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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31250 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I recently came across this little quillette article. https://quillette.com/2022/10/14/sundance-succumbs-to-social-panic/ where a film of jihadist rehabilitation is cancelled for being "islamophobic". Part of it as I read in the situation is that is a "white woman" is trying to sell the idea that one can be deprogrammed from ideological capture. I suspect that there is a deeper reason (which I can't prove) that we shouldn't go around believing that extremists can be redeemed or deprogrammed. This includes of course that there is no redemption arc for right-wing white nationalist extremists.

As an outsider to US politics I was fascinated by the apparatus of US media to "manufacturing of consent" to fighting terrorism of the evil jihadists with things like "enhanced interrogation techniques" a.k.a. torture. There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective. The critique of that show is that it was "islamophobic" because it painted the jihadist as an unredemptive terrorists.

I find it fascinating that less than a couple of decades ago the right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing, but now the left is touting similar reasoning with white supremacists and throws jihadist redemption under the bus, in the same breath.

I think it's much simpler; a white is daring to criticise a pet pitbull of a group (Muslim radicals). That's just not done.

right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing

Did it? Seemingly a third of prominent rightwing intellectuals in the US used to be left wing extremists, .g. Trotskyists.

I'm going to doubt that claim. A while back I looked into the backgrounds of neoconservatives - a group probably likeliest to be associated with being former Trots - and far fewer of them had Trotskyist roots than I had assumed. Sure, there were some examples of this - Irving Kristol the most notable one - but the former-leftist neocons seemed more likely to have been social democrats or cold-war liberals than Trotskyites or other sorts of commies.

Up for debate unless we do a headcount, however, neocons absolutely absorbed the hubristic revolutionary zeal of the trotskyists.

Starting during the 1980s, disputes concerning Israel and public policy contributed to a conflict with paleoconservatives. Pat Buchanan terms neoconservatism "a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology".[110] Paul Gottfried has written that the neocons' call for "permanent revolution" exists independently of their beliefs about Israel,[111] characterizing the neoconservatives as "ranters out of a Dostoyevskian novel, who are out to practice permanent revolution courtesy of the U.S. government" and questioning how anyone could mistake them for conservatives.[112]

What make neocons most dangerous are not their isolated ghetto hang-ups, like hating Germans and Southern whites and calling everyone and his cousin an anti-Semite, but the leftist revolutionary fury they express.[112]

He has also argued that domestic equality and the exportability of democracy are points of contention between them

What was it, seven countries in five years following 9/11?

Buchanan and Gottfried made their statements explicitly in the context of an internal power struggle about the future of the conservative movement, where it was prurient for them to concentrate on the leftist roots of (many) neoconservatives and exagerrate them, ie. portray the comparatively low number of former Trotskyites among them as a formative part of the movement. There's no particular need for finding Trotsky at the bottom of what, in the end, has been a quest for global extension of American power; the paleocons who think otherwise were always fighting a losing game based on an idealistic view of some non-interventionist, "non-imperial" American past that arguably never existed.

What was it, seven countries in five years following 9/11?

Clark mentions two figures here, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Neither was a Trotskyite; Rumsfeld was a lifelong basic Republican, Wolfowitz had by all accounts I've seen been a cold war Scoop Jackson liberal before moving to the GOP side.

Good points.

So, you are essentially claiming the rabid neocon interventionism is not derived from Trotskyist intellectual influences, but rather a case of common ideological descent from the frog headchoppers of 1790s ?

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