Socialist realism is making a comeback in some strange places – Hollywood and the Pentagon are good examples. Like the Soviet propaganda flics of yore, the good guys are ten feet tall and the bad guys are ambiguous nitwits. The action film, Act of Valor, purports to show “active-duty SEALs,” an elite cadre specially trained for covert warfare, in operations “based on true events.” For openers, it’s hard to quibble about the hype for feature length propaganda, but it’s also difficult to reconcile “true” anything and a Hollywood film crew.
And the nonsense about covert or secret is just that. Clandestine forces, and what they do, haven’t been secrets since the Kennedy administration. If special operations are covert, you might ask; why is the Department of Defense in bed with Tinsel Town again? If the secret Navy is on a heading from cloak and dagger to Hollywood Boulevard, recruiting numbers should hit bottom in no time. True warriors make poor actors and the best actors often make implausible warriors.
Beyond advertising hyperbole, this film fails as a recruiting incentive, art, or politics. Indeed, nearly two thirds of the early professional reviews are negative. And let’s not be too quick to write off the Media for their usual liberal bias. This ham-handed attempt to glamorize the special operations deserves all the bad press it gets. The whole project looks like a poorly made, and politically fishy, video game.
Kathyrn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) was an award winning piece of military realism a few years ago because the film had good actors and great writing - sparse and laced with grim humor. Act of Valor has none of this. Hurt Locker had the look and feel of a documentary; because the director had the good sense to step back and avoid the usual Hollywood bravo sierra.
Who in the Pentagon or Department of Defense thought it was a good idea to show real SEALs fighting a fake enemy? Are we not fighting a real Islamists in what is now approaching half-dozen real Muslim countries? All the real action is in the real Muslim world; yet Act of Valor would have you believe that the bad guys are Russian drug dealers, Chechens, or Filipinos with weird accents. Are we to believe that the world-wide terror campaign against peace and civility only flourishes in the Caucuses or Mindanao?
The problem with national security awareness is not that the taxpayer or potential recruits have a diminished appreciation of military heroes. The problem with retention and recruitment is that the Pentagon, and now Hollywood it seems, can not paint an honest picture of the threat – an enemy with a toxic political theology that inspires suicide bombers. No one dies for ambiguity!
It’s a safe bet that every suicide bomber has a clear, albeit necrotic, picture of their enemies; and those enemies appear to be almost any Jew, apostate, or infidel in Europe or America. And Islamist clarity, no matter how malignant, covers motives too; in short, doing God’s will, crying “Allahu, allahu akbar” all the way to perdition.
Successful wars have four essentials; a competent militia, an unambiguous picture of the threat, a supportive populace, and a political class willing to be candid about the first three. After two decades of combat, only the first standard has been met; and the outlook for the other three is not good. For any perceptive audience, Act of Valor does nothing but underline some intractable and long-standing deficits of strategic candor.
The appearance of this film in an election year is also troubling. This is not to say the movies shouldn’t have political spin, but if the film is sponsored by the Pentagon, the trip wire between admirals and politicians should launch a blinding flare. The only thing “covert” about Act of Valor may be the politics.
Act of Valor, ironically similar to recent national security estimates, is a transparent, if not deceptive, picture of the who and the why of a tedious ongoing war. The taxpayer, that pays the bills, and the warriors, that do the bleeding, deserve better from Washington and Hollywood.
Think for a moment about the real subtext of Act of Valor. Through film, the Navy brass seeks to recruit brave men to fight in a series of wars where Europe and America have already surrendered! There is little evidence today that Europe or America is willing to defend the culture that made industry, democracy, art, and science possible.
Both political parties no longer use the language of victory. Indeed, the political class can not bring themselves to name the enemy, no less defeat him. The bad guys are always vague euphemisms like “radicals” or “extremists.” Terms like “stability’ and “nation building” have replaced achievable military goals and political objectives - like victory.
The oldest American military decoration is the Purple Heart. The front has a miniature profile of George Washington; the back is inscribed with three words “For Military Merit.” Sadly, this soulless movie, politically correct and trite, has little to do with real heart or real merit.
“We are not going to baby sit (sic) any civil wars.” – Barak H. Obama
--------------------------------------------------------------
G. Murphy Donovan is a Vietnam veteran. He writes frequently about national security and politics. A version of this review, with hyperlinks, appears in the 1 March 2012 edition of the American Thinker.
Showing posts with label Islamism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islamism. Show all posts
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Sunday, September 12, 2010
The Shifting Paradigm of Islam
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." - Winston
Churchill.
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has discovered an Egyptian anti-Semite. Unfortunately, the object of Cohen’s ire has been dead for over four decades. Yes, Cohen who once labeled Israel a “historical mistake,” has taken to the pages of the Washington Post to chastise a martyred cadaver. Indeed, Cohen castigates The Economist for its review of Sayyid Qutb’s biography which celebrates Sayyid’s contributions to contemporary Islamic political “reform” while ignoring the bigotry for which he is equally famous. Cohen’s column makes you wonder where he and the American Press corps have been for the last 50 years. Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood (al Ikwan) has already been taken to the woodshed by Cohen’s betters; the likes of Paul Johnson, Bernard Lewis, and Paul Berman. Cohen also suggests that the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is starting to get thin. Do you think, Dick?
