Old Hickory's Weblog

An Old Right isolationist take on the Fort Hood massacre

2009-11-11T18:00:00.000-08:00

It's not surprising to me that Pat Robertson is banging the Islamophobia drums.

I'm not surprised, either, that Antiwar.com's editorial director Justin Raimondo is also jumping to rightwing conclusions over the Fort Hood shooting untethered from any factual basis. But I thought I would link to his post The War at Home: Jihad at Ft. Hood 11/09/09 for a couple of reasons. One is that it shows how on this particular subject, he's willing to leap to conclusions based on scarce evidence. It's also an example of his Old Right isolationism, in which he simultaneously sounds like he's trying to give an empathetic explanation of why an American Muslim would think himself justified in killing American soldiers and also promote a paranoid rightwing notion of a super-efficient Al Qa'ida having deadly sleeper agents prowling among us here in the Homeland. In his opening paragraphs, he could be mistaken for Michelle Malkin:

It’s been grimly amusing to watch the liberal mainstream media spin the murder spree at Ft. Hood. They are trying mightily to pretend it was all about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s inner psychological turmoil, given his job as an Army psychiatrist whose task it was to counsel troubled veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. He is depicted as a victim of post-traumatic stress syndrome, even though he was never in combat. His identification with his clients’ suffering, his poor job evaluations, even his lack of a wife are all blamed for his rampage, which killed 13 (so far) and wounded dozens of others.

In order to give this narrative of victimization credibility, the touchy-feely school of thought has to ignore the mountains of evidence that – given his premises – Hasan acted rationally and there was nothing inexplicable about his deadly spasm of violence.

Raimondo has already decided that Maj. Hasan is guilty of the shootings (a reasonable enough conclusion at this point) but also that he did so for jihadist religious-political reasons:

In 2001, before his transfer to Ft. Hood, Hasan attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., where Anwar al-Awlaki – recently banned from Britain due to his open advocacy of attacks on British troops in Afghanistan and his support for organizations deemed terrorist – preached and held sway. Two of Hasan’s fellow congregants were Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour, both among the 9/11 hijackers. A third hijacker attended the radical imam’s services in California.

These might be potentially interesting connections, if we knew a lot more than we do about the shooter's motivation than we actually do. Until then, it's speculation. Raimondo proceeds immediately to wilder speculation:

It is perfectly possible Hasan met the two and was recruited into al-Qaeda, a "sleeper" to be awakened at the right moment. The nut-job known as "Azzam the American," a Muslim convert from a Southern California Jewish family, issued a statement not long ago calling on Muslim Americans – specifically Muslim members of the armed services, of which there are thousands – to rise up and strike the infidels on the home front.

It's also "perfectly possible" that most of our TV pundits are space alien Pod People, too. But I would actually say we have more evidence for the Pod Pundit idea than we have for the idea that Hasan was an Al Qa'ida sleeper agent recruited by 9/11 hijackers.

He continues, sounding even more like Michelle Malkin:

The American-born Hasan, son of Palestinian parents who emigrated to the U.S. sometime in the 1960s, joined the military against the wishes of his family. Here is someone who was brought up in this country, presumably immersed in the culture of the West, and yet still responded to the call of al-Qaeda to make war on his homeland. With millions of native-born Muslims in this country, how many are similarly susceptible to Osama bin Laden’s appeal to strike at the "far enemy" – who is, for them, quite near?

This, of course, is just the question the neoconservatives have been asking ever since the Twin Towers were downed, and their answer is, oddly, the same as al-Qaeda’s. Both, for different reasons, are hoping for a crackdown by the U.S. government, starting with the banning of Muslims from our military. If we are indeed embarked on a religious war against Islam – and it sure seems like it – who can argue against this? The wet dream of the neocons and their ostensible opposite numbers in bin Laden’s cave is that the authorities will one day carry out Michelle Malkin’s vision of a repeat of FDR’s wartime internment camps, albeit this time filled with American Muslims instead of Japanese-Americans. That would certainly make both the editors of Commentary magazine and al-Qaeda’s top commanders quite happy. [my emphasis]

Was Hasan responding "to the call of al-Qaeda to make war on his homeland"? We don't know that, and neither does Raimondo. But it didn't stop him from embracing Malkin's suggestion about rounding up potentially disloyal Americans and putting them in preventive detention. It wouldn't at all surprise me for neocons to defend such an action. But it's certainly a broad generalization he makes to say it's their "wet dream".

And Raimondo gives us an example of how an antiwar postion can simultaneously be a xenophobic, rightwing conspiracy theory.

Our wars abroad are a diversion away from the main front in the effort to defeat al-Qaeda, which is right here at home. There is no doubt in my mind that bin Laden’s legions have planted their agents on our soil, and these murderous Myrmidons will spring forth fully armed when the time is ripe. Our borders, our security measures around such facilities as nuclear plants, and our intelligence-gathering methods are the weak links in our defense, made all the more so by the massive diversion of resources to a series of futile, draining, and unwinnable overseas conflicts. [my emphasis]

Antiwar.com is nominally a "libertarian"-type forum featuring antiwar writing from a variety of poltical positions from left to right. The Antiwar Radio feature frequently has sensible commentators associated more with the left side of the political spectrum, including human rights attorney Scott Horton, historian Gareth Porter, Glenn Greenwald and Tom Hayden.

Raimondo is also an "adjunct scholar" of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Ludwig von Mises was a hardline rightwing economist who was also an editor of the John Birch Society's American Opinion magazine. The founder and chairman of the Institute is neo-Confederate Lew Rockwell, whose articles can be found in abundance at his LewRockwell.com site. The site also features neo-Confederate Abraham Lincoln revisionism in its King Lincoln Archives.

Chip Berlet writes about the Mises Institute in Into the Mainstream Intelligence Report Summer 2003. "Around the country, ideas that originated on the hard right or in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists are finding their way into the mainstream," he writes. And he identifies the Mises Institute as one of the groups performing that service for the extreme right.

Antiwar.com identifies itself as a project of our parent foundation, the Randolph Bourne Institute," whose main reason for existence appears to be funding Antiwar.com. Antiwar.com's mission statement also declares, "Our dedication to libertarian principles, inspired in large part by the works and example of the late Murray N. Rothbard, is reflected on this site." Justin Raimondo is the author of an admiring Rothbard biography, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (2000). Berlet describes Rothbard's "libertarian" approach as follows:

A key player in the [Ludwig von Mises] institute for years was the late Murray Rothbard, who worked with [Lew] Rockwell closely and co-edited a journal with him. The institute's Web site includes a cybershrine to Rothbard, a man who complained that the "Officially Oppressed" of American society (read, blacks, women and so on) were a "parasitic burden," forcing their "hapless Oppressors" to provide "an endless flow of benefits."

"The call of 'equality,'" he wrote, "is a siren song that can only mean the destruction of all that we cherish as being human." Rothbard blamed much of what he disliked on meddling women. In the mid-1800s, a "legion of Yankee women" who were "not fettered by the responsibilities" of household work "imposed" voting rights for women on the nation. Later, Jewish women, after raising funds from "top Jewish financiers," agitated for child labor laws, Rothbard adds with evident disgust. The "dominant tradition" of all these activist women, he suggests, is lesbianism.

Other sources of Old Right isolationist commentary include Taki's Magazine, The American Conservative (which like Antiwar.com also publishes liberal and left war criticism) and Chronicles Magazine (not to be confused with The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Antiwar.com's mission statement claims that while acknowledging their Rothbardian point of view, they take their journalistic role seriously. Having the editorial director publish a paranoid, evidence-free claim about a sophisticated network of Al Qa'ida sleeper agents in the United States does anything but enhance their reputation for journalistic seriousness.

Tags: isolationism, justin raimondo, old right

Do they think Jesus doesn't want people to have health insurance?

2009-11-11T17:48:00.000-08:00

This if from two months ago. But it's still an impressive fact to me that the Christian Right actively opposes health care reform, as Jacqueline Salmon reports in Opposition to Health-Care Reform Revives Christian Right Washington Post 09/09/09. They saw putting abortion into the health care reform picture as a key part of their goal. They must be happy that the Stupak Coathanger Amendment passed the House last week:

As the president prepares to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night to press for health-care reform, conservative Christian leaders are rallying their troops to oppose him, with online town hall meetings, church gatherings, fundraising appeals, and e-mail and social networking campaigns. FRC Action, the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council, has scheduled a webcast Thursday night for tens of thousands of supporters in which House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other speakers will respond to the president's health-care address. ...

After seeing their bread-and-butter issue of abortion take a back seat during the election last year, the Christian right has been a prime force in moving it back to the front row by focusing on it as a potential part of health-care reform. ...

A coalition of three dozen conservative Christian organizations, representing 5 million people and calling itself the Freedom Federation, announced its formation last month. It has taken on opposition to health-care reform as its first issue. [my emphasis]

Do you think they are using some weird translation of the Gospels in which Jesus doesn't heal the sick but instead goes around making people sick?

In addition to getting the anti-abortion Stupak Coathanger Amendment adopted, this article is a reminder that the Christian Right is motivated to action by conservative issues generally, not just ones that are more narrowly religion-related.

Tags: christian right, health care reform

Parsing the available information on the Fort Hood massacre

2009-11-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

"Updates to the investigation surrounding Thursday's shooting were scarce Monday," writes Amanda Kim Stairrett speaking of last week's horrific shootings at Fort Hood, in FBI, CID continuing investigation Killeen Daily Herald 11/10/09.

But that hasn't stopped people from speculating freely. Joe Lieberman, honorary Democrat for reasons that apparently only his colleagues in the Senate can fathom, was on FOX News Sunday talking about having an investigation of "the worst terrorist attack since 9/11." Holy Joe is chairman of the Senate Internal Security Committee and his fellow Democratic members apparently can't say no to him over anything. So he can probably have his hearing if he really wants.

But the publicly available facts about the case are still sparse. And what is being confidently reported is often contradictory and confusing. Did the shooter have one pistol or two? Was Officer Kimberley Munley shot three times or five? Did Munley take down the shooter herself or did her partner Mark Todd deliver the shot that brought him down?

The body count seems to be stable in the reporting at 13. The Army has publicly released the names of the dead after the required notice to their families (presumably). Amanda Kim Stairrett's report linked above says that 15 injured in the attack were still in the hospital Monday afternoon and 27 had been discharged. She doesn't mention how many injured may have been treated on the spot and not taken to the hospital, if any.

Since the Republicans and others clearly want to use this case to promote Islamophobia, the details of the attack could turn out to be important beyond the legal case against the shooter. If we assume that there was at least one bullet per injury, that means at least 55 rounds were fired. Depending on the time frame and the weapon(s) used, that's possible. There was some early speculation about the possibility of "friendly fire" injuries being involved, i.e., victims wounded by accident by people firing at the shooter. But if Munley was the only responder, or she and her partner the only ones, that seems less likely. Kate Harding writes about some of the reporting problems in Was Kimberly Munley the real Fort Hood hero? Salon 11/09/09, although she almost gets lost in speculating about what various narrative frames might imply about larger cultural issues.

Dana Priest, who's one of the Washington Post's best reporters, has a strange story on the suspect, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan: Fort Hood suspect warned of threats within the ranks 11/10/09. As Taylor Marsh's reaction shows, it's easy to read Priest's article as virtually a warning that he might take violent action. But what the article says is that Hasan gave a presentation in his role as an Army psychiatrist about factors that might cause US Muslim troops to turn against their own forces. As far as those present who heard it, it's not at all clear to me that they had reason to take it as other than face value. Shouldn't Army psychiatrists be talking about such possibilities? In an online chat, Priest confirms that she does think that his listeners should have seen that as a warning of trouble. but then later she concedes that they may have seen no reason to take it as such a warning sign. The slide show Hasan used in that presentation seems long on Qu'rānic verses for a medical presentation. But I don't see any obvious flags that he was somehow trying to validate fratricide (killing other soldiers in your own army) or acts of violence.

This is kind of sad to see, though, from the online chat:

Washington, D.C.: Did the Post ever point out that Timothy McVeigh was Christian? Should we be kicking out all the Christians from the military? All white males?

Dana Priest: I don't remember McVeigh's actions being motivated by his faith. He hated the government. As I recall.

[Sigh!] Actually, there is evidence that McVeigh was influenced by the white supremacist Christian Identity movement, which is very influential in the white supremacist gutter. See Elohim City Anti-Defamation League n/d (2001 or later). But Beltway Village pundits know not to look for religious motivations among non-Muslim domestic far-right terrorists; the default assumption is that they are the proverbial "lone nuts".

In a later story, Post reporter Ann Scott Tyson quotes an anonymous Army source claiming that Hasan did not formally seek to leave military, Army official says 11/11/09.

Here are some of the key factual questions in my mind:

What actually happened at the shooting? Were the victims all hit by bullets from the perpetrator or was "friendly fire" involved?

What was the shooter's motivation? To what extent was this a consciously political or religious act?

Did he have actual accomplices of some sort? By actual accomplices, I mean people that actively enabled him to commit that specific crime. Having heard some radical Islamic preacher may be a clue to his motivations. But that's not the same as an accomplice to crime. Moral responsibility is another question, though it's pure speculation at this point.

