Right-Wing Flame War!
By JONATHAN DEE
January 24, 2010
New York Times Sunday Magazine
Charles Johnson has been writing a blog for almost as long as the word “blog” has existed. A bearish, gentle-voiced, ponytailed man who for three decades enjoyed a successful career as a jazz guitarist accompanying the likes of Al Jarreau and Stanley Clarke, Johnson has always had a geek’s penchant for self-education, and in that spirit he cultivated a side interest, and ultimately an expertise, in writing computer code. His Web log, which he named “Little Green Footballs” (a private joke whose derivation he has always refused to divulge), was begun in February 2001 mostly as a way to share advice and information with fellow code jockeys — his approach was similar in outlook, if vastly larger in its reach, to the guiding spirit in the days of ham radio. His final post on Sept. 10, 2001, was titled “Placement of Web Page Elements.” It read, in its entirety: “Here’s a well-executed academic study of where users expect things to be on a typical Web page.” It linked to, well, exactly what it said. The post attracted one comment, which read, in its entirety, “Fantastic article.”
The next 24 hours would transform his blog and, ultimately, his career. “I grew up in Hawaii,” Johnson told me recently when we met in his Los Angeles home, “but I was born in New York. After I moved away at age 10, I would read the news stories about how the World Trade Center towers were getting closer to finishing. When they were attacked that day, that really hit home for me in a way that reached back into my childhood. I’ve always been kind of a voracious reader, and when I saw the attack happen, I was probably one of the first ones to make a connection with Osama bin Laden, who’d declared war on America a few years earlier. It was like a huge light bulb going on over my head about this stuff, and I wanted to really learn about it, so I started posting everything I could find.”
Those searching the Web for information on the attackers soon found Johnson. “Many of us felt guilty that we didn’t even know who had invaded this country,” says Pamela Geller, an early Little Green Footballs reader and a former associate publisher at The New York Observer, who now writes a blog of her own called Atlas Shrugs. “The media had been, I think, somewhat derelict in terms of describing our mortal enemy. Charles Johnson was covering the global jihad in an in-depth and comprehensive fashion that nobody else was. That’s where I was getting my best news, from Little Green Footballs.”
By virtue of his willingness to do and share research, his personal embrace of a hawkish, populist anger and his extraordinary Web savvy, Johnson quickly turned Little Green Footballs (or L.G.F., as it is commonly known) into one of the most popular personal sites on the Web, and himself — the very model of a Los Angeles bohemian — into an avatar of the American right wing. With a daily audience in the hundreds of thousands, the career sideman had moved to the center of the stage.
Now it is eight years later, and Johnson, who is 56, sits in the ashes of an epic flame war that has destroyed his relationships with nearly every one of his old right-wing allies. People who have pledged their lives to fighting Islamic extremism, when asked about Charles Johnson now, unsheathe a word they do not throw around lightly: “evil.” Glenn Beck has taken the time to denounce him on air and at length. Johnson himself (Mad King Charles is one of his most frequent, and most printable, Web nicknames) has used his technical know-how to block thousands of his former readers not just from commenting on his site but even, in many cases, from viewing its home page. He recently moved into a gated community, partly out of fear, he said, that the venom directed at him in cyberspace might jump its boundaries and lead someone to do him physical harm. He has turned forcefully against Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, nearly every conservative icon you can name. And answering the question of what, or who, got to Charles Johnson has itself become a kind of boom genre on the Internet.
“It’s just so illogical,” Geller told me heatedly not long ago. “I loved him. I respected him. But the way he went after people was like a mental illness. There’s an evil to that, a maliciousness. He’s a traitor, a turncoat, a plant. We may not know for years what actually happened. You think he changed his mind?”
NUMBER OF SO-CALLED warblogs were born out of the post-9/11 moment, when hanging a shingle in the still relatively frontier-like blogosphere was a way of, if not doing something exactly, at least establishing a rallying point for the considerable fury of all those who longed to do something. But even if the cliché about bloggers — that they presume to write knowledgeably about complex subjects without ever leaving their homes — is mostly true, it doesn’t mean that bloggers can’t make things happen. Perhaps the defining moment in Johnson’s new career came in 2004, when he was able not just to follow but to drive a major story: he was the central blogger behind what came to be known as Rathergate, in which a few citizen journalists did what Dan Rather and the venerable CBS News lacked either the patience or the skill to do themselves — check a typewritten letter supposedly from 1972, criticizing George W. Bush’s military service, for authenticity.
There is some dispute, even today, as to who was the first to expose the fraud behind the so-called Killian documents, but Johnson will forever be associated with the episode because, unlike most other bloggers — who know as much about the technical workings of their medium as a poet is likely to know about a printing press — he had the wherewithal to create, almost instantly, an animated .gif image that toggled between the original letter and that same letter typed in Microsoft Word 32 years later, illustrating the issue in a way that no 500-word blog post could have done.
The Rathergate era was the golden age of L.G.F., at least in terms of traffic. Johnson says that the peak was somewhere around half a million page views per day. (Over the past year or so, it has averaged about one-fifth that many.) But even after its peak, L.G.F. remained one of the most influential blogs in cyberspace, certainly at the conservative end of the political spectrum. It would be going too far to say that L.G.F. was a single-issue blog in those days, but even those issues on which it branched out — for instance, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Johnson, an agnostic and a Gentile, is a fierce supporter of Israel, mostly on account of the affection he developed for it as a touring musician), or the 2004 presidential election, or the Patriot Act — were outgrowths of the one concern that trumped all others: national security in the face of Islamic terrorism.
If the tone of Johnson’s writing on the blog sometimes bordered, as his detractors claimed, on hate speech, that of his mostly anonymous commenters was reliably worse. A popular blog like L.G.F. functions as a kind of cloud-sourced id. It is not uncommon for a simple, 200-word post to accrue upward of a thousand written responses from readers. The question of how responsible he is, or should be, for these expressions of uncensored reader sentiment is one that Johnson, like many bloggers, has struggled with; but in the middle years of the last decade, whether for free-speech reasons or simply because he enjoyed being the popular focal point of such strong nationalist feeling, he did very little to rein it in. Muslims were described as “vermin.” The posthumous nickname St. Pancake was coined for the young American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, in reference to the Israeli bulldozer that killed her. Discussion of U.S. foreign-policy options included terms like “targeted genocide.” As for Palestinians, “they don’t need statehood,” offered one commenter; “they need sterilization.” And on and on. A so-called stalker blog, called L.G.F. Watch, sprang up to document instances of what it considered hate speech on the part of Johnson and his followers. Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott compared Johnson’s site to a “disorganized Nuremberg Rally.”
But enemies themselves are a kind of currency on the Internet, and for every attack L.G.F. provoked as a place that permitted and even fostered bigotry against Muslims in particular, new allies rose up to link themselves to Johnson and his causes. Those links were both spiritual and literal; allowing (or preventing) less-successful sites to post a link to yours, and maybe offering them a link on your own site in return, turns you into a kind of taste maker, a locus of tangible power. L.G.F. was, by 2007 or so, at the heart of a vast, amorphous grid of right-wing sites of every description, an interdependence that Johnson himself had become, in a way, too popular to control.
That concept of the link, in all its permutations, is the key to what happened next, both to Johnson and because of him, and it says something enlightening not just about blogging but also about the nature and prospects of citizen journalism. Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine.
IN OCTOBER 2007, Johnson was asked to take part in what was billed as a Counter-Jihad Conference in Brussels, a gathering of fewer than a hundred politicians and opinion leaders from around the world who convened to share ideas and strategies for combating the spread of militant Islam. Johnson was not the only writer invited — Geller was there, as well as Robert Spencer of jihadwatch.org (a Web site Johnson himself designed), to name two — but he did not go. “I’m just not a joiner of these things,” he says.
The conference finished up in Brussels, and “the next day,” Johnson remembers, “people were e-mailing me saying, ‘You might want to cover this.’ So I started looking into it.” He discovered that among the conference’s 90 or so participants — though not among the speakers — was a man named Filip Dewinter, a leader of a Belgian-nationalist political party called Vlaams Belang, or “Flemish Interest.” Vlaams Belang, which has a history that reaches back to the wrong side of World War II, has an unabashed record of inflammatory rhetoric and hateful, opportunistic verbal viciousness of all sorts; a few years ago, for example, the party announced an advertising campaign in Moroccan newspapers and magazines to “discourage foreigners from coming to our country.” And as recently as 2004, it was condemned by the Belgian Supreme Court for incitement to discrimination and racial segregation. (The party responded by changing its name.) Even to most right-wing sensibilities, Vlaams Belang is certainly beyond the pale. Still, whether or not Dewinter, who has said that “in Flanders, the multicultural society has led to a multicriminal society,” is more extreme than the commenters who appeared regularly on Little Green Footballs seems like a subject on which right-wing minds might reasonably disagree. Perhaps that still happens somewhere. Gray, however, is not a popular shade on the Internet.
It seems borderline ridiculous that the political character of an extremist Belgian party, which in the last parliamentary election captured just 17 seats out of 150 in the Chamber of Representatives, should become the issue over which a kind of civil war among American conservatives broke out, but that is what happened. Opposing “Islamofascism,” Johnson had come to believe, shouldn’t require identification with fascism of the older sort. Johnson began taking shots at not only Vlaams Belang, an organization it seems safe to say the vast majority of his readers had never heard of, but also at formerly favored colleagues like Spencer and Geller, to whom, by attending the same conference, the European neofascist movement was now . . . linked. Johnson first hinted, and eventually demanded, that they publicly distance themselves from both Vlaams Belang and the conference itself, and when they demurred, he publicly distanced himself from them.
“Filip Dewinter has said some things I deplore,” Spencer says. “But I don’t consider myself responsible for him just because I was at this conference and he was, too. That’s an outrageous kind of guilt by association. Let me ask you this: a few years ago I spoke at a Yom Kippur service, and one of the other speakers was Hillary Clinton. Does that make me a supporter or her work, or her of mine?”
Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997. The speaker will never put it behind him. (Just as Johnson, despite his very reasonable contention that he later changed his mind, will never be allowed to consign to the past a blog post he wrote in 2004 criticizing that judicial condemnation of Vlaams Belang as “a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups.”) It may be difficult to travel to Belgium and build the case that Filip Dewinter is not just a hateful character but an actual Nazi (and thus that those who can be linked to him are Nazi sympathizers), but sitting at your keyboard, there is no trick to it at all. Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.
Johnson broke off relations with blogs that claimed openly to owe their own existence to him. He called the syndicated columnist Diana West and the investigative reporter Richard Miniter fascist sympathizers. He threatened to take down Michelle Malkin. In some ways, it was an exploration of the limits of his own influence: all over the blogosphere, you were either with him or with the fascists.
“I was such a small fish at the time,” Geller said. “I realized I was basically committing blog suicide by going against him. But he was wrong.” When one of Johnson’s posts about the conference was picked up and incorporated in a press release by the conservative bête noire Council on American-Islamic Relations, Geller called him out on Atlas Shrugs; he responded with a series of posts about her, the most memorable of which was titled, “Pamela Geller: Poster Girl for Eurofascism.” (Not that Geller herself, who posted a Photoshopped picture of Johnson in Joker makeup, was exactly on the high road.) Traffic at her site, she says, went down about 75 percent. “He really did put a knife in the trans-Atlantic counterjihad movement, for a long time. People were running for cover. Nobody wanted to go against him then. He was the king.”
Spencer says: “I have actually had people contact me and say, ‘I understand you’re the American representative for Vlaams Belang.’ And that is because of Johnson.” After Spencer wrote last month on Jihad Watch that I interviewed him, Johnson forwarded me several posts by other bloggers charting Spencer’s unsavory “associations”; one of them tried to connect him, via a chain of links that is too long even to summarize, to Slobodan Milosevic. The more creatively defamatory the whole dispute becomes, the further it moves from the issues around which Johnson and Spencer and many others have supposedly reframed their lives. But I never got the sense that any of it was put forth by Johnson, either in person or on the blog, in anything other than perfect earnestness. He came of age, as a writer and as a public figure, in the culture of damnation by link, and he does not exempt himself from its logic.
Thus in retrospect it also seems clear that the Vlaams Belang blog war, with its attendant scary buzzwords (“fascist,” “racist,” “Nazi”), gave Johnson the intellectual cover to do something he wanted to do anyway, which was to conduct a kind of public self-purge of the alliances he acquired on the road to fame.
THE QUESTIONING OF Johnson’s tactics started to come not just from without L.G.F. but also from within. Readers both casual and loyal spoke up in the comment threads to ask, sometimes diplomatically and sometimes not, whether all this casual flinging of epithets like “fascist” wasn’t maybe an overreaction. Johnson’s response, in thousands of cases, was to block their accounts and ban some of them from viewing the blog. “Get off my Web site” was a common farewell. (Johnson insists that this is not true — that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for disagreeing with him — but the anecdotal evidence to the contrary is voluminous, and the fact that the offending comments were instantly and permanently deleted makes it impossible to check others’ records against his.)
“Running a community is hard,” says Markos Moulitsas of the liberal Web site Daily Kos, “and I don’t criticize people for the approaches they take in trying to control their sites. As I tell my own disgruntled commenters, if they don’t like a site’s comment policies, they can always find greener pastures elsewhere. It’s a big Internet.”
A reasonable approach, which L.G.F.’s exiles mostly rejected. Comment threads all over the blogosphere were hijacked by people sharing stories of their banishment. Another stalker blog — this one assailing Johnson from the right — sprang up, administered by banned former “Lizards,” as L.G.F.’s registrants are known. Johnson responded by posting those former registrants’ real names and photographs on L.G.F. — an astounding breach of civility on the Internet, where anonymity is often prized above all else.
It was a kind of orgy of delinking, an intentionally set brush fire meant to clear the psychic area around Johnson and ensure that no one would connect him to anyone else, period, unless he first said it was O.K. No one would define Johnson’s allegiances but Johnson. Of course, much of this was accomplished by the very methods he felt so threatened by: a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon approach to political rectitude, in which the existence of even a search-engine-generated connection between two people anywhere in the world implied a mutual back-scratching, an ideological partnership. It was unfair and simplistic and petulant, but it also seems to have achieved its goal. Very few people on the right want to be linked with Charles Johnson anymore.
NO ONE SEEMS TO WANT to believe that his thinking simply changed over time — and in fact he still has that much in common with his old allies, for Johnson, too, insists that he hasn’t really changed. His recent expressions of support for abortion rights, of contempt for creationism and the religious right — all these beliefs, he told me, are elements of the “classical liberalism” he has always believed in but previously opted not to write about. Why now? The answer is so heretical it seems destined to raise the tizzy-level among his former followers to new heights: “It’s not that the war on terror has finished,” he said. “It’s never going to be finished, but I think things have reached the point now where it’s not as pressing as it was. Some of the measures we took to protect ourselves against extremists have been pretty effective. And so I realized, you know, that maybe it’s time to tell people that I’m not onboard with a lot of this social-conservative agenda. And I think that I actually speak for a lot of people.” Though our conversation took place in the fall, he told me in a subsequent e-mail message that the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing “doesn’t change my opinion about that.”
The flip side of the fact that his acolytes felt so close to him without ever actually knowing him is that he serves now, just as credibly, as a sort of blank screen upon which to project conspiracy theories. It has been suggested online, with a gravity that is hard to overstate, that he is a convicted child molester worried about public exposure; that he is a closeted homosexual threatened with blackmail; that he is in sexual thrall to an unnamed woman; that he is being paid by George Soros; or that he is not, in fact, Charles Johnson at all but some sort of cyberpirate writing the blog’s posts from an undisclosed location. Anything, apparently, seems if not more credible then certainly less hurtful than the opinion that the threat of terrorism on American soil is no longer so imminent that other disputes should be subsumed by it.
