Mark his words

It seems not to be the done thing amongst bloggers of the left to quote Mark Steyn approvingly. The hell with that. I find some of Steyn's views rebarbative, but since on one or two key questions of the era he has a better position than what I'll just refer to loosely as the ailing, yesbut segment of the liberal-left, and since he writes, too, in a sharp, spirited and often funny way, giving him an advantage over the mumbling, let's-not-pay-too-much-attention-to-the-elephant segment of the liberal-left, I'm happy to cite those of Steyn's opinions I want to, even despite other of his opinions which may be rubbing shoulders with them and are less congenial to me. It's a feature of the world we now live in. On matters of considerable importance some leftists are seriously on the wrong side, and other leftists and some liberals are rather too adroitly placed in the in-between zone, while a part of the centre and the right are on the right side. You've got to get your picks where you can. So ends the preamble.

I write to take issue with one of Steyn's judgements in an article in the Australian but to commend another of them. Lamenting some of the early reactions to the Beslan massacre, Steyn focuses particularly on an article that does not merit the treatment he gives it. He writes:

And then there was Adam Nicolson in London's Daily Telegraph, who filed one of those ornately anguished columns full of elevated, overwritten allusions... and yet in a thousand words he's too busy honing his limpid imagery to confront the fact that this foul deed had perpetrators, never mind the identity of those perpetrators.

Sorry, it won't do. I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it.

Now, this might have just passed me by in other circumstances as something I disagreed with, but for the fact that I'd already seen a virtually identical judgement on one of the big North American blogs not long after posting a long excerpt from Nicholson's article myself. And the judgement is - frankly - obtuse. Leaving aside that Nicholson does have a reference in passing to at least some of the perpetrators ('The death and wounding of children - by women terrorists, for goodness sake...'), he writes about what happened in Beslan in terms making it quite clear that he's dealing with a horror inflicted by some human beings upon other human beings:

Beslan has taken its place in the list of cruelty and wrongness. Its name will be inseparable from the suffering of children and their parents, from the most terrible irruption of wickedness into innocent lives.

'Cruelty', 'wrongness', 'terrible irruption of wickedness' - these words carry upon their face that they are about the actions of human perpetrators, and it is a negligent oversight on Steyn's part to level the criticism he does. As to whether or not Nicholson is in favour of 'do[ing] something about' what happened at Beslan, I have no idea. I would venture to say that unless one has a basis for knowing that he wasn't, the default position ought to be that pretty well anyone writing as he did would be in favour of doing something. But, in any case, Nicholson was writing in the immediate aftermath, and so was entitled to his reaction - and expression - of anguish, without necessarily having to map out a course of action in short order. Speaking for myself, I thought his column amongst the best of the reactions which I read during those few days.

Still, if Mark Steyn gives an inaccurate and disobliging account of Adam Nicholson's column, in a more general way he hits the nail on the head vis-à-vis some of the more predictable liberal responses. Steyn writes:

The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children. But they didn't.

He's commenting on a piece by Isabel Hilton in the Guardian, but the point has much wider application - to arguments repeated over and again since 9/11 but whose proponents appear to see no need to digest this elementary point. In a Guardian leader yesterday we were told that:

[T]he savagery of the Chechen perpetrators is a necessary but not sufficient explanation of what happened.

The leader-writer went on to proffer some other elements of explanation: human rights abuses in Chechnya; and a puppet government, dubious elections, crushing poverty. But as necessary as this is in its turn by way of trying to understand, it still won't give you a sufficient explanation - for reasons implicit in the quoted observation of Mark Steyn's. It's not just about root causes and potentially bad people, both of which are ever with us. There's a particular politics here, with a distinctive outlook, a distinctive set of (criminal and murderous) ideas, behind it; and this is the transnational enemy that has now to be taken on and defeated. You can name it how you want - Islamo-fascist or other. But it needs to be named, and made central to every effort of understanding, so as to be seen clearly, that it may be taken on and defeated; and not dissolved in well-meaning claptrap about root causes.

Read Richard Norton-Taylor (he of the piece of brilliance scrutinized here) in today's edition of the same newspaper. What you will find - along with this piece of noxious obscurantism: that 'We have just witnessed the latest manifestation of the so-called war on terror in the Caucasus' - is that the primary problem in the world is the Bush administration; and as for terrorism, well, my friend, we have to get rid of the causes of it. These people just never will answer: why didn't such causes cause these effects, on this scale, before - with other movements and organizations?

As Mark Steyn says in another column:

[T]he war on terror isn't some racket cooked up to boost Halliburton profits but a profound challenge to America and the world.

And as David Brooks writes in the New York Times (hat tip: LG):

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes.
.....
Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this?