[Dean's World] Ali Eteraz: Fjording The Winds of Change

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Posted by Ali Eteraz:
Fjording The Winds of Change
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1161160546.shtml


   Given David Blue's uncritical acceptance of everything Fjordman, I
   thought I would resurrect my recently written quasi-polemic here at
   Dean's. David Blue looks to Fjordman with an uncritical and obedient
   eye and clashes stridently against the honest analytics of Joe Katzman
   and the sensibility of Armed Liberal. In the end, however, my
   difficulty is not with Blue. I shy away from followers. His adulation
   of Fjordman as if the latter represents some new-fangled European
   phenomenon reveals how little Blue really knows of Europe. That, in
   fact, is my essential critique of Fjordman himself, and that is the
   primary thrust of my post below. My simple argument is that the
   right-wing xenophobes of Europe -- only recently being discovered by
   self-annointed American defenders of the "Western Civilization" -- are
   neither new, nor helpful. What they excel in is drumming up hysteria,
   much the same way that their fundamentalist religious counterparts in
   Europe's Muslim ghettoes do. They pretend that they have an agenda --
   stopping all immigration for a generation. Well, if that is so, why do
   they go about doing this by maligning Islam (with a capital I),
   hobnobbing with racists, former and current anti-Semites (Le Pen and
   Haider), and doing their best to ostracize people who have plenty of
   their own demons to address? What happend to the benevolent pride of
   Voltaire and Burke? Why are we reduced, David Blue, to worshipping
   Fjordman and Le Pen? This is not the Enlightenment. Without further
   verbose ado, some polemicist retribution for the esteemed polemicists:
   Fjordman is the Scandinavian sensation saturating the saturnalian
   sphere of the right with soliloquoys of single-minded severity, who
   causes both sullied and stultified souls to salivate at the suggestion
   that sequestring the self from all immigrant Saracens and smashing the
   Submissive ones with the sword of suppression is the singular and most
   superior solution towards so called Western salvation. Unfortunately,
   the construction of that sentence is all the recognition of Fjordman I
   can spare, for at the end of the day Fjordman's works are nothing more
   than the repetitive motifs of a polemical propagandist. The fact that
   his punditry is deemed presumptively plauditory is not merely an
   indictment of the readers who soil themselves before his verbosity but
   of the blogmasters who disseminate him without once thinking of the
   consequences of their publication. It is as if the right blogosphere
   is caught in an endless mobius strip of deconstructive contempt, the
   apex and apotheosis is an author who excels in rehashing over and
   again in words manifold the same essential lamentation. The Arabs have
   a proverb which goes: At-Tikrar yu'allimu al-Himar (Repetition teaches
   even the donkey). Say hello to Fjordman, the illustrious teacher of
   the right. From his [DEL: :DEL] Scandinavian perch, which renders him
   influentional solely because no one else has the requisite English
   speaking ability [DEL: :DEL] to occupy it, has only one lesson to
   impart: Islam is an Evil War Machine seeking to conquer Europe while
   the "true" owners of the Continent cannot fight back because they are
   too corrupted by the legacies of Communism. His is a theology of
   despair, gloom, and total pessimism. Once upon a time, a time before
   the Gaya Scienza of Nietzsche, Shopenhauer told Europe that Reason was
   weak and insignificant, eventually comparing it to a lame blind man.
   Fjordman is the post-modern kitsch version of Shopenhauer's pessimism.
   The glass is half empty; no, no, it is altogether empty, and it is
   those immigrant Muslims in Europe, and those Jihadis Muslims in the
   Middle East, and those post-Communist conspirators around the world,
   who have drank it, and as a consequence of this, war is the most
   likely outcome, so let's all prepare for the forthcoming apocalypse
   (which given European military might will mean the massive destruction
   of all things remotely Muslim, which is too bad because killing is
   never easy). His problems are layered like cake. The outer crust is
   Islam; the inner core Communism. While there is nothing reprehensible
   in being so layered, concern does arise when his conception of Islam
   is entirely incorrect, and even worse, his thoughts on Communism show
   not a single ounce of nuance. But far worse than any of these,
   Fjordman's purportedly conservative writings fly in the face of true
   conservative thought. Over and over I read him, and while I shake my
   head at his elementary grasp of Islamic history and of the
   multiplicity of ideas among Muslims, and then shake my head at his
   incessant attempts to find a Communist conspiracy lurking behind every
   corner, it is when he (or others) hold him out as the newest
   representative archetype -- "we need more Fjordmans!" -- of Western
   Enlightenment conservatism that my entire brain starts spinning with
   absurdity. With respect to the outer layer, Islam, he [1]believes
   himself to be faced off against a monolithic, collectivist and almost
   mythically armored war machine called Islam.

     Muhammed was a brilliant intuitive leader/general, and he and his
     companions devised a near perfect closed system of war aginst the
     rest of humanity.

