Those who cannot learn from history are condemned…

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The Anchoress has written this wonderful post, so I don’t have to.

Read the whole thing, please, but most particularly this:

Right now, the insurgents are being vastly encouraged by what they read coming out of the mouths of Democrats and reporters, and even, sadly the Republicans. The message they are being given is: Just be patient. Just hold out a little while, and America will be gone, and you will re-gain control.

You who want to play politics with this war, wishing to abandon the people of Iraq merely to shame a president you hate and do a bit of crowing, just be ready to take responsibility for what comes after. Understand that when the inevitable deaths occur in Iraq, and elsewhere, at the hands of these insurgents, and at the hands of a rejuvenated Al Qaeda, that the blood of every victim thereafter will then be on your heads, as will the blood of all 2065 of our service people whose sacrifice will be rendered meaningless by your action.

If America pulls out without victory – without the Iraqis being capable of defending themselves – then every death from insurgents or terrorists – all over the world – will have to be a death counted upon the heads of those who would not allow a serious War on Terror to continue and succeed, simply because to do so would reflect too well on a man they hate.

The blood of innocents is a heavy, heavy stain – it will not easily be washed away.

I wish I could agree with the Anchoress, however, about that last sentence. The left and liberals, in particular, are no Lady Macbeths. In fact, as far as the results of our pullout from Vietnam goes, they don’t need all the perfumes of Arabia to wash their hands clean:

Doct. What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.
Gent. It is an accustom’d action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.
Lady M. Yet here’s a spot.
Doct. Hark! she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
Lady M. Out, damned spot! out, I say! One: two: why, then ’tis time to do ‘t. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
Doct. Do you mark that?
Lady M. The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now? What, will these hands ne’er be clean?…Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!
Doct. What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely charg’d.

It is not my impression that the left–or even most liberals–have been walking in their sleep over the Vietnam pullout, much less considering the stain unremovable. In fact, one of the reasons an Iraqi pullout is being pushed so hard now is that many in the left consider the Vietnam pullout to have been their finest hour.

I spent quite a few words and a great deal of thought on the issue a while back, here, when I attempted to answer the following, based on some musings of Dean Esmay:

Where were you in the mid- to late-70s, oh bleeding-heart Vietnam War protesters? Didn’t the terrible aftermath of the Vietnam War convince you that you had been wrong to work so hard for US withdrawal? And, if so, why not?

In my attempted answer, I linked to this article about the fall of Vietnam. I’m highlighting it again, and putting it in bold, because I can’t recommend it highly enough; please, please read it.

If the history of the Vietnam exit has been supressed, unknown, or denied, how can we ever learn from it? But please be assured that those on the left have learned that history very very well–the history of their success in getting the US to pull out of that war, that is.

If you don’t believe me, please read still another post of mine, here (I’m starting to feel as though I’m repeating myself, but I think these things bear repeating right now–unfortunately), based on an article written by Tom Hayden (does the name sound familiar?) one year ago, detailing the left’s plans to recapitulate the Vietnam pullout and providing a blueprint for doing just that. You will see that Mr. Hayden finds no blood on his hands, no blood whatsoever.

As David Horowitz has written in his book Radical Son:

Assisted by radical legislators like Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug, Hayden set up a caucus in the Capitol, where he lectured congressional staffers on the need to end American aid. He directed his attention to Cambodia as well, lobbying for an accommodation with the Khmer Rouge guerillas. Nixon’s resignation over Watergate provided all the leverage Hayden and his activists needed. The Democrats won the midterm elections, bringing to Washington a new group of legislators determined to undermine the settlement that Nixon and Kissinger had achieved. The aid was cut, the Saigon regime fell, and the Khmer rouge marched into the Cambodian capital. In the two years that followed, more Indochinese were killed by the victorious Communists than had been killed on both sides in all thirteen years of the anti-Communist war.

It was the bloodbath that [the Left’s] opponents had predicted. But for the Left there would be no contrition and no look back.

Radical Son was published in 1998, so we can forgive Horowitz for not seeing the future with total exactitude. He is right about the “no contrition” part. But the left is looking back, to the days of its greatest triumph. They have learned the lessons of history, and are proud to repeat them. But if the rest of us fail to learn those lessons, we–and the people of Iraq–will be condemned to repeat them.

