Conventional wisdom remains that our president is a wimp, spineless, etc., which flies in the face of jujitsu moments like this (hat tip Marc Cooper):
And that’s not to deny that Obama, in his way, makes use of political theater, which is what that health care summit was. But taking the opportunity to call out Republicans on their nonsense for six hours on national TV — is that a meaningless exercise or a cave-in? I don’t think so. Give the man a bit of credit already.
“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” This was one of Howard Zinn’s famous bon mots, but heaven forbid that a liberal like me should dissent from the unanimous chorus of praise from the left in the wake of Zinn’s death last week.
Michael Kazin’s withering 2004 critique of A People’s History of the United States, published in Dissent no less, says everything I wish to say.
History from below is a noble and important mode of scholarship, but as Kazin points out, there are other historians who have taken up the task more insightfully and scrupulously than Zinn, who proposed a one-note and drastically oversimplified view. Zinn’s “ruling elite is a transhistorical entity, a virtual monolith,” Kazin writes; “neither its interests nor its ideology change markedly from the days when its members owned slaves and wore knee-britches to the era of the Internet and Armani.” Moreover, “By Zinn’s account, the modern left made no errors of judgment, rhetoric, or strategy. He never mentions the Communist Party’s lockstep praise of Stalin or the New Left’s fantasy of guerilla warfare. Radical activists simply failed to muster enough clear-eyed troops to pierce through the enemy’s mighty, sophisticated defenses.” (This Guardian obit, via Oliver Kamm, cites critiques of Zinn from Eric Foner and Michael Kammen, making clear that Kazin is not the only credentialed historian willing to speak up on this.)
Note that Kazin doesn’t harp on Zinn’s lack of “objectivity,” which is a red herring. A historical narrative can be opinionated without being tendentious.
A tribute by earlofhuntingdon on Firedoglake asserts:
Howard Zinn challenged orthodoxy, he challenged comfortable perspectives and asked awkward questions. More importantly, he made YOU ask “Why?”, something many of us stop doing after the age of three. His model for doing so made it too uncomfortable to accept a simple, parental-like dismissal of, “Because I said so.”
There are plenty of orthodoxies and comfortable perspectives on the left that Zinn never challenged; there are many awkward questions he never asked of his own side. He was thoroughly a part of the fanatical milieu of Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, and signed on to all of their dubious Israel-Palestine pronouncements in recent years. And far from being skeptical by nature, Zinn was in fact credulous, as his blurb in praise of 9/11 conspiracy crank David Ray Griffin shows (“admirable and painstaking research”). The notion that he and his supporters have a monopoly on the qualities of intellectual curiosity and truth-seeking — this too is a comfortable perspective and an orthodoxy, and it should be challenged.
PS — Case in point, this sentimental homage to Zinn (and Chomsky) by Fred Branfman. The elevation of these men into “more than people,” into “some of the most important nouns of our life,” borders on frightening and bears no resemblance whatsoever to critical thought. And Branfman’s portrait of Chomsky bears no resemblance to Chomsky’s actual record.
PPS — In this NYT story, Jack Healy refers to Chomsky as a “liberal political activist,” which is flatly incorrect. Chomsky has directed some of his most bilious attacks against liberals and liberalism, in stark contrast to his apologetic, mealy-mouthed opinion of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and other unsavory figures.
The Jews had always been a problem in European countries. They had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole Governments to ransom. Even after their massacre by the Nazis of Germany, they survived to continue to be a source of even greater problems for the world. The Holocaust failed as a final solution.
That is Mahathir Mohamed, former authoritarian prime minister of Malaysia, not only giving his endorsement to the Nazi Holocaust, but also lamenting the fact that it didn’t succeed in wiping out every Jew. The remarks were just delivered at the General Conference for the Support of Al Quds (Jerusalem).
