Potholes and terrorism

Today’s news that Hezbollah has made diplomatic advances to the U.S. brings back to mind President Bush’s shocking commencement a couple of weeks ago of what VFR dubbed the Hezbollah peace process, describing it as a kind of super Oslo process. At the time, Clark Coleman penned these thoughts about the lack of political realism shown in the reasoning by which Bush’s twin brain, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, justified the administration’s opening to the terrorist group. I’m pleased to share Mr. Coleman’s thoughts with VFR’s readers:

The expectation that Hezbollah might moderate their terrorism once they have to worry about “filling potholes” and keeping their constituents happy shows an ignorance of the nature of victimhood politics. Let’s look at a few examples from recent history.

Hitler represented the Germans who felt oppressed by the Treaty of Versailles and the defeat in World War I. All the conservative talk about the 1938 agreement at Munich to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler centers on the evils of “appeasement” and how such appeasement only projects weakness and encourages the aggressor to become more aggressive. This is true, but I think it misses a bigger point. The reason that a leader such as Hitler could not take the Sudetenland and make no further demands is that he was a populist demagogue whose power came from representing people who saw themselves as victims.

They do not want to stop seeing themselves as victims, because when you are not a victim any more, you can make no further demands on others, and the only thing remaining is to get back to work and improve your own condition. Who wants to do that? If Hitler had come back from the 1938 summit and said, “OK, the injustices of 1919 have been redressed. We will get no more concessions. Everyone better be content and get to work,” the result would have been a sense of betrayal among his victim constituency. They would immediately have begun looking for a replacement who would perpetuate their victim claims, and Hitler would have been vulnerable to a coup d’etat from any group of generals who perceived this.

Similarly, Yasser Arafat could never return from Oslo, or any other summit, and say, “We have gotten all that we can possibly hope for in concessions. Now it is time to build our own country and stop worrying about Israel.” He would have been declared a “sell-out” and deposed, and replaced with someone willing to “carry on the fight” on behalf of the victim constituency. Instead of trying to perceive the problem in Israel as being the fault of that evil Arafat, we should have understood that it was not possible for him to do other than what he did, ONCE HE HAD COME INTO POWER as a populist demagogue in the first place.

Likewise, if any black leader in the U.S. announces that blacks have gotten all the changes in the law that they need, and it is time to get to work within their own culture to improve their situation, he is suspected of being a sell-out who is trying to say what whites want to hear. Jesse Jackson actually became famous pursuing this approach in the 1970s, but when the rest of the black leaders leaned on him, and many other blacks tired of his message, he became the preacher of victimology. If he stops, someone else will just take his place.

If the leaders of Hezbollah stop the politics of grievance, they will find a power struggle against someone else who is willing to continue down that path, and they will be called sell-outs, etc.

The way to deal with this kind of politics is (1) expose it openly as the politics of sitting on your rear and complaining that the rest of the world owes you, (2) expose the many ways in which the victim group could be bettering their own situation right now, and (3) absolutely refusing to appease the populist demagogues, who will then be seen as political failures because they cannot bring home the bacon.

As for filling in potholes, this really misunderstands the whole history of politics. Conquerors kept their subjects from rebelling by doing some public works. They filled in potholes, and also colonized and plundered. Urban political machines in our own recent history did the same: they filled in potholes, and quietly pursued personal power and wealth through corrupt means. When they came under attack for corruption, they had lots of constituents who were willing to defend them. Filling in potholes will keep Hezbollah popular with a large part of the people, while pursuing victimology (and hence terrorism) will satisfy a second, overlapping constituency. Why are Bush and Rice presenting the two approaches as mutually exclusive?

Giving Hezbollah the ability to fill potholes provides them with a political base of support that enables them to continue to pursue terrorism on the side.

The more they speak, the more that Bush and Rice indicate they don’t understand the way real, ugly, less than ideal governments work in the world (and not just in the Middle East).

Clark Coleman

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 11, 2005 08:49 PM | Send