More Hatred (Special Wretchard Edition)

by hilzoy

Wretchard at the Belmont Club has a post about the very light sentence given by Indonesian courts to Abu Bakar Bashir. At least, that's what it starts out discussing. He then segues into a discussion of Abu Ali, the Virginia student who was accused of plotting to kill the President after being held held in Saudi Arabia for 20 months. About that case, Wretchard writes:

"Presiding judge O'Grady issued the ritual apology which has become a standard part of treating with these men of the shadows. "I can assure you, you will not suffer any torture or humiliation while in the marshals' custody". Already the victims have become accustomed to craving pardon, in advance, for their unspeakable inferiority, before the emissaries of the madrassas. If US judges are halfway to their knees how likely is it that the Indonesians will hold themselves erect? "

For some reason, it would not have occurred to me to describe assuring a suspect that he would not be tortured in custody as being "halfway to (one's) knees", as if stating that federal marshals will follow federal law were some sort of craven concession. But the really offensive part of Wretchard's post comes later:

"Who was it who said that all wars of consequence were conflicts of the mind? Without getting too metaphysical, it still makes sense to regard ideas as the foundation of historical struggles; the thing that animates the visible clashes. While an idea's potency remains it will find adherents.

The casual outside observer would conclude, from the apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders, that it is not worth upholding. Radical Islam, on the other hand, must self-evidently be an idea of great worth, as so many are publicly willing to die for it. And to a limited degree they would be right, for something must be terribly wrong with the West to cause such self-hatred.

America has shown itself apt at striking the visible parts of its enemy but seems unable to touch its foundations. On the contrary, every blow it deals seemingly reverberates within it, spreading cracks throughout its own base. Sometimes I think this is fortunate because I am beginning to suspect that the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West and not within Islam."

So, just to be clear: when America tries to undermine the ideology of radical Islam, it ends up harming only its own. And "sometimes" Wretchard thinks this is a good thing. And why is that? Because he suspects that "the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West."

In an earlier post, I quoted C.S. Lewis on where hatred leads:

"Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred."

Wretchard began, as best I can tell, by hating the Islamists who attacked this country on 9/11 and the unspecified "Left" who, in his view, enable and support them. But now his hatred has circled back on itself. At least, that's the only way I can interpret his saying that it's a good thing that cracks are spreading through the ideology that supports this country, and that the West he began by defending contains "the foundations of Barad-Dur". Even if we assume that he only means that we on "the Left" provide those foundations, what he actually says is that he "sometimes" thinks that it's "fortunate" that America harms the ideological foundations on which it is built, since when our foundations are harmed, Barad-Dur's are harmed as well. This is madness.

There are other things about this post that are also -- I don't know what word to use other than 'delusional'*. Is it an "apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders"? Not in the world I live in. We can debate who those defenders are -- those on the right might cite the President, for starters, while I might be more likely to point to those who have protested the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and the courts who have ruled that the President does not have the right to detain people without charges. But whichever side you take, the idea that 'the Western ideal can find no public defenders' is not just false; it's so false that one has to wonder what planet Wretchard has been living on all this time. Likewise, he says that the madrassa system "has proved too powerful to shut down or even criticize", in the course of a discussion of Abu Ali, who went to school in Virginia. But obviously the reason Islamic schools have not been shut down isn't that they're 'too powerful'; it's that pesky little First Amendment. And if Wretchard thinks that no one has criticized madrassas, I have to wonder once again whether he and I inhabit the same universe.

On reflection, I think we probably aren't. He is trapped in Lewis' "universe of pure hatred", fighting enemies only he can see.

* To state the obvious: I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not using 'delusional' in a technical sense. I just mean: he is saying things that are not just false, but so obviously false that one has to ask what on earth is going on.

Comments

[Anarch]

PPS, I guess:

This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate. And you are now playing the part of Instapundit. I guess you don't like him because he knows your tricks?

Would you like an opportunity to retract that?

