The Great Debate

The great debate began with this (video below):

Published on May 10, 2013

The World?

On his Friday night show, Bill Maher invited his panel to discuss this week's developments about Benghazi — debating whether the story is as scandalous as Republicans are making it out to be. Maher, for one, couldn't understand exactly what the outrage is about. But some of his guests begged to differ.
"I still don't know what the scandal is," Maher lamented.

The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald examined the media spectrum's initial take on it — Fox News deeming it a major scandal and MSNBC arguing the White House didn't err — and stated that neither extreme was accurate. It's not a massive scandal the way the right has said, Greenwald argued, but the administration did put forth information that was untrue, whether intentionally or mistakenly. And that does merit investigation.
It's "a prototypical Washington scandal," Joy Reid chimed in. "It's a scandal about a memo." The "bombshell" was an edited memo, she noted, asserting that it demonstrates how "desperate" Republicans have become. Her argument immediately drew disagreeing looks from National Review's Charles Cooke, who contended that the "media sides with power."Obama's supposed to micromanage everything that happens in the world?" an incredulous Maher asked. Greenwald and Cooke pressed further, arguing that there is a valid issue that should not be readily dismissed. Maher was "bored" with the discussion.

...and thus moved on to the religious aspect of it, citing the anti-Islamic video the attack was initially blamed on. Every time we overthrow a Muslim government, he observed, it seems like it's worked: "Theocracies are actually dictatorships themselves, aren't they?"

To that point, Cooke pointed to various revolutions, contrasting how the "great" American one was different from the many others that are bloody and horrible. Immediately, Reid questioned how the revolution was "great," citing slavery — arguing that revolutions inherently are messy.

"We play a significant role in what's been happening in the Middle East because we've been interfering in and dominating that region," Greenwald charged. It's not all our fault, he added (noting that other religions are associated with violence as well), but we should take a lot of the blame.

Saturday, May 11, 2013 - Round One

Silly liberals wearing crowns

by digby

Watch Glenn Greenwald irritate the hell out of Bill Maher last night with his "silly liberal" opinion that Islam is not some kind of uniquely violent religion --- and that US foreign policy might just be partly to blame for its believers' hostility towards America.


I would love to know why Maher thinks that making this (to me, obvious) observation makes liberals "feel good." I can't speak for anyone but myself, but it makes me feel like shit. 

Sunday, May 12, 2013 - Round Two

 
Greenwald and Maher are both wrong

by David Atkins

It has been interesting to me to watch the various reactions to thedispute between Bill Maher and Glenn Greenwald. People tend to see the winner of the debate as the one who confirmed their own prior views. Maher's argument is that Islam is a uniquely violent religion; Greenwald's is that there's no difference between Islam and any other religion, but that U.S. imperialism is to blame for any differential blowback.

But the evidence would dictate that they're both wrong. Both of their arguments are too simplistic to be taken seriously, and both are easily assailable. We'll start with Greenwald's.

Falsehood #1: "Imperialism is to blame for everything." Yes, we all know: imperialism is bad. Imperialism begets blowback. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. All of this is true. But on the question Maher puts, those answers are sleight of hand. The debater in Greenwald's position would have to argue that predominantly Muslim nations have suffered imperialistic horrors so disproportionate to the experiences of other nations and cultures that their reactions must be equivalently disproportionate. On that front, Greenwald's argument totally falls apart.

It would be hard to argue that the average citizen of Iran or Saudi Arabia has suffered more greatly from racism and violence than have the victims of U.S. backed military juntas and death squads inGuatemala, Honduras, Argentina or El Salvador. Yes, the U.S. coup against Mossadegh in Iran and interposition of the corrupt Shah surely led to the rise of the Ayatollahs. But it's also true that the U.S. did far worse in Chile when we deposed Allende in favor of the brutally awful war criminal and genocidal maniac Augusto Pinochet. Few honest people would argue that Iran suffered more mightily under the Shah than Chile did under Pinochet. It's not as if the U.S. didn't covet Chile's copper just as surely it did Iran's oil. And yet, Chileans didn't take hostages at a U.S. embassy, nor are they threatening to use nuclear weapons against the rest of the world. Did the U.S. arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets, and then abandon them to their fate? Yes, and it led directly to the rise of Bin Laden. But we also did the same thing in Vietnam with far worse carnage. Somehow our far less atrocious involvement in Afghanistan led to the current predicament, while not even the horrors of My Lai set in motion a Vietnamese assault on the World Trade Center.

