US politics

Obama will bring the revolution

2008 US election, US politics
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Andy Newman is engaging in a bit of wishful thinking today, by arguing that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States will buy space for the left to grow. In particularly:

If Obama wins, then that is a mass popular endorsement of hope — that things should and can change. The revival of trade unionism in the sit down strikes in the 1930s could not have happened without the confidence given by Roosevelt’s New Deal. The growth of the 1960s civil
rights movement, and the growth of women’s liberation and black power movements were linked to expectations of injustice being ended by Kennedy and LB Johnson.

Barack Obama

I’m skeptical, as it reminds me too much of similar guff heard when New Labour was first elected, back in 1997, as witnessed in such thriumphal books like John O’Farrell’s Things Can Only Get Better (Andy seems to recognise this, considering the title of his post). But more importantly, it seems to me Andy has got the relationship between a strong progressive or leftist mass movement and a left leaning president wrong. The movements he mentions, trade unionism and the civil rights movement, existed and knew success before they got a president on their side. Roosevelt started off a moderate and was largely forced into the New Deal, Kennedy gave lip service to the civil rights movement but it was only with his successor LBJ that civil rights legislation really got going. And in both cases this wouldn’t have happened without pressure from a broadbased, grassroots uprising, didn’t go as far as the movement wanted or extended itself to foreign policy, which was just as reactionary under Roosevelt and Kenndey/LBJ as their under their predecessors.

With Obama we’ve seen that his first instincts certainly aren’t anything but centrist or even rightwing. He got lucky in that he didn’t have to vote for the War on Iraq, but it took a long time for him to take a real stand against it once he was elected. Even now, he only wants to leave Iraq to strengthen Afghanistan and he’s hawkish on the “threat” of nuclear armed Iran, as well as saying all the wrong things about Georgia. He does talk the talk about poverty in America, but also felt the need to urge Black fathers to take their responsibility. As Andy admits himself, he has a lot of support from Wall Street which is despairing of the Republicans bollixing up the economy and his core advisors are not exactly leftist firebrands either…

To come back to Andy’s main argument, that Barack Obama will bring a feeling of hope that has been missing for the past eight years, which will open space on the left, I’m with John Pilger, as quoted by Andy. “ An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.” We’ve seen it happen already, as the various centre left organisations like MoveOn have fallen in line behind the Democrats.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City — Rajiv Chandrasekaran

books and books review, US foreign policy, US politics, War on Iraq
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Cover of Imperial Life in the Emerald City


Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
365 pages including index
published in 2006

The Emerald City was what its inhabitants called the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2003-2004: a pleasant bubble of transplanted America, cut off from the everyday reality of Iraq, the ultimate ivory tower where the Coalition Provisional Authority that was in power in that year made its plans for the future of Iraq, unhindered by much knowledge of the world outside their bubble. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an eyewitness account of that first year of the American occupation of Iraq, as seen from inside the bubble. It’s a story of how wide eyed innocents and well intentioned ideologues came to Iraq to remake the country into a model of Jeffersonian freemarket democracy, with little more to recommend them for the job than their personal loyalty to Bush and the Republican party and how they were cruelly disappointed by the reality of post-war Iraq and its missed opportunities.

In short, this is a whitewash, though perhaps not a conscious whitewash. It’s true the New York Times quote on the back calls this a “A visceral –sometimes sickening– picture of how the administration and the handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq” and that every other page or so has you slapping your face at yet another incredibly obvious stupidity, but in the end it’s still a whitewash. The clue is in that word bungled. As if the Bush administration and their lackeys in Iraq started the war and subsequent occupation with the best of intentions, but lacked the competence to fulfill them, or took the wrong decisions for Iraq not to further their own ends, but because they were a bit naive about the realities of the country. The book is steeped in the assumption that, while the people in charge may have made the wrong decisions, they had every right to attempt to make those decisions. It’s like reading a book on British rule in India that only tells of the problems the British had in establishing their rule and in the day to day running of their empire, without ever questioning the presence of
the British there.

