An Example Of A Difference Between Literature And Mere Writing

 Here’s an example of a difference between mere writing and literature. 

I’m reading Rogue Cop by William McGivern. 

His protagonist, a bent cop, Mike Carmody, has just worked out and before that has played handball. 

After, he relaxes, exulting in how good his body feels. And yet he’s enjoying his first cigarette of the day. 

Then right after come descriptions of things being “clean”, the weather, certain interiors. 

A central conflict in the novel is between Carmody as bent  and his late father as righteous and his brother Eddie, also a cop, as righteous. 

In mere writing, the oddity of smoking after vigorous exercise, and the contrast between the surrounding cleanliness and Carmody as dirty consistent with the central contrast between Carmody and his brother and father are simply there.

In literature they’re intended, purposeful, in order to amplify and enrich the novel’s themes. 

Exchange On UCLA Anti Israel Encampment And Anti Semitism

 L:

What if a muslim claims a deeply and sincerely held religious belief that the state of Israel has no right to exist because muslims have a religious duty to spread their faith throughout that territory. If someone were to criticize this view, would it be fair to label that person as islamophobic? 

What if someone asserts a deeply held Christian Orthodox belief that Ukraine is the godly-ordained territory of Russia?  And there was a pro-Ukraine encampment, and they wanted to exclude people who held those views. Should those protesters be stigmatized with the label of  "anti-Christian"?

The question goes to the right of the protesters to cordon off a section of the campus in order to establish a zone for protest, education, and mutual support. Maybe there shouldn't be a zone where others who are considered to have "repugnant" views cannot enter - it's a university and a public space. 

But to label the encampment anti-semitic on those grounds alone is unfair.

Me:

I don’t get the relevance of your examples to events at UCLA or to Zionism.

Any Muslim who religiously believes that Israel has no right to exist is anti Semitic. In fact, most anyone who claims Israel has no right to exist, whether claimed religiously or not, is anti Semitic. Criticism of this view in the case of a Muslim isn’t Islamophobic: it’s being factual, true to what counts as anti Semitism. 

If a Russian Christian believes Ukraine is the God-given territory of Christian Russia, then pro Ukrainians who reject that are not anti Christian. If pro Ukrainians exclude such Christians from a public space, then they’d be wrong. They’re not, however, anti Christian despite the exclusion.

We must separate two issues:  lawfulness of protest; and content of protest.

People can legally protest in public spaces.

Commandeering some university grounds unlawfully is, well, unlawful. And more so if the protest is civil disobedience, the precise meaning of which is law breaking with willingness to take penal consequences. The lawfulness or illegality of protest is separate from content.

Whether a lawful protest or not, if the content is that Israel has no right to exist, that Jews have no right to a homeland state born of international assent, surviving as such with increasing assent and functioning with all the hallmarks of a sovereign state for almost 80 years, then that content is anti Semitic. It’s vivid anti Semitism. Israel is prominent in Judaism’s meaning.

Here your second example falls off. Christianity is a set of beliefs and earthly realities. The application of those beliefs in one geopolitical instance, Ukraine as part of Christian motherland Russia, is as nothing in relation to the whole of Christianity. It doesn’t begin to come close to exhausting its meaning.

Judaism is likewise a set of beliefs and earthly realities. Granted, one can be a Jew and not a Zionist, but the proximity of Zionism to Judaism is such that if Zionism is eliminated from the meaning of Judaism, then Judaism is hollowed out. 

Moreover, while Russia having a God given right to Ukraine is morally, geopolitically and objectively objectionable, and while the position that  Israel shouldn’t exist is similarly objectionable, the latter’s converse, that it should exist, is righteous.