perform[ing] a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War. It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong. No more hiding like cowards in our bases. It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places." Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path." Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars: "all out or all in." The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.Indeed, in his remarkable piece of propaganda Brooks's appraisal of the political and military situation is selective and slanted in its relationship with facts and irresponsible and, frankly, comical in its use of rhetoric. But, as I pointed out yesterday, what's truly sinister and galling is the piece's attempt to bend recent history to its own political ends. I mean, basically, it conflates statements of unambiguous fact with statements evincing a heterodox conception of political and military historiography. To call it heterodox is maybe too nice: It is nothing less than a neoconservative wet dream of blood-lust, self-righteousness, pedantry and calls to the cause of freedom and destiny!!!, pitting the United States (unambiguously good, honorable, honest, free, saintly) against...
Well, let's pause there. Against who, exactly? Who is it that we are fighting, and what is it that makes our enemies so damned evil, Dave Brooks?
Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither..*
We've been, for 30 years now!, engaged in a "long" conflict (i.e.: we're already knee-deep in this conflict, so giving up now would mean that the brave sacrifices of those who have gone before us will have been in vain!, a dishonor done to their memories!!!), a "complex" conflict (i.e.: a chess-like series of highly technical maneuvers, tactics, strategies, intelligence-gathering measures by way of "data-mining," spying, "harsh interrogations," computers and machines and all sorts of stealth, jargony technical and technological and academic and bookish stuff that you could never hope to understand in a million years, so just back off and leave it to us experts).
And the conflict has been with "Islamic extremism." But, wait, I thought it was a conflict with Al Quaeda? Or, wait: no!, it's a War On Terror, right? Or was it the Taliban in Afghanistan? Or was it in Pakistan? Or was it against Osama bin Laden? Or, wait: against Saddam Hussein? Or wait, what about Omar Kadafi? Or...uh...what about those mean-looking dudes in Iran? Hold on! I think I'm sensing a pattern here..... Don't tell me!
Okay: the idea of a "long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism" is so inexcusably hamfisted, willfully ignorant, so transparently calculated to render as ambiguous as possible the identity of our putative enemy, American aims in the putative conflict, its theater of action, and its putative moral authority, and moreover it's so classically, paradigmatically Orwellian (remember how the government kept switching the war enemy between Eurasia and Eastasia?: the point is that the more ambiguous the nature of the enemy/terms of conflict, the more potentially sinister, totalitarian and just plain dangerous it becomes for people like Brooks to issue absurd calls to arms in the name of empty, cynical and dishonest conceptions of quote-patriotism-unquote!!!).
I leave you with a side-by-side comparison of my own which I hope will illustrate in no uncertain terms why it's so very dangerous when asshole pseudo-intellectuals like David Brooks write like chest-thumping, fist-pounding neanderthals, particularly when they are saying War Is Hell, But We Americans Had Better Tough It Out To Preserve Our Honor And To Protect Our Way Of Live Against A Threat Posed By AN IDEOLOGY THAT'S INCOMPATIBLE WITH OUR OWN, This Is, If You're A Decent Honest Non-Terrorist American!!!!
Here's Brooks, giving it his best, really throwing the full strength of of his will into his appeal, the purity -- uncontaminated by 'foreign, un-American ideologies' -- of his thick-skinned, ideologically correct moral righteousness, his steadfast refusal to fall victim to the illusions of weaker men!!!!:
Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.
[...]
We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. ... This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
I can just hear the John Phillip Sousa march emanating from the speaker system of Brook's swanky corner office in The New York Times building. But the United States has not monopolized the use of careless bombast in attempts to justify not just warfare but ideological warfare, The same holds for ideological warfare in which the homeland's Weltanschauung or way of life or values or blood is cast as incompatible with another.
Who else was fond of saying, This planet ain't big enough for the both of us! and, It will take a long, possibly thousand-year struggle, but we must always be willing to attack in the most unrelenting and steadfast way, including the use of 'extraordinary measures, which will require a decisive break from the old, outdated philosophies, practices and values of the old, feeble-minded military hierarchy...?
I know who! A propagandist, political leader and military leader all rolled into one, who had the following to say to the German generals at a meeting in early March, 1941, before their glorious, hard-willed march into Russia and, as we all know, their eventual doom:
The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the the comprehension of you generals but...I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law...will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it. [Adolf Hitler, as quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]
Phew! I don't need to point out all of the parallels explicitly, do I? And the last couple of quoted sentences provide illuminating comparisons with not only Brooks's article but with the justifications used by Bush and Cheney, et al. for their (once-) secret approval of the use of torture in various "national security"-related interrogations.
