Thank you David Aaaronovitch for explaining this concept. It is something the middle class lefty liberals suffer from - a love of themselves and hatred of others from their own group (I would add that it is driven largely by envy)
he warped ideas of those who hate the West
If you believe Putin is much maligned and that our government has been a disaster for decades, whose side are you on?
There is a deeply controversial phrase perhaps too often used by some Jews about other Jews, which is that they are “self-hating”. Down the long years of pamphlets and pogroms, antisemites have always been able to cite a Jew somewhere saying, well yes, Jews are just as bad as you say they are.
But though such a person might be motivated by self-loathing, it has gradually dawned on me that, more likely, it is other Jews they really hate. Themselves they love. And so I am beginning to think it is with some people in the West who seem determined to take anyone’s side but that of their own country or government or way of life. It isn’t themselves they despise. It’s us. Themselves they adore.
That’s my charge and now here’s my argument. And it begins with the decision of a group of writers to publicly criticise the American PEN organisation for awarding their Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo. The wrongness of that stance was well dealt with by Oliver Kamm on these pages on Tuesday. I want to look instead at the reasoning, almost the psychology of their objection.
One of them, Francine Prose, explained herself the other day, as not wanting PEN “to fight the war on terrorism; that is the role of our government . . .” And she was leery of “the narrative of the Charlie Hebdo murders — white Europeans killed in their offices by Muslim extremists”, as one that fed “the cultural prejudices that have allowed our government to make so many disastrous mistakes in the Middle East”. In other words, honouring Charlie Hebdo was taking sides in a battle she didn’t want to be part of.
But suppose a group of black activist cartoonists and journalists had been massacred by Christian fundamentalists in Seattle or Albuquerque? Do we imagine Ms Prose would have written arguing against them being honoured? Or would she have known exactly what side she was on in such a battle?
Her fellow writer and objector, Deborah Eisenberg, spelt out the logic of the “count me out” world-view in a letter to American PEN’s executive director. Charlie Hebdo’s employees had no doubt been brave, she said, and killing them was awful, but they didn’t deserve an award because in satirising Islam they had been attacking the wrong people. The Muslim population of France (which she considered to be a monolithic unity) was “embattled, marginalised, impoverished, and victimised”, it was understandable — if regrettable — that someone among them would react to the magazine’s provocations.
There could only be such a thing as equally valid subjects for satire, she wrote, when “the disparate ‘targets’ of offence occupy an equal position within the dominant culture”. The cartoons had, said Eisenberg, been “intended to cause further humiliation and suffering”. She could imagine no other reason.
So we should not — if we wanted to be virtuous in the Eisenbergian sense — subject Muhammad to the same satirical scrutiny that we subject Jesus or Lenin to. But where does this take us? Applied more generally such a rule would mean not being too officious in enforcing laws created by the “dominant culture” but sometimes rejected by the marginalised ones. What could be more alienating than demanding that minorities abandon old customs such as forced marriage, honour killings and female genital mutilation?
If not Hebdo, then Eisenberg was revealingly clear about who the award should have gone to. It should have been awarded to the whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, or else their journalistic facilitators in the West, such as Glenn Greenwald. These — the folk who shared the secrets of the West with the whole world — were the people who not only were brave but “their courage has been fastidiously exercised for the good of humanity”. Unlike Charlie Hebdo.
Where had I seen this reasoning before? It was the familiar line of argument deployed against those seeking to support Soviet dissident writers during the Cold War. Life in the West was not so good, it was claimed, nor that in Russia so bad that it justified a concentration on so-called dissidents. Rather the accolades should go to those dissidents at home bravely standing up against war and capitalism.
Unsurprisingly Eisenberg’s argument was attractive enough to find space in the online pages of The Intercept, the vehicle set up by and for Glenn Greenwald when he left The Guardian and funded by eBay’s billionaire founder, Pierre Omidyar.
Greenwald posed his own question for PEN. “Given that PEN is supposed to stand for unpopular and marginalised views that are under assault,” he asked, “what purpose does it serve to simply echo the overwhelming consensus among western governments: that Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are heroes?”
And there you have it. The counter-position there is, for once, explicit. If Western governments are for it then we should be against it, or at the very least, not for it. In other words we should be on any side but our own.
In February a journalist called Ken Silverstein wrote about why he had resigned from the Greenwald outfit. He had been working on a story about a murder case in the US and had discovered that the person accused was actually guilty — a controversial view on the left. He couldn’t get the story published. “Internal critics believed I had taken the side of the prosecutors — and hence the state,” wrote Silverstein. “That support was unacceptable at a publication that claimed it was entirely independent and would be relentlessly adversarial towards The Man [the establishment]. That held true even in this case, when The Man successfully prosecuted a killer and sent him to jail.”
This influential childishness affects us in the UK and is an area where left and right and nationalists can converge. Though one stresses the role of the EU and the other that of US “imperialism”, both Ukip and the Green-supported Stop the War movement blame the West rather than the maligned Putin for the Ukraine crisis. Nicola Sturgeon takes a sterner view of Trident than she seems to take of the Iranian nuclear programme. Scots Nats write to me and say that the UK has been a “disaster” for the past 40 years.
Glenn, Russell, Nigel, Lutfur, Caroline, Deborah, let me ask you something. Is our society in its secularism no better than, say, Pakistan’s or Iran’s? Is its foreign policy as unguided by principle as Russia’s? Is its toleration of free speech to be no more valued than China’s lack of it? Is it, essentially, no less corrupt than Nigeria? Isn’t ours, for all its faults, sometimes the right side to be on?
he warped ideas of those who hate the West
If you believe Putin is much maligned and that our government has been a disaster for decades, whose side are you on?
