275. Responding Safely to Islamist Terrorism

The trouble with my saying that a culture can be a threat to a state (preceding post) is that Hitler would love it.  Jewish culture spawned subversives.  It was the water Bolsheviks swam in.  And Bolsheviks, who were they eliminating?  Anybody spawned in bourgeois culture.  All Stalin's executioners needed to see in a Ukrainian was a mark of it.

There it was, the clearest warning sign the twentieth century left us, and I was skating right up to it.  I was suggesting that Muslim culture encouraged terrorist acts.  Take my suggestion and you'll be persecuting those people.  Your thought police, your virtue squads, maybe even your executioners, are on the way.

How can we make sure we don't go past the sign?  I suggest that we begin by doing what Supreme Court justices do: not even consider the question until we have a case before us.  A legal case.  Concrete, particular, with consequences in the practical world.

We move into court to unburden ourselves.  So much of our thinking is abstract, or polemical, or competitive, or self-serving.  So much of our knowledge is inert.  In front of a case our load is lighter.  The abstractions fall to academic theorists, the polemics to pundits, the one-ups to bloggers and tweeters, and the ego-trips to confessors and shrinks.  As for knowledge, the heaviest burden, the excess is stripped from us by the test of relevance.  We are like a CIA director sorting through a mountain of intelligence.  "Is it actionable?" he asks.  In our case that becomes, "Does what we know about Muslim culture justify a change in our law punishing incitement to violence?"  All other knowledge falls to the marketplace, and takes its place in the general scrimmage.

OK, we know enough about Muslim culture — that the religion that determines the culture does not distinguish private religious responsibility from public political responsibility, that a very high percentage of its followers take the words of its Scripture and its preachers as literal and unquestionable truth, that it glorifies martyrdom, that it takes insults to its Prophet with blood seriousness — to justify considering a change in our laws about public violence.

So we set the law in front of us.  In Ohio (typical) it makes incitement to violence a crime only when the conduct "takes place under circumstances that create a clear and present danger that any offense of violence will be committed" or when "it proximately results in the commission of any offense of violence."  We close our ears to all shouts from the marketplace, all name-calling, all accusations, all guilt-thrusts, all cries of pain, all yells of triumph.  We close our minds to all judgments of moralists, preachers, priests, wise men, God.  We focus only on the danger.  Does it have to be "present"? 

We say no because we have seen Muslims inspired by the words of imams commit violence well after the words were spoken to them, as when training in Afghanistan or Syria intervenes.  That's a danger and our security is not ensured.  So we drop "present" from the first condition and scratch the whole second condition.  (See Post 273.)

Is the danger "clear"?  We're looking at another of those objective-sounding, confidently used terms (like "reasonable" in "reasonable doubt") that conceal their subjectivity (clear to whom?  reasonable to what mind?).  But, seeing that our common, liberal way of thinking about religions, inductively, will in this case leave us insecure (we're not worried about majority behavior) we think deductively and conclude that this religion encourages, and at least allows, such behavior (see Post 273). In any case we can accept whatever meaning of "clear" accumulated court decisions have given it. 

All right, let's go back and look at that warning sign.  Are we still on the right side of it? 

 I don't see how we can be on the other side, but I do see how we've opened ourselves to complaints about the law enforcement our change in the rules entails.  Our police are going to discriminate among ethnic groups and profile for one of them in surveillance.  Detectives are not going to be sitting in Methodist churches, guards are not going to be flagging Catholics.

I think most of these complaints can be silenced by pointing out that, no denying it, we are discriminating and profiling, but we are doing it in the sense of those words before they acquired the sense that racists, by their arbitrary and random actions, gave them.  Unless they can tail every citizen in the country equally our police will have to discriminate and profile.  It's a concession to their limited manpower.

For the people most directly affected by our discriminating and profiling, our Muslims, we can transpose the problem to Israel (as I did in Post 273).  Illegal settlements are being set up on the West Bank. You're a law enforcement official.  You know that in the line at check points there are going to be people who, taking their Scripture very seriously, believe that God gave them that land.  Do you want your guards to know which ones?  Do you want these believers taken aside for questioning?  And for that would you like to know which synagogue they attended and what the rabbi was saying to them?  A yes answer approves the kind of discriminating and profiling called for in our changes to our incitement-to-violence laws.

To settle an appeal in any of these cases statistics alone are sufficient.  People of this religion, holding these beliefs, have this probability of acting in this illegal way.  Our knowledge of them, our intelligence, is actionable.  We are still on the right, the objective, side of the twentieth-century's warning sign. 

