Turkie Talk

Some days ago, as some in my hypothetical audience might recall, I made the following pronouncement:

Andrew Sullivan is a great big shrill petty vindictive dissembling rabid wilfully blind right-wing lapdog with his tongue wedged so far up George W. Bush's suppurating rectum that he now shits for our Fearless Leader.

It was quite rightly pointed out that this was a somewhat intemperate phrase, given that this is, whether I think of it that way or not, something of a public forum, and bound to be cached on Google long after I have returned to dust. Suppurating recta could be my legacy to future generations. Do I want the faceless hordes of Internetdom for generations to come to witness me thus, talking out of my asshat?

I have given that some thought. Hurling unsubstantiated personal abuse is certainly not something, on reflection, I ought to do. I could remove the posting altogether, and watch in the future that I don't thoughtlessly say baseless and obnoxious things in a public forum again. I considered that. Yet that option would fail to satisfy, because, fundamentally, I think 'shrill petty vindictive dissembling rabid wilfully blind right-wing lapdog' is a pretty accurate description of Andrew Sullivan, as he appears in his blog and in some of his dead-tree journalism. So, rather than back up, I have decided the only acceptable course now is to press onwards, into bold new realms of adjectival invective, and this time live up to the potential of blogging for criticism and analysis by offering up firm and perhaps irrefutable evidence for all of my claims, with almost Weierstrassian rigour.

First, some background. Andrew Sullivan is a columnist, of British origins, imported to the United States; he is both gay and conservative in a number of distressing ways. I was introduced to his Internet presence first some years ago, and did not develop an overwhelmingly positive impression of his work, given that I am almost obscenely leftist and he is, well, not. I soon lost interest and gave him no more thought until the last month or two, when I began to delve deeper into the world of bloggishness, and found blogs like Eschaton, for example, occasionally referencing him disparagingly as a source of Bushian propaganda. There were, I learned, whole websites devoted to nothing but contesting his various claims, and to giving him such endearing nicknames as 'Ol Milky Loads'. To see what all the fuss was about, I began to sample Sullivan's Internettery myself, the end result being the incensed tirade above.

As you may have gathered, I think poorly of his recent work.

Many of the things that I find disagreeable about his journalism are on display, in less virulent form than on his blog, in this article from the Sunday Times of 6 April. Primarily, a sort of intellectually-dishonest, and, yes, shrill, misrepresentation of the facts as I understand them.

Get a cup of tea, or something. This may take some time. I'm not going anywhere.

All set?

The thrust of the article is that the Left should embrace the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein, and join in the crusade to rid the world of what he refers to as 'this new fascism' or Islamo-fascism, a term Sullivan uses later, and to which I'll come presently. If he was attempting to appeal to a liberal audience, however, he chose a very odd way to begin, for in his second sentence he's already referencing notable arsebucket Nicholas de Genova of Columbia University, who you may recall made headlines by publicly calling for a US military defeat in Iraq, and about whom the 99.999% of the anti-war movement who do not want Saddam Hussein's dick up their ass became mightily sick of hearing roughly five seconds after he hit the headlines, the same way Star Trek fans hate to hear about the guy at the convention wearing Spock ears and Captain Kirk pyjamas carrying a Klingon dictionary and wanking onto photographs of Gates McFadden. Sullivan immediately begins the construction of a false and simpleminded dichotomy, partitioning off liberals into the De Genovas of the world, and the 'other liberalism' he exemplifies with one Paul Berman, which has seen the need for this new Crusade:

There you have a core belief of some in the left-wing anti-war movement. Such sentiments help explain why at almost every anti-war rally, president Bush is routinely portrayed as Hitler on posters but Saddam is almost completely absent. And, given his ideology, and that of the far left, why wouldn't De Genova feel that way? The rhetoric of the "anti-war" movement has consistently argued that this is indeed a criminal war: that it is being conducted by an illegal president for nefarious ends - oil contracts, the Jews, world domination, etc etc. When you have used rhetoric of that sort, then why shouldn't you, when push comes to shove, support the enemy?

But this is not the only face of liberalism at this time. And as the war continues, and its military success, despite the best efforts of the BBC, begins to become apparent, the other liberalism is beginning to assert itself. The Village Voice last week ran a column by one Nat Hentoff, an old lefty, civil liberties enthusiast and journalistic lion of the campaign against the Vietnam War.

...

But Hentoff saw something else. He saw that any liberal who does not rejoice at the destruction of Saddam Hussein's despicable regime is no real liberal.

Note the identification first of De Genova with the 'far left', and then both of these with anti-war rhetoric in general, as if it's just a slippery and somewhat shallow slope from one to the other. This is a recapitulation of the first Sullivanism to make me wish to shit nails in recent days, his gross misrepresentation of the anti-war movement and his identification of all its components with the lunatic fringe. I, along with tens of thousands of others in Seattle (including the Math Department here), and hundreds of thousands in New York, and millions in London, was vocally opposed to the war in Iraq, and my political views, and those of all but a tiny handful of others', are in no way related to De Genova's. We did not hope for 'a million Mogadishus'; we hoped the war would never begin, and once it did, we hoped it would end as quickly and cleanly as possible. The whole point of being against war is that war kills people and breaks stuff. Whether it's American people and stuff or Iraqi people and stuff, we still didn't want them or it killed or broken, and to demonise anti-war protestors as America-hating Saddamophiles out for blood is not only false but vicious, scaremongering, and full of bile. The war, and for that matter Bush himself, was frequently referred to as 'criminal', it's true, but only in the land of Bush must criminal acts be avenged by the deaths of the criminals.

