Jeremayakovka

Kafir Caveat Again

David Solway again on Tariq Ramadan, whose memoir could justly be titled Dreams From My Grandfather.

Kafir Caveat

David Solway on Tariq Ramadan.

Cody's Books Shines Spotlight On Black Communist "Revolutionary" (i.e., Reactionary)

Cody's Books, which boasts of being the highest-profile and highest-quality bookstore in the City of Berkeley, reminds once more why that municipality is often referred to, by loyalists and defectors alike, as "The People's Republic of Berkeley." Whatever its offerings, Cody's is also, and always has been, a part-time intellectual rape room where genuine liberals are forced, willy-nilly, to copulate mentally with some of the most strident, most committed anti-American writers.

Fortunately, the changing nature of bookselling and Internet-era information distribution last year forced the original Cody's location -- a few blocks from the UC campus and, literally, a stone's throw from People's Park (right) -- to shut its doors for good after being in business for 50 years. I attended my share of left-wing author's events at the old Cody's, beginning with Rita Mae Brown in 1988 and ending, in 2006, with "Weatherson" Chavista, Chesa Boudin. (At the latter event I sat a just few feet away from Boudin's silver-spoon, earring-sporting, terrorist foster father, Bill Ayers.) Cody's has neither burned out nor faded away, however. In fact it has re-emerged in Berkeley's chic shopping center over on Fourth Street.

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This Saturday evening Cody's Fourth Street will host Nelson Peery (below), an otherwise obscure Black Communist who has a new memoir out. You probably have never heard of Nelson Peery, but that's no reason to continue to ignore him. For obscurity is no measure of the impact an individual or organization may have, not when the individual or organization, by definition, relies on stealth tactics to patiently and ruthlessly "bore from within." Then again, given that "these days being a conservative is cool," let's not hesitate to credit Communists like Peery with the other meaning of "bore"....
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With a CV that includes the following:

* Communist Party USA

* Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Revolutionary Party

* Communist League

* Communist Labor Party

* League of Revolutionaries for a New America
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Nelson Peery is a grizzled poster child for a public relations campaign on behalf of a Paul Robeson/Joseph Stalin-brand of American Communist Viagra. Or should I say on behalf of prostate ("pro-state") cancer...? For unlike other Communists from previous generations who were made the profitable career move to, as the postmodernists say, "work within structures," Peery has remained an unrepentant, itinerant radical.

And Cody's plays it to the hilt. From its email announcement:

"Why am I who never harmed anyone, mistreated, segregated, assigned an unequal place in a country that promises equality?” Nelson Peery asks this question upon returning home to Minneapolis from fighting in the all-black 93rd Infantry Division in World War II....

“As I learned the truth,” Peery realizes in the face of rising tides of racist violence, “I became a communist, for I could do nothing else.”
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I became a communist, for I could do nothing else. There you have it, straight from the Trojan horse's mouth: will-to-power, nihilism, and a bald-faced lie dressed in confessional clothing. If there truly was nothing else to do, how come the civil rights movement wasn't a Communist movement through and through? That's what its opponents -- Democrats, Republicans, and American Nazis alike -- alleged. Is Peery saying that those 60s reactionaries were right all along? That's his implication which, although absurd, is not without some basis in fact. For the complicated history of that era teaches that certain activists in the civil rights movement (although surpassed for the most part in influence by "anti-anti-Communist" New Left activists) either were Communists or had had tangental Communist ties -- including Rosa Parks.
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I became a communist, for I could do nothing else. Don't fall for it, Gentle Reader! That single sentence -- featured by Cody's Fourth Street to promote their anti-American author -- belies the pettiness, not greatness, of Peery's vision, and the stinginess, not generosity, of his spirit. We're all forged by the battles of our first adulthood, no matter what the battles and no matter what side we're on. Yet only certain of us re-temper ourselves by adding new elements to the alloy. Why does Peery advertise himself as if he's still living in 1946? Because he is. Committed to an antiquated, ideological segregation from the American mainstream, he understands reform only as a postponement of and, at the same time, a provocation for some dialectical advance toward "the Revolution." Peery can only spit in the face of the patriotic, liberal reforms -- hard-won by black and white alike -- of the post-war civil rights era. He can only spit in the face of the hard-fought reforms that remain to be won on the guilt-ridden, and unfinished, matter of race in America. Because Communists don't have dreams; instead they infiltrate other people's dreams, corrupting them so that they always end in nightmares.

In the post-civil rights, post-9/11 era, Free thinkers of the world, unite! -- unite against Nelson Peery and all other left-over, left-wing reactionaries.

