The Revolt of the Pendulum Read Online Free PDF Page B

tacitly invites to join in the widespread practice of putting jokey quotation marks around the phrase ‘war on terror’, might have pointed out that the quotation marks are a
cliche´ in themselves, helping as they do to disguise a brute reality: terrorists are at war with us, and don’t care who they kill. The reason terrorists don’t use those risible
cosmetic terms of ours such as ‘collateral damage’ is that they not only have no intention of sparing the innocent, they have no more desirable target in mind.
    The terrorist can talk a pure language: it’s purely violent, but still pure. His opponent is bound to equivocate, and sound silly doing so. That was the point Kraus missed because it had
not yet become apparent by contrast with something worse. A liberal democracy, of any kind or degree, is bound to deal in hypocrisy and lies, simply because it has a measure of real politics, and
is not unified and simplified by an ideology. Totalitarian irrationalism can say exactly what’s on its mind. Hitler had genocide on his mind, and said so. But only his nuttiest colleagues
believed he would actually do it. Samantha Power, in her excellent book Genocide: A Problem from Hell , reached a conclusion she didn’t want to reach, as the best analytical books so
often do. After showing that no genocidal government in the twentieth century had ever been stopped except by armed intervention, she reluctantly concluded that the armed intervention usually had
to be supplied by the United States.
    Those among us who sincerely believe that the Iraqis are killing each other in fulfilment of an American genocidal plan might think that her conclusion is no longer true. We would have to ignore
the implicit opinion of the eleven million Iraqi adults who voted in the last election, but most of us would rather do that than be taken for suckers. The Vietnam War dulled the Stars and Stripes
in our eyes. But Power’s idea was certainly still true when Kraus was alive. And there can be no question that he would have eventually spelled out the same conclusion himself. In effect, he
had already reached it. In 1930 he published a piece called ‘SOS USA’ predicting that America would have to step in if Europe were to be saved. And in 1933 he renewed the provision in
his passport to include travel to the USA. Timms, who makes little of that development, could safely have made more. He could have said, for example, that in making of itself a refuge so difficult
to reach, America had abetted the efforts of the maniacs. It would have been true, or at any rate half true.
    Kraus had no particular love for America – it wasn’t China – and he definitely overestimated what America would have been able to do in the short term, when its armed forces
were still considerably inferior even to those of Czechoslovakia. But he guessed how the balance of forces was shaping up. Can there be bad violence and good violence? But of course there can.
It’s a tragic perception, though, and the day is always sad when a comic perception must give way to it. Kraus had a comprehensive sensitivity to all the abuses of society. Injustice angered
him. He was way ahead of the game on questions of race. Nobody ever wrote more powerfully against capital punishment. Despite his famous pronouncement about the fish that fought its way ashore, he
understood what women were facing, and why they had to fight. He was their champion. He was a serious man, and a piercing satire was his weapon. But it worked only because he was funny. And then,
first gradually and then suddenly, being funny wasn’t enough.
    Australian Literary Review , March 2007
    Postscript
    When Kraus was alive there was no need for a word like ‘media’ because the press was the main thing, with radio only just on its way up. Had he been reborn
into the television age, he would have had a vastly increased range of mendacity to debunk. In the 1970s, when I began reviewing television, I was