Letters to the Editor
Rowan Berkeley
Published Letters: 176
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don't be frightened
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The development of electronic communications has produced new networks of felt affinities, which challenge the older and more predictable affinities based on textual criteria which can be used on a rote basis to determine who belongs with whom.
This state of felt affinity is only intermittent, so everyone gets tormenting glimpses of it and then falls back into their rote identifications. this produces a sort of panic.
Verbal reassurances of loyalty are useless. one gravitates to those one has the deepest and strongest affinities with, and casting around for explanations in terms of religious membership or genetic heritage is not only useless but harmful.
In this sense, the elderly among us who conceive themselves as guardians against infiltrators and insist on applying loyalty tests are causing serious difficulties, of which the religious zionists are the most problematic, given their power and influence, which is vast.
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may I ask why sysprog pasted in a wikipedia biography of Walter Darré?
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]it seems singularly pointless.
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jim webb with video
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/18/webb-gi-bill-veto/
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interesting video about mikey weinstein's campaign
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmmiOUfdhZA
his spelling of 'dominionist' is a bit weird, but more seriously, he doesn't articulate the relationship between this evangelical totalitarianism in the air force and christian zionism. I was confused by this for a while, but on balance I think he is doing his best.
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@ rollotomasi
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]it isn't that I'm "unable to connect the dots," it's that pasting in chunks of wikipedia doesn't progress us. If sysprog had had anything to say, he should have said it, in his own words.
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the problem with just comparing this to nazism
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]is that all of the most influential US Jewish organisations are right behind it. The temptation to dismiss this, by claiming that these Jewish organisations are institutionally psychotic, is very great, but this is just playing with words. In fact, these Jewish organisations know perfectly well that they are supporting something that is a mirror image of nazism in some respects, and they also know that, because of the enormity of it, most of its opponents will fall into the trap of describing it as American nazism, which is nonsensical. It is precisely the rhetoric of ANTI-nazism that powers US totalitarianism, and I think I have already offered as much material as possible to show how this came about. This is why I object to just pasting in material about German nazism. It doesn't explain the apparent paradox, does it?
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@ william timberman
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]you say that the paradox is purely semantic, which seems to me to imply that you would be happy describing AIPAC & Co. as "Jewish Nazis." Is that correct? If not, why not? Please don't say, "it's tactical suicide to describe them like that, so I shan't," and expect me to let you leave it at that!
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@william, @l.w.m.
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]william, you are doing what I told you I wouldn't let you get away with. You are weaseling around with synonyms and equivocations, trying to avoid the point, which is that even the nastiest neocon will nail you to the wall if you call him a "nazi," because the basic definition of "Nazism" involves anti-Semitism. "Nazism" is not a typological term like "totalitarianism." This is important because there is real, serious depth to these concepts, otherwise the neocons would not have been able to get away with what they have done.
Formally speaking, in terms of political typologies, there is a case for arguing that Jabotinsky was influenced not only by fascist practice but also by fascist theory. Lenni Brenner has written a lot about this, or rather has collected a lot of historical data about it. But the modern Likud has moved much closer to religious zionism, which as I keep saying is the x factor that ties everything together (even the lunatics in the christian zionist movement).
l.w.m., yes, I have read that letter, though it is torn out of context and not one of the things I think Scott Horton (whose radio work I like) should be particularly proud of. Strauss was a bit of a phony, in the way he used pseudo-classicism throughout his career, and not much of a Jew (if I may be permitted to say this).
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I've run out of emotional energy for the day
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]take care everyone. goodnight.
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good morning from 4 a.m. London
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I like this, from L.W.M.: "Chesterton on gummint: The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all. (G. K. Chesterton) Perhaps that makes some poorer RW anarchists useful idiots."
My remark about Leo Strauss' "pseudo-classicism" and him being a "bad Jew" was doubtless very tired-sounding ; that was just before I signed off last night. I would have to - let me make that, I WILL have to - develop this in Arendtian terms, and I shall do so as sincerely as I can, my not being Jewish notwithstanding. I can't do it overnight. But the argument will be something like this : Arendt admits, in a wry sort of way, that one of the perennial Jewish functions has been to act as ideological decorators for other peoples' empires. She refuses to condemn this, as a dogmatic marxist would, as witness her quite affectionate treatment of Disraeli, which I mentioned (and I have to stress that I am working through "Origins of Totalitarianism" very, very slowly).
However, Arendt was a secular progressive with a strong moral sense of Jewish responsibility. Her entire oeuvre was an attempt to explain what 'Jewish responsibility' meant. She would have agreed that from time to time Jews betray their own people's better qualities, and the human species as a whole, by engaging in forms of empire-flattery so vile that they effectively legitimate wholesale genocide, and if she was still around, she might add, incipient planetary-scale destruction.
This seems to me to be what Strauss did. In essence his work is ideological flattery of the worst tendencies of the US ruling class. It provides an intellectual gloss for Hollywood's pseudo-classical "New Rome", "New Centurions", type imagery, a sort of egg-head star wars fantasy. Then it introduces the epigones of classicism, notably Machiavelli.
Another image that comes to mind is Strauss as Iago to America's Othello. That certainly brings out the tragic aspect.