Of Assassinations in Dubai and Ideological Narratives

In the ancient times before the blogosphere, when even Internet forums were still a novelty, and blogs nonexistent, one occasionally ran across mainstream media types who would hilariously claim, with a perfectly straight face, that their news reporting was “objective.”  Nowadays such specimens have become a great rarity, seldom encountered outside of circus side shows.  Even the lowliest of trolls are now well aware of the existence of what is referred to as the “narrative.”  The narrative requires that reality be “adjusted” to conform to a particular ideological point of view.  These adjustments are seldom applied in the form of blatant lies.  In these days of instant Internet fact checking, it has simply become too risky.  Rather, one only reports stories that conform to the narrative, perhaps after trimming them of certain “irrelevant details” and adding some “interpretation” by “experts” to make sure readers don’t miss the point.  In other words, the story is massaged until, as the Germans put it, “Es passt in den Kram” (It fits in with the rest of the crap).

Sometimes events of such a shocking nature occur that even the most carefully crafted narratives must be adjusted to account for them.  One such event was, of course, the demise of Communism.  As one might expect, it left the narrative of the “progressive left” in a shambles.  A new, somewhat ramshackle version had to be cobbled together, from such ideological flotsam and jetsam as bobbed to the surface after the Soviet Titanic slid beneath the waves, combined with some interesting new twists.  One of the more amusing of these is the left’s increasingly steamy love affair with the more extreme Islamists.  It seems odd on the face of it that ideologues who once posed as champions of women’s liberation and gay rights, and vehemently denounced the agenda of the Christian right, are now found in such a warm embrace with misogynistic, homophobe religious fanatics.  However, Homo sapiens has never really been a rational animal.  We are simply better than the other animals at using reason to satisfy our emotional needs.  When it comes to emotional needs, there are those among us whose tastes run to “saving” the rest of us and making us all “happy” by stuffing the messianic world view du jour down our collective throats.  These are the familiar types who love to strike heroic poses on the “moral high ground.”  Marxism scratched their emotional itch admirably for many years, but has lately fallen out of fashion.  When it did, it left something of a psychological vacuum in its wake.  Mercifully, no brand new surefire prescription for saving humanity was waiting in the wings to take its place.  Instead, radical Islamism has rushed in to fill the vacuum.  When it comes to messianic world views, it is, for the time being at least, the only game in town.  Incongruous successor to Marxism that it is, it still scratches that itch.  The “progressive left” jumped on board.  It should really come as no surprise.  After all, back in the day, they managed to convince themselves that they were “saving the world” by collaborating in the mass murders of Pol Pot and Ho chi Minh, not to mention Stalin. 

Artifacts of this Islamist – leftist love affair are not hard to find.  When it comes to the European news media, for example, it takes the form of anti-Semitism Lite, often euphemistically referred to as “anti-Zionism.”  It manifests itself in the form of obsessive, one-sided bashing of Israel for the slightest real or imagined infractions of the left’s version of “morality,” combined with a the turning of a blind eye to the far more egregious misdeeds of her enemies.  For example, deliberate attempts by the Islamists to murder Israeli civilians with barrages of rockets are reported with as much emotional detachment as the next day’s weather, but grossly exaggerated accounts of atrocities in Gaza and “blood libel” fables about the harvesting of organs from Palestinian victims become the stuff of persistent propaganda campaigns without the slightest shred of proof. 

The process is nicely illustrated by the manner in which the news about the recent assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai has been reported in Europe.  There, as in the US, the “progressive left” tends to be over-represented in the legacy media.  It is overwhelmingly the case in Germany, where no equivalent of our talk radio or influential bloggers exists to restore a semblance of balance.  Consider, for example, the coverage in Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine.  A story about the assassination that appeared last week began with the ominous headline, “How Israel Covered Mossad’s Trail.”  The opening blurb reads, “The Israeli secret service will neither ‘confirm nor deny’ its involvement in the murder of Hamas weapons dealer Mabhouh.  However, the Dubai assassin who went by the cover name Michael Bodenheimer left a trail behind him:  In Cologne and in Israeli Herzliya.”  The rest of the article is a collection of circumstantial evidence combined with suggestions that the crime had all the earmarks of a Mossad hit. 