How did security at the base fail? If a bunch of people got killed because of preventable failures or shirking of responsibility on the part of base security, that's something that should be addressed. Kimberly Munley is being understandably praised for her heroism. But the current story is that she happened to be in the area having her car repaired and she and her partner heard shots and went to investigate. Munley and Todd may have performed well. But was base security working properly if the first responders were a couple of officers who just happened to be in the area picking up their car?

In connection with that last point, I hope the Army in this case holds those theoretically responsible for security actually responsible, though that doesn't always seem to be our military's approach.

John Nichols in The Nation suggests, Call Joe Lieberman's Bluff; Have a Real Inquiry 11/10/2009. He's referring to HoJo's seeming desire to investigate Muslims in the military. Nichols' point is that an investigation of how the military treats Muslim soldiers and the various factors including multiple deployments that may contribute to acts like the Fort Hood massacre might actually be a positive thing, though not exactly what Lieberman is picturing.

I think Nichols is half-right. We not only need to know the actual circumstances around this killing. The military needs to take a new attitude toward religious extremism in the military, especially among the officer corps. One of the questions that needs to be officially asked in some is whether the extensive Christian fundamentalist proselytizing that the military allows in its ranks led the military to look the other way at signs of religious/political extremism among officers in general?

Conservatives are grousing that "political correctness" - which to them apparently means "white people having to get along with non-whites" - is the reason that the military isn't exercising more diligence over Muslim soldiers and officers. But if it is the case that the military has been carelessly overlooking signs of Islamic extremism, my guess is that the desire to look the other way at Christianist political extremism among officers is likely to have more to do with it than the "political correctness" bogeyman.

One of the legitimate criticisms made of the military is that even now, nearly 19 years after Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait and the US military buildup in the Middle East for the Gulf War started, the Army still has a limited number of fluent Arabic speakers in its ranks. It's conceivable - though this is pure speculation - that the need for Arabic speakers could contribute to overly-accommodating attitudes toward danger signs in some cases.

The US military is experienced at trying to cover up its own mistakes. If lax base security was involved in the Fort Hood shootings, or friendly fire deaths, or bad responses to danger signals about the shooting suspect Hasan, or general failures in the military being alert to religious extremism among the officer core, the Army's instinct is going to be to cover that up as much as possible. Doing so may serve Army officers' careerist goals. But cover-ups will also feed conspiracy theories about deadly networks or super-efficient Al Qa'ida sleeper cells hiding behind every corner.

Tags: fort hood massacre

It was 20 years ago today

2009-11-09T00:10:00.000-08:00

The fall of the Berlin Wall

Tags: berlin+wall, berliner+mauer

Hope but verify: Health care reform, historic moments and the Democratic Party

2009-11-09T00:05:00.001-08:00

The passage of the health care reform by the House of Representatives is an historic and important moment. Josh Marshall gives the safe and convention take on it in One Vote on Health Care Reform TPM 11/08/09. But the Stupak Amendment taking another step toward banning women's right to decide on abortion is a reminder that it's not done until it's done. Tbogg calls the Stupak Amendment the Vagina Added Tax. So my new personal slogan for health care, Obama and the Democrats generally is "hope but verify".

Health care has to pass the Senate and be signed by the President. Obama's leadership in those last crucial days before the House vote was aimed, so far as we know from the news reporting, at pushing the liberal Democrats to still make concessions to the corporate Blue Dogs, even on something so essential as the public option, without which the bill would be a corporate gift that wouldn't provide adequate coverage and would actually be an unpopular program for consumers. And on the Stupak Amendment, the White House apparently cared not the least if women's rights had to be sacrificed to make a last-minute concession to Christian Rightists who will never support Obama anyway.

To be respectable in the Beltway Village, Democrats always have to slap a hippie (i.e., vote for something conservative even though they'll never get conservative votes for doing so)

Digby in The Lesson Hullabaloo 11/08/09 anaylzes the Stepak Amendment as reflecting the leaden insistence of the Beltway Village consensus that progressive political ideas cannot be validated as such. We call call the mainstream left-of-center position "liberal" in the United States in a usage going back to the post-First World War era that would be eccentric is pretty much the whole rest of the world. In the new "center-right" coalition in Germany, the conservative part is "center" and the liberal party (that is actually one of the parties in the Liberal International) is the "right" part of the coalition.

But in the US, it's perfectly acceptable thinking within the Republican Party to conflate left and liberal and communist and fascist and socialist and Nazi into one undifferentiated image of evil. So the best improvement in generic political labeling we can probably hope for in the US right now is to have more Democrats and progressive activists legitimize the basic concepts we call progressive or liberal in the US, such as defending the people against anti-social exercises of corporate power like the current insurance industry attempt to block health care reform.

Digby in her piece is addressing one of the peculiarities of the current political moment. The need for New Deal, Great Society, "liberal" types programs and political leadership is more clear and urgent and potentially very popular now than at any time at least since 1964 and possibly since 1932. We're in the middle of what Jerry Brown might call a "democratic moment", in which popular pressure is focused on having government respond realistically to real needs. These moment can last for months or years. But they don't last forever.

So in the abstract, it seems that raw ambition and opportunism would be inspiring Democratic politicians to sound like latter-day Franklin Roosevelts and Bob La Follettes. Instead, we've got the Democratic Party having to be pulled kicking and screaming into health care reform, which is not only popular and necessary but has the obvious potential to provide the basis of Democratic Party political dominance for decades.

Obviously, the dependence of our political system on huge amounts of corporate money is part of the explanation. But there is also a psychological-ideological aspect of the dilemma that can't just be explained by cynically assuming that big money dominates politics and always will, a favorite position of "concern troll" commenters at leftie blogs. The collapse in quality of our national press is a huge factor in this, as well. The fact that Rupert Murdoch has such an enormous presence in news media in the Anglo-Saxon world is no small matter when it comes to having a corporate-friendly spin on the news. But again, the dysfunction of our star journalists can't be explained by some rational corporate lobbying function. Their groupthink is just too bizarrely weird to be fully explained that way.

Digby gives a good description of how the current political environment in Congress, despite the national popular mood, is heavily weighted toward shafting the "liberal" position in exactly the way we say play out with the Stupak Amendment:

Universal health care is something any decent, wealthy society shouldn't even have to think twice about. It's a global embarrassment that the United States, the chest thumping superpower, is even having this debate at this late date. It's equally embarrassing that we have put together a Frankenstein of a system [for health care reform] because our democratic government is in league with wealthy interests which are exploiting its people. It's hard to believe that anyone would call that system liberal, much less socialist, but as you can see every day on Fox news, it's set off a tantrum among a vocal minority that would hardly be less hysterical if aliens from a foreign planet landed in Washington. (And that hysteria is also a tool of the permanent establishment, funded by big money, and used as a way of keeping the debate focused on the right, even if it's taking on an absurdist quality.)

Any legislation such as health care reform must therefore be tempered by a liberal sacrifice, something real, a principle that will make them hate themselves and loathe each other for having done it. It cannot be a clean victory, lest they come to believe they can do more. In the end, the "moral" must always be that you cannot go too far left. [my emphasis]

"The one consistent characteristic" of policy victories for liberal/progressive Democrats over the past 20 years, she writes, "is that they are never unambiguously positive for the left."

Ann Friedman at Tapped talks about the implications of the Sestak Amendment vote in Whose Health Care Victory? 11/08/09.

For Obama's next "historic achievement", can we not make reducing women's rights part of it?

Tags: abortion, democratic party, health care reform, obama administration

Bluff or serious threat?

2009-11-08T00:05:00.000-08:00

If this report from Rupert Murdoch's Sky News is right, this will destroy a great deal of the positive things that the Obama administration has been able to accomplish with a more pragmatic foreign policy.

We've been hearing these reports for years now. The Times of London, also a Murdoch property, used to report every few months that an Israli nuclear attack on Iran was imminent.

But if Israel attacks Iran, no one is going to believe that it occurred without US approval. And American troops in Iraq are likely to pay the highest immediate price outside of Iran.

Tags: israel, iran

Finding "common ground" - on trashing women's rights

2009-11-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

It looks like the Democrats are going to be able to pass a solid health care reform through the House, i.e., one that includes a meaningful public option.

But also one that throws women's right to choose out the window. As Jane Hamsher writes in NARAL and Planned Parenthood: Ineffectiveness Anti-Choice Democrats Can Rely On Huffington Post 11/07/09:

Democrats in Congress have just proudly signed a deal with the Catholic bishops which allows a bunch of old men who have spent the better part of the last century avoiding their own sexual issues to dictate access to abortion services in the House health care bill.

This is what comes of decades of mealy-mouthing on Democratic principles, including the rights of women and the rights of poor people. The Stupak Amendment would block private insurance plans participating in the insurance exchanges that are key to health care reform from covering most abortions.

I hope the Progressive Caucus votes it down because of this. Force Stupak and the anti-choice ~~Blue Dog Democrats~~ Blue Dogs to face killing health care reform in order to trash women's basic rights.

It's disgraceful that the large Democratic majority let this amendment go through.

But this is a success for the "common ground" theocrats who wanted anti-abortionists and the pro-choice majority to find common ground on issues to cooperate on. They've gotten on the only one that was ever an option for them: the "common ground" of working to wipe out women's right to choose on abortion.

"Liberal" Frank Rich may call them "Stalinists" for doing so. But the Republicans are willing to mount primary challenges against Republicans they think are insufficiently conservative. It's long past time the Democrats make a habit of mounting primary challenges at least against Democrats who won't defend the basic principles of the Party.

Tags: abortion, health care reform

More on the Fort Hood killings

2009-11-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

This is kind of a long post about some of my thoughts on the Fort Hood mass murder and the fairly pathetic national press coverage of it. Fortunately, not all the coverage was bad.

I won't try to link to all the articles at the Killeen Daily Herald/KDHNews.com site on the Fort Hood. But reading their articles reminds me of how having reporters familiar with the local scene can provide important context for a event like this. Reporters and TV infotainers blowing in New York or Washington are likely to have to rely very heavily on official spokespeople more than a competent local newspaper would. Knowing which locals can get a straight story and which will just blow smoke in your face is valuable for reporters. And a CNN infotainer isn't going to know that an hour after their plane lands.

But then, our TV infotainers who play reporters generally aren't trying to do actual journalism, either. The journalistic information that gets through is almost incidental.

Chris Hayes tweeted on Friday, "Today's probably a good day to stay clear of cable news." I remember on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Eric Alterman wrote that the networks and cable channels wouldn't have nearly the problems covering the one-year anniversary that they had in covering the original attacks in 2001. Because, he said, "coping" is a story that they can handle. So I'm guessing that the TV "news" will be full of coping stories the next few days.

I do hope some professional journalists pursue the question of why the base commander was telling reporters hours after the attack that the man who, from the current state of reporting, was the sole shooter was actually dead. That's not a minor fact point.

Liberal media critics are starting to focus on the coverage of the Fort Hood killings:

Glenn Greenwald, A media orgy of rumors, speculation and falsehoods Salon 11/06/09 (He gives some credit to a conservative site that had some meaningful criticisms of the coverage along with their usual frivolous kind.)

Jamison Foser, Crazy comparison of the day Media Matters 11/06/09

Eric Boehlert, Newsbusters praise ABC News for getting Ft. Hood shooting report wrong Media Matters 11/06/09

Glenn G on why the early reporting can be disproportionately influential on how people understand the story:

But shouldn't there be some standards governing what gets reported and what is held back? Particularly in a case like this -- which, for obvious reasons, has the potential to be quite inflammatory on a number of levels -- having the major media "report" completely false assertions as fact can be quite harmful. It's often the case that perceptions and judgments about stories like this solidify in the first few hours after one hears about it. The impact of subsequent corrections and clarifications pale in comparison to the impressions that are first formed. Despite that, one false and contradictory claim after the next was disseminated last night by the establishment media with regard to the core facts of the attack.

Sadly, this advice is probably worth following:

I'm obviously ambivalent about the issues of media responsibility raised by all of this. It's difficult to know exactly how the competing interests should be balanced -- between disclosing what one has heard in an evolving news story and ensuring some minimal level of reliability and accuracy. But whatever else is true, news outlets -- driven by competitive pressures in the age of instant "reporting" -- don't really seem to recognize the need for this balance at all. They're willing to pass on anything they hear without regard to reliability -- to the point where I automatically and studiously ignore the first day or so of news coverage on these events because, given how these things are "reported," it's simply impossible to know what is true and what isn't. In fact, following initial media coverage on these stories is more likely to leave one misled and confused than informed. Conversely, the best way to stay informed is to ignore it all -- or at least treat it all with extreme skepticism -- for at least a day. [my emphasis]

And the Radical Right proves once again that a total lack of scruples can provide a short-term advantage in spinning the meaning of events. Or, at least that some people have a total lack of scruples. Sarah Posner reports in Conservatives Stoke Fear of Fifth Column Religion Dispatches 11/06/09. Also from Sarah at Religion Dispatches comes this story about Mike Huckabee supporter and Christian nationalist Rick Scarborough, Religious Right Leader Claims Hasan Motivated By "Animus Toward Christians and Jews" 11/06/09.

Progressives and other cautious news consumers are understandably and commendably concerned about applying the term "terrorism" to the Fort Hood killings. Not every mass murder is an act of terrorism. And not every act of violence by a Muslim or someone with an "Arabic-sounding" name is terrorism, either. And unlike the zealots of the right who are eager to feed Islamophobia, I'm still reserving judgment until I have a more reliable account of the facts. The base commander's statement hours after the attack claiming the shooting suspect was dead really has me wondering what is going on with the Army's providing of information on this case.

