Nick Dyrenfurth is a Disingenuous Arsehat
In today’s Australian, Nick Dyrenfurth rails against the “nihilist left”, which turns out to be anyone who doesn’t agree with his view that the extra-judicial killing of Osama bin Laden was the greatest thing since the Inclosure Acts. The shrill tone of the piece belies its intellectual squalor, and the precarious moral scaffolding upon which the justifications are built. As Churchill noted in a margin of one of his speeches: “Weak argument; talk loudly”.
Best considered as rhetoric rather than rational argument, this swill ought to nonetheless be dissected.
The extra-judicial killing was a denial of due process, celebrity lawyer Geoffrey Robertson protested, oblivious to the impossibility of capturing or trying bin Laden.
Impossibility? It wasn’t impossible to try the entire surviving Nazi leadership, nor Slobodan Milošević, nor Mohammad Atta, nor every other two-bit murderer and thief in the last few hundred years. This “impossibility” is a non-sequitur, which refutes nothing.
Not to be outdone, Crikey’s Hunter S Thompson-wannabe, Guy Rundle, downplayed bin Laden’s crimes claiming that: “Morally speaking, 9/11 was no worse than a B-52 run over Vietnam.”
Interestingly, Dyrenfurth doesn’t respond to this statement on moral grounds. Instead, he begs the moral question, and calls the war merely “foolhardy”, perhaps subscribing to the standard orthodoxy that anything the US does is, by definition, good, even if sometimes misguided. I struggle to see how a moral distinction can be made between bombing buildings full of innocent people and flying planes into buildings full of innocent people without abandoning Kant’s basic dictum that each human being is an end in themselves. Possibly acts are more “moral” when they are done by the USA, a relativism to which I shall return.
Perhaps the most disturbing local contribution came from another Drum regular, anti-Israel activist Antony Loewenstein, who announced that “the West has much to learn”. Bin Laden’s “[terrorist] tactics were abhorrent and failed to attract huge numbers of followers” Loewenstein surmised, nonetheless the West’s subjugation of Muslims meant that the “arguments for his organisation’s force have only strengthened since 9/11”.
How rude of Loewenstein to suggest that Western thought hasn’t reached the zenith of its understanding of the world. It only takes a single counter-argument - say, the US’s silence as Bahraini police murdered protesters - to disprove Dyrenfurth’s claim that Loewenstein is wrong. There are many more examples, all easily found, though apparently not by Dyrenfurth.
Today, however, noisy elements on the far Left - think Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and our local scribblers - seem to believe that Western-style democracy is in fact the real enemy.
This is simply an untrue slur, though if we understand “Western-style democracy” to mean “systems in which elite interests act largely unrestricted by popular will and the public interest”, then perhaps some truth can be found in this statement. I doubt Dyrenfurth had this meaning in mind, but instead believes this ad hominem attack relieves him of refuting Chomsky and Pilger’s actual arguments.
And yet if I must quibble with his analysis and that of Geras et al, it is their designation of the apologists for radical Islam, as “Left”, an association that is arguably harming the electoral viability of centre-left parties across the globe. For they are no such thing.
Isn’t it a strange thing that, with both Dyrenfurth, and Mark Foley, whom he quotes approvingly, claiming this rash of left-wing “apologists” for “radical Islam”, that they are unable to quote a single person? Perhaps these mythical apologists have never said anything in a forum where they can be quoted, or perhaps they don’t exist. The left-wing types I’ve associated with certainly viewed the fervent forms of Islam (and Christianity, for that matter) with a very critical eye, and weren’t shy to state it.
To my mind, they should be known for what they are: nihilists.
I’m not sure Dyrenfurth actually understands what the word ‘nihilism’ means, because even if you accept the shoddy premises of his argument, those he has quoted have not rejected the possibility of morality, but have instead made moral claims different to his own. The nihilist rejects all (im)morality as false and a construct; Robertson, Rundle and Loewenstein obviously do not.
Dyrenfurth also holds that the Left are guilty of “moral relativism”, the idea that moral norms are not universal, but instead apply only to certain people and situations. Here, he seems to be far more guilty than any of the Left: opposing all killing of innocents, regardless of justification or actor, as the Left does, would seem to be far more morally consistent than, say, someone who dismisses the Vietnam war as not immoral, but merely “foolhardy”.
So let them rail against liberal democracy and chant: “We are all Hezbollah” from the rooftops but do not besmirch the good name of others by deeming themselves Left. No, let them stand with like-minded nihilists, Jew-haters and other enemies of social democracy, including a recently deceased jihadist unlikely to be enjoying a judenrein paradise of virgins. On behalf of the sane Left, good riddance to the lot of them.
Fittingly, Dyrenfurth finishes with a flourish so intellectually dishonest and so over-the-top that I’m not actually sure it’s not satire.
