by Barry Rubin
“First make sure you’re right, then go ahead.” –Davy Crockett, 1836
For
almost two months I have been talking and traveling through America
trying to understand the country. Soon I will begin a dozen-part series
called “Lost” about the reminder of the Obama term in the term in the
Middle East and how friendly countries and national interests can
survive.
Meanwhile
, though, it is adding insult to injury for defenders of the U.S.
policy to claim that I or someone else would have more credibility if I
didn’t write for a “right-wing site.” This is an extraordinarily
important way that the debate is being narrowed and dummied up.
First,
of course, I would never make a parallel argument. What matters is
whether the claims have credibility. Does it make sense? Is it
internally consistent? Does it correspond with otherwise known
information? This is the path of logic, of the Enlightenment. Reputation
of the author might be a useful factor, too.
An
argument from al-Qaida can be quite correct regardless of where it
comes from. Thus, this approach is part of the de-rationality of Western
thought today. It is a weapon: disregard everything that comes from a
source that disagrees with you on other issues.
Incidentally,
while some have told me that my language is too intemperate at times in
criticizing Obama, I note that they have not been any more successful
in changing views or even–whenever they speak out clearly–getting their
ideas (as opposed to technical expertise) to the public.
Second,
if I wanted to write about the so-called demographic threat (which I
can prove in five minutes is nonsense) or write that Israel must make
peace right away I can publish it in the NY Times.
So
first they bar certain arguments from the mass media and then they say
that if you persist in making certain arguments this proves bias because
of the few remaining and smaller places you are allowed to appear. In
other words, first you bar people and arguments; then you say that the
fact that they are barred proves that they—not you—is the biased one.
Let
me tell you a story. In 1991 Senator Charles Percy, a man who was then
highly regarded and considered himself something of an expert on the
Middle East, said he didn’t understand why the Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein didn’t withdraw from Kuwait. After all, said Percy, wouldn’t
some intelligence chief or general tell him that he was going to be
defeated?
This
was abject ignorance. If someone had done so—told Saddam he was
wrong—the man would be lucky if he were only fired, and still pretty
lucky if he wasn’t thrown into prison, tortured, and had his family
punished or executed.
The
supposed advantage of democracy is that the media, academia, and others
speak—where did I hear this before?—truth to power. If you know you are
not just going to be ignored, not just that you are going to be
punished, but that nobody is going to hear you that is a disincentive to
doing so.
But
this goes far beyond liberal or conservative, it sabotages the whole
advantage of democracy. You can’t be an anti-fascist or anti-Communist
in the 1930s until the elite officially accepts that? Maybe it would
have been better to voice these concerns and have them heeded before
December 7, 1941 or before September 11, 2001. Maybe it would have been
better to have done something about it before tens of thousands of lives
had been snuffed out internationally, blighted domestically, resources
wasted, and society set back by decades.
Is this really the best we can do in 2013?
Personally
I am a social democrat/liberal/centrist/conservative, reading from left
to right. What works works; what is true is true; what is wrong is
wrong. Forgetting that rather basic fact has been very bad for the West.
It’s called honest pragmatism.
Barry Rubin
Source: http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/08/how-western-intellectual-values-have-gone-haywire/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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