Eight Theses On Being Jeremayakovka

for Casey Sheehan and Cindy Sheehan, especially

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Fausta tagged me last week in the "8-ball meme" for eight more previously unknown personal facts. The first eight, it seems, only whetted her appetite. So here are eight, not just facts about, but theses[*] on being Jeremayakovka. [Note: It took a week to tweak #1-#4, and it'll be a piece of work to finish #5-#8. Please bear with me....]:
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1. My parents' ages are 19 years apart, with my mother being the older partner. Their coming together defied custom and practicality, even morality. Not surprisingly, it was also short-lived. Each was also (in effect) an only child, which is what I am, unmistakably. When coming of age as a radical leftwing activist, "family values" were something I rejected categorically and conspiratorially (in pride), and ignorantly and jealously (in shame). Despite reexamining leftwing values for some time now, for me to opine from the vantage point of "family values" would be, still, an imposture. "Family values" remain something to be observed rather than experienced, to be understood (if at all) a posteriori, not a priori.

2. Women usually react with visceral enthusiasm when I inform them that, yes, in fact my mother brought her first, her only healthy child to term at age 45. This is true especially of younger, unmarried, childless women. Standout exclamations include Whoa! and Way go to, mom!. Their enthusiasm smacks of ignorant solidarity, bordering on idolatry, and elicits from me mostly dismay. These daughters (so to speak) of "third wave feminism" -- educated to believe that just about anything subverting "traditional gender roles" (while also trafficking in the mainstream) is curious, virtuous, imperative -- know nothing of the tender travails and miserable dignities that attend a domestic situation such as the one my mother and I knew. These "peers," along with their baby boomer parents (here I include my other, baby boomer parent), often seem to me (as they must have seemed to my mother) to some extent, and in the worst sense, mere children.

3. When very young, about 5 or 6, I inadvertently plunged into the Sailboat Pond in New York's Central Park. I was racing to the opposite side to recover my model boat when the jingle of a far-off ice cream truck distracted me. So much so that, my head craning in one direction and my body running in another, I strode right over the pond's raised cement edge and into its artificial shallows. I forget how I got out -- whether anyone reached for or jumped in after me, or whether if even I pulled myself out. I do remember my father carrying me, soaking and sobbing, not home but to where he lived.

4. When a little less young, about 9 or 10, I nearly got myself swept away into the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane off the coast of Texas was sending successions of waves -- about twice as tall, fast, and frequent as usual -- into the west Florida beach where my mother and I were vacationing. This monstrous aggregation of briny sights, blustery sounds, salty smells was so enthralling that, with nobody else around, I decided I would test their bounties of touch and taste.... A few minutes later my feet, I suddenly realized, no longer could touch sand. With waves rolling in one upon another, my strokes rectified nothing. The waves lifted me and surged past, leaving me in their hollows where still I could not touch bottom.

In terror, time and language collapse. What remains in the mind (if anything) is the will -- yet even that is often displaced. Bobbing in that excited surf, my body became a constricted concert of heart, lungs, throat, nostrils, a concert bellowing in stark, perfect, physiognomic pitch (which only now I can translate into words): Confront terror with every fiber of your being. If you don't, it will seize you and make off with you. Fight it NOW or succumb forever. My thin, little-boy limbs stroked and kicked in a frantic unison through roller coaster swells. Ignoring whatever lay beneath me, I aimed directly for the line of shore (no longer just a beach). Watching it within reach, and even sensing its approach, brought no consolation until at last all four limbs, surf-slackened, scraped through lapping wavelets the rough but familiar blanket of sand.

Just how long it took to get back I could not measure in time, only distance. Relieved and morose, elated and enervated, I had to concede that I'd washed up hundreds of yards away from the point to which I'd struggled to return. My curiosity had nearly destroyed me. And while my best efforts, I saw, could deliver me, they also could not quite restore me.

On the wobbly walk up the beach, as if obeying an unfamiliar oath in a language yet to be identified (let alone acquired, let alone mastered), I calculated that it would be best never to tell anyone what I'd just come through. Least of all tell either parent. Others would receive my report only as shore-dwellers whereas I would transmit it as both shore-dweller and tempter of the deep. This unsettled purpose made me neither proud nor happy nor secure. It left me only with the sharp sense that, as the poem goes, "East is East, and West is West ..." -- and never the twain shall meet.

All in all it didn't feel like victory against the terror that had gripped me, but merely a draw.
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[*]: Proclaiming "Theses on [a *very important* subject]" is the boldest public undertaking any leftwing intellectual can ever realize (except for the seizure of state power). V.I. Lenin's "April Theses" of 1917 declared openly the Bolsheviks' intention to destabilize Russia's Provisional (reformist) Government. Walter Benjamin followed suit in 1940 with his oft-imitated "Theses on History." It seems to me high time that someone compose Theses for "our brave new, 'neoconservative' 21st Century." --JMK

Rhymes With Conservatism

Gabe on the importance of earnestly studying poetry.

