This sermonette is called Hypocrisy That Undermines Civilization by the editors at Real Clear Politics. Although V.D.H. Blimp himself claims that Blimpian Civilisation can be "undermined," he does not seem to have thought the matter through. It appears to me that his peculiar concept of BC is more like a Platonic Ideal, something that will always be there, believe in it or not, a banner that can be abandoned, yet scarcely "undermined." But God knows best.
| There is only a thin veneer that separates civilization from man's innate barbarity. Some 2,500 years ago the historian Thucydides once warned us about the irony of revolutionaries and insurrectionists destroying this fragile patina of culture, as if they themselves might be exempt from ever wanting it back again. Yet no sooner, he warned, have such outsiders torn down the system of law than they are in need of it themselves when they assume power and the responsibility of governance. Even the worst terrorist apparently wants his wife and kids to be safe--and able to drink clean water when turning on the faucet. The trick apparently is to blow up the neighborhood's electric pylon while still finding enough light and power to assemble an IED device. |
I know a trick worth two of that! Why not invasionize other people's countries in violation of specific treaties and international law and the sanctity of internationally recognized borders and all the underpinning of a predictable international order? It's not as if anybody will need legalistic claptrap of that sort ever again.
| When the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, a number of Baathists and Sunni militant groups turned to terrorism to thwart a democratic government that would leave them as a minority without their accustomed and inordinate privilege and influence. Suicide bombing, roadside mines, and kidnapping were all welcomed tactics--along with alliances with savage al Qaeda terrorists to torture and behead innocent civilians. But then radical Islamists in their newfound zones of control began even to butcher their erstwhile Sunni allies in horrific ways. And when they destroyed power, water, and sewer services, suddenly such nihilism seemed a bad idea. Too late--since Sunni Iraq is now a miasma of random killing, open cesspools, and abject lawlessness. Only belatedly have Sunni tribes at last come forward to join Americans and Iraqi government forces to rid Iraq of the primordial al Qaeda terrorists in their midst-- and restore the civil society that they once helped to destroy. |
Blimp has surged far, far ahead of mere reality in the provinces of the former Iraq. Of course he is not an area student like Col. G. M. R. Spook, but all the same, it takes quite a bit of unreality-basing to fancy that the Bedouin notables have now converted to Civil Socialism, "belatedly" or any other way. But perhaps Blimp doesn't believe that drool himself, and is only deploying it as a counter in Karl Rove's War? ("Primordial" is good!)
But let's move on to the main theme of today's pudding:
"The Palestinian people will never forgive the Hamas gangs for looting the home of the Palestinian people's great leader, Yasser Arafat," Palestinian authority spokesman Abdel Rahman recently exclaimed. "This crime will remain a stain of disgrace on the forehead of Hamas and its despicable gangs." For years Fatah and Palestinian authority-sanctioned terrorists themselves have undermined civil society by torturing, murdering, and bombing innocents. It was accepted by them that the laws of civilization--due process, exemption of civilians from attacks, and the rule of law--did not apply to Yasser Arafat's government that was as corrupt as it was savage. If you ever were in need of dialysis after you blew up the local clinic and shot the doctors, you could always cross the border to the nearby Zionist entity for treatment. But suddenly such Fatah terrorists are being out-terrorized by an even more barbaric Hamas, whose thugs have even looted the Nobel Peace Prize given Arafat. What barbarians! Where is the law? So now the outgunned Fatah gangsters are suddenly crying about the uncivilized evils of looting, gangs, and random killings. Just as Thucydides warned about insurrectionists destroying civil society, so Fatah once erased civilization's protocols on the presumption that no one else would dare do to them what they routinely did to others. How bizarre that Arafat's followers of all people are reduced to appealing to international norms of decency and legality to avoid their utter destruction in Gaza by Hamas. |
You'll notice that Blimp does not rally to his Party's current line, according to which the terrorist Tweedledum is to be deluged with bucks whereas something dreadful is to be arranged for the terrorist Tweedledee. There is no sign of any alternative proposal, though. Perhaps we should all just sit back and meditate on peccatum primordiale.
Middle Eastern and North African Muslims flock to Europe to enjoy a chance at tolerance and freedom long denied at home. But no sooner have many arrived than they slur their adopted continent as decadent, and chose instead to live by a de facto intolerant code of Sharia Law. Only in a free West do these immigrants have the opportunity of denying the free choice of association and lifestyle to their fellow Muslims. And yet if the West were to adopt their own Middle East nihilism, it would eventually itself devolve into a Libya, Syria, or Egypt. Then disenchanted, but unrepentant Muslim immigrants would desperately search for some new West that they could once again both simultaneously enjoy and destabilize. |
How about that, Eddie Burke? Who says you can't indict a whole people? With Blimp all things are possible, even to adopt a continent!
