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DAVID SOLWAY
AS THEY LIKE IT
 David
Solway has recently published a new collection of poems entitled
The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat (Goose Lane Editions,
2005), and is now working on his fourth book in education and
culture, entitled Reading, Riting and Rhythmitic. A
collection of literary/critical essays, Director's Cut,
was released by The Porcupine's Quill in Fall 2003 and a new
volume of literary/scholarly essays, Peregrines, is
slated for McGill-Queen's University Press. He was appointed
writer-in-residence at Concordia University for 1999-2000 and
is currently a contributing editor with Canadian Notes &
Queries and an associate editor with Books in Canada.
This
wide and universal theatre
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein
we play in.
As You Like It, II,
vii
If
again, it was not well cut, he disabled my judgment: this
is called the Reply Churlish. If again, it was not well cut,
he would
answer that I spake not true: this is called the Reproof Valiant.
If again, it was not well cut, he would say I lie: this is
called the
Countercheck Quarrelsome: and so to the Lie Circumstantial
and the Lie Direct.
As You Like It, V, iv
The uses of adversity
are not always sweet. And there are many books that might properly
be tossed into the running brooks and many sermons that read
as cold as stone. Nor does the stubborness of fortune readily
translate into so quiet and so sweet a style as that mastered
by the usurped Duke meditating in the Forest of Arden. This
is especially true of scholarly discourse in its generally baneful
efforts to come to terms with the menacing and intractable world
outside the leafy precincts of academic thinking. For the tendency
to bandy in faction and o’errun with policy is an intellectual
malady that would be harmless were it quarantined in the Ivory
Tower or confined to the realm of pseudo-scholarly journalism.
Unfortunately, in the ardent attempt toward the pacification
of reasonable and legitimate anxieties, our bien pensants
are chiefly adept at carrying us from the smoke into the smother.
Of course, such tranced insensibility has always been the problem
with intellectual rumination which safely ignores the briars
of the working-day world, but the elysian predisposition is
particularly strong today in the clipped and shaded walks of
learned commentary. A recent case in point:
Cass Sunstein’s
review in The New Republic Online of two new books
on terrorism and the “terrorism industry,” John
Mueller’s Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism
Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe
Them and Robert E. Goodin’s What’s Wrong
with Terrorism, develops a reasonably dispassionate account
of the revisionist perspective on the “war against terror.”
Sunstein summarizes the anti-administration arguments of these
two authors with considerable sympathy (though, to his credit,
not without a critical peroration that highlights some of the
flaws in their constatation). At the same time, he does contrive
to tilt the balance in their favour, especially with respect
to Goodin’s thesis that the American—or rather,
Republican—administration is prone to using scare-mongering
tactics, to “play[ing] the terrorism card,” in order
to obtain political advantage.
The trouble is
that Mueller and Goodin are playing their own terrorism card
in order to obtain polemical advantage. The statistical claims
they deploy to convince us that the terrorist threat has been
highly overrated, that John Kerry was probably right to describe
terrorism as little more than a “nuisance,” and
that the problem is really our fearful over-reaction to what
amounts to a relatively insignificant casualty count,
are a tissue of simple-minded inferences and deductions that
rely mainly on the abstract power of comparative numbers. In
thus portraying terrorism as contrastively innocuous in the
context of percentages and figures, they are also playing the
statistical card. But Mueller and Goodin seem completely unaware
of the way in which statistics can be misused as well as faultily
collated. As the old saw goes, “Do not put your faith
in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what
they do not say.”
Let me indulge
an explanatory aside. Take those reassuring statistical comparisons
which tell us that air travel is far safer than driving—Sunstein
himself, in the process of elaborating the notion that terrorism
is a tempest in a social and political teapot, regards it as
given that “driving is more dangerous than flying”
as it is ultimately more destructive than terror irruptions.
