Augean Stables

I first met Nidra Poller in the summer of 2003 in Paris where she lives. She introduced me to the al Durah material and guided me through the tangled thorns of the French intellectual scene al Durah has done so much to corrupt. She writes for the Wall Street Journal, and as I read this I thought, this is unusually bold (and long), “even” for the WSJ. Then I realized this was a post at Atlas Shrugged. Few things illustrate the value of the blogosphere than this laser-sharp analysis.

EURABIAN OBAMANIA

If European Obamaniacs had their way, they’d steal every American’s right to vote and elect BHO president of the USA, the world, and the heavens above.

Nidra Poller
Paris, July 28 2008

The flames of French Obamania leaped skyward last week when the once and future president, glowing from his mass rally in Berlin, stopped in Paris on his way to London. Pushing past the statistics—a recent poll showed over 80% of the French would vote for him if only they could—what does this wishful thinking reveal about the expectations aroused by the charismatic candidate? While Obama worshippers the world over clamor for a right to vote in the November elections, their enthusiasm should reciprocally help Americans understand what is at stake. Two interlocking redemptive fallacies, focused on Obama’s enhanced racial value and the international dividends this will incur, are clarified in the light of European incandescence.

I just want to draw attention to the value of this expression “redemptive fallacy.” I’ve googled it and Nidra’s is the only place I find it used. It’s an enormously important concept to keep in mind. People motivate themselves to superhuman efforts because they think they’ve found the way to salvation by an analysis of what’s fundamentally wrong, and how striving to eliminate that “evil” can redeem us/them/the world/the universe. I spoke of one of the redemptive fantasies in my previous post about the Human Rights activists who believe that if Israel goes, it will be a great blow for human rights in the Middle East.

The Zionist notion that if only the Jews had their own state and were therefore “normal”, then anti-semitism would vanish was an remarkably fruitful redemptive fallacy. (Palestine is the only territory to go from the bottom of the third world in the early 20th century to the top of the first world by century’s end). The communist notion that if only we eliminate private property then the natural “comrade” will emerge and participate in a perfect society, was an enormously destructive redemptive fallacy that led to the death of tens of millions and the mental bondage of hundreds of millions.

Transposed to France, where 99.99% of the media are rooting for the “first black American president,” the Obama look-alike would not be a slim trim sexy Antillean intellectual. He would be a Muslim, a real Muslim, not a Christian convert. Modern, of course, with no ostentatious religious symbols that could disturb resolutely secular French voters, but Muslim in heart and soul, arisen from the beleaguered immigrant class and placed on high to prove that France, too, has atoned for its sins of racism and colonialism. Only a Muslim could fulfill this role. No other minorities—Chinese, Jewish, Brazilian, etc. —need apply.

You wouldn’t know it but France already has a dashing young diversity president. Nicolas Sarkozy’s father is Hungarian, his maternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Salonika (who converted to Catholicism in 1917 to marry his French sweetheart), and his son Jean is reportedly converting to Judaism before his marriage with a Jewish girl. But Sarkozy gets no credit for his origins, and no applause for including three Muslim women— Fadela Amara, Rachida Dati, and Rama Yade–in his government. The French president has been ground to mincemeat by the media though his government is rapidly implementing the major reforms promised during the campaign. He was trashed for a three-day post-election jaunt on a rich man’s yacht, bashed for vacationing in Kennebunkport and eating barbecued hot dogs chez the arch-criminal Bush, and run through the wringer for having too much personal life.

Mocked as an over-excited omni-president who leaps from photo-ops to grandstanding interventions, Sarkozy is dismissed as a shallow show off one-man government, an elected monarch, a versatile back slapper… Along comes Barack Obama and the adjectives are shined up and pinned on his chest like medals. Oh la la le rock star! Cameras caress his private jet. His toothy smile is an expression of political brilliance, his glad hand is evidence of extraordinary diplomatic skill, his outstretched arm at Berlin’s Victory Tower promises miracles. The screeches of his international groupies were relayed with exceptional indulgence and his deliberate snubbing of Socialist politicians (presumably to avoid guilt by association) did not raise an eyebrow.

That last point is interesting. It’s as if the French understand what the American Muslims who complained bitterly that Obama’s staff dissed them by keeping them off the platform don’t — keep a low profile while he aligns himself in the center. Your day will come later. It’ suggests that for the French left, Obama is an enormously important object of redemptive desire.

