When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup. ~Thomas Sowell

Notice that Sowell does not distinguish between different parties or branches of government.  He talks generally about the entire political, media and intellectual elite (had he included talk about bankers and profiteers, he might as well be a communist), which means that he apparently sees President Bush (a politician), National Review (part of the media) and himself (who might be fairly described as a member of the “media,” an “educator” and a member of the “intelligentsia”) as part of the general worsening degeneracy. 

It puzzles me why anyone thinks that the military can work some kind of magic on a society that is badly corrupted.  There are times when he thinks that only a coup could “save the country,” he says, but save it from what?  If we are speaking of a degeneracy in standards of conduct, the quality of thought, competence, moral responsibility and the like, no army can save a country from these things.  It rests with citizens themselves to reform themselves and their country.  Otherwise, some military regime would be like having a cancer patient train for the marathon–it would probably hasten his death rather than restore his health.  Even if you take the view that the people serving in the military are more disciplined, moral and patriotic than everyone else, which at least sounds plausible, they could only seize control of the government and enforce order.  Expecting a military coup to undo the “worsening degeneracy” in a society is an expression of pure desperation.

Dean Barnett’s recent outburst of moral insanity should not come as a surprise to those of us who have had the misfortune of following his writings over the past few years.  Barnett has prompted the last twoinstallments in my (unfortunately) ever-longer list of posts on the (largely conservative) “argument from war crimes,” though technically Walter Williams also got into the war crimes-as-moral authority act in between Barnett’s two items.  Podhoretz, Krauthammer and Sowell were already leading the way in approvingly citing past war crimes to vindicate whatever bad policy they were trying to defend in the present.  On a slightly lower level you will even find Rabbi Daniel Lapin getting in on the act of invoking 20th century total war precedents to minimise whatever wrongdoing is going on at the time.  Who was it who was saying that conservative intellectual life was not gravely deficient?  Let him peruse these entries for proof of bankruptcy both moral and intellectual.   

Long gone throughout much of the movement (if it was ever there in the first place) is the wisdom of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who wrote, almost to the point of obsession at times, about the evils of “strategic bombing” and attacks on civilians.  His novel Black Banners is an extended description of the evils of the bombing campaigns against Germany.  Such attacks were for him the ultimate expression of identitarian madness and the willingness to dehumanise the enemy according to abstract and collectivist categories.  Mass politics and mass warfare were for him equally enemies of civilisation, and mass warfare was a direct product of the democratic age.  It is depressing, but hardly surprising any longer, that those who now speak for mainstream conservatism would not only not understand what K-L had to say, but they would reflexively regard everything he had to say as treacherous and vile.  Just imagine–someone against democracy and strategic bombing!

It might appear as if one could hardly turn around lately without running into a conservative pundit who will drag out the hoary “what about Nagasaki?” argument or some other inappropriate WWII reference.  There are a couple reasons for this.  One is the tendency on the modern right towards unmitigated and rather unfortunate exaltation of everything related to WWII, and to shape their ideas about war and foreign policy accordingly.  Internment?  The pundit will probably reply: “I don’t know whether it makes it any sense or whether it’s really necessary, but they did it in WWII, and that makes it all right by me!”  Bombing civilians?  The pundit says, “We did it to Japan, so it has to be okay.”  The supposedly clinching argument in favour of the “plan” to rebuild Iraq was: “We did it in Germany and Japan, and we can do it agan,” asserting a continuity between the competence of the Marshalls and MacArthurs of the world and their own that did not exist.  Many of these folks seem to proceed from the assumption that if the U.S. did something during the Good War, that something must be good or at least reasonably defensible, because “we” know that “we” would never do anything comparable to the evils committed by those people.  When there are no obvious precedents for whatever it is they would like to do, they put on a show with the old “he’s a new Hitler” routine or wave their hands around while screaming, “Munich!”  The other reason is, I suspect, a total divorce of many conservatives from the moral traditions of Christian civilisation.  It is not exactly clear to me when or how this happened, and it certainly isn’t limited to conservatives in America (Westerners generally have lost touch with these traditions), but it seems likely that it was the experience of WWII itself that accelerated whatever dissolution was underway.  It provided a cause that needed to have its every act justified, and it was a total war that required the rationalisation of ever more outrageous crimes.  Perhaps had post-WWII governments not thrust us headlong into the Cold War and all of the morally dubious enterprises that entailed, the damage could have been contained and repaired, but instead all of the worst things that WWII had done to the country the Cold War magnified and exaggerated.  Once a generation or two has contemplated the nuclear obliteration of the world with a certain indifference, the mere firebombing of a few cities ceases to shock or concern.

