Demosophia

Armed Liberal, Justifiably Pissed.

Armed Liberal, on Winds of Change, has an excellent post that takes on several related memes of the anti-war-Marxisant-left. Here's one thought that suggests some haunting parallels with the 1930s:

Second [meme infection], the notion that simplisme is the root of the desire for war, and that one who understands the complex, rich broth of history would take a different position:

[Arthur Silber]: According to the brave, fearless, always-typing warbloggers, we had spread before us an old-fashioned morality play: on one side, we had pure, untarnished good -- the noble, honorable, uncompromising United States, which stands only for truth, justice, freedom and liberty for all. And on the other side, we had a monster like Saddam Hussein -- and anyone who expressed a "but" clearly had placed himself on Saddam's side, and on the side of torture, the murder of innocents, the gassing of children, rape rooms, and innumerable other crimes against humanity. There was no middle ground, no complexity, no nuance here -- it was one or the other. You were either on the side of the typing warbloggers and of Pure Good, or allied with the forces of Unadulterated Evil.

Second, no, the issue isn't the acceptance of nuance, but the inability to see anything in the other side's facts or argument that can simply be accepted - as it makes sense to accept that Saddam's capture was good - without a left-handed attempt to devalue it. Again, it's about devaluing an opponent's arguments so that no real weighing can take place. I fully accept the idea that war is a bad thing - that innocents (and innocence) die; that events seldom play out according to plan; that plans themselves are incomplete and contingent.

I'm just weighing the scales differently, and am willing to accede both the goodwill and intellectual probity of those who disagree with me. Doesn't mean I don't think they aren't wrong; people often are.

Well, clearly, however evil you imagine the US has no impact whatsoever on the weight one must throw against Saddam on the scales, no matter how finely one measures it, nor does it change one's essential position regarding that regime very much. Even if one had to choose between an autocrat of the flavor of Chile's Pinochet and Saddam, the choice as well as the order of triage would be non-controversial for anyone whose thoughts and perceptions aren't clouded. Would a more precise measurement render Saddam less, rather than more, monstrous? How? One would have thought this so obvious it hardly needs saying, but the fact that it does suggests something more than a simple disagreement. There's also a cognitive dysfunction at work here, that needs to be explained and understood.

If only absolute evil is visible, then any sort of "nuance" that actually exists will operate as an effective "cloaking device" that leaves the observer unaware that a certain class of "bad guys" are really bad. Basically, any bad guy who manages to place himself in opposition to the US might as well be an angel from heaven, for all the effect his acts are likely to elicit from this group of self-assessed savants. And isn't the "nuance" that we're really supposed to be impressed by more along the lines of the Fauristes pre-WWII arguments, that Paul Berman summarizes as "the fog of peace" or "liberalism as denial?"

They [the followers of the Socialist Party's General Secretary, Paul Faure] were eager, they were desperate, to find a description of reality that did not point to a new war in the future. They grew thoughtful, therefore. They did not wish to reduce Germany in all its Teutonic complexity to black-and-white terms of good and evil. The anti-war Socialists pointed out that Germany had been wronged by the Treaty of Versailles, at the conclusion of the First World War. The anti-war Socialists observed that Germans living in the Slavic countries to the east were sometimes cruelly treated by their neighbors, and that Germany in the 1930s had every right to complain about its neighbors, and that Germany's people were, in fact, suffering, just as Hitler said....

[According to the anti-war Socialists in France] the truest danger came from the warmongers and arms manufacturers of France itself, as well as from the other great powers--the people who stood to benefit in material ways from a new war...

And so, listening to the Nazis make their wildest speeches, the anti-war Socialists, in a thoughtful mood, asked themselves: what is anti-Semitism anyway? Does every single criticism of the Jews reflect the superstitions of the Middle Ages? Surely it ought to be possible to criticize the Jews without being vilified as anti-Semites. Hitler ranted about Jewish financiers. He was excessive. Still, France's Socialists were, by definition, the enemies of financiers. Some financiers were Jews. Should Jewish financiers be exempt from criticism, simply because they were Jews? -- (Terror and Liberalism, pp. 124-6)

Nuance,... indeed..

Posted by Demosophist at January 2, 2004 04:09 PM | TrackBack