Johnson up the creek

The other day, when I quoted Charles Johnson’s relatively hard-line statement of November 15 about what he thinks needs to be done about jihadism, I observed that “this is not bad at all.” Fair-minded fellow that I am, I had forgotten something obvious. On November 8, in response to a commenter who said, “I hope Charles isn’t the one booted off the anti-jihad wagon, Johnson had replied, “They can’t boot me off something I never jumped on.” Now to any ordinary reader that would sound as though Johnson is saying that he has never had anything to do with anti-jihadism, and wants nothing to do with anti-jihadism. What credibility does he have, then, when he turns around a week later and says that in order to “deal with the jihad” we need “much stronger legal barriers to the spread of hardline ideology, including monitoring mosques and Islamic schools, [and] strictly limiting immigration from Islamic countries…” Where is this guy coming from? Does he himself know?

In an interesting survey of the Johnson affair, Conservative Swede opines that Johnson, with his reckless, guilt-by-association attacks on anti-jihad conservatives, has damaged his reputation so badly, and is now so desperate to save it, that he’s become incoherent. That seems plausible. Another explanation I would suggest is that Johnson is a man who simply has no idea how to make a sustained, coherent argument that can withstand logical scrutiny. His “writings” thus far have consisted of 30-word-long ex cathedra pronouncements, at the sound of which his acolytes fall at his feet. He hasn’t had the need to articulate positions that hold together, because he’s been preaching to worshipful followers, and has never been in a real debate.

- end of initial entry -

Ran M. writes:

Johnson said: “They can’t boot me off something I never jumped on.”

I never took this to mean that he wasn’t anti-jihad. I took it to mean that he did not consider himself a victim of groupthink. That he considers himself a free-thinker and a thought leader.

I think you’ve dissected him pretty well, but I think you’re reading more into this statement than it warrants.

LA replies:

That’s a reasonable reading of what he said. You may be right. However, if there was something I believed in strongly, Cause X, and there were some believers in Cause X who had formed a particular bandwagon that I didn’t believe in, would I say, “I’ve never been on the Cause X bandwagon? That makes it sound as if I’m not just dissociated myself from the bandwagon, but from Cause X itself.

Larry G. writes:

LGF has been anti-jihadist since just after September 11, 2001. Johnson changed the focus of his blog in response to the events of that day, and he did it independently of whatever anyone else was doing. So when he says he never jumped on any bandwagon, he is correct. He was anti-jihadist before publications like Brussels Journal came along, and he’ll probably continue being anti-jihadist after they are gone.

LA replies:

Even if what Larry G. says is correct, Johnson’s statement still doesn’t hold up. After all, what is this “anti-jihad bandwagon” that Johnson didn’t jump on? Is it an anti-jihad wagon that Paul Belien jumped on? Is it an anti-jihad wagon that Spencer, Bostom, Fjordman, and Bat Ye’or jumped on? Is it an anti-jihad wagon that that Filip Dewinter jumped on? The answer in all cases is no, because these are all serious critics and committed opponents of jihad. And that includes Belien because Belien is a more intellectually serious opponent of jihad than Johnson is, and it includes Dewinter, even if Johnson thinks Dewinter is a bad person. Who then are the people who jumped on the bandwagon here? And what and where is the bandwagon?

The answer is that in the universe of people involved in the Johnson-Belien debate, there is no anti-jihad bandwagon. “Anti-Jihad bandwagon” was an expression used by a poster at LGF who said that he hoped that Johnson wasn’t going to be kicked off the anti-jihad bandwagon. In response, Johnson said he had never jumped on it. Well, that’s clearly implying that the bandwagon exists. But since, as I’ve just established, there is no anti-jihad bandwagon in the neighborhood of this debate, but rather serious people who oppose jihad, the only thing Johnson could have meant by the anti-jihad bandwagon was the serious jihad opponents from whom he was dissociating himself in the act of saying he had never jumped on their “bandwagon.” That is a reasonable interpretation of what he was saying. And therefore when a week later he talked about opposong Jihad, there was reasonable ground for questioning his good faith.

Now, it seems to me that the only way I can be wrong in my interpretaton is if Johnson didn’t mean anything by “anti-jihad bandwagon” but was just irresponsibly tossing words around to make himself sound superior to some bogeyman. However, that still leaves the question: who did he want his readers to believe this bogeyman was? And again, the only possible answer is the serious jihad-critics .

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 16, 2007 11:25 PM | Send