That gives us security in the near future.  But dropping the word "present" also opens up the far future.  Suppose that, while reduced by the measures above, Islamist terrorist attacks are taking place ten years from now.  We can't see any reason that they won't.  The religion and culture are the same.  There's no change in the water in which these fish thrive.  Can we, within the limits our values allow us, do something about that?  Would we be justified in changing the water?  Or even, God help us, exchanging it for fresh?  

Like it or not, capable of it or not, we are in the business of manipulating culture.  How?  With what justification?  Being over-length already I'll have to take up these questions in another post.

273. Western Liberal in Agony

Man, these French Muslims are tying us Western liberals in knots.  Like:  The president of a mosque is asked by a mayor to help keep their town's Muslim youth from going jihadist in Syria and he (according to Midi Libre) says, "This is their choice.  It is not for me to judge them.”

They are free citizens of a free country.  Until they harm a fellow citizen that country, by the central principle of Mill's On Liberty, cannot justifiably do anything to them.  They are exercising their human right. 

So Lahoucine Goumri (the mosque president) can stick it to the mayor of Lunel (and me): Do you want me to condemn a man for simply exercising his human right? to make his own moral choice? to hold his own beliefs?

And we (at least I) find ourselves answering, "You're damned right we do.  We can't wait for those beliefs to play out into consequences.  They're too awful.  And they follow so obviously.   Believe the history (that ever since the Crusades the West has been out to get the East), believe the sociology (that Westerners exploit Easterners when they live together in the same country), believe the morality (that abstinent, God-fearing Easterners are ethically superior to indulgent, God-defying Westerners), believe the theology (that there's a special place in Heaven for Eastern martyrs) and you've got a high probability of an attack on Westerners.  Including Westerners whose faith in John Stuart Mill keeps them from making you a security risk."

So here I am, a Mill liberal, patrolling as a thought policeman.  How painful.  And the pain gets worse when the New York Times tells me that "instead of condemning the surge of young recruits, Mr. Goumri told local news media that the policies of President François Hollande were the main culprit and complained that it was not his job to denounce the jihadists when nobody protested French citizens who traveled to Israel to help the army 'kill Palestinian babies.'"

Unless there's protest on the other side terrorist acts by Islamists — taking down airliners, blowing up schools, killing Western journalists — are justified.  If he believes that he's dangerous.  And if he believes that martyrdom is a good thing he's more dangerous.  Dangerous beliefs make dangerous people.

Dangerous people?  Because of what they believe or how they worship?  That's the thought of a fascist.  And of medieval persecutors.  "You're the sort of people who need Christian blood for their matzo balls." 

I'm hurting.  But with Mr. Goumri twisting the knife at least I've got a pain I can calibrate.  I see that it will vary directly with the guilt I feel for supporting Israel in its actions against the Palestinians (see Post 214).  Israeli strikes have killed Palestinian babies.  Go all the way backing the original takeover of Palestinian land (from which nearly all horrors inflicted by Palestinians follow blamelessly) and I'm crushed under it.  Back only the measures to stop rocket attacks from Gaza and my head is nearly high.

So the best I can do is turn the dial down.  I don't back the original takeover but I back protecting what's taken over. 

"Not back the move into Palestine?  You'll deny the poor Jews of Europe, those remaining after the Holocaust, a sanctuary in their ancient homeland?"  

It's the old contest, the voice of the tribe against the voice of mankind.  And with me the first drowns out the second.  As it did earlier when I walked into Israel (see Post 214 again) and recognized my Judeo-Christianity.  So I have to support the takeover of Palestinian land.  Mr. Goumri has a case.

All I can do now is argue that it's a weaker case than mine, which has to be strong enough to justify serious restrictions on Mr. Goumri's freedom.  I can't argue it properly here but I can sum it up in one sentence: Since your beliefs are a threat to me and my people I am entitled to act against you.

There you are, right away, what we liberals all gag on.  To swallow it you have to, first, credit the claim that beliefs play out into consequences.  Then you have to quit thinking inductively about religions.

A good test of your gag reaction is found in Israel, where we have fundamentalist Jews sneaking into the Occupied Territory to set up illegal settlements.  Do you gag on the notion that this action has something to do with their belief that God literally gave them that land?  Would you say that somebody who holds that belief is more likely than others to take extreme, illegal action?  If so you have sufficiently suppressed your gag reaction to swallow the notion that those Muslims who hold certain beliefs (like those historical, sociological, moral, and theological beliefs listed earlier) will be more likely than others to take extreme, illegal action.

