On Saturday, Benjamin Barber wrote a piece at Salon, "WikiLeaks and the sham of 'public diplomacy'". Barber's 1995 book, Jihad vs. McWorld still stands as arguably the deepest and most prescient about 9/11--and perhaps the mounting corporate/oligrarchic attack on the welfare state as well. Barber argued that ethno-religious tribalism and corporate globalization were mutually reinforcing enemies, sharing a common enemy in the democratic state, particularly in its mature regulatory and welfare state form.
In his Salon commentary, Barber pointed out the degraded state of American relations with the world revealed by the gossipy, ill-informed--shall we say undiplomatic?--character of many of the cables. It was more than personally embarrassing, Barber argued: it was reflective of a profound attitudinal and institutional problem, which he traced in part to the 1999 demise of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA--once headed by Edward R. Murrow) at the hands of Jesse Helms. Although Barber doesn't come right out and say it, the loss of the USIA as an independent agency represented a terrible self-inflicted wound on America's soft power in the world, that ought to have been immediately reversed after 9/11, and if not, then surely when Obama took office.
Today's State Department--as these cables remind us--is far too much a handmaiden to America's military/intelligence apparatus. Yes, the diplomatic corps used to be used as cover for intelligence agents, but that's a far cry from having diplomats themselves doing the spying. But USIA was even farther removed from that sort of mission and mentality. Although not without a grounding in American self-interest, it was a genuine service to global civil society, an affirmation of our self-confidence in the value of our values as a democratic republic, and its loss has had a devastating ripple effect, as Barber's piece points out. It begins thus:
As the latest WikiLeaks revelations have shown, when diplomatic cables are made public they are often far from diplomatic. In fact, they aren't even good journalism.
It is shocking that in the hundreds of cables released in recent days, U.S. diplomats often repeat unverified rumors. If I tried to base a story on such information, my editors would routinely send it back to me with an admonition: "Get some better sources. Find someone to speak on the record. Verify some of this stuff."
So now the State Department is rushing to mollify foreign leaders in Italy, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This idle and unsubstantiated rumor-mongering by U.S. diplomats has shattered the brittle façade of official smiles we have dubbed "Public Diplomacy" -- a euphemism for public affairs that some also call "propaganda."
When I was in college, I was obsessed with the first third of the twentieth century. It wasn't because I thought things were better back then-far from it. However, they did at least seem exciting and full of possibility: monarchists, communists, fascists, imperialists, anti-colonialist nationalism, and civil rights movements operated simultaneously in what was certainly the most diverse ideological mix the world has ever seen (the literature and art wasn't bad, either). Compared to the incredibly boring and corporate loving 1990's, it certainly was alluring.
Suddenly, he goes on, there are signs that we may be in for a bit of an ideological shakeup. Which raises the questions: what is ideological struggle, anyways? A minimalist answer, I think is fairly simple: it's a struggle over what sort of model to use in organizing society. Of course, in practice it gets rather messy, since each different model comes with its own set of assumptions that make side-by-side comparisons difficult, if not impossible. In his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn advanced an historical argument that even in the refined rationalist realm of science, fundamental shifts from one model to another were in some sense trans-rational--competing models were incommensurable with one another, since they entailed different definitional frameworks that precluded straight-forward comparisons. Loosely speaking, we could think of them comprising different quotient spaces, dividing the world up in fundamentally different ways, as I discussed in my earlier diary, "Quotient Spaces In Politics".
Beyond the scientific realm, it gets much worse. For a true believer in the early-modern ideology of the divine right of kings, for example, anyone questioning the ideology was cast as an agent of Satan. That certainly puts a crimp in your attempts at comparative ideology. And, really, that's the way that most ideological struggle is carried out: true believers in one ideology cast all others as agents of evil, end of story. It's not about an intellectual exercise in model-building and testing, it's about quasi-religious belief. In a way, though, it's both. One key to understanding the past 40 years of American politics is that conservatives understand this in their bones, while liberals understand it not at all.
(Promoted again--it's sort of a prelude to a mini-series whose first installment will follow around 1 PM Eastern. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Over at Orcinus, Dave Neiwert draws attention to eliminationist language in book review at the New York Times--a review by Harvard/Oxford historian Niall Ferguson. I became intrigued by what Dave uncovered, and began to write about it-but then I went beyond the passage he excerpted and read the original, where I found an echo of the topic of Glenn Greenwald's diary today- Ken Pollack's defense of John McCain calling every terrorist in sight "al Qaeda." I must confess, I've read some strange reviews in my time, but Ferguson is out for some kind of record. What's more, the passage Dave excerpted comes immediately after the passage that echoes Greenwald's topic. They are both in the same paragraph.