The “news” here is hardly that Mossad wasn’t involved in the hit.  It’s the disconnect between the way Spiegel reported on this story, which happened to fit its anti-Israel narrative, and the way it reports on similar stories that don’t.  Take for example, the involvement of Al Qaeda in 911.  This was a story that most decidedly did not fit Spiegel’s pro-Islamist narrative at the time.  It also came at an inconvenient time, as Spiegel was in the forefront of a quasi-racist German jihad against the United States that reached levels of obsessive viciousness at about the time of 911 that would scarcely be credible to Americans who can’t read German.   Nevertheless, all the same circumstantial evidence was there, complete with a trail leading back to Germany.  In this case, however, instead of accepting the obvious, Spiegel’s editors dug in their heels, and tried to create an alternate version of reality.  They began what I referred to at the time as the “Spielchen mit den Beweisen,” or “cute little game with the proofs,” coming up with ever more contrived reasons to dismiss the increasing mountain of evidence pointing to Al Qaeda’s guilt.  Even when bin Laden appeared on tape, practically jumping up and down and screaming, “We did it!  We did it!” the editors refused to throw in the towel.  They were nothing if not stubborn.  Reality was what they said it was, and the rest of the world be damned!  They pointed out that (aha, oho), the translators of the videotape had been in the employ of the evil Americans.  They produced their own “translators” from the enormous pool of experts they have constantly at their beck and call, ready to “prove” the most absurd concoctions.  These came up with a “corrected” translation on demand which (surprise, surprise) exonerated bin Laden.  Only after a chorus of native Arab speakers in countries that could hardly be portrayed as “friends” of the United States pointed out that Spiegel’s “translators” were sucking canal water, did the editors finally give over, muttering dark comments about the “exegesis of videotapes.” 

In a word, then, as far as ideologues are concerned, be they on the left or the right of the political spectrum, the “real world” is what fits the narrative.  When it comes to dishing out blame, let him beware whom the ideological shoe fits.

UPDATE:  It’s odd that Spiegel didn’t pick up on this.  Looks like prime material for another “Spielchen mit den Beweisen” to me.

Republicans take Kennedy’s Seat: The German Reaction

Reactions in the German news media to Sam Brown’s victory in Massachusetts today are in line with the “Obama as failed, weak President” meme that has been dominant there for some time. Spiegel’s reaction:

Bitter setback for Barack Obama: One year after his inauguration the Democrats have lost the Senate seat that once belonged to Edward Kennedy, and with it their strategic majority in the Senate. Now the prospects have dimmed for the Presidents Great Project: health reform.

The take at Focus, another major news magazine:

Barack Obama: The Fallen Messiah

The Republicans shouldn’t be credited with the loss of the stronghold of the Democrats in Massachusetts: it was the US President. Obama has fallen out of favor with his fellow citizens because only humdrum politics as usual followed their initial euphoria.

To make sure readers get the message, the article is set off by an image of Obama with a Hitler moustache over the slogan, “I’ve changed.”

Stern has more of the same:

A slap in the face for Obama: It’s a shrill wake-up call. The setback in the Senate election in Massachusetts shows how much the US President has lost his magic aura and distanced himself from his voters. Now the fate of his Presidency is at stake.

It’s “all about Obama” for the right of center Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as well:

Setback for Obama on the first anniversary of his inauguration: One year after his inauguration, Barack Obama has lost his strategic majority in the Senate.

And so on, and so on. When it comes to coverage of the US, there’s not much difference between “left” and “right” in the German media.  A few brave little bloggers buck the trend, but, other than that, there are no powerful alternative voices on the Internet or any equivalent to our talk radio or Foxnews to counter the prevailing narrative.  The attitudes of “well-informed” Germans about the US are usually an uncritical reflection of that narrative.

Haiti: “Between a Helping and a Colonial Power”

According to Gene at Harry’s Place:

The latest meme from the “anti-imperialist” Left is that the US government is more interested in repressing the Haitian people in the wake of last week’s catastrophic earthquake than it is in assisting them. Unsurprisingly Hugo Chavez was one of those leading the rhetorical charge against the nefarious Yanquis.