The American Wonder’s brief Paris stopover offered a rare moment of respite for the French president. Press, fans, and a huge chunk of the political class from right to left, basking in the promise of New Improved Franco-American relations that will be ushered in when Obama wins in November, looked on tenderly as Sarkozy bantered with his “copain” Barack.

As could be expected, Obama fan clubs and paraphernalia flourish in Muslim immigrant communities. The nominally conservative Figaro daily ran an enthusiastic article on the hopes ignited by the Democratic candidate. Karim Zéribi, an elected official in Marseille’s Socialist government and self-described bobo [bourgeois bohémien], is lost in admiration for Obama who has “transcended” his origins. “He’s the best! Calm and powerful,” exclaims Zéribi, who chafes at being seen as a member of a “pseudo-minority.” On the right, Kamel Hamza, a UMP (Sarkozy’s party) official in the Seine St. Denis municipality shares Zérbi’s enthusiasm: “Un black [trendy French for noir] has a good chance to become president of the United States! A guy like us… president of one of the world’s most powerful nations!”

Dig that! Suddenly American power, in the right hands, would not be evil. American society, systematically portrayed as racist, communitarian, and imperialist, could become a beacon to the world…if only the right race wins. And Western European nations, faced with overwhelming problems of immigration, Islamization, and demographic decline, should redeem themselves by doing like the Yankees.

While the mere suggestion that Islam could be in any way shape or form a factor in the personality of Barack Hussein Obama is scorned as dirty fighting in America, hopes for a Muslim president are openly promoted in France. And democratic values are brushed aside with a flick of the wrist. In the place of elected officials committed to the general welfare, aggrieved minorities are unashamedly seeking “guys like us” who will defend their interests. Walt and Mearsheimer‘s pseudo-academic exposé of the “Jewish lobby” has no black power equivalent when Obama ignites ethnic-racial hopes.

This is one of the more critical issues that produces the inversions of reality so characteristic of the European “take” on the Arab-Israeli conflict. As dogmatic believers in the epistemological privilege of victims (a post-modern tendency), Europeans believe that Arabs — and especially Palestinians — have a justified truth claim for their narratives because they are underprivileged… not because they are right/honest/accurate.

On the other hand, Jews, no matter how accurate/right/honest they might be, are automatically disqualified. “Jews,” as one French observer noted to Nidra and me one day in 2004 during the continued wave of anti-semitism in France that began in October 2000, “cannot bear witness. They are too ‘communautariste,’ too partisan.” Only an anti-Zionist Jew can be trusted, because he is anti-communautariste. As an American college student told me: “If you’re Jewish and pro-Israel, you’re closed-minded.” And as Nidra suggests here, the main thrust of the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis is, “beware Jews whose advice has positive consequences for Israel.”

On the other hand, Arabs have a right to be as partisan as they want. Who on campus would dream of calling an Arab “closed-minded” for supporting the Palestinians? For them, claiming positions of based on communitarianism is not only legitimate but laudable.

This moral inequivalence explains the paradox that I kept rolling over in my mind in astonishment back in the first half of this sad decade: here are the French, especially Parisian intellectuals, among the most “méfiant” [suspicious, mistrustful, hypercritical] people on the planet, scarfing up nonesense (like Al Durah) from the Arab world.

The full irony can only be appreciated once you realize that for all their chummy solidarity, the Jews are the least partisan of identity groups, the ones most capable of a high level of detachment from emotionally driven beliefs, the most capable of self-criticism. Hence, among the Jews, the high number of scientists, academics, and journalists who can empathize with others. And if there are Jews throughout journalism, it’s not because they are secretly pursuing their people’s agenda, but because many have a particular talent for fair and impartial readings of situations. If anything, they bend over backwards to avoid their own people’s agendas in order to prove their impartiality (hence the NYT’s silence on the Holocaust).

From this we come to the ultimate projective misreading: Muslims believe in a world-wide Jewish conspiracy to control the press because they see Jews in the media everywhere. They assume that these Jews do what Muslims would do — be partisan — and therefore, were there as many Muslims in the media as Jews, they would try to control the for their own causes… as their formal publicly declared principles demand. So the Jews must be doing the same thing. QED. (Note, this is not to say that some Muslims are not excellent journalists; just that those who believe in the Jewish conspiracy think this way.)

Why bother with a lobby when you can have the whole building! If, as many Blacks and Muslims fervently believe, their interests will be more fairly represented by a black American president, shouldn’t the dominant group stand up and take notice? Why share power with the diversity crowd when you can keep all the goodies for yourself? Why give artificial advantages to groups that cannot pull their own weight, if they are going to use it to push you out of the driver’s seat and maybe out of the car?

