Recommended reading: Oliver Kamm

The New Neo Posted on by

I think I know my way around the blogosphere, but I keep making new discoveries–new, that is, to me. The latest is Oliver Kamm, a self-described leftist who blogs here.

Kamm–whom I found via Austin Bay’s link to this Guardian article of Kamm’s on the reasons why, despite flaws in execution, he still supports the Iraq war–is what Norman Geras would call a “principled leftist” and what Kamm himself calls a “tough liberal.” Kamm is also the author of an intriguing-sounding book (although I couldn’t find it on Amazon) entitled: Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy.

But what Kamm really is is smart, smart, smart, as well as being a writer of great clarity and graceful style. I’m sure there are points on which we disagree, but my hat is off to anyone who can wade through much of Noam Chomsky’s work and patiently demolish it, as Kamm has. This guy is good (Kamm that is, not Chomsky).

A great deal of Kamm’s Chomsky oeuvre has been reproduced here, at David Horowitz’s Frontpage. Kamm vibrates with the righteous anger of a leftist outraged by the likes of Chomsky. Kamm pulls no punches in this article when it comes to his own dislike of Nixon and his policies, but he shreds Chomsky’s own shredding of the man (keep clicking on the links at the end of each article to read the whole series):

It would be tempting to attribute the use Chomsky makes of this material to intellectual idleness and incompetence, but I fear this is too generous a judgement. There’s a pattern and a method here. Chomsky’s rhetorical attacks on the western democracies, and especially the United States, increasingly outdo anything else to be found in the adversary culture of far-Left politics…

Kamm goes on to give a detailed analysis of Chomsky’s methods, with typical examples. At the conclusion, he explains how it is that Chomsky (an incredibly popular writer and speaker) appeals to the susceptible and ignorant:

…Chomsky goes out of his way to omit the context that allows reasoned conclusions to be drawn. All that those readers have to go on is Chomsky’s ex cathedra judgements and the appearance of scholarship generated by innumerable foot-notes. Examine those foot-notes more closely and the careful reader will find (as in the absence of page references in the citation of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s memoirs) that the appearance is misleading. To those without background in the subjects covered, the argument may well appear convincing, and because the method of misdirection is to take things out of context it is not a quick and easy task to refute Chomsky; one has first to put back the material that Chomsky has taken out.

Chomsky’s methods remind me of those of another so-called “historian,” David Irving. Great lying minds must think alike, although of course Chomsky’s politics and field of “expertise” certainly differs with that of Irving.

Kamm is a self-identified leftist, as I said, although I haven’t read enough of his work to see what tenets of the left he believes in. One thing in which he clearly does believe is the importance of truth in history, whatever the political persuasion. I second the motion.

Dueling: defending one’s honor

The New Neo Posted on by

While I was researching something or other a while back (I think it may have been this post about the causes of war), I came across a brief reference to dueling.

It struck me that dueling seems related to the whole shame/honor question, about which a great deal has been written lately, especially in connection with the Arab world (for example, see this by my good friend Dr. Sanity).

But in this country we have our own–quite different–version of shame/honor. A fascinating book by Fox Butterfield entitled All God’s Children, which I read back when it first came out in 1996, deals with some of the more negative consequences of the shame/honor culture that the author feels permeates some areas of the American South.

Here’s a good summary of Butterfield’s thesis, taken from the first reader review at the Amazon link:

Butterfield argues that the white Southern mentality of easily aggrieved honor has made its way through time and the descendants of slaves, transmuted into the similar hair-trigger ethos of inner-city streets. The family he traces is from Edgefield, South Carolina. This was the home of Rep. Preston Brooks, who nearly beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner to death on the floor of the Senate. Butterfield shows that Southern society (of which Edgefield was an extreme example…measured “manhood” by the willingness to use violence in defense of one’s “honor.” “Honor” is defined as reputation, especially the reputation of being someone who cannot be insulted with impunity.

An emphasis on honor is one of those double-edged swords (an appropriate metaphor, given the topic of this post). Honor, of course, can lead to behavior that is–well, honorable–something any society would certainly want to encourage. But it can also lead to extreme sensitivity to slights to one’s honor, or even to perceived slights, and a resultant readiness to use violence to undo or avenge them.

The idea of a duel is something I remembered vaguely from the movies and romantic novels of my youth, as well as from Pushkin, whom I read in college; I tended to look on it as a sort of quaint literary device. But seen in terms of the whole honor/shame culture scenario, it seems to be a dramatic historical example of how such a dynamic used to work in our own culture.

My concept of dueling was as follows: after the insult and the challenge, the two men went with their “seconds” to the forest, stood back to back, stepped a few paces away from each other, turned, and fired their revolvers. A process that seemed very stupid and very strange. But it turns out the whole thing was far more complex than that (isn’t everything?), with styles and rules that make the NFL look simple.

Here’s an example of one such code that governed dueling in America for a while. The entire undertaking seems to have been rigidly controlled, with various points along the way at which a person could bail through apology (although my guess is that such an apology was rarely, if ever, tendered).

Here are a few highlights:

Rule 16. The challenged has the right to choose his own weapon, unless the challenger gives his honor he is no swordsman; after which, however, he can decline any second species of weapon proposed by the challenged.

Rule 17. The challenged chooses his ground; the challenger chooses his distance; the seconds fix the time and terms of firing.

Rule 18. The seconds load in presence of each other, unless they give their mutual honors they have charged smooth and single, which should be held sufficient.

Rule 19. Firing may be regulated — first by signal; secondly, by word of command; or thirdly, at pleasure — as may be agreeable to the parties. In the latter case, the parties may fire at their reasonable leisure, but second presents and rests are strictly prohibited…

Rule 22. Any wound sufficient to agitate the nerves and necessarily make the hand shake, must end the business for that day.

Rule 23. If the cause of the meeting be of such a nature that no apology or explanation can or will be received, the challenged takes his ground, and calls on the challenger to proceed as he chooses; in such cases, firing at pleasure is the usual practice, but may be varied by agreement.

Wikipedia seems to be a font of knowledge on the general course of events that led to duels, and the way they were customarily conducted:

After the offense, whether real or imagined, the offended party would demand “satisfaction” from the offender, signalling this demand with an inescapably insulting gesture, such as hitting the offender in the face with a glove, or throwing the glove before him, hence the phrase “throwing down the gauntlet”…Both parties would name a trusted representative (a second) who would, between them, determine a suitable “field of honour”, the chief criterion being isolation from interruptions. Duels traditionally took place at dawn, for this very reason. It was also the duty of each party’s second to check that the weapons were equal and that the duel was fair.

At the choice of the offended party, the duel could be:

* at first blood, in which case the first man to bleed would lose;
* till one man was heavily wounded and unable to physically continue the duel;
* to the death, in which case there would be no satisfaction until the other party was mortally wounded;
* or, in the case of pistol duels, each party would agree to fire one shot each, after which the duel would be declared over.

…For a pistol duel, the parties would be placed back to back with loaded weapons in hand and walk a set number of paces, turn to face the opponent, and shoot. Typically, the graver the insult, the fewer the paces agreed upon. Alternately, a pre-agreed length of ground would be measured out by the seconds and marked, often with swords stuck in the ground. At a given signal, often the dropping of a handkerchief, the principals could advance to the marker and fire at will. This latter system reduced the possibility of cheating, as neither principal had to trust the other not to turn too soon. Another system involved alternate shots being taken – the challenged firing first.

This short article mentions the role of the death of Alexander Hamilton in a duel as being an important factor in the decline of dueling in America, and also that the practice lasted longest in the South (as one might expect, given its emphasis on honor).

