The Economist’s choice of this year’s word of the year tells us what its editors see as the biggest challenge our civilization is facing. It isn’t the disastrous wars in Ukraine and the Middle East in which the Atlantic alliance is fully implicated. It isn’t even the destabilization of the global financial order so long organized around the unassailable status of the United States dollar. It isn’t rising temperatures causing climate havoc or the towering levels of debt that threaten, at a moment’s notice, to unravel the global financial system. No, for The Economist, dedicated to the ideal of “liberal rationality,” the real threat worth focusing on can only be… Donald Trump.

The “word of the year” article bears the subtitle: “The Greeks knew how to talk about politics and power.” Classical references always help buttress one’s case. The article cites Plato and Aristotle’s “political thinking,” which may be a subtle hint that there has been much of it in recent years. After seven paragraphs — punctuated by various interesting but not always very accurate details concerning history, philosophy and language — the article finally reveals, in three sentences, the identity of the mysterious word it has selected.

“So the word everyone was Googling was kakistocracy: the rule of the worst. The first root, kakos, is found in few others in English. ‘Kakistocracy’ is not found in ancient sources; it seems to have been coined in English as an intentional antonym to aristocracy, originally ‘rule by the best.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Kakistocracy:

The natural form any democracy will take when its political system is made subservient to the principles that undergird liberal, free market capitalism, in which the overriding authority of an anonymous class of wealthy individuals is rendered invisible thanks to the ruse of allowing unwealthy people to cast a vote in elections engineered by the same invisible wealthy class for one or another of their preselected representatives.

Contextual note

Our Devil’s Dictionary gloss obviously differs from — and directly contradicts — The Economist’s far more succinct definition. Let’s explore the reasons.

Our first objection to the content of the article may seem trivial, but is significant in that it points to something that strongly resembles “disinformation.” The article tells us that the root “kakos” in Greek means “worst.” In fact, it means “bad, inferior, worthless or poor.” Κάκιστος (kakistos), however, is the superlative of kakos and does mean “excessively bad” and in some contexts “worst.” The article also misleadingly informs us that kakos is “found in few other” words in English, but a notable example is “cacophony,” which obviously does not mean the “worst sound,” but simply bad, incoherent, unharmonic or disagreeable sound.

But let’s drop the niggling while trying to be charitable and forgiving in this season of good cheer. Apart from the venial sin of offering an inaccurate explanation of a Greek word, we should acknowledge that the magazine’s “word of the year” ritual is little more than an innocent exercise of holiday season levity. The article is essentially entertainment. It makes no pretension to be taken as serious scholarship… other than its annoying invocation of Plato and Aristotle, which actually does come across as pretentious.

Nevertheless, it’s there for another reason: to make a polemical political point. The Economist clearly sees Trump as a difficult morsel to digest. When the article informs us that kakistocracy is the inversion of aristocracy, we sense an undeclared nostalgia for an epoch in which the nation’s values reflected the refined culture of its nobility. The power wielded by the aristocratic caste disappeared with the empire, but not without regret. The free market’s new ruling class successfully promoted the culture of meritocracy to replace aristocracy. The author nevertheless reminds us that aristocracy is literally “the rule of the best,” just in case we allow ourselves to become too enamored of meritocratic upstarts. Still, The Economist’s readers will have no trouble empathizing with the idea of rule by the meritorious. This idea pretty much defines the social status of the majority of the magazine’s readership.

The choice of kakistocracy expresses the magazine’s pessimism, not about the state of the world — which is quite naturally becoming increasingly kakistocratic — but about the situation in the “indispensable nation,” the US. Its critique focuses on that particular embodiment of evil known as Trump. But in doing so, this liberal-minded British publication at least avoids the kind of alarmism that infects US media when it lays into Trump. Relying on irony rather than invective, The Economist bravely attempts to make an erudite joke. But, in this particular instance, it largely fails to where so many of its literary predecessors have succeeded, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, Monty Python and beyond.

Here is one example: “Kakistocracy has the crisp, hard sounds of glass breaking. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on whether you think the glass had it coming.” The synesthetic metaphor of breaking glass is intriguing. But the attempt at wit goes nowhere. It fails because there is no reasonable hypothetical case in which the reader might think that glass has “something coming.” Breaking glass, for almost everyone, including Greeks, is “kakos.”

Even worse is this attempt at an amusing analogy: “Last time round he [Trump] seemed to fire more officials than most presidents have trips on Air Force One.” What could possibly justify the comparison of fired officials to presidential trips on Air Force One? Talk about apples and oranges!

Historical note

The Economist is known for its ability to avoid alarmism, keep a stiff upper lip and confidently roll with the crises and disappointments that sometimes rock a world order the journal prefers to defend. Since 1843, it has promoted the central themes of a worldview characterized at the time as laissez-faire and today as economic liberalism, including its scion neoliberalism.

For the past century and more particularly throughout the “unipolar moment” in which the US, having assimilated the “political thinking” (ideology) of the Plato and Aristotle of our age — Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — we have been living confidently in an economic utopia characterized by democracy and a “rules-based international order.” Enforcing the rules consisted in maintaining the belief that actions undertaken by the governments in our democracy were made in the name of the people and with their consent.

The double tsunami of 2016 — first Brexit in the UK, then Trump’s election in the US — began to sow a few doubts about the future of democracy. The voters could easily be persuaded to make the wrong decisions. In so doing, they were breaking down the force of the rules that had been put in place by the wise leaders elected in the past (especially Reagan and Thatcher). Their wisdom suddenly appeared to be called into question.

The door to kakistocracy was now wide open. It took a second Trump election, in which he won even the popular vote, to make it official. For The Economist, kakistos, the worst, is yet to come… and it will be installed on January 20, 2025.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Economist Blames the Greeks for Trump’s Election appeared first on Fair Observer.

The obvious answer is the media. But few people in the United States trust the media these days. Surely, in a democracy “of the people, by the people and for the people,” there will be a few scoundrels who make their way into government, but we can assume that the majority merits our confidence. Well, according to a Pew survey titled, “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024,” the current level of trust has fallen to 22%.

December 2024 offers us a vision of exacerbated tensions in various parts of the globe. At such moments, we expect our leaders to speak with some degree of honesty. Especially when the stakes are high and decisions become a matter of life or death. We accept that some things must remain secret. But the democratic principle implies an effort on the part of our governments to offer a minimum of clarity concerning the facts and their intentions.

Alas, the duty of obscurity seems to have replaced the ideal of clarity as the norm. Clever government officials have good reasons to justify their brazen stonewalling. First, national security requires concealing one’s true intentions. After all, if revealed, the enemy will profit. Then there is the fact that in any situation of conflict, we should accept the reality of the “fog of war,” a concept erroneously but persistently attributed to Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz by commentators, some of whose brains may be subjected to a permanent fog.

What are US presidents for if not guiding the nation towards an understanding of the truth? In August 2023, US President Joe Biden informed us that “Putin has already lost the war” in Ukraine. An obvious fact. The truth teller now describes the recent history of US policy towards Syria. “Over the past four years, my administration pursued a clear and principled policy toward Syria. First, we made clear from the start sanctions on Assad would remain in place unless he engaged seriously in a political process to end the civil war.”

Today’s Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Principled policy:

A course of action relentlessly pursued thanks to the capacity of some people in a position of authority to persistently ignore surrounding reality.

Contextual note

Biden uses two epithets, “clear” and “principled,” to describe his policy. The word “clear” is certainly the most overused word by any spokesperson for the White House or State Department. At briefing sessions with personalities such as the White House’s Karine Jean-Pierre and the State Department’s Matthew Miller, whenever a journalist poses embarrassing questions that highlight potential ambiguity or equivocation with regard to the “noble” principles that guide US actions, they respond with the formula, “We have been very clear about…” In one random example, the press briefing session of March 27, 2024, Max Miller crafted this litany of explanations:

• So we have been very clear about this matter.
• So we have made that quite clear to them.
• So I will say that we have a fundamental disagreement with the Israeli Government over this issue, and we have made that quite clear.
• … we will continue to be clear about what we think about these actions.
• …we have made clear that we believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded.
• …we have made clear that the United States is not going to send any troops to Ukraine.
• And I think it’s clear that these claims are categorically false. (this was a response to the claim that the US created ISIS.)
• …and we’ll make the same thing clear privately.
• …we have made clear since the outset of this administration that the promotion of democracy is one of the top priorities for the President.
• So we continue to make clear in our conversations with the Government of Bangladesh… that we wanted to see free and fair elections and we will continue to support free, full, open democracy in Bangladesh.
• So we have been very clear about this matter. We’ve been unequivocal. (This concerned the fact that “Ben-Gvir’s coalition would be annexing additional land in the Jordan Valley.”)
• So we have made that quite clear to them. We’ve been very direct and candid about it in our conversations with them. (On the same topic of land seizures.)

This obsessively repeated verbal tic brings home the point that “being clear” means quite simply: “Whatever we say must be accepted as truth.” As for the “principled policy” Biden cited, his logic consists of announcing a simple principle — that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be removed from office — and never deviating from it. Even if circumstances change, and even if hundreds of thousands of people may die or be displaced as a result of clinging to that principle.

Biden has already vowed to support the new Syrian government. Some may find this a bit strange. At this point, nobody has even a vague idea about what the new government will look like. On principle, can the US support it? What if it turns out to be a Wahhabi terrorist government, fulfilling its leader’s initial allegiance? Moreover, Syrian Head of State Abu Mohammed al-Joulani still has a $10 million bounty on his head because the US branded him a terrorist. Does Joulani’s success in overthrowing a dictator, Assad, automatically mean that democracy is on its way? Biden might profitably consult the the poem, “The Great Day” by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats::

“Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”

Substitute “regime change” for “revolution” and Yeats has defined the principle that defines at least 50% of US foreign policy. In the meantime, Biden and his good friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are providing “more cannon-shot.” Within a day of the announced liberation of Syria, the US and Israel conducted multiple bombing raids on the military infrastructure and other threatening elements within a country that is rife with threatening elements. Can anyone seriously doubt that the lash will go on?

Anyone struggling with the question of which “clear principles” to apply to a dramatic situation in which multiple interests both converge and diverge would do well to follow Caitlin Johnstone’s advice. “I personally don’t blame people for misunderstanding what’s been happening in Syria all these years. Some of my favorite analysts got Syria wrong in the early years of the war. It’s a complicated issue. It’s hard to sort out the true from the false, and it’s hard to sort through the moral complexities and contradictions of it all as a human being. What matters is that you stay curious and open and sincerely dedicated to learning what’s true instead of bedding down and making an identity out of your current understanding.”

Johnstone’s wisdom tallies with the advice our fictional journalist and his AI assistant are intent on following in the video above.

Historical note

As US President Barack Obama’s vice president and then as president, Joe Biden has been associated with the framing and enforcing of the principles he claims to be at the core of US policy with regard to Syria.

But what are those principles? In 2015, The Guardian revealed that the most obvious one has been to ignore any initiative aiming at peace and mutual security, especially if the initiative comes from Russia.

The Guardian was clear. “Russia proposed more than three years ago that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could step down as part of a peace deal, according to a senior negotiator involved in back-channel discussions at the time. Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari said western powers failed to seize on the proposal. Since it was made, in 2012, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions uprooted, causing the world’s gravest refugee crisis since the second world war.”

Biden’s principles are clear. He once again demonstrated that clarity in December 2021 when he refused to consider security arrangements Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed that could have avoided an invasion and a prolonged war in Ukraine, in which an estimated one million people have died. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson applied the same principle when he instructed the Ukrainians not to sign a peace treaty in April 2022.

During a 2015 television interview, Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas recounted how his British friends told him they were planning to overthrow Assad because the “Syrian regime said things that were anti-Israeli.” Another case of applying a principle, this time by British allies of the US.

These cases illustrate what has become clear as far as principles are concerned. Negotiation and diplomacy can never replace kinetic action, whatever the eventual cost. The principle of regime change for Syria has already been in place for 12 years. It has finally succeeded. Just as it had in Iraq and Libya and even in Afghanistan in 2001.

One may legitimately ask, is it more about principle or about interest?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post For the US in Syria, Is It About Principle or Interest? appeared first on Fair Observer.

“Why our policy makers cannot for one moment think from the perspective of the other side is some kind of amazing incapacity, some fundamental dishonesty or some fundamental incapacity of these people that is so shocking it puts us all at risk. The first point of diplomacy at least is to understand the position of the other side. And we refuse to acknowledge that position. Yet that position makes a lot of sense when you listen to it and hear it because these are real concerns by a country that feels that it is directly under threat by us, a nuclear superpower.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Incapacity:

A basic career skill required for today’s politicians that enables them to appear strong and decisive, qualities that would be seriously compromised if they were to be tempted by the dubious qualities and attitudes known as curiosity, empirical wisdom, historical memory and empathy.

Contextual note

The incapacity to see events from two points of view and the consequent absence of empathy now appear as supreme virtues in the world of Western diplomacy. The surest way of manifesting that required incapacity is to avoid any situation in which dialogue might lead to an appreciation of complexity.

Since the beginning of organized human societies, when local tribes quarreled over territory or other possible motives of envy, diplomacy offered the possibility of seeking to understand the requirements, desires or ambitions of the opposing party. The knowledge gained through dialogue would serve either to confirm the incompatibility of the contrasting positions or define possible avenues of compromise.

Diplomacy guarantees nothing. It doesn’t prevent wars from occurring. But it can provide an idea of what a solution might look like, whether it’s the victory of one side or the other or the terms of a settlement acceptable to both sides. In pre-industrial days, it was rare for one party to think it had the technology and sheer material force to impose what it considered an “unbending” or “ironclad” principle that excluded at the very least an initial discussion. But we have entered the era of ironclad ideas. Formerly, soldiers or vehicles might have been literally ironclad. Today it’s the principles and beliefs about the world that have earned that epithet.

Some will say nothing has changed. Throughout history, diplomacy would begin with the formulation of one’s group or nation’s “interest.” If those interests were not respected, there would be consequences. So what has changed? Perhaps the modern conviction that “time is money,” “delay is costly” and “talk is cheap” has convinced a generation of political figures to adhere to a new principle of efficiency. By failing to put a plan into action immediately, one risks losing one’s resolve.

One thing is true of all situations of budding conflict. Whatever is decided, with or without negotiation, there will always be consequences. The boring business of discussing and thrashing out the details happens to be the likely negative consequence of diplomacy, certainly less exciting than war. And though it may be painful to think that the “great principle” driving our behavior and giving us a sense of identity has not been fully realized after a successful negotiation takes place, most people still believe that living to regret is preferable to mutual annihilation.

The real difference today is the factor mentioned above: the sense of identity. It’s only recently that humanity has accepted the principle that the Earth’s surface must be divided into nation states. This has spawned the phenomenon of a population’s identification with the nation state. As a feature of international relations, this appears as the question of territorial sovereignty. In many people’s minds it has evolved into what is felt to be an ironclad principle. Until just a few days ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy consistently used this as the reason for refusing to consider ceding a square inch of terrain. That ironclad position miraculously lost its tensile strength when he realized that Trump’s concept of territorial sovereignty may be looser than his own.

But the territory of a nation state is not the only factor of identity. In the case of the US, it is the belief in American exceptionalism, the conviction that the nation has a mission to impose order wherever disorder appears in the world. This particular sense of identity requires its citizens to believe that imposing order is not an act of pure self-interest, but that it corresponds to the nation’s “manifest destiny.” This sense of a divine calling was confirmed in 1954 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance all schoolchildren are required to recite.

Then there’s the even more extreme example of Israel. It may seem to many people normal that when the US emerged as the pre-eminent victor of World War II, endowed with an economy and technology that dwarfed that of every other nation, it should think itself exceptional to the point of believing itself tasked with the mission of regulating all the world’s problems. The doctor doesn’t negotiate with the disease, but instead applies the treatment. How else can anyone explain the fact that in December 2021, the US could simply refuse to sit down and discuss with Russia the question of “indivisible security,” a notion that had served to formulate a key factor of inter-bloc behavior during the Cold War?

Israel may dominate its region in numerous ways — militarily, economically and technologically — but, unlike the US, it cannot claim to have the mission of solving other people’s problems. Instead, it founds its refusal to dialogue coupled with its incapacity to empathize on a principle derived from its reading of its version of holy scripture: the laws, principles and ambitions listed in the books of the Torah. The only thing mysterious about the current situation in the Middle East is the literally ironclad identification of the US government and many of its people with what is essentially a political position formulated by unidentified scribes some 3,000 years ago. That propensity of Americans to identify with it literally defies understanding.

Historical note

In the interview cited above, Sachs reminds us of a famous quote from 1963 by US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

Kennedy admitted that international relations began with the idea of “defending… vital interests.” But he appears to be suggesting a condition today’s virtuously “incapacitated” political strategists no longer acknowledge: that averting confrontation is itself a shared “vital interest” of all parties.

Sachs notes that all the rhetoric over the past three years has pointed towards the very thing Kennedy believed was unthinkable: making a choice between humiliation — certainly unacceptable to anyone who believes in their own power — and a nuclear confrontation. If a nation that believes itself exceptional — or a nation such as Ukraine that believes it is backed by an exceptional nation — sees this as the choice, the danger is real that nuclear war will at some point become inevitable.

Is Sachs wrong to call this an “incapacity” of the politicians concerned? Or should we think of it merely as a temporary preference? There is little question that for the moment the US and Israel, but also the United Kingdom, have displayed behavior consistent with Sachs’s observation. We need only remind ourselves that it was Boris Johnson, the UK’s prime minister at the time, who in late March 2022 stepped in to convince Zelenskyy that there was nothing to negotiate, opening the door to two and a half years of prolonged, unnegotiated conflict in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian bodies would be literally and absolutely “incapacitated.”

Sachs made Judge Napolitano laugh at one point, when he summed up his appreciation of the politicians with this remark:

“They are individually and collectively strategic ignoramuses. I mean, one can only wonder what they’re thinking, right? When you look at Western leaders, you just shake your head and say, ‘Did these people ever take Strategy 101?’ And then you say to yourself, ‘If they did take Strategy 101, it must be the case that they failed the course — because the way they approach these different foreign policy problems facing them, it’s really quite remarkable in how ignorantly they behave.’”

The world is now awaiting to understand how much incapacity Trump’s new administration will wield.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Capacious Incapacity of a New Generation of Diplomats appeared first on Fair Observer.

This legislation would allow the federal government to revoke tax-exempt status for any non-profit organizations it decides to qualify as “terrorist supporting.” We have recently witnessed numerous examples of politicians and the media figures claiming that individuals suspected of voicing pro-Palestinian sentiments are, by that very act of speech, active supporters of Hamas, an officially designated “terrorist organization.” It isn’t difficult to see how such a law in the hands of any government — Democrat, Republican or simply fascist — can be used to throttle free speech.

The Fair Observer team has good reason to worry about this bill, but for reasons other than those cited by the dozens of Democrats who have suddenly seen the light. Our journal’s vocation is to allow everyone — including ordinary citizens with strong feelings — to publish the widest variety of reasoned readings of the events of contemporary history. We systematically require that the facts be respected. But we know that the interpretation people may have of the same facts will vary according to the elements of context from which they view those facts. Allowing for the expression of contrasting appreciations helps all of us better understand our own perceptions. It also invites us to revise our own partial understanding of the issues.

Many people see the exercise of freedom of thought and speech as the foundation of democracy. Now, whether what we have today is a healthy democracy remains a matter of open debate. For most Americans, freedom of expression stands as the axiom on which the logic of democracy is built.

But what is HR9495? Here is the official summary of the bill’s intent:

“Legislation that would prevent U.S. citizens who have been
taken hostage or wrongfully detained abroad from incurring
penalties for late tax payments while they were held, as well
as terminating tax-exempt status for organizations found to
be supporting terrorism.”

So why would Democrats even be tempted to flip-flop on such a question?

The Minnesota Reformer reports that “Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig voted in favor of the legislation last week, one of 52 House Democrats — and the only Minnesota Democrat — to do so.” She supported the bill because of its provisions granting tax leeway to Americans held hostage overseas. “However, Craig said she will vote against the bill this week.”

Craig claimed that she was initially motivated by her strong opposition to any actions that support foreign terrorist organizations. So, what has changed? “Over the past several days as the president-elect has rolled out his cabinet nominees, I’ve become increasingly concerned that H.R. 9495 would be used inappropriately by the incoming Administration.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Inappropriately:

In a way that would be abusive, possibly illegal and directed against a selection of enemies different from my own.

Contextual note

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, who clearly understands the danger such legislation represents, tweeted: “A frequent tool of dictators is to label political opposition groups as ‘terrorist groups’ and shut them down.” That has been the case at least since President George W. Bush launched his global war on terror.

We know Murphy believes Donald Trump is a potential dictator. Before the election, he told Fox News that “Donald Trump has made it very clear: if you put him back in power, he’s going to think about only one group of people and that’s his friends at Mar-a-Lago.” That in itself is a recipe for dictatorship.

We also know that Murphy does not believe President Joe Biden is a dictator, even if traditionally Americans tend to believe that only dictators would allow themselves to be complicit in a genocide. That distinction between who is and who isn’t a dictator has offered Murphy some serious clarity in his decision-making.

Another Democratic Congressman, Lloyd Doggett, is among only a minority of Democrats who have shown authentic sympathy for Palestinian suffering. He opposed the bill for the following reason. “This bill is not about terrorism — it’s about giving Donald Trump unlimited authority to label his opponents as terrorists.”

Of course, had the bill passed earlier, it would have given the same unlimited power to Biden, who consistently showed his managerial skill at neutralizing or even cancelling opponents. It isn’t clear whether Doggett would have had similar objections had Democratic candidate Kamala Harris been elected.

This episode raises serious questions about how Americans view the question of authority. The constitution establishes radical principles such as freedom of speech and religion, which should protect the widest range of expression and opinion, so long as it does not translate into illegal acts. Do all Americans share this concern? It’s becoming less and less clear.

Historical note

As some people predicted, November 5 has already proved to be a watershed moment in US political history. The debate about what catastrophes we can expect over the next four years will keep on raging at least until January 20, 2025. From that point on, we will be in a position to assess not only what those events turn out to be, but what long-term transformations they are likely to produce. A return to some imaginary status quo ante Trump 2 seems highly unlikely.

Trump’s unpredictability alone will cause serious havoc in various sectors. One in particular is the immense complex of the national security state, which Trump himself has in the past referred to as the “deep state.” We may see a struggle between the hyperreal personality of Trump — assisted by another hyperreal hero, Elon Musk — and the tentacular military and intelligence complex that has pretty consistently orientated US foreign policy for many decades, despite the alternation of parties and personalities in the White House.

Could it be that Trump won the election not because the population wished to elect an authoritarian leader, but because they were intent on voting out the current Democratic regime that they felt had become deeply authoritarian in its acts? Because of his flamboyant personality, Trump may well prove more explicitly authoritarian in his acts, but — and some find this trait redeeming — he doesn’t disguise his taste for authoritarianism. He puts it on display. He proudly proclaims his most “inappropriate” initiatives.

The Biden administration’s policies concerning freedom of speech, in contrast, have been highly visible examples of public hypocrisy. It has used and abused the bugbear of “disinformation” to accuse everyone who challenges its own arbitrary use of authority — whether concerning Covid-19 or its engagement in wars — as purveyors of misinformation, suppliers of harmful content and even apologists of terrorism. Many of them have joined the popular trend of calling critics of Israel antisemites, a rhetorical ploy that seeks to excuse the administration’s too obvious complicity in an ongoing genocide conducted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most authentically authoritarian leaders of our era.

Finally, let me clarify why we at Fair Observer share the worries of those Democrats who have now found the courage to oppose HR9495.

Fair Observer is a US non-profit organization that seeks to allow the expression of the widest range of insights, interpretations, opinions, sentiments and beliefs. The journal’s editorial standards require that the expression of any opinion, however marginal or eccentric, conform to the norms of rational discourse. This includes respect for facts and consistent reasoning. Consistent reasoning does not mean impeccable or complete reasoning. It means constructing a coherent viewpoint based on the facts presented. That alone does not prove whether a point of view is right or wrong. It reveals how that point of view attains some level of credibility.

Consequently, we publish some points of view that some people may consider “supporting terrorism.” The underlying problem is that in a democracy there is, and there should be “some” of everything, simply because every individual’s and every group’s perception of the world is variable, over space and time.

Losing our tax-exempt status would be fatal and not just to our journal, to the idea of democracy itself. We truly are at a historical turning-point.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Fair Observer Too Has Reason to Be Unhappy About HR9495 appeared first on Fair Observer.

Reuters, like the Pentagon itself, sought to reassure the public that, however poor the performance, the DoD’s intentions were good. (Cue the Nina Simone song, “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good; Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood…”)

For United States citizens, late 2021 was an odd moment in history. It was the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency. Following the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 after 20 years of war, the increasingly bloated US defense establishment was, for a few months, no longer visibly involved militarily, diplomatically or logistically in an overseas conflict. Yes, there was some action in Syria and even Iraq. But the public felt this as a moment of peacetime. The perfect opportunity to set one’s house in order.

Reuters cannot be blamed for failing to notice that the State Department was busy at the time setting the scene for a war with Russia as NATO — but not the US on its own — was putting increasing pressure on the Donbas region in Ukraine. No journalist could predict the Russian invasion that would take place three months later. It was indeed a privileged moment for reassessing the entire defense establishment’s capacity to manage and even audit its own accounts.

In the meantime, that war not only began but is still going on, with hundreds of billions of US defense expenses transferred to Ukraine. Even less predictable than Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine, was the equally “unprovoked” Gaza revolt of October 2023 that put the DoD money machine into overdrive as the ironclad commitment to Israel had to be respected, no matter what.

So, with all that unexpected activity and the complex politics that accompanies it, we should not be astonished today to discover that not too much has changed on the audit front.

This time it’s Brad Dress writing for The Hill who offers us what has now become a somewhat predictable and repetitive headline: “Pentagon fails 7th audit in a row but says progress made.”

But the Beatles certainly got it right, since, according to no less an authority than Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer Michael McCord, the Defense Department “has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges.” He even gave a reading of the dynamics when he added: “Momentum is on our side, and throughout the Department there is strong commitment — and belief in our ability — to achieve an unmodified audit opinion.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Strong commitment:

In the language of military officials, vague intention, which is a generous reading for something that more likely means “a weak non-commitment.”

Contextual note

It may sound abusive to claim that a phrase such as “strong commitment” can mean literally its opposite, as we propose in our definition. But meaning comes from context. In baseball, a 7-0 shutout is a weak performance, and this one resembles a “no-hitter.”

But there is another linguistic test we can apply to determine the meaning here. If a Silicon Valley entrepreneur makes a statement such as, “We have a strong commitment to rival the market leader,” no one will doubt that the company’s focus will be squarely on achieving that goal. In contrast, we learn from McCord that “throughout the Department there is strong commitment.” First, we should notice that “there is” signifies a passive assertion, compared to the type of formulation that identifies a determined will. The “we” in “we have a strong commitment” includes the speaker. McCord’s assertion is so vague it would be true even if he himself didn’t for a moment share the commitment.

McCord uses the idea of “throughout the Department” to rhetorically magnify the effect, but instead it dilutes it. “Throughout” suggests a dispersion in space, a diffuse feeling rather than the kind of moral engagement one would expect him to affirm. But it’s his following parenthesis that gives the game away. He speaks of a “belief in our ability.” The idea of “belief” is considerably weaker than, say, “confidence in our ability.” Belief expresses a form of hope that relies on no concrete evidence.

McCord allows the fog of his reasoning to thicken. “I do not say we failed, as I said, we have about half clean opinions. We have half that are not clean opinions. So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure. We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

At least the Beatles affirmed that it’s getting better all the time, not that they “think” they’re making progress.

Historical note

In a January 2022 Devil’s Dictionary piece, we cited the reflections of an observer of Beltway politics who provided a clue as to why things need not get better all the time. “None of the ‘centrist’ Democrats or Republicans who complained about the cost of the Build Back Better Act have said a peep about the ever-growing Pentagon budget — and the fact that it is somehow still growing even despite the Afghanistan pullout. It has grown about 25% in size over the past five years, even though the Pentagon just failed its fourth audit last month.”

We cited an earlier article from 2019 that began with this astonishing sentence: “A Michigan State University economics professor discovered $21 trillion unaccounted for in the federal budget starting in 1998 until the end of fiscal year 2015.”

In other words, there is no reason to be surprised today that a “strong commitment” to conduct accurate audits is necessary and will continue to make headlines… probably for decades to come. And the only change will be similar to what we’ve already seen when, three years later, four failed audits turn into seven.

But let’s look more deeply at the historical context. The latest article cites what appears to be a serious deadline, only four years away. “The Pentagon said it is firmly committed to achieving a clean audit by 2028, as mandated by the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.”

This leaves us wondering. Could this be related to another commitment we’ve been hearing about? Some will call it not so much a commitment, but a belief widely shared in national security circles and that concerns the medium term: that a war with China has been at least “mentally” programmed for 2027. Noah Robertson writing for Defense News this May published a two-part article with the title: “How DC became obsessed with a potential 2027 Chinese invasion of Taiwan.”

This leaves us speculating about why 2028 was chosen as the objective. How convenient a hot war with China would turn out to be for anyone seeking to avoid having to face up to the first “clean audit” the following year. Who would dare to demand accountability in the midst, or even the aftermath of a hot war with China?

So, how much “confidence” should we have in the breakout of a war with China in 2027? Remember, this forecast of a war at a precise date was formulated at a time when no one expected Donald Trump to be elected for a second time. It isn’t Trump’s volatility that explains it, nor his promise to focus his attention on China rather than Russia.

Robertson explained the logic by citing a Joe Biden administration official who paraphrased the remarks of Chinese President Xi Jinping: “Look, I hear all these reports in the United States [of] how we’re planning for military action in 2027 or 2035.” Xi affirms: “There are no such plans.” Which many interpret as the proof that such plans do exist.

“That first year, 2027,” Robertson says, “is a fixation in Washington. It has impacted the debate over China policy — a shift from the long term to the short term. It’s also helped steer billions of dollars toward U.S. forces in the Pacific. And in the last several years, it’s been a question mark hanging over the Biden administration’s approach to the region.”

There’s the answer to the mystery of the failed audits. We know that the military-industrial complex is all about helping to “steer billions of dollars” in any chosen direction. At the same time, one steers one’s regard away from the auditor’s books.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Pentagon’s Flawed Account of Its Failure to Keep Accounts appeared first on Fair Observer.

Among the prominent experts, former central banker at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Kathleen Tyson, recently tweeted concerning the global trend of central banks to diversify away from strict dependence on the US dollar: “Currency optionality is now a matter of economic and national security. US threats of more tariffs and sanctions against states moving to Local Currency Trade demonstrate the dangers of dollar dependence and the urgency of optionality and resiliency.”

Everyone understands the meaning of resiliency. But what about optionality?

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Optionality:

A euphemistic synonym of the common noun “choice.” It is employed to avoid provoking the simulacrum of “moral judgment” exercised by dominant powers who believe that their set of rules intended to normalize economic behavior endow them with the right to coerce others and the duty to limit others’ ability to choose.

Contextual note

Tyson is of course referring to the growing trend seen in a diversity of nations to devise methods, techniques and technology that will allow central banks and other foreign exchange operators to conduct transactions flexibly and, when possible, directly between the widest range of individual currencies. This means adopting an attitude that aims at avoiding dependence on what used to be the most convenient solution for everyone: holding US dollars reserves.

So why pedantically insist on a technocratic neologism? Why not be more simple and natural and call this “currency choice?” 

There are several comprehensible reasons for this innovation in vocabulary. Unlike the idea behind the word choice, optionality refers not to the act of choosing but to a persistent state in which flexible strategic choice appears as the default setting. In contrast, the idea of choice to modern ears evokes a specific act governed as much by taste as rational calculation. It even includes the idea of not choosing. Optionality implies the necessity to choose.

The emergence of the notion of “consumer choice” in the 20th century has polluted our vocabulary. It defines a mentality in which consumers, confronted with a diversity of brands, exercise their free will by choosing the one they find most attractive. This has even affected the model of democracy in the US. Americans now understand that they have a choice between exactly two viable brands. Elections are about convincing the electorate that one brand is better than the other. 

The advent of the consumer society enabled marketers to develop a complementary concept, the notion of impulse purchasing decisions fueled by advertising. Given the seriousness of foreign exchange, optionality can thus be seen as the necessary alternative to the ultimately trivial notion of consumer choice. 

Unlike consumer decisions, optionality is emotionally neutral. It supposes cold rationality in its decision making. Some find it ironic that at the same time dominant macro theories of modern capitalism posit and indeed require a belief in the existence of homo economicus — a purely rational being capable at all times of calculating what best correlated with their interest — the notion of impulse buying emerged as a staple of the “science” of marketing.

To understand the transition from the increasingly unipolar, normative and conformist 20th century and the disruptive increasingly multipolar 21st century, pondering these distinctions of vocabulary can prove helpful. It’s too easy to dismiss a word like optionality as a futile example of a self-enamored professional elite’s taste for jargon, designed to meet their need to feel both different from and superior to the common culture.

What we’re seeing today is an emerging world wounded and sent into disarray by Washington’s obsessive recourse to sanctions. Rather than seeking to undermine the dollar, the wise bankers and politicians are focusing on defining a field of options in which normal economic relationships may play out, free of the fear of coercion and intimidation. Rather than taking the form of a slave revolt, they are inventing not only new practices and technologies, but even a vocabulary that helps define a new economic culture.

Historical note

Since the beginning of the 21st century, two major events have transformed the way nations understand the world order. When President George W. Bush responded to the drama of the September 11 attacks by launching a war with a nation state, Afghanistan, instead of framing the issue as a criminal affair, his futile “forever wars” focused on regime change ultimately undermined the image of the US as the unipolar enforcer of a self-defined rules-based order. The prestige of its global military presence, ready to police the world in the name of democracy, took a serious hit. President Joe Biden’s ignominious retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, after 20 years of feckless war, confirmed the world’s worst suspicions.

The supposedly indomitable US military machine had confirmed what should have been clear with the fall of Saigon nearly 50 years earlier: Even with no rival global power on Earth, the US military was incapable of imposing its will on other regions of the world. Thanks to Bush, one pillar of US supremacy was seriously cracked for all the world to see. 

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 offered an initial glimpse of the weakness of the other pillar: the US economy, its tentacular stock market and the almighty dollar. The shock was real but not fatal. Thanks to President Barack Obama’s commitment to quantitative easing (QE), the dollar maintained its pivotal role, but at its core it was already seriously fragilized.

After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden made a new strategic error that had the effect of confirming the world’s perception that currency optionality had become an existential necessity. For decades, Washington has been addicted to sanctions designed to weaken and ultimately topple the governments of every nation that fails to show due respect to what Noam Chomsky has called “the Godfather.” The extreme measures taken in reaction to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought to the fore what should have been obvious: every nation should fear the dollar. When Biden cut Russia off from the SWIFT payment system and threatened to punish any country that did business with Russia, nations across the face of the globe realized that holding too many dollars, though convenient for trade, entailed a possibly existential risk.

The “de-dollarization” movement has been growing slowly over time. In 2016, Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew expressed his awareness of the risk for the US. He warned that the “escalation of financial sanctions will only accelerate this trend, precipitating further de-dollarization as more countries capitalize on digitalization to expand their use of LCS for bilateral transactions and to develop more hedging instruments.” He added this observation: “The more we condition the use of the dollar and our financial system on adherence to US foreign policy, the more the risk of migration to other currencies and other financial systems in the medium term grows.”

As Lew predicted, the medium term is living up to his forecast. Currency optionality will inexorably be part of a new world order.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How Optional Can De-Dollarization Become? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Although his official deadline for a general election was January 2025, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak brought the date forward for a general election by a full six months. Similarly, French President Emmanuel Macron, in a moment of panic following a disastrous round of European parliamentary elections, called a snap general election in June. The results were equally disastrous for both Sunak’s and Macron’s fragile power base.

A number of other elections made headlines without producing significant surprises. Russia re-elected President Vladimir Putin with a very comfortable majority, even if few think of Russia as a model of democracy. Mexico elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who also happens to be Jewish, demonstrating a significant cultural shift in Mexico’s electoral tradition. Many think of that as a win for democracy.

But the “big” election everyone was waiting for in 2024 took place this week in the 50 United States (disunited during presidential elections for the sake of counting “electoral votes”). This contest was trumpeted (no pun intended) as the litmus test for the health of US democracy. Democrats consistently claimed that, if elected, former President Donald Trump would abolish democracy. Now that he has handily won the electoral vote and possibly the popular vote as well, there is little likelihood that Trump will call into question the democratic processes that got him elected, now for the second time.

We might, therefore, assume that nearly all observers are ready to take as a sign of the vibrancy of democracy the fact that most of these elections, including Trump’s, appear to have been conducted in a peaceful, orderly manner. Alas, some experts and pollsters persist in promoting the average citizen’s belief that the merit of democracy seems to be flagging.

In an article published by the Journal of Democracy in 2015, Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, began by stating bluntly: “Democracy has been in a global recession for most of the last decade.” Two years later, in 2017, the Pew Research Center Democracy Report issued this dire warning: “Scholars have documented a global ‘democratic recession,’ and some now warn that even long-established ‘consolidated’ democracies could lose their commitment to freedom and slip toward more authoritarian politics.”

In June 2023, Financial Times published a two-part piece, “Martin Wolf on saving democratic capitalism: the ‘democratic recession.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Democratic recession:

A concept borrowed from economics by political analysts to make their complaints about the difficulty of governing sound more scientific.