With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east [sic] should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them. ~Edward Luttawak

The logic here would be akin to saying America lost the moral high ground after bombing the civilian center of Tokyo in World War II. While that bombing cost America any claim to moral perfection, no one was making any such claims in the first place. America still held the moral high ground because it wasn’t us that wanted to establish a global totalitarian dictatorship and exterminate inferior races. ~Dean Barnett

Wow, the dreaded “nostrism” rears its ugly head, as if Barnett had leapt directly from the pages of Black Banners.  

I suppose the same logic would apply, which would make the statement about losing the moral high ground in WWII with the mass bombings of civilian targets pretty much true.  I do find it intriguing how apologists for latter-day atrocities and war crimes will always run to past war crimes as some sort of trump card: “Our government used to kill a lot more civilians with indiscriminate bombing!  What do you have to say that to that, huh?” 

Never mind, also, that the Japanese weren’t trying to create a global totalitarian dictatorship, nor were they primarily interested in exterminating inferior races, though the militarists certainly believed in Japanese supremacy.  Granted, the war crimes our government committed in Japan were done at a greater remove than the war crimes their soldiers committed.  Strange how the two sets of crimes are remembered, though, isn’t it?  Except in revisionist Japanese textbooks, the Rape of Nanjing lives on in infamy (as it should), but the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and on and on, was all in a day’s work and shouldn’t give us a moment’s pause.  How could “we” lose the moral high ground just by killing a few hundred thousand Japs, right?  Our cause was just and noble and true, which permitted us to do whatever we wanted.  Because we had the right end in mind and the right intentions, mass murder was really just like getting our hair a little mussed in the process.  That’s what Barnett is saying, pure and simple. 

At least he allowed that slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people made our side less than perfect.  Mighty magnanimous of you, Barnett.  Mind you, these bombings were doubly vicious in that they didn’t even serve any obvious objective according to some purely amoral calculus of “necessity”–not that strategic necessity could or should be able to make right the massacre of innocents.  Where is our Mike Gravel to say, “These people are frightening”?

Update: The voice of barbarism and decadence speaks:

The anti-torture argument sits on a fragile branch of moral vanity. [!] The torture opponents’ entire premise rests on the erroneous notion that one can successfully wage war without cruelty and savagery. I wish they were right. But they’re not.

BEFORE GETTING TO TORTURE, ALLOW ME TO MAKE a quick digression into abortion. I’m pro-life. I strongly feel that every abortion is the taking of an innocent life [bold mine-DL]. But please note what I didn’t call it – murder.

Murder requires what those in the law refer to as a specific mens rea. That little Latin phrase in this context means you need a precise and knowing intent to kill someone in order to qualify as a murderer. The typical mother who has an abortion and the doctor who provides it have no such intent. They don’t feel they’re taking a life. I feel they’re wrong, and most of the readers of this site probably feel they’re wrong. But because they lack that specific and knowing intent, they’re not murderers. ~Dean Barnett

Via Ross

Notice anything wrong with all of this? Barnett “feels” that abortion is the taking of an innocent life; he cares and sympathises; he wants to know how the doctor “feels” about the abortion he’s performing.  That’s nice.  We wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, after all, over something so trivial as the snuffing out of human life.  Apparently the “taking of an innocent life” is just a minor infraction.  Besides, we wouldn’t want to use inflammatory language to talk about infanticide.  That would be strident and uncouth. 

