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His Husband, Her Wife December 12, 2013 If a word as spoken does not contain the entire history of its usages, neither does it offer any defense against them- state-nation as nation-state January 21, 2014 Its notion turns the whole world upside down, since the ideal state-nation is the universal homogeneous state, the world state or the democracy whose demos would be all of humankind, not any particular state within history but the action of history itself under a declared progressively "federative concept."
- A Collective Suicide Note February 22, 2014 So much to admire about this historical document, which came up yesterday on the excellent twitter feed of "Todo libro antiguo" (@Libroantiguo) with the following description: "Declaration of war from the German Empire 1914, starting WORLD WAR I. Signed by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II."
February 1, 2013
The eternal crosses infinitely all the way over to us on the finite cross. Even against the definitional and lethal disagreements within and between the Abrahamic faiths on instantiations of eternity, or finitizations of infinity, or mortalities of the immortal, the structure of the central question, as a dichotomy to be resolved into a unity, from incarnation to crucifixion to resurrection, survives all answering exclusions. We can even begin with the atheistic or heretical counter-narratives that insist that indispensable parts of the greatest story were merely story, that the humanly fallible texts amount to a pre-capitalist commodification for “franchising” purposes. Even the falsehood of the tale would precisely on its own level magnify it, as the greatest lie ever believed, in this the only world the closest a disenchanted perspective can approach to miracle.
Comment →
December 2, 2012
September 1, 2010
Many on the right think President Obama's Oval Office address last night should have credited "the Surge," and they would have preferred thanks to his predecessor for taking and implementing a decision that Senator Obama and others fiercely criticized. The left would have preferred a more ringing indictment of the Bush Administration, and a "never again" promise. The war's strongest supporters will, with notable exceptions, remain convinced that going to war was the right decision, that its positive effects are under-appreciated, and that the unknowable alternative history would likely have been at least as violent, and more difficult to influence. The war's strongest critics will remain convinced that going to war was undeniably the wrong decision, that any positive effects could have been achieved or even outbid by other means, and that the unknowable alternative history might have been much less violent and expensive, and have allowed America to retain much greater influence and freedom of action. No one knows for sure where actual history is leading, but everyone is prepared to blame someone else if things go poorly, and all will feel fully justified in their own eyes.
The President chose to let left and right cancel each other out:
As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.
It was his demeanor, called "half-hearted and detached" by one as-ever implacable critic, that expressed and may have resonated with a broader public sense of exhaustion regarding the whole subject. He seemed to be saying, "We're working hard to make the whole thing as boring and forgettable as possible." He did not promise "never again," possibly because he is not in a position to keep such a promise, otherwise because for the foreseeable future an Iraq Syndrome ought to handle the matter anyway. With 50,000 troops still in Iraq and in a re-negotiable position, with 100,000 troops in Afghanistan - and still an angry, self-righteous, globally committed, and incredibly well-armed nation - the U.S. will remain involved in wars and warfare, but we are, for now, exceedingly unlikely to undertake a new major military expedition except as a true last resort, and we are even less likely, next time, to assume an ability to change regimes and contain aftermaths. The experience of the '00s has erased the imperial hubris inherited from the '90s on both economic and military fronts. Call it our intellectual war dividend: Revolutions, we now recall, are not always, or even usually, velvet ones. Wars, we now recall, do not always, or even usually, end more quickly and at less cost than predicted. And, incidentally, incomes, revenues, and stock and property prices, we now recall, do not always, or even usually, rise continuously. In this sense Iraq was just one self-chastening among others.
My personal view remains that we were destined to become deeply, bloodily, and expensively engaged in and around Iraq: Too much unfinished business, too much political, economic, and moral involvement. Following 9/11,with both our fear and our blood still high, our confidence boosted by a seemingly easy victory in Afghanistan, we chose to act rather than react, to pre-empt rather than retaliate, to take the dice in our own hands rather than bet on someone else's throw. To indulge for a moment in a-what-might-have-been, if we had not acted when we did, then, sooner or later, by whatever concatenation of collapses or aggressions, we would have found ourselves on propinquitous ground, sea, and air taking and giving heavy fire anyway. The world economic and political system or "order" that we uphold and depend upon is itself too dependent on what flows out of the geographical Gulf for us to abide indefinitely all of those other gulfs: the gulf in our knowledge, troubling gaps in our sense of control and predictability, the increasingly intolerable moral chasm in our then existent policy. Nature abhors a gulf of gulfs, and "if we knew then what we know now" is a vain exercise, since we never would have learned what we now know except by having acted, suffered, and desperately fought to rescue ourselves. Compare what our armed forces, the political class, and the interested public now have learned about Iraq and environs, and all related issues, as compared to what we generally knew in the year 2000. Operation Iraqi Freedom was as much an exploratory expedition as a "real war" - for the country - if too real for our carefully counted soldiers and much less carefully counted budget.