Contextual note

One could make the paradoxical case that what the experts mean by “democratic regression” is a form of democratic progression. Those who use the term present it as signifying a loss of faith in democratic processes. But who is guilty of this loss of faith? In their view it is not the leaders, the parties and marketing experts who now play a dominant role in elections. No, they are innocent. The guilty party is none other than… the demos. It’s the people, the citizens of democracy, who enjoy the right to vote. They appear to be using a form of critical thinking to assess the democratic failure of an electoral system that appears, in the political results it produces, either to ignore or betray the average citizen’s interests. Instead, what they see corresponds troublingly to the very concept Wolf invokes: not democracy, but “democratic capitalism.”

To be fair to Wolf, he asserts that reversing the trend he calls democratic recession and which he associates with Trump-style populist movements, requires governments to address underlying economic issues by creating more inclusive economic policies that benefit broader populations rather than just the elite.

But, as any of the classic capitalist theoreticians might have reminded him, capitalism is, by design, a system that concentrates economic power in an elite. As the economic elite consolidates its wealth, it systemically distributes it not to the public, but to a political elite that not only shares its values but allows that same economic elite to dictate its policies. All lucid populists, right and left, complain that politicians respond not to the electors but to the “donor class.”

Economic power secretes political power, embraces it and effectively controls it. If the vote is the only concrete and extremely constrained tool of expression the people possess, political campaigns and the corporate-controlled media constitute the shared tools of the elite. The power this represents is carefully and expertly managed.

The logic behind such a system of “power-sharing” is famously enshrined in the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that “money is speech.” Voting serves one simple purpose: to elect the individual members of the political elite which is destined to merge with the economic elite. Votes change the names on the governing roster. Money serves to get things done. The people losing faith in democracy are not mistaken when they feel they’re treated as paying spectators of a pre-scripted show.

Historical note

The Pew study appeared in 2017 following two dramatic historical events a year earlier. The Brexit vote in the UK took place in June 2016. That November, Trump shocked a world expecting Hillary Clinton, a bona fide member of the political elite, to waltz into the White House. The study offered the following analysis: “Roughly a quarter of people (median of 23%) across the 38 countries surveyed are committed democrats. About twice as many (median of 47%) are less-committed democrats. Relatively few (13%) are nondemocratic. A small share (8%) does not endorse any of these forms of governance.”

Rather than being alarmed, a careful reader might have concluded that 70% (23 + 47%) of more or less committed democrats sounds reassuring. But this kind of statistical analysis deliberately ignores the most fundamental and seemingly obvious reality: that whatever wavering exists concerning a population’s faith in democracy is likely to be proportional to the perception that the established democratic systems those citizens experience do not function democratically. Instead of losing faith, they are gaining in lucidity.

No one can pretend that Trump is a political thinker and even less a theoretician of democracy. The democratic process is a game he has learned to play. He was bold enough to invent his own rules, a bit like the American Basketball Association (ABA) when it shook up the sports world by rivaling the established National Basketball Association (NBA) and inventing the three-point shot before the startup league was constrained to disappear within the folds of the NBA, which enthusiastically adopted the innovation. Similarly, Trump’s rules appear to have put the radically demographic orientation of the Democratic party’s rulebook out of commission.

Trump’s political behavior reflects the fact that he’s an “artist” of the deal, a businessman combined with an entertainer. But how democratic was the procedure that put Kamala Harris on the ballot as the only viable alternative honest US citizens might vote for? She was selected after a primary process from which all serious competitors were excluded. She was pegged to win following the traditional demographic analysis of minority voter blocs the Democratic National Committee counted on to vote in lockstep.

Reviewing the philosophical history of the idea of democracy in an article published earlier this week, our collaborator Anton Schauble reminded us that “it is no longer a secret that the US is not a democracy, but an oligarchy.” A Princeton University study in 2014 provided statistical proof of that by examining the legislation Congress passed and comparing how well it reflected the interests of the elite as opposed to the stated preferences of the people. Schauble points out that instead of thinking of Trump as a democratic outlier, we should realize that “he is an oligarch from America’s oligarchy… But oligarchies like America produce Donald Trumps like cherry trees produce cherries.”

The journal Southern Living tells us that “around a thousand different types of cherries grow in the U.S.” and some are tastier than others. Harris and the Democratic party clearly left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. Trump may be a crass vulgarian, but no one can deny he offers something with a strong taste.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Was Trump’s Win a Victory or a Defeat for Democracy? appeared first on Fair Observer.

News has always been a business. Back in that golden age, it was a risky business. The kind of truth the public took an interest in could potentially diverge from the particular financial and ideological interests of the owners. In recent decades, media owners have developed several techniques to limit that risk.

Expectations about what the public expects to find in the news have changed. In times past, the news cycle was punctuated by what we can call “moments of crisis.” These were typically dramatic developments in various kinds of political, financial or cultural power struggles. They might appear as showdowns, political shakeups, or even scandals. Crises generally highlighted specific moments of a conflict or sudden revelations.

I’m tempted to call some of those events “aristocratic crises.” In the US there was Watergate that brought down a president, the Church committee’s challenge to the CIA, leading to new laws restricting its actions, or President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to impeachment. Through those events, powerful people or institutions saw their authority challenged and their status modified. 

But there was another category I like to call “popular crises.” They resonate throughout society and affect the entire body politic. Unlike an aristocratic crisis that may lead to changes for the personnel of the ruling class, a popular crisis transforms the way society interprets the dominant narratives. One salient example took place around 1967. That was when the US public’s perception of the “meaning” as well as morality of the Vietnam War irrevocably shifted. It created political chaos for an incumbent president, spawned a massive protest movement as well as a backlash and changed the perception of the role of the US military, including transforming it into a professional army when President Nixon abolished the draft.

Because the owners of the corporate media have focused on reducing, if not eliminating risk by constricting and restraining the amount of unbridled truth-seeking reporting they permit, it is far rarer to see popular crises of the kind that dramatically challenged the US government’s policy in Vietnam or the French government’s control of higher education in 1968. It’s not that the truth can no longer emerge. If it is in any way disruptive, it simply won’t be mentioned in the legacy media. Instead, social media has amply filled in the gaps concerning truth-telling. But because social media is structured in the form of ideological silos, it can never achieve the scope required to change the general perception of a crisis.

This evolution in the culture of journalism has had a curiously transformative effect on the nature of the concept of crisis itself. UnHerd columnist Thomas Fazi highlights this phenomenon in an article dedicated to Europe’s incapacity to manage its culture of democracy. In his article, “Von der Leyen’s authoritarian plot: National democracies will be subordinate to her Commission,” Fazi describes an evolution, based on one woman’s ambition, towards a curious form of dictatorship that has the potential to destabilize Europe.

“Over the past 15 years,” Fazi writes, “the Commission has exploited Europe’s ‘permacrisis’ to radically, yet surreptitiously, increase its influence over areas of competence that were previously deemed to be the preserve of national governments — from financial budgets and health policy to foreign affairs and defence.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Permacrisis:

A state of extreme and growing tension and aggravated contradiction maintained indefinitely by those in power as the means of avoiding any initiative aiming at the kind of resolution that might call into question their hold on power.

Contextual note

Two years ago, Collins Dictionary elected “permacrisis” its “word of the year.” The publisher’s head of learning explained that the choice was made because of “how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people.” The neologism first appeared officially a year earlier, when Europeans used it to describe the current era or a “new normal” characterized by “volatility, uncertainty, and a prolonged sense of emergency.”

Though some explain it as a consequence of the long drawn-out trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic, I see permacrisis as a cousin of another somewhat older neologism, “forever war,” a concept many commentators have identified as a prominent feature of the 21st century geopolitical landscape. The practice of forever war began in earnest when US President George W. Bush launched the infinitely expandable idea of his “global war on terror” and began applying it to multiple countries. President Joe Biden carried on the tradition when he solemnly promised that NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine would last “as long as it takes” and subsequently agreed to offer “ironclad” support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of extermination intended to last until the coming of the Messiah.

Europe is already three years into its latest forever war for which Ursula von der Leyen has demonstrated her enthusiasm. She has also thrown her institutional weight behind another war whose initiator, Netanyahu, clearly wishes to endure and become his own forever war.

Historical note

When author Naomi Klein formulated the theory called “the shock doctrine,” she described an approach to international relations that aimed at implementing Washington’s neoliberal economic agenda across the globe. It featured a strategy of “disaster capitalism.” By exploiting or even provoking crises in different countries, neo-liberal economic doctors could step in to provide cures for the disease.

Her theory made sense in the era predating social media, when a crisis was expected to last for only a limited amount of time. Each of the crises Klein describes was expected to lead to a predictable solution: typically, one that would play out following rules established by Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics and correlate with the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

It was a veritable system. Everyone agreed that there existed a universal cure, especially for complaints that a local leader sought to address with a local cure. Chilean Prime Minister Salvador Allende, for example, in 1973 set out on a path of economic reform that included the nationalization of industries including banks, agrarian reform, state control of the economy and health and education reforms. The US State Department considered those very cures to be the symptoms of a disease that required a universal cure.

Like a Hollywood studio that understands the tried-and-true value of remakes, the CIA invoked and executed the same scenario that had successfully played out 20 years earlier in Iran, when Britain and the US ganged up to oust a democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Allende himself did not survive the coup. He may have preferred suicide to the type of cure his successor, the dictator Augusto Pinochet, was likely to administer.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the same pattern evolved into a sophisticated template called “color revolutions.” That trend continued and culminated in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution in 2014. That was the occasion in which Victoria Nuland, a key operator in US President Barack Obama’s State Department, appeared to single-handedly engineer the intended outcome when she put her man, “Yats” (Arseniy Yatseniuk), in the catbird seat after chasing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from power.

It was shortly thereafter that the concept of the sudden dramatic crisis began to give way to the more efficient concept of permacrisis. In his article on the transformation of European politics, Fazi describes the ongoing coup engineered by Ursula von der Leyen, who today is entering her second term as president of the European Commission. Her plan consists of “placing loyalists in strategic roles, marginalizing her critics, and establishing a complicated web of dependencies and overlapping duties that prevent any individual from gaining excessive influence.” Perhaps more efficiently than Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 or Adolf Hitler’s success when he merged the positions of Chancellor and President following President Paul von Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Madame Ursula is exploiting a prolonged state of crisis to exercise absolute power.

But unless she thinks NATO is under her command, she will be a dictator without an army, reminding us of Joseph Stalin’s famous remark: “How many divisions has the Pope?” And though, as I write, one of the pearls of German industry, Volkswagen, has fallen into a deep crisis manifestly linked to policies Washington imposed and Von der Leyen enthusiastically embraced — policies that have crippled Germany’s economy — she must certainly be gloating about her achievement, as she prepares, with increased authority, to reign over 27 countries for another five years.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Will Queen Ursula’s Crisis Management Skills Make Her the Empress of Europe? appeared first on Fair Observer.

In today’s international climate, expecting Western diplomats to calculate that it might be healthier to avoid war than prove a point about who has the right to make decisions for others would be totally illusory. From Washington’s point of view, there are principles that must be applied in the defense of a “rules-based order,” even at the expense of another allied country’s population.

Perhaps the seasoned strategists of DC’s State Department felt that the larger issue of European security was too big a morsel to chew on. In their eyes, the only manageable issue to consider was the right of a particular nation, Ukraine, to adhere to a sprawling and fundamentally incoherent military alliance. They had good reason to insist on this. In their mind, this was the key to maintaining control of what Zbigniew Brzezinski called “the grand chessboard.” The risk associated with spending unproductive months seeking to thrash out the mutual security requirements of neighboring, culturally connected nations was clearly not worth taking. By refusing to waste time in pointless discussion, they could seize the opportunity to continue on a well-trodden path by launching yet another one of Washington’s forever wars, another one of those epic conflicts that can carry on for “as long as it takes.”

War may be bad for some, but the war economy is good for anyone in power. That is the lesson America learned during World War II and it has never been forgotten.

In August 2021, the administration of American President Joe Biden finally wound up one of the most recent forever wars in Afghanistan. After 20 years, it had clearly run out of gas. The new Biden administration knew that Ukraine could be the new opportunity to focus on. Nearly three years on, it has become clear to everyone that — just like Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria — the war could not be won by the “good guys.” But winning apparently isn’t the major objective. Keeping a wartime economy going is clearly the top priority.

If, as early remarks by none other than Hillary Clinton indicated, the Ukraine fiasco was strategically planned to create an “Afghanistan situation” for Russia, the war that broke out in Gaza and Israel on October 7, 2023 was on no one’s agenda. Washington didn’t need another headache. It was too busy stoking the fires in Ukraine in its quest to postpone the resolution as long as possible. This time, the value of waging a new forever hot war accrued to a local leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. A prolonged war would have the twofold merit of pleasing a lot of key people in his own government and postponing the inevitable inglorious end of Bibi’s political career.

For authoritative voices inside the Beltway, the successive killing of the two top leaders of Hamas — Ismail Haniya and Yahya Sinwar — tells them the end of the conflict may be in sight. The White House followed up Sinwar’s elimination with this pronouncement: “There is now the opportunity for a ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power, and for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Day after:

An imaginary moment of the future that governments and every other defender of the status quo in times of war has an absolute need to invoke rhetorically as a demonstration of their commitment to peace while doing everything in their power to prevent it from occurring.

Contextual note

Washington’s track record on assessing the dynamics of ongoing wars — how long they might last and when they might end — has never been brilliant. No sooner had Biden expressed his optimism about the sunny day after than his staunch ally, Netanyahu, contradicted him. “Israeli leaders,” Al Jazeera reported, “had a drastically different message. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the war is ‘not over’ and pledged that Israeli forces would operate in Gaza for ‘years to come.’”

H.A. Hellyer, a geopolitical analyst, dismissed American talks of a day after in Gaza as “laughable,” noting “that the Israelis have made it very clear that they’re not leaving Gaza, that the military presence will remain, so the idea of any sort of political horizon here is just very, very unrealistic.”

So why such disparity of perception between the two allies, Bibi and Biden? One answer might be the American penchant for “hyperreality” that infects the country’s political and social culture, transforming even the average citizen’s perception of the world. Americans simply don’t see the meaning of events in the same way as others, including their ironclad allies, the Israelis. In fact, no two countries share the same vision of history, a fact State Department diplomats would do well to ponder.

For Americans, days are always significant, especially for tracking the ends of wars. The American Civil War ended on April 9, 1865, with the unconditional surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. General Ulysses S. Grant and Lee concretized the moment with a dramatic handshake. Adolf Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945 put an end to World War II in Europe. A pair of atomic bombs in early August of that year ended the Pacific version of the conflict.

Hollywood war films and most westerns build up to the single dramatic moment — often a showdown — when the villain dies or is humiliated and a brighter future emerges. This pattern of expectations appears to be wired into every American’s mindset as the key to understanding existential dramas. The successive deaths of Hamas leaders Haniya and Sinwar, with the added subplot of Israel’s elimination of Hassan Nasrallah’s in Lebanon, inevitably signaled to Americans that the year-long violent movie was coming to an end.

What Americans fail to recognize is that the Israeli screenwriters were working on a different script, one that derives not from Hollywood screenplays but from the mythology of the Old Testament. Messiahs don’t take over after the death of a villain. They don’t sign peace agreements. As instruments of a divine will, they install a new order. Their mission transcends the kind of everyday human goals associated with the banalities of governance and democracy.

Historical note

 “Forever wars” inevitably produce a curious linguistic paradox. “Forever” evokes timelessness, if not eternity. But for the sake of reasonable, peace-loving political discourse, the same promoters of forever war need to invoke a precise moment of theoretical resolution: the day after. Sadly, neither term — “forever war” or day after — makes any real-world sense.

Take the case of Afghanistan. In 2001, America mobilized NATO, transporting Western troops well beyond the confines of its “home base,” the North Atlantic. Its goal was to rid a remote Asian nation of the dreaded Taliban. On that occasion, America rejected a reasonable proposal to negotiate a solution whereby Afghanistan itself would arrest and try the criminals. The administration of President George W. Bush preferred launching a war that would last 20 years. And what did the day after of that war turn out to be in 2021? The restoration of an even more radicalized Taliban.

In 1967, in the midst of the war in Vietnam that provided the initial template for future forever wars, General Westmoreland and the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson began repeatedly evoking “the light at the end of the tunnel.” That was an earlier version of the day after. That war lasted 20 years and ended in chaotic humiliation for America.

The Hollywood treatment of war may appear inspired by Shakespearean tragedy, which always ends with a dramatic death. But William Shakespeare’s tragic characters, even villains like Richard III or Macbeth, have something heroic about them that we cannot help but admire. And the perception of the day after always remains ambiguous. When Hamlet dies, the crown is given not to a Dane, but a Norwegian rival, Fortinbras, whose name, derived from French, means “strong in arm.” In other words, despite Hamlet’s own encouragement (“he has my dying voice”), the day after will more likely be a continuation of a forever war.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Gaza: Is There a Day Before the Day After? appeared first on Fair Observer.

PACE is a key institution within the Council of Europe, the platform for cooperation and dialogue among Europe’s 27 nations. PACE focuses on promoting human rights, democracy and the rule of law across Europe. These are topics of universal interest one might expect United States news media and especially the US government, who spent so much time and money seeking Assange’s extradition, to be keenly interested in. But the story got little coverage in the West and practically none in the US. The last time The New York Times even mentioned PACE was over a year ago, in September 2023, in an article with the title: “In occupied areas of Ukraine, Russia is holding local elections that have been widely denounced.”

PACE not only monitors the implementation of Council of Europe conventions and agreements between member states, it also elects judges to the European Court of Human Rights. You would be justified in thinking of it as the “conscience” of Europe. Its role in human rights advocacy empowers it to adopt resolutions and make recommendations to improve human rights protection. In that capacity, following Assange’s testimony, PACE “expressed deep concern at ‘the disproportionately harsh treatment’ faced by Julian Assange and said this has had a ‘dangerous chilling effect’ which undermines the protection of journalists and whistleblowers around the world.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Disproportionately harsh treatment:

The US administration’s chosen strategy for dealing with anything or anyone that in any way threatens or even criticizes its actions abroad.

Contextual note

Assange’s legal saga began in 2010, four months after the publication of classified documents on the war in Iraq. It lasted until June 26, 2024 when Assange entered into a guilty plea agreement with the US justice system.

In the opening act, the Australian journalist and founder of WikiLeaks was charged with a sexual offense in Sweden. The case was closed in 2017, as the evidence required for a conviction had not been gathered. Simultaneously, the US Justice Department initiated an investigation using the pretext of the 1917 Espionage Act, a tool that the administration of former President Barack Obama became fond of using against whistleblowers. Fearing extradition to the US, the Ecuadorian embassy granted Assange asylum in London, where he remained for seven years. Then on April 11, 2019, he was forcibly handed over to the British authorities after the election of a new Ecuadorian president, whom WikiLeaks had accused of corruption.

The denouement came after Assange had spent five years in a high-security Belmarsh prison in the UK. It is still unclear why Washington agreed to his release. It should however be obvious that the administration of current President Joe Biden — used to benefiting from European indulgence, if not solidarity with even the harshest of US foreign policy positions — was not expecting the conclusions reached by PACE following Assange’s testimony earlier this month. The Parliamentary Assembly pulled no punches as it reached a conclusion with potentially deep implications for the behavior of all self-respecting democracies, especially those that like to lecture other nations about human rights, freedom of expression and the need to respect a rules-based order.

PACE noted explicitly that Assange’s treatment has had a dangerous deterrent effect on journalists and whistleblowers worldwide. “Chilling” is the term it chose. For the sake of the future of democracy, it becomes urgent to ask ourselves on both sides of the Atlantic: After the Assange case, will journalists and whistleblowers be better protected? On the basis of this judgment, we should hope so, but at the same time we must ask ourselves: Are the politicians in the US and in Europe even listening?

PACE specifically called on the US to go beyond its concern for the protection of journalists by actively combating the tradition of impunity for state agents guilty of war crimes. Will this call be heeded? In the context of ongoing conflicts today in which the US has become implicated, and at a moment when a democratic US presidential candidate openly embraces and celebrates the “service” of former Vice President Dick Cheney, there is reason to doubt it.

Historical note

This episode underlines the perception most people have today that we are living through a period of rapid historical transition. The question of the survival of democracy appears to be on everyone’s mind. We easily understand that democracy can never be perfect, but now that it appears threatened from various sides, can we even find the means to preserve it? Should we consider whistleblowers like Assange and Edward Snowden servants of a citizenry focused on the integrity of governance or dangerous enemies of a system that must be protected not just from physical assault but from critical assessment of any kind?

At a time when the fight for information control has been in the headlines with new pressures on Telegram and Twitter, we should see PACE’s resolution as a strong signal of encouragement to journalists and whistleblowers and a warning to governments easily tempted to justify or paper over the most extreme acts of their militaries and allies in times of war. European governments should be the first to take its recommendations on board. Journalism is already threatened in its theoretical independence by the domination of the economic interests that control or influence the media. If the wheels of justice can be manipulated to suppress truth-telling, democracy cannot survive.

PACE looks beyond Europe and its media. It specifically addresses the US, a nation that has persistently and assiduously put Assange through more than a decade of confinement and even torture. That he is now free to circulate and speak publicly is something of a victory, but it is a victory in a battle that should never have taken place in a democratic society. The atrocities revealed by Assange in his WikiLeaks must not be hidden from the public in the name of a nation’s raison d’Etat.

If PACE’s resolution has any real impact, it means that a clarified legal context will make it more difficult for governments to gag the media and allow crimes committed by their agents to go unpunished. In 2010, WikiLeaks published incontrovertible evidence of atrocities committed by American and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Governments and armies will always attempt to conceal acts they find embarrassing. But the press must be allowed to uncover them and publish the truth, with no fear of legal repercussions for doing so.

In recent times, European institutions have been the object of justified and unjustified criticism. Europe today suffers materially and psychologically from its ambiguous relationship with the most powerful member of the Atlantic Alliance. Defining Europe’s “strategic autonomy” is an ongoing challenge. The Council of Europe is once again proving itself to be a major institution for the protection of human rights. In 2005, this same Council mandated the late Dick Marty to investigate the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe. In 2015 and 2016, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Poland, Lithuania and Romania for housing such detention centers.

The governments called into question by such actions will always react defensively to such initiatives. They are rarely “brought to justice” in the sense of holding individuals and institutions legally and formally responsible for identified crimes and atrocities and subject to punishment under the law. But such resolutions help to set standards that will reduce the amount of abuse meted out to independent voices seeking to keep the public informed.

Assange is a journalist whose career was interrupted at the height of his powers and his potential contribution to society and democracy effectively silenced. In Gaza and Lebanon today we are seeing other cases of “disproportionately harsh treatment” that for some political leaders appears to be their privileged form of governance, if not a way of life. Even “proportional” harsh treatment needs to be used as sparingly as possible. As a society, we need to bring the taste for disproportionality under control. For some, it appears to be an addiction.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Europe Calls Assange a Victim of Disproportionate Harshness appeared first on Fair Observer.

She also cited the paper’s hostility to her self-described courageous attempts to bring diverse voices to the paper. Disappointed at the journal’s failure to implement the goals she had defined, she complained of constant bullying from colleagues who disagreed with her views. Weiss described the environment as “illiberal,” accusing some colleagues of calling her a Nazi and a racist.

The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary has, in its brief history, had no qualms about calling into question the NYT’s journalism for its ideological bias and its servile relationship with the US national security state. We can therefore sympathize with a former employee in a position to reveal why some of the news and analysis produced by the Gray Lady comes out as distorted and unreliable.

It may therefore seem paradoxical that we are convinced by the breath of fresh air Bari Weiss has promised to bring to the world of US journalism.

Bari Weiss founded The Free Press in 2021. Her aim was to “produce news stories that exemplify the journalistic ideals of honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence,” which she felt were lacking in mainstream journalism, committed as it appeared to be to the ideological conformity that permeates legacy media.

The NYT author Matt Flegenheimer’s article offers this description of Weiss’s method: “The founder of The Free Press has built a new media empire by persuading audiences that she is a teller of dangerous truths.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Dangerous truths:

An expression that pretentious people apply to the largely unoriginal ideas they think they have invented and which they mistakenly believe will upset and humiliate people whose viewpoint differs from their own.

Contextual note

Flegenheimer’s position is officially listed as The New York Times correspondent “focusing on in-depth profiles of powerful figures.” As a kind of takedown artist he reformulates our definition, applied to Weiss, in these terms: “She has created, or at least created space at, a cool kids’ table all her own, positioning herself as a teller of dangerous truths while becoming a kind of brand ambassador for the views and passions of her audience, which often seem to track neatly with her own: that elite universities have lost the plot; that legacy outlets have lost their minds; that Ms. Weiss knows the way forward.”

The NYT may be guilty of many of the many of the flaws and even crimes Weiss attributes to it, but at least has the humility to present itself as a collective effort to present the news of the world. Despite its obvious biases and often sanctimonious tone, it embraces a variety of styles of addressing the questions in the news, even when consciously limiting the breadth of its worldview. In contrast, Weiss makes it clear that The Free Press was created to revolve around her unique personality and her particular sensibilities. Its overall purpose, despite her fake commitment to variety, consists of ennobling her own personal assemblage of popular ideologies, which range from the provocatively unorthodox to the shamelessly conformist.

Flegenheimer quotes the assessment of veteran pollster and strategist Frank Luntz: “She doesn’t just speak to the 1 percent. She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1 percent. And they’ll listen.” They are titillated by the idea that what interests them may be deemed by others to be “dangerous truths,” even though they more often resemble narcissistic self-celebration.

To prove Luntz is right, here is how Weiss responds to the challenge by her interviewer at the recent All-In Summit of changing a society that is “morally bankrupt.” As expected, she has the foolproof, universally appropriate answer. “It starts with something very simple. Give up the heroin needle of prestige. Rip it out of your arm immediately. Stop poisoning yourself, your family and your children with the bankrupt notion that getting them into Harvard and Yale is more important than inculcating in them a sense of love of family, of country and of all of the things we used to think were normal.” This was followed by the audience’s deafening applause.

For Weiss, the key to solving the problem at the core of US culture will be to change the outlook of literally “one-hundredth of 1 percent” of the US population: those who see their parental mission as consisting of getting their children into Harvard or Yale. What could anyone who thinks in those terms possibly mean when she evokes “all of the things we used to think were normal?” Who is the “we” she has in mind? And what is “normal?” Does she not know that among “normal” Americans, more likely to be affected by the risk of homelessness and the opioid pandemic than by the “heroin” of sending their children to Harvard, survival rather than “prestige” is what they are focused on?

Weiss apparently sees the quest for prestige as the unique original sin of contemporary US culture. “Prestige and honor,” she adds, “is [sic] not something that has been granted to you by institutions that have allowed themselves to be corrupted by morally bankrupt people.” The world around Weiss is morally corrupt. Her own pursuit of prestige and honor by launching the nobly inclusive Free Press should not, on the other hand, be deemed “morally bankrupt.”

Historical note

Analyzing US culture is one thing. Looking at historical events gives us another perspective on what it means to be morally rich or morally bankrupt.

On October 3, Weiss featured her interview with Douglas Murray on Israel’s war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice assessed as a “plausible genocide” back in January. Subsequent actions have confirmed that assessment, as schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure have been sacrificed in what literally resembles an extermination campaign that has now been extended to the neighboring state of Lebanon. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has now called the war an “unmitigated disaster.”

The subtitle of Weiss’s interview with Murray reads, “The West is ‘drunk on peace.’ What will it take to wake them up?” Weiss describes Murray in the following terms: “And it is Douglas, more than almost anyone in the world, who has articulated the stakes of this war with the moral clarity it requires.” The UN and the International Court of Justice cannot be deemed purveyors of moral clarity. They are too “drunk on peace” to appreciate the necessity of a never-ending genocide.

How is the following as an example of Murray’s superior moral reasoning? “I was told by a Jewish friend the other day that apparently there is something in the Torah that says one should not take enormous delight in the decimation of one’s foes. But I’m not Jewish, and so I don’t have to follow this.” So, Murray’s superior “moral clarity” tells us that the rules governing the religion committing atrocities should be suspended because he, who is not subject to those rules, has a moral vision that sees those atrocities as justified. It would be difficult to find a better example not of moral bankruptcy, which so preoccupies Weiss, but of moral perversity.

Weiss is a product and promoter of the American art of hyperreality. She sucks up bits of reality and processes them for commercial advantage. That’s why the Venture Capitalist (VC) crowd that organized the All-In Summit loves her. She has done what all the great entrepreneurs celebrated in VC lore have done: She has not just made money — a banal accomplishment anyone with talent can manage — but built fame and prestige out of fabricating truly dangerous truths.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How Morally Bankrupt Can a Free Press Be? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The idea of electing a new “commander in chief” who will be the “leader of the free world” lifts people out of their boring routine. The actual political effect of the choice between a Democrat and Republican has never been clearly established. But because the emotional stakes are so high, the media have come to characterize every presidential election as existential. If the wrong candidate wins, democracy will disappear.

Along with the fabricated drama of existential stakes, every presidential campaign brings with it a great leap forward in the art of fiction. We used to wonder who might write “the great American novel,” a term so consecrated that it even merits an acronym: GAN. But of course, not many people have time to read novels these days, especially not “great” ones.

Who needs well-crafted literary masterpieces when the most compelling, thunderously suspenseful fiction appears regularly every four years in the drama of a presidential election? Whether its Haitian immigrants purloining pets and serving them for dinner or proclaiming a decade of unmitigated joy, election campaigns extend the range of the substitute for reality we call hyperreality.

Among the plethora of examples, let us consider a US presidential candidate’s foray into historical fiction. Here is how The New York Times summed up the plot of Harris’s historical novel:

“The most important moments in our history have come when we stood up to aggressors like Putin,” Ms. Harris said, warning that the Russian leader would not stop with Ukraine, and would possibly even look into encroaching on NATO territory, if he succeeds in his campaign.”

“History is so clear in reminding us, the United States cannot and should not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Isolation is not insulation.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Isolation:

In contemporary American English, the undesirable result of any policy that  shows a preference for diplomacy over aggressive intervention, peace over the fostering of foreign conflicts conducted by allies with the objective of reinforcing an obsolete notion of hegemony associated with nostalgia for an illusory unipolar world.

Contextual note

The emergence of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016 confirmed what should already have been obvious: that politics in the US no longer needed a direct connection with reality. At least since Ronald Reagan and the triumph of electoral marketing that turned policy debate into an anecdotal sideshow, presidential campaigns have become a pure exercise in manufacturing something even more fundamental than Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s consent: hyperreality. On every level — practically for every word in the political vocabulary — the relationship between historical reality and a newly crafted version of it had become artificial if not totally disconnected.

Examples of political hyperreality abound. Trump provided the ultimate demonstration of how pervasive hyperreality could be. Only days after his inauguration, his administration was promoting “alternative facts.” This was hardly new, but it was the first time it would become an object of public debate.

Kamala Harris’s use of “isolation” in the above quote provides a typical example of how the shift towards hyperreality produces its effects. Without being explicit, she appeals to a decontextualized historical meme drawn from a political culture that dates from the decades between the 20th century’s two world wars. The terms “isolationism” and “isolationist” were applied to an attitude spawned by the will to distance the US from any implication in the disputes between the waning and endemically belligerent European colonial powers. The US had very recently itself emerged as an active and rising colonial power thanks to its acquisitions that followed the 1898 Spanish–American war.

The people later vilified as “isolationists” have been blamed for impeding the US from challenging Adolf Hitler and other despots. They had developed an understandable distaste for getting involved in Europe’s internal quarrels. That, of course, changed after the “day of infamy” in which the Japanese attacked not only Hawaii but also the Philippines, Guam and British-controlled Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaya. The US was about to take its first steps as the future policeman of a world order that would emerge after the defeat of Germany and Japan.

One possible reading of the three major dramas of this month’s headlines — whether it’s next month’s election, the nearly three-year-old war in Ukraine or the genocidal campaign that Israel has extended beyond Gaza to the West Bank and now Lebanon — is that the battles we see emerging on all of these three fronts have one thing in common: They pitch an ill-defined cohort of defenders of the post-World War II 20th century order against an equally ill-defined group of seekers of a new world order that has manifestly become multipolar.

Trump finds himself comically, paradoxically and incomprehensibly sitting among the second camp, even though he has based his appeal on the idea of returning to the past by making “America great again.” Harris has become the empty, substance-deprived symbol of complacent immobility, whose mission is to perpetuate the existing hyperreality. Trump lives in the eternal present. That allows him to constantly invent his own hyperreality. Harris’s, in its continuity with the past, is already on public display.

Historical note

Most people should recognize that the world that preceded and the one that immediately followed World War II had very little in common. Harris displays lazy rhetoric when she applies terms inherited from a century ago to today’s reality. She’s in denial about the shift in meaning that took place over the course of a century. Language evolves. Apparently, politicians’ minds and worldviews don’t.

Harris’s use of the term “isolation” is clearly abusive and disrespectful of history. But it stands as only one among a multitude of examples in the hyperreal framework we now call “democratic politics.” The word “democracy” itself has never been so shamelessly abused. We find ourselves in yet another election year in which politicians and pundits are making the alarming claim that “democracy is on the ballot.” Practically equal numbers of voters on the two sides claim that electing the candidate they oppose will constitute a “threat to democracy.”

But do they have any idea of what the democracy is they’re referring to? Do they believe the notion inherited from the Greeks, which was less than wholeheartedly promoted by their nation’s founders, has any precise meaning concerning the reality of governance? Is democracy no more than observing the ritual of repetitive elections? James Madison and Alexander Hamilton thought of democracy as mob rule, whereas Thomas Jefferson maintained that “the will of the people should prevail.” Who won that debate? Apparently, the word “democracy” won, but there is little indication that any discernible concept prevailed.

And, by the way, is there anyone willing to debate it today? Does democracy even have an accepted meaning today? If so, how does it square with the findings of a Princeton study from 2014, which demonstrated with solid statistics that almost all significant policies are determined not by the people, but by an ill-defined, unelected but clearly powerful elite?

The NYT’s article contains another significant quote, this time from Morgan Finkelstein, the Harris campaign’s national security spokeswoman: “Vice President Harris understands that the American people stand on the side of freedom, democracy and rule of law. She knows that if America walks away from Ukraine, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe and our NATO allies.”

Can anyone honestly make the case that Ukraine provides an example of “freedom, democracy and rule of law?” The classic characterization of Putin as a new Russian Napoleon would be laughable to anyone observing events, mainly because of an utter lack of evidence in favor of it. But it is clearly established as a dogma of the reigning credo of hyperreality.

All this tends to demonstrate one thing: that a truly descriptive definition of democracy as it’s practiced today should be:

A political regime in which ambitious individuals can rise to a position of political power thanks to their “freedom” to distort the truth.

Harris and Trump are coming from different places but are playing the same game, though each has a different set of hyperreal rules. Trump invented his own. Harris sticks to house rules.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Must Kamala’s Rhetoric Be Isolated from Truth? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Many Israelis openly rejoiced at the audacity and efficiency of the two-day operation that left a toll of 39 dead and thousands injured. Jokes and memes circulated on social media not just about the damage done but even about the type of life-changing injuries it produced. Pennsylvanian Senator John Fetterman couldn’t suppress his glee, commenting, “I absolutely support that. In fact, if anything, I love it.”

Compare that with the assessment of Barack Obama’s former CIA Director: “When asked whether Israel’s attack constituted terrorism, Panetta was unequivocal. ‘I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism.’”

Is this truly a case of not mincing his words? He doesn’t say “terrorism,” but more cautiously calls it a “form of terrorism.” Are there degrees of mincing? How unminced was Panetta’s assessment?

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Form:

1. Following the Platonic tradition, the idea of something that exists beyond the empirical world of our senses.
2. When used with modern concepts the locution “a form of” serves as a rhetorical ploy to remove the object from the real world and turn it into an abstraction.

Contextual note

Panetta goes far beyond any other commentator from the political establishment. But his locution, “form of terrorism,” appears designed to avoid expressing the idea that Israel should be thought of as a pariah nation, an unthinkable initiative anywhere within the Beltway. If he truly thinks this is terrorism, it would certainly demand a strong response from Washington, such as sanctions or an embargo on arms shipments.

This unique assessment by a qualified observer stimulated my curiosity. Were there any other Beltway insiders, present or past, who shared this assessment? I interrogated ChatGPT, which offered the following response:

“As of now, no major figures from the Biden administration or other prominent officials in Washington have publicly supported Panetta’s characterization of the incident as terrorism. The U.S. government continues to maintain a strong alliance with Israel, focusing on diplomatic and security partnerships, while also emphasizing a desire to avoid further escalation in the region​.”

Here is where the language used to describe international relations appears to break down completely. As head of the CIA, Panetta was specifically tasked with leading the high priority global combat against terrorism. If someone of his stature can now make a statement of this kind, one would normally expect such an accusation to call into question the value of an “alliance.” As a rule, we don’t cozy up to terrorist nations. And speaking of “diplomatic and security partnerships,” isn’t it true that any partner suspected of engaging in terrorism should immediately earn the label of “pariah state?” That would presumably mean cutting off all support or even imposing sanctions. Didn’t Biden do precisely that with Saudi Arabia because of its alleged assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi?

The explanation becomes frankly comic when ChatGPT tells us that what guides the decision-making is the “desire to avoid further escalation.” It then adds this:

“This divide highlights the nuanced and often controversial nature of U.S. policy toward Israel, especially when military operations result in civilian harm.”

