A Particularly Slippery Slope

Something that drives me absolutely batty is the argument that every Muslim is somehow obligated to prove his "moderation" by denouncing the actions of a radical few. Jonah Goldberg posts a reader's email, then responds to it:

Jonah,

I agree with you concerning the oversensitivity of the public face of Islam, but I am curious just what you mean by this sentence:

"But these are the images even the moderate Muslims let loose upon the world without much objection"

So how are mobs in the street burning things "images let loose upon the world by moderates"? That doesn't even make sense. Do you expect that every time a mob gathers in anger at some pseudo-insult those Muslims who aren't really offended need to assemble a counter demonstration so that CNN and, by extension, you can see that not all Muslims are burning the Pope in effigy? Moderate Muslims are people with better things to do than hang around and demonstrate. They are people with jobs, families, and lives to preserve. They are people that live next door to the ever-present reality of violent Islam. They are people who don't want to call attention to themselves because they live in a dangerous world. It angers me to see someone as intelligent as yourself jump both feet forward into the event-driven-news-media portrayal of the Muslim world and take a cheap shot at a large number of non-violent Muslims while you are at it.

ME: I might have phrased it poorly, but yeah that's basically what I'm saying. Globally, Muslim leaders seem to all operate on the CAIR model, mumble stuff about how extremism is bad, but shout from the rooftops about how insulting Islam is outrageous and creates an atmosphere where the religion of peace becomes violent. In the meanwhile, moderates let the extremists speak for them by doing nothing. We have seen nigh upon infinite examples of Muslims saying, doing and hoping for horrible, evil and violent things in the name of Islam. I am of the opinion that these examples come from a minority of Muslims (but a significant number of them in absolute terms). These people are insulting Islam, it seems to me, far more than the Pope allegedly did.

This is an old argument now but it seems that Burke's line still applies: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"

Quoting Burke of all people to support the idea of collective responsibility is ludicrous; the quote Jonah cites is a narrow observation by Burke about the strength of evil in the face of passivity. Burke rejected the idea of collective responsibility. A far more apt quote on the subject was this, from his "Speech On Conciliation With America" in 1775: "I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people." Burke described talk in France of "fraternity" as "terrible in it's nature, and in it's manifest consequences." Jonah's misguided citation of someone as central to conservatism as Burke is telling, and it's another reason why the words "titular" and "Right" deserve to go together more frequently these days.

Hypothetical and actual examples abound. Whenever a pedophile priest is arrested, is every "reasonable" Catholic obligated either to denounce pedophilia publicly, or proclaim his own innocence of it to his community? My ancestry is Italian. My last name is Italian. I look Italian. Does that mean I have the responsibility to denounce organized crime loudly and publicly every time some John Gotti-wannabe and his crew pull a heist or whack someone? Some on the Titular Right dismissed the abuses at Abu Ghraib as a few bad apples. I must have missed their entreaties to every member of the military to speak out against it.

An important reason to reject collective responsibility -- and Burke understood this -- is because it leads to collective guilt and eventually the imposition of collective punishment. While assigning collective responsibility is often a pretext for what comes next, it's not always done with ulterior motives. But that doesn't make it any less dangerous, because collective responsibility, once established, can be exploited later by those with far more nefarious intent.

An example that may resonate with Jonah is what happened when Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, was assassinated by a Jew on November 7, 1938. The Nazis immediately held all Jews in Germany responsible and levied a fine of 1 billion marks against the Jewish community as punishment for the murder. On November 10, the following decree appeared in German newspapers: "Persons who, according to the Nurnberg law, are regarded as Jews, are forbidden to possess any weapon. Violaters will be condemned to a concentration camp and imprisoned for a period of up to 20 years." Der Angriff, a Berlin paper founded by Goebbels, stated that, "For every suffering, every crime and every injury that this criminal [the Jewish community] inflicts on a German anywhere, every individual Jew will be held responsible." This was against the backdrop of Kristallnacht ("night of broken glass") which arguably was the start of the Holocaust.

This isn't just about a nominally conservative member of the commentariat invoking Burke out of ignorance or laziness or both. It's about a specious, pseudo-intellectual justification for ever-expanding war by the radical Right -- from those who thought invading Iraq would "teach the entire Muslim world a lesson" to Tom "Take out their holy sites" Tancredo and the ideological offspring of Curtis LeMay -- and it's become alarmingly common in public discourse. The consequences of apathy about this slippery slope are far too great. With that, I think Burke would agree.