a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Thursday, August 15, 2002 Cynthia Ozick... has a good paragraph in an essay called "Public Intellectuals" -- written in the ’90s -- that applies beautifully to the Arundhati Roy-style War protests that try to put George Bush's sins on a level with Muslim fundamentalists'. I like Ozick because she can think about politics without immersing herself in this or that wing. She's writing about E.M. Forster's aloofness from world events in 1941:Some will say, how is it you have the gall to use so unforgivably denigrating a term as "barbarians"? Must you despise your opponents as other, as not of your own flesh? What of the humanity of the other? Are we not all equally flawed, equally capable of mercy? Are we ourselves not in some respects worse? Shall we not be decent to the other? But -- in a jurisprudential democracy especially -- a moment may come when it is needful to be decent to our own side, concerning whom we are not to witness falsely or even carelessly in order to prove how worse we are. Without such loyalty -- not always a popular notion among the global sentimentalists -- you may find you are too weak in self-respect to tell the truth or to commit yourself to the facts ... "I have seen the enemy and he is us" is not always and everywhere true; and self-blame can be the highest form of self-congratulation. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:16 PM | |
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