Letters to the Editor
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The Power of Nightmares
Tigerr, Bungo boy --
Agree, that's a great doc. A friend who is also a doc-maker turned me on to it.
I admit to some head scratching, though, about the ways both Leo Strauss and Sayid Qutb have been caricatured both by those who claim to be their followers and their enemies looking for the 'Rosetta Stone'.
Leo Strauss, by my reading in grad school, basically believed that there were enduring political insights contained in a 'canon' of political thought extending from the Greeks to now (including Muslim thinkers also, like Averroes and Avicenna, Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina respectively), and that it was worthile to collect these, read them again and again, and pay close attention to what they were saying. That has mutated into a public image as the father of the neocons (since so many of their leaders were students of his at Chicago) who believed in secret messages from great men that could be used to conquer the world. The adjective 'Straussian', fashionable though it is, is confusing to me.
Sayid Qutb's image is understandably distorted, since fewer people have read him and he had a hand in creating the Egyptian Ikhwan al-Muslimin, which we can always gather from their English name ... the Muslim Brotherhood ... are part of a global plot to enslave mankind and impose Sharia. Assassins of Sadat, and so forth. Who would want to read someone like that?
Yet if you do read 'Signposts on the Road', what he says is quite different. He uses some examples from his own experience that includes Americans, but this isn't the point. The tract, forceful as it is, is in response to the encroachment of modernity in the enfeebled Islamic world, and recommends that Muslims turn away from this, embrace their own traditions, and avoid the inherent corruptions of modernity. He sounds a lot like our own Western anti-modernists, but the cultural-authenticity argument he makes is part of a specifically Cairene tradition, which he knows will appeal broadly in the Arabic-speaking Muslim world.
It's very much a personal-responsibility moral argument, versus a manifesto for overturning the West; where he speaks of the West it is as a colonial entity that has to be driven out, not invaded or confronted on its own territory.
Maybe these are just parables about what happens when the thoughts of ordinary, thoughtful and articulate men become useful to those who seek power over others. To me, it's just a reminder not to confuse one with the other.
Peace,
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One more for the knob
I know that after Israel became an independent state all if its neighbors have attacked it.
And I know the history of the wars of Middle-Earth.
Did Israel never attack them?
Oh, in pre-emptive self-defense, I see. Isn't it always the way.
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I left out
That in that post on 9/11, Ledeen also says that Saddam was responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in the 90s.
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@Pedinska
And when you toss their own words back at them, like some perverted version of Superman and bullets, they just bounce off and fall, harmlessly, to the ground.
As far as I can see, the only thing that really shuts them down is forceful, contemptuous mocking of the facially absurd ideas they float.
The number-one thing is that they be taken seriously.
Nobody who can read the paper should take them seriously.
Politeness w.r.t. plans for mass-murder is not desirable.
Anyone floating the idea of pre-emptively nuking Iran should be effectively publically shamed. They should feel embarrassed for entertaining such an inhuman, un-American, un-strategic idea.
No one forces us to espouse nonsense, it is a sign of no self-respect. The neosense spouted by neocons these days deserves calumnies and parodies, and nothing more.
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Therefore
"is it the now wakened man's responsibility to save the burglar/murderer of his neighbor? Especially when he recognizes the man as the murderer of his own father?"
Answer: No. He ain't worth saving.
You ask easy questions.
Yes, it was an easy one.
So, why would Iran not pull the shotgun from under his bed and blow Uncle Sam away?
Maybe he's responsible after all.
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Why not cut & paste the actual quote? Too inconveniently factual, eh?
... why "Israel says" instead of "Neo-Cons in Israel say"?
That's a bit sweeping, to imply that ALL Israelis and ALL of Israel are a bunch of lying war-mongers, on the same level as the handful of neocon elites in the US. -- Taste of Death Publishing Company
Compare this to Glenn's actual words in his first Update:
UPDATE: It isn't just the American neocons, but also the Israelis, who are escalating the "Attack Iran" campaign. The Jerusalem Post yesterday "reported" that "with Iran racing forward with its nuclear program, Israel now believes the Islamic Republic will master centrifuge technology and be able to begin enriching uranium on a military scale this year" -- Glenn Greenwald
Greenwald did not write "Israel says" in his update. The sentence he wrote is ambiguous; the phrase "American neocons, but also the Israelis" could be read as either "also the Israeli neocons" or as "also all the Israeli political establishment".
His next sentence is quite clear in its attribution -- he reports that the Jerusalem Post is asserting what "Israel believes".
It's a bit more difficult for an honest commenter to beat his chest and rend cloth when Glenn's actual words are examined. But, I suspect if honest was your aim, you would have cut & pasted the quote in a comment, and asked him precisely what he meant before going on a tear about how terribly abused you are by the mere existence of a "leftwing blogosphere".
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@Pedinska
I've got this horrible image of these political 'tards in their unitards....GACK!
Visceral, wasn't it? :>
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Believing the Neo-Cons
An article in the Guardian speaks of millions of Whitehouse e-mails that were lost in 2003, just at the beginning of Iraq invasion (linked below). Can you imagine the hew and cry from the so-called "vast right-wing conspiracy" had this happened with Clinton? Few, if any, are complaining now...
There is no great secret to the Neo-Con way of history and remembering: you're with us or you're against us. They are authoritarian and belligerent, avoid taking responsibility for mistakes and the most shrill and thin skinned of accusers. Accuracy and thoroughness have little value other than when facts are cherry picked to anchor a narrative.
So it is with memory in general. They repress it when it comes to their own failures (which are staggering in number and range) or access it selectively to rationalize or aggrandize their decisions. This is part of the reason that the MSM media stars have been generally reluctant to call them on their pasts--they will offend and lose access if they do so.
It may prove harder to sucker the country into an attack on Iran (as GWB himself put it "Fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again."). But then again, they hardly have anything left to lose as they're heading towards the door and they have their men well placed to issue the orders.