Finally, just to really make everyone even more sick to their stomachs, let us consider what one Heinrich Himmler had to say to his S.S. generals on October 4, 1943:
...I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly...Of course I'm not comparing Brooks to these two dudes. Like I said, I'd happily have a beer with Dave Brooks, should the opportunity arise. He's a decent fellow, etc.
I mean...the extermination of the Jewish race....Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written... [quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]
I mean merely to illustrate that the coupling of elegant/pretentious ideological certitudes -- and grand abstract principles generally -- with windy, high-minded rhetoric and fist-pounding putatively patriotic fervor is dangerous. Especially when this combination is used to advocate long, violent, multi-front wars against an enemy whose identity is ambiguous, whose goals are completely abstract and easily doctored both in the framing of present and future debates but in rewriting our collective/cultural consciousness retrospectively. The latter is at the heart of any decent definition of Orwellian governance.
Last of all, don't let Brooks and his friends get away with convincing the American population that we must violate our own values, principles and ethics in order to stave off an enemy with which we are supposedly engaged in a never-ending existential conflict. That's the worst kind of bullying in the world: It doesn't make sense, it isn't an argument but a exercise in rhetorical and symbolic power, and we must fight back against it.
I know, I sound like Bono or something, but this stuff is just so unbelievably sleazy and unjust....
__________________
* All quoted passages that appear in bold typeface were chosen for emphasis by the present blogger.
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6 comments:
A bit overwrought with the Hitler comparisons, don't you think? It reminded me of the video you posted earlier in which the conservative protesters compared Obama with Hitler.
Nonetheless, I agree with your sentiment on this subject. What is to be done with Brooks, and those like him, though? Earlier, you were saying he's never had his megaphone taken away from him. Do you think this should happen? And on what grounds, because it's not real journalism, or commentary, or whatever his job description is? To what extent is this just a symptom of the dumbing down of everything (not that we've never had war mongering in national media many times before)? He must be helping the Times to sell...papers? website viewings?...perhaps that's all that really matters to the folks who run this publication.
O.K. just take another look at this paragraph:
Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither..
Let's look at that last bit again:
if we do so, extremism will wither..
That's quite a statement! Do you think that's true? Does anybody who isn't zealot with fruitcake for a brain actually think that this crusade (and that's exactly what he's describing: how is it different?) that appears to be so vivid, so noble and just a cause in the warped mind of David Brooks will actually, if, let's say, we remain vigilant and continue to live & die by the sword and blowing up little brown men, that this "end of extremism" could ever actually be attained?
What would it look like? How will we or our great great great grandchildren know when the extremists are vanquished, their "ideology" "withere[d]"?
It's major crackpot stuff that Brooks is spewing here. Unlike the southern redneck protesters and their Obama/Hitler fixation, I provided the quotations to which you refer not in an attempt to say that "David Brooks is a Nazi" -- I mean, I'm a man of many faults and am at times prone to hyperbole, etc., but unlike those rednecks, my references to the 3rd Reich are used to illustrate something substantive: that the Nazis are just one of the most heinous examples of the countless tyrants throughout history that marched hundreds of thousands/millions of their nations' best & brightest to their destruction in the service of some comparable ideal of COMPLETE VICTORY, the wiping out of an entire ideology.
You can't wipe out an entire ideology!!! That's not how the world works. I'm not saying that there aren't ideologies out there that are evil and/or are appropriated in the service of evil. But seriously, whatever the hell Brooks is rambling about there, he's clearly in fantasy-land and he's using puffed-up "us or them"/"let's die honorably" rhetoric that is truly disgusting.
What is to be done with Brooks, and those like him, though? Earlier, you were saying he's never had his megaphone taken away from him. Do you think this should happen? And on what grounds, because it's not real journalism, or commentary, or whatever his job description is? To what extent is this just a symptom of the dumbing down of everything (not that we've never had war mongering in national media many times before)? He must be helping the Times to sell...papers? website viewings?...perhaps that's all that really matters to the folks who run this publication.
I'm not sure I understand everything you're getting at here ("the dumbing down of everything..."?), but I understand what you mean when you ask -- in the words of V.I. Lenin -- "What is to be done?"
My answer is that nothing is to be done because we can't do anything about it. We haven't got the power to fire David Brooks or to demand that the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards sack all of the neoconservatives and/or militarist head-cases on their staffs or to wave a magic wand and bring back a mythical, simpler time in which most journalists had self-respect and were broad-minded enough to extricate themselves intellectually and morally from the commonplace-yet-specious assumptions and ethical blind-spots that surround journalism, politics and money interests.
