Cr*,
"The Real Clash of Civilizations"[NL]John Chuckman, June 24, 2003
[PARA]There is a real clash of civilizations in the world, but one that has
little to do with East and West. It is found in the advanced world and
consists in the values of traditional liberalism being attacked by the right
wing. Nowhere is this battle noisier and of more consequence to the world's
peoples than in America where victory for the right appears all but certain.
I have no quarrel with honest, decent conservatives. The essence of
conservatism is the preservation of what is best from the past, the
unwillingness to change what remains useful or valid just for the sake of
change. [PARA]But all social and political arrangements are subject to
change where there is economic growth. Old ways pass away, everything from
the daily wearing of traditional garb and the absolute role of males to the
average number of children and the selling of brides changes, sometimes in a
single lifetime. Liberals differ from conservatives in being more ready to
recognize this fundamental reality and to accommodate change in a timely
way. [PARA]America's right wing is another matter altogether. Attitudes here
go beyond conservatism into the shadowy realm of social Darwinism,
selfishness exalted as virtue, muscular arrogance, and turning one's back on
many aspects of enlightenment. These attitudes come embedded in an intense,
almost religious, fervor. [PARA]When people read the word Nazi they first
think of mass murder, and rightly so, but the Nazis had a set of beliefs and
attitudes other than racial theories. In fact many Germans, and even party
members, did not share Hitler's incandescent, almost inexplicable hatred of
Jews, although anti-Semitism was very much a theme in German history, Martin
Luther, for example, a remarkable man in so many respects, having said and
written things every bit as vile as Hitler. [PARA]What were the
characteristics of Nazism that might justify comparisons with influential
contemporary groups in America? [PARA]As the title of Hitler's book, Mein
Kampf, suggests, the Nazis viewed life as a struggle, embracing the idea
that only the able should thrive and reproduce. It is helpful when you hold
this belief if you also regard yourself as among the ablest, and so the
Nazis did. Hitler was a social Darwinist with a mystical belief in the
special merit of Germans. [PARA]The Nazis had an absolute loathing of
Communism, or Bolshevism as it was called then, and contempt for all forms
of liberalism and social democracy. All philosophies that offered hope
against their vision of a world of successful predators prevailing over the
weak were despised. Ruthlessness itself was held up by Hitler as a virtue
because it could bring victory, or so he thought. [PARA]The Nazis were
big-business capitalists, although political expediency had put socialist in
the party name, but where issues of great national significance were
concerned they never hesitated to redirect with subsidies, contracts, and
other pressures the efforts of German industry. The Nazis encouraged the
development of gigantic corporate entities. Small business was actually held
in contempt by Hitler, hence his famous derisive comment about the British
being a nation of shopkeepers. To support the Nazis' worship of military
strength, only vast enterprises would do. [PARA]The Nazis were willing to
accept a good deal of repression in their society if that guaranteed the
success of their primary values, and, despite Germany's being in many ways
one of the most advanced and cultured of European states, the Nazis were
willing to tolerate floods of ignorant propaganda so long as it supported
their aims. [PARA]Based on these criteria, it might be hard to distinguish
America's extreme right from a good many Nazis, but I think the prefix
crypto helpful in distinguishing them from their more straightforward
cousins. For America does have a set of written ideals about human rights
and freedoms at odds with Nazism, although these ideals have been
interpreted with great flexibility or totally ignored over long periods of
the country's history, often accommodating dark and brutal practices. Where
the will to make good on constitutional promises does not exist, they remain
fine words on parchment, as many wonderful-sounding third-world
constitutions attest. [PARA]That is why the cypto-Nazis always attack the
courts as unelected legislators when what the courts are mostly doing is the
necessary job of deciding how to interpret grand general statements into the
specific day-to-day circumstances of people's lives, and that under
ever-changing circumstances. By the way, in the Nazis' early period, before
they felt free to drag judges from their courts or murder them, they had
exactly the same view of courts that dared to make unfriendly decisions.