It would be difficult to argue that Estonians or Latvians somehow suffered less imperial oppression at the hands of the Soviet Union than did the Chechens. And yet the result is dramatically different. It would be difficult to say that the Muslim Uighur people in Western China have suffered more greatly under Chinese rule than have the Tibetans. And yet, the reaction has been markedly different. Palestine is not the only place in the world to be occupied at length by an unfriendly power, but it does seem to be uniquely intractable in ways that, say, the oppression of African-Americans in the South or of black Africans under Apartheid was not. Despite having experienced arguably more horrific slaughter and oppression than any other group, Native peoples in the new world aren't constructing secret terror cells in retaliation. It would be difficult to argue that Indians were somehow less oppressed by the British in 1920 than Pakistanis are by Americans today. The Holocausted Jews and Armenians might also have something to say about reacting malevolent oppression in ways that don't involve the intentional, indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians (and no, Greenwald's argument that targeted bombings that accidentally kill civilians are in the same moral space as terroristic acts that target civilians isn't even worth addressing). One could go on and on here without even bringing up death threats against cartoonists or bombing schools that dare to educate girls, both of which are also unique to certain cultures. The evidence that something unique is going on in the Muslim world beyond simple reaction to imperial oppression is so plainly obvious that to deny it is to be embarrassingly and willfully defiant of logic, reason and perspective. Maher's mockery of Greenwald for failing to see the self-evident was wholly justified.

Not that Maher wasn't deserving of ridicule himself. Which leads us to:

Falsehood #2: "Islam is uniquely violent." Maher and every other person who believes this is true should probably take a history class and write a series of mea culpae on the blackboard. There is nothing more problematic about Islam as a religion more than any other when viewed in historical context. Even ignoring ancient times, the history of the Christian era alone should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that Islam is somehow more inherently violent than other religions.

Islam has a long and proud history going back well over a millennium. Islamic scholars have been responsible for countless advances in the sciences and in philosophy, including at a time when most of Christian Europe was busy burning as much of its intellectual heritage as it could. That the same Christian world that perpetrated the Crusades and the Wars of Reformation would dare imply that Islam is somehow intrinsically belligerent is ludicrous. It was Christians who fought the American Civil War, Christians who perpetrated many of the awful evils of World Wars I and II. It was a born-again Christian President who lied an entire country into an illegal and immoral war against a majority Muslim country that had done nothing to us.

Nor do non-Christians get off easy. The worst crimes against humanity in history were perpetrated by Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, neither of them Christian or Muslim. Pol Pot deserves an honorable mention, as does Ataturk.

If there is anything uniquely problematic about Islam versus other cultures and religions, it somehow didn't seem to manifest until the last century when the Middle East suddenly became hot property for imperialistic, oil-centered conquests. Which in turn means that the problem isn't Islam. It's something else. Imperialism is, of course, the easy target. But we've already covered why that explanation is wholly inadequate.

So what is going on?

Well, it turns out that it's not that complicated. Maher and Greenwald are both right, and they're both wrong. Yes, the problem has much to do with oil, imperialism and oppression. But it's not quite as simple moral relativist academics might like it to be. And yes, the problem is religion--but not in the way that Maher thinks it is.

The problem, as it is everywhere, is fundamentalism. The problem that causes anti-choice terrorists to bomb abortion clinics, Timothy McVeigh to blow up a federal building or Eric Rudolph to bomb innocents at the Olympics, is the same problem that causes so many Muslims to become entrapped in terrorism and anti-progressive movements. It's a struggle against modernity and against progressivism that occurs :

1) whenever religion of any kind is allowed to be the sole driving force of organizational activity in resistance to oppression, and

2) when people are free enough to congregate and resist without being enslaved or mass murdered, but not free enough to hope for true social advancement.

