Monday, October 03, 2005
ANTI-WEST WEST
The Sydney Morning Herald bills its new star online hire Andrew West as “The Contrarian”, presumably because “Predictable Standard Issue Terror-Cowed Anti-Capitalist ABC/Fairfax/Crikey Leftoid Hack” wouldn’t fit in a graphic. Let’s take a look at Andrew’s wildly contrarian views, which are opposed by at least 0.03% of his fellow Fairfax staffers:
I don’t want this to be my “Susan Sontag” moment, but in the wake of the second, awful – and yes, evil – round of bombings in Bali this past weekend, we need to ask a lot of questions. We’ve already started to answer some: who, what, when, where and how. But we still haven’t asked, at least not in any depth, the most important question: why?
We haven’t? In fact, West’s Sontagian allies have done little else for four years. They’ve received plenty of answers, too; it’s just that those answers are a little inconvenient. So the likes of West refuse to listen, and again ask: “Why?”
Why are the perpetrators – fanatics, lunatics, to be sure – willing to martyr themselves in process of murdering scores of innocents?
See?
The late Jewish-American writer Susan Sontag won herself infamy in American conservative circles when, just days after the September 11 2001 attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, she wrote, in an essay in The New Yorker, “… whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards”. Sontag was emphatically not excusing the 9/11 mass murderers. She was merely trying to understand – in a provocative way – why such sacrificial madness was taking place.
Some essay. It’s only 30 or so words longer than West’s little blog item. And Sontag didn’t exactly struggle to explain September 11’s “sacrificial madness”, instead deciding that the attack was a rational response “undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.” Also, there was no attack on Pennsylvania, neither planned nor executed.
And she was rejecting the empty sloganeering of George W. Bush that the attacks were “cowardly” and “mindless”.
A couple of paragraphs ago West described the Bali bombings as “awful” and “evil”. The empty sloganeer!
Like the bombings in Bali in both 2002 and last weekend, the 9/11 atrocities were anything but. They were meticulously planned – in the case of the World Trade Centre, right down to hitting the building in just the right place to raze it – and involved a perverted form of courage. But that did not stop these attacks from being evil.
Whoa, whoa, back up here a second … “hitting the building in just the right place to raze it”? For a start, we’re talking about two buildings here, not one. And there isn’t a great deal of finesse in the act of slamming a jet loaded with fuel into a skyscraper; that’s why both towers burned and collapsed even though they were hit at different levels, and at different angles.
The problem is that after any act of terrorism like the Bali bombings, the right-wing brands anyone who dares to discern the reasoning or the perverse logic behind the attacks an apologist, or charges them with blaming the victim. But surely if we are to stamp out, or at least limit, such carnage in the future, we must understand the perpetrators’ motivation or grievance.
We already do. They’ve told us often enough. A lot of it is to do with Jews.
It may be – and probably is – the case that their grievance is utterly without merit, completely undeserving of sympathy. This is not some 1970s social worker-style desire to understand the “pain” of the perpetrator. It is a clear-eyed, strategic need to determine the root cause of the terror. And frankly, it is a way of avoiding the kind of quagmire in which US-led troops are now floundering in Iraq, where a combination of conveniently ignored pre-war intelligence and misdirected vengeance over 9/11 has lead to an unmitigated military disaster.
Interesting how your sophisticated lefties, capable of detecting courage and reason in the behaviour of terrorists, suddenly turn all simplistic and stupid when analysing Iraq. The war? Unmitigated disaster! Next question.
We have a duty to mourn and a right to be angry over the latest outrage in Bali. But it would be grave mistake if our response was driven by rage and not reason.
“Grave mistake” might be a better title for West’s SMH site. Contrarian it ain’t.