There are precious few columns in the Post or other dailies about contemporary home grown anti-Semitism and hate speech like that of Louis Farrakhan (aka Louis Walcott) of the Nation of Islam and Malik Zulu Shabazz (aka Paris Lewis) of the New Black Panthers. Indeed, Cohen could audit Farrakhan’s hate speech on one of his many visits to Howard University right there in Washington, DC. In case anyone missed it, the old Panthers, who were once garden variety black nationalists, have been hijacked by another malignant strain of Islam. Most of the “new” cats are radical Muslims.
But the most egregious negligence of the Press on all things Islamic is their failure to track the bloom of foreign Muslim study programs, cultural centers, mosques, and related organizations in the West – especially those on American university campuses. Indeed, one of more notable Saudi funded institutes thrives, again, in Cohen’s backyard at Georgetown University.
The Alwaleed Bin-Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding is funded by “Prince” Alwaleed whose autocratic family, the house of al Saud, mandates Wahhabism as the state religion of Saudi Arabia. Alwaleed owns three palaces, the world’s largest yacht, and the world’s largest private airplane. He was educated in US schools, yet he still practices polygamy. Alwaleed’s lifestyle and similar Saud family excesses help to make countrymen like Osama bin Laden possible.
A Freedom House study of Wahhabi publications used in American mosques concluded that the Saudi brand of Islam: opposed all non believers, advocated hatred of all other religions, and blamed “democracy” for the pathologies of the 20th Century. Wahhabis also control the Islamic shrines at Mecca and Medina, sacred to Muslims of all stripes, yet off limits to non believers, infidels, dar al harb (literally “the house of war”).
There are no Jewish or Christian centers of “understanding” in Saudi Arabia. Cohen and most of his journalistic colleagues have been remarkably uncurious about the ideology, funding, and objectives of a host of Islamic propagandists, most of whom originate in the Arab world. Many scholars suggest that Saudi Arabia alone may have spent as much “87 billion dollars” to date to spread “theofacism.”
No surprise then when John Esposito, the noisy Catholic director of the Alwaleed Center, was quick to come to the defense of the ground zero mosque - even beating President Obama to the punch. Twenty million Saudi petro-dollars did not come to Georgetown University without political obligations or ideological strings.
Beyond pederasty, it’s difficult to know what Catholic hierarchies believe they have in common with Islamist elites.
Take Turkey as an illustration. The Turks have long been held up as an example of Islamic “moderation,” yet starting with the Armenian genocide (1915) official state policy has sought to eliminate all vestiges of ecumenicism in what was arguably the oldest Christian diocese in the world. The only seminary in Turkey has been closed now by Ankara fiat; and without clergy, the Christian congregation has been reduced to marginal numbers. The Eastern Rite Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul has sought a dialogue with the Islamist regime in Ankara for years - to no avail. Anatolian Christianity is being exterminated in slow motion. Even in the so-called “moderate” Muslim world, tolerance is a one-way street.
No less an Islamic eminence than the Turkish prime minister has put a stake through the heart of moderation. Indeed, on several occasions Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that to put the adjective “moderate” before the noun “Muslim” is an insult to Islam: “The term ‘moderate Islam’ is ugly and offensive; Islam is Islam,” says Erdogan. If Muslims themselves don’t believe in Islamic moderation, why is this myth so pervasive among Europeans and Americans?
Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, discredited Swiss professor of taqiyya (the Islamic art of deception), and celebrated “moderate” was recently granted a visa, courtesy of Hillary Clinton, to tour the American academy, including a stop at Georgetown University. Previously, Ramadan had been offered a university sinecure at Notre Dame University. Ramadan, labeled a “dangerous” man by the French foreign minister, is notorious for breathing fire at young European Muslims while singing dulcet notes of moderation when speaking French or English to infidels. Ramadan defends the infamous Islamic practice of stoning women. How moderate is that?
Clearly, academic America is motivated by petro-dollars, seen as an alternative revenue stream. These same scholars seem all too anxious to return the favor by defending Islamism and associated practices on cue under the burkas of ecumenicism, culture, and moderation. Tolerating intolerance in the name of tolerance is not a virtue; it is an oxymoron; the first impenetrable paradox of the early 21th Century.
Richard Cohen’s opinion columns and similar reporting, like that of Michelle Boorstein, is typical of most journalism or academic writing on all things Islamic; more notable for what it excludes or ignores. Qutb is not simply a lone agitator for Muslim irredentism; that creed is now spread by the global reach of the Muslim Brotherhood, cutouts, and subsidiaries. Hamas and al Qaeda are just two of the more notorious military spin-offs of the Brotherhood.
The spread of an equally virulent Wahhabism with Saudi monies is complemented by a plethora of irredentist Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan. 60% of Pakistani clerics attend such religious schools. Deobandi, Taliban, and al Qaeda fanaticism are now the dominant Islamic idioms in South Asia. In flood ravaged Pakistan, the void created by Islamabad incompetence is being filled by radicals.
With the help of Arab financing, the spread of radical Islamic proselytizing centers in the form of mosques, cultural centers, and madrasses now threatens the myth of Islamic “moderation” – especially in Europe and America. The moderation paradigm has been carefully cultivated, with little or no evidence, by a combination of Islamic missionaries, venal academics, naïve journalists, and fearful politicians in the West.