This is true in many parts of conservative America, just as it is true in Sri Lanka where the Tamil Tigers emerged. It is also true in much of the oil-producing world, where vast oil wealth mingles with massive inequality and exploitation. The ease of financing a government with oil money tempts elites into creating an economy without a substantial middle-class tax base, and without a voice of the people in government. The people are free enough to be angry and act on that anger, but not free enough to succeed or create real change. This is when fundamentalist religion is most dangerous.

This is true everywhere, regardless of whether the people in question are Christian or Muslim.

And indeed, one of the more depressing dynamics in American politics is the immediate hope on both sides after any terrorist act that a member of the other tribe be implicated. Conservatives hope to see a Muslim terrorist implicated, while liberals hope it's a right-wing terrorist extremist. This is pointless and foolish. In fact, progressives should simply note that there's barely a breath of difference between the two. As I said back in 2010:

there isn't much separation between the fundamentalist extremists on the far right in America, and the fundamentalist extremists in the Islamist movement worldwide. Both want to subjugate women under patriarchal authority, keep gays in the closet, elevate scriptural authority over secular law, and resolve problems foreign and domestic with harsh violence including the torture and killing of civilians. They are peas in a pod.

Fundamentalism of any nature causes extraordinary harm. Fundamentalists believe that the ends justify the means, and that their ideology cannot fail--only people can fail their ideology. Christian and Islamist fundamentalists alike attribute any ills befalling the world as a sign of inadequate obeisance to their God, and do whatever it takes to remake the world more in keeping with their scriptural dogma. Market fundamentalists elevate the "free market" as a divinely infallible authority, attributing even the most obvious market and corporate failures to intrusions of "big government", and offer up only more deregulation, tax cuts and the occasional military coup as a solution. Even Marxist fundamentalists exist, looking at the failures of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot not as refutations of their dogma, but as inadequate implementations of their ideology. The end result of all of these fundamentalist beliefs is mindless tragedy, violence and death.

The implication of a fundamentalist extremist in an act of violence should never be a cause for cheering by our political opponents. Rather, any such event should be a teaching moment for us to implicate extremists of all kinds, and to reinforce the universality of violence based on religious dogma.

Any attempt to provide context or justification for these acts of terror is also misguided. Certainly, the U.S. and the West in general have a spotty record in the Middle East. Anyone familiar with the names Mohammed Mossadegh or Charlie Wilson would admit to that upfront. But no act of American foreign policy in that region or any other begins to provide even significant context, much less justification, for premeditated acts of violence designed expressly to kill and terrorize a civilian population. As well might we cite Thomas Frank and the slow implosion of the American middle class as context or justification for the terrorist acts of killers like Scott Roeder or Timothy McVeigh. No one should make any excuse for these abominable creatures; similarly, no excuses should be made for the likes of Richard Reid or (allegedly) Faisal Shahzad.

Simply put, there is evil in this world that harbors no excuses for its actions: its name is fundamentalism. It's time for progressives to end the cycle of left-right tribalism over which fundamentalists are more dangerous or need more context. It's time to simply paint them with a single brush, and offer our alternative for a better, safer, more rational, more peaceful and more humane world.

Both Greenwald and Maher are wrong. This isn't about imperialism or about Islam. This is about fundamentalism, and the need to uproot it in favor of a more ecumenical, open-minded progressivism wherever it exists.

Sunday, May 12, 2013 - Round Three

 
No sorry David, Glenn Greenwald is not wrong

by digby

It's interesting that David Atkins thinks that both Greenwald and  Maher are wrong since I came down heavily on Greenwald's side just yesterday. I suppose he was being polite. But obviously David's screed requires a response from me since he could just as easily have put my name in the title of his post.

Let me first say right upfront that I don't dictate what anyone writes on this blog.  It's a free forum and just because I might disagree with the thesis, in this case quite vehemently, I would never remove the piece simply on that basis. Free speech and clash of ideas and all that rot. But I do reserve the the right to respond when I think it's necessary. So.