That said, it seems to me that what the base and eyewitnesses are reporting about the event certainly has the form of a terrorist act. I won't try to parse the vexed question here of how to define terrorism exactly. But it appears that the shooter targeted a group of soldiers in a crowded facility and intended to kill a number of them without any particular regard to their individual identity. Even if the shooter's motivations were primarily personal or pathological, what is publicly known of the killings at the moment certainly suggests that whatever they were, he staged the action in a way to spread fear. And that's a big part of what terrorism is about.

Having a broken national press certainly complicates understanding an event like this in major ways. The typical press script for Muslim perpetrators is "jihadist", and the Radical Right will encourage such interpretations in every way they can, whether there is a factual basis for it or not. But in the cases of non-Muslim far-right perpetrators, even ones who express explicitly political motivations for their crimes, the favored press script is the "lone nut".

And even when the perpetrator is explicitly motivated by a religious belief, and that happens not just in the case of anti-abortion terrorists but also other far-rightists motivated by Christian Identity beliefs, the major Christian denominations don't feel compelled to make specific condemnations of those acts of "Christian terrorism". Though anti-abortions groups typically do make declarations against the violence, sometimes practically rolling their eyes at their own hypocrisy as they do it.

And as much as those of us who have been critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would like opposition to the war to be somehow pristine, some acts of opposition are not pristine. One symptom of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the problems it was causing more generally in American society was the numerous incidents of "fragging", the slang term then for assassinating unpopular officers in the field, sometimes by tossing a fragmentation grenade into their tent, which is where the term "fragging" came from. While I don't know of anyone who would want to encourage such a thing in any way, we could be missing something important if we just brush such incidents off as "lone nut" actions.

Here's an article from the San Antonio Express-News, Fort Hood shooter's neighbors say he was friendly, but a loner by Scott Huddleston 11/06/09, giving a "lone nut" take on the case. Is there ever a mass shooting case where we don't see this particular kind of stories? The reporter talks to the guy's neighbors, they say we was kind of quiet, seemed to be a loner, they're shocked to hear he might do such a thing. Later investigations into people who actually knew the guy show something different. What would you say to a reporter if your next-door neighbor was accused of being a mass murdered? "Sure, I used to hang out with him all the time and we watched sadistic videos together and talked about jihad." Why do reporters bother with these stories? Why do their editors wave them into print?

Pat Lang seems to be kind of a prick and he doesn't much like of what I have to say, at least not about his romantic fondness for things Confederate. He even invited me once to not quote him even when I agreed with him. But he often has useful things to say. And, prick or not, he actually has a point in Major Hasan's Alienation 11/06/09. Even though he opens with a quote from FOX News, Lang is actually careful about parsing facts (at least when it doesn't have to do with the CSA). He writes:

It is sadly amusing how much people do not want this to be about the man's religion or his Palestinian ancestry.

His relatives understandably want other Americans to believe that he was traumatized by listening to soldiers' stories about the wars. They certainly don't want people to think that there was anything about the atmosphere in his father's house that caused this man to reject the land of his birth and the obligations of his oath.

Lang is not pimping some phony wingnut theory here. He's pointing out that the accused shooter's political and religious outlook may have been major influences on his actions in the killings of which he is accused. While it's also sadly true - but not at all "amusing" to me - that the Christian Right is quick to look for religious motivations in Muslim perpetrators and quick to deny them in the case of religiously motivated Christian terrorists, understanding why people do such things involves looking at them as they are.

"Subject to revision as more becomes known," Lang adds several observations as of the time of his post, including:

- He avoided other officers socially and professionally to the extent he could manage. He avoided women colleagues. He would not be photographed with a woman. He asked his prayer community to find him a wife. They did not do so. He had no visible sexual relationships.

- He was transferred to Hood to do what the Army had trained him to do. Inevitably the Army decided that it was his "turn in the barrel" and sent him orders to deploy to one of combat areas to practise his medical specialty.

- He told people that he did not want to participate in wars against Muslims in a non-Muslim army. He tried to get out of the Army. Not surprisingly, the Army would not hear of that. Security camera video in a convenience store in Killeen, Texas outside the gate of the post shows him wandering around wearing strange garb apparently intended to set him apart in that town full of soldiers, present and past.

- He is reported to have uttered "Allahu Akbar" before he opened fire on what he seems to have seen as God's enemies.

I don't want to detract anything from the actions of Officer Kimberley Munley, who is reported to have stopped the shooter by wounding him with her gun and being wounded herself. But given the false information that even the base commander himself has been putting out - e.g., the accused shooter was dead, hours after the event - I'm worried that it may be a bit premature to turn her into a plaster saint, like this Huffington Post article seems to do: Kimberly Munley: The Hero Cop Who Ended The Fort Hood Rampage 11/06/09? Remember Pat Tillman? Remember Jessica Lynch? See Jessica Lynch Sets Record Straight: The Former POW Discusses Her Testimony In Pat Tillman Probe CBSNews.com 04/25/07.

There is the question of whether there were "friendly fire" injuries in the Fort Hood shootings. Current reports say that the shooter had two pistols, one semi-automatic. It's also my understanding that under base rules, the soldiers waiting for their shots and eye exams would not have been armed and that only police were allowed to carry their guns walking around the base. So it's not like there was a room full of armed soldiers returning massive fire at the shooter. Again, nothing at all against Munley. I just want to hear an accurate story.

I wonder at this point if it's advisable for Islamic groups to relexively issue statements condemning such actions. CNN's Tom Cohen reports in Alleged shooter's name prompts response from American Muslims 11/06/09 that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) thought they needed to issue a special statement of condemnation just because the first reports naming the alleged shooter said he had a name that sounded kind of Muslim:

Ibrahim Hooper knows the drill.

When news first broke Thursday that a shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, killed and injured U.S. soldiers, the national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote a statement of condemnation.

He only sent it out later, when reports emerged that the alleged shooter's name was Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

"As soon as we saw what appeared to be a Muslim name, we issued our statement," Hooper said. "Until that time, we were praying that no Muslim would be involved."

That's the reality of crisis management for the Muslim-American community, said Hooper, who handles communications for the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group.

Even without confirmation that the alleged gunman was Muslim -- there was no immediate determination of any religious affiliation for Hasan -- the mere reporting of a possible Muslim name required an immediate comment, he said.

"That's unfortunately the world we live in nowadays," Hooper said. "So often, Muslims are accused of not condemning these kind of acts."

But the reality is our xenophobes and Muslim-haters aren't going to stop condemning all Muslims for the acts of some. And their accusations that Muslims aren't loud enough in condemning violent acts by other Muslims is just a way of saying that all Muslims are guilty. Now it's reached the point that a group like CAIR is quick to condemn acts of violence by a Muslim even before it's clear that a Muslim is actually even a suspect! The Islamophobes will just say, yeah, that's fine, but they aren't enough Muslims condemning such acts and they aren't condemning them with enough condemnation.

It seems to me that CAIR's action in this case only encourage our sad excuse for a press corps to expect that the ordinary Muslims do have some special obligation to condemn violence by anyone with an Arabic-sounding name, an obligation going way beyond what American Christians consider themselves obligated to do. Does the National Council of Catholic Bishops issue a special statement every time someone named Murphy is accused of a murder? Does the Southern Baptist Convention, the country's largest Protestant denomination, issue formal condemnations every time a Baptist is accused of being involved in a shooting, political or not?

No, and there's no reason they should. What Christian denominations should do more of, though, is to address the very real problem of far-right Christian terrorism in a more serious way. Calling a permanent moratorium on frivolous comparisons between abortions and the Holocaust - most of which have more-or-less blatant anti-Semitic overtones - would be a good start.

Tags: fort hood massacre

Doctrine as a political force

2009-11-07T00:05:00.000-08:00

I've been doing some research into the prominent philosophical disputes in the early years of Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR in its German initials). Some of the disputes that became actually political issues and thus part of the history of internal dissent in the DDR seem pretty arcane at first glance. For instance, did Karl Marx derive his dialectical method from Hegel, or did he derive it from his study of Ludwig Feuerbach and other materialist philosophers and then reject Hegel's dialectic based on his own, independently-developed version?

With particular reference to the history of the world Communist movement, Stephen Walt in Birds of a feather: flocking together or flying apart? Foreign Policy Online 10/28/09 suggests that political movements that give a central place to doctrine are particularly subject to splits based on doctrine which may override the pragmatic political common interests that might otherwise be perceived:

Unlike liberalism, which emphasizes the need to tolerate a wide range of political views, political ideologies that rest on a single authoritative interpretation of "truth" are inherently divisive rather than unifying. In particular, ideologies that call for adherents to obey the leadership because it wields the "correct" interpretation of the faith (whether in Marxism, Christianity, Islam, etc.) tend to foster intense rivalries among different factions and between different leaders, each of whom must claim to be the "true" interpreter of the legitimating ideology. In such movements, ideological schisms are likely to be frequent and intense, because disagreements look like apostasy and a betrayal of the faith. Instead of flocking together, these "birds of a feather" are likely to fly apart. [my emphasis]

This is a huge generalization, of course. And it may look banal at first glance.

But it's especially notable because Walt is one of the leading figures in the Realist school of foreign policy thinking. And here, he's pointing to how ideological factors can and do override conventional power politics at times. Realists usually are found emphasizing how generic power considerations are the drivers of the behavior of states much more than their official ideological positions. But the examples Walt gives include cases where he apparently sees doctrine as such throwing around its own weight pretty heavily:

During the Cold War, for instance, hawks repeatedly worried about a "communist monolith" and were convinced that Marxists everywhere were reliable tools of the Kremlin. In reality, however, world communism was rife with internal tensions and ideological schisms, as illustrated by the furious Bolshevik-Menshevik split, the deadly battle between Trotsky and Stalin, and the subsequent rift between Stalin and Tito. China and the Soviet Union became bitter rivals by the early 1960s -- on both geopolitical and ideological grounds -- and the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam ended another yet another period of illusory communist unity and quickly led to wars between communist Vietnam, communist Kampuchea, and communist China. [my emphasis]

I'm assuming that Walt is pointing here to an interaction between ideology and power politics, in which ideas actually matter to people and to some extent drive events, rather than ideologies being simply tools in the course of political struggles driven by other considerations. I suppose in the case of Communist powers it would be more appropriate to say there is a dialectical interaction between doctrine and power considerations.

In the case of the DDR, both internal and international politics affected the role of doctrine in the political life of the DDR. The Soviet Union insisted in the early years of the Soviet occupation that their German allies emphasize the primacy of Soviet philosophy, especially in the form of Marxism-Leninism as canonized by Stalin. And in Communist governments, not just those within the Soviet orbit, mastery of Communist doctrine was considered important. Communist Party members were expected, along with more prosaic political skills, to know something about Marxist-Leninist doctrine. And for leadership roles, it was necessary to display some proficiency in it. Stalin published philosphical treatises as the leader of the USSR, even including a book on linguistics, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950). The lasting significance of that particular work has proven to be neglible. But it illustrates the extent to which philosophical doctrine played a major role in Communist politics.

So challenges to the official view on even seemingly abstract philosophical issues could be taken as threatening. Partly that was because of the importance of doctrine in Communist politics, so that deviation from the true doctrinal path could genuinely be seen as a threat to the health of the movement. It was also partly because in a society in which competitive democratic politics was forbidden and political orthodoxy was extensively enforced, expression of dissent often had to take the form of seemingly abstract or hair-splitting issues. And empowering a dogmatic view of a prevailing philosophy creates the opportunity for rivals in personal and institutional power struggles to seize on nuances of ideological purity as potentially potent political weapons against their opponents.

Tags: ddr, stephen walt

Ernst Sellin and the death of Moses (3 of 3): Is Sellin’s theory of the murder of Moses plausible?

2009-11-06T09:16:00.000-08:00

This is the third of three posts on the book, Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes (1924) by Ernst Sellin. Part 1 is Freud's use of Sellin's material. Part 2 is The Sellin mystery.

Ernst Sellin was an important Biblical scholar and archaeologist. Ernest Jones describes him as “one of the most distinguished Hebrew and Arabic scholars.” He is perhaps most famous for his archaeological work including the excavation of Jericho, which he described in Jericho, die ergebnisse der ausgrabungen dargestellt von Ernst Sellin und Carl Watzinger (1913).

Michaelangelo's Moses

The seventh annual Ernst Sellin-Carl Watzinger-Kolloquium was held in May 2009 at the University of Rostock. The 2006 version was held by the University of Vienna. Sellin taught in both universities.

I don’t read Hebrew and I have no credentials as a Biblical scholar. So I can only offer a lay person’s view as to the plausibility of Sellin’s argument on the murder of Moses.

Contemporary historical scholarship on the period is marked by a dispute between archaeological minimalists who contend that absent any supporting archaeological evidence, the Hebrew Scriptures have no secular historical value and events known only through that and other literary sources cannot be accepted as historically valid.

Most Biblical scholars aren’t ready to go that far in dismissing the literary sources as completely useless for the writing of history. But most would also not have put the confidence that Sellin and Freud apparently did in the literary sources, either. But Sellin was also a leading Biblical archaeologist and did not assume that Biblical traditions should override the physical evidence. His extensive use of information derived from archaeological discoveries in Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes is evidence of his familiarity with the field.