Many on the Internet cite as evidence that Johnson is in some dire need of money the fact that his blog is rife with advertisements — an argument that has a certain Yogi Berra quality to it, as most blogs can only dream of attracting his levels of revenue. Also popular is the theory that he did it only for the traffic, that he believes in nothing but the centrality of Charles Johnson and thus, seeing which way the political winds were blowing, that he betrayed his principles in order to remain in the spotlight. The problem with that theory is that the long-term decline in L.G.F.’s traffic, which its detractors delight in pointing out, began almost exactly at the moment two years ago when Johnson started turning on his allies and banning skeptical readers. If he was indeed panicked about loss of traffic to the site, blocking individual computers from being able to load his home page seems like an extraordinary way to reverse that.
But perhaps I am, as many suggested to me, just another liberal dupe. Perhaps I even fell for the pretense that Johnson lives in the modest home where I visited him, which bore none of the trappings his supposed sellout would suggest. The U.P.S. man who delivered packages to his door while I was there, and his truck, may have been hired for the day just to snow me; the decidedly un-Mata-Hari-like woman he introduced to me as his fiancée, who brought us water and fruit as we talked in his small home office, may have been a member of the Trilateral Commission. It would be just like a representative of the Mainstream Media to get caught believing his eyes like that.
THE SOUNDEST CONCLUSION seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.
No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the free exchange of ideas. “It’s his sandbox,” Pamela Geller says simply. “He can do whatever he wants.” Still, if you read L.G.F. today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of “Animal Farm.” Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines) to call commenters’ attention to yet another attack on him that was posted at some other site. On the home page, you can click to see the Top 10 comments of the day, as voted on by registered users; typically, half of those comments will be from Johnson himself. Even longtime commenters have been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he reminds them, always watching. L.G.F. still has more than 34,000 registered users, but the comment threads are dominated by the same two dozen or so names. And a handful of those have been empowered by Johnson sub rosa to watch as well — to delete critical comments and, if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult of personality — not that there’s any compelling reason, really, that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.
“This is one area where I did change,” Johnson admitted. “I realized you can’t just let it be free speech. It doesn’t work that way on the Internet. Total free speech is a recipe for anarchy when people can’t see each other.”
IN THE LAST DAY of November, Johnson delivered the final blow to his old alliances. In a post that he said took him about three minutes to write, he listed 10 reasons “Why I Parted Ways With the Right.” The “reasons” themselves amounted to little more than laundry lists: “Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.),” for instance. In the voluminous comment thread attached, Johnson was characteristically interested less in discussing the break itself than in discussing the reaction to it — calling readers’ attention to the number of times it was “re-tweeted,” linking to attacks on him, citing praise from quarters that not long ago would have considered him toxic. Anticlimactic as this moment might have seemed to right-wingers who broke with Johnson a year or more earlier, it caused a sensation: the site’s traffic spiked to about three and a half times what it was the day before. (It returned to its current levels — about 100,000 page views a day — within the week.)
“I saw the bill of particulars he nailed to the door of his Web site,” says the author Peter Collier — himself a survivor of the special vitriol directed at those who change sides in the ideological wars, after he and David Horowitz, his fellow former Ramparts editor, publicly leapt from far left to far right in the late 1980s. “Not exactly Whittaker Chambers, is he? I must say I was pretty put off by the profligate and kind of lame use of the word ‘fascism,’ a word that has been systematically denuded of its meaning, so that now it just signifies somebody you don’t agree with. I don’t want to say that it didn’t take some bravery and forethought and all that stuff — it just didn’t seem like a very considered and certainly not a very theoretical break. More of a take-this-job-and-shove-it moment.”
Johnson’s desk is flanked by a keyboard and an electric guitar, which he still plays, though not professionally. “The touring thing, when you’re younger — it’s nice and glamorous,” he said. “I’ve been to most of the continents in the world — the only big country I’ve missed is Russia, I think. I would probably still be doing it if the blog hadn’t taken off the way it did. If someone were to come to me and offer me a couple million dollars to go tour for six months, I wouldn’t say no. But at this point, the blog is more than meeting my needs, financially.” (He declines to characterize how much money he makes.)
Sitting at his desk, he read me an e-mail message he received that day from a stranger who wished upon him a series of unprintable misfortunes involving a “male black crack whore.” He closed the e-mail message and shook his head. Incivility, at least of the F2F variety, clearly makes him uncomfortable; in fact, he can be downright squeamish about it. “I don’t know why things can’t just stay on the level of the factual,” he said. “I don’t know why everything has to have a slant. I mean, The New York Times has a slant, and in the past I’ve called them out for that.” He sighed. “I miss the days of Walter Cronkite.”
Jonathan Dee is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new novel, “The Privileges,” has just been published.
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Friday, January 08, 2010
Indophobia: The Real Elephant in the Living Room
by Vamsee Juluri
Author and Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
Posted: January 8, 2010 03:29 PM
The Huffington Post
All prejudices are unpleasantly alike on some level, but the prejudice that India and Indians face on a global scale has proven to be exceptionally resistant to change.
In a week that saw innocent Indians being murdered and imaginary Indians being maligned on opposite ends of the Western world, Foreign Policy published an article that labels India a "global villain." It is time for a serious reality-check, and an even more serious attitude-check.
Let me start with the Foreign Policy article in question. Barbara Crossette, who authored the piece, formally worked at the New York Times, a publication, which has devoted entire editorials to its briskly exasperating civilizing mission vis-a-vid India. Now, Crossette writes about how annoying it is to deal with India on important global issues, such as trade and nuclear non-proliferation.
She begins with a pithy demolition of India's supposed good press in recent times (to which, one must note, a witty commentator has responded by asking the obvious: What good press?) only to go on to denounce India as a sanctimonious rogue among nations. The words that are used to describe India include "pious," "craving," "petulant," "intransigent," and "believes that the world's rules don't apply to it," all of which a student of postcolonial cultural studies would recognize as obnoxious cliches that have come to characterize Western discourse about the colonies for decades now. What else could be flashing in a writer's mind when the word "petulant" or "intransigent" is used but the belief that a a whole nation is infantile? What colonial image of a gaping-mouthed ragged supplicant must have inspired the use of a word like "craving" to describe India's goals?
The bold labeling of a sovereign, democratic nation as a "global evil" marks, I believe, a new low in what must be recognized as nothing less than Indophobia. If we have not heard that frequently enough before, it is not because it doesn't exist. Just like how the most effective propaganda is never called propaganda, but rather it is accepted as truth, the most insidious of prejudices seldom even get named as such (perhaps it is no coincidence that the phrase "elephant in the room," which means exactly that, is centered around the animal most closely identified with India). There are perhaps as many anecdotes about Indophobia at a personal level as there are Indians in foreign countries, but it is at a deeper cultural level that we need to face it first. The first sign of Indophobia many of us encounter is really its own ideological defenses; phrases which are used to preempt any discussion about it, like "Indian chauvinism," "Indian supremacism," "Indian exceptionalism," "Indian victimism," or just allegations of childish over-sensitiveness coupled with some sort of vague Eastern cultural fetishism pertaining to notions of honor (I have heard all of these sentiments informally or otherwise in my academic career from grad school until now). If we can get past these, perhaps we can see things more clearly.
India's role in the Western imagination has been a long and important one. Despite some reverential accounts of Indian civilization in the earliest days of the encounter between Europe and India, the image that has prevailed has not been a nice one, or even a truthful one. The present Indophobia has its origins in colonial Hinduphobia. Fuelled by the crazy stories of missionaries determined to rid the world of heathen Hindus and steeped in the ideologies of the colonizers' civilizing mission, Indophobia infiltrated popular, journalistic, political and academic thought. In the cold war period, some things improved, but in the great conversation of powers that Washington thought it was having, Pakistan would appear to it as a reliable favorite; tough, dependable, monotheistic, and anti-communist. India, on the other hand, was seen as too weak, too Hindu, too vegetarian, precariously past its Must Break Up By Date. At best, or worst, India was seen as "pious," with its Gandhian austerities and Nehruvian Non-Alignment dreams.
But it is the present, the post cold war, post 9/11, post outsourcing nature of Indophobia that we must return to, history in tow. The examples are many. Why is it that some Australians reacted to the beating and killing of Indian students with the odd retort that "this happens in Mumbai"? Why did NPR cheerily lend its audience to one man's claim that he saw an Indian get the Nigerian airline bomber on board? Why does Foreign Policy get to call India "evil" without a drop of concern for how it feels to Indian readers or how dangerous words like this were in the past for the colonized nations? Why does New York Times choose to show agonizing restraint when Pakistani terrorists massacre civilians in Mumbai and run screaming headlines naming the arrest of an "Indian" after Madrid? Why does Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most exhilarating movies of our time, depict the majority of Indian characters in it as irredeemably cruel and barbaric (not the nice Indian hero with the British accent though, of course not)? Why did the fictional slur "slumdog" and the image of poverty reportedly figure so often in the Australian attacks? Finally, why does Glenn Beck find the name of a life-giving sacred river similar to the name of a disease? I must admit though that the last case is less depressing because it is Glenn Beck after all and the problem must naturally lie not in the word 'Ganges' but really in his ears or what's (not) between them.
After a brief decade or so of somewhat unexpected "India Rising" stories, India-bashing is once again becoming fashionable. As a media studies teacher, I always wonder what it means when a particular way of looking at things suddenly becomes prevalent in history. What does it tell us about our times and who we are? In the past Indophobia was part of a colonial and then cold war mindset. Thinking of India as the very embodiment of wretchedness and poverty fit in with the western self-perception of the time. In recent times, things have improved at some levels. Racism is no longer legal and in many places no longer cool. With globalization and the economic success of India and Indians abroad, it is no longer possible to deny to India its talent, labor, and its contribution to the world. All should have been well, at least now. But Indophobia has found new reasons to resurface--and some of these reasons have less to do with India and more to do with where the United States sees itself in the world right now. The world's most powerful nation has been only minimally successful in its wars against its most formidable adversary. It is beset by doubts about the mortality of empires and such. It has swung from gung-ho bombs-away leadership to a low-bow bombs-away leadership. It has perhaps even painfully sensed the barb in the saying "with friends like these who needs enemies?" when it comes to the whole question of its cold war-era role in the creation of Frankenjihadis in South Asia. All of these have a bearing, directly or indirectly, on its present story on India.
The present wave of Indophobia, starting with the hate-call campaigns against Indian call centers a few years ago and culminating in the execrably immoral devaluing of Indian lives in recent times, may be at least in some parts the result of an overcompensation for a sense of imperial loss. The pinnacle of western power and prestige is no longer the only high rise in town (and I don't mean the Burj Dubai). Globalization has done to the world what it has done in India too--the days of single nation world dominance, like single party dominance in Indian politics, are over. Accepting this won't be easy for some because the culture has not found the will to change; at least not as far as India goes. The culture can grudgingly accept China as a rival. It can deem the whole of Islam as a civilizational rival. India's rise, though, is harder to accept. America is used to dealing with things on the grounds of toughness, force, power. Doing so on the grounds of smartness is new to it.
So the whole old repertoire of Indophobia returns; images of poverty and disease, allegations of corruption and piousness, insinuations about culture and religion. This time around though, there is less of the sort of restraint that existed in the past. Just as how some people think it is okay to be racist now because we have a black president, the new Indophobia deems it okay to spew nastiness because India has arrived too. But of course, post Mumbai and Slumdog the arrival story is also questioned. This is an old tired story too; of the romantic westerner eagerly turning to India despite their friends' counsel only to be tremendously disappointed that they didn't find nirvana, or even a nice airport terminal. That sort of backlash tends to get extra nasty, leaping into large scale generalizations. That is the pattern that seems to be playing out in the present India story. "You think you know India? You think India has got better/richer/nirvana?" The pitch inevitably starts (In Crossette's article this part runs with "internet entrepreneurs, hospitality industry pioneers and gurus"). "Nope," the anointed Western (and sometimes South Asian) expert gravely retorts. "Here's the real India and here are the real Indians. They are evil." At least Foreign Policy had the honesty to put that word up in lights.
As someone with an emotional stake in both India and the United States, I wonder whose loss will be greater in the end. The nastiness of Indophobia is of course bad for India in the first instance. It is young Indians who have been bearing the brunt, whether of American hate-callers or worse, of Australian murderers. But India is a survivor country; it has survived conquest, colonialism, and it survives its own chaotic self every day. America though is inexperienced on this count. It has just about started realizing, after much needless suffering of its own from blowback and backbite, that surviving the whirlwind of globalization takes smarts rather than brute force. I fear that the return of Indophobia may once again distract America from the right direction. When experts like Barbara Crossette heap sarcasm on "India's colorful, stubborn loquaciousness" they fail to see that the more we ignore this supposed "loquaciousness" the more we are signaling that the only language we recognize is that of brute force. There is no dearth of precedent on that. There is no dearth of possibilities that the future may be exactly that too, if old prejudices run unchecked.
But I cannot make myself leave on a pessimistic note. Indophobia can be fought, and I believe there is enough goodness in all communities to do so. First, I think the Indian community, in India and abroad, must get its own stories right. There has been a tendency to shy away from naming Indophobia as such because we think it affects our image of India Rising, which has been hard fought, no doubt. But there is a need to name bad stuff for what it is. To be fair, as always, we must continue our introspection into our own prejudices and shortcomings; after all, as Ramachandra Guha once wrote, 95% of blame for India's problems today lies with us and not the British. India needs a better India story too (Guha and Khilnani are the best place to start) and it won't be easy because of how diverse, divided, and indeed complicated we are. But that is our task, and indeed for those of us who have the privilege of living and writing in the Western world, indeed an important one. For our Western friends, especially those in positions of authority in the media, the task is more daunting. Your responsibility may not be towards Indian feelings, not at all. But you do have a responsibility in your profession towards Truth. As long as your Indophobia is acting up, you will remain clueless about it.
Author and Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
Posted: January 8, 2010 03:29 PM
The Huffington Post
All prejudices are unpleasantly alike on some level, but the prejudice that India and Indians face on a global scale has proven to be exceptionally resistant to change.
In a week that saw innocent Indians being murdered and imaginary Indians being maligned on opposite ends of the Western world, Foreign Policy published an article that labels India a "global villain." It is time for a serious reality-check, and an even more serious attitude-check.
Let me start with the Foreign Policy article in question. Barbara Crossette, who authored the piece, formally worked at the New York Times, a publication, which has devoted entire editorials to its briskly exasperating civilizing mission vis-a-vid India. Now, Crossette writes about how annoying it is to deal with India on important global issues, such as trade and nuclear non-proliferation.
She begins with a pithy demolition of India's supposed good press in recent times (to which, one must note, a witty commentator has responded by asking the obvious: What good press?) only to go on to denounce India as a sanctimonious rogue among nations. The words that are used to describe India include "pious," "craving," "petulant," "intransigent," and "believes that the world's rules don't apply to it," all of which a student of postcolonial cultural studies would recognize as obnoxious cliches that have come to characterize Western discourse about the colonies for decades now. What else could be flashing in a writer's mind when the word "petulant" or "intransigent" is used but the belief that a a whole nation is infantile? What colonial image of a gaping-mouthed ragged supplicant must have inspired the use of a word like "craving" to describe India's goals?
