---------
Yes you're paranoid, forget Canada. Well, unless you look middle eastern.
I read this article and was reminded of something that I've noticed over the last couple of decades about the rightwing. They usually point to Liberals and the Left and accuse this bogyman of their own flaws and short comings through some strange reflexive mirror.
However, after Harris's first background discussion over the Vietnam Day March on Washington, he stopped using the Left at his bete noir and moved over to fascism as the central analogy for al Qaeda. That was not entirely off base at all. I actually agree with most of it, although it was a little superficial and very tediously argued. So it comes down to a clash of ideologies, eh? Big wow.
The deeper problem with his essay is more subtle and perhaps more problematical. Harris assumes that his own point of view is ideologically neutral, a form of bland empiricism, thus granting his analysis a natural `objectivity'. From this rational neutrality, the rest of the world appears to be composed of seedy, irrational, dangerous ideologues. I even agree with that. Most of the world is full of dangerous, seedy ideologues.
Where we part company is I think he is just another one of the gang, along with Bush, most of the US government, al Qaeda, Saddam, Sharon, et al.
Harris just doesn't recognize his own ideological underpinnings, and therefore probably doesn't understand what has driven western history for the last five thousand years.
There is some indirect insight provided here:
``... For us, belief is a purely passive response to evidence presented to us - I form my beliefs about the world for the purpose of understanding the world as it is. But this is radically different from what might be called transformative belief - the secret of fantasy ideology. For here the belief is not passive, but intensely active, and its purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it. It is, in a sense, a deliberate form of make-believe, but one in which the make-believe is not an end in itself, but rather the means of making the make-believe become real...''
Who the hell is `us' Jim Bob?
What does this really say? It says that Harris is rational and that his belief system is a clear headed, passive form of empiricism that has no ideological filters.
So everybody who disagrees with Harris is driven, ideologically twisted, crazy, and ready for the looney bin.
I don't buy it for a minute. I am absolutely convinced that everybody who steps into the political arena is ideologically driven, is at least a little crazy if not entirely over the edge, and will do and say just about anything to defeat their opponents.
There is no such thing as a rational, non-emotive, empirically based ideology. Nobody is neutral and there is no such thing as a neutral reality that can be used as a standard from which to measure a political position.
The only form of such a neutral material measure is force. In other words raw material power. And the victor in the material arena decides what is to become the next ideologically configured mythos of western society, that is the next `reality'.
Since the Right no doubt assumes that United States Empire is the victor on all fronts, between Hiroshima and the fall of the Berlin Wall anyway, we can safely presume that the reigning ideology of the US and its power elite have been working hard to configured the current mythos of western society.
What mythological landscape am I referring to?
In its most iconic form it is essentially a Ronald Reagan Fifties SitCom, almost entirely composed of bourgeois psychological mock-ups engaged in intimacies, intriques, battles, and triumphs---just exactly like those portrayed in US mass media. This mythic tableaux is subject no material forces of history or other configuration. It is subject to no economic determinations by political institutions, it is subject to no deliberate policy decisions---and it is certainly not an entirely ideologically driven epi-phenomenon. It simply `is' ---a neutral and bland empirical fact with no ideological constructions what so ever. It is therefore as real as rocks and dirt.
Sure thing.
It's not for nothing that Tariq Ali titled his book, `Clash of Fundamentalisms, Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity'. Ali had Bush on the front cover, done up as a Mullah with some Photoshop cut and paste magic---and Oshama bin Laden on the back cover, done up as President of the US.
For someone like Harris, this jacket cover would appear to be a crude piece of propaganda with no concrete reference to the world. For me, it was as close to empirical fact as any piece of political theater could be.
Chuck Grimes