ASK
SPENGLER On nuking Iran, ending the war,
and Heraclitus as hero and
villain
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may send their queries to editor@atimes.com.
Spengler regrets that he may not be able to answer all
his mail.
Dear
Spengler, Considering the historical passivity of
European attitudes (eg, their reaction to Nazi
imperialism, Soviet communism, the recent Spanish
election/appeasment in reaction to a terrorist attack or
their impotence to even reproduce) do you believe that
if Israel began destroying neighborhood threats - Egypt,
Syria, Jordan, among others - they would be left to take
care of business and solve a long-festering problem for
good? JBO
Dear JBO, At first
glance I mistook your name for "Job", given your tone of
desperation. I would not have given a second glance at
your sad daydreams of vengeance except for the far more
interesting question of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Egypt and Jordan offer little threat to Israel, and
Syria is a danger insofar as it is allied to Iran, for
example in its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon. On
March 29, Iran's atomic energy agency announced that it
would resume enrichment of uranium at its Isfahan
nuclear facility, abandoning previous commitments to the
International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran well may have
deliverable nuclear weapons in a year or so.
What will Israel do in response to the Iranian
challenge? Israel cannot simply re-enact its 1981 raid
upon Iraq's Osirak reactor. Iran’s nuclear fuel
processing facilities are harder to get at, perhaps
beyond the capacity of non-nuclear weapons. Suppose
Israel were to attack Iranian nuclear capabilities with
nuclear weapons? What would Europe do then? Israel would
be condemned from the Bosphorus to Bantry Bay, but what
would anyone actually do about it? I doubt that the
Americans would mind at all. A mushroom cloud over
Isfahan might represent a minor inconvenience during the
presidential election campaign, but in all likelihood
the incumbent administration would benefit from a
heightened sense of risk.
The use of nuclear
weapons, to be sure, is something of a taboo, but like
many taboos, no one really cares after they are broken.
Israel is in a position analogous to that of Germany in
1914, when its General Staff argued that Russia must be
attacked straight away, before it built enough railways
to mobilize its huge army at speed. The logic is
inescapable. Therefore I believe Israel will indeed
conduct a nuclear strike against Iran's processing
capacity, and I am as curious as you are to find out
what the Europeans will do about it - I should think not
much of anything besides
noise. Spengler
Dear
Spengler, Are the terrorists beatable, or should
I just resign myself to the fact that Bush's "war on
terror" is going to last for a long long time? Awaiting
your wisdom, Martin Leon
King
Dear Martin, You may
find it tiresome to await the end of the "war on
terror", and even more tiresome to await my wisdom. I do
not think there is anything special about the present
"war on terror" though; on many past occasions some
change in the world landscape has left some group
desperate enough to fight to the death (More killing, please! June 12,
2003). Hostilities continue until everyone who wishes to
fight to the death has had the chance to do so.
America's "war on crime" of the 1970s and 1980s
succeeded to the extent that the phrase has disappeared
from political parlance. New York City's murder rate
reportedly has fallen to the lowest level in 40 years. A
generation ago, experts warned that it did not help to
put criminals in jail, because if criminal activity were
profitable, another criminal would take the place of the
one just apprehended. It did not occur to such experts
that the rate of incarceration and violent death could
exhaust the manpower resources of a whole generation of
potential criminals. A frequently quoted statistic puts
one out of three young black men in America either in
jail or on parole. The point, Martin, is that you can
kill or imprison enough of them. For quicker ways to
accomplish the same results see my answer above to
JBO. Spengler
Dear
Spengler, Given that colleges and universities in
the United States and Europe are, these days, more akin
to trade schools than centers of higher learning,
concentrating on what the Greeks call techne as
opposed to sophia; and given that the only reason
people in the West go to university these days is to
"get a job"; and the only reason given for going to an
elite college is to "get a better job": Is there, in
your opinion, a correlation between the cultural decline
of the West and the fact that schools no longer instruct
on the fundamental philosophical principles underlying
Western civilization and obligations of citizenship,
concentrating, instead, on "raising self-esteem" and
promoting "diversity" to the point of civilizational
suicide? Peter Taber
Dear
Peter, Waning interest in the Athenian
philosophers surely must correlate with the cultural
decline of the West, and I share your enthusiasm for
classical liberal, as opposed to merely functional,
education. But the problem is intractable. Twentieth
century philosophy stood under the spell of Martin
Heidegger, who looked back to the pre-Socratic
philosopher Heraclitus. There was nothing new in
Heidegger’s choice of the Ionians over the Athenians.
What we now call modernism, namely self-conscious
abandonment of the classic ideal of harmony, was present
in mature form even before Luther's Reformation, and
Heraclitus was its hero. At the turn of the 15th century
the crypto-Judaic Spanish playwright Fernando de Rojas
prefaced his great satire La Celestina with these
words: "It is the saying of that great and wise
philosopher Heraclitus that all things are created in
manner of a contention or battle." Battle and contention
rather than harmony and stability: the poison was in the
veins of the West from the beginning, long before
Richard Wagner made it a cult (The Ring and the remnants of the
West, Jan 11, 2003).
In the United
States, the followers of Leo Strauss continue to promote
the study of Plato, but with a Heraclitan twist.
Classical philosophy superficially promotes civic virtue
in the Straussian reading, but at a deeper level
promulgates a subversive critique (The secret that Leo Strauss never
revealed, May 13, 2003). Who will rescue the
Athenians from the Babylonian exile of the Heidegger
school? Where could such a person even find the
appropriate training among today’s
universities?
America never, in my surmise,
offered fertile soil for the propagation of Western
civilization. The founders of Massachusetts came to
America because they rejected Western civilization as
hopelessly corrupt, and conceived of a New Jerusalem.
The Virginians, with their mock-classic temples and
slave-based culture of leisure, identified with the
Greco-Roman classics. We know who won that argument.
America, such as it is, is not really a continuation of
Western civilization at all, but a strange throwback to
Hebraic rather than Greek origins.
Western
civilization has become a wanderer, like the god Wotan
in Wagner’s music drama Siegfried, present as an
observer, understanding but unable to
act. Spengler
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SPENGLER
