Fruits of McCain defeat: With Busheron gone, Peters suddenly discovers that people aren’t all the same

One day before Bush left office, Powerline reversed six years of support for the Bush Democracy Doctrine, and argued, based on Madison’s Federalist No. 10, that it is not true that if you give people freedom, they will become good, cooperative, and virtuous. Of course, that is or used to be part of the standard American understanding. It was only under Bush that it was perverted into its opposite by its supposed guardians, the neocons.

Now, two weeks after Bush left office, Ralph Peters, who two years ago backed away somewhat from the Bush Doctrine by saying that Muslims are driven by their religion to oppose us and cannot be easily reconciled to us, for the first time in my knowledge directly and explicitly contradicts the underlying assumption of the Bush Doctrine, namely that all people are the same as us and want the same things as us. Viewing Afghanistan through a science fiction prism, he writes:

Regarding Planet Afghanistan, we still hear the deadly cliche that “all human beings want the same basic things, such as better lives and greater opportunities for their children.” How does that apply to Afghan aliens who prefer their crude way of life and its merciless cults?

When girls and women are denied education or even health care and are executed by their own kin for minor infractions against the cult, how does that square with our insistence that all men want greater opportunities for the kids?

What about those Afghan parents who approve of or even encourage suicidal attacks by their sons? This not only confounds our value system, but defies biological reason.

So: These humanoid forms with which we must deal don’t all want or value the same things we do. They form different social aggregates and exchange goods and services within wildly different parameters (and exhibit hypocritical sexual tastes that diverge from procreative mandates—ask our troops about that).

These alien tribes seek to destroy physical objects and systems valued on Planet America. They perceive time differently. They treat other life forms more harshly than we do. Their own lives are shorter, with different arcs. They quite like our weapons, though …

The point isn’t to argue that Afghans are inferior beings. It’s just that they’re irreconcilably different beings—more divergent from our behavioral norms than the weirdest crew member of the starship Enterprise.

Peters claims that he has had this view of other cultures since reading science fiction in his youth. But, at least since I’ve been reading him in the New York Post starting in March 2003, he has never stated so plainly and forthrightly that any people of a different culture and religion are fundamentally and irreconcilably different from us. He has never, as he is doing now, gainsaid the “we’re all one” slogans that were constantly reiterated by Bush and the neocons, e.g.,

VD Hanson:

“Americans believe that freedom and consensual government—far from being the exclusive domain of the West—are ideals central to the human condition and the shared aspirations of all born into this world.”

or Midge Decter:

“[T]he world is everywhere full of ordinary people who want exactly what we want, though they may not even dare to dream of it. Whether they are Asians or Africans or Middle Easterners or Latin Americans, what they want is a decent place to live, decent food to eat, to be able to stick around long enough to watch their children grow and prosper, and perhaps above all, not to get pushed around by people with guns in their hands.”

And therefore, continued Decter, because Musims (like us) love their children and don’t want to be brutalized, they also are ready, willing, and able to adopt democracy. She might as well have said, because Muslims (like us) drink water and need several hours of sleep each night, they’re ready for democracy.

That Peters waited until after Bush left office before he directly disagreed with these fundamental Bushian beliefs at least partially confirms one of my main reasons, repeatedly endlessly, for not voting for McCain, namely that if McCain was defeated, the Bush-neocon ideology would also be defeated or at least would have the wind knocked out of its sails. If McCain had won, it is highly unlikely that Powerline and Peters would have made the above statements. They would still be singing the song of Muslim democracy (Powerline) or quietly acquiescing in it (Peters).

To repeat: Peters has from time to time said some very harsh things about Muslims, particularly Arabs, declaring in his trademark bloodthirsty way that we need to kill a lot of them; but he has never before categorically stated as he does in this column that an entire Muslim nation is essentially and irreconcilably different from us—and not just that they have an irreconcilably different culture, but that they are “irreconcilably different beings.” You can’t get more essentialist than that. Further, in the past, it was only Arab Muslims that he singled out for harsh criticism, saying that non-Arab Muslims were ok and reformable. Now he’s saying that Afghans are outside our reality and always will be. And if he believes that of Afghans, then of how many other Muslim nations does he believe it? Imagine the impact on the debate if he had had the intellectual honesty to say these things in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. We’re only getting that honesty now because Bush’s miserable presidency has come to an end, and Bush’s ideological twin and the neocons’ standardbearer, McCain, lost the election to succeed him.

