Robert Fulford: How the alt-right’s godfather transformed our world (not in a good way)

2018/03/31 Leave a comment

Some useful history:

It smells like fascism sometimes but the odour also makes you think of a seminar dominated by not-quite-bright freshmen who have been instructed to spill out their silliest political ideas. It’s at best a fringe movement, without leaders, membership cards or for that matter many followers.

But in the riotous, anger-drenched hothouse of the internet, alt-right somehow became a digital success. Its adherents have nothing in common but the concepts they love to hate — liberalism, multiculturalism, free trade and political correctness. Alt-right was rarely even mentioned two years ago but now it’s a rare day when it doesn’t show up somewhere on our computer screens.

Where did this phenomenon begin its life? The godfather of alt-right, a major source of its ideas and attitudes, has been identified as Paul Gottfried, a philosophy professor emeritus at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. For years he nourished thoughts that seemed at best eccentric but now form everyday conversation online. He was against globalism, the “therapeutic welfare state,” the Civil Rights Act and most of the other obsessions of the left. He’s obviously an elitist, but at the same time he favours the populist revolt, though he doesn’t see that as a contradiction.

As a man of right-wing views, why wouldn’t he join the traditionally right-wing Republican Party? His answer reveals the hurt feelings that explain part of alt-right’s appeal: “It has treated us, in contrast to such worthies as black nationalists, radical feminists, and open-border advocates, as being unfit for admittance into the political conversation. We are not viewed as honourable dissenters but depicted as subhuman infidels or ignored in the same way as one would a senile uncle who occasionally wanders into one’s living room.”

Gottfried is one of those few intellectuals who support Donald Trump. Before Trump appeared, people who read books and yet held right-of-right opinions were spiritually homeless.

Richard Spencer wasn’t homeless when he met Gottfried, but they recognized each other as natural allies. Gottfried became Spencer’s mentor, and Spencer, much younger and more energetic, became a star in the firmament he’d created. As Spencer’s eminence increased, they agreed to call their movement alt-right because they believed the world needed an alternative to the Republicans. Conservative or not, Spencer is no admirer of such heroes as William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan.

For an advocate anxious to get his theories across, Spencer has a snotty way of talking to people who disagree with him. On YouTube we see him telling an African-American that Africans have benefited from white supremacy. “How can you deny that?” he says, clearly annoyed. What he wants to say, we can tell, is something like: “Don’t you know I’m much smarter than you?”

Spencer claims not to be what many call him — a white supremacist. Instead, he insists he’s a member of “the identitarian movement.” Since hardly anyone has even heard of that, we have to assume he wants to create something less threatening than white supremacy. He recommends instead a future nation for a “dispossessed white race” — the term for it is white ethnostate.

He can become a geeky bore when he sets out to explain that in the U.S., white men are the victims of frightful prejudice in the job market. His complaints also reach other shores. He’s called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of non-whites in Europe to avoid what he claims is the coming destruction of European culture. Europe is less interested in him than he is in Europe. He’s been banned from the U.K. and from 22 of 28 European Union member states.

Spencer was a major speaker last August at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., when far-right extremists battled with counter-protesters (called antifa, meaning anti-fascists) and one woman was killed. White nationalists, neo-Confederates, Klansmen and neo-Nazis were there, apparently on Spencer’s side. Marchers chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans and carried swastikas, Confederate battle flags, and anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic banners. Since then Spencer’s speaking engagements have been cancelled by universities that complained they couldn’t afford to hire security guards to deal with riots he might provoke.

Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville attracted attention when he claimed there were “very fine people on both sides” of the conflict. He seemed to be saying that Klan members and neo-Nazis were morally equivalent to those who protested against them. If Spencer later realized that alt-right had reached a highly dangerous place, one he couldn’t control, he said nothing about it. On the other hand, he’s been relatively quiet lately. Perhaps he’s thinking things over.

Source: Robert Fulford: How the alt-right’s godfather transformed our world (not in a good way)

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Robert Fulford: A history of ‘Islamophobia,’ a word of dubious value

2017/09/25 Leave a comment

I always find it surprising that some people can can devote column space to the word Islamophobia without any discussion of the real world issues of discrimination and prejudice that many Canadian and other Western Muslims have experienced. This is essentially a more sophisticated version of the earlier commentary by Candice Malcolm (M-103 weaponizes what a ‘phobia’ is).

A cop-out IMO. One could argue that an excessive focus on the word Islamophobia is in itself a reflection of Islamophobia (or if you wish, anti-Muslim attitudes):

Every era has special words that ignite resentful arguments and reveal difficult emotions. There’s no doubt that Islamophobia is our word, a painful term that’s hard to avoid.

It functions as a rhetorical weapon. Whoever uses it (and many do) is trying to convict someone else of chauvinism and a thoughtless prejudice against Muslims and Islam. It’s a protective word, a shield against Muslims being damaged by criticism and argument.

