[lit-ideas] Re: Iran (1), The Revolutionary Imperative

  • From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2006 14:27:10 -0800

Mike, I hope this will be in the same vein as your note.

 

I understand what you are saying but I make a distinction that you don't.
If you take an Islamist (and I've done this) and examine his
presuppositions; then when you are done you can determine in a rough way
what he will think and do.  If you examine a traditional American's
presuppositions you can do the same thing.  The same can be done with a
Communist during the Cold War.  You can then say, given the respective sets
of presuppositions, they each are behaving in ways they believe are right.
They believe that those that oppose them are wrong.   Each position will say
that which is beneficial to it is "good," and that which is not is "bad."
In this sense you are right to say these views are relative to their
presuppositions.   But having said that, I observe that we disagree about
compass.  My compass is here and yours is not, or if here not only here.  I
can hypothetically understand a Communist or an Islamists point of view, and
I can accept that those who follow those paths have compasses clearly
oriented in accordance with their respective presuppositions, but I don't
want to orient my compass toward those positions.  In my view this can be
reduced to identity.  We have individuality, family, clan, city, and nation.
We are integrated into this if we are healthy.  

 

And I recognize that perhaps we ought not to seek this sort of health.
Sartre thought that if we thought we would alienate ourselves from these
relationships.  We had no justification for going beyond individual
existence.  And was it Colin Wilson in The Outsider who argued that
intellectuals alienate themselves from their society?  I can understand
those points of view and yet choose to orient myself in the traditional way.
And I choose to do this for several reasons.

 

One, I have studied history, foreign affairs, etc., to a fair extent and
agree with the Liberal-Democratic system.  I agree in the sense that it is
the best that has been developed.  There are things in it I don't like.  For
example I hate the coldness of big business, and I hate bureaucracies of any
sort, and yet I recognize this hatred as being visceral rather than logical.
I have also studied economics to a small extent and see the advantage of big
business being as cold as it is.  I lived through acts of coldness on
several occasions in aerospace.  Also, I see the advantage of bureaucracies
and also the weakness and temptation of bureaucrats and understand them at
the same time I hate them (viscerally).  But in short, Liberal-Democracy is
superior to anything else I've studied.

 

I also note that in Fukuyama's definition of Liberal Democracy, he embraces
it in all its forms.  He doesn't exclude the European Welfare state.  Beyond
that I recognize that we in America have been influenced by Marx for the
better.  The 8 hour day, medical and old age insurance and many other
benefits derive from Marx.  But the American Liberal-Democratic ideal
resists government control. Our constitution and bill of rights were
oriented against the tyranny the founding fathers broke away from.  They
didn't trust big government.  They believed the individual could do
wonderfully well if he was just left alone.  Perhaps he could on the land
available at that time, but crowded into cities he needs more help from
government - and yet he wants the help that he needs and not the government
control   We are in flux in these matters.  Should the levies have been
fixed at the local level by the people using them or should big brother in
Washington have been all seeing and done something from there?  Do the
states have rights and responsibilities, or is everything decided and
implemented in Washington.  The founding fathers were reluctant in their
administration and some believe modern presidents (and not just Democratic
Presidents) have not been as reluctant as they should have been, but none of
them has managed a tyranny in the founding fathers' sense of the word.  

 

Now in regard to Islamism, it is obviously inimical to our presuppositions.
If it were inimical in a benign way as pluralism requires, it could declare
hat it hates our way of life but is committed to a live and let live
approach.  You believe what you like and I'll believe what I like.  But the
Islamists aren't like that.  Instead they think that if you do not accept
their presuppositions you ought to die.  Now I'll grant that the Islamists
have held this belief since the 60s and haven't been terribly effective at
killing us; so previous administrations can be excused for not taking them
seriously, although I hesitate about giving this approval to Reagan after
241 Marines were killed in Beirut.  But in those days few people understood
the Middle East, let alone Islamism, and the view that we should just get
out of there and let them kill each other was considered practical wisdom.

 

But what happens when we can't get away from them?  And I believe this is
where we are at the present time.  They are not only inimical to our way of
life, our Liberal Democracy, but they do have power to harm us and they
fully intend to use that power.  I don't think abandoning war is a good
first step in dealing with the Islamists.  It is very like what we were
already doing, e.g., leaving Beirut to get out of their way.  The Iraqi and
Iranian threats have been subtle and I was at an advantage in regard to
learning these subtleties in that I was retired and had the time and the
money to study these them.  

 

But I did consider the idea of continuing to leave them alone.  I recall
Hitler's belief that he needs to make the hard decisions because subsequent
generations of Germans will become soft.  I noted also that when the first
generation of Communist fanatics died off, they were not replaced.  Instead
cynical bureaucrats took their place.  So would the fanaticism of the
Islamists carry on to accomplish the world domination Sayyid Qutb and the
Ayatollah Khomeini envisioned?  Or would it peter out as it did a few
generations after Mohammad died?   I tend to think it will soften as time
goes on.  Unfortunately we are being confronted by the first-generation
Islamist fanatics and there is no give in them.  They will take as much as
we allow them just as the early generations of Mohammad's followers did.
Eventually the early advance was stopped, and the stoppage occurred in
Spain.  Spanish warriors drove them out of Spain and some Muslims that had
known nothing but Andalusia their whole lives were forced to settle on North
Africa, but their descendants still hope to return, and this hope preceded
Islamism.