And here we have a discussion of why dueling was so important to upperclass men of the time:

Duels were fought over anything and everything, from revenge for violent crime against a friend, family member or lover, to philosophical, religious or scientific disagreement. It wasn’t just stupid young thugs who engaged in dueling, either. In the 1700’s, the famous mathematician Galois left the world puzzled when, at the age of 21, he wrote in his notes an incredibly useful formula, with a note attached saying “The Proof is obvious. I shall write it out later”, went off to fight a duel, and was killed. Nobody has been able to work out his ‘obvious’ proof, but the formula works, and forms a key part of a branch of modern mathematics.

So, why would a brilliant scholar go off to a fight he may very well die in, when the worst he would suffer for it by refusing is social ostracism? That is, in fact, the answer. If a nobleman will not defend his honour, then what is his word worth? He obviously doesn’t value his own principles, for he will not defend them! Why, then, would anyone take his verbal guarantee on anything? Why would tradesmen do work for him without being paid up front, if he is not a man of his word? Why would anyone lend him money? Why would polite society tolerate him at all? How can judges rule in his favour when his word cannot be trusted? In a society where a person’s word is taken as a commitment as binding as any court-order is today, demonstrating that your word is valueless is effectively social death.

A practice that appears irrational and wasteful and destructive–and no doubt is irrational and wasteful and destructive–is not without its purposes, if embedded in the proper context. A man’s honor (and that of his womenfolk) was not a little thing, it was nearly everything; and losing it perhaps did seem something worse than death. So, why not risk death to defend it?

Just to make it clear: I’m not a fan of duels, nor am I advocating them (in blogging, I’ve learned to try to make everything crystal clear in an attempt to defend my own “honor” and head off various slings and arrows in the comments section, often to no avail).

In a sense, what is going on in the Arab world–the sense of desperate and outraged honor and the need to ward off and/or expunge feelings of shame–is not utterly foreign to our culture. Nor is the act of resorting to violence to do so. What’s different–and it’s very different, so different as to constitute a universe of difference–is the form such violence takes. Old-fashioned duelers would no more kill women and children than they would take an insult lying down; their honor did not allow such acts. The proper course of action was clear and prescribed, and it was specific to the person who had dealt the insult and he who received it.

In the Arab world where terrorists and jihadists are spawned, those inhibitions have been removed. The killing of anyone (women, children, and noncombatants included) who is part of a group identified as the source of insult and shame is not only allowed, but is encouraged by those “spiritual leaders” we’ve heard so much about. Honor is a double-edged sword, indeed.

We will bury you

The New Neo Posted on by

Callimachus writes here about Oriana Fallaci’s new book, which deals in part with the question of whether a certain segment of the Arab/Moslem world is trying to overwhelm the West, both demographically and otherwise. He offers some quotes to that effect from Fallaci’s writings, taken from a book review by Brendan Bernhard’s in LA Weekly.

The first quote is from a 1972 interview (in her heyday, Fallaci was renowned for her pull-no-punches style of questioning) with Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who declared that the goal was to:

…wage war “against Europe and America” and to ensure that henceforth “there would be no peace for the West.” The Arabs, he informed her, would “advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet.”

At the time, Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later–much later–did she understand that:

…he “also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens ”¦ In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism.”

Cold wars, terrorism wars, demographic wars. As far as the latter goes, Bernhard (and Callimachus) offers an explicit declaration, this time from Algerian President Boumedienne way back in 1974:

One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.

You can’t say the West wasn’t warned. But warnings often only seem important in retrospect. It was the sort of thing few were paying attention to at the time, “typical hyperbole.” Bombast. And perhaps it was, at that.

At least back then the threats were peaceful and reproductive in nature. More recently they took on a more chilling (or rather, a decidedly “hot”) tone–witness this Haaretz article (via Little Green Footballs) that quotes Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran telling former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar at a meeting in 2001 that “Iran must declare war on Israel and the United States until they are completely destroyed,” and that “setting Israel on fire” was the first order of the day.

Unless Khamenei is a man especially given to metaphor, it seems we must take his intent seriously. The Haaretz article concludes with the words, “Khamenei still holds the post of Iranian spiritual leader, and [is] considered to be the powerful man in the country.”

There’s that “spiritual leader” phrase again, one which actually deserves the much-abused designation “Orwellian.” I’ve written about “spiritual leaders” before, here, in a post entitled “Yeah, and Goebbels was the ‘spiritual leader’ of the Nazis, too.”

What I wrote then still applies, to Khamenei in this case:

…how are people such as Abu Bakar Bashir, a cleric who most agree is the one who inspires and guides the murderers of Jemaah Islamiyah “spiritual” (unless, of course, the spirit of evil and hatred counts)? Is it because he hides behind the role of cleric? Well, the mere title “cleric” does not a spiritual leader make. It’s a perversion of the word and the concept “spiritual”…

These “spiritual” guys must never have heard of Teddy Roosevelt, who famously counseled “speak softly and carry a big stick” (a bit of trivia here: it turns out that Teddy was actually quoting a West African proverb. But I digress).

The extremely spiritual Iranian ayatollah may not speak softly, but he seems determined to obtain the biggest stick of all, and he’s not all that shy about saying what he plans to do with it. Whether he will accomplish either goal remains to be seen.

This all puts me in mind of a very different leader (who was quite unspiritual, unless you count Communism as a religion): Nikita Khrushchev, whose terrifying words, spoken in 1956 to Western ambassadors at a Moscow reception, haunted my childhood, “We will bury you.”

What did Khrushchev mean? Some thought he meant an ideological victory in the cold war (although that victory was not thought to be primarily demographic). Some feared a hot war such as Khamenei appears to be promising. The preponderance of evidence seems to be that Khrushchev meant the former, although there’s no doubt he had a plethora of big sticks available for the latter:

The translation has been controversial by being presented as belligerent out of context. The phrase may well have been intended to suggest “we will outlast you” as a more complete version of the quote reads: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you” – a meaning more akin to “we will attend your funeral” than “we shall cause your funeral”.

Those big sticks were never used, and the long war between the USSR and the USA remained cold, although it provided kindling for large and heated brushfires in many parts of the world. And history has dictated that the seemingly final burial (in the ideological sense) went in the other direction.. But history has yet to be written on the final outcome of the threats–cold and/or hot–of those others.

[HISTORICAL SIDELIGHT: Khrushchev was frightening in my youth, but little did I know at the time what a big improvement he was over his predecessor, Stalin. Nor was I aware how relatively rational he would seem compared to the current crop of Islamic supremacists.

Khrushchev himself often appeared to be somewhat of a loose cannon and a buffoon, a reputation he may have purposely manipulated and played on; witness the famous shoe-banging incident of 1960, which didn’t frighten me but certainly puzzled me at the time:

The shoe sits in front of Khrushchev, behind the shoulder of the man looking with a mixture of hope and resignation at his watch. What was the shoe incident about?

Well, according to his granddaughter Nina Khrushchev, it was an act of humorous theater in which Khrushchev purposely played the fool in order to make a point. And, who knows? She might even be correct (although I’m not sure. At any rate, I can’t quite imagine the Ayatollah doing the same, although Saddam may give it a go at his trial).

Here’s her version, for what it’s worth :

The head of the Philippine delegation, Senator Lorenzo Sumulong, expressed his surprise at the Soviet Union’s concerns over western imperialism, while it, in turn, swallowed the whole of eastern Europe. Khrushchev’s rage was beyond anything he had ever shown before. He called the poor Filipino “a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism”, then he put his shoe on the desk and banged it….

According to Khrushchev, there was abundant evidence that western powers had mistreated and mistrusted the Soviet Union…Dismissing him as a worthy opponent, capitalists thought of Khrushchev as a vaudeville character. Very well then, he would become one. He needed the UN stage to make an important statement: it is better to take the socialist world seriously. He wanted to be heard. But next to the noble Macmillan, smart Eisenhower, refined De Gaulle and wise Nehru, the short Nikita Khrushchev couldn’t help looking a wag.

