I am not one particularly drawn to an Ariel Levy or Isla Fisher.  It doesn’t help that I had literally never heard of either one until today.  (Make of that what you will.)  Apparently, Ms. Fisher is the fiancee of Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame, which is very “naice” for him; she has also apparently ridiculed Scientologists, which is a testament to her good judgement (despite the business of being engaged to Sacha Baron Cohen).  No, if we must talk about actresses/celebrities we will never meet, it simply has to be Rani Mukherjee whom we admire:

About such a woman, Sayat Nova might have said:

Ov che tesi, test e uzum, ov tesnoom e, miranoom e

(He who does not see wants to see you; he who sees, perishes.)

Or to use one of my favourites:

Patvakan angin javahir, lal badeshkhan is indz ama

(You are a worthy, priceless jewel, the very ruby of Badeshkhan for me.)

Update: Here is a higher-quality version of Rani performing Main Vari Vari from Mangal Pandey.  Tumhari adao pe main vari vari indeed.

Leon Hadar explains why peace and populism may possibly play well in Peoria.

While watching Rosa Brooks (of the Obama-is-the-Messiah school) and Ross talk about Obama’s amazingly bad speech on the day of the Virginia Tech killings, it occurred to me that Obama’s failure here was not simply one of poor taste and political tone-deafness.  Obama has said more times than anyone can care to remember that he wants a new kind of politics, he wants to transform the country, he wants to bring an end to cynicism and, last but not least, he thinks that a significant part of “the problem” in Washington is the “smallness of politics.”  Suppose for a moment that some poor fellow actually believed all this drivel and enthusiastically backed Obama’s candidacy.  What would such a person have made of a speech that was at once rather petty (score one last point against Imus!), cynical (exploiting a horrible crime to talk up your political issues) and predictable (a politician talks nonsense in the wake of a disaster)?  This would-be Obama man would probably conclude that Obama’s talk about transformation, a new kind of politics and so on (the things that were supposed to make Obama “fresh” and interesting as a candidate) was just a lot of talk and nothing else.  At the moment when Obama could have demonstrated what his new sort of politics might look like when everyone was paying attention he retreated to the comfort of boilerplate rhetoric, tired point-scoring and attempting to manipulate human suffering for his own purposes on the day of the killings itself.  Perhaps no one really believed all his talk about transformation and newness and such (we can only hope), but it is a little strange that hardly anyone has noted how completely it subverts what was supposedly a core theme of his campaign.

Reihan has an interesting post responding to twoof mine, and he had some very kind words for the Dark Lord of Paleoconservatism (as I have been dubbed).  For my part, I enjoy Reihan’s charmingly eccentric, often idiosyncratic version of meliorism, and his criticisms here are unlikely to provoke much of my usual rhetorical ruthlessness.  Reihan allows that “[m]ost “And-ism” really is shallow,” so in this respect we don’t disagree at all.  I would say more and say that most And-ism is shallow because it is usually a gimmick or a blind groping towards some amorphous change.  Between most “And-ism” and “Me-tooism” there is often a thin, almost invisible line. 

Reihan speaks of “defying false choices,” and I am all for this kind of defiance.  But there is also virtue in defying false pairings.  Take the pairing of the label “green” with the carbon tax or the label “free market” with state capitalism.  There is frequently a pressure in debates to define your position in terms of the conventional policies frequently associated with that position.  Thus to show that you are serious about conservation you have to make certain alarmed statements about the dangers of climate change and you must also demonstrate your concern about these dangers by arguing for a carbon tax of one kind or another, whether or not climate change really is likely to usher in catastrophic events and whether or not a carbon tax (or Kyoto or what-have-you) is actually a prudent and workable policy.