But is this belief really warranted? Do we ever stop to reflect
how flimsy and truncated, even misleading, such quasi-mathematical
structures really are? For example, a minor mechanical malfunction
in an automobile will likely lead to nothing more than stopping
by the side of the road, pulling over to a garage station or
simply waiting for a convenient moment to address the problem;
a similar malfunction in an airplane may plausibly lead to a
hecatomb. Properly speaking, the term “minor malfunction”
is instrumentally inappropriate in describing the mechanics
of flying. When we board an airliner, we know instinctively
that nothing must go wrong, a presentiment absent from
the morning commute. A sensor gives a wrong reading in a car:
we’ll attend to it eventually. A sensor gives a wrong
reading in an airplane: hundreds may die. How can these situational
elements, the brute empirics of what is known as the “informal
realm,” be calculated and integrated into a statistical
equation? And how can we quantify the sense of vulnerability
that modifies our affective response in evaluating the likelihood
of danger? There is no viable technique which allows for the
compilation of such incommensurable variables or their systematic
factoring into a nomothetic transfer frame.
Further, there
is the problem of adjustable distributions, that is, there is
no precise way of calculating how many times a person gets into
a car every day or what the distance, duration and conditions
of such journeys may be—extrapolated over a year from
a sizeable population the numbers would be astronomical where
numbers even apply. These data are in their nature inaccessible
but common sense suggests that were such a God’s-eye view
possible, our statistical computations might well generate a
wholly different set of conclusions from those provided by mass
casualty counts and rough correlations. Airline travel is of
course more easily calibrated and the relevant data are at least
theoretically manageable but the same is not so with respect
to vehicular traffic. Were it feasible, however, to measure
reliably the number of hours we spend on average in a car or
truck or taxi or municipal bus or Greyhound or motor home over
a large enough temporal gradient, the nature, frequency and
duration of these journeys, the various distances travelled,
the actual road and weather conditions which impinge at all
of these times, and the number of mechanical malfunctions that
may be presently disregarded without risk, the results pertaining
to the relative safety-quotients between vehicular and air travel
might well be several orders of destabilizing magnitude different
from the purring statistics that sedate us into a false sense
of security when it comes to flying. We might well discover
in the light of a complete data set that traffic fatalities
are remarkably low and airline mortality is comparatively high.
The current statistical distributions with respect to the comparative
dangers of driving and flying depend on the available data which
are crucially—and inherently—inadequate
to producing accurate results and certainly incapable of supporting
the wished-for consensus. Our findings are skewed by the twin
constraints of data-inaccessibility and weak or imperfect distributionalism
which effectively obscure the very real possibility, in line
with our intuitive convictions, that flying may be enormously
more perilous than driving. Reality does not always comply with
our rational delusions.
The same facile
assumptions dominate the revisionist discussion of terrorist
casualties vis à vis domestic fatalities. The issue does
not revolve, as Mueller suggests, around the 40,000 traffic
deaths per annum in the U.S. as opposed to the (merely) 3000
victims of the 9/11 massacre, a number that is not only considerably
smaller but is actuarially reduced with the passing of time
as the traffic statistics remain constant in the absence of
further terrorist attacks. In fact, the question is profoundly
more complicated than such crass arithmetic implies. The statistical
apparatus that is usually brought to bear upon the events in
question is not only starved of sufficient data but is meant
to distort our perception of the situation in which we are embroiled.
It cannot accommodate, as the above heuristic should establish,
the scalene and empirical properties of certain sorts of phenomena—in
this instance, what we might refer to as “crisis events.”
Additionally, there
is a third element which qualifies the conceptual structure
we are working with, namely, the conscious feature of harmful
intent, of premeditated malice. Terrorist events are informed
by sentience—they are not the outcomes of chance
or randomness which are variously susceptible to mathematical/statistical
constructs. With the one, we have the unsettling feeling that
someone is gunning for us and is prepared to wait for the opportune
moment, which cannot be statistically predicted; with the other,
well, that’s life, and we do not feel personally victimized
by what is arbitrary or contingent. The Muellers of this world,
I’m afraid, are not so much doing the math as doing the
myth. Consider the following aspects and salients of terrorist
operations, both statistical and practical.
