Samizdata

“A pragmatist doesn’t keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn’t open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what’s wrong.”

– Michael Barone. The veteran chronicler of US politics is not given to harsh language, but he’s certainly not pulling his punches today.

I have been away for almost 10 days in the lovely Aeolian Islands off the north coast of Sicily, hence my silence. It is a mental health break to be away from emails, internet, TV and the rest. Nothing but good conversation and the company of lots of pulp thrillers, chatty Italian waiters and friendly locals. But I return to work and home with a bump. And of course, we are close to the 10th anniversary of that day of horror in lower Manhattan and Washington DC:

“The proper task of the “public intellectual” might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and “unbelievers,” and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.”

Christopher Hitchens.

For what it is worth, I am not really very keen on this whole idea of there being a “public intellectual”. Who gets to decide that a person holds this sort of role? Anyway, quibbles aside, it is a good piece.

Here are a couple of other paragraphs that stand out:

The battle against casuistry and bad faith has also been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.

In these cases, then, the problems did turn out to be more complicated than any “simple” solution the theocratic fanatics could propose. But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and “free speech fundamentalism.” The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of “ancient hatreds” but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called “evil.” And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.