Maajid Nawaz and the Problem of the Well-Meaning Racist

Maajid Nawaz very eloquently explains something that has bothered me for awhile, but which I feel is difficult to talk about as a white radical.

It's also a good example of why I try to hold my own 'side' to higher standards, not because I'm against them but because I expect better. When what is holding back the growth and development of the Muslim Left if our own Western Left, we need to reaffirm our principles and abandon the same tribal group-thinks we spend so much time criticising the Right over.

'This is the “racism of the anti-racists,” the new Orientalism. Increasingly today, it is the defenders of everything black and brown, every Oriental and exotic religious and spiritual practice, those who have taken to portraying their cultural sophistication by being able to pronounce Eastern culinary dishes with correctly accented syllables, who are guilty of the most patronizing and debilitating form of racism and bigotry.'

As Maajid Nawaz says, these aren't Western Liberal Ideas, they are human ones. And if we succumb to parochial instincts of tribal identity and continue to stimy those struggling for what we already take for granted, then we fail not just our brothers and sisters in the Muslim community, but advancement of the entire human family.

Merry Christmas.

Hitler Was Not Donald Trump

You would think this would go without saying, but liberals, my people, you are fucking embarrassing me. Adolph Hitler developed an ideology based around what is essentially blood magic that caused the murder of millions and the misery of hundreds of millions. Donald Trump is a racist buffoon.

If Hitler had been as dangerous as the Donald, the world would have been a better place. There would be more people alive today (especially Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals), because at least so far Trump has not advocated anything like the cultic murder religion embodied by National Socialism’s sadistic race theories. He’s your drunk uncle who doesn’t know very much and is scared of brown orphans.

But you know who did do things similar to what Trump has said? Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That’s right, the great liberal hero locked up thousands of Americans and their families for the crime of being of the same racial background as some other people who attacked us. It was a little something called the Japanese Internment, and it was a horrific crime. Donald Trump wants to do that to Muslims--he does not, as far as I can tell, want to exterminate them from the face of the Earth. So let’s criticize him for what he has actually said he wants to do by comparing it to something actually similar to what he said.

To do otherwise is just as dishonest as what the reactionary right tries to do by comparing Sanders’ socialism to the terror of the Bolsheviks. It’s called poisoning the well, and it’s a fallacy when they do it, and even more so when we do it. Because if we’re going to claim to be on the side of reason, we’d damned-well better act like it.

The Appropriation of Yoga or The Revolution Eats Its Children

A pretty good analysis of how the left can eat it's own. It's not phrased that way, of course, but the meaning is basically the same. Slate does a good job identifying the problems with this particular case, that of a Canadian university banning a yoga class because of concerns about cultural appropriation, but misses what is in my view the bigger picture--that the idea of cultural appropriation is itself incoherent.

Sure, there is a real problem underlying things like black face and sorority girls wearing Native American headdresses, but the problem lies in our specific colonial and imperial history, not in some universal concept of pre-hegemonic cultural purity. You can't say with a straight face, or in the same breath, that these people are both our equals and that their cultural practices or religion or whatever is somehow more pure and sacred than any other. The history of the world is, in essence, the long story of cultural fusion of one type or another, and despite what you might think from the leftist press, there is nothing new about conquest or empires. It begs credulity of us to accept artificial divisions of this kind, and incidents like this will increase unless we liberals take a sober look at the principles we uphold.

We can, I would argue, make a better case for our opposition to things like black face by taking it on specifically due to the history in our culture of using shoe polish to belittle and dehumanize the oppressed for the very fact of their being oppressed and disadvantaged. The same is true of the drunken Indian trope, usually performed by a white actor in Native American garb, which is so heavy with the spoils of colonial triumph that in our culture it--rightly--is becoming unconscionable for inebriated college students to don the same costume in mimicry of the suffering we inflicted.

But the general rule of cultural appropriation will push us into absurdities like the one reported by Slate above.

Yankee Go Home, or Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About the Civil War

If South'd won Civil War? Slaves would've soon been freed anyway, South would now be banana republic, & North the greatest civilisation ever

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 29, 2015

Anyone who knows me (the overwhelming majority of all none of my readers) has probably heard me say the following:

The two most obnoxious animals in the American ecosystem are the Southern Evangelical and the Yankee Progressive.

Neither will give you a moments peace. Now I know that Richard Dawkins is not himself a citizen of our great republic, but for the purposes of this brief polemic I'm willing to extend him that honor.

To most people the venerable scientist's statement will seem unnecessary to even be said--we all know the stats about the disparity between Northern and Southern states when it comes to income and education levels, and the greater denial of science such as Darwinian evolution and climate change in the former Confederate States. So why are my hackles thus raised, like the proverbial wildcat cornered in the henhouse?