"The Battle of Algiers" - A Black & White Blueprint For Full-Color Fauxtography

* Updated * (Naomi Ragen emails that Frida Ghitis confirms this post with "How the Media Partnered With Hezbollah: Harvard's Cautionary Report")
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Last night I screened The Battle of Algiers for the first time since last summer's (unfinished) war between Israel and Hezbollah. Gillo Pontecorvo's Academy Award-winning masterpiece is in some ways a great dramatic record of the tragically implacable, anti-colonial war that ravaged Algeria's people and countryside for nearly a decade while leading directly to the downfall of France's Fourth Republic. The definitive English-language history of this 1954-62 conflict, Alistaire Horne's worthwhile A Savage War of Peace, is so titled for good and terrible reason. (Horne, btw, is on record chiding America's forward strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein.)
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Similar to Picasso's Guernica which had become (after the damage was done) lionized as Europe's definitive objet d'art commemorating all victims of fascist aggression, La Battaglia di Algeri became in the succeeding generation something similar: Europe's definitive objet d'art, extolled in the service of (perceived) anti-colonial, (perceived) aspirations.  With still panel and flickering image attempting to refract war's gory horror through prisms of unblinking moral lucidity, it's no surprise that director Gillo Pontecorvo chose to depict his subjects in black & white. Within that, however, are also many shades of gray. Thus we see in The Battle of Algiers artistic expression of necessary aspirations for independence, self-determination, and peaceful coexistence among all peoples. At the same time, it directly inspires the cult of armed revolution which in turn has spawned endless apologias for the exceedingly and unfailingly cruel list of tin-pot genocidal masters -- from Ernesto Guevara to Idi Amin to Pol Pot to Yasser Arafat to Saddam Hussein to Robert Mugabe -- not to mention independent Algeria's road to its own, homegrown, and precarious socialism. Uncritical screenings of this objet d'art , then, screen damage that continues to be done by dictatorial movements, both the aspiring and the realized.
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In terms of the poster art, note how the above image seems handily handspun from otherwise disparate, but equally strident, visual styles of inter-war Social Democratic pacifist Käthe Kollwitz and post-war Marxist-Leninist Huey Newton. Are the politics of The Battle of Algiers marching forward to socialism? Retreating backward from barbarism? Going round and round in the night consumed by fire? Reflecting neoconservative concerns, are its politics somehow now, nearly two generations later, marching backward to barbarism -- which is to say, retreating forward to socialism? The latter-day result is that -- from street agitators to the academiklatura and minds in between -- the Left adores The Battle of Algiers, to the point where it has elevated (that is, reduced) it to cult status. One thing I'll propose is that the West's inability (or refusal) to arrive at clear determinations about its own history -- and the attendant, staggering spiritual uncertainties -- have created an intellectual vacuum which postmodernism now most ponderously, with a kind of diffuse determination, fills.

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In the meantime, a mental note I took during last night's screening. In one of several fauxtography scandals during last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the New York Times published advertised a demonstrably staged photo-op of the devastation effected by Israel's aerial bombardment of southern (i.e., Hezbollah-headquartered) Beirut (below). By a kind of visual verbatim, the pose in the news image seems not just staged but copied from images of a sequence halfway through the The Battle of Algiers. It's right after colonial police, acting under an exacerbated but concentrated authority, have blown up a building in the Arab casbah, and its residents (to paraphrase Jim Morrison) bring out their dead (above). Real warfare, real damage, real suffering, and real reportage aside, the latter-day result is neither drama nor journalism, but melodrama -- and melojournalism!

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See Michelle Malkin's substantive post for in-depth treatment of this and other recent fauxtography scandals.

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The dead speak: Poor mountain folk, poor students, poor young people -- your enemies of tomorrow will be worse than those of today.
-- Mouloud Feraoun (1913-1962)

Bonus: Leonard Lopate's sensitive, informative interview of U. of Nebraska prof James Le Sueur re Mouloud Feraoun. (Prof. Le Sueur has written a methodical and highly readable introduction to the French-Algerian War, which appears within his introduction to Mouloud Feraoun's Journal 1954-1962.)

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Defining the enemy, at home and abroad, that's our first task.

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Previous: "Hezbollah, Mon Amour" "Lesbollah"

Cho Seung-Hui - Not Beneficent And Not Merciful

* Update (Giovanni taught Seung-Hui poetry) *
* Update (Students feared Seung-Hui based on his plays) *
* Update (Screenwriter Robert Avrech deplores the media's attention to this mass murder) *
* Update (Seung-Hui inspires Muslims who rejoice in America's corruption, anticipate its destruction) *
* Update (Cho Seung-Hui and mental illness) *
* Final Update * (Muslim academic official forbids Muslim prayers for Seung-Hui's victims unless the prayers also are for the victims' conversion to Islam)
* Final Final Update * Pat Buchanan gets the last word (via Matt Sanchez): If there is a lesson to be taken away from this horror, it is that we, as a society, are becoming too tolerant of the aberrant.

Here are some comments on a recent AP wire article on Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui. At this point I say we can eliminate the possibility that the killer was a devout Muslim at the time of the murders. That is, he did not commit his atrocity, as the saying goes, in the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.... In the name of what, then, did he commit his atrocity?