1. Deaths due
to terrorist attacks are additional deaths; they
should not be tactically compared with other kinds of fatalities
to establish relative scale but added to them, giving us even
more to worry about, not less. Further, they are not, strictly
speaking, statistically inevitable, as the traffic sheet is;
they are supernumerary and can be conceivably avoided or significantly
reduced by the adoption of stringent counter-measures, whereas
the traffic toll will vary only minimally around a standard
meridian.
2. The psychological
effect, which owing to the “explosiveness” of
terror episodes, their spectacular nature and the amount of
immediate damage they can do, is far more conspicuous
and, indeed, “terrifying” than what a randomly
distributed traffic score can incite. (In fact, their effect
is closer to that of an airline crash, absenting conscious
intent.) In such cases statistics do not offer solace and
they cannot, no matter how the experts pontificate, diminish
the collective feeling of threat and exposure. Such estimates
are only a means of bullying the inassimilable facts. “If
the incident is emotionally gripping, it can lead us to forget
the question of probability altogether,” says an unflappable
Sunstein. But as we will see, the “question of probability”
is not as simple as he assumes and an incident that is “emotionally
gripping” may equally dispose us to remember
the undeniable danger we are in. The psychological repercussions
are not so perfunctorily logicized away.
3. As a corollary
of the above, we sense that these fatalities occur all
at once, i.e., massively, and also by design.
In assessing a major terrorist assault such as 9/11, the gruesome
details along with the anterior purpose cannot be clinically
dissembled. 3000 deaths in one hour and in a single, circumscribed
spot of approximately one square mile is a much different
kind of event than 40,000 deaths spread out over twelve months
and across fifty states, or approximately 3,537,444 square
miles—which scarcely registers on the psyche and certainly
not in the same way as a terrorist atrocity. Macroscopic facts
of a fortuitous nature and relating to large variables are
diluted over time and itemized cumulatively rather than felt
on the pulses as a kind of singularity. Nor are they the product
of deliberation. The human significance of the aleatory
is always thin. But a carefully planned attack with the intent
of inflicting maximum harm and yielding instantaneous
consequences of the most frightful nature is another thing
entirely. Let us consider 9/11 again since this remains the
signature terrorist act. If one were inclined to play the
numbers game and graph the raw data along an axial grid, the
averaging out of the results would be startling: based on
the expression (mile^-2 year ^-1), the WTC event would give
us 26,000,000 fatalities per square mile per year; the traffic
estimates would work out to 0.0113 fatalities per square mile
per year. Of course, the initial numbers appear grossly inflated
since the primary event is not repeated every day; it doesn’t
need to be. Its effect is like that of an asteroid slamming
into the earth, which doesn’t happen all that often.
Once is enough. (To round off the analogy, one would have
to imagine that the asteroid had consciously selected the
collision course.) What may seem preposterous in projecting
the bloated ciphers of disaster is only a reflection of the
psychological impact experienced by those who have been scarred,
personally or vicariously, by such “incidents,”
or who have the imagination to internalize their import. Recalling
Paul Brodeur’s dictum in Outrageous Misconduct that
“Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off,”
I candidly admit that this rudimentary display of concentrated
devastation is a game I would rather have avoided playing.
But what such a reductio ad absurdum shows, apart
from a streak of the macabre, is the inapplicability of statistical
instruments to cognitive incompatibles and the essential grotesquery
of the procedure.
4. A second corollary
entails the economic impact, which follows from the inevitable
psychological effect. We saw what happened to the airline
industry, the tourist trade, the Nasdaq, the export and import
enterprise, the oil prices after 9/11. If the London hijackers
had succeeded in their plot to bring down ten airliners over
the Atlantic within minutes of one another, important sectors
of the market would have imploded and the livelihoods of many
people around the world would have been ruinously affected,
which is manifestly not the case when we consider the accidents
that happen on the nation’s highways, kitchens or hiking
trails.
