31 July 2009

A Word about Power-Affirmin’ Nationalism


2. The very feature that makes Lieberman distasteful to many Westerners — his power-affirming nationalism — may make him more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world, especially in places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled.

Although this commonterrorist (Neocomrade D. Hazony) has nicely delineated the slippery slope down which Jewish Statism has been consistently proceeding for quite a while, I would not venture to estimate exactly how much "strange new respect" for Hyperzion will be forthcoming in the short-term future. [1]

As a purely rhetorical shtyk, the trope about Jewish Statists bein’ impeccable third-worlders themselves, kitted out with a bonä fide National Liberation Movement just like any other, is almost as old as colonialist mendacity itself. "Places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled" were never the least bit impressed with that self-servicin’ baloney that I noticed.

To be sure, previous strongpersons of colour obviously thought that product baloney even when they were selling it themselves, so perhaps if they become convinced that the J. S. crew have now really converted to their own brand of strongpersondom sincerely and irrevocably, they will reconsider. Neocomrade D. Hazony might worry a little, though, about how prominent, and how off-puttin’ to mainstream strongpersons of colour, the remaining shreds and tatters of liberalism and Aufklärung inside the Tel Avîv statelet actually are. Doubtless such things are only junk left over from yesterday rather than accurate indicators of future performance, but I am not at all sure that "places like Russia and Latin America" pay enough attention to the neo-Levant to abandon all reasonable doubts as to exactly what direction Hyperzion is degeneratin’ in.

Neocomrade D. Hazony and the CommonTerror crew definitely ought to worry about what they are doin’ if, as appears from the rest of today's scribble, commendin’ themselves to global strongpersondom with "power-affirming nationalism" is only half of their nifty new Weltpolitik -- and possibly the smaller half at that. The other half looks like this:

There is something ingenious about Netanyahu’s deployment of his foreign policy assets, from his assignment of Lieberman to places where he is most likely to be respected and his positioning of Michael Oren ... as ambassador to the U.S., to [M. de Nétanyahou's] æown rallying of Israeli public support against Obama’s firm stance on settlements. It is indeed way too simplistic to look at Lieberman as having been swept under the rug for inner political reasons. That this narrative has carried the day is itself one of Netanyahu’s most impressive diplomatic achievements.

Considered purely æsthetically, is that not, Dr. Bones, the sort of Weltpolitik ideally suitable for weekly standardisers? Indeed, it even pushes the TWS envelope a little to assume, in effect, that not all the benighted heathen and poorly illuminated dhimmís of the world are living in the same policy week at any given moment

On the other hand, should you happen not to care for that sort of thing, I daresay you will feel fully warranted to make some rude remark about Hyperzionism talkin’ with forked tongue, presentin’ itself as "power-affirming nationalism" to "places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled," whilst continuin’ to agitate and propagandise in Old Europe and central North America along the traditional lines -- i.e., by representin’ the Tel Avîv régime as unique in its immediate vicinity because it alone has no time for, or sympathy with, strongpersondom.

Now in theory Jewish Statism could get away with the nifty Liebermann-Hazony approach toWeltpolitik as long as the outright heathens and we dhimmís of the holy Homeland™ and similar abodes of bliss never venture to compare notes. Yet how likely is that nowadays? Surely it is almost impossible for any neocomradess or neocomrade to start agitproppin’ for Hyperzion in one market stall without bein’ overheard by pretty well the whole súq? The practical consequence of the whole world hearing or overhearing the Tel Avîv government's apologists bein’ "all things to all men" simultaneously, St.-Paulin’ it in the common presence of all their separately targeted dupes and marks are . . . well, let's just say these consequences are easy to foresee and unlikely to be of much benefit to the Jewish Statist cause. [2] [3]

Neocomrade D. Hazony really ought to have noticed that M. de Nétanyahou's "something ingenious" is one of those swell ingenuities that should never be let out of the seminar room at a Prussian-style graduate school where it was first hatched.