As for the Iraqis, it is an index of our former naivete, insuperable except by experience, that we hoped to "give" them freedom, and, through their happy example, to spread it to the rest of the Arab and eventually the Islamic world. We simply allowed ourselves to forget what our own history would have taught us, if only anyone ever learned from history. Maybe deep down we remembered, but put it out of our minds -choosing to believe (not all of us, but easily enough of us) what we needed to believe. You can say we chose to trick ourselves into acting, and, even though we saw the bucket of water placed strategically above the partly open door, we decided to blunder forward anyway. Except the bucket was full of blood, and most of it Iraqi, the critics will say - and they are right. Yet can anyone with much knowledge of the history of the region pretend that the violence and destruction would likely have been avoided for very long? That they weren't bleeding out month by month already - with an ever-present option on the next catastrophe, against a background of misery and despair? That goes for the violence and destruction of the first liberation, the liberation from Saddam - it had to come someday; it goes for the violence and destruction of the second liberation - from foreign masters and would-be masters, including but not limited to us; it goes for the violence and destruction of the third liberation, from the "thousand Saddams" that now compete in Iraq for position.
By intervening as we did and how we did, we helped set the timetable of revolutionary violence and put ourselves in place to absorb and channel it, but it may be another form of hubris to assume anything more. Here is the simple summary that the President supplied, using terms that his predecessor might just as well have used, putting a hopeful emphasis on how Americans enabled Iraqis to take their fate into their own hands:
The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people. Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future. They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi Security Forces; and took out terrorist leaders. Because of our troops and civilians – and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people – Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.
The difficulty for Americans, especially for onetime proponents of the war like myself who hoped for a simpler, smoother, and much less costly transition - though who had been willing to contemplate a much costlier initial battle - was coming to understand why the Iraqis themselves were so resistant to seizing that historical opportunity and acting in their own collective interests.
So here is what I think we have re-learned, and had to re-learn: Prior to "Operation Iraqi Freedom," as the name emphasizes, the Iraqis were un-free. They were unprepared and perhaps unwilling to enter history as free human beings, and, though we removed one seemingly insuperable obstacle, the terror regime, we could not relieve them of the struggle that alone gives meaning and, potentially, durability to freedom. Without us, the Iraqis might have put off a new effort of self-liberation for many years. They might never have gone the final distance as a people (or set of captured peoples), but such a description ignores the extent to which they were held back and hemmed in, trapped by history at the cradle of civilization, at the crossroads of the world, on an ocean of oil, and at the same time pushed forward by larger forces - the same ones that gave Saddam his weapons and his dreams, the same ones that enslaved the Iraqis together in a "republic of fear," the same ones that made the world so interested.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom" could therefore only have ever meant a willed confrontation with catastrophe. We can take this knowledge with us on the next "operation," and there will very likely be a next one, different because of our additional knowledge and our new cautions, but sooner or later on the same terms.
Comment →
These changes look like they will be fantastic. I already like the ability to go further back. When might we see the lower-left icons?
I don't take such phrases as categorically poor writing, although I leave to your judgment in this case. Whether Chaucer in The Knight's Tale, describing [...]
bob wrote:
The multiplicity of Hegels alone should be proof enough for the existence of parallel universes.
Parallel incomplete self-consistent universals. My Hegel describes the "revel." [...]
On “On re-reading Liberal Fascism: Defining Evil Down”
Never fear - those were approving if slightly appalled exclamation points. Consider also that today is (well still is on the West Coast) the anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
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@ fuster:
!!!
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Seems like a sloppy use of the word "tyrannical" to me, Sully.