5. Without increased
surveillance, defective and partial as it is at present, the
“terror ratio” would augment dramatically, rendering
the statistical matrices our revisionist thinkers like to
invoke progressively irrelevant anyway. Moreover, Mueller’s
confidence that terrorists may “scarcely exist in the
United States” is misplaced. Clearly, he has not read
Robert Spencer’s Onward Muslim Soldiers or
Steven Emerson’s American Jihad: The Terrorists
Living Among Us, the publication of which forced Emerson
to go into internal exile to escape the attentions of an Islamic
death squad. Conversely, it has become oddly fashionable to
forget that we are not dealing only with the terrorists who
live among us, but with those who plot our destruction from
afar. In line with the effort to extenuate the terrorist threat,
many commentators routinely consider the strategy of confronting
the terrorists on their home ground to be seriously mistaken.
What is happening there, they argue, is not happening
here, and we can only exacerbate the problem by projecting
power into such distant regions. But this is a naïve
and shortsighted argument. The Argentinian bombings in 1992
and 1994 carried out by Iranian agents and their Hizbullah
proxies and the Alas Chiricanas bombing in Panama in 1994
demonstrate that the terrorists’ reach is global, as
was that of al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in 2001. Attacking
the enemy in its bases, training camps, offices and military
installations is a costly and bloody venture in the short
run, but it is the price we must pay if we are not to go bankrupt
in the long run. This is not a fairy tale we are living in.
There are no happy endings, only, if we are lucky, less catastrophic
ones. In today’s New World Ordure, pre-emption means
trying to keep the home front sanitary first rather than cleaning
up the mess afterward.
6. A dirty bomb
and/or suitcase bomb would swell the casualty count exponentially,
could well infect thousands of others with slow radiation
poisoning thus striking the next generation in its very genes,
and seal off portions of the target city for up to sixty years.
This may be a worse-case scenario but it is also an eminently
possible one. At this point the statistics relating to traffic
fatalities and other quotidian visitations cease to signify
altogether. The damage that can be done by one such bomb is
in another category entirely and the worldwide economic collapse
that might conceivably ensue boggles the mind. The same applies
to chemical and biological attacks, especially if the food
and water supply are contaminated. Sunstein, Mueller et
al. are dead wrong to suggest that the terrorists’
“capacity to inflict harm is sharply limited.”
It is not. The argument made here (and elsewhere) that WMD
are difficult to manufacture is casuistical. An article in
The Atlantic, “Inside al-Qaeda’s Hard
Drive” (September 2004) reveals that bin Laden and his
cronies are well on the way to acquiring the expertise necessary
to produce a biological and chemical weapons program. In an
email to an associate at that time, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command
Ayman al-Zawahiri noted, “The destructive power of these
weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons.” It
would also be folly to assume that a radiological is beyond
al-Qaeda’s means. Paranoia may be the only sane response
to the current state of affairs. Playing down Chernobyl as
a merely local incident, as Sunstein does to make a point
about our propensity to exaggeration, is also frivolous. Deformed
children are still being born in this region even today, 20
years after the reactor meltdown. Polish agriculture has yet
to recover fully from the spread of radioactive pollution.
7. Further, WMD
components are procurable ready-made from the former Soviet
Union’s poorly guarded storage facilities. Another article
for The Atlantic, “How to Get a Nuclear Bomb”
(December 2006), worries that “the use of even a single
fission device could pose an existential threat to the West.”