And then I’m afraid there’ll be an awful lot of sleepwalking and handwashing to be done.

Breaking the contract: New York Review of Books

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I’m visiting relatives who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, a publication that isn’t ordinarily my favorite reading matter. But whenever I’m here I can’t resist the temptation to pick it up, despite the fact that I know if I read anything about politics there I’m probably going to end up frustrated and angry.

This time I consciously (and conscientiously) tried to read it without any preconceived notions of what I’d find, and without any sort of chip on my shoulder. I chose Pankaj Mishra’s book review of two books: No God but God: the origins, evolution, and future of Islam by Reza Aslan, and Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: gender and the seductions of Islamism, by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson.

One of the questions Mishra’s book review tackles is of obvious interest to all neocons: are the tenets of the religion of Islam compatible with democracy? According to Mishra, Azlan finds nothing in the Koran incompatible with democracy; the Koran says nothing very specific about what sort of government Moslems ought to have. It is not the Koran itself, but fundamentalist, traditionalist Islam, according to Azlan, that cannot be reconciled with “modern conceptions of democracy and human rights.”

So far, so good. Agreed; there seems to be nothing fundamentally incompatible between Islam and basic human rights–except for Islamicist fundamentalism itself.

But then Mishra writes:

Certainly, events in the Muslim world continue to surprise–especially those who believe that most Muslims, when given the choice, would opt for Western ways. Despite its growing economy, Iran elected a hard-liner as its president in June.

At that point I put the paper down and paced around the room, wondering how a person could be considered qualified to write this book review and yet be so abysmally ignorant as to believe that the recent elections in Iran represented the will of its people, any sort of “choice” they have made. Then I picked up the paper and finished the article, looking for more, but that’s the sum total of what Mishra wrote about the Iranian elections.

Mishra doesn’t seem to feel the need to explain what he means by these extraordinary statements; apparently, it’s self-evident to him that “an election is an election is an election.” The elimination of the slate of reform candidates in Iran, the organized boycotts of the election by many people because it was a sham–Mishra says nothing at all about these factors. Either he doesn’t know about them (shocking) or thinks he can get away with not addressing them because his audience doesn’t know about them (shocking), or he thinks somehow an election can be valid despite them (shocking).

When reading an article or book review such as Mishra’s, the reader relies on some sort of implicit contract between him/herself and the writer. The writer is presumed to be both expert and truthful. If one or the other assumption breaks down, that’s the end of the story, because it’s the end of the writer’s reliability and trustworthiness. And this is exactly what happened with me and Mishra when I read these two sentences–he became an untrustworthy source of information/opinion.

But if I hadn’t followed the Iranian elections in my new role as political junkie and blogger, I would have read the sentences and not even blinked. I would not have realized that Mishra had just broken our contract. I would have gone on to finish the article, nodded, and the information imparted therein (“Iranian democratic elections indicate the will of the people is for a hard-line theocracy”) would have become part of my knowledge base and my belief system. And if I never read other articles that convincingly contradicted that idea, it would continue to be part of my belief system. That’s the way political positions are built, one brick at a time, until there’s a strong structure that’s often quite resistant to change.

So, just who is Pankaj Mishra, anyway? He’s an Indian writer sometimes living in London, the author of a novel set in India entitled The Romantics, as well as a nonfiction work about his own search for Buddha, and a book of travels through India. Mishra seems, in fact, to be the New York Times Book Review’s resident expert on India, since he’s written a great many of their reviews of books on that country, as well as a few about Afghanistan.

That’s it. He doesn’t seem to have any special experience or knowledge of Iran, politics, or history; he’s a novelist, reviewer, and writing of philosophical/travel books about India. In other words, another predominantly literary guy, at least as far as I can tell. And here, once again, one finds that strange naivete of the literary in the face of totalitarian and authoritarian states.

Don’t sit on a hot stove until you see a correction in the New York Review of Books.

The well-rounded blogosphere of OSM

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Well, I don’t think you’ll get the definitive report on the OSM (I still think of it as Pajamas Media) get-together here.

But I have no guilt about that–there are plenty of other bloggers who can easily fill you in. I haven’t had a chance yet to check out what others have written, but I’ve no doubt the event was well-documented, since I could see close to a hundred laptops blooming around the room. Not me, though–I’ve never developed the art of writing about something as I’m experiencing it; not good at walking and chewing gum at the same time.