There is a sense in which paleoconservatives have been offering an “and” conservatism in certain respects all along, but in an entirely different sense than the “And-ism” we have been discussing.  Paleos are and have been advocating the best in the traditions of the Christian West and, at bottom, a humane, traditional conservatism of place, prescription and piety.  In this sense, we are following the path of the Agrarians and the New Conservatives, among the more recent figures, who sought a holistic (not partial!) vision of order, the common good and the good life, and so we are looking to the example of what you might call the original “and” conservatives.  The idea that there was some contradiction in defending the rights of property and tending to the landscape would have struck many of these men as absurd.  To their mind, a decent respect for the land went hand in hand with owning property, because to them property still possessed the sense of having something to do with owning land.  The farther removed we become from that connection, thanks to the preferred arrangements of the moneyed interest, the more one-sided and fragmented every appeal to either property or conservation becomes, so that we are often left with And-ists desperately grasping at some earlier sense of what conservation required and usually ending up by accepting the most dreadfully conventional views of state environmentalism.   

However, if these traditional conservatives were and are early “and” men, they were and are even more fierce “or” men in that they insisted, for example, that you should not concentrate wealth in massive enterprises, gear everything towards efficiency and place the “protection” of both property and the land more and more in the hands of a state that would have great incentives to subvert those protections and to “develop” the land (very often in recent decades by making that land unusable for anything but parking or shopping) according to the goals of the moneyed interest.  To defend a wider array of goods necessarily means taking on that many more adversaries, which surprisingly is not the recommended way to win elections.  And-ists run the risk of making more adversaries, but very often they advance their And-ism with the most milquetoast, drippy, neutral language aimed at maximising superficial voting support and avoiding those policies that tend to create resistance.  Even the And-ists at ConservativeHome are unhappy with Cameron because he has taken this inevitable step away from emphasising “both…and” to just talking about the new and trendy things that will supposedly make the Tories likeable and electable again. 

My impression of virtually all “And-ism” as represented by the folks at ConservativeHome, for instance, is that its adherents revel a little too much in being contrarian when it will make them appear “new” or “interesting” or “innovative,” but are not as interested in challenging deep-set structural problems.  It doesn’t help that a lot of “And-ism” appears on the scene with the explicit purpose of rehabilitating the fortunes of some virtually moribund political party, which tends to mean that “And-ism,” like its distant cousin, fusionism, will shift and transform according to the needs of the party and not necessarily according to the goods of the commonwealth.  The Cameroons are a great example of this: they are “and” conservatives when it means that they can add on something trendy or popular to their agenda (e.g., Tory support for the disastrously bad, but theoretically very popular Kyoto accords), but they long ago in practice gave up on insisting on the “or” elements of conservatism when it has come to challenging expansive government.  In practice, “And-ism” of the kind advanced at ConservativeHome and, to some degree, in the counsels of the Cameron shadow government is just another way of saying, “Let’s take the easy way out.”  As I have seen it being practiced in politics, I think it is, in the end, an abdication of leadership posing as bold, exciting and transformative leadership.  This leads us, quite naturally, to Barack Obama, who purportedly offers us a kind of “And” progressivism.

Reihan is right that all large-scale problems are defined by complexity and numerous interrelated factors.  They cannot be addressed effectively by attacking from one and only one side.  Arguably, this is even more true in foreign affairs than elsewhere, where the complexity is potentially greater and the number of factors has vastly increased.  Responding to my critique of Obama’s big foreign policy speech, Reihan also grants that “Naxalite rebels don’t menace Peoria.”  But not even Obama would have said anything quite so easily ridiculed (though he might talk about the “quiet violence” of caste stereotypes in Bollywood movies).  The underlying assumption that made Obama claim our security “is inextricably linked to the security of all people” is that, eventually, unless “we”Americans do something about it the Naxalite rebellion will cause a chain reaction of events that will result in the destruction of Miami (or whichever city) or something equally undesirable.  (For the sake of clarity, I should note here that I was the one to first start talking about Naxalites in this discussion–one will look in Obama’s speech in vain for a reference to them.)  It is domino theory on stimulants: as Orissa goes, so goes the free world!  You could use any foreign crisis, real or imagined, in place of the Naxalites, and you would get the same unreasonable alarmism.  It is as if pop chaos theory met Cold War paranoia and had a brief tryst in the supply closet at an establishment foreign policy think tank, resulting in the birth of modern interventionism.  Strangely, though, instead of regarding this kind of thinking as the conspiracy theorising of bureaucrats and academics, a lot of people take it as sober and far-seeing analysis.  It is because of this kind of thinking that we are always being called to “do something” here or there–not necessarily because of the crisis itself, which might actually be relatively limited, but because of its potential impact “on the region.”  In Obama’s vision of the world, if a chicken on the other side of the planet sneezes, Americans might die.  Whatever else you want to say about interconnectedness, I think we can all agree that this is simply nuts. 