Gene is apparently so outraged that he doesn’t stick at comparing Hugo to Rush, who stands somewhat to the right of Beelzebub in Harry’s political spectrum. Don’t look now, Gene, but the “anti-imperialist” Left in Europe is looking more mainstream all the time. I’ve already linked to Spiegel’s drearily predictable “analysis” that confirms all Hugo’s worst fears about the “nefarious Yanquis.” Things are no different at the other major “serious” German news magazine, Focus, where we learn that the US is “Between a Helping and a Colonial Power in Haiti.” According to Focus,

The US sprang to devastated Haiti’s side with breathtakingly massive aid. No other country provided more help. Help that isn’t completely selfless.

Regional politics is another area in which Obama wants to distance himself from Bush. He wants to improve ties to the countries of central and South America. However, very little of a concrete nature followed his first charm offensive, according to Jonas Wolff of the Hessian Peace and Conflict Research Foundation. Now the US President has signaled via his aid to Haiti that the US interests are not limited to Iraq and Afghanistan. Its help will be extended to its own continent as well.

How’s that for German subtlety? As we learn from the BBC, the French have also been in a huff about the situation in Haiti lately. According to the Beeb, France’s “International Cooperation Minister,” Alain Joyandet, was aggrieved that the US was stealing his thunder:

Mr Joyandet – who was in Haiti – said he had issued a formal protest to the US authorities via the French embassy, and that his actions were backed by Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. He was quoted as saying: “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti.”

The Beeb’s take:

Underlying the episode is a tangible sense of hurt pride that France is being relegated to a secondary role in a country long regarded as part of its own sphere of influence.

Non Pasaran links to a French cartoon that sets the appropriate tone of hurt infantile pride. Not to worry, though, as it appears Obama and Sarkozy have patched things up and are, once again, best of buddies.

Of Haitian Aid and US Conspiracies: Spiegel’s Hate Pedlar Pitzke Carries On

Germany is a country where anti-American hate goes hand in hand with “progressive” ideology. The editors of Spiegel magazine were among the first to discover just how lucrative it could be to exploit the phenomenon. They were in the forefront of a campaign of quasi-racist hatemongering that reached its climax in the final years of the Clinton and the first years of the Bush Administration. Some of its nastiest manifestations have been well-documented at Davids Medienkritik, where you will find an occasional comment by yours truly. In those days, Spiegel’s virulent anti-Americanism became so obsessive that occasionally it was hard to find any news about Germany on their website. Their hate pedlar in chief was Marc Pitzke, who could always be relied on to throw out red meat to Germany’s legions of Amerika haters thinly tarted up as “analysis.” Eventually, people on the other side of the Atlantic began to notice what was going on, and Spiegel’s claims of “objective criticism” no longer passed the “ho ho” test. Spiegel put Pitzke back in his jar and throttled back the hate campaign. Manifestations of anti-Americanism have been more “tasteful” since then, but they’ve hardly disappeared. The haters haven’t gone anywhere, and they are still more than willing to pay good coin to anyone willing to feed their prejudices. Spiegel still uses Pitzke to give them an occasional “fix.” It helps the bottom line.

The content of his latest “analysis” is no less predictable than any of his other offerings over the last decade and more. It appears the rapid mobilization of US aid to Haiti had nothing to do with any praiseworthy motive, but was all part of a dark conspiracy to promote US imperial ambitions in the region. Surprise, surprise! Some money quotes from Pitzke’s “analysis:”

Here “help” doesn’t just mean help – but rather invariably a complex fabric of geopolitical interests and self serving.

This time, too, the US military took the lead.

(at UN Headquarters in New York) Bill Clinton appealed before the General Assembly for international help and aid, and then made the rounds of the TV news shows. “Only five dollars can make a difference,” he said… As President he made sure via an American intervention that Haiti’s deposed chief of state, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was returned to office, in the hope that he would be a vassal.

You get the idea.  Remember the old saying, “No good deed goes unpunished!”  I often wonder what Pitzke gets for this kind of “analysis.”  Spiegel probably pays him too much.  Let any reasonably competent journalism undergraduate read four or five of his articles to get the general idea, supply them with the topic of the day, and they could surely reproduce this sort of ”analysis” virtually word for word.  It’s about as predictable as the sun rising in the morning.