Read more…

What Jonah wants

US politics, wingnuts
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Earlier I said that Jonah is just another kind of Holocaust denier, the way he distorts the true history and politics of fascism, but the big question is what he tries to achieve with this distortion. You can do worse than to read John Emerson’s explanation, who argues it’s done partially to slime the left, partially to inoculate the Republicans against the charge of fascism and partially, perhaps unconsciously as a dominance game within the media: “no matter how stupid we make our arguments, you will take them seriously”. All fine points, but there’s still something missing. There’s more going on and it’s best expressed through that stupid backcover quote:

The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

What Goldberg is saying with that, and with so many other examples, is that all traditional, stereotypical liberal dogoodery is fascist. That it doesn’t matter whether state power is used benignly or malignantly, the fact that it’s state power is enough to make it fascist. A public school system, a national health service, all fascist. Ridiculous of course, but it is an extreme version of what a lot of rightwingers half believe already. Which makes Jonah’s book so dangerous, as it strengthens the paranoid beliefs of an already radicial and powerful group. Worse, because it’s so extreme it helps legitamise less extreme versions of this idea. The American media is already saturated with reports and stories that push the idea all state interference is bad, all social programmes are evil and pushing the idea that it’s not just wrong but fascist to have welfare can only help in further eroding public support.

What’s to be done? Debating Jonah on the merits of his book is pointless, as that only strengthens the perception of legitamicy, though just straightforward education in what fascism is should be done. Making fun of him and his book is better, but in itself is not enough. What we want is to make sure the sheer stupidity of these beliefs is exposed, which I think is best done by dragging these half hidden ideas I outlined above into the spotlights and then ridiculing them. Fortunately, most people are still not stupid enough to think a female school teacher is really the modern equivalent of a concentration camp guard.

Jonah Goldberg: just another kind of Holocaust denier

US politics, wingnuts
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So Jonah Goldberg, the cheetos munching spawn of Lucianne, has actually managed to complete his magnus opus Liberal Fascism: from Mussoline to Muscle Beach, showing us how no really, it wasn’t the fascists that were fascists, it was the liberals! Since it came out David Neiwert has, as usual, done a sterling duty in calmly explaining how and why Goldberg is talking cock, but of course without leaving any impression on the man himself. Goldberg knows it doesn’t matter what David says or how carefully he explains he’s wrong, as his audience will never see nor (want to) understand David’s arguments. As long as the message of “liberals = Fascism!”is out there, Jonah has done his job.

Which is why the important point David makes is not that Jonah is wrong, but that he is just another kind of Holocaust denier:

Goldberg is much offended, of course, that I’ve compared his work to David Irving’s in this regard, saying “he tries ever so slightly to tag me as a member of the David Irving Holocaust-denier camp.” But that, of course, isn’t what I’m saying at all: Rather, my point is that he employs the same historical methodology as Holocaust deniers, which is rather a different thing. I once made a similar point about Michelle Malkin’s methodology in her book In Defense of Internment — and predictably, as Jonah did, she simply tossed it off as a “smear” rather than answer the point.

what Jonah does is just as offensive, morally and factually wrong as denying that the Holocaust has happened. He distorts history to make the victims of fascism into their own oppressors, just like some Holocaust deniers blame the Jews for their own persecution. Therefore it is not possible to get into a “reasonable debate” with Goldberg, nor should we want to. Instead he should be shunned and mocked for his beliefs. Wasting time refuting his arguments just helps establishing the idea that his opinions on this are respectable, if wrong in its particulars.

This is not the impression anybody who is serious about history, who is serious about fascism, whether liberal, conservative or socialist, should want to encourage. Already the idea of what fascism was and is has been diluted by overuse as a general purpose insult. Imprinting the belief on the general public that it’s the liberals who are the true fascists, or even the idea that this is a reasonable thing to believe means we can give up any hope of being able to use fascism in its true meaning. And that’s just what Jonah Goldberg would like to happen.