Why We Fight...Conservatism: A META, Meta-article

American propaganda poster from the Second World War

*SEPTEMBER 8TH UPDATED DISCLAIMER & WARNING* "Why We Fight" in the title of this article refers to a series of propaganda films made by Frank Capra during the Second World War, which you can link to via my Recommendations. That title, and the poster on the right, compose a tongue-in-cheek reference to those films and to another, 2005 film of the same name about the Military-Industrial Complex. The swastika on the boot is not intended to indicate that this article equates Nazism and conservatism, although it does make comparisons between the two, and warn of what conservatism might become in the future.

A extensive response to many of the comments below is available on my column

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I write this to make a point, to keep a promise and to give a warning.

The point:

I've been reading a lot of meta-posts recently. The conversation about Newsvine is often more interesting and more personal than the news. Of recent, I read Mr. Djehuty's Open Letter to Newsvine," where 130 columnists and counting pledged "less tolerance of hate speech and abuse". Said Mr. Djehuty:

We love this place but we can't spend much time here with the way things are. A high proportion of threads are now argumentative and unhelpful. Few people are getting smarter here, they're stopping by for a fight, hidden behind an anonymous identity and with no consideration for the humanity of the people with whom they're arguing.

On the Vinecast of 30 July 2008, featuring Mr. LeClerc, Ms. Babbles, Mr. McCann, Ms. yasmin and Mr. cowboy, the discussion revolved around "trolls" and "drive-by" comment shootings. Mr. cowboy and Mr. McCann were discussing whether or not they'd leave Newsvine. In the end, Mr. McCann did, although Mr. cowboy seems to hanging out in a limited capacity (and a long belated thank you, Mr. cowboy, for the kind testimonial on my column). That the meta-issues of Newsvine seemed to occupy more of the Vinecast than did the actual news is, again, telling. That long-time Newsviners seem to feel it necessary to leave Newsvine when they still enjoy posting is unfortunate.

Mr. Bilokonsky, in State of the Vine: What the @!$%# is Wrong With Everyone?, explained what had happened to Mr. McCann – a story to which I was not privy. Apparently, the whole things was over allegations of anti-Semitism in a thread about Israel/Palestine, and the entire affair had become so heated that the thread was shut down and the participants given a 24-hour "cooling-off" period. I haven't read the thread, so I'll not pass judgment. But these right/left confrontations seem to be becoming a regular theme of Newsvine. A lot of people think that's a bad thing. I'm not so certain.

Mr. Bilokonsky's article was eloquent, and although perhaps not intentional, his efforts at describing what he sees Newsvine becoming mirrors the larger torment of the American nation – which, in turn, is what drives both the Newsvine community's angst and urge to post. "Two years ago this was a small site with not that many members," said Bilokonsky. "We all knew each other really well. We didn't lock our doors, as it were." Is that not the pie-scented America of nostalgia? Is that not Bedford Falls?

"Those days are gone," he continued. "That's it. This site has had its gate thrown open to the world, and I think that as long as we...fail to recognize the fundamental paradigm shift involved then there's going to be chaos." Is this not globalisation? Communities fragmented, paradigms smashed, cultures clashing: what is happening to Newsvine is happening to the world. Newsvine was a village, and now it's an international metropolis. People are running highways through the village center, chain stores and shopping centers are popping up, and the Mom & Pop Shop is out on its keister. If the local market and the village green are in the way of progress, are in the way of the American dream, they've gotta' go.

We might call the takeover of Newsvine by MSNBC "intellectual urban sprawl," (with not a few benefits, mind you). The broader conflicts of a fractured and disintegrating American nation have broken into our little news forum. I daresay, Newsvine users are now seeing a more realistic picture of both the news and their neighbors, and it isn't pretty. A lot of people have found themselves under verbal attack, and with all the vigor of a figurative hit squad. What are we to make of it? Whose fault is it? Said Mr. Bilokonsky, under the appropriate subheading, On Bullying and Cyber-Terrorism:

In my experience the left and the right are equally to blame here...