No one should overlook that Seung-Hui provided, strategically provided, ample evidence of what we can term pop jihad or copycat jihad or secular jihad or mental illness jihad [see the most recent update (below)]. The killer had a gradual and irreversible breakdown of Judeo-Christian ethics -- if he ever had them in the first place. He then adopted rhetoric, costume, gestures, and victimology that have much in common with jihadists' homegrown ones, ones that have enjoyed much currency since 9/11 in the MSM, the Arabic-language media, and (albeit with intense scrutiny) the blogosphere. In addition, his rage against inherited wealth -- but without any responsible awareness that, as a VT student, he was at the same time inter pares -- was loud and clear. We may also be seeing echoes of the emptiness of someone who, in his moral and cultural deformation, suffered from a breakdown of Korean or, more generally, East Asian social (even martial) values -- again, if he ever had them in the first place.

Call me a D'Souzian, but all this, imho, points to an indictment of contemporary American (so-called) culture (and perhaps contemporary Korean and East Asian cultures) at least as much as an indictment of Islam.

Knowing that Seung-Hui was an English major, and having spent half my undergraduate time in and around lit departments, I am intensely curious as to what constituted his course cirricula, assigned readings (esp. postmodern critical writing), chosen paper topics, and any other of his formative undergraduate influences and experiences, in and out of the classroom and in terms of professional preparation (club and team membership, counseling, grad school options, etc.).
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* Update * The New York Times depicts Nikki Giovanni as the front line of moral decency because she allowed Seung-Hui's violent "poetry" to intimidate over 60 students into dropping her exclusive writing workshop at Virginia Tech. Then she devoted time to work with him in a one-on-one setting. In terms of the consequences, this outdoes Norman Mailer's advocacy for Jack Henry Abbott (the convicted murderer Mailer helped spring from prison on the basis of his writing promise -- the murderer who immediately murderered again). "The Professor Who Said 'Not In My Class'," harrumphs the Gray Lady. "... 'Not in my class, but in my office hour'," it should read. Thus he pursued his preoccupations, there and elsewhere, and over 30 students -- none of whom Giovanni had devoted one-on-one time to -- are dead. And what a disgusting choice of photo by the Times (above, right), given the subject. The literary Left's fascination with, facilitation of, and refusal (or inability) to discriminate against evil is truly deadly. [Virginia Tech alumn Gabe at Social Foundations sets the pace for the heavy lifting that remains to be done regarding -- how should I phrase it? -- Giovanni's classroom. Read: "Nikki Giovanni's Violent 'Poetry'" and "Bad Poetry".]

* Update * A Virginia Tech student reports: When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. Read "Richard McBeef" and "Mr. Brownstone" by Cho Seung-Hui (warning: graphic content).

* Update * From "The Killer and the Mainstream Media: A Love Story" (at Seraphic Secret): He is, of course, the ultimate, narcisisst, wallowing in too much self-esteem. Our sin? We did not recognize his greatness. NBC has done a great disservice by acting as the killer's PR machine.

* Update * Basharee Murtadd, a self-described "apostate of Islam" who testifies that "there is no deity but the Truth," provides a round-up of some internet-based Islamic reactions to Cho Seung-Hui's mass murder. The script on this image translates as: A Product of American [democracy + nationalism]. As Muslims, our real condolences to you is to help you absolutely destroy your criminal democracy. By the vulnerable people in the Earth.
That's not "closure" -- them's fightin' words.

* Update * It is widely suggested that Seung-Hui a) had some degree of severe mental illness and b) as this link indicates, had in the past received some attention from the (euphemistically termed) "mental health system." This brings into play numerous considerations as to the public and professional (mis)diagnoses and (mis)perceptions of mental illness, plus considerations as to the sufferer's (or rather, patient's) own responsibility in monitoring and managing his condition. In addition to the scrutiny I am trying to bring to bear on the cultural and political consequences and context of his mass murder, specific medical and legal issues seem to be germaine to understanding its cause. Keeping all these considerations in mind all the time is the best way to reflect -- with a surpassing beneficence and mercy -- on what came to pass on April 16. (Also, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred insists that the presence of mental illness does not obviate what should be regarded obviously as terrorism.)

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Now you can read for yourself what I originally read, and draw your own conclusions (emphases added):

Va. Tech gunman sent material to NBC
By MATT APUZZO, AP National Writer 1 hour, 56 minutes ago

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Midway through his murderous rampage, the Virginia Tech gunman went to the post office and mailed NBC a package containing photos and videos of him brandishing guns and delivering a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich "brats" and their "hedonistic needs.

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui says in a harsh monotone. "But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

NBC said the package contained a rambling and often-incoherent, 1,800-word video manifesto, plus 43 photos, 11 of them showing him aiming handguns at the camera.

He repeatedly suggests he was picked on or otherwise hurt.

"You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience," he says, apparently reading from his manifesto. "You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

The package arrived at NBC's headquarters in New York two days after Cho killed 32 people and committed suicide in the deadliest one-man shooting rampage in modern U.S. history. It bore a Postal Service time stamp showing that it had been mailed at a Virginia post office at 9:01 a.m. Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho first opened fire.

