Passionate Intensity

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming -- William Butler Yeats

In the aftermath of the Turkish inspired Gaza "Humanitarian" incident, Israel has been attacked with a frenzied passion not seen since the days of the Third Reich.  A great many words have been written attempting to make sense of the reactions of the sophisticated, mostly liberal, European and American elites, which have at times mirrored the mindless rage of the Palestinians and their enablers.  Two of the more important discussions are worth highlighting.

Walter Russell Mead has written a much linked post discussing the recurrence of a, perhaps naive, facilitation of atrocity, by those who Stalin once referred to as "useful idiots":

Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood Is Dripping From Their Hands

When ‘Understanding’ Becomes Collaboration

Worse, some of the ‘good guys’ sympathized with and made excuses for the bad.  Germany was resentful and bitter, they said, because the Treaty of Versailles was unfair.  Let Adolf Hitler have his ‘reasonable’ goals of reuniting ethnic Germans under one roof, and Germany would become a peaceful and satisfied country, a bulwark of European order.  This sounds crazy now, but it was the conventional wisdom among the intelligentsia and literati (except for the Communists and their closest sympathizers) during the 1930s; this is why voices warning of war like Churchill were so isolated.  War was so destructive, argued the false prophets of fake enlightenment, that only a madman would start one.  And while Hitler was alarming, the apparatus of the German state was sane.  There were moderate Nazis, with limited goals; given western forbearance, wise concessions and enough time, the moderates would edge the Nazi radicals out of power.

That was the standard refrain about Germany from 1933 through 1939 and at every crisis or turning point academics and journalists stepped forward to plead for patience and to predict an imminent triumph of the ‘moderate’ Nazis over the ‘radicals’.  In the meantime, anti-Nazi rhetoric and boycotts in the West only empowered Hitler and united German opinion behind him. Give him the Saar, Austria, yes and the Sudetenland: sooner or later he would calm down and the world would be at peace.  When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming that simply by giving Hitler the Sudentenland (the then-German speaking part of Czechoslovakia that happened to include the country’s mountainous border areas and natural defenses) he had won “peace in our time”, nobody was happier than the fatheaded peace clergy — unless it was the enlightened class of journalists and professors who set the tone for upper middle class enlightenment at the time.

It was the same thing with Stalin.  Half of the peace movement was in love with Communism; the other half thought that poor Stalin had no choice but to be brutal and tough because he was surrounded by hostile states.  Recognize Stalin, trade with him, stop calling him nasty names.  Treat him with dignity and respect, they said, and everything will work out for the best. There had been plenty of sympathy for Stalin in the West during the thirties — even as he was carrying out mass murder on a scale that poor Pol Pot could only envy, Stalin never lacked for apologists and defenders among the chattering classes in those countries where they were still permitted to chat.

It is a remarkable and inescapable conclusion when reading Walter Russell Mead's review of the history of such a strain in the body politic to recognize how history is repeating.  Substitute Hamas, or Iran, or Hezbollah, or Turkey for Russia and Germany and the sense of deja vu is profound.  Consider our current "Peace movement":

It is just not true, historically speaking, that ‘peace movements’ lead to peace or, for that matter, support policies that will bring peace.  More often than not, the opposite is true.  Winston Churchill was a grizzled old British imperialist of the worst kind, but if Britain had listened to him instead of to its peace campaigners in the 1930s there most likely would never have been either a World War Two or Cold War.  We can be very grateful that Ronald Reagan and the NATO leadership turned a deaf ear to the nuclear freeze movement; had those besotted idealists had their way the Soviet Union and the Cold War might be still with us today — along with nuclear arsenals much larger and much more dangerous than anything the US and Russia now have.

Not so long ago we had a word in our society for tiger-strokers: people who thought that if you soothed the savage passions of irrational dictators by treating them with respect and giving them treats then the dictators would become less dangerous.

We called them ‘appeasers’.

Professor Richard Landes addresses an important question concerning these people, many among the most privileged in the West, who appear to be collaborating with those who would enjoy nothing more than to cut their heads off:

From Useful Idiot to Useful Infidel: Meditations on the Folly of 21st Century “Intellectuals”

So why would a late 20th century progressive sympathize with, support, run interference, even lie and deceive, for a movement that manifested all the worst traits of totalitarian megadeath from the 20th century – the cult of death, the embrace of nihilism, paranoia, and genocidal hate-mongering? At least the fellow travelers of the early and mid-20th century had a noble ideal for which they carried out their campaigns of misinformation. But now, we have intellectuals from a wide range of fields running interference for Islam, even in its most regressive forms.