I don’t know who attended this conference — and presumably sat in respectful silence as Mahathir uttered those words. I do know that Mahathir Mohamed has positioned himself as a global leader on Palestine solidarity, and that American “leftists” such as Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party 2008 presidential candidate, have attended past events, such as the International Conference to Criminalise War and the Forum and Exhibition on Gaza Genocide, in which Mahathir has played a prominent role.
Very often we hear that Jews and allies who raise the issue of antisemitism are merely employing a “tactic” — i.e., making it up, crying wolf, attempting to silence criticism of Israel. If so, they’re doing an ineffectual job, for there’s no silence on the issue whatsoever.
And there shouldn’t be silence: Israel should be held to account for its human rights abuses, authoritarian practices and land-grabbing in the territories it occupies. (The record of Hamas toward Gaza Palestinians is hardly better [pdf], one must add.)
But Palestine solidarity activists who give Mahathir Mohamed a hearing, elevate him as a spokesperson for their movement, and congratulate themselves for their morally superior stance cannot feign surprise and outrage when they’re taken to task. And to the extent that they disallow and discredit all mention of antisemitism, it is they who are doing the silencing.
Josh Marshall and Marc Cooper make good sense on the Massachusetts aftermath, and although I remain a staunch Obama supporter, I can agree with this from Cooper:
Obama conceded way too much power to a feckless and literally corrupt Congress. He pandered to such dolts as Baucus and Lieberman instead of going to the Hill early on and sternly warning his delegation that he was elected on a mandate of real change and real change is what he wanted and wanted NOW.
True enough. But most of the other analyses I’ve seen amount to: “Obama didn’t affirm my worldview at every step during the first year, therefore his presidency is a flop,” and on and on. That’s the gist of this post by Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine. Positively oozing with self-importance, Lerner’s screed hinges on the ludicrous suggestion, taken as a mere given, that the MA election went down as it did because Obama failed to govern like a movement leftist.
As long as I’m discussing stuff from my past: I interned for Tikkun in 1993. And I still identify with the ideal of Judaism and social justice, the mode of Jewish political engagement that drew me strongly toward Tikkun in the first place. But the last thing President Obama should do is to start expounding the worldview of Michael Lerner. It’s not as if there’s any danger of it actually happening, but just for the record.
Lerner is in some ways a complex case. To the right-wing smear artists of Discover the Networks, he’s a rabid anti-Israel ideologue on par with Yasser Arafat, although in a list of his books they of course omit The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left, which would conflict with their caricature. To the editors of Palestine Solidarity Review, Lerner represents “the vanguard of the Zionist state” and wants more than anything “to keep Palestinians in their place, as as a subordinated colonized people.” So take your pick.
Normally I feel drawn to thinkers so wildly misrepresented by both the far right and the far left. But Lerner has taken what was a promising forum for ideas back in the ’80s and ’90s and flushed it. Even as far back as my internship, he was starting to turn the magazine into a platform for his own self-aggrandizement.
But he did want to move the left away from its bad habits and build something new. He published fresh, original thinking by the likes of Jay Rosen and Todd Gitlin. Today? He’s publishing James Petras on Venezuela. As Judeosphere has noted, Petras busies himself by identifying powerful Jews in what he calls the Zionist Power Configuration, and puts the word “genocide” in quotes when referring to Darfur. This is someone whose work has been trashed even in the ultra-left Monthly Review, but Lerner features him at great length. Lerner is also a dabbler in 9/11 Truth; he put his name to this document alongside Cynthia McKinney, David Ray Griffin and other cranks.
Read the posts on the Tikkun blog and you’ll find Obama being smeared as a “rightist” and a person without principles. But just keep in mind the cretins that Tikkun sees fit to highlight in its space — and Lerner’s contorted, barely readable justifications for doing so — and ask yourself: Who is the principled one?
About 15 years ago, when the Clinton administration sent troops to Haiti to restore the democratically elected left-populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, I joined a small group of hard-left demonstrators in a number of pitiful marches against the intervention. For the life of me, today I cannot tell you why.