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@ J.E. Dyer:
Since you say you lack for time, I'll keep my response brief - also since I don't want to leave yet another long loose end on a discussion about what the American experiment is - or about what it makes sense to try to say it is.
If you're trying to suggest that every form of government except for "limited government constitutionalism" qualifies as "fascist," then you're defining evil down. If not - if there's something else that made fascism fascistic, then it may be a calumny to associate progressivism with fascism simply because both were ideologies at work in the 20th C that indulged in what you call "prophylactic" governance.
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JEM - the discussion is as alive as we want it to be - zombie Tinkerbell style - and anyway the post ain't so old. So please don't hesitate to post your reply here, and thanks in advance for any help steering me out of error - especially before you alert the fearsome yet congenial JG! - or for any opposition that forces me or us to think harder or better about any point of interest. You're also welcome to try your hand at authoring a response post, if you're of a mind to.
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@ Sully:
You're not going Paulbot on us now, are you, Sully?
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@ fuster:
Just exploring my own reasons for hesitation. I really don't mind getting into fights and becoming a poster-boy (pixel-boy?) for RINO-hatred. I like seeing juvenile plays on my name appear on random HotAir threads - figure it virtually ensures attention, boycotters notwithstanding, and I accept the scorn of imbeciles as a sign I'm on the right track. But there's no urgency to writing on LF right now, and putting it up at HA (no rice bowl, btw, it's toadly unpaid, except when people click on an Amazon link) might be grandstanding/attention whoring... Maybe let it be a ZC exclusive, held in reserve.
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@ fuster:
What - destroying the after-market by encouraging to put their used copies on sale?
I'm thinking now I won't post this piece to HA. It might just come across as picking a fight. It can remain a reference for future uses. @ narciso:
Was a good piece by JED, but which subject at hand?
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@ Joe NS:
Son of the South, fersure, born Staunton, VA, brought up Savannah - but liberal sophisticated Presbyterian circles, with recent Scottish and northern roots: Not Old South/plantation class. Dad a handsome, respected Pres. Mom born in England of Scots minister. Learning disability.
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@ Zoltan Newberry:
Could you handle the Awesome Responsibility of posting via e-mail? Your missives would go directly to the front page (though of course they could be proofed and edited after the fact).
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Joe NS wrote:
A major theme for Wilson, too, in his most important work of political science, CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT - which I haven't read, btw, except in abstracts via the Wilson biography I've been making use of.
Naturally, the Wilson-haters use Wilson's analysis, and the 29-y-o budding author's interest in parliamentary government, as "proof" that he sought either a dictatorship or (redundancy alert) evil European pollutions of pristine American perfection.
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@ Joe NS:
Seriously, though - that's all quite interesting, and I mean it, but the facts as you present them cut both ways. How was a pygmy government, instituted to "promote the general welfare" and "secure the blessings of liberty," etc., supposed to contend over the long run with the likes of Standard Oil and kin?
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no doubt a hard worker.
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@ Rex Caruthers:
Within a couple of decades they'd end up being hard to distinguish from each other and would re-unite amidst the political equivalent of "make-up sex."
Much more likely, and all to the better, is that we'll keep on arguing from the extremes and muddling along down the middle. JPod had it about right in his recent Commentary essay, I think. See Recommended Browsing.
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fuster wrote:
That's kind, or indulgent, or maybe both. Let's see how it plays out in discussion, and whether a supplementary post, or page, is justified.
Zoltan Newberry wrote:
At some point I'll post this to HA, and trust that avid HA reader Glenn Beck will pass it on to Goldberg if Goldberg doesn't run across it himself.
I find that by posting these pieces first to ZC, I get a chance, with the help of the ZCers, to test and cure them, and I frequently discover typos, mistakes, un-clarities, and potentially embarrassing rhetorical excesses. Since there are folks gunning for me over there, and since I'm taking on popular figures on the right, I'm very grateful for the collective editing, even though there have also been times when hostile readers have come to ZC and grabbed statements from our discussion to use against me.
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Almost - but it turns out that "Fascisti" was the conventional Italian name for political groups/bands/leagues etc. I think it is relevant, however, that the Fascists unified this independent political impulse on its own terms. They were the "groupists," and the fasces remain relevant for the same reason: They ended up representing the essence of politics, power, for its own sake and at the source. The Fascisti generally represented an alternative to traditional sources of power - church, royalty, establishment - etc. It was at the same moment that M dropped internationalism and looked into ancient history for his validation that his fascists became truly the Fascists. You might say that he stripped the will to power of burdens and distractions, fully revealing the fasces.
