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Title: The Fight Is for Democracy : Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World by George Packer ISBN: 0-06-053249-1 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 14 August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Flee the imperialism?
Comment: To the imperialism theorist in the previous review: Someone with an Anglo-American name living in Tokyo certainly would give the impression of an ex-patriot. Its a good thing that after we defeated the Japanese in WWII because of OUR imperial interests we installed a ruthless dictator to run that country and keep the Japanese people oppressed and under our control with military might. In fact, perhaps we should have ethnically cleansed them to boot to keep in line with our foreign policy. I should like to flee a terrible country like the US and go to a nation with no record of Imperialism, violence, and terror like Japan.
Rating: 1
Summary: Imperialist apologism
Comment: The title itself is absurd, the US has never or does not care a hoot about democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. As William Blum shows in his books Killing Hope and Rogue State, the US has propped up endless numbers of dictators and human rights violating regimes all across the world. If the US government cared about democracy in the world they would stop intervening in the affairs of other peoples, stop plundering their resources and murdering their citizens.
As Mark Hand writing in Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org) points out about the Tomasky essay, "Tomasky's belief in invading a country for its own good represents American liberalism in its most classic sense. Liberals are secular missionaries whose aim is to travel the country and the world, sermonizing about the sanctity of American culture and government. Tomasky's essay shows how establishment liberals aren't far removed at all from the much-maligned neocons running the Bush adminstration - both groups are committed to a radically interventionist U.S. foreign policy."
This nicely sums up the imperial apologist intent of The Fight is for Democracy. Now that computerized voting machines have put the final nail in the coffin of formal democracy in the US (due to their easy manipulation by corporations or vote riggers) why don't the Packerites just come out and say it: we are all neocons now.
Richard Wilcox, Tokyo
Rating: 5
Summary: The Liberal Response to Radical Islam and Terrorism
Comment: After September 11th, moderate liberals have found themselves in a difficult position: while they understood the potential of American power to do good in the world, they rejected the narrow national-interest realism of Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. At the same time, they recoiled at the total failure of the far left to come to terms with the radical Islamic or Islamist ideology that started the war, which true liberals recognized to be an entirely destructive and illiberal force that clearly required a vigorous response.
Enter Paul Berman this April, with his eloquent book "Terror and Liberalism." To be fair, there were others, most notably Daniel Pipes, who have long sounded the alarm that what we face is an implacable and murderous modern-day ideology. But I found Paul Berman's to be an astoundingly eloquent and convincing effort to search out Islamism's roots. Islamism, he finds, as opposed to the great religion of Islam, is a form of Islamic totalitarianism with the same philosophical roots in the interwar period as the better-understood European totalitarianisms. It is analogous to fascism, Nazism and Communism (all of which took power between 1917 and 1933 - the first Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded in 1928).
This not cheap sophistry: at bottom, all are mass pathological movements, characterized by manipulated religious traditions, conspiratorial fantasies about diabolical enemies, millenarian ambitions for new and perfect societies and romanticized cults of murder and death. Like its European counterparts, Islamism a dangerous illiberal challenge to liberalism, and its enormous popularity in certain precincts demand confrontation - intellectually, in terms of a war on ideas, but also militarily, as with bin Laden and Saddam (who represent the religions and secular variants of Islamic totalitarianism). Though it hasn't killed as many as Communism and Nazism, Berman writes, that should be of little consolation: it has killed millions, in addition to apocalyptic potential should its quest for weapons of mass destruction be fruitful.
Responding to the Islamist challenge to liberal democracy is what liberals must set out to do, and in doing this, the book succeeds with its deeply thoughtful and lucid collection of essay. The overarching theme is formulating a liberal foreign-policy response to the threat of Islamism and terrorism. The first essay, by Michael Tomasky - "Between Cheney and Chomsky: Making a Domestic Case for a New Liberal Foreign Policy" - sets the tone. The key insight is that both extremes of political thought - personified some might say by Cheney and Chomsky (though Chomsky is worse by far) - should be rejected by liberal-minded thinkers. A reevaluation is in order, where, in Packer's words, "liberalism needs to assert anew that American power can be employed to good ends, and indeed that American power must be used wherever needed around the globe to support the principles to which liberalism is dedicated."
The demanding situation liberals in which find themselves is neatly summed up by Laura Secor: "At the end of the Cold War, the United States found itself in a nearly unprecedented position in the world. It possessed a power so vast and so uncontested that it could, at least theoretically, impose its will anywhere on earth. The moral problem this presented was profound and insoluble. Wherever there was evil or suffering, the action or inaction of the United States could be decisive. And so it followed that the United States bore a responsibility without end." Yes, American has power, and with that power comes real responsibility. Cheney's belief in force and force alone is inadequate, as is Chomsky's terrible and false conclusion that America is essentially evil, leading to a strange type of left-wing isolationism.
Secor's essay in particularly well-written and engaging, revealing through the example of the former Yugoslavia that even actions we know to be right might not be seen as such from different vantage points, and this must always be kept in mind.
Kanan Makiya, who was indefatigable in making the moral argument in support of the successful Iraq war, has an important essay that helps explain the political culture of Middle East - a "veritable basket case" - full of swirling conspiracy theories and severe political repression, though it could have done without the cheap shots at Israel.
Susie Linfield presents a powerful intellectual demolition-job of the excessive rationalizing by those who seek to explain the massacres of September 11th through various Muslims grievances, most notably leftist Chomsky-reading types, who insist some form of "cosmic justice" was at work, and in doing so justify mass murder. Such thinking - the deluded amoral relativism and PC inanities of the hard left - "conflates victims and perpetrators. It confuses just war and terror, politics and mass murder, states and civilians. It insists that crime in a punishment." The failure to make a distinction between the United States and the Islamic totalitarianisms of bin Laden or Saddam is a weak-minded evasion of responsibility as members of this society.
Paul Berman's essay is largely drawn from his book, and provides a clear-headed synopsis of the theme he develops in greater detail in his book. His argument is perhaps the most important to understand.
The one essay I found incongruous was that of William Finnegan entitled "Globalization Meets Pachamama." It amounted to a polemic against the World Bank and WTO (and globalization itself, to an extent), detailing its failure to uphold its founding creed while not offering one example of what the two institutions might have done right. To me, it seemed too reminiscent of the overconfident one-sidedness of the two extremes (Cheney and Chomsky) that liberals are supposed to be avoiding.
For those liberals who understand that we face are in new era, one filled with threats and opportunities - but above all, responsibility - this is required reading. Radical Islam is a dangerous movement with an enormous capacity for causing suffering, and all must make an honest attempt at understanding it in order to better win the war on ideas (a neoconservative idea itself, though not all of the essayists would admit it). I commend George Packer - whose own introduction is also level-headed and well-reasoned - for putting it together.
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Title: Blood of the Liberals by George Packer ISBN: 0374527784 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Red, White & Liberal : How Left Is Right & Right Is Wrong by Alan Colmes ISBN: 0060562978 Publisher: Regan Books Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman ISBN: 0393057755 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris ISBN: 0743257499 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 11 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire by Wesley K. Clark ISBN: 1586482181 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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