[lit-ideas] Re: The Strident Voice of Defeat
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 13:31:23 -0800
Mike:
The difficulty we have in communicating with each other is sufficient
evidence to suggests that we can never know one another in a thorough-going
way, but we still function as a society because we know quite a lot about
other humans because we are human ourselves. I was once loosely affiliated
with an organization that wrote to prisoners. I wrote to a number of them
and it turned out I could understand quite a bit of what it was like to be a
prisoner having been in Marine Corps Boot Camp. There are parallels. I
left civilization knowing in an academic way what I was getting into, but
the actual experience was beyond what I anticipated. We stood in rows while
drill instructors shouted at us. We were told how low we were in their
eyes. Our heads were shaved, we were given drab clothing to wear and we were
harassed incessantly until we either cracked or became Marines several weeks
later. Now in the case of prison there is no becoming a Marine at the end,
but I could sort of understand what it was like to be there, or maybe I
could only sort of understand what it would have been like if I was there.
I knew someone like your Mr. Lekowski when I went to work for Douglas
Aircraft Company in 1959. There was a fellow engineer who had been born in
Russia and escaped with his family. He had a heavy accent and chewed on
antacids continuously. There was always a bit of white residue at the
corners of his mouth. He was a member of the John Birch Society and we used
to argue about Communism. I was as he suspected Left leaning back then and
he had to decide whether I was a serious Communist or just a dupe like
Eisenhower. He decided the latter. I argued and believed at the time that
the Communists were not as serious a threat as this fellow and the Birchers
thought it was. In thinking back I was right because they weren't as potent
a threat - at least the USSR wasn't. I was wrong however about the extent
of Communist infiltration in the government and aerospace industry. The
Venona Papers have shown there were a lot more Communist agents in this
country than most of us realized.
I was Left leaning but not so far that I believed we shouldn't do our duty
in regard to defense, but then one of my friends was a Communist and he had
been in the Army during the Berlin Air Lift and he too thought we should do
our duty in the military regardless of our political positions. In regard
to study, I had the same habits back then that I have now and since my
friend supplied me with book after book supporting the Communist position, I
read them all. At one point an older Engineer at Douglas, Neal something or
other, after hearing my views told me to follow him out into the parking lot
one day where he gave me several boxes of old-time-American-Left literature.
He had lost interest in Leftism, perhaps as a result of doing well at
Douglas. He advised other people about the Stock Market. He told me his
knowledge of Marxist economics enabled him to do this, but he was no longer
interested in the sort of Leftism contained in the books he gave me. But I
was and read them.
But if you now think I'm rabid about the dangers of Militant Islam then you
are probably mistaking the heat of my arguing some particular point for
that. I think it entirely possible that it will turn out that Militant
Islam will ultimately be far less serious a threat than Communism was. As
I've said, Fukuyama was swayed to that belief by reading especially Olivier
Roy's Globalized Islam, the Search for a new Ummah, and Gelles Kepel's The
War for Muslim Minds, Islam and the West, both of which I also read. I was
not as convinced as Fukuyama was by these books, but I read their arguments
and find them plausible in the sense that things may well turn out as they
predict - Roy especially. They see the activists whom they call Jihadists
as the sole threat. As for the rest, the theological influence of Radical
Islam, they acknowledge it but seem to think that in the long run it will
give way to the inducements of modernism; which is something the optimistic
Thomas Barnett would hope. Of course it could turn out that Militant Islam
will ultimately be far more serious than people like Fukuyama, Roy and Kepel
believe. We don't have enough information yet to know which scenario is the
likeliest.
In Aerospace we had an expression "worst case scenario." You couldn't
design for the likeliest thing to happen. You had to design for the "worst
case," the thing that might not be the likeliest to happen but (given
Murphy's Law) is entirely possible. [Murphy's Law being "whatever can go
wrong, will go wrong"] Kepel and Roy might well be providing us with the
likeliest scenario, but we've got to "war-game" as though we will be
confronted with the "worst case."