Unfortunately, David chose to represent Greenwald's views as being some sort of simplistic "blaming" of all the world's ills on imperialism. That's not what he said. Indeed he said several times, in response to Maher's repeated insistence, that he did not believe that. He was referring specifically to the perennial question of "why they hate us."  He believes that the beef stems from American foreign policy of the past six decades and not out of some religious hatred for The Great Satan.  In other words, he doesn't think they hate us for our freedoms or because Allah told them so, but rather for our insistence on interfering in the rest of the world's business both economically and militarily.  (Yes,  that's "imperialism" and we are an empire, which is indisputable.)

I don't think it's surprising in the least that when people find themselves on the receiving end of massive technology and military might, they become angry and violent. Sure, they might turn to their God and religion for justification, but the truth is far more prosaic --- we dominate and kill them and they want revenge. It's the oldest story in the book.

The birth of widespread Muslim fundamentalist hatred for America stemmed from covert and overt support for dictatorships in the middle east,  military interference in Afghanistan, Israel, the corruption of the oil patch states and their relationship to the richest most profligate nation in the world (us) and a desire for independence and self-rule. God's edicts fall far down the list of reasons.

Their fundamentalism gained power as much because of America's foreign policy actions as some desire for pre-modern society --- Islam was the only institution that provided power for the masses. Iran is the perfect example of how it happens:  a dominant superpower decided to interfere in a nation's internal politics in order to control its resources,  the church foments a revolution and the rest is history.  There's a name for it and we all know it: blow-back. And it's happened so often now that it's astonishing that anyone's arguing the point  anymore. We've seen it manifest in the middle east over decades starting in in Iran and Afghanistan to devastating effect and we have no idea how catastrophic our little Iraq adventure is going to turn out to be. I'm not even going to mention the consequences of our relationship with Israel, which plays into everything that happens in the region.

To me, it is simply indisputable that the United States' sometimes well-intentioned but often brutal and violent use of its global dominance as a military and economic power has resulted in the blow-back we call terrorism. Is it everything?  Of course not and Greenwald was careful to say he didn't believe so either.  It's economics, culture and yes, religion as well. All these factors play into this problem. But there's only one factor that Americans have any direct influence over --- the actions of their democratically elected government.  So that's probably the smartest first step to try and correct, don't you think?

Do I think Islam, fundamentalist or otherwise, is unusually lethal as religions go?  No, frankly, I don't. I think the embrace of fundamentalist Islam --- and especially terrorism --- among a sub-set of Muslims is driven mostly by the politics of the era, probably at the hands of opportunistic leaders who use it to keep their followers on their path to power. I think we can all agree that religion has often served that purpose, can't we? I certainly don't think these fundamentalist/extremist Muslims don't truly believe what they believe --- and like David, I find those beliefs very noxious --- but I honestly don't think they are the most important source of the problem of terrorism either.

Maher's facile assumption that  Islam is the only religion that still embraces violence is very convenient, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if the shoes were on the other feet, Americans would have no problem adopting a religious justification for fighting back the Imperial Islamic Iranians. Christians haven't had the need to kill in the name of God for quite some time, but I'm sure they'd be able to find that old time religious mojo if the need arose.

Not that it's likely to happen:

If you think there are no consequences to taking on that dominant military role and then using your advanced weaponry to invade countries that didn't attack you, depose legitimately elected leaders, torture and indefinitely imprison innocent people etc, etc. then I think you're being naive. If it expects to be safe from any retribution, any nation that takes such power unto itself would be wise to go to great lengths to insure that none of those things happened in order to preserve moral authority and the goodwill of as many people on this globe as possible. And sadly, I don't think we've met that burden whether in Southeast Asia, Latin America or the middle east.

Maybe we just aren't cut out for this empire thing. Certainly the founders of this nation didn't intend for us to be one. And that's a problem, not just for them, but for us.

We are not to blame for all the world's ills and neither Greenwald or I are making that case. But we must acknowledge that this imperial project at least requires that we take our responsibility as citizens seriously enough to oversee our government's foreign policy with clear eyes and make our representatives and leadership project ideals and values that do not create more enemies than friends. We're a strong country, I guarantee we can take it.

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