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@ Joe NS:
Income tax was a live issue continuously after the CW. It was made impractical by the Supreme Court Pollock decision, requiring the Constitutional Amendment - which was supported by all parties, and passed, as required, by 3/4 of the states. To blame it on the progressives is in that sense to suggest that progressivism had by then become the effective American consensus. There may be some truth to that (see #12 above).
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Because they're neglected, minimized, and discounted by the critics; because they directly contradict the notion that the progs were authoritarians merely seeking the expansion of unchecked government; because conservatives have made good use of direct democracy, recall of officials, primary challenges, etc., pretty much exactly as the reforms were intended; because the demands for government transparency and voter education and participation have characterized the conservative critique in the Age of (mrp) ; and for a bunch of other reasons.
It doesn't mean that there aren't potential downsides to direct democracy and other political reforms of that type, but, when they were first implemented, the need for them was very strongly felt as a means to strengthen democracy against concentrations of power, especially economic power - the creeping oligarchy of the day. In that wacky Bucky Fuller essay I mentioned the other day, in looking at the massification of economy and politics in his own day, he justifies his own program as follows:
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@ Joe NS:
Please do note that the progs did not invent the income tax or even invent its "progressivity" - unless you're of a mind to generalize a transcendant progressive impulse and declare Honest Abe a progressive, since it was during his Civil War administration that the first American income tax was instituted. Since I'm actually of the opinion that progressivism is deeply American, I won't mind such an extension of the term, but then you'll have to grant me the Founding and even more the Framing of the Constitution as progressive moments, and I may eventually end up calling human civilization, life on Earth, and the expanding universe progressive. I believe it not just because it's absurd, though that doesn't hurt.
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But here I have to demur a bit: There was without doubt a heavy religious aspect to classic Progressivism - from the religious calling averred by leading Progs to the widely remarked tent revival quality of the 1912 Prog Convention, where speechifying from the dais was interrupted and accompanied by ecstatic hymn-singing. (What a thing that must have been to attend!) All the same, progressive politics was very much of this world, expressing a determination to make real improvements in real lives. I disagree especially with those, like Mr. Beck, who relentlessly assert that the progs, just like the commies, were utopians. Many of them toyed with visions of a just society and some hoped that through some harmonic convergence of science, morality, and humanity, very great leaps forward could be accomplished, but, compared to the real revolutionaries of the day, they were a rather circumspect and highly law-abiding, merely reformist bunch. Even the more extreme-tending leaders like TR conceived of what they were doing as a relatively conservative alternative to revolutionary utopianism.
On “Paul Ryan on Real Progressivism”
@ fuster:
Actually, Goldberg DOES define fascism, he just defines it prejudicially, in a manner favorable to his thesis - as a species of liberalism that has little to do with the the fascism that Joe just evoked rather poetically above.
I am in the process of preparing a piece that dwells inordinately on this question of definition. I say inordinately because it's around twice as long as it should be. I hope that it will be a little less inordinate by the time I post it. My ability to work on it effectively is also somewhat impaired by an injury to my hand.
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@ J.E. Dyer:
Wouldna sed it, didna believe it.
In regard to Goldberg and Beck, Beck is obviously more melodramatic and his radicalism is much more overt. In Goldberg, the utopianism is more implicit and possibly inadvertent, yet unavoidable, as when he equates "Third Way"-ism with fascism, and states that the only other alternatives are communism and laissez-faire capitalism. I would argue that there are many gradations and multiple dimensions of alternatives, and also that the history of self-consciously "Third Way" movements is much, much richer than Goldberg seems aware, or is willing to acknowledge. Goldberg himself seems to me to be a much more moderate personality and pundit than LF is a book.
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However, you probably did read his "working definition" of fascism, then blotted it out of your little frog brain.
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@ Fourstring Casady:
Stay tuned.
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@ Zoltan P. Newberry:
Worry not, one way or the other, fine - but that goes also for me and my good friend Paul Ryan and my old buddy Newt if we like to tweak Harry Obamalosi and their army of facilitators as phony persimmons, and traitors to original preregrinationism.