So this will be my quick impressionistic take on what it was that I really came for, if the truth be known–the chance to meet a whole crowd of bloggers. And what a crowd it was! The following pre-conference theories of mine seemed generally to be borne out:

1) bloggers can talk; in fact, most bloggers would rather talk than eat

2) bloggers tend to be intense

3) bloggers include a high proportion of night people and/or people who don’t sleep all that much

4) most bloggers look like their photos–except me. I actually don’t have an apple in from of my face.

5) Roger Simon wears a fedora

Things that were surprises:

1) a higher-than-expected proportion of bloggers are smokers

2) you can’t tell who’s short and who’s tall from a photo

3) Roger Simon wears a fedora

(Actually, I already knew that you can’t tell who’s short and who’s tall from a photo. But it was still a surprise.)

Further observations:

1) When I say bloggers can talk, I mean talk. We’re talking serious talk here. Stamina, breadth, depth, decibel level. Get a group together, and it’s not for the faint of heart–if you don’t jump in quickly and vigorously, you may never get the floor, because the competition is hot and the topics change at the speed of light as one thought follows another, like group chain-smoking. Those with natural projective qualities of voice have an advantage here; those of us with naturally quieter voices stand in danger of getting hoarse.

2) New York restaurants have gotten ever more expensive as the portions have gotten smaller.

3) There are no elevator operators in Saks anymore. I stopped in there today to get out of the cold for a few minutes, and discovered the lack of elevator operators as well as the fact that there is not an item in the store that I could possibly afford. Which is fine since there’s not an item in the store that I’d care to buy, so there.)

I could not possibly mention all the bloggers I met, although they all deserve mention. So the following is an almost random snapshot of people I’d never met before but felt I already knew:

Glenn Reynolds is measured, articulate, unaffected, incisive, and possessed of a dry wit–as well as the patience to put up with being buttonholed by every blogger who wanted to meet him, which was all of us.

Charles Johnson is still very much the charming and laid-back musician I imagine he was before 9/11 and its aftermath set him down such an unexpected path.

Richard Fernandez, heretofore the mysterious Wretchard, is a man who projects utter calm and a powerful quality of being deeply-centered, and whose words are unusually reflective and thoughtful.

Austin Bay was our fearless and intrepid leader, charging into a drenching downpour with the rest of us following behind (rain? what’s a little rain?), his Renaissance mind discoursing at dinner with great animation on such widely-ranging subjects as politics, war, literature, history, writing, and more.

Vodkapundit is as elegant and intelligent as one might imagine, even on the brink of impending fatherhood (best of luck, Steve, to both you and your wife).

Clive Davis not only has a charming British accent (there’s that “charming” word again), but the wit and kindness to go with it (although, unfortunately, Clive actually had to work at his day job during his visit, and therefore missed a few of the festivities).

I could natter on–and on and on and on–because there are, quite literally, a hundred other people I could (and should) write about. But I won’t–too tired. Suffice to say it was a great deal of fun.

I find it an extraordinary experience to meet people backwards: that is, to meet their minds first and their bodies second. You get to know people in a totally different way as, day after day, you read what they are thinking without ever having met them in the flesh.

You don’t even realize how many preconceptions (and perhaps misconceptions) you are building up until you meet the person him/herself. Sometimes the meeting shatters those preconceptions utterly. Far more often, however, the person you meet is both similar and somewhat different from the one you had expected: younger, older; livelier, shyer; more fidgety, calmer; funnier, more solemn. Then you superimpose the new template on the old and merge the two, and now you know the person in a fuller, rounder sense.

And so it is that I am very happy to have met these and so many other old friends (and new), and to have made the pictures of them in my mind’s eye more complete.

About that word “Islamofascism”

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Don Surber has pointed out that recently–first on October 6, and then again yesterday–Bush has begun to use the word “Islamofascism” in his speeches to name the enemy.

I have a bit of history with that word myself, and so I have some advice for him.

I was reminded of this by accident the other day when I was looking in my old e-mail files and came across something I’d sent to a friend way back in the spring of ’04. It was written during a time when I’d just “outed” myself at a party where a group had been speaking in glowing terms of none other than Michael Moore and “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

After I had piped up and let them know I didn’t consider MM and his movie to be the repository of truth, a stunned and shocked silence ensued, and then a variety of reactions followed. Some people were angry and argumentative, some quiet. But one or two of my friends came up to me afterwards and said they wouldn’t mind if I e-mailed them some more information, and maybe some links.

