Quote of the day: on the scum of the earth. Who? Read on!

A phrase that really gets to me, for instance, would be one of those neoconservative references to Vietnam as a national tragedy, but only because we lost. That thought fills me with ire. To begin with, the person who says it is typically untouched by tragedy; like me, he has not lost a son or a job. In addition, the implication is that if we had won, the war would have been somehow less tragic. People with that mentality, I have to admit, impress me as being the scum of the earth.

 That is Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 (ht)

Catch-22 is now fifty years old.  I have read a few essays in this context.  The best one of them all is this one by Ron Rosenbaum. 

In a way, it was a coincidence that those essays came up as I was wrapping up reading and blogging about A farewell to arms. 

"War is not won by victory. ... We think. We read. We are not peasants.  We are mechanics.  But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war.  Everybody hates this war."

"There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war."

"Also they make money out of it."

Liberals tell Neocons that in wars "anything you do, I can do better" :(

A long, long, time ago, in my first year of graduate school, which is when I began the transition from electrical engineering to the social sciences, Jennifer Wolch, now a dean at Berkeley, remarked in her lecture that external wars are often used to legitimize the state.  Yes, a standard poli.sci. argument, but it was new to me then.  And, as I started getting more and more into understanding such issues, I could get a sense of why a Burkean-conservatives might not want to poke their noses into places where they don't belong, but that otherwise we could have interventionist arguments made from the conservative side of the political spectrum as well as from the liberals.  It is then a harsh reality that there aren't very many people around who would not want to initiate conflicts.  As in conflicts that are not a result of self-defence.

Thus, under the previous presidency, the (neo)conservatives got to wage wars, and now it is the liberals' turn.  Anything you can do, I can do better!  So, while the neoconservatives made fun of the French while singing "bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran," the liberals are bombing now with active assistance from those who supposedly would rather spend their evenings with cheese and wine while listening to Edith Piaff!

Does Sarkozy have any special interest in this?  Of course, it is a wag-the-dog story, writes Anne Applebaum:

Sarkozy clearly hopes the Libyan adventure will make him popular, too. Nobody finds this surprising. At a conference in Brussels over the weekend, I watched a French participant boast of France's leading role in the Libyan air campaign. A minute later, he heartily agreed that the war was a ploy to help Sarkozy get re-elected. The two emotions—pride in French leadership and cynicism about Sarkozy's real motives—were not, it seems, mutually exclusive.

See--external wars and legitimation strategies.

But, haven't we learnt any damn thing from the three-trillion-dollar fiasco that the Iraq War is?  Apparently not:

while this intervention has been couched in the language of humanitarianism and of the global good deed, invoking the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the U.N.’s new doctrine that is supposed to govern those instances when outside powers must step in militarily to prevent tyrants from killing their own people, the more important goal has been to support the insurgency, which is to say, to bring about regime change. Had it been otherwise, the bombing could have been halted once the Libyan government attack on Benghazi had been halted. Instead, it goes on, with various French, British, and American politicians and military officials at odds mainly about how much (not whether) the bombing campaign should be widened, and whether Colonel Qaddafi is himself a legitimate target for assassination from the air.
...
This war—let us call it by its right name, for once—will be remembered to a considerable extent as a war made by intellectuals, and cheered on by intellectuals. The main difference this time is that, particularly in the United States, these intellectuals largely come from the liberal rather than the conservative side. Presumably, when the war goes wrong, they will disown it, blaming the Obama administration for having botched it, in much the same way that many neoconservatives blamed Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for his strategic errors, rather than blaming themselves for urging a war that never had a chance of transforming Iraq in the way that they hoped. The judgment of history will almost certainly be that it was Iran, not the United States, which won that war. And Libya? Anything is possible, of course, but the odds of this war, so grandiose in terms of the moral claims made for its necessity and so incoherent in its tactics, turning out in the way its advocates are promising seem remarkably small.

Holy crap, is all I want to say! 

Meanwhile, over at the other party ....

Ironic, isn't it, that the "progressive" Democrats are often caricatured as anti-war peaceniks?  It is all bloody tweedledum and tweedledee :(

Quote of the day: on Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is probably one of the most controversial contemporary intellectuals--he sure is bound to piss off a bunch of people with every essay or book.  Given his political Damascene Conversion after 9/11, it has been all the more merrier for intellectual junkies like me to follow the debates and discussions from afar; here is one such moment, from Ian Buruma's review of Hitchens' memoir, Hitch-22:

Like many people who count “Hitch” among their friends, I have watched with a certain degree of dismay how this lifelong champion of left-wing, anti-imperialist causes, this scourge of armed American hubris, this erstwhile booster of Vietcong and Sandinistas, this ex-Trot who delighted in calling his friends and allies “comrades,” ended up as a loud drummer boy for President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, a tub-thumper for neoconservatism, and a strident American patriot.