Let’s accept the description of the policy as “controversial” because clearly — and despite Washington’s valiant efforts at censoring all dissenting voices — US policy remains controversial among US residents, just as it did during the Vietnam War. Despite the docile media’s best efforts, there is no glorious national consensus of unconditional support for Israel, despite the quasi-unanimity among Congress, the White House or the State Department.

But calling the policy “nuanced” risks leaving an observer both laughing and crying. Crying, because of the unmitigated marathon of civilian deaths and casualties, along with starvation and the uncontained spreading of disease in a Gaza bombed to the point of being uninhabitable. And laughing, when considering the idea that the most powerful nation in the history of the world is rendered helpless because of a policy deemed too “nuanced.”

Historical note

The concept of terrorism made its grand debut in European history when the leaders of the French Revolution, after overthrowing the monarchy, became pathologically paranoid after they realized that not everyone was ready to align with their newly defined hyper-rational order. There were a multitude of dissidents and contrarians out there whose necks were perfectly adapted to the efficient design of a guillotine, France’s most obvious contribution to the just emerging Industrial Revolution. This post-revolutionary period is known in English as the “Reign of Terror” but in French more simply as La Terreur. This was, of course, state-sponsored violence, the opposite of what terrorism would later come to mean.

It was only towards the end of the 19th century that the idea of terrorism as a political act became associated with non-state actors seeking to overthrow the established order. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1872 novel, The Demons (Бесы) describes the link between the highly intellectualized theorization of political power by anarchists and nihilists, and the planning and execution of atrocities intended to destabilize the existing order.

This period culminated with a banal but fateful terrorist act: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on June 28, 1914. Instead of provoking a revolution, it set off a devastating World War.

The drama of World War I and the establishment of the revolutionary Soviet Union ultimately reduced the attraction of classic terrorism for many decades. In the late 20th century, suicide bombings, particularly in the context of the ongoing Israel–Palestine conflict but also relating to “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, gave terrorism a modern twist, changing the perception of what it was all about. Both of those dramatic contexts pitched people of two religious identities against one another. They contributed to the meme of a “clash of civilizations” — religion against religion — popularized by Samuel Huntington.

Ultimately, it was Osama bin Laden’s monumental September 11 operation that redefined our understanding of the term terrorism. Terrorism was no longer an intimate act of sabotage. It had become big, bold and very public. Moreover, it was now identified with a theological, civilizational mission. No longer a type of random, annoyingly political crime, it achieved the status of a massive act of formal warfare.

September 11 empowered US President George W. Bush to consolidate and put into active practice the neo-conservative ideology his circle of collaborators bathed in. Here was a noble cause with a universal application. Civilized people were united in the cause of defeating global terrorism. Its supposed hard-nosed rationality combined with its sense of a fanatical purpose reinforced a deep-seated belief in its historical mission. The only difference from the ideology of Dostoyevsky’s demons lay in the fact that, instead of seeking to overturn established power, it operated from the position of defending and reinforcing institutional power. It played on the combined emotions associated with political, economic and theological identity. What could have been perceived as an egregious criminal act to be brought before justice and punished turned into the illusory mission of destroying terror itself, as if terror was an identifiable enemy.

To destroy terror, the new crusaders came to embody a publicly funded and administratively managed terror of their own making, a process that is still developing. Since then, those in power, whether Republicans or Democrats, have sought to strengthen and refine their control of the instruments essential to a modern reign of terror. Censorship of their own population — now called the war on disinformation — is at the top of the list alongside varied forms of warfare and lawfare.

On the warfare side, technology has dominated. The emergence of drone warfare, privileged by the “peace president” Obama, played a major role as war came to imitate the logic of video games, with no risk to the attacker. Lawfare became a feature linked to mass surveillance mediated by the tech giants who earned money commercially and politically by amassing data on its own and other populations, in ways that Maximilien Robespierre would certainly have envied.

We now have new “forms of warfare” and “forms of lawfare.” Panetta has revealed that there are also “forms of terrorism” that we are undoubtedly learning to classify as essential tools of modern government.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Has an Ex-CIA Chief Really Accused Israel of Terrorism? appeared first on Fair Observer.

On September 6, a member of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) fatally shot Aysenur Eygi in the head as she was taking part in a protest near the Palestinian village of Beita. The IDF immediately claimed it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area.”

Eygi’s family was unimpressed by the Israel promise to “look into” the killing. The New York Times cited the complaint expressed by Aysenur’s father, Suat Eygi. “I know that when something happens, the U.S. will attack like the eagle on its seal. But when Israel is in question, it transforms into a dove.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken had the temerity to describe the killing as “unprovoked and unjustified.” He used the occasion to helpfully clarify US policy: “No one — no one — should be shot and killed for attending a protest.” That clarity should serve to correct an ambiguity that many people will appreciate 54 years after the Kent State killings. Protesters should be reassured. The worst they have to fear in this far more enlightened era is being arrested and accused of antisemitism and eventually complicity in terrorism for speaking their mind.

As the official Democratic candidate for the presidency, Kamala Harris undoubtedly felt obliged to weigh in on such an egregious violation of a US citizen’s rights. “Israel’s preliminary investigation indicated it was the result of a tragic error for which the [Israeli military] is responsible. We will continue to press the government of Israel for answers and for continued access to the findings of the investigation so we can have confidence in the results.” Al Jazeera cites these deeply empathetic words spoken by the vice president while at the same time noting that she “stopped short of endorsing requests for an independent investigation into the incident.” 

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Press for answers:

Make a rhetorical request that one expects will never be fulfilled and will eventually be forgotten with the passage of time.

Contextual note

The verb “to press” contains the idea of pressure. The literal meaning of the expression “press for answers” suggests a sustained series of actions to put pressure on the party concerned until a positive result is obtained. Anyone curious enough to watch the regular State Department press briefings concerning the Gaza conflict will have witnessed multiple instances of members of the press literally pressing the administration’s spokespersons not just to request, but to require independent investigations of alleged war crimes. Harris’s choice of the expression “press for answers” seems to fall somewhere between “request” and “require.” Most observers agree the Biden administration’s approach to Israel’s “excesses” has been to multiply the requests for restraint in some cases or for an investigation in others, without ever requiring such action.

What exactly is the difference between these two concepts? Requesting means the demand may be legitimately refused. It tells us that the person requesting is not willing to use any power they may have over the person to whom the request is addressed. Requiring implies exercising one’s power to act. The US clearly has the power to force Israel’s hands if it chooses. But it typically chooses not to.

Al Jazeera notes that “Eygi’s family had called on the US to conduct its own probe into the killing. But Washington has all but ruled out the request, saying that it is awaiting the results of the Israeli investigation.” Given what we know about the Israeli “investigation” of the 2022 shooting of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, this reminds us of O.J. Simpson’s promise to probe the murder of his ex-wife in order to unveil the true killer. But this is a deceptive comparison. Simpson only killed two people at one isolated moment of his life. Israel has made it a daily habit for decades, before radically accelerating the pace over the past 11 months.

A brief sample of dialogue from a press briefing by State Department spokesman Matthew Miller from earlier this year will give a good idea of how the process works. In this typical exchange, the press presses. The government, in contrast, exercises its infinite trust in the professionalism of Simpson…, I mean, the Israelis.

QUESTION: Right. In terms of accountability, though, you talk about the fact that Israel has open investigations. So, what kind of timeline did Israel provide you to conclude those investigations?

MR MILLER: So, we have made clear to Israel that those investigations ought to proceed expeditiously. They ought to reach conclusions as soon as possible.

QUESTION: And have they provided you a timeline?

MR MILLER: I’m not – I’m not going to – I’m not going to speak to our internal discussions or speak for the Israeli Government. But everyone – it is very difficult always to put a timeline on any kind of investigation, certainly on a criminal investigation, and I wouldn’t want to do that on behalf of the foreign government other than to say our expectation on behalf of the United States is that they should proceed and finish as soon as possible – but not at the expense of thoroughness.

Apart from the very professional waffling about grand principles, such as “thoroughness” and “respect” for foreign governments, the message should be clear: “We have no reason to press forward.”

Historical note

Given the long and fundamentally equivocal history of investigating war crimes, murders of journalists and massive destruction of hospitals and schools, an observer of today’s news may legitimately raise the question Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa explored in his classic movie, Rashomon. We may know the effects of a crime, but can we ever know the story of a crime? Kurosawa’s film tells us we cannot. And the reason is that all crimes must be recounted from someone’s point of view. When politics is involved, there is good reason to conclude not that we cannot but that we will not. We can usually be certain that a greater effort will be made to disguise the crime than to reveal its true narrative.

Classic movie

Sixty-one years after the John F. Kennedy assassination, even though all implicated persons have either died, retired or removed themselves from public life, no truly independent investigation has ever been commissioned. It should be obvious that the Warren Commission was not independent, despite former Chief Justice Warren’s personal reputation for independence. The mere presence of former CIA Chief Allen Dulles obviated any semblance of independence.

I raise this question today only because it took six decades for the world to discover the most obvious, credible and easily available evidence, evidence far more credible than courtroom style testimony taken under the intimidating conditions of cross-examination. The document is the raw broadcast footage of Dallas TV station WFAA during the first hour following the assassination. Two journalists and two bystanders who were standing on the lawn below the triple underpass speak at length about hearing the shots coming from behind them on the grassy knoll. One of the journalists even draws a map of the shooting on a blackboard, indicating the origin of all the shots they heard. None came from the direction of the Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald worked.

At precisely the time of that broadcast, Oswald had already been identified as the suspect. How strange!

I asked ChatGPT whether the Warren Commission had consulted the WFAA tapes. Its response: “The Warren Commission did not consult the WFAA broadcast tapes that captured the immediate aftermath of the assassination, largely because those tapes were not widely known or considered crucial at the time.”

An answer worthy of Matthew Miller’s reasoning.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post One Dead American. Will Israel Investigate? Don’t Count on It appeared first on Fair Observer.

Is anyone at The New York Times interested in or even curious about peace? Putin’s declaration should have caught the attention of anyone even vaguely aware of the way the war has been evolving. Russia’s advance in the east of Ukraine is clearly gaining momentum while the Ukrainians have launched a daring but perilous, possibly suicidal incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. Putin’s evoking a prospect for a negotiated peace should have been treated as major news.

At the same precise moment, sole mention of Russia on the NYT’s main page appeared in an article with the title, “U.S. Announces Plan to Counter Russian Influence Ahead of 2024 Election.” That headline should have had a familiar ring. The newspaper of record did publish another article the same day, by Marc Santora and Anton Troianovski, on Putin’s speech in Vladivostok: “Putin Drives Home a Perilous Point: Ukraine’s East Is Russia’s Main Goal.” Nowhere in the article is there a mention of Putin’s allusion to negotiations. For these serious journalists, war is news. Peace is a childish fantasy.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Russian Influence:

The presumed source of every objective observation made by informed Americans that deviates even slightly from official US government policy.

Contextual note

At least the NYT has recently begun to report a few unvarnished facts from the battlefield that are both true and, more surprisingly, at odds both with official state department talking points the paper usually prefers to repeat. Since February 2022, the NYT’s journalists have gotten into the habit of celebrating Ukrainian successes and ignoring, dismissing or seriously underreporting Russian advances. Its interpretation of the state of play consistently echoed White House assessments.

The paper took seriously Biden’s claim last year in Finland that “Russia has already lost the war.” In February of this year, as things had become even worse for Ukraine, it featured an op-ed piece claiming that “Putin Has Already Lost.” This was, of course, consistent with the rest of the mainstream media in the US, who long ago decided which team to root for. Newsweek, for example, at the beginning of Ukraine’s invasion of the Kursk region, just a month ago, featured the same tired headline: “Russia Has Already Lost in Ukraine.”

The NYT’s journalists nevertheless had the honesty to admit in their article on Putin’s speech that the “situation in the Donbas has now become increasingly difficult for Ukraine, even acknowledging that the besieged city of Pokrovsk is likely to fall.” But even there, their reporting was incomplete. The authors never troubled to explain that Pokrovsk is a major strategic hub, whose fall will provoke serious logistical headaches for all Ukraine’s defensive operations. The BBC, usually as reticent as the NYT to report the naked truth about the war, provides precisely the explanation the New Yorkers have so studiously avoided. It even quotes the assessment of a Ukrainian military expert: “If we lose Pokrovsk, the entire front line will crumble.” That sounds more like a lobotomy than a headache.

For the NYT, an article about a possible negotiated peace could never rival “political importance” with breaking news about what everyone has been encouraged for years to fear as an existential threat: Russian influence on the coming United States election. That will attract its readers’ attention far more surely than intimations of peace in Ukraine. Russia is our existential enemy. If ever we forget that, we may begin to question the massive continuing investment in the means of waging war, which is especially painless when we know it’s our good friends who wage those wars for us and sacrifice their lives, not ours. When reviewing “all the news that’s fit to print,” peace will inevitably end up in the dustbin.

Commenting on the latest avatar of Russiagate so eagerly featured by the NYT, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein pithily sums it up: “Russia’s influence operations are a joke.” He’s right. It’s a running punchline the NYT has been repeating since 2016. Klippenstein even highlights a truly comic twist: “The paradox of the government’s very public obsession with election security is that the more attention paid to these supposed threats, the more likely people are to question the legitimacy of the outcome. In fact, this is an effect foreign adversaries undertaking influence operations hope for.”

Historical note

Glenn Greenwald is more direct when he describes the highly mediatized legal case as “yet another act of standard Democratic Party reflex to scream Russia whenever they feel endangered.” This is a pattern that regularly plays out in the months before an election. Intelligence directors, past or present, government officials and “respectable” media have, since 2016, refined the art of launching terrifying accusations whose vacuity will only be revealed after the election. The now infamous case of the 51 intelligence directors who, weeks before the 2020 election, claimed that the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” stands as the obvious precedent. They spoke out. Biden was elected. It worked in 2020, there’s every reason to think it could work again.

This new version of an old routine, as described by the three reporters from the NYT, contains a telling echo that made me in particular laugh. “The United States,” they explain, “was caught flat-footed in 2016 as its spy agencies learned about Russian efforts to influence the vote on behalf of Mr. Trump and were late in warning the public.”

Were they late? If so, they were late in announcing something that turned out to be false. Everyone curious about historical truth should know by now that the thesis we refer to as Russiagate was debunked by the special investigator, Robert Mueller, on whom the breathless anti-Trump media were counting as the inevitable prelude to a president’s impeachment. They eventually did muster up support for the impeachment, but, for lack of evidence, that too failed.

The deeper irony here harks back to something our Devil’s Dictionary revealed on August 26, 2019, when we glossed the precise term “flat-footed.” It came from a quote by NYT’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, in the context of a private meeting of his news desk. On that occasion, Baquet admitted that the paper had gone overboard with its Russiagate obsession. “We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed,” he confessed. “I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”

When a serious journalist can say a story “looked” a certain way, it’s the clearest indication that the journal, even if we call it a “newspaper of record,” was looking in only one direction. That simple fact invites us, in turn, to have another “look” at the story to understand who was directing the NYT’s gaze.

Now, four years later, instead of apologizing for their own faulty reporting concerning the Hunter Biden laptop, the self-described “flat-footed” NYT complains that the clearly overeager spy agencies in 2016 weren’t over-eager enough. Just as the NYT did with the Havana Syndrome — another nothingburger no one ever apologized for, even after the CIA admitted it had no substance — its journalists have retained their habit of trotting out discredited stories from the past, with precisely the aim of instilling doubt about the fact that they have been definitively discredited.

Whether it’s Russiagate or the Havana Syndrome, or the JFK assassination 60 years after the fact, they can always appeal to the perception that nothing has been definitively proven either way. It’s the good old “there’s no smoking gun” defense. In reality, it’s just sloppy and sadly dishonest journalism.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A New York Timeless Commitment to Russiagate appeared first on Fair Observer.

Most Western democracies have embraced the democratic ideology Abraham Lincoln famously articulated when he evoked “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” But who are “the people” and how can you define them, especially in a melting pot or salad bowl like the US? The very fact of diversity casts a dark shadow on the comforting idea of “we the people.” Aware of that potentially troubling anomaly, Americans rallied around the idea of “majority rule.”

The 19th century idea of rule by an elusive “majority” inevitably spawned the historical trend towards the now classic two-party system. The 50.1% rule for elections became the measure that allowed diverse populations to believe in majority rule. It became apparent this can only work when there are no more than two dominant parties. So, even today, you’re a Democrat or a Republican, but you might also be an independent, sitting on the fence. In Europe, it was more complex. Nevertheless, even with multiple parties, democracy tended towards a perception of left (working class) vs right (educated ruling and business class).

Even though the founding fathers raised serious objections to the very idea of parties — which they characterized as “factions” — the US political system culturally, and to some extent legally, codified the two-party system, making it a structural feature of all but local elections. Third parties are permitted but barely tolerated. The media systematically casts third parties and their candidates into the category of annoying eccentricities. Strom Thurmond (1948), Ross Perot (1992), Ralph Nader (2000) and a few others managed to muddy the otherwise clear waters, but each could be dismissed as an ephemeral nuisance.

Repeated cases in recent years of US presidents elected while failing to obtain a majority of the popular vote began to disturb the tranquil belief people had in the principle of majority rule. The tsunami provoked by hurricane Donald, highlighting “American carnage,” “alternate facts” and “stolen elections” has now called the logic itself into question.

The events of this election year in the US, marked by an assassination attempt and the last minute replacement of an incumbent, have provoked a further erosion of the belief in democracy. But it can’t compare, in gravity, with what is unfolding today in France.

France’s parliamentary elections two years ago failed to produce a majority for the already re-elected President Emmanuel Macron. This forced him to rely on improvised alliances within the center, the right and eventually the far-right, to pass legislation. Disappointed by the disastrous results of the European parliamentary elections in June of this year, Macron launched a desperate gambit. In the mistaken belief that he might achieve democratic clarity, he dissolved parliament, provoking new parliamentary elections. Clarity turned to obscurity and opacity.

Macron’s party in the European elections of June 9 was roundly defeated by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. The French parliamentary elections a month later saw a reinvigorated left, the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire or NFP), rise to the top position. In terms of “majority rule” thinking, that double whammy was the equivalent of a TKO in boxing. The problem is that there’s no referee other than the constitution to stop the combat. And only a unified Assemblée would have the power to impeach a president. The fight has been paused, but the former champion must remain in the ring for another three years! And the stunned, incapacitated fighter must keep the crowd entertained.

The constitution requires that the president must designate a new prime minister, who in turn forms a new government according to his wishes. This isn’t the first time a sitting president has been deprived of a majority. A tradition dating back to 1986 established the precedent that the party or coalition with the most seats in parliament should propose a new prime minister from its ranks. The NFP has done precisely that, very cautiously designating an economist, Lucie Castets. But Macron, aware of his constitutional rights and committed to his Jupiterian idea of leadership, has bucked the tradition and demurred.

Le Monde describes the situation in these terms: “Macron has justified his refusal to name Castets as head of government by saying it is his duty to ensure ‘institutional stability.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Institutional stability:

What French presidents under the 5th Republic seek and obviously fail to secure when faced with an even more fundamental reality: constitutional instability.

Contextual note

The Paris Olympic Games provided Macron with his first pretext for postponing the constitution of a new government. Now he has adapted a different tactic. Since he alone has the power to nominate a prime minister, he will “pursue his consultations” with as many irrelevant personalities as possible. He may hope that the longer it goes, the more likely people will be resigned to accepting any solution he throws at them.

This week he has been listening to a range of personalities, including former right-wing president (and convicted felon) Nicolas Sarkozy, who unsurprisingly believes the prime minister should be selected from his party, Les Républicains, a party that earned the whopping total of 39 seats, less than 7% of the 577 seats. Sarkozy argues that France is a right-wing nation, probably because he lumps the extreme right into the traditional right.

Whatever choice Macron eventually makes, there is little likelihood that it will augur anything resembling stability. Emmanuel sees himself as the sole pillar of stability. A regime built on the idea of a president standing at the center, like a king on a chessboard, surrounded by loyal bishops and knights committed to his defense, living in safety within his castle walls, may have worked for the expert wielder of power, Louis XIV, whose reign lasted 72 years. As everyone knows, it didn’t work out quite as well for his more “centrist” great-grandson, Louis XVI.

Historical note

Macron, a young, ambitious but largely unknown minister in François Hollande’s colorless administration, emerged into stardom when the ruling Socialist party began to unravel. With no true political experience and no existing party structure to work from, Macron surprised everyone in May 2017, first by coming out of nowhere to lead all other candidates in the first round of voting, and then by beating Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election.

His victory clearly went to his head. But it was less his political genius than a stroke of luck that led to his 2017 success. Like Moses, he benefited from a miraculous parting of the political sea. The Socialists were in disarray after five years of Hollande’s presidency. The traditional right lost its bearings when its obvious frontrunner, François Fillon, mismanaged a scandal he was implicated in and refused to step down in favor of a ”cleaner” candidate. The only credible challenge left was the unambiguously left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whom the political class and the media treated as a dangerous firebrand. Le Pen nudged ahead of both Fillon and Mélenchon by less than 2%. Le Pen trailed Macron by only 2.6%.

In other words, from the start of his presidency, Macron had no truly constituted party and could only be deemed “the center” because he was surrounded on all sides by other political orientations. That was the precise moment he speculated about the taste he believed the French had for a Jupiterian leader.

Very quickly he was contested not by a party but by “the people,” citizens donning the iconic yellow vest the government obliged them to store in the private vehicles. That was when the Red Sea parted again for Macron thanks to a virus, Covid-19, that turned him into a “war president.”

Now he finds himself in a struggle with the entire political class and soon with the population as well. Unlike Moses, Macron never made the effort to get to the other side. The Red (and blue) Sea is closing in on him as he dawdles in the middle. Nobody is likely to be happy with the personality he selects as his prime minister, whoever she or he happens to be.

We’re in for another ride. Fortunately, France definitively banished the guillotine in 1981.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Macron’s Leisurely Fishing Trip in a Sinking Boat appeared first on Fair Observer.

Time is money, but equally money is time. Don’t believe me? Just ask Warren Buffett, a man who marvels at the miraculous nature of compound interest, representing the perfect unification of money and time. Albert Einstein called compound interest “the eighth wonder of the world” even while expressing doubts about the reality of quantum mechanics.

Because time has such a special place in US culture, it’s instructive to see how it may influence discussions both trivial and grave. Take the topic of nuclear weapons, for example. Most other cultures see the very idea of possessing a nuclear arsenal as an existential problem. Most nations question whether nuclear weapons should even be allowed to exist. Americans, in contrast — especially those who have the power to make policy — focus on the real question: how those weapons need to be managed over time.

In an article for the publication Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jack O’Doherty, presents in some depth the current debate among Washington’s military strategists concerning nuclear policy. As you read the article, bear in mind that the nation’s citizens have not been consulted on the options outlined, nor are they likely even to be aware of them. No politicians covered by the popular media have even alluded to this question. The outcome of the debate will nevertheless affect the life of every person on Earth.

Here are two significant quotes from the article:

“The United States has begun a long overdue modernization of its nuclear arsenal, and it’s essential to understand the purpose of these acquisitions.”

 “It’s time for the American nuclear policy community to have a long-overdue conversation about what, prescriptively, US nuclear weapons are for. Deterrence, yes, but in what form?”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Long-overdue:

So urgent that a decision must be made without the time-consuming effort of analyzing all the possible and probable consequences, even if they point towards global catastrophe.

Contextual note

Most of us learned the meaning of the adjective overdue in the context of checking out books from the library, when we were learning to read. Our parents taught us to be careful about respecting dates, to avoid the dreadful consequence of a monetary fine. Later in life, many people discovered that the word could carry a slightly more serious level of urgency, when it came to paying rent to a landlord or alimony to a divorced spouse. Too much “overdueing it” could land you in court.

Using the epithet, as O’Doherty does, when discussing nuclear arsenals clearly takes us to another level. One might think that when discussing any nation’s nuclear strategy, we would be invited to entertain a full spectrum of choices, starting with total disarmament and extending across the spectrum to the idea of covering entire regions with a strike capacity designed as a nuclear noose.

O’Doherty’s article informs us that, at least in the US context, the spectrum has now been conveniently reduced to a binary choice. He presents them as practically the equivalent of a Dodge City-style “nuclear showdown.” Here is how he describes the “two schools of thought.”

“The development of nuclear weapons started an inflexible and entangled debate between what—to borrow almost anachronistic language—may be described as the “nuclear revolution” and the “nuclear superiority” schools of thought. The former insists that mutual vulnerability (from which deterrence stability is derived) has revolutionized international competition by making wars between great powers essentially impossible. The latter, meanwhile, contends that the Pentagon should embrace nuclear warfighting postures revolving around a counterforce targeting doctrine—that is, shooting first in a preemptive strike to eliminate an opponent’s nuclear weapons before they can be launched (this is defined by its proponents as the only conceivable way to win a nuclear war).”

The second “school of thought” seems to reflect the philosophy infamously deployed by George W. Bush to justify launching his invasion of Iraq in 2003. Because we didn’t know what Saddam Hussein might do with his (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, we sure as hell had to make sure that he would never get the chance.

In that scenario, we invaded and declared “mission accomplished.” In this scenario, however, it isn’t about invading. It’s about launching a nuclear attack once we are convinced sufficient suspicions exist to make it necessary. Suspicions of the sort expressed by CIA Director George Tenet in 2002 to President Bush: “It’s a slam dunk.” Could that kind of pre-emptive reasoning and the act that followed take place again? If O’Dohery’s second “school of thought” were to win out, the answer will be presumably, yes.

Historical note

In retrospect, everyone notes that the fall of the Soviet Union marked a major turning point in history. It ushered in the unipolar world, an order that lasted for most of the next three decades, in which the US dominated the planet’s economic activity and its most significant political events. International Relations guru John Mearsheimer cites 2017 as the moment when that suddenly appearing unipolar world gave way to a new multipolar world that is still taking and changing shape as we write.

The significance of a unipolar world can be summarized in the oft-repeated idea of a “rules-based order,” understood as a set of behavioral standards defined and enforced by a unique superpower: the US. The existence of a unipolar hegemon “simplified” some of the reasoning about issues arising between nations. Everyone in the “free world” was now “free” to align with the policies of Washington, knowing that it would put them “on the right side of (unipolar) history.”

Some people developed the habit of calling this a “normative order.” The idea of normative appears to embrace several things:

• standards of behavior widely accepted and expected in the international community,
• moral guidelines that shape decisions and actions, such as the just war theory,
• international laws and treaties that formalize these norms and principles, such as the Geneva Conventions or the United Nations Charter
• and finally, cultural values.

That dog’s dinner leaves a lot to choose from, to say nothing about the fact that experts in cultural communication will tell you that identifying any set of behaviors as “normative” could only be a fool’s errand.

Even while the idea of “normative” carries a lot of positive connotations, one of the consequences many people have noticed — and which I recently discussed with former Swiss ambassador Jean-Daniel Ruch — has been the marginalization, or frankly discrediting, of the basic tool of diplomacy: dialogue. When one has a “normative order” to refer to, it makes it easy to cut short any dialogue by referring to the rules of that order. This trend has had the effect of producing a world of “forever wars” and never-to-be-realized “ceasefires.” I put this last term in quotes to highlight the degree of meaninglessness it has effectively achieved. They say time is the great healer. Dialogue is an even better one… and it saves time!

To sum up, the history of the past 35 years offered us the hope of living under a normative order that has never managed to exist. It has also supplied the explanation of why it could never exist. The answer is simple: the enforced absence of dialogue and the death of diplomacy.

In this year of multiple elections, with the most monumental one expected in November, is there any real chance of seeing a new world order built not of normativity, but of dialogue? Some of us still cling to that hope. On that note, I leave you with one remark in O’Doherty’s article concerning the “dialogue” between the two “schools of thought:”

“These competing perspectives share the halls of power but rarely talk to each other. Each accuses the other of entertaining imaginary empirical pretensions, of a lazy misreading of history, and of celebrating theories compromised by their own basic premise.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Debate About the Best Path to Armageddon appeared first on Fair Observer.

That was April. Last week, on August 12, in anticipation of the interview Musk had planned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Breton posted on X an extraordinary preemptive warning against the “amplification of harmful content.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Harmful content:

Any words, expressions or ideas formulated by individuals certain persons or groups in a position of authority happen to dislike.

Contextual note

In his letter, Breton worries about the possibility of language that may have “detrimental effects on civil discourse and public security.” His definition of “harmful” applies to “content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.”

“Instances of disinformation” sums up the essence of Breton’s complaint. The idea that people may say things that are not true and that all instances of untruth should be suppressed has become a standard obsession of those who seek to wield power over the unenlightened masses.

Although he has no inkling of what would transpire in a conversation that hasn’t yet taken place, the commissioner clearly anticipates that Musk and Trump will spout the kind of odious ideas his authority has the power to punish. Like George W. Bush’s preemptive invasion of Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein’s using the arsenal of weapons of mass destruction experts Hans Blix and Scott Ritter insisted didn’t exist, Breton prepared his own invasion of X to prevent Musk and Trump from saying things that, to his mind, might be politically incorrect.

As I pointed out in last week’s “Devil’s Dictionary,” the political class has even taken the idea of critical thinking, which implies openness to the consideration of a multiple perspectives before constructing meaning through exposure to all of them, and transformed the definition to mean the tracking and banishment of unconventional viewpoints. In other words, the idea of critical thinking is turned on its head in the service of authorized, conformist thinking.

Breton’s remarks highlight another feature of the new censorship culture that has been gaining steam since 2016, when it became the principal weapon for countering Trump’s obvious predilection for outlandish exaggerations and “alternate facts.” Censorship has become a transnational crusade across the defensive alliance of North America and Europe we call “the West.” In that sense, NATO enlargement has not just been about territorial expansion eastward to the borders of Russia but also the revival of the McCarthyist instinct that poisoned US political culture in the 1950s.

Europe managed to dodge the McCarthyist epidemic that successfully transformed the meaning of the word “communist” for Americans into the equivalent of “possessing diabolical intent.” “As the relevant content is accessible to EU users,” Breton notes, “and being amplified also in our jurisdiction, we cannot exclude potential spillovers in the EU.” He wants to protect Europeans from contamination. With the notion of “spillover,” Breton correctly highlights Europe’s current alacrity for imitating and adopting the worst political practices exported from America.

But Breton’s moment of triumph didn’t last 24 hours. On August 13, an article by The Financial Times sported the title: “Brussels slaps down Thierry Breton over ‘harmful content’ letter to Elon Musk.” Breton’s own masters judged that, with his comminatory letter, the commissioner had overreached. It was bad PR, making Europe appear to be something of a bully, a role usually exercised by Washington over Europe.

In a further irony, the FT quotes an EU official who explained that “Thierry has his own mind and way of working and thinking.” In other words, he’s a loose cannon, guilty, in his own way, of producing “harmful content” that might compromise the image of Europe as a culture committed to the respect of all citizens’ rights, including prominent US billionaires with one-syllable last names, like Musk and Trump.

Historical note

In the fourth and final book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a race of horses called the Houyhnhnms not only have the gift of human speech, they use it in the wisest way possible. They cannot say anything that is untrue. In their language — unlike that of Thierry Breton or numerous people in Washington, DC who have put “disinformation,” “misinformation” and “harmful content” at the top of their useful vocabulary lists — the Houyhnhnms don’t even have a word to express the notion of lying.

Breton and a new class of censors that wish to apply more and more rules concerning the way people speak in public appear to see Swift’s Houyhnhnm model as an ideal to be emulated. They are busy devising the mechanisms that will prevent anything they can qualify as potentially harmful — even before it is spoken or written — from being expressed in public. After all, there may be “spillover.”

The problem Swift noticed — and it drove his character, Lemuel Gulliver, mad — is that, as a master of the English language, he understood that nearly everything people say may be construed as not quite truthful. Even Oxford’s famous linguistic philosophers of the 20th century, who reduced philosophy itself to the question of what language is capable of expressing, concluded that there is no principle that can establish the truth of any proposition. Bertrand Russell could prove that the sentence, “the king of France is bald” is false — even though in theory it could be true — but no philosopher has found a way of proving any assertion is true.

The debate is now raging in the US about whether the freedom of expression so unambiguously affirmed in the first amendment to the US Constitution can have any meaning. A century ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used the analogy of “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” to demonstrate that there should be limits on what one may express in public. The context of Holmes’s pronouncement was the debate on the constitutionality of the now notorious Espionage Act. Congress passed the law during World War I, when fear of German spying was a reality. Long considered irrelevant, recent presidents had invoked it repeatedly in recent years against whistleblowers and journalists, including Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

The legal definition of disinformation is: “False information knowingly shared to cause harm.” Lawmakers have no capacity to define “harm” with precision, which means that potentially any discourse or act of expression can fall into a category of speech that must be suppressed. The campaign to brand critics of Israel’s policies and actions as antisemitic on the grounds that such criticism harms the sensibility of Zionist Jews is continuing and has proved very effective in the US and Europe.

Whatever disagreement may remain inside Europe between Thierry Breton and his boss, Ursula von der Leyen, there can be little doubt that the official assault on “harmful content” from both sides of the Atlantic will continue. A far more worrying case is that of British journalist Richard Medhurst, who was arrested by his nation’s police at Heathrow airport, detained under appalling conditions and charged under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act. His crime? Producing a style of harmful content known as factual reporting.

Future historians will face the challenge of finding an original name for an episode of history that began with Joe McCarthy, spanned a period that included President Joe Biden and, with the aid of AI, is likely to continue unimpeded into an undefined future. As the world awaits an impending civilizational showdown that will either define a new world order or culminate in a spectacular nuclear holocaust, we are all cast into the role of reluctant spectators, observing the prolonged crisis of democracy. The outcome will inevitably be scripted by a coterie of politicians skilled at protecting us from harmful content.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How to Make Someone Who’s Harmful Content appeared first on Fair Observer.

Brexit, a carefully orchestrated psychodrama fueled by the ambition of Boris Johnson, played out during a period spanning nearly four years. The British nation could finally affirm not only that it was no longer part of Europe; it had equally lost any sense of connection with the rest of the world.

Things have taken a further dire turn over the past ten days with a spate of extremely violent xenophobic riots spread across the “scepter’d isle.” Is the world witnessing the death knell of English culture, that for centuries fed and stimulated European and even world culture? John Donne famously told us that “no man is an island,” affirming that “if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.” Has Britain now become that clod washed away into a state of utter irrelevance?

Events of the past week demonstrate that significant numbers of English men and women are willing to organize, demonstrate, assault, burn and destroy to prove that what unites their nation and defines their identity is essentially race and a skewed notion of national origin.

Britain’s new Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer will not have it. Leading the resistance, Sir Keir believes he is intent upon building “a ‘national capability’ across police forces to tackle violent disorder.” He believes it should include technology such as facial recognition. That should make average citizens feel safer and protected. What better way to defeat xenophobia than provide new pretexts for paranoia?

Others in Starmer’s government have identified non-technological solutions to the visibly degraded situation. The Guardian notes the approach of Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who “said she was launching a review of the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to embed critical thinking across multiple subjects and arm children against ‘putrid conspiracy theories.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Critical thinking:

1. The opposite of conformist thinking, an ideal around which most national educational programs and curricula are designed in the interest of making sure citizens never become too curious about how their behavior needs to be controlled.
2. The single most important life skill that has traditionally been excluded from all national educational programs and curricula that have been crafted to promote conformist thinking and, though sometimes regretted, is unlikely to reappear.

Contextual note

One is left wondering what Philipson means when she says she will “embed critical thinking across multiple subjects.” Is she intending to build critical thinking into the learning process as a fundamental feature or simply add some new techniques aimed at spotting disinformation?

This is an important distinction. Critical thinking for learning can be framed as either a discipline unto itself — with its own rules, built on the grounds of epistemological reflection and logic — or as a useful gadget for categorizing things like “putrid conspiracy theories” and rejecting them as sources of disinformation.

The Secretary’s drift tends to suggest the second solution, which bears little resemblance to authentic critical thinking. It consists of providing a system for recognizing clues that something might be disinformation because of its apparent resemblance with officially identified conspiracy theories. But such a practice is the contrary of critical thinking. It is nothing less than propaganda.

When faced with insufficient evidence needed to account for a known problem, a disciplined scientist first constructs and then tests one or more hypotheses. Some of them may seem far-fetched, but truth is sometimes far-fetched. In contrast, when your aim is to identify and reject “putrid conspiracy theories,” correct hypotheses can be dismissed before being tested. This violates the basic premise of empiricism, the basis for scientific critical thinking.

Philipson explains, “One example may include pupils analysing newspaper articles in English lessons in a way that would help differentiate fabricated stories from true reporting.” If there was a serious method to what she proposes, this would certainly represent a much desired breakthrough in any nation’s approach to education. The first problem to recognize is that, contrary to her belief in something called “true reporting,” all reporting contains some bias. Here the notion of “true reporting” can only be a chimera.

Historical note

Let’s take a case from recent history to test Philipson’s suggestion. An interesting place to begin might be a slew of stories published by The Guardian starting in 2016. All were designed, in typical conspiracy theory fashion, to make the British public believe a falsehood: that because Jeremy Corbyn had expressed criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, he should be labeled a rabid anti-Semite. The problem with determining that these were examples of false rather than true reporting is that it would require not only reading dozens of articles over a period of several years just to deal with one specific case, but studying the various objective reports on, for example, Israel’s policies that appear to be similar to apartheid. Can we expect school children at any level to engage in that kind of research and then apply their skills of critical thinking?

