Page 2 of 2 Jimmy Carter's heart of
dorkiness By Spengler
cities, like a hundred other rural
populations of the so-called developing world.
Kept hostage for political reasons, they cannot
stay, and they cannot leave. They have chosen
instead to fight, and if need be to die.
The Palestinians cannot hope to earn their
keep in peacetime; their only hope is to keep the
region in perpetual tension, the better to
blackmail the West and the Arab Persian Gulf
states for subsidies. Voting for Hamas, in other
words, was a rational
choice
on strictly economic grounds. Economics was an
afterthought, though. Without a viable
alternative, the Palestinians might as well choose
the leadership that best flatters their national
feeling. Now this balancing act has broken down,
largely because Iran has disrupted the fragile
equilibrium among Palestinian factions. By turning
to Tehran for funding, Hamas has made itself an
outlaw, and the West as well as Saudi Arabia has
no alternative but to support violent means to
reduce a democratically chosen majority party.
The
horror of the facts on the ground is one
thing, and Jimmy Carter's response to them is quite
another. The former president is hard to read
without taking into account the southern US
context. A partial explanation for his
see-and-hear-no-evil view of the world can be
found in southern guilt over the maltreatment of
blacks. Carter's chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan,
heard his first briefing on the Middle East in
1977 and offered, "I get it: the Palestinians are
the niggers."
Jimmy Carter knows better
than that: the Palestinians are not in the
position of southern American blacks, but rather
of southern American whites, the exemplar of a
self-exterminating people in the modern period.
That is why Carter identifies with them. Apart
from modern Palestine, there are very few cases in
modern history in which a militant population
showed its willingness to fight to the death. The
US south sacrificed two-fifths of its military-age
men during the Civil War of 1861-65, a casualty
rate matched only by Serbia during World War I.
Southern blacks, by contrast, were pacific,
Christian, and long-suffering in their hopes for
eventual deliverance.
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!"
As I argued in another location, the poor
whites of the US south fought for a dream of an
empire in which they, too, would have land and
slaves. [3] The Scottish and Irish poor of the
Confederacy saw themselves as an oppressed people
fighting for their rights against Anglo-Saxon
oppression. Their battle flag displayed the Scots'
Cross of St Andrew. In defeat, they did not even
have the consolation of fighters for a lost but
noble cause, only the self-reproach of the
frustrated freebooter who got what he deserved.
White southerners who dwell on the subject
of forgiveness and reconciliation can evince a
unique sort of self-serving hypocrisy. They cannot
come to terms with the evil of the ancestors whom
they portray as gallant, aristocratic warriors. It
is not the descendants of African slaves whom they
pity as an oppressed class, but rather themselves.
Think of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the
Rings explaining to Samwise why he cannot give
up hope for Gollum's redemption from the curse of
Sauron's ring, because that would weaken Frodo's
hope for his own redemption. This form of
obsessive self-pity produces the unctuous forms of
expression that make it so painful to listen to a
Jimmy Carter or a Bill Clinton talk about
political morality, with a lip-sucking,
voice-throbbing, eye-tearing, fixed-staring,
self-pitying, and downright creepy form of bathos
that is painful to watch. The difference, of
course, is that Bill Clinton is an utter
hypocrite, while Jimmy Carter is quite sincere -
which makes him all the more nauseating.
It is easy to ridicule the fixation of
white US southerners. But it is the Americans of
the north who embraced the legend of the gallant
south and the Lost Cause, in the form of
travesties like Gone With the Wind, with
its cloying faux aristocratic masquerade of
the brutal world of the slave plantation.
Americans invented the war of extermination in the
modern world - the total war that only can be won
killing so many of the enemy that not enough young
men are left to be put into the line. The US south
chafes in anger and shame at its defeat, and the
north recoils in horror from its own victory.
Americans, in their amnesia and denial, blot out
the idea that other peoples also must fight until
they have exterminated the recalcitrant among
their own populations.
The Palestinian and
Iraqi civil wars, in the deepest sense of the
term, are the true American solution, that is, the
solution consonant with America's actual history.
It took exactly 100 years between the end of the
Civil War and the Voting Rights Act of 1865 for
one-man, one-vote democracy to arrive in the US
south. The Middle East, in the time-honored
expression, has not begun to fight. More killing,
please!
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