Instead of trying to act and speak according to traditional diplomacy, he broke the ritual and created his own manner. The manner, which suited his goal, was to be different from the hypocrites of the west, with their appropriate words but calculated deeds. He would do it the other way – say more than he meant. A tragi-comic act of shoe banging was intended to separate two superpowers not only in terms of their politics, but also in their diplomatic methods.]

My surrender to crass commercialism: PJ ads

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple of days ago I glanced at my sitemeter and noticed a dribble of hits coming from Instapundit. If this was an Instanlanche, it was the smallest one on the face of the earth, which seemed impossible–any mention by Glenn, however modest, would ordinarily glean far more traffic than a grand total of about ten hits an hour. I went to Instapundit to see what was what, but could find neither hide nor hair of myself.

But still the hits kept coming, and then a few more, randomly, from other blogs that hadn’t linked me either. A puzzlement. The mystery was solved when I noticed I’d been featured in a PJ Media ad that was circulating around the various member blogs.

Including my own. Apparently I was advertising myself on my blog, too, via PJ Media ads—a rather circular phenomenon, like the symbol for infinity, the snake devouring its own tail.

And, although I was initially wary, it turns out I actually rather like the PJ ads. I think they’re visually attractive, as ads go, and I enjoy the way they switch around unpredictably (do I hear you saying, “Neo, please get a life?”), sort of like the horse of a different color in “The Wizard of Oz.”

So, what do you think of them?

Ah, but Bush lied! Lied, I tell you!

The New Neo Posted on by

Appearing in the upcoming May/June 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs will be this article, entitled “Saddam’s Delusions: The View from the Inside.”

It presents excerpts from the recently declassified book-length report of the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project. Author Kevin Woods is a defense analyst in Washington, D.C., author James Lacey a military analyst for the U.S. Joint Forces Command, and author Williamson Murray a Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the U.S. Naval Academy. Along with Mark Stout and Michael Pease, they were the principal participants in the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.

The article is quite a read. Here is one of many tidbits if offers:

When it came to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Saddam attempted to convince one audience that they were gone while simultaneously convincing another that Iraq still had them. Coming clean about WMD and using full compliance with inspections to escape from sanctions would have been his best course of action for the long run. Saddam, however, found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having WMD, especially since it played so well in the Arab world.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” for his use of chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians in 1987, was convinced Iraq no longer possessed WMD but claims that many within Iraq’s ruling circle never stopped believing that the weapons still existed. Even at the highest echelons of the regime, when it came to WMD there was always some element of doubt about the truth. According to Chemical Ali, Saddam was asked about the weapons during a meeting with members of the Revolutionary Command Council. He replied that Iraq did not have WMD but flatly rejected a suggestion that the regime remove all doubts to the contrary, going on to explain that such a declaration might encourage the Israelis to attack.

Saddam believed he would win the war and stay in power, almost to the end (narcissists and megalomaniacs are like that). In his regime, there was no way of detecting the truth, even for insiders –and, in some cases, even for Saddam:

Ironically, it now appears that some of the actions resulting from Saddam’s new policy of cooperation actually helped solidify the coalition’s case for war. Over the years, Western intelligence services had obtained many internal Iraqi communications, among them a 1996 memorandum from the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service directing all subordinates to “insure that there is no equipment, materials, research, studies, or books related to manufacturing of the prohibited weapons (chemical, biological, nuclear, and missiles) in your site.” And when UN inspectors went to these research and storage locations, they inevitably discovered lingering evidence of WMD-related programs.

In 2002, therefore, when the United States intercepted a message between two Iraqi Republican Guard Corps commanders discussing the removal of the words “nerve agents” from “the wireless instructions,” or learned of instructions to “search the area surrounding the headquarters camp and [the unit] for any chemical agents, make sure the area is free of chemical containers, and write a report on it,” U.S. analysts viewed this information through the prism of a decade of prior deceit. They had no way of knowing that this time the information reflected the regime’s attempt to ensure it was in compliance with UN resolutions.

This constant stream of false reporting undoubtedly accounts for why many of Saddam’s calculations on operational, strategic, and political issues made perfect sense to him. According to Aziz, “The people in the Military Industrial Commission were liars. They lied to you, and they lied to Saddam. They were always saying that they were producing or procuring special weapons so that they could get favors out of Saddam — money, cars, everything — but they were liars. If they did all of this business and brought in all of these secret weapons, why didn’t [the weapons] work?”

Members of the Military Industrial Commission were not the only liars. Bending the truth was particularly common among the most trusted members of Saddam’s inner circle — especially when negative news might reflect poorly on the teller’s abilities or reputation. According to one former high-ranking Baath Party official, “Saddam had an idea about Iraq’s conventional and potential unconventional capabilities, but never an accurate one because of the extensive lying occurring in that area. Many reports were falsified. The ministers attempted to convey a positive perspective with reports, which were forwarded to Saddam’s secretary, who in turn passed them up to Saddam.” In the years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, everyone around Saddam understood that his need to hear only good news was constantly growing and that it was in their best interest to feed that hunger.

For many months after the fall of Baghdad, a number of senior Iraqi officials in coalition custody continued to believe it possible that Iraq still possessed a WMD capability hidden away somewhere (although they adamantly insisted that they had no direct knowledge of WMD programs). Coalition interviewers discovered that this belief was based on the fact that Iraq had possessed and used WMD in the past and might need them again; on the plausibility of secret, compartmentalized WMD programs existing given how the Iraqi regime worked; and on the fact that so many Western governments believed such programs existed.

I’ve written about WMDs before, and discussed why their actual existence or non-existence was not–in my opinion and that of many others–the make-or-break justification for the war. I don’t want to beat this particular horse again, as it seems to lead nowhere and convince no one (although that may not stop the arguments from going on ad nauseum).

But I thought the material from this particular article fascinating in and of itself, presenting a chilling picture–almost a caricature–of what happens in a tyrannical dictatorship in which every person is afraid that, if he gives the Leader bad news, the answer will be “Off with his head!” (and, in the interests of gender neutrality, I suppose it could sometimes be “Off with her head!”)

Dictators such as Saddam may start out relatively sane, or they may not. But there tends to be a trajectory towards greater and greater lack of connection to reality. It certainly happened to Hitler in his last years, although some of his problems may have stemmed from various diseases he is speculated to have had.

This increasing paranoia/irrationality and its effects–the fact that no one can tell the tyrant the truth–has its good points and its bad. The good is that it tends to lower the leader’s effectiveness in the decision-making process, and may cause major lapses of judgment that can be fatal to his cause. The bad news is that no one can count on that, and in the meantime the tyrant spirals more and more out of control and can do even more damage, both domestically and internationally.

[ADDENDUM: Prediction: someone in the comments section will say this article actually describes Bushhitler.]

When light pierced the darkness: Moslem rescuers during the Holocaust

The New Neo Posted on by

Sigmund Carl & Alfred has written a post that tells a story I’d not heard before, of “The Mosque that Sheltered Jews.”

The rescue occurred in France during the German occupation of WWII. Here are some details:

The mosque-based resistance network consisted of people from Algeria’s mountainous Kabylia regions. Kabyls are one of several North-African groups who have preserved their Berber language and culture; the Berbers inhabited North Africa before the Arabs invaded and introduced Islam in the 7th century. At least 95 percent of Algerian immigrants to France came from Kabylia. The network’s Kabyls communicated in their Berber dialect, Tamazight, making infiltration almost impossible.

The soul of the network was the mosque’s rector, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, a man with three nationalities – Algerian, Moroccan, and French – who moved with ease in all three worlds, and whose Islam was tolerant and inclusive.

More than 1,700 people are thought to have found short-term shelter in apartments on or near the grounds of the mosque. Benghabrit set up an alert system that allowed fugitives to disappear swiftly in case of a raid – if necessary to the prayer room’s women’s section, where men were normally not admitted. He wrote numerous false birth certificates making Jewish children into Muslims….

