Hitchens on Hirsi Ali as an "Enlightenment Absolutist"

Remember back in college when your agnostic professors used to intone against the backwardness of medieval religious civilization and then exalt the glories of the Enlightenment, a narrative which brushed aside centuries of Church-dominated "superstition and obscurantism?" That was the prevailing doctrine at the University of Michigan in the late sixties.

But in a classic case of Giambattista Vico's ricorso, Christoper Hitchens has discovered the beginning of an ultimate betrayal of the Enlightenment we were all taught in graduate school to revere. [Actually, as a reconverted Catholic, I now believe the Enlightenment more than a bit oversold, to say the very least.]

Hitchens cites one of my favorite poems, September 1, 1939, W.H. Auden's gloomy meditation on how all the s**t in the world is hitting the fan one more time, only now even worse than ever, as the planet slides into World War II. [Pardon my indulgence]
"Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analyzed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again."
I'm now reading Victor Davis Hanson' book A War Like No Other based on Thucydides wonderful history concerning The Pelopponesian War [431-411 B.C.] Back in the day, I studied Attic Greek and read several authors in their original flowing language [unfortunately, not Thucydides before my Attic faded]. Hanson brilliantly shows the insanity of the jealous and hopelessly reactionary Spartans attack on the rich, globalizing [the contemporaneous term was attikizo]arrogant Athenians, busy enticing the entire Mediterranean with its seductive democracy, a democratic ethos that was seducing the poor in many Greek city-states into calling for Athenian home-grown models. More importantly to the Spartan ephors, the economic and artistic growth concomitant with democracy was undermining the tough oligarchic semi-serf dictatorship of the militarist Spartans. So the Spartans rashly decided in 432 BC to strike at Athenian democracy and prosperity in order to undermine the growing seductions of globalization just as Al Qaeda struck at the WTC and the Pentagon, a pre-emptive blow to an overwhelmingly powerful hegemon.

Of course, the Auden poem is correct that Thucydides saw all the ironies of a rich democratic power attacked by a benighted reactionary militarist ethos. Substitute religious for militarist, and the parallelism with Al Qaeda is uncanny.

And today, Hitchens points out the incomprehensible irony of the two great reactionary forces in constraining human freedom, atheistic socialists and violent religious reactionaries, seeking common cause in tearing down Enlightenment values and replacing them with, on the one hand, a semi-totalitarian elitist nannified dirigiste guardian state and on the other, a hateful and violent religious imperialism employing terrorism and immigrant communities as their beachhead into democracies based on Enlightenment values.

As Hitchens notes in his article, these two opposing ideologies, like Stalin and Hitler before September 1, 1939, have become allies of convenience to attack globalization and democratic values from two fronts. Internally, the ultra-left socialists employ progressive moles to advance their attacks on economic free markets and religious/volunteer organizations and private education. Externally, the Islamists ally with these leftist dupes to wreak slaughter and havoc in London, Madrid, and a couple of failed attempts in Germany and the US, knowing that the leftist media will downplay their nefarious agenda and cover up their crimes with MSM counterattacks on the GWOT.

Hitchens has recovered his sanity after decades of railing against capitalism and zionism. We can only hope that the media elites in academia, newsprint and TV, Hollyweird, and the moles in the US public educational establishment eventually awaken and avoid the catastrophes that ensue when jealous militant reactionaries meet rich democratic globalizers.

That already happened, as Hitchens, W.H. Auden, and Victor Davis Hanson all know. I am going to see the movie 300 this weekend to get a good fix on the event at Thermopylae [which I have visited in Greece] in 490 B.C. that began the incredible century of Greek cultural glory. Like the French holding back the German Army in 1914, Thermopylae began a century of conflicts and cultural efflorescence and worldwide prosperity and again, a final conflict. As the Greek example indicates, all the remarkable gains of the twentieth century could implode as Thucydides delineates in his magnificent history, which is more exactly a work of moral philosophy.