You might be able to argue, or at least you might have done once upon a time when pre-natal development was not as well and widely understood, that the mother doesn’t realise what she’s doing and isn’t doing it with “malice of forethought” (let’s throw that in since we’re going to be speaking in the language of weasel lawyers), but the doctor surely knows exactly what he is doing, especially now.  That he may not be particularly troubled by what he does or believes that he is actually doing a good thing does not excuse him from the responsibility to the life he is ending.  But, wait, Barnett isn’t done:

THE TORTURE DEBATE brings out a similar absolutism from torture opponents. They tend to casually assume that people who support “coercive interrogation techniques” do so because they’re congenital sadists who have just been waiting for this moment in history so they could begin water-boarding Muslims with impunity.

 

That’s not the case. The people who support coercive interrogation techniques, and I am one of them, do so sadly. Unfortunately, given the nature of the war we’re in, certain moral compromises are a necessity. Using coercive interrogation techniques is one of them.

Oh, Barnett is sad about torturing people–so at least there’s some hope for him yet!  Why not just tattoo “the banality of evil” across his forehead and be done with it?  This is amazing stuff.  Doesn’t Barnett realise that it is far worse to be a relatively sane person who nonetheless rationally and knowingly justifies the use of torture and insists upon using the propagandistic euphemism “coercive interrogation techniques”?  If Barnett were actually a sadist, the moral corruption he advocates would be much easier to contain and avoid.  It is the attempt to make moral corruption reasonable, justifiable, normal that is the far greater perversion of the moral order–and yet he thinks he is showing how reasonable and decent the friends of torture are!

But Barnett hasn’t stopped digging himself into a hole:

What’s most infuriating about the anti-torture people is their tacit assumption that you can fight a war without making moral compromises. War is all about moral compromise. It’s not in the normal order of things to kill others. The very aim of war is to do just that. In World War II, we did terrible things like the fire-bombing of Dresden, the massive bombing of Tokyo, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While all these actions were terrible, they were also necessary. And justifiable.

Except that it is never justifiable to slaughter indiscriminately hundreds of thousands of people, not even when it is done in the name of “strategic bombing” and “necessity.”  There is such a thing as ius in bello.  Granted, if you believe incinerating entire cities as a demonstration of power and vengeance is legitimate, what’s a little waterboarding or electrocution going to matter?  Once mass murder of civilians, noncombatants, has been normalised, there are no limits.  We should thank Mr. Barnett for revealing once again the horrifying moral abyss into which at least some war supporters have fallen. 

Update: Mark Shea writes:

There’s just one problem: It is not a “moral compromise” to shoot an enemy combatant in wartime. It is just, assuming a just war. However, the mass slaughter of civilians that Barnett cites aboves is *not* “justifiable”. It too is not a moral compromise. It is simply and solely evil: a “crime against man and God” according to the Church. Barnett is calling a largely religious and prolife readership to enthusiastically accept grave evil. He is, in short, a false prophet.

That’s the name of the game for “new fusionism.”

Personally, though, if I were running for president I’d site [sic] something obscure like Andrei Bely’s objectively pro-terrorist modernist classic Petersburg. ~Matt Yglesias 

This is an interesting choice, a very intriguing…hm, yes, quite a unique selection.

Okay, so, I can’t really replicate the odd style of Bely, but I have to commend Yglesias on the selection.  As weird, Hesse-like, pre-revolutionary Russian novels go, it’s right up there.

But “conservatism” has no mystical essence. Rather than a magisterium handed down from apostolic times, it is an ideology whose contours are largely arbitrary and accidental. By ideology, I mean precisely what Orwell depicted in 1984. I do not mean, of course, that conservatism is totalitarian. Taken as prophecy, 1984 has little merit. Taken as a description of the world we actually live in, however, it is indispensable. 1984 reveals not the horrors of the future but the quotidian realities of ideology in mass democracy. Conservatism exemplifies them all. ~Austin Bramwell

The worst thing that can happen to a conservative is to be seen as disloyal. The worst thing that can happen to a liberal is to be seen as “in the tank.” ~Jonathan Chait

Second, there is the corrupting influence of teamism. Being a good conservative now means sticking together with other conservatives, not thinking new and adventurous thoughts. Those who stray from the reservation are accused of selling out to the mainstream media by the guardians of conservative correctness. ~David Brooks