The other problem with that example is that it could create confusion about the meaning of “conspiracy.” The standard notion of antisemitism, citing the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as the incriminating piece of evidence, is that anti-Semites are conspiracy theorists. But a study of The Guardian’s anti-Corbyn campaign might reveal something else: that The Guardian may have been part of a conspiracy organized by Britain’s powerful Israeli lobby so brilliantly (and controversially) exposed in a daring documentary by Al Jazeera? Making such a suggestion about The Guardian might easily get one thrown into the basket of those who fall for “putrid conspiracy theories?”

Just to be clear, The Jewish Voice for Labour actually did explore the history of that anti-Corbyn campaign. “In March 2016, the Guardian published a column by Jonathan Freedland with the title ‘Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem.’ If we could identify any single article as the starting point for the whole controversy, this was it.”

This and other articles to follow effectively led to the shaming of Jeremy Corbyn. “By the second half of 2019, bigoted views of Palestinians were so pervasive in British public discourse as to pass unnoticed.”

The self-inflicted wounds of Labour helped set the scene for the election of Boris Johnson. It was deemed a cautionary tale that established a simple principle, applicable anywhere: Criticizing Israel is a cardinal sin and a clear indicator of antisemitism. This principle is still in force for a majority of politicians of all parties. It has served to excuse what the International Court of Justice called a plausible genocide in January. Since January, the level of plausibility has significantly risen.

Britain’s Secretary of Education is right in principle, even if the practice she recommends is likely to be aberrant. Yes, it’s time to put in practice critical thinking at the core of our curricula, or simply bring it back after a long historical exile. Nurtured by Greek philosophers two and a half millennia ago, Western thinkers practiced it in various forms, from the disputio dear the scholastics in the Middle Ages and the inquiring minds of the French Enlightenment. But with the Industrial Revolution the cultivation of critical thinking was banished from our schools. The future for today’s youngsters is not open, critical dialogue. As everyone should know by now, it is about coding… or maybe trading or banking, something useful and cash positive for the practitioner. 

Look at the world of “public debate” today. What dominates in both politics and the media? Monologue. The college essay represents little more than proving one’s skill at the art of monologue. Critical thinking is born of… critical talking, or at least of active and even interactive exchange. But this is an age that conducts international relations as a zero sum game. It has abandoned diplomacy — which requires dialogue — in favor of waging war to impose “inviolable” principles. Talking itself has adopted the unique model of monologue. You’ll find it everywhere on commercial as well as social media.

Anyone interested in Plato’s monologues?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Your Solution to Riots: Technology or Critical Thinking? appeared first on Fair Observer.

“Fears of Wider Mideast Conflict Deepen, With U.S. Seen as ‘Not in Control’”

The article’s author, London bureau chief Mark Landler, develops a quote he gleaned from a veteran of the Obama State Department. “This is going to make the region extremely nervous. It’s never good for the United States to be seen as not in control.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

In control:

1. An often fleeting and frequently unstable feeling of mastery felt by people who find themselves in situations they are familiar with which leads them to believe they understand all the parameters of the situation.
2. An increasingly unjustified feeling of mastery of other people and nations by politicians in Washington, DC, the effect of decades of blindness to cultural differences and the deceitful impression that fear of a dominant power is an indicator of admiration, respect and even love.

Contextual note

Analysts of cultural differences have often pointed out that in US political and media culture, one of the core values is control, the idea that things should never be left to unknown influences. It links with another core value: self-reliance. Most of the world’s cultures leave considerable room for chance or fatality in the way events play out. Inch’Allah is often evoked outside the Muslim world. 

In the US, citizens learn from an early age that they are on their own in their quest to control the environment and the events they may be involved in. Even if team effort is encouraged, the focus of groups is not camaraderie but to work together to ensure their collective control.

Landers’s article provides some context for the helplessness expressed in its headline. “For President Biden, who expended time and prestige trying to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to release hostages in Gaza, the back-to-back assassinations of the Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, and the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, could signal the futility of his diplomatic efforts, at least for now.”

Without being disrespectful, I can’t fail to find this laughable for two reasons. The first is Landers’s assumption that there ever was any hope of being “in control” of a situation that has been consistently controlled by one voice alone, that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The second is his phrase, “diplomatic efforts.” Many of us have noticed that diplomacy is now a long-forgotten art in the US. The US no longer “engages” in diplomacy. It imposes what it calls diplomacy. What that means is that it states a position, usually framing it as an inviolable principle, and then expects others to fall into line. But when someone like Netanyahu refuses to fall into line, Washington prefers looking helpless.

The fact that an NYT bureau chief can express surprise and disappointment at Biden’s loss of control is quite simply comic. I won’t even begin to cite the impressive number of perfectly sane people who refused to believe that a policy characterized by sending messages of mild disagreement to an increasingly violent and visibly unhinged regime had any chance of producing a different result. They all pointed out that a simple phone call informing his good friend Bibi that the US would be obliged to cut off support for a war that was clearly already out of anyone’s control has been possible for months, but never attempted.

A pattern emerged even in the early days of the conflict. Washington offers warnings about not going too far or not attempting particular acts, such as the bombing of Rafah. US media then proudly trumpets the warnings to show that the Biden administration was capable of taking a moral position, at least rhetorically. But when those warnings produced no result other than new atrocities, the White House and the media would express their disappointment and hope that such crimes would not be repeated. The Biden administration projected to the world the simple message that it was never in control.

Historical note

Since its founding less than 250 years ago, the new American democracy has enjoyed the privilege of sensing that it is in control of most of the things it has had to deal with. As the sole Europeans inhabiting a stretch of continent that extended westward to the Pacific, the British colonists in control of their towns, farms, plantations and waterways along the east coast of the US understood the opportunity that awaited them. It was based, paradoxically, on their belief, formally stated, that “all men are created equal,” but completed by the sentiment that some groups of those men are destined to dominate others. Before obtaining their independence, the discomfort they felt with the fact that the government in London was constraining their ambition turned out to be a major factor fueling their desire to revolt and break the bonds of dependence on Britain.

The local populations that inhabited the continent before the arrival of Europeans clearly lacked the advanced level of economic and technological culture that had already begun to define modern Europe, and England in particular. The indigenous tribes simply could not compete with the ever more resourceful Anglo-Saxons, who had mastered the science of “prosperity” through organization, industry, technology and personal ambition. The European Americans were paragons of what historian Jan de Vries called the “industrious revolution” that preceded and continued to accompany the industrial revolution that was already underway in England.

Once they had achieved independence, westward expansion began. It later took on its own separate historical status when the population viewed it as “manifest destiny.” By the middle of the 20th century, some began expressing their concern with the “closing of the frontier,” which of course provoked President John F Kennedy’s youthful administration in 1961 to evoke a “New Frontier.” The spirit of expansion with a view to control, validated by a Calvinist God who instituted manifest destiny has been a permanent feature of the US political mindset. This should help observers today to understand why the eastward expansion of NATO, though initially resisted by many European leaders and dramatically opposed by Russia, seems to everyone in Washington totally natural and probably predestined.

The Strategy Bridge, a foreign policy think tank, in a 2021 paper cited a commission of former government officials who, in 1996, “conducted a study of American vital interests” that listed five goals:

“(1) prevent, deter, and reduce the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons attacks on the United States; (2) prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Europe or Asia; (3) prevent the emergence of a hostile major power on U.S. borders or in control of the seas; (4) prevent the catastrophic collapse of major global systems; and (5) ensure the survival of U.S. allies.”

The breadth of those goals expressed the view of the hegemon feeling alone on the stage in what is now referred to as “the unipolar moment.” With the Soviet empire gone, Washington finally felt in total control. The ultimate promise of the culture was fulfilled. All would be well in the world. Francis Fukuyama even called it the “end of history.”  

For two decades, an attempt to control the politics and economy of the Middle East led to slowly unfolding disappointment, when US leaders failed to manage the controls. Subsequent events in eastern Europe and the Middle East are demonstrating today that, despite constant resolutions and promises to regain control of declining military and economic fortunes, the capacity of the US to influence other regions of the world in any other way than provoking conflicts that inevitably go out of control has disappeared. We see this in the erosion of the once effective arsenal of soft power that instilled a positive perception of the US and its culture across the globe. Now it becomes visible with every act that announces to the world that the combined force of Washington’s armies, spies, financial domination, technology, media and social networks cannot even “ensure the survival of U.S. allies.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A Gray Lady Now Wonders, “Who’s at the Controls?” appeared first on Fair Observer.

Although some, including Biden himself, deem him “a great” president, a group of historians less impressed by his achievements ranked him as the 14th best president. The man who inherited a number of often contestable policies put into practice by his three predecessors — George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — did very little to distinguish himself as the first to do much of anything really memorable.

Biden’s three predecessors will be remembered for their distinctive roles in 21st century history. Bush was the first to invade multiple countries using the original concept of “preventive war.” Obama was the first black person to be elected president. And Trump distinguished himself by being the first “stable genius” seeking to innovate in so many interesting ways. His most spectacular contribution to US political culture was to demonstrate that one could govern by tweeting. In contrast, Biden, who had promised to become the new FDR, in the end simply prolonged existing policies, even the contestable ones, already in place.

It was therefore edifying to learn from Biden’s own testimony that he believes he’s first in one area that seems to have escaped most people’s notice. “I’m the first president this century,” Biden read from a teleprompter, “to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Report (verb):

To say something that may or may not be true, which, if the speaker happens to be a politician, is more likely to be the opposite of true.

Contextual note

Taken literally, Biden is telling the truth. He’s undoubtedly the first president to “report” that America is not at war anywhere in the world. The reasons other presidents before him didn’t do so lies in the simple fact that such a “report” would have appeared to be a bald-faced lie. A quick review of US history tells us that during the terms of every other president — with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter — the US has been involved in overseas wars. Carter was too modest to make such a boast.

Biden is thus incontestably the “first to report” such a claim. From the public’s point of view, the outrageous claims a lame duck makes no longer matter. But anyone who reads the newspapers, watches cable news or even overhears a conversation in a public bar will understand that the US is very much involved in at least two wars: in Ukraine and Israel. To Biden’s mind, proxy wars and economic warfare, sanctions — though wreaking untold damage on civilian populations — don’t count. It’s a bit like Bill Clinton when he famously said, “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman.” He believed he was telling the truth. For him, “sexual relations” meant full genital intercourse.

Biden follows the same logic. Technically, the US is not at war with Russia since no US troops are currently fighting in Ukraine, although, as The New York Times reported in February, US intelligence operators have been totally involved in both preparing and conducting the war for the past ten years. In December 2023, Biden himself evoked the eventuality of “American troops fighting Russian troops.” And he repeatedly committed to backing the war “as long as it takes,” which he biw appears to have planned to last a decade following the ten year U.S.-Ukraine Bilateral Security Agreement signed in June.

The US is avidly providing financial, operational, logistical and diplomatic support for two governments waging war. We also know that the primary aim of the war, as revealed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, is not to secure Ukraine’s sovereignty but to “weaken Russia.” So, yes, Biden can truthfully claim that he did not have “military relations” with Ukraine, in the Clintonian sense.

By “reporting” this reassuring news of his administration’s deep commitment to peace in the world, Biden is seeking to distract the American public from what has become obvious to all serious observers. The risk is not just war, but war with a nuclear power. In this period in which Biden reports there are “no wars,” the world has now come closer to a nuclear conflict than at any moment in the past. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter explains why the risk is likely to materialize by 2026, as a direct result of Biden’s policies. The former marine intelligence officer claims that by removing safeguards that have been in place for decades, the Trump and Biden administrations have created “a situation that exceeds the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of the risk of a nuclear war by an order of magnitude or more.”

Historical note

In the sentence preceding Biden’s “report” that the US was no longer at war, the president (mis)read these words from his teleprompter: “I will keep working to ensure American [sic] keeps strong.” He thus finds a way to associate appearing “strong” with staying out of war. That would mark a clear historical shift. In the years of peace following World War II, the US developed the habit of projecting its strength by engaging enthusiastically in wars intended to demonstrate its strength to the rest of the world.

This shift should remind us that in recent years the paradigm for wars conducted by nation states has evolved. Traditionally, a war was the occasion for a collective effort of a nation. Everyone remembers Rosy the Riveter in WWII. The nation needed to focus on producing the weaponry its military could successfully deploy in the theaters of war. Uncle Sam and Uncle Joseph (Stalin) needed “you” (the people), not only to fight but also to supply the military’s needs.

The paradigm began shifting with Vietnam in 1964, when the US officially entered the fray. For the first time, large swathes of the nation’s citizens refused to identify with the government’s war. Only three years earlier, President Eisenhower had warned of the risks associated with a military-industrial-Congressional complex (MIC) leading the nation towards extreme militarization and the encouragement of conflict.

The confrontation at home turned traumatic. Violating the basic principle of its mission, the CIA mounted Operation Chaos aimed at dissident Americans. In 1970, the National Guard at Penn State University murdered four student protesters. In 1974, with the war nearing its denouement, The New York Times revealed the CIA’s operation, further embarrassing President Nixon, who had expanded the war to Cambodia. But already, in 1973, Nixon had discovered the foolproof solution to dissidence: abolish the draft. He thus provided a miracle solution for the MIC’s future wars: a volunteer army of US citizens. Since then, the trend has continued, with an orientation towards mercenary armies and drone wars. Killing was still the norm but the Vietnam problem was solved. Americans must never see “our boys” (every mother’s kids) dying.

Everyone in Washington agrees, including Biden and Senators Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell (“No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. We’re rebuilding our industrial base.”) and Roger Wicker (“The Ukrainians are willing to fight the fight for us if the West will give them the provisions. It’s a pretty good deal.”). Let Ukrainians die in place of Americans. Our Slavic friends have generously accepted to take on the role of that valuable commodity known as martyrdom. We have thus succeeded in convincing them that, despite the obvious fact that for the past ten years the US has actively provoked and even created the conditions that made the conflict inevitable, their martyrdom is the result of one thing alone: Russian aggression.

Obama prolonged Bush’s wars but got drones to do the donkey work, saving US lives. Biden did Obama one better by engaging in wars fully supported by the US, in which Ukrainians and Israelis die, which is a real pity. Russians also die, which is considered good news. And Palestinians as well, which leaves Beltway citizens largely indifferent. But Israel’s sovereignty, like Ukraine’s, trumps all other considerations.

And so Biden “reports,” we are not at war. Our boys are safe and, of course, our defense industry prospers. 

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Biden Report: No Wars To Be Seen appeared first on Fair Observer.

Up to that point, political commentators had been wondering: “Is the melodrama we’re witnessing a comedy or a tragedy?” At times it resembled Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play in which an elderly ruler hesitates about leaving the reins of power to the next generation. But thanks to mistaken identities — Putin for Zelenskyy, “Vice President Trump” for “Kamala Harris” — and other well-delivered gaffes, it also recalled the Bard’s early play, The Comedy of Errors.

Now that the world has learned of Biden’s irrevocable decision, can we answer the question? Was it comedy or tragedy? We may only know when the final curtain falls on November 5.

On June 28, The New York Times editorial board surprised its readership and the American elite when it solemnly pronounced its negative verdict on Biden’s viability as a candidate. Though paradoxical, the new position of the editors, traditionally loyal to the Democratic establishment, made sense. They deemed the interest of the party they prefer — the Democrats — superior to the satisfaction of the ego of a president whose policies they unhesitatingly endorsed, even when it amounted to supporting a visible genocide.

Nevertheless, two weeks later on July 11, the paper’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, not only entertained the idea that Biden need not obey the dictum of his newspaper but that the White House’s record-breaking senior citizen was capable of proving his capacity to lead the nation for another four years. NYT apparently needed to hedge its bets.

True to form, Baker’s article put its patented rhetorical strategy on full display as it developed its message of praise for Biden’s performance. “His voice, strong at first, grew a little weaker as he went along. But he had some forceful moments, got his points across and offered serious answers about NATO, Ukraine, Gaza, China and other major topics.”

In that pair of sentences, Baker employed four adjectives — strong, forceful, serious and major — designed to overcome one concession to Biden’s cognitive failure when he called the president’s voice at one point “weaker.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Serious answers:

The preferred description used by partisan journalists to describe the most absurdly fanciful statements made by politicians of whom they approve.

Contextual note

What criteria for seriousness could Baker possibly be using when assessing politicians’ answers? Most people take the locution “serious answer” to contain two important ideas: honesty and sticking to facts. In today’s era of fake news that comes in every flavor, most people should have reached the rational conclusion that politicians have no “serious” interest in honesty.

As someone who has worked intimately with one American politician who throughout a long career cultivated a reputation for honesty, I can affirm that the sole interest of politicians is to defend whatever narrative, true or false, favors their electoral fortunes. A politician’s stance on honesty is similar to that of a corporate CEO, whose answers to questions from outsiders will infallibly reflect the executive’s fiduciary sense of duty to shareholder interest. In politics, the party establishment is the politician’s unique shareholder.

So let’s try and test Baker’s accuracy by analyzing the putative “seriousness” of Biden’s answers on foreign policy. Here are some essential points Biden made, transcribed verbatim.

“But I’ve made it clear, a strong NATO is essential to American security. And I believe the obligation of Article 5 is sacred.”

At an earlier NATO summit in his first year in office, Biden insisted on making “clear that the US commitment to Article Five of the NATO Treaty is rock solid and unshakable. It’s a sacred commitment. NATO stands together.” He is obviously attached to the adjective “sacred.” But can “sacred” be taken seriously in this context? Politicians constantly evoke God’s blessing on America, but does that mean just anything American can be deemed sacred?

Biden’s reference here is not trivial. He speaks of respecting a treaty. Washington considers all treaties sacred, doesn’t it? Alas, contemporary historians have noticed that US presidents and their governments sometimes show a strong penchant for withdrawing from even the most solemn commitments. Just ask any indigenous American with a vague awareness of their people’s struggle to survive on the continent they formerly occupied. The most obvious and recent example of betraying a sacred commitment was Trump’s precipitous withdrawal from both the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal. Some cite Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as another example.

Serious linguists and a lot of prominent international relations experts are likely to complain that the word “sacred” has no place in reference to military commitments or even diplomacy. It is a religious concept. A serious politician might, for example, justifiably use the adjective to describe the perception Palestinians have of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, a religious monument that Israeli settlers stormed days before October 7, 2023. They chose to violate its perceived sacredness. But Biden doesn’t take that kind of sacredness seriously. He prefers calling sacred the nation’s commitments to wage war.

Baker doesn’t seem too concerned about linguistic rigor. After all, we can think of Biden’s use of “sacred” as metaphorical and let the hyperbole pass. But what about facts? In the following meandering paragraph, does Biden propose any discernible “facts” in his analysis of what most people take to be a very serious topic: China?

“The issue is that you have to make sure that Xi understands there is a price to pay for undercutting both the Pacific basin as well as Europe as it relates to Russia and dealing with Ukraine. And so, we, for example, if you want to invest in China, you know, you know this area really well. China, you have to have a 51% Chinese owner. You have to make sure you do [it] by their rules, and you don’t have the authority, you have to provide access for all the data and information you have.”

What sense can anyone make of this? Can a political leader “undercut” “a basin?” As for the rest of the paragraph, it hints at one recognizable aspect of reality, but it simply does not sound “serious.”

So, Biden’s out and, for the moment, Kamala’s in. The question Democrats will now have to deal with is this: Is the heiress to the throne, capable of producing word salads that offer more clarity explanation concerning investment in China? And then there’s the real question: Can those word salads translate into effective policy?

Historical note

In his press conference, Biden spoke the words NATO delegates wanted to hear. “I made it clear that I will not bow down to Putin. I will not walk away from Ukraine. I will keep NATO strong. That’s exactly what we did and exactly what we’ll continue to do.”

Whether he said this seriously or not, it poses a new problem with regard to Biden’s honesty concerning both the past and the future. Biden speaks as if his promises are “sacred.” As an early promoter of George W. Bush’s wars in the Middle East, Biden turned out to be the president who actually did “walk away” from Afghanistan. Why should anyone believe he or the next president will not walk away from Ukraine? Should they believe Biden or any Democrat concerning such a promise? Especially as Trump has intimated in no uncertain terms that he”s ready to do the opposite.

The real question facing the Democrats going forward is this: Can they collectively come up with any “serious answers” to Donald Trump, a man who, through his deep contempt for seriousness and commitment to hyperreal fantasy is clearly the competitor with the most “serious” chance of winning in November?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post In One Week, a Hyperreal Election Cycle Became Surreal appeared first on Fair Observer.

More than half a century has passed since the dramatic decade between 1963 and 1973. At that time, Americans became inured to waking up in the morning to read about the latest political figure to be targeted by assassins. Two Kennedys, Lee Harvey Oswald, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Governor George Wallace, Salvador Allende — to mention only the most newsworthy cases — saw their blood spilled or their lives ended thanks to these operations. Persons and institutions carefully executed their plots, applying the quickest and most definitive solution to an annoying problem.

At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, that decade saw a cultural clash. In August 1968, it reached a climax at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. War protesters, hippies and yippies got together to stage a popular revolt against a sclerotic, bellicose political establishment. The nation was in a state of effervescence over an unjustified war taking place overseas, in Vietnam, presumably to prevent dominoes from falling.

Is America living a déjà vu moment? Next month, the Democratic National Convention will once again take place in Chicago. A president committed to supporting wars in Ukraine and Israel has refused to follow Lyndon B Johnson’s example and withdraw from seeking re-election. Another Robert F Kennedy (RFK) who doesn’t believe in dominoes is running. Assassination — which eliminated the first RFK from the race — has reappeared as a fact of political life. Some claim we are experiencing Cold War 2.0. Are we also on the brink of the kind of civil trauma that defined the US of 1968?

Following the attempt on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s life, Edward Luce of The Financial Times wrote an article titled, “America is staring into the abyss.” Luce is worried. He writes of “an already existential election” that has now become more “fraught.”

“Violence was already implicit in much of the rhetoric,” as he reminds readers of the US gun culture. “But,” he continues, “the conditions in 2024 are unique. A bullet almost killed the man who is vowing retribution if he is returned to the White House. A spirit of vengeance is haunting America.” 

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Spirit of vengeance:

A factor of motivation guiding human behavior, particularly prized in societies that promote the idea of competition over cooperation.

Contextual note

Luce expects us to feel surprised that an event such as this should reveal the existence of an “abyss” in American society. He ignores the fact that the “spirit of vengeance” has always had a privileged place in US culture. He worries about the fragility of the nation.

“It is not just Donald Trump who dodged a bullet. Half an inch to the left and the cartridge that grazed Trump’s ear would have turned him into a martyr. There is no telling what his death would have unleashed.”

We too can speculate about what would have been “unleashed.” Anti-Trumpers have consistently forecast a civil war if Trump is eliminated, whether by assassination or a defeat in November’s election. Those fears should now be allayed. The brush with martyrdom has practically guaranteed that Trump will defeat Biden in November.

Some commentators believe this new drama has deflated a hitherto growing revolt among Democrats intent on forcing Biden to withdraw his candidacy. If Tapper is to be believed, they now appear resigned to a second Trump presidency. Does Luce feel relieved now that the threat of civil war has been prevented? Or does he think the election may now become more “existential” than ever and that Trump’s “spirit of vengeance” will simply be increased?

Politicians and even The Financial Times journalists have acquired the habit of evoking unrealized and often fanciful fears to grab our attention and obtain our adhesion. Luce’s evocation of an “existential election” conveys the widespread belief that Trump, if re-elected, will conduct an assault on democratic processes and literally cancel future elections.

The same type of fearmongering about other people’s outrageously evil intentions has been used to justify Biden’s foreign policy. The oft-repeated but clearly delusional assertion that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the prelude to his project to reconstitute the Soviet empire has become the go-to argument trotted out to justify prolonging the martyrdom of a generation of Ukrainians. No need to develop the reasoning around the fact, so helpfully signaled by Senator Lindsey Graham, that the real reason for refusing a negotiated peace is that the US covets the “ten to twelve trillion dollars of critical mineral assets” a subdued and fully colonized Ukraine offers for exploitation by Western governments and their enterprises. Trump’s assault on democracy mirrors Putin’s conquest of Europe. With such reasoning, vengeance isn’t required. Pre-emptive opposition gets the job done.

Some commentators have made the case that in recent decades, democratic processes have already reached a terrible level of degradation or dysfunction — one that calls into serious doubt the persistence of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Despite the token presence of third-party candidates, voters (“the people”) have become increasingly frustrated by the binary choice they are given in presidential elections. They are limited to two highly unpopular and ostensibly incompetent or incapable candidates. They have begun to realize that those pairs of candidates have been selected by channels dominated by anonymous sources of wealth and influence, with no connection to “the people.”

That same public may also soon realize that the culture they adhere to deploys a “moral logic” based on the reflex of addressing complex problems with violence rather than dialogue and reasoning. Luce appears to deplore this instinct. He calls it “the spirit of vengeance that is haunting America,” and imagines it’s something new.

Historical note

It will take time for this recent assassination attempt’s significance to unfold within US culture. For the moment, most people believe that it comforts and consolidates the advance Trump was credited with already, especially following Biden’s disastrous debate. The larger question is the one Luce evokes. Is it a sign indicating a “spirit of vengeance” that “is haunting America?”

Luce chose the verb “haunt,” with its connotation of the supernatural and its association with forces of evil, to inspire fear. As I mentioned earlier, politicians and journalists understand that fear attracts people’s attention. In this case, a simpler interpretation of Luce’s intention would be his appeal to the widely disseminated message that Trump inspires fear, is committed to vengeance and must therefore be defeated in this “existential” election.

If there is a spirit of vengeance, as Luce claims, hasn’t it always been a feature of US culture? The trend of issuing death threats to anyone with whom one disagrees existed long before social media. War and economic sanctions, a permanent feature of US foreign policy, are fully materialized equivalents of death threats. Washington, DC puts into practice a culture fostered by Hollywood. It works on a simple premise for its screenplays: For around 90 minutes a problem emerges, gains in complexity and emotional charge before being conclusively resolved in a spray of bullets or other forms of purgative violence. The villains fall, accompanied by the tragic sacrifice of one or two innocents (played by what Hollywood terms, “character actors”).

That was the scenario that might have played out on Saturday at Trump’s rally, if a Hollywood studio had been producing it. One innocent died and others were wounded, but in this real-world case, the villain, Trump, survived. The status of the sniper, Thomas Crooks, remains a mystery. Some Biden Democrats may secretly think of him as a modern but unlucky version of the romanticized “hero” archetype: the brave soul who, understanding the drift of history, had the courage to step up and assassinate America’s Hitler, thereby ridding the world of absolute evil.

On Saturday, June 13, the US was lucky. Crooks merely grazed Trump’s ear. Perhaps the experience will make the orange dictator more humble and less malicious after his predicted return to the White House. At least the civil war Luce feared has not yet been “unleashed.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What’s Amiss in the Abyss? Trump Gets an Earful! appeared first on Fair Observer.

Rishi Sunak, the UK’s most recent Tory Prime Minister, understood that his party’s hold on power was weakening. So he thought he could catch his opponents off guard, forcing the electorate to cling to the idea of continuity in times of uncertainty. He provoked an unprecedented bloodbath that left the Tories with an abject minority in Parliament, and Labour with a crushing majority: 412 to 121!

Similarly, French President Emmanuel Macron had a panicked reaction to being handily distanced by Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally in June’s European parliamentary elections. He called a snap election to take place exactly three weeks later, for the stated sake of “clarification.” The first round of that election confirmed the electorate’s massive rejection of Macron’s policies and even of the man himself.

The first round also allowed the electorate to “proclaim” its preference for the xenophobic right over “Macronisme.” The second round permitted voters to favor the left, leaving Macron stranded in a no man’s land: an undefined, powerless middle. Even though he has three years left to preside over the nation, Macron has become the lamest of lame ducks.

But the most obvious example of the negative democracy trend would be the last two United States presidential elections, along with the upcoming one. In 2016, pollsters revealed that both Hillary Clinton, who was nevertheless expected to win, and Donald Trump, the ultimate outsider, held the titles of the two most unpopular presidential candidates ever to face off in the modern era.

The 2020 election pitted the consistently unpopular Trump against an aging Democratic workhorse, Joe Biden, who was clearly past his prime. “Sleepy Joe” won the primaries not because he inspired voters, but because the party’s establishment, working in the background, pushed him through. Above all, they wished to avoid nominating the much more popular Democrat: Bernie Sanders. In Negative Democracy, popular candidates are viewed as potential threats to their parties.

Biden was never popular but he had two redeeming factors: his association with former US President Barack Obama and his appearance as a politician who could conduct “business as usual.” He contrasted with the mercurial, unpredictable Trump. Was he villainous? No one was sure. But a majority of voters saw him as the lesser of two evils.

2024 offers a rematch between the already rejected Trump and — as polls seem to indicate — the soon-to-be rejected Biden. Both are now widely perceived as lacking any realistic awareness of the nation’s needs and an ability to address them; Trump because of his personality, Biden because of his age.

In short, the way politicians win elections today is not to prove that they deserve to govern. Rather, they persuade the public that their opponent deserves to be punished for their sins or obvious failings.

Analyzing the rather surprising landslide defeat of Britain’s Conservative Party after 14 years of continuous rule, The Guardian’s columnist Rafael Baer explains the result as the “imperative to punish the Tories for years of political malpractice.” He claims it “was palpable on the campaign trail in a way that exultant Starmer fandom was not.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Imperative to punish:

A moral sentiment caused by the buildup of a population’s frustration with two things: its powerlessness to influence events and its growing understanding that every government it elects is destined to produce consistently disappointing results.

Contextual note

In theory, democracies hold elections to enable the most creative and constructive elements of the population to make up the governing structures that will ensure collective security and foster conditions of prosperity and well-being. The ideal, in most democracies, has been historically betrayed by the empowerment of parties and their associated factions that have eclipsed “the people” as sources of decision-making. Parties foster the creation of a protected political class whose interests become distinct from the population’s. The existence of a political class fosters the emergence of a courtier class, the myriad lobbyists who enforce the role of private interests over public welfare.

Elections have become the measure of two complementary forms of powerlessness. Democracy itself, as a method of governing designed to convey the “will of the people,” has lost any power it once had. This is compounded by the fact that the ruling elites appear powerless to do anything that doesn’t simply aggravate the existing instability of institutions and, of course, the economy.

Elections, instead of embodying the aspirations of the population, have thus become little more than tools of punishment. That may well be necessary when entire populations judge that their way of life is consistently going downhill and that their social, political and economic culture is becoming seriously degraded. That instinct for punishment could even be salutary, if punishment could be managed with a view to improvement rather than simple rejection.

Historical note

In a famous 1960 essay for The Atlantic titled, “The Imperative to Punish,” David Bazelon introduced the concept of restorative justice as an alternative to traditional punitive measures. Restorative justice focuses on repairing the harm caused by crime and involving all stakeholders — victims, offenders and the community — in the process of justice. In the context of the 1960s, a period of creative reform symbolized by the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty and US President Lyndon B Johnson’s “Great Society,” the idea of restorative justice as an alternative to punishment made sense. But history moved in a different direction.

Concurrently with the reforms, Johnson prosecuted a war in Southeast Asia designed to punish Vietnamese nationalists who might be tempted by socialism or communism as an alternative to the US model of god-fearing capitalism. If foreign policy could be based on punishment, why shouldn’t domestic policy follow the same logic? President Nixon and later Reagan pursued that notion. The taste to punish became the driving force in policy-making, foreign or domestic.

This worked out well for the evolving contours of US political parties. Democrats could seek to punish Republicans for being racist and Republicans could insist on punishing Democrats for “over-regulating” and thereby robbing them of their basic freedoms. Namely, the freedom to use any business practices that weren’t outright assassination or theft to get things done. Polluting the environment, for example, should be allowed when required for commercial success. Those who seek to regulate should be punished.

Starting with the premise of civil rights, Democrats began evolving the rules that ended up defining the “identity culture” that established the practices of “cancel culture.” This became an informal system of social punishment that could include getting people fired from their jobs or simply being inundated with death threats on social media.

No one should be surprised that the “satisfaction” of punishing those you disagree with has taken center stage in the psychology of politics in our modern democracies. The “imperative to punish” cited in Baer’s description of the Tory defeat reminds us of the Kantian concept of the “categorical imperative.” Kant’s ethics that define moral principles as categorical — meaning they admit of no exceptions and leave no room to discuss, examine, negotiate, debate and seek “restorative” solutions — has come to dominate Western thinking, especially in the domain of politics. The case can be made that it has perverted the concept and practice of democracy.

We continue to see its nefarious effects in the field of foreign policy. The now well-documented adamant refusal of Biden’s State Department to consider, let alone engage in, negotiations in any of its provoked wars provides perfect examples of the categorical imperative’s misapplication. The cost so far can be measured in hundreds of thousands of lives in Ukraine and Gaza. But it could reach the hundreds of millions as we move closer to creating the conditions in which a spark can ignite conflagration. Armageddon would be the final application of our most cherished “categorical imperative.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Triumph of Negative Democracy, AKA Electoral Nihilism appeared first on Fair Observer.

For us, young George did something none of us would have dared to do: engage in an act of unprovoked aggression against our father. In such cases, we would expect some grave punishment. Instead, when his father managed to assess the damage, he summoned his son and asked, “Who did this?” George famously replied: “I cannot tell a lie.”

I had to wait until adulthood to learn the story was apocryphal, invented by a certain Pastor Mason Locke Weems not long after Washington’s death. A century and a half later, our teacher made sure we all understand that great presidents don’t lie and neither should we. The other lesson only became clear to me much later: that fiction presented as history would be a permanent feature of our way of life.

I can only speculate that current US President Joe Biden may have had a similar experience at school and that he too learned the legend was invented, according to Snopes, because “Weems was motivated by profit, and knew readers would be curious about Washington’s private virtues, including his relationship with his father.” The story seems to have left a trace in Biden’s memory. Following the debacle of last week’s debate against former President Donald Trump, a confirmed liar, Biden humbly defended himself with the following argument:

“Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Tell the truth:

In the great American tradition as practiced by preachers and presidents, the act of explaining things in a way that sounds so inspiring the public is likely to believe they are factual, even if they are not.

Contextual note

What Biden really meant was that the number of lies he tells cannot compare to Trump’s, who has made outrageous lying part of his brand. By contrast, Biden has cultivated the science of telling lies that appear on the surface to be true, despite scores of documented cases of Biden flagrantly bending the truth. That includes appropriating a British politician’s biographical narrative in 1988. More recently, who can forget the 40 beheaded babies he claimed to have seen proof of following the Hamas revolt on October 7, 2023?

The Democratic Party is in a dither about retaining a faltering Biden as their presidential candidate. But it’s not just the party stressing. The Biden family itself appears divided, as The New York Times explains. “One of the strongest voices imploring Mr. Biden to resist pressure to drop out was his son Hunter Biden, whom the president has long leaned on for advice.”

Hunter Biden is the author of a book titled, Beautiful Things. It recounts, apparently truthfully and sincerely, the endless series of wrong decisions he tends to make. Why would someone as honest and truthful as Joe look to Hunter for advice? As CNN explained, Beautiful Things is full of “ugly truths.” An obsession with truth seems to run in the family. George Washington himself would be proud.

When Pontius Pilate responded to his prisoner’s claim to “bear witness unto the truth” (John 18:37), he asked Jesus the most basic epistemological question: “What is truth?” While Biden himself believes that he knows “how to tell the truth,” he hasn’t revealed with any clarity how he accesses it. George W Bush once claimed to get it directly from God the Father, like Jesus himself. The Biden administration appears obsessed with accusing anyone who publicly challenges official doctrine on foreign policy or Covid mandates of spreading “disinformation.” We must therefore assume that Biden has sources of truth not available to the rest of us. At least we now know that Hunter is one of them.

Historical note

By the time I was old enough to determine that Weems’s story of the cherry tree was creative fiction, I had already read most of the works of psychologist Sigmund Freud. Thinking back to my early intuition that the tale might have been too absurd to be true, it occurred to me that the tale may conceive a deeper lesson than simply to follow Washington’s example and avoid telling lies.

It occurred to me that Weems may have eerily anticipated the insights of the founder of psychoanalysis. Perhaps in the depths of his unconscious, and therefore unbeknownst to himself, the pastor was articulating an authentically “true” interpretation of the significance of the legend he himself created. After exploring that intuition, this is what I discovered.

The father’s “favorite cherry tree” is not just a tree but a stand-in for George’s father’s phallus. The future president, even at the age of six, unconsciously assaulted his father’s genitals, the source of his own creation. Chopping down the cherry tree correlates perfectly with the Freudian theory of the male child’s wish to castrate his father.

But Weems’s account doesn’t actually use the verb, “to chop.” According to Weems, young George “unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree, which he barked so terribly, that I don’t believe the tree ever got the better of it.” For Weems, George effectively rendered the tree incapable of producing fruit, which is the whole point of castration.

But our symbolic reading becomes more complex. He “tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful” object suggests that the tree, which for one moment is the father’s phallus, is also the “body” that the father uses to bear fruit — in other words, his wife, George’s mother. What Weems describes is the boy’s attempt to commit Oedipal incest with his mother. The fact that it was specifically a cherry tree adds more credibility to this interpretation.

Weems reports that George was six years old at the time of the castration. Freud claims that age marks the culmination of the phallic stage of development, which lasts from the ages of three to six. The oral and anal stage precede the phallic stage, which is followed by latency, in which sexual feelings are repressed.

To my knowledge, Freud never tried to analyze this legend. I believe the good doctor, had he been aware of it, would find it as intriguing as the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Freud analyzed similarly. And just as Hamlet is a story with both a political and psychoanalytical dimension, the cherry tree story fits perfectly with Washington’s future political vocation.

George’s symbolic aggression against his father’s phallus perfectly prefigures his successful military campaign against a father-figure, the English king, whose name also happens to be George: George III. The symbolism is complete.