There is no clear archaeological evidence for the existence of Moses or of the Exodus. There is archaeological evidence showing that a major part of the people who later became Israelites were not descended from Hebrews coming out of Egypt but rather developed locally and expanded their presence through some combination of peaceful and military expansion. A reasonably conservative use of the available evidence would argue that there probably was an Exodus and that some leader like the one remembered as Moses existed, and that Hebrew immigrants into Palestine combined with local groups over a period of time to form the tribes of Israel. There is evidence of the presence of large numbers of Semitic people in Egypt that is consistent with the movement of people there describes in Genesis in the story of Joseph.

Based on the Biblical passages he cites, I would say that Sellin has a good argument for a tradition that believed Moses had been killed by his own people. Given the lack of evidence outside the Scriptures for the existence of Moses, it doesn’t strike me as a tradition that should be completely discarded as history.

The fact that Freud found such a reading historically plausible is in itself a reason not to dismiss it carelessly. Ernest Jones wrote, “It was Sellin's suggestion [on the murder of Moses] that made Freud decide to write his book; it fitted so well with his views on the importance of parricide.” Jones’ description argues for the view that Freud may have been particularly disposed to accept such an interpretation, and that’s very likely true. But Freud’s own studies on religion and his views on the role of guilt in Judaism and Christianity provide a basis for that inclination that is neither arbitrary nor irrational in itself.

The possibility of the existence of such a tradition that Moses was murdered is important in itself because it could have shaped the understanding of the authors of the Hebrew Bible in ways such as those on which Freud speculated in Moses and Monotheism. I find Sellin’s idea that [Deutero-] Isaiah 53, the Suffering Servant chapter, could be read as coming out of this tradition that viewed Moses as having been murdered and then taken retrospectively as a substitute sacrifice for his people, to be particularly intriguing in that regard.

Christians, of course, see Deutero-Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Jesus and generally don’t give it much more thought. A great deal of the lyrics in Handel’s orotorio The Messiah are taken from the Suffering Servant description. The Jewish theologian and philosopher Abraham Heschel wrote in The Prophets (1962) about the servant of the Lord, who is the subject of Chapter 53 and other passages in Second Isaiah:

Perhaps no other problem in the Hebrew Bible has occupied the minds of scholars more than the identification and interpretation of the servant. For a survey of the vast literature, see C. R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah (Oxford, 1956). In the main, four theories have been proposed. The servant is (1) an anonymous contemporary of Second Isaiah; (2) Second Isaiah himself; (3) Israel; (4) a purely ideal or imaginary figure. To quote J. Muilenburg, in The Interpreter's Bible, V, 408, 411, "The servant is certainly Israel. . . . Israel, and Israel alone, is able to bear all that is said about the servant of the Lord. For the fundamental fact outweighing all others is the repeated equation of the two in the poems." ... According to H. H. Rowley, The Faith of Israel (London, 1956), p. 122, "The servant is at once Israel and an individual, who both represents the whole community and carries to its supreme point the mission of the nation, while calling the whole people to enter into that mission, so that it shall be its mission and not merely his. ... The servant is Israel today and tomorrow; but Israel may be all or a few or one of its members."

A tradition like that Sellin and Freud describe around the murder of Moses could very plausibly have contributed to Jewish and later Christian concepts of the Messiah, the anointed one. And specifically to Deutero-Isaiah’s image of the Servant of the Lord.

Sellin’s following comments about the significant of Moses in the Jewish religion could apply just as well to an historically false tradition that nevertheless could have contributed to the development of ancient Jewish theology (S. 94):

Zum Schlusse sei schon hier daran erinnert, daß Mose auch durch sein persönliches Schicksal bedeutungsvoll für die Religion seines Volkes geworden ist. Sein Verkehr mit der Gottheit galt je länger je mehr als ein Unikum, nur er hatte Gott von Angesicht zu Angesicht gesehn, nur mit ihm hatte Gott von Mund zu Mund gesprochen vgl. Ex. 33.11; Num. 12.7 f.; Deut. 34.10. Er war von seinen eigenen Volksgenossen als Märtyrer seines Glaubens hingemordet, auch das ist im Kreise seiner Anhänger unvergessen geblieben. Während Hosea noch einfach konstatiert, daß dies ungesühnte Verbrechen der Gipfel aller Sünden Israels sei, daß es unweigerlich jetzt das Gericht im Gefolge haben werde 9.7,11f.; 12.15, bildete sich allmählich die Vorstellung heraus, daß Mose, der sanft-mütigste aller Menschen Num. 12.3, sich freiwillig selbst als Sühnopfer dargebracht habe, und daraus erwuchs beim Deuterojesaja der Gedanke einer Erlösung des Volkes durch ihn, die Hoffnung auf seine Wiederkehr als eines Torahlehrers für die Volker der Erde 42.1ff.; 49.1 ff. usw. Und das bleibt bestehn [sic]: mit ihm ist ein Großer durch die Geschichte hindurchgegangen, der nicht nur eine Bedeutung für sein Volk, sondern für die ganze Menschheit gewonnen hat, eine weit großere, als die meisten Menschen sich träumen lassen.

[In conclusion, it should also be remembered that Moses also became important for the religion of his people through his personal fate. [Sellin means his murder at the hands of the Israelites.] His interaction with God was seen increasingly as unique; only he had seen God face to face, only with him did God speak mouth to mouth. … He was massacred by those from his own people as a martyr to his faith, [and] that also remained unforgotten in the circles of his followers. While Hosea still simply took the view that this unexpiated crime was the pinnacle of all Israel’s sins, that it would now inevitably bring judgment …, a concept was developing that Moses, the mildest of all people, … freely offered himself as a sin-offering, and from that arose the idea with Deutero-Isaiah of the salvation of the people through him, the hope of his return as a teacher of the Torah for the peoples of the earth … And it remains true: with him, a great one passed through history who won not only a significance for his people, but for all of humanity, one far wider than most people could even dream.]

Tags: ernst sellin, ernest jones, freud, moses

Fort Hood massacre and early news

2009-11-05T20:25:00.000-08:00

When the news was coming out this afternoon about the mass murder at Fort Hood, I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker who was also following the news. He currently has two sons in the military so, as he said, the news "hits too close to home".

I said something to the effect that it was a horrible event. But I also said I was reserving judgment on the specifics until we heard some more solid news. He said that he believed what the base commander, Gen. Robert Cone, had reported in the first news conference he held after the incident. I said, "But the military's first statement on things like this is always a lie." He was taken aback by that. And we had an interesting talk about it.

I showed him the one of the first news articles I had seen about it from La Opinión - I actually first heard about it from the paper's Twitter feed - which at the time was reporting seven dead and 20 injured, apparently based on Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's statement using information from the base. It was also said shooting had been reported at two locations on the base, and that there was believed to be one shooter and one additional suspect. I also showed him a Salon report that had been updated in an additional section after Cone's press conference. Then we were talking about 12 dead, 31 wounded, the shooter and a police officer also killed (the shooter maybe or maybe not one of the 12), and two additional suspects in custody.

I explained that expected just this kind of changing reporting from a situation like this. And that even if we assumed that the base commander had the best of intention, he might actually have good reason to give out incomplete or false information at that moment when they were still trying to resolve the immediate situation and make arrests. But I was a little surprised myself at how totally skeptical I was of Cone's information. As far as I recall, I've never heard of the man before. But as I explained to my co-worker, an endless number of false statement about battle situations has had it's effect. And especially the Pat Tillman case, in which senior Army officers knowingly lied to the public and to Tillman's family about his being killed in a "friendly fire" incident, because they wanted to cover up their own mistakes and also use his death as propaganda.

I also said that I could see reasons for the base commander to have not so admirable reasons to lie. After all, this is the largest US military base anywhere. And one of the worst terrorist-type incident, a real mass murder, had just taken place on the base under his command. Reading about recent German history, I know there were incidents in which the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) terrorist group attacked US military bases, sometimes killing several Americans. And there have obviously been deadly attacks on American bases in combat zones. But I don't recall ever hearing of one this costly in lives happening in the US outside actual combat situations like the Civil War. So he very well might have incentive to dissemble. As citizens and news consumers, we'd be foolish to overlook that possibility.

But I did say that I would be surprised if the death toll or the number of wounded turned out to be lower than reported, because I couldn't see any motive for the base commander to exaggerate those figures.

Well, here we are a few hours later. As the subtitle on this Alex Koppelman report at Salon puts it, "Much of what was initially reported about the mass murder at an Army post turns out to have been wrong." And while the last I saw, the count of dead and wounded is still at 12 and 30+, respectively, it appears I was a bit too optimistic about the likely accuracy of the Gen. Cone's information. Because the officer that was being reported killed at one point was wounded but not killed.

Even more surprisingly, the alleged shooter is still alive. Now, that's a real surprise. And somebody along the chain from the wounded but alive suspect to Cone's press conference to us was almost certainly knowingly lying. It's not unthinkable that there could have been a legitimate reason to disseminate that bit of disinformation. I can't think of what that might be. But if there was, I want to hear about it. As Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher observed on Twitter, "Military says they reported Hasan dead due to confusion at hospital. Huh?"

If the top brass at the base really thought there was a sole shooter and that he was dead, I'm not sure if that's more worrisome in its own way that the fact that they just lied about it. How good a job were they doing handling the emergency if they could get something that important wrong? As Mitchell said in another Tweet, "Get ready for days of jokes, old and new, about 'military intelligence.'"

But we also can't forget what kind of country we live in after the Cheney-Bush years and the Obama administration extreme claims of government secrecy for "national security" issues. Did the military initially make the false claim that the shooter was dead because they thought they might ship him off to Gitmo or some CIA gulag station and torture him for the next 10 years? Or did they say he was dead because they were torturing him already? Until there is a full legal investigation and prosecution of the known torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush administration, we have to learn to ask these questions.

Sen. Levin Carl Levin said early on that his Senate Armed Services Committee was calling for "a detailed accounting" of the incident. I hope they don't just take the base commander's word for it. We'll see if Levin's makes a decent follow-through. I've been disappointed by him more than once.

I suppose I should add that the military should look closely at Cone's performance in this matter. I won't hold my breath they they will do it responsibly. We've seen too much too often of how our glorious generals operate in such matters the last eight years.

Tags: fort hood massacre, us military

Jamie Galbraith on the economy and political anger

2009-11-05T09:12:00.000-08:00

Bill Moyers recently interviewed economist Jamie Galbraith, whose book The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008) has been one my favorite books to refer to on the large questions of economic policy over the last year. The transcript of the 10/30/09 interview is available on the Bill Moyers Journal Web site.

Which reminds me, Galbraith would be a great speaker for next year's Netroots Nation conference. He wouldn't have the rock star status that Paul Krugman does for the crowd, but I'm sure he would be very well received.

Anyway, he's calling for more federal stimulus, because without it the economy could very well fall back into recession:

We have a stimulus package, which is helping now, but it will be over with at the end of next year. Will there be a basis for another strong, privately financed expansion at that point? I don't see the evidence for that now. And that seems to me to be something we should be worrying about. ...

We need to find another path for economic expansion. We need to set a strategic direction.

Our problem now, our big social and environmental problem, is energy. It's climate change. It's the greenhouse gas emission issue. If we built a set of institutions that could deal with that problem effectively, you could employ a large part of the labor force for a generation, dealing with that. And you'd then make that profitable for private enterprise to get into in a serious way. [my emphasis]

He also describes how the lop-sided benefits that have gone to Wall Street creates a situation that will wind up with the Democrats squandering an enormous political opportunity unless they start focusing on job creation:

JAMES GALBRAITH: ... you really have to think about, do you want to have a financial sector dominated by a small number of very large institutions, very difficult to manage, practically impossible to regulate, and ruled by, essentially, the same people and the same culture that caused the crisis in the first place.

BILL MOYERS: Well, that's what we're getting, because after all of the mergers, shakedowns, losses of the last year, you have five monster financial institutions really driving the system, right?

JAMES GALBRAITH: And they're highly profitable, and they are already paying, in some cases, extraordinary bonuses. And you have an enormous problem, as the public sees very clearly that a very small number of people really have been kept afloat by public action. And yet there is no visible benefit to people who are looking for jobs or people who are looking to try and save their houses or to somehow get out of a catastrophic personal debt situation that they're in. [my emphasis]

The tough economic times in 1980 were key to the Reagan Republicans being able to win the White House that year. If the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress don't get a solid health care reform passed, and fix their orientation toward bailing out billionaires while neglecting the job issue, they could wind up derailing a very hopeful political moment.

And they return to the issue again:

BILL MOYERS: So you can understand that anger on the streets, outside the American Bankers Association's meeting in Chicago this week.

JAMES GALBRAITH: Of course. It's entirely justified.

BILL MOYERS: Where do you think that anger might go? It could go either direction.

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, of course. I mean, that's the great danger, is that if there is not a constructive program that people can identify with, there will be a destructive program that they will identify with. And it will come along quite soon. And what form it will take, and it's anybody's guess, but the result will be, very well could be disastrous.

BILL MOYERS: So we're not out of the woods yet.

JAMES GALBRAITH: No, not by any means. I think we're in an extremely dangerous period. And which, as I said, everybody can see that a few, very small number of people have come out of this. And they cannot see how this is bringing any benefit to their own lives. It's not saving their houses. It's not providing them with jobs.

Tags: james galbraith, us economy

No more chance for two-state solution in Israel-Palestine?