My friend Mathis Szykowski, also a Holocaust survivor and a hidden child, testifies to this: “It must be said and repeated that in any account of survival, there are many people who will help, at great risk to themselves, people who appear almost mysteriously, whom you trust instinctively. No one can survive such circumstances by themselves. So it becomes obvious that in life as in death, we are all interdependent.” A human being whose mind has not been distorted by ideology will instinctively help another in danger, especially a child.

This harks back to my own post on Dr. Wafa Sultan, and the idea that there are some people who will help others even at risk to their own lives, because their humanity and integrity dictates that they cannot do otherwise.

For millennia there had been many Jews living in Arab lands, and the history of the two peoples, although complex, was at least one of familiarity and not strangeness. Jews at that time were not totally “other,” as they are today to most Arabs.

The blog “Point of No Return” is dedicated to telling the story of these Jews from Arab lands. Here is a brief history of what has happened, and why most of the Arab world is now virtually Judenfrei.

Take a look around the blog; it contains much fascinating and little-known history. Here is a post entitled “In search of righteous Arabs,” which contains the heretofore unknown (at least, to me) story of how Hitler tried to extend the Holocaust into Arab and North African lands, and how some inhabitants cooperated fully whereas some were rescuers much like those in the Paris mosque:

Taken together, this history is rarely told, and the heroes, in particular, have never been recognized. Of the more than 19,000 “righteous Gentiles” honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews from death during the Holocaust, not a single one is an Arab (though there are a number of Muslims, including Turks, Bosnians, and Albanians). In my view, the reason for this lacuna is dual: few have ever looked for “Arab righteous,”and fewer still have had an incentive to be found. For Arabs, the legacy of World War II was soon overshadowed by two other developments: the conflict with Zionism over the fate of Palestine and the struggle for independence against European colonialism. By the late 1940’s””and certainly by the time of the Suez crisis in 1956””the blurring of the state of Israel with “the Jews” was already a deeply embedded theme of Middle Eastern politics. For an Arab, there was little to be gained (and much to be lost) by being identified with the defense of Jews or of Jewish interests.

…[This was] my reception by the children of one of my prime candidates for recognition as a “righteous Arab”: Tunisia’s wartime prime minister, Muhammad Chenik. Walking a dangerous line between the Germans and his longtime personal friendships with Jews, this Arab notable, according to various interviewees, had used his connections to warn Jewish leaders of impending arrests and had secured dispensations from forced labor for the sons of Jews he knew from his business days. He very likely saved Jewish lives, perhaps at risk to his own.

Whatever the motive behind these deeds””personal friendship, old business obligations, simple kindness””they were truly noble. Since I was intending to resurrect the story of this long-forgotten statesman, and bring honor to his name, I had expected his family to embrace the revelations I was offering them, or at the very least to thank me for my efforts. And indeed, the family members who gathered in their comfortable seaside villa to hear my tale were polite, generous, and welcoming,plying me with tray after tray of delicious sweets and several rounds of coffee and tea. But through the smiles and handshakes, it rapidly became clear that they wanted nothing to do with my story of their father’s exploits. We have never heard about any of this, they insisted, and even if what you say is true, it does not amount to anything significant. Although they urged me to return with irrefutable proof, they offered no help, and it was obvious they hoped never to hear from me again. Perhaps the hardest blow has been the silence that has greeted most of my entreaties to moderate, forward-thinking Arabs to assist in shedding light on this chapter of their history. For every positive response to a phone call or a posting on an Internet message board, there have been a dozen cold shoulders, unanswered faxes, or unfilled promises…the taboo against recognizing any Arab connection to the Holocaust, even in order to celebrate the deeds of a heroic Arab rescuer, is evidently too strong.

In Semites and Anti-Semites, Bernard Lewis traces the origins of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. His book, which I encourage you to read, advances much evidence for the thesis that virulent anti-Semitism (as opposed to the milder, garden-variety type) in that area is neither inherent in Islam, nor does it have a lengthy history, nor does its genesis lie in the establishment of Israel. Lewis makes a strong case (and this is why I used the word “Judenfrei” earlier in this post) that the vicious anti-Semitism present in the Arab world has its true origins in the nineteen-thirties, and was a direct result of Nazi influence and propaganda taking root there at that time.

The establishment of Israel certainly made the situation worse. But the change had occurred prior to that event, and was exploited by many in the Arab world to incite people further against Israel and against Jews in general. The Arab world (including Egypt, which is not strictly Arab but is part of the area and has a similar history), as well as Iran, is today the home not just of “anti-Zionism,” but of Nazi-type hatred of Jews and widespread belief in the truth of such old lies as the Protocols and the blood libel.

The current absence of Jews in Arab countries has paradoxically made them easier to hate, since few Arabs now have personal knowledge of Jews as neighbors or friends. It has come to such a sad and sorry state that even mention of the brave, selfless, and humane acts of Arabs towards Jews is hush-hush, a source of shame rather than of pride.

Light pierced the darkness in Arab lands, too. But this is a very dark time–and it’s getting darker, I fear.

Beware the Ides of March

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I’m not Caesar. But I should have listened anyway.

This was going to be a 2-post day. Actually, it is a 2-post day, since I’m writing this one. But it was going to be a different 2-post day.

I had just finished writing a rather lengthy post expanding on some further points about the fathers’ rights issue, when the entire thing disappeared down the cyberhole due to some unintentional slippery fingers on my part. Disappeared, never to return, unless I laboriously try to recreate it later today. Which I may do; but right now I have other obligations to tend to.

I’ve told myself time and again to save posts as I write, and often I do. But periodically I forget, and this time I paid the price. And I can’t even blame that always-appealing target, Blogger. I have no one to blame but myself. Drat.

The civil civil war on the left

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I was reading Marc Cooper’s post entitled “Slobbering Over Slobo,” in which Cooper expresses sympathy neither with Milosevic nor with those who apologize for him. Cooper, who is what Norm Geras might refer to as a “principled leftist,” also takes on the “blame America first, often, and always” crowd:

Believe it or not there are those who continue to make out the Butcher of the Balkans as some sort of victim. The U.S. ”” it turns out”“ was the true source of evil in the decade-long series of wars that took hundreds of thousands of lives. Poor old Slobo, you see, was just a “piker” compared to the real fascists (i.e. whoever the U.S. supported).

Commenter J Cummings responds, here:

More serious is M Cooper’s subtle orwellianism. He claims that there is no distinction between Ramsey Clark and friends on one hand, and those of us, on the other hand, who put Milosevic AND Bush in the same war criminal category – and point out that in terms of raw numbers, Bush has killed more people.

Although this is an aside, one of the things that continues to amaze me is the protean use to which the adjective “Orwellian” can be put. It always strikes me as ironic that Orwell himself–Eric Blair–probably wouldn’t have been any too happy about his name being immortalized as a synonym for distorting and reversing the truth in clever and devious ways, since this is what he was warning us against. But no matter; the greater irony is that those who cry “Orwellian!” are all too often guilty of the charge themselves.

Positing this simple fact of dead=dead is a strange sort of moral equivalence. In a way, it’s actually an amoral equivalence, since taking no account of the context in which a death occurs is doing away with some basic considerations that are necessary for any sort of moral evaluation of that death.

I’ve noticed this process again and again on the left, and I’ve wondered about its origins. Is it sheer sophistry, something even the writer doesn’t believe but which he/she considers an effective rhetorical ploy? That may be true in some cases, but I tend to doubt it accounts for many.

Is it a lack of ability to make such distinctions, a failure of logic? Perhaps, at times. But again, I don’t think that’s what’s operating in most cases.

