On the early morning of Sunday 25 July, I saw a long (half-hour) BBC interview with Eileen Gittins, the founder of the print-to-order company Blurb. (Print-to-order companies are internet-based businesses that allow anyone to publish a book and make as many or as few copies as they can sell or pay for. The best-known is Lulu.) The interviewer was Zeinab Bedawi, an elegantly Western-looking Muslim lady, quite chic, gracefully made up and coiffured, and with not the shadow of a veil in sight.
From the beginning, Ms.Bedawi was visibly hostile, and her questioning was clearly aimed at showing, either that there was something unethical – as in the case of old-fashioned vanity publishers – about print-to-order, or that it would lower the level of communication. For the first ten minutes or so of the interview, I felt that this was the caste arrogance of the professional journo coming out – we cannot allow all that blogger rabble to pollute the sanctuary of mass communication with their muddy boots and vile manners.
But then, at first from behind a tangle of words and claims, and then more and more clearly, another agenda showed itself. Suppose someone published something that was offensive. Well, answered Ms.Gittins, we have mechanisms in place – we don’t vet everything ourselves, but we encourage the public to make complaints. Ah, said Ms.Bedawi, but what about things offensive to particular groups? Like, say, the Danish cartoons? She started really hammering at this point, which is when I switched the TV off – though I must say that Ms.Gittins was being admirably stout and refusing to privilege a group’s claims over freedom of expression.
This made me think. It seems evident to me that what Ms.Bedawi instinctively opposed was the thought of thousands, maybe millions of people, each publishing freely - what is already happening with the internet, but in the more permanent and respected medium of paper. Where the surface of caste prejudice and the inner reality of religious threat meet, was in hating the idea of mass action - mob action - in the print media. Now militant Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims, of the kind who feel strongly about Danish cartoons and the like, certainly do not dislike mob action as such. That is how they make themselves felt: yelling crowds of bearded youths pouring from mosques on hot Friday afternoons. On the other hand, the appeal clearly made by Bedawi to non-Muslims in general is clearly coded in a language of snobbery, intended to reach the elites and those who regard themselves as elite. It says: "Don't allow this banausic mob of Sunday scribblers to take control of the media from you - you who are educated, professional and enlightened. See what risks you run when you allow Uncle Tom Cobbley and all to say what they think about things they know nothing of - such as Islam?"
In other words, there is an inherent attempt to co-opt the non-Muslim societal leaderships into the job of extremist Muslim repression, by flattering their intellectual and social presumptions. You can hear it in the constant but never justified claim that anyone who criticizes or opposes militant Islam does so because he is ignorant: this is frequently repeated by establishment friends of Hamas and the like - and you can see that the assumption involved helps them accept the claim, by flattering their own self-image. Hey, you don't understand Islam - because we do! Who else but us, the educated, the enlightened?
So a religious party or area that lives on the unleashing of its own mobs, even aiming them at Muslim elites and even to Muslim majorities, also advances by flattering the natural snobbish and repressive instincts of the elites of opposite groups; that is, not just by the implicit threat of their violent methods. Open violence is not necessary when you can just arouse their own contempt - laced by unspoken and above all unadmitted fear - for the mobs in their own world. Of course, fears remaining a useful unadmitted motivation, but there is no need to ever mention it: to the contrary, you may act for all the world like the most quivering of cowed dhimmis and still see in the mirror the face of a paragon, a hero of enlightened vision and principle.
I want to underline that my point is not so much to attack the lucky Ms. Bedawi (if it had not been her, it would have been someone else) so much as to describe the realization I had about the mechanism of validation by vanity and self-righteousness by which Western elites become joined at the hip with Muslim militants.
I would go further and say that the result of the prevalence of soixante-huitards, old hippies and those who model themselves after them, in the current social leadership, has led to a situation where democracy - by which I mean the mechanism which leaves ultimate political power in the hands of the adult people - is resented, placed under surveillance, and under constant attack. That is the common, radically mutual interest that joins Islam and the current Western elites; and that is why the Western elites genuinely do not feel under threat by Islamic terrorism. They regard that kind of Islam as an ally in the placing under control of all "unprogressive" elements. And control is the essential thing.
After all, that generation was quite clear about its goals right from the start: "We shall make a new world". This was a straightforward claim for political power - how else was a "new world" to be "made"? Or as an Italian singer put it: "We shall make a revolution, but not a single cannon shall be fired". Convenient, too, since firing cannon - going to war - has two major flaws: it requires sacrifices and courage, and it is uncertain in its results. Plenty of revolutions have been crushed. No, this self-declared founding aristocracy of a new world, intending to make a civilization that would be different from anything their fathers had ever imagined (except when they had imagined it), went about it the safe way, by colonizing institutions and corporations.