Unfortunately, Thucydides recounted a century that ended in the Greeks tearing themselves apart in an insane civil war.

Omne Exemplum Clauditur, [every metaphor limps], but Ayaan Hirsi Ali's cry for freedom from religious oppression is a canary in a coal mine for all of our values.

Hitchens does well to put the contending forces into context.

Hirsi Ali Irks Euro Nomenklatura

Those orchidaceous Dutch, who fervently collaborated with the Nazis against the Jews
dislike Hirsi Ali intensely, says Anne Applebaum, writer of the Pulitzer-winner Gulag and a world-ranking expert on group-think in a Slate piece.

You see, Hirsi has disturbed the Euros complacency about Islam, and brought an inconvenient truth [THAT IS ACTUALLY TRUE!] to the fore by her book Infidel, which trumpets Western values, a most unfashionable thing to do among Dutch intelligentsia and their Brit collaborators, like Timothy Garten Ash, who sneers at Hirsi Ali for her juvenile enthusiasm for democracy and liberal values.

The multiculturalists refuse to turn over the Islamic rock to investigate just what kind of life lives beneath, and condone honor killings and sharia law as some sort of commendably exotic eccentricity. However, a few Europeans actually criticize the sometimes violent and deeply reactionary culture that persists in the 45 signatory countries of "Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam."

Yes, there are many moderate Muslims in Europe who want to live a quiet life. Unfortunately, among them dwell a growing minority of aggressively violent conspirators who want to overthrow Western values, the ones that distinguished European academics and writers so often disparage with ill-concealed disdain.

How these sophisticated European polemicists square their hatred of the pope with their admiration of Islam continues to baffle this confused observer.

Brace yourselves for 10 Muharram tomorrow

The Muslim feast of
Ashura
is January 30, and my bet is that the large collection of bad hombres killed yesterday near Najaf were in a staging area for a big terrorist attack on Shi'ite pilgrims going to Najaf or Kerbala, the two great Shi'a pilgrimage sites, for this gruesome festival commemorating the death of Husayn, the son of 'Ali. While living in Lebanon, I saw an Ashura street demo in South Beirut with a very mild public version of the terrific penitential self-flagellation and cutting that takes place in Shi'ite mosques.

Even NPR hints that the horrific attack on the Samarra mosque and Zarqawi's assaults on Shi'ites in Sadr City and elsewhere are instigated by an Al Qaeda campaign to foment civil war and boost the ranks of defeatists in the USA. The brunt of the attacks on Najaf and Kerbala may have been thwarted by yesterday's news of hundreds of casualties among the Sunni insurgents, but the good tidings of an Iraqi military success has been put on the back pages of the MSM outlets and TV news. East-to-get video of terror-bombings in Baghdad make front-page, top of the broadcast news. Successes in out-of-the-way places are duly noted, but buried by lurid tales of insurgent nastiness and funerals of stateside families mourning their heroic dead. At one point a few days ago, I switched from ABC to CBS to NBC and all simultaneously [I believe it was Friday night's weekend wrap-up] had stories of berieved families. AQ Agitpreppie Brian Williams had his usual shallow commentary, and the MSM campaign to discredit victory in Iraq continues...

Yes, Bush and his lieutenants botched the job, but that doesn't mean walking away before the job is finally finished. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow the Al Qaeda will still be on the job, whether we walk away or not.

Hitchens Makes Mincemeat of Old Left Radicals

The Perfessoriat, the BBC, and George Galloway all come under the withering fire of the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Nick Cohen's book, What's Left? How the Liberals Lost Their Way. CH as usual eviscerates with a sharp scalpel all the frauds on the far left who still love to hate Bush/Blair/democracy.

Some choice cuts:

...there are thousands and thousands of middle-aged lefties for whom their once-revolutionary "credentials"” are all they have left to show for a lifetime of "activism," and who could not face their friends — or, perhaps, their students — if they found themselves endorsing a war fought by British or American soldiers. (I myself remember repressing a twinge of annoyance at the idea that the assault on civilisation represented by the 9/11 attacks would drive my anti-Kissinger book from the front page where I still believe it belonged.) But Cohen goes further: "I wanted anything associated with Tony Blair to fail, because that would allow me to return to the easy life of attacking him."”