Nonetheless, major Arab states like Saudi Arabia (the richest), the Emirates, Egypt (the most populous), Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and the two Palestines are slowly shedding the veils of victimhood. World Health Organization studies of Egypt alone suggest that as many as 90% of Egyptian women have been castrated. Consanguinity in the Emirates is thought to be 50% among Arabs.
Even if terrorism, Sharia financing, and jihad proselytizing were set aside; the prevalence of these and other irredentist practices, which also include fatwas (summary judgments), honor killings, beheadings, amputations, stoning, flogging, polygamy, and child marriage, would put the lie to any conventional notions of “moderation” in the Muslim world. Arguments about whether these traditions are religious or cultural are becoming less and less relevant. These practices are being exposed as part of the weft and warp of dar al Islam.
Not every Muslim is a terrorist, yet nearly every terrorist is a Muslim. In the past year, 90 terror groups struck in 83 countries where there were nearly 60, 000 casualties. Sunni attacks alone accounted for more than half the victims.
Recent Pew surveys of Arab attitudes towards Jews put another nail in the moderation coffin. In the countries surveyed, negative attitudes towards Jews were well north of 90%. Europeans and Americans didn’t fare much better.
While perceptions about the Sunni side of the Islamic equation are shifting in Europe and America; there has never been any doubt about radical Shiite irredentism in Iran and elsewhere. Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses, a novel which mocks the Koran and Mohamed, still has a Shiite price on his head. Indeed, just as theocratic Arabs hijacked a noble Egyptian culture over time; a more recent surge of Shia Islamists has commandeered a noble Persian tradition. Israel, Europe, and America are now in the crosshairs. Nonetheless, signs of blowback are appearing in both worlds.
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, a groundbreaking study of shifting paradigms. Kuhn argued that reasonable observers might look at the same evidence and come to radically different conclusions because both proceed with different bias or assumptions. He also argued that the reconciliation of conflicting views, paradigm shifts, was glacial – often requiring a new generation of analysts.
The conventional wisdom about Islam, or more precisely its status as a morally equivalent religious culture, is starting to shift. The tectonic plates of opinion are moving almost imperceptibly towards the recognition of radical Islam as a necrotic menace, an undemocratic, if not toxic, political paradigm. Appropriately enough, the early evidence of the shift is iconic.
In 2002, a Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was found decapitated and literally decimated (cut into 10 pieces) by Islamists in Pakistan. Then there was the award winning 2007 UNICEF ‘engagement’ photo of a nine year old girl and a bearded, aging patriarch. Then comes the photo of a mutilated young Afghan girl on the cover of Time Magazine, nose and ears cut off by Islamic fanatics for some minor transgression. The girl was rescued on a roadside by some American GIs before she bled to death.
Most recently, in New York City, the ground zero mosque and its controversial imam have been swept up in a vortex of public dismay over the cleric’s politics, foreign finances, and Islam’s dismissal of American sensitivities. “In your face” is sometimes out of place even in Manhattan.
Defenders of the mosque refuse to recognize the politics, foreign financing, or the religious double standards of Muslims, especially Arabs, when it comes to infidel (aka “unclean”) churches and or synagogues in Muslim countries. Adding insult to injury, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, has been hired by the US State Department as an American outreach (sic) spokesman to the Emirates. Americans are beginning to recognize the lengths to which apologists will go to defend the indefensible. Public opinion polls reflect that dismay.
The Islamic paradigm is shifting in Europe and America. And the questions these changes raise have global consequences. As the appeasement paradigm oxidizes, the West will ask itself why non-Muslims should sacrifice their children and treasure to save Islam from itself. And if fanaticism is more of a threat to dar al Islam than the West, infidels need to know why “moderate” Arab and Muslim armies are not at the front. Europe and America will also need to know why “moderate” Arab treasure is not financing the fight against extremism - instead of buying yachts, palaces, and propaganda pulpits in Europe and America.
As we speak, Saudi Sunnis are praying that the Israelis will make short work of Shiite apostates in Tehran. Yet, the question remains; why should Israel, Europe, or America fight any battles for or within Islam?
All of which raises a penultimate strategic question: What are the consequences of a transient Islamist triumph in South Asia or the Middle East? Do we continue to support Muslim royals, oligarchs, and tyrants or do we let them fall to their fate in the hands of fellow believers? If the Israeli experience provides any precedent, no amount of reason or appeasement (see land for peace) will placate Muslim elites or radical insurgents.
The short answer may be that any merger of Islamist non-state and Islamic state actors simplifies the targeting problem. The West may die from a thousand cuts before it prevails in any series of debilitating guerilla wars. Conversely, NATO still retains the conventional and nuclear superiority to make short work of state actors. If conflict is inevitable, why let a weaker, decentralized adversary dictate the terms of the fight?
Tactical simplicity often provides strategic clarity. Islam is not a monolith, nor is it a monoculture; nonetheless, for too many, it aspires to be both. These aspirations pit the irreconcilable paradigms of theofacism and democracy against each other. The coming clash will not be military, political, religious, or cultural; it will be all of these.
___________________________________________
This essay first appeared in the American Thinker on 11 September 2010. The author also writes at G. Murphy Donovan.
Churchill.