You “old German hands” out there will no doubt remember how the apologists and rationalizers assured us that German anti-Americanism was “all about Bush.”  Well, Bush is long gone, and German anti-Americanism is alive and well.  They didn’t give Obama much of a honeymoon, did they?  How very disappointed the apologists must be to discover that, after all, he’s just like Bush.

Pitzke ends his latest offering with some pious pontifications about televangelist Pat Robertson’s take on Haiti.  It turns out Pat has stepped in it again, characteristically attributing the disaster to divine vengeance.  Apparently he wasn’t too finicky about historical accuracy in the process, claiming that the Haitians made a “pact with the devil” when they were “under the knout” of Napoleon III, instead of Napoleon I.  Pitzke’s “zinger” sentence at the end of his “analysis:”

But the Americans have never been too exact about history when it comes to Haiti.

There you have it, dear readers.   You thought you were individuals.  In fact, you’re all just so many Pat Robertsons.

Michael Zantovsky and The End of The End of History

Hattip to Matt Welch at Hit and Run for linking this brilliant essay, entitled “Resumption:  The Gears of 1989,” by Michael Zantovsky, Czech ambassador to the UK.  Matt’s introductory paragraph:

Writing in the World Affairs Journal, Michael Zantovsky, the former Czech ambassador to the U.S. and longtime former wingman to Vaclav Havel, has an interesting and hard-to-define essay that ruminates on the collapse of communism, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, evolutionary biology, Sept. 11, Hayek, and much else besides. Any excerpt will be an injustice; here’s the closing paragraph:

I suggest you take the time to read the whole essay, and not just the closing paragraph.  It will be worth your while.  I agree with Matt’s caution about excerpts, but, just in case you’re too lazy to follow the link, here’s a nugget to whet your appetite.  It refers back to a previous paragraph about the failed theories of Communism:

Based on the known record, history is more likely a complex stochastic process in which each event is to a larger, smaller, or infinitesimal extent the result of everything that has happened before combined with a healthy dose of randomness. As such, it carries forward and perpetuates, at least for a time, not only human growth and human achievements but also our weaknesses, fallacies, inconsistencies, and failures. That is why it comes back to haunt us so often. One can only ask whether the post–Cold War world would be any different if Communism was smashed to dust and eradicated the way Nazism was. In the event, to the vast relief of people in the West and East alike, it imploded peacefully. But perhaps in doing so, it was also allowed to scatter tiny bits of its tyrannical self, its messianic arrogance, its ignorance of human nature, and its fundamental immorality to the ends of the earth. It is gone but not dead. In any case, democracies seem to have been much more aware of their fundamental values and the price of liberty when the totalitarian threat was still around.

Can you imagine an American ambassador writing anything like that?  Neither can I.  Sad, isn’t it?

“Age of Delirium” and the Collapse of Communism

“Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union,” is another example of the apparent oxymoron, a good book about history written by a journalist. Its author, David Satter, first arrived in the Soviet Union in 1976, and spent a total of nearly two decades reporting and writing about it and Russia and the other states that merged after its collapse. Like David Remnick’s “Lenin’s Tomb,” it chronicles the fates of people, each of whose lives shed some light on the reality of Communism and the reasons for its final demise. As glasnost gradually diminished the fear of Soviet citizens, it loosened their tongues as well, providing a golden opportunity for first rate reporters with a sense of history like Satter and Remnick to gather individual stories that, collectively, provide a wonderful insight into the nature of the sytem and the reasons for its astonishing disappearance from the stage of history. I suspect later generations will come to see the rise and fall of Communism as the most significant event of the 20th century. Russia was not the only state to pay a heavy price for this arrogant experiment of cocksure intellectuals who had mesmerized themselves into believing they had the perfect formula for creating a paradise on earth. If we are to avoid stumbling into more such experiments, it would be well if we thoroughly learned the lessons of this one. Such books should be required reading in every high school.