Onward! Next comes Greater Mexifornia:
| Mexico counts on sending almost a million illegal aliens into the United States each year to ensure billions of dollars in remittance from expatriates, a sympathetic Hispanic lobbying presence in the United States, and easy exits for potential dissidents unhappy with Mexico City's failure to provide basic services for its own indigenous people. To facilitate such massive illegal immigration, Mexican officials hector their American counterparts about our supposed illiberality in not letting millions more stream in unchecked. They have even gone so far as to publish a government comic book instructing their own citizens how to cross the American border safely--and in flagrant violation of our laws. But Mexico has nearly the same problem with its own 600-mile southern border with Guatemala as we do with our own 1,800-mile common boundary with Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of Central and Southern Americans try to cross into Mexico, either to work as cheap laborers or to make their way eventually into the United States as competitors to illegal aliens from Mexico. In response, Mexico's policy toward illegal immigrants on its southern border is as brutal as America's is humane. Violators are often summarily deported--if they are not first robbed by Mexican officials or beaten and killed by criminal gangs. Mexicans may lecture Americans about our purported sins in trying to secure our border, but they don't seem to care what their own government does to Guatemalans. Again, the irony arises that a government that has abandoned the rule of international law suddenly is worried that another country may be doing to it what it does to others. What lies behind this abject hypocrisy of first undermining civilization and then demanding that it reappear in the hour of need? |
Well, it would be a oversimplification to claim that everybody alien is only trying to become as up-to-date as Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh.
Double standards depend on demanding from United States and Europe a sort of impossible perfection. When such utopianism is not--and never can be--met, cheap accusations of racism, colonialism, and imperialism follow. Such posturing is intended to con the West into feeling guilty, and, with such self-loathing, granting political concessions, relaxing immigration, or handing over more foreign aid. Left unsaid is that such critics of the West will always ignore their own hypocrisy, and, when convenient, destroy civilized norms while expecting someone else to restore them when needed. |
Blimp's primary enemy, then, is not located in the former Iraq, or in East Palestine and Gaza, or even amidst the abominable Mejicani. Not at all! The foe of foes lurks in Old Europe and in certain degenerate "red state" portions of the Holy Homeland, give or take probably Canada. Blimp surges on to worry about how Hoovervillians and Heritagitarians and AEIdeologues are to cope without lingering on exactly what we fiends are up to. It appears, however, that our motive for smashing Western Civilisation is chiefly to make Blimp and his Party neocomrades feel guilty. As far as sheer narcissism goes, that diagnosis is impeccably just what one would expect from this ideological direction, but it contains a technical mistake: he ought to have "translated the axes" (as I believe mathematicians say) of his narcissism, and emphasized how good it makes us fiends feel about ourselves to dabble in anarcholibertarianism and neobarbarism. Blimp can't seriously fancy that we put his feelin's first!
What, then, to do? Stop feeling guilty, apologizing, and trying to rationalize barbarity. Instead insist on the same uniform standards of humane behavior from our critics that they now demand from us. |
It sounds swell, and I'm sure Dr. Limbaugh and Dame Ann Coulter will love Blimp's new product, but all the same, isn't it a bit lacking in details? As is often the case, a concrete example would probably have shed some light on the textbook principle. For instance, "We mean to hold you to uniform standards of humane behavior from now on, Ramsey Clark, and that means that in future you won't be getting away with _________________." From the abstract exposition, the only thing that occurs to me to fill in the blank with would be "trying to make wunnerful us feel guilty."
It is theoretically possible, but not at all likely, that "humane behavior" is considered by Col. V. D. H. Blimp of AEI and Hoover to consist entirely in never making other folks feel guilty. That formula, however, sounds a great deal more like what he might accuse us fiends of believing than vice versa. Could he perhaps have Ayatollah Newman vaguely in mind, and suppose that a humane behaver, a.k.a. "the gentleman," never inadvertently makes others feel guilty? Even as amended, it seems an unlikely bumpersticker, although it does dodge the obvious tu quoque about Neocomradess Coulter.
| Finally, remember that there is a reason why millions flood into Europe from the Middle East and to America from Mexico--and not vice versa. There is a reason why Democrats and Republicans don't shoot each other in the streets of Washington, or why blue-state America does not mine red-state highways. And there is a reason why a Shiite mosque in Detroit is safer in the land of the Great Satan than it would be in Muslim Saudi Arabia. It's called civilization--a precious and fragile commodity that is missed even by its destroyers the minute they've done away with it. |
As an amateur sociologist, Blimp manages to make even Señorito David Brooks look like Ibn Khaldún or Max Weber. If the sweet puppies of the Right are pleased to amuse themselves by lumpin' together everthing they happen to like and callin' the lump "civilization," well, of course it's still a free country, isn't it? But grown-ups are not to be told with a straight face that such a lump as that can ever be a "reason," let alone an efficient cause.
As an amateur hack pol, hackin' for the Party of Lee Atwater, Blimp and his plan have at least a little bit to commend them. Naturally the Wingnut City "civilization" lump is bound to contain a number of ingredients that l*b*r*l fiends do not care to endorse, so of course if that non-endorsement is all the sweet puppies mean by "barbarism," why, they are 100.0% right -- tautologically.
Observe that Rear-Col. Blimp feels he must exhort the Boy-'n'-Party troops to remember his tautology gimmick. That is to say, he does not suppose that many of them think as he does already. About this point, at least, his political sociology appears to be empirically sound. What the neocomrades customarily raise a self-servin' hullabaloo about is ten times more likely to be labeled Freedom than Civilization. This proportion applies to the GOP geniuses as well as to their base and vile. Indeed, the authentic OnePercenters are even more likely to be clamorous self-proclaimed eleutherophiles than their inferiors. Blimp surges straight over the rift in the Big Party about immigration policy as if it wasn't there, but since he sides against the OnePercenters, he is probably headed for intramural trouble sooner or later. Presumably he does not want to encourage anybody at all to regard country-club Republicans as enemies of "civilization," exactly, but he does rather expose himself on that flank.
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