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Monday, April 19, 2004
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'They Hate Us Because of Our Freedom'. Whenever I hear "they hate us because of our freedom" or "because they hate our way of life" or some other such drivel, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. If real people didn't suffer the consequences of it, such ignorance would be amusing. But another annoying thing about statements like these is that they perpetuate the myth that we live in a land of freedom. The sad fact is, we are not free, and haven't been for a long, long time.
[...]
So, let's reiterate. You need government permission to make your home, travel, earn a living, defend yourself, obtain medical treatment, and educate your children. You will never get government approval for many of those things in many places. You will never get government permission to entertain your mind and body in unapproved ways. At certain times, you cannot criticize those who decide who and what gets approved. You must sell your property to the government if they want it, and you must kill and die for them if they tell you to. And you have no choice but to pay for it all anyway, whether you like it or not.
And still, we think we are free. [Strike The Root]
9:23:35 PM 
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Punishment First, Vindication Later. All charges against Capt. James Yee have now been dropped, including those related to the adultery and pornography offenses that were discovered during the government's fruitless search for evidence of espionage. You might have missed the story (I almost did), since Yee's vindication did not receive nearly as much press attention as his arrest and confinement. In fact, the Miami Herald reports that Gen. James T. Hill, head of the U.S. Southern Command, decided to dismiss the last remaining charges against Yee and remove the resulting reprimand from his record "because of the personal and professional stigma already experienced by Yee because of extensive media coverage of the case."
[Hit & Run]
8:05:35 PM
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Meet the new boss. Negroponte's in. [Back to Iraq 3.0]
Christopher Allbritton explains why Negroponte is a bad choice for the role. Ironically, the very record that makes him a bad choice is probably what made the Feds pick him.
7:04:26 PM
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Today is the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and the murder of the Branch Davidians.
6:50:42 PM
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1994: The Republican Revolution Betrayed. Writing in TechCentralStation, Radley Balko marks the tenth anniversary of the Contract with America. Republicans, he argues, have "succumbed to the very seductions and trappings of power that they ran and won against in 1994. They now control the White House too. And since the GOP began both passing the laws and signing them in 2001, the federal government has grown at rates unseen in nearly a half-century." [Hit & Run]
I think Balko is being awfully kind to the Republicans by assuming that they ever had principals to betray. I haven't seen anything to suggest that's true.
6:46:18 PM
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The F Word. Now that "fascist" is back as everybody's favorite lazy pejorative, Salon's Laura Miller has a review of Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. A passage on the most popular current piece of gobbledegook, "Islamic Fascism" or "Islamo-Fascism," goes like this:
Paxton also eliminates another contemporary contender for the label, Islamist militancy, condemned as the new totalitarian threat by conservatives and some left-leaning American thinkers such as Paul Berman, who endorsed the current Iraq war as a blow against this new danger. Paxton argues that fascism only arises in states where democracy is failing miserably to solve the nation's woes and the public can be persuaded to give up their liberties to regain a sense of power, momentum and purpose. The Islamists who took over Iran or who keep trying to take over Algeria didn't live in democracies to begin with. The Taliban stepped in where there was essentially no state at all, and militants elsewhere in the Arab world have little real political power.
Perhaps, but if fascism is as culturally opportunistic as Paxton says, it is already adapting itself to new conditions. And in the non-Western world, those conditions could include a religion that is inseparable from the state. If the mullahs of Iran aren't expansionist (prosecuting war is the fascist's favorite way of stoking ecstatic national unity), Osama bin Laden certainly dreams of restoring the Caliphate: Both embrace an idealized pre-modern vision of the nation of Islam that they aim to achieve with the use of the latest technology, in classic fascist style. Maybe fascism will mutate from an ultra-nationalistic rebellion against failed Western liberal democracy into an ultra-pious revolt against failed Arab nationalism. Perhaps then it won't be fascism anymore, but it'll look a whole lot like it.
Or maybe we need to expand our vocabularies a bit. George Orwell, unwitting godfather to the many blowhards who today call Osama bin Laden a fascist, said a long time ago, "The word Fascism has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies 'something not desirable.'" Militant Islam is clearly not desirable, but to call a movement that is consciously multi-ethnic, international, borderless and anti-nationalistic "fascism" demostrates only that a) you don't know what fascism is, or b) you do know but you're trying to demagogue an issue that hardly needs any more emotional inflation. Better just to adopt George W. Bush's "evildoers" than to wander back through the bogs of yore in search of a term that at best doesn't fit and at worst adds more fog to the atmosphere. [Hit & Run]
Fascism properly refers to an economic system where in theory private property exists, but in practice the government dictates what may be done with it. Now, I've never heard any Muslim fundamentalist expressing any opinion on economic matters, but it does appear, at least from a distance, as though most Muslim countries are actually less fascist than the United States.
5:56:50 PM
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© Copyright
2006
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
2/15/2006; 2:00:55 PM.
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