[liberal japonicus]

This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate. And you are now playing the part of Instapundit. I guess you don't like him because he knows your tricks?

Sebastian, I'm not sure who 'you all' are, but if you are referring to me, Felixrayman and Anarch, well...

What I was complaining about was Gary Farber said that Reynolds was 'has never...been anything other than a dogged critic of the Christian Right' and we sparred over that (Gary, I'm really sorry to bring this up again but I just want to make the point to Seb) I did not mention anything about Churchill.

Felixrayman did not comment on that post. Anarch posted here, here and 3 other times. None of Anarch's posts had anything to do with Instapundit.

There have been some other threads about Instapundit and ones about Ward Churchill, (the other likely possibility is this one, but I can find no comments made by the three of us concerning Instapundit and any comments about Churchill are pretty limited)

Please stop. It's embarrassing.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"I'm glad you're aware of the existence of Ann Coulter, I guess, but are you also aware about her frequent appearances in the media? It's somewhat hard to label her an "extremist" (as opposed to "mainstream") given her wretched ubiquity."

Can I label Chomsky as a mainstream liberal? What about Michael Moore? I hear he has very popular political movies. Honestly.

Liberal Japonicus--you really seem to bring out the snarky in me but I'm going to try not to be. Reynolds is one of the two main subjects of the 200+ comment post on Who exactly is this left where you particularly agree with the 'liberals are getting slammed unfairly' subject of the post. Churchill also was the subject. Reynolds' treatment of Churchill vis-a-vis the left was one of the main complaints being addressed. Neiwert is doing precisely the same by turning an extremist into a false representative of the class he wants to demonize. As is felixrayman.

[liberal japonicus]

Sebastian,
My point is that if 'you all' means us three, you are making crap up.

As for the thread you cited, Anarch commented, but wrote about the Churchill who wrote the book called _Complex Variables_. Here are all his comments
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here

I wrote a number of comments, but none of them can be construed as me 'particularly agreeing' with the thesis "'liberals are getting slammed unfairly'"

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here

Felixrayman did not even post in that thread.

I realize that this is incredibly anal, but I know what I wrote and none of these comments can remotely be construed to have the content you attribute to them.

Just because you've apologized once for going off on me in this thread, it does not give you license to do so again. I'm sorry that I bring out the snarky in you, but I'm not going to change my handle for you, which is the only reason you could be upset from this thread, unless I should have known that Summers meant 'nasty pseudo-Indian professors[sic] in Denver". Maybe you are taking issue with something else I've said in some other thread. I have news for you, that makes it impossible to have a civil conversation. I cannot read your damn mind.

You got a beef with felix? Fine, take it up with him, don't sling around this 'you all' crap. You want to claim that he's got some grudge against Instapundit, call him out by name (hint, that means avoiding the use of 'you all,' ok?). You take exception to Anarch's point about Ann Coulter (after you whale on him for disagreeing with your view of the Clinton-Hitler meme) Ditto. (note that in Anarch's 9:41, he is taking issue with _Felixrayman_. But you are in such an incoherent sputtering rage, you can't even see that) But if you pull me in again (and I'm from Mississippi, so 'you all' will be construed as a plural 2nd person), I will ask you to point to precisely which of my words you are talking about and cite them. I am not going to take any crap off of you for what you think I said. Good night.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

If you don't believe that the subject of "Who, Exactly, Is This "Left" About Which I Hear Such Strange And Dreadful Things?" is as I have outlined I can't help you. If you don't believe you expressed assent to the subject of the post I also can't help you. You apparently want a statement saying "Some conservatives unfairly attack liberals." You are apparently unwilling to accept that you were commenting affirmatively on a post which made that assertion (correctly) and which used the Reynolds-Churchill example of it (correctly). You apparently object to my summary of a 200+ comments thread. It is of course a one sentence summary of something which if printed would likely fill dozens of pages. That's nice.

Do you understand the point of hilzoy's piece?

Do you understand how it applies when I say: "This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate"?

Do you see your comments on the thread?