As Mr. Bramwell has argued, the movement has existed to instill conformity and filter the approved policy positions down to the members.  This is not something that has happened just recently, but has been a feature of the movement (as it will be a feature of anything that calls itself a movement) from fairly early on.  The reason for the emphasis on loyalty and conformity seems to have come from the awareness of being outnumbered and surrounded, politically speaking, which required greater cohesion and solidarity than might otherwise be desirable for the full flourishing of intelligent thought.  As both movement and party have become more embattled–since the movement has hitched itself to a party that is in the process of destroying itself through bad policy and incompetent administration–the impulse for unity has become even stronger.  Part of this impulse has been centered around the very thing that is destroying the movement, namely Iraq, and the other part of is expressed in the profound longing for some “authentic” conservative to rescue the movement from all of the compromises and failures of its leaders.  The two expressions of the desire for unity are directly contradictory and will end up cancelling each other out.  Unless, of course, they drop the war, which isn’t going to happen.

You “conservatives” and “libertarians”, who have aligned yourselves with these type of people due to a shared opposition to the war, disgust me. It’s like you all have been duped into the notion that these people actually care about civil liberties. Get a clue. Liberals do not care one iota about liberty. They don’t care one bit about the free market. All they care about is a large intrusive government that forces their collectivist ideals on the masses. They may say this and they may that, but wake up people. They are nothing but a bunch of Stalinists. ~Glen Dean

Via Clark

What is it like to be an Iraq war supporter?  What does it feel like to wake up every day and believe that roughly 95% of the world’s population is insane and bent on destroying you?  What is it like to think that one of the most miserable countries on the other side of the planet poses a direct and dire threat to you and your neighbours?  What is it like to unthinkingly follow the President?  Tell us, Glen. 

Incidentally, isn’t a war propelled by nationalistic loyalty to the state something of a “collectivist ideal” being imposed on “the masses”?  Just wondering!   

I don’t know about all liberals, but it seems to me that someone like Russ Feingold, who actually voted against the PATRIOT Act, cares a good deal more about civil liberties than the “national emergency” crowd.  Now there are liberals who endorse all of the security state legislation–the Lieberman left–who are deemed to be “responsible” on national security, which is strange.  Shouldn’t support for such measures instead be taken as proof of the inherent “Stalinism” of liberals?  Apparently “Stalinism” these days involves suspicion of and opposition to excessive and unaccountable government power–who knew? 

Of course, it is perfectly possible for a liberal to be right about the unconstitutional actions of the government in one area (unreasonable searches) and get it magnificently wrong when it comes to another area (e.g., freedom of speech in the Limbaugh case), just as conservatives who wrongly support this war are still capable of being right in their opposition to other bad government policies.  Just as the dangers of centralised government to individual liberty ought to make left-liberals opponents of centralised government action, so the damage that war does to good order, constitutional liberties, civilised norms, traditional morality and settled communities ought to make conservatives oppose war in almost every circumstance.  Failure of conservatives to oppose aggressive war doesn’t mean that they “really” hate good order, constitutional liberty, civilised norms, traditional morality and settled communities, but that their support for the war is radically out of step with everything else they do claim to believe.  It corrupts and undermines their other convictions.  Like all the left-liberals who embrace concentrated power in a mistaken belief that it will advance “positive liberty,” conservatives who support aggressive wars are usually confused and have lost touch with their foundations.  

Liberals are as humourless about matters of race as most “conservatives” are about anything pertaining to foreign policy.  For the former, you can’t tell certain kinds of jokes; for the latter, you are not allowed to say anything even remotely favourable about another country if its government happens to take a different foreign policy line from our own.  For the former, any hint of what they will deem as racism puts a person beyond the pale of civilised society–ban him, jail him, expel him!  For the latter, any hint of critical thinking about the flaws in U.S. policy or decisions to start wars shows that you must secretly desire the green flag to fly over the Capitol and want the United States to surrender abjectly to any and all adversaries.  The response to such “defeatists” is much the same as the liberal response to “racists.”  In both cases you see ideology and the desire to silence opposition winning out over critical thinking.  Those who want to cavalierly fling around accusations of Stalinism might want to look in the mirror when they speak. 