In this particular case, however, I reckon the hatchin’ will have taken place at one of the Wingnut City or Telavívestání Tanks of Thought. The learnèd wikipædiatricians advise us that

David Hazony is an Israeli writer, and a regular contributor to Contentions, the blog of Commentary Magazine. Until 2007, he was a fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, founded by his older brother Yoram Hazony, and from 2004-2007 served as editor in chief of Azure, its quarterly. He has a B.A. and M.A. from Yeshiva University. He is an expert on the Jewish philosopher Eliezer Berkovits. [4]

Happy days.

___
[1] You will remember, Dr. Bones, how the wingnuttes and wingnuts used to complain that grown-up journalism always says something like "Senator Specter has been viewed with a strange new respect in unlikely quarters of late" whenever some pol whom Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh had thought reliable begins to wobble in the direction of moderation.


[2] If you insist, Dr. Bones, on my not shirking the task of practical consequence formulation, perhaps it may suffice to point out that every heathen and every dhimmí would furnished with an excellent argument for not paying any attention to Hyperzionistical protestations ever again. Or, in the vernacular: "Any fool can plainly see that those clowns at T. A. are willin’ to say just simply anythin’ at all!"


[3] On re-reading, it occurs to me that one might take Neocomrade D. Hazony quite literally when he announces that "power-affirming nationalism — may make [Neocomrade Gospodin Minister A. von Liebermann] more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world.

That is to say, D. Hazony may be bankin’ on the assumption that even if the marks and dupes in some other market stall than the one immediately targeted were to overhear a Hyperzion agitprop product tailored for quite a different audience, they would not be likely to understand what they overheard well enough to compare notes about it with other heathens and dhimmís in any way practically dangerous to Jewish Statism.

I admit that this hypothesis is more than a little improbable, but I do not know the particular commenterroriser well enough to be quite sure it can be ruled out. To rule it in more clearly, it would have been nice if he had spelled out the vice-versa case, the case in which well-meaning, but dim-witted, holy-Homelanders™ and old Euros dismiss as incredible primâ facie the notion that the Telavívestánís and their fellow-travelers chez nous could really be serious about alignin’ themselves with the two-hundred-proof political heathen on a platform of "power-affirming nationalism."

In the long run this point will not matter, though. that sort of primâ facie incomprehension has a limited shelf life. Once Hyperzion has actually behaved on the basis of "power-affirming nationalism" often enough, it must inevitably face a day of reckonin’, the day when all but the blindest must see what has been goin’ on. At that juncture, if not before, comparison of notes by the various victims or patients of Nétanyahou-Liebermann-Hazony Weltpolitik will be unavoidable.

Even at that point, however, the two-hundred-proof heathen may decide not to admit the Tel Avîv régime to the Strongperson Club. The current membership could easily decide that "power-affirming nationalism" is not, after all, their Club’s only raison d’être. Thus it may be that Neocomrade D. Hazony et al. will end up not gettin’ that mess of pottage no matter how much of the now useless bric-à-brac left over from their previous, their bad and juvenile, Western Sieve period they manage to jettison in pursuit of it.

No real Realpolitiker can, I suppose, find anything very favourable to say about a plan to "sell out" that leaves the seller-out unpaid. But Father Zeus knows best.



[4] OK, sure, Dr. Bones, why not? Even the most useless looking scrap of knowledge might come in handy someday. One can never tell in advance.

The core of his theology [that of Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. E. Berkovits, obit anno Christi 1992] is the encounter as an actual meeting of God and human at Mt. Sinai. The encounter is paradoxical in that it transcends human comprehension, yet it demonstrates that God cares about human beings. He teaches that once human beings know God cares for them, they can act in ways that seek meaning, accept responsibility for their actions, and act with righteousness toward others. This implies the keeping of the commandments, ethical concern for others, and building the State of Israel.