Yew and others think it vital that the aftermath of the War in Iraq, the
"Nation Building," be a success. He fears a destabilization of the entire
region if this Nation Building fails. He thinks if this fails that the
Jihadists will be emboldened. Well, that might be true, but I don't think
it will be. If we give the Iraqi government our best effort, and if they
can't keep their government or nation together after we leave, we won't be
necessarily worse off because of that, and the region won't necessarily be
destabilized. It might be if the Arab Shiites in Iraq declare common cause
with the Persian Shiites in Iran and the Alawis in Syria, but if one has to
bet on whether some Middle Eastern group is going to get together or not get
together, the latter is always the safer bet. The actual Sunni territory
under Sunni control in Iraq has no oil in it and the Sunnis are more used to
controlling Iraqi oil revenues than either the Shiites or the Kurds; so some
people think the Sunnis won't be willing to be left out. Well, as we know,
sometimes violence settles things in ways we don't like, and that may happen
to the Sunnis if there is a civil war, especially since many of them seem
unwilling to accept anything less than total control of Iraq.
As to what we ought to do, well, it would be best if Iraq developed a viable
Democracy of some sort and was able to police itself and its borders, but if
the Shiites would rather exterminate the Sunnis in order to get even for all
the harm the Sunnis under Saddam did them, then we should distance ourselves
from that blood bath. Perhaps at that time the sort of coalition that Yew
imagines might step in to stop the violence.
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Mike Geary
Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2007 11:58 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The Strident Voice of Defeat
LH:
>>Then there is the equivalent of "you can't know anything about being Black
>>unless you are Black."<<
Well, yes, I think that's very true. I assert that you have no concept of
what it means to be a Black person in America. You can imagine some
difficulties, I'm sure, but KNOW? No way, Jose. Nor can you know what it
is to be Hispanic, especially not an illegal. Again you can imagine what it
must be like, but the only poor sod of whom you can possibly have any
knowledge of what it's like to be like is Lawrence Helm. You and only you
can know that. And the further you get away from Lawrence Helm the less
able you are to imagine being another. So sayeth I.
>>I think that's pretty much run its course in Black movements<<
Oh, so you're an expert on "Black Movements" now?
>>But perhaps Mike is trying to adapt that to the current situation. That
>>will be difficult because Qutbist Islamism doesn't want to be accepted.
>>It doesn't want rights as Blacks did in the U.S. It wants to conquer and
>>it fully expects to. It is a warrior code and to oppose it doesn't
>>comprise "bigotry" in any usual sense of that word. One doesn't usually
>>wonder if one is becoming a bigot if one is defending one's family or
>>nation against an attacking enemy. And Qutbism believes in attacking
>>enemies.<<
When I was a senior in high school, I had a very charismatic social science
teacher. Mr. Lekowski. His classes were exciting. He was a rabid
anti-Communist. Communists were everywhere. They were devouring democracy,
nibbling away in their especially pernicious way at Capitalism and at the
most sacred of America's holy doctrines Private Property. No one had any
idea just how immanent and dangerous the threat was. He was a voracious
reader of anti-Communist literature. Anything he disagreed with (like
taxation, social security, labor unions, welfare, fluoridation of the water,
racial integration, long hair) was a Communist conspiracy. He could quote
chapter and verse from an impressive repertoire of sources to prove it all.
Anyone who disagreed with him -- liberals mostly -- were ignorant or
spiritually blind or nefarious fellow-travelers, pinkos if not fully red.
Wake up, America! was his middle name. I loved his class if only because
it wasn't boring. He was more a proselytizer than a teacher, but damn
entertaining. I wish I'd had more like him. I didn't believe a word he
said. I thought he was crazy, in fact, but damn entertaining. I came from
Pinko stock those who still genuflected at the name of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. To his credit, Mr. Lekowski never tested us on his personal
beliefs, but he sure liked you better if you were true blue. Can't blame
him for that. What sticks in my mind most about experiencing Mr. Lekowski
is my impression at the time that if it weren't for Communism, the man would
have nothing to live for. He was Don Quixote constructing his own
windmills. There's a lot of that in Lawrence I think. And like Mr.
Lekowski, I get a kick out of him.
I hope you don't take that as patronizing, Lawrence.
Mike Geary
Memphis
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