Quo Vadis?

The other night I read a popular blogger's comment that bloggers had been keeping the Congo story going. I thought of Bobby Block on the satphone, calling from somewhere in Africa, describing to John Batchelor what he'd recently seen of the fighting in the Congo. He'd witnessed atrocities, included cannibalism.

Block sounded wrung out emotionally and he was physically exhausted and still in a very dangerous powderkeg region. I remember John telling him, "Keep yourself safe" and Bobby's wry assurance that he would try.

That conversation must have been about a year ago. I forget which newspaper Block was reporting for at the time--probably the Wall Street Journal but maybe The New York Times.

I've been listening to Batchelor's radio program since the third day of the US invasion of Iraq. I can't remember when I first heard him talk about the Congo but it was not longer after I started listening. He returns to the situation every so many weeks. More than any American media outlet, his program talks about situations across the African continent and keeps the Congo story going.

John is alive to the fact that Americans can't ignore any region of the world because the enemy doesn't. The situation in the Congo is made to order for al Qaeda so it bears close watching, as does all of Africa.

A grotesque irony of this war is that the enemy does a public service by forcing Americans to think globally. The enemy is quicker than Western governments at finding the weakest links in the developing world. Run him out of Afghanistan, run him out of Yemen, run him out Iraq, he just sets up shop somewhere else. Somewhere where human life is still cheap, where armies can be bought for a song and tribal blood feuds are easily exploited.

The enemy is very sophisticated. He's an oil patch expert; he knows every region where oil exploration is underway, where oil pipelines are being laid. He knows every petroleum route by heart. He understands globalized crime and banking and how they intersect He fights with a copy of the financial pages in one hand. For all his talk about hating modernity, the enemy thinks modern--more modern than most Americans. He understands the 21st century.

I'm wonder whether the blogosphere isn't heading toward the same mistake as the mainstream media. The mainstream pays so much attention to what their own members talk about that their attention is narrowed on their own world. That, too, the enemy exploits because he is a master at working on our blind side.

Last Man Standing

I, in America, listening to John Batchelor in Jerusalem talk with Robert Alter in Wales. They are discussing Alter's work to translate the five books of Moses. With millions sitting by the radio and hanging on every word, Alter is discussing....a word. "Seed" to be exact. How to get at the essence of what Hebrew scholars were trying to convey thousands of years ago? How to intuit what Alter terms "a little puffy cloud of abstraction," the significance the scholars attached to "seed" in writing about The Flood?

I scribble notes and ponder. For those of us who are awakening to the scale of this war and the nature of the enemy, it has become a duty to think hard on what is worth fighting to defend.

I remember overhearing my father ask my mother, "How could a country that produced Bach and Beethoven produce Hitler?" Of course it was a rhetorical question but small children don't understand the meaning of rhetoric.

It took me a few decades to work it out, but the answer to my father's question is that civilization is not self-perpetuating. It takes a conscious decision on the part of many people, a constant effort to be guided by conscience, a determination to struggle against barbarity.

Hitler was explicitly aware of that--although I didn't know this until I read an essayby Aisha Siddiqa Qureshi. Qureshi observes:

In his writings, Hitler clearly said that he is a barbarian who wants to express his primal instincts and Judaism says he can't. For him, not only is the concept of conscience "a Jewish invention; it is a blemish, like circumcision.. . .I am freeing man from . . . the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a false vision known as conscience and morality . . ."

I don't know how much stock to put in Quershi's thesis that "people are and have always been willing to hate the Jews [because] they gave the world the concept of objective right and wrong." I think most who are prejudiced against Jews are not well-informed enough about Jewish theology to think about them at the level Hitler did.

But Hitler and his circle certainly understood that to take control of ideas of right and wrong they had to suppress attention to conscience. Can that really be done on a widescale basis?

Patrick K. O'Donnell, who was embedded with the Marines during the Battle of Fallujah, reported to John last week that they found many used syringes in the rubble; they also found vials of adrenaline and caches of cocaine. That explains how the enemy is able to wire his own wounded with explosives, wire himself with explosives, and remain in a fighting posture even when surrender is clearly not dishonor. The jihadi warrior in Iraq is a druggie. He arrives at the gates of his imagined paradise stoned out of his skull.

So, yes, it's possible to condition or drug a person into not referencing the dictate of conscience. The catch is that it doesn't seem possible to forge a society with such people. That's because the bedrock of human society is the ability to put oneself in the place of another; indeed, that is conscience.

If not for conscience there could be no civilization--not even "barbaric" tribal societies. For society to exist, people must be able to ask themselves, "How would I feel, if this were done to me?" when they contemplate murder or mayhem against another because of a slight.

So Hitler was talking trash by saying he could both create an Aryan civilization and destroy conscience. One can't have it both ways. But of course the Nazis knew this. That is why they had to conquer, in the way a junkie has to steal more and more to support his addiction. It was the only way to keep the illusion going that it's possible to do anything you damn well please to others and suffer no great consequence.

It is the same for the present enemy and his talk of an Islamic civilization. At their core the Nazis and Islamic terrorists are a murder-suicide cult. Last man standing shoots himself.


.