More on the View from Minas Morgul

Milos L. writes:

I am the author of the blog View from Minas Morgul. First of all, I’d like to thank you for reproducing my blog entry about David Horowitz’s change of heart.

Second, I’m sorry if you saw my quotation of Kubrick, “In every gook, there is an American waiting to get out,” as a cheap shot. I assure you that it was not meant to be one, nor was it meant as an endorsement of Kubrick’s political views. You are right, there are substantial differences between how democracy promoters see Muslims and the sentiment expressed in the quote I provided and I probably oversimplified the matter when I wrote how the quote “perfectly captures such a mentality [of democracy-promoters].” It’s just that I thought that the phrase “in every ____, there is an American waiting to get out” (write on the blank line any non-European, non-Western entity of your choosing) strips the neoconservative ideology down to the lowest common denominator and exposes its shallowness. [LA replies: Of course that point was clear. That was not objectionable. What was objectionable, as I said, was the word “gook,” which is extremely prejudicial against Americans and switches the focus of what you were saying from the American belief in universal democracy to a supposed American belief that other peoples, particularly Asians, are subhuman inferiors. So the Kubrick quote should have been avoided and a better expression of the same idea found. If part of a sentence doesn’t work, then the sentence doesn’t work.]

Finally, something about the name of my blog. I am afraid you had Minas Morgul and Minas Tirith mixed up. Now, you are probably wondering why I chose to name myself and the blog after an evil character and place. I’ll try to explain. It is a result of a thought process that involved our national characteristic known as “inat”(roughly translated as “spite taken to the extreme”) and a bit of Serbian sense of humour which has a self-deprecating streak. If you know the joke about the Jew who liked to read “Der Sturmer” I believe you can understand where I’m coming from. With Serb people being universally reviled up to the point where some downright absurd actions were attributed to us, I thought, tongue in cheek, that if people are trying to portray me as a villain I may as well be one (and with Lord of the Rings being en vogue in the days I started blogging I picked who I believed was the coolest villain). I hope I cleared things up a bit.

Looking back though, the name “View from Minas Tirith” would indeed have been appropriate because Minas Tirith was referred to as the White City, and the capital of Serbia, Belgrade, means “white city.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 28, 2011 09:10 AM | Send