In other words, as your comment begins to imply, it's a systemic problem. And maybe part of what we mean when we say the problem is systemic is that its "problematicity" is compounded by and perhaps in large part emanates from the fact that the structures currently in place -- be they old & decaying or as innovative and as shrewdly designed as credit-default swaps -- aren't built to deal with them in a meaningful way.
Problems like that can't be solved w/ discrete solutions, the way that we plug drain, but that doesn't mean that it's not important to ask the question.
It's just that no answers come to mind right now, and I point to these problems not specifically in order to propose solutions but, rather, to try to describe the problems in a somewhat meaningful way.
As I said earlier, we don't have the power to change any of it, and that's all the more reason that we should point them out. Because people who don't know how powerless they are and the ways in which they are powerless are ill-equipped to make moral & practical judgments. We've talked before about how flattery and how one of the ways in which people become numb/anesthetized to political reality is because one side flatters their pants off. The GOP specializes in that kind of thing among particular income groups, etc., and I'm sure I needn't state explicitly the person that I'm thinking of when I say this. People want to believe that they are important, that they have a voice and that they are in charge.
The fact that they're NOT, which they keep bumping up against, again and again, then becomes an unwelcome intrusion that makes them ever-more susceptible to flattery and ever more DEPENDENT upon that specific kind of ego-gratification in order to maintain their sense of pride, self-respect, value.
Thus, they drift further and further away from reality with its inconvenient facts.
Ha! Very well-put, CFT. I for some reason appreciate hearing this part of your analysis, too, the V.I. Lenin part. You say "we don't have the power to change any of it, and that's all the more reason that we should point them out." My hope is that pointing them out, as you and other less mainstream media do, represents/anticipates/leads to some eventual structural change.
I'm just amazed how the only person who criticizes Brooks is Greenwald.
@Jack:
Thanks for the kind words, and thanks for asking the "What is to be done?" question, because, I agree w/ you, exploring it raises additional interesting questions...
Also, as for the hope of anticipating or influencing change, I must share the hope on some level, because otherwise I wouldn't derive enjoyment from shooting my mouth off, & moreover, I probably wouldn't be "morally outraged" (what more is "moral outrage" than an expression of disappointment that leads to existential despair?) in the first place. Even so, as regards conscious thinking/feeling, hope has nothing at all to do with it. OK, I hate counter-factuals, but: If we somehow knew with absolute certainty that everything we value & believe in is doomed to disastrous failure, would we stop having political conversations? What I'm getting at in my pedantic (a nice way of putting it) way is that I suspect that the desire for Verstehen and/or Aufklärung would still represent our primary motivation for having bull sessions about politics.
@PhP:
No kidding! That's depressing. Glenn Greenwald has long been one of the few columnists writing for semi-prominent rags like Salon who's willing to call someone like Brooks out. Go up one tier on the mainstream ladder, and you will not find, to my knowledge (although, I frankly haven't been reading much news lately) not a single columnist expressing something sympathetic with Greenwald's view.
Something is monumentally messed up about that, because, let's face it, it's not exactly a small number of people who are inclined to see things Greenwald's way, and among them are many well-respected, credible and even influential people from all over the country and the world, from many walks of life, from academia to the military to the actual experts (that is to say: NOT political hacks like Brooks, Friedman, Kristol & Kagan) in foreign policy, diplomacy and international relations.
And yet, the views of these competent and intellectually honest experts seem never to see the light of day on quite the same scale as William Safire (RIP), David Brooks or George Will. Moreover, the vast majority of critiques of neoconservative foreign policy that DO appear in more prominent publications are usually expressed in a way that comes across as febrile, wishy-washy and so "technical"-sounding & jargony.
In other words, the real authorities on these subjects, being experts in their fields, sound like a bunch of experts and therefore fail to influence ordinary people in these discourses. And how could somebody who spends his time actually studying his subject compete with hacks like David Brooks when it comes to influencing "ordinary people"?
I mean, when you put in years and years not only propagandizing but propagandizing the SAME THING over and over again -- the only thing that ever changes is the specific Islamic COUNTRY that he's talking about! -- you get damn good at it. If your opponents in expert circles don't devote the same time and energy to "messaging" because they're too busy being experts, and if they also seem not to be given prominent positions in public discourse, then of course you're going to get your way nearly every time.
And how it is that GOP mouth-breathers CONTINUE to get away with calling The New York Times & The Washington Post "THE LIBERAL MEDIA" is entirely beyond me. It is a statement, we might say, that has a considerably-less-than-precarious relation to FACT.
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