Properly assigning blame for: xxxxxxxx

Please forgive me for so-rapidly referencing Lileks again (two posts in a week!), but his 07/12 Screedblog excerpt of an important book called "Life at the Bottom", by Theodore Dalrymple touches on something that's been sticking in my craw for a few years now. His entire post is short enough to repost here in it's entirety (to be redundant) :



Noted before on the Bleat: “Life at the Bottom,” by Theodore Dalrymple. He wrote an essay about the effects of post-war architecture , and the role it played in facilitating the passivity and sense of aggrieved & sullen victimhood he sees in the British underclass. (I believe it's about more than just architecture, though; but also about the doctor's experience caring for the underclass of British society. Brad)

He makes a rather obvious point – for some of us, anyway – that the buildings helped foster the underclass. The inhuman scale of the projects, the destruction of neighborhoods that had arisen to meet the needs of people, and the substitution of ideology for experience.

This stood out: "This sense of community, now destroyed, allowed people to withstand genuine hardship – hardship that wasn’t self-inflicted, like so much of today’s. I remember a patient who described with great warmth the street on which he had lived as a child – “until,” he added, “Adolph Hitler moved us on.” What an admirable depth of character, uncomplaining in the face of misfortune, those few words convey! Nowadays the victim of such a bombing would be more likely to blame the government for having declared war on the Nazis in the first place." (As the Left laments: "We've created more terrorists and made ourselves less-safe by invading Iraq", along with the accusations that we earned the wrath of Islamofascists by "meddling" in other countries and "forcing" our culture on them. Brad)
Date he wrote the essay: 1995. It’s been a long time coming.


The heartbreaking aspect of inaccurately assigning responsibility for personal burdens, for instance, especially the routine hurdles and detours of daily life, is that the self-creation of victimhood may discourage people from recognizing and correcting what might be the true cause of the miseries they experience.

Regarding one's personal lot in life, a sincere look in the mirror not only hastens the progress toward resolving many pathologies, but helps develop a sense of empowerment because it focuses on causes that are within one's power to actually do something about.
It's a bit daunting for the average fellow to tackle the conspiracy of the "international banking syndicate" that he blames for creating a system of economic control that keeps him destitute and powerless. It's liberating, on the other hand, for this fellow to break the bondage of his own self-destructive personal habits and behaviors that squander his time and money.


In the bigger picture, however (and I mean the really big picture: the battle of Good vs. Evil that has raged through the ages amongst men and nations), the inaccurate assigning of responsibility for the struggles that free nations engage in to promote liberty and respond to threats to peace and stability can undermine and cripple the success of those efforts, to the peril of millions.

In a column about the increasingly politically correct response by the West to terrorist attacks, Tony Blankley wrote on July 13: "The first lesson of war is to know thy enemy. While we should never put people in that category who don't fit, it is suicidal to refuse to acknowledge the accurate nature of the enemy."

And UK Prime Minister Tony Blair put it today: "The greatest danger is that we fail to face up to the nature of the threat that we're dealing with," he said. "And what we are confronting here is an evil ideology. ... It is a battle of ideas, of hearts and of minds, both within Islam and outside it."

Well, isn't this coincidental: while searching for a link to Blankley's piece, I ran across this column by Cal Thomas, in the Jewish World Review, which details the foolishness, even danger, of the problem I'm writing about. Of course, he says it much better, and in greater detail (I had planned to write at greater length about this, but this post will be too long for some people already!), so I recommend it to you. As least I can feel a little validated, and who can't use that, eh?

Brad