I don't expect Komrade David to be capable of comprehending the following
article.
It is written at a college level which is far beyond the reach of Komrade
David's intellectual abilities.
But, that is exactly how the Communist Party likes their "useful idiots".
__________________________________________________ __________________

The London Bombings: A View from the Left
By Norman Geras
The Guardian Unlimited | July 22, 2005

The following article, by Norman Geras, originally appeared in the Thursday,
July 21 issue of The Guardian, a key newspaper of the British Left, under
the title, "There are Apologists Amongst Us." It was written before the
latest round of bombings... Those blasts further punctuate the moral
confusion of the leftists Geras takes to task in his essay. -- The Editors.

Norman Geras is professor emeritus in government at the University of
Manchester; the following is the original, unedited longer version of the
above mentioned published article.

Apologists among us

OK, it's more than time to nail this. Within hours of the bombs going off
last Thursday the voices one could have predicted began to make themselves
heard with their putative explanations for the murder and maiming of a
random group of tube and bus passengers in London. It was due to Blair, Iraq
and Afghanistan, illegal war and all the rest of it. The first voices, so
far as I know, were those of the SWP and George Galloway, but it wasn't very
long - indeed it was no time at all, taking into account production
schedules - before this stuff was spreading like the infestation it is
across the pages of Britain's oldest liberal newspaper, where it has
remained for going on a week (and today as appallingly as ever).

Let's just get by the matter of timing - of timeliness - with the brief
expression of repugnance which it deserves. No words of dismay or regret,
let alone sorrow, mourning, could be allowed to pass these people's lips
without the accompaniment of a 'We told you so' and an exercise in blaming
someone else than the perpetrators. No sense of what an awful tragedy like
this might call for or rule out. Just as if you were to hear from a
distraught friend that her husband (or lover, mother, son) had just been
murdered while walking in a 'bad' neighbourhood, and were to respond by
saying how upset you were to hear it (or maybe even to give that part a
miss) but that it was extremely foolish of the deceased to have been walking
there on his or her own. We had all this in the early aftermath of September
11 2001, so in a way it was to be expected. But one constantly nurtures the
illusion that people learn. The fact is that some of them don't and, from
where they think, can't. It is a matter of interest to me now that there was
even (some time during the last year, though I don't recall where and so
can't link to it) a comments thread on which one or two of the participants
questioned whether there had really been left and liberal voices after 9/11
making excuses for the crime of that day and proffering little essays in
'understanding'. Yes, there really were then, and there have been again now.

It needs to be seen and said clear: there are, amongst us, apologists for
what the killers do, and they make more difficult the long fight that is
needed to defeat them. (To forestall any possible misunderstanding on this
point: I do not say these people are not entitled to the views they express
or to their expression of them. They are. Just as I am entitled to criticize
their views for the wretched apologia they amount to.) The plea will be
made, though - it always is - that these are not apologists, they are merely
honest Joes and Joanies endeavouring to understand the world in which we all
live. What could be wrong with that? What indeed? Nothing is wrong with
genuine efforts at understanding; on these we all depend. But the genuine
article is one thing, and root-causes advocacy that seeks to dissipate
responsibility for atrocity, mass murder, crime against humanity, especially
in the immediate aftermath of their occurrence, is something else.

Note, first, the selectivity in the general way root-causes arguments
function. Purporting to be about causal explanation rather than
excuse-making, they are invariably deployed on behalf of movements, actions,
etc., for which the proponent wants to engage our sympathy or indulgence,
and in order to direct blame towards some party for whom he or she has no
sympathy. Try the following, by way of a hypothetical example, to see how
the exercise works and doesn't work.

On account of the present situation in Zimbabwe, the government decides to
halt all scheduled deportations of Zimbabweans who have been denied the
right to remain in the UK. Some BNP thugs are made angry by this decision
and they take out their anger by beating up a passer-by who happens to be an
African immigrant. Can you imagine a single person of left or liberal
outlook who would blame, or even partially blame, this act of violence on
the government's decision to halt the deportations, or who would urge us to
consider sympathetically the root causes of the act? It wouldn't happen,
even though (ex hypothesi) the government decision is part of the causal
chain leading to the violence in question. It wouldn't happen because the
anger of the thugs doesn't begin to justify what they have done.