It may be that America at present is too bound up in the “global supply chain” to extricate itself from many of the places where someone in government thinks we have some interest, which certainly imposes constraints on what can be done right now, but it seems to be a mistake to accept that this dependency is either necessary or unchangeable.  My foreign policy views are based at least in part on the assumption that such dependency in the form that it now takes is neither necessary nor unchangeable and that this dependency is positively harmful to the United States.  From my perspective, someone who wants to enmesh us ever deeper into a global network, as Obama clearly does, does not really offer any greater appreciation for the complexity of that network, nor does he inspire confidence that he has any clear understanding of what the American interest is or ought to be.  He has, like so many progressives, fetishised cooperation and interdependence, as if to mirror the extent to which many Republicans have fetishised a sort of “splendid isolation” that isolates us from nothing harmful but rather leaves us stranded in hostile territory.

Did Marty Peretz care about the politics of Mauritania until someone pointed out to him that he could use it as a cudgel with which to bash Arabs?  My guess would be no.  Incidentally, how did the “new democracy” of Mauritania come about?  It was the result of a military coup overthrowing the former tyrannical ruler, Taya, who had been more or less “our” man in Nouakchott (if you can imagine such a thing).  This paved the way for the elections that put Abdallahi in power. 

In other words, Mauritanian “democracy,” such as it is, came about initially through non-democratic means and arose out of opposition to a pro-Washington regime, which would seem to make nonsense out of most democratist notions of how U.S.-led democratisation is supposed to work.  The good news is that Mauritania might provide an example of a nation in Africa handling its own internal problems, which is one more argument against meddling in the internal affairs of other African countries.  The bad news, if you like, is that all of this talk about “democracy” in Mauritania is as meaningless as it was when it was being used about Kyrgyzstan.  The causes of past cruelties against the black African population in Mauritania have not been eliminated.  As the leader of the Forces de liberation africaines de Mauritanie puts it:

What is going on [in Mauritania] is neither democracy nor its ‘cousin.’ It is nothing but an evolution of the mechanisms of distribution of power among the Arab-Berber tribes. We have gone from coups d’etat… to tribal alliances with a democratic unction, so as not to alienate the international community… 

Who would have guessed that you cannot establish functioning democracy in tribal societies?  Shocking! 

Marty’s New Role Model!

Update: The CSM story linked to above reminded me that Taya had earned the wrath of his country’s Islamists because he had established ties with Israel, and the new “democratic” president wants to review and possibly end those ties.  As was reported on the day of his inauguration, Abdallahi has had to play to the crowd:

But the tie with Israel is unpopular with most Mauritanians and Abdallahi has said it will be reviewed and debated.

“Mauritania will continue to stand by the struggle of the Palestinian people to recover their legitimate rights on their national soil,” he said in his inauguration speech.  

Funny how democracy works, isn’t it?  Upon learning about this, Peretz will probably insist that the coup and everything that followed were all terrible things that should never have happened.

Does John Edwards include Jews in his prayers? Or Muslims? Or Hindus?  Or any other non-Christians?

He didn’t the other day. The other day, in order to commemorate those killed at Virginia Tech, Edwards led a prayer “in Christ’s name” at Ryman Auditorium, which bills itself as “Nashville’s  Premier Performance Hall.”

Edwards has a perfect right to pray publicly or privately any way he wants to. But people who are not Christians often feel left out of prayers like his. ~Roger Simon

I have to agree with Yglesias: this Politico item reaches new depths of lameness.  In fact, it has passed far beneath the mere crust of lameness and broken down into the core of absurdity, where it will fortunately be consumed by tons of satirical magma.