That would help explain one of the biggest mysteries about the massacre: where the gunman was and what he did during that two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire, at a high-rise dorm, and the second fusillade, at a classroom building.

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," says Cho, a South Korean immigrant whose parents work at a dry cleaners in surburban Washington. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

Some of the pictures show him smiling; others show him frowning and snarling. Some depict him brandishing two weapons at a time, one in each hand. He wears a khaki-colored military-style vest, fingerless gloves, a black T-shirt, a backpack and a backwards, black baseball cap. Another photo shows him swinging a hammer two-fisted. Another shows an angry-looking Cho holding a gun to his temple.

He refers to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" — a reference to the teenage killers in the Columbine High massacre.

The package was sent by overnight delivery but did not arrive at NBC until Wednesday morning. It had apparently been delayed because it had the wrong ZIP code, NBC said.

An alert postal employee brought the package to NBC's attention after noticing the Blacksburg return address and a name similar to the words reportedly found scrawled in red ink on Cho's arm after the bloodbath, "Ismail Ax," NBC said.

NBC News President Steve Capus said that the network received the package around noon and notified the FBI. He said the FBI asked NBC to hold off reporting on it so that the bureau could look at it first, and NBC complied, finally breaking the story just before a police announcement of the package at 4:30 p.m.

Capus said it was clear Cho videotaped himself, because he could be seen leaning in to shut off the camera.

State Police Spokeswoman Corinne Geller cautioned that, while the package was mailed between the two shootings, police have not inspected the footage and have yet to establish exactly when the images were made.

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Liberalism Delenda Est

* Updated and Expanded * (Jump into the Comments section, folks!)

[This post is a follow-up to "When In Sparta Do As A Spartan"; if you like this, you might love that.]

In the comments to the previous post a reader asks what I mean by "destroy an idea." As if there is something untrustworthy or dangerous about refuting -- beyond riposte and beyond reproach, where possible -- an idea. "Destroy an idea" has nothing to do with censoring thought or speech, but everything to do, whether in private discussion or public debate, with exercising thought and speech competently and morally.

For example, in an email a different reader told me he'd attended a lecture on the Roosevelt Administration's policy of not allowing mass immigration of Jews into the United States before World War II. This can be an anxious subject, of course, especially if you have or had (as I did) European Jewish kin who were slaughtered in World War II. He didn't pick my brain, but it turns out the subject is one I've thought about, sometimes been disturbed about, over the years.

The best single source on it I know of is David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. I came across it when I was a very young adult trying to draw conclusions about the United States' general worth or reliability. The "conclusions" I drew then led to anxiety and mistrust toward American power and American purpose. Stuck inside this Jewish refugee issue, I'd refused to weigh more complex and obvious factors: namely, America's subsequent support for the State of Israel. Instead of free thinking I'd settled for fear and trembling. The first is the essence of a confident and truly liberal education; the second, a temperamental foundation of the postmodern mindset. Before too long fear and trembling led precipitously to taking intellectual refuge in the very desperate hope of revolutionary commitment. I went to the extreme Left. Some, disturbed by the very same issues, go to the extreme Right, like former Meir Kahane devotee, the Israeli journalist and New Republic Editor Yossi Klein Halevi. (Today, like me, he is closer to the center.) A minor detail at the time, but one not lost on me, is that one of the lifetime Jewish communist cultists who influenced me was also familiar with Wyman's book. (Similar to the Russian Bolshevik movement, very many of the American communists I knew were Jewish, a fact from which we constantly drew righteous solace for our otherwise stubborn and self-selecting self-righteousness.) As a result, I felt confirmed in my mistrust of America and more confident in the political direction she provided. This may sound trivial, but when you're 20, as I was -- and in the absence of more fully formed, discriminating values -- such a detail can be pivotal.

Back to the reader who'd attended a recent lecture on the subject. He didn't offer me any details of its content nor his reactions to it nor whether there had been a Q&A session. But I do know that the reader is a lifelong Democrat who thinks rather favorably of  Howard Dean. (Howard Dean, who in public has sported a Palestinian keffiyeh and who during his presidential campaign met and was photographed (all smiles) with one of the most prominent politicians of my former Marxist group.) So I felt adequately informed and obligated to set out not just to destroy, but to pre-emptively destroy, any America-doubting anxiety the lecture might have either instilled in or elicited from this reader. This is what I wrote:

Here are the essential points on the subject I would impart to anyone: In a time of widespread antisemitism around the world (including in America), it was a heartbreaking and tragic historical episode. BUT -- had Western European powers, the Soviet Union, and America braved Hitler's rise to power --had they braved it and denied it instead of enabled it [*] -- there would never have been a mass exodus of refugees to worry about. Assimilated liberal Jews were, in fact, among the appeasers (such as Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband). So the moral and political onus is widespread and by no means merely a stain on the reputation of the Roosevelt Administration(s). Further, the three generations since World War II have seen the most far-reaching social, economic, and political (and military) gains ever for American and Israeli Jewry. G-d bless America! and G-d curse the appeasers of evil!