I believe its origins lie in a process I’ve discussed previously in this post: the need some people have to preserve their own moral superiority in an absolutist sense, the desire to keep their own hands clean. Of course, this can only be done if others are willing to get their hands dirty (bloodstained, that is) in order to protect these people’s right to keep theirs pristine and unstained. But in this country, fortunately, that’s still possible.

Belmont Club touched on this theme in his post on the dreadful murder of pacifist Tom Fox in Iraq. And it’s also implicit and explicit in my pacifism series, which describes some of the potential dreadful consequences of absolute pacifism.

In that series, I’ve also described the deep divisions within the Quaker community on just how far pacifism goes, or should go. I was surprised by the fact that even among Quakers, renowned for the depth of their devotion to that cause, there are many who argue for a pacifism that is more–well, more “nuanced.” The views of one of the founders of the Quaker religion, George Fox, were as follows:

Fox was not a pacifist in the modern sense that he utterly rejected participating in all wars and violent conflicts. He couldn’t imagine himself bearing the sword, at least under {his} present circumstances… but he also recognized that someone must wield the sword against evil-doers.”

Ingle goes on to say, “Fox would not condone violence except ‘in the cause of justice’… ‘in a war with the devil and his works’… ‘for a righteous cause’… or for ‘keeping the peace and protecting people’s estates’ (i.e. not their property but their condition), and Ingle continues that Fox would ‘never deny the right of a nation’s rulers to wield weapons in defense of a just cause. The problem was in defining such a cause.’ Thus the dilemma.

For those pacifists (and leftists or liberals) who do accept that someone must wield the sword against evil-doers, the dilemma becomes how to define an evildoer. And if the government of the US (especially any Republican government) is reflexively defined by some as “evildoers,” why then, those particular pacifists and/or leftists cannot support its wielding the sword, and the distinction between war and war crimes becomes obliterated: war by the US is defined as a crime, unless it is in response to something as unequivocal as a wholesale invasion by an enemy military force (something unlikely to happen).

The civil war (and it is a rather civil one) among pacifists is mirrored by this civil war among leftists. Marc Cooper and Norm Geras are among those who hold up one end; commenter J Cummings represents another. Here‘s a portion of Marc’s response to Cummings:

[Bush’s] ill-fated war in Iraq was ”” whether we like it or not”“ waged with overwhelming congressional approval. Sad but true. Thousands have died in Iraq”¦ I would say for the most part with not much of a good reason. It’s the sort of war that should cost a sitting president’s party their hold on the White House and should be a teaching moment about the limits and pretensions of imperial power. Iraq, however, is not a genocide and it as much or not a war crime as most any war is.

Milosevic was but a thinly disguised Nazi; he blatantly expoited ethnic and religious differences to whip up a murderous nationalism. His militias, death squads and soldiers had a policy of blatant massacre. The butchery at Sbrenjica and the Siege of Sarajevo are horrific, blood curdling crimes.

What’s amazing is the self-hatred that you display as an American. If U.S. military policy were the same as Milosevic’s then you would be committing a war crime by not taking up arms against the Bush regime. You have rendered yourself incapable of distinguishing among liberals, conservatives and beligerant fascists.

Clearly Cooper doesn’t agree with those of us who supported the Iraq war, either on whether it should have been started in the first place, or whether it’s time to declare it failed. But he expresses himself well, and the last paragraph, in particular, rings with a sort of righteous rage at how the left has been co-opted by voices such as Cummings’s instead of those such as Cooper’s own. The former have come close to drowning out the latter, which is a sad and troubling development. Cooper and Geras have been fighting this fight for some time, and though they seem to be losing the battle at the moment (at least, to my eyes), I hope they win the war.

Here is Cooper approximately a month after 9/11, in an article of his that appeared in the LA Times:

The end result of this psycho-political micro-climate are two generations of American leftists who lack the political sensibility and even the simple emotional language that would allow them to see their own fellow citizens, even transitorily, as victims rather than victimizers, that would allow them to distinguish between a CIA coup abroad and the butchering of thousands of innocent American civilians at home…

It’s one thing to argue that Americans are naive and perhaps arrogant to have believed in a historic exceptionalism that could immunize them against pain and bloodshed on their own soil. It’s quite another to suggest, as I repeatedly heard during that peace rally, that America somehow invited last month’s massacre. Morally repugnant and politically unviable, this sort of demagogy can only render the left irrelevant….

These difficult times require the active and effective presence of a clearer-thinking left, one that can offer unique and salutary perspectives to counter a war-empowered, conservative Bush administration.

It must begin with an unequivocal acknowledgement that the perpetrators of Sept. 11 are in no way the avengers of some oppressed constituency. They were atavistic, religious fascists whose world view is diametrically opposed to all humanitarian and progressive morality.

And the left must recognize that these forces cannot be neutralized by nonviolent moral suasion or international law alone.

Cooper goes on to advocate some positions with which I disagree. But that’s not the point. The point is that the left is not unitary, nor are pacifists, and both have some voices of reason who can make important moral distinctions. But their voices seem increasingly to be lost in the din of shriller voices, screaming in a sort of Orwellian–yes, Orwellian–rage that the US is the font of most of the evil in this world.

Another changed mind: Dr. Wafa Sultan

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Many–if not most–of you have probably heard of Dr. Wafa Sultan by now.

She’s the talk of the blogosphere (try doing a Techorati search and see how many links turn up), a woman of immense courage who’s risked speaking out against the Moslem religion and the uses that have been made of Islam lately. She’s an American and a psychiatrist, born in Syria but living and working in this country.

Dr. Sultan is one of those “moderate Moslems” that many have been seeking, Diogenes-like, and she is nothing if not outspoken. This recent profile in the New York Times caused quite a stir, and she’s received a number of death threats from those who were somehow able to obtain her phone number.

Dr. Sultan’s notoriety began with an interview on Al Jazeera (a partial transcript may be found here) in which she accuses the Moslem religion of oppressing human rights and of religious intolerance. A few quotes:

The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.

[…]

Host: I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?

Wafa Sultan: Yes, that is what I mean.

Not very PC, is Dr. Sultan.

According to the Times profile, Dr. Sultan is writing a book that she believes is “going to turn the Islamic world upside down.” I hope she lives to finish it. Recently she’s been Salman Rushdiezed, and there seems to be a target painted on both her front and her back.

I have a special interest in Dr. Sultan because she’s a “changer,” and a psychiatrist as well. What occasioned her change? Here’s what the Times profile has to say about that:

Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith’s strictures into adulthood.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

“They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, ‘God is great!’ ” she said. “At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god.”

So here we have Sultan’s 9/11, her personal watershed moment, and a very traumatic one it was. She and her husband began to plan to emigrate to America, but the move took them ten years to accomplish.

Recently, as Dr. Sultan’s anger and drive to do something about what she saw happening in the Arab/Moslem world increased, she started writing for this website, “Annaqed.” That, in turn, prompted the invitation to speak on Al Jazeera. Now, as a result, she needs protection from those who would kill her because of what she’s done.

I’ve written earlier about how change sometimes happens quickly and sometimes gradually (see this post, in particular the comments section). Dr. Sultan seems to have been subject to both types. The original sudden shock was her presence at the shooting of her teacher by thugs shouting the name of Allah, but she’s also been evolving more slowly ever since, from private to public figure.

Dr. Sultan is sophisticated and knowledgeable enough about the forces arrayed against her that she must have known what the reaction to her statements on Al Jazeera would be, and so her “coming out” was at grave personal and familial risk. How does a person get such courage (courage which I doubt I’d have, by the way)?

Dr. Sultan’s description of witnessing the murder of her professor certainly explains something, but when you really think about it, it actually doesn’t explain all that much (I’d love to get a chance to interview her and ask a few more questions). That 1979 classroom was full of students, but I doubt many of them had a similar reaction to Dr. Sultan’s.