Do you see your comments on the thread as generally agreeing with the thesis of the post?

I suspect that the only problem area is question 4. If you want to claim that your comments were randomish babblings not pertaining to the thread, I'm certainly not going to argue with you. If you think they weren't pertinent and broadly in line with both the thesis and theme of the post, so be it.

Of course that would make your point in this post something along the lines of "I didn't personally agree that there is anything wrong with unfairly tarring people Sebastian, how dare you say that I did." Is that what you are saying?

So as it pertains to this post and this quote: "This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate" are you complaining that my charge is incorrect because you don't feel like 'you'. Or are you attacking it substantively because you think my analogy between Neiwert's attacks on pseduo-fascism tarring nearly all public conservatives with Reynold's attack on the left is wrong?

You can nitpick or address the issue. Based on your typical responses, I have a prediction about which you do. I also have a prediction about how the next round of nitpicking will go, but maybe I'll get lucky and you can try the substance for a change.

[liberal japonicus]

Seb
Do you understand the point of hilzoy's piece?
I understood the point of the piece to be a discussion of an essay by one writer. I tried to find out more about that person. You, on the other hand, seem to think it was an attack on the fundamental principals of conservatism and therefore an attack on everything you believe

Do you understand how it applies when I say: "This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate"?
If you believe that any attack on some aspect of conservative philosophy is an attack on the whole, yeah. I don't see where anyone has said that Wretchard is attacking *me* and my entire family, though.

Do you see your comments on the thread?
Which one, this one or the other one? If by this one, see question 1. If by the Reynold's thread, yes, that's why I gave you links.

Do you see your comments on the thread as generally agreeing with the thesis of the post?
Again, do you mean this one, or the other one? If it's this one, I agree with hilzoy's thesis as I've stated it. If it's the Reynolds thread, the thesis I agree with is that Churchill is not a representative of the left. I didn't see a link to a Reynolds series detailing how Churchill's rhetoric has entered into the Democratic mainstream.

I'd also point out (yet again) that I am on the other side of the world, so I either get to a thread early or arrive late. If you have trouble remembering that, just look at my handle, as that is what the 'japonicus' part means.

Since you want to make this a comparison between Neiwert and Reynolds, (neither originally mentioned in hilzoy's post) your thesis is that they are 'exactly the same'. I don't agree. Niewert has presented his viewpoint exhaustively, supporting them with illustrations and writings. And Reynolds has, well, I guess he hasn't. Now, if he wrote a 6 part, bazillion word series on how extreme leftist ideas get transferred into the mainstream, using the rhetoric of Churchill and Chomsky, we could discuss what he says. We could note that he feels that Democracy is like sexual reproduction or we could note that he feels that interpretations of the 2nd amendments are incredibly slanted towards a states rights viewpoint or examine his views on patent law or legal versus scientific reasoning and see if he is being logically consistent. However, since Reynolds, to the best of my knowledge, has never posted such a thesis, fleshed out with examples, we can't. That's the difference. Is that clear?

Now, if you want to believe my participation in a thread about Reynolds as equivalent to the above, that's your perogative. I'm not going to stop you. But if you write about what I think, quote the point I make. I realize that this may be tough, given that you seem to have attributed quotes by hilzoy and JerryN to me, and I'm sorry if you think that asking you to state clearly what you think I believe and then back that opinion up with evidence is 'nitpicking'. But if you can't correctly assign opinions to the people who hold them, then why should we take any opinion you have as being based in fact.

Aspects of Niewert's discussion could be profitably applied to Huey Long and the Chicago ward machines, both of which are 'Democratic'. Wouldn't be very helpful for discussing aspects of our present situation, but we could. I suppose that 'heh' and 'read the rest' could be applied to Republicans or different periods in history as well, but to my mind, they somehow seem to lack the attempted explanatory power of Niewert's thesis. But that's just my reading and since you, speed reader that you are, have consumed the entire totality of both Niewert and Reynolds collected writings, "your reading is truer than mine". Well, if that is the case, why are you so threatened when I disagree? Just walk away, secure in the knowledge that I am just another misguided soul.

