112 lines
8.0 KiB
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112 lines
8.0 KiB
Plaintext
When there’s nothing left to say, self-parody is the way
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<p>I’m just, barely, old enough to remember the anti-war Leftists of<br />
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the 1960s and 1970s. I disagreed with them over Vietnam then, and<br />
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I disagree with the anti-war Left’s agitation against a war on Iraq<br />
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today. But as I read what comes out of minds of people like Robert<br />
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Fisk and Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag these days, I wonder if I’m<br />
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getting old and allowing a golden haze to cloud my recollection of<br />
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past decades. Because I find myself feeling almost nostalgic for<br />
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the anti-Vietnam-war Left.</p>
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<p>Yes, yes, I still think “Hanoi Jane” and her crowd were basically<br />
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wrong. Wrong about the consequences of a North Vietnamese victory<br />
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(Communists turn out to be murderously repressive — what a shock!);<br />
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wrong about the motives and interests of the U.S.; wrong about almost<br />
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everything except the level of incompetence, buffoonery, and myopia<br />
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afflicting the generals and politicians running that war.</p>
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<p>But there was one important difference. The anti-Vietnam-war Left<br />
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may have been deluded and prone to masturbating in front of Che<br />
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Guevara posters…but if you sifted through enough of their ranting<br />
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you could detect the outlines of a principled case, or several<br />
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principled cases. There was one argument on which they persuaded me;<br />
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though I was not of draftable age, I found I agreed with them that the<br />
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military draft was an intolerable form of slavery years before I<br />
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encountered Robert Heinlein’s pithy objurgation that “A nation that<br />
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cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself will not survive<br />
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— and does not deserve to.”</p>
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<p>But try as I might, I can’t detect a principled case anywhere in today’s<br />
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anti-war Left. Which is all the more curious since I think they<br />
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could be making one. Several, in fact: starting with the argument<br />
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that we should abandon the path of war not even because of what it does<br />
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to our enemies but because of what it does to ourselves. At every<br />
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level from the personal to the political, warfare is a brutalizing<br />
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experience that erodes our freedoms and empowers the nastiest elements<br />
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of human psyches and societies.</p>
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<p>There are principled responses to that case, but that particular<br />
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argument is not my point. My point is that today’s anti-war<br />
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rhetoric, as exemplified by reports on a planned September 11<br />
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“Teach-In and Panel regarding Oppression” at UCLA, never seems<br />
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to even confront the question of whether war against Afghanistan and Iraq<br />
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is justified by the Islamist threat. Instead, the topic is “U.S. Law<br />
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and Policy Against Immigrants of Color”, as if there is any kind of<br />
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equivalence between the U.S.’s border policies and the catastrophic<br />
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mass murder of 2,500 people.</p>
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<p>There is a curious kind of evasiveness at work here. We can see it<br />
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at work in the arid deconstructionism of Susan Sontag’s NYT op-ed, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/opinion/10SONT.html">Real<br />
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Battles and Empty Metaphors</a>. Even the title announces that she’s<br />
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going to lucubrate about the relationship between language and<br />
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reality, not confront reality itself. A similar denial is evident<br />
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it the rhetoric of Noam Chomsky; prodded for commentary on the war,<br />
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he recites a litany of past American wrongdoing as if that somehow<br />
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banishes the question of how soon Saddam Hussein will have nuclear<br />
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weapons and what he will do with them when he gets them.</p>
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<p>Maybe I’m getting senile, but it seems to me that the Left of my<br />
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teens was in better contact with reality than today’s crew. There<br />
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really was a military-industrial complex and the desire for war<br />
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profits probably did drive some of the political support for the<br />
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Vietnam war. The military-industrial complex is still with us today,<br />
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but the Left seems to have forgotten even the little it once knew<br />
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about political economics and isn’t even bothering to raise that<br />
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issue. Perhaps this amnesia is a post-traumatic effect of watching<br />
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Marx take a header into the dustbin of history; we’ve come to strange<br />
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days indeed when I have to conclude that my libertarian self could<br />
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easily write a better Marxist critique of Dubya’s war propaganda than<br />
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anyone on the Left has yet issued in public.</p>
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<p>Instead, what we’re seeing is a rhetoric that is half a retreat<br />
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into language-chopping and half an expression of contempt for the<br />
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U.S. — contempt so out of balance that it’s doomed to be tuned out by<br />
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anyone less far to the left than the unlamented former Congresswoman<br />
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<a href="http://www.house.gov/mckinney/">Cynthia McKinney</a>.</p>
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<p>When did the Left descend into such empty self-parody? And why?</p>
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<p>Watching “real existing socialism” self-destruct must have been<br />
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part of it. I speculated on the psychological effects of that<br />
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political collapse in a previous essay <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200205#75">Socialists<br />
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to the Stars</a>, about Scottish SF writers Ken McLeod and Iain Banks.<br />
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But something weirder and more diffuse happened to the Left on<br />
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<em>this</em> side of the pond, and I’m not sure what it was.</p>
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<p>Some days I wonder if Greg Egan, the reclusive West Australian<br />
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author who has produced some of the best hard SF of the last decade,<br />
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may not have called it right in the following passage from his novel<br />
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“Teranesia”:</p>
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<blockquote><p>
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“Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and<br />
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all the other social justice movements were getting more and more<br />
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support. So, in the 1980s, the CIA [...] hired some really clever<br />
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linguists to invent a secret weapon; an incredibly complicated way of<br />
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talking about politics that didn’t actually make any sense, but which<br />
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spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded<br />
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so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just<br />
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hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else<br />
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let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But<br />
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then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver.”</p>
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<p>“So instead of going to the people in power and saying, `How about<br />
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upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?’ the<br />
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people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like `My<br />
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truth narrative is in conflict with your truth marrative!’. And the<br />
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people in power replied `Woe is me! You’ve thrown me into the briar<br />
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patch!’ And everyone else said `Who are these idiots? Why should we<br />
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trust them when they can’t even speak properly?’ And the CIA was<br />
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happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon<br />
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lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone<br />
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who’d played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit<br />
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what they’d done,”
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</p></blockquote>
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<p>Egan’s account is implausible only because it seems unlikely that<br />
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the CIA is quite that subtle. But he’s right in pointing out that the<br />
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rise of the language of postmodernism — the sterile, involuted,<br />
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pseudo-profundity famously skewered by the <a href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/">Sokal Hoax</a><br />
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— seems to be an important correlate of the decline of the<br />
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American Left.</p>
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<p>Self-parody is where you end up when you have nothing left to say.<br />
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And when all you can talk about is `discourse’ that’s a damn short road,</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=81561881">Bogspot comments</a></p>
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