A Second Hand Conjecture

The subject of the bloody 1965 Indonesian mass murder of suspected communists is not often openly discussed history even in today’s Indonesia. Given the pervasive silence, estimates vary on the actual number of people killed, but it’s generally accepted as being somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. Yet so infected with fear is the subject of the massacre (and so influential do many of the men who took part in it remain), that outspoken eyewitnesses are extremely rare, despite the enormous numbers of people involved and widespread knowledge of where each town’s unmarked mass graves can be found.

Some of the worst killings were carried out on a volunteer basis by village men who were members of Islamic and nationalist youth groups, often on extremely flimsy evidence of communist sympathies. Yet due testimony from actual members of these groups who performed the round-ups and committed the killings in the countryside, is virtually nonexistent in the historical record. So it is remarkable and important that some of those men have finally spoken out in old age to the Associated Press. All the men interviewed by the AP however are unrepentant and convinced that they saved their country from an impending communist takeover.

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Modern pessimists of the human condition often see the loss of mankind’s dignity deriving from deviation from traditional religious orders. Their secular opponents see the fall conditioned by a retreat from scientific rationalism. They can have their debate. For my own part, I think the death of human dignity results from becoming an adult LARPer.

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You may have noticed there’s an ugly and unfortunate current developing in some of the protests against Proposition 8 in California. Namely white gays, blaming blacks for its passage. Even Andrew Sullivan, who has been blaming blacks for a couple of days now, has noticed that perhaps things are getting a little out of hand.

Altogether, as Mark Steyn puts it, this wasn’t quite the possibility for post-election civil discord people were anticipating:

The media were warning that if the election went the wrong way there’d be riots, but I didn’t realize they meant Klansmen in Abercrombie polos roaming West Hollywood itching for a rumble.
(NRO)

One of the most visible recurring problems here is the frustration many gay men and women are experiencing with the question of how blacks could “betray” the cause of universal civil rights, after such a long and noble struggle of their own to secure them. Confronting this matter directly in an opinion in the Los Angeles Times, Jasmyne Cannick raises several worthwhile points of explanation. Most notably, a misunderstanding on the part of white gays about both the origins and requirements of an appeal to the black community:

[T]he black civil rights movement was essentially born out of and driven by the black church; social justice and religion are inextricably intertwined in the black community. To many blacks, civil rights are grounded in Christianity — not something separate and apart from religion but synonymous with it. To the extent that the issue of gay marriage seemed to be pitted against the church, it was going to be a losing battle in my community.

[...]

Likewise, holding the occasional town-hall meeting in Leimert Park — the one part of the black community where they now feel safe thanks to gentrification — to tell black people how to vote on something gay isn’t effective outreach either.
(LAT)

In a consistent vein she adds on her site:

[G]ays are headed to Long Beach tonight to protest. I wonder though why they are moving from Westwood to Long Beach and skipping past Compton, Watts, and South L.A.?
(Jasmyne Cannick)

While fear and conceit are definitely in evidence, more pertinent is the matter of misdirection in the division between political friends and enemies. In ordinary times, the necessary accord for putting these two parties back into a grudging spiritual alignment would be to unify against the common enemy: the invidious conservative power structure.

Thus the real trouble is that simultaneous with the passage of Proposition 8, this conservative power structure and government has been quite visibly thrown down by the election of Barack Obama and the Democrats. The once titanic foe is now in pieces, scattered and preoccupied with internal reexamination and a painful reconsolidation project. It isn’t a party to this debate, it isn’t even a party with an agenda of any kind at the moment. So it is that without a Tito to oppose in common struggle, the Balkan coalition of Yugoslavian dissidents become Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians, almost eager to turn on each other. Head north to peaceful Slovenia says me. Call it Oregon.

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Ross Douthat

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

Isn’t it interesting that those who tend to believe in the paranormal are also those who tend to believe the big lie of the liberal left?

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Ramadan always means new soap operas in the Arab world. I learned today it also means not even thinking about masturbation. A small thing to you perhaps, but in a repressive sexual society where the curves of the female figure are a matter of imaginative mystery, this is a serious lifestyle sacrifice for young men.

For me, Ramadan always means sharing a cigarette on a dirty floorboard outside Cairo. I’d offered my driver my last smoke in the midst of the holy month when he’d picked me up from a camel train. I’d held it out with an appeal that God was after all merciful. Tobacco is haram, forbidden, during the daylight hours of Ramadan. He’d stared at it for a long time. ‘Western devils and their temptations’ might have been in his thoughts. Finally he said “Yes. But not here.”
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I’d heard that Hitch addressed the situation in Zimbabwe in his introductory remarks at the Freedom Fest 2008 debate with Dinesh D’Souza, but I hadn’t seen the video of it until today. It’s worth a watch.

The subject of the debate itself wasn’t Zimbabwe, but the general subject of conflict and religion. If you’ve seen one D’Souza/Hitchens debate on God and man, you’ve seen everything that follows this clip, so I’ll only post the first part.

Hitch takes the opportunity to examine his marginal complicity in fostering the Western mythology of Robert Mugabe as a heroic anticolonial guerrilla leader resisting Rhodesian tyranny. A Western moral investment that Mugabe has been trading on ever since, to the unbelievable misfortune of his people.
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Blogs for Victory
“I wanted to make a distinction between separation of Church and state, and separating our faith from our politics. You can embrace the concept of separation of Church and state, but that’s not at all the same thing as separating our faith from our actions, from our political actions.”