Before I get to that, let me first and foremost tell you what this polemic is not: it is in no way a defense of the Confederate States of America or that horrific institution called slavery that they fought to preserve. Southern slavery, distinguished from other historical forms by it's singularly racial nature, was an abomination that haunts us to this day. And the clumsy attempts of many of my fellow Southerners to whitewash this history and preserve their generals as heroes and gods has done much to prevent our society from healing from these ancient wounds.

But here's the thing that sticks in my craw about the triumphalist yankee's narrative, and that's that it draws a clear line between us and them, as though the south created and maintained it's economy in a vacuum, and all the Northern citizen could do was look on in horror and disgust. This is, of course, absolutely false. In large part, this civilization that the good professors paeans as "The Greatest on Earth" was paid for in the main by cheap southern cotton and tobacco, two plants acquired from the ground almost exclusively by removing the skin and sweat of the African slave. Whatever moral qualms the average citizen of the north, or their political representatives, may have had were more than salved by the immense fortunes built on manufacturing and shipping the finished goods to a world hungry for the produce of the unpaid labor of millions of southern slaves.

The very foundation of our early republic was built almost exclusively upon the back of the negro, in the most literal sense: Washington DC itself was built primarily through slave labor. And the proof of this is so obvious that most history text books in both the North and South present it with no comment--our good President Abraham Lincoln went to great pains to make clear he did not intend to abolish slavery. So while it's true the South started the war in order to preserve slavery beyond the next generation, Lincoln's radical notion was simply that it not spread to the new territories. Territories, it must be stated, where slavery served almost no economic purpose anyways. The North was drunk on the products of the institution that equally disgusted them, and if you can't imagine how both emotions could be held by the same person, you no-doubt-liberal of the modern world, feel in your pocket for your cell phone and tell me how often the misery of it's production bothers you at night. This is the foundation that allowed the North to create what Dawkins calls unabashedly, "the Greatest Civilization on Earth." Without the south there could have been no Great North, and without the rapacity of the North's markets the impetus for the goods of slavery would have been greatly reduced.

The second great mistake Dawkins makes is that in comparing post-war regions, he is ignoring the fact that the North was victorious and essentially untouched by the war, and that the South was defeated and that its heartland was destroyed in the conflict. This was the first step in assuring that the current and near past South would come to be, the second was an act of mercy when the revered President Lincoln saved the sons of Brutus by allowing the white masters to return to their plantations almost wholly unmolested. The desire of the Southern Radicals (mostly Republican, it should be noted) to reshape southern society post-war not withstanding, both Lincoln and his successor, Johnson, ensured that the same political order would continue to dominate in the South after a brief interregnum. By the time Reconstruction was fully under way cheap cotton was again flowing northwards, picked almost entirely by the same people who had done so previously, only now as indentured share croppers. This is the final sin of the national tragedy that was the Civil War, and made Jim Crow and segregation essentially inevitable, and a legacy we are still trapped with today.

So yes, Mr. Dawkins, criticize the failings of the South. Lord knows I do, and not always in a spirit of brotherhood. But nothing about the current situation was inevitable, and most of it was created unintentionally by the well meaning mistake of one of America's greatest heroes. So in light of the temporary citizenship I with the authority of this unread blog have bestowed, I say with deep affection:

Yankee go home.

Reza Aslan, New Atheist

Reza Aslan makes the New Atheist critique for us, and yet somehow completely misses the point.

Replace the word scripture with Mein Kampf in the discussion above, and tell me it still makes moral sense to you.

My Heart Bleeds for Baltimore

I woke up this morning to heart rending news:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/04/protests-baltimore

Another young black man has died at the hands of the police, and this time nobody has any idea why. No self defense, no resisting other than a brief sprint, and yet somehow his spine was severed and now, after several weeks in the hospital he has passed away leaving every aspect of the case a mystery.

And now Baltimore is burning, and that's all anyone wants to talk about. Even those who style themselves as sympathetic to the protests can't help but conflate it with the rioting, as though this were an expression of resistance. Look at the facts, and you notice something immediately--the protestors were well organized and peaceful. They marched into the city to express their justified anger at a system that has built itself on the sweat of their backs and returned nothing for too long. The riots are not part of this, these are lawless people taking advantage of the fact that the Baltimore police are unable to cope with the city at the best of times, and now that they are so terrified of a justified and peaceful demonstration of this fact to the world they have left the rest of the city totally undefended.

So seriously, everyone, stop conflating the two. The riots are not part of the protests, they are results from what the protestors are demonstrating against. And everyone who thinks they are helping by voicing sympathy for the fictional "violent protests" are unintentionally feeding the false narrative that blacks and other people of color are unable to give themselves voice as responsible citizens without resorting to lawlessness and destruction.