An essential help in this was the pre-existent evil that is the institutional structure of parties. I have no words strong enough to say how much I hate parties and party mentalities. I think it may be shown that the institution of parties (which is not found in any democratic Constitution) was intended from the beginning to occupy the space of democratic politics, denying access to it to anyone who was not an apparatchik. Professional Tories replace professional Labour, professional Gaullists replace professional Socialists, professional Republicans replace professional Democrats - each of them more in debt to the party structure that took them where they are than to the electorate which they see, at best, once every four or five years, and whose existence they are free to otherwise ignore. (And by the way, God be praised for the fractiousness and breakability of Italian parties, which has saved us from the dreadful destiny of two- or three-party rule.) And as they were already intended to limit and control the choices of the people, these parasitic structures were peculiarly suited to being colonized by soixante-huitards. And colonized they were - along with trades unions, charities, foundations, institutional bodies and the judiciary. Even the Churches suffered their soixante-huitard infiltration; no later than a couple of weeks ago, I found that a certain Keith Harrison, who had become notorious in the seventies for theorizing the "progressive" censorship of the contents of public libraries, had not only been, unbelievably, ordained a Catholic priest, but that he was actually connected with the London Oratory - a supposedly conservative Catholic institution!
The reason why the elites are so committed to contrasting goals such as feminism, gay rights, and the promotion of Islam in its most militant and folkloric fashion, is that they are not really goals. They are means. In one way or another, they are intended to limit the space of public debate, of free deliberation, of citizen intervention. What radical Islamists and gay rights activists have in common is their commitment to the politics of offence, to demanding that anyone whose views they find offensive should be silenced by force, and ultimately that any law whioh offends them should be suppressed. This places power in the hands of minorities and away from the mass of the people. It is not even good for the large numbers of decent, hard-working, law-abiding Muslims - such as my beloved friend![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kikei - because it threatens their own rights just as it threatens everyone else's; and I would say the same to gay men and feminists, if it were possible to reason on these matters.
The politics of outrage and constant claim, backed by the occupation of institutions by a single ideological group, are resulting in an anti-democratic revolution from above. Elections will increasingly become an empty ritual - unless somewhere a political leader emerges who can not only break the stranglehold of the culture of offence, but also have the nerve to impeach and send to jail those judges and civil servants who have used their position to rewrite the laws and oppress opponents, and to demand that the laws and the will of the people be respected in every area.
From the beginning, Ms.Bedawi was visibly hostile, and her questioning was clearly aimed at showing, either that there was something unethical – as in the case of old-fashioned vanity publishers – about print-to-order, or that it would lower the level of communication. For the first ten minutes or so of the interview, I felt that this was the caste arrogance of the professional journo coming out – we cannot allow all that blogger rabble to pollute the sanctuary of mass communication with their muddy boots and vile manners.
But then, at first from behind a tangle of words and claims, and then more and more clearly, another agenda showed itself. Suppose someone published something that was offensive. Well, answered Ms.Gittins, we have mechanisms in place – we don’t vet everything ourselves, but we encourage the public to make complaints. Ah, said Ms.Bedawi, but what about things offensive to particular groups? Like, say, the Danish cartoons? She started really hammering at this point, which is when I switched the TV off – though I must say that Ms.Gittins was being admirably stout and refusing to privilege a group’s claims over freedom of expression.
This made me think. It seems evident to me that what Ms.Bedawi instinctively opposed was the thought of thousands, maybe millions of people, each publishing freely - what is already happening with the internet, but in the more permanent and respected medium of paper. Where the surface of caste prejudice and the inner reality of religious threat meet, was in hating the idea of mass action - mob action - in the print media. Now militant Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims, of the kind who feel strongly about Danish cartoons and the like, certainly do not dislike mob action as such. That is how they make themselves felt: yelling crowds of bearded youths pouring from mosques on hot Friday afternoons. On the other hand, the appeal clearly made by Bedawi to non-Muslims in general is clearly coded in a language of snobbery, intended to reach the elites and those who regard themselves as elite. It says: "Don't allow this banausic mob of Sunday scribblers to take control of the media from you - you who are educated, professional and enlightened. See what risks you run when you allow Uncle Tom Cobbley and all to say what they think about things they know nothing of - such as Islam?"