A severe, lazy, and fatal flaw of contemporary liberal culture (including scholarship) is to revisit those tragic historical episodes in a way that generates pseudo-intellectual fodder for those who TODAY despise American values and American power and who TODAY appease America's and Israel's GENOCIDAL enemies (witness, Pelosi's headscarved, near-treasonous trip to Syria). It allows them to believe that because American institutions in the past were less than providential (in an almost Biblical sense) that they do not deserve our proud, fierce, and abiding loyalty. That lady in New York harbor is the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Exodus or of Utopia. Had I attended that lecture I would have lit into the speaker or any commenters who would not have made that point clear. Why? Because for its continuous complicity in the last century's most monstrous historical crimes, modern liberals have conceded whatever moral high ground they possibly ever had.

Liberalism delenda est ("Liberalism must be destroyed"). It's what the Romans said -- and did -- about Carthage.

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[*]: The simplistic, Marxism-derived version of the rivalry between Germany's Nazis and Communist Parties is that Germany's industrial classes cynically, aloofly, and deludedly preferred Nazi ascent in order to purge the nation of "those rabble-rousing (but nonetheless promising)" Communists and thus -- in an archaically conservative sense that would appeal to old money -- restore order. This now is almost conventional American cultural wisdom, as a single line of dialogue in Bob Fosse's "dystopian", (allegedly) anti-escapist Cabaret conveys quite economically (it's Max speaking from his limousine).

That history is more complex. While Communists ended up being among the Nazis' first political victims (among the very first concentration camp inmates, tagged with a red triangle, etc.), the German Communist Party -- under orders from Moscow -- for a time actually allied with the Nazi Party. This is merely the subterfuge routinely practiced by every totalitarian political movement -- the agenda behind the agenda, etc. -- whether Nazi or Communist, Hezbollah or Hamas, or even Democratic. (Fans of The Manchurian Candidate, take note!) See, e.g., the entries here on the Nazi-Communist alliance in Germany's 1931 elections.

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Here is what I mean by "destroy an idea" or, as I wrote yesterday:

Destroy not their persons, of course, but their ideas and their justifications for their ideas. Destroy utterly their concepts and let the people -- if they can, if they have the will -- build new ideas and justifications from their dusty intellectual rubble. But first those ideas and justifications really must be pounded into rubble.

Say It Loud! I'm Black Irish And Proud!

It's a theme I've brushed upon indirectly and will be returning to with force and precision:

Black is not "beautiful", sisterhood is not "powerful", and gay is not "good".

(If that phrase irks you, Gentle Reader, it's because it's designed to force you to think harder. Hint: Not about what "beautiful", "powerful", and "good" mean, but about what "black" means, about what "sisterhood" means, and about what "gay" means. Most of all -- and this is old hat for liberals -- about what the meaning of "is" is.)

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Well, baseball season's almost upon us and as you can see JMK will not be shy about hurling high and tight brushback fastballs, clocking 98 MPH or more, when multicultural sluggers come to the plate.

In other good news from the pre-season, I'm glad to say I've got at least one hot prospect for this spring's squad of The Good News Eagles: Mick Brady (left) of Dancing In Tongues. I'm not sure what's his best fielding position, but here he shows he can run the bases and slide just the way I like -- kicking up a lot of dirt and getting his spikes into the baseman's mitt. Mick's got a few things to say about himself, Barack Obama, and Irishness:

If it's true that Barack has some Irish blood in him, it does not make him Black Irish. It makes him a slightly Irish Black, just like Al Sharpton is now slightly Strom Thurmondish....

I don't know (and hell, maybe don't want to know) what he absorbed while coming up through the minors, but Mick's earned a spot on my big league blogroll. You might want to give him a tryout for yours, too.

Older Poem - "Kafka"

.....................Kafka


.....................those eyes
.....................dark and bright
.....................deep set
.....................in a chiseled
.....................visage

.....................two shining
.....................black lamps
.....................lit by the flame
.....................that shone
.....................through stone
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ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

* Wrote it about ten years ago. It started out as a sentence in a journal entry that shattered, then set, into this little verbal crystal.

* I've blogged very little about Jeremayakovka's three great inspirations (Jeremiah, Mayakovsky, Kafka). The spiritual nourishment, however, that generating and offering "An Open Letter To Matt Sanchez" recently provided is akin to what this offers. Or to what this is evidence of.

* I'm not nearly as read in Kafka as are the professional litterateurs. His Diaries I find the most compelling, followed by his short prose, and only then by his novels. None of the novels have I read through to the end. (They just don't sustain my attention, can't say why.)

* The first (also lasting) impression Kafka made on me was thanks to an exhibit devoted to him at The Jewish Museum in New York during the 1980s. I didn't visit. It's just that every weekday of its duration our high school track team ran past that museum on the way to Central Park for our workout. The photo of Kafka that appears above figured prominently on the posters the museum had designed to advertise its exhibit. As one among many, mostly hale and hearty, mostly privileged, mostly Jewish, teenaged American boys, I would feel -- while fleetingly and somehow ashamedly looking up to watch -- Kafka watch us rush past him.