The bold labeling of a sovereign, democratic nation as a "global evil" marks, I believe, a new low in what must be recognized as nothing less than Indophobia. If we have not heard that frequently enough before, it is not because it doesn't exist. Just like how the most effective propaganda is never called propaganda, but rather it is accepted as truth, the most insidious of prejudices seldom even get named as such (perhaps it is no coincidence that the phrase "elephant in the room," which means exactly that, is centered around the animal most closely identified with India). There are perhaps as many anecdotes about Indophobia at a personal level as there are Indians in foreign countries, but it is at a deeper cultural level that we need to face it first. The first sign of Indophobia many of us encounter is really its own ideological defenses; phrases which are used to preempt any discussion about it, like "Indian chauvinism," "Indian supremacism," "Indian exceptionalism," "Indian victimism," or just allegations of childish over-sensitiveness coupled with some sort of vague Eastern cultural fetishism pertaining to notions of honor (I have heard all of these sentiments informally or otherwise in my academic career from grad school until now). If we can get past these, perhaps we can see things more clearly.
India's role in the Western imagination has been a long and important one. Despite some reverential accounts of Indian civilization in the earliest days of the encounter between Europe and India, the image that has prevailed has not been a nice one, or even a truthful one. The present Indophobia has its origins in colonial Hinduphobia. Fuelled by the crazy stories of missionaries determined to rid the world of heathen Hindus and steeped in the ideologies of the colonizers' civilizing mission, Indophobia infiltrated popular, journalistic, political and academic thought. In the cold war period, some things improved, but in the great conversation of powers that Washington thought it was having, Pakistan would appear to it as a reliable favorite; tough, dependable, monotheistic, and anti-communist. India, on the other hand, was seen as too weak, too Hindu, too vegetarian, precariously past its Must Break Up By Date. At best, or worst, India was seen as "pious," with its Gandhian austerities and Nehruvian Non-Alignment dreams.
But it is the present, the post cold war, post 9/11, post outsourcing nature of Indophobia that we must return to, history in tow. The examples are many. Why is it that some Australians reacted to the beating and killing of Indian students with the odd retort that "this happens in Mumbai"? Why did NPR cheerily lend its audience to one man's claim that he saw an Indian get the Nigerian airline bomber on board? Why does Foreign Policy get to call India "evil" without a drop of concern for how it feels to Indian readers or how dangerous words like this were in the past for the colonized nations? Why does New York Times choose to show agonizing restraint when Pakistani terrorists massacre civilians in Mumbai and run screaming headlines naming the arrest of an "Indian" after Madrid? Why does Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most exhilarating movies of our time, depict the majority of Indian characters in it as irredeemably cruel and barbaric (not the nice Indian hero with the British accent though, of course not)? Why did the fictional slur "slumdog" and the image of poverty reportedly figure so often in the Australian attacks? Finally, why does Glenn Beck find the name of a life-giving sacred river similar to the name of a disease? I must admit though that the last case is less depressing because it is Glenn Beck after all and the problem must naturally lie not in the word 'Ganges' but really in his ears or what's (not) between them.
After a brief decade or so of somewhat unexpected "India Rising" stories, India-bashing is once again becoming fashionable. As a media studies teacher, I always wonder what it means when a particular way of looking at things suddenly becomes prevalent in history. What does it tell us about our times and who we are? In the past Indophobia was part of a colonial and then cold war mindset. Thinking of India as the very embodiment of wretchedness and poverty fit in with the western self-perception of the time. In recent times, things have improved at some levels. Racism is no longer legal and in many places no longer cool. With globalization and the economic success of India and Indians abroad, it is no longer possible to deny to India its talent, labor, and its contribution to the world. All should have been well, at least now. But Indophobia has found new reasons to resurface--and some of these reasons have less to do with India and more to do with where the United States sees itself in the world right now. The world's most powerful nation has been only minimally successful in its wars against its most formidable adversary. It is beset by doubts about the mortality of empires and such. It has swung from gung-ho bombs-away leadership to a low-bow bombs-away leadership. It has perhaps even painfully sensed the barb in the saying "with friends like these who needs enemies?" when it comes to the whole question of its cold war-era role in the creation of Frankenjihadis in South Asia. All of these have a bearing, directly or indirectly, on its present story on India.
The present wave of Indophobia, starting with the hate-call campaigns against Indian call centers a few years ago and culminating in the execrably immoral devaluing of Indian lives in recent times, may be at least in some parts the result of an overcompensation for a sense of imperial loss. The pinnacle of western power and prestige is no longer the only high rise in town (and I don't mean the Burj Dubai). Globalization has done to the world what it has done in India too--the days of single nation world dominance, like single party dominance in Indian politics, are over. Accepting this won't be easy for some because the culture has not found the will to change; at least not as far as India goes. The culture can grudgingly accept China as a rival. It can deem the whole of Islam as a civilizational rival. India's rise, though, is harder to accept. America is used to dealing with things on the grounds of toughness, force, power. Doing so on the grounds of smartness is new to it.
So the whole old repertoire of Indophobia returns; images of poverty and disease, allegations of corruption and piousness, insinuations about culture and religion. This time around though, there is less of the sort of restraint that existed in the past. Just as how some people think it is okay to be racist now because we have a black president, the new Indophobia deems it okay to spew nastiness because India has arrived too. But of course, post Mumbai and Slumdog the arrival story is also questioned. This is an old tired story too; of the romantic westerner eagerly turning to India despite their friends' counsel only to be tremendously disappointed that they didn't find nirvana, or even a nice airport terminal. That sort of backlash tends to get extra nasty, leaping into large scale generalizations. That is the pattern that seems to be playing out in the present India story. "You think you know India? You think India has got better/richer/nirvana?" The pitch inevitably starts (In Crossette's article this part runs with "internet entrepreneurs, hospitality industry pioneers and gurus"). "Nope," the anointed Western (and sometimes South Asian) expert gravely retorts. "Here's the real India and here are the real Indians. They are evil." At least Foreign Policy had the honesty to put that word up in lights.
As someone with an emotional stake in both India and the United States, I wonder whose loss will be greater in the end. The nastiness of Indophobia is of course bad for India in the first instance. It is young Indians who have been bearing the brunt, whether of American hate-callers or worse, of Australian murderers. But India is a survivor country; it has survived conquest, colonialism, and it survives its own chaotic self every day. America though is inexperienced on this count. It has just about started realizing, after much needless suffering of its own from blowback and backbite, that surviving the whirlwind of globalization takes smarts rather than brute force. I fear that the return of Indophobia may once again distract America from the right direction. When experts like Barbara Crossette heap sarcasm on "India's colorful, stubborn loquaciousness" they fail to see that the more we ignore this supposed "loquaciousness" the more we are signaling that the only language we recognize is that of brute force. There is no dearth of precedent on that. There is no dearth of possibilities that the future may be exactly that too, if old prejudices run unchecked.
But I cannot make myself leave on a pessimistic note. Indophobia can be fought, and I believe there is enough goodness in all communities to do so. First, I think the Indian community, in India and abroad, must get its own stories right. There has been a tendency to shy away from naming Indophobia as such because we think it affects our image of India Rising, which has been hard fought, no doubt. But there is a need to name bad stuff for what it is. To be fair, as always, we must continue our introspection into our own prejudices and shortcomings; after all, as Ramachandra Guha once wrote, 95% of blame for India's problems today lies with us and not the British. India needs a better India story too (Guha and Khilnani are the best place to start) and it won't be easy because of how diverse, divided, and indeed complicated we are. But that is our task, and indeed for those of us who have the privilege of living and writing in the Western world, indeed an important one. For our Western friends, especially those in positions of authority in the media, the task is more daunting. Your responsibility may not be towards Indian feelings, not at all. But you do have a responsibility in your profession towards Truth. As long as your Indophobia is acting up, you will remain clueless about it.
Why India Is No Villain
So Barbara Crossette, wrote a innuendo filled fluff piece maligning India.
Here is a rebuttal from Nitin Pai
Barbara Crossette is wrong: This rising power helps solve far more problems than it creates.
BY NITIN PAI
Foreign Policy
JANUARY 7, 2010
According to the Financial Times' Lucy Kellaway, "Elephant in the Room" was the most popular cliché to appear in major newspapers and journals in 2009. It is perhaps appropriate then that Barbara Crossette's latest diatribe against India appeared in Foreign Policy under that headline. Although it claims to show that India causes "the most global consternation" and "gives global governance the biggest headache," it is merely a series of rants and newsroom clichés selected entirely arbitrarily to support the author's prejudice.
Listing India's alleged failings, Crossette makes the unfathomable assertion that it is India that causes the most consternation and the biggest headache for the world -- more than Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Pakistan, and China. Without an attempt to compare the failings across countries (And why only these countries? Why leave out the West and the rest?), it is logically impossible to arrive at the conclusion that one of them is the biggest culprit. But once you trade logic for hyperbole, you can fit just about any animal you like into the room. For Crossette, it is the pachyderm.
Consider these facts instead: The only country to have militarily intervened to halt an ongoing genocide is India, which it did in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971. After the December 2004 tsunami, it was India's navy that was the first international responder, deploying within 24 hours and delivering humanitarian assistance to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Maldives. It subsequently coordinated operations with the United States, Japan, and Australia. India has been involved in U.N. peacekeeping from the very beginning and remains one of the biggest troop contributors to this day, often putting its soldiers in danger in conflicts that have nothing to do with national interests. Indian naval ships are also involved in maritime security operations from Somalia to the Strait of Malacca. Even this partial list is enough to prove that India is not, as Crossette believes, "a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence."
Let's take a closer look at Crossette's rap sheet. First, she agrees with a quote from an article that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal that advocates arms control (hardly a neutral source), arguing that India's refusals to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty make it "comparable to other defiant nuclear states [and] will undoubtedly contribute to a deteriorating security environment in Asia." She doesn't explain how, because she would be hard-pressed to prove that India's "contribution" is comparable to that of China, which helped put the bomb in the hands of the likes of Pakistan, or North Korea, which brazenly violated the treaty it signed. Actions matter more than signatures.
Second, on the Doha round of trade negotiations, Crossette blames India for single-handedly foiling a deal that "nobody loved, but one that would have benefited developing countries most." Does she really know better than the developing countries themselves? It seems odd that they would not love a deal that "would have benefited [them] most." It is just as presumptuous and illogical to blame the failure of Doha on India alone. Gideon Rachman, for instance, argues that "the Doha round ultimately broke down because of a stand-off between the United States, India, China and the European Union over agricultural trade." Turns out it takes more than one hand to wreck a multilateral deal.
It is on the third point -- climate change -- that Crossette's proclivity for being selective with facts stands out most. She mentions the Indian environment minister's refusal to agree to binding carbon emission targets five months before the Copenhagen talks, but ignores his statement in Parliament five days before the negotiations pledging 20 to 25 percent carbon emission intensity cuts from the 2005 levels by 2020. Nonbinding yes, but nevertheless a serious commitment. And no country's commitments at Copenhagen were binding. She also ignores that in the end, the Copenhagen "deal" came about in part due to India's bridging of the differences between the United States and China.
Fourth, on the basis of one data point -- the scandal over a pay increase to Paul Wolfowitz's girlfriend that precipitated his resignation as president of the World Bank -- Crossette alleges that India "attacks individuals." Wolfowitz, she says, was ousted "not because his relationship with a female official caused a public furor, but because he had turned his attention to Indian corruption and fraud in the diversion of bank funds." It is undeniable that there is corruption in India, but Crossette glosses over the fact that in the interview she quotes, Steve Berkman alleges that World Bank officials were involved in it too. What the latter actually said, as paraphrased by a journalist for Rediff India Abroad, is that "the international bureaucrats who run the Bank ... are the ones who conspired to nail Wolfowitz using the mini-scandal with his girlfriend to call for his ouster." Where does that leave Crossette's argument?
Fifth, Crossette claims that India "regularly refuses visas for international rights advocates," a failing that she supposes occurs because such advocates are critical of the government. Granting that there is a case for India to be more liberal in its visa regime, the country does not lack robust, committed, and vocal human rights activists. Tune in to any Indian television channel. On the other hand, the U.N. Human Rights Council is not exactly a shining example of how the international community protects human rights. Domestic activism and the liberal democratic institutions that allow it are perhaps far more effective in safeguarding human rights.
Ultimately, Crossette's suggestion that India presents a "headache" for global governance is a manifestation of an outdated mindset. It ignores the growing convergence of interests between India and the United States on the biggest challenges of this century: from establishing a liberal, democratic order to managing the rise of China to containing jihadi terrorism to addressing climate change and a host of other challenges. For those worried about rising elephants, make room if you don't want to be squeezed.
Here is a rebuttal from Nitin Pai
Barbara Crossette is wrong: This rising power helps solve far more problems than it creates.
BY NITIN PAI
Foreign Policy
JANUARY 7, 2010
According to the Financial Times' Lucy Kellaway, "Elephant in the Room" was the most popular cliché to appear in major newspapers and journals in 2009. It is perhaps appropriate then that Barbara Crossette's latest diatribe against India appeared in Foreign Policy under that headline. Although it claims to show that India causes "the most global consternation" and "gives global governance the biggest headache," it is merely a series of rants and newsroom clichés selected entirely arbitrarily to support the author's prejudice.
Listing India's alleged failings, Crossette makes the unfathomable assertion that it is India that causes the most consternation and the biggest headache for the world -- more than Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Pakistan, and China. Without an attempt to compare the failings across countries (And why only these countries? Why leave out the West and the rest?), it is logically impossible to arrive at the conclusion that one of them is the biggest culprit. But once you trade logic for hyperbole, you can fit just about any animal you like into the room. For Crossette, it is the pachyderm.
Consider these facts instead: The only country to have militarily intervened to halt an ongoing genocide is India, which it did in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971. After the December 2004 tsunami, it was India's navy that was the first international responder, deploying within 24 hours and delivering humanitarian assistance to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Maldives. It subsequently coordinated operations with the United States, Japan, and Australia. India has been involved in U.N. peacekeeping from the very beginning and remains one of the biggest troop contributors to this day, often putting its soldiers in danger in conflicts that have nothing to do with national interests. Indian naval ships are also involved in maritime security operations from Somalia to the Strait of Malacca. Even this partial list is enough to prove that India is not, as Crossette believes, "a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence."
Let's take a closer look at Crossette's rap sheet. First, she agrees with a quote from an article that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal that advocates arms control (hardly a neutral source), arguing that India's refusals to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty make it "comparable to other defiant nuclear states [and] will undoubtedly contribute to a deteriorating security environment in Asia." She doesn't explain how, because she would be hard-pressed to prove that India's "contribution" is comparable to that of China, which helped put the bomb in the hands of the likes of Pakistan, or North Korea, which brazenly violated the treaty it signed. Actions matter more than signatures.
Second, on the Doha round of trade negotiations, Crossette blames India for single-handedly foiling a deal that "nobody loved, but one that would have benefited developing countries most." Does she really know better than the developing countries themselves? It seems odd that they would not love a deal that "would have benefited [them] most." It is just as presumptuous and illogical to blame the failure of Doha on India alone. Gideon Rachman, for instance, argues that "the Doha round ultimately broke down because of a stand-off between the United States, India, China and the European Union over agricultural trade." Turns out it takes more than one hand to wreck a multilateral deal.