Pascal Bruckner, the French philosopher, who has spent a great deal of time working on this issue, summarizes his opinion in a few words: “There’s No Such Thing as Islamophobia. Critique of religion is a fundamental Western right, not an illness.”

A phobia is a medical term, an anxiety disorder stirred up by irrational fear of heights, or perhaps spiders or snakes and other repellent creatures. Few would confess to feeling that way about Islam. Fewer still would seek treatment of their negative reactions to Islam.

Islam is a titanic force in this era and we talk about it and write about it often. But we hardly know how to express ourselves. We stutter and stammer when it comes up and sometimes we may use words like Islamophobia to censor ourselves. From Barack Obama down we have wrestled with attempts to define Islam or interpret it. Obama actually said that the Islamic State is not Islamic, as if he would know. He said Islam is a religion of love and peace, to which the only honest reply is: Sometimes Yes, sometimes No.

Our thinking on this subject can be affected by a sense of guilt, conscious or unconscious. Many Muslims are from places conquered and then dominated by European imperialists. Bruckner has investigated this fact in his book, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism.

“Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West,” Bruckner says. “All of modern thought can be reduced to mechanical denunciations of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.”

The hard truth is that many non-Muslims find it difficult to speak about (or to) Muslims. Our intentions are confusing, even to us. We hope for good relations with Muslims who live among us and we assume that they are as appalled as we are by violence committed in the name of their religion. We also hope they know that Islam, though sacred to them, is also the scourge of millions when it’s interpreted literally by blindly self-righteous mass murderers.

We know they seem more sensitive, in a way, than others. They can’t easily shrug off humiliation. Le Monde in Paris pointed out that Charlie Hebdo, the satire magazine, devoted only four per cent of its covers to ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed; meanwhile, the same artists had been mocking Jesus, Moses, the Dalai Lama, and the various popes for 40 years. But Islamist killers were so offended by the four per cent that, in January 2015, they assassinated most of the staff.

Le Monde’s comparison means nothing. The killers could reason that Jesus, the popes and the rest are of little importance. The Prophet, on the other hand, is a crucial figure in their daily lives and they must protect him from humiliation.

Bruckner is of course right when he says that critique of religion is a fundamental Western right, but committed Muslims are not entirely in the West. They are in a larger place, the world they imagine, where no such right exists. Perhaps they know that Christianity and Judaism broke into pieces because their rules permitted serious, long-ranging criticism of their most basic principles.

The word Islamophobia originated in the early 20th century. An early use was in a French biography of Muhammad (“islamophobie”). Sometimes it was used internally, within Islam, to identify a fear of Islam felt by liberal Muslims and Muslim feminists, rather than a fear or dislike of Muslims by non-Muslims. It was given an official imprimatur in 2004 when Kofi Annan, then the UN Secretary-General, said the word Islamophobia had to be coined in order to “take account of increasingly widespread bigotry.” From there on it was part of language, a word of dubious value.

Source: National Post | Full Comment » Full…

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Robert Fulford: How to avoid sounding like a bureaucrat

2014/10/06 4 Comments

As a former bureaucrat who constantly struggles against my decades in government writing and tries to write more plainly and clearly, enjoyed this piece by Robert Fulford on Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century:

Pinker advocates what he calls “classic style,” a combination of inventiveness, good manners and the awareness of a reader’s needs. In the classic style, the writer pretends to speak conversationally to a single person. But this works only if the writer can overcome the main obstacle to clear prose: “The difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.”

The opposite of classic style is jargon, a language that’s terrifyingly easy to learn. A bright graduate student can produce bales of it without breaking a sweat. There are those who believe scholars use jargon to hide their lack of something to say or to protect their status in a priestly class. Pinker argues otherwise. Many scholars have nothing to hide and no need to impress, he says. He finds them “honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing stinks.”

Pinker’s research in linguistics has taught him to respect the human “hunger for coherence” and specific easy-to-imagine words. The classic style calls for prose that all of us can follow. Readers need to see the connector between the first sentence and the second, between the second and the third. Working on this book, Pinker came to a fresh understanding of connective words, like “but, despite, because, even so, however.” He calls them the cement of reason, “unsung heroes of lucid prose.” (“Cement of reason” is a Pinker-approved phrase.)

He’s full of helpful advice, based on the study of mental processes — including one rule that I’m centuries late in learning: When setting down a series of ideas, “Save the heaviest for last.” He quotes a famous Scottish prayer that used the proper order by asking for deliverance from “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.” Research shows that it’s hard to absorb a series of small details while holding in memory a big one.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” gets it right, as does “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!” Pinker tells us that light-before-heavy is an ancient principle in linguistics, discovered by a Sanskrit grammarian in the fourth century BCE.

Robert Fulford: How to avoid sounding like a bureaucrat

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