Hugh’s Vacuum

Today in a Jihad Watch article, Hugh Fitzgerald yet again operates in the vacuum I have alluded to before.

First, as usual with Hugh’s writings, we have a presentation of intelligent sense:

Israel is not an “occupier” in the sense in which the Germans were occupiers of Occupied France, or of Occupied Paris, or after the war, the Four Powers were in control of Occupied Vienna or Occupied Berlin. Israel has a much deeper, longer claim to those areas—which in the case of Gaza it may not wish to exercise for practical reasons. It is a legal claim based on the intent and terms of the Mandate for Palestine, which in turn is based on a historic and moral claim that the intelligent men who created the League of Nations, and the other intelligent men who staffed the Mandates Commission of that body, found convincing.

Then, as usual with Hugh’s writings, we have a glimpse of the vacuum in which Hugh operates:

Of course, that was in the days before there was oil money from the Arabs sloshing about.

With this sentence—which he only amplifies with more of the same throughout the remainder of his article and does nothing to supplement—he is explaining the stubbornly uncharitable (at best) and positively demonizing attitude (at usual worst) of the Western world towards Israel, which has been getting worse decade after decade over the past 50-odd years, entirely by means of the factor of greed (i.e., one of Hugh’s “Esdrujula Elves”—cupidity). The intelligence to which Hugh refers flourished—at least relatively more so—not merely “in the days before there was oil money”, but far more importantly in the days before PC Multiculturalism had become dominant and mainstream throughout the West.

Hugh’s perspicacity is apparently oblivious to the massive fact that, over these past 50-odd years (with strong roots going back at least to the 18th century), the “intelligent men” of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations and their heirs have become increasingly seen as evil white Westerners perpetuating an insidious and disastrous neo-Colonialism and inflicting it on the Third World. Never mind that this same League of Nations was the beginning of a historically unprecedented self-imposed dismantling of a civilization’s imperialistic structure—given new life and a dynamic push subsequently through the United Nations—, attended by billions of dollars, coordinated political support throughout the West, dozens of human rights and educational international organizations, and hundreds of thousands of Western volunteers to help Third World peoples in various ways try to reconstruct, or create anew, independent national systems, and—last but not least—an equally historically unprecedented transformation of sociopolitical consciousness (again with strong roots going back at least to the 18th century) combining extraordinary degrees of self-criticism with equally extraordinary intellectual and emotional generosity reaching out to try to understand our cultural “Others” of the Third World. No, all that has not been good enough for the dominant and mainstream PC Multiculturalists. Or, more specifically, what has been going on over the past 50-odd years is that this extraordinary shift in consciousness just mentioned above involved a spectacular bout of pathologically excessive health: a morbid obsession of self-criticism combined with a hectic flush of romanticization of the Third World “Other”.

At any rate, the above description is only a sketch of the enormous sea change that the West has undergone over the past half century or so, and which—much more fundamentally than mere greed explains why the West, increasingly, does not give a shit what any “intelligent” dead white men of the League of Nations thought in the early decades of the 20th century. Too bad that Hugh, in turn, gives not a shit about the complex reasons why the Western world, increasingly, has been turning its back on intelligence. Hugh, apparently, would rather assume that no suitably larger explanation for such a large problem exists—that, in effect, no larger sociopolitico-cultural support system contextualizes this large problem (and all the other large, related problems that radiate out from PC Multiculturalism), but that it is simply suspended in a vacuum.