In the end, though, it didn’t work out too well–both of them asked me to cease and desist after a month or two. One of them took great umbrage in particular at my use of the term “Islamofascism” in one of my e-mails. She wrote to me asking whether I would ever use the terms “Christianofascism” or “Judeofascism,” and why I didn’t condemn skinheads as well as Islamofascists.

So, if Bush runs into the same sort of trouble with the word that I did, perhaps he’d like to take a look at my answer to my friend:

The word doesn’t mean “Islam” and it doesn’t mean “Moslems.” It’s simply a shorthand expression to signify “the current crop of people who quote the Moslem religion to justify terrorism and other types of violence and who purposely target innocents such as women, children, and other bystanders with the goal of being a minority who rule over the vast majority of peace-loving people (including the vast majority of Moslems) who would prefer nothing better than to be left alone to live their own lives in peace; and who have a declared agenda to take over the rule of all Moslem countries and the rest of the world, imposing a very strict, repressive, intolerant, illiberal, anti-woman regime on all of mankind.” Think Taliban, ruling the world–that’s the goal.

That’s quite a mouthful, I know, so I use the term “Islamofascist” to cover it. Why “fascist?” Well, the connection to “fascist” is that it is a totalitarian and tyrannical group seeking power over a wide area of the globe, and these people don’t care what they do to get it–it’s no-holds-barred. The particular group I’m speaking about does this in the name of Islam, but if in fact there were some Buddhists, Christians, Jews, or any other sect with such an agenda in the name of their religion, I would call them “whatever-fascists,” also (as I call Nazis fascists; but they were secular fascists). White supremacist fascists (I assume that’s what you mean by “skinheads?”) are to be condemned also, of course, and in no uncertain terms–but right now they don’t seem to have purposely and premeditatedly blown 3,000 people to kingdom come and are not threatening to do it again and again, so my primary concern is with the people who have done just that.

By the way, another reason I use the term “fascist” to refer to the current crop of terrorists and their followers and sympathizers is that, historically speaking, they are actually the direct heirs of the Nazis. I don’t mean that in the metaphorical sense–although I do mean that, as well–I mean it in an actual sense. The Arab countries in general were allies of the Nazis in WWII and were, unfortunately, fed vast reams of Nazi propaganda, which, just as unfortunately, took root. Skinheads or neo-Nazis are unusual in the US, although of course they exist—but admiration of Nazis and their agenda became almost mainstream in the 30s in the Arab world as a direct result of Nazi influence, propaganda, and involvement there, and it has not gone away.

Reasonable minds may differ on what is to be done. I’m only writing about what my own study has led me to believe, and of course it’s possible I’m wrong. Perhaps we don’t disagree as much as you might think, because I, too, would love for the young men of that area, as you write, “to change their minds before they are poisoned.” That is actually what the whole idea of liberating Iraq was about–and you may laugh, or think I’m wildly naive to still use the word “liberated”–but I mean what I say. The Iraqi bloggers whom I’ve been reading are trying to do just that: change minds before they are irrevocably poisoned. They are the ones who have given me hope that a liberation is slowly but surely happening there, in a way that they say was utterly impossible before the war, and in a way that our media has hardly ever written about (and in a way that won’t be possible if we don’t stay the course until things are more stable there).

Well, now that I look at it, it may be a tad long and convoluted to put in a speech. But I did get a good response from my friend, who seemed to understand when I put it that way. And we’re still friends, although I stopped sending her anything political.

My heart is not broken; no, not at all

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It’s official; neo-neocon will not become a playing card in aaron’s Deck O’Bloggers. However, thanks to your valiant efforts I made a respectable showing despite my eleventh hour entry into the game.

But, no excuses (although come to think of it, didn’t I just make one?), no regrets. Upward and onward, excelsior, keep on keeping on, look for the silver lining, my HEART will go on…

Congratulations to the top winners, and Dr. Sanity and I will just go and lick our wounds in private.

