More “Nightmares”: Qutb & Strauss

I’ve made 2 postings (first & second) on the CBC’s airing of “Nightmares,” which draws a frivolous comparison between Islamist Sayyid Qutb and political philosopher Leo Strauss.

The documentary runs over 3 nights. Fortunately, Monday night’s broadcast ran only 1 hour (instead of 2, like Sunday night).

Monday’s night’s broadcast was a little more balanced. It covered the rise of Islamism since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and helpfully drew links between the two (in terms of geostrategy) that the public needs more awareness of. It also covered a radical Islamist group in Algeria who’s leader so wanted a purified nation that he wanted to murder everyone in Algeria except for himself and his little group of terrorists.

It covers the Clinton years, and focuses on the “neocons’” attempt to destroy his presidency. It repeats the old line that the Republicans persecuted Clinton for his adultery, instead of treating the impeachment as a consequence of Clinton’s obsessive lying (which Clinton himself confesses in his autobiography). Even so, I thought its coverage of the American Spectator’s attacks on him were more or less balanced. A lot of conservatives during that 1990s were bent on a politics of personally destroying the president. Ironically, I think they helped get Clinton re-elected. Today, they find their left-wing counterparts among the Michael Moores of the world.

One of the more contentious of the documentary’s claims is that the US invented al-Qaeda. It doesn’t go so far as to claim that the Pentagon organized 9/11. After all, the director’s British, not French. Rather, it claims the administration needed a monolithic enemy, a la Cold War Manichaean rhetoric of good versus evil, us versus them, to wage its war, and to further its rulership style of portraying itself as the protector of the people from their nightmares. It claims that the administration portrays al-Qaeda as monolithic with Usama bin Laden presiding at its top, like a Lord of Darkness. It even provides some kitschy video montage of old films portraying Arabic evildoers as a way of mocking Americans.

However, even the video clips they provide don’t validate this claim. While they do focus on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, one of the clips they show is Bush referring to al-Qaeda as a network. Anyone who’s paid attention to strategic thinking in the last while will know that the administration knows the difference between a network and a monolithic organization. A network is a loose assortment of militant groups, unified by shared ideology and perhaps financing. When it comes down to it, even the documentary treats al-Qaeda in these terms.

The other reason it claims the US invented al-Qaeda was so it could prosecute cell members in the wake of the 1993 WTC bombing, and the 1998 bombing in Nairobi, Kenya. Bin Laden was charged in absentia for the Nairobi bombing. The documentary claims prosecutors thought they could get a prosecution if they followed the model of previous prosecutions of criminal gangs like the Mafia. Simple membership is enough to get a conviction. And so the documentary claims that US prosecutors invented al-Qaeda to fit the cause.

I don’t know enough about the history of these cases. However, the claim that al-Qaeda was invented by US politicians and prosecutors in the late 1990s doesn’t fit with a lot of histories of al-Qaeda that I’ve seen (samplings here and here).

Moreover, the “creation” of al-Qaeda to serve a legal purpose is beside the point. For purposes of law, it may be necessary to “create” such an organization (rather: to convince a court that such an organization is in existence, on the basis of sketchy evidence).

However, the attempt to prove that al-Qaeda exists in a legal sense is unrelated to its existence in the pragmatic sense because people calling themselves al-Qaeda, including bin Laden and his associates, had been active before the late 1990s. Moreover, scholarship on networks already demonstrates that these organizations are amorphous, despite the law’s requirement that they be not.

Well, here’s some news: netwarriors don’t act as US domestic law would like them. So there’s no point wishing they did. And there’s no point in arguing that the “creation” of al-Qaeda for the purpose of US legal categories means that al-Qaeda does not exist.

The documentary bases its claim that the US administration has hyped up the al-Qaeda threat because it has confused legal and strategic categories of thinking.

***

Oh, and what does all this have to do with Qutb and Strauss? Well, as I explained in the previous posts, both, especially Strauss, serve as useful tropes for the documentary’s simplistic and, frankly, Manichaean, narrative.

It’s not altogether surprising that the documentary adopts a Manichaean view of reality, while accusing Islamists and neocons of doing the same. And just as US (and Western) politicians are said to promise to protect us from our “nightmares” while simultaneously creating them, so too will leftist documentary directors do the same.

UPDATE: If you haven’t fallen asleep yet, you can read my musings on the 3rd and final part of “Nightmares”

Paul Martin: His Unedited Speech

Exclusively tonight!: An unedited bootleg copy of Paul Martin’s address to the nation from last week, in (the Windows Media format is far superior to Real):

Windows Media

Real

And if you too are bored one night, check out the Martin Mash Up Challenge.