And if launching a war without a reasonable immediate danger and without the sanction of the UN Security Council isn't criminal...

So Sullivan mischaracterises the left, as he has so often, and adopts the Bush 'with us or against us' mentality. Is that all? Not hardly!

He next, albeit briefly, attempts to wallpaper over the closet in which so many of Bush's and Rumsfeld's et alii skeletons are hidden, the skeletons of Reagan and Thatcher, who propped up Saddam's regime in the Eighties both militarily and financially. Quoth Sullivan:

He also saw that the liberal fig-leaf - the way in which leftists could absolve themselves of responsibility for the Iraqi horror - was just a fig leaf. I refer to the United Nations...

He fails to explain why, exactly, Iraq should be the fault of leftists; it seems to me the implication he makes is that by failing to support a war, the left is tacitly condoning the regime. Neatly shifting the blame from the conservative governments who gave the Ba'ath regime weapons, money, and support to begin with. Though that's tangential...

The hallmark of Sullivan's piece is an anti-intellectual identification of distinct ideas or movements. First, De Genova and the anti-war crowd as a whole. Next, Sullivan blithely lumps every extremist Arab movement together under the banner of 'Islamo-fascism', which is a catchy term, it's true, but also completely misleading. Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator who kept the bars open for many years and took inspiration from Stalin. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, and the Taleban want a strict fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. Hussein and Al-Qaeda are natural enemies, as are Syria and Al-Qaeda; Syria is, like Iraq, a secular Ba'athist state, and Syria offered the US some invaluable assistance in the war against terrorism in the aftermath of 11 September. Sullivan does not want to admit, it seems, that there are more than two sides to any conflict, or indeed that there can be more than one conflict, the war against Islamo-fascism being so vast as to eclipse or subsume all others. And he repeatedly identifies this Islamo-fascism with the fascism of Hitler and of World War II.

Good liberals, as they did in the 1930s, should not shy away from confronting this new fascism. In fact, given their political legacy, they should feel doubly responsible for confronting it.

The invocation of Hitler is the last resort of the hysterical. It renders any kind of reasoned discussion impossible, because Hitler and the Nazis have become practically the archetypes of evil for our society. It's like Islamic extremists' denouncing the US as 'the Great Satan': the language and imagery being used are too powerful to allow for debate or discussion or dissent. Trying to connect Saddam Hussein now to the iconography of Nazism, in his language here, and in his comparisons of the liberation of Iraq to the liberation of Japan and Germany, is a crude and inherently undemocratic tactic, undemocratic in that it is specifically intended to render any sort of diagreement on any grounds morally untenable.

Sullivan claims:

Liberalism cannot co-exist with terror or totalitarianism. One must vanquish the other. And when you look at what we are learning about Saddam's Iraq - its horrifying brutality, its deep alliance with terrorism, its genocidal core, its fanatical anti-Semitism, its contempt for human freedom and human life - you see what, at the deepest level, this war has been about.

Whatever this war was about, and the jury will I suspect still be out on that subject years from now, it was not about freedom, or justice, or compassion. It was not a righteous struggle to free an oppressed people. Was it about terrorism? Was it about weapons of mass destruction? Was it about protecting the American people from an imminent threat? Was it about revenge for 9/11? The administration has claimed so many things, none of them truthful. If it was about liberation, why now? Why so suddenly? When did we grow a conscience? And why couldn't we wait until we'd built up enough troops to secure Iraq after we conquered it? Why didn't we have the troops to protect the hospitals, at the very least? If we're an army of compassion, why have we delivered the Iraqis into chaos? And if our hearts are so big, why haven't we put a tenth of the money spent on this war into rebuilding Afghanistan? Why do we invade Iraq and not North Korea, whose people are at least as oppressed? (Because North Korea could put up a fight?) Sullivan might call this a cowardly buck-passing, falling back on questions to avoid having to take a stand. But these are important questions, and if this cause is a just one, they should be easy to answer.

Strangely, no answers are forthcoming.

It's dishonest. It's unethical opportunism masquerading as a noble sentiment. If Sullivan won't or can't perceive the contradictions and mendacity of his call to arms, he's a bigger fool than even I am, and that's saying something.

Shrill, dissembling, rabid, wilfully blind, right-wing lapdog. I've missed out on petty and vindictive, I know, but it's dinnertime, and I crave pizza; you can find countless examples in Sullivan's blog, in his attacks on the New York Times and on Paul Krugman, in the series of smug anti-awards he passes out on his site. I've done my part for blog journalism for the day.

It's time to wallow in socialist sin.

Posted by aloysius at April 18, 2003 05:38 PM |