Bush-hatred revisited

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Dr. Sanity tackles that old bugaboo, Bush-Derangement-Syndrome (BDS), and tries to drive a stake into its vigorously beating heart. Her post is a good description of how the psychological mechanism of displacement functions in deflecting the hatred and fear of terrorism onto Bush.

Dr. Sanity doesn’t pretend to explain the whole phenomenon of Bush-hatred, however, nor do I. I’ve felt for quite some time that there’s something quite mysterious and “extra” about it, something very difficult to explain.

Perhaps it’s merely that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. In addition to the process Dr. Sanity describes (which I think is key), there are other intangibles that feed the beast of BDS.

I’m not talking about mere disagreement with Bush. I’m referring to the sort of visceral demonization of the man that clearly seems out of touch with any reality, and which has gripped so many people I personally know and turned them into something unrecognizable and ferocious when they even mention his name–which they do with some regularity.

A while back I wrote a bit on the subject, which I’d like to repeat now as an addition to Dr. Sanity’s thoughts. Although I’m talking about something relatively superficial here, I believe that for some who hate Bush it is at least a part of what drives them:

…many people hate Bush for stylistic reasons. The way he talks, the way he smirks, the frat-boy persona–he represents the kind of person they simply detested in high school and college (particularly if they were the intellectual or literary sort). They distrust and dislike him in a very visceral way.

I am old enough to remember the reaction among Democrats to Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination. They detested him–his good ol’ boy accent, his picking up his dog by the ears, his showing off his surgical scars–man, they just hated him; he had no class. Kennedy was the absolute personification of smoothness and class, so witty and bright and charming, and that New England accent!

But, in the end, that’s all surface stuff. Was Kennedy’s actual record as President much better–or really all that much different–than Johnson’s? Of course, we can’t know whether Kennedy would have done any better with the Vietnam war than Johnson did, but from books such as The Best and the Brightest, I think the answer is at least “probably not.” Perhaps, though, he may have ultimately done better because he would have had a more friendly press.

FDR and Kennedy were also children of great privilege–as great, or greater, than Bush. But they had that Eastern style, and great personal magnetism, that he lacks. And, of course, many people hated them–but not the press, and not academics.

Personal style is part of this. We relate to people in many ways, some of them quite subtle and even outside of our awareness: body language and facial expressions and clothing, as well as accents and speech patterns. The utter revulsion some feel towards Bush, both here and abroad, is partly a reaction to such signals that he gives off. In the end, these feelings are neither political, rational, nor amenable to argument–they simply are.

Literary leftists–Part I: “Reading Lolita in Tehran” (be careful what you wish for)

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Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran has scored a surprising amount of popular success, currently ranked around #300 at Amazon, and amassing close to 300 comments there as well. For a fairly literary and even somewhat didactic work subtitled “A memoir in books,” that’s pretty good.

I think part of its success (aside from its great title) is that it’s the type of book that especially appeals to women’s book groups—in fact, that’s how I came to read it. Most of the members of my book group talked about the book’s main theme: the shocking and depressing ways in which Iranian women’s lives have been stunted and twisted by the authoritarian and misogynistic theocracy in charge in Iran, and how Nafisi and her students somehow managed to feed their spirits by the clandestine study of some of the classics of Western literature.

Apparently, literature can help keep people who live under a totalitarian system sane—the Soviet dissidents also provided evidence of that. But, although of interest, that was not the theme I kept noticing and marveling at when I read the book; no, a very different aspect of Reading Lolita in Tehran kept grabbing my attention: the tendency of literary and intellectual youths in free societies to gravitate towards leftist causes that would end up curtailing that very freedom.

Author Nafisi is currently a literature professor at Johns Hopkins. The biographical blurb on the flyleaf of her book states that she had formerly been an English professor at the University of Tehran but was expelled for refusing to wear the veil, and that she later emigrated to the United States in 1997.

But Nafisi’s story, and her relationship to the revolution that devastated her country, is far more complex and ironic than that. The year 1997 was not her first emigration from Iran; she had left at the age of thirteen and been educated in England, Switzerland, and the US, only returning during the pivotal and fateful year 1979 to her beloved and much-longed-for homeland.