You may note here that you have quit thinking inductively about religions.  An inductive thinker asks, "What behavior is characteristic of believers?"  He discards the exceptional, the extreme.  If he's a traditional liberal he will go on to make a case for tolerance.  The deductive thinker asks, "What behavior follows logically from these beliefs?"  It won't matter whether the behavior is characteristic or not because the correlative questions are, "What behavior do they encourage?  What do they allow?" 

We are distinguishing among religions by looking at their edges.  We discriminate for purposes of our own security.  In the case of terrorist acts that kill thousands one tenth of one percent will suffice. "What deeds do its alienated youth characteristically perform in order to feel what all alienated youth want to feel, powerful and admired?  What turns its losers into winners?  What satisfies its psychotics?" The answer will vary with the religion and when we find one that threatens our security we are justified in restricting the freedom of its preachers. 

That, to my mind, makes a stronger case than Mr. Goumri can make.  I don't know how accepting it would play out in France, but I can see how it would play out in the U.S.  Say Mr. Goumri lived in Ohio, my state.   The law (Ohio Revised Code, Title 29, Chapter 2917) now makes incitement to violence a crime only when

(1) The conduct takes place under circumstances that create a clear and present danger that any offense of violence will be committed;

(2) The conduct proximately results in the commission of any offense of violence.

The legislature would vote to remove the words "and present" from the first specification and drop the second.   By deduction from the beliefs of the religion Mr. Goumri preaches the danger is clear.

Satisfying the law is one thing; satisfying the liberal conscience is another.  The latter tells us that we are discriminating, we are profiling, we are seeing harm where no harmful acts have been performed, we are curbing freedom of religion, we are denying freedom of speech. 

Each will answer his conscience in his own way, and I don't expect it to be easy.  We are seeing harm where no harm has been done, we are curbing freedom of religion and freedom of speech.  That will torment us unless we see that we are doing it all for the sake of our security, to which we give a higher priority.  (If you don't give it a higher priority now, conscience, you've got more explaining to do than we have.)  As for discriminating and profiling, I think they are handled by getting the conscience to think a little harder about those words "discriminate" and "profile," which have larger application than the liberal conscience customarily assigns.

256. Come on U.S. presidents, listen to my civics teacher.

-->

 

Most of us believe by now that a market economy will outperform a planned economy hands down.  Communist states just fall behind in supplying material goods.  And that's where we measure success in the East-West competition, isn't it, in material satisfaction of the workers?  The American Dream is a dream of money, ability to buy things; the Marxist dream is a dream of satisfied needs, material needs (it's dialectical materialism, isn't it?).  Show Krushchev those rows of middle-class houses in Detroit, tell him they belong to workers, and we can see points going up on the board.

So why did we need to do all those dirty tricks to communist countries, and send advisers to coach resisters, and agents to funnel arms to opponents, and technicians to help the arms-handlers, and do all those covert things Robert M. Gates, Cold War insider, tells about in his book, From the Shadows? 

"Because sometimes, when something had to be done, you could do it more effectively and safely covertly than you could by doing it in the open."

But why did we have to go so far?  Like mining a harbor and blowing up a Soviet ship.  Real in-your-face challenges.  I remember those Cold War anxieties.  We knew what kind of eager warriors we had in Washington.  Smart, but oh my. They could so easily miscalculate.  Trigger too much pride, impose too much humiliation, underestimate a paranoia, and we could find ourselves under an approaching missile.  Or stuck in a postcolonial swamp.  Along with the dictator we backed.

"I know the answer to why we went so far.  Because I've studied some history.  It's that if we hadn't gone far enough we simply would have lost."

Lost what?  Our lives?  Our way of life?

"No.  The game.  It's the game, stupid.  The Great Game, the game played by Britain against Russia for a hundred years in Asia, the game played by Palmerston in his morning coat and Disraeli in his spats, sending an emissary here, a regiment there, the game we're continuing to play against Russia now.  But it's really the game played by any country that wants to be a Great Power (to take over the capital letters awarded to those countries who succeeded in the nineteenth century).  Slip a little and you lose your title."

That's a tough game, I know, but if you're up against communists you don't have to play it.  If what my high-school civics teacher told me about both systems is true we can just sit back and wait for their system to wither.