Crossposted to Rempelia Prime

Reading This Blog (and All Other Blogs) Makes You Stupid

Via Democracy Project, Vnunet reports on a study showing how email decreases IQ at a faster rate than cannabis use:

Those distracted by incoming email, phone calls and text messages saw a 10-point fall in their IQ, more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking cannabis, according to the researchers.

…

This constant shifting of concentration makes the brain more tired and less focused, and causes the temporary IQ fall-off.

…now what was I writing about?

Conservatives and Remand

Conservatives love the law & order issues. So: Here is Bob Tarantino grousing about judges’ practice of counting pre-conviction time in custody as double-time:

Counting pre-trial time served as equivalent to twice as much post-sentencing time served is found nowhere in any legislation. Judges just made it up. The basis is some bizarre calculus that because the accused is being held without the benefit of having been convicted, the time served is somehow “worse” or “more punishment” than serving time once you’re actually convicted and sentenced.

It is a practice, as Tarantino points out, that is completely aconstitutional (as opposed to unconstitutional, which seems to entail a violation of the constitution) practice, but one which, in my view, is warranted. Judges, as one of Tarantino’s commenters points out, draw a distinction between hard and soft time. Strangely enough, pre-conviction time in remand counts as hard while time in actual prisons counts as soft. This might strike people who claim to be concerned for justice as strange: Why would people who have not yet been convicted of a crime (if indeed they will be) be given a rougher ride by the penal systems than are convicted criminals?

A friend of mine emerged from a tough time in his life a better person, but in the meantime provided several insights on the subject. He confirmed that remand was hellish and that being sent to an actual prison seemed like a favor from the state. He explained that such an arrangement takes pressure off the actual prisons, but also hypothesized upon a more ominous reason. “In remand,� he recounted with something of a distant, haunted look in his eyes, “they try to break you, to break your spirit. That way it’s easier to get you through the trial process.� And so: the more sadistic prison guards are recruited to remand through lower pay, the nutritional value of food is kept appropriately low, opportunities to actually move around or even go outside are restricted, etc. etc..

Which is all the more annoying since remand is affected almost entirely by economic status. My friend had no source of income or credit and was therefore unable to post bail. Anyone from a middle-class family, with the vast amounts of credit available to such groupings, can usually post bail rather easily and therefore be free from the disadvantages of pre-trial jailing. Not only will they be free of the excesses of remand, they will have the opportunity to pursue outside counseling related to their crimes. If found guilty, a judge will lend heavy consideration to whether the criminal has already gone through counseling when determining the sentence.

Remand, it seems to me, is a necessary evil. I don’t like the idea of anyone who has not been convicted of a crime serving “hard time.� That said, it is necessary to keep pre-trial prisoners when a judge determines that bail is not appropriate, which hardly ever happens. Instead, remand has become an integral component of the trial process through its biasing of defendants’ ability to construct a good case and reduction of potential jail time beforehand. Worse still, it is one based entirely upon the economic status of the defendant.

That bothers me, as it should anyone with an interest in the fair administration of justice in Canada. That category, it seems to me, should include Canadian conservatives.

Crossposted to Rempelia Prime

Parents Distrust Democratic Party

The Washington Times reports on a study by the Progressive Policy Institute (which is tied to the Democratic Party) that shows how parents distrust the Democrats on cultural issues and especially on account of the party’s ties with Hollywood:

“Democrats will not do better with married parents until they recognize one simple truth: Parents have a beef with popular culture. As they see it, the culture is getting ever more violent, materialistic, and misogynistic, and they are losing their ability to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages,” said the study’s author, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University and a senior fellow at PPI.

But it’s not so easy for the Dems to change its outlook:

In the 2004 election, married parents supported President Bush over Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts by nearly 20 percentage points. Mr. Bush frequently talked about the importance of faith and morals in his campaign and the role that parents played in raising their children. Mr. Kerry and his party, much of whose campaign funding and political support came from liberals in the entertainment industry, rarely touched the issue.

As Eric Alterman wrote in last summer’s Atlantic Monthly (subscription required), Hollywood is one of the key bases of contributors to the Democratic Party, up there with the trial lawyers and teachers’ associations. The Dems can’t court parents without also alienating their core contributors. This puts them in a very tough situation.

