[here's a non-pen-l perspective.] Searching on dry ground Alan Johnson
September 30, 2006 01:16 PM [ellipsis: a standard story about someone (a "Chelmite") looking for a ruble in a place where it's easy to look, rather than where it might be.] Parts of the left are searching for the lost ruble - for answers to terrorism - on their own preferred "dry ground". Mark Seddon, in accusing the Home Secretary John Reid of bringing the politics of fear to the UK, moves from the synagogue courtyard to the outskirts of town, reaching his own "dry ground", by taking the same six steps as all left-Chelmites. Step 1: Treat today's terror threat are the same as previous terror threats. "Terrorism is of course a threat, it has been throughout the last century and it is now", writes Seddon, impatiently mentioning the IRA and ETA. Paul Berman has spelt out why this comparison, and this insouciance, is so very dangerous. "That threat [from the IRA and ETA] was not existential. Islamist terrorism is different. The Islamist threat is not that some hundreds of people will be killed, or even that once every so often they will get 'lucky', and kill some thousands. In the Muslim world the victims of totalitarian movements have been in the millions. In the western countries we have experienced a few flecks of foam from that wave. So it is easy to imagine that that is all we will ever experience. Many find it impossible to grasp that one day the victims here could be in the millions. From the non-west to the west is not such a great distance. Sometimes the two places are the same place. It's a fantasy to think we can weigh the terrorist threat we face in the west without considering this background in the Muslim countries." [where did Berman get his "facts"? where were these millions killed? by whom? the "totalitarian" tag has been used so much -- and so indiscriminately -- that it doesn't have any descriptive content any more. It seems that Berman and Johnson are just as much engaged in a war against an abstraction as Bush is with his "war on terror." [The only cases I can think of where "millions" (more or less) have been killed since World War II have been under the Khmer Rouge and Suharto's Indonesia. Both were allied to the US at one point or another, so they can't be all bad from the Eustonite perspective. [Why is the alleged threat of these totalitarian movements "existential"? Is the "West" so fragile that the killing of 3,000 plus people in 911 threatened its very existence? Is the "West" a house of cards? [Many Israelis and their allies see Hizbullah as embodying an "existential" threat to that country, ignoring its military supremacy (on the defense side). How could the "West" be threatened in this way? The US has lots of nukes, a gigantic army, etc. If there's any threat to that power at present, it's Bush's bungling.] Step 2: Pretend there is a 911 response to 9/11. Terrorists are to be arrested by the police. Leave aside the fact that those who make this argument are usually the first to object to the very same police getting new powers of detention. Seddon's argument is bad in its own terms. For we are not fighting "terrorism" so much as totalitarian political Islam. Our enemy is a pathological mass movement, in some senses a death-cult, and we have difficulty coming to terms with it. We project onto it our own rationalist frameworks, and so treat it as similar to political and rational terrorist movements we have experience in dealing with, such as the IRA. In fact Islamist terrorism is a form of totalitarianism with roots in the most profound organic crisis of the Arab and Muslim world - set out in a series of Arab Human Development Reports, produced by the UN. [the (provisional) IRA was "rational"? there sure was a lot of macho BS and obsession with revenge involved in that movement. [On the other hand, I really don't see the difference between police and military methods. They both involve the use of violence against designated bad guys. But the "police" as an institution seems to have been more effective in fighting al Qaeda than the "military" has.] There is no policing solution to that. There must be a long-term battle of ideas alongside a drive to democratise and develop the region. And there must be a security response. We may yet pay a terrible price for our reluctance to acknowledge what is new in the threat we face today, and our preference to think about that threat by analogy to older forms of terrorism. [since Johnson's step 1 argument is so weak, this one falls. It's nothing but recycled Cold War rhetoric. What does "democratise and develop" mean? in practice it means that small states should be run by the IMF and must open their economies to the predations of multinational corporations. [Bush has discovered that the democracy slogan can bite him in the butt. After all, he wanted democracy in Lebanon and Palestine. But in both