The root-causers always plead a desire merely to expand our understanding,
but they're very selective in what they want us to 'understand'. Did you
ever hear a Jenny Tonge who empathizes with the Palestinian suicide bomber
also understanding the worries of Israeli and other Jews - after the
Holocaust, after the decades-long hostility of the Arab world to the State
of Israel and the teaching of hatred there against Jews, after the acts of
war against that state and the acts of terrorism against its citizens? This
would seem to constitute a potentially rich soil of roots and causes, but it
goes unexplored by the supposedly non-excuse-making purveyors of a
root-causism seeking to 'understand'.

The fact is that if causes and explanation are indeed a serious enterprise
and not just a convenient partisan game, then it needs to be recognized that
causality is one thing and moral responsibility another, although the two
are related. Observe...

Me, David and Sam are chatting. I make a remark to David, David gets cross
because of the remark and he punches me in the mouth. Sam says 'You had it
coming'. In this story it is uncontroversially true - I can tell you this,
being the story's one and only author - that my remark to David and Sam is
the cause of David's anger. Is Sam, then, right to tell me in effect that I
either share the blame for David's punching me in the mouth or am entirely
to blame for it myself? Well, the content of my remark was 'I love the music
of Bob Dylan'. David for his part doesn't like the music of Bob Dylan. I
think most people will recognize without the need of further urging on my
part that, contrary to what Sam says, I didn't have it coming, David is
entirely to blame for punching me in the mouth and I, accordingly, am not to
blame in any way at all. If, on the other hand, my remark was not about Bob
Dylan's music, but was a deeply offensive comment about David's mother, then
without troubling to weight the respective shares of blame here, I'd say it
would have been reasonable for Sam to tell me that I must bear some of it.

In circumstances he judges not too risky, Bob, an occasional but serial
rapist, is drawn to women dressed in some particular way. One morning Elaine
dresses in that particular way and she crosses Bob's path in circumstances
he judges not too risky. He rapes her. Elaine's mode of dress is part of the
causal chain which leads to her rape. But she is not at all to blame for
being raped.

The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or
atrocity, doesn't show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are
morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have
contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn't serve to justify it.
Furthemore, even when what someone else has contributed causally to the
occurrence of the criminal or atrocious act is wrong, this won't necessarily
show they bear any of the blame for it. If Mabel borrows Zack's bicycle
without permission and Zack, being embittered about this, burns down Mabel's
house, Mabel doesn't share the blame for her house being burned down. Though
she may have behaved wrongly and her doing so is part of the causal chain
leading to the conflagration, neither her act nor the wrongness of it
justifies Zack in burning down her house. So simply by invoking prior
causes, or putative prior causes, you do not make the case go through - the
case, I mean, that someone else than the actual perpetrator of the
wrongdoing is to blame.

The 'We told you so' crowd all just somehow know that the Iraq war was an
effective cause of the deaths in London last week. How do they know this,
these clever people? Leave aside for the moment the question of rightness
and wrongness - for, of course, there were many people (in London, in the
rest of the UK) for whom the Iraq war was not wrong but right, and if they
are right that it was right, then no blame attaches to those who led,
prosecuted and supported that war, even if it has entered the causal chain
leading to the bombings, by way of the motivating grievances of the
'militants' and 'activists'. But, as I say, leave this aside. How do they
know?

What they need to know is not just that Iraq was one of a number of
influencing causes, but that it was the specific, and a necessary,
motivating cause for the London bombings. Because if it was only an
influencing motivational cause amongst others, and if, more particularly,
another such motivational cause was supplied by the military intervention in
Afghanistan, then we don't have that the London bombings wouldn't have
happened but for the Iraq war. Now, I'm aware that some of the 'We told you
so' people are of the view that the intervention in Afghanistan was wrong
too. But others of the 'We told you so' people aren't of this view; and that
segment of root-cause opinion, at least, will have a hard time of it
establishing that just the Iraq war, and not Afghanistan - or anything else,
for that matter (Palestine, the status of women, modernity, sexual freedom,
pluralism, religious tolerance) - is what has provoked the murderers to
their murders.

As for those (the SWPers, Galloways, etc.) for whom the intervention in
Afghanistan should also not have happened, I'm happy to leave them where
they are on this. These are people for whom the crime of 9/11 did not
constitute an act of war meriting a military response, people whose
preferred course of action was to leave the Taliban in situ ruling that
country and al-Qaida with the freedom to continue organizing there. This
rather does help to establish what is one of the main objects of the present
post, namely that the root-causers are very selective about the root causes
they're willing to recognize as relevant; and, attached as they are to an
ethico-political outlook that has lately been (let us just say) indulgent
towards anti-democratic forces, they particularly favour root causes
originating in the vicinity of Washington DC.