You may not believe it, but I tried to let you have the last word(s) when you responded to my reading of Neiwert. I didn't agree, but hey, that's life. But then you say 'This is EXACTLY what you all were complaining about with the Churchill debate.' I'm from Mississippi, so you all means you all. Given that you thought the person in question was Larry Summers, president of Harvard instead of Ward Churchill, former Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies and CU, maybe I should have just attributed it to a mental lapse, but I did want to know if you included me in that group and, lo and behold, you did. You have conflated my argument with Gary about Reynolds position changing over time with the discussion about Churchill and Reynolds. As I said, to my knowledge, Reynolds has not written a series (or even a long essay) detailing how Churchill's rhetoric has entered into the Democratic mainstream, but if he does, please let me know. But hopefully on another thread, because this is the last post I'm going to make on this thread. I trust my response didn't surprise you and I leave you the last word.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"If you believe that any attack on some aspect of conservative philosophy is an attack on the whole, yeah."

Your whole analysis goes apart at this turning point. As I have quoted above, Neiwert is attacking almost every public conservative voice in America. The fact that you attempt to dramatically transform that into 'any attack on some aspect of conservative philosophy is an attack on the whole' is either brutally dishonest or a not very careful reading.

[Anarch]

Can I label Chomsky as a mainstream liberal? What about Michael Moore? I hear he has very popular political movies. Honestly.

"Honestly"? Well, whatever; let's tackle the substance, shall we? The key here, as I noted above, is whether we define "mainstream" as referring to the access a person has -- mainstream people would be invited on major talk shows, have guest columns in major newspapers, and the like -- or whether it refers to the tenor of their views.

So, Chomsky as a "mainstream" liberal? He's not in the slightest bit mainstream-in-access. That I'm aware of: he's never appeared on any major news show in the past decade; he's never written a guest column in the NYT, the WaPo, the LA Times or the like; he's not cited by name by any of the major columnists; nor has anyone identifiably "Chomskyite" done these things on a regular basis. I freely admit that these claims are contingent upon my knowledge and that it's possible that I've simply missed a lurking mainstream Chomskyite influence for the past ten years... but my knowledge of the VLWC is decent enough that I find that unlikely. The onus is on you to find positive counterexamples, which you may do at your leisure.

[In a nutshell: if Chomsky's contribution to the modern mainstream isn't zero, it's essentially negligible.]

Moore is a trickier one to categorize. He's certainly very popular, but IMO one-shot popularity -- and I'd say that that's all he really has atm, Stupid White Men notwithstanding -- is not a sufficient (or even really necessary) condition to be mainstream. His presence at the Democratic Convention, however, belies that: one would certainly think that such guests should certainly count as mainstream-in-access. You could certainly make a legitimate case that he, and F911, is mainstream. I'd say he's something of a toss-up depending on the amount of actual access and actual power he wields, which I suspect is highly overrated (especially by him). So YMMV.

Ann Coulter? She's a frequent guest on Chris Mathews' crapfest, she was a regular on Crossfire IIRC, she's a syndicated columnist for UPS, she writes for townhall.com -- which I understand to be typical of the "mainstream meeting halls of modern conservativism", although I will of course bow to your superior knowledge in that regard -- and she is also a reasonably popular author. [Not to the same extent as Michael Moore, but nontrivially nonetheless.] Accesswise, I'd say she's pretty much the definition of mainstream.

As for mainstream-in-views, there are two ways to measure this. One is simply to consider the disparity of the person's views from our best estimate of the current political center in the country. The other is to try and hold them up to a quasi-Platonic political spectrum of where left and right "should" be, especially if you think (as I do) that the current political center is far from quasi-Platonically centered. The problem here is that the first is a popularity contest, pure and simple, while the second falls prone to the ever-popular "Well, *I'm* mainstream..." fallacy. [I'm sure we can think of people from all over the political map who've articulated such utterances, all evidence to the contrary; please, please don't make me name names.] Considering those three in light of the popularity spectrum, I'd say that Chomsky is necessarily an extremist -- how many Chomskyites are there in the real world, really? -- and both Moore and Coulter are marginally outside the "mainstream-in-popularity" centers of liberalism and conservativism respectively.