places, it encouraged anti-Israel feelings to bloom. Of course, Israel has done its part there.] Step 3: If anyone points out - as I just have - that today's terrorism is qualitatively different from that of the IRA, accuse them of playing (always use the word "playing") "the politics of fear". Use the phrase "the power of nightmares". Don't be put off by Islamist bombs going off, or Islamists plots foiled. Simon Jenkins published a column on the morning of the Madrid Bombings...denouncing Tony Blair for scaring us about the terror "threat". This has not stopped him writing more or less the same column ever since. Seddon takes step three with a rhetorical flourish taken from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1933 Inaugural. "In truth people have one big fear, and that is fear itself", writes Seddon. The implication is obvious. The fear is irrational, stoked by John Reid, not a rational response to Islamist terrorism. [there's fear and then again there's fear. The Bushites and their poodle -- the folks that Johnson is defending -- are pushing irrational fear in order to increase their own power and to push their agendas of military might, tax cuts for the rich, etc. They don't want people to think for themselves. They want them to obey.] Step 4: Claim that the real threat is... the west! The most consistent Chelmites [people who look in the easy place] - the Chelmite militants we might call them - don't just seek to establish a moral equivalence between the terrorists and the anti-terrorists. Hell no! Think of those Chelmite placards that scream "Bush is the Real Terrorist!" Franklin Delano Seddon thinks we should, as the cliché goes, Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid. But not of the jihadis with liquid explosives and airline tickets. "My own fear is John Reid", he writes. [given the way in which Bush's invasion of Iraq has encouraged terrorism all around the world and destabilized the entire Middle East, it's not surprising that most of the world these days sees Bush and his poodle as the main threat to world peace. Bush has also applied the unilateralist formula of We Are Right And If You Don't Agree, You're an Evil-Doer so much that it's irritated and alienated most countries' leaders.] Step 5: Throw the word "neoconservative" around. This is the Chelmite left's holy water. It sanctifies any argument. John Reid made a "neoconservative" speech, says Seddon. In fact he made "the most neo-conservative speech ever heard at a Labour party conference". Wow! And why was it a "neoconservative" speech? Left Chelmite silence. When it has the word "neoconservative" on its lips, the left is the equivalent of that character in Arthur Miller's The Crucible who hyperventilates her lines. "I saw Goody Proctor dance with the Devil! I saw Goody Proctor dance with the Devil!" As Paul Berman puts it, interviewed in Democratiya, "It has reached the point that whenever you read the word you should say it out loud in falsetto, as if a mouse had just run across your foot. Otherwise you will not have captured the right tone". [Johnson uses the same magical method he accuses Seddon of, but he uses the word "totalitarian." ["Neo-conservatism" has a very clear meaning: it refers to the demand for a US-dominated world, while following the hard-core Israeli hawks' attitudes and policies. Despite the nod by some neo-cons toward social democracy, in practice it involves pushing neo-liberal economic theory (laissez-faire capitalism) backed by the force of the US military. In practice it is cronyism trying to insulate itself from all criticism, all efforts to hold the leadership responsible for its actions. In its theory of the way the world works, it's the standard militarist one of using exaggerated worst-case scenarios to encourage military spending, invasions of other countries, nuking of Iran, etc.] Move 6: End on some uplift. Choose a fuzzy set of words that appear to be a progressive alternative to the "politics of fear" and hide the fact that from the beginning of the article to the end you have not addressed the actual threat we face. Once again Seddon innovates. He quotes John Foster Dulles. "Mankind will never win lasting peace so long as men use their full resources only in tasks of war. While we are yet at peace, let us mobilize the potentialities which we usually reserve for war". That sounds good, doesn't it? The trick is to read it again. Slowly. That's right. Seddon seeks to exploit your support for global economic justice and soft power. Once you are on board for "mobilising potentialties", Seddon hopes you will not notice that he has used the deadly threat of Islamist terror to demonise... John Reid. [given the anemia of the previous argument, this part is a whimper, not a bang.] [ellipsis: a return to the ruble analogy.] -- Jim Devine / "it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be." -- KM