So don’t expect them to appeal to parents’ concerns except perhaps in a superficial way. You can expect various leaders like Joe Lieberman to make speeches denouncing Hollywood. However, the Dems are not going to make the culture of personal responsibility one of the prongs of its campaign unless they find an alternate funding base.

On the other hand, David Brooks argues that American kids don’t really want to imitate Hollywood debauchery. They treat is as an ironic escapism. Perhaps. I do notice that little girls aren’t as likely to dress as Britney Spears trollopes as they were a year or so ago. But these things change.

Keep this in mind as Hillary Clinton courts Black Baptist preachers and DNC Chairman Howard Dean portrays himself as a friend of religious Americans.

UPDATE: I noticed Joseph Knippenberg’s posting shortly after I posted this.

“Our Common Era” vs. Anno Domini

The Washington Times reports on some of the school board and textbook politics behind the choice whether or not to use BCE & CE or BC or AD as ways of designating years. Apparently, BCE & CE were first used by Hebrew schools and textbooks because they regarded BC/AD as Christian. And of course they were correct. Today, BCE & CE are commonly used in academic writing and wherever else people are concerned with appearing inclusive.

As with all things p.c., few bother to figure out the meaning of the new mode and order. If BCE/CE take the “common era” as its epoch, then what is supposed to be “common” about our common era, if not Jesus Christ?

According to religioustolerance.org and the BBC, the “common era” refers to the common usage of the Gregorian calendar. We happen to be using it, so that accident of history makes it “common.” This is a classic example of what postmodern thinker Richard Rorty refers to as liberalism’s “parasitic” relationship to Christianity (I almost wrote “Judeo-Christian heritage” – which itself is a late modern construction).

But that justification of “common” rests on a slender reed indeed. One can point to numerous other usages worldwide and very well question their legitimacy and rightfulness. One need not be a green-haired anti-seal hunt weirdo with a love-hate relationship with Starbucks lattes (Starbucks as MNC bad, but lattes are yummy) to have reservations about globalization and the reduction of common life to economics (consider Sunday shopping as an example).

As usual, a deeper account of “common” is beyond the grasp of either the proponents of BE/BCE or of the anti-globalization crowd.

A deeper account could be found in the writings of thinkers like Karl Jaspers and Eric Voegelin. Both noticed that the period between 800BC and 400AD was one of tremendous spiritual advance, an age Jaspers calls “axis time.” Reflecting on Jaspers, Voegelin in The World of the Polis writes:

The true axis of world history woudl have to be found empirically as a fact that is valid for all men, including Christians; it would have to be the epoch in which was born what ever since man has proved able to be, an overwhelming fertility in the formation of humanity, equally convincing to Orient and Occident, so that for all peoples there would be a common frame of historical self-understanding. This epoch is to be found in the spiritual processes which take place in China and India, in Iran, Israel, and Hellas, between 800 and 200 BC, with a concentration about 500 BC when Confucius, Laotse, the Buddha, Deutero-Isaiah, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus were members of the same generation. In this axis-time, “man becomes conscious of the universe, himself, and his limitations.”

One of the usages of globalization worth criticizing is the way time is used and abused, regimenting us and destroying opportunities for contemplative leisure. So basing our calendar on “axis time” with its standard deviation of about 600 years may be overly imprecise.

Then again, if globalization marks the dominance of utility, then with philosopher Lessing may ask with leisure, “what’s the utility of utility?”

Update on CBC on Qutb & Strauss

Further to my previous post on “The Power of Nightmares” on CBC.

Out of the same perverse desire for spectacle that makes people gaze at corpses beside the executor’s bloc or at least at a car accident, I decided to watch Part One. Let’s just say that this is one of the crudest pieces of knuckle-dragging idiocy I’ve seen since the last time I saw something like this on CBC.

It had incredibly cheap production value, with lots of cheesy music. It also makes simplistic assertions – repeatedly. Perhaps its cheap production value is due to it having been a BBC production from 2004. Its director, Adam Curtis, has been toasted by all the usual Michael Moore-crowd suspects including Cannes (it also won the British Oscar for Best Documentary). Here’s his justification for his postmodern journalism:

My aim in doing this was to say to people: “Look, have you thought of it this way?” as a means of encouraging them to question the received wisdom they are told by governments and the media.

You don’t have to agree with my argument about why this has happened, but what I do hope is that the basic journalism and evidence in the programmes will make people see how weak and partial the official version is.

That is to say, he’s got another set of evidence than what officialdom provides, and, like officialdom, he’s not going to bother considering counterevidence or alternate interpretations. As I’ve noted before, especially of the left (but not exclusively by any means), this is because we live in a fragmented world where “truth” is taken to be elusive at best, which makes innuendo, shaky associations and inferences apparently justified.