Here’s the whole Peters article:

TALIBAN FROM OUTER SPACE
UNDERSTANDING AFGHANISTAN
February 3, 2009

A FUNDAMENTAL reason why our intelligence agencies, military leaders and (above all) Washington pols can’t understand Afghanistan is that they don’t recognize that we’re dealing with alien life-forms.

Oh, the strange-minded aliens in question resemble us physically. We share a few common needs: We and the aliens are oxygen breathers who require food and water at frequent intervals. Our body casings feel heat or cold. We’re divided into two sexes (more or less). And we’re mortal.

But that’s about where the similarities end, analytically speaking.

In my years as an intelligence officer, I saw colleagues make the same blunder over and over: They rushed to stress the ways in which the Russians, the Chinese or the Iranians were “just like us.” It’s the differences that kill you, though.

I was an effective intelligence officer. Why? In junior high, I matured past the French Existentialists and started reading science fiction. The prose was often ragged, but the speculative frameworks offered a useful approach to analysis.

Begin with the view that all opponents are aliens from another cultural planet. Build your assessment from a blank slate. What do the alien collectives desire or fear? How do they perceive the galaxy? What are their unique weaknesses?

Regarding Planet Afghanistan, we still hear the deadly cliché that “all human beings want the same basic things, such as better lives and greater opportunities for their children.” How does that apply to Afghan aliens who prefer their crude way of life and its merciless cults?

When girls and women are denied education or even health care and are executed by their own kin for minor infractions against the cult, how does that square with our insistence that all men want greater opportunities for the kids?

What about those Afghan parents who approve of or even encourage suicidal attacks by their sons? This not only confounds our value system, but defies biological reason.

So: These humanoid forms with which we must deal don’t all want or value the same things we do. They form different social aggregates and exchange goods and services within wildly different parameters (and exhibit hypocritical sexual tastes that diverge from procreative mandates—ask our troops about that).

These alien tribes seek to destroy physical objects and systems valued on Planet America. They perceive time differently. They treat other life forms more harshly than we do. Their own lives are shorter, with different arcs. They quite like our weapons, though …

The point isn’t to argue that Afghans are inferior beings. It’s just that they’re irreconcilably different beings—more divergent from our behavioral norms than the weirdest crew member of the starship Enterprise.

As an analytical exercise, try to understand Afghanistan as a hostile planet to which we have been forced, in self-defense, to deploy military colonies. How do the bizarre creatures on that other planet view us? What do they want? What will they accept? Is killing us business, pleasure—or both?

Are there tribes among these aliens with which we can cooperate? Which actions of ours inflame the alien psyche? What will the alien willingly die for? What does the alien find inexplicable about us? Must we preserve a useful climate of fear?

Do we intend to maintain our military colonies out there in deep space? For how long? Can the angry planet ever be sanitized of threats?

Of course, there’s more in play than images of our “starship troopers” combating those alien life-forms that call themselves “Taliban.” This exercise is just meant to break our mental gridlock, to challenge our crippling assumption that we’re all merry brothers and sisters who just have to work through a few small understandings.

This is a “war of the worlds” in the cultural sense, a head-on collision between civilizations from different galaxies.

And the aliens don’t come in peace.

Ralph Peters’ latest book is “Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World.”

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

But now compare the above column to Peters’s September 2006 column in which he attacked certain unnamed Islam critics (we can assume he meant the likes of Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and Diana West, as well as people who agree that Islam itself is the problem) as Nazi-like would be exterminators of all Muslims. Thus:

The most repugnant trend in the American shouting match that passes for a debate on the struggle with Islamist terrorism isn’t the irresponsible nonsense on the left—destructive though that is. The really ugly “domestic insurgency” is among right-wing extremists bent on discrediting honorable conservatism.

How? By insisting that Islam can never reform, that the violent conquest and subjugation of unbelievers is the faith’s primary agenda… [T]hose who warn of Muslims in general are heirs of the creeps who once told us Jews can never be real Americans and JFK will serve the Vatican….

But the fight is with the fanatics—a minority of a minority—not with those who simply worship differently than those of us who grew up with the Little Brown Church in the Vale.

But now Peters writes that the entire nation of the Afghans (and how many other Muslim peoples) are irreconcilably different beings from us. Does that make him a Nazi-like would-be killer of all Muslims?

There is no accountability in American intellectual life. Once you have become established in academia or the media or opinion journalism, you can say whatever you like, you can veer wildly from one extreme to another, you can contradict yourself life crazy, you can smear unnamed parties without quoting them, and no one will hold you to account for it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 03, 2009 04:01 PM | Send