Equal blame, equal rights, all very fair. Except, I don't think the "left and right" actually are equally guilty. Sure, there's plenty of blame to go around, but the overwhelming bulk of this these attacks are coming from that amorphous school of pseudo-philosophy called conservatism and its ideological familiars. Now, that's not to say that there aren't "flaming liberals" (sorry, I couldn't help it) or that there aren't civil and neighborly conservatives – people I wouldn't mind having a beer with (I seed and write things myself that are designed to invite confrontation with so-called conservatives, although I demand civility). But the mode and method of these two forms of provocation are starkly apart. They overlap, but they're two different kinds of provocation.

Thing is, so-called liberals assume that by sharing blame that doesn't belong to you, you are somehow being "fair." Mr. Bilokonsky also said, "...what you believe doesn't justify idiotic behavior. I have cited two right-wing groups by name because I've had run-ins with them, but that doesn't let you off the hook." Indeed it does not, and kudos to Mr. Bilokonsky for tactful phrasing; but there's more to this story, and I do not implicate Mr. Bilokonsky in what I'm about to say.

We parse these terms "liberal" and "conservative," but they're not real; they're inventions of the power structure designed to divide our people and create a wall between our leaders and just oversight. While certainly there are liberal and conservative trends among groups of people (and sometimes within especially conflicted individuals, myself included), NO ONE can be accurately labeled a liberal or a conservative in any meaningful way, any more than an economic system can be labeled purely capitalistic, socialistic or communistic. It's a mixed bag no matter what. Thus my target here isn't people who identify themselves – foolishly, I think – as conservatives, but conservatism itself.

We have made the mistake of elevating conservatism (whatever dark and squishy thing that is) as a legitimate equal to liberal democracy. It most certainly IS NOT. Nor can we or should we dignify the idea of a "conservative media" or "conservative journalism" as anything other than farce, a front for cheap and ungainly agitprop. Journalism DOES have a liberal bias because it is a liberal institution, and cannot exist in any other form without becoming something vastly different. So are democracy, constitutional government, free market capitalism, the scientific method, universal education and a host of other Enlightenment era ideas offshoots of liberal philosophy. If we are to take these as the sum total of what the United States is supposed to be, then I'd dare to say that conservatism is un-American.

This is not a debate or a motion requiring a quorum. It is a fact, a starting point, the substance of Locke and Jefferson and Franklin and Washington and the U.S.-bloody-Constitution. Conservatism, in the time of the American revolution, was fealty to the King of England, a God-ordained monarch. Conservatism, in our time, is rapidly becoming fealty to a President-King, a God-ordained monarch, whichever party he or she comes from. The America that I love – a place of unprecedented artistic achievement and technological innovation; a place of skyscrapers and bridges and long-distance trains; a place of big-band music, classical jazz, bluegrass and Zydeco; a place containing the great, humid southland of my childhood, the gentle, snowy mountains of Vermont and the tropical perfection of Hawaii – places I've lived – has been slowly decaying since the 1950s. Or, at least, the idea of it has been decaying, and we are left, in the days of the information society, with the stark, Klieg-lighted reality of what has been wrought.

Those who would conserve our traditional culture and national identity have handed both, wholesale, to corporatists who are dismantling the whole mess to sell off for spare parts. They pretend conservative values (an empty show of Sturm und Drang to begin with) just long enough to cash in and run off to the Bahamas or Costa Rica or Singapore or Abu Dhabi with your tax dollars. They're international, their assets are diversified, and they're bleeding the U.S. government dry. When that massive corpse is only so much spider-fodder, they'll toss it aside, and all those populist conservatives that bought Ann Coulter's book, sent campaign donations to W. and engaged in Machiavellian malefactions on the likes of Newsvine will be left reeling with the broke liberals they defamed, and who defamed them in return.

"What," you ask, "has any of this to do with my column and my how I spend my free time? Indeed, let's just delete the abusive comments, ignore-list the troublemakers and enjoy our hobby as would-be journalists. These are, as we say, meta-issues that shouldn't interfere with the normal function of seeding news and writing articles."

