Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy, children – I’ve spent too much of today arguing with a ‘Holocaust denier,’ or perhaps just a brainless troll pretending to be a Holocaust denier. I knew I shouldn’t, I knew it was as futile an enterprise as cooking rice one grain at a time or shoveling snow with a teaspoon, but I couldn’t stop myself. The troll kept answering and answering and answering, and I just couldn’t leave it alone. I’m such a fool!

But, I don’t know, perhaps it was inevitable. It kept saying ‘there’s no evidence’ so how could I not go fetch some evidence to show it that there is? It would be expecting too much. Or maybe it wouldn’t, but anyway, that’s what I did. But of course the stupid troll couldn’t be bothered to look at the evidence, it was having much too much fun doing nothing at all apart from repeating over and over that there was no evidence. It only does it to annoy, because it knows it teases – I know that, I know that perfectly well, it’s like those people in the playground, you don’t argue with them, you just walk away. But – well, I’m not that sane, that’s all; I never have been.

The thing is that Julian wanted readers’ thoughts on whether he should or shouldn’t debate David Irving.

The issue for me is not about whether Irving should be allowed to air his views: I think he should. The serious issue for me is whether it is right to give people with such views a prominent public platform, thereby legitimising them in some way. In theory, it sounds nobler to always fight the truth out in public, but we surely can’t ignore the fact that the attention someone gets has as much, if not more, of an impact than what we actually say when we debate them.

Just so, and in particular in the case of David Irving, because he is a falsifier as well as a denier, so not only is that an excellent reason not to give him the oxygen of publicity, it’s also an excellent reason not to debate him since it’s impossible to trust him to tell the truth. Most people yesterday said Don’t do it – and then today the deniers turned up. There’s a guy called Fredrick Toben, who has a Wikipedia entry. And there’s a troll, who has nothing in particular except the ability to say ‘There is not a shred of evidence’ over and over despite having evidence handed to him on an engraved silver charger with tortoiseshell inlay. He got up my nose, that troll did. So I spent too much time typing words for him to read and then ignore. I’m a fool, a fool!

But maybe not. After all I’m interested in this kind of thing, these cherished and protected delusions (and of course that’s what they think or pretend to think of us – the ‘Holocaust industry’ as they call it), so it’s not such a waste to explore it in depth now and then. Only the stupidity is so exasperating, you know.

Never mind, I spent time exploring Holocaust Denial on Trial, which is certainly well worth doing. An education in history all by itself, for one thing.

Actually I guess the reason it annoys me is not the time but the sense of, how shall I say, contamination. They’re not a crowd I much want to sit around chatting with, frankly.

Did you read this article at Dissent by Nadia Urbinati? I find it a little baffling…because she’s a professor of political theory at Columbia, but the article seems to me to be just startlingly bad. It reminds me of several I read the other day at Comment is Free. It goes like this: first a lot of straw man stuff, then a lot of pointing out the obvious, then mixing the straw man stuff with the obvious stuff, then it winds up with a resounding contradiction.

Am I missing something?

(Probably not, actually, because Michael Walzer in his reply says much the same thing except far more politely, but then Urbinati is a friend of his.)

[O]n the one hand, there are those who, questioning what they regard as a naive liberal ideal of toleration, acknowledge the existence of cultural and religious differences within a democratic community, but with one exception—Islam. On the other hand, there are those who question this exception insofar as they suggest we should be careful to articulate our judgment on the Islamic culture and think it is a mistake to regard it as a whole, as if it were a homogeneous world with no internal differences.

That’s your strawman stuff, along with a lot more like it. Complete nonsense. Who on the Left thinks it’s not a mistake to regard ‘the Islamic culture’ (whatever that is) as if it were a homogeneous world? No one. Then she makes an inane comparison with the Cold War, then goes on to say how much cleverer about these things European intellectuals were during the Cold War – thus talking about European intellectuals as if they were a whole, and she does the same with other large groups.

As a matter of fact, once the Italian Communists agreed to discuss their doctrinal principles with a liberal theorist according to the method of “arguments and counter-arguments,” they were actually agreeing to put their dogmatic system on trial, and to risk acknowledging its limits and flaws.

‘The’ Italian Communists? Hardly! She’s talking about the leadership there, not all Italian Communists, who of course didn’t agree to any such thing.

Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor…emphasize, correctly, the important implications that [this theoretical contribution] has today in the face of the rebirth of new Manichean attitudes amidst Western reformist intellectuals…[I]t assumes that within each culture there are minorities (which the liberal rights of the “exist” and “voice,” as elucidated by Albert Hirschman, should guarantee)—in other words, that no culture is monolithic.

That’s the mixture of straw man and obvious. No culture is monolithic – gee, no kidding! Who knew?

The philosophy of dialogue is based on these premises, both of which Manichaeism radically rejects.

No doubt, but there is no such Manichaeism; that’s an invention, a fantasy.

