Spengler on Wilders: Bring it.

Spengler goes off the rails in his praise for John Brown. But both Wilders and Hirsi Ali have acted heroically and reasonably.

Rod:

That Spengler piece is utter claptrap. Astonishing claptrap.

What exactly is he suggesting? That some sort of vigilante violence be employed against Muslims in Europe, so as to precipitate a full- blown global conflict against Islam? We need the equivalent of a John Brown to commit a messianic act of violence to .. what? Huh? Is Spengler nuts? Are you nuts, Rod?

I'm really really tired of all this paranoia directed at Muslims by people who no little about it. I mean, there are problems associated with Islam, and Western relations with Muslims are indeed strained. But too many people are prone to hysteria over the subject. Please calm the *'n 'eck down. Your febrile angst is exactly the response the Muslim extremists want. All the violence you have advocated is playing into their hands, and radicalizing Muslims all over the world. The neocons, Zionists & Salafist jihadist nutjobs all love guys like you.

You talk good game sometimes, and I do enjoy reading your stuff Rod. But when you get on your rabid little anti-Muslim kick, I wonder if you really have taken all that stuff like Chris Lasch and Wendell Berry (not to mention the Beatitudes) to heart or not. I mean, has that time you spent working for the NY Post & National Review utterly poached & addled your ethical sensibilities?

And you say you were born in Louisiana, but anyone who could admire that essay from the South has to be a carpetbagger. I mean slavery & racism obviously aside, the South was on the side of the angels in virtually every other way. Any "conservative" who says otherwise is just a federalist whig buttering up the hicks, to keep them from noticing that all of his truly heartfelt policy positions are really pro-plutocracy and for the ascendancy of big capital monopoly.

All this b.s. about ending slavery & abortion was just that: b.s. for rubes who really buy all that Christianity stuff.

Just like Geo. W. advancing the cause of immigrant labor & NAFTA, Lincoln was more concerned with unifying the US market, permanently solidifying pro-industry trade policies/protective tariffs & freeing the slaves to suppress the price of labor than he was with any purely ethical consideration.

The Republicans are the same, then & now: plutocrats in cynical alliance with evangelical protestants, who give a fig leaf of ethical justification to their rapacious economic policies.

Slavery was well on its way to being technologically obsolete. It was abolished without war in every other Western jurisdiction by the 1880's. That war was about solidifying Federalism, and denying any state the right of succession explicitly enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. It was a bloody travesty, and a moral outrage.

Just like the war in Iraq, the real ends are camouflaged by a patina of ethical myth. You like most Americans have bought into the illusion of our ethical exceptionally. I only hope in your case that it's not hypocritical cynicism.

I mean slavery & racism obviously aside, the South was on the side of the angels in virtually every other way.

Charles, re-read that line.

I mean, the murder of the president obviously aside, we had a grand time at Ford's Theater that night.

I mean, that thing on Dealey Plaza obviously aside, Dallas was great that day in November.

I can't speak for what Spengler does and doesn't want, but I would bet money he doesn't want pogroms. He wants Geert Wilders to release his protest film and force the conflict that's coming anyway. I read Spengler to be saying that the situation in Europe and the threat to liberty and the public order posed by fundamentalist Muslims is such that the Europeans have to draw a line in the sand, and defend it. They have to assert their own values over and against the values of a truculent minority. And that if that truculent minority is bound and determined to fight because it can't stand having its feelings hurt in countries that aren't even Muslim, then it's better to have that fight now than later.

It's a position that can be disagreed with, certainly, but it's not a crazy argument, or so it seems to me. What any of this has to do with National Review and plutocracy and Yankee carpetbaggers escapes me.

Sorry for coming off so vociferously, there, Rod.

It's only that I'm tired of everyone reacting in fear, and forecasting doom, when that is exactly what the Islamic extremists hope to elicit in us. The very fear and paranoia that cause us to reciprocate their intolerance, to respond in violence. We serve their purposes by reacting hysterically.

I agree that there is trouble brewing. Riots, more terror, assassinations, all of that. But I say none of it will pose an existential threat (even given Europe's demographic picture) unless we allow our response to continue polarizing and radicalizing people. Unless we allow our fear and avarice to rule us. To drive us to continued violence, collaboration with despotism and oppression.

Which is what we have allowed, so far. And what we will most likely continue to allow. We are driven by fear. Which is why we may finally lose. The moment demands self confidence and openness, dialog and charity. Yet we are decadent, timorous, and insecure. Because we lack faith.

Casting the Islamic world as menacing "other," irredeemably retrograde and barbaric, when it is actually very human and rife with hope, does us no favors. We caricature them, emphasizing their worst aspects, and diminishing their best, at our risk. We disrespect them, and that is stupid.

I've lived "among the believers" for a while, I think I know what I'm talking about.

As for my comments on the Civil War, I stand by my assertion. As a Yankee Catholic, born and bred in Maine, I could never have fought in the Civil War. In Constitutional terms, my sympathies are- would have been- entirely with the South. Slavery I of course abhor. But again, that was not in my view what the war was really about. It was about national economic policy & local autonomy, and the fact that South knew it was losing the demographic war for representation. Slavery was a subsidiary issue.