Although the acquisition and assembly of nuclear materials
would not be a cakewalk, in the right set of circumstances,
the article continues, “Construction of the bomb would
take maybe four months.” As scientists Peter Zimmerman
and Jeffrey Lewis write (National Post, December
20, 2006), it is “perhaps easier to make a gun-assembled
nuclear bomb than it is to develop biological or chemical
weapons…The frightening truth is that fissile material,
including nuclear explosive material, is an item of commerce…”
In 2005 alone, the IEAE confiscated 18 lots of stolen plutonium
and enriched uranium. Even the US State Department, traditionally
soft toward the Muslim world, warned in March 2007 about the
“large number” of nuclear smuggling incidents,
which are regarded as “substantial.” The official
spokesperson mentioned in particular Hizbullah, Hamas, Islamic
Jihad and Iran, but al-Qaeda is obviously in the mix as well.
Anyone who believes that al-Qaeda is not planning to acquire
and use both radiological and biological dispersion weapons
against major population centers is simply living in a fantasy
and will eventually be forced to pay the human and economic
cost of his negligence. There is also the alarming possibility
that nuclear weapons may be pirated intact. What is more,
North Korea is exporting both know-how and delivery hardware
to the world’s most volatile regimes. Pakistan has long
been in the business of disseminating nuclear technology.
And should Iran be permitted to arrive at nuclear enrichment,
it will have the capacity both to unleash a thermonuclear
maelstrom and to distribute such weapons or weapon-components
to its terrorist proxies. Then shall we be news-crammed.
Indeed, investigative
reporter Paul Williams’ recently published The Day
of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World,
paints an even more horrific picture of al-Qaeda’s nuclear
plans, which date back to the early 1990s. Williams argues
that it is not merely dirty bombs that we have to worry about
but actual nuclear devices which, according to Williams’
sources, are primed to detonate in seven American cities simultaneously—New
York, Washington, D.C., Houston, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Boston
and Miami. The evidence he cites is based on contract documents
and testimony from several different official informants,
detailing bin Laden’s acquisition of enriched uranium
from Sudan and tactical nuclear weapons purchased from the
Russian Mafia. Saudi intelligence estimates that bin Laden
may aleady possess a daunting number of such nuclear explosives
and Russian intelligence sources speak of 12 to 15 operational
nuclear devices. Some readers may suspect that Williams is
pushing the sensationalism envelope, overstating his case
to emphasize the terrifying possibility of a domestic Armageddon—or
to profit cynically from our anxieties. This may or may not
be so, but both his reasoning and his corroborative material
seem sound and certainly compelling.
As for the statistics
pertaining to alcohol-related deaths, traffic accidents or even
being struck by lightning which are supposed to put everything
in context, occurrences which are both non-purposeful and diffused
over a prolonged time-period and across a vast land area, they
only reinforce a kind of dream world, a species of farcical
irreality. Point-device in their numerical accoutrements, the
inhabitants of this parodic Arden give the distinct impression
of a carefree desolation. One scarcely has the patience to engage
these grown-up children manipulating their ludicrous number
games intended to tranquillize our justifiable fears—a
ton of sarin gas would cause only “between three thousand
and eight thousand deaths,” we are told. Can these people
be serious? This isn’t bingo. This is moral insanity.
But if one must shuffle numbers about, how about several coordinated
sarin gas attacks (or attacks using several different substances)
as with the Islamist plan to bring down a fleet of airliners?
The death toll might well settle somewhere in the five figure
range—which from the evident point of view of our mainstream
dissentients would be trivial compared, say, to the more than
60 million deaths caused by WW II. Deaths numbered in the thousands
“can be readily absorbed,” declares the ever-cavalier
Mueller. The logic is abominable. I don’t know whether
this is infantile thinking or magical thinking, but I do know
that it is both shallow and barbarous thinking—if it is
thinking at all. The foul body of th’ infected world is
not so easily cleansed.
Robert Goodin comes
off little better with his argument that those who amplify the
terrorist threat for their own purposes must also be accounted
as terrorists. This may be true in itself, but the implication
is disingenuous since such conjectures are only mind games acted
out in an intellectual vacuum, the stuff of conspiracy theories.
