Saturday Notes
Memo to Max Boot: either join the Wikipedians or they'll beat you to the punch. Boot,"Caveat Emptor," Contentions, 10 October, points to Wikipedia's entry on the"Philippine-American War" and a claim"in the very first paragraph" that:"The U.S. conquest of the Philippines has been described as a genocide, and resulted in the death of 1.4 million Filipinos (out of a total population of seven million)." By the time Andrew Sullivan picked up Boot's comment, the Wikipedia article had already been revised.
Anticipating David Horowitz's"Hate Your Neighbor Week," at Liberty & Power, David Beito notes that such repressive -- but American supported -- Muslim regimes as those in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan are rarely called"Islamo-fascist." He cites George Orwell's 1944 essay,"What is Fascism?" on the abuse of the word. In print, said Orwell, he'd seen Conservatives, Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, Catholics, war resisters, supporters of the war, and nationalists referred to as"Fascists". In conversation, the word was used even more carelessly, so as to render it meaningless.
I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else... almost any English person would accept ‘bully' as a synonym for ‘Fascist'.
Cato Unbound has an important symposium on religion and politics in the United States and abroad. Mark Lilla, the author of The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, leads with"Coping with Political Theology," an essay arguing that the decline of political theology in the modern West has no parallel in the Muslim world. Damon Linker, the author of The Theocons: Secular America under Siege, follows with"Political Theology in America," which emphasizes the persistence of political theology in American politics. Philip Jenkins, the author of Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, argues in"The Stillborn Modernization" that political theology runs as a central theme in American reform movements and suggests an alternative narrative for the emergence of liberal toleration in the West. Andrew Sullivan's response will be found here. I'm inclined to agree with Jenkins, but the symposium would be strengthened by someone less rooted in the Anglo-American experience, someone more intimately familiar with the world of Islam: Tariq Ramadan, Reza Aslan, or Manan Ahmed. That's still a possibility because Cato Unbound will survey responses on the net and add the best of them to the symposium. Hat tip.