One wonders if the fall of the system was inevitable, and how long it might have survived if, against all odds, a man as fundamentally decent as Gorbachev had not come on the scene. He certainly had his faults, but I think his role in history was a great deal more positive than he’s often given credit for today. When I say he was a decent man, I am not forgetting he was the leader of the Soviet Union during the events of January 1990 in Baku, or January 1991 in Vilnius.  When confronted with the unraveling of everything he had dedicated his life to building, he tacked to the right.  Still, in the end, he refused to yield to the conspirators who staged the August coup, though he surely realised his life was at stake.  Later, he yielded to Yeltsin and accepted personal humiliation rather than cling to power when he knew the likely outcome would be civil war and another bloodbath in a country that had already experienced too many.  In the end, he was one more example of the decisive importance of individuals in history.

And what of the future?  In “The New Class,” Milovan Djilas analyzed the emergence of the state as a vehicle to absolute power for an elite.  George Orwell gave us a fictionalized picture of the same phenomenon in “1984.”  These two brilliant 20th century thinkers have not lost their relevance with the demise of Communism.  State power shows no signs of withering away.  On the contrary, the role of government continues to expand in our lives, regardless of the nature of our leaders’ claims to legitimacy.  The expansion of state power is inimical to the liberty of the individual in any case.   In the 18th century, no less a thinker than Boswell’s Dr. Johnson could maintain with perfect seriousness that the nature of the government one lived under was irrelevant to individual liberty.  That is no longer the case today.  Perhaps the world of “1984″ is inevitable.  The only question is whether it will come, as Orwell suggested, via revolution, or “on little cats feet,” by the evolutionary expansion of “democratic” state power.

An Execution in China

The international uproar over China’s execution of Akmal Shaikh demonstrates once again the truth of Stalin’s dictum, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” It is unlikely that Mr. Shaikh was the victim of a high-handed act by local officials. It is more probable that his killing was deliberate, approved at the highest levels, and intended to send a message. Mr Shaikh was caught smuggling narcotics. I’m sure China’s rulers have not forgotten the Opium Wars. Perhaps they wanted to send the British a message that those days are over once and for all, and that, eventually, what goes around comes around, even if it takes a long time. As they demonstrated when they turned the guns of their tanks on their own people in Tienanmen Square, they don’t lack the level of cynicism required for such an act.

“The New Republic” and the Pitfalls of Historical Prophecy

“The New Republic” has had its ups and downs. Not too long ago its editors were almost unique in their willingness to honestly and thoroughly set forth the arguments for opposing points of view, and in their ability to address them convincingly, although lately they’ve shown a lamentable tendency to sink to the level of the rest of the pack. In common with many American journals of opinion that have survived for any length of time, its content has run from the ridiculous to the sublime, from essays by some of the most brilliant pundits this country has produced to the excrescences of Communist ideologues during the “red period” it passed through in common with many other journals in the aftermath of the Great Depression. It was launched in the opening months of that great watershed event in modern history, the first World War, and lately I’ve been looking through some of those inaugural issues.

It’s very useful to occasionally read through a few articles in the journals and magazines of days gone by. It puts things that are happening today in perspective. Back in 1914, for example, The New Republic devoted a great deal of ink to discussion of the ramifications of the U.S. military intervention in Mexico. The first page of the third issue was entirely taken up with ruminations concerning what should be done about the U.S. troops in Vera Cruz. Today the number of us who are even aware that U.S. troops were in Vera Cruz in 1914 is vanishingly small. Will the matters that raise such passions and seem of such overwhelming importance to us today assume a similar insignificance for later generations?

Perhaps the most important thing one gains from reading old journals is a sense of humility. One finds many predictions about the future, but few of them that were accurate. The problem isn’t that the authors making those predictions were fools. The problem is that we lack the intellectual capacity to assimilate all the facts that will have a bearing on the outcome of history, and correctly connect the dots between them. We must learn to appreciate our limitations. It’s unwise to overestimate our ability to predict future events that have no historical precedent. For example, how many of us back in 1988 predicted the manner in which Communism and the Soviet Union would collapse, or when the momentous events culminating in those results would occur?