The bulk of it focuses on Strauss. Scratch that. More precisely, the bulk of it focuses on inferring associations between Strauss and Irving Kristol’s rejection of LBJ’s Great Society, and then the latter’s coalition with Rumsfeld and Cheney during the Ford administration. It then takes the viewer through the Reagan year’s and the alleged neocon (=Straussian, apparently) conspiracy that overstated the Soviet threat and found ideological kin among the Afghan muhajadeen.

I’m not making this up. I’m incapable of making this up.

And what does this story have to do with Strauss? Nothing, really. But it makes for a simplistic and satisfying (for some) storyline that makes the purported “Gunsmoke” vision of America it alleges Strauss and his epigones to have held, look like a nuanced and subtle series of dialectics.

It also includes interviews with Harvey Mansfield making provocative statements on frivolous relativists (thus inadvertently, it seems, confirming the documentary’s working premise), and Stanley Rosen explaining why Strauss liked TV shows “Gunsmoke” (simple stories about good and evil) and “Perry Mason” (the elite keep things from commoners).

Most laughable is how self-contradictory and illiterate the piece is. Its basic premise is that Strauss and Qutb reject liberalism because of the corroding effects of its liberalism. However, Irving Kristol states that he rejected LBJ’s Great Society because of its statism. I suppose one could say that Kristol’s statement agrees with the documentary’s basic premise if you see that for Strauss and him, individualism leads to bad national projects while he and Strauss allegedly sought good national projects.

What’s the project? Reassert national self-confidence for the plebs by creating a civil religion of national greatness by finding external enemies. The director obviously has no understanding of American history, and the role of civil religion in it. He’s never heard of Jonathan Winthrop or read George Washington’s Farewell Address. Nor does he mention any of the scholars of religion (civil or otherwise) in the US, including Ernest Tuveson, Mark Noll, Robert Bellah, or Jurgen Gebhardt, Ellis Sandoz, and the list goes on.

Of course, even though the show is supposed to center on Strauss, the show never once investigates any single word he ever wrote. No mention of Natural Right and History or of Liberalism: Ancient and Modern, two places you’d think the show would look to find out his views on liberalism, the US, etc.

So there you have it. Knuckle-dragging vulgarity at its finest. All paid for by the British and Canadian taxpayer.

Ok, NOW I miss NHL pro hockey. CBC: please bring back Ron and Don so we can hear intelligent commentary! Better yet, let us rejoice we now have access to Fox News.

For more commentary on this documentary, see Joseph Knippenberg’s comments on this documentary, as well as National Review, where Clive Davis provides more examples of its distorted journalism and interview techniques.

Part Two goes tomorrow and Part Three on Tuesday. I don’t think I need to hear how the neocons created Bill Clinton as a way of creating a crisis (as the commercial for Part Two promises).

UPDATE: Here’s my take on Monday night’s episode.

CBC Propaganda: Leo Strauss and Sayyid Qutb

The CBC has sunk to a new low in its propaganda with its upcoming show, “The Power of Nightmares: Episode One.”

The premise of the show is to draw parallels between the intellectual fount of Islamic fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb, and political philosopher, Leo Strauss, who’s deemed the fount of the contemporary neoconservatives. Here’s a snippet from the show’s website:

At the same time Leo Strauss, an American professor of political philosophy, also came to see western liberalism as corrosive to morality and to society. Like Qutb, Strauss believed that individual freedoms threatened to tear apart the values which held society together. He taught his students that politicians should assert powerful and inspiring myths – like religion or the myth of the nation – that everyone could believe in.

A group of young students, including Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukuyama and William Kristol studied Strauss’ ideas and formed a loose group in Washington which became known as the neo-conservatives. They set out to create a myth of America as a unique nation whose destiny was to battle against evil in the world.

Both Qutb and Strauss were idealists whose ideas were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. The two movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay.

Strauss has received quite a bit of “commentary” lately by people who claim to know what he was talking about. Most of it very bad, in the sense of it being thoughtless. See Joseph Knippenberg’s review of Anne Norton’s weak book, Leo Strauss and the American Empire.

Now, I’ve read a bit of Strauss as well as Qutb, though I’m not expert in either one’s thought.

Even so, I’ve read enough to know they differ in radical ways, and not just politically. Strauss was a thinker. Qutb was an ideologue.