Few Northerners fought to free the slaves. Just as few of us now would go to fight in (say) the Sudan for human rights. It's one thing to pay lip service advocating another man's freedom. Entirely another to risk your own life for it. Slavery, given it's imminent & economically foreordained demise, was therefore a side issue. The real issue was where the power in our government would lie. With the localities & states, where we all have far more individual power? Or in DC where the corporate interests & courts reign?

I believe in local control and autonomy. That those powers not explicitly given the Federal government in the Constitution are forever reserved to the states.

But that is not the government we have.

And for that we can thank Abraham Lincoln. We can indirectly thank Abe for Woodrow Wilson's Income Tax, his international interventionism, his creation of the Federal Reserve, the untrammeled banking power that drove people off the land during the Depression, the meddling of the Supreme Court, all of it. The power has gone to Washington, and we are becoming more and more dependent and abject. Roe v. Wade? War upon war? Military Industrial complex out of control? K Street corruption swallowing our government?

The logic of it all began with Lincoln. The Gilded Age began in his aftermath, and in it's way still continues. We, the populists, the people, have lost.

The "Great Emancipator" destroyed the Constitution. We've been governed by judges commenting on it's "penumbra" of it's burn out, ever since.

But enough. I would ask where you would have stood, and if you would have fought. But no. You advocated for this Iraq war, and like so many others who did, are not fighting. Which is your right. You are a family man. Understood. We live by our deeds. All hypotheticals aside.

I have a friend named Muhammad Abdul Rahman. A very good friend. He's taught me a lot about the meanings of violence, and of prejudice. Two years ago we drove into upper Egypt together, visiting Luxor, and a string of Coptic churches & monasteries & mosques of various descriptions. We visited his ancestral village on the Nile, which is really two villages, the ancient Coptic village built around a church/monastery, and the more recent (700 or so year old) Arab Muslim village, of Bedouin brought by one of the Sultans of yore, and settled there as fellahin. It hugs the river beneath a great flat hill several miles long, into which are dug caves probably first burrowed there by our neolithic forebears.

I would describe the place, and my many other experiences in places like upper Egypt to you, but I never could, not truly. I'll only add that he and I spent the entire trip talking politics & religion. I tried to explain the Trinity to him (try explaining it to a non-Westerner sometime.. it's a real eye opener.. how bizarre the idea is at first blush, and how, even in this time of skepticism we all pretty much take it for granted.. after you've attempted to proselytize a Saracen, you gain a whole new appreciation for how seminal such ideas really are.. but I digress.)

He spent a lot of time screaming at me on that trip. I remember one of the things that unhinged him was Darfur. Now, know that I am no fan of the Janjweed. And I pray often for the people there, and have worked with Sudanese Christian refugees. But I have never been able to think about the problem the same way since living in Egypt. Everytime I hear someone suggest we ought to "do something" about it, like plant the Marine Corps or a UNPROFOR smack in the middle of it, I think of Muhammad. And the tens of millions like him. And I think, if we did that, Muhammad's gonna think it's really all about frustrating China, and all that Sudanese oil.

And you know, now I'm so damned cynical, part of me would agree with him. Part of me would think, I may advocate intervention on humanitarian grounds; but Dick Cheney, he's got his eye on that oil, and keeping it out of China's hands. And if we were ever to really do it, that really would probably be the score. And the Muslim world, they would definitely see that way. With good reason. Even if our motives were lily pure. But they so rarely are.

Anyway, I don't consider calling you on you chickenhawk status a low blow, Rod. Not when you continue advocating violence.

I just read a piece of yours from NOR posted on March 21, 2003 entitled "Ex-Friends: Casualties of this war." In it favorably you quote somebody named Magnet Atwood from the Manhattan Institute Institute who says:

“There are an awful lot of people whose politics are really nothing but attitude and fashion, as I learned very sharply in the sixties.. Attitude and fashion changes [sic] with the wind. As we go in and win the war, God willing, and begin to remake Iraq in a way that makes it a freer society, an awful lot of people who have no idea what they’re saying now will find themselves saying something completely opposite, and will have no idea they’ve contradicted themselves.”

Which of course is far too ironic to need a gloss. I would have told you the same thing I'm telling you now, then. My thinking and position hasn't changed.

All I can finally say is that though we will never likely meet I like you, Rod. My buddy Josh is coming by later, he's been deployed with 3rd special forces in Gardez for a while, and between the Army bureaucracy & the IED's he's about ready to take somebody's head off. Instead, we're gonna sit on the balcony, and lay down some funky assed country guit, jamm the harp, and drink some beers. You'd be welcome. Since I don't expect you, know I'll toss one back to you & dedicate Jonny Horton's The Battle Of New Orleans to you.

You keep talking smack about apocalyptic violence (Bring it?? Get yourself a Kalishnikov), though, I'll keep filling your comboxes with mild derision.

Like I can't even get his name right. Never said I wasn't a dork.