Prostitution of the pen and the dark side of the free market

[fpb]

Four years ago, the government of the French Republic took the lead in refusing to support the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The French, who had taken a very active and successful part in the first Iraq war, simply did not think that an invasion followed by the occupation of an Arab country was a good idea. That was their prerogative (see under "sovereign state").

(My position was that I loathed Saddam Hussein so much that anyone who wanted to drive him out was fine by me. I would even have supported an Iranian invasion. But I would not have started to insult people who disagreed.)

The idiot part of the American right suddenly made France the bout of all their hatred. Someone spotted a market opportunity, as Americans do (the French do that as well, but when the French do it, that's evil!) and prostituted a certain amount of historical knowledge in the search for a quick buck, producing some sort of tract which rewrote history with the claim that "France have always been our enemy, but they have concealed it under a pretence of friendship".

I would dismiss this intellectually contemptible and factually fraudulent thesis in as many words, and not even bother about it, were it not that one of the finest minds in my f-list seems to have been taken in by it. As it is, I want to ask how you imagine you can trace a consistent attitude of hatred, and what is more, of subtly disguised hatred, in a nation that has, since the foundation of the United States, experienced three royalist constitutions, five republican ones, two bonapartist ones, and one fascist tyranny, and completely boxed the compass in terms of attitudes, views, and alliances. This is the kind of things that rabid anti-Semites postulate about Jews - attitudes consistent across the centuries, constant vicious subtlety in carrying them out, hatred fertile in invention but completely barren of reason. The French ought to be proud: they have been promoted to the rank of Chosen People, next to that other target of unreasoning, blind, stupid, despicable hatred. In case anyone had any doubts, I regard Jew-bashing as a stain on the face of mankind.

No doubt the prostitute or prostitutes who set out on this bit of free enterprise got out of it what they wanted - money, admiting letters from ignorami and fanatics, and the odd spot on TV talk shows; rewards that serious historians get rather less often. But as we are still free people here, I want to use my own freedom of expression, rather less despicably than the prostitute or prostitutes concerned: first, by calling whoredom by its proper name; and second, by stating clearly that there shall be no pity here for such views. The historical slag or slags who sold their integrity for popular success will not be treated as anything but filth, and anyone who takes them seriously is warned that I will do what is in my power to restore them to sanity.

Comments

[notebuyer.livejournal.com]

the principle that a military murderer and thief is better than a Communist military murderer and thief

Sounds good to me.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Murder has no colour. If you think otherwise, I am afraid I find myself forced to defriend you right now.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

If the choice is between two flavors of murderer for the local government, why would you want to see the Communist one in power in preference to the pro-Western one? I can see one and only one reason -- having a murderer on one's own side makes one look bad.

The problem is that, in a lot of the world, one only has the choice between different flavors of murderers. You accused me of failing to respect the sub-Saharan Africans -- in most of those countries, the leaders of all popular factions are murderers and will murder some more if they gain power. What alternative would you propose ... especially since you are rejecting "recolonialization?"

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This is the kind of thinking that led the US to support murderous mujaheddeen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. What followed from that, we all know. It is OK to ally oneself with Stalin when one is trying to survive Hitler, but to assume that one has to take part in any monstrous struggle between monsters is plain stupid. When the struggle is between murderers, and when no desperate national interest is concerned, it is better not to be involved at all.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

This is the kind of thinking that led the US to support murderous mujaheddeen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. What followed from that, we all know.

The first thing that it helped cause was the defeat of international Communism and the fall of the Soviet Union. These were not trivial victories.

It is in the nature of things that in any large conflict (such as the Cold War), one will not be able to avoid unsavory allies. It is also in the nature of things that, after the war is won, some of those allies may turn into enemies.

It is OK to ally oneself with Stalin when one is trying to survive Hitler, but to assume that one has to take part in any monstrous struggle between monsters is plain stupid.

Why is it ok to ally with Stalin when one is trying to survive Hitler, but not to ally with the Afghan rebels (not all by any means of whom were Taliban) when trying to survive the Soviet Union?

When the struggle is between murderers, and when no desperate national interest is concerned, it is better not to be involved at all.