There is much to be gained from the reading of history. One learns how human beings are likely to react in given situations. Occasionally, history really does repeat itself, and, to the extent that future events fit the familiar patterns of the past, they are predictable. However, once in a while she jumps her tracks completely. World War I was such an event. Reflecting on the possible outcomes of that conflict in the second issue of The New Republic, one Simon N. Patten wrote:

Progress has ever been a ruthless crushing, whether we regard it as indistrial or view it in its political aspects. Growth has meant a centralization which eliminates the weak to the advantage of the strong. Belgium and Servia are today where hundreds of small nations have found themselves in the past. Belgium is racially and socially a part of France. Economically she is a part of Germany. One or the other fate she must in the end meet. Servia must also be either Russian or Austrian.

In fact, in the aftermath of the war, the historical context on which Mr. Patten based his assumptions ceased to exist. Serbia did not become a part of Austria because the great empire that went by that name disintegrated. She did not become a part of Russia because she, too, ceased to exist in any form recognizable from the past. Belgium is still with us, and belongs to a European Union that would have been incomprehensible to the combatants of 1914. The lesson here isn’t that Mr. Patten was a fool. I’m sure he was a very intelligent man. Nor is it that we should cease speculating about the future. However, in doing so we should recall that we are not omniscient, and that the truth isn’t always obvious.

Iranian Protests and “Western Instigation”

According to a German proverb, “lies have short legs.” That’s not always true. Sometimes lies become enduring myths. A remarkable instance thereof is the yarn about how the CIA single-handedly toppled the “legitimate” government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in their famous “electric Kool-aid acid coup” back in ‘53. Earlier posts on the subject may be found here, here and here. This particular thigh slapper became “historical truth” by virtue of what John Stuart Mill would have called its “utility.” It was useful to the CIA dilettantes in Tehran at the time because it allowed them to take credit for something that happened more in spite of than because of their botched efforts, even as they were justifiably commiserating with each other on their abject failure. It was useful to their bosses back in Washington to go along with the charade, so that some of the “glory” would reflect on them as well, although it beggars the imagination to believe that any of them were really bone stupid enough to take the transparently bogus after action report of their operatives in Tehran at face value. It was useful to the editors of the New York Times because it enabled them to strike their usual pious pose as noble vindicators of the “truth,” and fit their chosen narrative, according to which the CIA consists entirely of evildoers whose goal in life, for reasons incomprehensible to the rest of us, is to go about commiting bad deeds. It has been abundantly useful to generations of Iranian intellectuals, because it gave them a plausible pretext for experiencing the virtuous indignation and sense of victimization that have been the twin delights of intellectuals in all ages, assuming, of course, that they weren’t too finicky about the facts.

Small wonder, then, that the pathetic theocrats who now call the tune in Iran are, once again, playing the “Western instigation” card. There was a time when her people could bid defiance to the power of Rome in her heyday. How sad, that her rulers must now base their claims to legitimacy on such abject lies. Well, be that as it may, her people have lost none of their courage in the intervening years.

The Iranian Bomb: Guessing the Date

According to the latest estimate by Israeli intelligence, Iran is capable of building a bomb by 2011. These estimates always beg the question of what kind of bomb one is talking about. In fact, Iran will have a perfectly adequate bomb or, more accurately, nuclear device, the moment it has enough bomb grade plutonium or uranium to assemble a critical mass. In the first place, it does not take a great deal of technical finesse to build a gun assembled atomic bomb. In the second, Iran needn’t bother, because, if she were really determined to carry out a nuclear attack, something much more crude would be more attractive from her point of view. By “crude” I mean, for example, a suicide bomber equipped with two subcritical masses that, when combined, would form a critical mass. This could be done by dropping one subcritical mass on top of another, or simply slapping them together. Unlike something as sophisticated as the device dropped on Hiroshima, such a “bomb” would preserve plausible denial for Iran. Even if the material could be traced to one of her reactors, she could claim that it had been stolen or diverted by terrorists. If assembled in the middle of a large city, it may not produce the familiar mushroom cloud, but it would certainly produce a radioactive mess that would inspire terror, likely cost billions to clean up, be much less likely to provoke nuclear retaliation than a high yield bomb, and spare Iran immediate relegation to the status of an international pariah for having once again unleashed the nuclear genie, committing mass murder in the process.

In a word, once Iran has sufficient special nuclear material to make a bomb, it will no longer be necessary to speculate about how long it will take her to build one. She will have the “bomb” the moment she has enough material to assemble a critical mass.