"Yes.  If your civics teacher is right about communist systems that's what our legislators can vote for.   And if voters really believe what they say about communism, they'll be behind them.  So instead of a Cold War with all its expense and crises we'll have peace and prosperity and saved lives and built-up capital and everything civilized human beings might want. Oh yes, and love will be a thing that can never go wrong, and (to finish Dorothy Parker's way) you'll be Marie of Romania.  The unreality of your logically sound conclusion must be apparent to you. "

 Well, with Gates’ help it's becoming so.  I must admit that it's hard to see any of those five presidents he worked under — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush — saying, "Well, we're going to sit back and wait for things to go our way on this one."  Even harder when you see Obama getting plastered every time he goes an extra second on his chair.

 "And that's just pressure from the voters.  Think of presidential cabinets and staffs, the best and the brightest, the most eager.  Even the most progressive, those most alert to human suffering, with the most humane instincts, even they are going to want action.  Action.  Get a picture of them at home during the Cold War (as in Katherine Graham's autobiography) and what do you see?  Hawks, hawks, and more hawks.  Democratic, humane, Goldwater-deploring, Nixon-fighting, future warriors on poverty.  There they are in Graham's dining room, sorting out moves against the Soviets.  To the last guest!"

And yet, if my teacher is right about communism and I'm right about a passive stand-down in the face of it, what they're going against is peace and prosperity and saved lives and built-up capital and everything civilized human beings might want.  Who goes against such things?  Barbarians.  Are Cold Warriors barbarians?

"It's a reasonable question, and, as you can see in Gates' book, one our presidents most frequently had to ask about CIA people, who often took the operational lead, or stood nearby pushing their favorite operations.  But pushed in such a gentlemanly way.  None more gentlemanly, more civilized appearing, than CIA Director William J. Casey,   "He dressed expensively and formally.  Even on weekends, when he would come into the office, he almost always wore a jacket and tie." He'd have been right at home, sartorially, among the players of the first Great Game, those in the Palmerston cabinet, planning moves against the Russians. 

"And he'd have a lot in common with that other group of well-dressed males around a table in St. Petersburg, planning opposing moves.  I'm with you here.  They're all one.  They're all having the time of their lives.  'Man, is this ever a great game.'  All their hormones are engaged. Male life lived all the way up.  If the Brits weren't having so much fun why would they call it a game?"

That's a terrible thing to picture when you can see where the low-level players of their game wound up. There they are, the poet reminds us, "East and west on fields forgotten....Lovely lads and dead and rotten."  To the soldiers it wasn't such a great game.

"That eats at me me.  And all the more in the light of the history I've read.  I know that what put those lads on those fields, dead, were moves planned by gentlemen, educated, highly civilized gentlemen, England's brightest and best.  As our brightest and best put our lads, dead, on the fields of Viet Nam."

It eats at me too.  And it leads me to believe that I, for all my upward-gazing awe, and you, for all your sophistication in history, still have a naive view of gentlemen.  All those players of the Great Game, old and new, whatever their dress, or manners, or education, or state of civilization, were playing for a very primitive satisfaction: to get the best of another male. What we have to see in those morning coats, essentially, is what I saw on my big city grammar-school playground: competitors in a contest over who would be "cock of the walk," as my uncle from the farm called the winner.  Unsatisfied testosterone.  New on the playground, old in the cabinet meeting.  Inside that morning coat or blazer there's still an unspayed tomcat.  There may be signs of a successful operation, but it hasn't worked.

"That's certainly hard for me to dispute when I look at the CIA described in all the other books about it.  Oh, it's got variety, and thought, and humanity, but you know what its default position is?  You really want to know?  It's a grip on the balls.  The CIA's most vigorous people, the people that gravitate to it, still love Teddy Roosevelt, his manliness, his realistic manliness: 'When you've got 'em by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.'  So shut up, peaceniks, about hearts and minds.  On with the Great Game.  The Ur-Game was Greek wrestling, with no holds barred."

How it must grind those types now when they read of Jimmy Carter, that wimp, doing more with his talk of human rights to break down the Soviet Union than they ever did.  Carter, leveraging the idealistic language Ford had gotten the Soviets to agree to in the Helsinki Accords, and with the help of the new pope (still with no army divisions), started the fires in Poland and Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe that would burn down the whole communist house.  And Gates, noting how he and Ford were belittled for their naive idealism by "those who considered themselves as hardheaded realists in foreign policy," gives him full credit for it (pages 89-96).

