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Terry Eagleton’s Pro-Fascist Zealotry
By Josh Strawn / July 9, 2007
There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say that Terry Eagleton could benefit from having his head given a dollar value by Muslim extremists. Nostalgic for the era when Britain had still had "Blake to dream of a communist utopia," Eagleton laments what he perceives to be the lack of an "eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie come under particularly harsh fire for their negative appraisals of Islamic fascism and the war against it:
The knighting of Salman Rushdie is the establishment's reward for a man who moved from being a remorseless satirist of the west to cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Couldn't have had anything to do with the establishment rewarding a man who courageously faced down death in defense of a novelist's right of free expression…
Eagleton has a history of being revolted by "card carrying rationalists" who don't share his nuanced appreciation of theology and theocracy. He claims that Martin Amis "has written of the need to prevent Muslims travelling and to strip-search people," when in fact Amis said nothing of the sort. I paraphrased the quote to which Eagleton is referring in the opening sentence above precisely because while one may have an urge to say these things, an expression of sentiment is hardly a prescription. After all, Amis has elsewhere written:
The form that Islamophobia is now taking – the harassment and worse of Muslim women in the street – disgusts me. It is mortifying to be part of a society in which any minority feels under threat.
Expressing an urge or tendency allows one to indulge in potentially productive thought experiments. I don't hope for any more fatwahs to be issued against writers, but I do enjoy speculating how Eagleton might feel about a war on radical Islamism if he had spent the better part of two decades the target of a worldwide Islamist enjoinder to his assassination. There is no cognitive dissonance in being simultaneously "disgusted" at Islamophobic behavior and imagining how the Muslim community might react if it were subjected to the kinds of abuses that the "Western" society so many of them deplore prohibits. The Western society, it should be added, that Eagleton appears to wish had more numerous opponents.
Interestingly enough, Evelyn Waugh, to whom Hitchens is compared, chided the "left wing intellectuals" who believed fascism was a threat to civilization when it descended upon Spain in the late 1930's. Doesn't Eagleton sound far more like Waugh taking the piss out of folks like Spender, Auden and Orwell?
Orwell knew something about courage that Eagleton and a great majority of his "radical" ilk keep missing. Writing about Waugh, he remarked:
To a great extent, what is still loosely thought of as heterodoxy has become orthodoxy…one cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it.
As far as Eagleton is concerned, there aren't enough British writers willing to question western society and the capitalist system that undergirds it. Awash on a sea of lock-step orthodoxy, with his the lone courageous voice of dissent, is a literary community that doesn't meet his standard of snuff. It's more likely the other way around. In the long run, the best Eagleton could hope for would be something resembling T.S. Eliot status. Despite having snubbed his compatriots and fellow men of words who managed to condemn the menace of fascism, Eliot's work can overshadow his bad judgment. Until Eagleton produces a Prufrock, a Wasteland or a Four Quartets, he'll be little more than a fellow who got it wrong in a time when getting it right mattered most.
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For the past year, or at least since Terry Eagleton reaffirmed his sacramental side in reviewing the work of Richard Dawkins, he has become increasingly enamored with all things irrational. Not that he was a bastion of reason before – his literary criticism itself is predicated upon the embrace of madness, a kind of postmodern caricature of Fear and Trembling. Indeed, the abstraction of defiance – toward "Islamaphobia" or "Capitalism" or the modern decay of "values" – that Eagleton praises shares deeply the approach of fundamentalists, whether that of American Baptists and dissidents around the 1910s or that of the Iranian rebels in the 1970s. One wonders exactly what Eagleton hopes to accomplish with all of this defiance (or more accurately, this defiant posturing.) His firm sense of faith in faith itself reminds me of a particularly dangerous marriage of Marxist historical determinism with fundamentalist religious confidence. Perhaps the next step in his irrationality will be to advise the West to get out of the way of its Muslim opponents, since (to purloin from Marvell) 'tis madness to resist or blame the angry force of heaven's flame…'
Just checked that Luxembourg piece. Quoting Macbeth and declaring the "triumph" of self-immolation. Jesus. I wish I could say I was dumbfounded, but by now I should really stop expecting major "left" intellectuals to do anything other than put their own grievances in the mouths of suicide bombers. AND it was written in 2005, long after the information was available that 12 of the 15 Saudi hijackers were from well-to-do families in a specific geographical region (Ta'if and Asir) known throughout the Islamic world for their firebrand religious violence!
For all their talk about rich white men sending poor minorities off to die, it starts to look as if folks like Terry are quite happy to use the misguided Arabs and Muslims as their own infantry, vicariously enjoying their "courage" and defiance. Why else would they choose to satisfy their jones for anti-Americanism/anti-capitalism by exalting mass murderers when they could be doing something like harping on corporate monsters like Socal and American relations with a country that finances the spread of Islamist ideology? They could do that and not utter a word of sympathy or admiration for jihadists, but they don't. I think this exposes one of the core simillarities between Islamism and the so-called radical left of today–they're both hysterical.
Not hysterical in the sense of hilarious, but in the rigorous psychoanalytic sense. The hysteric's demands must be unfulfillable. The hysteric operates in the field of desire and sets his/herself up for noble failure. Zizek writes that liberals "like to evoke racism, ecology, workers' grievances, etc., to score points over the conservatives without endangering the system." The hysteric expends the most energy railing against the crimes of the Master and the least on the true act that could change the horizon. Eagleton seems to give suicide bombing credit as the act, but it seems more fair to say that it nothing but a spectacle of the rejection of such an act. In this way, it appears as if suicide bombing is the true embodiment of radical/hysterical left politics today.
I feel we should note that Virginia Woolf followed up those words with similar sentiments: "I would not like them when it's damp / I could not like them in a camp"
He's really outdone himself this time, although a close second in my book is still his comparison of Rosa Luxemburg with suicide-murderers in Jerusalem and Baghdad, also written — or typed — for the Guardian.
Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh," among other pleasant observations about the tribe into which she married. And Harold Pinter never met an anti-American cause he didn't befriend.
Shall we delve into Byron's opinions of Islam and "Wahhab's rebel brood"?
T-Bird's as hopeless a literary critic as he is a socialist.
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