Indeed, these are meta-issues. But they are far more META than many of us realize. During the Vinecast of 6 August, our panelists – who were still discussing trolls and munchkins and drive-by commenters – brought out the N-word – Nazi – and engaged in a typically stilted debate about the Second World War and it's socio-economic indicators. Since they brought it up, and since so much of how we see ourselves is tied up into the Second World War, let's talk about it.

The Promise

When I first started actively participating on Newsvine, I seeded a link that I thought would go nowhere. I was wrong. The article, which was about the New York Times editorial penned by seven Marines in Iraq, ended up generating about 90 comments (a LOT for me), a few of which were from the gracious and fair-minded Newsviner, Ms. Megan to Pagan. We had been discussing terrorism, and I said to her that, "While we cannot be blamed specifically for creating terrorism, we Americans bear primary responsibility for maintaining the environment in which it thrives." Ms. to Pagan responded, "What would you suggest we, as in the US and the incoming President, could do to minimize the 'environment in which it thrives'."

Now, that was over half a year ago, and I never really answered her question in an article (and I'll only half do it here). But in the interest of keeping that promise, I've kept asking myself, "What is the environment in which terrorism thrives?" I labored long under that question, and every time I thought I had it answered I would lose it. So the answer developed slowly. No doubt it will, in the near future, congeal. One clue, though, came to me when I recently stumbled across an article in an outdated copy of Atlantic Monthly and had a sudden inspiration.

It was part III of a series by Bernard-Henri Levi called In the Footsteps of Tocqueville. Levi, a Frenchman, traveled across the United States for over a year to report, like Tocqueville before him, on the oddity that is America. During his travels, Levy goes through Texas and attends the "Great Western Gun Show," where people "caress daggers whose certificates of origin bluntly specify how many 'Viets' they've stabbed," and mentions the sale of "Competition Bushmaster AR-15's like the one used by the snipers who killed thirteen people near Washington, D.C., in 2002."

He happens upon a dealer with a table full of Nazi weapons and paraphernalia, including "Goebbels dolls. Swastikas. … Himmler's personal revolver. Goring's sword. A piece of the door to Nazi headquarters in Munich." A conversation ensues with the dealer:

"Doesn't it bother you to sell this stuff? Since there are people who want to buy it, someone's got to sell it. Are you aware that this is absolutely forbidden in Europe? Makes sense. You were occupied; we conquered them! No misgivings, then? No misgivings; the Reich killed fewer people than Genghis Khan. Would you sell objects that had belonged to bin Laden? Oh no! [outraged] That's completely different! Those things sure wouldn't have the aesthetic quality of these Nazi artifacts'"

Why doesn't the dealer of Nazi "artifacts" see the conflict of interest? Why is it OK for him to sell Nazi stuff but not that of Ossama bin Laden? Having grown up in the South, I've had many conversations of this nature, where the Nazis were evil, but the reasons for this evil are less important than the fact. For our gun-show dealer, that the Nazis believed the wrong thing doesn't mean that their symbolism, their weapons and colors and icons, weren't cool and thus deserving of admiration. Rather, the Nazis, despite how cool their team might have been, just weren't on the right team, the American team. This stress on symbolism, on iconic belief, is prolific in American society, and arguments about the deeds and misdeeds of the American nation often get caught up in this same sports-team mentality (as you no doubt know).

Tocqueville, Levy tells us, also spoke of the effects of "geographic isolation." For most of its history, the United States has been isolated by two oceans and had no hemispheric rivals. It is arguable that, had the U.S. been founded on a landed border with its European forebears, it would not be a superpower today, or have its unique cultural and governmental aspects, or have succeeded at all. The ideas that fomented the American nation were conceived in Europe, but could find no root there. Our nation was built upon Enlightenment philosophy imported from Europe, but along with it we also brought Social Darwinism, nationalism, patriotism: pan-Western phenomena that were products of the colonial era. In Europe, these led to the rise of fascism.

The Allied armies toppled the Third Reich, and Europeans seem, in the wake of millions of dead, to have learned their lesson. But what about the United States? No occupying army ever shocked our nation into it's senses. Have Americans assumed, like our gun dealer above, that they are immune simply because we won the war? Might makes right and all that? Did our country unilaterally purge its association with dark politics in 1945? Even after Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were gone, even as the Soviet Union teetered on the edge of ruin and finally collapsed, even as all the great enemies slowly gave way to American hegemony, we held onto the idea of our eternal struggle against the forces of evil.