My favourite combination of these two obsessive mentalities is when some neocon democratist gets on his high horse and declares that anyone who is not in favour of killing other people to bestow freedom on them must therefore regard those people as inferior.  Only a racist could think democratising Iraq is a fool’s errand!  You must hate Arabs and freedom!

As for devotion to individual liberty, why do I think that people who endorse extraordinary rendition, the arbitrary detention of citizens and the launching of unprovoked wars are in a poor position to sit in judgement of others’ libertarian qualifications?  I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Before today’s court decision, Mr. Gul had faced another round of parliamentary voting this week in order to be confirmed as president. Mr. Erdogan may now propose another candidate or, more likely, call a general election. ~The New York Times

This confrontation between the constitutional court and AK was only a matter of time.  Putting forward Gul as the sole candidate for president has served as a dangerous provocation to the army.  Practically speaking, if you want an example of how an Islamist party is a threat to Turkish representative government you need only take account of the likelihood that the Islamist party is likely to provoke a military coup against it.  Someone will object that this isn’t the Islamists’ fault–what policies do they advocate that would actually undermine democratic norms or constitutional protections?  At the moment, none, obviously, because if they so much as blink the wrong way the army will overthrow the government.  They have played a clever tactical game in which they are more pro-European than the secularists, but it is purely tactical, as I would hope anyone can see.  Does anyone really think that the condition of religious minorities in Turkey, for example, will become better under a more assertively Islamist government in the future?  Is it reassuring to, say, the remaining Armenians in Turkey that the current PM is a man who was imprisoned because he recited a poem by Ziya Gokalp, arch-ideologue of the bad, old CUP, that spoke of “our minarets” being like bayonets? 

To take as evidence of future intentions AK’s tactical maneuvers to get Turkey into the EU (which won’t work anyway) is to mistake them for a happy socially conservative social democratic party that just happens to be full of Muslims.  That seems a mistaken reading of the situation to me.  It’s true that there are Islamists, and then there are Islamists, but there is necessarily something in political Islam that is not compatible with representative government because the claims of Islam in the political realm generally are broad enough and expansive enough that they leave no space for the free public space needed to cultivate what anyone else would recognise as a pluralistic or democratic order. 

You might be able to argue that a mass Islamic republic, such as Turkey could well become if Kemalism collapses, does not necessarily have to represent some great danger, but I will insist that people recognise that a mass Islamic republic and a pluralistic republican democracy are nowhere near the same thing.  For the latter to be maintained, it would be necessary for the bulk of AK’s voters to appreciate and desire such an arrangement, when it seems to me that they do not.  From a realistic foreign policy perspective, it is important to note that the rise of successful Islamism in Turkey has coincided with the gradual drift of Turkey away from the West.  We may never see a return to Erbakan-like proposals for Islamic economic unions and the like, but the priorities and desires of AK voters do not lie in becoming more like Europe.  This is why it is not possible to take at face value AK’s current pro-EU position and all of the reformism that the drive for membership entails.  

If someone wants to make the argument that we should collaborate with “moderate” Islamists in the way that Western governments tried to use unions and social democrats against communism, that is another debate, but we should appreciate that the reason why “moderate” Islamism will be successful in depriving jihadis of recruits and political strength is that it will also be offering a similar future vision of a state governed in the name of Islam.  A party like AK might help to counteract the temptation of violent political action, but it will do so because it offers another means to the same general goals. 

However, a sizeable, powerful minority in Turkey does not want to see what AK will become and this minority can and will stop it from happening.  For them, any political Islam is really too much, and I don’t really blame them.  In the Turkish case, the question of whether AK can manage the contradictions between political Islam and democratic norms is purely academic, since Turkey does not have regular democratic norms in the first place (a consequence of the repressive speech laws instituted by the Kemalists) and the army will never permit the experiment to last for very long.

Two new Nawal Al Zoghbi albums, Habit Ya Leiland Elli-Tmanetoh, arrived in the mail today, so I have been treating myself to some of her older songs, including some I have mentioned before, such as Gharib Al Raai, and others that I have learned about only recently.  I don’t really have anything else to add, but I thought I would take this opportunity to try out a title (in this case, Nawal Al Zoghbi’s name) in Arabic script.