And what a homecoming it was! She writes:

The dream had finally come true. I was home, but the mood in the airport was not welcoming. It was somber and slightly menacing, like the unsmiling portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and his anointed successor, Ayatollah Montazeri, that covered the walls. It seemed as if a bad witch with her broomstick had flown over the building and in one sweep had taken away the restaurants, the children and the women in colorful clothes that I remembered. This feeling was confirmed when I noticed the cagey anxiety in the eyes of my mother and friends, who had come to the airport to welcome us home.

Nafisi learned through bitter experience that you can’t go home again, although you can try.

The terrible irony of her story arises because Nafisi herself was part of the revolution that ended up destroying her country. Her tale resembles that of so many youthful visionaries, dabbling in politics like a bunch of naive Mickey Mouses (Mice?) in Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” not realizing until too late the horrors their machinations will conjure into existence.

Nafisi married early, at eighteen, and attended college at the University of Oklahoma during the 1970s. Her plunge into political activism was as casual (and as literary) as it was leftist:

I joined the Iranian student movement reluctantly. My father’s imprisonment and my family’s vague nationalist sympathies had sensitized me towards politics, but I was more of a rebel than a political activist–though in those days there was not much difference between them. One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn’t try to assault or seduce me. Instead, they held study groups in which we read and discussed Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In the seventies, the mood—not just among Iranians, but among American and European students—was revolutionary. There was the Cuban example, and China of course. The revolutionary cant and romantic atmosphere were infectious, and the Iranian students were at the forefront of the struggle.

So, revolution was a mood, an essence, something infectious in the air—rather like bacilli, as it turns out. Nafisi describes the group as markedly Marxist in philosophy and in style, sporting “Che Guevara sports jackets and boots…and Mao jackets and khakis.”

For Nafisi herself, romanticism and literature seem to have been the primary motives, passed somehow through the alchemy of her homesickness and transmuted into political activism:

[I] insisted on wearing long dresses outside the meetings…I never gave up the habit of reading and loving “counterrevolutionary” writers—T. S. Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgerald—but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. My oppressive yearning for home was shaped into excited speeches against the tyrants back home and their American backers.

Once in Tehran, Nafisi began to realize that the unsettling airport scene had been only the tip of the iceberg. She soon came to bitterly regret the mindless revolutionary zeal of her youth, and to realize that her revolutionary dream had turned into a nightmare, as they so often do:

When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them.

Although the revolutionaries back in Oklahoma and elsewhere had been decidedly leftist, the revolution they helped birth was a restrictive theocracy. One of the most interesting portions of the book describes how those leftists, at least in the early stages, managed to rationalize and excuse such clear signs that things had gone sharply awry as the imposition of the veil and the subjugation of women.

Nafisi was not one of those excusers, however; she describes her horror at the relentless approach of the suffocating clasp of the mullahs, a chill embrace undreamt of in her leftist days in Oklahoma.

And it got worse, much worse; there are many passages in the book that reminded me uncannily of what it must have been like for French revolutionaries to have watched the unfolding of the Reign of Terror (those who survived, that is), not to mention Stalin’s ex-comrades viewing the purges of their ranks:

In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [Nafisi’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old comrades in the U.S. on television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence…I turned and asked Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.

“No, I didn’t, but I should have.” What quiet words of chilling despair! And indeed, one wonders how it was that smart people could have been so dumb; by the mid-to late-1970’s, when Nafisi and her friends were supporting a leftist revolution in Iran, surely the jury was no longer out on the fact that this was a road that would lead to the revolution swallowing its own as well as many others. But we see such a phenomenon again and again, as history repeats itself in its winding, twisting path.

In Nafisi’s case, she seems to have been mainly a romantic, interested in literature almost to the exclusion of other topics—such as history, apparently. Unfortunately for her, she had to learn the lessons of history the hard way, from personal experience. And so, too, did her revolutionary Iranian comrades-in-arms, unfortunately for them—and for us, and for the world as well. They could never have guessed at the trajectory their lives would follow from those long-ago days of sartorial playing at being revolutionaries, sporting Che and Mao jackets, to their final moments in the executioner’s chamber.

And, if you can believe this interview, the Iranian students who took the Americans hostage in the last year of Jimmy Carter’s administration were hardly more serious or more focused than Nafisi herself. Read it and weep.

Nafisi’s story underscores the fact that there does seem to be something in the literary mind that is especially susceptible to romantic ideals of revolution, that doesn’t accept that institutions of government will always be flawed, that seeks a sort of misty perfection, and that believes in the power of youth to proclaim those ideals merely by taking to the streets and wishing it very, very hard.