In other words, there is an inherent attempt to co-opt the non-Muslim societal leaderships into the job of extremist Muslim repression, by flattering their intellectual and social presumptions. You can hear it in the constant but never justified claim that anyone who criticizes or opposes militant Islam does so because he is ignorant: this is frequently repeated by establishment friends of Hamas and the like - and you can see that the assumption involved helps them accept the claim, by flattering their own self-image. Hey, you don't understand Islam - because we do! Who else but us, the educated, the enlightened?
So a religious party or area that lives on the unleashing of its own mobs, even aiming them at Muslim elites and even to Muslim majorities, also advances by flattering the natural snobbish and repressive instincts of the elites of opposite groups; that is, not just by the implicit threat of their violent methods. Open violence is not necessary when you can just arouse their own contempt - laced by unspoken and above all unadmitted fear - for the mobs in their own world. Of course, fears remaining a useful unadmitted motivation, but there is no need to ever mention it: to the contrary, you may act for all the world like the most quivering of cowed dhimmis and still see in the mirror the face of a paragon, a hero of enlightened vision and principle.
I want to underline that my point is not so much to attack the lucky Ms. Bedawi (if it had not been her, it would have been someone else) so much as to describe the realization I had about the mechanism of validation by vanity and self-righteousness by which Western elites become joined at the hip with Muslim militants.
I would go further and say that the result of the prevalence of soixante-huitards, old hippies and those who model themselves after them, in the current social leadership, has led to a situation where democracy - by which I mean the mechanism which leaves ultimate political power in the hands of the adult people - is resented, placed under surveillance, and under constant attack. That is the common, radically mutual interest that joins Islam and the current Western elites; and that is why the Western elites genuinely do not feel under threat by Islamic terrorism. They regard that kind of Islam as an ally in the placing under control of all "unprogressive" elements. And control is the essential thing.
After all, that generation was quite clear about its goals right from the start: "We shall make a new world". This was a straightforward claim for political power - how else was a "new world" to be "made"? Or as an Italian singer put it: "We shall make a revolution, but not a single cannon shall be fired". Convenient, too, since firing cannon - going to war - has two major flaws: it requires sacrifices and courage, and it is uncertain in its results. Plenty of revolutions have been crushed. No, this self-declared founding aristocracy of a new world, intending to make a civilization that would be different from anything their fathers had ever imagined (except when they had imagined it), went about it the safe way, by colonizing institutions and corporations.
An essential help in this was the pre-existent evil that is the institutional structure of parties. I have no words strong enough to say how much I hate parties and party mentalities. I think it may be shown that the institution of parties (which is not found in any democratic Constitution) was intended from the beginning to occupy the space of democratic politics, denying access to it to anyone who was not an apparatchik. Professional Tories replace professional Labour, professional Gaullists replace professional Socialists, professional Republicans replace professional Democrats - each of them more in debt to the party structure that took them where they are than to the electorate which they see, at best, once every four or five years, and whose existence they are free to otherwise ignore. (And by the way, God be praised for the fractiousness and breakability of Italian parties, which has saved us from the dreadful destiny of two- or three-party rule.) And as they were already intended to limit and control the choices of the people, these parasitic structures were peculiarly suited to being colonized by soixante-huitards. And colonized they were - along with trades unions, charities, foundations, institutional bodies and the judiciary. Even the Churches suffered their soixante-huitard infiltration; no later than a couple of weeks ago, I found that a certain Keith Harrison, who had become notorious in the seventies for theorizing the "progressive" censorship of the contents of public libraries, had not only been, unbelievably, ordained a Catholic priest, but that he was actually connected with the London Oratory - a supposedly conservative Catholic institution!
The reason why the elites are so committed to contrasting goals such as feminism, gay rights, and the promotion of Islam in its most militant and folkloric fashion, is that they are not really goals. They are means. In one way or another, they are intended to limit the space of public debate, of free deliberation, of citizen intervention. What radical Islamists and gay rights activists have in common is their commitment to the politics of offence, to demanding that anyone whose views they find offensive should be silenced by force, and ultimately that any law whioh offends them should be suppressed. This places power in the hands of minorities and away from the mass of the people. It is not even good for the large numbers of decent, hard-working, law-abiding Muslims - such as my beloved friend
kikei - because it threatens their own rights just as it threatens everyone else's; and I would say the same to gay men and feminists, if it were possible to reason on these matters.The politics of outrage and constant claim, backed by the occupation of institutions by a single ideological group, are resulting in an anti-democratic revolution from above. Elections will increasingly become an empty ritual - unless somewhere a political leader emerges who can not only break the stranglehold of the culture of offence, but also have the nerve to impeach and send to jail those judges and civil servants who have used their position to rewrite the laws and oppress opponents, and to demand that the laws and the will of the people be respected in every area.