[This is complicated, of course, by the fact that they're often great big dicks, but inasmuch as I can get a sense of their public political viewpoints, that's roughly where I'd locate them IRL. The blogosphere is, as always, a completely different matter.]

Finally, "mainstream-as-quasi-Platonic-ideal". That's a tough one and I don't really have the stamina (or inclination) to tackle it in-depth right now. Long story short, I'd say that Chomsky is a die-hard leftist but probably not an extremist in the sense I'd use the term; Moore is a pompous, bloviating jackass who's actually not as far to the left as he usually appears; and Coulter's public persona -- which I distinguish from Coulter herself because I'm frankly not sure how much of that persona is real and how much of it is a carefully cultivated shock-jock act -- is an extremist to the right under pretty much any definition of the terms.

That's all my opinion, natch. I'd be happy to debate it further except that I'm completely uninterested in doing so.

As I have quoted above, Neiwert is attacking almost every public conservative voice in America.

You cited him as attacking FOX News, the WSJ op-ed page, the 700 Club and the beneficiaries of the named trusts (Scaife, Coors et al). If that's what you consider to be "almost every public conservative voice in America", then conservatives in America are in serious trouble because he's pretty much got them dead to rights IMO. Me, I'd like to think there are public conservatives -- albeit fewer and further between -- who don't make scurrilous allegations without cause, who don't treat news as WWE-lite, who don't contradict their own news reportage to hew the ideological mainline, who don't blame 9/11 on gay marriage, and who don't maliciously fund some of the most rabid and, yes, anti-American voices on the right. If you or your family are part of that elite then yes, Sebastian, I hold you personally responsible for a good chunk of the problems in this country; if not -- and, to the best of my knowledge, that is not the case -- then no, you're not the ones Neiwert or I are attacking.

To go one step further: having read Neiwert for a fairly long time -- and no, I'm not going to get into a pissing contest about whether your experience with him is greater than mine, so please don't bother -- I think it's fairly clear from his writings that a) he isn't talking about you or, I presume, your family, b) he is talking about the leadership of the GOP and the party apparatchiks in the media (viz FOX News et al) and that c) his central allegation is that those tainted, politically-extremist elements (both people and memes) on the right are gaining more and more prominence and mainstream access. That's his position, distilled as best I can: whether you like it or not, or admit it or not, your party is getting devoured by extremists who are getting installed into prominent, powerful positions... and unless people like you -- which is to say, generally moderate-in-spectrum, generally conservative in philosophy, increasingly marginal-in-access, not in the least "pseudo-fascist" -- do something about it, the country's gonna get in a real bad way.

And with that, I'm done. I hope I've met your requirements for "substance"; I'd certainly like to think I've met them for length. If your purpose is dialogue, synthetic debate, or even plain old edification, I strongly recommend you contact Neiwert personally and ask him to explicate his position. If your purpose is to be aggrieved, have fun. Either way, the thread is yours.

[Dantheman]

Well said, Anarch.

[Dantheman]

An example (cited in TAPPED) of how a "generally moderate-in-spectrum, generally conservative in philosophy, increasingly marginal-in-access, not in the least "pseudo-fascist" " formerly influential Republican officeholder views the transformation of the Republican party that Niewert is documenting from the other side:

link

[Michael O'Malley]

Sorry, you seem to have missed Wechart's Metaphor. Barad-dur was the Dark Tower in Mordor, but its foundation was the One Ring, the Ring of Power, which was elsewhere; that is in the "West" and not in Mordor.

There is a second metaphor within the Wechart's. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, used the "One Ring" as a metaphor for "sin".

So does Wechart I beleive.