Thursday, August 26, 2010

Sloppy Thinking

Didi Remez wasn't amused by my mentioning him yesterday. I don't always manage to follow his train of thought or argument, but in an e-mail he sent me he seems to be claiming I'm afraid to repeat publicly what I said privately about neocons. So here, I'm saying publicly:

Whatever the term neocon may have meant in the past, say in the way it was used at Commentary Magazine in the 1980s, it has long since ceased to mean. These days,"neocon" is a sloppy, imprecise, undefined epithet used mostly by publicists from the political left to mean either (or both) of two things:
1. Folks we really don't like whose opinions of the War That Has No Name are abhorrent to us.
2. Jews who stand behind the hawks, and often manipulate them into actions of war they would not otherwise engage in.

This sort of term has a long and dishonorable pedigree in political discourse. Previous empty phrases that served in similar ways were Cosmopolitans, Rootless internationalists; Trotskyites, and others. Fascists, too, nowadays: that's also a term which has lost any explanatory meaning and serves mostly as a goad, not an argument.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yaacov
how can you be so cruel to Didi

It seems he has so much to say - one of these days I must get around to understand his "message"

Silke

Anonymous said...

Wikipedia says the term was coined in 1973 in a Dissent article but somewhere I have read that it started when Norman Podhoretz was still younger than that.

by which I want to say that there was some serious thinking involved in coming up with it

Silke

Anonymous said...

Yaakov -

I just noticed these little boxes under the blog posts. I guess they are for the reader to rate the post.

When did you put them up?

Can you make up your own categories?

And just what "Oy!" supposed to mean.

Nycerbarb

Anonymous said...

'Cosmopolitans" and "Internationalists" are terms used by some conservatives to describe those lefties who don't believe in national borders and or those who despise any patriotic sentiment.

Anonymous said...

Nycerbarb
thanks for asking the OY-question? Maybe you'll get an answer to it. When I asked nobody took pity on me;-)
-----
I am about half-way through the Maimonides - what times he lived in

isn't it strange that Jews depending on their opinions/professions have been called all kinds of darkly insinuating things but to the best of my knowledge doctors never were included?

unless maybe in the old times via the roundabout route that doctors quite often were rabbis at the same time (according to Nuland) and thus maybe/possibly implicated in the blood libel heinousness. (all that madness and just because "they" can't tolerate somebody having a "speciality.)

BTW Nuland says the first was in Blois - 3 years later the William of Norwich desaster happened - Blois had a Benedictine monastery as of about 900+ and the Norwich libeller was a Benedictine - another one of those red threads I like to keep in mind to see whether they grow or whither or vanish.

Silke

Anonymous said...

Anon
I think when you report on name calling/labelling it would be helpful, if you qualified the time period during which a special term is used in a certain insinuating manner or having a generally accepted or understood undertone.

my favourite example is that when Somerset Maugham wrote "gay" there wasn't even a whiff of an insinuation of today's accepted meaning in it.

Silke

Anonymous said...

Didi cropping up again made me pay special attention to this comment to the Gideon Levy piece
and it confused me quite a bit.

Hitherto I believed that Didi was elite by peace movement ranking and now this ...

what is she trying to say?
- that Didi is a newbie to the cause?
or
that he is somebody from the old guard who one doesn't need to pay attention to any longer?

When I was in Israel this summer I was heartened by a reemergence of the Israeli peace movement in Jerusalem. It’s not all that many people but it is NEW FOLKS, not the same OLD campaigners. (emphasis mine)

http://richardmillett.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/gideon-levy-packs-them-in-at-amnesty/#comment-2969

Silke

(PS: that is btw the same Rebecca who asked a to me incomprehensible question at Yaacov's recent Jerusalem post)

Anonymous said...

Just found some really stupid "Letter to Israel" by Lauren Booth. She doesn't even know the words "rational discourse".

Regards, André

"It’s becoming increasingly clear that your young men and women are being trained to behave like animals."

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/an-open-letter-to-israel-from-lauren-booth-uk.html#entry8638501

Anonymous said...

Melanie Phillips has something at Standpoint about the Neocons - I haven't read it yet but since it contains a really nice photo of Norman Podhoretz (to whom I'm partial because he is such a good teacher/writer) I wanted to share it immediately.
Silke

http://standpointmag.co.uk/books-sept-10-launching-pad-of-the-neocons-melanie-phillips-running-commentary-benjamin-balint

Anonymous said...

I've just read Didi's masterpiece of the day i.e. it is a masterpiece if he does the translations on it himself, because whoever does, has given the world this long long yearned for new expression:

FASCINATION (of Zionism)

I googled it and what a disappointment obviously the "Proletarskaya Gazeta" came up with it already in September 2001 and comes as the first hit on the results page - so once again poor Didi or whoever failed ...

also I'd advise the featured Meir Shalev to look for another translator the current one turns his text a very clumsy read.

Silke

Anonymous said...

ooops sorry the magnificent word is of course

FASCIZATION

coming across excellence always confuses me something terrible.

Silke

Anonymous said...

Nycerbarb
in case you are still monitoring this thread:
here is a piece on mosque building in Europe which seems a bit sloppy and hastily gobbled together but the majority of what seems not quite right seems to make finances etc look better than they really are. It may explain to you why I get jittery about all that is beyond community size. I found it on this website and it is worth a read http://daledamos.blogspot.com/2010/08/meanwhile-on-other-side-of-ocean.html

but especially "nice" is this quote:
"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers." Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey he is of course the guy who also said that "assimilation is a crime against humanity" other than that I only remember that he praised the Mavi Marmara "activists".

Silke

Anonymous said...

Silke -

I am still reading. thank you for the link. I have no time to read it now, yet alone respond.

I am glad you like the Nuland. I am fascinated by how Maimonides managed to get educated while on the run/in hiding in Spain. I also wonder how he managed to write his Mishna commentary while on the run in North Africa. It is not like he had a flash drive or something!

Nycerbarb

Anonymous said...

Nycerbarb
one of the mothers of my Jewish Latin-American German clique had children while on the run, first to Paris and then to I think Peru or Colombia and they all made it through and turned out well.

Altogether she had 5 and needless to say she was an indestructably cheerful woman - I don't know more about her story because she was more a friend of my mother than her son was a friend of mine.
But maybe that her first name was Irene is a tell-all about her.

as to Maimonides doing all that writing and thinking while on the run - maybe maintenance of gadgets takes more time and effort than we are willing to realise and maybe this being constantly exposed to something and somebody different keeps the mind alive and kicking. Still, it is the most astonishing feat as is in general how he managed to get a life again and again.

Silke