George Packer, writing in Dissent, supported the intervention, and soon after, the magazine published a letter from me in strong disagreement. Packer replied back and tore me to shreds. That’s not how I saw it at the time, but it’s true. Unfortunately I don’t have these materials handy to post online.
My stance wasn’t entirely crackers. The U.S. had a long and dismal recent record in Haiti, propping up dictators, backing the Revolutionary Front for Advancement and Progress in Haiti (FRAPH), a grotesquely named right-wing death squad, and so forth. My leftist allies and I figured that in light of all that, any U.S. military intervention could only do harm. In other words, the stance of Hugo Chavez right now. What we refused to acknowledge was that the White House was pursuing a noble policy, even as the CIA was pursuing ignoble policies through the back channel — a fact that ultimately gave FRAPH leader Emmanuel “Toto” Constant safe harbor in my own fair city, in nearby Queens. (Constant was found guilty of grand larceny and mortgage fraud in 2008 and was handed a stiff sentence, with his Haiti crimes taken into account.)
All this to say that Haiti has been on my mind for a long time, though my outlook has evolved. Today the same myths persist — Chavez and the dinosaur left blast U.S. “occupation” while the Bill O’Reilly right blasts all aid attempts as a waste and Haiti as hopeless. Nick Kristof demolishes the latter in an essential column. In short, Haiti is poor thanks to crippling debt, rampant deforestation, years of U.S.-backed dictatorship, on and on. Kristof writes:
…Haiti in recent years has been much better managed under President René Préval and has shown signs of being on the mend.
Far more than most other impoverished countries — particularly those in Africa — Haiti could plausibly turn itself around. It has an excellent geographic location, there are no regional wars, and it could boom if it could just export to the American market. [...] [L]et’s challenge the myth that because Haiti has been poor, it always will be. That kind of self-fulfilling fatalism may be the biggest threat of all to Haiti, the real pact with the devil.
From reading Robert Greenwald’s antiwar website Rethink Afghanistan, or the work of pacifist Derrick Crowe, one of RA’s house bloggers, you would think that Obama’s plan is to reenact the My Lai massacre on a regular basis and maybe drink the blood of the victims in ritualistic triumph. Crowe writes:
I held my nose and voted for President Obama last year, fully understanding he planned to send roughly 12,000 troops to Afghanistan, fully aware that he would have to be resisted, protested, cajoled and boxed in if we were to have hope of true change….
At least Crowe, unlike Michael Moore, is honest enough to acknowledge Obama’s clearly stated campaign position rather than moan about a supposed betrayal. He goes on:
After reading this [Nobel] speech, I can honestly say I regret my vote for him. No, I don’t regret it: I repent of it.[Emphasis in original.]
Oh, really now. While Crowe is rending his garments and hurling every charge in the book at the new American president, he might want to say something about the routine carnage being caused by Islamist militants in Pakistan, or read about UN statistics establishing that the majority of Afghan civilian deaths in recent months are the result of insurgent action, not U.S. or NATO action. These things by themselves do not justify a U.S. escalation, but they form the context in which Obama reached his decision. And Crowe, as someone who condemns violence in all forms and bears witness to injustice, ought to say more about it.
It’s worth reading thisChristian Science Monitor piece about Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools, a man who’s been doing humanitarian work on the ground in Afghanistan for nearly two decades. While Mortenson had some sharp criticisms of how the White House reached its troop-surge decision, he is not anti-military per se. In fact, by his own account he’s acted as an unofficial Pentagon advisor, helping put civilian welfare and civilian infrastructure at the top of the agenda:
Mortenson says his respect for US commanders has grown immeasurably. [...] “Our military is now actually ahead of the curve, not behind it,” he says.
And then this:
Jamal Meer, a shura elder in Paktia Province in the east, says if more US soldiers are assigned, they should be concentrated on the border with Pakistan. But if “the other kind of soldiers are sent,” he says, referring to National Guard troops with expertise in civil engineering and farming, their presence as teachers would be welcomed.
