I'm working on a multi-diary follow-up to my diaries on Creationism (
"Evolution As Theory AND Fact--Intro To Talk Origins")
and "Intelligent Design" (
"The ID Fraud: "Intelligent Design" For Non-Dummies"), examining the theocratic fraud behind them in some detail. But it's not ready for prime time. Instead, something else came up.
In response to Kos's post "$350 million and a PR goldmine lost", I wrote a comment which touched off an exteneded exchange with a troll, aptly named "dooleytroll", who I quickly determined was delusional, and stopped responding to. After starting a longish comment of my own, addressed to other Kossians, I thought the lessons to be drawn were important enough for a separate diary.
My original comment, What The Pentagon Said said quite a lot, I thought. I put forth the seldom-discussed idea that we could have swiftly and decisively defeated al Qaeda by a resolutely moral and non-military response.
I wrote, in part:
We could have utterly and completely isolated al Qaeda within a matter of days if we had simply come clean and said someting like this:
"Yes, like any nation, we have done some things that were not right, some things, even, that go against our own most cherished values. And we understand that this contradiction is one of the reasons that people feel so angry with us sometimes. They hold us to a higher standard. And they are right to do that.
"But killing three thousand innocent people--a number of them Muslims, we should note--is not the way to express such anger. In fact, it is a terrible stain on the virtue and honor of Islam that such a thing should be done--however falsely--allegedly as an act of Jihad. And so we must act quickly to utterly condemn this madness, isolate those responsible and put them swiftly on trial. And we must act just as quickly to assure people of good will that we will act to redress legitimate grievances which these criminal terrorists have sought to exploit for their own bloody ends."
Such a declaration--backed up by deeds--would have gotten rid of al Qaeda so quickly it would have made heads spin on Alpha Cantauri. But you would have never heard such a declaration from anyone high up in our political classes, because they are utterly lost in games of power and posturing, and have lost touch with the heart and soul of what makes America a truly great and unique nation--the promise it held out at its inception, a promise of peace, justice, tolerance, and inclusion for all, a promise codified into norms and laws that have utterly transformed the world, but seems to now be an orphan in the land of its birth.
I would truly like to see a serious discussion of this point, because I think it calls into question a whole range of basic assumptions that need to be examined.
But of course, we can't have that! So instead we get trash talk from a troll. This precisely recapitulates the way in which serious thoughtful, informed alternatives were automatically ruled out of order after 9/11. Nothng that had the slightest possibility of actually working in the long run was allowed to be discussed. It was automatically labelled "blaming America First," "objectively pro-terrorist" and "anti-American."
So, what did dooleytroll focus on? ("I'll say it again...") My use of the words "legitimate grievances" in the sentence, "We must act just as quickly to assure people of good will that we will act to redress legitimate grievances which these criminal terrorists have sought to exploit for their own bloody ends."
Dooleytroll sneered:
Address "legitimate" grievances?
What was OBL's OWN stated reason for ordering 9/11? American troops stationed in the Saudi Desert. That's it!! Some grievance.
This clearly missed my point. I was not talking about bin Laden's grievances, but that of those he was trying to appeal to. The unwillingness and/or inability to clearly focus on the Moslem mainstream is a defining characteristic of the cultural narcissism that drives our racist/religiously bigoted foreign policy in the Middle East, and which threatens to destroy us as a nation.
Bin Laden is an easy bogey man to hang all our hatred, anger, fear and projected inner demons on. Let's pay attention to him and ignore all the other 1.2 billion Moslems in the world. They're not important.
Yeah, right, that's a real mature, reality-based, winning strategy to pursue. Why didn't Sun Tzu put that into The Art of War? Oh, right, he wasn't dumb as a fencepost in Crawford, TX.
So, I respond with a second comment, "Obviously Dreadfully Ill-Informed" in which I point out the well-known fact that al Qaeda had, by 9/11, significantly broadened the ranger of grievances it was citing. Now, jingoistic idiots are always eager to denounce bin Laden as a cynical opportunist, who doesn't really care about these other issues. To which I have a two word response: "Your point?"