Today, the great enemy is terrorism. Never mind that the CIA sewed the seeds of Al Qaeda during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Never mind American support for authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world. Never mind that when Israel fights against its enemies, it does it with American military machinery. Terror knows no chain of cause and effect. We are left to assume that Muslims just hate us, and that it couldn't be for any good reason other than that our freedom pisses them off. Thus it is with such flippant errancy that we refer to "Islamo-Fascism," in the vain hope that this new threat might be tied to the old, lumped into the same easily digestible misapprehension we have about the Nazis. How easily we forget what fascism actually was.

My grandparents filled many parental roles during my childhood. I grew up on the Lone Ranger and Red Skelton; Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy; Loony Tunes featuring victory gardens and Bugs Bunny singing wartime ditties; the Andrew Sisters and Bing Crosby. Thus it was with eager anticipation that I began to explore Europe and see the remnants of that time in the hopes of making contact with it. I pictured a Germany of dirt roads and pointed, Gothic-scripted signs and lavishly outfitted zeppelins; a southern Dutch and Belgian countryside of rolling hills and idyllic little towns; a Normandy of gray, bloody beaches. In many cases, I found exactly these things. In others, I found urban sprawl in the wake of flattened cities, KZ memorials and people who wanted nothing more than to forget.

I recall two instances when I actually "made contact" with the Second World War. The first was during the annual Carnival celebration in Maastricht, when the entire city goes out into the freezing cold dressed in costume and dances and sings and drinks. We – my wife and a friend – were walking back to the car at 3AM, stumbling over the slippery cobblestones. Ice crystals were falling, and we could see our breath in the yellow, red and green lights of the festival. We passed a local bar, The Tribunal, and after a quick drink we were leaving to get into our car and go home. Then, out of the bar stepped a few members of one of the "drunken brass bands" that roam around Maastricht during Carnival playing...drunken brass music. We looked back a guy with a trombone lifted his instrument and began playing:

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when
But I know we'll meet again some sunny day.
Keep smiling through, just like you always do
Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away.

So will you please say hello to the folks that I know
Tell them I won't be long.
They'll be happy to know that as you saw me go
I was singing this song.

It's a war song, from a soldier as he goes off to fight. There, in the colored lights of an ancient festival, I had a moment. You'll hear from conservative talking heads that Europeans don't remember American sacrifices during that time, BUT THEY DO. In my travels, old people in the Netherlands, France, even Germany, when they heard I was American, have actually said thank you to me for what my ancestors did. The kids may be cocky and spoiled by the social welfare system, but the old folks remember. I was recently at the funeral where all the attendees sang We'll Meet Again. I was the only native English speaker in the room, but they all knew the words by heart. It may sound inconsequential, but it isn't.

The second moment was outside Nuremberg. I was on a study trip, examining the relics of the Third Reich as one of my topics for a Europe in the 20th Century course. I was walking the NSDAP rally grounds on the outskirts of the city when I came to the neo-classical Zeppelin Field and the massive, marble Tribune where many Nazi rallies were filmed. It was formed to look like a fortress, and the field (where people still play soccer) was surrounded by marble seating so that the whole thing resembled, from the inside, an amphitheater. Most of the seating was overgrown with vegetation, even a few trees.

I walked up the Tribune, an enormous reviewing stand where dignitaries would watch the spectacle below. It was covered with broken glass. In the center was a prominent lectern, where a speaker could address the masses. I knew, for a fact, that Adolf Hitler had stood there. Behind it, inside the Tribune, was a temple where a brazier would have been burning. I was trying to bring myself to stand on the spot where Hitler had been, but for some reason I could not. I squinted and looked out over the field below, and tried to imagine what it would have been like during one of those rallies.