It would perhaps not be entirely absurd and arbitrary to link the Berkovitsian theôria with the Nétanyahou-Liebermann-Hazony degeneration in praxi. My understanding, conceivably mistaken, of specifically Hebrew Christojudæanity, as that ideology stood before the late Dr. B. started remodelin’ it, is that to "accept responsibility for [one's] actions and act with righteousness toward others" is mandatory on everybody irrespective of theophanies. That weird word ‘Noahide’ tends to crop up in such discussions.

The Berkovitsian new-modelin’ has what I suppose Castle Podhóretz would regard as the merit of puttin’ the recipients of authentic theophany safely outside the legitimate perimeter of evaluation by heathens and dhimmís.

The bad news (?) is that it is not easy to see how the lucky few could ever be real allies with anybody at all.

But Father Zeus knows best about authentic theophanies.

26 July 2009

Appeasing The Jihád Careerists


... [T]he United States is becoming as culpable as Europe, its liberal news media and college campuses willfully refusing to acknowledge the danger posed by radical Islam and opening their pages and seminars to those who seek the undoing of the very tenets that allow liberals — and everyone else — their freedoms[, and] refusing to highlight the Islamist threat while swallowing the claims of figures like Tariq Ramadan, a supposed moderate who ... is “a habitual practitioner of the Islamic art of taqiyya — which essentially means saying one thing in Arabic and another thing in English or French.

Now although the grandson of M. Hasan al-Banná’ would make a very notable convert to the ’Imámiyya, Dr. Bones, yet somehow it is easier to believe in a Big Management Party neocomrade [1] talkin’ ignorant nonsense rather than in M. le Dr. Ramadán having suddenly detected the infallibility of the Fourteen whilst thinking in either Arabic or Frankish.

The New York Times Company appears to have assigned Neocomrade B. Bawer’s phobic scribble to its ninth-best book reviewer [2]. This ploy is perhaps excusable, considering that B. Bawer despises poor old Aunt Nitsy in lockstep neocomradely fashion: "Bawer devotes much of his book to an attack on The New York Times for refusing to highlight" --and so on as already quoted. Of course it is absurd to suppose it possible to appease militant extremism, so Nitsy really ought to have lowered the heaviest boom available on Master Bruce. That would make quite clear which side she's on, even if it does not actually frustrate any of jihád careerism's knavish tricks. Flying one's true flag is not altogether a matter of expediency and cost-effectiveness, after all! Plus playing this game is a little tough on the customer who just wants to be told what is in the book.

In any case, our ninth-rater does not tell us exactly what the accused has said or written or thought in Indo-Germanic that he won't repeat in Semitic, or vice versa. And it's doubtful, at best, that he (Neocomrade S. Pollard IX) knows the true account of taqiyya to tell it, even if he did not mind embarrassin’ B. Bawer. Oh, well!

You had better read the whole megillah for yourself, Dr. Bones. It's a swell treat, but not quite good enough for me to swipe it in toto.

On the other hand, let me spoil your fun and reveal how it (the ninth-rate review) ends:

“Surrender” is, at times, hard going. In part that is because of the level of detail Bawer offers in support of his argument. But “Surrender” is hard going in another respect as well. Bawer is unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply ­- terrifying.

Happy days.

____
[1] Who says wingnutettes and wingnuts can never insinuate themselves into the ranks of the learnèd wikipædiatricians?

Bruce Bawer (born October 31, 1956 in New York City) is an American literary critic.... (...) His most recent book (2009) is Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. Eliot Weinberger, one of the board members of the [National Book Critics] Circle, when he presented the list of nominations for the award, stated that Bawer's book was an example of "racism as criticism." Following that, the president of the Circle, John Freeman, declared that "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer's When Europe Slept. Its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia." Comments such as those from Weinberger and Freeman came as no surprise, as Bawer was expecting a considerable amount of criticism from politically correct officials, and responded by pointing out that he never criticized a race, only Islam as a political ideology.