Lies, Damn Lies...
Because Greenwald's issue is simpler, I'm going to take it up first. For a while now, Glenn has been following John McCain's propensity to label everyone "al Qaeda," along with the media's propensity to give him a pass. What this patterns shows, of course is that (A) contrary to his "foreign policy expert" rep, John McCain is a clueless old coot, and (B) the media loves him anyway, cause they're just as clueless as he is-particularly about doing their frikken jobs.
Which brings us to today's Greenwald column, which begins:
Ken Pollack: Al Qaeda is a great "catch-all" term
The New York Timestoday examines John McCain's very Bush-like propensity to run around slapping the "Al Qaeda" label on everyone we're fighting in Iraq, even though . . . it's completely false to describe them that way. The article, needless to say, asks war cheerleader and Extremely Serious Middle East Expert Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution what he thinks about that and he replies with one of the most striking statements in a while:
Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain's portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a "perfectly reasonable catchall phrase" that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that "does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing," said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
Absolutely. Poor John McCain can't be expected to be accurate in describing the identities and goals of all our Enemies while on the campaign trail. That's far too complex to bother the shallow American voter with. So it's "perfectly reasonable" -- that's really the phrase Pollack used -- to just call them all "Al Qaeda," because it's not as though that term packs any sort of emotional punch or is likely to mislead people in thinking about whether we should withdraw. It's just convenient shorthand for "Arabs who think that we shouldn't be occupying Muslim countries" and, notwithstanding the fact that it's completely false, there is no reason whatsoever to object to McCain's efforts to mislead Americans into thinking that Iraqi insurgents are the same people who attacked us on 9/11. They're all just Al Qaeda - so sayeth our Great Middle East scholar Kenneth Pollack.
But, turn out, it's not just Kenneth Pollack. It's Niall Ferguson, too!
In my previous post, "Glenn Greenwald's Ron Paul Problem--And Ours", I argued that Glenn-following some very important lines of critical inquiry over the past few years-was predisposed not to reocgnize the troubling aspects of Ron Paul's candidacy that Dave Neiwart and Sara Robinson of Orcinus were particularly attuned to and familiar with. Glenn is focused on the rhetorical directness and simplicity of Paul's anti-Iraq War and anti-Imperialist/Imperial Presidency self-presentation. Neiwart and Robinson are focused on Paul's whole package, and the role he plays in the larger world of rightwing extremist influence on American politics.
In 2003, Neiwart-a professional journalist prior to taking up blogging-wrote a Koufax-winning series, Rush, Newspeak and Fascism. Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis [PDF] [Illustrated HTML], which dealt at length with the role of Limbaugh as a righwing demogagic propagandist, and in particular with his role as a transmitter of extremist views into the conservative mainstream. It is Neiwart's familiarity with this entire world-which he had previously covered from the ground up-that informs his views of Ron Paul as well.
Neiwert notes that Limbaugh's closest parallel is probably Father Coughlin, a virulently anti-Semetic radio personality of the 1920s and 30s, however:
Limbaugh, in contrast, has always carefully eschewed conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. Through most of the first decade of his radio career, his primary shtick has been to rail against the government and its supposed takeover of our daily lives. This anti-government propaganda has served one main purpose: To drive a wedge between middle- and lower-class workers and the one entity that has the capability to protect them from the ravages of wealthy class warriors and swarms of corporate wolves.
Although quite different in many ways, there is a clear parallel between Limbaugh and Paul-both serve to repackage and mainstream extremist views that are highly damaging to the fate of workers whom they appeal to on cultural grounds. If anything, Paul has more openly embraced classic conspiricism than Limbaugh has.
So far, none of this has impressed (or even visibly registered on) Glenn. My purpose here is not to dig deeper into the material Dave has already uncovered. Rather, it is to sketch out a framework for how we ought to understand Paul's politics, and why the issues Dave and Sara raise are not secondary concerns which can simply be ignored because of the primacy of the Iraq War and Bush Administration lawlessness. The framework for doing this was also introduced in the previous diay-it is Benjamin Barber's analysis of ethno-relgious tribalism and corporate globalization in his book, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. Barber argues that both forces, although ostensibly oppossed to one another, actually work synergistically to undermine democratic republicanism, the only truly viable way for people to democratically and collectively control the larger outlines of our collective destiny. Barber's analysis helps clarify why Paul's opposition to Bushism is, in the long run, more injurious to the progressive cause than it is helpful. That is the argument developed on the flip.
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