John Edwards is a Christian.  It seems to me that the only way that he could pray without being tagged as a pandering, overly ecumenical buffoon would be to pray “in Christ’s name.”  It has to be embarrassing for all involved to hear politicians rattle off the new trinity of inclusiveness: “The strength of America is in our churches, our synagogues and our mosques!”  Presumably a Muslim candidate, were there ever to be such a one, would open his prayer with bismillah arrahman arrahim, or perhaps a translation of the same, because that’s part of how Muslims pray.  Give me a candidate who will not reshape his prayers to fit a focus group any day (even if his decision to give a prayer was apparently done on the advice of a consultant).  Spare me the treacly preaching of a Roger Simon when he asks:

Why not include all religions in your prayers?

Because that’s obviously fake and done for political purposes?  Because virtually no one, in his regular prayers, “includes” all religions in this way?  The reasons could go on.

When writing a polemic designed to warn your readers about incipient American fascism, here are some helpful tips for what not to do (so that you do not end up sounding like Naomi Wolf).  To save time, I have limited it just to eight points:

1) Do not start by referring to the overwhelmingly popular military coup in Thailand that was blessed by the Thai king and helped remove from power an incompetent and corrupt demagogue.  Mentioning this will only make your readers wonder why the same thing might not be tried here to good effect.

2) Do not, if you can help it, refer at any time to Pinochet, whose lasting legacy will be that he made Chile into one of the relatively wealthier, more stable and least basketcase-like Latin American countries that it still is today.

3) Do not write the following: “I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds [bold mine-DL] of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.”  Other kinds of fascism?  Like the Australian kind?  What other kinds of fascism besides the European are there?  (Hint: there is no Islamofascism)

4) Do not go through the entire article and fail to define fascism.

5) Do not set up fascism as the opposite of democracy or as equivalent with the policies of authoritarian caudillos, since this will show you to be entirely ignorant of what fascism is.

6) Do not refer to Rev. Niemoeller when talking about Guantanamo.

7) Do not liken the Florida recount fights to the rise of the fascisti.  James Baker was not the second coming of D’Annunzio.

8) Whatever you do, DO NOT compare the firing of the eight US Attorneys to anything related to Joseph Goebbels.

The sad thing about Wolf’s article is that many of the things she objects to are usurpations, bad policies or violations of fundamental rights.  Instead of focusing specifically on these, she has to make it into a tiresome declaration of her zealous anti-fascism, in the process showing that she doesn’t know what the word fascist means and thus manages to devalue the legitimate criticisms she was trying to make.

No, it was secular nationalism that killed them, the pseudo-religion that exalts the Turkish nation. ~Morning’s Minion

Undoubtedly pan-Turanism and Turkish nationalism masquerading as Ottomanism were profoundly significant ideological factors in driving the genocide, and I wouldn’t even object to allowing that they were the most significant factors for the architects of the genocide.  In addition to pointing to the basic Muslim identity of the irregulars, both Turkish and Kurdish, who carried out most of the actual looting and killing, I would point to an important feature of the ideology of the CUP leadership that is very often glossed over in many traditional accounts of this group.  Taner Akcam, who will probably not be mistaken for a “right-wing culture warrior” (though I might fairly be described as such), wrote in his masterful A Shameful Act on the Islamic background to the genocide:

In addition to the general subjugation of all its subjects, the Ottoman state specifically oppressed and discriminated against non-Muslims.  Indeed, in the course of Ottoman rule, long-standing assumptions of Muslim superiority evolved into the legal and cultural attitudes that created the background for genocide.  This is not to say that the Ottoman Empire rested only on violence, but that without a grasp of the particular circumstances of the Muslim-non-Muslim relationship, we cannot understand the process that led to a decision for a “final solution” to the Armenian question….The Muslim-Christian clashes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Armenian genocide must be considered against this background.  Accordingly, the view that relative peace prevailed prior to the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalism, [sic] is not only incorrect but also misleading. (p.19-20)

And again:

Solidarity among the empire’s Muslims, no matter what, was the psychological product of decline and disintegration coupled with the belief of being surrounded by hostile forces desiring the state’s elimination.  Thus Pan-Islamism was transformed into state ideology.