It is on the third point -- climate change -- that Crossette's proclivity for being selective with facts stands out most. She mentions the Indian environment minister's refusal to agree to binding carbon emission targets five months before the Copenhagen talks, but ignores his statement in Parliament five days before the negotiations pledging 20 to 25 percent carbon emission intensity cuts from the 2005 levels by 2020. Nonbinding yes, but nevertheless a serious commitment. And no country's commitments at Copenhagen were binding. She also ignores that in the end, the Copenhagen "deal" came about in part due to India's bridging of the differences between the United States and China.
Fourth, on the basis of one data point -- the scandal over a pay increase to Paul Wolfowitz's girlfriend that precipitated his resignation as president of the World Bank -- Crossette alleges that India "attacks individuals." Wolfowitz, she says, was ousted "not because his relationship with a female official caused a public furor, but because he had turned his attention to Indian corruption and fraud in the diversion of bank funds." It is undeniable that there is corruption in India, but Crossette glosses over the fact that in the interview she quotes, Steve Berkman alleges that World Bank officials were involved in it too. What the latter actually said, as paraphrased by a journalist for Rediff India Abroad, is that "the international bureaucrats who run the Bank ... are the ones who conspired to nail Wolfowitz using the mini-scandal with his girlfriend to call for his ouster." Where does that leave Crossette's argument?
Fifth, Crossette claims that India "regularly refuses visas for international rights advocates," a failing that she supposes occurs because such advocates are critical of the government. Granting that there is a case for India to be more liberal in its visa regime, the country does not lack robust, committed, and vocal human rights activists. Tune in to any Indian television channel. On the other hand, the U.N. Human Rights Council is not exactly a shining example of how the international community protects human rights. Domestic activism and the liberal democratic institutions that allow it are perhaps far more effective in safeguarding human rights.
Ultimately, Crossette's suggestion that India presents a "headache" for global governance is a manifestation of an outdated mindset. It ignores the growing convergence of interests between India and the United States on the biggest challenges of this century: from establishing a liberal, democratic order to managing the rise of China to containing jihadi terrorism to addressing climate change and a host of other challenges. For those worried about rising elephants, make room if you don't want to be squeezed.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Srinagar, Kahmir attack what's in a name?
Al Jazeera's "fighters" = everyone else's "terrorists"
Indian troops storm Kashmir hotel
Aj Jazeera
Security forces surrounded the hotel, which had been overtaken by a group of fighters
A standoff in the main market area of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, has ended after nearly 24 hours, with the death of two fighters at the hands of security forces.
Kuldeep Khuda, the police chief of Indian Kashmir, said on the Thursday that "the operation as far as we are concerned is over".
A small hotel taken over by the men was left in flames after the police operation.
The standoff began when the attackers threw grenades and opened fire in Srinagar's Lal Chowk, before forcing their way into the hotel on Wednesday.
The police entered the four-storey building on Thursday morning, and killed the first fighter.
"The other terrorist tried to set the building on fire ... the building caught fire and he tried to make his escape but he was shot down," Khuda said.
"We are trying to find out if any more terrorists were inside but there are two bodies that are visible."
Khuda claimed one of the fighters was a Pakistani national.
_________________________________________
Troops storm hotel, end siege in Indian Kashmir
By Izhar Wani (AFP) – 9 hours ago
SRINAGAR, India — Commandoes stormed a hotel in Indian Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.
The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both the pro-Pakistan extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.
The gunmen had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar's main market area. One police officer was killed in the attack and one bystander succumbed to his injuries Thursday. "The operation as far as we are concerned is over," Kuldeep Khuda, the state police chief, told reporters at the scene.
_________________________________
2 militants killed in 22-hour-long gunbattle in India-controlled Kashmir
NEW DELHI, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Indian security forces Thursday killed two militants, allegedly belonging to the Pakistani terror outfit Lashker-e-Toiba, who were holed up in a hotel in the Indian-controlled Kashmir's capital city Srinagar, after a 22-hour-long fierce gun battle in which at least two people lost their lives, a senior police official said.
"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kashmir's police chief Kuldeep Khooda told the media in Srinagar.
He said a policeman was killed while a paramilitary trooper and eight civilians were injured when the terrorists opened fire and lobbed grenades when they were intercepted at a police check post in the Lal Chowk area.
"One of the civilians succumbed to his injuries today," he said.
________________________________________
Militants die as Kashmir gunbattle ends
By James Lamont in New Delhi
Financial Times (India)
Published: January 7 2010 06:04
A day-long gunfight between militants and security forces in Srinagar, the capital of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, came to an end on Thursday morning after two gunmen were killed.
The attack, blamed by Indian officials on “Pakistani elements”, was the highest profile strike since the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008, which claimed the lives of more than 160 people. It was the first militant attack on Srinagar for two years when armed men had stormed a paramilitary camp killing.
_________________________________________
Lal Chowk gunbattle ends, two terrorists killed
Peerzada Ashiq , Hindustan Times
Srinagar, January 07, 2010
In a surgical operation that lasted for more than 22 hours, security forces on Thursday claimed they have killed two Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) militants holed up inside a hotel in Srinagar after they fired at a CRPF picket at commercial hub Lal Chowk on Wednesday.
IG CRPF NC Asthana confirmed that two militants have been killed in the operation.
“We suspect one more militant has been killed but we have only recovered two bodies,” said Asthana. He said the operation took time because the security forces were busy in evacuation of civilian population stuck in the nearby building. “We ensured that before the final assault in the morning that civilians are evacuated from the nearby buildings,” said Asthana.
_______________________
Siege ends at Lal Chowk; 2 militants gunned down
Agencies Posted online: Thursday , Jan 07, 2010
Indian Express
Srinagar : Security forces stormed a hotel in busy Lal Chowk area killing two LeT terrorists including a Pakistani, ending a 22-hour fierce gunbattle that also left a policeman and a civilian dead.
....
The DGP said concerted efforts were being made by Pakistani terrorists to hit targets in J and K and in other parts of the country. "There is desperation in infiltration, there is desperation in carrying out such attacks".
Khoda said the militants probably had some other target to attack, "but because of the encounter, they rushed into the hotel and took positions there to open fire at the police".
The ultras first lobbed grenades and opened fire at a CRPF picket outside Palladium Cinema in Lal Chowk before taking shelter inside the hotel.
_____________________________________________
Fidayeen lay siege to Srinagar hotel
M Saleem Pandit, TNN, 7 January 2010,
Times of India
SRINAGAR\NEW DELHI: Two heavily armed terrorists — members of suicide squad (fidayeen) — lobbed grenades, shot dead a constable, then attacked a vehicle that came to evacuate him before entering into a hotel, triggering a fierce gunbattle — the first in over two years — in Srinagar’s business hub of Lal Chowk on Wednesday.
Initial reports indicated that the suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists wanted to enter the nearby CRPF camp. But, when they were stopped during a routine check near Pladium in the heart of Lal Chowk, they began firing and hurling grenades. They then entered the nearby Punjab Hotel, took positions and continued firing at the security forces comprising J&K police and CRPF. Soon, armoured vehicles carrying police reinforcements surrounded the hotel. Shopkeepers downed shutters and passers-by ran helter-skelter. The firing continued when reports last came in.
....
While sources in security agencies said the terrorists belonged to LeT, a little known outfit, Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the attack in a faxed statement to local media offices.
_______________________________________________
Terrorists were in touch with Pak handlers: Home Ministry sources
PTI, 7 January 2010, 07:25pm
Times of India
NEW DELHI: The Lashker-e-Taiba terrorists, who were killed by security forces during the siege at Lal Chowk in Srinagar, were in constant touch with their handlers in Pakistan when they were holed up inside a hotel there.
According to highly placed sources in the Union Home Ministry, nearly 700 terrorists, half of them foreign mercenaries, are active in Jammu and Kashmir.
They said some more attacks were expected to take place as the holed up militants at the hotel in Lal Chowk area had communicated the same to their handlers in Pakistan, the sources said.
According to the official data available with the Home Ministry, 413 infiltration attempts were made from across the border during which 93 terrorists were killed while 110 managed to sneak in.
Out of the 110 who had infiltrated, 70% were foreign militants while the remaining locals.
_______________________________________________
22 hours of terror ends in the Valley
7 Jan 2010, 1133 hrs IST
Times Now (India)
After over 22 hours of fierce gunbattle between terrorists and security forces in Lal Chowk, Srinagar, the three terrorists, who struck at the heart of the city, were killed on Thursday (January 7), the Home Ministry confirmed.
The first terrorist was gunned down yesterday evening, while the other two ‘fidayeen’ identified as Qari and Mustafa were killed today afternoon. Sources said that Qari is a local Kashmiri militant, while Mustafa is a Pakistani and could belong to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kuldeep Khooda, DGP, told reporters.
....
Though Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen claimed the responsibility for the attack, Police said it was the handiwork of Lashker terrorists only.
_________________
4 Dead After 20-Hour Gun Battle in Kashmir
By HARI KUMAR
New York Times
January 8, 2010
NEW DELHI — A 20-hour gun battle prompted by a deadly militant attack on a police outpost in Kashmir’s summer capital ended Thursday at a hotel after the police killed two militants, including one Pakistani national, Indian police officials said.
....
“In this operation just two terrorists are killed, but we are trying to ascertain whether any more terrorists are inside the building” said Kuldeep Khoda, the police chief of Jammu and Kashmir. Mr. Khoda also said that both militants belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization based in Pakistan that has been blamed for the attacks on Mumbai, India, in November 2008.
_____________________
Indian troops storm hotel, end siege in central Srinagar
Thursday, 07 Jan, 2010
Dawn
SRINAGAR: Commandos stormed a hotel in Indian-administered Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.
The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.
The gunmen – one a Pakistani and the other an Indian Kashmiri, according to police – had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar’s main market area
....
A militant group, Jamiat-ul-Mujahedin, claimed it was behind the assault, which left five police and four civilians injured. Police pointed the finger at the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).
_________________________________
Gun and bomb attacks rock Kashmir
BBC Wednesday, 6 January 2010
On the other side of the de facto border dividing Kashmir a policeman was killed in a gun battle in Srinagar.
India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir and have fought two wars over it.
Police in Srinagar say militants threw a grenade and opened fire at police in the city's historic Lal Chowk or Red Square.
At least two gunmen are thought to have taken refuge in a hotel from where they exchanged fire with the security forces.
_____________________________
Indian troops storm Kashmir hotel
Aj Jazeera
Security forces surrounded the hotel, which had been overtaken by a group of fighters
A standoff in the main market area of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, has ended after nearly 24 hours, with the death of two fighters at the hands of security forces.
Kuldeep Khuda, the police chief of Indian Kashmir, said on the Thursday that "the operation as far as we are concerned is over".
A small hotel taken over by the men was left in flames after the police operation.
The standoff began when the attackers threw grenades and opened fire in Srinagar's Lal Chowk, before forcing their way into the hotel on Wednesday.
The police entered the four-storey building on Thursday morning, and killed the first fighter.
"The other terrorist tried to set the building on fire ... the building caught fire and he tried to make his escape but he was shot down," Khuda said.
"We are trying to find out if any more terrorists were inside but there are two bodies that are visible."
Khuda claimed one of the fighters was a Pakistani national.
_________________________________________
Troops storm hotel, end siege in Indian Kashmir
By Izhar Wani (AFP) – 9 hours ago
SRINAGAR, India — Commandoes stormed a hotel in Indian Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.
The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both the pro-Pakistan extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.
The gunmen had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar's main market area. One police officer was killed in the attack and one bystander succumbed to his injuries Thursday. "The operation as far as we are concerned is over," Kuldeep Khuda, the state police chief, told reporters at the scene.
_________________________________
2 militants killed in 22-hour-long gunbattle in India-controlled Kashmir
NEW DELHI, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Indian security forces Thursday killed two militants, allegedly belonging to the Pakistani terror outfit Lashker-e-Toiba, who were holed up in a hotel in the Indian-controlled Kashmir's capital city Srinagar, after a 22-hour-long fierce gun battle in which at least two people lost their lives, a senior police official said.
"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kashmir's police chief Kuldeep Khooda told the media in Srinagar.
He said a policeman was killed while a paramilitary trooper and eight civilians were injured when the terrorists opened fire and lobbed grenades when they were intercepted at a police check post in the Lal Chowk area.
"One of the civilians succumbed to his injuries today," he said.
________________________________________
Militants die as Kashmir gunbattle ends
By James Lamont in New Delhi
Financial Times (India)
Published: January 7 2010 06:04
A day-long gunfight between militants and security forces in Srinagar, the capital of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, came to an end on Thursday morning after two gunmen were killed.
The attack, blamed by Indian officials on “Pakistani elements”, was the highest profile strike since the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008, which claimed the lives of more than 160 people. It was the first militant attack on Srinagar for two years when armed men had stormed a paramilitary camp killing.
_________________________________________
Lal Chowk gunbattle ends, two terrorists killed
Peerzada Ashiq , Hindustan Times
Srinagar, January 07, 2010
In a surgical operation that lasted for more than 22 hours, security forces on Thursday claimed they have killed two Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) militants holed up inside a hotel in Srinagar after they fired at a CRPF picket at commercial hub Lal Chowk on Wednesday.
IG CRPF NC Asthana confirmed that two militants have been killed in the operation.
“We suspect one more militant has been killed but we have only recovered two bodies,” said Asthana. He said the operation took time because the security forces were busy in evacuation of civilian population stuck in the nearby building. “We ensured that before the final assault in the morning that civilians are evacuated from the nearby buildings,” said Asthana.
_______________________
Siege ends at Lal Chowk; 2 militants gunned down
Agencies Posted online: Thursday , Jan 07, 2010
Indian Express
Srinagar : Security forces stormed a hotel in busy Lal Chowk area killing two LeT terrorists including a Pakistani, ending a 22-hour fierce gunbattle that also left a policeman and a civilian dead.
....
The DGP said concerted efforts were being made by Pakistani terrorists to hit targets in J and K and in other parts of the country. "There is desperation in infiltration, there is desperation in carrying out such attacks".
Khoda said the militants probably had some other target to attack, "but because of the encounter, they rushed into the hotel and took positions there to open fire at the police".
The ultras first lobbed grenades and opened fire at a CRPF picket outside Palladium Cinema in Lal Chowk before taking shelter inside the hotel.
_____________________________________________
Fidayeen lay siege to Srinagar hotel
M Saleem Pandit, TNN, 7 January 2010,
Times of India
SRINAGAR\NEW DELHI: Two heavily armed terrorists — members of suicide squad (fidayeen) — lobbed grenades, shot dead a constable, then attacked a vehicle that came to evacuate him before entering into a hotel, triggering a fierce gunbattle — the first in over two years — in Srinagar’s business hub of Lal Chowk on Wednesday.
Initial reports indicated that the suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists wanted to enter the nearby CRPF camp. But, when they were stopped during a routine check near Pladium in the heart of Lal Chowk, they began firing and hurling grenades. They then entered the nearby Punjab Hotel, took positions and continued firing at the security forces comprising J&K police and CRPF. Soon, armoured vehicles carrying police reinforcements surrounded the hotel. Shopkeepers downed shutters and passers-by ran helter-skelter. The firing continued when reports last came in.
....
While sources in security agencies said the terrorists belonged to LeT, a little known outfit, Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the attack in a faxed statement to local media offices.
_______________________________________________
Terrorists were in touch with Pak handlers: Home Ministry sources
PTI, 7 January 2010, 07:25pm
Times of India
NEW DELHI: The Lashker-e-Taiba terrorists, who were killed by security forces during the siege at Lal Chowk in Srinagar, were in constant touch with their handlers in Pakistan when they were holed up inside a hotel there.
