Concerning ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement!

For the señorito (or Young Fogey™) element of Commentariat and Weekly Standarisers to thunder against ‘appeasement’ without stint or limit or prudent choice of occasion is logical enough. A rhetor might rhetoricize that it is in their very DNA, our previous degeneration of neoterics havin’ given that same therapy to the Lenin-Gorbachev racket. [1] LIke a remarkable collection of other improbable Walter Mittys (notably including M. bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí), Homelandic neocomrades fancy themselves the slayers of Bolshevism, a fantasy that must make it even more gallin’ for them at the moment that they have somehow lost control of the means of invasion and must therefore sit on the sidelines watchin’ while Barry XLIV loses Pakistan. [2]

I have myself occasionally compared the courage and good judgment of the neocomradely community to Ms. Chicken Little in the childrens’ story. That still seems sound enough as a picture from outside the institution, but when the inmates are feelin’ especially self-sorrowful (like about 90% of the time since 4 November 2008), they may notice a nonparallelism of no great interest to me, namely that Neocomradess Ch. Little is never traditionally represented as being in possession of a Secret Anti-Skyfall Plan. Whereas the Baní Podhóretz and Bnê Bint Ye’or . . . !

Turning from invidious gossip about them to their policies and their knavish tricks, the serious student of Neocomradology ought to begin, I think, by wondering with me whether ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement! can truly be said to amount to a policy. Even its credentials as a knavish trick can be questioned, not because it isn’t tricky, but becuase it isn't properly knavish. The Brit chauvinist ditty (the hat-Tiqwah or Vltava of Airstrip One, as it were) refers to a proverbial distinction between fools and knaves, and from here I sit in the cheap seats, ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement! looks far closer to folly than to knavery.

It looks, moreover, like exactly the sort of folly that has characterized the vast hordes of Hooverville and Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh of late, not some exalted Quixotic brand of neofolly that only up-market Commentarians and Standardmongers, legitimately descended from the original Hate-’68 Movement™, are likely to wish to purchase. "The wider the market, the shoddier the goods" ought to be a maxim of Chicagonomics, if it isn’t one already, and ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement! would do nicely for a "case study" after the famous methodology of the H*rv*rd Victory School.

The shoddiness consists above all in the self-omphaloscopy of it: Master Narcissus Dexter is determined not to be perceived [3] as an appeaser, and so he barks and bellows ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement!. That aspect of the sloganizin’ is far clearer than anythin’ objective or ‘objective’ out there in the former (pre-Rove) Real World that is to be confronted rather than endured. It is not an accident that Jungherr von Greenwald avoids the obvious formulation "Let us resolve never to appease X!"

At this point the student of Neocomradology may reasonably differ from me by supposing that Von Greenwald is bein’ knavish rather than foolish when he so avoids. The knavishness would consist in the señorito and his neocomrades havin’ such a long enemies list that to specify any one X in particular might be perceived as lettin’ enemies A through W and Y and Z off the hook: inclusio unius exclusio alterius.

Well, it is certainly true that Commentarians and Standardmongers have lots of lists and that a concatenation of them all would stretch from Kalamazoo to Kankakee. Beyond that, however, I fear Ms. Student deviates into erroneous analysis. One particular type of erroneous analysis, in fact, namely the conspiratorialist type. Presented with an obnoxious factionette like this one, it is only too easy to lapse into detecting a conspiracy where there is really only a herd or flock or gaggle. Looking in through the barbed wire fence around their neo-institution, one seems to see them all marchin’ in step while the Wingnut City Noise Machine keeps them in steps with a paramilitary blare of drums and trumpets.

Now right here, if anywhere, is where one finds the Wingnut City Noise Machine in action. If Ms. Student would attentively examine how Princess Neoterica and Jungherr von Greenwald go about earnin’ their daily bread, she ought to be able to see that it is inept to talk about conspiracy. (After that, the next lesson should be to decide that the notion that the aggression of March 2003 into the former al-‘Iráq was perpetrated at the behest of a "Neoconservative Cabal" is no better warranted. This, however, seems to be rather an advanced exercise, considering that otherwise sensible observers like Professor Juan Cole refuse to relinquish it.)

At any rate, misdetecting conspiracies is usually a slippery slope. Once she starts down that path, Ms. Student is only too likely to begin inventing more and more detailed knavishnesses to attribute to the neocomrades (while in fact inventing them herself.) Though her subjective sincerity remains unquestionable, her analysis remains wrong. When tempted to wander off in that direction, Ms. Student might do well to repeat out loud ten times "But are they SMART enough to have thought of that?" The answer I presume to that question is "NO, of course they are not!" Ms. Student will not, at the beginning, see any "of course" about it, but I venture to expect that if she perseveres with the plan suggested, she will come to agree with me fairly quickly.

This therapy can be recommended for all occasions of temptation into conspiracy-think. It is true that the neocomrades of the strict observance (offsprings of the first degeneration of the Kristol-Pipes-Podhóretz Hate-’68 Movement™) tend to brandish their academic and paracademic and pseudacademic credentials in a disstessing and unseemly way. But this is a sham that has little to do with their true case, as the neocomrades can be found admittin’ themselves if you get them started barkin’ and bellowin’ against lefty perfessers who can't park a straight bicycle.

On this very point, the neocomrades are only a natural gaggle and not an artificial conspiracy: it would be dotty to suppose that they ever deliberately *decided* to make themselves out less undereducated than they are. If Ms. Student supposes the contrary, let her explain the way they have been fellow-travelin’ lately with numbskull ‘populism’ of the type so beautifully embodied in Neocomrade Governess S. Heath-Paling of Alaska and Neocomrade Baron S. J. von Wurzelbacher of Faucetville OH. [4]

At the moment Jungherr von Greenwald and Princess Neoterica might confuse their havin’ an antiskyfall ‘plan’ with them bein’ smarter than Chicken Little is, but that innocent self-kiddin’ is surely no problem to trouble anybody outside the asylum with!

Happy days.


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[1] Recall Pipes Major and that "Team B" for the Central Intelligence Agency that managed to be even more mistaken about the Soviet Union than Team A was. Not an easy feat! Yet the difficulty of a performance is not interchangable with its merit.



[2] George XLIII ought to thank his Father Zeus that he is out of the kitchen at last, because once the neocomrades get really worked out, their fair-weather friends are not much safer from them than decent political adults are. The latter do, however, have the consolation of knowing in advance that they cannot be stabbed in the back.


[3] Remember how Princess Neoterica Herself stumbled over the ‘perceived’ pea the other day!


[4] I suspect I waste my breath, though. If Ms. Student really wants a conspiratorialist explanation of Joe and Sarah and Commentary magazine and The Weekly Standard, she can invent one easily enough, making what I consaider the same mistake as ever. Kristol Minor may (just barely conceivably) have been tryin’ to use Mr. Quayle of Indiana as his private Charlie McCarthy, but the idea that the whole neocomradely horde are tryin’ to pull the strings of Televisionland and the electorate leads nowhere. Or at any rate, it leads to no better destination than Waltville Junction and Castle Mearsheimer.