What Artists Can Do

The HBO mini-series Rome is the stuff of nightmares.  Murder was done routinely to achieve political as well as financial ends during the period depicted in the show — a period of civil war that accelerated the bloodletting, to be sure. If the historians consulted for that show are correct, Rome’s elite routinely consigned innocent people including loyal soldiers to an early death merely to acquire what they wanted, and faced no sanction.  Further down the social ladder, slaves, prostitutes, even children were frequently sacrificed for the most trivial of reasons, their murderers also seemingly unpunished.

In America today, and in the countries that also built their governments and judicial systems on Enlightenment principles, the life of every individual is seen as deserving of full protection by the state.  Even if a murder victim is a criminal in the act of committing a crime, our system is supposed to work to redeem that lost life.  In war, the common understanding now is that a soldier’s death is an unusual event, a breakdown in the system, to be avoided whenever possible. 

The jihadists’ willingness to sacrifice themselves as well as the lives of innocents is what avowedly gives them whatever advantage they’ve got.  That we cherish the lives of individuals is interpreted as a sign of our weakness and decadance, says Osama Bin Laden.  The jihadists know they can use our belief that every person has a fundamental right to life against us.  They draw on a more ancient understanding of justice, one that relatively devalues individual life, remorselessly sacrificing thousands of people in the name of crusades for God and power.

How did we get from there to here?  From Rome to the U.S. Constitution?  From the Dark Ages to today?  From nightmares to dreams? 

According to this review on WSJ.com, author Lynn Hunt suggests (in “Inventing Human Rights”) literature made a crucial contribution:

The definition of human rights, she argues, “indeed their very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason.” Accordingly, rights continue to evolve “because their emotional basis continues to shift.” Jefferson’s assertions resonated, she says, thanks to “brain changes” that had occurred in the 18th century. “Ordinary people had . . . new understandings that came from new kinds of feelings.”

But where did these new feelings come from? Ms. Hunt offers two answers. First, new forms of art, especially the epistolary novel, focused on the lives of ordinary people and thus encouraged a broadening and deepening of empathy. “Can it be coincidental,” she asks, “that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century–Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761)–were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of ‘the rights of man’?” Second, the public felt a growing revulsion toward judicial torture, a practice she describes in grisly detail. This revulsion, in turn, stemmed from a new respect for the human body, in particular its individuality.

The reviewer, Joshua Muravchik, finds her theory “not entirely convincing,” by the way. It feels right to me, however.  Who better than an artist, a writer, to go outside the hierarchy of power to show in memorable ways what “the little people” normally trampled by history think and feel; to educate our imaginations to see souls, not masses?

The jihadis need a good novelist.  Or a mini-series.   

The Islamismophobe

Novelist and University of Manchester Creative Writing Professor Martin Amis answered some reader questions at the Independent about a month ago — including some questions a journalist seeking to appear even-handed would never dare ask. This is a good thing. Amis seems at his best when provoked.

Along with Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, Amis has been accused of being a British literary neo-conservative, or Blitcon for short, in the New Statesman. So some of the questions appear to come from the sector who agrees with that assessment. For example:

The phrase “horrorism”, which you invented to describe 9/11, is unintentionally hilarious. Have you got any more? JONATHAN BROOKS, by email

Yes, I have. Here’s a good one (though I can hardly claim it as my own): the phrase is “fuck off”.

I wasn’t describing “9/11”, as you call it. I was describing suicide bombing or suicide-mass murder. And the distinction between terrorism and horrorism is a real one. If for some reason you were about to cross Siberia by sleigh, you would be feeling “anxiety”; when you heard the first howl of the wolves, your anxiety would be promoted to “fear”; as the pack drew near and gave chase, your fear would become “terror”; “horror” is reserved for when the wolves are actually there.

