have they ever been interested before now in pushing educational efforts of this sort. Also, they too are aware of the news, just as I am. It is not an accident that they suddenly became interested in outreach at this time.
They're scared.
They are afraid of what lessons you and I are learning from the news. They're afraid of the outrage over the ports deal in a way that they weren't afraid of the outrage over 9/11. They're afraid of the hostility directed at America by Muslims worldwide, and about the hostility increasingly -- and rationally -- felt by Americans toward much of worldwide Islam. They want us to know that there is a lot more to Islam that what is appearing in the news, that there is a beautiful and a peaceful side to it that has informed and brightened their lives.
Fair enough: America wants the Islamic world to know that there's a lot more to America than what they see on the news, particularly if they get their news from the conspiracists who seem to run the press in so many parts of the world. Yet, just as Karen Hughes has made a poor messenger to Islam, so too these efforts by Muslims to reach out to us are ineffective. They rather too obviously come from outsiders; they are rather too obviously biased. We might, and they might, be susceptible to an independent reading -- or a positive reading from one of our own. But tensions are too high for a sermon from within the other's camp.
So I'm going to tell you what I know about Islam. I think it's important that they have an advocate in one of us: and I will take up that cause, which is not my own, out of sympathy and a desire to ease the fear they feel. It is right to do this, as at least the fictional Lionheart held:
"I should in that case hold you," replied the yeoman, "a friend to the weaker party."The first Muslim friends I had I met in college. Most of them were from Pakistan. Pakistan is divided sharply between its ruling, educated class and the classes and tribes that are not. These were of the educated sort: military men, some of them, including a good friend I had who was an F-16 pilot. He was brave and smart and clever, as a fighter pilot ought to be; and well read, as a college student ought to be (but so rarely is). I enjoyed the conversations, which were challenging because they arose from a genuinely different point of view: their embedded interests in every political question were those of the Third, rather than the First world; those of Muslims, rather than the Christians I had mostly known; those of Pakistan, rather than America. They were a challenge, but an intellectual one. They were capable of, interested in, and passionate about intellectual inquiry and argument.
"Such is the duty of a true knight at least," replied the Black Champion.
Pakistan worries about what might happen if the uneducated, tribal groups should gain control of the state from the educated class. They are right to worry: but we should also remember that the educated class exists, and are natural allies of ours. This is not to say that they have the same interests: as I just finished saying, they have almost always different ones. But it is to say that the parts of Islam that worry us also worry them, and are a bigger threat to them than to us. We, alike, want to see that population educated and lifted into what we think of as the modern world.
At my wedding, one of my groomsman was a Muslim: a Scot who had converted from Presbyterianism. Yet he did not refuse friendship with non-Muslims, any more than had these Pakistani Muslims, regardless of what prohibitions may be in Islamic law. We have all read of such things, and they have a hold on the imagination of the radicals. Yet I have seen that it is not always that way, and that there are many Muslims who wish to be, and can be, good friends.
In China, I lived in a foreign residence hall at Zhejiang University -- this is where many of the few foreigners in the city of HangZhou were kept. We came from all over the world, centralized in one building because China wanted to keep watch on any foreigners in their country. There was little in the way of a common language: most people there spoke little or no English; most yet spoke little or no Chinese. I could manage French with the West Africans, who spoke it far better than I did.
Buddhists and Hindus and Christians all lived there, but there was no obvious community to them. Not so the Muslims. We talk a lot about the tribal aspects of much of those parts of the Islamic world where there is trouble, and indeed, much of Islam is still tribal. Yet it is also the case that Islam is the bridge across that tribalism, and an effective one. The Muslims -- from Pakistan, from Africa, from island nations, wherever they came from -- banded together at once in a bond of friendship. They washed and prayed together daily; they never failed, that I witnessed, to share equally food or cigarettes or whatever was needed by their brother Muslims.
Christians said and did little in the way of such things, knowing how the ever-present authorities in Communist China looks with suspicion on faith; but the Muslims prayed fearlessly and in public. If they had lost their scholarships and been thrown out of the country, particularly the Africans, it would have meant real poverty and a collapse of their dreams: but they never let that stop them. That was a high and fine thing to see, prayer in defiance of fear.
There is much good to be said for Islam. I will not hesistate to say it. I do not think Islam is a true faith, but that is for me to decide only for me. The road forward for the West is not to tear down the Crescent, but to raise up our own banners again. We are called, not to defile what they believe, but to recover again our own faith. We must, if we are to see the freedoms and virtues of the West survive into the next century and beyond.
Yet, in becoming a defender of the West, do not make yourself an enemy of Islam. Richard the Lionheart fought against the Muslim warriors more than most of us shall ever do, and yet he came to respect and honor Saladin. No Muslim every fought harder or more successfully against the West's armies, yet Saladin came to love and honor not only Richard but Western knighthood. That must be the model for us: defiant to the very last against any tyranny, Islamic or otherwise; yet prepared to be friends, in honorable disagreement, if we are received in friendship.
It is not impossible. I have been so received, now and then, and am proud and glad to say it.
UPDATE:
It appears BlackFive and I are on the same page again:
After the first crusaders took Jerusalem in the eleventh century, a Kurd Sunni from Tikrit by the name of Saladin took it and much of the crusader gained territory back. Saladin, even seen as a conquering enemy, was revered by European courts for his grace, kindness and intelligence. They regarded him as a Knight. In actuality, he embodied more of the gentle and honorable traits of a Knight than most of the European gentry sent off to rid the world of non-Christians.Well said.
In the Reverse Crusades, our Saladin is not a "who", but a "what". Our Saladin must be the idea that all men and women were created equal and free.
We need to wage both war and peace at the same time. Both require strength of will, both require passion and understanding. Both require love.
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