wingnuts

The Amnesty rule

Civil liberties, wingnuts
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Bouncing off my own post yesterday, Alex proposes the Amnesty rule:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this happen when B actually had a point – time after bleeding time, it followed this exact course. I therefore intended to declare this as a law, like Godwin’s Law. The Amnesty rule – anyone who asks “why doesn’t Amnesty speak out on X?” is lying.

This goes for Human Rights Watch as well. Though I couldn’t find it yesterday, I’m sure I’ve done posts before either here or at Prog Gold on this subject, showing some rightwinger bozo that no, AI doesn’t just criticise the US or Israel and yes, has actually spent more time campaigning on some cause or other he pulled out of his ass and never wrote about before or since…

It’s worse when this sort of thing comes from alleged lefties, masking as honest critics of Amnesty or whatever other human rights organisation which dared to criticise one of their hobby horses, when whatever miniscule amount of dirt that can be brought up is blown up out of all proportions but what AI actually does is completely ignored. Rightwing critics are bad enough, but relatively honest in their hatred of AI; the motivations of their supposedly leftwing “critics” is much more petty. Flying Rodent put it best, back when the whole sorry Gita Sahgal mess first came to light:

This excerpt represents the clearest statement of what I believe has motivated this whole sorry affair – a small group of like-minded journalists and bloggers determined to crush Amnesty, in the insane belief that a spontaneous uprising of somebody else will magic a deus ex machina human rights organisation into existence… that will say nasty things about Noam Chomsky.

Gita Sahgal: Amnesty International tortures people?!?

Civil liberties, wingnuts
Published on 3 Comments on Gita Sahgal: Amnesty International tortures people?!?

You really don’t need to read further than the second paragraph in Gita Sahgal’s latest rant to understand she’s completely lost the plot:

This week, Amnesty International launches its Annual Report and starts year long preparations for a jamboree titled Amnesty@50. From a small group of activists it has grown into a gigantic, global organization. And in many ways, has come to resemble the forces that it has done so much to oppose. Its record of handling one of the greatest challenges to its reputation suggests that it is entirely unable to examine the story of itself or the story of its times. So difficult is it for Amnesty International to provide a coherent account of what has happened over the last few months, that it has chosen to provide no account at all.

Really? Amnesty International has started to disappear, torture and murder people? Why isn’t this frontpage news rather than a blogpost? Or is it’s just that AI choose not to pay much attentions to the over the top accusations of encouraging “Islamofascism” leveled against them by you, nobody else found them credible either but for a handful of nutters gunning for AI anyway because Amnesty has dared to criticise Israel and the The War Against Terror?

It gets better.

Their programmes of social control such as promotion of the hijab are supported quite uncritically. The actions of human rights advocates mirror those of governments from Chechnya to the UK. Recruit former insurgents or fundamentalists and subcontract them to provide surveillance and control over the mass of the population. Defeat one form of fundamentalism by supporting another.

How does this even make sense? How the hell is AI using “former insurgents or fundamentalists” to “provide surveillance and control over the mass of the population”? does she thinks AI is some sort of government or what?

Those are the two nuttiest propositions in the article; the rest is the usual wingnut boilerplate about how AI gives comfort to the enemy yadda yadda and how it always criticises “us” but not “them”. For instance:

Those who make this allegation are immediately accused of supporting torture or arbitrary detention. Shadi Sadr, the courageous Iranian lawyer who has been sentenced in absentia to lashings and imprisonment, has pointed out that while Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have rushed to condemn the niqab ban in Europe, not a word has been heard against increasing dress code restrictions imposed by the State in Iran and accompanied by draconian punishments.

Let’s see for ourselves, shall we? Here’s the latest A-Z county reports (PDF) from AI and what it says on Iran’s treatment of women:

Women continued to face severe discrimination under the law and in practice, and women’s rights campaigners were harassed, arrested and imprisoned.

[…]

Discrimination against women
Women continued to face discrimination in law, despite some minor improvements. Women’s rights campaigners, including those active in the “One Million Signatures” campaign to end legal discrimination, were harassed, detained, prosecuted and banned from travelling for collecting signatures in support of their petition.

On 1 February, Alieh Eghdam-Doust, a member of the Campaign for Equality, began a three-year prison sentence imposed for participating in a peaceful demonstration. She was among many women arrested during a protest in June 2006 against discriminatory laws, and the first to begin serving a prison sentence.

That’s just from this year’s annual report; much more can be found by simply googling “amnesty international” “dress code” iran. This is not hard or esoteric knowledge and I wish that people stop accusing organisations like AI or Human Rights Watch of not caring about subjects when even five seconds of research would show otherwise. But then Gita Sahgal isn’t that interested in honesty anyway, is she?

a failed Womble

Media, Numpties, wingnuts
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That Rod Liddle bid for the editorship of The Independent in full:

By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.

You can see the sole reason Liddle was refused this position was that the powers that be were afraid of his blunt honesty, not because he’s just another rightwing asshole who thinks he’s entitled to lead a leftleaning paper, or because he has a habit of posting racist comments on Millwall supporter sites (under pseudonym, natch). Title courtesy of Charlie Brooker, who described Liddle a while back as “a failed Womble who’s just been shaken awake in a shop doorway”.