According to highly placed sources in the Union Home Ministry, nearly 700 terrorists, half of them foreign mercenaries, are active in Jammu and Kashmir.
They said some more attacks were expected to take place as the holed up militants at the hotel in Lal Chowk area had communicated the same to their handlers in Pakistan, the sources said.
According to the official data available with the Home Ministry, 413 infiltration attempts were made from across the border during which 93 terrorists were killed while 110 managed to sneak in.
Out of the 110 who had infiltrated, 70% were foreign militants while the remaining locals.
_______________________________________________
22 hours of terror ends in the Valley
7 Jan 2010, 1133 hrs IST
Times Now (India)
After over 22 hours of fierce gunbattle between terrorists and security forces in Lal Chowk, Srinagar, the three terrorists, who struck at the heart of the city, were killed on Thursday (January 7), the Home Ministry confirmed.
The first terrorist was gunned down yesterday evening, while the other two ‘fidayeen’ identified as Qari and Mustafa were killed today afternoon. Sources said that Qari is a local Kashmiri militant, while Mustafa is a Pakistani and could belong to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kuldeep Khooda, DGP, told reporters.
....
Though Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen claimed the responsibility for the attack, Police said it was the handiwork of Lashker terrorists only.
_________________
4 Dead After 20-Hour Gun Battle in Kashmir
By HARI KUMAR
New York Times
January 8, 2010
NEW DELHI — A 20-hour gun battle prompted by a deadly militant attack on a police outpost in Kashmir’s summer capital ended Thursday at a hotel after the police killed two militants, including one Pakistani national, Indian police officials said.
....
“In this operation just two terrorists are killed, but we are trying to ascertain whether any more terrorists are inside the building” said Kuldeep Khoda, the police chief of Jammu and Kashmir. Mr. Khoda also said that both militants belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization based in Pakistan that has been blamed for the attacks on Mumbai, India, in November 2008.
_____________________
Indian troops storm hotel, end siege in central Srinagar
Thursday, 07 Jan, 2010
Dawn
SRINAGAR: Commandos stormed a hotel in Indian-administered Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.
The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.
The gunmen – one a Pakistani and the other an Indian Kashmiri, according to police – had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar’s main market area
....
A militant group, Jamiat-ul-Mujahedin, claimed it was behind the assault, which left five police and four civilians injured. Police pointed the finger at the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).
_________________________________
Gun and bomb attacks rock Kashmir
BBC Wednesday, 6 January 2010
On the other side of the de facto border dividing Kashmir a policeman was killed in a gun battle in Srinagar.
India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir and have fought two wars over it.
Police in Srinagar say militants threw a grenade and opened fire at police in the city's historic Lal Chowk or Red Square.
At least two gunmen are thought to have taken refuge in a hotel from where they exchanged fire with the security forces.
_____________________________
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Hard times at the Washington Post
The once proud Washington Post gets into bed with a right-wing billionaire and fills its news pages with his agenda
by Dean Baker
Guardian
Monday 4 January 2010 19.00 GMT
The Washington Post is a newspaper with a proud legacy. It has done much important reporting over the years, most famously its coverage of the Watergate scandal that resulted in the resignation of Richard Nixon. Unfortunately, it seems to have abandoned its journalistic standards. In its last issue of the decade, it published as a news piece an article by the Peter Peterson Foundation-funded Fiscal Times. This compromised the Post's journalistic integrity to the extent that readers can no longer take it seriously.
Peter Peterson is a Wall Street billionaire and former Nixon administration cabinet member who has been trying to gut social security payments and Medicare for at least the last quarter of a century. He has written several books that warn of a demographic disaster when the baby boomers retire. These books often include nonsense arguments to make his case. For example, in one of the books making his pitch for cutting social security as matter of generational equity, Peterson proposes reducing the annual cost of living adjustment. Peterson justified this cut by arguing that the price index overstated the true rate of inflation, therefore the annual cost of living adjustment was overcompensating retirees.
The problem with Peterson's logic is that if the price index really overstated inflation, then the country has been getting wealthier much faster than the standard data show. This means that the young people who he was so worried about would be far richer than anyone could have imagined. It would also mean that the most of the retirees whose benefits he wanted to cut grew up in poverty.
These conclusions logically followed from Peterson's claim that the price index overstated inflation. But Peterson didn't care about the logic, he wanted to cut social security and he was prepared to say anything to advance this agenda.
Of course, what Peterson says matters because he uses his billions to make sure that his voice gets heard. In the case of his books, he would take out full-page ads in major newspapers to ensure that these otherwise very forgettable tracts got taken seriously.
And he started organisations. First, he had the Concord Coalition ("a nationwide, non-partisan, grassroots organisation advocating generationally responsible fiscal policy") and, more recently, the Peter G Peterson Foundation, and now its offspring, the Fiscal Times. Interestingly, the Fiscal Times' debut piece in the Post managed to reference both of Peterson's earlier creations.
The piece also included the standard and inaccurate Peterson refrain about "skyrocketing spending on Medicare, Medicaid and social security." Spending on social security is not "skyrocketing" in the normal usage of the term. Measured as a share of national income it will increase by less than 40% over the next two decades, an increase that is fully funded by the designated Social Security tax.
While spending on Medicare and Medicaid is increasing rapidly, this is primarily the result of exploding private sector healthcare costs. As every serious budget analysts knows, private sector healthcare costs have been growing at a rate that threatens to devastate the economy. If the private healthcare sector is not fixed, we face an economic disaster regardless of what happens with Medicare and Medicaid. If it is fixed, then the problems facing the public sector programmes will be manageable.
This is not the first time that the Washington Post has been prepared to compromise its integrity to rescue its finances. Last year the Post's top management planned a series of dinners, billed as "salons", where they had intended to sell lobbyists the opportunity to meet with the Washington Post's reporters in an informal setting. This plan was nixed after it was leaked and the idea developed into a scandal.
While selling access to reporters is a certainly a high crime for a serious newspaper, handing over a portion of the news section to an advocacy group is arguably a worse sin. The Fiscal Times piece was indistinguishable in its appearance from any other news story in the Washington Post. Only those careful to read the byline or the note at the bottom of the page would realize that the article was not a regular news story. Nowhere is the Fiscal Times identified as being affiliated with, and funded by, the Peter Peterson Foundation.
If the Fiscal Times becomes a regular source of news articles at the Post, we can probably soon expect to see pieces from National Rifle Association's Shooting Illustrated. It is unfortunate that technological change may have made the traditional newspaper economically unviable – but it would have been better if the Washington Post could have had a dignified death.
by Dean Baker
Guardian
Monday 4 January 2010 19.00 GMT
The Washington Post is a newspaper with a proud legacy. It has done much important reporting over the years, most famously its coverage of the Watergate scandal that resulted in the resignation of Richard Nixon. Unfortunately, it seems to have abandoned its journalistic standards. In its last issue of the decade, it published as a news piece an article by the Peter Peterson Foundation-funded Fiscal Times. This compromised the Post's journalistic integrity to the extent that readers can no longer take it seriously.
Peter Peterson is a Wall Street billionaire and former Nixon administration cabinet member who has been trying to gut social security payments and Medicare for at least the last quarter of a century. He has written several books that warn of a demographic disaster when the baby boomers retire. These books often include nonsense arguments to make his case. For example, in one of the books making his pitch for cutting social security as matter of generational equity, Peterson proposes reducing the annual cost of living adjustment. Peterson justified this cut by arguing that the price index overstated the true rate of inflation, therefore the annual cost of living adjustment was overcompensating retirees.
The problem with Peterson's logic is that if the price index really overstated inflation, then the country has been getting wealthier much faster than the standard data show. This means that the young people who he was so worried about would be far richer than anyone could have imagined. It would also mean that the most of the retirees whose benefits he wanted to cut grew up in poverty.
These conclusions logically followed from Peterson's claim that the price index overstated inflation. But Peterson didn't care about the logic, he wanted to cut social security and he was prepared to say anything to advance this agenda.
Of course, what Peterson says matters because he uses his billions to make sure that his voice gets heard. In the case of his books, he would take out full-page ads in major newspapers to ensure that these otherwise very forgettable tracts got taken seriously.
And he started organisations. First, he had the Concord Coalition ("a nationwide, non-partisan, grassroots organisation advocating generationally responsible fiscal policy") and, more recently, the Peter G Peterson Foundation, and now its offspring, the Fiscal Times. Interestingly, the Fiscal Times' debut piece in the Post managed to reference both of Peterson's earlier creations.
The piece also included the standard and inaccurate Peterson refrain about "skyrocketing spending on Medicare, Medicaid and social security." Spending on social security is not "skyrocketing" in the normal usage of the term. Measured as a share of national income it will increase by less than 40% over the next two decades, an increase that is fully funded by the designated Social Security tax.
While spending on Medicare and Medicaid is increasing rapidly, this is primarily the result of exploding private sector healthcare costs. As every serious budget analysts knows, private sector healthcare costs have been growing at a rate that threatens to devastate the economy. If the private healthcare sector is not fixed, we face an economic disaster regardless of what happens with Medicare and Medicaid. If it is fixed, then the problems facing the public sector programmes will be manageable.
This is not the first time that the Washington Post has been prepared to compromise its integrity to rescue its finances. Last year the Post's top management planned a series of dinners, billed as "salons", where they had intended to sell lobbyists the opportunity to meet with the Washington Post's reporters in an informal setting. This plan was nixed after it was leaked and the idea developed into a scandal.
While selling access to reporters is a certainly a high crime for a serious newspaper, handing over a portion of the news section to an advocacy group is arguably a worse sin. The Fiscal Times piece was indistinguishable in its appearance from any other news story in the Washington Post. Only those careful to read the byline or the note at the bottom of the page would realize that the article was not a regular news story. Nowhere is the Fiscal Times identified as being affiliated with, and funded by, the Peter Peterson Foundation.
If the Fiscal Times becomes a regular source of news articles at the Post, we can probably soon expect to see pieces from National Rifle Association's Shooting Illustrated. It is unfortunate that technological change may have made the traditional newspaper economically unviable – but it would have been better if the Washington Post could have had a dignified death.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The chastened long-tie George Will
George Will-ful Blushes
The Nation
Leslie Savan on December 2, 2009
Ever since Barack Obama's inauguration, progressives have been able to point to one segment of the traditional media that consistently bears witness to the depth of change implied by the Democratic landslide: the chastened demeanor of George Will on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Particularly obvious whenever Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is on hand to call Will on his donnish prevarications, the change has nonetheless been unmistakable over time and provided the show's real "Sunday Funnies" for lots of us, as this clip from Stephen Colbert last month makes clear:
Of course, chipping away at Will's certitude is intrinsically funny because of his magisterial, always unsmiling manner--it's like teasing a pinched and grumpy-looking hedgehog with a sharp stick.
Twice on the most recent This Week, Will set himself up as the straight man for Krugman. First, during the discussion of "Climategate," the manufactured scandal over hacked emails from British climatologists that purportedly "prove" that global warming isn't real. The ever-intellectual Will--along with less bookish illuminati like Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)--has been one of the leading global-warming deniers. But Krugman easily slapped down Will's conspiracy theory-like distortions, and George had to just sit there like a conservative Kon-Tiki and take it.
Then, a bit later in the show, after Will poohed-poohed cap-and-trade proposals, Krugman lowered the boom on one of Will's signature contradictions. "I'm surprised, George," he said, "that you lack faith in the power of the marketplace."
Notice how after Krugman snags Will on the free-market, Will immediately and absurdly tries to change the subject, insisting that those atmospheric bean-counters in the global-warming camp are really in it for the Benjamins. To which Krugman answers, his eyes practically rolling: "There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter. It's so much easier, come on--you got the energy industry's behind it."
Actually, Will has been teeing up talking points and Krugman has been knocking them down for a while now. Shortly after the 2008 election, there was, for instance, this classic moment, when Krugman schooled Will on FDR and the Depression:
Four or five years ago, Will would have dominated that discussion and talked over his opponent; now he's being called on it and simply deciding not to argue with the unconverted. He's still fulminating in the Washington Post, where his just-say-no-to-climate-change columns have gone unchallenged. But he's become more careful on the air, backing off, dodging, and, occasionally, apparently listening. What's different now is that it's difficult for Will--or for that matter, Cokie Roberts or any other "centrist" on the show--to sniff at a Nobel laureate wielding facts.
But what's also different is that, on some topics, Will is no longer a frozen ideologue. He has been undergoing a kind of global warming of his own. Over the last year or so, he's lobbed critiques that were anti-Bush, anti-Palin, and, in the face of neocon wrath, bravely anti-war, agreeing with The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel on Afghanistan, for example.
I think Will never liked the high-school-jock atmosphere of the Bush/Cheney White House--the towel-snapping sneers at book-larnin', and the populist, megachurch, know-nothingness of its policies. There wasn't much room there for a Whiggish parson of political prissiness. Oh, he doesn't care for the new, niggling emphasis on reality, either, but he's trying to adapt to a political world dominated by cable and comedy shows that hammer constantly at the bankruptcy of conservative economic verities.
On November 1, as This Week played the clip of Colbert riffing on Will's bow-ties and all that they imply, Will had to sit there and take it again. Even as he watched himself, Will didn't crack a smile--and Stephanopoulos said it was the first time he'd ever seen George Will blush.
The Nation
Leslie Savan on December 2, 2009
Ever since Barack Obama's inauguration, progressives have been able to point to one segment of the traditional media that consistently bears witness to the depth of change implied by the Democratic landslide: the chastened demeanor of George Will on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Particularly obvious whenever Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is on hand to call Will on his donnish prevarications, the change has nonetheless been unmistakable over time and provided the show's real "Sunday Funnies" for lots of us, as this clip from Stephen Colbert last month makes clear:
Of course, chipping away at Will's certitude is intrinsically funny because of his magisterial, always unsmiling manner--it's like teasing a pinched and grumpy-looking hedgehog with a sharp stick.
Twice on the most recent This Week, Will set himself up as the straight man for Krugman. First, during the discussion of "Climategate," the manufactured scandal over hacked emails from British climatologists that purportedly "prove" that global warming isn't real. The ever-intellectual Will--along with less bookish illuminati like Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)--has been one of the leading global-warming deniers. But Krugman easily slapped down Will's conspiracy theory-like distortions, and George had to just sit there like a conservative Kon-Tiki and take it.
Then, a bit later in the show, after Will poohed-poohed cap-and-trade proposals, Krugman lowered the boom on one of Will's signature contradictions. "I'm surprised, George," he said, "that you lack faith in the power of the marketplace."
Notice how after Krugman snags Will on the free-market, Will immediately and absurdly tries to change the subject, insisting that those atmospheric bean-counters in the global-warming camp are really in it for the Benjamins. To which Krugman answers, his eyes practically rolling: "There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter. It's so much easier, come on--you got the energy industry's behind it."
Actually, Will has been teeing up talking points and Krugman has been knocking them down for a while now. Shortly after the 2008 election, there was, for instance, this classic moment, when Krugman schooled Will on FDR and the Depression:
Four or five years ago, Will would have dominated that discussion and talked over his opponent; now he's being called on it and simply deciding not to argue with the unconverted. He's still fulminating in the Washington Post, where his just-say-no-to-climate-change columns have gone unchallenged. But he's become more careful on the air, backing off, dodging, and, occasionally, apparently listening. What's different now is that it's difficult for Will--or for that matter, Cokie Roberts or any other "centrist" on the show--to sniff at a Nobel laureate wielding facts.
