With the second anniversary just a week away, I find myself reluctantly starting to think about the horror once again. Whether you agree with the wisdom of the war in Iraq or not, this is a fascinating reexamination of the Western left intelligensia's response to 9/11 by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the U.K. Prospect, and how the morally bankrupt absurdity of that response made the war in Iraq (to which the writer objects) easier to obtain, since anti-war and anti-U.S. sentiment in general had been so badly represented in the aftermath of 9/11 by the likes of Arundhati Roy, Barbara Kingsolver, Susan Sontag, Jeanette Winterson, Martin Amis, Alice Walker, Dario Fo, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Berger, Mary Beard, Michael Moore, and on and on - a gallery of Literary Lights and Deep Thinkers proving themselves to be outrageously wrongheaded, vacuous fools swimming in their own little pools of intellectual putrescence. Goddamn! no one can be as stupid as some "smart people."
- These unthinking "radicals" provoked more than just amusement mixed with irritation—they induced a sense of despair. They simply had nothing to say—as they showed when they were asked for more practical advice. If Alice Walker’s suggestion that Bin Laden should be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done was one of the most remarkable entries in this whole sottisier, it wasn’t much different in kind from the fatuities on offer elsewhere. Paul Foot led the way by telling Bush, "first, cut off your aid to the state of Israel." This was like saying, first, conquer the law of gravity, or, first, fly to Venus.
....A clue to this sorry performance may be found in the relationship between the literary-academic left in the west—or "what’s left of the left"—and militant Islam. On the face of it they should be opposite magnetic poles. So they once were. The Enlightenment knew what to say about religions, all of them: "Écrasez l’infame!" In the 19th century, the progressive party believed that one of the reasons for European superiority over the benighted regions of Asia and Africa was the conquest of superstition.
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