The protestors themselves are putting the lie to this slander right now, by following the best example of their own from decades past despite the tyranny they live under every day--and make no mistake, tyranny is what it is when citizens feed the institutions of government and get none or little of the protections they are entitled to. And this tyranny should burn the soul of every free American, because some of our brothers and sisters are not free, and every day live under a yoke. The black citizens of Baltimore deserve better, and all of us should join them in demanding that they get it; otherwise, we might very well have a real and organized revolution on our hands, and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves. And no free citizen of the world will feel sorry for us.

Nor should they.

Charlie Hebdo, Chapel Hill, and the "I'm Against... But...." Two Step

Here's an issue over which much ink (and many electrons) has already been spilled to the page by many better men and women than I, but it's been on my mind lately and there's something about it that has been free-riding on almost everyone's platitudes that needs to be made explicit.

But first, let's do something that shouldn't be necessary but that I'm going to do anyways if for no reason than that I'm sure someone will (uncharitably) assume I don't thinks so: almost everyone condemns killing people for the crime of disagreement. Almost. Everyone. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Atheists, Straights, Gays, Bicycle-commuters, and Transgender Hot-dog Vendors in the main hold to the consensus that killing people for drawing pictures or living a life a little different than yours is wrong. And I'd put even money that most of them (at least to varying degrees) don't even want it to be illegal under penalty of fine. The problem isn't that most people of any stripe don't agree with what we consider modern liberal values, it's one of two things:

1. They don't really understand the implications of those values
2. All the people who don't agree with these values are geographically concentrated

The first is a blight on otherwise well-meaning citizens of the civilized world, and the second is the blight (mostly) of the uncivilized one. In the former you have the pictured Pope Francis and others like Reza Aslan and Glen Greenwald, and in the latter you have Saudi Arabia and Iran (and maybe some red states). It should be no surprise to anyone that Muslims who live in secular countries are less violent, advocate violence less, or support the exercise of violence on their behalf than the general populace. Many of them have immigrated from places in the latter group, and have no illusions about what that sort of life would be like. These are, by and large, people who I will take at their word, and for whom Islam may actually be a religion of peace. I hope these ideas spread and more of the world begins to agree with them, both Muslims and non, because what a world that would be.

But then you have Pope Francis, the Great White Hope of liberal Catholics who, possibly due to long-time exposure to wrong ideas, can't help but insert them into otherwise palatable statements, as after condemning the attack he couldn't help himself but to add:

If my good friend Dr. Gasbarri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It's normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.

"Sure, it's wrong but really they brought it on themselves." I make no secret of my loathing of the Vatican and it's long history of waging war against human happiness, but this is a mealy mouthed attempt to play both sides. The Pope is a man of faith, I get it, and you don't have to be an atheist to support the secular right to free speech (I have more on that in another article, tentatively titled Why Atheist Should Talk Less About Atheism, but that's an outline on another burner). But come on.

Oh, and here's perennial favorite of the leftist talk circuit, Reza Aslan:

Well, it’s not a justification by any means at all, but what Charlie Hebdo represents for a lot of people in Europe is precisely this clash of civilizations. Look, the editors of Charlie Hebdo would unapologetically say they make fun of everybody, every religion, and they make fun of Muslims for a very specific reason to sort of show, or maybe demonstrate, that look if you maybe want to be in this country, if you want to be in France, then you have to deal with the French values, you have to rid yourself of your own values, ideals, norms, and you have to take on French values. And there have been a number of laws passed not only in France, with regard to prohibitions on Islamic dress, but throughout Europe about whether you can build mosques, about whether build minarets, et cetera. And this tension, this polarization I’m afraid has led to a lot of acts of violence. Not just the tragedy yesterday…

"Sure, it's wrong, but they had reasons, man!" This is the soul of liberal religious apologetics--yes, they admit, usually over an expensively crafted latte or cappuccino made with soy-milk (full disclosure: the author is lactose intolerant, but I think the stereotype isn't far off), there are some problems among religious communities and sometimes they do bad things--but it isn't their fault! Someone made them do it! It's not their beliefs (some of which he shares), because then he'd have to admit what the rest of us have been saying all along--religion is bunk and all morals are man made. So he's forced to bend over backwards to build another narrative.

And this brings us to the tragedy of what in the press is being called somewhat euphemistically "the Chapel Hill murders". Aha! say the aforementioned liberal apologists, a militant atheist has killed three young muslims and to be consistent you must condemn atheism as causing it! To which I respond, No. And here's why:

I categorically condemn the killings. There is no but, no search for context. Whether it was due to the religious convictions of the three young Muslims or over a parking space, it makes no difference. There is no justification for taking another human beings life over the crime of exercising their rights as free citizens of the free world. Praying loudly, parking inconveniently, wearing hair coverings; none of these things warrant violence of any kind. The minority status of atheists or the actions of Muslims on the other side of the globe bears no significance whatsoever to the magnitude of this horrible crime. And anyone, atheist or otherwise, who prevaricates on this point is no ally of me or mine. These three students should be alive today, and hopefully tomorrow and the day after that and the days following those, because the ability to converse and argue and most importantly convince is the bedrock of secular values. This is the difference, and is why it's disingenuous to try to draw an equivalency between the two crimes. Both are horrific, but only one has apologists.