For this reason the attacks, mainly against the Armenians, had the nature of pogroms.  The state unleashed its attacks on the slightest provocation, calculating that this would bind Muslims more closely to the empire.  The Austrian ambassador to the Porte reported that Muslims were being armed and set into action against Christians, calling this a policy a “Muslim Crusade.”  From reportss of the various diplomatic missions in Istanbul and eyewitness accounts, it is clear that the massacres of 1894-96 were centrally planned. (p.44)

And again Dr. Akcam wrote:

For all their differences, these divergent currents–Ottomanism, Islamism, Turkism, and Westernism–shared one core premise: the nationalism of a dominant ethnic group, which was understood to mean the Turks. (p.49)

Elsewhere he stresses the flexibility of the CUP in stressing different aspects of their ideology according to perceived need; when it helped to speak of jihad, they spoke of jihad, and when it helped to speak in racialist terms, they spoke as racialists.  Whichever way you slice it, this was a nasty bunch.  They were motivated by a number of different senses of their rightful superiority over Armenians and other minorities, one of which in this case was Islam, albeit an Islam as mediated through a particularly Turkist filter.

Speaking of “right-wing culture warriors” and the Armenian genocide together is notable for another reason, since relatively few “right-wing culture warriors” over here have any familiarity with the genocide and even fewer care very much.  I have noticed that almost the only people who have shown any interest in what I have had to say about the genocide have been on the left or center-left.  It is not for nothing that it is the Democrats who consistently push for recognition of the genocide, if only because Armenian-Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic.  Christian conservatives, who might theoretically be natural allies for the Diasporan Armenians in this area, seem to be generally uninterested in the question. 

Depressingly, any sense of solidarity with Armenian Christians that one might think Christians in this country would or ought to have is virtually non-existent.  For obvious reasons, American Jews are much more aware of the genocide and they tend to be more involved in promoting knowledge about the Armenian genocide.  Likewise, the slaughter of the Assyrians undertaken at around the same time is also largely unknown to American Christians, just as the sorry fate of today’s Assyrians is overshadowed by an unfortunate commitment to Mr. Bush’s War.  This deplorable neglect of Near Eastern Christians is repeated time and again across much of the American right.  The response tends to be one of ignorance, indifference or some mixture of the two, so I would be very interested to see more “right-wing culture warriors” at least paying some lip service to remembering the Armenian genocide.

 Menk’ Hishoom Enk’

 

The bill’s advocates had hoped that Pelosi, a longtime advocate for recognition of the Armenian genocide, would bring the bill to a floor vote by Tuesday.

Yet the bill still is lingering in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where it has not been scheduled for a vote. ~The Chicago Tribune

This is a shame.  I had been operating on the mistaken assumption that Ankara’s mouthpieces had been making so much noise about this because the resolution was set for a successful vote.  It would seem that Madam Speaker once again has managed to disappoint even in the most symbolic things.

What You Cannot Say In Turkey

Americans From A Different Time 

Activities here for the Commemoration Day were not all that remarkable, but it is a fairly small Armenian presence here on campus.  Today I had my normal Sayat Nova translating session, and then our Armenian students here at the University gathered for a screening of Assignment: Berlin, which makes up in importance as a lesson in the fate of Talaat Pasha for what it lacks in production value.  I had said yesterday that the CUP men managed to avoid facing their responsibility for what they did, which is only partly true.  They did not face the same kind of formal, internationally recognised justice that certain other genocidaires have had to face.  They were, of course, formally condemned by the Kemalists, who wanted to make clear that they had no connection to the CUP leadership, and one by one the leading party men were gunned down in the following years.  The movie mentioned above tells the story of the trial of Taalat’s assassin.

Update: Mark Krikorian writes on the genocide here.

To say that conservatives can compromise on first principles but cannot disagree about how best to wage the war on terror is to urge the abandonment of the issues that built the Republican majority in favor of the issue that tore it down. ~Jim Antle