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.

Don Cordonnola

On the basis of the so-called prophecies of Nostradamus, people predicted the end of the world for the year 2000. But the predictions were revised and reoriented by others. The arrival of the anti-Christ would be preceded by a black Pope, they say. As much as I like Cardinal Arenzi, I am pleased that Ratzinger won.

And just when Paul Martin thought things might get better, a new Canadian version of Chicken Little will arrive to the airwaves tomorrow on Radio-Canada’s Le point. Former Minister of Public Works and now disgraced Capo, Alfonso “Cordonnola” Gagliano, will share his vision of Canada’s immanent demise, caused by, I am really not making this up, the Gomery Commission and the probable move of Stephen Harper to Sussex Drive (for those of you who think I am making this up, see here [en francais]).

Lord Thundering Jebus!! This should provide some priceless footage for Conservative advertisements in the up-coming election campaign. How much worse can it get for Paul??

PS: donnola is the Italian for weasel.

Cross posted from Civitatensis

Je me souviens

The first time I visited the Quebec National Assembly, a keen US tourist asked the young guide from New Brunswick what “Je me souviens” meant. She recited a sweetly diplomatic line: “It means “I remember;” Quebecers remember their history and heritage, and parliamentary democracy is part of their heritage,” she said not giving the smallest hint of having rehearsed the line for days. Not bad, I thought (and certainly ages better than the guide at Queen’s Park who instructed us all that the Mace was a symbol of the power of the people of Ontario!!!). The QNA guide was, of course, right –except that there is much more to it than that.

Watching Gilles Duceppe and his gang, the QNA guide’s explanation helps me to make sense of why the separatists may be among the few talking like real parliamentarians, in the language of the traditions of parliament. Le Devoir quotes Duceppe on Friday regarding Martin’s Liberals: “Il y a bris de confiance. Ce gouvernement n’est plus en mesure de gouverner” [There is a breach of confidence. This government is no longer fit to govern] .

C’est honteux: If only Jack Layton and Paul Martin would remember.

Cross posted from Civitatensis

Conduct and responsibility, Martin and Gomery

The Patriot was on TV last night. I happened to catch a scene where Lord Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson) admonishes Col. Tavington (Jason Isaacs), a fictional character based on Banastre Tarleton, for his brutal tactics of slaughtering civilians and so on. He complains that the conduct of Tavington reflects upon Cornwallis as his commanding officer, and indeed it does, for he is charged with ensuring that Tavington conducts himself in a manner pleasing to his superior, King George III.

In the military it is generally held that officers are responsible for the conduct of the men under their command. Indeed, this attitude pervades throughout many other veins of life: teachers can be held responsible for students who fail to learn, managers are held responsible for problematic employees, and so forth. Now, we all know that Adscam was a Bad Thing. A lot of taxpayer money was stolen and a lot of public servants were corrupt. All Gomery is attempting to do is find out its extent. This Bad Thing happened under the watch of Chretien and Martin, and so it is reasonable to hold both responsible for it. As the officers of the Liberal Party, it was their task to oversee their underlings and their conduct, and with the responsibility for ensuring good conduct comes the accountability for shortcomings in that conduct.

Paul Martin’s appeal for a time-out basically attempts to evade this. He does not want to be held accountable for the conduct of public servants under his command and he attempts to do this by delaying an election. Should the Conservatives force one he asks that the public not find him responsible for the misconduct of those he was responsible for. Waiting for the outcome of the Gomery inquiry is only relevant if Martin expects that the inquiry will completely exonerate the Liberal Party and all its members and minions. Not even he could realistically believe this, so there is but one conclusion: Martin wants to shirk his responsibility, his accountability and his duty. Clearly he wishes to cling to power at the expense of justice, due process and the very country itself. A man with such a disgusting lust for power that it overrides all moral and ethical principles should not be allowed to indulge it any further.

The Fallacy in the Statement, “Wait for Gomery to Finish”

Andrew Coyne and Civitatensis provide essential reading for anyone who thinks it’s politically, morally, or even legally necessary for the Gomery Commission to finish its work before holding an election.

Coyne quotes Andrew Stark of the Uof Toronto stating:

It’s a total breakdown of all the moral, legal and institutional boundaries that we expect to see observed.

Civitatensis (and here) makes some helpful distinctions between Gomery’s legal work, and the political judgment that we the electorate must make concerning what’s come out so far:

To put in perspective the distinction between the legal and the political, consider the limited analogy of an airline pilot. A pilot is hired for his qualifications and must have a flying license. There are tests that he must pass to be allowed to fly. There is no way that a pilot would be allowed to fly for ten months after having lost his flying license for negligence and incompetence; for failing a test. Paul Martin’s Liberals have flunked several tests and lost their flying license. But all Martin wants is to surrender is his driver’s license for the speeding tickets that he has received, but wants to continue flying. One activity has nothing to do with the other.

Michael Ignatieff Update

Colby Cosh puts his 2 cents in on the possibility of Michael Ignatieff becoming the next Liberal Party leader. He doesn’t take Ignatieff’s academic creds on, nor does he critically address Ignatieff’s views on foreign policy (as I’ve done previously), but restricts himself to some critical comments on domestic policy and expresses doubt whether Ignatieff the academic has the stomach to deal with the crocodiles in the Liberal Party swamp:

But Ignatieff regards the Liberals the same way all Liberals do, though he is more candid than most. He sees them as “the governing party”, period. It’s a matter of religious faith. So while he might be capable of quarrelling with the Liberals on fine points of post-Pearsonian foreign policy, he is utterly unprepared to offer a comprehensive critique of the party’s history. He is no use at all to Canada, even as a guide to the Liberal Party’s soul-searching (and let us know when you find one, fellas). Still, one almost wishes the movement to bring him “home” would pick up steam; it might be a fitting penalty for his fatuity for him to return to Canada and be confronted with the crooked, mean, evasive, plumb-stupid reality of Liberalism. Imagine the courtly, learned professor trying to absorb the reality of–never mind actually dealing with–creatures like Alfonso Gagliano. Dante himself could not devise a better hell for an intellectual than the one called Ottawa.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: The Man and the Job

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was given a job in 1981, and he performed it very well. The shadows that now some want to cast over him have mostly to do with his past job as doctrine enforcer. Many people have not made the distinction betweeen the man and the peformance of a duty.

But there is a reason why those who take the Throne of Peter change names. It would be unwise to judge Pope Benedict XVI as the sum of his acts in the Holy Office for the Propagation of the Faith. That was then, and this is now.

I am not surprised to read that he said at his installation:

My real program of governance is not to do my own will, not to pursue my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the will of the Lord

He has a new job now. All things indicate that he will take this one as serious as he took the previous one. And that can only lead to an excellent pontificate.

Cross posted from Civitatensis.

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