The putative line of reasoning that Nidra lays out here — the seemingly appropriate attitude of the power-elite — is actually the standard line of reasoning of pre-modern (prime divider) elites: rule others lest they rule you. In 1179, a group of apostolic Christians under the leadership of a man named Waldo, came to see the pope and ask, among other things for permission to preach, and for approval of the vernacular (French) translation of the Bible they had developed. One of the court officials who examined them (and tried successfully according to his own account to make a fool of them) wrote the following conclusion to his account:

They are meek and mild right now, but if we let them in, they will push us out.

Thus the “Church” rapidly declared the “Waldensians” heretics, tranlsations of the Bible were banned, and Europe headed for half a millennium of inquisitorial persecution of religious dissidents.

The principles of modern civil society call for a radically different approach: everyone gets a chance, everyone can participate in the social contract where access to the public space and access to power are determined by talent rather than incumbency.

Far from clinging to their selfish privileges, the dominant groups of our societies — directly in the U.S., vicariously in Europe — are throwing them at Obama’s feet and shrieking with joy at the prospect of following the leader who will redeem them of their presumed sins of… racism. White Americans bring the world the “We have Overcome” good tidings that Europeans will gleefully apply in their own besieged cultures.

This final note strikes me as correct if rhetorically inflated: people are not only engaged in a redemptive bargain with Obama — electing him proves we Americans are not racists — but one with enormous risks, particularly when transposed to Europe. If you elect a Muslim demopath (or dupe of demopaths) to prove you’re not an Islamophobe, you’re committing suicide. Which is, of course, just what the demopaths demand of us.

Of course the Obama campaign would argue that their candidate is not responsible for false hopes aroused by his superficial attributes (forget about the Reverend Wright, that was in another country and the bastard is bound and gagged), and progressives will claim that minority empowerment is universally beneficial, but that should not keep us from looking reality squarely in the face.

On that subject, the recent re-emergence of Obama’s editorial writings during the period from 1996-2004 should be cause for some serious reconsideration of what he really thinks.

If origins are anything more than a drop in the blood, they connect to some very real attributes indeed. All men are created equal but not all cultures are equally admirable, acceptable, or desirable adjuncts to our own. Is it sacrilegious to obverse that Obama’s third world credentials were touted during the primaries while Kenyans of different tribes and political parties were hacking each other to death or burning each other alive?

And his associations in this process are particularly troubling. Nidra’s comments here on the disparity between cultures is about as un-PC as one can get. But they point up some of the ironies of our current post-modern dilemmas:

• Not all cultures are capable of sustaining multi-culturalism. That includes most “pre-modern” prime divider political cultures, and especially ones that, under the humiliating pressures of civic demands, have taken an anti-modern turn.
• In a world where there is no objectivity, judgment becomes all the more important. Rather than all narratives being equal, one has to judge the honesty and accuracy of the multiple narratives we should listen to.

This may seem far-fetched in the American context but Europe’s diversity-immigrants (not all foreigners qualify for the honorific label) are primarily recent Muslim immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa. Their countries of origin do not protect minority political, cultural, or religious rights. Of course any given immigrant from any backward country may be an exemplary citizen worthy of the highest honors. Nonetheless, ethnic politics represents a clear and present danger in Europe.

Democratic societies that have made spectacular progress in fighting discrimination would be ill-advised to backslide into a tribal move-over-it’s-my-turn mode of government. Putting Obama’s face on America, we are told, would win friends and influence people everywhere in the world. Obama himself has promised to replace “cowboy diplomacy” with blessed multilateralism. And that is the crux of the problem and the key to Obamania: the vain hope that not only replacing but symbolically erasing George W. Bush will make that indefinable global conflict go away.

And part of the vanity of that hope are the twin illusions that a) European anti-Americanism is rational, and b) Muslim grievances are fair criticisms of the West. Thus a) changing the given “reason” for anti-Americanism — Bush is such an idiot — with a reversal — Obama will be cooperative rather than confrontational — will solve the problem of European anti-Americanism and b) granting concessions to Muslim grievance — be more “even-handed” in the Middle East, force Israel back to the 1967 borders, allow Sharia law, elect Muslim candidates — will solve the “clash of civilizations.”

But the European problem is deeply rooted in resentment; and the cooperative/concessive strategy fraught with dangers.

Over and above the immediate electoral question this magical thinking weakens the free world. If the United States, which has become the default superpower precisely because a war-weary Europe has opted for infinite compromise, swoons to Obama’s sirens, the resulting multilateralism will be as shaky as the ambiguous triumph of diversity.

