May 13, 2002

Cognitive Dissonance? Daddy Warblogs expertly

Cognitive Dissonance?

Daddy Warblogs expertly dissects three editorials from the Independent's Argument section. No surprises: it's pretty messy in there. If you're a fan of the Brit-lefty-barrelling genre (and who isn't?) it doesn't get much better than this.

At the end, he has this interesting comment on "why Europe is so hard on Israel:"

it has to do with the Holocaust, but not in the way some people have suggested. I don't believe most anti-Israel sentiment is motivated by anti-Semitism; there's anti-Semitism out there, but that's not where the criticism comes from. All European nations, I think, suffer from a burden of guilt over the Holocaust, either because they were directly implicated in it, or failed to prevent it. Today, we think 'If only the Jews could be passive victims, if only they refused to fight back against their enemies - then we could rush in and save them.' - rush in and save them the way we failed to do in the 1930s and 40s, and thereby atone for our actions (or inaction) and be released from that burden of guilt. But the Israelis, by fighting back, block the expression of that impulse; they don't need to be 'saved' by us - they are capable of saving themselves, and this frustrates us because we want so much to atone and they are preventing us from doing so. This is why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes constant headlines, while the Chinese occupation of Tibet, or the Kurds, or East Timor, or any one of a dozen other little wars have nothing like the same public profile - we do not have a psychological 'vested interest' in those conflicts.

I've given up trying to figure this one out, for the moment anyway. The purely psychological explanations of Euro-hostility to Israel and Jews (of which this one is as good as any, and more cogent than most) never ring completely true to me, though I'm not sure why. Sure, there's a "vested psychological interest" in the Israel/Palestinian conflict because of the crimes of Europe's recent past; and the "burden of guilt" is undeniable. But if such psychological factors were determinative, wouldn't you expect the reaction to be the opposite of what it is, i.e., at least a modicum of support for Israel and Jews, rather than enthusiastic championing of the enemies who want to wipe them off the face of the earth? Shouldn't they be, at minimum, just a bit less grudging in conceding Israel's right to exist, and perhaps a little less inclined to act as apologists for the terrorist thugs whose words and deeds bear such an uncanny resemblance to those of the architects of Europe's own record-breaking persecution of the Jews? How does feeling guilty over having killed six million Jews in the recent past somehow require you to ally yourself with and make excuses for those who would quite like to kill six million more today? (Yeah, I know: criticism of Israel isn't necessarily anti-Semitism...)

Does "denial" require that they evade the issue by "blaming the victim," as Ron Rosenbaum recently suggested? Or perhaps, as Daddy W. argues, the Europeans really do harbor secret dreams of atoning for their sins by rushing in to save defenseless Jews, and are merely frustrated that the Jews who have taken their defense into their own hands have deprived them of the opportunity to carry out this penance. (God help 'em if that unlikely scenario were ever to be thrust upon them.) But, to continue in the psychological vein, even if total salvation is denied to them, there are still little things the Eurocrats and Europundits could do, like "admitting there's a problem," taking a "searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves," "making amends," etc. You know, baby steps.

How about an occasional op-ed affirming Israel's right to exist and defend itself? How about a hint of acknowledgement that Israel's actions in the cause of defense and security, while not always to their liking, are nonetheless a response to a genuine threat, based on what are judged to be real defensive and strategic needs rather than merely upon a senseless thirst for blood? How about a little less eagerness to revel in gleeful condemnation of "Jewish evil-doing" before the facts have been established (as with the Jenin "massacre?") How about a sober acknowledgement of the plain fact that their celebrated client, Yassir Arafat, for all his other wonderful qualities, is a terrorist and that an integral part of his "struggle" involves the deliberate murder of large numbers of Jews? And that if he and his associates were allowed to kill more, they'd kill many, many more? Since neither the Independent nor the EU can quite bring themselves to do even that, it's no surprise that the patient remains sick. Fate is a river, free will is a paddle, and well, you know...

Like I said, I still don't entirely "get it." I'm sure part of the answer does indeed lie in the realm of psychopathology. It has to. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that it also has to do with the fact that, as bearers of the ungainly legacy of 1968, Euro-elites (read, the no-longer-all-that-new Left) are saddled with an ideology that for many years now has been at increasingly obvious odds with reality. For die-hard moral relativists, the Holocaust, as the ultimate demonstration of the bright line between evil and good, is an inconvenient exception that is best avoided or discounted. The conceit that Communist totalitarianism is preferable to "decadent" liberal democracy, once an unalterable article of faith among the hipsters of the revolution, can no longer be uttered with a straight face, yet it nevertheless is part of the foundation of the ideological culture represented by the New Statesman (in whose pages you can still read the occasional apologia for Stalinism or Stalinist figures like Milosevic.) If your intellectual heroes are those for whom Stalin was a political hero, the whole issue of the persecution of Jews and state-run mass murder becomes inconvenient, problematic, and best avoided. Thus the venerable and pernicious tradition on the Left of downplaying the importance or "relevance" of the Holocaust historically and with regard to contemporary politics. And, for the generation that ingenuously believed that people like Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Yassir Arafat were nothing more than pure and honest freedom fighters whose virtue was beyond criticism and whose predations were more than justified by the promise of a coming hip apocalypse-- well, there's only one of them now left to coddle and fund, isn't there? History has been poking this ideology full of holes for some time now: hostility to Israel may be just about the last bit of it that is still recognizable and available to those who wish to keep it alive.

Communism failed. Socialism failed. The hippie love generation failed. The Red Brigades, the SLA and the Baader-Meinhoff gang all failed to kill the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people, otherwise known as Amerikkka. Only Arafat, the Guardipendent, the New Statesman, and a vague, limping anti-Americanism, remain. They'd never admit it, but I suspect that, in a sense, Euro-lefties are fond of Arafat (in his Che Guevara mode) in the same way that my dad loved John Wayne: as a last, doomed, remnant of a world long since and irrevocably lost. Similarly, the self-absolving view of Israel as the linchpin of Amerkkkian imperialism which must be "smashed" and destroyed for the sake of "social justice" (not anti-Semitism, *nudge* *wink*) appears to linger unnamed, a grotesque kind of nostalgia. Of course, while Arafat has one foot in retrograde Marxist-Leninist "freedom fighter" territory, his other foot has stumbled onto the thoroughly-modern Islamofascist square of the contemporary political chessboard. The European left haven't quite worked out how to react to this position, how to decide whom to root against in this contest: the goal of self-preservation and the defense of liberal values is indisputably at odds with the still-cherished tenets of anti-Americanism. Unfortunately, it will probably take a massive attack on a European city, which I fear is now more likely than not, to induce them to admit that they ought to have opted for self-preservation much sooner. After that, 1968 will be well and truly gone.

There's probably a psychological element here, too (inasmuch as the student movement of 1968 politicized and "globalized" their rebellion against parental authority and everything it supposedly stood for) as well as a pharmacological one (in that the architects and proponents of this strain of leftist ideology were, by most accounts, generally on drugs.) I daresay there's more to it than that. As I said, I don't pretend to understand it at all. I only understand enough to realize how puzzled I still am.

Anyway, read Daddy Warblogs's post-- it's excellent as usual.

Posted by Dr. Frank at May 13, 2002 12:42 AM | TrackBack