Wrestling pigs

Imperialism, wingnuts
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There’s supposedly a new wingnut meme doing the rounds of rightwing blogs, that the Church Committee, the 1975 senate comittee set up after Watergate revealed some of the dirty tricks the CIA had engaged in both at home and abroad. The idea being that this oversight committee destroyed the CIA and left it helpless to stop 9/11 yada yada. Over at Edge of the West, guest poster Kathy Solmsted quickly demolishes these lies, setting the fact straights. There’s only problem with this.

The facts are irrelevant.

These memes are not fact based, but do rely for some considerable extent on gaining wider circulation by being taken seriously enough by liberals or leftists to offer refutations. Instead of something to be ridiculed, the idea that the CIA was destroyed by teh lieberuls becomes a serious proposition worthy of debate — gaining a false legitimacy. And once an idea is treated seriously, there are always non-partisan bystanders who’ll fall the lies or, because that’s what they’ve been taught all their lives, think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Another disadvantage of attempting to refute lies is that it’s so much more difficult than telling the lie was. It takes time and energy away from stating your own case, puts you on the defense and as we’re again taught by the newsmedia — not to mention countless courtroom dramas — makes you look bad.

Countering these crackpot ideas is difficult therefore, as you have to take them seriously to refute them and if you take them seriously you allow the crackpots to frame the debate. Which is why I prefer the Alicublog method of treating these memes with the seriousness they deserve, by pointing and laughing.

Apart from that, there may also be something of a difference between liberals and leftists playing a role in this particular case. Liberals historically have never had any real problems with the existence of the CIA, just with the abuses of its power revealed by the Curch committee and similar investigations. It was under Truman, a Democratic president that the CIA was founded and under the ur-liberal president Kennedy that it played some of its dirtiest tricks, the difference being that these tricks were directed at foreign socalled enemies and not Americans as much and so perfectly fine. For those liberals therefore who still think the CIA is a valid institution, defending the Church committee in particular and the idea of congressional oversight over it in general is much harder than it is for leftists like me who’d rather see it disappear sooner than later. Once you admit the CIA is a necesary evil by its very nature it becomes harder to argue for strict oversight.

Personally therefore I’d argue that the Church committee didn’t go far enough, was pivotal into bringing to light certain clasess of abuses, largely those against US citizens, but largely ignoring the raison d’etre of the organisation, which is to make the world safe for American business, the first line of defence against any unwelcome development that would harm their interests.

Chickens coming home

US foreign policy, US politics, wingnuts
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Can we treat the Republicans as a normal political party, a party that went off the rails during the last eight (actually sixteen) years but which can still be rescued from its more self destructive, hard right tendencies through engaging its more moderate elements. Is it possible to remake it, as Paul Krugman and other liberal commentators still seem to believe, into something on the level of the Tories or the various Christian Democratic parties in Europe; rightwing but nor reactionary? Not according to the Stiftung Leo Strauss, who explains just what the Republicans have turned into in the past three decades:

It wasn’t always like this, of course. The Republican Party as an independent actor and entity was able to keep the Movement within bounds. But after Reagan, and especially the Bush debacle in ‘92, the Movement learned to seize power on its own within and without the Republican Party. As a sign of their increased power, the Movement’s rage, paranoia, and conspiracy fever in 1993 seemed novel. By 1994 and certainly 2000. the Movement had completed its subversion of the Republican Party.

Wonder why after Obama the ferocity is turned up to 11? The answer is intrinsic to the Movement as functional social, cultural and political creature. It governed for 6 years and hung on for 2 more. Its Counter-Enlightenment, racial, authoritarian /hierarchical impulse was the official American government. With Obama’s victory its rejection is not only personal but for the first time, in 2006 and 2008, it as dominant political force (not as a minor coalition partner within the Republican Party) was rejected.

The Movement Is Not Playing For Liberal Democracy

For the Movement, as we said, politics is existential. And when survival is on the line, pluralistic compromise is for chumps. Democrats still are playing for political advantage within the confines of traditional two party politics. How to give a concrete example? When the other side’s world view is existential, then the stakes are higher than something so trite as the Constitution, etc. We saw this in part through Addington, Cheney et al. with their view on the Unitary Executive. As I wrote a while ago, during a lunch with John Ashcroft after his tenure as AG, he quite blithely said the President is entitled to ignore Congress and its laws — the only thing that matters is the plebiscite on a president because it is national. He then added if the president is re-elected that by definition means the country ratified everything he has done, even secret stuff the nation doesn’t know about.

Existential combat in ideological struggle for survival with a natural affinity for hierarchical organizations and militarized speech and thought patterns. Do you see now why to the Movement any criticism of Bush as Warlord was akin to treason? It’s not only mere warfare for any given news cycle, but deeply rooted in the non-liberal democratic, pre-Enlightenment agenda.

What the Stiftung is describing is immediately recognisable to anybody familiar with US foreign policy during the Cold War and how anti-communism was used to overrule any considerations of democracy and freedom. The normalisation of torture, election fraud, rightwing militias, political assassinations (what else would you call the murder of doctor Tiller), the mass hysteria whipped up over what Obama is going to do to the country and how this justifies anything that can stop it all of it has been used with great succes in South America and elsewhere to destroy governments and countries Washington does not like. It was only a matter of time before these techniques were re-imported into the US.