I must confess to a certain confusion here. Everyone talks about a war-weary Europe as if the current generation — rather poor in history — had an existential memory of the horrors of war and would felt in their gut, “never-again.” My read of history is that war is like an appetite, something that returns almost every generation (like apocalyptic expectations). That Europe has now gone over sixty years without war may be the result of not wanting war, but I don’t buy the “war-weary” argument. Maybe when they first adopted the “let America protect us” approach. But now…?

Europe has neither the will nor the way to defend itself against global jihad.

On that topic, see Fiamma Nierenstein’s brilliant book, Israele siamo noi [Israel is us].

In fact, a few cracks appeared in the Obamania front when the Magician pulled an Afghanistan surge out of his false-bottom hat. Several French commentators [and German ones] warned that President Obama would be asking us for boots on the ground…and we don’t want that, do we?

Similar dynamic happened in Germany.

President Sarkozy faced fierce domestic opposition a few months ago when he resolved to reinforce the French contingent in Afghanistan. The decision, which coincided with the Olympic Flame protests, elicited live-and-let-live comments about the Taliban and contrasting righteous indignation over Sarkozy’s eventual presence at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. Tibet was already forgotten last week when McCain’s reception of the Dalai Lama earned him a 2-seond TV yawn and a snide comment about his hopeless attempts to upstage Obama.

So to Charles Jacobs’ “human rights complex” in which the perpetrators matters far more than the victims no matter how much (or little) they suffers we now have to add another factor — how much self-sacrifice is involved in pursuing the “bad guys.” I suspect that what we have here is a combination of both of those factors — and yet another: does the identity of the person denouncing the human rights violation match your political agenda. Sarkozy is “bad,” which makes his enemies (Taliban) okay; McCain is “bad,” which makes his efforts to side with the Dalai Lama against the Chinese insignificant. Black hearts trump red spades.

The 2003 Franco-American rift is given as the ultimate example of faulty Bush diplomacy. French people share Obama’s conviction that we should never have gone into Iraq; they knew better at the time and the catastrophic outcome of the intervention should be a lesson for the future. Otherwise well-informed people are absolutely certain that the bloody terrorist attacks featured for years on daily newscasts as proof of America’s folly continue unabated to this day. Knowing little or nothing of French involvement in the UN oil for food scam they believe that France’s decision to oppose the American intervention was based on superior diplomatic finesse and tougher moral fiber.

I commented extensively on the bizarre condition of the French intelligentsia in 2003 and 2004, partly as a result of my conversations with Nidra. The pack mentality of anti-Americanism — from left to right — was stunning. And the Muslims saw this as a sign of French weakness. As one Moroccan explained to a visiting European, “The French are siding with people who hate them (the Iraqis) against their friends. There’s no reason to do that other than fear.” (Of course there’s always suicidal resentment against a friend more powerful than you.) But the French saw it differently. “Courage is standing up to the powerful, and the US is the most powerful, said one French journalist proudly.

How would Obama’s promised multilateralism differ from the sidewalk-café diplomacy of 2003 when the Chirac government wanted the right to dispose of US troops massed on the Iraqi border on the pretext that their mere presence, would eventually convince Saddam Hussein to comply with UN resolutions? Nations that will not give blood and treasure to fight our enemies can presume to exert a “moral” influence on American military might! When in the history of humanity has there been such a disconnect from the reality of power?

It’s hard to think of an earlier example. It’s directly related to “moral Europe” — this bizarre entity that, as a result of being saved twice in less than a generation from its own belligerent madness by the US, has now adopted what it considers a post-military stance. We don’t need to fight wars; we can negotiate a solution to any conflict. And the US, with its cowboy mentality, is the source of evil in the world. Moral posturing and profound self-delusion contribute significantly to this disconnect.

Breaking with decades of anti-Americanism President Sarkozy has tried — unsuccessfully — to encourage EU countries to increase defense spending and shoulder a greater part of the burden in a conflict that will not vanish with a swish of the diplomatic wand. Imagine, along with the Obama worshippers, a victory for their candidate this November and the subsequent election of a French Muslim president in 2012. The resulting multilateralist dream would look more like UN Resolution 1701, that delivered Lebanon into the maw of Hizbullah and doubled the threat to Israel, than to any glorious joint effort to defeat the enemies of the free world.

What would be your exit strategy on that?

Indeed. As I said to a student who assured me that if every country in the world had nuclear weapons we’d have peace, “What if you’re wrong?”