[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
Opinions/Editorials Title: The Paranoid Style of Anti-Islamism This is a rather dated piece I wrote for consideration by the magazine last fall, but it remains very relevant, as I don’t think the apparent passing of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy means that Anti-Islamism is going away any time soon. Indeed, among the freshman House Republicans will be Allen West, who gave an impassioned speech about Tours and Lepanto at an event sponsored by Frank Gaffney. Incidentally, for all my Catholic friends, there is a very simple answer to the question “Did Charles Martel ask why they hate us?” – Charles Martel would never have said that they hate us for our freedom. ***************** By now it should be practically cliché to speak of applying Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics to the present wave of anti-Muslim hysteria. Still, there is much that a thoroughgoing exploration can teach us. Consider one of Hofstadter’s most famous passages: It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self, both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated the Catholic Church by donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through front groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. On the most superficial level, one can easily see the projection on to Islam of a universal cosmic struggle in the invocation by less-than-pious Christians to be fighting the same war that was fought at Tours and Lepanto. Yet it goes deeper, for as Hofstadter also observed: Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated – if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. From this can only follow naturally a sense of martyrdom, and it is this martyrdom complex, distinctly in the name of secularism, in which Hofstadter’s projection principle, and the whole paranoid style, is most evident. Consider the case of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. Late last year the duo got into a highly publicized feud with Comedy Central over the ultimately thwarted airing of images of the Prophet Muhammad. One can accept that Comedy Central committed itself dishonorably while also speaking frankly of the pathologies animating Parker and Stone. Anyone familiar with South Park will know it for its fanatically adolescent eagerness to shock all sensibilities, deep animus toward religion, and pro-war libertarian politics. Regarding all three, they have had a mutual embrace with the creators and partisans of the infamous Muhammad cartoons in Europe. It is easy to conclude, therefore, that Parker and Stone have been fixated on the Muhammad question out of their own martyrdom complex for the cause of free speech, a classic illustration of Hofstadter’s projection principle. To trace the roots of such a martyrdom complex in American popular culture, however, demonstrates it to be odder still. For what is the quintessential case in our popular culture of artists and writers becoming martyrs to the First Amendment? The Hollywood blacklist, that bizarre episode in which the downfall of a group of well paid hacks, whose most notable expression of their Communism was their contribution as such to World War II propaganda, was somehow plausibly portrayed as the beginning of a fascist revolution in America. The popularized version of this history is but one product of the universal cosmic struggle against the totally unappeasable total evil called fascism. Fortunately, there is a totally raw, and therefore highly instructive example of this very old paranoid style projected seamlessly on to the great cosmic struggle against “Islamofascism”. Paul Berman, the leading American partisan in the last decade for a movement of the left against “Islamofascism”, provides this in his recently published polemic The Flight of the Intellectuals. After seeing fit to write nearly 30,000 words dissembling the reformist Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan for The New Republic, he felt it necessary to expand this into a barely longer book. Yet as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left American liberals so cruelly disillusioned with the armed idealism variously called “liberal internationalism” or “democratic socialism”, Berman has now become an island unto himself. He bogs himself down in discourses on the contemporary French intellectual scene, for just as by the 1970s there were more true-believing Marxist-Leninists in the American academy than in all the Soviet Union, so today are there more true-believers in armed liberal-left internationalism among the continental philosophes. As Lee Siegel put it in a devastating review, “he argues his weirdly outdated concepts with such fury because he is really trying to make a case for his own importance.” It has been argued that Hofstadter’s projection principle applies to no one more uncannily than left-wing watchers of the “radical right” whose tactics of guilt-by-association and threat inflation by dramatic flair mimic McCarthyism in the nth degree. Berman, however, has seen fit to set his sights beyond assorted libertarian cranks on the home front, and instead brandish this sword in the great anti-fascist crusade against “radical Islam”. Berman indicts Ramadan because his grandfather was a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, whose sister party in Palestine was led by the Mufti of Jerusalem who collaborated with Hitler. Nearly half of The Flight of the Intellectuals dwells on this history, in this midst of which not even half a paragraph is given to the founding of the State of Israel and the controversy surrounding it. Berman does take the time to acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda are not one and the same, that indeed the latter is an extremist splinter banished by the former for heresy. For Berman to insist that there is no difference between the two in ends, only in means, is to repeat the radical right trope of yore that social democracy and Marxism-Leninism were divided only by means and not ends, and to encourage the same conceit in the wider public. This has been extended to mean that the victory by democratic means of the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world is a triumph for the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. Indeed, this was quite openly suggested by many when the ruling party of Turkey was the object of much self-righteous outrage after the Gaza flotilla tragedy. This was as though to have suggested that the election of Ramsay MacDonald meant that Lenin had conquered the British Empire. Not even the Baron von Ungern-Sternberg would have ever dreamt of thinking such a thing, but this is exactly the view of our self-styled leading “democrat of the left” Paul Berman. Of course, the Israel lobby can be blamed for a great deal of the prejudice against what may be the Muslim world’s best hope for the peaceful and organic development of democracy. Berman, however, is by all appearances a sincere believer in the great cosmic struggle of western modernity against Islamofascism, if for most neocons it can be an arduous and thankless task to discern where the former ends and frank partisanship of Israel begins. Whereas for most of our anti-Islamists the definition of the side of good in the great cosmic struggle consists of a clumsily hobbled brief history of Christendom, Paul Berman has an all too clear conception of the leftist modernity that defines it for him. But if Berman is an extreme case, his is nonetheless an idiosyncratic rendition of the secular faith, euphemistically called “civil religion” by political scientists, at the heart of the present anti-Muslim hysteria. Conservatives of another era such as Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet would be absolutely appalled by the protests against violations of the “sacred ground” of the World Trade Center site in the name of this secular faith in American virtue. Indeed, the neocon propagandist David Gelernter wrote of this “Americanism” as “the fourth great Western religion” – the three being Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, pointedly excluding Islam. For here, alas, we have a literal analog in anti-Islamism to the Klan’s priestly vestments: “Ground Zero” as the Holy of Holies, which mere mortals are only fit to reverently encircle at the perimeter. A commonality in the paranoid style that went unexplored by Hofstadter can help explain why this phenomenon has emerged now, nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks, when al-Qaeda is increasingly irrelevant. Similarly, Joe McCarthy came on to the scene at the very time the American Communist Party was in precipitous and irreversible decline, and well after the major prosecutions of Soviet spies at the start of the Cold War. For a large segment of the population, there is great anxiety over the fact that 9/11 has not proven to be the day that “changed everything”, leading to the desperate scramble to reassert the holiness of all that it represents in the civic religion of American nationalism. What we are witnessing, therefore, is a popular revanchist uprising of anxiety over the decline and fall of the American empire, akin to the Lost Generation in Britain or the revolt of the pied noirs in France, marking the last days of those empires. This has already been evident in the bulk of the Tea Party movement, whose most often heard grievance is that there is a war on many fronts against “American exceptionalism”. How this rather obscure Marxist concept became the creed of the American right is incredible to contemplate, but it is nevertheless the logical outcome of the inverted Marxism-Leninism we call neoconservatism. It is hardly unusual therefore that an impeccable democratic socialist like Paul Berman should be one of the most articulate spokesmen for the paranoid style of anti-Islamism. It is less odd still that the secular faith which the neoconservatives regard to be “the fourth great western religion” is the militant world-redemptive creed whose pathologies they project on to the Islamic faith.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
|
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|