Freud was right when he said “a cigar is sometimes a cigar,” which can also be taken to mean that a cherry tree is sometimes the father’s phallus. Washington’s historical vocation consisted of unseating and replacing the symbolic father, the king of England. And of course, all Americans remember Washington as “the father of his country.”

Joe Biden undoubtedly thinks of himself as something more than just the father of Hunter Biden, even if he puts all his trust in his son’s wisdom. Just as his son put all his trust in his father’s name (and title as vice president) to get his cushy job on the board of Burisma Holdings’s directors in Ukraine.

Some people will claim that everything above is disinformation. But I think not only Freud, but even Pontius Pilate might have accepted this as truth.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Has Joe Biden Chopped Down the Cherry Tree? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Every English speaker understands that languages are living tools not regulated by governments, but created by the mass of people who speak and write the language. Professional lexicographers define words at the behest of editors seeking to sell dictionaries on the free market. The job of a dictionary is to help citizens understand how other people use the words of the language. No honest person needs an agency appointed by the government to decide what words mean. As a warning of what might come if that principle was ever forgotten, George Orwell wrote a book in 1948 describing that ignominious process: 1984!

In the context of protests on United States college campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza, The Intercept’s Natasha Lennard reported information revealed by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, concerning Columbia University’s task force on antisemitism. Lennard informs readers “that a definition of antisemitism will be put forward — and it will include anti-Zionism.”  More specifically, the task force’s brief “is expected to determine that statements calling for the destruction and death of Israel and Zionism can be considered antisemitic.”

“This definition is designed to inform faculty and students about what can offend Jewish people and which types of statements can cause pain and discomfort,” Haaretz stated.

This exceptional initiative to co-opt the task of professional lexicographers should impel us to think deeply not just about what the definition of “antisemitism” might be, but far more radically, about what the definition of “definition” should be.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Definition:

An always partial, limited, incomplete and sometimes distorted formulation found in dictionaries for the purpose of giving an idea of the sense or rather association of meaning that competent speakers of a language recognize as one of the designations that is frequently — though not necessarily — shared by other competent speakers of the language.

Contextual note

My proposed “definition” seeks to be precise by being vague, which is to say, as inclusive as possible in its account of the general public’s perception of the word. Formal dictionary definitions do not attempt to be inclusive. To be truly inclusive, every definition would require a lengthy essay.

Dictionary.com offers this definition of definition: “the formal statement of the meaning or significance of a word, phrase, idiom, etc., as found in dictionaries.” Note that the author of this definition felt obliged to include an essential allusion to context: “as found in dictionaries.” It’s a way of saying: “I’m only talking about that convention used in the kind of book we all identify as a dictionary.” The author acknowledges that in different contexts the same word will have a very different signification.

My “Shorter Oxford Dictionary” published in 1967 contains five different definitions of definition. The first entry dating from 1483 states: “The setting of bounds; limitation (rare).” It’s only the fourth entry that points us towards the practice of dictionaries, and it is divided into two meanings: “A precise statement of the essential nature of a thing” and “A declaration of the signification of a word or phrase.”

We should note this important point: A dictionary definition focuses on “the essential nature of a thing.” In the case of antisemitism, everyone spontaneously understands that what is essential is the reference to the Jewish religion or Jewish people. The attitude towards a particular national government or its policies at a moment in time is unequivocally non-essential.

Lennard acknowledges the task force’s action is limited to a specific context of use: the development of a “mandatory antisemitism orientation.” This specification of context is important, but rather than offering some useful precision about the meaning of words, the fact that it will be mandatory instruction makes the fait accompli of a definition artificially imposed even more troubling. A mandatory program that seeks to redefine a culturally loaded word with the objective of judging or constraining the freedom of thought and expression of others falls into the category of unmitigated authoritarianism. This is the contrary of the spirit of a liberal education.

The Intercept article explains that the pretext for this redefinition has nothing to do with homing in on the actual use of the word in authentic linguistic contexts. Rather, it has everything to do with anecdotal reports of the “discomfort” felt by certain individuals when exposed to other people’s speech. The whole point of branding those forms of speech “antisemitism” is to ostracize and therefore limit the way other people speak when unconstrained by official rules.

The ultimate absurdity is that to accomplish this goal of general censure requires a prestigious educational institution such as Columbia University to stretch the meaning of antisemitism to include a notion associated with a different word that remains undefined: anti-Zionism. The task force might have better spent its time defining anti-Zionism. But that would have required examining a century and a half of history, something the task force prefers to avoid. It runs the risk of getting people to think and express themselves freely.

Defenders of the task force’s imitative insist that they aren’t trying to modify the dictionary, but simply give some precision to the points made in the mandatory instruction. “Even if the only use of the definition is during mandatory orientations on antisemitism,” Lennard points out, “its deployment inscribes the dangerous antisemitism/anti-Zionism conflation into campus culture. Views of Palestinians, anti-Zionist Jews, and the many others in the community who express criticism of Israel are bound to be delegitimized.”

Historical note

The US has consistently celebrated its commitment to free speech. Just as consistently it has found ways, official and unofficial, to suppress it. A mere decade after ratifying the constitution’s Bill of Rights that enshrined the basic freedoms, Congress, fearing a war with France, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The second of these acts “banned the publishing of false or malicious writings against the government and the inciting of opposition to any act of Congress or the president.”

When the war with France failed to materialize, those acts were allowed to expire or were repealed. That was not the case with the much more drastic Espionage Act of 1917, passed during World War I. It is still in vigor to this day and has been used, with surreal effect, against government whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and others. Despite the obvious contradiction with the letter and spirit of the First Amendment, Americans easily tolerate acts that restrict speech whenever they are convinced there is a threat from a foreign enemy. Consequently, politicians set about trying to convince citizens there is a threat, even if none exists.

What made some kind of sense in World War I is difficult to understand today. The idea that the US should bend its commitment to its own basic rights in the interest of Israel, a foreign power credibly accused of genocide, stretches beyond any patriotic reasoning the logic of “national security.” But contemporary US presidents and Congress demonstrate an incorrigible knack for prioritizing the interests of an extremist government in Israel over enforcing the basic freedoms enshrined in the constitution for its own citizens. Congress is nearly unanimous in its weaponizing of the notion of antisemitism.

Linguistic manipulation is common in times of war. In 1917, sauerkraut was rechristened “liberty cabbage.” Even the quintessential US dish, the hamburger, became a “liberty steak.” Orchestras refused to perform Beethoven. In 2003, George W Bush renamed French fries “freedom fries” to spite the French who had the audacity to disbelieve the manufactured lie that Saddam Hussein was threatening the Western world with weapons of mass destruction. The tradition of redefining or even renaming words to please political interests long ago earned its title of nobility in US culture.

The real lesson we should draw from the “liberty cabbage” episode is that people in times of war twist language as a way of affirming their authority and stirring hatred against critics. When protesters today say “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” they are not attacking Jews, they are expressing their frustration with the historic policies of successive Israeli governments. They are protesting very visible war crimes being carried out before their very eyes.

Anti-Zionism is simply NOT antisemitism!

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Do Zionists Know the Definition of Definition? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The second amendment establishes what people now refer to as “gun rights” at the core of the nation’s patented “gun culture.” The first amendment is, however, the big one that reveals the true originality of US political culture. This is where the idea of “freedom” is made explicit. It tells us that Americans are not only free to speak and publish, to practice or refuse to practice a religion, but also to assemble and protest. Here is the text of the amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Most Americans are taught at school to see this amendment as a dictum that imposes the notion of tolerance of diversity as the foundational value of the nation. Everyone is free to express disapproval of what they don’t like, but they must accept its existence. It expresses the ideal libertarians seek to push to its extreme.

That ideal is quickly becoming “more honored in the breach than in the observance.” We are living out a moment in history when the government’s commitment to supporting violent, destructive and even genocidal wars implies the media’s obligation to suppress forms of discourse that contradict or fail to conform to the dominant propaganda.

A hit piece published by The Washington Post on June 2 provides a perfect example of what has become a campaign to make propaganda great again. A key element is an innovative intolerance of tolerance. What was once assumed to be a foundational virtue has become not just a vice but a crime. The author, Joseph Menn, explains that “Americans’ tolerance for information paid for by foreign actors has made disinformation one of the most critical threats to U.S. democracy.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Tolerance:

Traditionally a virtue appreciated for of its acceptance of diversity but now deemed a vice for the same reason in a society that prefers enforcing conformity of thought and expression.

Contextual note

War inevitably breeds conditions that favor the emergence of Manichean discourse. Those involved frame conflict as a battle between good and evil. Whatever our side does will always be good and anything our adversaries do — even cooking dinner or walking the dog — will always be evil. Even when we ourselves flagrantly violate obvious laws and moral principles, we explain that it’s because “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” If our adversary makes a reasonable and reasoned overture in the name of resolving the conflict, we reflexively assume it’s a manipulative ploy because we are convinced that whatever they do springs from an evil intention.

Now Menn, as a true Manichean, has to stretch things a bit to prove that an American journalist doing his job is on the side of evil. But stretching things in modern journalism is part of what a man’s gotta do. or at least what a Manichean’s gotta do.

Menn’s and the Post’s adversary in this battle between good and evil, black and white, is the appropriately named Gray Zone, an annoying group of seriously diligent investigative reporters led by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté. They are singularly annoying because of their insistence on taking seriously the first amendment right to “redress grievances” with regard to a US government with a developed taste for spending money on war. Rather than address the terms of the grievance, Menn focuses his attack on an employee of the Gray Zone, Wyatt Reed, whom he calls “a top editor.” He also provides similar “evidence” against Blumenthal himself.

If he cannot prove that what these people do is evil, he must prove that these gentlemen are contaminated by evil. But how do you provide proof of contamination? That’s easy for a Manichean. Practically any direct or remote contact — past, present or future — with designated evil parties will seal the case for contamination. (In this case, it’s Russia and Iran, which readers of the Post now understand to be pillars of the new “axis of evil.”) Especially if that contact involves money.

Thanks to the careful “investigative” work of Menn, identified by the Post itself as a “technology reporter,” we learn that, once upon a time, Reed earned “thousands of dollars” paid by an Iranian broadcaster “for occasional contributions to its programming in 2020 and 2021 while he was working as a correspondent for Russia’s Sputnik news outlet.” That is a case of flagrant contamination. Thousands of dollars can go a long way to twisting one’s psyche. Menn probably understands that from within.

Reed’s case contrasts with that of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to literally “sit” on the board of Burisma, a company run by a notoriously corrupt Ukrainian oligarch, Reed’s thousands were paid for journalistic work he actually did to earn a living. His crime was to have earned those thousands by working for an employer whom the Post identifies with the source of all evil. Blumenthal was equally guilty of working for Sputnik and even “accepted a trip to Moscow” for an event in which Vladimir Putin, the devil himself, was present.

Case closed.

Historical note

This story has much to tell us about how the notion of tolerance has evolved since being enshrined in the first amendment to the constitution 233 years ago. The obvious conclusion is that intolerance now has the upper hand with regard to tolerance. If you were paid in the past by someone beyond our borders now considered evil, you are literally contaminated for life. Even if your motive was limited to ensuring your personal survival, you are contaminated and everything you do or say is intolerable.

In contrast, Hunter Biden, who earned many more thousands abroad, chose to do so for good rather than evil masters. His vastly superior pay may be explained by the fact that he needed the cash to nurse his expensive drug habit, a personal weakness that should never be seen as evil.

Some judge Hunter’s pay to be excessive in relation to the work he was asked to provide. In 2019, the Post reported that “Hunter Biden brought knowledge of international politics to the board, which met twice a year.” What is clear, however, is that unlike Reed, the younger Biden was not “contaminated” by the money he received. That is borne out by the fact that, unlike Reed and Blumenthal, he can still be counted on to refrain from abusing his first amendment rights by denigrating the policies of his father’s administration.

Manichean political cultures become the norm in times of war, breeding a form of intolerance clearly incompatible with the first amendment. The US has become a nation no less addicted to war than Hunter Biden has been to his various drugs. Intolerance has become a kind of norm that takes the form of censorship, blanket condemnation of ideas and forms of expression and breeds the kind of implicit libel Joseph Menn practices in the guise of Washington Post journalism. AI is now a tool of intolerance in the hands of our new technofeudal masters, with the capacity to build their intolerance into the “logic of the system.”

To save honest journalism, the US constitution may need an amendment to its first amendment.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Has Intolerance Become the New Tolerance? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Can a similar logic about murderous behavior be playing out at the blob in Washington, DC?

At last week’s press briefing focused on the latest massacre by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller expressed his predictable regret for any damage that may have occurred to the wellbeing of innocent Palestinian civilians. He did so while reminding the press of the administration’s commitment to respecting the Jewish state’s legitimate exercise of “self-defense.” This session took place several days before a more spectacular massacre of at least 274 Palestinians the IDF conducted in its successful operation to release four of the October 7 captives. This toll included “dozens of children.”

In his usual manner, Miller seeks to reassure visibly troubled journalists, whose professional interest in documented facts has made them allergic to relying on bureaucratic hearsay. Alas, in this conflict, facts have consistently taken a back seat to Israeli promises of transparency at some unspecified date in the future. Here are Miller’s exact words:

And so the Government of Israel has said that they are going to release more information about this strike, including the names of those who died in it. We expect them to be fully transparent in making that information public.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Fully transparent:

Full of carefully adjusted formulations and explanations that incontrovertibly reveal and make visible the capacity to establish lies as the only truths to be retained.

Contextual note

Miller literally needs to append the adverb “fully” to transparent because for the transparency to be full, a lot filler is required. And Israel has proved itself expert in offering filler. For example, it claims to have “the most moral army in the world.” Nobody in the State Department’s briefing room appears to believe that kind of transparency or the Biden administration’s repeated claim that they have not seen any evidence of human rights violations on the part of Israel.

Despite all that obvious doubt, the briefing continues with Miller’s insistence on the his faith in Israel’s future transparency. “So that’s why we are pressing the Government of Israel and the IDF to be completely transparent about what happened here. We want to know the facts as much as anyone.”

A bit later, we hear this: “As I said, we need to see what the facts are, and we expect them to make those facts public and be completely transparent about it.”

One journalist, noticing the obsessive use of the term, ended up calling into question the very idea of transparency in the following exchange:

QUESTION: You’ve said repeatedly “transparent,” that you’re looking for — for the Israelis to be transparent. I mean, the Israelis are basically saying that militants were killed. So I mean, do you expect them to investigate beyond that to see whether children were killed, civilians were killed? And is there a track record of Israel actually investigating that on the ground?

MR MIILLER: So two things. One, with respect to transparency, they have said that they will release the names of those who were killed.

QUESTION: The names of the militants or the names—

MR MIILLER: That is what they have said, and we’re going to watch and see what they do. If we think any further investigation is warranted after we see the results of what they announce first, we won’t hesitate to call on that, as we have in the past. 

But after Miller responds with more meandering, the journalist keeps up the pressure.

QUESTION: And just to put a point on that, I mean, do you think it’s — are you basically calling on Israel also to identify those who were killed who were potentially noncombatants, who were children? Do you expect Israel to do that?

MR MIILLER: So we want to — so I don’t know if they have any ability to do that, right, if they’re not there on the ground. But we want to know exactly what happened, and we’re willing to look at all sorts of information to determine that.

QUESTION: I’m sorry if you covered this before, but I mean, is — how are you going to know if the list of names that they release is accurate?

MR MIILLER: So we will — I don’t want to prejudge — it’s— it is—

QUESTION: I mean, I could make up a bunch of names right now and tell you—

MR MIILLER: It is — it is a good question.

And, of course because it’s a “good question,” there will be no response, transparent or opaque.

Historical note

State Department press briefings tend to resemble the plot of the famous Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day, where Murray’s character, a television weatherman, experiences the identical events of a single cold day in February over and over again. The endless series of State Department briefings on the war in Gaza is also a history told with a marked stutter. The only visible difference is that Murray’s character evolves in the course of the movie. The Biden administration’s doesn’t. It robotically repeats itself.

In Miller’s briefing, another journalist points to the fact that, throughout the long months since October 7, the State Department has built a history that consists of kicking the can down the road on the basis of an “expectation” of transparency in the future investigations Israel systematically promises.

Miller even appears to be aware of the Groundhog Day-esque dimension of the issue, but he is clearly far less troubled about it than Murray’s weatherman.

QUESTION: And so, what is their response these past two attacks that have used what they say are precision weapons but have been very destructive?

In his response, Miller acknowledges that Israel’s “claim is that they are using precision weapons and that they are using the smallest weapon possible to achieve the target. That said, we have obviously seen the reports of civilian harm.” He then even cites the horrendous details related to a recent atrocity, but this leads to the following reassuring comment: “They have an ongoing review of that. As far as I’m aware. It’s not been concluded yet. I know we haven’t been briefed on any review yet. And with respect to this one, we — as I said, we need to see what the facts are, and we expect them to make those facts public and be completely transparent about it.”

When he invokes the “ongoing review” and adds “as far as I’m aware,” it becomes clear that the motivation to become aware is not a priority. There is simply some kind of ill-defined expectation that Israel one day will be “completely transparent about it.” Miller then offers a bit of reasoning that can be called an extreme example of may be termed a “hyper-conditional” sentence, introduced with no less than four “ifs” followed by the conditional clause, “then we would fully expect…”

They have said to us that they are going to release information about…what the result of the strike was and who it was that was killed in the strike. I don’t believe they’ve announced an official review yet, but if they — if there — if it is shown — if there are shown to be civilian deaths, as the reports on the — from the ground appear to show, then we would fully expect them to review that, consistent with their code of conduct.

Miller and the State Department literally have “great expectations” on a Dickensian scale, though the historical rather than fictional context is closer to senseless tragedy than to Victorian melodrama. It’s telling however that the Biden administration has so much confidence in the “expected” results of “promised” investigations that can be counted on for their transparency.

The problem of transparency is that it is only real if it exists in the present. Future transparency is, by definition, a form of mendacity.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Transparency? The State Department’s Literally Full of It! appeared first on Fair Observer.

Subjectivity is therefore not only a component of all writing, but an essential ingredient. As readers, we should always seek to have a sense of the person or intelligence who’s speaking to us. Good readers want to situate them on some kind of cultural map. For that reason, fairness should never be conceived of as the quest for a middle position between extremes. That may seem logical in a two-dimensional world. But in a multi-dimensional world, the middle itself can be an extreme.

Last month, our readers had an opportunity to see how a flawed understanding of the principle of fairness can lead an author astray. On May 15, we published an article by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, “Arsenal of Genocide: This Is What the US Is Supplying Israel.” The authors are widely known for their commitment to the cause of peace and to the virtue of negotiation to end conflicts. On May 28, FO° Contributing Editor Christopher Roper-Schell published a polemical response with the provocative title, “On Gaza, CODEPINK Now Engages in Yellow Journalism.”

Christopher’s article begins by throwing punches provoked by the the word “genocide” in the title. In the first paragraph we read: “They don’t even bother to substantiate war crimes or a massacre. Frankly, such bald assertions are precisely what Fair Observer typically avoids, and that avoidance is one of the reasons I write here.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Bald assertions:

The preferred term used by lazy polemicists to describe the summary conclusions cited by those who draw their own conclusions from well-documented facts, especially when the facts in question are ones they themselves prefer to ignore.

Contextual note

Before going any further, I must explain that Christopher Roper-Schell is a valuable part of the Fair Observer team. I spent many agreeable moments in Christopher’s company in India two years ago.

Christopher is a card-carrying Republican. This background knowledge should help readers situate his vantage point. The same is true concerning the well-established public reputation in the media of Benjamin and Davies. Fair readers, like fair observers, should always take that kind of information on board as they tease out the meaning of what they read.

The opposite of a Republican, as everyone knows, is a Democrat. That long standing binary reality — despite growing ambiguity in recent years — has for at least a century constituted the ideological bedrock of political culture in the US. In most European countries, people might ask, “Which (of the plurality of parties) are you going to vote for?” In the US the choice has long been much simpler: “Are you a Republican or a Democrat?”

In other words, Christopher proudly proclaims his binary political and ideological allegiance, the tribe he belongs to. In contrast, Benjamin and Davies align themselves not with a given group of ambition-driven politicians but with a moral principle defined by their commitment to peace and a preference for negotiation over war. They have consistently opposed both the aggressive international politics of both Democrats and Republicans. This puts them in a minority within US political culture. War is, of course, more manly.

What does this mean for the reader of Christopher’s article? It contains what I would call a truly “bald assertion” about “what Fair Observer typically avoids.” As his senior, I would suggest that his article is more typical of what Fair Observer seeks to avoid. When opinion becomes pure partisan polemic, then the question of fairness comes to the fore.

Christopher’s first few paragraphs are essentially vituperative and invective. He complains about what the authors didn’t say. Didn’t he notice that the title containing the word he contests, “genocide,” indicates that the article is focused on the specific question of Washington’s role as a supplier of arms to Israel? He curmudgeonly reprimands the authors for not writing about the question he thinks is important: “how this started,” meaning, of course, the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel. Read the article, Christopher! It’s about what’s happening now, not eight months or 75 years ago. Had he done his research, he might have noticed that the authors already treated that in at least one earlier article we published.

Christopher fixates on the term “genocide.” He complains they “don’t bother to prove” that there is a genocide. The absurdity of his claim should be obvious to anyone following international news. In January, the International Court of Justice called Israel’s war a “plausible” genocide. A myriad of experts in international relations have gone further. These include Israeli historian and Holocaust scholar Raz Segal and Human Rights Watch co-founder and Holocaust survivor Aryeh Neier.

Perhaps Christopher would have better understood the title of the article he critiques if he had read as far as this sentence: “During the Second World War, the United States proudly called itself the ‘Arsenal of Democracy.’” In other words, in terms of cleverness of allusion, the wordplay in the original article is a serious notch above the facile and meaningless play on colors that equates a “pink” code with “yellow journalism.”

Fair Observer seeks to publish articles that reflect a variety of vantage points, each of which reflects a diversity of cultural, intellectual and political contexts. Cultures famously provide filters that make the same set of facts appear differently to different people. By respecting variety, we justify our claim to fairness. All three authors are American. One alone, however, is a Beltway Republican.

Historical note

The contrast between these two articles helps to illustrate a principle that has existed for many decades as a constant at the core of US culture: a preference for binary oppositions and an impatience with nuance, deemed a time-waster. This produces a Manichean approach to most serious problems. In practical terms, it means that there’s only one thing we need to know when discussing any issue: “Are you for it or against it?”  The Marx Brothers had fun parodying this feature of US culture. In the movie “Horsefeathers,” released in 1932, Groucho embodied this Yankee disgust with nuance in a medley of two songs: “(Whatever It Is,) I’m Against It” and “I Always Get My Man.”

The first paragraph of Christopher’s article makes it clear that whatever the article says, he’s against it. Groucho’s character would be proud of that unambiguous position. He would also appreciate the fact that Christopher tries to “get” not just his “man” but both the woman and the man he deems guilty of “yellow journalism.”

As “fair observers,” we should bear in mind that Benjamin and Davies’s article stands as an example of journalism that develops an argument from a non-binary position in multi-dimensional space. Between war and peace, both contained within their own inertia, it posits a third dynamic element: dialogue and resolution. Their position may seem extreme to someone who lives in a binary world. In purely objective terms, it may also be wrong or partial in the way it interprets certain facts since it reflects the authors’ commitment to clearly stated principles. It nevertheless defines a non-binary position and makes its argument by presenting a range of evidence. It puts forward clearly nuanced positions, such as this: “As with all these questions, we do not know the answers, but we should be skeptical of unverified atrocity claims.”

Christopher apparently knows all the answers. He bases his argument on two-dimensional logic, making claims that appear more accurately applied to his own writing than to his target: “Their narrative is wild and unsubstantiated. It’s also illogical.” What follows that accusation is Christopher’s egregious misreading of the point the original article is making.

Critical reading is what makes “fair observation” possible. We should consider it a prerequisite for critical thinking. But, my dear Christopher, try to appreciate that people who confine themselves to a binary, two-dimensional world — whether Republican or Democrat; warmonger or peacenik — will falter when faced with the nuance that comes from the unseen existence of even a third dimension.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Failings of Humorless Groucho-Marxism in a Multidimensional World appeared first on Fair Observer.

US President Joe Biden has never ceased aligning the adjectives that proclaim his nation’s unwavering, unbreakable, unreserved, iron-clad support for Israel. Earlier this month, however, he wavered ever so slightly — and only briefly —  when he chose to interrupt his regular delivery of the 2,000-pound bombs Israel needs in its quest to establish Greater Israel as a unified ethno-supremacist Jewish state.

In the meantime, the International Criminal Court prosecutor has requested an arrest warrant for Netanyahu as a war criminal. The International Court of Justice followed suit days later when it ordered Israel to halt its military operations on the town of Rafah which the IDF had previously designated as the last safe zone from Israeli bombing.

Grappo reveals the prevailing change of tone in Washington today. “Biden is fed up with Bibi’s resistance to addressing the Gaza humanitarian crisis satisfactorily (though matters have improved since early April), with his insistence on an all-out assault on Rafah, where refugees are still holed up, and with his refusal to articulate an effective plan for governance and security in Gaza after the war.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Satisfactorily:

To an extent that pleases someone in a position in power, who imposes standards of levels of acceptability even on concepts such as genocide.

Contextual note

The parenthetical remark “though matters have improved since early April” helps us to understand what the adverb “satisfactorily” means in this context. The usual version of political ethics in Washington appeals to a binary distinction between what is lawful or unlawful, good or evil. The qualifier “satisfactory” suggest the possibility of a gradation of nuance added to the usual Manichean moral framework. There may be a “more satisfactory” way of committing genocide.

This method of introducing a third term to soften the sharp edge of binary logic is not new. When I was in school in California in the 1960s, our teachers applied a ternary system to assess our behavior and work habits. The three terms were: E (Excellent), S (Satisfactory) and U (Unsatisfactory). Students capable of a minimum of self-control, some luck in having a captivating teacher worth listening to and a modicum of carefully managed flattery could earn an “E.” It wasn’t essential to strive for it, but it felt good when you got it. Most of us were reasonably happy with an S since either an E or an S put you on the right side of the law, shielding you from opprobrium. U alone branded you as a misfit.

Israel’s behavior before April was so bad that most reasonable people other than fanatical Zionists would have given it a U. As a nation, it had clearly become a misfit. The world’s international courts, NGOs specialized in human rights and quite a lot of neutral observers concurred. The UN’s International Court of Justice solemnly declared genocide a “plausible” description of Israel’s conduct of the war, another way of saying it was “unsatisfactory.”

Grappo’s term “satisfactorily” correctly helps us to understand the moral system shared by a tiny group of people in an enclave called “the Beltway,” known for its flexible ethics The starting point for Beltway reasoning is, of course, the distinction between good and evil. Things that favor peace, stability and US economic interests are good. Things that tend towards conflict, instability or that challenge the US idea of “freedom” are evil. When Russia unlawfully invaded Ukraine it immediately proved itself guilty of irrevocably unsatisfactory behavior. No need to explore why Putin may have had such an outlandish idea.

Manichean systems make life and moral judgment easy. Especially if you tend to think of everyone as a potential enemy. France, for example, earned a U in 2003 when it refused to join the Bush administration’s ethically motivated invasion of Iraq. A traditional, nearly “iron-clad” ally instantly became an adversary through its display of “unsatisfactory” behavior. That’s when French fries, in the White House cantine, were canceled and rebranded “freedom fries.”

For some reason, Washington’s relationship with Israel belongs to another ethical dimension. If friends like France can instantly become adversaries, there is also at least one friend that can never become an adversary, however outrageous its behavior. “Outrageous,” by the way, is the adjective Joe Biden chose to qualify the International Criminal Court’s decision to call Bibi’s behavior unsatisfactory!

Historical note

The current conflicts that dominate the headlines, despite the horrors they have produced, have the merit of raising the public’s awareness of an interesting historical trend. In our current conception of democracy, we have traditionally assumed that, because elected officials are deemed to be “representative,” the policies enacted by our governments correlate with the popular will. Most people aligned with the idea that the government was doing its best to respond to the wants and needs of its people. That belief has radically eroded in recent years.

Today’s pro-Palestinian protest movements on college campuses in the US are one obvious indication of that disconnect. But that is an isolated issue that reveals a lot but remains exceptional. At a deeper level, thanks to a 2014 Princeton study of how democratic politics works in the US, we can understand that US democracy has, in its depth, become a de facto oligarchy. The study demonstrated that the policies legislated, enacted and enforced by elected officials in their grand majority reflect the wishes of a wealthy, corporate elite, often in direct opposition to what used to be called “the will of the people.”

Back in 2014, the publication of the study had little impact. Mainstream media paid no attention to it. In times of peace, people tend to prefer to ignore the kind of bad news that requires reflection and the effort of remedying “unsatisfactory” behavior. In times of conflict, however, especially when serious moral questions are raised, the public’s awareness of what’s going on in the depths grows and can even become acute.

Everything that is happening in the world points in the direction of rethinking old relationships. It also implies calling into question the supposed majoritarian orientation of democratic societies. Fragmentation has become the new norm. This year’s presidential election in the US may end up electing Biden the Democrat or Trump the Republican, but the presence and attraction of third parties will have a major effect on the result. And neither Biden nor Trump truly represents a unified party that can pretend to represent a majority of the American people. Both major parties are irrevocably fractured. Traditionally, either a strong leader or a strong ideology — and ideally both — could unify a party. Nothing and no one appears to be capable of taking on that task.

Grappo tells us that “the majority of Israelis … want to see their leadership work more cooperatively with Washington and Israel’s moderate neighbors to confront the true existential threat to the Jewish state, Iran.” This vague formulation may contain some truth, but, even in this traumatized nation that wants in its vast majority to achieve security by eliminating Hamas, this is a particularly difficult time to get any clear idea of what an identifiable majority of Israelis want. Yes, security is the absolute priority. But I doubt that any pollster could find a consensus on the practical means of achieving that.

The EU parliamentary elections, only days away, are likely to demonstrate a similar trend in Europe’s democracies. While governments struggle to find satisfactory responses to questions of war and failing economies, their electors increasingly judge their governments’ conduct unsatisfactory.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Bibi’s Problem Is Now Biden’s Problem appeared first on Fair Observer.

To Scarborough’s surprise, the conversation quickly turned out to be slightly embarrassing. You can watch it here:

The discussion began with what even today every mainstream media commentator takes to be codified wisdom about Israel’s sacred right to self-defense when he solemnly asked his interlocutor, “What do we do the next time Israel is attacked from an outside force? What do we do at that point?”

Brzezinski brutally responded that it was “the wrong question.” Scarborough seemed shocked by his guest’s impertinence. Speaking from the position of regal authority that hosting a news show on MSNBC confers on him, Scarborough shot back by denying it was the wrong question before explaining what he believed to be the real problem: “We never get the condemnation of Hamas or Hezbollah. It’s always after Israel responds to defending itself.”

Brzezinski calmly responded, explaining that the conflict had “lasted for years and the United States has been largely passive, so the right question is not: ‘What do we do when things break down?’ The right question is: ‘What do we do to avoid a breakdown by being engaged seriously in the peace process.’”

Brzezinski then went on to explain that the failure to do so led to “the mess” that had become visible in 2009. This was too much for Scarborough, who had served as a Republican member of Congress from 1995 to 2001. Taking offense at the suggestion that Republicans had created the mess, he set the rules on what was and was not permitted. “You cannot blame what’s going on in Israel on the Bush administration.”

Unperturbed, the knowledgeable expert remained calm but couldn’t hold back. “You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Stunningly superficial knowledge:

The entire set of talking points adopted and enforced by members of the corporate media in the United States, who consider it their duty to repeat those talking points endlessly, even in the face of visible facts on the ground or the honest discourse of truly informed observers that incontrovertibly reveal them to be false.

Contextual note

This interview contains a curious tragi-comic twist that could not have been apparent at the time. In early 2017, eight years later, Scarborough became secretly engaged to his co-host Mika Brzezinski, the diplomat’s daughter. In that same month of May, Zbigniew died. Six months later, the marriage took place. At the time of the interview, Mika’s father could not have guessed that he was insulting the man destined to become his future son-in-law. At the time, Joe was happily married, at least until his divorce in 2013.

This interview took place in the transitional period between Obama’s election and his inauguration. The “Gaza war” of 2008 had begun three days earlier, a three-week war that resulted in the death of 1,400 Gazans, 13 Israelis and the destruction of 46,000 homes, leaving 100,000 homeless.

The media at the time treated the exchange between Joe and Zbigniew as at best an amusing anecdote. It takes on vastly more significance today with a new war in Gaza threatens to trigger a new world war. Fifteen years on, it tells us more about how the media has evolved, or rather failed to evolve since then. This time, Joe’s father-in-law cannot be present to highlight the media’s — and not just Joe’s — stunning superficiality.

Half a century ago, in the age of Walter Cronkite on CBS and Huntley and Brinkley on NBC, a news media figure lecturing an expert would have been unthinkable. Those journalists treated the news with humility. They sought to hear what the experts they interviewed would say. They refrained from spouting the government’s slogans at them.

Today’s news hosts and interviewers tend to be eponymous stars of shows highlighting their names. Whether its Morning Joe, Piers Morgan, Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson, these personalities see their mission as converting the audience to their position on politics, which generally represents somebody’s party line. Brzezinski was right to call Scarborough’s lazy thinking the repetition of “slogans.”

Fifteen years later, Scarborough continues to demonstrate his allergy to any form of critical thinking. On May 12, he posted on X a piece of obvious fake news that was quickly debunked. Scarborough has still not retracted it. The tweet reads: “UN halves estimates of women and children killed in Gaza. Apparently, the Hamas figures repeatedly cited are false.”

Scarborough’s figures, not the UN’s, are false. “Superficial” would be too kind an epithet to use today.

Historical note

Zbigniew Brzezinski counseled President Lyndon Johnson on foreign policy between 1966 and 1968. He earned his media stripes and became known to the public eight years later when Jimmy Carter made him the his foreign policy wizard. He thus replaced Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s Henry Kissinger as the “international brain” of the White House. The 1970s were that curious decade in which presidents felt obliged to feature a powerful thinker in their team to justify their foreign policy. Nixon had Kissinger; Carter chose Brzezinski.

Both achieved stardom thanks to their deep knowledge and strategic thinking. That doesn’t mean the policies they promoted were destined to prove more effective. They were simply better thought-out.

As a number of his obituaries last November revealed, many serious commentators today consider Kissinger an unmitigated war criminal. Brzezinski famously promoted the idea of the “Afghan trap” that pushed the US to support Afghan mujahideen fighters against the Soviets after their invasion. In retrospect, he was playing the sorcerer’s apprentice. That policy spawned the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a powerful and uncontrollable political force throughout the Middle East that also spilled into Europe.

Kissinger’s promotion of the “peace process” in the Middle East may have had similar effects, leading to today’s genocidal campaign and existential crisis. “The genius of [Kissinger’s] peace process,” according to US diplomat, Martin S. Indyk, “is that it wasn’t designed to produce peace, but it was designed to produce order.” The order it produced “made it possible for Israel to buy time,” which ultimately nourished the hegemonic obsession of Israel’s leaders.

Our civilization has shown a talent for letting local problems, deemed to require hegemonic leadership, spin out of control. We see it in Ukraine. We see it again in Gaza. It’s time to begin asking itself a deeply embarrassing question about how we frame the problems we seek to address. Are subtle thinkers like Brzezinski and Kissinger more dangerous than stunningly superficial media figures like Joe Scarborough? If Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow and Piers Morgan were the voices guiding our leaders, would the outcomes be better?

In reality, the “great strategists” and the media people are playing out their respective roles in a spectacle that not only has room for both but has found subtle ways of getting them to work side by side within the same dysfunctional system, even when they disagree. That’s because politicians manage the space between the two. Brzezinski’s explanation of the peace talks should have definitively settled the question of Yasser Arafat’s supposed “refusal” of the two-state solutions. And yet Hillary Clinton gets mountains of airtime making the same false claim as Scarborough even today.

At the end of the 2008 interview, Scarborough sarcastically “admitted” that he was “listening to the mainstream media too much.” He had cited The New York Times, The Washington Post and Foreign Affairs as his sources that he would now have to abandon.

Would he had actually done so 15 years ago!

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Dr. Brzezinski’s Stunning Revelation About the Peace Process appeared first on Fair Observer.

Back in 2017, Murray had made a major impact on British media with the publication of his book, The Strange Death of Europe. It provided a detailed justification of the kind of xenophobia that enabled the triumph of Brexit in the previous year’s referendum. In her review of the book, The Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff characterized Murray’s style of diatribe as that of someone specialized in delivering “a slightly posher, better-read, more respectable way of saying that you’d rather not live next door to Romanians or think Muslims are coming to rape your womenfolk.”

Brexit and the election of Donald Trump seemed to mark 2016 as the year when xenophobia became the new foundational value of a world order that everyone sensed was about to undergo serious change. Britain, for once, appeared to be the harbinger of things to come. Alongside the faux working-class demeanor of alehouse oracle Nigel Farage and the transparent, self-assured mendacity of Boris Johnson — the twin pillars of the “Leave” campaign — the nakedly vulgar xenophobia they championed desperately required a gentrified version to achieve full legitimacy.

That’s where Murray stepped up to the plate. His ideology was far more extreme, but it sounded much better educated because of his gift for condescending mockery, which he probably acquired as an Oxford debater. By 2016, Johnson’s own Oxford veneer had been seriously compromised by his years spent as hack tabloid journalist. Farage, of course, had no university credentials. Instead, in his own words, he thrived in public because he was “unafraid of the limelight, a bit noisy and good at selling things.” Murray, in contrast, appeared to be someone who delved below the surface to reveal deeper truths. All three of these promoters of xenophobia proved effective in their respective roles.