2009-11-05T08:39:00.000-08:00

Juan Cole reports that Saeb Erekat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Steering Committee and a key figure in the negotiation process with Israel, is saying that given the Israeli colonization of the West Bank, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palesinitian conflict will not be possible. While Erekat's statement doesn't seem to be a flat-out rejection of the two-state solution as a goal, Cole's conclusion is:

I think the whole thing is over with. I can't see a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank as it is now configured, and I can't imagine the Netanyahu government halting settlements.

The "one-state solution" would mean basically having the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as citizens of Israel. Such an outcome would mean that Israel could remain a democracy but not a majority-Jewish state for very long.

The Israeli Right's goal has always been to take over the West Bank. But the Israeli Labor Party has also supported the colonization movement. It may well be that the two-state solution really is no longer a viable solution because the West Bank settlement has now proceeded so far that for an Israeli government to force their evacuation is completely politically infeasible, even if there were the will to do so among Israeli political leaders.

Tags: israel, palestinians

Ernst Sellin and the death of Moses (2 of 3): The Sellin mystery

2009-11-05T00:20:00.000-08:00

This is the second of three posts on the book, Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes (1924) by Ernst Sellin. Part 1 is Freud's use of Sellin's material.

Freud’s and Sellin’s view that Moses was murdered by the Hebrews he led never gained broad acceptance among Biblical scholars, an issue which is discussed further in Part 3 tomorrow.

Freud’s close collaborator and biographer Ernest Jones added a more recent mystery in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2: The Last Phase, 1919-1939 (1957). Sellin’s argument was “immediately rejected by all Jewish scholars”, Jones writes. As Freud’s version of Moses in Moses and Monotheism was also, for the most part. One of the arguments Jewish scholars made is that Sellin himself later repudiated his argument, “some say ten years later and some seven”, according to Jones. That would presumably be seven or ten years after Sellin’s 1922 book on Moses. Jones relates:

Yahuda [presumably Abraham Shalom Yahuda], another great scholar, told Freud this when he visited him in 1938, and Freud could only shrug his shoulders and say "It might be true all the same." It was Sellin's suggestion that made Freud decide to write his book; it fitted so well with his views on the importance of parricide.

There is a curious postscript to this story. I have made all possible endeavors to find out the truth about Sellin's supposed withdrawal, and have been given a number of different references to it, in his writings, in his addresses before Congresses and so on. All of them proved to be false. On the contrary, in a book Sellin published thirteen years later he not only adhered to his opinion, but stated that he had found "further confirmation" of it in a number of allusions to the murder, which he listed, in the writings of other prophets. In spite of all that, however, there appears to be a certain basis for the rumor. A friend of Sellin's, Professor Rust of Berlin, has been good enough to answer my inquiries, and he informs me that on one occasion Sellin, when hard pressed in private talk, was willing to admit that he might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the passage in Hosea which had been the starting point of his theory.

The book to which he refers as having been published 13 years later than 1922 is Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes, which was originally published in 1924; Jones’ endnote cites a 1935 date. Additional mystery, because the original publication puts it two years after the 1922 book, so a repudiation seven or ten years after the 1922 book wouldn’t be contradicted by the first publication of Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes in 1924.

And Jones adds cryptically:

Sellin's hypothesis could be supported by numerous suggestive passages in the Torah and other apocryphal literature hinting mysteriously at various legends concerning the death of Moses, but it would be impertinent to discuss them here.

“Impertinent” is an odd choice of words in the context, it seems to me. Here he cites three sources: Meyer Abraham, “La Mort de Moïse,” Legendes juives aprocryphes sur la vie de Moïse (1925); Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (1947); and, M. Rosenfeld, Der Midrasch über den Tod des Moses (1899).

Ernest Jones (1879-1958)

It does seem that Jones’ account of this aspect of Freud’s work on Moses is too dismissive. Sellin had identified a number of passages in the Hebrew Bible which he read as a tradition that said Moses had been killed. Jones himself then cites material from the Jewish midrash that also, by his own account, lend credence to Sellin’s argument and also demonstrate the existence of Jewish traditions about the death of Moses at variance with the main view presented in the Hebrew Bible. Yet his account, quoted above, leaves the impression that Freud picked up the idea based on Sellin’s 1922 book and that he picked it up because “it fitted so well with his views on the importance of parricide,“ even lightly dismissing the news from a leading scholar that Sellin himself had rejected his own theory.

But, as I noted before, it seems odd that Freud would not have been familiar with Sellin’s later work on Moses. He was not a specialist in Biblical scholarship as such. But he was no dilettante, either. He was familiar with some of the cutting-edge work on Near East archaeology and Biblical criticism. It makes more sense to me that Freud was familiar with Sellin’s case he made two years after the original book, but cited the 1922 book in Moses and Monotheism because, as he wrote in it, “In 1922 Ernst Sellin made a discovery of decisive importance.” Moses and Monotheism cites only a limited number of sources; it’s entirely plausible that Freud cited only the one that originally contained Sellin’s “discovery”.

Unfortunately, Jones also does not give a date for Professor Rust’s reported conversation with Sellin, a fact which has obvious relevance to the question of whether Sellin later rejected his own argument on the death of Moses. And what Jones relates of Rust’s account of his private conversation with Sellin doesn’t have Sellin rejecting the whole notion; instead it has Sellin “willing to admit that he might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the passage in Hosea which had been the starting point of his theory.”

But as we’ve seen, Sellin cited at least five passages in Hosea in support of his view of the murder of Moses, and well as numerous others from other books of the Hebrew Bible. The fact that Sellin in a long conversation with a friend and fellow scholar may have mused out loud that his interpretation of one of those passages may have been mistaken in some way isn’t exactly the same as retracting an elaborate argument made in print on more than one occasion. (Not even close, actually.) And, again, in the context it’s puzzling that Jones didn’t give any indication of when that conversation took place.

Part 3 tomorrow: Is Sellin’s theory of the murder of Moses plausible?

Tags: ernst sellin, ernest jones, freud, moses

Republicans and the Tea Party (non-) fringe

2009-11-04T00:11:00.000-08:00

My post Monday criticizing Frank Rich's Sunday column was downright mild compared to Bob Somerby's at The Daily Howler 11/02/09. After reading Somerby's, mine sounds almost like praise.

A couple of quick points from his comments. One is that Rich weirdly parsed the voting results in the 2008 election to say that McCain won only "white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural." As the Howler points out, "But in fact, McCain-Palin won the 'demographic group' known as 'white voters' by a roughly 56-43 percent margin. (That has been a fairly typical margin among white voters in recent presidential elections.)"

Somerby also complained about Rich's sloppy use of "Stalinist" and various other vague insults. For one thing, it plays right along with the massive Bircher-type thinking promoted by Glenn Beck and large parts of the Republican Party that liberalism, socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism, a decent health insurance system, cannibalism and incest are all pretty much the same thing. (Okay, I added the last two, and I'm sure Somerby wouldn't approve of my doing that.)

More specifically, Rich says of those fringe elements like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh that have so very little influence in the Republican Party (in Rich's Pod Pundit reality) that they "are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode". By which he means they criticized Arlen Specter before his switch to the Democratic Party for being insufficiently conservative. And they supported the Conservative Party candidate in today's special election in a rural New York Congressional district over the Republican candidate.

Now, there are several ways that you could define Stalinism, depending on what you're looking at. But the bare fact of intra-party fighting over their Party's political program simply does not qualify.

But I don't want to be prissy about Democrats calling Republicans name. Because the Democrats have been doing way too little name-calling for at least the last two decades in the face of the Republicans' well-funded full-time sleaze-slinging.

Palin supporters may conceivably constitute a faction of sorts within the Republican Party. But I don't see any point in trying to conjure some responsible and moderate faction within the Republican Party that was somehow completely invisible during the Cheney-Bush administration. But to buy into the teapartiers' pretense that they are some insurgent group out to bring nasty radicals into a respectable Republican Party is silly. Yes, the radicalization of the Republicans is proceeding. But it's not a new path for them, and it's not the result of a Tea Party grassroots "insurgency".

None of them fall for it as much as Frank Rich does, But these two stories all buy into the concept to some extent:

For Democrats, NY-23 is Heads We Win, Tails They Lose by Blue Texan FireDogLake 11/03/09: "Today in New York’s 23rd district, either a Democrat will be elected to Congress for the first time since Reconstruction, or Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin will officially take over the Republican party."

Get ready for the Grand Old Tea Party takeover by Mike Madden Salon 11/02/09: "Tuesday could wind up being the day the Tea Party movement left the fringe and went mainstream. (Or at least mainstream-ish.)"

Digby and David Dayen both have more clear-eyed takes on this situation.

In Teabag Front Hullabaloo 11/02/09, Digby takes off from this article, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Movement Are at War With the GOP by Adele M. Stan AlterNet 11/02/09. Adele Stan cautions about the squabbles between some older-line Party leaders and the Palinites in the context of the much-publicized Congressional special election today in the 23rd Congressional District of New York:

While it's hard not to crack a smile at the Republicans' travails, a word of caution may be in order.

... when push came to shove and the regular people of 23rd, backed up by the GOP establishment, appeared poised to elect the pro-choice, pro-union [Republican Party candidate] Scozzafava, the Tea Party astroturf machine moved in, backing [Conservative Party candidate] Hoffman, who promised pro-business, anti-woman and anti-labor votes in Congress. ...

Although Hoffman's candidacy seemed to come out of nowhere, it was the endorsement of Armey, chairman of the astroturfing group FreedomWorks, who put him on the map. Then Palin signed on via this note on her Facebook page, putting Hoffman over the top ...

She goes on to detail how well-financed Republicans like Armey, who is in good standing in the Party along with Palin and Rush, gave the push that forced the Republican candidate out of the race.

But this wasn't some grassroots uprising against a responsibly conservative Republican Party. It was Republicans very much in their Party's mainstream (which is very different than saying their political positions are mainstream - enforcing Party discipline in the somewhat unusual circumstances of a special election. Digby sums it up very nicely:

Stan shows that the conservatives are playing the long game and they know how to do it. They don't care that they might lose in the short run or that the ruling elites think they are kooky. What they care about is that when the electorate looks to change horses, as it always does, the Republican Party will be firmly in the hands of the conservatives and further to the right when they last checked in.

Stan phrases it this way:

In the short run, this could be good for the Democrats.

But American politics is cyclical in nature. No victory is permanent. Sooner or later, voters tire of one side and elect the other.

As the Republican Party condenses to its most bitter strain, the poison is distilled. Chances are, that poison will be dispersed into the populace when voters at last tire of the Democrats. And that would be very bad for all of us.

The Republicans' maneuvers in the New York special election - which the Democrat won - were only a special case of the kind of primary challenges to insufficiently zealous ideologues discussed in this story: Uncivil War: Conservatives to challenge a dozen GOP candidates by Charles Mahtesian and Alex Isenstadt Politico 11/03/09

David Dayen in The Hidden Storyline: No Progressive Economic Pushback Killing Democrats FDL News Desk 11/03/09 remembers what our celebrity pundits can barely notice because times are great for them: these are economic hard times, unemployment is rising and there's no job upturn in sight. And so far it's painfully obvious to anyone except our Big Pundits that the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats have been far, far more willing to bail out Wall Street multimillionaires on easy terms than they have been to put the unemployed back to work. In policy terms, what the administration has done is certainly better than what the Republicans favored and still favor. But, as Digby and Adele Stan both point out, when times are bad like they are not, some portion of persuadable swing voters are likely to see elections in binary terms: if I'm not happy with how the In party is handling things, I'll vote for the Out party. David writes:

This is not limited to teabagger activists or deeply conservative voting blocks. All over the country, the fiscal scolds have started their push, to fearmonger about the national debt and “runaway spending,” to stop Democrats from taking the necessary steps in the midst of a recession and a job-loss recovery, to call any effort at public investment reckless and wrong, to whip up concerns about debt. And there is virtually nobody from the Democratic side on the playing field to rebut these concerns. [my emphasis]

That's why it would be foolish for Democratic politicians or activists to buy the smug complacency that Frank Rich is peddling.

Tags: democratic party, radical right, republican party

Ernst Sellin and the death of Moses (1of 3): Freud's use of Sellin's material

2009-11-04T00:05:00.000-08:00

Ernst Sellin (1867-1946)

I recently found a copy of a book, Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes (1924) by Ernst Sellin (1867-1946) which gave me new insight into a literary/historical question that has puzzled me for a long time.

One of Sigmund Freud’s very last publications, which came out during his exile in England, is Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion. Drei Abhandlungen, published in English as Moses and Monotheism (1939).

There is a tradition of considering Moses as an Egyptian rather than a Hebrew, which Freud also did in Moses and Monotheism. Not as implausible as it might sound to those familiar only with the traditional story. The familiar Biblical story itself describes Moses growing up as an Egyptian prince, and Moses is an Egyptian name. Jan Assmann discusses this tradition, including Freud’s part in it, in Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997; Harvard Press edition).

Assmann points out that the selection of the phrase “der Mann Moses” (the man Moses) for the title of Freud’s book in German refers to Exodus 11:3, the only place in the Scriptures in which Moses is referred to that way, in what Assmann calls “such a distancing manner”. That description includes a reference to Moses being “exceedingly important in the land of Egypt”, making the use of “der Mann Moses” a particular reference to his Egyptian background.