[2] A surname to make one wonder irrelevant things, though its bearer is presumably a Brit:

Stephen Pollard, the editor of The Jewish Chronicle, is the author of Ten Days That Changed the Nation: The Making of Modern Britain.

Welcome to Bernieworld!


[T]he June 4, 1967, border is not feasible, but the principle of defining a border on the basis of June 4 certainly is. America needs to offer support, and fast, for a 1:1 land swap to insure that territories allotted to Israel and Palestine are equivalent in area to what existed on June 4. It should appoint a Quartet commission, answerable to Senator Mitchell, to suggest a map. Palestine is not Israel's internal affair, nor will Palestinians ever accept the border envisioned by Netanyahu. Only a new "international" map will reconcile the Arab League peace initiative with the difficulties of moving settlers back into Israel. Sketching a border will bring obvious immediate benefits, such as helping government officials, businesspeople and others on both sides to plan and invest. But it will also help prepare the ground to evacuate those who must ultimately be moved.

There are some proper nouns and adjectives in that prose pudding that sound vaguely familiar, Dr. Bones, but naturally the writer cannot be talking about our planet. Political sci-fi, I guess it must be, parallel-universe stuff.

Evidently "George Mitchell" is the Vespasianus or Titus of Planet Avishai, except that instead of a Roman Empire he commands a "Quartet" endowed with superimperial powers to "define borders" and "offer support" and "ensure equivalency" -- and so forth and so on down through "evacuate evacuees."

A positive John Galt of the diplomatic world is the "George Mitchell" action hero! ZAP!!!

With his Tonto-like "Quartet" behind him, "George Mitchell" is unstoppable--unless perchance some other fictionizer grabs the Avishaian keyboard and manages to write the next thrilling chapter on different lines.

Yet perhaps the current narrative management was aiming at Dean Swift rather than at Miss Rand? Maybe this scrumptious piffle is goal-oriented satire rather than idle fantasy?

Perhaps we (the odious human race) are supposed to wonder why it is that we can NOT successfully behave as if all the world were our conquered provinces unless we actually do, very tiresomely and at great expense, march out and conquer them?

What is it about our Terra, as opposed to the feigned Planet Avishai, that prevents a few hundred thousand charter members of "the international community," journalists and pols and PowerPointers and blogmongers and social scientisers and the like, all the usual suspects!, from designing and implementing and enforcing a real-world Mitchellian Quartet that will then let (or say 'make') everybody--natives and locals and international communitarians all alike--live happily ever after? With, needless to say, each living happily in her proper Quartet-specified place?

I mean, what's the actual hold-up, my fellow Yahoos? Don't you guys want to be Galt-and-Mitchell-worthy Houyhnhnms?

Now, if Father Zeus had asked me for advice on Day One, Dr. Bones, why . . . .


Happy days.

17 July 2009

"a wind of 18 months to 2 years"



Headmaster J. C. Manners recently gave us at the Ann Arbour Idiot Academy a stiff pep talk about always washing behind our ears and worrying sufficiently about ‘our’ Afghanistan -- and look what has come of it: no two idiots have a common theory of what ‘we’ are doing wandering about in the wilds of Khorasán in the first place!

The only primâ facie presentable khabar wáhid is second-hand and belongs to Shaykh Pepe Escobar -- not exactly a first-rate transmitter, despite his impeccable tiersmondiste orthodoxy. A second glance at the account indicates it is not the article wanted anyway, though it might do if the unaccountable mucking-about had begun "In the past month." Of course one could always fantasize that ‘we’ knew years and years ago that last month was coming and were trying to get ready. [1] On the other hand, if you believe that, you’d believe anything.

The idiocy about "hell bent on setting back the clock to another epoch, which ... simply should not allowed to happen" has already drawn some fire, so rather than pile on, let’s be perverse and see if we can find a pony in it somewhere.