But what's also different is that, on some topics, Will is no longer a frozen ideologue. He has been undergoing a kind of global warming of his own. Over the last year or so, he's lobbed critiques that were anti-Bush, anti-Palin, and, in the face of neocon wrath, bravely anti-war, agreeing with The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel on Afghanistan, for example.
I think Will never liked the high-school-jock atmosphere of the Bush/Cheney White House--the towel-snapping sneers at book-larnin', and the populist, megachurch, know-nothingness of its policies. There wasn't much room there for a Whiggish parson of political prissiness. Oh, he doesn't care for the new, niggling emphasis on reality, either, but he's trying to adapt to a political world dominated by cable and comedy shows that hammer constantly at the bankruptcy of conservative economic verities.
On November 1, as This Week played the clip of Colbert riffing on Will's bow-ties and all that they imply, Will had to sit there and take it again. Even as he watched himself, Will didn't crack a smile--and Stephanopoulos said it was the first time he'd ever seen George Will blush.
When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?
by Annalee Newitz, io9Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...
Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?
Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop on the verdant moon Pandora, whose landscapes look like a cross between Northern California's redwood cathedrals and Brazil's tropical rainforest. The moon's inhabitants, the Na'vi, are blue, catlike versions of native people: They wear feathers in their hair, worship nature gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes. Watching the movie, there is really no mistake that these are alien versions of stereotypical native peoples that we've seen in Hollywood movies for decades.
And Pandora is clearly supposed to be the rich, beautiful land America could still be if white people hadn't paved it over with concrete and strip malls. In Avatar, our white hero Jake Sully (sully - get it?) explains that Earth is basically a war-torn wasteland with no greenery or natural resources left. The humans started to colonize Pandora in order to mine a mineral called unobtainium that can serve as a mega-energy source. But a few of these humans don't want to crush the natives with tanks and bombs, so they wire their brains into the bodies of Na'vi avatars and try to win the natives' trust. Jake is one of the team of avatar pilots, and he discovers to his surprise that he loves his life as a Na'vi warrior far more than he ever did his life as a human marine.
Jake is so enchanted that he gives up on carrying out his mission, which is to persuade the Na'vi to relocate from their "home tree," where the humans want to mine the unobtanium. Instead, he focuses on becoming a great warrior who rides giant birds and falls in love with the chief's daughter. When the inevitable happens and the marines arrive to burn down the Na'vi's home tree, Jake switches sides. With the help of a few human renegades, he maintains a link with his avatar body in order to lead the Na'vi against the human invaders. Not only has he been assimilated into the native people's culture, but he has become their leader.
This is a classic scenario you've seen in non-scifi epics from Dances With Wolves to The Last Samurai, where a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member. But it's also, as I indicated earlier, very similar in some ways to District 9. In that film, our (anti)hero Wikus is trying to relocate a shantytown of aliens to a region far outside Johannesburg. When he's accidentally squirted with fluid from an alien technology, he begins turning into one of the aliens against his will. Deformed and cast out of human society, Wikus reluctantly helps one of the aliens to launch their stalled ship and seek help from their home planet.
If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?
In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress. Then, a white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior. This is also the basic story of Dune, where a member of the white royalty flees his posh palace on the planet Dune to become leader of the worm-riding native Fremen (the worm-riding rite of passage has an analog in Avatar, where Jake proves his manhood by riding a giant bird). An interesting tweak on this story can be seen in 1980s flick Enemy Mine, where a white man (Dennis Quaid) and the alien he's been battling (Louis Gossett Jr.) are stranded on a hostile planet together for years. Eventually they become best friends, and when the alien dies, the human raises the alien's child as his own. When humans arrive on the planet and try to enslave the alien child, he lays down his life to rescue it. His loyalties to an alien have become stronger than to his own species.
These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it's like to be a Na'vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He's becoming alien and he can't go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he's hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a "cure" for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.
This is not a message anybody wants to hear, least of all the white people who are creating and consuming these fantasies. Afro-Canadian scifi writer Nalo Hopkinson recently told the Boston Globe:
"In the US, to talk about race is to be seen as racist. You become the problem because you bring up the problem. So you find people who are hesitant to talk about it."
She adds that the main mythic story you find in science fiction, generally written by whites, "is going to a foreign culture and colonizing it."
Sure, Avatar goes a little bit beyond the basic colonizing story. We are told in no uncertain terms that it's wrong to colonize the lands of native people. Our hero chooses to join the Na'vi rather than abide the racist culture of his own people. But it is nevertheless a story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels.
When will whites stop making these movies and start thinking about race in a new way?
First, we'll need to stop thinking that white people are the most "relatable" characters in stories. As one blogger put it:
"By the end of the film you're left wondering why the film needed the Jake Sully character at all. The film could have done just as well by focusing on an actual Na'vi native who comes into contact with crazy humans who have no respect for the environment. I can just see the explanation: "Well, we need someone (an avatar) for the audience to connect with. A normal guy will work better than these tall blue people." However, this is the type of thinking that molds all leads as white male characters (blank slates for the audience to project themselves upon) unless your name is Will Smith."
But more than that, whites need to rethink their fantasies about race.
Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don't need to hear more about my own racial experience. I'd like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I'm doomed to see the same old story again and again.
-----
"All the voice acting for the Na’vi is done by actors of color"
"A white man saves the noble savages"
"Decoding the Racial, Religious Messages in Avatar"
Thursday, December 17, 2009
China Hunts for Art Treasures in U.S. Museums
By ANDREW JACOBS
December 17, 2009
New York Times
China’s “treasure hunting team” descended on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last week, and James C.Y. Watt, the patrician head of Asian art, braced for a confrontation.
For the past two weeks, the delegation of Chinese cultural experts has swept through American institutions, seeking to reclaim items once ensconced at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, which was one of the world’s most richly appointed imperial residences until British and French troops plundered it in 1860.
With a crew from China’s national broadcaster filming the visit, the Chinese fired off questions about the provenance of objects on display, and when it came to a collection of jade pieces, they requested documentation to show that the pieces had been acquired legally.
But then, with no eureka discovery, the tension faded. The Chinese pronounced themselves satisfied, smiled for a group photo, and drove away.
“That wasn’t so bad after all,” Mr. Watt said.
Emboldened by newfound wealth, China has been on a noisy campaign to reclaim relics that disappeared during its so-called century of humiliation, the period between 1842 and 1945 when foreign powers subjugated China through military incursions and onerous treaties.
But the quest, fueled by national pride, has been quixotic, provoking fear at institutions overseas but in the end amounting to little more than a public relations show aimed at audiences back home.
At its core, such mixed signals are an outgrowth of China’s evolving self-identity. Is it a developing country with fresh memories of its victimization by imperial powers? Or is it the world’s biggest exporter, eager to ensure good relations with the outside world to protect its trade-dependent economy?
“China is like an adolescent who took too many steroids,” said Liu Kang, a professor of Chinese studies at Duke University. “It has suddenly become big, but it finds it hard to coordinate and control its body. To the West, it can look like a monster.”
Recounted in Chinese textbooks and in countless television dramas, the destruction of the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan as it is called in Chinese, remains a crucial event epitomizing China’s fall from greatness. Begun in the early 18th century and expanded over the course of 150 years, the palace was a wonderland of artificial hills and lakes, and so many ornate wooden structures that it took 3,000 troops three days to burn them down.
“The wound is still open and hurts every time you probe it,” said Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer and a driving force in the movement to regain stolen antiquities. “It reminds people what may come when we are too weak.”
Stoked by populist sentiment but carefully managed by the Communist Party, the drive to reclaim lost cultural property has so far been halting. While officials privately acknowledge there is scant legal basis for repatriation, their public statements suggest that they would use lawsuits, diplomatic pressure and shame to bring home looted objects — not unlike Italy, Greece and Egypt, which have sought, with some success, to recover antiquities in European and American museums.
“The ideal scenario would be for the holders of these relics to donate them back to China,” said Chen Mingjie, the director of the palace museum, whose grounds include a shabby exhibition hall and an evocative pile of stone ruins that are instantly recognizable to any Chinese elementary school student.
The Communist Party has long used the narrative of foreign subjugation as a binding force, one that has become especially useful in recent years as the credo of market economics overruns the last remnants of its Marxist ideology.
But arousing nationalist sentiment, Chinese officials have learned, is a double-edged sword. In 2005, officials allowed public ire against Japan, over territorial disputes and textbooks that glossed over Japanese wartime atrocities, to boil over into violent street protests. After some of the anti-Japanese slogans began morphing into demands for action by Chinese leaders, the authorities clamped down.
The delegation traveling to United States museums appears to have been caught up in a political maelstrom. The relics quest intensified this year after Christie’s in Paris auctioned a pair of bronze animal heads that had been part of a fountain on the palace grounds; the sale was met with outrage in China. In the end, a Chinese collector sabotaged the auction by calling in the highest bids — $18 million for each head — then refusing to pay.
The United States scouting tour — visits to England, France and Japan will come early next year — quickly turned into a spectacle sponsored by a Chinese liquor company. As for the eight-member delegation, a closer look revealed that most either were employed by the Chinese media or were from the palace museum’s propaganda department.
“These days even building a toilet at Yuanmingyuan would be front-page news in People’s Daily,” said Liu Yang, a researcher who joined the trip.
But the 20-day spin through a dozen institutions has not been especially fruitful. Wu Jiabi, an archaeologist and the leader of the delegation, said that meaningful contacts were made but acknowledged that the group had not discovered illicit relics.
The visit has had its share of mishaps. Not all the museums on the itinerary were prepared for the delegation. One stop, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., was scrapped after the group realized the museum was in the Midwest, not in the Northeast.
The art experts whom the group met along the way offered consistent advice: the lion’s share of palace relics are in private hands, including those of collectors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. “The best thing would be to look through the catalogs of Sotheby’s and Christie’s,” said Mr. Watt of the Metropolitan Museum.
Although the Chinese public broadly supports recovering such items, a few critics have suggested that the campaign merely distracts from the continued destruction of historic buildings and archaeological sites across the country. A government survey released this month found that 23,600 registered relics had disappeared in recent years because of theft or illicit sales, while tens of thousands of culturally significant sites had been plowed under for development.
What’s more, said Wu Zuolai, a professor at the China Academy of Art, the obsession with Yuanmingyuan ignores the plunder of older sites that are more artistically significant.
“Chinese history did not start with the Qing Dynasty,” he said. “This treasure hunting trip is just a political show. The media portray it as patriotic, but it’s just spreading hate.”
Like many of the curators the delegation met last week, Keith Wilson, who oversees the Chinese art collection at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, both part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said that he was unsure what delegation members were really after. “They took a million miles of video, but in the end, I really felt they were not controlling their own destiny,” he said.
Mr. Liu, the researcher who was part of the delegation, seemed to admit as much, complaining that politics had upstaged scholarship. Even if he stumbled upon a palace relic, he said, he would be reluctant to take it back to an institution whose unheated exhibition space resembled little more than a military barracks. “To be honest, if you leave a thermos in our office, it gets broken,” he said.
“Maybe it’s better these things stay where they are.”
Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.
December 17, 2009
New York Times
China’s “treasure hunting team” descended on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last week, and James C.Y. Watt, the patrician head of Asian art, braced for a confrontation.
For the past two weeks, the delegation of Chinese cultural experts has swept through American institutions, seeking to reclaim items once ensconced at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, which was one of the world’s most richly appointed imperial residences until British and French troops plundered it in 1860.
With a crew from China’s national broadcaster filming the visit, the Chinese fired off questions about the provenance of objects on display, and when it came to a collection of jade pieces, they requested documentation to show that the pieces had been acquired legally.
But then, with no eureka discovery, the tension faded. The Chinese pronounced themselves satisfied, smiled for a group photo, and drove away.
“That wasn’t so bad after all,” Mr. Watt said.
Emboldened by newfound wealth, China has been on a noisy campaign to reclaim relics that disappeared during its so-called century of humiliation, the period between 1842 and 1945 when foreign powers subjugated China through military incursions and onerous treaties.
But the quest, fueled by national pride, has been quixotic, provoking fear at institutions overseas but in the end amounting to little more than a public relations show aimed at audiences back home.
At its core, such mixed signals are an outgrowth of China’s evolving self-identity. Is it a developing country with fresh memories of its victimization by imperial powers? Or is it the world’s biggest exporter, eager to ensure good relations with the outside world to protect its trade-dependent economy?
“China is like an adolescent who took too many steroids,” said Liu Kang, a professor of Chinese studies at Duke University. “It has suddenly become big, but it finds it hard to coordinate and control its body. To the West, it can look like a monster.”
Recounted in Chinese textbooks and in countless television dramas, the destruction of the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan as it is called in Chinese, remains a crucial event epitomizing China’s fall from greatness. Begun in the early 18th century and expanded over the course of 150 years, the palace was a wonderland of artificial hills and lakes, and so many ornate wooden structures that it took 3,000 troops three days to burn them down.
“The wound is still open and hurts every time you probe it,” said Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer and a driving force in the movement to regain stolen antiquities. “It reminds people what may come when we are too weak.”
Stoked by populist sentiment but carefully managed by the Communist Party, the drive to reclaim lost cultural property has so far been halting. While officials privately acknowledge there is scant legal basis for repatriation, their public statements suggest that they would use lawsuits, diplomatic pressure and shame to bring home looted objects — not unlike Italy, Greece and Egypt, which have sought, with some success, to recover antiquities in European and American museums.
“The ideal scenario would be for the holders of these relics to donate them back to China,” said Chen Mingjie, the director of the palace museum, whose grounds include a shabby exhibition hall and an evocative pile of stone ruins that are instantly recognizable to any Chinese elementary school student.
The Communist Party has long used the narrative of foreign subjugation as a binding force, one that has become especially useful in recent years as the credo of market economics overruns the last remnants of its Marxist ideology.
But arousing nationalist sentiment, Chinese officials have learned, is a double-edged sword. In 2005, officials allowed public ire against Japan, over territorial disputes and textbooks that glossed over Japanese wartime atrocities, to boil over into violent street protests. After some of the anti-Japanese slogans began morphing into demands for action by Chinese leaders, the authorities clamped down.
The delegation traveling to United States museums appears to have been caught up in a political maelstrom. The relics quest intensified this year after Christie’s in Paris auctioned a pair of bronze animal heads that had been part of a fountain on the palace grounds; the sale was met with outrage in China. In the end, a Chinese collector sabotaged the auction by calling in the highest bids — $18 million for each head — then refusing to pay.
The United States scouting tour — visits to England, France and Japan will come early next year — quickly turned into a spectacle sponsored by a Chinese liquor company. As for the eight-member delegation, a closer look revealed that most either were employed by the Chinese media or were from the palace museum’s propaganda department.
“These days even building a toilet at Yuanmingyuan would be front-page news in People’s Daily,” said Liu Yang, a researcher who joined the trip.
But the 20-day spin through a dozen institutions has not been especially fruitful. Wu Jiabi, an archaeologist and the leader of the delegation, said that meaningful contacts were made but acknowledged that the group had not discovered illicit relics.
The visit has had its share of mishaps. Not all the museums on the itinerary were prepared for the delegation. One stop, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., was scrapped after the group realized the museum was in the Midwest, not in the Northeast.
The art experts whom the group met along the way offered consistent advice: the lion’s share of palace relics are in private hands, including those of collectors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. “The best thing would be to look through the catalogs of Sotheby’s and Christie’s,” said Mr. Watt of the Metropolitan Museum.