[ADDENDUM: I’m well aware that all major political change is susceptible to being overtaken by unplanned and unwanted forces. That included our American Revolution, for example, and that’s why the drafting and adoption of our Constitution was so vitally important. That’s also why, as a neocon who had advocated regime change in Iraq, I waited with trepidation to see what the results of the Iraqi elections and constitution drafts would be.

So far, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of that country, as long as forces in the West continue to protect Iraq in its process of establishing some sort of true representative government, with checks and balances and guarantees of liberty and human rights that are unusual for that part of the world. Those things are our only hope against tyrannnies on both left and right.

But as Nafisi describes them, the leftists who wanted so much to overthrow the Shah did not even seem to care about those petty little details when thinking about what would take his place. They broke quite a few eggs, but instead of an omelet they got Humpty Dumpty. Are there any horses and men who can ever put him back together again?]

Shut up and deal

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve come so late to this game it’s almost over, but why not play anyway?

There’s only one more day left, and so I’m playing mega catch-up. But there’s a competition over at aaron’s. It’s a poll to elect women bloggers as playing cards (hearts, naturally) in a card deck of the blogosphere.

Go vote if you want. You don’t even have to vote for me; I’ll forgive you.

So, what’s up with those suits, anyway? Did you ever wonder why it’s hearts, spades, clubs, diamonds? I have. Card decks are among the most conservative things around–paleo-paleo-con–preserving old courtly distinctions long after their original incarnations (jack; jester) have gone the way of the dodo.

Well, the final choice as to which suits would become standardized seems to have been fairly arbitrary, after a great many predecessors had been tried. The suits we now use originated in France, and became popular because they were less expensive to make. Here’s a little playing card history:

The cards manufactured by German printers used the suits of hearts, bells, leaves, and acorns…Later Italian and Spanish cards of the 15th century used swords, batons, cups, and coins…The four suits (hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs) now used in most of the world originated in France, approximately in 1480. These suits have generally prevailed because decks using them could be made more cheaply; the former suits were all drawings which had to be reproduced by woodcuts, but the French suits could be made by stencil.

So, why not an apple?

Took the day off

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m visiting family today and am taking the day off. I plan to be back posting tomorrow.

The weather is lovely, and I’m about to go out for dinner, so that’s good.

I’ve only been online for a few moments today, but it was long enough to read the astounding news of the woman bomber who failed to detonate herself.

If I could travel back in time about five years to tell my previous self that I’d be writing about a woman who, with her husband’s help and guidance, strapped herself with explosives and walked into a wedding party at a fancy hotel in Jordan planning to blow herself up among a bunch of happy celebrating strangers, I would think I had gone mad. But such events have become part and parcel of our lives now.

I hope this woman has a lot of very useful information to impart.

The Arab street speaks

The New Neo Posted on by

The well-known “Arab street” has spoken recently, and it seems to be angry at al-Zarqawi .

The hotel bombings have outraged Jordanians, apparently even some who ordinarily don’t support the king’s Western ways:

The Amman protest was organized by Jordan’s 14 professional and trade unions, made up of both hard-line Islamic groups and leftist political organizations, traditional critics of the king’s moderate, pro-Western policies…

Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba has noticed, also:

the attack should alert Jordan that it needed to stop hosting former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“I hope that these attacks will wake up the ‘Jordanian street’ to end their sympathy with Saddam’s remnants … who exploit the freedom in this country to have a safe shelter to plot their criminal acts against Iraqis.”

Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi agrees, stating:

she did not believe al-Qaeda “or any of these violent extremists have had support among mainstream Arab opinion at all. Now they are making sure they are turning everyone against them.”

Can we believe it? Here’s evidence to bolster Ashrawi’s claims:

Braizat said in an opinion poll conducted last year by his office, 67 percent of Jordanian adult respondents had considered al Qaeda in Iraq “a legitimate resistance organization.” That attitude may be changing, he said Friday, explaining that he had spoken since the attacks to 10 survey participants who held favorable views of al Qaeda; nine of them had changed their minds.