The former was a friendly critic of liberalism, and considered the US Constitution the best modern embodiment of classical natural right (which is to say that he affirmed its basic tenets as both reasonable and good, though not unthinkingly so). The latter got his impressions of the US and the West in general from a brief study trip to the US and from French fascist, Alexis Carrell, whose L’Homme, cet inconnu [Man, the Unknown](1957) trots out the usual tropes of the West’s materialism destroying its spirit, which has been the standard critique of the Western modernity since Romanticism.

In other words, Strauss’s thinking is original and requires patient study to appreciate its merits. Qutb, as one insightful critic as called him, is a spiritual “ignoramus.” This is not to say that Strauss is intelligent because he’s a philosopher and Qutb is an ignoramus because he was supposedly religious. Rather, Qutb’s thought is unoriginal, sloganeering, and exhibits all the signs of ideological closure.

The CBC can’t figure out a basic distinction that even 1st year university students can figure out.

The intellectual sources of Bush’s foreign policy are more complex than I can hint here. I’ve tried to provide some background on Bush’s “evangelical conservatism” as well as that of the one well-placed person who took courses from Strauss, Paul Wolfowitz.

A much better treatment of Bush’s foreign policy than either I or the CBC (no kidding) could provide is Alexander Moens’s The Foreign Policy of George W. Bush. Incidently, he points out that no one in Bush’s inner circle can even be considered a neoconservative, and that includes Cheney.

The best treatment of Strauss and American foreign policy is Thomas West’s article in the summer 2004 Claremont Review of Books. I haven’t been able to get the article’s link to work, so here’s a snippet from another website.

The best account of Qutb is in Barry Cooper’s New Political Religions, Or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism.

UPDATE: I stayed up to watch the stupid program. Here are some of my impressions.

UPDATE 2: Here’s my take on Monday night’s episode.

UPDATE 3: Here’s my take on Part 3, aired on Tuesday night.

UPDATE 4 (June 29, 2005): The American blogs are finally getting around to looking at “Nightmares”: Sullivan, Clive Davis, and The Nation.

Lefties and Anti-Americanism on Canadian Campuses

We’ve noticed several recent studies demonstrating the leftist tilt of the academy, as well as anti-American discrimination where violence has been threatened.

The Halifax Herald reports strong anti-Americanism against American students studying at places like University of King’s College in Halifax. Here’s a typical example:

Sometimes the joke goes too far. When Julia informed someone that her father consulted for the Bush administration, the response she got was: “Can I have your house address for letter-bombing purposes?”

What’s ironic is that most of the American students interviewed for the story are liberals who generally oppose George W. Bush’s policies.

The best way to make them Bush voters is to exhibit the kind of knuckle-dragging anti-American discrimination like that reported in this article.

Meanwhile, Daniel J. Mahoney reviews Bernard Henri-Levy’s book, Anti-Americanism.

How Ratzinger Became Benedict XVI

Via No Left Turns, Time has an interesting summary of some of the behind the scenes manoeuvres in the conclave that led to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger becoming Pope Benedict XVI. Of note:

Still, like any good campaigner, he was center stage at every turnâ€???at John Paul’s funeral; at the first of the novemdiales Masses, held on the nine days after the Pope’s funeral; as chairman of the Cardinals’ daily congregation meetings; at the preconclave Mass. Were they all required appearances? Apparently, the novemdiales Mass did not necessarily have to be celebrated by Ratzinger. He was also under no obligation to deliver such substantial homilies. “Ratzinger seems to have grabbed the ball and run with it for two weeks,” remarked an experienced Vaticanologist. A Ratzinger supporter put it in more pious terms: “Some inner fire was lit, like God had chosen him.”

And then, on the Monday of the conclave, he delivered a homily that effectively acknowledged his candidacy, making it plain that he would not compromise his ideals to gain votes. It was a gauntlet thrown down before would-be challengers and a rallying cry for supporters. “What was he doing issuing a whole program for the future of the church?” asked an aide to a liberal Cardinal. “That should have been a moment for the dean of Cardinals to reflect on the spiritual process they were about to enter, not lay out his visions.”

Ratzinger’s supporters saw it otherwise. “It’s not that he wanted the job. He didn’t,” said one. “But his brother Cardinals saw him leading an important Mass. Watching him, there was something that had changed, almost like he had already ascended to a new level.” If the liberals arrived in Rome not truly believing Ratzinger was a viable candidate, they did now.

As Peter Schramm of No Left Turns notes, with the support of the Italians and Latin Americans, the liberals had no chance.

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