The heresy of dialogue

[fpb]

If I come across as irritable, and if I have a temper, it is to some extent - not largely, but at least to some extent - because I have spent all my life, literally from childhood, bashing my head against a soft, crushing, unconquerable obsession of the modern West, which poisons Italy and has all but murdered Britain: I mean the heresy of dialogue. That is, the general idea that there is no problem on earth that cannot be solved, and no distance that cannot be filled, and no difference that cannot be reconciled, by sitting down and talking about it. That, of course, is nonsense; but all my life - and while not ancient, I am well into my middle age - the vast majority of the people I met clung to it as though it were their mother's breast, feeding them their mother's milk.

There is literally no way to convince most of them that there are limits to dialogue. They ignore decades of total failure in crisis after crisis, and seize one minor and partial success - I mean the unreconciled "reconciliation" in Northern Ireland - to convince themselves that dialogue is always and everywhere the answer. Of course, even in Northern Ireland, there is no peace; only the absence of high-profile violence. Cops are not shot any more, but the terrorists of both sides effectively patrol and control their communities, cut off from each other by ever-growing lengths of wall. I don't want to underrate the importance of no longer having open violence; but this is, at best, a half-successful piece of "dialogue", and does not deserve its iconic status.

However, international public opinion has made a fetish of it (international public opinion, after all, does not live in Northern Ireland and doesn't have to suffer the swagger and menace of the "militants" on their streets). All right; so Irish blood no longer flows - though Irish bones are frequently broken. That's an improvement. But when this lowering of the temperature of violence is internationally promoted as a triumph of "dialogue", when Britain aggressively markets itself as specialists in conflict resolution across the world on the strength of Northern Ireland, when the figurehead of the "peace process" in NI, Tony Blair, is made the international delegate to have peace in the Middle East - then one has to wonder who can possibly imagine that what barely works in the streets of Belfast can ever be relevant to the armed millions of the East Mediterranean. But because the heresy of "dialogue" seems - by deliberately adopting a mental squint that fails to see the thousand wrong things - to have once been validated, there is no limit to the credit that can be claimed on its strength.

But the heresy of dialogue is not disastrous every now and then or at random; it is disastrous inevitably, always, and by its own nature. There is a process that has taken place again and again but from which the dialogue-addicts never learn. When a conflict arises, the dialogue-addicts inevitably tend to favour the more violent, more brutal and more unscrupulous side. So in the thirties they favoured Hitler against France, in the sixties the Soviet Union against America, and now the Muslim world against Israel.

Why? Because it is in the nature of things. It is in the nature of things that Prime Minister Bullying-Bastard will always be willing to talk. He is friendly, hospitable, will listen for hours. ON the other hand, Prime Minister Threatened-Decency cannot pretend that he can offer the moon. He has to place limits on the concessions he is willing to make. And the result of this is inevitably that the dialogue-addicts remain impressed, even enchanted, by the friendly openness of Mr.Bullying-Bastard, and increasingly sadly disappointed by the intransigence of Mr.Threatened-Decency. Hitler's antechamber positively swarmed with pacifists from every nation; even after he had conquered Poland and France, he was still talking peace, peace, peace at any cost. As for Joe Stalin, he positively took out the copyright on pacifism; every international pacifist association from the thirties onwards was a Soviet front. And our contemporary parallels! Why, how open to debate they are, how willing to talk, talk for hours at a time, any time of day and night! Nobody could possibly imagine that they have anything against dialogue. And they don't - since they expect dialogue to deliver everything they want, bit by bit. That is why "peace" must be a "process"; so that everything may be renegotiated over and over again, dead issues resurrected, impossible demands made over and over again with every appeareance of reasonableness. That is what "dialogue" is about.

What happened is quite simply this: that many Europeans, and an enormous majority of Britons, have become addicted to this opium. And because this drug only works one way, can only work one way, it always ends up allying the dialogue-addicts with the worst villains.

Comments

[pathology-doc.livejournal.com]

My reading of World War One - from Martin Gilbert's history and Correlli Barnett's "The Swordbearers" - is that talking might possibly have worked if only the talkers had been given long enough. That, however, was when many of the European nations were ruled by the same set of first cousins and had as much in common as they had differences.

In addition, there were only political ideology and self-interest to consider: there was no intransigent, entrenched fanaticism. And for all that the German Army behaved terribly in Belgium, people strapping bombs to themselves and deliberately detonating them amidst women and children shopping or leaving church would have been condemned universally on both sides. This is the sort of enemy with whom the only dialogue possible is highly supersonic and weighs somewhere between four and nine grams.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

ACtually, I read WW1 differently: http://fpb.livejournal.com/169933.html

[pathology-doc.livejournal.com]

Very differently, but how unutterably boring it would be if historians all concurred.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

I am of the opinion that the addiction to dialogue is partly a holdover from the blind, idiot pacifism of pre-WW2 and partly a holdover from the blind, idiot "pacificism" (of the Useful Idiot variety) post-WW2. You correctly point out that it's the Bullying-Bastards that get all the attention and praise for talking, and that's because they are the ones the dialogue addicts are the most frightened of. Therefore, they figure the more the Bullying-Bastards talk, the less they're going to do to those with whom they're talking. Of course, history has shown this to be patently absurd, but the belief continues. The Threatened-Decency folks are always going to wind up bending over and taking it dry, because, frankly, everyone knows they pretty much play by the "rules", and it's always easier to push rules-abiders around than miscreants, goons, violent lunatics, psychopaths, sociopaths, criminals, thugs, and murderers, who by definition do not play by the rules.

Those who continue the insanity of doing the same unsuccessful thing over and over again and expecting different results often call themselves "progressives" or "liberals". If what they're selling is either progress or the promotion of what they see as liberty, then I want none of it. I will find my own way.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's as simple as that. What I tried to say is that the dialogue-addicts are not, in the majority, disguising their fear of Hizzoner Bullying-Bastard. They fear war in the abstract, but what they fear more is to have their mental constructs disproved. I have seen people whom I would never suspect of cowardice or conscious collaboration be dragged inch after inch over the line because they were so obsessed by dialogue as such that anyone who went through a pretence of dialogue satisfied them, and anyone who told them to their faces that dialogue on certain terms was just not possible was perceived as pointlessly oppositional, irrational, obstinate. It is at this point that the terms of morality become reversed.

And I will add another thing. What the dialogue addict is disguising is his own underlying bullying nature, not his fear of bullies. It is not that he fears them, but that he has already in his heart of hearts adhered to their nature. Why, after all, should dialogue be so important? Why can't we live with our own differences and go on as we are? When you realize that the dialogue fanatic simply will not allow the other person to be left alone to live as they will, that the obsession with dialogue has as its immediate, and intended, result, to place everything into doubt or into play - even the things that the other party would not want to place into play - you will realize that there is a profound affinity between most dialogue addicts and most bullies. George Orwell had seen it clearly, in that attack on pacifist writers in 1942 which I published a few weeks back.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

I'd initially written a longer (initial) response. I edited it way down because I didn't want to draft an epistle so early in the morning. I had a paragraph on how the dialogue-addicts' had become close-mindedness, character assassination of opposition, and complicity in horrors. It was just rambly and not too coherent. So I took it out.

But yes, you are quite right there.

[capnflynn.livejournal.com]

Well said.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

I think the great tragedy of the modern approach to dialogue is that it the possibility is rejected when dialogue would be appropriate, and then insisted upon where the opportunity has passed or when it would be most unsuitable.

Well said

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

Brilliant.