Had we followed your advice, we might not have won the Cold War, because the resources of many Third World countries would have been added to the Soviet empire.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

So you think that the Soviet Union would not have collapsed without the Afghanistan war? I disagree. And as for the resources of many third world countries being added to the Soviet Empire - they were. Are you old enough to remember the seventies? I am. The whole third world, except for a few Latin American military dictatorship, was in the Soviet Union's pockets. The West was besieged, under attack by terrorists from the inside and by economic warfare from the outside (the deliberate use of oil as a weapon). Inflation was up to 25% in some countries, unemployment in the tens of millions. And then, one day, the besieged citadel woke and found that there were no besiegers any more; that the Soviet Union was looking for deals, that the third world could no longer support the burden of their own debt, that the oil bloc could not keep up its artificial price in the face of their own internal hatreds - Saudi Arabia vs. Iraq vs. Iran - and that the Soviet Union was quite willing to underprice them anyway. Do you know what defeated the Soviet Union? Afghanistan? Don't be ridiculous: that was a footling affair that any Russian government could have kept going for ever. What defeated them was that immense Mother Russia, with the broadest and most fertile arable lands in the world, was having to import grain from Canada and the US. That the cars in its streets were cheap knock-offs of outdated Fiat models produced under licence. That most families lived in two-rooms prefabricated flats. That people had to queue for hours to buy bread, while food supplies rotted in railway sidings for lack of organization. That the ships of the mighty Soviet navy had engines that had to be started by chucking a lighted match into a pilot flame. That is what put an end to the Soviet Union: it had become economically dependent on the West. As had all its other enemies. And so, one day, the citizens of the besieged citadels walked out and started taking care of the affairs of their enemies. It was wealth that did it, my friend, the accumulation of capital in Tokyo and New York, in London and Paris and Frankfurt; capital without which the rest of the world could no longer live. And that capital accumulated there and nowhere else - in West Berlin and not in East Berlin - because the one society was free and the other was not. Freedom, political freedom, was the ultimate power on the victorious side. Afghanistan only showed that the Soviets were too tired to fight it any more - Stalin, or any Tsar, would have disposed of the nuisance in five years flat. It also, incidentally, allowed some Americans a certain amount of pleasing revenge for the similar Hell cooked up for them by the Soviets a few years earlier in Vietnam. But as for having any ultimate meaning, any war would have done as well - or no war at all.

They both murder.

[notebuyer.livejournal.com]

And yes, murder is bad. Torture is bad. But there is another distinction, made by Jeane Kirkpatrick:

Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other
resources, which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual
rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal
relations.

Essentially, the autocracies protect their own power and wealth, but leave most other aspects of life relatively untouched. As the name implies, they are more concerned with who in society will wield authority, i.e. themselves, than with imposing any particular ideology. Because this is the case, they in fact preserve many of the institutions upon which democracy can later be built, whether the Church or corporations or other civic organizations.

Totalitarian regimes, on the other hand, as the name implies, seek to totally reinvent and control every aspect of society. This requires them to so violate the existing institutions as to render the society nearly incapable of evolving into a democracy.

In other words, the disrespect for the reality of personhood by totalitarian regimes is not specific, but general. And that violation means that even when it stops short of murder, destruction and violence, it continues to insist on itsr right to control all social and human institutions without regard to their human, and divine, foundation.

While I would regret being dropped from your list of friends (since I rather enjoy the exchanges from which I can, sometimes, learn), you will remain on my list of friends.

Re: They both murder.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Kirkpatrick's distinction always struck me as one of the most odious pieces of apologetics ever designed by a clever and unprincipled person to make followers believe that black is white. The moral characteristic of police states is exactly the same, whether they drape themselves in black or in red. The midnight knock at the door, the terrified rumours about what happens in certain buildings and certain camps in the country, the sudden disappearances - sometimes for no discernible reason - and the creeping fear and demoralization that follows them, do not change. Kirkpatrick would have done better to point out that, in point of fact, most Latino military murderers killed rather less than most Communists did. Pinochet's proven murders, for instance, are about four thousand, which makes him a positive slacker as compared to most Communists. But any notion that government by fear and disappearance does not violate the basics of humanity is unworthy of an honest person. If you want a reason why Kirkpatrick was universally hated in Europe, this disgusting argument (as heard by societies where Fascism was a living memory) is a very good one.