You have no rights when you’re dead
Today Glenn Greenwald points to an interesting tirade from Mark Steyn, neoconservative chest-thumper extraordinaire and a columnist for Chicago’s daily rag. In it, Steyn finds the time to assault kidnapped Fox reporters Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, civil libertarians, multiculturalists, and anyone else who isn’t positively chomping at the bit to kill some dark-skinned Middle Easterners in the name of Western freedom.
Greenwald finds this to be hideously offensive, never mind stupid, for good reason:
So, to recap: The West is like a 16-year old girl assaulted by aggressive Middle Eastern men - weak, vulnerable, humiliated, and in submission. Gay hedonist Andrew Sullivan, along with the bound and submissive Fox journalists, are the symbols of the weak, decadent West which Steyn so despises — devoid of any manly values and courage. Each week, Steyn screeches that we must wage war — aggressive, unrestrained, manly glorious war against our Enemies — because the alternative, which he fears so deeply, is to be a 16-year-old submissive girl or a gay Andrew Sullivan — the men without chests, as Warren put it. You can find this transparent dynamic in most warmongering screeds these days.
The ironies of this disturbed war dance are virtually infinite, the most obvious one being that the Steyn Warriors can never point to any sacrifices they make or risks they incur. But the most striking irony is this. So much of the neoconservative warrior cries are built on an ethos of deep fear, of exactly the desperate desire to be protected and saved which Steyn and company claim is the hallmark of the girlish, soul-less West. As they strike the warrior pose, they are desperately willing, even eager, to fundamentally change the character and principles of our republic and to sacrifice the core liberties which define it because they are scared and want, more than anything else, to be protected.
As it happens, though, these particular anxieties are not new to the neoconservative psyche, nor are they exclusively motivated by physical fear. I was a student of enough disciplines to see this in any number of prior historical circumstances, and nearly always this primal fear of girliness is motivated by two things, neither of which requires a violent response: Low birth rate relative to the Other (to use the academic-speak), and a pluralistic culture that values a model of masculinity other than the Warrior-King.
It’s disconcerting, because the first two models of similar ideological behavior that come to mind are Belle Epoque France and Weimar Germany.
In France before World War I, many people felt a growing sense that the country had been emasculated by its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Seeing the German population grow much faster than the French population, this emasculation was confirmed for them by low birth-rate. And unlike England and Germany, both of which had been countries with relatively large minority ethnic and religious groups since the 18th century, France saw a tremendous influx of minorities during the late 19th and early 20th century: Jews, Arabs, Italians, Russians, and Eastern Europeans. The conservative French intelligentsia believed that this was weakening the very Frenchness of their country. (Sarah Maza is insistent the Dreyfus Affair is mostly an outgrowth of the French need to find someone to blame for the Belle Epoque state of affairs.
In a very real sense, then, the French were feeling Freudian castration anxiety. The response was, of course, unequivocal: The French Right paraded around practically demanding a war, insisting that only by letting French blood flow would the country somehow be purged of its weakness, and only then could la France take her rightful place at the top of the pantheon of nations — or something. We’ve seen how well this worked out for Belle Epoque France: The war they got was World War I, which cost France 1.38 million men, young and old, and wounded 4.27 million others. That’s 75 percent of the total mobilized.
Our second example, and one of the easier ones, is Weimar Germany. After World War I, and Germany’s defeat, the country was financially humiliated and its leadership took solace in social liberalism and some of the irrational responses to World War I like Dada. Germany had suddenly, over the course of four years, been transformed from a rising world power to a humiliated, weak and subservient nation! What had happened?
The answer, as we know all too well, was that someone was to blame. But the ideology of the German Right during the Weimar years, before the rise of an explicit Nazi ideology, sounds very much like Glenn Greenwald’s: To show weakness is to be weak! We have no values, no core for which to stand up if we don’t act like manly men! Et cetera.