And in a question referring to Amis’ famous father, Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim:

How do you think you might have ended up spending your working life if your father hadn’t been a famous writer? JOHN GORDON, Eastleigh

Well, John, that would depend on what my father had chosen to do instead. If he had been a postman, then I would have been a postman. If he had been a travel agent, then I would have been a travel agent. Do you get the idea?

But what motivated me to post this colloquy was Amis’ views on a London protest he witnesses shortly after returning to England:

The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying, We Are All Hizbollah Now. Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: “We don’t want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you.” Similarly, when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, “should be dropping bombs on themselves!” And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

(Emphasis mine.) Thank you, Amis. The self-destructiveness of this mind-set, not to overlook its deadly irony, cannot be exposed enough. I don’t necessarily think there are a lot of U.S. Democratic Party leaders who would join a pro-Hizbollah protest; but they and the “netroots” certainly do invest more time and energy expressing outrage at our own democratically-elected leadership than they ever do against this most illiberal of cults.

Maybe when Bush is out of office, this tendency will fade. I hope.

(Thanks for the tip to DodgerThoughts commenter Andrew Shimmin!)

Foreign Policy Mix-Up

I agree with some foreign-policy hawks that our country needs to get more real about the threat we face from radical Islamists. Though I am a Democrat, I have given the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt, not because I “agree” with them, but because the Constitution gives them the burden of responsibilty to protect this country, and I believe that there can only be so much political interference with their carrying-out of this responsibility before it becomes damaging to the country. The childishness, cliquishness, hypocrisy and naked partisanship of the Administration’s critics has drained much of whatever ideological sympathy I might have started with. I mean, my God, even the most committed liberals must get bored with the constant “Bushitler asshole” rants — although the evidence is they can’t get enough of it.

All that being said: This is disgraceful, unacceptable and makes we want to impeach all of them:

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.

Just to cut to the chase for those who can’t keep it straight: Bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia, and his #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is from Egypt. These are Sunni states. Al Queda is a Sunni organization.  The Taliban?  Sunni.  Hezbollah, on the other hand, is Shiite.  The Ayatollah Khomeini?  A Shiite.

And, it goes without saying, there are millions of Sunnis and Shiites who don’t belong to terrorist organizations.  Neither denomination is inherently “more radical.”  There are far more Sunnis than Shiites, by a factor greater than 5 to 1. The origin of the split was the Shiites belief that only the descendents of Ali, Muhammed’s son-in-law, can lead the Muslim people.  But the split occured at the dawn of Islam, and at this point the differences are more the result of how the two sects developed historically over the succeeding 1,400 years.

A complete collapse in Iraq could provide a haven for Al Qaeda operatives within striking distance of Israel, even Europe. And the nature of the threat from Iran, a potential nuclear power with protégés in the Gulf states, northern Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, is entirely different from that of Al Qaeda. It seems silly to have to argue that officials responsible for counterterrorism should be able to recognize opportunities for pitting these rivals against each other.

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

The author of this op-ed, Jeff Stein, who writes for Congressional Quarterly, makes a little game out of asking senior FBI officials and members of Congress if they know anything about the Shi’a and the Sunnis, and which forces are allied with which sects. Here’s an example:

At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the (FBI’s) new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”

He took a stab: “Sunni.”

Wrong.

Al Qaeda? “Sunni.”

Right.

I think I could make a lot of money in Washington if I just printed out a palm-sized card that briefly explained the difference between the two denominations, how they started, and which countries and organizations are associated with each one. I’m sure I could sell quite a few to the Democrats who are about to take over the key committees. They must be a little glad that it’s Republican officials whose stupidity is being exposed. This gives them a little time to bone up.

The ignorance — and arrogance defense of such ignorance — is particularly galling at a time when we are fighting a war in Iraq, a country whose primary characteristic is that it contains large populations of both Shiites and Sunnis. If you can’t keep straight which group is closer to Iran, vs. which group is supported by Al Queda…

(I’m sorry, I just fainted.)