There is a deeply controversial phrase perhaps too often used by some Jews about other Jews, which is that they are “self-hating”. Down the long years of pamphlets and pogroms, antisemites have always been able to cite a Jew somewhere saying, well yes, Jews are just as bad as you say they are.
But though such a person might be motivated by self-loathing, it has gradually dawned on me that, more likely, it is other Jews they really hate. Themselves they love. And so I am beginning to think it is with some people in the West who seem determined to take anyone’s side but that of their own country or government or way of life. It isn’t themselves they despise. It’s us. Themselves they adore.
That’s my charge and now here’s my argument. And it begins with the decision of a group of writers to publicly criticise the American PEN organisation for awarding their Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo. The wrongness of that stance was well dealt with by Oliver Kamm on these pages on Tuesday. I want to look instead at the reasoning, almost the psychology of their objection.
One of them, Francine Prose, explained herself the other day, as not wanting PEN “to fight the war on terrorism; that is the role of our government . . .” And she was leery of “the narrative of the Charlie Hebdo murders — white Europeans killed in their offices by Muslim extremists”, as one that fed “the cultural prejudices that have allowed our government to make so many disastrous mistakes in the Middle East”. In other words, honouring Charlie Hebdo was taking sides in a battle she didn’t want to be part of.
But suppose a group of black activist cartoonists and journalists had been massacred by Christian fundamentalists in Seattle or Albuquerque? Do we imagine Ms Prose would have written arguing against them being honoured? Or would she have known exactly what side she was on in such a battle?
Her fellow writer and objector, Deborah Eisenberg, spelt out the logic of the “count me out” world-view in a letter to American PEN’s executive director. Charlie Hebdo’s employees had no doubt been brave, she said, and killing them was awful, but they didn’t deserve an award because in satirising Islam they had been attacking the wrong people. The Muslim population of France (which she considered to be a monolithic unity) was “embattled, marginalised, impoverished, and victimised”, it was understandable — if regrettable — that someone among them would react to the magazine’s provocations.
There could only be such a thing as equally valid subjects for satire, she wrote, when “the disparate ‘targets’ of offence occupy an equal position within the dominant culture”. The cartoons had, said Eisenberg, been “intended to cause further humiliation and suffering”. She could imagine no other reason.
So we should not — if we wanted to be virtuous in the Eisenbergian sense — subject Muhammad to the same satirical scrutiny that we subject Jesus or Lenin to. But where does this take us? Applied more generally such a rule would mean not being too officious in enforcing laws created by the “dominant culture” but sometimes rejected by the marginalised ones. What could be more alienating than demanding that minorities abandon old customs such as forced marriage, honour killings and female genital mutilation?
If not Hebdo, then Eisenberg was revealingly clear about who the award should have gone to. It should have been awarded to the whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, or else their journalistic facilitators in the West, such as Glenn Greenwald. These — the folk who shared the secrets of the West with the whole world — were the people who not only were brave but “their courage has been fastidiously exercised for the good of humanity”. Unlike Charlie Hebdo.
Where had I seen this reasoning before? It was the familiar line of argument deployed against those seeking to support Soviet dissident writers during the Cold War. Life in the West was not so good, it was claimed, nor that in Russia so bad that it justified a concentration on so-called dissidents. Rather the accolades should go to those dissidents at home bravely standing up against war and capitalism.
Unsurprisingly Eisenberg’s argument was attractive enough to find space in the online pages of The Intercept, the vehicle set up by and for Glenn Greenwald when he left The Guardian and funded by eBay’s billionaire founder, Pierre Omidyar.
Greenwald posed his own question for PEN. “Given that PEN is supposed to stand for unpopular and marginalised views that are under assault,” he asked, “what purpose does it serve to simply echo the overwhelming consensus among western governments: that Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are heroes?”
And there you have it. The counter-position there is, for once, explicit. If Western governments are for it then we should be against it, or at the very least, not for it. In other words we should be on any side but our own.
In February a journalist called Ken Silverstein wrote about why he had resigned from the Greenwald outfit. He had been working on a story about a murder case in the US and had discovered that the person accused was actually guilty — a controversial view on the left. He couldn’t get the story published. “Internal critics believed I had taken the side of the prosecutors — and hence the state,” wrote Silverstein. “That support was unacceptable at a publication that claimed it was entirely independent and would be relentlessly adversarial towards The Man [the establishment]. That held true even in this case, when The Man successfully prosecuted a killer and sent him to jail.”
This influential childishness affects us in the UK and is an area where left and right and nationalists can converge. Though one stresses the role of the EU and the other that of US “imperialism”, both Ukip and the Green-supported Stop the War movement blame the West rather than the maligned Putin for the Ukraine crisis. Nicola Sturgeon takes a sterner view of Trident than she seems to take of the Iranian nuclear programme. Scots Nats write to me and say that the UK has been a “disaster” for the past 40 years.
Glenn, Russell, Nigel, Lutfur, Caroline, Deborah, let me ask you something. Is our society in its secularism no better than, say, Pakistan’s or Iran’s? Is its foreign policy as unguided by principle as Russia’s? Is its toleration of free speech to be no more valued than China’s lack of it? Is it, essentially, no less corrupt than Nigeria? Isn’t ours, for all its faults, sometimes the right side to be on?
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