Freud cites the references in Sellin’s earlier Mose[sic] und seine Bedeutung fur die israelitisch-jüdischenReligionsgeschichte (1922) and describes Sellin’s references there to the murder of Moses as follows:

In 1922 Ernst Sellin made a discovery of decisive importance. He found in the book of the Prophet Hosea (second half of the eighth century [BCE]) unmistakable traces of a tradition to the effect that the founder of their religion, Moses, met a violent end in a rebellion of his stubborn and refractory people. The religion he had instituted was at that time abandoned. This tradition is not restricted to Hosea: it recurs in the writings of most of the later Prophets; indeed, according to Sellin, it was the basis of all the later expectations of the Messiah. [Katherine Jones translation]

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in London, 1938, with the manuscript of An Outline of Psychoanalysis

Sellin saw the northern prophets Hosea and Amos as part of a religious tendency that preserved the “desert religion” of Moses and the period of the Exodus. This trend placed a strong emphasis on an ethical monotheism. So they were particularly critical of the assimilation of what they saw as Canaanite practices, especially including the incorporation of Canaanite deities. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly refers to the cult of the goddess Asheroth. Sellin argues that Asheroth was of honored in some form as part of the Yahwist religion and later archaeological work has confirmed that view. She was sometimes considered to be Yahweh’s consort. But as the invective against Asheroth in the Hebrew Bible shows, this was never a generally accepted practice and apparently always had its opponents, not just among the supposed “desert religion” tendency of Hosea and Amos.

Sellin detects two distinct traditions in the Hebrew Bible over the wandering of the Israelites in the desert: a Sinai tradition and a Kadesh tradition, which were merged at the time of Saul and David. He’s careful to note that solutions have to be inferred from the evidence and cannot be taken as certain.

Sellin argued that part of this desert religion/Sinai tradition included a version of the Exodus in which the Israelite rose up against Moses and actually killed him. This tradition was also known to others, he argues, that were not Northern prophets like Deutero-Isaiah and Deutero-Zechariah. He lists the following as “Seher un freien Propheten” working in the direct Mosaic tradition: “Debora, Samuel, Nathan, Elia, Amos, Hosea, Jesaja, Micha, Jeremia, Deuterojesaja”. He argued that those in this group who followed the ethical religion of Moses “the most truly have the image of the historical Moses,” i.e., the more likely correct image.

The passages of the Bible in which he perceives this tendency include the following, based on his exposition in Geschichte des israelitisch-jüdischen Volkes (pp. 77-78) are:

Hosea 9:7-13; 12:14-13:4; 5:2; 4:4-5; 11:3. According to his summary in this work, the first three references are those he cited in the earlier book Der Mann Mose that Freud cites in Moses and Monotheism.

Exodus 32:32 vergleich mit Hosea 9:7ff

Numbers 11:12; 25:6ff; vergleich mit 12:1; he notes that Num. 25:1-5 “reißen ganz abrupt ab”.

Deuteronomy 34:1ff “mit einem Schleier zugedeckt”.

II Kings 9:31

Amos 5:13

Deutero-Isaiah Ch. 53, the Suffering Servant chapter, using the figure of the Servant of the Lord.

Jeremiah 2:30

Deutero-Zachariah 10:12; 11:4-14; 13:7

Since Geschichte des israelitisch-jüdischen Volkes appeared two years after Der Mann Mose and apparently includes more complete references to the texts on which Sellin based his theory of the death of Moses, I wonder why Freud didn’t cite the later text, as well.

Part 2 tomorrow: The Sellin mystery

Tags: ernst sellin, ernest jones, freud, moses

Islāmic reformist views of Western culture

2009-11-03T00:05:00.000-08:00

‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis (1889–1940)

Following up on my post yesterday on a translation of a speech credited to the first caliph Abu Bakr used by the Algerian Islāmic reformer ‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis (1889–1940) as a response to what he saw as failings of the Ottoman caliphate, an article by Ibrahim Kalin of Georgetown University, Islam and the West: Deciphering a Contested History (available publicly as of this writing), from Oxford Islamic Studies Online describes four main modern response in the Islamic world to Western culture. The approach he calls "critical engagement" is reflected by the Islāmic reformist tradition of which Ibn Badis was part:

From the Ottoman intellectuals Namik Kemal and Mehmed Âkif Ersoy to their colleagues the Iranian Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and the Egyptian Muḥammad ʿAbduh, the reformists sought to unlink the Western value system from the material achievements of Western civilization, that is, science, technology, democracy, and constitutionalism. Their assumption was based on a clear distinction between an objective material civilization, which was represented by the modern West, and spiritual values, which the Muslim world did not need to borrow from the West. While this view is still widely held in the Muslim world, extreme modernization and globalization have made such distinctions impossible. [my emphasis]

The other three positions he calls total adaptation, "outright rejection and denouncement of Western culture as cultural imperialism" (Wahhābīs and Salafīs) and the kind of traditional Islām holding "that a more elevated ethical and spiritual dialogue with the West (and the rest of the world) is possible while maintaining one's [non-Western] cultural tradition."

The jihadist groups like Osama bin Laden's original al-Qa'ida, which scarcely exists any more in the form it did in 2001, are generally extreme manifestations of the Sunni Salafī tradition. Shi'a groups like Hamas, of course, reject the majority Sunni brand of Islām including its Salafī variety.

Kalin also makes this important observation:

The legacy of colonialism continues to make a profound impact on Islam-West relations today. Many Muslim countries fought wars of liberation against European powers but after independence found themselves dependent upon their former colonizers. The current distribution of global power, once wielded by Europe and now by the United States, fuels a sense of alienation, frustration, and mistrust in the Muslim world. In addition to pressing policy issues, Samuel Huntington's implicit claim in his Clash of Civilizations (1996) that there is a collision between the fundamental values of Islamic and Western worlds and that "Islam has bloody borders" was viewed as epitomizing a point of view that justifies the current global power imbalance to the detriment of non-Western cultures and societies. The events of September 11th and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have further increased tensions between various Muslim and Western groups. Many in Europe and the U.S. see extremist groups in the Muslim world as a threat to the existence of international security and to the future of Western civilization. Many in the Muslim world see the "war on terror" as a war on Islam and Muslims. As [John] Esposito and [Dalia] Mogahed show in Who Speaks for Islam (2008), the overwhelming majority of Muslims subscribe to the universal principles of human rights, rule of law, and democracy, which are also Western values. But they also want the West to respect Islamic culture, religion, and tradition. This entails a more reasoned and balanced discussion of Islam-West relations than equating Islam and Muslims stereotypically with terrorism, violence, irrationalism, oppression, or cultural backwardness. In this regard, Islamophobia, the unfounded fear of Islam and Muslims, and the hatred arising from that fear are a major source of tension. [my emphasis]

Tags: albelhamid ben badis, islam

Nothing to worry about

2009-11-02T19:24:00.000-08:00

Good ole Pat Boone, the clean-cut Christian pop singer who must be about 100 years old by now, just had a column at World NutDaily and also at NewsMax saying that the "vermin" in the White House need to gassed with a "very powerful fumigant" to get rid of its "invaders" and "alien rodents". Republicans on OxyContin, it ain't a pretty sight.

Fortunately, we know from Frank Rich's column Sunday that characters who talk this way are marginal figures in the Republican Party. You know, like Rush Limbaugh, who hardly any Republicans listen to, much less share his attitudes and ideas. Otherwise I might worry.

Tags: frank rich, paranoid style, pat boone, radical right

Frank Rich vs. GOP "Stalinists"

2009-11-02T00:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not so thrilled about Frank Rich's New York Times column The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York 10/31/09. The short version of my discomfort with it is that he seems to be looking for that now-extinct political species, the "moderate" Republican.

He apparently thinks that two of the current off-year elections coming on Tuesday have Republicans who are practically Democrats:

No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine. [my emphasis]

It seems to go right by him that in order to find an example of Republican politicians who are seemingly willing to distance themselves from the likes of Sarah Palin, he has to find them among two that he describes as very conservative Republicans.

And does Frank Rich really think its a novel thing for one Party to borrow popular but largely content-free symbolism from the other Party's ad campaigns? I mean, using "Hope" in a campaign commercial isn't exactly the same as supporting health care reform and strong financial regulation, or opposing the war in Afghanistan. You know, the stuff that actually affects people's lives?

How does this position from Bob McDonnell's campaign Web site differ in substance from Sarah Palin's, Rush Limbaugh's or Glenn Beck's:

Bob McDonnell has concerns that Washington’s proposed reforms will drive the cost of health care up and jeopardize quality and access. Reforms being discussed in Washington could raise costs for those who already have insurance, harm small business owners and make it harder to create jobs, or shift millions of Virginians from their private insurance into a government run system, raise taxes and increase our deficit even further. Rather than centralizing control of health care at the federal level, or saddling Virginia businesses and workers with new mandates to pay for plans the government thinks they want, we should let individuals and families control their health care decisions.

I beginning to wish for a moratorium on citations to Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics".

Richard Hofstadter(1916-1970)

Which might sound a tad strange for someone who's been making references to Hofstadter and his writing on the "paranoid style" for pretty much as long as I've been blogging, as in Richard Hofstadter and the "paranoid style" of politics 12/29/04, in which I discuss the theory generally. When I checked, I was a bit surprised at how many of my posts over the years contain a reference to his work. Here's how Rich uses Hofstadter:

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

While his narrow analogy between the Tea Partiers and the Birchers is a valid enough use of Hofstadter's work, the emphasis should be on narrow.

Because the main essay in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) was about the kind of politics practiced by the Barry Goldwater faction of the Republican Party that dominated the Presidential nominating convention in San Francisco in 1964, including a very public clash with the "eastern Establishment" wing of the Party lined up behind Nelson Rockefeller's Presidential candidacy. That was a key turning point for the present-day "movement conservatism". The movement conservatism that has dominated the Republican Party since 1980!

The Beltway Village is in thrall to the faith of High Broderism: American politics is dominated by the "vital center"; bipartisanship is the high and best form of politics; the "extremes of the right and the left" have to be avoided but especially those of the left.

One of the many problems of that conceptual framing of the world of American politics is that as the Republican Party became dominated by what was it's scruffy, still-not-respectable right wing back in 1964, and then became more and more radicalized to the point of embracing criminal torture as one of its core values (not unrelated to the embrace of lynching by the segregationists of 1964) and launching an overt war of aggression in Iraq based on straight-up fabricated claims, the priests and devotees of High Broderism have continued to define the Republican Party as being part of that "vital center." "Vital center" was a phrase that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. popularized in a book by that title, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949), which was one of the founding texts we might say of Cold War liberalism. In his last book published during his lifetime, War and the American Presidency (2004), Schlesinger left no doubt of his own ability to distinguish between today's Republican Party and some kind of centrist conservatism. He described the Party then led by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush this way:

For all his buffoonish side, the president is secure in himself, disciplined, decisive, and crafty, and capable of concentrating on a few priorities. He has maintained control of a rag-tag Republican coalition, well described by Kevin Phillips ... as consisting of "Wall Street, Big Energy, multinational corporations, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Religious Right, the Market Extremist think-tanks, and the Rush Limbaugh Axis." All these groups agree in their strong support of their president, though they sharply disagree among themselves.

Frank Rich writes as though only the Christian Right and the OxyContin Axis are those who practice the "paranoid style". And in this best of all possible High Broderist worlds, they are doomed to political marginalization.

That's not what happened to the paranoid-style politics of the "movement conservatism" of 1964. There aren't any Nelson Rockefellers or Mark Hatfields in the Republican Congressional delegations today. Although Village conventional wisdom John McCain is a bold Maverick who's playing that role. Frank Rich, in other words, can't address the reality of the fanaticism dominating today's Republican Party without going way outside the conventional assumptions of his fellow Villagers.

Dan Froomkin express a much better grasp of that situation as he addresses it in Seven questions for Dan Froomkin The Economist Online 11/01/09 in the context of press coverage of the bama administration and the problem for "balance" in the current climate:

DIA: Do you think the media should strive for objectivity in its reporting?

Mr Froomkin: No. Journalists should strive for accuracy, and fairness. Objectivity is impossible, and is too often confused with balance. And the problem with balance is that we are not living in a balanced time. For instance, is it patently obvious that at this point in our history, the leading luminaries on one side of the American political spectrum are considerably less tethered to reality than those on the other side. Madly trying to split the difference, as so many of my mainstream-media colleagues feel impelled to do, does a disservice to the concept of the truth.

Rich did depart a tiny bit from the Village wisdom on the Obama administration's (mild!) verbal attacks on FOX News:

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president's numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

This is also a fairly strange statement, largely because Rich observes his obligation as a celebrity pundit not to talk about what the mainstream press is doing. Like, for instance, picking up the phony memes that FOX pumps up furiously. Like his own newspaper the New York Times recently scolding themselves for not paying enough attention to conservative concerns and promising to pay much more attention from now on. And he doesn't note a critical fact, which is that when Glenn Beck and other prominent figures in that "alternative universe" make hysterical and false charges against the Democratic health care reform plans, their viewers and listeners will find it very hard to find clear explanations of the key issues around that issue in the New York Times or other major news outlets. And they do a pitifully poor job of reporting on how the Beckians and the Limbaugh dittoheads actually do affect the political dynamics. Rich's column is an example of that, I'm afraid.

