When all the talk is said and done, one thing remains perfectly clear: Obama may have changed the name of the war on terrorism, but he hasn't changed anything else. It's still the fundamental framework for US foreign policy, and because it is, it's important for us to understand just how utterly foolish and self-destructive that framework is. Not to mention how that framework is related to the elite plan to destroy America's middle class, and return us to the Dark Ages, when human life for all but the elite was indeed, "nasty, brutish, and short".
Self & Other
To do so, I'd like to start by taking not one, but two steps back to take in the big picture. One of the widespread themes of 20th Century social science is that the self is constituted or created in tandem with the not-self, or the other. In psychology, Freud gave us the Oedipal conflict and Jung gave us the shadow, and every level of analysis up from their-social psychology, small group psychology, small group sociology, mass sociology, cultural anthropology, you name it, has developed its own versions, its own ways of describing and/or analyzing this phenomena. At every level of analysis, the social scientists tell us some version of the same truth: we are who we are at least partially by virtue of who we are not-and this is a process that will magnify small differences or even manufacture them if real ones cannot be found. Because we define ourselves primarily in contrast to others close at hand, we also often blind ourselves to how much we have in common, as well.
So that's the picture two steps back. What does that mean for us? It means we need to look at ourselves as a nation, and realize that the need for self-definition creates the need for others who are "other".
(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!
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