Then she charges Paul Berman with ‘Manichean Occidentalism,’ which is more straw, then she recommends internal criticism and contextual criticism, which is more banging on an open door. Then she identifies two visions of democracy, one being the politics of the will: “ideological, quasi religious in kind, based on a nucleus of values that are identified with the West as an organic whole (it corresponds, more or less, to a Wilsonian conception of democracy as a mission and that not only many American neo-conservatives but also some revisionist liberals such as Berman identify with.”

While it acknowledges democracy as the highest value and peace as its corollary, the politics of the will betrays the democratic principle of self-determination, which is the necessary condition for the creation of democracy, and violates the principle of sovereignty without which neither democracy nor peace can exist…The other vision is identifiable with a politics of judgment. It is better rooted than the other one in the idea that citizens’ consent is the fundamental requirement for a democratic political order.

Well there’s some block thinking for you, and it’s block thinking that makes a complete nonsense of what she seems to want to say. What is this self-determination? What is this sovereignty? The politics of the will is clearly enough another name for liberal interventionism, so the subject is apparently why democracies should not force non-democracies to become democracies. There certainly are arguments for that view (although I think they’re stronger in some cases than in others – she said, stating the obvious herself) – but self-determination and sovereignty? Self-determination of whom, by whom? What does self-determination mean in the case of an authoritarian regime? Not much! If the people aren’t asked, then it’s determination by an elite or an autocrat – in an authoritarian regime, self-determination is a cruel oxymoron. And the same goes for sovereignty. If the ruler is there by force, what’s the sovereignty worth? Not much. Who cares about Hitler’s sovereignty, or Pinochet’s, or Mugabe’s? Yet Urbinati cites them as if they should make us choke up with emotion. Of course it’s true that people generally don’t like being invaded, but that has to be spelled out; just calling it self-determination and sovereignty fails to do that. It’s blocky.

Then in the last para there’s the contradiction. The first sentence says X, the second and last says not-X.

Now, too, we are witnessing perhaps the need to emancipate the individual from the identification with the culture and/or the religion she or he belongs to. The issue here is not a conclusion that culture and religions are fictions and illusions, but the emphasis that culture and religion are expressions of—and originate in—the individual search for meaningful life.

I see. [wanders off, scratching her head]

Now it’s the pope’s turn to tell us what’s what. He met with some ‘academics’ at the Vatican and told them “that science is not capable of fully understanding the mystery of human beings.” No doubt implying that the Vatican by contrast is.

[It is important not to ignore anthropological, philosophical and theological research, which highlight and maintain the mystery of human beings, because no science can say who they are, where they come from and where they go.

Theological research? Into…what? And what does it tell us about the mystery of human beings? Well, other than the fact that they believe in peculiar and usually nasty gods.

Man, said the Pope is “characterized by his otherness. He is a being created by God, a being in the image of God, a being who is loved and is made to love. As a human he is never closed within himself. He is always a bearer of otherness and, from his origins, is in interaction with other human beings”. Contrary to the Darwinian concept of man, Pope Benedict said that “man is not the result of mere chance, of converging circumstances, of determinism, of chemical inter-reactions.”

And the Pope knows this how? On the basis of what research?

“In our own time, when the progress of the sciences attracts and seduces for the possibilities it offers, it is more necessary than ever to educate the consciences of our contemporaries to ensure that science does not become the criterion of good, that man is still respected as the centre of creation…”

And that mysterious humans go on thinking the Vatican is as important as they always have so that the pope can go on wearing the embroidered outfits. Sure.

Another thing about the archbishop. He suggests, you remember, that we should ‘exercise a little imagination’ about the Muslims in West Yorkshire who were angry about Salman Rushdie’s book – who “know only that one of their most overpoweringly significant sources of identity is being held up to public scorn.” Well I think it’s the archbishop who needs to exercise some imagination here, or perhaps rather some rational thought along with some knowledge. He phrases that as if all West Yorks Muslims or at least West Yorks Muslims in general knew only that, but in fact 1) he doesn’t know that and 2) in fact it isn’t true, because the anger was political: it was Islamist anger, not Muslim anger, and it’s not reasonable or sensible to assume that all Muslims shared the Islamist view of the matter. You can’t just assume that if some people in X ‘community’ are angry about something that means that actually all people in X ‘community’ are angry about that something but most of them are too busy or distracted or tired or apathetic to go outside and scream about it. That’s not reasonable, it’s not fair, it’s not good epistemology, it’s not good politics, it’s not good anything. That’s especially important to remember when the thing that some people are angry about is not a thing it is reasonable to be angry about. The archbishop’s argument here rests on the assumption that this feeling was pervasive if not universal and therefore should be treated with sympathy even if it was unreasonable. Well – he doesn’t know how pervasive it was, and it was utterly unreasonable, so it shouldn’t be treated with sympathy.

Bad archbishop, no archbishop biscuit.