Although the Chinese public broadly supports recovering such items, a few critics have suggested that the campaign merely distracts from the continued destruction of historic buildings and archaeological sites across the country. A government survey released this month found that 23,600 registered relics had disappeared in recent years because of theft or illicit sales, while tens of thousands of culturally significant sites had been plowed under for development.
What’s more, said Wu Zuolai, a professor at the China Academy of Art, the obsession with Yuanmingyuan ignores the plunder of older sites that are more artistically significant.
“Chinese history did not start with the Qing Dynasty,” he said. “This treasure hunting trip is just a political show. The media portray it as patriotic, but it’s just spreading hate.”
Like many of the curators the delegation met last week, Keith Wilson, who oversees the Chinese art collection at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, both part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said that he was unsure what delegation members were really after. “They took a million miles of video, but in the end, I really felt they were not controlling their own destiny,” he said.
Mr. Liu, the researcher who was part of the delegation, seemed to admit as much, complaining that politics had upstaged scholarship. Even if he stumbled upon a palace relic, he said, he would be reluctant to take it back to an institution whose unheated exhibition space resembled little more than a military barracks. “To be honest, if you leave a thermos in our office, it gets broken,” he said.
“Maybe it’s better these things stay where they are.”
Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Obama Gets It Wrong on Churchill & Torture
May 1, 2009
Real Clear Politics
By Jonah Goldberg
In his press conference Wednesday night, President Obama offered a nice little sermonette on "shortcuts."
Asked about his decision to release the "torture memos" and ban waterboarding, Obama said: "I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don't torture,' when . . . all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. . . . Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country."
It's a nice, honorable statement. But there's not much evidence it's true.
It's unconfirmed, but the article Obama referred to is probably a combination of a 2006 op-ed by Ben Macintyre in the Times of London and a recent blog post about it by The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan. Macintyre focused on British Col. Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens, the wartime commander of Camp 020 whose motto was "never strike a man," a code he didn't always succeed in enforcing. But even many of Stephens's preferred techniques - sleep deprivation, psychological cruelty, etc. - are routinely denounced as "torture" by Bush administration critics like Sullivan.
Macintyre doesn't mention Churchill. That's all Sullivan, who writes: "Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting."
Typically, Sullivan's emotions are getting ahead of his facts. Churchill's preference for humane treatment of German POWs under the Geneva Conventions had more to do with ensuring reciprocity from enemy armies. Al-Qaeda isn't a signatory and isn't interested in such reciprocity.
One reason Churchill might have eschewed putting the screws to detainees in 1942 is that he already knew what they could tell him about the bombings. The Allies knew where the airbases were and had cracked German codes years before.
Regardless, Churchill and Great Britain didn't quite take the firm stand against "torture" that Obama and Sullivan suggest. During the war, the Brits ran an interrogation center, "the Cage," in one of London's fanciest neighborhoods, where they worked over 3,573 captured Germans, sometimes brutally. The Free French movement, headquartered in London, savagely beat detainees under the nose of British authorities. From 1945 to 1947, Colonel Stephens himself ran the Bad Nenndorf prison near Hanover, Germany, where Soviet and Nazi prisoners were treated far more brutally than those at Guantanamo Bay. Stephens was court-martialed, and cleared, for some of the alleged atrocities.
Of course, none of this remotely made Britain "equivalent" to Nazi Germany.
Regardless of the debatable facts, the real problem is this idea that "taking shortcuts" erodes the character of a people. One hears this constantly, but it is almost invariably asserted rather than demonstrated.
First, this argument assumes society knows about the shortcuts. After all, if the shortcut in question is kept a secret, then it's hard to see how the "character of a people" will be corroded (or that such methods will be used as a "recruiting tool"). Alas, the idea that the government should be able to do things in secret to fight a war is out of vogue today.
The more significant shortcuts are the public ones people can't ignore. Churchill ordered the firebombing of Dresden just twelve weeks before the end of World War II. No one knows for sure how many civilians were burned alive, but tens of thousands surely were, in no small part to deliver a psychological blow to the Germans. If Churchill could have waterboarded a prisoner to avoid that - or stop the Holocaust - would one shortcut have been preferable to the other? Why? Or why not? Obama gives no sense he has an answer to such questions. You can ask the same questions about the shortcuts that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Did these shortcuts erode the character of the American and British people? If so, how? And what does it say about the "greatest generation" Barack Obama invokes relentlessly? And, again, what of the shortcuts we don't know about?
Churchill was a heroic leader. He did right as best he could in a bloody mess of a war. But he made countless horrible-but-correct decisions in the process. For instance, he refused to warn residents of Coventry that the Nazis were going to bomb, lest he betray the secret that he was listening to Nazi cable traffic. After the war, he advocated the shortcut of summary executions of Nazi officials.
It might seem otherwise, but I'm not making the case for what some people see as torture. I'm simply noting that war is always about shortcuts - all are horrible; some are necessary. If Obama doesn't understand that, let's hope he never has to learn it.
Real Clear Politics
By Jonah Goldberg
In his press conference Wednesday night, President Obama offered a nice little sermonette on "shortcuts."
Asked about his decision to release the "torture memos" and ban waterboarding, Obama said: "I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don't torture,' when . . . all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. . . . Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country."
It's a nice, honorable statement. But there's not much evidence it's true.
It's unconfirmed, but the article Obama referred to is probably a combination of a 2006 op-ed by Ben Macintyre in the Times of London and a recent blog post about it by The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan. Macintyre focused on British Col. Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens, the wartime commander of Camp 020 whose motto was "never strike a man," a code he didn't always succeed in enforcing. But even many of Stephens's preferred techniques - sleep deprivation, psychological cruelty, etc. - are routinely denounced as "torture" by Bush administration critics like Sullivan.
Macintyre doesn't mention Churchill. That's all Sullivan, who writes: "Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting."
Typically, Sullivan's emotions are getting ahead of his facts. Churchill's preference for humane treatment of German POWs under the Geneva Conventions had more to do with ensuring reciprocity from enemy armies. Al-Qaeda isn't a signatory and isn't interested in such reciprocity.
One reason Churchill might have eschewed putting the screws to detainees in 1942 is that he already knew what they could tell him about the bombings. The Allies knew where the airbases were and had cracked German codes years before.
Regardless, Churchill and Great Britain didn't quite take the firm stand against "torture" that Obama and Sullivan suggest. During the war, the Brits ran an interrogation center, "the Cage," in one of London's fanciest neighborhoods, where they worked over 3,573 captured Germans, sometimes brutally. The Free French movement, headquartered in London, savagely beat detainees under the nose of British authorities. From 1945 to 1947, Colonel Stephens himself ran the Bad Nenndorf prison near Hanover, Germany, where Soviet and Nazi prisoners were treated far more brutally than those at Guantanamo Bay. Stephens was court-martialed, and cleared, for some of the alleged atrocities.
Of course, none of this remotely made Britain "equivalent" to Nazi Germany.
Regardless of the debatable facts, the real problem is this idea that "taking shortcuts" erodes the character of a people. One hears this constantly, but it is almost invariably asserted rather than demonstrated.
First, this argument assumes society knows about the shortcuts. After all, if the shortcut in question is kept a secret, then it's hard to see how the "character of a people" will be corroded (or that such methods will be used as a "recruiting tool"). Alas, the idea that the government should be able to do things in secret to fight a war is out of vogue today.
The more significant shortcuts are the public ones people can't ignore. Churchill ordered the firebombing of Dresden just twelve weeks before the end of World War II. No one knows for sure how many civilians were burned alive, but tens of thousands surely were, in no small part to deliver a psychological blow to the Germans. If Churchill could have waterboarded a prisoner to avoid that - or stop the Holocaust - would one shortcut have been preferable to the other? Why? Or why not? Obama gives no sense he has an answer to such questions. You can ask the same questions about the shortcuts that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Did these shortcuts erode the character of the American and British people? If so, how? And what does it say about the "greatest generation" Barack Obama invokes relentlessly? And, again, what of the shortcuts we don't know about?
Churchill was a heroic leader. He did right as best he could in a bloody mess of a war. But he made countless horrible-but-correct decisions in the process. For instance, he refused to warn residents of Coventry that the Nazis were going to bomb, lest he betray the secret that he was listening to Nazi cable traffic. After the war, he advocated the shortcut of summary executions of Nazi officials.
It might seem otherwise, but I'm not making the case for what some people see as torture. I'm simply noting that war is always about shortcuts - all are horrible; some are necessary. If Obama doesn't understand that, let's hope he never has to learn it.
21,000 protest okinawa base
Nov 8, 2009
USMVAW
Around 21,000 people protested against the planned relocation of a U.S. military airfield within Okinawa Prefecture on Sunday ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Japan, in a sign of growing local frustration over the new Japanese government’s vague stance in reviewing the transfer plan.
USMVAW
Around 21,000 people protested against the planned relocation of a U.S. military airfield within Okinawa Prefecture on Sunday ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Japan, in a sign of growing local frustration over the new Japanese government’s vague stance in reviewing the transfer plan.
British Authorities Probing New Claims Soldiers Tortured, Raped Iraqi Prisoners
by: Jason Leopold,
t r u t h o u t
Saturday 14 November 2009
Britain's Ministry of Defense has launched an investigation into new claims that soldiers sexually abused Iraqi detainees and subjected them to mock executions, hooding, and used dogs to incite fear--interrogation methods that were also used by US soldiers and personally approved by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The charges come on the heels of Britian's complete withdrawal from Iraq last summer.
The allegations by former Iraqi detainees include one in which a 16-year-old Iraqi boy claims he was raped by two British soldiers on an army base. One of the victims has likened the alleged abuse to the torture and sexual humiliation that took place in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which was run by US forces.
The Ministry of Defense confirmed it is probing 33 cases of sexual abuse and torture.
But in a letter sent to Britain's Ministry of Defense, Phil Shiner, the attorney representing the Iraqis who leveled the charges, said he has it "on good authority that there are hundreds of cases that are going uninvestigated.
"If you are an Iraqi and terrible things have happened to you then how would you know that we have a judicial system in this country to deal with it? My guess is that many of them will remain buried."
Shiner added in his letter that the similarities between the type of abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib by American soldiers and the new charges against Britsh troops is not surprising.
"Given the history of the U.K.'s involvement in the development of these techniques alongside the US, it is deeply concerning that there appears to be strong similarities between instances of the use of sexual humiliation," he said.
Shiner's law firm, Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), published a report last June, "British Forces in Iraq: The Emerging Picture of Human Rights Violations and the Role of Judicial Review," which documented the cases at the center of the Ministry of Defense's inquiry.
One such case, according to an Associated Press report, is that of a 16-year-old boy who claimed “that he was among a group of Iraqis in May 2003 who were taken to the Shatt-al-Arab British camp to help fill sandbags.”
In a statement reported by The Independent newspaper, he alleged when he entered a room to get more sandbags he saw two British male soldiers engaged in oral sex. When he tried to leave, he alleges the men started to beat and kick him. When he fell to the floor, he claims one of the men held a blade to his neck while the other soldier stripped him naked. He claims the two British soldiers, one after the other, raped him.
In another claim:
A 35-year-old carpenter said he was arrested in April 2006 and taken to the British camp at Shaaibah where he alleges he was subjected to sexual abuse and humiliation by both male and female soldiers.He alleged soldiers used to watch pornographic films and would play loud music when he tried to pray. He also alleged that female soldiers exposed themselves or taunted him sexually. He alleged a soldier in the observation tower used to point the laser spot of his gun at his penis when he was in the toilet.
The AP also noted that accusations British soldiers abused Iraqis have been ongoing since 2003 and has already resulted in a $5 million settlement the UK paid to abuse victims in one case lead to a war war crimes conviction against a British corporal.
According to the Independent, evidence is scheduled to be presented Monday in the latter case in which British troops were accused of beating an Iraqi father to death during a raid on the Basra hotel he worked at in 2003.
Cpl. Donald Payne, the only soldier convicted in connection with the murder, is expected to testify in the public inquiry.
PIL is the lead legal team representing Daoud Mousa, the father of the victim, Baha Mousa, and nine other Iraqis who were allegedly abused by British soldiers.
According to the law firm, "as a result of the use of conditioning techniques, Baha Mousa was killed and nine other men (most of them colleagues from the hotel where Baha Mousa worked) were badly injured in what clearly amounted to torture in breach of article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights."
In a statement, the Ministry of Defense said it was taking the new allegations of abuse “very seriously” but warned that the claims "must not be taken as fact" until the investigation is complete.
“Over 120,000 British troops have served in Iraq and the vast majority have conducted themselves to the highest standards of behavior, displaying integrity and selfless commitment,” the ministry’s statement said. “There have been instances when individuals have behaved badly but only a tiny number have been shown to have fallen short of our high standards."
The report published by Shiner's law firm, however, contradicts the Ministry of Defense's position.
"The details of the abuse and the use of coercive interrogation techniques (hooding, stressing, food and water deprivation) are all too familiar from the case studies [detailed in the report]. With the ever mounting evidence of repeated systemic abuse, the protests that these atrocities have been caused by a few rotten apples ring ever more hollow," the report says.
Armed Forces Minister Bill Rammell told the BBC that he will personally oversee a special unit within the Ministry of Defense to probe the abuse claims, but rejected calls for a public inquiry.
Channeling Rumsfeld, Rammell disputed claims that abuse was widespread.
"Over 120,000 British soldiers served in Iraq. In the vast majority of cases they adhered to the highest standards of behavior," he said. "There is no evidence that systematic abuse was a feature of our operations on a widespread basis within Iraq."
Rumsfeld and other high-ranking Bush administration officials pinned the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib on a "few bad apples." But a Senate Armed Services Committee report released earlier this year disputed the "few bad apples" theory.
The panel's report concluded that a February 7, 2002 action memo signed by President George W. Bush, which excluded "war on terror" suspects from Geneva Conventions' protections, and orders Rumsfeld issued to military officials authorizing specific interrogation methods directly lead to the abuse and the deaths of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own,” the committee report said. “The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”
The alleged victims waited until Britain withdrew the last of its troops from Iraq last summer before coming forward because they feared "the British would come back and punish them," Mazin Younis, the Iraqi human rights campaigner who has been compiling the abuse claims, told the BBC.
"Now the British are out," Younis said.
----------
Torture and British foreign policy
British generals should be charged with war crimes
a short history of british torture
Bad Nenndorf
t r u t h o u t
Saturday 14 November 2009
Britain's Ministry of Defense has launched an investigation into new claims that soldiers sexually abused Iraqi detainees and subjected them to mock executions, hooding, and used dogs to incite fear--interrogation methods that were also used by US soldiers and personally approved by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The charges come on the heels of Britian's complete withdrawal from Iraq last summer.
The allegations by former Iraqi detainees include one in which a 16-year-old Iraqi boy claims he was raped by two British soldiers on an army base. One of the victims has likened the alleged abuse to the torture and sexual humiliation that took place in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which was run by US forces.
The Ministry of Defense confirmed it is probing 33 cases of sexual abuse and torture.
But in a letter sent to Britain's Ministry of Defense, Phil Shiner, the attorney representing the Iraqis who leveled the charges, said he has it "on good authority that there are hundreds of cases that are going uninvestigated.
"If you are an Iraqi and terrible things have happened to you then how would you know that we have a judicial system in this country to deal with it? My guess is that many of them will remain buried."
Shiner added in his letter that the similarities between the type of abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib by American soldiers and the new charges against Britsh troops is not surprising.
"Given the history of the U.K.'s involvement in the development of these techniques alongside the US, it is deeply concerning that there appears to be strong similarities between instances of the use of sexual humiliation," he said.