Xenophobia combines two well-known psychological psychiatric disorders. A 2021 European Management Review article explains the Brexit xenophobia in these terms: “Paranoia and narcissism combine to create the perfect xenophobic storm.” Murray’s brand of xenophobia may be the most perfect of them all.

Most people see xenophobia as correlating strongly with extreme nationalism. But nations no longer stand as the unique reference. In Murray’s case, the nation that was the “empire on which the sun never sets” now only receives its twelve hours of sunlight per day, more often than not interrupted by rain. Murray’s chauvinism now extends well beyond “this sceptered isle, other Eden, demi-paradise” to quote Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt in Richard II. Murray’s homeland is far too small. Like Hitler, he clearly requires more Lebensraum. In a speech he gave last week while accepting the Alexander Hamilton Award for his “unwavering defense of Western values,” Murray made clear that his homeland stretches westward, across the Atlantic and as far as the Pacific, and eastward, first to Ukraine and then beyond, to Israel, a nation he truly deems an “other Eden.”

In his speech, after evoking both Ukraine and Israel, Murray cites a UK poll that reports the depressing news that “a mere 27% of young people said that they would be willing to be enlisted to fight for their country.” He cites similar estimations in the US. “It doesn’t surprise me,” he continues, “that a lot of young Americans wouldn’t be willing to fight for their country if they’ve been told from the cradle that their country was rotten from birth and had nothing going for it other than slavery, colonialism and everything else. You’ve really got to miseducate Americans into this kind of self-loathing.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Self-loathing:

A pathological condition affecting the youth of Western countries that consists of employing their intellectual powers for the illegitimate purpose of critiquing their own government on the spurious grounds that its policies are in direct and flagrant contradiction with its stated democratic principles and humanistic ideals.

Contextual note

“Self-loathing” is a less common variant of the expression “self-hating.” The concept originated in the late 19th century with the rise of the Zionist movement. It became consecrated as an insult. “Self-hating Jews” became the go-to insult to apply to Jews who failed to identify with Zionist ideology or dared to critique the Zionists’ political ambitions.

In his diatribe against Americans reluctant to enlist and defend a foreign policy they find morally repugnant, Murray seriously stretches the meaning of “self-loathing.” The US defines itself as a land of racial and religious diversity. That means the root of individual identity for most Americans is very different from that of Jews. No one would imagine calling someone a “self-hating Roman Catholic” or a “self-loathing Korean,” “Mexican” or “Irishman.” No other religion or ethnicity expects members who identify with it to adhere and show indefectible loyalty to a political program. Islam, even when pushed to its theocratic extremes, does not conceive of using national politics as a litmus test for religious identity.

Most groups feel justified in highlighting and condemning disloyalty to the community or deviation from its norms. In the US, the emancipated black community used the label “Uncle Tom” to condemn blacks who appear to identify with a white supremacist order. But no one would regard them as self-hating.

How is it, then, that, among ethnic and religious minorities, Jews alone can be saddled with the term “self-hating?” And where does the British Douglas Murray find the presumption to call another group of people, defined by their citizenship alone, “self-loathing?” That’s a case of pushing xenophobia beyond even the extremes Murray seems so comfortable with.

Historical note

Murray is a Manichean thinker and a professional pessimist who has famously written about “the strange death of Europe.” But the obituary should not concern Europe alone. Instead, accumulating evidence points towards an ongoing decline and potential impending death, not of Europe nor the West itself, but of the Western “rules-based order.” For all his intellectual credentials, Murray appears little interested in analyzing “order.” That implies understanding organic structure and non-linear thinking. Murray prefers raw emotion and decisive action, preferably in the form of combat. Systems, whether declining or emerging, to the extent they are systems, will adapt to and counter the kind of decisive action Murray envisions.

The Israeli system, as it has functioned at least since 1967, cannot survive. Israel as a state may and should survive, but the system will have to assume a different profile or perish. Creative minds should be focused on retrieving what is viable within it to ensure systemic adjustment. But Manicheans, like Murray or the current Washington, DC, power structure, notoriously resist thinking in those terms.

Murray endorses manifestly genocidal violence with enthusiasm because he believes it is a response to absolute evil. His side is the enlightened European tradition now dying in Europe but thriving in the US, Ukraine and Israel. He calls Hamas “a cult of death, a cult that wishes to annihilate an entire race, and which, after dealing with that race, has made very clear what it wants to do with Christians, everyone in Britain, everyone in America and everyone else next.” This is a wild, unjustified, irresponsible fantasy, like the idea that Putin will not stop at Ukraine, but seek to conquer the rest of Europe.

Hamas is clearly guilty of terrorist acts, which it carries out in the name of resistance to occupation. But it is clearly not a cult of death. Neither is Israel, even though its state terrorism easily eclipses in scale the very real crimes of Hamas.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Fear of Critical Thinking Is the Ultimate Xenophobia appeared first on Fair Observer.

The drama that played out over two weeks in NYC inspired similar demonstrations in campuses across the nation. Though the police effectively cleared Columbia out, the protests and encampments are continuing and are likely to continue in New York and elsewhere. Depending on external events (notably in the Palestine itself) there may even be a buildup of tension culminating, like in 1968, in protests at the Democratic Convention, coincidentally planned to take place this summer in Chicago as it did 56 years ago.

That is not a prospect anyone in the establishment relishes. Predictably, the immediate response articulated by practically everyone in a position of authority has been to seek a way of nipping the protests in the bud. That at least is how New York City’s mayor and former police captain, Eric Adams saw it when he explained: “There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not going to wait until it’s done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it.”

He doesn’t want to “wait until it’s done” and be caught be surprise. Time may not be money in this case, but to his mind, it is security. The status quo will always fear radicality, even when the same status quo is quite happy chugging along with an unfolding genocide.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Radicalize (young people):

Allow a generation to develop a moral conscience concerning questions the previous generations have struggled mightily to remove from their field of awareness.

Contextual note

Mayor Adams called the crackdown “a necessary response to chaos perpetuated by external actors.”

We might expect Adams’ impatience with visible disorder within the city’s precincts to be the logical choice of a former police officer, but not necessarily of politicians, and certainly not educational authorities. Universities have traditionally held a special status in US culture, which sees them as not entirely dissimilar to churches. Many people believe a university’s student body, composed of inquiring adults, should enjoy a margin of maneuver greater than elsewhere in society. Colleges are spaces charged with fostering intellectual liberty.

Times have clearly changed. The Washington Post describes the attitude that a majority of university administrations now assume, closer to privileging censorship than freedom of thought. “As pro-Palestinian student protests surged in the past week, universities responded with consequences not imposed en masse for decades: suspensions, expulsions and arrests, hoping to tamp down a spiraling movement that has inflamed passions on all sides.” After evoking historical protest movements from the war in Vietnam to South Africa apartheid, the Post adds this observation: “Nothing since then has come close to this sort of disciplinary crack down.”

Caitlin Johnstone has documented the effort made by media as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, The Washington Times and, of course, politicians and the New York Police Department, intent on instilling the idea that sinister forces are at work seeking to subvert the peaceful order all US institutions are committed to. We inevitably learn that “that foreign governments are behind this new protest movement to radicalize young people against Washington and Israel” and, as Johnstone notes, we now consider normal “that it is the job of the police to control the spread of unauthorized political opinions.” This used to be considered a feature of totalitarian regimes.

To get a better grip on the change that has taken place, I suggest a thought experiment that appeals to counterfactual history. Imagine we’re back in the early 1940s in Hitler’s Germany. Some groups of students have learned that their nation has a secret program to round up and exterminate the “inferior races.” Appalled by the injustice of such a plan, some of the students decide to protest with the idea of drawing the general population’s attention to their passive complicity in a genocide. Knowing what we know about the Nazi regime, no one could doubt that the protests would have been short-lived. The Gestapo would waste no time suppressing them.

With no social media at the time and full control of all available media, the Nazis had little to fear. They had the enormous advantage of being able to hide their genocide from their own population. But what if these imaginary students had learned about it and attempted to protest it? What would today’s history books say about them?

Not only would these “radical troublemakers” be hailed as heroes and martyrs for human rights, but we would also qualify their behavior as exemplary and point to them as models to emulate. They alone would be pointed for courageously standing up to the challenge of their time.

Nazi genocide was invisible because no one was allowed to see. Today’s genocide is, for some, invisible because they don’t wish to see it. 

Historical note

There’s nothing new about student protests. In some ways, today’s movement resembles the spectacular events that roiled American civilization in the 1960s. In others, as we shall see, the resemblance is real but only superficial.

In the first months of 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who earned his reputation as an effective reformer — the champion of a “war on poverty,” civil rights and the “great society” — had committed the nation to what people increasingly perceived as an unwanted, unwinnable and immoral war in Vietnam. The generation of youngsters who were expected to participate in that war not only rejected the politics that would oblige them to go halfway around the world on a mission to murder people who in no way threatened them, but they called into question the conformist, productivist and consumerist culture that the authorities and their parents expected them to gratefully embrace.

The long-haired hippies had lost faith in crewcut culture. The civil rights movement clued them into the fact that WASP culture (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) could be and maybe even had to be oppressive. The war in Vietnam, launched to prevent theoretical dominoes from falling, threatened their very lives. Their rallying slogan became: “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”

Sixty years later, it thus appears striking that Columbia University, the epicenter of the anti-war movement in 1968, should emerge as the locus of a movement that has now spread across dozens of campuses to protest not against a foreign war initiated by the US, but this time against the nation’s passive complicity in a perceived genocide. Eric Clapton’s group The Cream summed up the feelings of the epoch: “I found out today we’re going wrong.” There was a vague sentiment that we had gone adrift. In contrast, today it’s about the specific reality of a visible genocide taking place in a country that has been declared an indefectible ally: Israel.

60 years ago, an entire generation felt out of place. The violence of an incomprehensible assassination in November 1963 was followed, in August 1964, by the outbreak of a war we needed to embrace in a remote corner of Asia. Dr. Stragelove appeared in cinemas midway between those two events. The 50s were long gone. LSD, rather than Miller High Life beer, became the means of escaping from the ennui of the consumer society and its expanding military-industrial complex.

By 1966, dodging the draft became a goal shared by most boys, their girlfriends and their mothers. Somewhat less so by their fathers. Opposing Lyndon Johnson’s war made a lot of pragmatic sense for those of us who were preparing for life in the adult world and attempting to imagine our futures.

2024 is vastly different. Generation Z is different. The witnesses I’ve spoken to today are aware not of an annoying obstacle to their future but of a stark moral dilemma. What may be more extraordinary is that their commitment, instead of being framed as a refusal to be sacrificed for a cause they reject, represents a willingness to suffer and even to compromise their future because of their values.

Only a scoundrel could explain that as “radicalization.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Radically Camping Out at Columbia appeared first on Fair Observer.

The revolutionary idea I’m referring to inverts the standard moral logic our society has traditionally applied to war. Some clever pundits and politicians have successfully applied that great American resource, “the power of positive thinking” to remove the traditional stigma of war as evil and turn it into a model of good financial management.

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell may have been the first to articulate the idea. To mark the anniversary of Russia’s invasion in February 2023, the minority leader of the Senate proclaimed that “U.S. aid to Ukraine is a ‘direct investment’ in the country’s interests and against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘war machine’.” To buttress his case, he indulged his fancy, imagining the geopolitical future as if it were a scenario in a video game. “If Putin were given a green light to destabilize Europe, invading and killing at will, the long-term cost to the United States in both dollars and security risks would be astronomically higher than the minuscule fraction of our GDP that we have invested in Ukraine’s defense thus far.” McConnell’s Putin isn’t Hitler. He’s Genghis Khan as a character in an action-packed Hollywood movie.

McConnell sowed the seed that seven months later flowered and took a more realistic form in the brain of former private equity executive and presidential candidate Senator Mitt Romney. After evoking Washington’s noble effort to use Ukraine to weaken the Russian economy, he explained: “To be able to do that with five per cent of your military budget strikes me as an extraordinarily wise investment and not by any means something we can’t afford.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Investment:

In classic capitalism the allocation of money to create value; in late-stage capitalism, the allocation of money to destroy challenges to monopoly.

Contextual note

What McConnell and Romney may have intended more as a metaphor that literal truth has taken its place as orthodoxy in the Beltway credo about Ukraine. It has become to go-to argument evoked endlessly and with great solemnity by NATO’s secular priesthood, in the US and Europe in its effort to overcome Republican resistance to further funding for Ukraine.  

In the runup to last month’s successful vote in the House, the Atlantic Council echoed Romney’s description: “To be able to do that with five per cent of your military budget strikes me as an extraordinarily wise investment and not by any means something we can’t afford.”

In February of this year, NATO chief Jan Stoltenberg parroted the same message. “I strongly believe that it’s a good deal for the United States to support Ukraine. It’s not charity, it’s an investment into their own security.” He then made a key point: “By allocating a fraction of our defense budgets we have enabled the Ukrainians to destroy significant parts of the Russian combat capability without putting any NATO soldier, any US soldier, in harm’s way.”

UK foreign minister and former Prime Minister Lord David Cameron made the same case just a month ago. “I argue that it is extremely good value for money for the United States and for others. Perhaps for about five or 10% of your defense budget, almost half of Russia’s pre-war military equipment has been destroyed without the loss of a single American life. This is an investment in United States security.” The recently named lord is no elitist. He uses the language of the consumer society to make his case when he points out it is “a good value for money.”

Lord Cameron didn’t stop there. In so doing, he absurdly appeared to endorse Putin’s own assessment of Western policy when he claimed back in July 2022 that the West would wage a war “until the last Ukrainian is left standing.” Here are Cameron’s words uttered in April 2024: “The best thing we can do this year is to help keep the Ukrainians in this fight. They’re fighting so bravely — they’re not going to lose for want of morale.”

Western leaders see this prolongable war as an investor’s dream scenario. Not only is profit guaranteed; there is zero risk since none of our people are dying for the cause. The profit to be calculated is any damage the Ukrainians manage to do to Russia. In such a scenario, the cost to the economy isn’t zero. Better than that, it’s negative. This support of Ukraine has allowed the West to clear out its ancient stocks of armaments and begin producing a generation of up-to-date weaponry. And, though the same investment analysts avoid mentioning it, even the monetary cost ultimately falls on the Ukrainians. These are sales of weapons, on a lend-lease basis, and not outright gifts. The Ukrainians are a godsend to America: an entire population ready to pay in both dollars and their lives to fulfill Washington’s mission of neutralizing Russia.

Of course, the only people who actually do have to pay for the expense are Western taxpayers. They supply the money that goes directly to the great arms manufacturers, whose wealth already rivals Croesus.

In other words, we can compare Western politicians to teenagers playing a video game. They can try all kinds of things that may fail, producing impressive explosions, knowing that in all cases they and their people will live to play again. Even better, as the Center for Strategic International Studies argues, this video game simulation we call a war provides the main player an opportunity to improve its skills and confirm its dominant position, even in relation to its allies: “Such aid helps to rebuild and strengthen the role America plays as the de facto leader of the West and other democratic states.”

War used to be about measuring and parrying the risk to one’s own troops, national infrastructure and the nation’s citizens. All that has changed. With the knowledge that only the citizens of a distant land will be sacrificed, one can freely speculate on the financial gains such an operation should produce.

Historical note

Why has no one in the media noticed this change of attitude that has taken place over the past few decades?

During the Vietnam War, the message on one side was “make love, not war.” On the other side, it was a form of historical teleology celebrating the emergence of the greatest nation in the history of the world, buttressed by a domino theory. It reflected Superman’s mission: to fight for “truth, justice and the American way.” In those pre-Gordon Gekko days, no one would have confused “the American way” with Gekko’s dictum, “greed is good.” But Gekko’s thinking has structured the current ideology. The current motto could be formulated as “make money, not war nor love.” But arrange things so that others make war and do the actual fighting.

The Superman cartoons of the 1950s provided the ultimate justification for the military-industrial complex (MIC) that was taking root at that time. It has become possibly the most effective instrument of greed mankind has ever invented. Unlike Midas, Croesus, Lorenzo de Medici or even John D Rockefeller, the MIC is a truly democratic institution, insofar as it is open to all those with the ambition to embrace it. It is composed of a series of entities that exercise an unassailable monopoly that promotes a stratospheric concentration of wealth.

The MIC includes much of the government itself, to the extent that its members are treated to a permanent ride on what may be described as the fast track for insider trading, Some, more skillful and motivated than others, are particularly adept at exploiting its promise. Others avoid the temptation while tacitly acknowledging and accepting its existence. It is democratic in the sense that it sits there for everyone’s eventual profit. And that is precisely why the media – who have their own privileged place within the complex – avoid answering the question I asked at the beginning of this section.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What is the Share Price of Ukraine’s War? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Avoiding defeat is one thing. But neither Secretary of State Antony Blinken nor even the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, who in March proclaimed “Ukrainian victory is good for the world, and it is good for us,” dares to claim that the new package will guarantee a Ukrainian victory.

In such a context, we should retain exactly three possible hypotheses:

1. A Russian victory sealed by a Ukrainian surrender,

2. A negotiated settlement before things become much worse,

3. A prolonged war along the model of Afghanistan.

The US and NATO have famously promised for the past two years to carry on the war “as long as it takes.” No one will accept the first hypothesis, which would be a total humiliation after only two year. The humiliation in Afghanistan happened so long after the start of the war, that it seemed almost natural.

With the hypothesis of a Ukrainian victory no longer seriously entertained, only choices 2 and 3 remain. The choice of a prolonged war would be consistent with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s famous assertion that the goal of the fight was “weakening Russia.” But prolonging the war has been seriously called into question by the reluctance of Republicans to keep funding the war effort. It is further compounded by the prospect of Donald Trump winning the presidency in November.

Has the idea of a negotiated settlement has now become a serious talking point? That is what the authors of an important article in Foreign Affairs appears to be saying. The article that bears the title “The Talks That Could Have Ended the War in Ukraine” asks this question:

“What did the Russians want to accomplish by invading Ukraine? On February 24, 2022, Putin gave a speech in which he justified the invasion by mentioning the vague goal of ‘denazification’ of the country. The most reasonable interpretation of “denazification” was that Putin sought to topple the government in Kyiv, possibly killing or capturing Zelensky in the process.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Most reasonable interpretation:

The one preferred by the speaker even when there is no factual basis for accepting it.

Contextual note

The authors, Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko have filled their article with a dog’s dinner of facts, conjectures and, of course, “reasonable interpretations.” My own conjecture is that the point of publishing such an article in Foreign Affairs is to prepare the public for a negotiated end to a war that Ukraine and NATO now realize they cannot win.

The $61 billion package for Ukraine’s defense will undoubtedly be the last one the embattled nation will receive from the US Congress. The months-long struggle to get that legislation through has forced the Washington elite formerly committed to fighting “as long as it takes” to accept the possibility of not achieving that goal. This will lead to an inevitable loss of face, but Charap and Radchenko’s article may be designed to limit the damage. After two years of denial negotiations, it won’t be easy. “When we put all these pieces together,” they tell us as if discovering some unsuspected truth, “what we found is surprising—and could have significant implications for future diplomatic efforts to end the war.”

The political game in Washington in this election year has become complex, especially when it comes to yet another failed military engagement. Democrats can still blame Republicans for creating the conditions for Ukraine’s defeat by holding back the funds the Democrats considered so necessary. Republicans, however, can now say that they honored their sentiment of solidarity Ukraine but that the ultimate result demonstrates that they were right to resist continuing to finance a lost cause. Both of those “interpretations” can be considered “reasonable.”

So, is the article a belated endorsement coming from the Washington elite of the idea that negotiations in 2022 should have been allowed to succeed? The authors also don’t quite go that far. They develop what I’m tempted to call the ChatGPT defense. Whenever confronted with a challenge to “official truth” contradicted by apparent facts, the AI chatbot consistently applies a three-word formula. It calls the issue “complex and multifaceted.”

Charap and Radchenko begin by signalling two opposing interpretations of the facts dating from March/April 2022. One version points to the claim that a nearly completed agreement between Ukraine and Russia had been reached. The other is the one held by those who “dismissed the significance of the talks entirely.” This is where the authors develop their ChatGPT defense: “Although those interpretations contain kernels of truth, they obscure more than they illuminate. There was no single smoking gun; this story defies simple explanations.”

The “reasonable interpretation” the authors put forward turns out to be a little more ornate than ChatGPT’s economical reasoning, but the intent is identical. Did the West block the negotiations? Or was there no serious likelihood that they might succeed? The authors cite a litany of true but largely anecdotal observations before culminating with a critique of the scope and ambition of contents of the proposed agreement, informing us that it was over-ambitious.

“They tried to deliver an overarching settlement even as a basic cease-fire proved out of reach.” Aiming for an “overarching settlement” to end a war would, in the authors’ eyes, be inappropriate. They don’t bother to explain why. They do, however, observe that “Putin and Zelensky surprised everyone with their mutual willingness to consider far-reaching concessions to end the war. They might well surprise everyone again in the future.”

That appears to be the point. The public now needs to get ready for a “surprise,” which is one way of sugar-coating a humiliating defeat.

Historical note

Foreign Affairs is unquestionably one of the most influential political magazines in the US. Although it can be counted on most of the time to reflect the orthodox thinking of the foreign policy establishment and the Ivy League elite, it has a track record of publishing seminal articles that shapes the discourse on international relations for Washington’s policymakers and the nation’s media. George Kennan’s “X Article” in 1947 and Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” in 1993 stand as two examples of landmark contributions to the evolving worldview shared amongst the intellectual classes of the role of the US in the world.

Both Kennan and Huntington expressed original interpretations that influenced the direction of foreign policy for the following decades. Kennan articulated the Soviet containment policy that underlay most of the decisions made during the Cold War. It directed influenced President John F Kennedy’s reasoning that allowed him to avoid war during the Cuban missile crisis. In contrast, the same commitment to containment guided Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, to justify waging war with a non-nuclear enemy in Vietnam. Samuel Huntington’s article conveniently provided the rationale that permitted President George W. Bush to launch his “Global War on Terror” a decade later.

The consequences of those reorientations of Beltway thought are still playing out today in the most dramatic fashion. The conflict in Gaza falls into Huntington’s logic of a clash of civilizations whereas the logic behind the war in Ukraine has its roots in the containment strategy that led to the creation of NATO. The historical conditions have changed but the ideological reflexes are still in place.

The logic that spawned NATO should have disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Kennan himself observed in 1998: “I think [NATO expansion] is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.” Continuing Kennan’s reasoning, John Mearsheimer pointed out in a “controversial” article published by Foreign Affairs in March 2015, that NATO expansion into Ukraine, if pursued, would inevitably provoke a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Because Mearsheimer was “controversial” no one needed to take seriously his predictions.

So, should we now take seriously a hint in Foreign Affairs that a negotiated settlement is in the offing and that NATO’s eastward expansion will finally be stopped in its tracks? That would be a sea-change after 75 years of NATO. And though it will likely create a shock, it may just happen.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Has Foreign Affairs Begun a Love Affair With Diplomacy? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Iran sought to reassure the rest of the world by defining the entire exercise, not as an act of war, but as a calculated response to Israel’s provocation. Iran addressed the following message to the United Nations.

In the statement posted on social media platform X, Iran’s UN mission argued that the attack was conducted under Article 51 of the UN Charter, which pertains to legitimate defense, and that the matter could be “deemed concluded.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Deemed concluded:

Paid in full, in the interest of allowing life to carry on as usual, though in today’s Middle East a debt paid in full appears to have the curious characteristic of continuing to accrue interest.

Contextual note

The reigning equilibrium in the Middle East was already a murderous game in which Israel has conducted a wide range of isolated covert operations, including targeted assassinations of government officials and scientists. The events of April that began with the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus have changed the nature of that game. For the moment, the contest resembles a 19th-century duel rather than, say, a boxing match. But that may change in the coming days.

The world is now left to speculate nervously about Israel’s next move. Governments that most enthusiastically support Israel — notably the US and Germany — have already begun taking what appear to be serious steps to restrain Netanyahu’s right wing government from succumbing to the same spirit of vengeance against Iran that it so enthusiastically manifested against the population of Gaza following Hamas’s assault on October 7.

In other words, Israel refuses to deem the game concluded. In contrast, the rest of the world appears ready to align with US President Joe Biden, who recommended to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu to “take the win” and get back to his principal business: completing his campaign of genocide.

There remains nevertheless a nagging problem. Even if Israel could decide to do something purely symbolic designed to avoid provoking a more lethal response from Iran, many informed observers, such as Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara, believe that Bibi’s goal — whether for personal or political reasons — is to provoke a regional war in which the US will become fatally involved. Bibi’s first concern is to remain at the helm and avoid being cast into prison as a common criminal.

Consequently, the world is on the brink and everyone’s nerves are on edge. Since all that is left to us at this point is creative speculation, let’s try to understand how the US might react if Israel does opt for serious provocation. We know Biden has reaffirmed his “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s defense. He has also insisted on his “devotion” to the Israeli cause. “Devotion” is a religious term that indicates faith in a superior power and submission to that power. That language alone should give us pause.

Hedging his bets, Biden has also refused to participate in any offensive move Israel may make against Iran. But this is potentially contradictory. Does his “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s defense leave him any room to wiggle out of a commitment to supporting Israel if effectively provokes a war with Iran?

Given the recent history of “forever wars” in the Middle East, many of us are left wondering whether this isn’t the sign of an addiction. The behavior of the US increasingly resembles that of an addict with a dealer. There are only two standard solutions to heroin addiction: a managed methodone treatment — relief without the kick — or what junkies call “cold turkey.” Biden’s problem is that turkey day in the US — Thanksgiving — will occur three weeks after this year’s presidential election in which he is hoping against hope to defeat his nemesis, Donald Trump.

Historical note

Most of the media have chosen to grace Iran’s assault with the epithet “unprecedented.” This is, after all, the first time in at least two millennia that Persians have attacked an independent Jewish nation. Something like this has not occurred since the geopolitical predecessor of the Persian Empire, Assyria, took the kingdom of Israel into captivity all the way back in 732 BC.

Iran clearly designed its attack to appear as a forceful but essentially symbolic retaliation for the murder of two of its leading military commanders and eleven other people in Israel’s attack on its consulate in Damascus. Given the fact that Iran had warned neighboring countries some 72 hours in advance that its retaliatory strike in response to Israel’s April 1 attack was imminent, there was no legitimate reason to revert to the habit of calling it “unprovoked.” This had become the standard epithet used by the media and politicians to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s October 7 assault. Instead, everyone seemed to agree that “unprecedented” was a reasonable substitute that, like “unprovoked,” suggested the innocence of the victim.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise nevertheless diverged from the consensus. He maintained what has now become the conditioned Pavlovian reflex of dismissing the facts of history as irrelevant. NPR reports his assertion that, “The House of Representatives stands strongly with Israel, and there must be consequences for this unprovoked attack.”

To any other than the obtusely ignorant, Iran’s attack was obviously not “unprovoked.” And yet, not only did Scalise use this term, NPR in its reporting neglected to highlight the absurdity of Scalise’s claim, which should be recognized as a clear case of disinformation. The media appears increasingly intent on proving its incapacity to notice the obvious and to comment on it.

An article by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim that appeared this week on The Intercept may help us to understand how today’s media can fail to notice or react to the obvious. The title of the article is: “LEAKED NYT GAZA MEMO TELLS JOURNALISTS TO AVOID WORDS “GENOCIDE,” “ETHNIC CLEANSING,” AND “OCCUPIED TERRITORY.”

The article confirms that The New York Times uses language not to inform, but to create a system of belief for its readers. That means cultivating their readers’ indifference to how language is used. This may seem odd in an era in which everyone seems obsessed with rooting out “disinformation.”

Mainstream media now identifies with the mission of “fact-checking.” If the facts cited in an article are verifiable, the article is deemed trustworthy. But for NYT some facts are better not mentioned. In January, the International Court of Justice deemed plausible case the description of Israel’s behavior in Gaza as genocide. That does not mean genocide is a fact. But it does mean that the accusation of genocide by South Africa and others is a fact not contradicted by any other facts. But NYT has identified some facts as too inconvenient to be “fit for print.” Such facts might have the disturbing characteristic of inciting people to think critically about the events the paper reports.

After citing Scalise, NPR sees no reason to critique this obviously false claim. In the website’s defense, it is sticking to the facts by simply quoting what Scalise actually said. It might, however, have noted that what he says is not factual. The second reason is that American politicians and the media have been conditioned to call any aggressive action by a party considered to be an adversary “unprovoked.”

This is all part of a “moral system” shared in the West. Evil people (e.g., Russians, Iranians, Hamas) exist to commit evil acts. Good people are incapable of provoking those evil acts. Consequently, whenever an evil act occurs, by definition it must be unprovoked.

NPR’s article concludes by quoting a series of quotes by legislators insisting on the importance of providing financial support to the victims of all the unprovoked evil acts by parties identified as evil enemies. In such circumstances, no conflict will ever be deemed concluded, until we achieve the total annihilation of those who provoke without ever being provoked. That helps to explain why negotiation will always be rejected as an inadequate and inappropriate solution.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Iran and Israel: In Conclusion, There’s No Conclusion appeared first on Fair Observer.

After the slaughter last week of seven members of the staff of World Central Kitchen, an atrocity that shocked the world, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu reassuringly announced: “The IDF is conducting a swift and transparent investigation and we will make our findings public.” 

C-Span quoted State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller who “says the U.S. wants to see a ‘full, swift, and transparent investigation’ into the killing of the aid workers.” White House National Security Spokesman, John Kirby called for “a broader investigation to be conducted and to be done so in a swift and comprehensive manner.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Swift and transparent investigation:

An organized effort aimed at disseminating a rapidly produced and easy-to-see-through distortion of the truth.

Contextual note

Where Blinken says “thorough,” Miller says “full,” whereas Kirby prefers “comprehensive.” They are all reading from the same hymn book, provided initially by Netanyahu, but graced by minor variations to the official lyrics, presumably in an effort to demonstrate their creativity and affirm their personality. But their creative pleonasms add nothing new as they appear to agree on one thing: to cover for acts of wanton destruction.

Kirby expressed his hope that “those findings will be made public and that there is appropriate accountability.” He appears to admit that if the findings prove embarrassing,  as is most likely, they won’t be made public. Under questioning from a press corps clearly troubled by the attack, Kirby at one point was reduced to this awkward waffling: “We look forward to that investigation being thorough and qui- — and swiftly done and, as I said, that — that it’ll be transparent, the results of it, and that if there’s accountability that needs to be had, that it will be had.”

Kirby’s choice of vocabulary, reinforced by his body language, appeared very revealing. Anyone listening would have noticed that he began to say “quick” but interrupted himself to substitute “swiftly done.” Presumably, he realized that the idea of quick could appear to contradict the idea that it might be thorough, which he had just solemnly affirmed. “Swiftly done” is clearly a better choice. Quick implies haste.

Even more significant is Kirby’s choice of verbs. “We look forward to the investigation being thorough” is far more noncommittal than “we expect” or, even more affirmatively, “we will insist.” As an essential backer of Israel, Washington presumably has the moral authority to use its pressure in the interest of establishing the truth. Some legal minds have even pointed out that the US has a binding legal obligation to assess the degree to which a nation it aids militarily may be committing war crimes and to act accordingly by refusing to provide weaponry.

Kirby goes on to assert speculatively: “If there’s accountability that needs to be had, that it will be had.” Spoken in these conditional terms, he treats the idea of accountability as a kind of remote possibility, something he doesn’t expect to see. In other words, his default position appears to be that, when Israel is concerned, accountability is never a priority. At least he is correctly describing historical reality. American officials in the military, the State Department and right up to the president have all acquired the habit of adhering to the idea that “we will support Israel no matter what.”

Kirby makes this principle clear. “Right now, we are continuing to support Israel because they continue to need military assistance because they continue to face a viable threat.” To make his case he feels the need to concatenate two successive “because” clauses. This piling on stands as a rhetorical admission that support is unconditional, meaning any true accountability is unthinkable.

Politico offered this assessment: “President Joe Biden was privately enraged by the deadly strike and in a public statement upbraided Israel for it, calling for ‘accountability’ to those responsible and demanding more humanitarian assistance be allowed into Gaza. But two senior administration officials said that is as far as he and the White House will go for now.” Politico’s headline reads:

‘Angry’ Biden not changing Israel policy after deadly strike on aid workers.”

The scare quotes around ‘angry’ indicate a measure of doubt about the sincerity behind Biden’s rage.

Historical note

In a moment of creative speculation, thinking outside the box, I wondered whether the choice of the adjective “swift” proposed by Netanyahu and all US spokesmen might not be an unconscious allusion to the 18th century satirical writer Jonathan Swift, the author of “Gulliver’s Travels.” Swift excelled excelled at exposing hypocrisy, most famously in his mock government white paper that bore the title: “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.”

Swift employed an extreme form of irony in his “Modest Proposal” as he mockingly argued that an eminently practical solution existed to reduce the risk of starvation in Ireland. It consisted of selling Irish babies to the English, who could easily afford to purchase these culinary delicacies. In other words, feed Irish babies to the British elite to reduce poverty in Ireland.

Israel has never been interested in cannibalism. But its actions have added a further level of irony to Swift’s already black humor, making the satirist’s cannibalistic tale sound slightly less horrendous than what has actually been taking place in Gaza. Swift cleverly invoked a form of humanitarian concern as he claimed that shipping babies as food for discerning Englishmen was a response to the fear of famine in Ireland. Israel, in contrast, has been indiscriminately slaughtering all civilians, including entire families in their homes, with a majority of the victims being women and children, not for relief of the afflicted or food for the privileged, but just to cynically eliminate as many as possible.

The obscenity of this campaign has led some to believe history has reached a point of no return. It was only three decades ago that Francis Fukuyama, in a celebrated essay, announced the impending end of history as the forces of liberal democracy triumphed over the totalitarian movements that had come to the fore in the 20th century.

In the meantime, we have seen that history still had its word to add to the conversation. No one, however, expected that the worst of totalitarian crimes, wrought by the Nazis against the Jews, might, in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat, be replicated with growing enthusiasm by some of its own designated victims. Israel has changed the rules of the game of war in the 21st century. It has reverted to a mentality similar in significant ways to what the worst 20th century totalitarians attempted. The only seemingly reasonable and civilized way to deny that is to quibble, as most defenders of Israel do, over the definition of the term, genocide.

The US government refuses even to acknowledge that purely linguistic debate. Instead, it prefers to invoke investigations that will be characterized as “swift” before they even begin, then referred to as “ongoing” but incomplete as time goes by, and later, after an indefinite lapse of time, dismissed as “old business” as the facts concerned are overtaken by more recent events requiring the next round of swift investigation.

This logic became clear when Kirby responded to a journalist’s question about the US evaluation of other reported war crimes over the past six months. “I’m telling you,” Kirby insisted, “the State Department has looked at incidents in the past and has yet to determine that any of those incidents violate international humanitarian law.” He is certainly aware of the assessment of the International Court of Justice that drew a clearly emitted the contrary hypothesis.

This is the time-tried tactic of complaining that so long as there is no smoking gun, no accusation need be taken seriously. In Gaza, however, there are hundreds of square kilometers of smoking rubble and, as of last week, seven new charred bodies before hundreds more to come.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How to Swiftly and Transparently Justify a War Crime appeared first on Fair Observer.

Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith posted the text of what Taibbi calls an “ominous letter from its ad service company” on the journal’s website.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Flag:

Formerly the carefully composed symbol displayed by a group of people to signify their presence and their unity, now the badge of shame of people whose thinking and expression fails to conform to strictly defined norms.

Contextual note

Smith explains that the incriminating “URL is for a cross-post from Tom Engelhardt about Chalmers Johnson … a mild critic of US foreign policy” who “has nothing whatsoever to do with health or health care policy. That creates the appearance that Google regards ‘anti-vaxx’ as a showstopper, and is for some reason desperately applying it to this site, which is not vaccine-hostile. Google has blatantly mislabeled unrelated content to try to make that bogus charge.”

Although Fair Observer depends on donations from our readers and refuses ad revenue, we also regularly publish cross-posts from Tom Engelhardt. Undoubtedly, Google will judge that we fail to meet its recondite criteria for ad-eligibility. Because we do not solicit ad revenue, we feel safe but nevertheless compelled to denounce the abuse this represents.

Smith sees this development as particularly sinister, warning that “the Censorship Industrial Complex is now extending its tentacles into commercial relationships. This appears to be going well beyond the ‘kill a chicken to scare a monkey’ strategy of deplatforming and demonetizing particularly strident voices.”

In another article, Smith points to the fact that this is the result not necessarily of some human agent’s decision-making but of the AI algorithms Google not only uses but uncritically enforces. “We consulted several experts,” Smith explains. “All are confident that Google relied on algorithms to single out these posts. As we will explain, they also stressed that whatever Google is doing here, it is not for advertisers.”

This last point highlights how incoherent such policies can be, since this kind of censorship is detrimental not only to those who publish, but also to those who pay Google — the advertisers. Google should be aware of this fundamental economic reality: Both the publishers and the advertisers are Google’s golden geese who fill the platform’s coffers with their golden eggs of content and advertising.

As with all crimes, one must ask cui bono, who is benefitting? Even though Google keeps the advertising cash for itself when it punishes content providers for not respecting its rules, in a rational world, Google would have no longer-term interest in applying such algorithms. Why kill any of its geese that lay golden eggs? Smith, like Tiabbi, is right to detect another logic in the background: that of the Censorship Industrial Complex, an ideological as well as economic power structure.

