Sean Collins has written a long, courteous, and thoughtful reply to my comments on the Spanish elections. Without wanting to get too much into the back and forth, there are a couple of corrections, clarifications, and elaborations that I need to make.
1. My second paragraph. I didn't mean to imply that Sean wasn't appalled by the violent attacks in Madrid; he obviously is. My language does make it sound that way, though, falsely generalizing his 3/16 post into all of his comments on the events in Spain. My apologies.
Speaking of false generalizations, later on in the article my comments start shifting between Sean's post in particular and conservative/hawkish rhetoric in general, resulting in more potential confusions. The Chamberlain aside, for example, wasn't directed at Sean in particular but at the general mania for Munich analogies (about which more below). I should have made it clearer which comments were geared specifically to Sean's comments and which weren't.
2. The Guardian editorial. I had originally written a substantially longer section about this piece, but I cut it - because, much as I don't like the "appeasement" invective Sean heaps upon it, I don't particularly care for the editorial itself either. Nevertheless, I don't think it constitutes "appeasement," "Jew-baiting," or any of the other two-steps-short-of-Godwin's-Law labels it provokes.
3. Language. Yes, words do change meanings over time - but they don't always shed their original ones after only a couple of decades. "Fellow traveler," in particular, still means first and foremost someone who is sympathetic to the Communist Party, and still retains its disdainful Cold War connotations. "Fifth column" has become more broadly applicable, but that etymology needed to be teased out because of the cruel irony, in this case, of its origins.
This is as much a point about stylistics as politics. Can someone really be a Falange fifth columnist, a Chamberlainian appeaser, a CPUSA fellow traveler, and a fascist apologist all at the same time? No, and the rhetorical overkill alone says much, to me, about the validity of the arguments. This was just a blatant attempt to tar anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war viewpoints with every color on the angry man's palette.
Bonus points to Sean for reminding me of "quisling," though. How the hell could I have missed the Norwegian connection?
4. The Ortega y Gasset Foundation and Antonio Garrigues. What does this have to do with Sean's arguments? Not much at all. What does it have to do with the viewpoints expressed by Jose Varela Ortega, which are making such a splash on various conservative weblogs? Quite a bit, I think, because it suggests that Varela's "appeasement" assessment may be just as ideologically slanted as any names Sean can throw at the Guardian. Lots of conservative posters seem to be taking this guy's word as the gospel, I would presume because it confirms their already extant views, but if he comes from a think-tank run by the son of a prominent fascist official, well, that's worth knowing.
And, let's face it, there is more than a little irony if, in a discussion fraught with accusations of appeasement and evocations of fascism, the most prominent native Spanish accusation of appeasement comes from a group with familial ties to the fascists.
(I should add, at this point, that Jose Ortega y Gasset himself, for whom the Foundation is named, was not a fascist or a Franco supporter, although he was willing to live and teach in Franco's Spain after World War II. He was, however, an antidemocratic and aristocratic writer whose work was influenced by Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. I mention this only because I've spent all damn day trying to figure out where, politically, the Ortega y Gasset Foundation lies, and this is the best I can do. Given their president, their academic and political connections, and Ortega y Gasset's views, I think it's highly likely that they're a right-wing think-tank and that Varela's comments are best read through the lens of Spin.)
5. My Springer-like Final Thought. Sean says, "It seems like Marc and I have drawn very different conclusions about terrorism and the war thereon..." I think we've probably drawn the same conclusions about terrorism: it sucks. Where we differ, I would imagine, is in our assessments of where to fight it, how to fight it, and who's connected to it.
And in what relationship, if any, "appeasement" has to the problem of terrorism. Chamberlain metaphors have, for the past year or two, been a popular tool for bullying people into supporting war (I'm generalizing out beyond Sean again - although his 3/16 post does not exactly buck this trend), but this is not 1938 and terrorists do not represent the credible threat to Western democracy that Hitler did. They are credible threats to innocent lives, to be sure - and all too numerous and potent ones - but they aren't going to conquer Europe. I believe the Spanish elections represent the power of democracy, not its weakness; and, according to most of what was said in that Post article, they were more of a referendum on Aznar than on terrorism.
That about does it for me - I, like Sean, am now exhausted. Hope you enjoyed reading the exchange.
To a certain degree I don't comment as much on your political posts because I dislike it when I find myself nodding and saying "yeah" a lot, but I will say one thing. I find a lot of the talk of 'appeasement' (as Bush trotted out tonight) tied to the withdrawl of troops from Iraq to be a bit of a shell game.
To a certain degree, it would matter why those troops are being withdrawn. If, on the one hand, Spain and Poland are removing their troops from Iraq wholly out of fear of more terrorist attacks, that actually would be appeasement. However, if instead those troops are being withdrawn out of a sense that three years of the Bush Administration's worldwide military actions have done nothing to make terror attacks less likely and that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with anti-terrorist activity, then those would not be the actions of appeasers, merely people who believed that their troops are better used in other ways rather than in the military occupation of a land that was not a significant threat before it was invaded.
Several folks have already extended the argument that Afghanistan was the show and we walked away in the middle to pursue an idiotic and reckless aggression against Iraq. It seems to me that Spain and now Poland are starting to feel the same way, and that Bush & his advisers need to start realizing that they've done nothing at all since 2002 to make the world safer and reduce the ability of Al Qaida to kill hundreds. Iraq was no threat, and has if anything only become one entirely because of a poorly thought out military action that even the previous Bush administration knew was a bad idea. It's hardly appeasement for other nations to decide "Screw helping the US occupy Iraq, we want our troops to go where the terrorists actually are."
Posted by: ezrael | March 19, 2004 at 12:53 AM