To shift part of the blame for the London killings and maimings on to Blair
and Bush - and also Parliament and Congress, and everyone who supported the
war in all the coalition-of-the-willing countries - you not only have to
guess at the Iraq war having been operative and decisive in the motivations
of the actual bombers, you not only have to overlook anything that might
have been right about that war, like seeing off one of the most brutal and
murderous dictators of the last few decades, you further have to reckon that
what was wrong about the war not merely caused the anger of those bombers
but made their response, in some sort, morally appropriate rather than (what
it in fact was) criminally excessive. Just think about the implications of
this position. If on account of the Iraq war Tony Blair is to blame for four
young British Muslims (as it now seems) murdering and injuring some large
number of travellers in London, will he also be to blame if one or two
members of the Stop the War Coalition for the same reason should decide to
bump off a few people in, say, Dundee? Ever on the lookout for damning
causes, the root-causers never seem to go for the most obvious of them, so
visibly obvious a one that it isn't even beneath the surface of things the
way roots often are, it's right out in the open. This is the cause, indeed,
which shows - negatively - why most critics of the Iraq war and of other
events, institutions, movements, do not go around murdering people they are
upset or angry with; I mean the fanatical, fundamentalist belief system
which teaches hatred and justifies these acts of murder, justifies them to
those who are swayed by it but not to anyone else. It somehow gets a free
pass from the hunters-out of causes.

So, there are apologists among us. They have to be fought - fought
intellectually and politically and without let-up. What is it that moves
them to their disgraceful litany of excuses? This is doubtless a complex
matter, but here are a few suggestions. One thing seems to be the treatment
of those who practise terror as though they were part of some natural
environment we have to take as given - not themselves free and responsible
agents, but like a vicious dog or a hive of bees. If we do anything that
provokes them, that must make us morally responsible, for they can be
expected to react as they do. If this isn't a form of covert racism, then
it's a kind of diminishing culturalism and is equally insulting to the
people transformed by it into amoral beings incapable of choice or
judgement.

Then, with at least some of the root-causers, their political sympathies and
antipathies naturally incline them towards apologia. Here are people for
whom the discomfiture of the US is number one priority, who would therefore
have been happy to see the Americans bogged down without reaching Baghdad
and toppling Saddam Hussein, who have openly spoken their support for an
Iraqi 'resistance' committing daily crimes against the people of Iraq.

However, there are others not of this ilk and who would be horrified and
outraged - and rightly - to see themselves described as indulgent towards
such ugly and murderous forces, but who employ the tropes of blame-shifting
and excuse-making nonetheless. These people, one may speculate more
charitably, are merely confused; and amongst the things they are confused by
are more local political divisions and animosities, which can seem to loom
larger before them than the battle for and against democratic societies, for
and against pluralist, enlightenment cultures, being fought across the world
today.

Whatever the combination of impulses behind the pleas of the root-causes
apologists, they do not help to strengthen the democratic culture and
institutions whose benefits we and they share. Because we believe in and
value these we have to contend with what such people say. But contend with
is precisely it. We have to contest what they say of this kind, challenge it
all along the line. We are not obliged to respect their repeated exercises
in apologia for the inexcusable.

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog...ists_amon.html

"SeeingEyeDog" wrote in message
...


Large article snipped


I don't think it's right either to say that Britain deserved to be bombed.

However, I also think that no one should be surprised. If Britain is a
combatant, then the enemy would see it right to strike back. The only
problem is that the enemy should be engaing soldiers and not London
civilians on their way to work. That is why they are terrorists and not
combatants.

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 13:54:26 -0500, "SeeingEyeDog" wrote:


I don't expect Komrade David to be capable of comprehending the following
article.
It is written at a college level which is far beyond the reach of Komrade
David's intellectual abilities.
But, that is exactly how the Communist Party likes their "useful idiots".
_________________________________________________ ___________________
As much as I like parties, I don't think your Communistics have an
answer.

The only way to save our sorry selves is to learn to quit being so
piggy. Sacrifice. Drop the exceptionalism crap. Etc.

This, of course, will never happen. Therefore, we're doomed.

BTW: Your gated community won't be able to protect you from what's
coming. No siree.