Boy, all these writers can use words so well :)
Anyway, more on Hitchens' memoir--this time from across the pond:

What [Hitchens] most resembles, to an almost uncanny degree, is a particular kind of political romantic, as described by Carl Schmitt in his 1919 book Political Romanticism. Schmitt was ostensibly writing about German romanticism at the turn of the 19th century (the intellectual movement that flourished between Rousseau and Hegel) but his real targets were the revolutionary romantics of his own time, including two of Hitchens’s Trotskyite heroes, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. For Schmitt, political romantics are driven not by the quest for pseudo-religious certainty, but by the search for excitement, for the romance of what he calls ‘the occasion’. They want something, anything, to happen, so that they can feel themselves to be at the heart of things. As a result, political romantics often lead complicated double lives, moving between different versions of themselves, experimenting with alternative personae. ‘Reversing one’s position between several realities and playing them off against one another belongs to the nature of the romantic situation,’ Schmitt writes. Political romantics are ostensibly self-sufficient yet also have a desperate need for human comradeship. ‘In every romantic we can find examples of anarchistic self-confidence as well as an excessive need for sociability. He is just as easily moved by altruistic feelings, by pity and sympathy, as by presumptuous snobbery.’ Romantics loathe abuses of power, but invariably end up worshipping power itself, sometimes indiscriminately: ‘The caliph of Baghdad is no less romantic than the patriarch of Jerusalem. Here everything can be substituted for everything else.’ Above all, in place of God they substitute themselves. ‘As long as the romantic believed he was himself the transcendental ego, he did not have to be troubled by the question of the true cause: he was himself the creator of the world in which he lived.’All of this sounds a lot like Christopher Hitchens.

Crossfire gone. Kristol gone. Who is coming in?

I was definitely one of the people who cheered Jon Stewart's stinging words directed at television talk shows like  Crossfire.  Soon after that, quite a few talking-heads shows disappeared from television.
Dan Drezner has a good question: did Stewart do us a favor, or did he kill any remnants of potential for conversations across ideological divides?  Drezner's point is to:

question what replaced these kinds of shows on the cable newsverse.  Instead of Hannity & Colmes, you now have.... Hannity.  Is this really an improvement?   

As inane as the crosstalk shows might have been, one of their strengths was that they had people with different ideological and political perspectives talking to (and sometimes past) each other.  You could argue that the level of discourse was pretty simplistic and crude -- but at least it was an attempt at cross-ideological debate.  People from different ideological stripes watched the same show and heard the same arguments.  

He has a good point there.  While it might not have been a direct result of Stewart's criticism, these shows are gone and have been replaced by single-perspective shows.  Drezner notes:

Instead of Crossfire-style shows on cable news, you now have content like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, etc.  These programs have no cross-ideological debate.  Instead, you have hosts on both the left and the right outbidding each other to see who can be the mostbatsh**t insane ideologically pure.  These shows attract audiences sympathetic to the host's political beliefs, and the content of these shows help viewers to fortify their own ideological bunkers to the point where no amount of truth is going to penetrate their worldviews.  Which allows these hosts to say any crazy thing that pops into their head and hear nothing but "Ditto!" after they say it. 

Now, in the intellectual print world, the death of Irving Kristol has revealed the vacuum that exists.  Jack Shafer writes:

Without a substantive challenge, liberals grow smug and lazy. They overreach and overspend. Conservatives need to return to civic responsibility, not just to check their opponents, but to offer the country a valid alternative. They need some new neoconservatives. They need the old Irving Kristol.

Postmodernists and Neoconservatives

Postmodernism challenges the idea of "truth"--truth is politically and socially constructed, which means there are many truths and all are equally "truthful". So, you then pick up whichever truth fits you and, well, to heck with the rest.

The strangest thing is that while postmodernists tend to be way left of center, such an approach to competing to truths in the public sphere is practically the same one preached by conservatives of many colors--the neoconservatives and those who challenge natural selection and evolution.

Irving Kristol, who died a couple of days ago, and considered to be the father of the neoconservative movement, said (HT)

"There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work,"

Postmodernists will be very happy with such an explanation of how there exist multiple truths, and that there is no single meta-narrative that will fit one and all.

I suppose it is not that difficult to imagine Kristol being a postmodernist; after all, he was a Trotskyist, who later underwent a conservative conversion while holding on to many of his original notions. As one commentator noted back in 2004,

Irving Kristol began his political life at the City University of New York in the 1930s as a follower of Trotsky, whose own critique of the USSR allowed Kristol to abandon an early flirtation with Marxism.

From Trotsky, Kristol drew one important lesson: the idea of "permanent revolution" and the "export of Communism" without any concession made to other political ideologies, such as nationalism (or "socialism in one country"). If Trotsky wrote of "exporting Communism", Kristol's junior Joshua Muravchik wrote, in 1991, of "exporting democracy", where "democracy in one country" is insufficient, since it has to be exported around the world if it is to be sustained.

So, when there are competing truths, and the permanent revolution seeks to export democracy, well, it is no wonder we then came across a bizarre "postmodernist" statement by a senior adviser to President Bush:

''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."