There certainly do exist folks (off the AAIA campus) who take that line, though possibly it is more a tautology than a profundity, inasmuch as ‘we’ are in Afghanistan (one presumes) because SOMETHING or another "simply should not allowed to happen." The challenge is to think of any one definite ‘something’ that does not apply to forty-six other nations and provinces and administrative districts as well.

This challenge I cannot meet, and, more to the point, as far as I can make out, nobody at Le Club Colonial can meet it either. Take the Commissariat for the New American Innovation™, that liberal, or at any rate bushevik-free, octopus of a thousand tentacles. [2] The violence-professional neocommisars of CNAI go on and on, drearily enough, about their Petræo-McNamaran COIN ("counterinsurgency") product, but they never explain how ‘we’ came to be a Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower awash in a sea of surgency, or spell out why those forty-six other candidates should not get COINed as well. They would rather die than talk policy.

Now it is not only true, but obvious, that ‘we’ can definitely not afford to run the whole world at the same rate per capita of natives and locals that ‘we’ now run [3] Afghanistan and the former al-‘Iráq. The neocommissars, however, are so pluperfectly devoted to Mr. Blake’s notion that "To generalise is to be an idiot," that one will not catch them coming even that close to a statement of High Policy rather than mere strategy and operations and tactics.

Their evasion might pass for humility: violence pros and PowerPointers know their place as hired hands and avoid getting uppity. "Civilian control of the military," don’t you know? Very pretty! -- if only it did not seem so probable that these neogentry are actually making most of the imperial and colonial decisions that get casually attributed to ‘us’ and to poor buck-stopping Mr. Obama. [4]

Our Academy’s esteemed Head has guessed as follows:

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, cautioned that there is hard fighting ahead in Afghanistan. He sees a wind of 18 months to 2 years during which the US and its NATO allies must reestablish as much security as possible even as it trains tens of thousands of new Afghan troops. The window is probably how long the Obama administration expects there to be support for the Afghan war in the US Congress.

That’s not much better guesswork than kiddies’ own, is it? But here, too, one can always do a pony quest, and take the paragraph to be not really a guess about Afghanistan but a satire on Capitol Hill, where one can always count on a couple years of support for anything at all, as long as one relentlessly refuses to explain it.

(( There was, I believe, an eighteenth-century projector who announced "An Undertaking of the greatest possible Publick Utility, but nobody to know what it is." [5] ))

Happy days.


___
[1] Somebody should command the good and forbid Shaykh Escobar to keep working from those delightful Victorian maps of "the vast network of oil and gas pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet" that he finds in his Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling.

Another of us id..., of us Kolean kiddies, that is, offered a YooToob from beautiful downtown Asmar in the Outer Khorasánian province of Kúnar. Folks who seriously project fetching petroleum from the Caspian Sea by that route probably favored the plan, mentioned right before the March 2003 aggression, of placing one of ‘our’ aircraft carriers in the Cap so as to have the Beast of Baghdád surrounded.

And Pepe’s, remember, is the BEST kiddie notion going. Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison; Kyrie eleison!


[2] The tentacle du jour calls itself The Center for a New American Security and is not to be confused with, say, The Center for American Progress . And of course not with The Project For the New American Century -- that one is the bad guys.

There are several more neotentacles -- I keep meaning to take a complete inventory but do not get around to it.


[3] There is a strong case for shudder quotes around ‘run’ too. But God knows best.


[4] It’s no worse than any other AAIA guess to propose that the COINsters chiefly need Afghanistan as a sort of sandbox in which to play their Petræo-McNamaran games. But the guess is no better than the others either, because there is no glimpse in it of why our current neogentry should consider that proficiency at precisely those games is urgent and critical.

With their predecessors, the Yoos and Feiths and von Wolfowitzen and especially Viceroy R. B. Cheney, it was at least easy to know wrong what they were up to, viz. that were doin’ it all for dear old Zion. Or, alternatively, to demonstrate their hereditary flair for Big Management.

