Sholom Keller Speaks Out
Sholom Keller fought for this country. He is a critical voice of veterans protesting the Iraq War. The JTA interviewed him, and Keller, always an insightful person, has some critical things to say about the American Jewish community and Chabad, and addresses the anti-Israel elements within the anti-war movement.
Over the past couple of years, Keller has risen from protester to activist leader. It is nice to see him getting this kind of attention and respect that he deserves. Apparently, a new feature article on Keller is forthcoming on New Voices as well.
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He’s an extraordinary young man, who’s been through a great deal. Amazing that someone like Sholom could emerge out of the Brooklyn Lubavitch community.
His labeling of Chabad as a “cult” reminded me that a couple of years ago, I said the same on Jewschool, and Sholom quoted me on his blog. I think it was the first time I actually said it (I’ve said it a few times since!).
He specifically says he wanted to take part in something bigger than himself, to take part in a cause. It wasn’t about what was right, but fulfilling an emotional/psychological imperative. That alone tells me much about him. Puts him in the same category as most cause-heads. Mommy and daddy didn’t give me enough, I didn’t get a pony, I didn’t feel relevant, I’m going to go find my unfairly denied sense of fulfillment somewhere else.
(More solidly capitalist businessmen come from poor backgrounds of deprivation than the fat middle class. More childish young socialists come from the fat middle class than poverty. Most of those going on about the environment grew up able to ski in nice places and use the environment as a playscape. Most of those waxing philosophical on income distribution never went to bed hungry. Causes tend to be the domains of theoreticians who have no real world experience with them and luxury to hypothesize directly at odds with everyday experience because the truth doesn’t matter to them and being wrong has no repercussions for them Other people who suffer under their theories, that’s another matter.)
He goes right from the quick bit about leaving the army and joining the anti-war group to the usual lefty spiel about the government being accountable to the people which it never was, isn’t now, and never will be by the very design of it and human nature. People like taking credit and assigning blame. When things work, the people take credit for their voting choices. When things go wrong, they disclaim all responsibility and blame the politicians as if they never voted them in. It’s been this way for the entire history of the USA and democracy in general and is never going to be otherwise anywhere humans are involved. Humans aren’t naturally enlightened critters. It does one credit to wish they would be, but none at all to delusionally insist they are contrary to all evidence.
I love when he asks how we can export democracy when we don’t defend our own liberties. Apples and oranges right there. Democracy has nothing to do with personal freedoms and liberties but embrace and embodiment of the normal human imperative to win, be right, have their way, and have certainty. People like guarantees and winning. If the vote goes their way, they win. If it doesn’t, they blame “those other people” whoever they conjure them to be and immaturely won’t accept loss gracefully. Look around you. Bush didn’t steal any election, but no one wanted to admit that the great masses of the indecisive middle voted chose Bush over their POV. Humans don’t like admitting they can be wrong, never mind that they are, unless it is an excuse to evade responsibility.
We’re exporting democracy because it is entirely more chaotic and less decisive than most other systems and that means they have to argue, nag, wimble, and vote before they get around to making war and that gives the people in general time to subvert the system and carve out liberties and jealously guard them (if they have any sense as government’s natural tendency is to lessen liberties which is in line with humans preferring guarantees and order to uncertainty and chaos). Exporting democracy is in general good for peace as in the ancient undemocratic world, wars were more or less every other week and if they had used fuel air explosives, bombers, and automatic weapons, no one would be alive today. Dictatorial systems can move to war quickly. Democracies are often so paralyzed by their very nature they can hardly bother defending themselves adequately. Israel comes to mind. When the race is warlike, chaos is peaceful and order is not and we humans are extremely aggressive buggers.
Most of the interview is utter twaddle of the usual anti-war sort, attempting to sound grounded in morals and ethics while at the same time demonstrating an absolute willful ignorance of their own species’ mentality and tendencies nevermind the true immorality of the situation pretending that now that the war has happened, that we can walk away from it like a kid making a mess then leaving it to mom to clean up. We do that and Iraq becoming Iran II is guaranteed. None of Keller’s camp would ever allow themselves to live under a theocracy and everytime any politician they disagree with or in the opposite political camp expresses religious views, they go absolutely apoplectic and swear we’re headed for a Christian theocracy. Yet letting Iraq become a Muslim theocracy, doing that to the Iraqis after we took away their dubious but real stable secular society under Saddam, that’s perfectly A-OK with them.
The fact that Keller served means zero. My dad was a Viet Nam vet and at the time believed he was doing the noble thing and serving his nation and now he rants in front of the news like the intellectual offspring of George Carlin and Howard Dean. My grandfather served in WWII Europe. He was a staunch conservative all his life. Which one is right? I think my grandfather was.
In short, the anti-war movement is mostly people without a clue or interest in having a clue as to human and political realities. They’d rather live in a delusional world where things work they way they imagine them to because they are such good and deserving people that the world should bend to their imagination. This goes for people who want to save glaciers from melting, people who want to send the military to save every group they pity de jure, people who want to end racism, people who want to end poverty, etc. It’s not about what is right, it’s about them being right.
Being right is not what’s right and what’s right is frequently messy. We started this mess, and if we don’t finish it in Iraq, our children will be facing the next war over it. As Kosh in Babylon 5 said, it is too late for the pebbles to vote once the avalanche has begun.
sholom [deleted by siteowner] keller is really stupid, he is “defending” the U.S. constitution by trying to make it so that the USA can’t complete its goal turning Iraq from a dictatorship into a democracy.
SJ, stop insulting Sholom. After you fight over in Iraq, you can call Sholom whatever you like.
DK, with respect, since when did one have to fight in a war in order to have an opinion on a war? I thought in the United States, the military works for the civilians.
for once i agree with SJ. One can’t have an opinion just because they didnt fight? And just because someone fought doesn’t make them right.
I think you guys should ask yourselves if the Arabs truly want democracy. Does it look high up on their priorities? In the off chance that this isn’t what they really want, then what are the odds that we are going to successfully impose it on them?
You know, I haven’t had sound on my laptop for over a year (it’s integrated, and I can’t afford a new computer). It would be nice if you could transcribe the good parts of these things when you post them - wishful thinking, I know. But I can’t be the only person on the planet who has this problem. Shalom!
I can’t believe I agree with SP. Most radical political activists (right and left) adhere to what Lee Harris terms a fantasy ideology:
http://www.hoover.org/publicat.....59646.html
My first encounter with this particular kind of fantasy occurred when I was in college in the late sixties. A friend of mine and I got into a heated argument. Although we were both opposed to the Vietnam War, we discovered that we differed considerably on what counted as permissible forms of anti-war protest. To me the point of such protest was simple — to turn people against the war. Hence anything that was counterproductive to this purpose was politically irresponsible and should be severely censured. My friend thought otherwise; in fact, he was planning to join what by all accounts was to be a massively disruptive demonstration in Washington, and which in fact became one.
My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul.
What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.
And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.
It was not your garden-variety fantasy of life as a sexual athlete or a racecar driver, but in it, he nonetheless made himself out as a hero — a hero of the revolutionary struggle. The components of his fantasy — and that of many young intellectuals at that time — were compounded purely of ideological ingredients, smatterings of Marx and Mao, a little Fanon and perhaps a dash of Herbert Marcuse.
For want of a better term, call the phenomenon in question a fantasy ideology — by which I mean, political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy. It is, to be frank, something like “Dungeons and Dragons” carried out not with the trappings of medieval romances — old castles and maidens in distress — but entirely in terms of ideological symbols and emblems.
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