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has discovered an Egyptian anti-Semite. Unfortunately, the object of Cohen’s ire has been dead for over four decades. Yes, Cohen who once labeled Israel a “historical mistake,” has taken to the pages of the Washington Post to chastise a martyred cadaver. Indeed, Cohen castigates The Economist for its review of Sayyid Qutb’s biography which celebrates Sayyid’s contributions to contemporary Islamic political “reform” while ignoring the bigotry for which he is equally famous. Cohen’s column makes you wonder where he and the American Press corps have been for the last 50 years. Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood (al Ikwan) has already been taken to the woodshed by Cohen’s betters; the likes of Paul Johnson, Bernard Lewis, and Paul Berman. Cohen also suggests that the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is starting to get thin. Do you think, Dick?
There are precious few columns in the Post or other dailies about contemporary home grown anti-Semitism and hate speech like that of Louis Farrakhan (aka Louis Walcott) of the Nation of Islam and Malik Zulu Shabazz (aka Paris Lewis) of the New Black Panthers. Indeed, Cohen could audit Farrakhan’s hate speech on one of his many visits to Howard University right there in Washington, DC. In case anyone missed it, the old Panthers, who were once garden variety black nationalists, have been hijacked by another malignant strain of Islam. Most of the “new” cats are radical Muslims.
But the most egregious negligence of the Press on all things Islamic is their failure to track the bloom of foreign Muslim study programs, cultural centers, mosques, and related organizations in the West – especially those on American university campuses. Indeed, one of more notable Saudi funded institutes thrives, again, in Cohen’s backyard at Georgetown University.
The Alwaleed Bin-Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding is funded by “Prince” Alwaleed whose autocratic family, the house of al Saud, mandates Wahhabism as the state religion of Saudi Arabia. Alwaleed owns three palaces, the world’s largest yacht, and the world’s largest private airplane. He was educated in US schools, yet he still practices polygamy. Alwaleed’s lifestyle and similar Saud family excesses help to make countrymen like Osama bin Laden possible.
A Freedom House study of Wahhabi publications used in American mosques concluded that the Saudi brand of Islam: opposed all non believers, advocated hatred of all other religions, and blamed “democracy” for the pathologies of the 20th Century. Wahhabis also control the Islamic shrines at Mecca and Medina, sacred to Muslims of all stripes, yet off limits to non believers, infidels, dar al harb (literally “the house of war”).
There are no Jewish or Christian centers of “understanding” in Saudi Arabia. Cohen and most of his journalistic colleagues have been remarkably uncurious about the ideology, funding, and objectives of a host of Islamic propagandists, most of whom originate in the Arab world. Many scholars suggest that Saudi Arabia alone may have spent as much “87 billion dollars” to date to spread “theofacism.”
No surprise then when John Esposito, the noisy Catholic director of the Alwaleed Center, was quick to come to the defense of the ground zero mosque - even beating President Obama to the punch. Twenty million Saudi petro-dollars did not come to Georgetown University without political obligations or ideological strings.
Beyond pederasty, it’s difficult to know what Catholic hierarchies believe they have in common with Islamist elites.
Take Turkey as an illustration. The Turks have long been held up as an example of Islamic “moderation,” yet starting with the Armenian genocide (1915) official state policy has sought to eliminate all vestiges of ecumenicism in what was arguably the oldest Christian diocese in the world. The only seminary in Turkey has been closed now by Ankara fiat; and without clergy, the Christian congregation has been reduced to marginal numbers. The Eastern Rite Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul has sought a dialogue with the Islamist regime in Ankara for years - to no avail. Anatolian Christianity is being exterminated in slow motion. Even in the so-called “moderate” Muslim world, tolerance is a one-way street.
No less an Islamic eminence than the Turkish prime minister has put a stake through the heart of moderation. Indeed, on several occasions Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that to put the adjective “moderate” before the noun “Muslim” is an insult to Islam: “The term ‘moderate Islam’ is ugly and offensive; Islam is Islam,” says Erdogan. If Muslims themselves don’t believe in Islamic moderation, why is this myth so pervasive among Europeans and Americans?
Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, discredited Swiss professor of taqiyya (the Islamic art of deception), and celebrated “moderate” was recently granted a visa, courtesy of Hillary Clinton, to tour the American academy, including a stop at Georgetown University. Previously, Ramadan had been offered a university sinecure at Notre Dame University. Ramadan, labeled a “dangerous” man by the French foreign minister, is notorious for breathing fire at young European Muslims while singing dulcet notes of moderation when speaking French or English to infidels. Ramadan defends the infamous Islamic practice of stoning women. How moderate is that?
Clearly, academic America is motivated by petro-dollars, seen as an alternative revenue stream. These same scholars seem all too anxious to return the favor by defending Islamism and associated practices on cue under the burkas of ecumenicism, culture, and moderation. Tolerating intolerance in the name of tolerance is not a virtue; it is an oxymoron; the first impenetrable paradox of the early 21th Century.
Richard Cohen’s opinion columns and similar reporting, like that of Michelle Boorstein, is typical of most journalism or academic writing on all things Islamic; more notable for what it excludes or ignores. Qutb is not simply a lone agitator for Muslim irredentism; that creed is now spread by the global reach of the Muslim Brotherhood, cutouts, and subsidiaries. Hamas and al Qaeda are just two of the more notorious military spin-offs of the Brotherhood.
The spread of an equally virulent Wahhabism with Saudi monies is complemented by a plethora of irredentist Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan. 60% of Pakistani clerics attend such religious schools. Deobandi, Taliban, and al Qaeda fanaticism are now the dominant Islamic idioms in South Asia. In flood ravaged Pakistan, the void created by Islamabad incompetence is being filled by radicals.