* Kafka, like Orwell, would doubtless have felt entirely violated had he lived to see his name neologized (Kafkaesque, Orwellian, etc.). As death closed in on him, he (now) famously demanded that his unpublished works be destroyed, a demand his best friend disobeyed. So the act of reading Kafka is, almost always, a conspicuous betrayal of his exceedingly private, ever-receding spirit. (Ever-receding as a man; as an author (auctor (Lat.): increase) he is diffusely immanent, ever-exodic.) Can someone say how many German lit professors and postmodern literary philosophers ever really (morally) weigh this? Of the ones who do, how many succeed in conveying that to their classroom charges? For to be visited and nourished by a (living) literary corpus is entirely different from swarming around and feeding upon a (dead) literary corpse. Given the nihilistic taint (if not intent) of postmodernism, how many are even capable of that? Or even care to? Or rather: How few?

* This is why, despite the leonine tendencies I sometimes display on Jeremayakovka, I always approach, always take leave of Kafka ... in silence.
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Arab Feminist Soft Sell of Hezbollah

Found this Warholesque portrait of one of Israel's and America's sworn enemies, Hassan Nasrallah, at the San Francisco-based International Museum of Women (under "War and Dialogue").
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The introductory comment reads: [B]y painting him, perhaps I can break past the media pop star, and try to get to know the human being who has come to have such an overwhelming presence in my life.

He's not a pop star -- he's a rock star -- all over the Arab media. And now he's supposed to be some kind of art star in the Western media? Unh-uh. Overwhelming force -- cultural and, when necessary, military -- is the only way to deal with people for whom this "human being" is "an overwhelming presence."
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More about the New York- and Beirut-based painter here.

Related: "Lesbollah", "To Nasrallah, With Love"

The West On The Ropes

We never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have....
-- from Fjordman's "Political Correctness -- The Revenge of Marxism"

Moral Imagination

Moral imagination is better than American Express: not only should you not leave home without it, you can't find your way back home without it, too. John Kekes elaborates on his new book, The Enlargement of Life: Moral Imagination At Work [couldn't find an image of his latest title, Gentle Reader, so a previous one will have to do]:
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We all start out in life with possibilities that are defined by our genetic inheritance, upbringing, personal experience, and education. The range of these possibilities is narrow, full of tensions and inconsistencies. It is hospitable to some of our needs, talents, and ambitions, and it is indifferent to or even antagonistic to others.

Many people remain stuck with the possibilities they start with, and since the possibilities often do not fit their personalities and characters, they end up living frustrated lives by trying to realize possibilities not suited to them. The great importance of moral imagination is that it is perhaps the most important means by which people can expand the possibilities of life they have available.

Moral imagination enables people to grow in breadth and depth, become acquainted with new, interesting possibilities of life, and thereby enrich the narrow set of possibilities with which they start out. And moral imagination does this by way of the intelligent and reflective reading of works of literature that have stood the test of time precisely because they depict different forms of life, different possibilities, and different ways in which lives can be become fulfilling or frustrating. Moral imagination is moral because it is one of the best ways to make a good life for oneself.

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This is the stuff I intuited but was never taught in college, and hence one of the reasons, despite the perks and opportunities, I resented and frankly loathed my undergraduate experience. This stuff -- let's call it "moral imagination" -- is what, after the political, professional, and financial shipwreck of the early Marxist commitment, I was reaching to recover during the "lonely years." Those were years of dutifully sitting down with many a book on my lap (literature and history, mostly), with my conscience on my back, and just maybe with an angel or two on my shoulder. I even set aside literary ambitions (for the time), trying just to relearn and retool -- morally as well as intellectually. The loneliness of those years was more spiritual than social or physical, although the years were lonely in all those senses. For when the spirit is unsettled, all else is unsettled. (That's what I was trying to get at when typing "find your way back home" at the top of this post: a less restless, more settled spirit.)

"Imagination" is funny to Chet Baker, but moral imagination sure isn't funny to Jeremayakovka!

Frances Fukuyama on Multiculturalism, Nationhood, and Grasping Radical Islam

From "Identity and Migration," in the February 2007 American Prospect:

The radical Islamist ideology that has motivated terror attacks over the past decade must be seen in large measure as a manifestation of modern identity politics rather than of traditional Muslim culture. As such, it is familiar to us from earlier political movements. The fact that it is modern does not make it less dangerous, but it helps to clarify the problem and its possible solutions.

Death to Multiculturalism at Home! Death to Radical Islam Abroad!

* Update! * D'Souza's first response to his critics.

Has a nice ring to it. For starters, it turns the tables on "Death to America." Am I calling for blood? Well, more blood to the brain, for starters.