My hunch is that something in this woman was already primed for a change, and the terrible incident only provided the spark. Granted, it was an especially dramatic and horrific event, and she witnessed it up close and personal, maximizing its impact. The nature of the incident itself–the murder of a professor, representing the forces of knowledge and science, by gunmen invoking the will of Allah–was both a personal tragedy and a metaphor for her present cause. Dr. Sultan, already a medical student at the time, probably had a special scientific and logical bent, as well as an interest in human behavior and motivation, and I imagine that these qualities provided at least part of the impetus for her resultant turn away from strict adherance and blind acceptance of all the tenets of her faith and towards intellectual freedom and the defense of human rights.

But even that doesn’t explain the mysteries of the human heart and mind, the wellsprings from which she draws her formidable bravery. My guess is that some of this is rooted in her relationship to her parents and siblings, and how they may have encouraged her independence of mind, and perhaps her husband as well (he seems to have been supportive right from the first).

And some people just seem to have a deeper integrity than others, and feel driven to speak out no matter what the personal consequences may be. They are heroes of a very special sort.

I recall reading a book some time ago that attempted to analyze those people who made the decision to save or protect Jews in Poland during the Holocaust, at the risk of their lives and those of their families as well. The book, by Nechama Tec, is called When Light Pierced the Darkness,” and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in these questions.

Some of those “savers” were motivated by money and personal gain, some by political dedication (Communists were overrepresented, for example), some by religious faith. There was a significant number, however, who didn’t explain their actions by any of those things, but who seem to have been motivated by something else. I think that same something may be what’s driving Dr. Sultan. And what is that something?

I’m doing this from memory, but I would state it this way: they couldn’t live with themselves if they didn’t act. These people were often a bit puzzled as to their motivations; they couldn’t explain them too well, and seemed to think “anyone else” would have done the same. This of course is demonstrably incorrect; most people did not do the same; most people don’t have the courage. But the ones who do have it appear to have come to some sort of peace with the danger involved, and to have decided that the shame/guilt they would feel about doing nothing is greater than their fear of the consequences of acting. I believe this is what’s going on with Dr. Sultan.

Dr. Sultan is no longer religious, but she has nothing against anyone else practicing religion. Her motivation is human rights and tolerance of all faiths, and she throws down the gauntlet in this exchange from the Al Jazeera interview:

Wafa Sultan: I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others’ right to believe in it.

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?

Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural…

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran…

Wafa Sultan: These are personal matters that do not concern you.

Dr. Sultan knows exactly and precisely what is happening here: she is declaring herself in front of the entire Al Jazeera audience in such a way as to be labeled a heretic and be placed under penalty of death. Her declaration of the Enlightenment creed of personal and religious freedom, “These are personal matters that do not concern you,” is one of the bravest acts I’ve ever seen.

Is Dr. Sultan afraid? She says not, except for worry about the safety of her family back in Syria. The following is the statement of hers that led me to believe that she shares the motivation of those Holocaust rescuers who declared that they simply could not do other than what they’ve done, whatever the personal consequences. Her decision was made some time ago, and now it’s more important for that she speak out than to protect her life or even the lives of her relatives:

“I have no fear,” she said. “I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles.”

I wish the best of luck to Dr. Sultan on her journey; she will undoubtedly need it. Let us all hope (and pray, if we are religious) that she lives a long and productive life; that her message reaches–and touches–those who need to hear it; and that others of her persuasion find the same sort of astounding courage within themselves to speak out, as light pierces the darkness.

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: and now it’s time for a little art history

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No, I’m not becoming a Dean Esmay stalker, or tailgater, or whatever the expression might be, although today’s post was sparked by one of Dean’s, once again.

The subject? Female nudity in popular magazines: to wit, the following cover of Vanity Fair, and what it might mean about our society that this sort of thing is on the newsstands:

I happen to have been at the hairdresser’s the other day, and while there I saw this very cover in the flesh, as it were. What struck me was the photo’s resemblance, in theme although not composition, to the Manet painting “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (probably an excellent indication that I’m both a very dull old person, and not a man).

Here’s Manet’s painting, which I studied back in college. In English, it’s entitled “Luncheon (or Picnic) on the Grass:”

The Manet was shocking in its time, and I think it remains somewhat shocking even today (more so, in a way, than the magazine cover). From the time I first saw it as a young teenager, it has puzzled and mystified me, and apparently I’m not alone.

In the Vanity Fair photo, Scarlett Johansson (the woman lying down) seems to sport a similar expression to the lady on the left of the painting; she gazes at the viewer with cool and utter aplomb. The man in the photo resembles the one on the left of the painting as well, even the shape of his beard and the cut of his slightly nipped-in jacket (although, in the interest of formality, the man in the Manet has kept his tie on, even though the group is outdoors, whereas the magazine man is showing us his chest).

The woman in the painting’s background, in the flowing diaphonous togalike gown, always reminded me of another figure from my youth, the White Rock girl who appeared on the bottles of soda stored in our basement, gazing like Narcissus at her reflection in some small pond.

But what was this all about–surely not selling ginger ale, like Ms. White Rock?

In Manet’s painting, the woman on the left has taken off her clothing, which lies in disarray on the ground to her left, amidst some spilled fruit. The men, however, are fully clothed. Nor does anyone seem the least bit surprised, or even engaged by the situation. In the photo, the man is clearly amorous (or meant to be); in Manet, the men are talking to each other.

It’s not totally clear what Manet meant by the painting, but it is clear he was calling on certain traditional and conventional artistic subjects (female nudes, still lifes) and turning them on their head by modernizing them (something like the Vanity Fair cover, perhaps).

It’s well-known that Manet was referring back to earlier works of art such as this Giorgione entitled “Féªte champéªtre” (Pastoral Concert):

In Giorgione’s work from the early 1500s, the nudes are not only weightier than Manet’s, but more classical:

The female figures in the foreground are the Muses of poetry, their nakedness reveals their divine being. The standing figure pouring water from a glass jar represents the superior tragic poetry, while the seated one holding a flute is the Muse of the less prestigious comedy or pastoral poetry. The well-dressed youth who is playing a lute is the poet of exalted lyricism, while the bareheaded one is an ordinary lyricist.

So we have poetry and lyricism, made manifest as naked women and clothed men with lutes. Here we also see, perhaps, the origins of the diaphanous toga of Manet’s woman-in-the background–and even, perhaps, the White Rock girl of my youth. But Manet has stripped (to coin a phrase) the scene of all its pretense to culture, and that was what was so shocking.

Manet did not set out to shock, though. His actual aim seems to have been to paint modernity. But shock he did. The painting:

…did not bring Manet laurels and accolades. It brought criticism. Critics found Dejuener to be anti-academic and politically suspect and the ensuing fire storm surrounding this painting has made Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe a benchmark in academic discussions of modern art. The nude in Manet’s painting was no nymph, or mythological being…she was a modern Parisian women cast into a contemporary setting with two clothed man. Many found this to be quite vulgar and begged the question “Who’s for lunch?” The critics also had much to say about Manet’s technical abilities. His harsh frontal lighting and elimination of mid tones rocked ideas of traditional academic training. And yet, it is also important to understand that not everyone criticized Manet, for it was also Dejeuner which set the stage for the advent of Impressionism.
…Manet was not a radical artist, such as Courbet; nor was he a bohemian, as the critics had thought. Recently married to Suzanne Leenhoff, the well mannered and well bred Manet was an immaculately groomed member of high society.

And here’s a similar thought, although it seems to have been translated by Babelfish:

Manet, who had an ambition of bourgeois success, will suffer all his life time that his painting, carried out by a great artistic intuition, would only deserve him sulfurous notoriety, but no official recognition.