Historical note

The economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis calls the type of economy Google, Facebook, Amazon and other platforms have now imposed on humanity “technofeudalism.” It’s a system in which power is concentrated behind the impenetrable walls of virtual castles held by a small number of unaccountable barons of the consumer economy. These lords employ an army of technologists to exploit the surrounding population and defend the castle.

Matt Taibbi describes how that army functions in the age of AI. “Technologists are in love with new AI tools, but they don’t always know how they work. Machines may be given a review task and access to data, but how the task is achieved is sometimes mysterious.” In other words, the lords make the laws, the technologists create the machinery to apply the laws, and their algorithms play the role of law enforcement.

Taibbi describes a system in which, far more effectively than in traditional feudal times, our freedom of expression is controlled. Prophet though he was in many ways, George Orwell failed to pick up the clues that were already present when he wrote 1984 thanks to rising influence of Madison Avenue. The Censorship Industrial Complex doesn’t require a highly visible central authority to command what constitutes legitimate thought.

“Companies (and governments),” Taibbi explains, “have learned that the best way to control content is by attacking revenue sources, either through NewsGuard- or GDI-style ‘nutrition’ or ‘dynamic exclusion’ lists, or advertiser boycotts.” This is the equivalent of sanctions that governments use as a substitute for war.

In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was the principal vector of censorship, but thanks to the emergence of universities, the church itself and its masters of theology became themselves a source of contradictory dialogue. They enthroned “disputation” as the means of discovering the truth. Satire was omnipresent in the culture of the times, in its poetry, storytelling, songs and painting. Irreverence played a noble role alongside reverence.

The church did respond to heresy, judicially and even militarily, but though some of those campaigns could be spectacular, they were few and far between. The church also exerted pressure on the aristocrats who owned the lands and raised armies. That rivalry between secular and spiritual power kept everyone on their toes and, as often as not, discouraged intellectual conformity.

That spirit of disputation prepared the intellectual terrain for writers such as Rabelais, Montaigne and Pascal in the 16th and 17th centuries. That led directly to the French Enlightenment of the 18th century which in turn spawned political revolutions in the industrializing West and implanted the belief in democracy.

The modern world battled its own heresies — fascism and communism — through two world wars and a lengthy cold war before our purely secular authorities could discover the miraculous properties of technologies that appeared to answer their dreams by providing them with effective means of homogenizing culture and all forms of intellectual ambition.

That’s where we are today. Technofeudalism combines and consolidates the secular authority of governments managed by political parties, themselves controlled by the economic elite, with the invisible but omnipresent power of the “platforms.” Thanks to the social media environment provided by the platforms, debate is possible, but it is easily marginalized, thanks to a brilliantly structured complicity between corporate media and the platforms on which everyone depends.

To the extent that marginalized independent voices manage, in spite of everything, to establish their presence, they will live in permanent fear of being demonetized and cast into cultural limbo. Governments, media and platforms work hand in hand to preserve an abstract “freedom of expression” while enforcing a system that effectively tolerates only conformist thought and expression.

Now it should be clear to everyone why, at Fair Observer, we do not advertise.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is It Time to Rally Round the Flagged Items? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Reacting to the world’s growing concern with the latest development in Israel’s “plausible genocide,” NYT mobilized four of its ace reporters to do some serious investigating. The team managed to come up with a shiny example of what appears to be a thorough answer to the annoying question of a possible famine in Gaza.

The authors not only identify five distinct causes, but also explain in detail how each of them plays out. Their effort appears to be very thorough indeed, but some may suspect that their list is not complete. Before we look at how to complete it, here are the five clearly identified causes:

1. The land delivery route is complex,

2. Inspections have been onerous,

3. Destroyed roads and strained resources make distributing aid inside Gaza a challenge,

4. Aid convoys are frequently beset by violence,

5. Air and sea efforts are ‘not going to solve the problem.’

Before seeking to delve deeper, let’s have a closer look at the second cause, summed up by the adjective, “onerous,” a word derived from the Latin noun, onus, meaning “weight” or “burden.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Onerous:

Containing unnecessary weight, a common strategy employed by bureaucracies in designing and executing their procedures to deny services to deserving citizens, used by Israel in this instance to radically reduce and eventually eliminate altogether the weight of Palestinians, a population deemed by the Israeli government to be an unnecessary burden on Israel’s vibrant democracy.

Contextual note

Speaking of burdens, although South Africa successfully produced the onus probandi or “burden of proof” that convinced the International Court of Justice two months ago a genocide was already plausibly taking place, the Israelis have, since that assessment, knowingly aggravated the conditions that would lead to a generalized famine. They apparently view it as a necessary complement to the past five month’s massively destructive bombing campaign.

Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy attempted to deny the existence of a campaign to starve the Palestinians, claiming there was “no limit to the amount of food that can enter Gaza, and in fact MORE food trucks are entering Gaza now than before the war.” For such an egregious lie, he was suspended. The rules of propaganda are such that when the accumulation of visible facts contradicting one’s assertion reach a critical threshold, the person who tells such lies must be sanctioned. Most lies appear as simple exaggerations and can be repeated endlessly. But the most extreme lead to an unacceptable loss of face for a government that counts on controlled level of lying.

NYT has consistently tolerated and often repeated and amplified Israeli propaganda. The clearest example was its reporting on “systematic use of sexual assault” by Hamas in the October 7 terror attack. The paper’s “exhaustive report” published in December that sought to establish a pattern of “mass rape” has since been thoroughly debunked for lack of any solid evidence. The exposure of an act of conscious propaganda led the paper’s editors to “walk back” the unambiguous but false accusation of the article, but not to retract it or suspend the journalists.

Perhaps the humiliation related to the drama of what turned into an internal revolt by NYT staff against that example shoddy “reporting” taught the paper to tread more carefully and stick to verifiable facts. The war in Gaza had turned into a journalistic minefield. That’s one of the unintended effects of going easy on apparent genocide. The paper’s objectivity, which we have long called into question in these columns, was now being impugned both from without and within. Not wishing to fall into the trap a second time in its reporting on violence in Palestine, as famine became the latest of Israel’s  war crimes, NYT wanted to make sure that this time it would stick to facts. That is why it so carefully listed and explained the five causes of suffering in food-challenged Gaza.

Some may have noticed that one cause failed to appear in the list: Israel’s embargo on the entry of all types of supplies, including food. There was even another cause careful observers might see as missing from the list: the IDF’s attacks on the famished crowds queueing for food. Perhaps NYT didn’t bother to list those causes because each could be described in full in just one sentence, whereas the complex causes in the list each require a few paragraphs of explanation.

For the NYT the problem lies elsewhere. Its editorial stance requires that it remain in phase with the White House and the State Department. In this case it distances itself from what seems obvious: a population is on the brink of starvation; it is the consequence of political decisions that most observers interpret as potential war crimes, if not genocide.

But neither the US government nor The New York Times can allow itself to entertain such thoughts. They can offer lengthy explanations about difficult logistics but have no eyes to see the politics. In the words of State Department spokesman Matthew Miller responding to questions from the press about Israel’s campaign to starve the Gazans: “We have not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance.”

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Executive Vice President Trita Parsi not only sees clear violations on the part of Israel but signals US complicity in the policies that NYT refuses to acknowledge. The US is not a neutral observer. Parsi explains it in the simplest terms: “The Biden administration is in on it, making sure that the Israelis will get maximum protection to be able to continue this war. And all the administration is doing is trying to reduce the most excessive measures the Israelis are taking in order to reduce the political pressure on Israel to stop.”

Historical note

In this column, we have consistently traced the propensity of The New York Times to produce detailed explanations of events and phenomena that over time have proved false. We followed the episodes over a span of years relating to the newspaper’s commitment to Russiagate conspiracy theory or to the absurdity of Russia’s “likely” responsibility for the Havana Syndrome that poisoned the lives and compromised the health of US diplomats.  How can a newspaper of record consistently either distort or hide basic factual truth? Interestingly, one of their reports provided the answer.

Jeffrey Gettleman, the Pulitzer prize winning author of the NYT article attempting to establish that Hamas had been guilty of systematic rape on October 7, explained why he and his co-author felt it was their professional duty to exaggerate the facts to the point of fabricating a lie. The Intercept notes that in remarks recently offered at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, “Gettleman dismissed the need for reporters to provide ‘evidence.’” He was even more specific. “That’s our job as journalists”: to get the information and to share the story in a way that makes people care. Not just to inform, but to move people.”

The seasoned journalist is right: if the purpose of journalism is to “move people” and to make them “care”, a journalist should accept the truth that simple facts may sometimes get in the way. Fabricated facts may often prove better at getting the job done. This is especially if the journalist sees a particular nation’s interests as the kind of superior cause the paper’s readers should be prompted “care” for.

NYT has done a good job identifying the interests it cares a lot for. Among the most prominent are: anyone in the Biden administration (and no one in a Trump administration), the State Department’s and the intelligence community’s (no matter which administration) and Israel’s, at all times .

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The New York Times Prefers Fake Rape to Real Starvation appeared first on Fair Observer.

Macron’s basic preùise is that “we mustn’t let Russia win.” Should we understand that as the expression of an ideal to inspire hope or as a categorical imperative, that must be accomplished at all costs? And what does he mean? Who is the “we”? France, NATO, Europe, Macron’s government or all morally decent people? He can’t count on Pope Francis, who recently called for Ukraine to summon the “courage to raise the white flag.”

And what does he mean by not letting “Russia win?” Would retaining conquered territory and formalizing Ukraine’s neutrality be considered a “win” for Russia? Macron’s tone appears to signify that he not only wants to prevent Russia’s victory, but to inflict on it the humiliation he insisted, two years ago, must be avoided.

When in February, in the presence of 27 European leaders, he first suggested sending troops to Ukraine, Macron may have assumed no one would take his grandstanding seriously. Unfortunately, both his NATO allies and critics at home took notice and excoriated him for overreaching.

To deflect criticism, Macron cleverly confessed to practicing “strategic ambiguity.” No one should doubt Macron’s taste for ambiguity, but if he had any real sense of strategy he would have understood that the starting point for strategic thinking must be reality rather than the fantasy of French bravery galloping in on a shining steed to miraculously turn the tide. Most experts, even in his own military, are convinced Ukraine simply cannot defeat Russia.

In the interview, Macron offered this curious conditional statement: “If the situation were to deteriorate, we must be ready and we will be ready.” (Si la situation devait se dégrader, nous devons être prêts et nous serons prêts.)

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Situation:

Circumstances that, because they are beyond one’s control, may be invoked in provocative ways to create the illusion that one is capable of control.

Contextual note

Macron’s conditional assertion must be deemed odd, if only because every knowledgeable person about the state of play in Ukraine recognizes see the situation as already deteriorating. This is not a matter of speculation.

Monsieur le Président appears to be saying we must act now. But France cannot act alone. He has even labeled his allies cowards. Perhaps Macron sees himself in the role of NATO’s Jeanne d’Arc before the battle of Orléans, the heroic champion who mounts his horse and sallies forth to inspire courage in the faltering king’s forces, forcing the English – in this case the Russians – to flee.

To play such a role, serious drama is required. Macron describes the war in Ukraine as “existential for our Europe and for France” (“existentielle pour notre Europe et pour la France). The interesting word here is “notre.” What can he possibly mean by “our Europe?” Does he believe there are multiple Europes? Is Russia a different Europe?

More likely, “our” points to a class of people or an ideology within Europe. Macron has never made a secret of his own ideology and class, which is composed of ENA graduates, Rothschild bankers, hauts fonctionnaires (senior bureaucrats) and McKinsey consultants. Macron himself was a Rothschild banker. He notoriously paid McKinsey handsomely to play a significant role in guiding his policies of governance. The Europe of bankers, consultants and private think tanks is real. From the beginning of his career, Macron was groomed inside it and for it. The  Europe he calls “our Europe” is indeed facing an existential threat.

That class of professionals, largely shielded from direct contact with the people of Europe’s disparate nations, has governed and managed the European Union for decades. It’s the Europe of banks, multinationals, consultants, lawyers and an army of senior bureaucrats who comfortably make decisions and spend money within the very real and well-defended security of institutions that were designed to stand above the plebian masses with no accountability to the people. Though regularly challenged by multiple parties and movements, the self-satisfied, arrogant technocracy that reigns in Brussels and depends on US-led NATO for its security, is the “existing” Europe that Macron perceives as being existentially threatened.

Those in Europe who challenge an invisible hierarchy of financial and political interests tied by an umbilical cord to its protector, NATO (the US military-industrial complex), fall into three categories: nationalistic populists on the right, anti-capitalist parties on the left and a wide range of sometimes prestigious but largely marginalized intellectuals and independent thinkers. Prominent among them are personalities with historical connections to politics but no longer tied to established parties, such as Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister and Dominique de Villepin, former French prime minister. They, and the people of the European community, in the full ideological diversity, appear to belong to something other than Macron’s “notre Europe.”

Historical note

France did have its moment of very real influence during the Cold War. It even had several moments, despite its obvious weakness regarding the two competing superpowers. In 1966, De Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command structure. De Gaulle believed that France should not be bound by decisions made by other NATO members, particularly the United States.

Similarly, under his leadership, France insisted on developing its own nuclear deterrent, including the testing and deployment of nuclear weapons. The French nuclear program aimed to ensure that France could defend itself independently, without relying on other nuclear powers.

Perhaps even more significantly in February 1965, de Gaulle announced France’s intention to exchange its U.S. dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate, effectively calling what had become the post Bretton Woods bluff. The general dared to call the dollar the “exorbitant privilege” that allowed the US to hold the world hostage to a currency everyone had to have and hold, meaning the US was free to print the money that allowed it to wage wars and conduct covert operations across the globe.

At a time when the US had become comfortable with the idea that a divided Europe was a good thing, even if it meant allowing the Soviet Union to pull strings in the east, De Gaulle advocated for a united Europe that could assert its interests on the global stage. He dared to evoke a Europe stretching “from the Atlantic to the Urals.” Though some in the US and Europe categorized the general as an impertinent nationalist, his thinking was consistently regional. As Henri Guaino, a close collaborator of President Nicolas Sarkozy, recently remarked, De Gaulle “wanted sovereignty for France and independence for Europe.”

Guaino, and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin under President Jacques Chriac, are two prominent voices today who, not content to critique Macron’s bellicose foreign policy, argue strongly in favor of diplomacy rather than intransigent confrontation as the means of resolving conflict. Both invoke the Gaullist tradition.

De Gaulle left office in 1969 and died a year later. The irony of history is that today, six decades on, NATO is not only threatened existentially by its failure to master events in Ukraine but the almighty dollar also appears to be losing its exorbitant privilege as multiple forces line up to weaken its dominance.

No one can predict how the two current wars – in Ukraine and Gaza – will end or drag on. But the brightest minds understand that the Western “rules-based” and dollar-based order has lost a significant measure of its prestige. France’s politics, much like the US, have achieved a level of astoning incoherence. My prediction for France is that De Gaulle’s heritage will be felt again, not in a spirit of Make France Great Again, but by permitting to rethink France’s fundamental “existential” relationships across in Europe and elsewhere. An unpredictable multipolar world is emerging and France, but not Macron, will have something to contribute to it. 

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Replaying World War I, Macron Wants to Fight “Over There” appeared first on Fair Observer.

Diplomacy took on new meaning during the thirty-year reign of the State Department’s Queen Victoria. Today’s definition seeks to capture the essence of the concept that sits “at the center of” Biden’s, Blinken’s and Nuland’s foreign policy.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Diplomacy:

The practice of peremptorily giving instructions to ambassadors intended to relieve them of the embarrassing and time-consuming task of engaging in dialogue with foreign governments.

Contextual note

Ukraine’s modern history will be forever marked by an intercepted phone call between Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt on February 4, 2014, 18 days before the coup d’état that overturned the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych. In it, Nuland provided the perfect demonstration of how diplomacy has come to resemble the art of dramaturgy. Whether Nuland herself wrote the script of the play, or whether she was the designated lead actor of a production funded and produced in Washington’s Beltway, we may never know.

We do know, however, that for the diplomats involved, it was more about playing rather than practicing the complex but boring ritual of constructive dialogue that in former times defined diplomacy. Postmodern diplomacy can be summed up in this idea: Don’t waste time talking; write the script and hire the actors.

Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt’s opening words in the conversation were: “I think we’re in play.” After this flourish, the two immediately embark on the equivalent of a director’s casting session for an upcoming Broadway production. It’s clear from their phone chat that they are preparing a new season of political theater in Ukraine. The program would include the turbulent drama of the Maidan coup quickly followed by a revolt by the ethnic Russians in the Donbas that quickly morphed into a civil war punctuated by Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.

The following season featured the two-act tragedy of the Minsk accords, whose delayed denouement, staged eight years later, revealed that the tragedy was actually designed as a pantomime, a comic interlude designed to fool the audience (mainly Russian) and allow Ukraine the time backstage to arm itself, thanks to the able assistance of NATO in the role of costume designer, props manager and wardrobe assistant.

Like so much in our postmodern civilization, theatrically managed, produced and promoted historical events efface reality. Events are scripted. Roles are assigned. The media sets itself up in the orchestra, playing their own role as a disciplined group of musicians reading from their score. Their own modest role is to set the rhythm and provide any incidental music required, scene by scene.

Though the great geopolitical dramas unfolding before our eyes make little sense and radically reduce the kind of human agency that might seek to resolve rather than produce crises, the public now expects these dramas. Thanks to the media’s presentation of them as logical — usually because of some identifiable diabolical presence — the public never questions the causes or seriously wonders about possible solutions. That is the nature of today’s political and geopolitical hyperreality. Diplomacy is the most obvious victim of the trend. 

Historical note

In former times, diplomats played a key role in defining historical reality. They invested energy and intelligence in the effort. They entertained the now passé belief that crises might find solutions through dialogue. Ambassadors and diplomats learned to ply the subtle art of managing relations between national governments. Their leaders defined the themes and the goals, but the diplomats had the responsibility for developing and managing the dialogue. Today’s diplomats, especially those certain of the financial and military might behind them, have been instructed to stage-manage an elaborate pre-scripted roleplay.

On the other hand, most of the world’s diplomats, who lack the financial or military clout have no choice but to learn to play their assigned role. Europe’s leaders as well as its diplomats have now accepted that reality. Their actions, and especially their lack of reactions, demonstrate that they see themselves as hired actors working for a professional production team in Washington that has all the right backers.

Some of Europe’s supporting actors — the ones who sport the prestigious title of president or prime minister — may at some point in their career have naively expected to enjoy a fleeting moment at center stage. But in recent years, they have all discovered the pattern at work. The director, according to his or her inspiration, has the power to write their role out of the script, leaving them simply visible as extras in a crowd scene. Or the production team may let them speak but require them to deliver their lines from the wings. Nuland made this relationship clear back in 2014, when weighing the factors at play as the coup was brewing, she blurted out, “and fuck the EU!”

Could any elected leader in a European democracy dare to say anything similar? German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande, leading players on their respective national stages, were probably convinced in their hearts of their noble diplomatic mission when sponsoring and promoting the Minsk accords between Russia and Ukraine. The result on paper had all the appearances of successful diplomacy in the traditional sense. But both of those leaders of Europe’s two most powerful nations admitted years later, after leaving office, that the Minsk agreements, to the people like Nuland in the production team, were nothing more than a ploy to gain time and facilitate Ukraine’s integration into NATO.

Merkel managed to be respected and admired for her control of some crucial situations within Germany and Europe. Her successor Olaf Scholz silently watched his role and his nation’s economy reduced to that of an afterthought when the American production team decided that he was too fond of the cheap Russian gas required to make his industry competitive. That scene highlighting Germany’s powerful economy had, in the meantime, been written out of the script.

But not all are so self-effacing as Scholz. French President Emmanuel Macron, sure of his talent, last week decided to turn his assigned role as Rosencranz or Guildenstern on alternative nights into that of Julius Caesar, as he unexpectedly marched forward, stage right, to deliver an improvised soliloquy. He was apparently unaware that the play’s setting happens to be Elsinore, not Rome, situated squarely in the state of Denmark, where the true hero of play knew that something smelled increasingly rotten.

Blinken’s panegyric of the departing Nuland celebrates “Toria’s leadership on Ukraine that diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come.” Indeed, students wishing to understand the slow but certain degradation of diplomacy and the creeping paralysis of US foreign policy will be attentive to every aspect of her role in the Ukraine fiasco, whose history is yet to be written. The most astute commentators are suggesting that her departure signals the acceptance in the Beltway of the imminent abandonment of Nuland’s disastrous policies.

Blinken looks forward to “the day when [Ukraine] will be able to stand strongly on its own feet — democratically, economically, and militarily.” John Mearsheimer believes that as a result of Nuland’s policies, it is likely to become little more than a “dysfunctional rump state.”

Responsible Statecraft’s Daniel Larison cites an unnamed European official’s summary of Nuland’s “leadership” that so impressed Blinken. “She doesn’t engage like most diplomats. She comes off as rather ideological.” Larson adds this pertinent comment: “It is a measure of how little diplomatic skills are prized in U.S. foreign policy that Nuland flourished for such a long time in Washington.”

Her time is over. The question remains: Is Washington’s grip on Ukraine that she so personally tightened over? Joe Biden desperately wants to avoid a repeat of his chaotic exit from Afghanistan in 2021. That may explain why he needs $61 billion more to maintain the suspense at least until November’s election.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Who Scripted the New Queen Victoria’s Tragic Exit? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Hope:

In the context of a situation of desperation, a sentiment expressed by the powerless that points in the direction of potential relief. When expressed by the powerful, it indicates the refusal to take responsibility for events they might have the capacity to control if they were inclined to wield the power that is in their hands.

Contextual note

Reporting on this event, The New York Times offered its analysis of Biden’s thinking, asserting that “a halt in hostilities could open the door to a broader realignment of the region that he has been working toward, with Arab states like Saudi Arabia recognizing Israel. But while he has been pushing Israel to accept a so-called two-state solution in which the Palestinians would get a nation of their own, he pulled back a bit by describing that as more of a long-term goal.”

Most observers now believe that, though long-term goals are essential to finding a resolution, the sheer desperation of the situation requires a hard focus on the short term. When the parties concerned failed to respect Biden’s theoretical timeline as the weekend drew to a close with no hint of a ceasefire and indeed an intensification of the IDF’s attacks on Rafah, Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris turned up the pressure as she expressed her impatience: ““Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire for at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table.”

If the president can only hope for even a temporary halt to the massacre and an impending famine, is it reasonable to think the superior moral power of Kamala Harris will have an effect? Critics of the administration’s continue to express their astonishment at the apparent powerlessness of the world’s most powerful nation. 

Some commentators noticed the potential for grim irony concerning a US operation that CBS News described with this headline: “U.S. military aircraft airdrop thousands of meals into Gaza in emergency humanitarian aid operation.” “Thousands of meals” sounds impressive, but for hundreds of thousands facing starvation in an operation that only lasted hours? Does the limited scale of the airdrop define the status of US powerlessness? Can “three military planes” feed an entire population?

In its reporting on the event, the BBC mentions that it “was the first of many announced by President Joe Biden.” “The Beeb” failed, however, to ask a much more pertinent question: Wouldn’t it have been easier and less expensive to put pressure on the Israelis who have blockaded the Gaza strip, preventing thousands of trucks from entering and delivering the much-needed supplies?

Some have even noted that those three planes fulfilling their humanitarian duty can’t be working full time on dropping meals. They are needed for the regular delivery of bombs the Israelis require in the days ahead, targeting Gazans who will by then have digested their airdropped meals.

Many commentators have grappled with the quandary of the persistent powerlessness of Joe Biden, commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful army and designated “leader of the free world.” Some point to the power of the Israeli lobby that has managed to control domestic politics in the US by wielding its unlimited capacity to fund the political campaigns of those who follow its dictates and to punish those who have dared to disobey by funding the campaigns of their opponents. Others explain that Biden has always identified with Israel to the point of being voluntarily blind to its crimes.

There are others again who put forward a more complex thesis: that it isn’t the executive branch who decides. Nor is it Congress, even though the constitution empowers it alone to define foreign policy. Instead, it’s the “deep state,” built upon the military-industrial-financial complex, a protean network of interests that despite lacking a brain has a mind of its own.

According to this logic, US foreign policy will systematically tend to support wars in which the citizens of other nations fight and die, while consuming US military technology. As James Carville once explained, “It’s the economy, stupid” — but in this case, a permanent war economy. The simple truth, as economist Michael Hudson explained in his 1972 book, Super Imperialism, all post-World War II governments discovered that the key to global success consisted in fostering a defense-oriented economic culture.

Historical note

In history courses we learn that European nations in the 17th and 18th centuries aligned on a system for managing national economies called mercantilism. Most modern economists have dismissed mercantilism as a flawed theory and claim it disappeared by the end of the 18th century, superseded by free market theory. But a close look at the trends in the global economy over the past eight decades suggests that the US government’s approach to the economy has come to resemble its discredited ancestor.

Intrigued by the possible parallels, I decided to consult ChatGPT and asked it this question: Are we justified in calling an economy in which defense manufacturing plays a dominant role an example of 21st-century mercantilism?” Somewhat to my surprise, the AI chatbot unhesitatingly agreed and offered a detailed account of why this might be true.

Certainly! An economy in which defense manufacturing holds a dominant position can indeed be seen as an example of 21st-century mercantilism Let’s break it down:

1. Mercantilism

• Historically, mercantilism was an economic theory prevalent in Europe during the 16th to 18th centuries.
• Key tenets of mercantilism included:
  • Export-Oriented Policies: Nations aimed to maximize exports while minimizing imports.
  • Accumulation of Wealth: The focus was on accumulating precious metals (gold and silver) through trade surpluses.
  • State Intervention: Governments actively regulated trade, imposed tariffs, and promoted domestic industries.
• Mercantilism aimed at enhancing a nation’s power and wealth through economic policies.

2. Defense Manufacturing in the 21st Century:

• In the modern context, defense manufacturing remains a critical sector for many countries. Here’s how it aligns with mercantilist principles:
  • Export-Driven: Defense manufacturers often rely on exports of military equipment, technology, and services. These exports ontribute to national revenue and influence global power dynamics.
  • Strategic Importance: A strong defense industry enhances a nation’s security and geopolitical standing.
  • Government Support: Governments actively support defense manufacturers through contracts, subsidies, and research funding.
  • Trade Balance Considerations: Like mercantilists, countries may prioritize defense exports to maintain a favorable trade balance.
  • National Security and Independence: A robust defense manufacturing sector ensures self-sufficiency in critical technologies and reduces dependence on foreign suppliers.

3. Challenges and Ethical Considerations:

• While defense manufacturing can boost an economy, it also raises ethical questions:
  • Arms Sales: Exporting weapons can contribute to conflicts and human suffering.
  • Resource Allocation: Heavy investment in defense may divert resources from other sectors like education, healthcare, and infrastructure.
  • Global Stability: Striking a balance between national security and global stability is crucial.

In summary, the prominence of defense manufacturing in an economy reflects a blend of strategic interests, economic goals, and historical echoes of mercantilism. However, policymakers must carefully navigate these complexities to ensure a balanced approach that benefits both national security and overall well-being.”

The new mercantilism grew from the discovery by economic experts that weapons manufacturing was the most stable sector of the capitalist economy. It was also the easiest for a national government to manage, while still claiming to believe in free markets. Furthermore, in the dawning age of high tech, it proved to be the principal source of new generations of consumer goods, a fundamental necessity to keep the “consumer society” happy.

So, to hijack John Kennedy’s wisdom: “Don’t ask what wars can do for you, but what wars can do for your country.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can Hope Spring Eternal in Joe Biden’s Aging Mind? appeared first on Fair Observer.

We learned at school that rationality is an essential tool for acting in the world. It all goes back to the famous trio of Greek philosophers — Socrates, Plato and Aristotle — who saw reasoning as the key to understanding the world and achieving “the good life” both as individuals and for society as a whole.

International relations guru John Mearsheimer, known as a realist, has always insisted that nations use rationality to craft policies focused on defending their interests. In times of peace and stability that sounds like a rational assessment. But in times of war and rapid global shift, do we still believe that?

The American Conservative this month published the transcript of an event organized by the Quincy Institute on the occasion of the publication of Mearsheimer’s book co-authored with political scientist Sebastian Rosato, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy. In his lecture, Mearsheimer explained that policies are “rational” if they are “based on credible theories.” To make his point, he cites three theories that lay behind NATO’s decision to expand eastward, which he believes are flawed.

Policymakers, according to Mearsheimer, must learn to distinguish between logically-constructed theories that, however logical in themselves, may either be consistent with reality or flawed. Theories can be deceptive. Mearsheimer thinks the validity of Washington’s Ukraine policy can be assessed by asking this question: “Does the policymaking elite have a rational policy based on our credible theory, and did they operate collectively in a way that fostered uninhibited debate to produce this policy? And, if the answer is yes, it’s a rational policymaking process.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Uninhibited debate:

A social and political practice cultivated by human beings ever since the emergence of philosophy as a discipline and then abruptly abandoned by the political class and the media at some point in the early 21st century.

Contextual note

Mearsheimer explains why the example of US policy on Ukraine and NATO expansion offers an illustration of why rationality alone is never enough. “So, I think that the policy of NATO expansion was rational in the sense it was based on credible theories. But I also thought at the time that it was flawed, and I believe that I was right. But all of this just highlights that there are different theories, which lead to different policy prescriptions.”

According to Mearsheimer, there exists a permanent risk that even the best theory may be flawed. But there’s also a key to avoiding the flaws, quite simply: “uninhibited debate.” To make his point, Mearsheimer adds a second epithet to reinforce his argument: “freewheeling.”

“The second part of our argument is that the different individuals involved in the policymaking process have to work together in a collective way, so as to produce a rational decision. And that involves… uninhibited and freewheeling debate among the relevant policymakers. So, if you have this sort of open-ended freewheeling debate at the collective level and you come up with a policy that’s based on a credible theory about how the world works, then you are rational in our story.”

Mearsheimer makes it clear that there are several complementary ideas to this process: “different individuals” who “work together in a collective way,” “uninhibited and freewheeling debate” and the production of a “credible theory.” This raises the further question of what makes one theory more credible than another.

Mearsheimer answers this question by invoking the notion of goals. These should be defined through uninhibited debate. “If there is something profoundly flawed about the basic goal,” he doubts that the policymaking process can be deemed rational. But he doesn’t stop there. He takes his reasoning one step further, adding that “it’s the process, not the outcomes that matter.”

In other words, rational decision-making in matters of foreign policy requires a process spawned by uninhibited debate that seeks to clarify goals. It may then evolve along two lines that consist of monitoring the real conditions in which the policy is applied and continued debate. In foreign policy, thinking you are right is never enough. You have to get it right. And to get it right requires freewheeling debate.

Historical note

Mearsheimer’s position on the Ukraine conflict has been extremely consistent over the past decade. It is also very different from the orthodoxy of both theory and practice in Washington. We might find it odd that in a democracy, given the differences of well-informed opinion that exist, there has been no debate on issues that are historically and geopolitically complex. Instead, Washington and NATO have consistently announced a policy supposedly justified by a single theoretical principle not subject to debate or even discussion: Ukraine’s “sovereign right to choose its own path as a sovereign nation.”

In contrast, Mearsheimer has attempted to open the debate on many occasions since 2014, as the video below illustrates. In spite of his reputation as a preeminent US expert in international relations, none of the three presidents since 2014 — Obama, Trump or Biden — has thought of consulting him on the issue, apparently because of an endemic allergy to freewheeling debate.

Mearsheimer’s analysis hasn’t changed 2014. And history has proved him a prophet. He claimed back then that if US policy failed to take into account the reality he described, conflict would be inevitable. In contrast, even with nearly 200,000 Russian troops positioned all along the border, the Biden administration believed Putin would never dare to invade Ukraine. That differing reading might have produced the kind of debate capable of preventing the ongoing catastrophe we are currently witnessing. But that debate was never permitted. The Biden administration continues to elude it even today when it could still serve to prevent further suffering.

What about goals? The mantra in the West has been reduced to a simplistic narrative equally immune to debate. The goal is to assist in Ukraine’s self-defense. After an “unprovoked” invasion, the members of NATO have stood in solidarity supporting the cause.

President Barack Obama’s official position in the aftermath of the 2014 coup, that Ukraine has limited strategic value to the US, has been echoed more recently by critics such as Tucker Carlson. Western governments may firmly believe in the right of sovereign nations to choose their alliances, but any course of action that risks provoking a regional war should be either questioned and before being implemented subjected to a truly uninhibited debate. Instead, based on that principle, in December 2021 the US and NATO refused to consider a discussion of Russia’s security concerns, calling its propositions a “clear non-starter.” Given the result, it’s fair to conclude that the theories justifying the West’s policies were flawed.

One of the obvious flaws was in the formulation of goals. Perhaps inadvertently, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made it clear that the true goal was not the defense of Ukraine but to “weaken Russia.” CNN concluded, “Austin’s assertion that US wants to ‘weaken’ Russia underlines Biden strategy shift.” It is far more likely that the defense secretary was admitting the true strategic goal from the very beginning, an illegitimate goal that clearly could not have been subjected to freewheeling debate.

Most people would agree that democracy implies uninhibited debate on many different levels: within the political class, among experts such as Mearsheimer, in the media and in the public arena. On foreign policy, the political class appears clearly immune to any form of real debate. Governments and the media prefer repeating their standard mantras. As a result, the public has been shielded from the very substantial debate that experts are permitted to develop only in the margins, far from mainstream media.

To a large extent, this sums up the real crisis of democracy. It isn’t about rigged elections or foreign-sourced disinformation. It’s about the impossibility in today’s political culture of conducting uninhibited and freewheeling debate in what is still, probably mistakenly, called “the free world.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Foreign Policy: How Free are Washington’s Wheels? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Adderley was a black musician born into a modest middle-class family in Tampa, Florida. He earned his reputation as perhaps the most talented and accomplished alto saxophonist of the generation that followed Charlie Parker. After collaborating on Miles Davis’s iconic album Kind of Blue in 1959, he went on to achieve immortality in a commercially dynamic musical marketplace that bridged jazz and funk, thanks especially to “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” Adderley was a millionaire when he died at the age of 46, with a net worth estimated at $1–5 million. Starting out as a struggling black musician a decade before Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement began to change the racial landscape, Adderley understood and overcame adversity, achieving fame and fortune thanks to his brilliant musicianship.

Former Goldman Sachs analyst Sam Dogen retired at the age of 34 with a net worth of $3 million. Had he waited another 12 years, even without working, his fortune would have been multiplied perhaps exponentially. But after retiring, he encountered adversity and, according to Moneywise is now demanding mercy, mercy, mercy.

Dogen has been reduced to the indignity of having to live on a passive income of a mere $230,000 a year. He blames himself for the tragedy. He could have prudently allowed his accumulated fortune to accrue, thanks to a phenomenon an urban legend tells us Einstein called “the most powerful force in the universe” and that Warren Buffett believed was the “eighth wonder of the world.” What was that wonderful force? Very simply, compound interest. Instead of following Einstein’s alleged lead, Dogen decided on a carpe diem strategy by purchasing his dream house with cash. Though that put a solid asset in his personal balance sheet, it reduced his stockpile of interest-bearing dollars, weakening the force field of his potential for compound interest.

Like Adderley himself, the severe trials that Dogen has endured because of his imprudence have turned him into something of a philosopher, who now has a message for humanity. He recently wrote in his blog this compelling, original thought that has the ring of an ancestral proverb: “Desire is the cause of all suffering.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Suffering:

For people with true insider’s knowledge of the economy, the realization that one has lost a source of passive income.

Contextual note

Suffering is not the only word in the English language that Dogan has shown a talent for redefining. Progress is another. The following sentence in the Moneywise article gives an idea of what that word might mean in Dogan’s updated dictionary. “He’s since been living off his passive income from stocks, bonds, and real estate — but after paying cash for a recently remodeled home on a triple-wide lot, he says about five years’ worth of progress has been lost.’”

Progress in his dictionary stands for the exact opposite of suffering. In his vocabulary, progress means the maintenance of passive income. In Dogen’s worldview, shared by most of today’s financial elite, the only reliable source of civilizational progress is neither hard work, nor ingenuity, nor the entrepreneurial spirit nor even technological innovation. It’s the action of compound interest, which Buffett also called “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Dogen is very aware of his own moral turpitude and its cost. We learn that “in 2023 his passive income was tracking to generate about $380,000 a year. But after purchasing a new home in the pricey San Francisco Bay Area, he now expects it to decline to about $230,000 — which he claims is no longer enough to cover his family of four’s living expenses.” Someone should have reminded him of the proverb, “You cannot have your house and eat it.” Actually, I think the original was about cake.

The article offers some insight into Dogen’s career as a deep and subtle philosopher. Before discovering the secret of human suffering, he pitched himself as a promoter of “prosperity philosophy,” closely related to another American speciality: “prosperity theology,” the principal weapon of tele-evangelists who preach its gospel to draw donations that pay off even more handsomely than compound interest. Dogen “made headlines back in 2012 for championing the ‘financial independence, retire early’ (FIRE) movement” when he chose to retire and advertise his conversion to this philosophy.

Now that he’s realized his mistake, Dogen has become even more philosophical. Not only has he decided to return to some form of work to supplement the meager $230,000 that he can still count on, faithful to the metaphysics he had earlier embraced, he “still plans to reach FIRE status again within three to five years.” He probably has in mind another proverb: “Life begins at forty… and not at 34.”