   Not only that, but in his world, Islam and Jihadis are synonymous. In
   the same piece quoted above he makes a casual leap from "Islam" to
   "Jihadis." Lost in this quantum leap of absurd proportions are the
   hundreds of millions of altogether apathetic and blameless Muslims
   (who are blown up in Iraq, Tanzania and Kenya and whose businesses are
   extorted by the so called Militias of Allah) who also consider Islam
   their religious home. Lost in that leap are the innumerable
   reformists, jurists, writers, novelists, film-makers, and every day
   heroes. His problem is the same as that of any other avowed
   Islamophobe: the inability to understand that his best bet of
   engagement with Islam will occur via the same Muslims whom he does not
   even recognize exist. But I didn't write this to speak about the
   selective myopia that strikes some members of the right blogosphere
   when it comes time to conflate Islam with Jihadis. That is not
   something for me to 'fix.' There will have to rise among the right
   those who are capable of more nuanced thinking. Thankfully there are
   already such [2]people. May their lucidity triump over this other
   myopia. I wrote primarily because of the other two reasons: Fjordman's
   Communist conspiracy theories, and of his butchery of Western
   conservatism. With respect to his musings on Communism, I believe I
   understand Fjordman well. He wakes up in the morning, sets to the
   newspapers like a meticulous thinker ought, then he turns to a
   pre-existing list in his mind of a number of keywords which he
   identifies with the "Left." These words are "[3]multiculturalism,"
   "[4]universities," "[5]media," "[6]the EU," "open immigration,"
   "political correctness," "[7]feminism," "[8]poverty," and
   "environmentalism." If and when these words turn up, voila, you have a
   Communist conspiracy souffle. And why wouldn't such an evaluation turn
   up conspiracies everywhere one turns? [9]After all:

     The simple fact is that we never won the Cold War as decisively as
     we should have. Yes, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union
     collapsed. This removed the military threat to the West, and the
     most hardcore, economic Marxism suffered a blow as a credible
     alternative. However, one of the really big mistakes we made after
     the Cold War ended was to declare that Socialism was now dead, and
     thus no longer anything to worry about. Here we are, nearly a
     generation later, discovering that Marxist rhetoric and thinking
     have penetrated every single stratum of our society, from the
     Universities to the media.

   This has to be the most egregious misconstruction of post-Soviet
   European history I have read. Fjordman's argument is premised on the
   esophoric notion that the Cold War was a battle between a completely
   non-Socialist West and a Socialist-Marxist Soviet sphere. Extinguished
   in a puff of hasty intellectual leaps is the century long existence
   (and active existence at that) of socialism in the Western experience!
   It was a socialist who gave the Americans their pledge of allegiance
   and its labor unions (which have now transformed themselves into
   billion dollar pension funds). It was socialists who formed a large
   core of the British Labour party. It was the socialists who, even as
   the Soviet Union tick-tocked a few miles away, consented and
   affirmatively brought the Scandinavian welfare state into existence in
   the 1920's and 30's. Even today, Denmark, which boasts one of the most
   libertarian leaders in the region, has not gone further than to issue
   a platform that it intends to "save" the welfare state by reforming
   it. Norway is the most regulated economy in Scandinavia, and its
   Christian Democrat leader is not at all the market-oriented type of
   reformist. In other words, my point is that, socialism, its economic
   policies, and subsequently many of its cultural values, are
   incredibly, if not intrinsically, connected with the Western
   socio-political fiber. Yet Fjordman would have us believe that in 1991
   the West could have purged its Socialist kick in one fell swoop! He
   calls it analogous to a "de-Nazification process." Let's for a second
   ignore the monstrous human and social costs of this metaphsical
   notion. His idea might have been possible if there was somewhere in
   the West a single society which had not already internalized the
   lessons of socialism. Including America there neither is, nor was,
   [DEL: :DEL] such society. A little thing called the Great Depression
   occurred and FDR (now deemed our greatest President), pulled us out
   with principles modified from Socialist economic theory. Nowhere in
   the capitalist world does there exist a perfect capitalist,
   non-socialist socio-cultural system. Fjordman seems to have forgotten
   his essential Marx: socialism is a necessary and inevitable phase of
   capitalism. Perhaps it is because he doesn't know it that he sees it
   everywhere. What further exacerbates Fjordman's problems is that it
   was Christian parties all over Europe that openly adopted and indulged
   in socialist principles. In other words, he would like to sell us the
   idea that the Europe he purpots to speak for was fully free of any
   major Socialist imprimatur. Yet he cannot point to a single such
   example, except a few on the insane right (who are referred to as
   fascists). Which is probably why he never does point to such groups. I
   certainly will no longer be fooled by this travesty passing for
   history. Europe has a past (and present) that is hued with socialism.
   To altogether deny its existence is to live in the same kind of
   phantasmagoria that Bin Laden lives in when he asserts that Islam has
   not been affected by modernity (bollocks!). In this age of flux and
   unreality we need fewer fantasies. Of course, I agree with Fjordman
   that tomorrow's Europe needs less welfare-state and more
   privatization; less EU bureacracy and more decentralized autonomy.
   However, he would like us to get there by dishonestly demonizing and
   attacking socialism, instead of properly coming to terms with it by
   acknowledging it, taking from its sense of solidarity, federalism and
   freedom, and saying no thank you to its economic model (and yet even
   the we will have to acknowledge its presence because so much of the
   American economic model -- from antitrust laws to consumer protection
   laws to securities fraud laws to corporate laws to worker compensation
   laws to sexual harrassment laws to civil rights laws to divorce laws
   to custody laws are rooted in the basic socialist principle that when
   an individual cannot represent himself, he should be free to get the
   assistance of the state). Thus, either Fjordman wants to consign us to
   an altogether libertarian future where we are hapless atoms, or he
   really has no plan whatsoever. Given the absence of any meaningful
   ideas on what the future holds -- aside from war with Islam of course
   -- methinks the latter (although I'd love to be proven wrong). No, it
   is far easier to keep repeating: Marxists + Muslims = Threat To
   Western Civilization. Donkeys we are, after all. I once naively
   thought that Fjordman was a serious thinker who was on the cusp of
   postulating workable conservative solutions to the European conundrum.
   It is no mystery that today's immigrant Muslim in Europe is part akin
   to the 1970's black and the 1990's hispanic of America. It is also no
   mystery that European universities are, indeed, not equipped to
   provide solutions to the problems of integration, economics, and
   social reconstruction that are necessary (having sold their souls to
   what he properly calls a "hippie" radical leftism). (On this point I
   agree with Fjordman's skepticism towards the modern academy). However,
   thus far all Fjordman has proven himself to be is a metaphysician of
   tired cliches - "Islam is a shame culture" -- "Islam is a war machine"
   -- "Marxists and Muslims are bedfellows." I dare ask: how are such
   cliches representative of, and emblematic of the illustrious European
   conservative tradition? If Fjordman wants to argue on behalf of
   "traditional" Europe; if he wants to be the Atlas to the Enlightenment
   in the face of the illiberalism of incoming immigrants, he needs to
   cease writing manifestos of such insane length and stop and think. He
   would be well advised to take the lessons of Edmund Burke to heart:

     History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought
     upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust,
     sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of
     disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same
     troublous storms that toss the private state and render life
     unsweet. These vices are the causes of those storms. Religions,
     morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men,
     are the pretexts. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not
     to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the
     occassional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in
     which they appear.

   Reflections On The Revolution In France Instead, Fjordman has
   demonstrated himself to be caught up in the "names." The word "Islam"
   and "Communist" and "Socialist" means more to him than the vice of
   "intolerance" or the goal of "communication" and "coalition building."
   What sort of conservatism is this? If Fjordman is whom the right today
   turns to provide its solutions, I have a difficult time considering
   the right the defender of the Western civilization. In a long ago
   comment to Fjordman, back when I truly held hope out of him, I
   suggested that he consider dabbling in the consensus theory of truth
   by Habermas as a way to provide contemporary Europeans a workable,
   authetically Enlightenment (and not nihilistic post-modenrist) way of
   dealing with their innumerable social issues. The idea of the theory
   is very simple: that all speech has an inherent telos (the Greek word
   for "purpose" or "goal") â the goal of mutual understanding, and that
   human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such
   understanding. But slowly and surely it has been revealed to me that
   perhaps Fjordman is not the man to undertake this job, and it must be
   deferred to a true conservative. In short, there is space for someone
   else to take the mantle of true Western conservative, and wear it with
   all the grace and style of men like Isaiah Berlin and Edmund Burke.
   From what I have come to learn of Fjordman, while he may have the
   acumen, he does not have the willingness to stake out his claim upon
   this position. As such, I will leave Fjordman to dabble in what he
   insists is the real future of Europe, a Europe of insult and
   animosity. Burke would be so proud:

     Therefore, one of the best tactics for us to take in the War on
     Terror is to mock them and exploit their childishness, so that they
     will expose themselves to everyone.

References

   1. http://fjordman.blogspot.com/2005/12/what-are-islams-weak-points.html
   2. http://maxedoutmama.blogspot.com/2006/08/omeed-aziz-popal.html
   3. http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/06/political-correctness-revenge-of.html
   4. http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/08/failure-of-western-universities.html
   5. http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/04/im-terrorist-groupie-hear-me-roar.html
   6. http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-eu-needs-to-be-destroyed-and-soon.html
   7. http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/09/western-feminism-and-need-for.html
   8. http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/08/welfare-state-is-dead-long-live.html
   9. http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/06/political-correctness-revenge-of.html