With the help of Arab financing, the spread of radical Islamic proselytizing centers in the form of mosques, cultural centers, and madrasses now threatens the myth of Islamic “moderation” – especially in Europe and America. The moderation paradigm has been carefully cultivated, with little or no evidence, by a combination of Islamic missionaries, venal academics, naïve journalists, and fearful politicians in the West.
Nonetheless, major Arab states like Saudi Arabia (the richest), the Emirates, Egypt (the most populous), Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and the two Palestines are slowly shedding the veils of victimhood. World Health Organization studies of Egypt alone suggest that as many as 90% of Egyptian women have been castrated. Consanguinity in the Emirates is thought to be 50% among Arabs.
Even if terrorism, Sharia financing, and jihad proselytizing were set aside; the prevalence of these and other irredentist practices, which also include fatwas (summary judgments), honor killings, beheadings, amputations, stoning, flogging, polygamy, and child marriage, would put the lie to any conventional notions of “moderation” in the Muslim world. Arguments about whether these traditions are religious or cultural are becoming less and less relevant. These practices are being exposed as part of the weft and warp of dar al Islam.
Not every Muslim is a terrorist, yet nearly every terrorist is a Muslim. In the past year, 90 terror groups struck in 83 countries where there were nearly 60, 000 casualties. Sunni attacks alone accounted for more than half the victims.
Recent Pew surveys of Arab attitudes towards Jews put another nail in the moderation coffin. In the countries surveyed, negative attitudes towards Jews were well north of 90%. Europeans and Americans didn’t fare much better.
While perceptions about the Sunni side of the Islamic equation are shifting in Europe and America; there has never been any doubt about radical Shiite irredentism in Iran and elsewhere. Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses, a novel which mocks the Koran and Mohamed, still has a Shiite price on his head. Indeed, just as theocratic Arabs hijacked a noble Egyptian culture over time; a more recent surge of Shia Islamists has commandeered a noble Persian tradition. Israel, Europe, and America are now in the crosshairs. Nonetheless, signs of blowback are appearing in both worlds.
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, a groundbreaking study of shifting paradigms. Kuhn argued that reasonable observers might look at the same evidence and come to radically different conclusions because both proceed with different bias or assumptions. He also argued that the reconciliation of conflicting views, paradigm shifts, was glacial – often requiring a new generation of analysts.
The conventional wisdom about Islam, or more precisely its status as a morally equivalent religious culture, is starting to shift. The tectonic plates of opinion are moving almost imperceptibly towards the recognition of radical Islam as a necrotic menace, an undemocratic, if not toxic, political paradigm. Appropriately enough, the early evidence of the shift is iconic.
In 2002, a Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was found decapitated and literally decimated (cut into 10 pieces) by Islamists in Pakistan. Then there was the award winning 2007 UNICEF ‘engagement’ photo of a nine year old girl and a bearded, aging patriarch. Then comes the photo of a mutilated young Afghan girl on the cover of Time Magazine, nose and ears cut off by Islamic fanatics for some minor transgression. The girl was rescued on a roadside by some American GIs before she bled to death.
Most recently, in New York City, the ground zero mosque and its controversial imam have been swept up in a vortex of public dismay over the cleric’s politics, foreign finances, and Islam’s dismissal of American sensitivities. “In your face” is sometimes out of place even in Manhattan.
Defenders of the mosque refuse to recognize the politics, foreign financing, or the religious double standards of Muslims, especially Arabs, when it comes to infidel (aka “unclean”) churches and or synagogues in Muslim countries. Adding insult to injury, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, has been hired by the US State Department as an American outreach (sic) spokesman to the Emirates. Americans are beginning to recognize the lengths to which apologists will go to defend the indefensible. Public opinion polls reflect that dismay.
The Islamic paradigm is shifting in Europe and America. And the questions these changes raise have global consequences. As the appeasement paradigm oxidizes, the West will ask itself why non-Muslims should sacrifice their children and treasure to save Islam from itself. And if fanaticism is more of a threat to dar al Islam than the West, infidels need to know why “moderate” Arab and Muslim armies are not at the front. Europe and America will also need to know why “moderate” Arab treasure is not financing the fight against extremism - instead of buying yachts, palaces, and propaganda pulpits in Europe and America.
As we speak, Saudi Sunnis are praying that the Israelis will make short work of Shiite apostates in Tehran. Yet, the question remains; why should Israel, Europe, or America fight any battles for or within Islam?
All of which raises a penultimate strategic question: What are the consequences of a transient Islamist triumph in South Asia or the Middle East? Do we continue to support Muslim royals, oligarchs, and tyrants or do we let them fall to their fate in the hands of fellow believers? If the Israeli experience provides any precedent, no amount of reason or appeasement (see land for peace) will placate Muslim elites or radical insurgents.
The short answer may be that any merger of Islamist non-state and Islamic state actors simplifies the targeting problem. The West may die from a thousand cuts before it prevails in any series of debilitating guerilla wars. Conversely, NATO still retains the conventional and nuclear superiority to make short work of state actors. If conflict is inevitable, why let a weaker, decentralized adversary dictate the terms of the fight?
