printMuch has been made of the American singers who sang for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Nothing has been said of the intelligentsia that has sung his praise. There is a big difference between singing for your supper and singing songs of praise for this, and other, odious characters. Paul A. Rahe at The Chronicle of Higher Education dissects “The Intellectual as Courtier.” (Here, with thanks to my Canadian friend, Dr. Grant Havers.)
“If, in The Washington Post, one were to describe the elder Qaddafi as ‘a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat,’ if one were to call him ‘flexible and pragmatic,’ if one were to go on to suggest that ‘Libya under Qaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally,’ one would be apt—and with good reason—to be compared with Leni Riefenstahl, as Benjamin Barber was by Ken Silverstein at Harper’s Magazine.
Worse criticism would justifiably be in store for the intellectual sycophant who chose to write on the eve of the Libyan uprising, as Barber did at The Huffington Post, that Qaddafi ‘is not detested in the way that Mubarak has been detested and rules by means other than fear,’ especially if he were to add, ‘His son Seif, with a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the London School of Economics and two forthcoming books focused on liberalism in the developing world, has pioneered a gradualist approach to civil society in Libya, insisting along the way that he would accept no office that wasn’t subject to popular elections. No dynasty likely there.'”
[SNIP]
Because of their wide reach, Peggy Noonan (and her ilk)—while no intellectual— serves as a greater court courtesan than does the academic sycophant. As I chronicled in “LETHAL WEAPONS: NEOCON GROUPIES,” Noonan has gone as far as to conflate President Bush “with a Higher Power – Peggy believes God speaks through George W. Bush. From his furrows to his genitals, her high-flown linguistic banalities have lovingly depicted her man’s every inch. (See “He’s Got Two of ‘Em.”)
There are other culprits, of course.
UPDATE: Myron: You’re the funniest ever here on “nuance.” Why not cross-post this and other posts to the Facebook page, where the blog posts appear automatically? You’ll spice up the place in no time.
Switching from politics to “Defense Research”, I watch certain suckups who wind up getting millions of dollars to either screw up or to wind up validating predictions I made 9 years earlier. Regardless, the same old schnooks lurch from failure to failure.
Those academicians who suck up to Hugo, Vladimir, Muammar: Being a troubadour to these jackasses entails money, publicity, power, fame. They count a lot more in this life than integrity. I daresay that Ilana Mercer as a knee-jerk conservative lapdog of the Coulter-Hannity variety could garner a far greater audience (at the cost of your conscience and my condemnation!) .
The ultimate academic suckup was Arthur Schlesinger, the Kennedy Court Troubadour, treated as an “objective” historian by the so-called academic community.
Another great feature of these idiot savants is to find NUANCE where none exists like the “moderate Palestinians”, “good Nazis”, “realistic communists”, “feminist Islamists” etc. in their dream world. Some thuggish dictator with an MD like Assad who wears a fashionable suit or plays piano is elevated into some urbane statesman. And Mao was merely an agrarian reformer (tell it to the 75,000,000 who got reformed into the world of the dead!)
We all know that Col. Qaddafi has been a paragon of peace, tolerance, and western democratic values for years. It is not intuitively obvious to the most casual obersever?
Myron I understand your comments on “Defense Research”. Keeping your integrity in our industry does require a certain amount of “difficult swallowing” from time-to-time.