 

As you know, I'm not a pacifist. I don't believe in aggressive war, but I
don't believe preempting someone who intends to attack us is in that
category.  If we could have preempted Japan before Pearl Harbor or Hitler
before the Anschluss, we would have been well to do it.  We would have saved
millions of lives had we done so.  Now there are those, and I'm among them,
who think that Iran is in a situation very like Japan before Pearl Harbor
and Germany before the Anschluss.  It does plan all manner of harm to our
allies and to us.  It intends to become the dominant power in the Middle
East, and it intends to do so by means of violence.  Even if we were not
directly threatened, and we are, could we abandon our allies to the evil (in
our sense of the term) of Islamism?  

 

I don't think everyone needs to be a warrior or own a gun.  I received
extensive training along those lines and after I got back from Korea I was a
rifle instructor at Camp Pendleton and was exposed to a number of "shooters'
whom I would not feel comfortable living next door to - if they had guns
over there.  But this sort of thing has always been true.  Only a small
portion of any given society (usually) needs to be trained for war, but
having been trained I have lived with the belief that such as we are needed
here in America.  When life was simpler we could fight enemies who attacked
us in our homes, but life is not simple today and the argument that we
should preempt Iran for our (and our allie's) safety is on the table.  I
have read the arguments and believe they are probably right.  The risk of
allowing Iran to gain nuclear weapons is as more than one person here on
Lit-ideas, some of whom I would have classified in former times as
"liberal," insane.  

 

Francis Fukuyama has painted an optimistic future when the peace you seek
will prevail throughout the world, but he assumes the ultimate success of
Liberal Democracy.  Fukuyama is a theorist and thinks, after Hegel, that
Liberal-Democracy is inevitable.  We don't need to export it.  It will just
happen.  Fukuyama was okay in regard to invading Afghanistan but balked at
Iraq, but continues to think Liberal Democracy is inevitable.  But can we
afford to let the Islamists do their worst?  Fukuyama wouldn't go quite that
far.  We need to use military force judiciously.  He does not approve of
exporting Democracy by military means, but to be fair that was not Bush's
initial intention.  But as long as he was going to remove Saddam Hussein, he
had to replace that regime with something; so why not be consistent with our
ideals and replace it with a democracy?  

 

But to return to the notion of "good" and "bad," we know what that is
regarding ourselves, our families, clans and cities.  We are less clear in
regard to our nation, but I was impressed when I read of Socrates being
presented with this problem.  He was unjustly convicted by the legal system
in Athens which was clearly a bad thing for him.  He was encouraged to
escape, but he chose not to because he would then be perpetrating something
harmful against his City State.  He was loyal to it because he recognized he
was an integral part of it.  I feel that way about my nation.  Whether I'd
be willing to drink hemlock if they asked me to, I don't know, but I am very
conscious of the need for citizens to be loyal to a nation if it is to
remain viable.   Thus, let the Iranians be loyal to Iran and I'll be loyal
to the U.S.  Let the individual Iranian follow the leadership of the
Islamist Imams and I'll follow the leadership of which ever party happens to
be in power at the time.  We can but do our duty and trust in the gods (or
God in my case and "fate" or "chance" in yours) to determine who is to win
and who is to lose.

 

Lawrence

 

  _____  

From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Mike Geary
Sent: Friday, February 03, 2006 12:46 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Iran (1), The Revolutionary Imperative

 

LH:

>>Mike,  I agree with everything you've written even though you write it
with obvious disapproval.  I approve of what you disapprove.  But then I
think Democracy a good thing and Islamist Fascism a bad thing.  I also agree
with our tactics during the Cold War.  Letting the USSR win the Cold War
would have been a very bad thing in my opinion.  And yes we need to make the
world safe for Democracy.  That's very important.  Making the world save for
Islamic tyranny, which you put on a par with democracy, is not a good
thing.<<

 

Where do we disagree, Lawrence?  I think it's in the notion of good and bad.
Forgive me how I say this, I don't mean it to be insulting, but to the point
-- to me you come off as cartoonish in your notions of us (the US) being the
Good Guys and anyone who opposes us as the Bad Guys.  Why can't you see the
world rather as all of us being Just Guys Seeing Things From Our Own
Perspective?  We're no better than the Islamists.  We (the West) have killed
as many if not more in our desire that everyone to be just like us, which,
currently would be good, secular, capitalist democrats.  We'd especially
like the Islamist to be like us.  Why can't an Islamist be like a Christian?
I prefer that the world be one giant democracy, freed from nationality -- a
long as, of course, they make room for me to be me.  I prefer that there be
a human constitution insuring the equality of all peoples without regard to
sex, race, creed, nationality etc.  I prefer, I prefer, I prefer....just as
you do.

 

I think that we both want the same thing for humanity -- peace and justice
and freedom and prosperity and the end, once and for all, to war.  Let's
start with the end to war.  Never again war.  Start with that.  Make that
concrete and absolute, make that sacred and inviolable and the others will
work themselves out over the millennia.  Cultures clash, of course, but they
need not kill one another in their clashes.  There should be sock-hops in
the gym between rival nations.  Get with it, guy.  Killing ain't cool  Come
to terms.  Let us absorb one another, create a new us, one that no one can
foresee.  Islamists aren't evil.  We're not evil.  Stop the evil seeing.
Start respecting.  Who goes first?

 

Mike Geary

beginning my 63rd year as a Marxist Liberal Communist former Catholic
Atheist

   

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