So what if bin Laden is cynically exploiting the grievances of others. If true, this would only make it easier for us to outmanuever him by doing the right thing. And if it's not true, if he really is sincere, then we had damn well act now, before he goes even further and develops deeper and more genuine connections between his struggle and the various different grievances that other Moslems have accumulated over decades and centuries of arrogant Western imperialism.
In his response, ("Fair enuf...perhaps we don't need troops in"), dooleytroll plays this card, of course. But it's not the only card he plays. He says that maybe we didn't need troops in Saudi Arabia, but that doesn't make it a legitimate grievance. Hello? Is this a point that really needs to be debated? How would dooleytroll feel if Saudi Arabia had troops stationed in the US? Would he think it might be "a legitimate grievance" that some folks didn't think it was a good idea? The only reason dooleytroll doesn't see this immediately is (1) blind nationalism, (2) blind racism, or (3) both.
Dooleytroll ducks the Iraq sanctions issue by saying "those were UN imposed, i.e. the whole world partook," as if the US hasn't fought bitterly against everyone else who has tried to make the sanctions more human. Dooleytroll may not know any of this, of course. But the Moslem world is not as ignorant as he. And it is their perceptions that we have to consider if we want to understand their grievances. If they know something that we don't, then we have to find out about it. This was the whole point of my initial argument. Taking bin Laden seriously means that we have to get our of our narcissistic self-absorption and listen to what other people are saying. Doing this is utterly beyond Dooleytroll's limited comprehension.
And, of course, we get an ill-formed piece of neocon/Likud propaganda on Israel, entirely crafted to justify not looking at the Israeli/Palestinian situation from both sides.
To sum up: (1) Dooleytroll first ignored the fact that I was talking about the legitimate grievances perceived by 1.2 billion Moslems, and instead focused on al Qaeda, falsely claiming that they only cared about troops in Saudi Arabia. (2) I then documented that al Qaeda had identified at least two more concerns that were widely shared by both Moslems and non-Moslems in the Middle East. (3) Dooleytroll made no admission of having been factually mistaken, and made no serious attempt to understand why those might be legitimate grievances. Instead, he presented the flimsiest of rationales for not even considering whether they were legitimate or not.
In his mind, as later posts attest, he had "answered me." And, indeed, if this had been all he said, I would have responded, making some similar points to what I have just written. But then he went one step further. He tipped his hand and openly declared the underlying logic which was already so visible in what he had just written. He wrote:
Quit apologizing for murderers!!!
Stop apologizing for murderers.
This final outburst undermined all the previous pretense to presenting rationale argumentation. The whole point of the rushed, slapshod rationales that preceeded it was to build up to this moment of outraged denunciation. The little man struts upon the stage of world history and denounces the forces of darkness to their face! The audience roars its approval! So what if there is not a whit of evidence to support it? The less evidence there is, the purer the belief!
This is deep, deep, narcissistic delusion. If it were only dooleytroll, I would not have bothered to write so much. But this is the same mentality that the Bush Administration embodies, and models to the entire American body politic. It is the logic that dominates Peter Beinart, the DLC, Senator No-Menutm Leiberman, and all the rest of the sorry-ass crowd that is dragging our country to its destruction in a centuries-long religious war that neither side can possibly "win." Beause it is delusion, it cannot, ultimately, be argued against. You don't argue with a man who tells you the moon is trying to eat him.
What you do, instead, is work to educate others who are not so deeply deluded, but merely ignorant or ill-informed. It pays to debate folks like dooleytroll, only when it serves as a venue for reaching this other audience. And you should frame the terms of your debate with this other, real audience in mind.
In this case, the audience is other Kossians, who undertandably want to argue with folly and stupidity when they see it. I understand that well. I am not really separate from you. A part of me is the audience for this comment as well. That's why I'm writing this. I may be the only one who ever reads it. But "I'll learn my song well before I start singing." This is our song--the song of reason, compassion, communication and bridge-building reaching out to those with ears to hear it. We need to learn it well.