Tactical simplicity often provides strategic clarity. Islam is not a monolith, nor is it a monoculture; nonetheless, for too many, it aspires to be both. These aspirations pit the irreconcilable paradigms of theofacism and democracy against each other. The coming clash will not be military, political, religious, or cultural; it will be all of these.
___________________________________________
This essay first appeared in the American Thinker on 11 September 2010. The author also writes at G. Murphy Donovan.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
The Binary Imperative
“Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced. Whatever is above all price has dignity.” – Emmanuel Kant
Agnotology is the study of ignorance, or not knowing. As such it is the antithesis of epistemology, the study of the scope and limits of knowledge. In spite of its Greek roots, the word was minted within the last decade by Robert Proctor, a California academic who specializes in the history of science. The term Agnotology was coined to discredit the “junk science” used to defend cigarette smoking; but more recently it could be found imbedded in the faux science used to defend theories of climate change (nee “global warming”).
Surely ignorance itself is not a modern phenomenon. An individual might be expert on some subject, but no person is expert on all subjects. And specialized expertise is often dangerous; Dr. Frankenstein of literature and Werner Von Braun, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Einstein of recent memory are famous examples.
When the latter three wandered beyond their niche of expertise, specialized knowledge was of little value, hardly fungible. Von Braun and Heidegger became Nazis and the German refugee Einstein, as a Princeton recluse, was a late arrival as a critic of mid- 20th Century German behavior. Even within his specialty, Einstein was morally ambiguous; he was for nuclear weapons before he was against them.
In isolation, science is the study of process; how things work, not how they should work. Pure science has few concerns with ethics; legal restrictions maybe, but few notions of propriety beyond that.
Ignorance, scientific and moral, is universal to some degree or other. You might also expect ignorance to be value neutral; a kind of immunity for unfortunates who do not or will not understand. Not in a democracy! Ignorance is not a defense in any common law tradition.
All are called before the bar for what a “reasonable man” might be expected to know. Ignorance is indeed held to a higher standard than knowledge. This facet alone makes the study of ignorance a worthy field of inquiry.
Thus Agnotology is not simply the study of vacuums of knowledge, but it is also a study of responsibility and societal expectations. Dr. Proctor’s wife therefore refined the definition of Agnotology as a kind of “culturally produced” ignorance; clearly implying that social movements and motives play a role. Unlike Epistemology, Agnotology carries significant moral hazard.
No small wonder then that the praxis of Agnotology covers a multitude of sins; structural ignorance, inattention, suppression, selective fact finding, secrecy, manipulation, plagiarism, and other engineering tools. These are inspired by some combination of social, political, religious, or cultural ideology (including political correctness). Indeed, many observers see Agnotology, or false narratives, as the product of social and political struggle – a kind of perverse dialectic that creates and sustains pervasive ignorance – beliefs at odds with truth.
Giving this phenomenon a name is a new development; but clearly several related practices have been around for centuries. Politicians use “opposition research” to discredit opponents, intelligence agents use disinformation, and soldiers use psychological operations (aka PSYOPS) to confuse the enemy. Perhaps the most notorious subterfuge was the Communist practice of agitation and propaganda (agitprop), the use of arts or Media to incite violence or discredit opponents. Agitprop could be compared to the contemporary use of “talking points,” repetition to sustain false narratives, a practice common to journalism and politics.
The communications revolution of the past sixty years was thought to extract the teeth from agitprop. Indeed, communications philosophers like Marshall McCluhan went so far as to forecast a “global village,” a theory that suggests that electronics would create a kind of value neutral, global central nervous system where judgments might be suspended. The content of Media, such as TV, according to McCluhan, shouldn’t matter either. Indeed, content like The View, Kieth Olberman, Bill Maher, Sixty Minutes, Homer Simpson, and Grand Theft Auto might be confirmation of McCluhan’s influence, if not his theory.
If content didn’t matter, then advertisers would be wasting their money. Commercial content seeks to influence minds and open wallets. If content doesn’t matter, then censorship shouldn’t matter either. Here Beijing Communists recently hoisted Google’s Eric Schmidt on McCluhan’s petard. Surely other morally ambiguous entrepreneurs like Microsoft now wait for the ax to drop. Indeed, the evidence to date suggests that communications philosophers, scientists, and engineers are clueless about the cultural implications of an internet revolution - “unfettered” by value judgment.
It seems that value neutral techno-optimism fails to account for two developments.
The first is the centrifugal spin of political forces since the end of WWII. The world has not become more unitary, as McCluhan had forecast, it has become more fractured. Membership at the UN has grown tenfold since 1942. Neither democracy nor enlightenment is the dominant idiom among a resounding majority of new members.
A bloom of international institutions has accompanied the colonial meltdown. Like the sponsor states, organizations like the UN, the European Union, the Arab League, and the African Union rapidly oxidized into expensive talking clubs where tyrants, apologists, oligarchs, anti-Semites, and fiscal illiterates predominate.
The second development is the realization, now formalized as science by Dr. Proctor, that communications gadgetry is as likely to spread ignorance as knowledge. Here, the growth of fanatical religious irredentism is exhibit “A.” And the donut hole of scientific integrity is being filled by theocratic barbarisms that many political “scientists” and academics defend in the name of culture or ecumenicism.