It was night, and the colonnade was intact. Along its length were braziers full of fire, and red swastika flags – hundreds of them. Below, the sounds of boots on the pavement, and the sight of a giant, fiery swastika of torches held aloft by marching soldiers. And over it all, the din of Heil! Heil! Heil! The word, "heil," is akin to the English "heal" and "hail." The Roman salute, arm outstretched and fingers extended, palm down, is not so far removed from the laying on of hands in certain Christian sects. Above, the Leader, the "heilig," a word meaning something like "holy man" or "savior," received their blessing. And there I stood, not quite daring to take that last step.

And how does that feel? The scary thing is, it feels good. Colors; flags; fire; the beating of drums; the martial music; the adoration of thousands ready to die at your command; the emotional feeling of belonging to a people and a place and an ideal: PATRIOTISM. We don't want to think of it that way, perhaps because it raises too many inconvenient questions about our own civic culture, but patriotism was central to Nazi ideology. What's the difference between their patriotism and ours?

This is what feeds the environment in which terror thrives. In the midst of nationalist emotion, when ethical systems become the amoral imperative of "us and them"; when we ignore the consequences of our actions; when we hold symbols of state above the imperatives of reason and humanism; when we reduce our adversaries to caricatures of great evil; when we needlessly inflict hurt, suffering and death on thousands of people and refuse to punish those responsible: in all of these cases, we are feeding the environment in which terrorism thrives. And I tell you this, dear reader: terror is a two way street.

The warning

I said before that, "As I see it, there are two American soldiers in the European psyche. The 1st is the WWII soldier, handing out chocolate to kids. The 2nd is the Abu Ghraib soldier, holding a Doberman off a naked prisoner." At the end of that article, I said they were one and the same. In essence, movement conservatism has presented itself as the WWII soldier with the chocolates so it can get away with doing Abu Ghraib soldier stuff like torture and kidnapping, and the somewhat minor sin of bullying and scapegoating "liberals" in places like Newsvine.

That is nothing new. Conservatism is a very old idea. Conservatism gained its roughly modern definition and prominence under the French Revolution, (as did the word terrorism) when Conservatives fought to restore the power of the Catholic monarchy. But there are much older antecedents. The fall of Rome, the Crusades, the Inquisition and Reconquista, and the rise of fascism in Europe were all associated with efforts to conserve the old order, idealize the past, in the face of a desperate crisis. After the fall of Rome, it was the Church burning books, launching pogroms and befriending the new Germanic nobility. During the Crusades, it was the Pope seeking to expand and enrich Christendom in the name of regaining the "Holy Land" from infidels (a Latin word, first used by the Christians). During the Inquisition and the Reconquista it was a backlash to the inexplicable Black Death, the victory of Christians over Muslim Iberia, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the elimination of the Cathars in southern France. During the 1930's, it was to restore stability and national pride in the wake of a worldwide economic crisis and the Versailles debacle.

It is no different today in the United States. A fictional age of greatness has been fabricated, as in Germany before the war. We all know the line: our traditional, Judeo-Christian culture, which has worked for a thousand years, must be preserved or a doom of moral turpitude will descend, led by the dark forces of secularism (read "liberalism"). A Promised Land; a Chosen People; a glorious, traditional golden age that has been corrupted; an elevation of flags and anthems and colors as pseudo-religious icons; how, exactly, are we so different? What, exactly, is being "conserved"?

Is it "the purple mountains majesty" that are being leveled for coal? Is it "the amber waves of grain" that genetically modified crops are slowly Frankenstein-ing? Is it the glory of our national parks, forests and federal lands, which we're preparing to open up for drilling and the massive road construction that goes with it? Is it our tradition of liberal Christian ethics and religious tolerance, which is slowly being corrupted by Christian fundamentalism and Muslim-bashing? Is it our traditional American architecture, town centers and countrysides – the corner post-office, the multi-denominational church and the town hall – which have been steadily removed in favor of road expansions, box-store developments and single-use zoning? Is it our unalienable rights, which seem to have been rendered quite alienable since the 1950s? There doesn't seem to be any conservation involved in this mix. Rather, fiscal conservatism is using cultural conservatism to bring about the apocalypse predicted by religious conservatism; and all three blame the dirty liberals.

