Apologists
Norm on apologists.
Imagine a thought experiment, he gently urges.
On account of the present situation in Zimbabwe, the government decides to halt all scheduled deportations of Zimbabweans who have been denied the right to remain in the UK. Some BNP thugs are made angry by this decision and they take out their anger by beating up a passer-by who happens to be an African immigrant. Can you imagine a single person of left or liberal outlook who would blame, or even partially blame, this act of violence on the government’s decision to halt the deportations, or who would urge us to consider sympathetically the root causes of the act? It wouldn’t happen, even though (ex hypothesi) the government decision is part of the causal chain leading to the violence in question. It wouldn’t happen because the anger of the thugs doesn’t begin to justify what they have done.
I’ve been having a similar thought for days, ever since reading Tariq Ali. It’s July 7, 1944. Bombs explode on three tube trains at 8:50 in the morning, and on a bus an hour later. The perpetrators turn out to be fans of Oswald Mosley, would-be members of the British Union of Fascists. Diana Mosley writes an article titled ‘The price of occupation’ in which she says ‘But it is safe to assume that the cause of these bombs is the unstinting support given by the national government and its prime minister to the US-led invasion of Nazi Europe’ and ‘Most Londoners (as the rest of the country) were opposed to the anti-Nazi war. Tragically, they have suffered the blow and paid the price for the takeover of Churchill and a continuation of the war.’ Can you imagine a single person of left or liberal outlook who would blame, or even partially blame, this act of violence on the government’s decision to resist the Nazis, or who would urge us to consider sympathetically the root causes of the act? (If you go back five years from 1944, of course, you can indeed imagine that, which just goes to show that some people of left or liberal outlook can be – more than a little foolish.) But you get the drift. Nazi terrorists blow up tube trains because they’re really pissed off, and – ? And nothing. So they’re pissed off, so what? Anybody can be pissed off, anyone can have a ‘grievance,’ that doesn’t mean their cause is any good. People are always going to get pissed off when someone stops them doing what they want. But if what they want is to kill half the village, or torture children to death because they are ‘witches,’ or kill the whole village – then it is better to stop them, rather than attending a ten year anniversary of the mass slaughter they managed to pull off in full view of the UN.
I think your WWII example is better, where London gets bombed because we went to war against the Germans instead of leaving them to it – the causal connection, and nature of the acts, are much closer to the present situation – and I’m sure its clear that there were people who said that it was the government’s fault for going to war with Germany (although many of them would have been fascists, or arguing from a somewhat more practical than moral perspective, total war being a considerably greater risk to your civilian population, and especially your young men, than a few terrorist attacks.
Of course the analogy only holds if you regard the war in Iraq as a justifiable act (like stopping deportations to Zimbabwe or war against the Nazis).
I can think of a non hypothetical example. In the case of the recent vandalising of Mosques can you imagine a single person of left or liberal outlook who would blame, or even partially blame, these acts of violence on the fact that the London Terrorists happened to be muslim. I suspect not.
I wrote my own version of that thought in my fourth comment in the original Tariq Ali thread – and then deleted it before submitting because it was making it too long and distracted from the main point I wanted to make about the “innocent victims without callous perpetrators” anomaly.
However, now that you’ve expanded on it anyway, I could go a teeny bit further. An additional reason I didn’t post that then was that TA at least mentioned the bombers (even if only once), so he didn’t quite go all the way in his desired direction of “eliminating the middleman.”
A strong implication in his piece (though that’s not how he puts it) is that the bombers lack free will. In the little chain he sketches of reactions, the victims are innocent, but the bombers are merely doing the only thing possible in response to the Blair government’s actions. The Blair government, of course, could have chosen not do the things that made the bombers’ acts inevitable (it has a power of choice and free will that the bombers don’t). To blur the perception that the Blair government was also reacting to something, TA messes up the chronology of the entire Middle East, as I pointed out at the beginning of that same thread, pushing like mad for an axiomatic idea of “anything bad the West does was done without cause, because the West is evil, but anything bad done in the name of Islam is excusable because the West provoked it and it was the only possible reaction to the provocation.”
If only the Islamic world would react to its grievances with the West the way TA tells the West to react to the terrorism inflicted on it by those claiming to act in the name of Islam.