The thread of utopian optimism that guides modern science and engineering has a specific lineage in German philosophy; a theme that runs through Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Lenin, and now Fukuyama. That thread is the assumption that struggle, or dialectics, coupled with the passage of time, is somehow a kind of progress. Ironically, religious irredentists, progressive journalists, and academic utopians seem to share a similar vision of the future. Christopher Hitchens, a step-child of Marx, in his recent best seller, God is Not Great, uses language like “unfettered (sic) scientific inquiry.” Josef Mengele might have been comfortable with such imagery.
Unfortunately, the science of communications is a modern Janus: both a marketplace for ideas and a nitwit’s megaphone. The centrifugal forces of anti-democratic politics are at odds with the gravitational pull of improved communications. Indeed, some combination of technology and false content could undo the very democratic traditions that made the internet possible.
The pandering of scientific monopolies (e.g. Google and Microsoft) to totalitarian regimes has an obvious logic beyond markets. Business is thought to be a vehicle for change. Yet, the sword of commerce also cuts two ways; do they become more like us or do we become more like them? With market communists like China and Venezuela, the jury is still out. The evidence in the Muslim world is far less ambiguous. Islamism clearly has the upper hand – a growing anti-democratic malignancy within the Muslim world and the West.
The study of ignorance, or Agnotology, is still a new science. Nonetheless, a number of axioms might now be postulated:
The first is that truth, especially scientific truth, has a moral component. There are no “unfettered” sciences, especially communications.
An understanding that knowledge and ignorance (masquerading as content) have equal footing in the internet age might be a second axiom. While reason is necessary, only values are sufficient in the pursuit of truth. Unfortunately, the willingness of democracies to defend either reason or democratic values is still a cipher.
A third postulate is the realization that modern journalism is not so much “the first draft of history” as it might be the last draft of truth. Journalism (Agnotology, Proctor and Schiebinger, p. 266) is clearly the prime suspect in the viral spread of ignorance and false narratives, now formalized as Agnotology. McCluhan captured the danger when he concluded: “News, far more than art, is artifact.”
As an academic philosopher, Marshall McCluhan was familiar, no doubt, with the role of moral philosophy in the development of commerce and culture in the West; a tradition that included; Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant. Kant was unique because he was the first great modern ethicist without religious credentials. His arguments had a profound influence on western epistemology and legal traditions. His “categorical imperative,” the admonition to do the right thing (fiat justitia, pereat mundus), was a duty; an obligation based on reason informed by values - not appeals to tradition or theology.
If there is now to be a science of ignorance, its implications are as relevant as epistemology or any subordinate field like communications theory. McCluhan was wrong. No medium, or content, is value neutral. This is not to say that McCluhan was amoral; he, like Google, Microsoft, and contemporary content providers, simply chose to ignore the values issue.
Philosophers and entrepreneurs of the Internet Age at some point will be forced to consider a “binary imperative;” step up to the ethical plate or lose the cultural game. If we fail to consider what is best, surely we will succumb to the worst.
……………………………………..
This essay appeared in the 29 July 10 issue of Family Security Matters.
Agnotology is the study of ignorance, or not knowing. As such it is the antithesis of epistemology, the study of the scope and limits of knowledge. In spite of its Greek roots, the word was minted within the last decade by Robert Proctor, a California academic who specializes in the history of science. The term Agnotology was coined to discredit the “junk science” used to defend cigarette smoking; but more recently it could be found imbedded in the faux science used to defend theories of climate change (nee “global warming”).
Surely ignorance itself is not a modern phenomenon. An individual might be expert on some subject, but no person is expert on all subjects. And specialized expertise is often dangerous; Dr. Frankenstein of literature and Werner Von Braun, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Einstein of recent memory are famous examples.
When the latter three wandered beyond their niche of expertise, specialized knowledge was of little value, hardly fungible. Von Braun and Heidegger became Nazis and the German refugee Einstein, as a Princeton recluse, was a late arrival as a critic of mid- 20th Century German behavior. Even within his specialty, Einstein was morally ambiguous; he was for nuclear weapons before he was against them.
In isolation, science is the study of process; how things work, not how they should work. Pure science has few concerns with ethics; legal restrictions maybe, but few notions of propriety beyond that.
Ignorance, scientific and moral, is universal to some degree or other. You might also expect ignorance to be value neutral; a kind of immunity for unfortunates who do not or will not understand. Not in a democracy! Ignorance is not a defense in any common law tradition.
All are called before the bar for what a “reasonable man” might be expected to know. Ignorance is indeed held to a higher standard than knowledge. This facet alone makes the study of ignorance a worthy field of inquiry.
Thus Agnotology is not simply the study of vacuums of knowledge, but it is also a study of responsibility and societal expectations. Dr. Proctor’s wife therefore refined the definition of Agnotology as a kind of “culturally produced” ignorance; clearly implying that social movements and motives play a role. Unlike Epistemology, Agnotology carries significant moral hazard.
No small wonder then that the praxis of Agnotology covers a multitude of sins; structural ignorance, inattention, suppression, selective fact finding, secrecy, manipulation, plagiarism, and other engineering tools. These are inspired by some combination of social, political, religious, or cultural ideology (including political correctness). Indeed, many observers see Agnotology, or false narratives, as the product of social and political struggle – a kind of perverse dialectic that creates and sustains pervasive ignorance – beliefs at odds with truth.