Now here's the warning. As I say, crisis feeds conservative movements. While it might seem far away at the moment, the entire world is on the verge of, not one, but several crises: a peak in energy supplies without an adequate replacement; a global, environmental crisis that IS happening whether it is anthropogenic or not; a looming, worldwide food shortage; a worldwide economic crisis: all of these are imminent if current trends remain constant. And this is happening even as we continue to lose access to our government and the realm of civil, public discourse is becoming increasingly fractious.

It is within this context that users of Newsvine read and seed news, and write about what they see. We are facing the ancient curse, "May you live in interesting times." We are about to be absolutely buried in interestingness.

Most conservatives are, I think, very decent people who love order and eschew complexity (and who can blame them?). That they are good people does not mean that conservatism isn't a thoroughly unconscionable and reactionary ethos. Very good people can have very bad ideas, and do very bad things, as history has evidenced. Trolls, munchkins, drive by comment shootings, flamers, cyber-bullies – whatever you want to call them – are not concerned about the literal mode of conservatism; they're concerned about the attack. Conservatism is just a convenient vehicle to defend what they're really after. I'll let you fill in that blank, but it ain't so far removed from 1930's.

I've been watching the efforts of "those who would be liberals," and they have been lacking at best. We have allowed an anti-intellectual and thoroughly hypocritical ideology of closeted misanthropy to define the terms of our confrontation with it. We have lowered ourselves to demeaning our opponents on the level we claim to detest, and we have lent them legitimacy by the culturally relative assumption that all ideas are created equal. They most certainly are not.

When a person attempts to murder discourse or stifle dissent, it is intellectual thuggery, not free speech. When the goal is not to prove you incorrect, but to seed so much doubt and raw emotion that the very idea of correctness seems impossible, it is not discourse. When facts are reduced to declaratives that are insisted upon but never proven, it isn't journalism. You are defeated simply by the mountain of nonsense you have to disprove. Most of the so-called liberals I'm reading seem woefully ill-equipped to disprove anything except that their opponents are dumb! ...and mean!

Make no mistake, actual liberals (as in 18th Century) DID start this fight. Far less conflicted free-thinkers living in far more dangerous times had the audacity to find the reality with which they were confronted unbearable. Ill-content to sit idly by and accept absurd ideologies, they faced horrific consequences simply for disagreeing. Be damned that we allow such conditions to again flourish in our time. Intellectual violence breeds physical violence. You've got to stand up to the bullies who would shout you down today or you'll have to stand up to those who would beat you down tomorrow. This is a war of words, and one that must not be lost. To leave Newsvine for greener pastures, or just to get away, will not work. In the recent words of Mr. OTB, who called for "stalwart defenders" of public discourse:

Those who would leave should also know this.. the trolls are everywhere. They are omnipresent and completely pervasive. They're the tamarisk on the river, the kudzu of the forest, anywhere you'd like to go they'll eventually follow. Run, run for your lives... and spend your lives running. Or don't. Pick your battleground. I don't see any better than NV.

Nor do I. While deleting and flagging verbal attacks may help control the prolificacy of "the environment in which it thrives," it's merely a first step. No one invests as much time and energy as Newsvine requires simply to delete, flag and file complaints. You get smarter through debate, and sometimes through confrontation. By all means, expand your ignore list, avoid the threads of propagandists, de-friend users, flag abusive comments and delete blatant attacks on your own threads. But know that there are times when you've got to stand and fight, and there are ways of doing it that allow you to strike a blow while keeping your civility intact.

That's hard. It take patience, research, dedication and not a small amount of ruthlessness. It won't get you leaves on your stick or win you any popularity contests. But it feels good, especially on that rare occasion when you get through. And you will.

I tell you this: Although opinions are not created equally, our right to speak is. It may seem, at times, that your work here is futile, that no one is listening, and that you're not getting through to anyone. That simply isn't true. Even if you only change the mind of one person, that is a far greater feat than many of us believe, and worth every second. To quote my countryman:

O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless – of cities fill'd with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light – of the objects mean – of the struggle ever renew'd;
Of the poor results of all--of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest – with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring – What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here – that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

Well?

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