It's also important to remember that the whole Republican Party is keenly attuned to the Beckian/OxyContin "alternative universe", not just those for whom Palin is currently their favorite choice for Presidential candidate.

And I'm not so sure that for the typical TV viewer "the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in 'Star Wars.'" Since our national press corps does such a very poor job of reporting on that movement, who the activists are and who the groups like Freedom Watch are that finance their protests, I'm not at all sure that's how they come across. One prominent aspect of the Tea Party protests is the extent to which they were organized by the partisan-Republican groups we know as FOX News. But, as we have seen, when the Democrats challenge the "news" channel crass partisanship and political organizing, even very mildly criticize it, the Village lines up to scold Obama and the Democrats for such naughty behavior. As Rich put it, "It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive ..." Actually, mainstream pundits have said worse than that, that it was on the level of Spiro Agnews back in the day.

And, sure, when you look at Sarah Palin's close cooperation with Birchers and especially the neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party (AIP), and with the theocratic and cultish aspect of the Third Wave Pentecostal movement of which she has been a very active part, she might look as though she came from an alternative political universe. But our national press corps focused on in 2008 and focuses on still is her verbal gaffes and Tina Fey's spoofs of her from Saturday Night Live. The average news consumer have heard a lot of that. But her "pallin' around" with neo-Confederates? Her theocratic religious commitments? Not so much. Not much at all, actually.

Tags: establishment press, frank rich, paranoid style, radical right, richard hofstadter

Abū Bakr, ‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis and Muslim political theory

2009-11-02T00:05:00.000-08:00

‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis (1889-1940)

I've written before about the Rightly Guided Caliphs, the first four caliphs following the Prophet Muhammad as leader of the Muslim community (umma). They were, with the time of their caliphates: Abū Bakr (632-634 CE); ‛Umar ibn al-Khaţţāb (634-644); ‛Uthmān ibn Άffān (644-656); and, ‛Alī ibn abī Tālib (656-661).

These four caliphs are assumed especially in the Sunni tradition to have established important precedents for Islāmic conduct. All four of them had known the Prophet and had worked closely with him, and were thus known as being among the "Companions of the Prophet". Naturally, their association with the Prophet added to the authority of their precedents as rulers.

The Shi'a, the "partisans of ‛Alī", recognized only ‛Alī among the four as a legitimate caliph. The Shi'a tendency emerged from the first Muslim civil war (Fitnah), which began during ‛Alī. Today about 10% of the world's Muslims being Shia. For centuries, the Shia would be intermixed in the same communities as the majority Sunni. The present-day geographical concentrations of Shia in Iran and certain areas of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon was a later development.

The following speech attributed to Abū Bakr from 632, "The Principles of Governing in Islam" appears in Oxford Islamic Studies Online. It is an English translation taken from al-Hihab (The Meteor) of January 1938, a newspaper of an Algerian Islamic reformer, ‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis (1889-1940). The translation from the Arabic is by Emad Eldin Shahin. Shahin says in his introduction that the article, which apparently consisted almost completely of Abū Bakr's speech, "reflects Ibn Badis's nonconventional response to the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate [as a consequence of the First World War], which he held responsible for the repression and injustice of Muslim societies."

I've bolded passages that refer to requirements of rulers to act justly and to the need for the people to provide legitimacy and consent to the rulers based on the justice of their actions. The italicized passages are in the Oxford Islamic Studies Online original:

O People. I was entrusted as your ruler, although I am not better than any one of you.

Support me as long as you see me following the right path, and correct me when you see me going astray.

Obey me as long as I observe God in your affairs. If I disobey Him, you owe me no obedience.

The weak among you are powerful [in my eyes] until I get them their due. The powerful among you are weak [in my eyes] until I take away from them what is due to others.

I say that and seek God's forgiveness for myself and for you.

The First Principle

No one has the right to assume any of the affairs of the umma [Muslim community] without their consent. It is the people that have the right to delegate authority to the leaders and depose them. No one can rule without the consent of the people. Rule cannot be bequeathed nor be based on personal considerations. This principle is derived from [Abu Bakr's] statement, “I was entrusted as your ruler.” In other words, I was entrusted by others; and that is “you.”

The Second Principle

He who manages an affair of the Muslim community should be the most qualified in this matter and not the best in behavior. If two persons share good behavior and qualifications, but one is better in good behavior and the other is more qualified for this matter, the one who is better qualified should be entrusted with this matter. Undoubtedly, qualification varies with the circumstance and the position. Someone might be qualified in a specific matter and position for possessing the characteristics suitable for that position. In this case, he should be entrusted with that post. On this basis, the Prophet appointed ‘Amr ibn al-‘Asi [died 663] to lead the army of Dhat al-Salasil and supported him with Abu Bakr, ‘Umar [ibn al-Khattab, died 644], and Abu ‘Ubayda ibn al-Jarra [circa 581–639], who were all under his command, though they were better than him. He also appointed Usama ibn Zayd [died circa 673] as a commander of an army that included Abu Bakr and ‘Umar. This principle is based on the statement, “although I am not better than any one of you.”

The Third Principle

Assuming the affairs of the people does not make the ruler better than anyone else. Preference is achieved through merit and deeds. If Abu Bakr was better, this was not due to his rule over them but because of his deeds and stances. This principle is also derived from the statement, “although I am not better than any one of you.”

The Fourth Principle

The people have the right to monitor those in charge because they are the source of their authority and preserve the right to appoint or depose them.

The Fifth Principle

The responsibility of the people toward the ruler lies in offering assistance to him as long as they see him following the righteous path. They must support him, as they share with him the responsibility. This principle, as the previous one, is derived from the statement, “Support me as long as you see me following the right path.”

The Sixth Principle

The responsibility of the people also lies in advising and guiding the ruler and pointing the righteous path to him when he deviates. The people must correct him if he misbehaves. This principle is based on the statement, “correct me when you see me going astray.”

The Seventh Principle

The people have the right to question the rulers, hold them accountable for their actions, and make them follow the choice of the nation, not their own. The people have the final word, not the rulers. This is a result of the people's right to hold the rulers accountable and correct them when they are convinced that the rulers are not following the right path, and cannot convince the people otherwise. This is derived form the statement, “correct me when you see me going astray.”

The Eighth Principle

Any one who assumes an affair of the people should declare the plan he is going to follow, so that the people become aware of and agree to it. He is not allowed to lead the people as he pleases, but as they please. This principle is based on the statement, “Obey me as long as I observe God in your affairs.” His plan is the obedience of God. The people knew what the obedience of God in Islam entailed.

The Ninth Principle

The people will not be governed except by the law they voluntarily adopt, the law that realizes their interest. The rulers only implement the will of the people, who obey the law because it emanates from them, not because it is imposed on them by any other authority, be it of an individual or of a group. This makes the people feel free to manage their affairs on their own. Everyone in society will share this feeling. Freedom and sovereignty are a natural and legitimate right of every individual in society. This principle is derived from the statement, “Obey me as long as I observe God in your affairs. If I disobey Him, you owe me no obedience.” Thus, they do not obey the ruler per se, but they obey God by following the law that He has revealed and that they have accepted for themselves. The ruler is delegated by them to apply this law to everyone, including himself. Therefore, if he deviates, he forsakes their obedience.

The Tenth Principle

All are equal before the law, regardless of their strength or weakness. The law should apply to the strong without any fear of their strength and to the weak without leniency for their weakness.

The Eleventh Principle

[The state] should protect the rights of the individuals and groups in society. The rights of the weak should not be forsaken because of their weakness, and the strong should not usurp the right of anyone because of their strength.

The Twelfth Principle

[The state] should maintain a balance in society when protecting the rights of its members. The dues should be fairly taken from the strong without transgression or weakening them. The rights of the weak should be granted to them without favor due to their weakness, so that they do not transgress against others. This principle and the two previous ones are derived from the statement, “The weak among you are powerful [in my eyes] until I get them their due. The powerful among you are weak [in my eyes] until I take away from them what is due to others.”

The Thirteenth Principle

There should be a realization of a mutual responsibility of the ruler and the ruled in reforming society. They should always feel the need to continue working strenuously and seriously, and seek forgiveness from God, who oversees them. This is based on the statement, “I say that and seek God's forgiveness for myself and for you.”

Tags: abu bakr, albelhamid ben badis, islam

The 2001 anthrax attack

2009-11-01T11:37:00.000-08:00

The invaluable Marcy Wheeler reminds us that the 2001 anthrax case is still not solved in FBI’s Robert Mueller Still Engaging in an Anthrax Cover-Up Emptywheel 11/01/09. The 2001 anthrax attack is an actual case of the deployment of a so-called "weapon of mass destruction", a term which thankfully seems to be disappearing from the political vocabulary, or may that's my overly-hopeful read on it. We invaded Iraq in 2003 and are still at war there that was justified to the Congress and the public as a war to eliminate "weapon of mass destruction" that didn't actually exist.

Solving this actual case of a WMD attack on the US is one of the most important pieces of unfinished business left by the Cheney-Bush administration's to the Obama administration. And, I'm sorry to say, I haven't heard anything that makes me think they're making any progress on it. Marcy provides a number of links in her post on the problems with the FBI's current explanation of the 2001 attack:

As we have discussed at length, there are reasons to doubt the FBI’s conclusions that Bruce Ivins acted alone (more here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). Indeed, all the FBI has claimed it proved with its nifty new scientific analysis (and Mueller states this) is that Ivins made the strain used in the attack (I’ll leave it to the scientists to address Mueller’s certainty on that front). They certainly have not proven that Ivins mailed the anthrax. Which means, quite simply, they haven’t solved the case.

Meryl Nass has developed a lot of her work on the blog Anthrax Vaccine to the 2001 anthrax attack and the still-unresolved issues around it. (Her most recent posts have to do with other vaccine issues.)

Glenn Greenwald has written about this issue quite a bit, as well, as in Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News Salon 08/01/09. In that particular post, he focuses on the unresolved issues around the efforts by advocates of invading Iraq to tie the 2001 anthrax attack to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Tags: anthrax, anthrax attack

What kind of reformist vision did William Appleman Williams have?

2009-11-01T11:21:00.000-08:00

William Appleman Williams (1921-1990)

The Nation in July presents a long essay on the late historian William Appleman Williams by historian Greg Grandin, Off Dead Center: William Appleman Williams 07/01/09 (07/20/09 edition).

Andrew Bacevich in The New American Militarism (2005) gives Williams credit, along with Charles Beard, for focusing attention on internal economic and political factors that affected American foreign policy. Because much of conventional commentary and scholarly analysis of US foreign policy fails to do so. Bacevich certainly didn't make any blanket endorsement of either of their outlooks.

Grandin talks about the fact that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., considered Williams an ideological opponent. But he doesn't discuss Schlesinger's actual critique of Williams' historical work, which raise some substantial scholarly objections to Williams' work, arguing that his mis- or over-interpreted some documents and gave unwarrented significance to some events. But Sclesinger's main criticism of Williams' account of the origins of the Cold War, in particular, was directed against a flaw of islolationist work in general, i.e., that it treated American foreign policy as almost exclusively self-generated and ignored or minimized the signficance of other international actors. (That criticism applies even more emphatically to Charles Beard.)

This apparently admiring description of Williams' self-understanding late in life gives good picture, though probably unintentional on Grandin's part, of the hodge-podge of organizing ideas that plagued his historical narratives:

[His own] self-description makes Williams sound more like a Hegelian than a Spinozian or a Marxist. Indeed, despite his searing indictment of empire, he was openly obsessed with the idea of America as the embodiment of a world spirit. "America," he wrote toward the end of his life, "is the kind of culture that wakes you in the night, the kind of nightmare that may [yet] possibly lead us closer to the truth." Williams was a serious, empirical scholar whose prose could be as dense as any academic's, but he often broke out of form to riff in a style as sprawling as his subject matter. "If we start with reform and go on to modernize, prosperity, improve, uplift," he said of the action words of American expansion, "then we come out with purify, put right, purgation, overtake, and never look back. Finally, we find stewards as policemen, which leads us backward and forwards to benevolence, surveillance, reform, paternalism, and systematic discipline in the name of progress." Intoxicated by the "dialectical tension" of "coming apart at the seams at midnight" and "stitching it back together in a sentence or two at 3 a.m.," Williams, a jazz drummer, increasingly expressed himself with bop rhythm and beat imagery. [?!?!] "Assume the worst," he warned in his last great work, chanting its title with a frequency worthy of Howl's Moloch: "empire as a way of life will lead to nuclear death."

I'm sorry, but I have no idea of just what the [Cheney] the dialectical tension of coming apart at midnight might mean. It sounds depressingly like a Maureen Dowd column to me.

Now, there's a lot that can legitimately be said in criticism of Cold War liberalism. But I don't that this counts:

Well before the publication of The Tragedy of American Diplomacy--Williams's best-known book, it has been reissued this year on its fiftieth anniversary--tragedy had become a favored genre of scholars operating within the "vital center" of American intellectual life. "History is not a redeemer, promising to solve all human problems in time," Arthur Schlesinger cautioned in 1949 in a Partisan Review essay nominally about the Civil War but really a brief for containment; it is rather a "tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration." Other "tough-minded" liberal intellectuals, such as Richard Hofstadter and Reinhold Niebuhr, invoked the force of instinct and passion in mass society as something of a deus ex machina to stress history's tragic dimensions. The notion that evil did not "proceed from a cruel system"--that is, a system that could be engineered to produce ever more virtue--but from man's "dark and tangled aspects," as Schlesinger interpreted Niebuhr, helped transform liberalism from a politics of hope to one of fear. The policy implications were clear: the New Deal was the outer limit of reform, beyond which lay the nether lands of totalitarianism, and the Soviets needed to be confronted with the same resolve with which the Union defeated the Confederacy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt beat the Nazis.