Giving this phenomenon a name is a new development; but clearly several related practices have been around for centuries. Politicians use “opposition research” to discredit opponents, intelligence agents use disinformation, and soldiers use psychological operations (aka PSYOPS) to confuse the enemy. Perhaps the most notorious subterfuge was the Communist practice of agitation and propaganda (agitprop), the use of arts or Media to incite violence or discredit opponents. Agitprop could be compared to the contemporary use of “talking points,” repetition to sustain false narratives, a practice common to journalism and politics.
The communications revolution of the past sixty years was thought to extract the teeth from agitprop. Indeed, communications philosophers like Marshall McCluhan went so far as to forecast a “global village,” a theory that suggests that electronics would create a kind of value neutral, global central nervous system where judgments might be suspended. The content of Media, such as TV, according to McCluhan, shouldn’t matter either. Indeed, content like The View, Kieth Olberman, Bill Maher, Sixty Minutes, Homer Simpson, and Grand Theft Auto might be confirmation of McCluhan’s influence, if not his theory.
If content didn’t matter, then advertisers would be wasting their money. Commercial content seeks to influence minds and open wallets. If content doesn’t matter, then censorship shouldn’t matter either. Here Beijing Communists recently hoisted Google’s Eric Schmidt on McCluhan’s petard. Surely other morally ambiguous entrepreneurs like Microsoft now wait for the ax to drop. Indeed, the evidence to date suggests that communications philosophers, scientists, and engineers are clueless about the cultural implications of an internet revolution - “unfettered” by value judgment.
It seems that value neutral techno-optimism fails to account for two developments.
The first is the centrifugal spin of political forces since the end of WWII. The world has not become more unitary, as McCluhan had forecast, it has become more fractured. Membership at the UN has grown tenfold since 1942. Neither democracy nor enlightenment is the dominant idiom among a resounding majority of new members.
A bloom of international institutions has accompanied the colonial meltdown. Like the sponsor states, organizations like the UN, the European Union, the Arab League, and the African Union rapidly oxidized into expensive talking clubs where tyrants, apologists, oligarchs, anti-Semites, and fiscal illiterates predominate.
The second development is the realization, now formalized as science by Dr. Proctor, that communications gadgetry is as likely to spread ignorance as knowledge. Here, the growth of fanatical religious irredentism is exhibit “A.” And the donut hole of scientific integrity is being filled by theocratic barbarisms that many political “scientists” and academics defend in the name of culture or ecumenicism.
The thread of utopian optimism that guides modern science and engineering has a specific lineage in German philosophy; a theme that runs through Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Lenin, and now Fukuyama. That thread is the assumption that struggle, or dialectics, coupled with the passage of time, is somehow a kind of progress. Ironically, religious irredentists, progressive journalists, and academic utopians seem to share a similar vision of the future. Christopher Hitchens, a step-child of Marx, in his recent best seller, God is Not Great, uses language like “unfettered (sic) scientific inquiry.” Josef Mengele might have been comfortable with such imagery.
Unfortunately, the science of communications is a modern Janus: both a marketplace for ideas and a nitwit’s megaphone. The centrifugal forces of anti-democratic politics are at odds with the gravitational pull of improved communications. Indeed, some combination of technology and false content could undo the very democratic traditions that made the internet possible.
The pandering of scientific monopolies (e.g. Google and Microsoft) to totalitarian regimes has an obvious logic beyond markets. Business is thought to be a vehicle for change. Yet, the sword of commerce also cuts two ways; do they become more like us or do we become more like them? With market communists like China and Venezuela, the jury is still out. The evidence in the Muslim world is far less ambiguous. Islamism clearly has the upper hand – a growing anti-democratic malignancy within the Muslim world and the West.
The study of ignorance, or Agnotology, is still a new science. Nonetheless, a number of axioms might now be postulated:
The first is that truth, especially scientific truth, has a moral component. There are no “unfettered” sciences, especially communications.
An understanding that knowledge and ignorance (masquerading as content) have equal footing in the internet age might be a second axiom. While reason is necessary, only values are sufficient in the pursuit of truth. Unfortunately, the willingness of democracies to defend either reason or democratic values is still a cipher.
A third postulate is the realization that modern journalism is not so much “the first draft of history” as it might be the last draft of truth. Journalism (Agnotology, Proctor and Schiebinger, p. 266) is clearly the prime suspect in the viral spread of ignorance and false narratives, now formalized as Agnotology. McCluhan captured the danger when he concluded: “News, far more than art, is artifact.”
As an academic philosopher, Marshall McCluhan was familiar, no doubt, with the role of moral philosophy in the development of commerce and culture in the West; a tradition that included; Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant. Kant was unique because he was the first great modern ethicist without religious credentials. His arguments had a profound influence on western epistemology and legal traditions. His “categorical imperative,” the admonition to do the right thing (fiat justitia, pereat mundus), was a duty; an obligation based on reason informed by values - not appeals to tradition or theology.
If there is now to be a science of ignorance, its implications are as relevant as epistemology or any subordinate field like communications theory. McCluhan was wrong. No medium, or content, is value neutral. This is not to say that McCluhan was amoral; he, like Google, Microsoft, and contemporary content providers, simply chose to ignore the values issue.
Philosophers and entrepreneurs of the Internet Age at some point will be forced to consider a “binary imperative;” step up to the ethical plate or lose the cultural game. If we fail to consider what is best, surely we will succumb to the worst.
……………………………………..
This essay appeared in the 29 July 10 issue of Family Security Matters.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)