Whereas the Commissariat of Innovation is blankly inscrutable. As the current Idiot Academy performance indicates, one can scarcely make even a good wrong guess about their knavish tricks.


[5] Not bad for a quotation from memory at several decades’ distance! The exact wording runs "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

As you may read at URL cit. (p. 65), this intrepid forerunner of the Petræo-McNamaran whizkids seems to have made a success of it.


05 July 2009

Harrop et Ramázání Frères S. A.


The Performers
American and Iranian revolutionary traditions surprisingly have much in common. When Americans celebrate the 4th of July, they often forget that the core purpose of the famous document penned by Thomas Jefferson was to declare independence from Great Britain. Had the colonies failed in that struggle for freedom to govern themselves, the Declaration of Independence's famous "unalienable" rights to equality, liberty, and life would have been rendered not self-evident. Like America, Iran's 1979 Revolution, had much to do with throwing off perceived shackles of foreign domination. One hundred years ago, imperial Britain and Russia strangled Iran's first Constitutional revolution. Similarly, in 1953, the US CIA orchestrated the overthrow of a democratically elected government. Restoring the Shah to his throne caused subsequent repression to be seen as made in America.

(( snip ))

Earlier this year, the Iranian and American presidents both stressed the importance of "mutual respect," of recognizing what independence, equality, regional leadership, and freedom mean to both countries. For Iran, an open question is how will it respect its own people and heal the deep fissures recently opened. This need not be a clash of alien values, of America vs. Iran. One hundred years ago, Howard Baskerville, a 24-year old missionary educator, became Iran's American martyr while trying to help Iranians then struggling for freedom. He's still admired in Iran; in 2005, former President Mohammed Khatami unveiled a sculpture of Baskerville in Tabriz's Constitutional House museum. Before his death, Baskerville explained to skeptical friends that "The only difference between me and these people is my place of birth, and that is not a big difference." He was right.


The Critic
...you have picked up ... the slogans of both countries, rather than the historical and cultural contexts and differences .... ["Posted by JES at July 5, 2009 02:55 AM"]

Indeed, indeed, Mr. Critic, but what else is a decent, self-respecting (not to say "respectability-crazed") ‘you’ to do on a purely ceremonial occasion?

Of course it could be fun to break this flimsy butterfly on a wheel, and fun well short of solemnly doubting that the earnest respectabilitators have any adequate grasp of what went wrong in the early 1860's.

Why, I myself could easily get worked up about how an elegant imported article like M. de Ramázání manages to overestimate the ignorance of the holy-Homelanders™. Wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung have taken a grave toll, doubtless, but can it really be the case that most Yank sweet puppies are unaware that "the core purpose of the famous document penned (sic) by Thomas Jefferson was to declare independence from Great Britain"? [1]

On the fun side, one should cherish the prominent "Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?" aspect of that attempted mass defamation of poor old Sam’s idiot nieces and nephews: Et vous, M. le Professeur, qu’est-ce que vous gardez dans votre boîte de pain? [2]

Have a nice Silly Season, everybody.

___
[1] Few things are more annoying than that perpetual comfy wallowin’ of U. S. rightists and neorightists in the supposed wonderfulness -- the ‘exceptionalism’, the ‘indispensibility’ -- of Wunnerful US. But there is another side of the horse to fall off as well. Verb. sap.

It's rather a shame that the good folks who would be most irritated by this little exercise in Selbstelitismus are extremely unlikely to encounter it. Certainly anybody who dwells within the penumbrae et emanationes of Planet Justworld is bound to be well washed in the blood of this lamb already.


[2] Very likely it contains the collected addresses of Th. W. Wilson and M. M. Litvinov instead of anything less nutricious from Pepperidge Farm. La paix est indivisible is especially delicious with bologna and fresh aruguletta and mayonnaise.