There is no verifiable proof that our political leaders
may be involved in such nefarious practices, whether with respect
to Iraq, where every intelligence agency in the world believed
that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, or Homeland Security. Reports
faulting the American or British governments in their perhaps
over-zealous assessments of current geopolitical realities are,
in effect, expressions of the collective opinion of often partisan
“experts.” The important fact is that the impulse
to draw serious attention to the hypothetical possibility of
malfeasance while our real enemies are busy refining their methods
and perfecting their weapons constitutes a hazardous distraction,
to say the least. The debate is entirely factitious and self-serving,
academic makework, the verbal Hackey Sack of those who have
nothing better to do with their time. This is not to say that
the motives and tactics of those in power cannot be questioned,
but that this is not the time to call their bona fides into
procedural doubt, and the evidence for a deliberate strategy
of misdirection would have to be absolutely ironclad.
Indeed, what we
might call the Argument Spurious is a veritable stock in trade
of such writers. For Mueller, a radiological attack is not the
calamity we consider it to be for in its aftermath “medical
and civil defense measures can be deployed” and antidotes
administered—but the state of preparedness of our responder
networks plainly indicates that unmitigated chaos would ensue.
For Goodin, we should refrain from magnifying terrorist activities
out of proportion, which explains why he praises the British
government for its low-key response to the transport bombings.
But the truth of the matter is that the British authorities,
by and large, like their counterparts in Holland, France and
Canada, suffered from an acute failure of nerve and shrunk from
implicating the Muslim community in whose midst the homegrown
jihadists “lived and recruited and plotted,” as
Robert Spencer has pointed out in an article for FrontPage
magazine.com (August 17, 2006). Thanks to the dogma of
political correctness, the M-word was generally taboo and the
spotlight for the most part turned elsewhere: “criminals,”
“youths,” the “excluded,” the innocently
“indoctrinated,” the “socially disadvantaged”
were variously responsible for the carnage, the latter as a
consequence, it would appear, of a legitimate grievance. The
response was not low-key, it was pusillanimous.
The old political
maxim, “Where you stand depends on where you sit,”
is apt. Our authors have padded their sitzfleisch in
prestigious academic appointments, Mueller on the Woody Hayes
Chair of National Security at Ohio State University, Goodin
at the Australian National University and Sunstein at the University
of Chicago. Not much in the way of rigorous, peripatetic inquiry
of a classical strain here. A university Chair is a sedentary
thing; and, as often as not in today’s PC climate, a tenured
position is a neural carapace. We should keep in mind that far
too many of our intellectual luminaries live in a beta version
of reality, a sort of pastoral interlude protracted, which those
whose livings are dependent on the trades and the markets should
be skeptical of. The Duchy of the Actual is a non-contiguous
zone, existentially remote from the land of visionary seminarians
and yet ideologically porous to their species of advocacy. This
it is that renders the activities of these “specialists”
in international affairs suspect. For when these seignorial
capacities pronounce on the incendiary issues of the day, the
result is more likely to be one of noxious bathos than, as we
have been trained to expect, counsels of modest good sense.
A more recent instance
of this tendency is furnished by David A. Bell, a history professor
at Johns Hopkins University. Writing in the Los Angeles
Times Online (January 28, 2007), Bell brings up the automobile
statistics again, uses the WW II Soviet casualty count of 20
million to minimize the current threat, and glibly refers to
the terrorists as “criminals”—who may be “exceptionally
dangerous,” he allows, but a criminal is not an apocalyptically-inspired
terrorist. Bell recommends that the best response to our predicament
is “coolness, resolve and stamina” and the awareness
that “not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.”