It seems difficult–perhaps impossible–for Jordanians to excuse this as an insurgency or a nationalist movement fighting against an evil occupation. Since Al-Zarqawi is a Jordanian, this feels like a case of fratricide:

“Oh my God, oh my God. Is it possible that Arabs are killing Arabs, Muslims killing Muslims? For what did they do that?” screamed 35-year-old Najah Akhras, who lost two nieces in the attack. Similar thoughts were heard over and over throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Until now Najah Akhras had somehow avoided knowing that yes, Arabs kill Arabs, Muslims kill Muslims–although how, after watching the Iraq-Iran war, or seeing what is happening these days in Iraq, or even learning the Black September history of Jordan itself, I don’t really know. Perhaps when reality is just too horrific, the mind closes down and denies–until the horror comes home in a way that no longer can be denied.

One wonders why al-Zarqawi didn’t heed his far more strategic mentor, al-Zawaheri, who cautioned him about the negative PR fallout from this sort of thing. And why, oh why, did Zarqawi actually claim this as his own act, rather than letting people blame it on the Jews or the Americans, as many in the Arab world did 9/11? My guess is that Zarqawi just doesn’t care; his focus is on proving that he’s badder than old King Kong, and meaner than a junkyard dog.

Lest you think I’m being frivolous by quoting Jim Croce–that’s not my intent. I am simply noting that although Zarqawi has political/Islamicist motives, his actions here don’t seem to be strategic at all. In fact, they seem counterproductive (as Zawaheri understood), and more in the realm of psychological pathology writ large: that is, he is a psychopath on a world stage.

The details of Zarqawi’s criminal past:

He spent his time scrapping and playing football in Zarqa’s dusty streets and surprised no one by dropping out of school aged 17.

He drifted into casual crime as an enforcer and general-purpose thug. At some time, he was imprisoned for sexual assault. On the streets, he learned the art of violence. It was a lesson he used to dramatic effect when he hacked off the head of American engineer Nick Berg in the first “snuff video” to emerge from Iraq.

Indeed, much of his violence has a street crime feel to it. It is brutal, direct, unflinching and unthinking. Not for Zarqawi the press interviews with Westerners that bin Laden once gave. Not for Zarqawi the pampered Saudi childhood. Not for Zarqawi the meandering meditations on Islamic theory as a justification for murder. If Zarqawi and his network are eclipsing bin Laden and al-Qaeda, as some terrorist experts believe, then it is a form of terrorism that betrays its roots in Zarqa’s brutish underworld, not some austere Arabian seminary.

Jordan has reason to regret its previous leniency towards its spawn Zarqawi. He was imprisoned there for plotting to replace the monarchy with an Islamic state, but was inexplicably released in 1997 after serving only five years in prison.

NOTE: I wrote most of this post last night, intending to finish it today. But this morning, when I checked out the NY Times, I wondered whether I’d spoken too soon about this being a case in which the Israelis weren’t being blamed. Take a look at this front-page article headlined: “Many in Jordan see old enemy in attack: Israel,” which describes blaming the same-old same-old scapegoat.

However, it’s impossible to know from the Times article how many this “many” refers to. As is so often the case these days, the Times sees no need to quantify it. That there are such people in Jordan and elsewhere I have no doubt, but that news is only useful if we know how extensive the belief is, and the Times offers no help with that.

However, the Times does offer some rather insightful remarks on the “blame Israel first” crowd from several Arab scholars and pundits who seem to have thought some of this through:

Whatever the cause, the result is the same: “In the first place, people don’t even recognize the reality around them,” said Muhammad el-Sayed Said, a political analyst at the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Egypt. “Secondly, they continue to overlook and ignore the problem without supporting a consistent anti-terrorism campaign, which the government might be seeking.”

Dawoud al-Shoryan, a prominent writer and journalist from Saudi Arabia, says he is not convinced that those who blame Israel really believe it. But, he added, many people are deeply angry at United States policy in the region, including its occupation of Iraq, and blaming Israel is a way of conferring some degree of legitimacy on a crime that would be considered unspeakable if committed by a Muslim.

“They try to hide the hideous face of terrorism by hanging it on the United States and Israel,” he said. “Shifting the accusation is nothing but a subconscious attempt to justify the act.”

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, it seems.

So, which point of view will win out? My guess is that, whatever the Times says, the Jordan hotel bombings have cut into some of that denial, and that quite a few Jordanians were mugged by the tragic and horrific reality of 11/9.