The people I have criticized in this post may very well mean well. They have, in the main, taken a decent observation, that Muslims often are unfairly maligned for the actions of others and that the region populated primarily by Muslims was subjected to terrible forms of colonization and humiliation by Western powers up until late in the last century, and drawn a line across all actions in order to try to be overly generous and excuse anything they due in order to speak truth to power, but in doing so they sell out the very thing they claim to support: liberal values. 

You can't support victims while making excuses for victimizers. You can't promote internationalism while encouraging parochial hatreds. And you can't align with free speech while making some topics off limits. There is plenty of real bigotry against Muslims in what we like to think of as the Free World, and let's call them out on that, but don't forget that sometimes a spade is really just a spade no matter who deals the cards--and then nothing more needs to be said.

A Meditation

This, the inaugural post of this humble offering, had originally been planned as a self introduction that described my social and political ideologies, handwave their contradictions, and ultimately try to make the case that the dialectic is more important than consensus. But today I read of two deaths that affected me more deeply than I expected, since I have never met either person, and now I find myself in something of a meditative mood--and since there's no time like the present, let's reflect on that sword that dangles above us, that which we do our best to dream away and that which, in the end, will claim all of us. That darkened, twisted blade, Mortality.

The first person whose death I heard of today was of Ajivit Roy, an American secular blogger who was hacked to death by machetes in Bangladesh. The second was Leonard Nimoy, now the late actor of the late cultural touchstone called Star Trek. This post isn't really about them because, as I mentioned, I've never met either of them, and I can't clearly remember if I actually read anything by Mr. Roy at all. His name was familiar when I heard it, but I had to ask to verify who it was. The Original Spock was ancient and had announced over a year ago that he had a terminal condition--his death is no surprise other than it actually occurring. But now they are both dead, and some day there also go I.

That's what I'm trying to write about.

But why? Why a meditation?

I am no Marcus Aurelius. I'd probably barely pass for a philosopher of any stripe, much less one who can command an audience (although, to be fair, Marcus was an emperor and could remove any ear that refused to turn his way--he's dead now too, by the way, as well as any ears he may have bent), but I have a life and I have no doubt that one day I will lose it. And then what?

Void?

Nothing.

Time stretches out after us just as it stretches out before we sprang with a squal and a gush from the womb of the woman who bore us--and, as Einstein instructed us, there is no privileged frame in either space or time. We none of us will miss this life after we are gone any more than we did before we had it. And then as children, when all men look back and remember the joy of it more clearly than any child could conceive of it, we revelled in it without even knowing what it was and with no concept that it could ever end. And now, as men and women (and other?) grown, now that this fact rests upon our psyche and crawls down into our gut whenever it is dark or whenever we, through the hubris that rests behind the human eye, we take a deep honest look at our own reflections which betray the passing of life slowly and inexorably into the abyss which spawned us--what now? I am not now young, but neither have I achieved any great age. I have no right to bitterness as I, fortune be fair, may have as much time left--though hopefully a little more--than has passed, but still there comes the times less and less infrequently where everyone who abandons the fairytales of humankind's adolescence must take pause and make accounting of their own expectations, or else abandon themselves to be a husk. Empty of the complex weaving of consciousness that fools us always into thinking we are something.

So here, reader, is where knife cuts, where the philosopher must admit he can never be king, and what was once madness is now the only wisdom left to our tragic species: there is no life. Not in the way we have always, as humans, tried to convince our twisted ape-bodies that we had. We are no more than an evolutionary bridge in a species of ape between what it was that crawled from the primordial ooze and what will be when our distant descendants either reach the stars and ensure that eyes like ours are witness to the final moments of existence itself or are ignominiously wiped out by our own short-sighted ape-brains unequal to galactic scales. There is no magic in us, any more than there was in the proto-human, or the proto-chimp that joined us and our closest living relatives. There was no magic in the first animal to grow a hair, or to crawl from the ocean, or that first protein that popped together in the sludge we tell ourselves was miraculous. We, and everyone we know, and everything we see, is nothing more than chemistry and chemistry is nothing more than physics. There is nothing separate in us, and in the great view of time there is nothing that separates our parts from the parts of the stones, or the air, or the vacuum of space.

We will one day be that which we were--nothing. And that nothing is the everything that has ever been.

So eat, the world is bounteous. Drink, moderation provides relief from all toil. And be merry, for life is nothing and death is nothing and WE LIVE.





good night