But the most striking example — which is why I saved it for last — is actually to a much earlier time, to the West’s strange obsession-infatuation-fixation on Islam during the late early-modern period, in the 17th century. A rise in pirate hijackings on the high seas, Western incursions into northern Africa and the Middle East and the Great Turkish War all combined into a lot of Western paranoia about the Middle East, and also a strange cultural phenomenon of idealizing them. I studied a particular subset of this culture, English Turk plays and (fictional and non-fictional) captivity narratives, for their very anxiety about what loyalty meant to those captured. These plays and narratives nearly always involve Westerners taken captive, and in that event some of them are weak and are either killed or convert, and at least one and sometimes more show strength and escape back to the West. These stories range from the heroic but believable to James Bond levels of fictionalization. In the end, these plays divide Westerners into two groups: Those who are true Westerners, who can resist the allure of Islam and the appeal of weakness and death, and those who cannot.
Having said that, Steyn’s screed shows many of the same anxieties. Our cultural discourse is modeled differently, of course; but if Steyn were writing in 17th-century England, he too would probably have written a Turk play or a fictionalized captivity narrative, rather than a newspaper essay. That play would probably put Wiig and Centanni in exactly the same situation, in which their lives were threatened unless they converted; he would have them convert; and then he would find a way to get them killed in battle, showing remorse for their conversion at the last minute but finding it too late. (In that period, religion was generally a proxy for nationality, and vice versa. I’d like to say that it isn’t the case in the 21st-century United States, but I’d be wrong.)
Of all the Turk plays that I’ve read, I know of only one where the narrator himself admits to converting and does not demonstrate remorse or attempt to show that it was a false conversion. Here, curiously, we have turned the tables: It is Steyn, not Centanni and Wiig, who want us to know that the conversion is false.
Nevertheless, the fear remains the same. You see, to Steyn, this conversion is a demonstration of the weakness of the entire West: If you value life more than you value your religion, you are unprincipled and will be destroyed by the Infidel Other.
The Western tradition, you see, tells us to buck up and play hero. Somehow, I think, Steyn wants our two brave reporters not only to slant the news from Iraq to make it sound better than it is, but also to magically become John McCain overnight and resist torture, demonstrate great heroism. The problem with this is that John McCain is not only a hero but a rare man; even though I did not and will not vote for him, he certainly deserves our admiration. But the preference of two reporters for life over the this strangely weak and easily compromised Christianity and Western tradition is not a repudiation of heroism, but an acknowledgment of the nature of our nihilistic foes.
(An aside: I maintain that, far from being “Islamofascism,” the terrorists we are attempting to fight are basically nihilists. They are Muslim, Arab terrorists because the particular power vacuum of the Middle East allows terrorists to flourish there where they would not elsewhere; but there are also Russian and Chechen and Basque and Irish and Moldavian and Japanese terrorists, and the only reason that we don’t worry as much about them is because the power structure there mostly keeps them fighting their own governments instead. But all terrorism is nihilism. Violence is always wrong.)
Of course, Greenwald is right to point out that Steyn’s superimposition of this purported weakness on Wiig and Centanni has more to do with Mark Steyn than with the reporters. After all, the very thing he is so busily accusing them of — weakness, lack of moral fiber, willingness to trade safety for security — is precisely what he himself is advocating! His column devolves into: Bah, who needs civil liberties or a pluralistic society when it’ll get you killed? Now, does it sound like he’s worried for the souls of two reporters, or more that he’s panicked about his own, personal safety to you?
It’s sad, because the reason the United States exists at all is because a handful of very brave and very noble men agreed that death was better than giving up what they believed were their natural rights as human beings. I am astonished, and have been for the last five years, that the very men who proclaim themselves to be the inheritors of the legacy of the Founding Fathers run around merrily trampling on the civil liberties that those great men were willing to give their lives for.
We can hardly hold Centanni and Wiig responsible for lacking principle and preserving their lives — for all we know, they were agnostics anyway — but asking Mark Steyn, who sits comfortably in his home in Chicago and accuses two captives caught in a foreign land of being weak and hollow, to be principled is another thing entirely.
John Maynard Keynes was right: In the long run, we are all dead. It’s just that some of us don’t want life to be all that great in the short run, either.
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