Re: Horribilism as art...

From: Tim Cole (tcole@ADOBE.COM)
Date: Thu Sep 20 2001 - 12:05:49 EDT


> Not all uses of force are morally equivalent. Intentionally murdering 5,000
> people without provocation -- other than the very existence of Western
> culture, capitalism and American supremacy in a world where the alternative
> was latter-day Stalinism -- is not the same thing as using force, even
> erroneously, in an effort to prevent such an attack from recurring or to
> eliminate the killers.

Opinion Journal (http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/) had some material this
morning that amplifies your observation:

National Post (Canada):

However the view is hedged, when a person says the United States "had it
coming," what he or she means is that murder is a morally appropriate
rejoinder to a perceived slight or injustice. The annihilation of innocent
civilians is thereby cast as a legitimate means to promote one's political
or theological ends. This is familiar territory for the radical left: Since
the time of Lenin, Marxists have preached the virtues of exterminating
inconvenient classes of individuals in order to bring those still living
into a state of equality. . . .

At the heart of the propaganda campaign against the United States is a moral
equivalence conflating what is evil with what is merely imperfect. In the
Cold War, this tactic took the form of the argument that the United States
was just as dictatorial as the Soviet Union because poor Americans were
allegedly not "free" from injustice, racism and want. Now that we have
entered a new kind of war, this fatuous argument has been recycled: Yes,
Islamist maniacs slaughter thousands of innocents . . . but think of the
psychic pain inflicted on the Middle East by Taco Bell and the Backstreet
Boys. Who is to judge which is more inhumane?

In Macbeth, Shakespeare reserved a special space in Hell for "an
equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale." That
thought provides some consolation as we watch our television screens and see
this shameful parade of apologists wagging their fingers at the United
States.

Andrew Sullivan

One of the amazing things about the far left's embrace of the anti-American
ideology of some in the Middle East is their willful blindness about what
these fanatics actually believe in. Susan Sontag, for example, is a Jew.
Does she honestly believe that America is responsible for more evil than a
bunch of Muslim fanatics who would gas her in a second if they could?

Could any gay person seriously argue for appeasement of people who would
execute [him] on the spot if [he] lived under their rule? Could any serious
feminist not believe in opposing fanatics who would eviscerate the slightest
shred of freedom for women? I just don't get it. Liberals of all people
should be the most serious about fighting this scourge. Is their hatred of
America that deep?

As to bin Laden's vicious anti-Semitism, check the PBS interview out. Here
are my choice excerpts from the Goebbels of Afghanistan: "The enmity between
us and the Jews goes far back in time and is deep rooted. There is no
question that war between the two of us is inevitable. . . . The leaders in
America and in other countries as well have fallen victim to Jewish Zionist
blackmail. . . . Once again, I have to stress the necessity of focusing on
the Americans and the Jews for they represent the spearhead with which the
members of our religion have been slaughtered. Any effort directed against
America and the Jews yields positive and direct results--Allah willing.
. . . We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far
as we are concerned, they are all targets, and this is what the fatwah says.
. . . We believe that this administration represents Israel inside America.
Take the sensitive ministries such as the Ministry of Exterior and the
Ministry of Defense and the CIA, you will find that the Jews have the upper
hand in them."

This isn't like Nazism. In its pathological, paranoid hatred of the Jews, it
is Nazism. And these guys want to appease it again?

Also from Sullivan is this startling bit of aesthetic philosophy...

GET READY FOR YOUR JAW TO FALL OFF:
According to the German radio station, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen called the WTC assault "the greatest work of art
imaginable for the whole cosmos." According to a tape transcript, he went
on: "Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in
music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a
concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people
who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched
into the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison,
we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the
limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we
open ourselves to another world." When a journalist asked him whether crime
and art were interchangeable, Stockhausen remarked, "It's a crime because
those involved didn't consent. They didn't come to the 'concert.' That's
obvious. And no one announced that they risked losing their lives. What
happened in spiritual terms, the leap out of security, out of what is
usually taken for granted, out of life, that sometimes happens to a small
extent in art, too, otherwise art is nothing." Life is a cabaret, old chum.



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