Historical note

Most Americans remember Benjamin Franklin’s dictum, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Franklin was famous for inventing — or at least remembering proverbs, which he published in his famous “Poor Richard’s Almanack.” The penny proverb belongs to a family of proverbs that illustrate the traditional American Puritan ethic. Another one that focuses on avoiding the kind of error Dogen committed urges people to act prudently by husbanding one’s resources: “Waste not, want not.”

Franklin’s own philosophy extended far beyond proverbial wisdom. Consistent with the “penny saved” proverb, Franklin is credited with a lesser-known quote that correctly describes the miracle of compound interest: “Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes money.”

Poor Richard’s Almanack actually made Franklin rich. The Benjamin Franklin Historical Society describes it as “Franklin’s greatest business accomplishment.” Along with his other ventures, it allowed him not to buy a dream house in a pricey San Francisco neighborhood, but to leave “a gift of $5,000 to each of his two favorite cities, Boston and Philadelphia,” stipulating “that the money was to be invested and could be paid out at two specific dates, the first 100 years and the second 200 years after the date of the gift.”

The result of his modest generosity was that over the allotted time Franklin’s gifts “compounded to approximately $20 million for each city.” Not a bad demonstration of the eighth wonder of the world.

But Franklin’s gesture gives us something else to think about. When Buffett or Dogen composes an encomium to celebrate the mystical powers of compound interest, they focus on the individual who harnesses that power. Franklin sought to attribute that power to two communities who would use it for a collective purpose rather than hoard it to consolidate power. That appears to be the way a lot of “civilized” people reasoned in the 18th century. Many assume that Adam Smith preached the gospel of self-interest we associate with modern economists such as Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. But Smith insisted not just on the virtue of “sympathy” (we would say “empathy” today) but especially on its centrality to basic social and moral behavior. For Smith, it was never about the calculation of maximum profit.

In contrast, Dogen’s reasoning begins and ends with the idea of acting to constitute, expand and defend one’s personal fortune. He will not allow “adversity” to compromise his elite consumer lifestyle. On his constrained budget of $230,000 ($175,000 after taxes), Dogen defines his needs as including a certain number of luxuries.

The linguist and contemporary “philosophizer” Steven Pinker believes the modern world is the ongoing fulfillment of humanity’s genius for progress. His notion of progress doesn’t seem all that different from Dogen’s. Pinker explains that this works because “you and I are both better off if we share our surpluses.” The calculation of what makes us “better off” and where our needs end and our surplusses begin is an idea neither Franklin nor Smith would have found compelling. But, of course, those Enlightenment spirits didn’t live in the post-Enlightenment world so dear to Pinker and Dogen.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Two Ways of Being an American Multi-Millionaire appeared first on Fair Observer.

As she approaches her 84^th birthday, Pelosi, like President Biden himself,  represents the senior side of the Democratic party. It has become increasingly apparent that their generation is out of touch with America’s youth, a demographic traditionally counted upon to support Democrats. That sounds like bad news in an election year. Recent polls show the Democratic party’s taste for getting seriously involved in and committed to overseas wars has alienated a good portion of the younger generation from the Democrats. Biden’s resistance to calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza conflict appears to be a major factor in the disaffection of voters in the age range of 18 to 34.

Mama Bear won’t tolerate such flagrant indiscipline. Interviewed last week on CNN’s “State of the Union,” she berated Biden’s critics. “For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message,” she insisted. “Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine. It’s about Putin’s message. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Putin’s message:

For establishment Democrats, any statement made by an American that varies from the orthodoxy of the party, especially if related to the question of military intervention in various parts of the world.

Contextual note

Some feel that Pelosi’s insistence on seeing Putin as the source of every idea that fails to conform to the party’s orthodoxy resembles a dangerous conspiracy theory. Others may say that it’s nothing more than an innocent reflex inherited from the great Russiagate campaign the Democratic party launched in its embarrassment to explain away Donald Trump’s 2016 election.

“Pelosi Wants F.B.I. to Investigate Pro-Palestinian Protesters” is the title NYT affixed to its article. Investigate, really? She must know that investigations cost taxpayer money. So, if she made such a request, she must have felt she was on solid ground. No responsible politician, especially a former Speaker of the House, would ever consider spending their citizens’ hard-earned money on trivialities, would they?

Pelosi is of course open-minded. We should admire her generosity of spirit when she conceded that “some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere.” She can even imagine lost souls taking such a deluded position without having to consult the Kremlin or allow their brains to be programmed by Putin’s telepathic powers. 

Pelosi is right to focus on money as the obvious explanation. What else could explain such an aberration? Pelosi’s own life story demonstrates how rational people may do the most outlandish things when there is a prospect for making money. In their place, she herself would have taken the Kremlin’s money and placed it in a stock she had reason to think might soon be rising.

There’s another pragmatic reason to dismiss the idea that this is about Putin’s mind control of the protesters. Since the start of the Ukraine war, the US government has banned access to Russia’s privileged channels of propaganda. Two years ago, paid Kremlin agents brazenly presented their programs on RT, which had a license to broadcast in the US. Thanks to the Russian channel, Americans were free to have their minds programmed by propaganda spread by the likes of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, satirical comedian Lee Camp and former governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, among others. Pelosi understood that it was Putin who provided these professional entertainers with their scripts. The Biden administration effectively silenced those seditious voices.

With so little access to Putin’s political theology, money alone can explain the obedience of the protesters. It’s now up to the FBI to do what it’s generally good at (except possibly in the case of Hunter and Joe Biden): scrutinize in detail each of the culprits’ bank account.

Who in Washington better than Pelosi understands the role of money in politics? Just as ardently as she defends the Democratic party and its policies does she defend the sacred right of legislators of both parties to engage in “informed investing,” which some abusively refer to as insider trading.

Historical note

American politics in the 2020s has taken on a character of déjà vu. The Democrats have taken more seriously than Trump the Donald’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Most people understood it to evoke a nostalgia for the conformist culture of the 1950s, with its crewcuts, tail fins, thin ties and button-down collars. But thanks to the Democrats, the real culture of the fifties has return with a full-throated revival of the spirit of the Cold War and even its iconic moment, McCarthyism. Pelosi’s wish to have the FBI investigate peace protesters is worthy of the most paranoiac excesses of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.

The only significant difference between McCarthy’s feverish campaign to root out American communists and Pelosi’s mission of exposing the Kremlin puppets populating the current peace movement is that McCarthy’s crusade was directed at preventing the damage wrought on the US by evil Marxists. Pelosi’s focus isn’t on preserving American institutions, but Israel’s.

Under the Republican Eisenhower administration, McCarthy sought to shield the sacred institutions of American democracy from the universal communist threat. Pelosi’s modern patriotism is focused on protecting the administration of that great democratic leader, Benjamin Netanyahu and furthering Bibi’s noble cause of ridding his Middle Eastern nation of the troublemakers who have no business trying to survive in his holy land.

The Democrats of the 1950s vilified and eventually shamed and neutralized Joe McCarthy. In contrast, Pelosi demonstrates what Richard Hofstadter documented in a famous Harper’s Magazine article from November, 1964 that ran with the title, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The author developed the thesis that paranoia had always been a feature of style in the framing of political causes throughout US history.

In the year arch-conservative Barry Goldwater stood as the Republican candidate for the presidency, Hofstadter described the paranoid style as a feature of the right and occasional populist movements. No sane commentator identifies Pelosi with either the right or populism. They believe Democrats to be the party of the left. But Hofstadter insists that the paranoid style is neither right nor left. It is built around the belief in the threatening presence of an imaginary enemy. “Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.”

This appears to correlate with the way Pelosi and others in the supposedly “left-wing” Democratic party think. Russia is clearly the enemy, just as it was in the good ole Cold War days. Its leader is “totally evil and totally unappeasable.” Those who share any so much as random thoughts with the devil are totally evil. Even those diabolical souls who claim to protest genocide.

Hofstadter adds another observation, about history itself. “The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will.” 

Pelosi, but nearly everyone in the Democratic party and the modern security state has focused on Putin’s supernatural will that manifests itself in the most varied contexts: Trump’s 2016 election, the Donbas, Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and most perversely among young Americans hypocritically claiming to be shocked by genocide.

In other words, Hofstadter was spot on when he observed that the paranoid style has been present throughout US history. But 60 years ago, back in 1964, he couldn’t have suspected that one day the paranoia might stretch across the entire mainstream political spectrum, embracing both major parties. Mama Bear has now made that entirely apparent.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Three P’s: Pelosi, Putin and Paranoia appeared first on Fair Observer.

Interviewed by Ryan Grim, Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, agreed on the ruling’s historical significance. Stepping back from the evaluation of Israel’s potential guilt, which can only be established when all the evidence is weighed and that may take years, Parsi made another observation with possibly wider implications. “Senior Biden administration officials,” he noted, “have more or less stopped using the term rules-based international order since October 7.” Law is one thing. It can always be twisted by clever lawyers. Language is another.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Rules-based international order:

A totemic expression commonly and uncritically used by politicians, New York Times pundits and Western media in general from the late twentieth century until the end of 2023, the moment in history when the general population finally understood that the expression referred to a mythical concept and was typically deployed for devious purposes.

Contextual note

Interviewed by former Fox News host, judge Andrew Napolitano, former British diplomat and Middle East negotiator Alistair Crooke made exactly the same point as Parsi. “For about three weeks now,” he noted, “we’ve heard nothing about the rules-based order any more… Blinken used to use it pretty well every other day.”

The term has played an interesting role in geopolitics over the past few decades. Ben Scott, writing for The Interpreter in 2021, summarized the history of the term “rules-based order” he abbreviates as RBO. Although everyone seems to agree that the purported rules were initially formulated in the aftermath of World War II, Scott explains that the popularity of the term “RBO emerged in the early 1990s under the shadow of the ‘Liberal international order (LIO)’ – a term that is still much more widely used.”

Historical trends, especially when they concern the language of propaganda, can change very abruptly. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, RBO and RBIO became a dominant meme, easily eclipsing LIO. After all, sending an army across a border blatantly violates an easily perceived rule. In that sense, for Western politicians and the media Putin’s invasion constituted a linguistic godsend.

During his first year in office, US President Joe Biden insisted not so much on rules but on the kind of Manichean distinction Americans love, this time between diabolical autocracies and angelic democracies. That sounded like a convenient way of reducing the world’s geopolitical complexity. It had the advantage of echoing the propaganda of the Cold War. Philip Bump described Biden’s obsessive invocation of the distinction in a Washington Post article. Rather than accuse America’s multiple enemies of specific crimes, Biden more conveniently group them all together when he “framed the central tension of the moment as pitting democracy against autocracy.”

Thanks to Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the language abruptly changed. Now it was no longer a case of the alleged enemies simply failing to be liberal. Putin was breaking the rules that defined the order. From that moment on, the Biden State Department has tirelessly lambasted not only its enemies for violating the RBIO. But it has also lambasted some of its friends, such as India, for resisting the rules-based requirement of applying US sanctions and embargos on Russia.

Now the language has shifted again. Trita Parsi makes a strong point. The legitimacy of a rules-based order requires that not only explicit laws, but also implicitly understood rules apply to everyone in exactly the same way. In reality it was already clear to most observers that powerful nations have the ability to twist the rules, since they alone have the power to enforce those rules.

Parsi notes that irony of the RBO today. When a nation like the US claims that an accusation of genocide is “meritless” while a duly constituted international court sees it as plausible, the suspicion of hypocrisy appears justified. “There is no consistency whatsoever,” he tells us. “There is no legitimacy or credibility talking about it given how the United States under Biden has acted in the case of Gaza.” It is therefore hardly surprising that the Biden administration’s taste for invoking any kind of rules-based order has seriously waned.

This signals a major quandary. If rules are no longer the litmus test of legitimacy, what guidelines remain to replace the vaunted RBO? The respect of sheer military might? The hallowed tradition followed by so many countries that consists of assuming Washington’s judgment is always just? Or could I be some new form of ideology, such as the one that prevailed during the Cold War when God-fearing capitalism opposed atheistic communism?

Times have changed. None of those principles defining the world order is convincing. For most nations, the problem of behavioral guidelines is further compounded by the increasingly credible prospect of a second Donald Trump term in the White House. Even the European governments – hitherto incapable of undoing their shackles or even admitting they are wearing them – now understand that in Trump’s universe not only are there no rules; there is also no need for rules. One consequence of this has become visible in the unseen tsunami of panic now unfurling within the brains of European leaders today as they try to envision a future they know they are powerless to influence.

Historical note

After Putin’s invasion of Russia, German chancellor Olaf Scholz launched a personal meme that occupied the headlines, even though it made no clear historical sense. He  invoke the Zeitenwende or turning point. Perhaps he remembered and was trying to emulate the success of Francis Fukuyama three decades earlier when he dramatically proclaimed “the end of history.” In both cases, they got people talking.

Scholz initially used the term to describe a shift in Germany’s geopolitical stance, presumably signifying a break with Germany’s economic romance with resource-rich Russia. But by the end of the year, when the chancellor penned an article for Foreign Affairs, the term had taken on a more metaphysical character. He was now invoking “The Global Zeitenwende.” A subtitle followed: “How to Avoid a New Cold War in a Multipolar Era.”

In his article Sholz invoked the idea of defending and fostering “an international order based on the principles of the UN Charter.” Could he have been anticipating the showdown that would take place in the UN’s ICJ? Did he imagine that the UN Charter might be the instrument that would call to order the very US hegemony that Germany was now unconditionally aligned with thanks to his unilateral Zeitewende?

That hegemony has been dealt a serious blow. As an associate Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Haidar Eid has every reason to offer a partisan reading of the court’s ruling. But his comment on its historical significance deserves our serious attention. “With this case, South Africa has put not only Israel, but the entirety of the global justice system on trial. This case is a major turning point for humanity, because it marks the first time in history when a Global South country bravely crossed a red line drawn by the colonial West and demanded its favourite settler colony, Israel, be held to account for the crimes it has long been committing against an Indigenous people.”

Eid is right to call this a turning point. Unlike Scholz he describes the precise historical context. Something in the perception of the relationship between the West and the Global South was already shifting, but now it has made something of a 180° turning.

One question remains. After turning in a new direction that would seem to call for a world order with a new set of rules, can we be certain that powerful forces of inertia already in place will not pivot back in the original direction? When a rules-based order appears compatible with genocide, it may be time for humanity to make sure that such a backward Zeitenwende simply cannot be allowed to happen.   

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is the Rules-Based-Order in Contempt of Court? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Every year, these exemplars of earthly success produce for our consumption some great, resounding idea or set of ideas meant to clarify the terms of the quotidian struggle we common mortals are engaged in. We should feel reassured. The new global aristocracy, whose PR is handled by these masters of social, political and economic insight, generously shares their conclusions with the rest of the world. This year their spiritual leader, Klaus Schwab, set the tone, informing us that this is a “unique juncture in human history facing challenges that are as diverse as they are profound.”

So what must we do to meet those challenges? The message was simple: “Rebuild trust.” This, of course, could be taken as an admission that a deficit of trust exists with regard to all the institutions that matter. These include governments, media, think tanks and… influencers? I add the last merely because they have become an institution in their own right.

If you truly believe there is a failure of trust, rather than exhorting people to show more trust, you should be spending your time and energy inquiring why trust has evaporated. To its credit, the WEF team appeared to accept that something was rotten in the state of the former unipolar order. They even hinted a new world order could be in the offing.

One key moment occurred when the WEF’s president, Norwegian Conservative politician Børge Brende, interviewed White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Confronting Sullivan with one of the memes of this year’s conference — the idea that the global order was undergoing a major transition — Joe Biden’s strategic thinker suddenly appeared to feel deeply uncomfortable. Was Brende intimating that the famous “world order” — sometimes referred to as the unipolar moment, in which the US has played a central role since World War II — was near its end and might soon be buried under the alluvia of history?

Sullivan’s quick thinking allowed him to dodge the issue by a shift of vocabulary. Instead of a change of order, he saw it as a change of “era.”

“I think of this a little bit more about a transition of eras rather than a transition to orders, but the two are kind of cousins of one another. The reason I draw the distinction is because I don’t think the international order built after 1945 is getting replaced wholesale with some new order; it will obviously evolve as it has evolved multiple times over the decades since 1945.”

Sullivan clearly believes in the persistence of the Pax Americana, even if it has consistently provided more bellum (war) than pax (peace). He sees no reason for calling into question the existing system of authority. On the contrary, he affirmed its power to act. “We have the capacity to shape what that looks like. And at the heart of it will be many of the core principles and core institutions of the existing order adapted for the challenges that we face today.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Core principles:

The implicit, unwritten and deliberately unarticulated rules that permit the exercise of power by those who control the status quo and can promote it as the accepted norm.

Contextual note

Sullivan gave away his game when he called the forces he invoked “the core principles and core institutions of the existing order,” which should be taken to be “the accepted norm.” An “existing order” stands as a power structure, a system of authoritative control that cannot be called into question. The “accepted norm” implies an admission of powerlessness by all those who do not hold the reins of power or simply can’t afford the trip to Davos.

When Sullivan claimed that “we have the capacity to shape what that looks like,” he played an interesting trick with regard to the subject of his proposition. Who is the “we” he invokes? This demonstrates the skill of someone who has mastered the art of what Shakespeare in Macbeth called “equivocation.” “We” is an inclusive pronoun. But whom does it typically include? 

Sullivan wanted to have it four different ways. The “we” may refer to the government he represents, the Biden administration. Alternatively, it may designate the two people involved in the conversation, though Sullivan was probably not counting on Brende to lend a hand personally. “We” could refer to the entire elite assembly in Davos, the people whose accumulated power permits them to rule the world. The fourth and final possibility is humanity itself, the entire global population.

Most likely, what Sullivan had in mind were both the first and third references: his government and an undefined ruling global elite, the committed defenders of the status quo.

Historical note

Sullivan continued his reflection. He even appeared to see at least an abstract basis for acknowledging a potential modification of the sacred status quo. “But, yes,” he told the audience, “I believe we’ve entered a new era. I think that era is marked by a simple thing to say but a very complex reality, which is strategic competition in an age of interdependence. The major powers are deeply interdependent; they are also competitive. And that creates the world we’re operating in.”

This is the expected binary thinking endemic in US strategic reflection. On one side, interdependence; on the other, competition. Unlike the yin and yang, in which each term contains the other, they are opposed rather than dynamically related. But Sullivan’s level of abstraction makes the entire proposition meaningless. Yes, contrary trends always exist. So what? In his view, it’s the existing elite’s role to balance them.

Although Sullivan avoids it, the formerly unfashionable idea of a “multipolar world” has achieved the level of a Davos meme. It’s a concept that very directly challenges the notion that the historical period commonly referred to as the “unipolar moment” may persist. This was the period that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving the US as the world’s unique superpower. Joe Biden apparently sees that moment as the start of what has been called “the American century.” In December 2020, the president-elect asserted, “I, honest to God, believe the 21st century’s going to be an American century.”

More and more lucid commentators today — such as historian Alfred McCoy in these columns — are prone to concluding that the American century is about to end. It may have escaped Biden’s aging brain when the influential publisher, Henry Luce, coined the phrase in 1941, he was presciently invoking a century of American domination that would begin once the war was over. 

McCoy has been asserting for some time that it was the foreign policy of George W Bush, the mad promoter of his Global War on Terror, that set in motion the inexorable decline that would cut short the American century. The “core institutions” of that system of domination — including the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization — are still in place, though they reveal themselves increasingly powerless to maintain an order that was seriously shaken for the first time in 1971 when President Richard Nixon dismantled its key institution, the framework of the Bretton Woods agreement, by decoupling the dollar from gold. That event marked the disappearance of one of the essential “core principles” Sullivan refers to.

One is left wondering what other principles now remain. Fundamental ideas like democracy and the rule of law have never appeared more fragile. A series of chaotic elections in the US has coupled with systemic media prevarication have destroyed the kind of “trust” in the institutions the WEF seeks to restore.

Will, this time around, the WEF’s annual exercise of equivocation conducted high in the Swiss Alps reassure anyone?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more ofFair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is the American Century on Life Support? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The chosen planet was Mars. Over the years, Musk has clearly expressed his fear that Earth is doomed. That conviction commanded him to assume a position of leadership in the arduous task of ensuring “the survival of humanity as a multi-planetary species.”

Some say he isn’t so much leading as lagging. In 2017, Musk forecast sending humans to Mars by 2024, promising SpaceX would be ready. In 2021, his projected date shifted to 2026, then 2029. His latest estimation, which he calls “optimistic,” is 2033.

The realists, especially scientists who need to be distracted by the optimism of an entrepreneur, are more prone to saying never. Not that they doubt sending men to Mars is possible, but the idea of creating anything even tenuously sustainable qualifies as romantic musing that is also ethically suspect.

Fortunately, there are those whose dreams seem slightly less far-fetched but just as bold, as Britain’s The Independent now informs us. A New York City architecture firm, The Clouds Architecture Office, calls it the Analemma Tower. This New Age skyscraper would not just scrape the surface of the sky; it would take up residence in it, hanging from a tether anchored to an asteroid. It would circle the globe on a daily basis and return to its home position over Manhattan every evening.

More modestly and realistically than Musk’s projected Mars colony, this project would demonstrate that living elsewhere than our planet’s crust is feasible. Once people began living in skyscrapers suspended over American cities rather than being tethered to that slave master Gaia, they might, at least in their imaginations, “take wings” and prepare for the real, truly futuristic mission of colonizing Mars. In such a context, you could think of the tower as the equivalent of learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels.

In contrast with Musk’s planned exile to an uninhabitable and fundamentally hostile planet, the Analemma Tower would function more along the lines of a suspended bedroom hovering over the Earth. Perhaps some would feel so “over the moon” in their new habitat that they might choose never to leave and consequently spend all their waking as well sleeping hours as citizens of the cosmos. But the architects have thought of everything. Transport back to Earth via drone will always be possible. This will prove useful for example if one of the inhabitants got an itch to drop down to catch the latest Broadway hit.

According to the architects’ plan, the tower will be constructed in Dubai, largely, I suppose, by cheap immigrant labor. They would then transport it back to civilization and launch it into the atmosphere over New York. It will profit from Earth’s daily rotation to bring it back every evening, like a disciplined commuter, to the Big Apple.

Musk should find this project comforting, because it draws on his own philosophy, or what we are tempted to call his “otherworldview.” It foresees the liberation of humanity from the slavery that has historically bound it to Earth’s unstable and unpredictably battered surface. “Going back to the earliest known structures,” the Analemma Tower’s promoters explain, “we can see a clear pattern emerging .We are in the process of dislodging ourselves from the planet’s surface.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Dislodging:

The latest trend in hypermodern social, technological and scientific theory, diversely applied to Manhattan skyscrapers and the population of Gaza.

Contextual note

The reasoning behind this project is impeccable. It begins with cost-benefit analysis and offers a clear demonstration of the science of exploiting price differentials. “The Analemma Tower would be constructed in Dubai — for one-fifth of the cost of building the structure in New York City — before the company proposes to launch it above Manhattan.” In other words, you could command Manhattan-level prices for real estate that was developed elsewhere at lower cost.

And of course, its selling price would include the added value offered by an unrivaled view as well as the certainty that no future structures will ever be built that might cast an unwanted shadow on it.

The promoters explain the very simple economic logic that justifies this daring project: “the company expects the residential complex will command record prices based off the current trend that sales price per square foot rises with floor elevation.” How could anyone with some spare cash refuse to invest in such a business adventure, even if they themselves were incapable of paying the literally astronomical rent such dwellings would command?

The final sentence in The Independent’s article specifies one other advantage, in this case simply an intangible prestige factor: “Once completed, the structure would be considered the world’s tallest building.” This leaves one wondering whether Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s visionary leader, will agree to the construction of a tower that would dethrone Burj Khalifa as the world’s tallest building.

Historical note

It was nearly a century ago that a curious race began in New York. Its official dates covered a two-year period that were curiously contemporary with the notorious Wall Street crash. Between 1929 and 1931, a heated competition among architects played out on the surface of Manhattan. It is remembered as “the race to the sky.” It produced the two exceptional monuments of office architecture that define the New York skyline: the elegant Chrysler building and the Empire State Building.

Those two buildings occupy an extraordinary place in the modern imagination. When working in Dubai, I was surprised to notice several buildings clearly inspired by the Chrysler building, featuring a pastiche of its elegant dome composed of an expanding series of concentric arches. Dubai’s mix of daring to the point of insolent innovation and kitsch has made it the ultimate expression of architectural hyperreality, as much a symbol of the culture of the 21st century as the Manhattan of the 1930s was of 20th century culture.

No sooner was the Empire State Building constructed than Hollywood sealed its symbolic fame by having King Kong climb to its summit to swat at aggressive airplanes whose mission was to defeat the beast of the jungle.

I cannot doubt that if the Analemma Tower is actually built — but who will define the zoning laws that apply to it? — its architects will believe they will be defining the character of the 21st century in the same way the race to the sky between 1929 and 1931 did a century ago. I wouldn’t be surprised that they were aiming to build it precisely between 2029 and 2031, which at least means they will beat Musk’s goal still “optimistically” targeted at 2033.

In that case, Dubai, whose future is threatened, will only have achieved the distinction of being remembered as a special moment in the evolution of Earth-kitsch that would ultimately be superseded and in fact canceled by space-kitsch. The first three decades of the 21st century will be remembered for their literal mundaneness, before the new masters of cosmic kitsch, armed with AI facilitated designs, push our overdeveloped consumer culture into the stratosphere.

Perhaps the real significance of the Analemma Tower project is that it could provide the answer to the conflict in Israel. Why not propose to all the Israeli settlers in the West Bank to live in a collection of  such towers hovering over Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa? Gaza, already turned into a parking lot, could function as the Cape Canaveral from which new towers would be launched. That would enable the Palestinians to return to their land and the Israelis to maintain their feeling of domination. After the promised land, the promised sky!

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Age of Cosmic Kitsch is Now Dawning appeared first on Fair Observer.

Despite the very real fragility of democracy and a visible trend in many nations of an erosion of faith in political institutions, there is little doubt that democracy has become a default value in the eyes of populations where democratic institutions already exist. However criticized, they continue to function thanks to the ritual of voting and the media commentary that accompanies it. 2024 will be a record-setting year for democracy. This year 4.1 billion voters will be invited to the polling booths.

The year’s first significant election took place on Sunday in Bangladesh. It saw incumbent prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League party (AL) register what would ordinarily be celebrated as a landslide victory, raking in 222 of the parliament’s 300 seats. But the real reason for the amplitude of AL’s success was less the incumbent’s popularity than an embarrassing problem indicating not only diminished faith in the electoral process but also a loss of credibility for the political class. The principal opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), boycotted the vote. 

On Saturday, Al Jazeera described explained how absurd the situation had become due to the absence of the only credible opposition. “The ruling Awami League has tried to give the election a competitive veneer by fielding a number of what they, themselves call ‘dummy candidates’ and running full-fledged election campaigns which ended early on Friday morning.”

In the aftermath of the election, Al Jazeera cited Shahidul Alam, a Fair Observer contributor. The “renowned Bangladeshi rights activist and photographer” described the events as the “bizarre outcome of a bizarre election. Dummy candidates in a dummy election will now lead to a dummy parliament.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Dummy candidates:

1. Candidates in democratic elections who appear to represent an opposition but in fact exist only to create the illusion of democratic choice and serve instead to bolster a political order that brooks no real opposition.

2. An epithet that increasingly applies to a majority of candidates in modern democracies who act literally as the ventriloquist’s dummy in their relationship with their donors.

Contextual note

In cases of extreme political or cultural polarization that may be due to differences in class, caste, ideology or religion, the practice of democracy can become delicate and the exercise of democracy chaotic. The rivalry between the Awami League and the BNP reflects in exaggerated form a division that is visible elsewhere in South and West Asia. AL adheres to secularist principles and projects a traditional left-of-center political orientation that stresses a strong government role in promoting social justice. The BNP is right-leaning and advocates nationalism with an Islamist bias.

Both parties officially proclaim their belief in democracy. Both have exercised power. In doing so, both have acquired the art of manipulating the levers of democracy to achieve their particular aims. Vote-rigging is an art practiced whenever possible in every democracy — though in some much more than others. Though some optimists may believe it is rare, just like cheating on taxes, it should be considered a normal human activity, something everyone will practice so long as they think they can get away with it. Only extremely naïve people would suppose that the procedures and, worse, the voting machines some nations rely on will guarantee pristine results at the polls.

Boycotting elections to destabilize an existing government occurs much more rarely. We have nevertheless witnessed it in nations as diverse as Venezuela, Egypt and Zimbabwe. Even in the US this election year, a country that is likely to see a contest between two unpopular, aging has-beens, campaigns to abstain that psychologically resemble boycotts are likely to have an impact on the result.

Does this mean democracy is dying?

Most people see the ritual of regular elections as proof that democracy is still alive and kicking. Though the numbers of voters may diminish in times of growing disillusionment, people continue to believe that voting is the one thing that may keep the politicians honest, by virtue of their incentive to do the will of the people in order to stay in power. And the theatrical drama of elections as it plays out in the media has become an essential ingredient of the hyperreality made possible by our techno-culture.

Historical note

Bangladesh as a nation has existed for a mere half-century and may need some time to develop the true habits of a democracy. India has had nearly a quarter century more to affirm its mastery of democracy. Despite an official decline in its democracy index rating over time and internal conflicts not dissimilar to those of Bangladesh, India offers a reasonable example of how democracy may work in South Asia.

But even in the US, that pioneer of national democratic institutions, democracy has never fulfilled its promise. And despite various cries of alarm, the crisis of democracy is not a recent phenomenon. It has simply become more visible.

The contemporary distrust of democratic institutions didn’t begin on January 6, 2021. It’s true that Americans like to have “kickoff” dates for their existential crises, as if none of them were preceded by tension and conflict. The media play their role in getting us to hold these fateful dates in our heads. December 7 — “a day that will live infamy” — 9/11, February 24, 2022, October 7, 2023; these all stand in our memories as a date at which a crisis was born.

President Donald Trump’s challenge to US democracy following the 2020 election and the events of January 6 certainly marked a moment of epiphany, but a Princeton study released in 2014 had made it clear that the US functioned as an oligarchy, or even a plutocracy, and that its democratic institutions played by the oligarchic rules, avoiding systematically to respond to vox populi.

Let’s return to Bangladesh. Dhaka-based political analyst Zahed Ur Rahman observed that Sunday’s election was meant “to show the world that even without the main political opposition in Bangladesh’s essentially ‘two-party politics,’ the turnout could be high. Rahman described the election as a “stage-managed mockery of democracy.”

What if future historians concluded that in the two-century span in which world history became dominated by the ideology of “liberal democracy” the rituals and practices of elections in almost every nation adhering to that ideology were precisely more about stage management than governance?

Since the US has always touted itself as the model of democracy, it’s worth noting that what the Princeton study demonstrated, and many contemporary commentators have noticed, is that, contrary to Bangladesh’s “dummy candidates,” the US has produced several generations of dummy legislators and executives. An actual dummy, after all, is the tool of a ventriloquist, who draws the public’s attention to the human-resembling prop and creates the belief that the puppet is acting and talking.

Bangladesh’s dummy candidates were there to make it appear the “real” AL candidate had defeated an opponent. But US legislators who, for example, can vote with near unanimity (311 to 14) to declare – as if they were the US equivalent of the French Academie that writes the official dictionary – that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” are literally the dummies of a ventriloquist who goes by the name of American Israel Public Affairs Committee which either finances their campaigns or threatens to finance opponents in the case that they choose not to conform. That is true even of the 92 Democrats who voted “present.”

The stage-managed theatre in both democracies respects the difference of style in both. But their political hyperreality appears to lucid observers such as Shahidul Alam, quoted above, or to anyone curious about the theory of democracy, as legitimately bizarre.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Political Dummies Are Not Dumb, at Least in Appearance appeared first on Fair Observer.

But Israel is also achieving excellence on two other fronts. The first is ethnic cleansing, thanks to a strategy aiming at the removal of an existing population from a land it has occupied for millennia. The second is revealed in an article that appeared in The Israel Times on December 31, 2023, with the title: “Israel said set to replace all Palestinian workers with tens of thousands of foreigners.” In other words, a nation so successful at export needs to achieve balance with its imports.

Related Reading

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And it makes a lot of economic sense. When you export an ethnic group that has played the role of productive second-class citizens within your high-powered economy, at some point you need to fill the gap. Israel’s leadership pertinently reframes the question. Why permit Palestinians to survive in Greater Israel, if the younger of the tribe — the most qualified for essential manual work — insist on being undisciplined, disobedient and disruptive?

Not only is it a no-brainer to seek ways of cleansing the landscape of their presence, the obvious solution to the loss of their manpower is to look to import the kind of third-class population that has consistently demonstrated its utility for wonderfully successful economies such as those of Israel’s neighboring Gulf states. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, whose native and religiously homogeneous indigenous communities constitutes only a little over 10% of the total population, have proved that small privileged minority can harmoniously manage a civilization and earn the world’s admiration.

The government is now asserting its intention not to allow Palestinian workers back even after the current war ends. The logic is crystal clear. According to The Israel Times, “Israel plans to permanently replace all Palestinian laborers with foreign workers, in a major, ambitious initiative aimed at ridding the country of a perceived security threat, the Kan public broadcaster reports.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Security threat:

People unlike one’s own.

Contextual note

This should not be confused with a randomly suggested “replacement theory.” It’s the real thing, a well-articulated plan resulting from serious interministerial collaboration, worked out in precise numerical detail. “The reported plan by the finance, interior and labor ministries would see Israel bring in 25,500 workers from Sri Lanka, 20,000 from China, 17,000 from India, 13,000 from Thailand and 6,000 from Moldova,” says the Times.

Unlike most European countries and the US, who have seen powerful political movements growing to repel and reject any form of immigration, Israel is demonstrating its commitment to tolerance, diversity and its own brand of inclusion. These thousands of people from a variety of other provenances will provide a model for whatever portion of the Palestinian population is permitted to continue to reside in Greater Israel. Once the Palestinians observe, it is hoped, how peaceful it can be to simply show up for a job and earn a living without being obsessed by one’s identity, history or ancestral memory, there may come a time when they can be reintegrated into the Israeli economy.

The resourceful Israeli leadership doesn’t stop with that simple idea of importing docile populations. “Additionally, the government intends to incentivize Israelis to work in construction and agriculture, as well promoting technologies that could cut the number of employees needed in these fields.”

Now this is really insightful. There must surely be a small minority among the privileged ethnicity in Israel that will accept the kind of menial work God created darker-skinned populations to execute. Why not get them involved to pick up some of the slack? Somewhere in Israel’s hypermodern culture, the memory exists of the heroic period of Israel when people arrived in droves to work on kibbutzim and realize the romantic dream of rural socialism.

That actually seems unlikely, at least on any significant scale, as the Jewish Agency for Israel admits. “Somewhat romanticized in the past, the Kibbutz of today has evolved dramatically and the focus of Kibbutz life on society has substantially diminished.” The modern kibbutz is better adapted to organizing rave parties than promoting an idealized form of hard-working collective prosperity based on apparently discredited socialistic principles.

The second hypothesis is far more likely: that “technologies” — obviously meaning AI — will “cut the number of employees needed in these fields. That makes a lot of sense, since the focus of Israeli productivity long ago moved beyond oranges and avocadoes to producing the world’s most sophisticated software. Israel’s best-selling philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, has been focused for a long time on the question of AI’s capacity to transform the job market. Undoubtedly, the Israeli government will seek to benefit from his wisdom.

Historical note

Commentators have noticed for decades Israel’s focus on a particular theme that has inspired political decisions made by previous generations of Israeli governments. It is parallel with US history and especially US expansion in the 19th century — in fact, Israeli leaders have frequented resonated with the idea of “manifest destiny.” Back in 1956, Moshe Dayan notably described the dominant vision of Israel’s future. “We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home … This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life — to be prepared and armed, strong and tough — or otherwise the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out.”

The similarities with US history don’t end there. Before the American Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, many white people, including sitting and future presidents, sought to solve the problem of slavery by sending “free Black Americans to Africa through ‘colonization’,” as History describes it. In their eyes, if slavery were abolished, all the freed slaves could then return to Africa. Thanks to the ability of European and white North American nations to colonize regions of the “uncivilized” world, the American Colonization Society created a region in Africa that became known as Liberia, the destination of freed American slaves.

The Times of Israel now informs us that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is conducting secret contacts for accepting thousands of immigrants from Gaza with Congo, in addition to other nations.” Exporting the troublemakers to Africa seems like the right idea. If the US had done the same after the Civil War, we might never have seen the unseemly events that followed the deaths of Martin Luther King and George Floyd. Tucker Carlson’s “legacy Americans” would feel much more in control today as the nation’s political and interracial culture becomes increasingly polarized and conflictual. Life in the US might be much more harmonious.

Related Reading

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Of course, there is one notable difference, despite the obvious parallel. The North American slaves were Africans, and though not many if any at all hailed from the region of Liberia, they would at least be returning to the native continent. The Palestinians are not only natives to the land from which they are to be exported. Those exporting them are in a large part from other lands.

One further irony, reported in November by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, is worth noticing. “Dr. Arthur Rupin, the Zionist colonization expert, made the startling assertion that the Arabs of Palestine were descendants of old Palestine Jews who had been converted to Mohammedism.” So the Palestinians could be, even in their majority, the true descendants of “the people of the Bible” in whose name the state of Israel was created.

As ChatGPT would typically conclude, if asked to weigh in on this question: History is “complex and multifaceted.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Israel’s Newest Import-Export Orientation Looks Like a Doozy appeared first on Fair Observer.