Shiner's law firm, Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), published a report last June, "British Forces in Iraq: The Emerging Picture of Human Rights Violations and the Role of Judicial Review," which documented the cases at the center of the Ministry of Defense's inquiry.
One such case, according to an Associated Press report, is that of a 16-year-old boy who claimed “that he was among a group of Iraqis in May 2003 who were taken to the Shatt-al-Arab British camp to help fill sandbags.”
In a statement reported by The Independent newspaper, he alleged when he entered a room to get more sandbags he saw two British male soldiers engaged in oral sex. When he tried to leave, he alleges the men started to beat and kick him. When he fell to the floor, he claims one of the men held a blade to his neck while the other soldier stripped him naked. He claims the two British soldiers, one after the other, raped him.
In another claim:
A 35-year-old carpenter said he was arrested in April 2006 and taken to the British camp at Shaaibah where he alleges he was subjected to sexual abuse and humiliation by both male and female soldiers.He alleged soldiers used to watch pornographic films and would play loud music when he tried to pray. He also alleged that female soldiers exposed themselves or taunted him sexually. He alleged a soldier in the observation tower used to point the laser spot of his gun at his penis when he was in the toilet.
The AP also noted that accusations British soldiers abused Iraqis have been ongoing since 2003 and has already resulted in a $5 million settlement the UK paid to abuse victims in one case lead to a war war crimes conviction against a British corporal.
According to the Independent, evidence is scheduled to be presented Monday in the latter case in which British troops were accused of beating an Iraqi father to death during a raid on the Basra hotel he worked at in 2003.
Cpl. Donald Payne, the only soldier convicted in connection with the murder, is expected to testify in the public inquiry.
PIL is the lead legal team representing Daoud Mousa, the father of the victim, Baha Mousa, and nine other Iraqis who were allegedly abused by British soldiers.
According to the law firm, "as a result of the use of conditioning techniques, Baha Mousa was killed and nine other men (most of them colleagues from the hotel where Baha Mousa worked) were badly injured in what clearly amounted to torture in breach of article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights."
In a statement, the Ministry of Defense said it was taking the new allegations of abuse “very seriously” but warned that the claims "must not be taken as fact" until the investigation is complete.
“Over 120,000 British troops have served in Iraq and the vast majority have conducted themselves to the highest standards of behavior, displaying integrity and selfless commitment,” the ministry’s statement said. “There have been instances when individuals have behaved badly but only a tiny number have been shown to have fallen short of our high standards."
The report published by Shiner's law firm, however, contradicts the Ministry of Defense's position.
"The details of the abuse and the use of coercive interrogation techniques (hooding, stressing, food and water deprivation) are all too familiar from the case studies [detailed in the report]. With the ever mounting evidence of repeated systemic abuse, the protests that these atrocities have been caused by a few rotten apples ring ever more hollow," the report says.
Armed Forces Minister Bill Rammell told the BBC that he will personally oversee a special unit within the Ministry of Defense to probe the abuse claims, but rejected calls for a public inquiry.
Channeling Rumsfeld, Rammell disputed claims that abuse was widespread.
"Over 120,000 British soldiers served in Iraq. In the vast majority of cases they adhered to the highest standards of behavior," he said. "There is no evidence that systematic abuse was a feature of our operations on a widespread basis within Iraq."
Rumsfeld and other high-ranking Bush administration officials pinned the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib on a "few bad apples." But a Senate Armed Services Committee report released earlier this year disputed the "few bad apples" theory.
The panel's report concluded that a February 7, 2002 action memo signed by President George W. Bush, which excluded "war on terror" suspects from Geneva Conventions' protections, and orders Rumsfeld issued to military officials authorizing specific interrogation methods directly lead to the abuse and the deaths of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own,” the committee report said. “The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”
The alleged victims waited until Britain withdrew the last of its troops from Iraq last summer before coming forward because they feared "the British would come back and punish them," Mazin Younis, the Iraqi human rights campaigner who has been compiling the abuse claims, told the BBC.
"Now the British are out," Younis said.
----------
Torture and British foreign policy
British generals should be charged with war crimes
a short history of british torture
Bad Nenndorf
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Is Fox News, News? No…A proof.
All indicators suggest it is actually entertainment - well packaged entertainment, but not news....from the Inverse Square Blog
Obama Is Right About Fox News
Obama Is Right About Fox News
Wall Street Journal
By THOMAS FRANK
OCTOBER 27, 2009
Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution. There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source. And the Newseum in Washington, D.C., establishes the profession's legitimacy with a memorial to fallen scribes, thus drawing an implicit connection between the murdered abolitionist editors of long ago and the struggling outfit that gave you this morning's page-one story about cute pets in Halloween costumes.
But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.
As the Obama administration has discovered by now. A few weeks ago, after Fox had scored a number of points against administration figures and policies, administration spokesmen decided it was time to start fighting back. Communications Director Anita Dunn called the network "a wing of the Republican Party," while Obama himself reportedly dismissed it for following "a talk radio format."
The network's moaners swung instantly into self-pitying action likening the administration's combative attitude to Richard Nixon's famous "enemies list."
They should remember that it wasn't just the keeping of a list that made Nixon's hostility to the media remarkable. Nearly every president—and probably just about every politician—has criticized the press at some point or other. What made the Nixon administration stand out is that it also sued the New York Times to keep that paper from publishing the Pentagon Papers. It schemed to ruin the Washington Post financially by challenging the broadcast licenses for the TV stations it owned. It bugged the office of Joseph Kraft, a prominent newspaper columnist. One of its most notorious henchmen was G. Gordon Liddy, who tells us in his autobiography that under certain conditions he was "willing to obey an order to kill [columnist] Jack Anderson."
It is interesting to note that Mr. Liddy, that friend of the First Amendment, appeared frequently in 2006 on none other than the Fox News network. In fact, the network sometimes seems like a grand electronic homage to the Nixonian spirit: Its constant attacks on the "elite media," for example, might well have been inspired by the famous pronouncements on TV news's liberal bias made by Mr. Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew.
And, of course, the network's chairman, Roger Ailes, was an adviser to Mr. Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign; his signature innovation back then was TV commercials in which Mr. Nixon answered questions from hand-picked citizens in a town-hall style setting.
Although they cry persecution today, the network and its leading lights have not really distinguished themselves on the issues surrounding clashes between the government and the press. When Mr. Ailes was on the other side of the politician/press divide, making ads for the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, the Washington Post once found out in advance where one of the commercials was going to be filmed. According to an article that appeared in that paper in 1988, Mr. Ailes was moved to comment thusly on the situation: " 'These leakers!' he told an inquiring reporter the night before the planned event. 'I think they should all be executed and tortured.'"
Mr. Ailes was joking on that occasion. But faced with one of the biggest First Amendment cases of our own time—the New York Times's 2005 story on the George W. Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program—how did Fox News react? By impugning the motives of the Times, of course, with different Fox personalities speculating that the Times deliberately published the story when it did in order to dissuade the U. S. Senate from reauthorizing the Patriot Act.
To point out that this network is different, that it is intensely politicized, that it inhabits an alternate reality defined by an imaginary conflict between noble heartland patriots and devious liberals—to be aware of these things is not the act of a scheming dictatorial personality. It is the obvious conclusion drawn by anybody with eyes and ears.
Still, one wishes that the Obama administration had taken on Fox News with a little more skill. As cultural criticism goes, this was clumsy, plodding stuff. What the situation required was sarcasm, irony, a little humor. Simply feeding Fox a slice of raw denunciation was like dumping gasoline into a fire. It did nothing but furnish the network with a real-world validation of its long-running conspiracy theories—and a nice bump in its ratings.
Wall Street Journal
By THOMAS FRANK
OCTOBER 27, 2009
Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution. There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source. And the Newseum in Washington, D.C., establishes the profession's legitimacy with a memorial to fallen scribes, thus drawing an implicit connection between the murdered abolitionist editors of long ago and the struggling outfit that gave you this morning's page-one story about cute pets in Halloween costumes.
But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.
As the Obama administration has discovered by now. A few weeks ago, after Fox had scored a number of points against administration figures and policies, administration spokesmen decided it was time to start fighting back. Communications Director Anita Dunn called the network "a wing of the Republican Party," while Obama himself reportedly dismissed it for following "a talk radio format."
The network's moaners swung instantly into self-pitying action likening the administration's combative attitude to Richard Nixon's famous "enemies list."
They should remember that it wasn't just the keeping of a list that made Nixon's hostility to the media remarkable. Nearly every president—and probably just about every politician—has criticized the press at some point or other. What made the Nixon administration stand out is that it also sued the New York Times to keep that paper from publishing the Pentagon Papers. It schemed to ruin the Washington Post financially by challenging the broadcast licenses for the TV stations it owned. It bugged the office of Joseph Kraft, a prominent newspaper columnist. One of its most notorious henchmen was G. Gordon Liddy, who tells us in his autobiography that under certain conditions he was "willing to obey an order to kill [columnist] Jack Anderson."
It is interesting to note that Mr. Liddy, that friend of the First Amendment, appeared frequently in 2006 on none other than the Fox News network. In fact, the network sometimes seems like a grand electronic homage to the Nixonian spirit: Its constant attacks on the "elite media," for example, might well have been inspired by the famous pronouncements on TV news's liberal bias made by Mr. Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew.
And, of course, the network's chairman, Roger Ailes, was an adviser to Mr. Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign; his signature innovation back then was TV commercials in which Mr. Nixon answered questions from hand-picked citizens in a town-hall style setting.
Although they cry persecution today, the network and its leading lights have not really distinguished themselves on the issues surrounding clashes between the government and the press. When Mr. Ailes was on the other side of the politician/press divide, making ads for the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, the Washington Post once found out in advance where one of the commercials was going to be filmed. According to an article that appeared in that paper in 1988, Mr. Ailes was moved to comment thusly on the situation: " 'These leakers!' he told an inquiring reporter the night before the planned event. 'I think they should all be executed and tortured.'"
Mr. Ailes was joking on that occasion. But faced with one of the biggest First Amendment cases of our own time—the New York Times's 2005 story on the George W. Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program—how did Fox News react? By impugning the motives of the Times, of course, with different Fox personalities speculating that the Times deliberately published the story when it did in order to dissuade the U. S. Senate from reauthorizing the Patriot Act.
To point out that this network is different, that it is intensely politicized, that it inhabits an alternate reality defined by an imaginary conflict between noble heartland patriots and devious liberals—to be aware of these things is not the act of a scheming dictatorial personality. It is the obvious conclusion drawn by anybody with eyes and ears.
Still, one wishes that the Obama administration had taken on Fox News with a little more skill. As cultural criticism goes, this was clumsy, plodding stuff. What the situation required was sarcasm, irony, a little humor. Simply feeding Fox a slice of raw denunciation was like dumping gasoline into a fire. It did nothing but furnish the network with a real-world validation of its long-running conspiracy theories—and a nice bump in its ratings.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
This rewriting of history is spreading Europe's poison
Blaming the USSR for the second world war is not only absurd – it boosts the heirs of the Nazis' wartime collaborators
Seumas Milne
Guardian(uk),
Wednesday 9 September 2009 21.00 BST
Through decades of British commemorations and coverage of the second world war – from Dunkirk to D-day – there has never been any doubt about who started it. However dishonestly the story of 1939 has been abused to justify new wars against quite different kinds of enemies, the responsibility for the greatest conflagration in human history has always been laid at the door of Hitler and his genocidal Nazi regime.
That is until now. Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war. Stalin was "Hitler's accomplice", the Economist insisted, after Russian and Polish politicians traded accusations over the events of the late 1930s.
In his introduction to this week's Guardian history of the war, the neoconservative historian Niall Ferguson declared that Stalin was "as much an aggressor as Hitler". Last month, the ostensibly more liberal Orlando Figes went further, insisting the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact was "the licence for the Holocaust".
Given that the Soviet Union played the decisive military role in Hitler's defeat at the cost of 25 million dead, it's scarcely surprising that Russians are outraged by such accusations. When the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last week denounced attempts to draw parallels between the role of the Nazis and the Soviet Union as a "cynical lie", he wasn't just speaking for his government, but the whole country – and a good deal of the rest of the world besides.
There's no doubt that the pact of August 1939 was a shocking act of realpolitik by the state that had led the campaign against fascism since before the Spanish civil war. You can argue about how Stalin used it to buy time, his delusions about delaying the Nazi onslaught, or whether the Soviet occupation of the mainly Ukrainian and Byelorussian parts of Poland was, as Churchill maintained at the time, "necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace".
But to claim that without the pact there would have been no war is simply absurd – and, in the words of the historian Mark Mazower, "too tainted by present day political concerns to be taken seriously". Hitler had given the order to attack and occupy Poland much earlier. As fellow historian Geoff Roberts puts it, the pact was an "instrument of defence, not aggression".
That was a good deal less true of the previous year's Munich agreement, in which British and French politicians dismembered Czechoslovakia at the Nazi dictator's pleasure. The one pact that could conceivably have prevented war, a collective security alliance with the Soviet Union, was in effect blocked by the appeaser Chamberlain and an authoritarian Polish government that refused to allow Soviet troops on Polish soil.
Poland had signed its own non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and seized Czech territory, which puts last week's description by the Polish president Lech Kaczynski of a Soviet "stab in the back" in perspective. The case against the Anglo-French appeasers and the Polish colonels' regime over the failure to prevent war is a good deal stronger than against the Soviet Union, which perhaps helps to explain the enthusiasm for the new revisionism in both parts of the continent.
But across eastern Europe, the Baltic republics and the Ukraine, the drive to rewrite history is being used to relativise Nazi crimes and rehabilitate collaborators. At the official level, it has focused on a campaign to turn August 23 – the anniversary of the non-aggression pact – into a day of commemoration for the victims of communism and nazism.
In July that was backed by the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe, following a similar vote in the European parliament and a declaration signed by Vaclav Havel and others branding "communism and nazism as a common legacy" of Europe that should be jointly commemorated because of "substantial similarities".
That east Europeans should want to remember the deportations and killings of "class enemies" by the Soviet Union during and after the war is entirely understandable. So is their pressure on Russia to account, say, for the killing of Polish officers at Katyn – even if Soviet and Russian acknowledgment of Stalin's crimes already goes far beyond, for example, any such apologies by Britain or France for the crimes of colonialism.
But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar "enslavement" of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that could have been made by the Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
The real meaning of the attempt to equate Nazi genocide with Soviet repression is clearest in the Baltic republics, where collaboration with SS death squads and direct participation in the mass murder of Jews was at its most extreme, and politicians are at pains to turn perpetrators into victims. Veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS now parade through Riga, Vilnius's Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust and Estonian parliamentarians honour those who served the Third Reich as "fighters for independence".
Most repulsively of all, while rehabilitating convicted Nazi war criminals, the state prosecutor in Lithuania – a member of the EU and Nato – last year opened a war crimes investigation into four Lithuanian Jewish resistance veterans who fought with Soviet partisans: a case only abandoned for lack of evidence. As Efraim Zuroff, veteran Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, puts it: "People need to wake up to what is going on. This attempt to create a false symmetry between communism and the Nazi genocide is aimed at covering up these countries' participation in mass murder."
As the political heirs of the Nazis' collaborators in eastern Europe gain strength on the back of growing unemployment and poverty, and antisemitism and racist violence against Roma grow across the region, the current indulgence of historical falsehoods about the second world war can only spread this poison.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Health Care: No room for discussion
| Can there be any room for a centrist at a health care reform town hall meeting |
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