And of course, at this asymmetrical stage in the war that Global Jihad wages against the West, nothing is more critical to the capacity of Jihad to mobilize – to recruit, indoctrinate, train, and deploy – its forces than a cognitive victory in which its targets in the West are kept in the dark about its real intentions. And given the yeoman job that apologists like John Esposito, Noah Feldman and Juan Cole perform in this sense, I think it worthwhile to use the expression “useful infidel” for this new breed of fellow travelers. Nothing is more useful to Jihadi ambitions to subject the entire world to Sharia than non-Muslim intellectuals who insist that Islam is a religion of peace that is perfectly consonant with democracy, and that the terrorists represent a tiny, marginal, deviation from true Islam.

I want to argue that this astonishing paradox – Islamic Jihad is the last thing one would expect reasonable, progressive intellectuals to support – strips away the pretence of naïve good intentions that the older “useful idiot” used to plead. Once we confront the “irrationality” of useful infidelity, and realize the urgency of trying to understand a phenomenon that pushes us in the direction of cultural, even civilizational suicide, we must confront the underlying (self-destructive) emotions.

...

Demopaths and their Dupes

It seems to me that the phenomenon of useful idiocy revolves around a particularly dysfunctional relationship, that between demopath and dupe. Demopaths arise in response to democratic cultures, which they target in a cognitive war suited only to assaults on such societies, that is, ones that embrace principles of a human right to freedom. They themselves embrace authoritarian principles of dominion by force, what Lee Smith has chronicled so chillingly in his latest book, The Strong Horse. Their line of attack: “you (democratic target) do not live up to your commitments; and in particular, you violate our (demopathic belligerent) rights in preventing us from participating in your democracy.”

The key to demopaths is their hypocrisy: they have no commitment to democratic values or human rights. On the contrary, they despise these values, and they have no intention of, once in power, respecting the rights of others. Their motto: “Use democracy to destroy democracy.”

Richard Landes argues that at least some of the genesis of such "useful infidels" stems from cognitive dissonance (the inability to tolerate the collapse of their world view when the Communist Utopia finally and unmistakably failed in 1989), envy (of Jews and Americans, successful cultures and successful peoples) and unacknowledged fear (of Islamists and their rage.)

Both Walter Russell Mead and Richard Landes have made important contributions to understanding how so many in the West can be willing, to paraphrase Lenin, to sell the Islamists the knife with which to behead them.

I would add an additional element. The superannuated Progressive sophisticate in the 21st century, as his forebears before him, prides himself on his distance from the primitive.  Passion in recreational sex is idealized but passion in defense of one's Civilization and its accomplishments is beneath them.  Yet passion, while it can be hidden, does not disappear and die.  In the progressive, passion  lives on vicariously through the idealized "noble savage."  If Rousseau's noble savage was never more than a caricature, it was a caricature that expressed a deep, even primal, yearning for a return to a state of innocence and passionate engagement which the modern man felt was lacking within himself.  If there is no God, there is no passion in religion.  If there is no divinity in man, he is merely a beast and all his passions must be simultaneously denied and expressed in carefully hidden and externalized ways.  Today, the"noble savage" is the Palestinian and the Jihadi.  These are people who are free to express the most primitive passions, and they are held as innocents at the same time.  In this view, they have been driven to extremis by the depredations of the evil, fallen West.  If one is beaten by such savages, it is understandable; they were driven to it and in reality are simply "nobles savages" fighting for the basic rights we take for granted and have denied them.  After being nearly beaten to death by a mob, "journalist" Robert Fisk expressed these sentiments beautifully:

UK journalist beaten by Afghan mob

"It doesn't excuse them for beating me up so badly but there was a real reason why they should hate Westerners so much.

"I don't want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason. They had every reason to be angry - I've been an outspoken critic of the US actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me."

Passionate rage is powerful and exciting.  Fisk could never express such rage simply for his own sake or for the sake of his country; that would be unseemly, unsophisticated.  Yet he could easily express such rage vicariously through those who are willing to express their inchoate rage freely and without reservation or guilt.  For those who are emotionally stunted and crippled by their anomie, such noble passions are admirable.  As a bonus, such passion is generally accepted, within  their social milieu, as entirely appropriate if directed at the hated and envied Jews and Americans.  As a bonus, the Jews and Americans will rarely even murmur a word of protest, let alone threaten your life.  You can even pretend you are "speaking truth to power" and receive a frisson of pleasure at your temerity, without having to actually risk anything at all!

In a civilized nation, we must  learn to tame our passionate rage, the pleasure we gain from destruction and terror.  Those who do not find compensating, more sublimated outlets for their aggression, may find themselves peculiarly susceptible to the siren call of the passionate intensity of the imagined "noble savage."  Thus are "useful infidels" formed, from the intersection of the personal and the political.

As Richard Landes and Walter Russell Mead both recognize, and  as the great poet once noted, in such grim times events take on a momentum of their own and the outcome is unlikely to be promising.

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?