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Those of us who remember the political scene of the 1990s remember Bob Barr as a hero of rightwing social conservatives. That was before his peculiar (some say opportunistic) transformation into libertarian civil rights crusader. Anyway, I’d missed this a week ago, but apparently Ed Brayton cornered Barr on his 90s crusade against Wiccans. Barr compared his unsurprisingly changed position on the neo-pagan religion to his former opposition to gays in military, which only reminds us of yet another soc-con cause he once championed and now repudiates.
(via Nate Uncensored via IPR)

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(photo: Mani Babbar)

After 9/11 widened Al Qaeda’s ambitious war against most of the world, Osama bin Laden described his own axis-o-evil as being composed of “Crusaders, Zionists and Hindus.” But at some point, without anyone much noticing, that seems to have changed for Hindus.

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Well, Mr. Obama has finally quit that ludicrous Chicago institution known as Trinity United Church of Christ. His membership had survived Rev. Wright, but was ultimately done in over the visiting Rev. Michael Pfleger’s bizarre self-hating white guilt trip, and radicalized political rally in sacred masquerade.

Having seen the deranged, obscenely ideological sermons of Wright and then Pfleger, it may be that conservatives are experiencing for the first time in national politics what the left has endured for decades: the insufferable and corrosive experience of seeing clergy involved in brutish political editorializing from the pulpit, done allegedly under the sanction of God, for and toward His rather famously unpredictable purposes.

Perhaps there might then be a collective recognition in this country that aggressively involving the church in politics isn’t such a swell idea. Perhaps even a deeper understanding that God –who by His nature rules only through decree– might not be such a logical source for consultation in a democracy, which rules through consent of the governed.

Too much to hope for, I know. But one can dream of a better day. Even in an era where the preacher pirates in the Evangelical social conservative movement hold a cutlass at the Republican party’s throat every election. And thereby a patently preposterous, explicitly theocratic ignoramus like Mike Huckabee, can experience significant support within that party for its vice presidential nomination.

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Social conservatives and particularly crypto-socialist social conservatives (or “populists” if you prefer), are inevitably going to be a minority faction within the GOP. But to their great credit they themselves recognize this. The implications of that self-awareness are dire for Huckabee however.

Because their interests and perspectives are in many ways peculiar to themselves within the party, historically they’ve always been sensitive to their permanent political vulnerability. Thereby there is a tendency among social conservative voters to desert their insurgent leaders at the first sign of weaknesses (ala Pat Robertson, 1988). Weaknesses which could conceivably imperil their leveraged influence with the eventual broader party nominee and his regime.

As Mick Stockinger at Uncorrelated points out, these odd men out have smelled weakness on Huckabee and must soon begin their desertion from him to the establishment, in order to preserve influence. That’s because what the social conservatives are staring at now, is the prospect of being rendered completely irrelevant for the first time since perhaps 1976. Having supported the overthrow of the prevailing order in the Republican party by an extremist champion with a radical and unpopular agenda, only to watch him fail to seize control of the party, the coup plotters will soon be looking for ways to make themselves indispensable again.

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Exit poll data in South Carolina suggests there’s a big turnout from “white evangelical and born-again Christians.” Uh-oh.

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Add another unsettling dimension to Mike Huckabee’s rather bizarre views on the Constitution: he apparently subscribes to the judicial pragmatist interpretation of a Living Constitution. Imagine the notion of an open constitution into which you can read any unwritten right, although this time not practiced by social liberals (as we’ve grown accustomed to), but instead by a committed theocrat, determined to inject “God’s standards” into the document. An unwelcome development.

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Video clip of Mike Huckabee arguing that “what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards.” Hmm. Is that really in accord with anyone’s notion of Founders intent? I know committed social conservatives who do not share such a false and extreme view of the Constitution. Aside from that, can you imagine this kind of rhetoric in the context of a general election? Automatic defeat.

H/T: Pamela Leavey

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Here’s some splendid news for those of us not delighted by the prospect of a liberation theologist takeover of the Republican Party. Rasmussen is reporting their new South Carolina numbers and Mike Huckabee has lost five points and Fred Thompson gained four since last week. Thompson now stands at 16%, Huckabee at 19%, with McCain reaping the rewards at 28%.

If Huckabee can be stopped in South Carolina, it’s quite probable that will be the end of him. Until of course John McCain’s advisers convince him to name Huckabee as his Vice Presidential nominee in order to appease the soc-con voting bloc (traditionally his strongest adversaries within the party).

Indeed, my friend Jason over at postpolitical (who is an ardent Huckabee supporter) is holding out hope for McCain to win the nomination if Huckabee fails, for precisely this eventuality. Even the slimmest chance of getting Huckabee anywhere near the levers of power is apparently enormously important to his supporters. But is it as important to his opponents to prevent that? It should be.

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(listening notes; Dinosaur Jr., The Volcano Suns, The Minutemen, The Dixie Chicks, Hank Williams Sr., The Rolling Stones)

Late in the eighties I was taking a course in American history after 1945. One of my fellow students was a bright, interesting Palestinian. We had become acquaintances and spent a fair amount of time after class discussing various topics. He was not in my mind anyone much different than other students. He was a good guy. While he was a Muslim, and a believer he wasn’t what I would call devout and certainly not radical. Needless to say eventually the topic of the class turned to the Arab Israeli conflict and the professor gave an entire class period over to this young man to give a presentation. It was quite good, if one sided, at showing the conditions in the refugee camps, various atrocities committed by the Israeli’s and Israel’s refusal to negotiate in good faith. He was quite effective at arousing the sympathies of the class, including mine. The discussion after that turned into a chance for the more left leaning members of the class to give monologues about their deep sympathy for the Palestinian people and the brutality of the Israeli’s.

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