It is this sentence, and its implications, that make his book an exceptional and necessary one. Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they would applaud the squaddies and grunts who removed hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a “resistance”. Those who do this are not “anti-war” at all, but are shadily taking the other side in a conflict where the moral and civilisational stakes are extremely high.

Treason on the left is not new, but has become the media shibboleth with Dysfunctional-Bush-Hatred and Global Warming the new armaments in the long leftist war against free enterprise and political freedom. Of course, no one dissects these walking talking cadavers better than Hitchens, himself a veteran Man of the Left.

It’s all here: from the pseudo-radicals who said there was nothing to choose between Nazi imperialism in Europe and British rule in India, through the supporters of the Hitler-Stalin pact, all the way to those who defended Slobodan Milosevic as a socialist and those who took, quite literally took, money from the bloody hands of Saddam Hussein. Just in the past decade or so, had this “anti-war” rabble had its way, we would have seen Kuwait stay part of Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo cleansed and annexed by “Greater” Serbia, and the Taliban retaining control of Afghanistan. You might think that such a record would lead its adherents to be dismissed as a silly and sinister fringe, but instead it is they who pose as the principled radicals and their opponents who are treated with unconcealed disdain in the universities and on the BBC.

This betrayal (because there is no other word for it) has been made possible in part by a degraded version of multiculturalism. The hard left has junked its historic secularism, to say nothing of its principles of equality for females and homosexuals, to make common cause with Muslim outfits some of which are associated in other countries with the extreme right. It has done this by the use of nonsense terms such as “Islamophobia”, which are designed to give the no-less nonsensical impression that Islam is some kind of persecuted ethnicity. But the vile attacks by Islamists on the Jews (Britain’s oldest minority) and on India (Britain’s most important democratic ally after the United States) show the truly reactionary and hateful character of the opportunist alliance between failed ex-Stalinists and fanatical theocrats. For Cohen, as for some others of us, this is no longer a difference of emphasis within the family of the left. It is the adamant line of division in a bitter fight against a new form of fascism, at home no less than abroad.

I think he is right to identify the opening of this crisis with the events in Bosnia and Kosovo, because in that instance it was America (pushed by the supposed “poodle” Blair) that used force to prevent the annihilation of a Muslim community. Those who opposed that rescue operation, and who yet denounce the fight against Bin-Ladenism and its allies as “targeting” Muslims, have given the game away and shown that they hate only Anglo-American policy, to a degree that results in blindness. Meanwhile, Israel is always and everywhere to be denounced (and not always wrongly) while the other product of British partition policy during 1947-48, the part-rogue and part-failed state named Pakistan, is never indicted in the same way for its numberless bigotries and aggressions. This is bad faith, and needs to be unmasked as such. Cohen’s book is an admirable example of self- criticism and self-examination, using intellectual honesty as a means of illuminating a much wider canvas.

Like St. Paul who was a sort of one-man Mossad for the Orthodox Jewry of his day, CH has had the scales fall from his eyes and recognizes the shallow, superficial twaddle purveyed by the High Priests of the Liberal Left, be it useful idiots like Gore on GW or former-rightie opportunists like Arianna Puffington and her attendant Host twittering at the moon as they flutter skyward above the darkling plain.

CH ends with a recommendation to read another book:

Do not feel that you have to be a leftist or liberal to read it, because it engages with an argument that is crucial for all of us, and for our time.

Read on... books:
Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman (Norton £9.99)
A huge influence on Cohen’s ideas

The long demise of a defunct intelligentsia continues, but as their moral authority erodes, the shrill hysteria increases, so leftists are left to tabloid issues like the Plame fiasco or pseudo-heroism by barely literate actors and other showmen.