Spengler on the West Bank / Gaza, and Jimmah >> WHAT PALESTINIANS?

The Palestinians are not an oppressed people, but rather the irreconcilable remnants of a once-victorious but now defeated empire, living in an irredentist dream world in which a new Salahuddin will drive the new Crusaders into the sea. Pour a few bourbons into the average white citizen of the US state of Georgia, and the same irredentist fantasy will bubble up: "The south shall rise again!"

Jimmy Carter's heart of dorkiness
By Spengler

Jimmy Carter's timing is dorky, as always. The same sanctimonious ineptitude that made him the least successful president in US history prompted him to wager the remains of his reputation on advocacy for the Palestinians, precisely when the Palestinians have shown themselves to be their own worst enemies. Carter's obsession with justice in Palestine has the same source as George W Bush's obsession with democracy in Iraq: horror in the face of the alternative has overwhelmed their better judgment.

Horror is the ultimate weapon of the Muslim world against the West, I long have argued. [1] Traditional society is crumbling, andwith it identities of peoples who comprise a good one-third of the world's population. Many rather would perish than give themselves over to a world that offers them neither hope nor consolation. Suicide bombing is the least expression of their despair, which impels them toward perpetual war. If entire peoples are bent on self-destruction, no outside agency can prevent it. But the destruction of whole peoples overwhelms the Western mind.

Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness gave us the archetype for fatal abhorrence: the degenerate Belgian colonial official Kurtz, who dies muttering, "The horror! The horror!" T S Eliot referred to Kurtz' horrible end in the epigraph to his poem "The Hollow Men", which concludes with the unpleasant thought: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." The difference between Bush and Carter is that Bush is horrified by the prospective fate of the Iraqis, whereas Carter is horrified by his own history. Bear with me, and I will try to make this clear.

Some of Carter's Jewish associates have broken with him loudly over his new book, Peace Not Apartheid, observing that it is unfair to Israelis. Carter, though, is more consistent than the Jewish liberals who now reject him. What is happening to the Palestinians is horrifying, by which I mean not simply unpleasant, but subversive of identity, in the sense of Sigmund Freud's das Unheimliche. It is not nearly as horrifying as what will happen next, however. Carter could not bring himself to confront Soviet aggression during the 1970s for the same reason that he cannot abide the predicament of the Palestinians. As he looked down the river to the end of the journey, the former president muttered, "The horror! The horror!" By deluding himself that the Palestinian predicament is something else than it really is, Carter attempts to keep the horror away.

Reading Spengler in total is like pushing you tongue against that blister on the inside of your cheek, it hurts, it's annoying, and you can't stop.

Just one more salty fattening, unhealthy loaded potato chip, please.

Even when he's wrong he's pleasing. But on this (except for Georgians), man is he right.

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