When did Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ever say that the New Deal was "the outer limit of reform"? In fact, he was very much a supporter of the Kennedy and Johnson brands of domestic liberalism which did go beyond the New Deal. Surely Grandin has heard of Medicare? And both Schlesinger and Niebuhr became opponents of the Vietnam War. In fact, Niebuhr's Christian conception of the tragic element in human history led him and others who followed his thinking to recognize the limits of US power that the country had encountered in the Vietnam War. Schlesinger lived to see the early part of the Iraq War, which he also opposed forthrightly.

Grandin also seems to find some grand and subtle historical insight in the following:

Williams did not believe, as did many progressives of his day, that liberalism was a way station on the road to social democracy; he thought that whatever transformative force the philosophy once held had mutated either into a corrosive, anti-intellectual individualism or a justification for monopoly capitalism, in both cases kept alive only by a constant "fleeing forward." Thus he was free to find traces of a latent socialism in the unlikeliest places, including in the South's culture of defeat and resentment (a "prism-prison" that distorts some truths, leading to racial supremacy and "hawkish bellicosity," but that clarifies a healthy distrust of the state) and in the writings of aristocrats, conservative politicians and businessmen who, even if they still defended hierarchy, candidly confronted the predicaments of capital. His most famous restoration project was Herbert Hoover; it seemed that every time Schlesinger wrote a book about FDR, Williams would counter by finding some new, underappreciated quality in the man New Dealers loved to ridicule.

He continues immediately to say that Williams greatest inspiration was the American civil rights movement. But he doesn't seem to see the screaming contradiction he spells out in that paragraph just quoted: Williams looked to conservatives more than (American-style) liberals for a hopeful future. How could those ideas lead to some kind of "socialism"? Possibly because his idea of "socialism" seem to be, as Bacevich describes it, something like his picture of peaceful Midwestern farm communities.

Grandin's essay reminds me how the American political vocablulary complicates ideological discussions. Williams drew on the "progressive" tradition to form a vision of a non-imperialist, "socialist" America based on the ideas of reactionary Republicans like Herbert Hoover and a rejection of the brand of liberalism represented by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Many "progressives" thought that "liberalism" would lead to "social democracy": a statement that would make sense if we knew just what he meant by progressives, liberalism and social democracy.

The problem with untangling this is realted to the fact that in the context of European politics of the same period, the relationships among liberals, social democrats, conservatives and Communists could be more easily described because there were actual parties representing those distinct trends. In Europe, liberalism was the basic ideology of "free market" capitalism, with both conservative and liberal trends within that understanding. Social democracy evolved from a reformist opposition to capitalism to a reformist version of support for capitalism. The Communists and the social democrats were both parties of the Left, sharing a broad criticism of capitalist social relations. But no one had trouble telling the two apart most of the times, though their opponents often found it convenient to claim otherwise.

Whereas in America, reformist and conservative-to-reactionary tendencies were present in both major parties. Reformers in the early part of the 20th century tended to call themselves progressives. When Theodore Roosevelt formed a third party to again for President in 1912, it was called the Progressive Party. The model liberal Woodrow Wilson opposed extending the franchise to women. The Democratic Party of Jefferson and Jackson was home to both union workers and militant farmers and to the Ku Klux Klan and reactionary Southern planters. The "liberal" label more-or-less as we know it today in American politics really emerged after the First World War, when pro-labor activists wanted a way to distinguish themselves from "progressives", who were often affluent middle-class reformers whose reforms were partially aimed at restricted the power of unions.

So we wind up today with American liberals being the pro-labor advocates - though many are not nearly as pro-labor as they should be - and conservatives being the more overt advocates of unrestrained corporate power.

How does this related to a critique like that of Williams or to Grandin's laudatory essay? Because part of the problem in Williams' approach is that he conflates the "liberalism" of the 19th century with that of the 20th, and the "liberalism" of democracy and human rights with that of coporate greed and military expansionism. He then makes the liberals of the 20th century the villains of American history. And from the perspective of his own pastoral, small-town vision of "socialism" - which seems to be more like the vision of the Amish communities or the Shakers than of European Social Democrats or Communists - he looked hard to find positive examples and trends among conservatives and even reactionaries.

Since the American New Left of the 1960s found itself protesting the Vietnam War and other foreign policies of two liberal Democratic administrations, Williams' arguments resonated with many New Left activists and intellectuals, who presumably missed or weren't too concerned about some of the basically reactionary perspectives underlying his analysis. It's surprising that a historian like Williams for whom conservatives are the heroes of American history is still being claimed by Grandin as a figure of the left. But then, if your ideal society is a "socialism" of Midwestern farm towns, maybe Herbert Hoover counts as a leftist.

The complicated but fascinating ideological tangles in Williams' work and its reception shouldn't obscure the important substantive objections that his critics like Schlesinger advanced on his use of historical material.

Grandin tries to dispute that Williams was repelled by the excesses he perceived in the youth movement of the late 1960s. But there does seem to have been some kind of biographical break in his approach at about that time. Bacevich perceives such a break around 1969. As I've noted in other posts on Williams, his work in the 1970s actually endorsed the neo-Confederate position that the North should have just let the Southern states go in peace, because that's all they really wanted. That position is frankly ludicrous on both factual and interpretative grounds. And any approach to American history that gets you to that point has to be seriously flawed.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, william appleman williams

Obama's honors soldiers sacrifices while Liz Cheney whines

2009-11-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

La Opinión is now making some of its editorials available in English translation, including El costo de la guerra/The cost of the war 10/31/09:

La guerra es una realidad cruenta que no puede ni debe ser disimulada.

Nos referimos a la decisión del presidente Obama de recibir los cuerpos de los soldados muertos en Afganistán en la ceremonia de rutina que se realiza en la Base Area Dover. La imagen del mandatario en este momento solemne contrasta con la política de su predecesor. George W. Bush, a pesar de favorecer la estrategia militar, sobre otros medios, intentó esconder de los estadounidenses los costos psicológicos de la guerra, prohibiendo las fotos del arribo de ataúdes, y el monetario, aislando el precio del conflicto en presupuestos de emergencia.

Se quiso pintar una guerra ideal, sin muertos propios y sin aumentar el déficit, aunque lo cierto es todo lo contrario. La intención política de desligar este gigantesco costo de la realidad era deshonesto. [mi énfasis]

The fact that war is a bloody reality is not be glossed over.

We are referring to President Obama’s decision to take part in the repatriation ceremony for the war dead from Afghanistan at the Dover Air force Base. The image of the President in this solemn occasion stands in contrast to the policy of his predecessor. George W. Bush, in spite of suporting a belligerent policy over other approaches, tried to shield Americans from the costs of war by forbidding photographs of the arrival of caskets and separating out the costs of the conflict in emergency budgets.

That would be an ideal war, one with no deaths and with no increase in the deficit, but the truth is quite the contrary. The political intent to hide this immense cost is, more than anything else, dishonest. [my emphasis]

Meanwhile, Liz Cheney whines about Obama honoring our troops. Is it genetic, or did Liz have to work to acquire her father's psychopathic approach?

At this point, we really do have to wonder if "patriotism" for many Republicans is now simply a synonym for "supports the Republican Party". Digby (Wingnut Revisionists Hullabaloo 10/30/09) and Blue Texan (Attention Bush Apologists: Reagan Greeted Fallen Americans at an Air Force Base, Idiots FireDogLake 10/30/09). Digby writes:

Any discussion that there's something untoward in the President greeting dead soldiers is wingnut revisionist crap. Kings and leaders have been doing this since time began. It's a sign of respect for the fallen and they do it publicly as gesture on behalf of the people . That these so-called patriots think there's now something wrong with that tells you everything you need to know about their sincerity

Why do they hate the troops so much?

At this point, especially with the Cheneys, that finally question hardly seems ironic at all.

Tags: afghanistan war, barack obama, liz cheney, republican party

Big Thinking on the permanent war economy/society/state

2009-10-31T10:27:00.000-07:00

Several of my favorite bloggers have been attending a conference sponsoring by the Democratic-leaning America's Future group called, "Making it in America: Building The New Economy."

Digby in Bubbly Spartans Hullabaloo 10/29/09 in a report from the conference points out that a significant amount of American research and development, and therefore basic science research, is sponsored by government, especially the military:

One of the speakers here, Suzanne Berger from MIT, made a very interesting case that even if we want more bubbles, we aren't likely to get anything very impressive in the future because the kind of industrial innovation that used to be undertaken by private industry, such as Bell Labs, are so atrophied from the past couple of decades of short term financial pressure that they just don't exist anymore. Therefore, it falls to the government to filo the gap --- which isn't a problem as long as the innovation has something to do with killing people or supplying an army.

In fact, we have the vast amount of federal welfare for educated white guys -- defense spending --- to thank for a rather large amount of the growth we have in the economy generally. Too bad Americans are mostly a bunch of overweight, mall shopping TV watchers or we'd have a future as the Sparta of the 21ast [sic] century. Our economy is gearing itself up to focus almost exclusively on war making. Support the surge, support the workers? [my emphasis]

Only the most comfortable generalization and set-piece slogans fit smoothly between commercials in most of our network and cable infotainment programs. As a result, I'm guessing that more people know the snarky definition of "hiking on the Appalachian trail" as a synonym for "boinking my Argentinian girlfriend" than have any idea of what to make of this week's news that the House of Representatives will be voting on a non-"robust" plan for a health insurance public option that will reimburse at Medicare rates rather than "Medicare plus five".

And the latter is something than a lot of us are probably going to have to figure into our personal budgets before we know it, although admittedly it's more boring to daydream about than trysts with a Latin lover. When it comes to thinking about issues like the US military position in the world, the public discussion rarely gets beyond variations on superficial patriotic bromides about being the number 1 power, US world leadership, defenses second to none and "9/11". And, of course, appeasement and "Munich", which we all know we must avoid at every stage of our generations-spanning Long War.

Terry Eagleton earlier this year in Culture & Barbarism: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism Commonweal 03/27/09 touched on some of the same themes Digby raises about how the Big Picture state of our society presented some deadly opportunities for religious and political extremists to wreak havoc:

Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic. It looks particularly flaccid when its paucity of belief runs up against an excess of the stuff—not only abroad, but domestically too, in the form of various homegrown fundamentalisms. Modern market societies tend to be secular, relativist, pragmatic, and materialistic, qualities that undermine the metaphysical values on which political authority in part depends. And yet capitalism cannot easily dispense with those metaphysical values, even though it has difficulty taking them seriously. (As President Dwight Eisenhower once announced, channeling Groucho Marx, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief—and I don’t care what it is.”) Religious faith in this view is both vital and vacuous. God is ritually invoked on American political platforms, but it would not do to raise him in a committee meeting of the World Bank. In the United States, ideologues of the religious Right, aware of the market’s tendency to oust metaphysics, sought to put those values back in place. Thus does postmodern relativism breed a redneck fundamentalism; those who believe very little rub shoulders with those ready to believe almost anything. With the advent of Islamist terrorism, these contradictions have been dramatically sharpened. It is now more than ever necessary that the people should believe, even as the Western way of life deprives them of much incentive for doing so.

Assured since the fall of the Soviet bloc that it could proceed with impunity to pursue its own global interests, the West overreached itself. Just when ideologies in general seemed to have packed up for good, the United States put them back on the agenda in the form of a peculiarly poisonous brand of neoconservatism. Like characters in some second-rate piece of science fiction, a small cabal of fanatical dogmatists occupied the White House and proceeded to execute their well-laid plans for world sovereignty. It was almost as bizarre as Scientologists taking over 10 Downing Street, or Da Vinci Code buffs patrolling the corridors of the Elysée Palace. The much-trumpeted Death of History, meaning that capitalism was now the only game in town, reflected the arrogance of the West’s project of global domination; and that aggressive project triggered a backlash in the form of radical Islam.

Tags: militarism, military budget, military and society

Bad news, good news on health care reform

2009-10-30T14:44:00.000-07:00

David Dayen at FDL News Desk has both in Obama Meeting With Progressives And Caucus Leaders Focused On Triggers And Opt-Out 10/30/09. The headline has the bad news, which David summarizes as follows, "Most of the discussion, [Adam] Sarvana said, was about House members’ opposition to public option compromises like triggers and the opt-out." (emphasis in original)

The good news:

The Congressional Progressive Caucus remains on the record as 100% opposed to the trigger AND the opt-out clause, which has not really been prominent in the debate. Everyone assumes that whatever passes the Senate on the public option will represent what must appear in the final bill, but House progressives are, for the moment, not backing down in their opposition.

I've got to admit it's discouraging to see the President in this situation leaning on the liberals to let him flush the public option when we haven't seen any comparable pressure from the White House on the Blue Dogs to get on board with the public plan. Obama's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett was right when she said at this summer's Netroots Nation convention that they had no intention to pressure the Blue Dogs on the public option. "But clearly, the White House wanted to feel out that opposition and see if they could potentially break it down," David writes.

Tags: health care reform, obama administration