Bollettino

Ceasefire and the intellectuals

In Edward Lascelles Life of Charles James Fox, there�s a passage that describes the formation of the peace cabinet. The Whig opposition, at this point, had been guided both philosophically and strategically by Edmund Burke. The great unifying issue was peace with the North American colonies. In 1782, to negotiate the peace, a government formed under Lord Shelburne, but no cabinet post was found for Burke. This has always been a bit of a puzzle for historians. This is Lascelles explanation:

The exalted spirit of Burke might have upheld Whig principles in the Cabinet, but no place was found for him. His omission was probably due less to the aristocratic exclusiveness of a Whig administration than to the fact that the Whigs doubted whether Burke, with all his inspiring genius, possessed either the self-control or the judgment necessary for a cabinet minister.

Now, that is the kind of thing that drives Burke�s fans crazy. Whether it was true of Burke or not, it is surely true that the intellectual vice, in politics, is lack of self-control and judgment. We�ve been pondering this since reading Kanan Makiya�s intemperate, and pretty much politically suicidal, entries in his TNR weblog.

Solzhenitsyn, however he had set his face against the Soviet regime, never wished for bombs to rain down on Moscow. Even Adenauer avoided, as far as we know, celebrating publicly the mass incineration of Dresden. But here is the kind of thing that rolls right off of Makiya�s pen, and is referenced with approval by innumerable belligeranti:

The bombs have begun to fall on Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers have shot their officers and are giving themselves up to the Americans and the British in droves. Others, as in Nasiriyah and Umm Qasr, are fighting back, and civilians have already come under fire. Yet I find myself dismissing contemptuously all the e-mails and phone calls I get from antiwar friends who think they are commiserating with me because "their" country is bombing "mine." To be sure, I am worried. Like every other Iraqi I know, I have friends and relatives in Baghdad. I am nauseous with anxiety for their safety. But still those bombs are music to my ears. They are like bells tolling for liberation in a country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp. One is not supposed to say such things in the kind of liberal, pacifist, and deeply anti-American circles of academia, in which I normally live and work. The truth is jarring even to my own ears.'

This is the sadder insofar as it is obviously a case of a man who has lost his sense of limits by allowing himself to be endlessly coddled by the ultra-hawks, who form a sort of guard of enablers around those who they grossly embrace (it is, by the way, a little hard to believe that Makiya is getting a lot of emails from antiwar activists. It must be spam). The same thing has been happening to Blair, even if, for him, the threshold of temptation is much lower. If, as I hope is still possible, a ceasefire is enforced in Iraq � a more interesting possibility at this point than when the war started, and more obviously to the American interest than anyone in the American press is allowing (is there anyone in the American press who is even considering it?) � one of the provisions of it, to please the ever liberating Bush administration, would be to include the exile community in the devolution of the power on the ground to Iraqis.

Self-censorship seems, according to an admiring profile of Kanan Makiya, to be a terrible struggle for the man. It�s easy to understand Makiya having the thought that the bombs should come down � LI has entertained a treasonous thought or too ourselves during the last week. But to express it is merely forging the knife that will be used to cut your throat. For what? What grand gesture needs to be made so badly?

Perhaps there is something to the theory that intellectuals and tyrants are secret sharers of each other�s characters. Tyrants, too, are enamored of metaphors. The elided 'like," the hidden 'as if" -- these seem impossible for the totalitarian mindset to sense. Only the intoxicating power of one's own rhetoric explains how Makiya could move from the idea that "country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp" to the idea that the bombing is music to his ears. Guess what? the people the bombs kill -- the school kid, the vending cart guy, the mother -- probably don't think of themselves as concentration camp inmates. In fact, given that metaphor, there is no reason for Saddam H. to build concentration camps, or political prisons -- what, after all, would be the point?

...And so all distinction is overthrown -- a very bad sign of the times.