Part of McChrystal’s request specifically asks for soldiers with skills beyond warfighting.
Skills beyond warfighting. This is what will make or break Obama’s Afghan strategy. And it’s one of the many complexities that Derrick Crowe’s rigid, morally one-sided analysis doesn’t account for.
Um, no, says Nate Silver, one of the most keen and thorough minds in progressive American politics. More of Silver’s case here. And here. Rather than rehash his analysis I’ll just quote his conclusion: that the Senate health care bill, even with all its considerable shortcomings, could be “the largest social welfare program to be implemented since the Great Society.”
And yet I just listened to Keith Olbermann, in a typically melodramatic “Special Comment,” urge progressives to work against it. And far from stopping there, Olbermann brayed about the prospect of a 2012 primary challenge to President Obama.
Look, there’s a lot about Olbermann I respect. But this is reverse-Limbaughism, I’m sorry. From the self-enamored delivery to the spewing of what amounts to misinformation. (Again, read Silver.) As we near the one-year mark of Obama’s term, progressives need to start thinking past tantrum politics and stop feeding what could amount to a self-fulfilling prophecy on Obama’s failure. Jonathan Cohn said it best: the left is playing with fire.
I didn’t object to George Bush because he claimed that there was “evil” in the world. I objected to George Bush because there was so much evil that he didn’t see, and he was awful at prosecuting the evil he did see. I objected to George Bush’s foreign policy because it married a freshman’s view of idealism (Big talk on human rights) with a profane, dishonest take one realism (We don’t torture.) It’s weak to look two presidents, see them both use the word “evil,” and then conclude that they’re the same.
I expect Obama to be who he campaigned as. But more than that, I expect him to actually think about the world. I expect him to be curious, deliberative, and cool-headed. That’s who he is. I often disagree with him. But I don’t regret a thing. I don’t understand these people. It’s like they thought he’d go to Oslo, hand over the launch codes, and offer twenty Texas virgins in exchange for a pledge from Al’Qaeda to stop being mean to us.
In the end, no, Obama did not merit the Nobel, but on account of the newness of his presidency (as he himself said), not on account of his principled use of military force. But to those on the left who scoff at a wartime president receiving a peace prize: it is far more outrageous that John Pilger and Arundhati Roy, both deeply unprincipled and unmoored advocates of violence from the left, received the Sydney Peace Prize.
The real purpose of these 300,000 [sic] soldiers is to make Obama look tough as he heads toward the next US presidential election.
[...]
There is nothing else to Obama’s Afghan strategy.
Actually, there is nothing else to Parenti’s analysis of Obama’s Afghan strategy. And the careless error on the number of troops, still yet to be corrected by HuffPo, is in fact telling: for Parenti, that number and other such details don’t matter at all. What matters is his shallow, one-note narrative and his melodramatic, slanderous claim that President Obama is about to “kill many thousands of Afghan civilians.”
We get no real analysis of Afghanistan or Pakistan. No, it all comes down to Obama doing a “masculine war dance.” I’d like to point out once again that on Monday, someone did a masculine war dance all over the Moon Market in Lahore, where women were shopping for clothes. Survivors who tried to flee the scene were raked with gunfire. Attacks like these are happening nearly every day, and they far outstrip any Predator drone strike in terms of immorality. And let’s be clear: the perpetrators are not avenging the deaths of Muslims. They are causing the deaths of Muslims.
So instead of condemning a hypothetical civilian death toll from Obama’s escalation (when U.S.-provided military security in the villages might in fact reduce the civilian death toll currently being racked up by the Taliban), Parenti ought to acknowledge the carnage in Lahore, and Peshawar, and elsewhere throughout this region, voice a bit of moral outrage if he has any decency, and allow that maybe, just maybe, this spectacle of extremist violence had something to do with Obama’s decision.