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On Death to Multiculturalism at Home!: Am looking forward to Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy Within. (D'Souza's Intro here.) It's conservative Kulturkampf against contemporary liberalism. Not content with castigating contemporary liberals for responding faultily to the 9/11 attacks, D'Souza's ambition is to pin the blame for the attacks in the first place on contemporary liberalism itself. Wow. If it contains a grain of truth, I intend to find it.

As for TEW's early reception, blogbuddy JMK (NYC) is joyed while Eric is already parsing it. Hugh calls him "a total ass." Counterpunch is punchy. Robert Spencer wants to debate Dinesh.

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On Death to Radical Islam Abroad!: Freedom's Zone picks up on Frank Salvato's "The War Against Radical Islam" in the Washington Times: 

We can both abandon the multicultural politically correct fantasy of an ideologically symbiotic utopia with those who practice radical Islam and fight this war to win or we can die.

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More on Frank's educational non-profit The Basics Project here.

Horowitz 101

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an entertaining and informative piece up about a recent extended exchange between public intellectual David Horowitz (left) and Penn State lit prof Michael Bérubé (below). Rarely does a conservative mix it up with a liberal with enough civility to actually learn more about each one's thinking. This is one of those exceptions.

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Each has a high professional stake in the debate, since Horowitz made sure Bérubé was profiled in The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, and since Bérubé was, not surprisingly, not amused. Many apsects of David's thoughts and public stances are either overlooked or distorted beyond reason by his critics. CHE's "Breaking Bread: Horowitz vs. Bérubé" is a good intro:

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Horowitz: I'm not against women's studies. I'm against a feminist indoctrination program.
Bérubé: I'm against any indoctrination program, partly on the grounds that they don't work.
Horowitz: No, also on the grounds that they're illiberal.

Arrivederci, Fallaci, Fare Thee Well

Now that you were dead, they would listen to you.
-- Oriana Fallaci, A Man

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They called her aggressive, abrasive -- racist, even. Her mind was the fierce, gifted offspring of a most felicitous marriage of reason and emotion: each book an assault on the citadel of postmodern European presumption, each sentence a cavalry charge. Were we to conduct an intellectual autopsy on Oriana Fallaci, were we to behold her brain we would have to compare it to a cannonball; her sex we would have to compare to its etymological source, to a sword's or dagger's sheath.

One of the boldest of contemporary voices of a dying (or rather, long dead) Europe, she was a ferociously indignant echo of what had once been the most harmonious chorus of civilization. Ever. This was a civilization that in the 500-year aftermath of its glorious Renaissance could devise only more and more grotesque ways of betraying its own promise: the Inquisition, the Hundred Years' War, the Jacobin Terror, the Napoleonic Campaigns, the Scramble for Africa, the Great War and its eventual issue, the Great Dictators, each of whom -- the German and the Russian -- bequeathed to posterity (to us) totalized, collectivized, industrialized state murder.

But indignation assures that one's pessimism will never be overwhelming, never quite enervating. Reading Fallaci I sense thrust together the split scream of Antonin Artaud and the unified sublimity of Friedrich Schiller. I hear the cri de coeur from a cryptic public address Artaud gave upon his release from incarceration in an insane asylum -- eight mean, mostly war years during which he incurred dozens of electroshock sessions and the loss of his teeth and much of his hair, but also during which he wrote fully half of his 24 volumes of Collected Works -- the cri de coeur, C'est un vrai désespéré qui vous parle! ("This is a truly desperate man who speaks to you!"). Reading Fallaci I sense that bitter but proud solicitation blended with the admonishing, transcendent aspiration of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" which Beethoven adapted for the finale of his 9th Symphony, after he himself had gone deaf:

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!                   Oh friends, not these sounds!
Sondern lasst uns angenehmere            Let us raise our voices in more
anstimmen, und freudenvollere!           pleasing and more joyful sounds!

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That, to me, is the force of Fallaci's reason. That her mere body, wracked of late with cancer, has perished means little compared to the relentlessness with which in her late years she chastised a dead Europe and exhorted its despised but would-be savoir step-children, America and Israel, to carry on the fight -- our fight -- for civilization worthy of the name. Fallaci was a restless, rambunctious rebuke to all of our intellectuals who have gone deaf, dumb and/or blind in the face of the calamitous threat of Islam.

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Arrivederci, Fallaci. Fare thee well.

(H/T to Asher for the wee-hour heads up on this one.)

* Updated with new links *

Some further tributes:

Iraqi Bloggers Central has the definitive round-up
Stefania
Debbie Schlussel
Michael Ledeen
David Horowitz
Michelle Malkin
Robert Spencer
Judith Weiss
ZionistYoungster
Stop the ACLU.
Gates of Vienna
The Anti-Jihad Pundit

Read the comments at ¡No Pasarán!
A 2002 review of Fallaci's The Rage and The Pride

*New! (9/18)*: Daniel Pipes's informative summary of her career
Say goodbye to Oriana: video footage from her funeral.

* Three galleries of photos * (this one's my favorite):

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