Did Carter understand power, the power of ideas, their appeal to hearts and minds, better than they did?  His behavior encourages doubt but to me it looks like it.  The central fact about those CIA realpoliticians, those confident justifiers of the dirty trick, the talking point when you want to take their money (and their reputation in history) away, is that they simply did not understand power.

"And, you know, every time a dirty trick was exposed they had a chance to understand it.  The indignation before the world's TV sets, the disappointment in our allies' faces, the regret in the hearts of our young. They could have learned something from that."

Well, they certainly got their come-uppance from the grieving young in the sixties.   "Covert action?  That might be uncovered?  Christ, can't do that any more.  Not with all these students ready to flood the streets."

"The realpoliticians couldn't do anything any more. Kissinger at the table with the North Vietnamese starts one of his old moves and then, in mid-gesture, realizes that the students wouldn't put up with it."

Ah, those sickened hearts and minds of the young.  But back to the education of the vigorous old.  Only if they had taken their high-school civics course — the course the grieving young were so much closer to — only if they had taken that course seriously, would they have learned something.  Take "democracy" and "the rule of law" as mere words and you're uneducable.  You're free, in your ignorance, to mine another nation's harbors, and overthrow its elected presidents, and deceive your own legislators about the whole thing.  You're free to undermine, and dismiss as naive, the very power that can win the battle you're fighting, the power of an idea.

So, I conclude, my high-school civics teacher had the secret to power, the key to the kingdom, all along.  She have could given it to these presidents play by play.  I'll make her National Security Adviser and let her speak:  "Trust your system.  Trust democracy.  Trust free enterprise.  Trust the ideals of the Founding Fathers.  Trust their strength.  In the battle for hearts and minds, the battle where the war is won, they will win out.  The world will see you conserving lives and treasure, prospering, confirming the practicality of your nation's ideals.  And there's only one person who can keep those ideals from winning out.  You.  You can screw them up.  If by your behavior and the behavior you allow your subordinates you show that you don't trust them, you will screw them up.  The world will hear the once-powerful words and say, 'Yeah, yeah.'  There goes your strength and you'll be back to the no-holds-barred game, which you have no better chance of winning than the other dirty players have."

80. "Repressive regime"

What does a "repressive regime" repress? Human rights. What does a "progressive regime" promote? Human progress. And what do you call a regime that denies human rights and promotes human progress?

We have no word for such a regime but we do have a wonderful example, the regime of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. If by progress you mean movement from the old and benighted to the new and enlightened that state has made it. Its public schools are now up alongside the best in the world, its pension system is a model, its wealth per capita is higher than Britain's, and its corruption is less than that of any state in Asia.

But oh what violations of human rights. Lee imprisoned critics without trial, suspended habeas corpus, arrested union leaders, deregistered unions, and had vandals caned. He also, according to Nicholas Kristof, "banned bubblegum, punished people who did not flush toilets and…forcibly gave haircuts to young men with long hair" (NYT 11-5-00).

Americans have to choose between the put-down word and the build-up word. There is no in-between. So it's case by case. Here's the Shah of Iran, pushing all kinds of social and economic reforms, expropriating large estates for the benefit of small farmers, extending suffrage to women, improving the schools, extending literacy, and raising the national income to record heights. In the New York Times (since 1981, two years after his people threw him out) his regime gets called "repressive" eleven times. Then there's the regime of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, which tried to do the same and more in Turkey, and succeeded. Not one time is his regime called "repressive." Ataturk had nothing like the Shah's secret police but that word still fit him. He outlawed the fez and tried to cut off beards.

So, no surprise. We use the word "repressive" selectively and we obviously take success into consideration. It's a little like "treason"; if it succeeds who dares name it?

Otto von Bismarck thought success took care of the whole problem. "Our democratic friends," he said, "will pipe in vain when they see princes concerned with their well-being." That was after he set up social insurance for German workers. But America can't stop piping. And its democratic history calls the tune. But alas, the words come from the dictionary. There "repressive" means "inhibiting or restraining the freedom of a person or group of people." And that means that every dictator America supported in the Cold War and every oil autocrat it supports now comes within the word's range of reference. The dictionary shows the world, to which we and Bismarck pipe, how disharmonious our song is.

My guess is that that will never stop us from singing about human rights. After the idealists ask us what we as a nation stand for we won't be able to bear the silence. We've been pretty well taught that there are more important things than harmony.