The painting remains mysterious and ambiguous. But much is known about the identities of Manet’s models:

In reality, all of the figures are based on living identifiable people in Manet’s life. The seated nude was Victiorne Meurand (Manets’ favorite model at the time) and the gentlemen were his brother Eugéne (with cane) and his brother-in-law, the sculpter Ferdinand Leenhof. Manet loved women and in his works, he usually leaves the men’s faces blurred or undefined, their individuality blurred in rhetoric, as dismissible as the “others” in the background. Always one to try to keep within the lines of “accepted” art since he was a semi-important member of society, hence, he left the men clothed….Edouard Manet, himself declared that the chief actor in the painting is the light. The public and critics, guardians of public taste saw only a sketch without the customary “finish.”

Manet also addresses the power of the artist to create reality. The one man’s hand is pointing towards the woman and he is paraphrasing Michelangelo’s “God Creates Man” fresco. He is saying the artist creates reality in the same way that God does. This is the major lesson of Impressionism. Reinterpreted, Manet again says , ‘God created man, but the artist creates Woman’ and may well be the the reason for the candor of model Victorine Meurent’s knowing (yet somehow alienated) gaze. Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a manifesto of modern painting, has always proven problematic when it comes to critical and historical interpretation. At the time of its succes de scandale at the Salon des Refusés, one critic admitted that he searched “in vain for the meaning” of it. Since that time, various readings have been suggested, none of them definitive. . . The furious outcry it caused as the principal exhibit among the Salon rejects was based on this indecency. One holistic critic, doubtless voicing his own opinion, said,

A commoplace woman of demimonde, as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth. These latter look like schoolboys on a holiday, perpetuating an outrage to play the man. . . . . This is a young man’s practical joke–a shameful, open sore.

The passage above contains a possible answer to the question of why the men are clothed: depicting the male nude was considered more scandalous. Perhaps this is still true. But I doubt it’s the only reason for the difference.

So, here we have an interesting trajectory: from Giorgione’s allegory in which the sexuality is a subtext, although still present; through Manet’s shocking modernized grouping that refers back to those earlier nudes, but shorn of any pretense of classicism except as a facile reference point. Then, on to the modern photo that is sold on newsstands and overtly meant to titillate, and which has only a vague and very hidden reference to its predecessors. But to me, all three works stand in an unbroken line, and even the last refers all the way back to the first.

Men’s rights and child support: the law is an ass (Part II)

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I added the following as a comment to the original post on the subject, but I thought I’d highlight it here as well, since it’s a response to points made by many readers in the comments section. This post doesn’t really stand on its own; it relies on the first one and is an expansion of it.

(I want to add, also, that I am rather intensely sympathetic to the problems of both men and women in this area. There’s plenty of sorrow, pain, and injustice to go around.)

Equal protection does not, when last I looked, apply where the valid and actual biological differences between male and female are the basis for the distinction made. Pregnancy is, by definition, one of these biological differences, and in my opinion the distinction here is based on that biological difference. The situation will never be exactly equal for that reason, and cannot be.

Once the woman is pregnant and there is a disagreement between partners about what should be done (the situation we are dealing with here), the following would be the only alternatives for her: bearing the child or having an abortion, and doing either because she chooses it; or bearing the child or having an abortion because she is compelled by another. Given that abortion is presently legal, to allow a man to compel a woman to bear a child against her will is not a good solution in the legal sense. The same would be true, by the way, for forcing her to have an abortion against her will.

For a somewhat (but not totally) analogous situation, there’s a principle in the law of contracts that says that “specific performance” of a contract is not ordinarily enforceable by the law. There are certain things the law will not compel a person to do just because the other person involved in the bargain or the contract wants him/her to do so, even if it was explicitly part of the original agreement. Making things right traditionally involves a money penalty, rather than compelling specific performance.

However, back when the legal system banned abortion, it used to compel the woman to bear a child against her will, although it could not compel her to keep it. (In truth, however, in many cases, women got illegal abortions anyway and did not bear the children in question. But that’s a different issue.)

Now that a woman is allowed to make the choice to have a legal abortion, no one else is allowed to choose for her, not even her husband. Some of you may indeed disagree with that, but IMHO changing that rule would make very bad law indeed, somewhat like compelling specific performance.

The real question is: what is the proper remedy in a case in which the mother bears the child against the biological father’s will, and is asking him to financially support that child? Note, again, that no one can force him to be an involved or caring father; no one can compel him to babysit or have the child live with him (that would be compelling specific performance, once again).

The remedy is financial, as remedies usually are under the civil law: pay child support. And it applies equally to both spouses, as far as I know (legally speaking; in actual practice it’s not always applied so equally). For example, if the unwed father successfully stops a mother from giving a child away for adoption, she is compelled to pay him child support for that child (although she never wanted or expected to), and he is free to raise it. This would be the most analogous situation, in my opinion, the one to which equal protection would apply. The remedy, once again, is financial: she could not be compelled against her will to have anything more to do with the child other than to pay child support.

If one accepts the principle that, for biological reasons, the woman gets to decide the course of her pregnancy, the question remains whether the biological father should be allowed to opt out of paying if she chooses to bear and to keep the child against his will. Under some sort of contract law, one might imagine that, as a penalty, she might have to forego child support because she is going against his expressed wishes about his own child.

But that’s where some sort of strict contract law between the parties (mother and father) does not apply, because the remedy is not to the mother as a party to a contract (real or implied): it’s to the child, who is not a party to any contract made before its conception. Child support is paid to the parent but it’s a right of the child, and is supposed to be applied to the child’s needs only.

For example, let’s say the woman had promised the man that she’d have an abortion if pregnant; an explicit oral contract. But she then changes her mind when actually pregnant and refuses to do. “Specific performance” is not allowed; he can’t force an abortion on her. If contract law were to be applied, and he could prove she had agreed to an abortion and broken her word to him (the “contract”), he might be able to opt out of paying for that child as a sort of financial penalty for her breaking the contract, in lieu of specific performance.

But this is where another overriding principle, the “best interests of the child” comes in. And this, once again, is because the child was not a party to that contract, and the child is the helpless result of the decisions of both these adults, and as such must be protected. It is in society’s interests to protect that child–or so goes the argument–and to compel both parents to support that child financially until it reaches its majority.

So, there is a linked set of decisions: the decision to have sex (and to assume its consequences), in which both take part; the decision to have or not to have the child, which is the woman’s only, for biological reasons; once she decides to have the child, the decision as to whether it will be given up for adoption (and the man has some rights in this matter, to challenge an adoption and keep the child himself); once the decision is made for one or the other parent to keep the child, the decision to pay child support (equal for both parents according to ability to pay), and the decision about coparenting and visitation rights, in which the court is involved if the parties disagree.

Bottom line: there are certain things you can force a person to do legally, and certain things you can’t. There are certain risks you are assumed to have taken on when you engage in certain acts. And there are certain considerations that trump others, according to the law, and are considered best for society as a whole.

[First part here.]

Men’s rights and child support: the law is an ass?

The New Neo Posted on by

Dean Esmay wrote a short post with the following statement that caught my eye:

…I still note with some mild annoyance that apparently it’s okay to loudly proclaim for “a woman’s right to choose,” and evil and wicked and oppressive to say that her right to choose might have limits, that she should use birth control and be more prudent… but if a man doesn’t want to be held fiscally and socially responsible for a woman’s choice for 18 years, he’s an evil scumbag who should keep it in his pants and use birth control and if he doesn’t like it too bad. He made his “choice” when he chose sex. She gets her choice well after the fact, and gets to hold him responsible for her choice whether he likes it or not.

Although I think I understand where Dean is coming from—on the face of it, it certainly seems an unfair situation, doesn’t it?—his words made me take a little stroll down memory lane, along some paths I haven’t visited in quite some time. Thus, this post.

One of the benefits of being a little (just a little!) older is being able to remember when things were very very different, and trying to apply that perspective to the issues of the day. I’m well aware that nothing I say here may convince Dean (or anyone else, for that matter) to see this issue any differently. But please hear me out.