But as we have seen above, the terrorist enemy demonstrably
is. The title of Bell’s article says it all: “Was
9/11 really that bad?” Yes, Dr. Bell, it really was that
bad, and probably worse. Obviously, one does not have to think
too hard about the real world and its woeful pageants or how
to comport oneself in it when enjoying the sinecure provided
by a scholarly Arden. Ensconced in safe and insular positions
where words are the currency of exchange, our savants need not
fret if their arguments are not well cut so long as the words—and
numbers—keep flowing. This is as they like it. The burden
of lean and wasteful learning sits lightly upon them. They are
also liable to forget that the adversary does not quarrel only
in print and by the book but by the measuring of swords. But
in the fabulous domain of titled speculation, they fleet the
time carelessly as they did in the golden world, composing in
peace their sweet and quixotic rhapsodies.
Similarly, Michael
Byers, professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair
in Global Politics and International Law at the University of
British Columbia, has recently made a media reputation for himself
by questioning Canada’s military commitment in Afghanistan.
Byers agonizes over the allegedly harsh treatment of Taliban
terrorists turned over by Canadian forces to the Afghan authorities
and suggests that criminal proceedings might be considered against
the Canadian chain of command up to the level of the Prime Minister
himself. For Byers, it appears, we are little different from
the terrorists. In an article for Maisonneuve magazine
(Issue 23, Spring 2007), Byers argues that more money should
be earmarked for civil reconstruction (but who will prevent
these new structures from being blown up is an issue conveniently
unaddressed), deplores the possibility of attacking Iran’s
nuclear facilities (despite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat
to “wipe Israel off the map” by “a single
storm”), reaffirms Canada’s “traditional role
in peacekeeping” (when there is no peace to keep), stresses
the importance of abiding by the Geneva Conventions (when we
are in the midst of a global asymmetrical war in which the enemy
consistently and intentionally violates both the Fourth
Geneva Convention protecting civilians and the Hague Convention
regulating the conduct of battle), and highlights the American
mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as a defining event
(when the perpetrators were court martialled by the American
military and Abu Ghraib is infamous for Saddam’s slaughtering
of its inmates). Byers is guilty not only of the usual hyperbole
and of a complete misunderstanding of radical Islam, but of
failing to apply a university-trained mind to examining the
gap between cloistered immunities and realworld detriments.
But of course, that is precisely the nature of the paradox.
To sum up. There
is more than one kind of exile which the individual may experience,
that which is the result of compulsion and flight and that which
is generated by choice, the opting for safety and perquisites.
In the latter case, the grass is not only greener but, compared
with the precarious terrain outside the portals of privileged
lucubration, there is usually more of it—and as the Bard
says, good pasture makes fat sheep. So it goes with the obsessive
yonderings of most of our university-bred virtuosos. Eschewing
the real world for a benign simulacrum in which stanchless rhetoric
and comparative numbers deputize for harsh truths, it is as
if they have sold their own lands to see other men’s.
But a happy and loquacious sojourn in the glen of otherworldliness,
whatever else it may do, does not inspire the confidence of
a demanding readership, who would count it but lost time to
hear such foolish songs. There is, in the last analysis, something
distressingly puerile about the laboured vaporizings of these
pampered vedettes. Jurist Richard Posner makes no bones about
the intellectual maturity of our academic political commentators;
in Public Intellectuals, he dismisses them as “people
who have never left school. Their milieu is post-adolescent.”
And unfortunately,
nothing will convince our euphonious intellectuals of the chronic
nonsense purveyed in their writing unless they or their loved
ones should be incinerated in one of those terrorist attacks
they habitually downplay—or, as in the hit TV series 24
dramatizing a real possibility, a rogue nuclear device assembled
on site takes out a suburb of a populous city. Statistics wouldn’t
matter much then and neither would consoling fictions. Let us
hope it never comes to that but, in the interim, as Albert Camus
ruefully stated in his Preface to Algerian Reports,
“we could have used moralists less joyfully resigned to
their country’s misfortune.”
David Solway is interviewed by FrontPageMagazine.com
The Big Lie: Terror, Antsemitism, and Identity
Publisher: Lester, Mason & Begg
ISBN: 978-0-9781765-0-1
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