[PARA]The father of this contempt for courts in America was Thomas Jefferson
who loathed the idea that the Supreme Court would interpret the
Constitution's generalizations on behalf of the states. That is why he is
the patron saint of America's crypto-Nazis. Jefferson was an expert at
sounding high-minded while acting shabbily. [PARA]During the early
Federalist period, Jefferson was ready to have Virginia secede - more than
half a century before the rise of the Confederacy - over the issue of the
Supreme Court's authority. Why? Because he understood the intrinsic conflict
between a Bill of Rights and a society of aristocratic slaveholders, a
democratic-sounding Constitution and a Virginia where about one percent of
people could vote, and he was, despite all his high-sounding language, quite
comfortable being an aristocratic slaveholder. The Bill of Rights sounded
fine, but just don't set up anyone to interpret and enforce it. [PARA]Parts
of America's right drift off into utter blindness and even phobic hatred.
Jefferson to his dying day believed blacks were inferior, almost another
species, and that women didn't merit the same education, and certainly not
the same political privileges, as men. You don't find America's Aryan
churches or weird militia groups or anti-gay organizations with liberals on
their membership rolls. America's extreme right provided the vicious
anti-Semites of American history -- the founding males of many clans like
the Fords or the Bushes -- but they rule now in an odd partnership with the
religious right whose eyes tear over with every mention of words like Holy
Land, the End of Time, and Armageddon. [PARA]One of the major bonds tying
them together is the fundamentalists' fear of social change. Fundamentalist
minds seem fixed somewhere around 1840 or so as offering the ideal family
and social arrangements, although they do enjoy suburban living, television,
fast food, and SUVs, and not many of them have ten children or mail-order
brides anymore. They see the never-ending pressure for change in American
society -- the inexorable result of long-term economic growth - as
destructive to their vision of what society should be, and they are right,
it is. This is why undefined blubber about "family values" joined the
right-wing lexicon some years back. Ironically, the right wing's simplistic
and enduring love for "the hell with regulations" economic growth, actually
works against the long-term interests of fundamentalists, creating even
greater future stresses on their vision of society, but few of them seem to
understand this fact. [PARA]What of liberalism and its history in America?
Although America rejected the idea of a king or lifetime president, taking
what was a liberal view in the 18th century, the early Republic was
effectively an aristocracy, an aristocracy of men with money, farms, and
slaves rather than noble birth. It was the spirit of liberalism that
gradually extended the franchise to include more than a small number of
(male, white) property owners. It was the same spirit that gave the
franchise to women and that made the United States Senate an elected rather
than appointed, aristocratic body. It was liberalism that finally freed
America's blacks from a second bondage, brutal apartheid in every detail,
and gave them the franchise a century after the supposed end of slavery. It
was liberalism that produced the great reforms of the Depression, creating
hope and saving America from the brutal coups and civil wars of Europe
during the troubled 1930s. It was liberalism that drove hope and progress
for universal education. It was always liberalism pushing to make the
tolerance for speech or religion promised in the Constitution into something
tangible. [PARA]The mouthpieces for America's equivalent of the 1930s' Krupp
or Farben -- Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, William F. Buckley, and dozens of
others -- are rarely seriously challenged over their sophomoric historical
knowledge or their sneering jokes at hard-won human values. There appears to
be a large appetite in America for re-cycled political garbage. The money
supporting its production comes in truckloads. And there are truckloads,
too, for phony institutes where ideologue-propagandists pose as academics,
much like actors in white lab coats posing as doctors on ads for hemorrhoid
relief. Money gushes like blood from opened arteries to support meaningless
advertising's suffocation of genuine debate in American elections, and the
George Wills of this world are paid handsomely to cover this naked display
of power with arguments about free speech. [PARA]All the insensitivity and
stupidity spewing over America's airwaves and carried in its newspapers does
have an effect, as its sponsors intend that it should. Without any serious
political opposition inside the country, America has launched two
meaningless wars on weak nations, killing and maiming thousands of innocent
people. It threatens still others and keeps prisoners in cages offshore.
There is considerable public acceptance of barbarities like torture and
assassination, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, inside the country are
arrested and held with no access to courts or legal help. There is a vast
increase in spying on your own people, and there is selective support for
leaders of some countries no better than tyrants or murderers.
[PARA]Meanwhile, "Hon, they've got a special on air conditioners down at the
mall. Do you think we could drive down after the news?"
C/
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