[Update at the end]
In an article last weekend, Mark Steyn, in his inimitable style, skewered those who missed the significance of the Centanni/Wiig forced conversion tape (which the Sanity Squad discussed in last week's podcast):
It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.
In response, Glenn Greenwald made the point, after slanting Steyn's words to fit and adding some ad hominem remarks of his own, that many Neocons are reacting out of fear to the current threats we face. His post, Will the real cowards please stand up? contains some important elements of truth, but he stops short of recognizing the implications of what he writes:
The ironies of this disturbed war dance are virtually infinite, the most obvious one being that the Steyn Warriors can never point to any sacrifices they make or risks they incur. But the most striking irony is this. So much of the neoconservative warrior cries are built on an ethos of deep fear, of exactly the desperate desire to be protected and saved which Steyn and company claim is the hallmark of the girlish, soul-less West. As they strike the warrior pose, they are desperately willing, even eager, to fundamentally change the character and principles of our republic and to sacrifice the core liberties which define it because they are scared and want, more than anything else, to be protected.
Dean Barnett responded with some deserved criticism of Greenwald's style, followed by an attack on his substance; however, Dean actually agrees with Greenwald on a basic point:
Here’s where we get into the real madness behind this latest meme. Anyone who is not frightened by the Islamist threat is either ignorant or foolish. If someone wants to write a piece about why this threat doesn’t create the grounds for fully justified fear, I encourage them to do so on their own blog. If it’s especially idiotic, I’ll probably link to it.
[Interestingly, Glenn Greenwald blogs at a site he named Amygdala, as well as at Unclaimed Territory. For those who are unfamiliar with Neuro-Psychiatry and Psychology, the Amygdala has been long recognized as a crucial part of the Limbic System, the emotional circuitry of the brain. The limbic system lies deep within the brain and has tremendous impact on the assessment of emotionally charged situations and the encoding of emotionally charged memories. The Amygdala has the most important role in this, being especially tuned to danger situations and the expression of fear and rage. Efforts to modulate the response and effects of the Amygdala are ongoing, with the goal of being able to help people suffering from various syndromes including PTSD, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, a disorder singularly related to inappropriate fear and terror (ie, PTSD symptoms occur when relatively harmless and innocuous situations are interpreted by the "alarm" circuitry in the brain as life-threatening dangers.)]
I have made the point repeatedly that our brains are not organized to support rational thought; if anything our rationality is an evolutionarily late development that is fragile and subject to disruption by strong emotional states. In other words, when people are terrified, they can't think logically and rationally.
The left, exemplified by Glenn Greenwald's post, is correct that Neocons are reacting to their fears; what they rarely acknowledge is that they are doing the exact same thing! We all react to our fears, often much more powerfully than we react to anything else. Where the left and right differ is on their assessment of how realistic their fears are and what the primary dangers are that we face.
In point of fact, I agree with Glenn Greenwald when he writes that our core liberties are in danger. I can even agree with him that unrestrained Executive power is a potentially grave threat to our freedoms. In effect, the left argues that the Bush administration is a greater threat to our civil liberties than are the Islamic terrorists. However, there are two fundamental fears that the left misperceives which alter the argument.
First, in order to make their argument, the left has to explicitly, or implicitly, minimize the threat from Islamic terror. Greenwald does this by setting up straw man arguments based on cherry picked quotes:
Here is Bush loyalist Sen. John Cornyn, explaining why we should allow the President to break the law and eavesdrop on our conversations without any oversight: "None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead." And here is Pat Roberts, showing how willing he is to trade all American values in the hope of being protected from the things he fears: "I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead." That "rationale" means we do anything -- give up all freedoms, relinquish all values -- because desperately trying to stay alive is the only thing that matters.
This is disingenuous; I do not especially worry that I will be targeted by terrorists (though working in New York City and having many friends and family in New York City does increase the risk of being caught in any future large scale terror attack). I do worry that a future attack will kill thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of my countrymen, and that is the second area in which the left misperceives the danger. I especially worry that our response to such a successful attack will be to do exactly what Glenn fears is happening right now; ie, any successful attack on us or our allies increases the risk of our government diminishing our civil liberties. That has already been the pattern of this war (now we can't even bring bottled water on an airplane!) It seems to me that any reasonable person concerned about civil liberties would certainly tolerate some erosion at the edges in order to preserve the core; the absolutist pose of the left leaves us more vulnerable to the exact precipitant (a successful terror attack) that would cause their worst fears to come to fruition.
I suppose my major disagreement with the left is on the assessment of our current state of affairs. At the moment, I consider the risk of a successful terror attack to be greater than the risk of the United States turning into the fascist state in the absence of a successful attack. Furthermore, I have yet to see an even minimally convincing argument that the state sponsors of Islamic terror, feverishly working for a nuclear weapon, can be deterred from enabling the most devastating weaponry from being used by themselves or their proxies and allies.
I think my fears are more realistic than the left's fears. The fact that they do not even acknowledge any realistic basis for my fears, including my fears of losing civil liberties in a much more dangerous way following a future attack, leaves me convinced they are either in denial of their own fears or dangerously misperceiving the current risks we all face.
Update: I owe Gary Farber a sincere apology for my error in suggesting his site was used by Glenn Greenwald. I have read Gary Farber's site and linked to it in the past and my error was inexcusable.
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