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Monday, October 21, 2002
03:11 p.m.
War doubters and the usual suspects: more guilt by association
It's one of the most powerful political tricks: to damn an argument by the company it keeps.
It can work even when it's left to the voters to work it out: thus, during the 1975 referendum campaign on the question whether the UK should withdraw from the EEC (as it then was), you only had to compare the platform speakers for the 'Stay in' campaign (the leaders of all major parties) with those for the 'Get out': Enoch Powell and all points right, Michael 'Donkey Jacket' Foot and all points left. No-brainer or what!
Thus, the insistence of the War Party in focussing on the least palatable of those not 100% behind an attack against Iraq. The argument is as sleazy as any to come out of the toolkit of...well, let's not risk succumbing to Godwin's Law quite yet! And its most recent exponent is that epitome of the Zealous Convert, Christopher Hitchens, in a piece in yesterday's Washington Post.
By his title, it appears he is merely attacking the
liberal and leftist
tendencies. But as the article continues, it becomes clear that anyone who is
anti-war
is within his sights.
The idea is, if A shares some views of B, he is deemed to share all of those views; and the views of anyone else who shares B's views; and so on, making a sort of 'daisy-chain' of vicarious political responsibility. By this reasoning, of course, Churchill (that idol of the War Party) was a Communist. Which is why, to be effective, the Hitchens technique must avoid pedantic scrutiny. (There is a little book - once much reprinted in the UK, and of which I'm fairly certain Hitchens will have a copy - called Straight and Crooked Thinking. My own copy has gone AWOL, but I'm pretty certain this is one of the tricks exposed therein.)
Hitchens' list of hate figures associated with the 'Left' (with whom, we are meant to suppose, are associated any who are not whole-hearted supporters of the war) - start, naturally enough, with Clinton. (More 'd'oh!' than 'doh' - a very bad place for some hawks to start: they started the Impeachment War against the Great Fornicator knowing they would never have the 67 Senate votes to save them from ignominious defeat. And now these jokers want to run a shooting war against Saddam?!)
Then Ramsey Clark (chorus of 'Who he?') supposedly
acting as a front man for a sinister sect
which is
quasi-Stalinist.
Now there's a name to conjure with! We're back to the good old days of Rankin, McCarran, the loyalty oath and Tailgunner Joe himself. We've seen Saddam compared to Hitler in the endless, fatuous trottings-out of the Munich false-analogy - now Uncle Joe (no relation) is vindicated with his own namecheck!
Apparently, this sect has
a surreptitious political agenda:
for Heavens' sake, they don't let you in the Quasi-Stalinist Club if you don't have one!
Unfortunately, he can't keep it up; from the Kulak Killer, we descend in a bathetic lurch to - George Galloway, the latest British MP in a long line of parliamentary nutters who, over the years, have done their best to foster the cause of the Divine Right of Kings.
And then he's really scraping the barrel with Milosevic, bin Laden and Jacques Chirac - the fact (if it is one) that
Saddam...took Milosevic's side
is especially telling for Hitchens: like landing on a Double Word Score at Scrabble.
I think we all get the picture: for all he's a Brit, Hitchens has caught onto the essential technique of social discipline ruling small-town Puritan America - those that keep 'bad company' are to be shunned, treated as a class apart.
Away from the bogey men, what has he to say?
Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism -- the willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it -- is the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than "cowboy" language.
Again, he seeks to turn the company they (willy nilly) keep against those less than supportive of the war. The Bush jokebook is vastly overused; in the UK, the depth of ignorance of the detail of the American political system is covered by the figleaf of a knowledge that Bush stole the election from Gore. The BBC still can hardly mention Bush without a crack along those lines.
So what? Does that affect the pertinence of the questions being asked of the Administration about their strategy, intelligence, war-fighting capacity, etc? Absolutely not - another piece of misdirection from the War Party.
And
moral relativism
is scarcely the prerogative of 'the Left'.
Let's just look - since Hitchens brought him up - at Joseph Stalin himself. A man of evil beyond the dreams of Saddam - yet an essential ally in the defeat of Hitler, his erstwhile chum of August 1939. Sucking-up from the West on a mammoth scale took place during the War to secure his stopping up German guns with millions of Russian bodies (those T-34 tanks helped more than somewhat as well, of course); and, after the War, a Nelson's eye was cast in the direction of whatever he damned well wanted to do on his side of the Iron Curtain.
No high moral principle, just relativism. Only those in the grip of Wilsonian imbecility (FDR for a good while, apparently) thought anything else.
And the fact that 'the Left', whoever they are these days, are not courting the much-famed Iraqi opposition does not prove that the opposition is credible or trustworthy (on some variation of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'). It's cogent evidence of nothing except, perhaps, the political irrelevance of the Left in the West. Something, I think, we were mostly all aware of.
On a point of information, is it in fact true that
In the United States, the main organizer of anti-war propaganda is Ramsey Clark?
How, exactly, is he organising? Does he have cells and cadres and the other apparatus of insurgent propaganda? And a bunker from which he issues directives? How exactly does this organisation manifest itself? Or is the fact that none of us are aware of it proof of its effectiveness? (I donate that line free of charge to the, rather more obvious, War Party propaganda effort!)
Towards the end of the piece, he appears to embrace two arguments he attributes to 'the Left': that the West once supported Saddam; and acting against Iraq but not Saudi is a double standard.
No wonder - they feed his 'argument' that the West must place principle above moral relativism.
The answer to both, regardless of one's views on the war, is, again: So what? Times change: once Iran was the big threat (not to mention a country due revenge for humiliating Uncle Sam over those 444 days). That was then, this is now: Stalin represents the biggest blowback in recorded history, but I don't think many of us would take comfort in having retained our moral 'un-relativism' as we intoned the Horst Wessel Song.
And as for Saudi - they have Europe's oil; we know they're creeps with a Neanderthal society and a visceral loathing for everything we - even Jacques Chirac - stand for. But a world depression is too high a price to roll the dice and replace the regime - what price President bin Laden?
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