I’ve done a bit of work off and on over the years in the fields of custody, child support, and the rights of fathers and mothers. Way back when I was first learning about this stuff, abortion was illegal, and divorce was granted on fault grounds (adultery, desertion, battery; that sort of thing). In fact, the family law of Massachusetts, the state I knew best, embraced some very strange principles, so strange that when I write about them you may not believe they were operating as recently as the late 60s and early 70s .

In fault divorces one person was the plaintiff and sued the other, alleging a marital offense; the other often countersued and alleged a different offense on the part of the original plaintiff. So the couple wasn’t just suing for a divorce, they were suing to see who would be judged the guilty party and who the innocent one.

Condonation was a possible defense against fault charges, and was defined as:

the act of forgiving one’s spouse who has committed an act of wrongdoing that would constitute a ground for divorce. Condonation generally is proven by living and cohabiting with the spouse after learning that the wrongdoing was committed.

So, to be crystal clear: if spouse A hit spouse B, this would ordinarily constitute a marital offense and B could sue A for divorce and win. But if A could successfully claim that at any time after the blow—even if it was months after—the two had slept together, then B could be denied a fault divorce on these grounds.

Then there was “collusion.” In a state such as New York, for example, adultery was one of the only grounds for divorce, and people often faked adultery in order to obtain a divorce. In those days there was actually a fairly lucrative business trafficking in women whom one could hire to go to a hotel and pretend to have an assignation with the husband for this very purpose.

So, collusion was:

an agreement between two or more persons that one of the parties brings false charges against the other. In a divorce case, the husband and wife may agree to use adultery as a ground in order to obtain a divorce more quickly, knowing full well that adultery was not committed. Collusion is illegal.

Illegal—meaning, if found to have occurred, no divorce.

And then there was a third strange legal principle. Memory fails me (and Google does, too; I can’t find the term anywhere) as to what it was called. But the idea was that if both parties alleged fault on the part of the other, and the court found that both their claims had merit, they could be judged to cancel each other out. Two wrongs apparently could make a right—and then, no divorce.

The utter absurdity of much of this underlines the timeless truth of the famous statement made by Charles Dickens’s character Mr. Bumble, about a different but highly related matter (that the law presumed a wife to be under her husband’s control):

Mr. Brownlow: The law assumes that your wife acts under your direction.

Mr. Bumble: If the law supposes that, then the law is a ass, a idiot! If that’s the eye of the law, then the law is a bachelor. And the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience.

Fault divorce had its—well, it had its faults, to be sure. Now that it has nearly gone the way of the dodo, I don’t think too many people mourn it. At any rate, I’m certainly not one of them. The once-flourishing industry that provided fake mistresses (and real photographers to document the occasion) is no more, as well. But remnants of the old system remain in our family laws, like some sort of vestigial organ.

What was the point of all of this, anyway? The law was thought to have a strong interest in marriage because the institution constituted the bedrock of society and of childrearing. Breaking up a marriage was meant to be difficult, and only to be available under certain quite egregious circumstances. The lack of easy availability of divorce was often painful for everyone involved, and it led to terrible hardship—although, of course, the remedies making it easier have also led to terrible hardship.

I’m not suggesting we go back. But it’s useless to pretend that the law can ever solve the dreadful problems inherent in the fact that people are flawed, love doesn’t always last, and that the children of such unions need to be protected as much as possible from the mistakes of their parents.

The following is an illustration of just how far the law used to be willing to go to protect the children. There was a rule in Massachusetts that all divorces were conditional when granted, and that they only became official six months after the final hearing. The reason? Way back when this rule had been written, there was no way to be certain that a woman wasn’t pregnant at the time of the divorce, and the court didn’t want to make bastards of the children born after the hearing, if in fact the pregnancy had occurred during the marriage. Back in those quaint days, being illegitimate had huge negative ramifications for the child, and the court would go far to prevent a child from being placed in that legal no man’s land.

What’s more, there was another odd and related rule: a man was (and in many cases, still is) “estopped” from claiming he was not the father of any child born of his marriage—that is, conceived within the time frame of the marriage. And this not only included cases in which the child was not in fact his because his wife had had an affair, it included pregnancies that began when he was away from home and could not have possibly been the father.

Talk about lack of father’s rights; a man was (and, as I said, often still is) actually required to support a child that was not his! And why was/is the law being such a dreadful, abominable ass? The rationale behind the idea, archaic though it may seem, was that (a) the rights of a child to be legitimate were paramount, and (b) when you got married, you made your bed and had to lie in it (even if someone else had been lying in it as well).

I am most definitely not saying I approve of such laws. I’m merely trotting them out from the dustbins of memory (and please, let me know if I’m wrong about any of this, because I’m doing this entirely from my own recollection) to illustrate just how far the pendulum has swung in recent years towards protecting the rights of parents versus those of the child.

Yes, with abortion and birth control and divorce on demand and most of the people involved in these cases not ever having been married in the first place, it does seem as though a man should be able to say, “Whoa! I never bargained for this! You got pregnant, you decided not to have an abortion (the solution I would have preferred), you decided to keep the baby. Why should I have to pay for the next eighteen years?”

This is the way it used to be explained, anyway: when two people sleep together, both of them—man and woman—are presumed to assume the risks that go along with the act. And what are these risks?

The first is that every single act of intercourse might end in pregnancy (unless the woman is past menopause, which of course is irrelevant to these cases). Despite birth control, despite assurances that all is taken care of and that it can’t happen, despite whatever people tell themselves and each other, despite truths and despite lies—it’s still possible. And everyone is presumed to know it’s possible. And if they don’t, they very well should.

But all is not equal. By the act of sleeping together (with or without birth control), the man and the woman assume different risks, and there’s no way around some of those differences, because they are rooted in biology. The woman runs the risk of becoming pregnant. Pregnancy means a woman is faced with the associated health risks, which can be considerable; the associated decisions (because—and there’s no way around this—she carries the fetus around within her body) as to whether to bear or not bear the child and whether to keep the child, if borne (if she gives birth and wants to give the baby up for adoption, the father can in many cases sue to block the adoption and raise the child himself. But that’s a different situation than we’re faced with in Dean’s example, in which the father neither wants the child nor wants to pay for it).

In addition to the risks and responsibilities of pregnancy itself, the mother who chooses to give birth and give the child away bears the pain associated with that. And, if she chooses to keep the child and raise it, she—no less than the father—takes on the responsibility of supporting it financially. As custodial parent, she takes on the task of raising it as well, in the emotional sense.

The father takes on a different responsibility, and different risks. He knows he does not have any chance of becoming pregnant (at least that was true when last I checked). But he knows he runs the risk that his partner might, and that if she does she’ll have the right to make the major decisions about that pregnancy. He also knows that, if she happens to decide to keep the baby, he will be required to support it financially, although his emotional connection to it cannot be forced. And he knows, and assumes the risk, that she might even keep the fact of a pregnancy from him, and/or abort the baby without his knowledge.

That’s a lot of freight associated with one act of sex, isn’t it? Not too many people think about it that way—and, to be realistic, they probably never will. It’s perhaps the very last thing most young people think of when they hop into bed together.

But the law doesn’t really care; it’s that much of an ass, and a party pooper as well. Because the law still contains that remnant—that vestigial organ, as it were—of being more interested in the welfare of the child than the rights of either parent.

You may disagree with the results—I don’t like the results all that much myself. But my observation is that there’s no good solution and probably never will be, human nature being what it is. And the law we’ve got right now is as good as any I can come up with, I’m afraid—even though it may still be an ass.

[NOTE 1: For all you English majors out there: yes, I know the original quote is “The law is a ass.”]

[NOTE 2: In my research, I found this unrelated NY Times article with the amusing title “If the law is an ass, the law professor is a donkey,” about the prevalence of Democratic professors in law schools.]