And while we’re at it, while I don’t think random attacks on Islamic targets are an appropriate response to last week’s bombings, some of the protestations that they had nothing to do with Islam have gone too far. If one of the bombers was 19, British-born, male, of Pakistani origin, a Moslem and a keen cricketer, does that mean it makes sense to cast a suspicious eye on all 19-year-olds, everyone who’s British-born, all males, all those of Pakistani origin and everyone with a keen interest in cricket? Of course it bloody doesn’t, because to the best of our knowledge, he and an awful lot of other people in the last few years have wrought havoc in the world because they thought it was their duty as Moslems, not cricketers. Random slaughter may be a perversion of the “true” teachings of Islam, but if so many people have become a menace to civilisation because they think that’s what a good Moslem does, how can anyone else claiming to be a Moslem expect not to be under a magnifying glass? The Nazis used to focus on Jewish criminals and claim it made them a race to be distrusted, but how many Jews accused of white-collar crimes ever took the stand and claimed it was their duty as Jews to swindle the Gentiles? The terrorists are quite open in equating their bombings, beheadings etc. with their Islamic faith, so why aren’t enough people listening?
“Of course the analogy only holds if you regard the war in Iraq as a justifiable act”
Sure – but the point of the analogy is to focus attention on the fact that one has to ask that question in the first place. TA just takes it as axiomatic. And that is a commonplace trope – the idea that a ‘grievance’ just qua grievance is something to be sympathized with or at least understood – yet the people who deploy that trope are highly selective about which grievances they actually do sympathize with – without, apparently, even being aware of how selective they are being.
A more worrying aspect is that a bunch of northern muslim lads are hardly at the sharp end of Western imperialistic oppression, a similar point has been made about the Sept 11th hijackers.
Apropos OB’s last observation, I once came up, in a completely different context, with a little observation of my own that, unfortunately, fits all too many situations familiar to us all: “The more extreme the bias, the less it is noticed by the person holding it.”
And
“some of the protestations that they had nothing to do with Islam have gone too far”
That’s what Irshad Manji says.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4735885
She gives a full version of a verse from the Koran that is usually given with a crucial phrase left out. It’s an important point.
And of course one could do exactly the same thing with the Bible. Apologists and fans of Judaism and Xianity aren’t usually all that eager to quote the parts about dashing babies heads against walls or some of the more ruthless things Jesus is made to say (‘made to say’ because many scholars think he didn’t say them) – but they’re there all the same.
One of the things she’s getting at is that, while admitting a problem is not a guarantee of solution, non-admission is almost a guarantee of non-solution. How one takes it from there is another matter (I can’t recall any religions that didn’t resist reform; understandably, as a concession on the principle is tantamount to agreeing that the scripture might not be the word of god, or that god had gotten something wrong), but, yes, let’s please acknowledge that everyone’s holy books contain loopholes for the violently inclined. They all take the bits that match their nature. Can you imagine a timid, pacifist believer reluctantly slaughtering infidels because the book told him to? Zealotry without enthusiasm, anyone?
Stewart, I agree with almost all of what you say, but that last remark is way off beam. The whole point about religion is that it can turn gentle caring people into zealots. The suicide bomber’s enthusiasm is not for the fate of the souls they take with them, but for their own (and apparently 70 of their friends and families) free passes to paradise. They are victims of poisonous ideologies against which, apparently, we should not engender hatred.
A belated response, or qualification. My intention wasn’t to make a blanket statement exonerating religion from the charge that it “can make good people do bad things.” I was concentrated more on the fact that believers of different natures can find things in their scriptures that match their temperaments, leading to situations in which mild men of the “turn the other cheek” variety can claim the same book for inspiration as did Torquemada. I seem to recall specific instances in which the organisers of suicide bombings asked their spiritual advisers to find them the loopholes that would permit them to take innocents with them. There’s also an amusing (?) list somewhere out there of all the baggage Bush really has to take on board if he’s 100% serious in basing his idea of marriage on the biblical model, as he likes to claim in his fight against one specific of freedom he finds distasteful.
Recent events make all this a lot sharper. Is it enough to be against violence if you’re claiming as holy a text that permits it?
Yeah – the whole ‘biblical model’ thing is so brazenly ridiculous and stupid and riddled with inconsistencies that I can’t even deal with it.
Actually, the Holy Books and traditional laws do make a viable blueprint for life. Admittedly, life in the Bronze Age, but isn’t that where these fundies want us to go?
Yes. And besides, it depends how one defines ‘viable.’ Viable as in – enough people survive to reproduction age to keep the species going, but nothing more than that. Let’s aim higher!