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.

They Do it Every Time

War on Iraq
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Phillip Carter explains the challenges facing the US Army’s new post-surge offensive:

All this partly explains the size of the offensive. It’s an attempt to impose security on these warring insurgent cells and sectarian militias by brute force in a very hard-to-secure part of the country. By way of comparison, in April 2004, a task force of three Marine battalions assaulted the city of Fallujah after the brutal killing of four U.S. contractors there. In November 2004, the Marines launched their second assault on Fallujah with six battalions of combat troops and an arsenal of airpower and artillery. Now, in the Diyala breadbasket, U.S. forces are sending seven battalions plus various special forces units and a comparable amount of firepower. This for an area of Iraq previously occupied by only one battalion of about 500 troops –or sometimes fewer– during the last three years.

One truism about the surge has been that where we deploy sufficient numbers of U.S. troops, we prevail. There is no doubt that this quantity of U.S. troops will clear this small area of insurgents and al-Qaida fighters. The only question for the near term is whether our troops will kill, capture, or merely push those fighters out of the breadbasket. This has been the pattern for U.S. military operations since 2003, and yet the insurgency continues. The more important question is whether the U.S. military –and its partners in the Iraqi army and police– can secure the area for the long term, and do so with fewer and fewer U.S. troops as the surge ends.

What was that country in South-East Asia again, in which the Americans were involved for over a decade winning every battle, or so they said, but in which they lost the war?

Oohh yyyeaah…

New Iraq mortality survey

Iraqi war deaths, War on Iraq
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With relatively little fanfare a new study into post-invasion mortality rates in Iraq was published last week, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Below is the abstract:

Background Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count) to 601,027 (from a national survey). Results from the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), which was conducted in 2006 and 2007, provide new evidence on mortality in Iraq.

Methods The IFHS is a nationally representative survey of 9345 households that collected information on deaths in the household since June 2001. We used multiple methods for estimating the level of underreporting and compared reported rates of death with those from other sources.

Results Interviewers visited 89.4% of 1086 household clusters during the study period; the household response rate was 96.2%. From January 2002 through June 2006, there were 1325 reported deaths. After adjustment for missing clusters, the overall rate of death per 1000 person-years was 5.31 (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.89 to 5.77); the estimated rate of violence-related death was 1.09 (95% CI, 0.81 to 1.50). When underreporting was taken into account, the rate of violence-related death was estimated to be 1.67 (95% uncertainty range, 1.24 to 2.30). This rate translates into an estimated number of violent deaths of 151,000 (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) from March 2003 through June 2006.

Conclusions Violence is a leading cause of death for Iraqi adults and was the main cause of death in men between the ages of 15 and 59 years during the first 3 years after the 2003 invasion. Although the estimated range is substantially lower than a recent survey-based estimate, it nonetheless points to a massive death toll, only one of the many health and human consequences of an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

According to this study an estimated 151,000 people died of violence during the first three years of the occupation. At first this looks a far cry from the 655,000 or so excess deaths (of which some 600,000 were attributed to violence) the most recent Lancet study found. However, as the authors of this study constantly and admirably admit to, this new study is more than likely to underrrpot deaths:

Recall of deaths in household surveys with very few exceptions suffer from underreporting of deaths. None of the methods to assess the level of underreporting provide a clear indication of the numbers of deaths missed in the IFHS. All methods presented here have shortcomings and can suggest only that as many as 50% of violent deaths may have gone unreported. Household migration affects not only the reporting of deaths but also the accuracy of sampling and computation of national rates of death

Therefore this new study does not “prove” that the Lancet studies were wrong, let alone that they were fraudulent. Doing this kind of research in Iraq is after all dangerous and fraught with difficulty. Over at Tim Lambert, Les Roberts, who was involved with the Lancet
studies has posted his reaction and argued that this new study does not in fact differ that much from the Lancet studies and that some of the differences might in fact be explained by the difficulties this survey encountered gathering data.

Now all of this won’t stop wingnuts from using this study to discredit the 2006 Lancet study or last year’s ORB survey, but this is nothing new. I remember when the only guide to how many iraqi civilians had died in the invasion and occupation was the Iraqi Body Count project and how that was vilified. Once the first independent survey of war deaths –the original Lancet study– came out, suddenly there was nothing wrong with the IBC’s estimates anymore. Now we get people arguing that this new study shows Lancet 2 is not just wrong but fraudulent. As if “only” 151,000 deaths instead of 600,000 means the invasion is suddenly worthwhile.

What no longer can be denied is that the invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation have created a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. There are now five major studies done by four different organisations saying essentially the same thing: that the invasion has lead to an incredible increase in violence and death by violence and that this isn’t abating so far. No matter how many “deadenders” would like to argue these facts, they won’t change. The case has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the invasion was a disaster, so I feel no longer the need to engage those who refuse to see and neither should you. The question we should be asking is how to end this disaster, without being distracted by pointless rearguard actions.

Clinton Obama Clinton’s candidacy is now inevitable

US politics
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Nothing demonstrates how sheer godddamn useless the American news media is as the primaries this year. It’s been very funny to see the press veer wildly from their starting position of Hillary Clinton as the designated winner, only for Obama to be anointed as such the minute after he had won the Iowa primaries, then to be written off again now Clinton has won New Hampshire. This tendency to latch on to the latest shiny thing as the One True Shiny is of course at its worst in the US press, but don’t for a minute think it’s much better elsewhere; just listen a few days to Radio 4’s newscoverage if you want proof.

Meanwhile another annoying feature of the US newsmedia is also in full force, their pretence that their own prejudices, likes and dislikes determine objective reality and are shared by the voters. The pres has alway loved McCain and always assumed against all evidence to the contrart that this was shared by the Republican primary voters. Now that McCain has won New Hampshire, which should not have been a surprise, considering he did this last time as well, expect them to become insufferable in their McCain lovin’.

all of which would be annoying enough on its own, but unfortunately this press posturing can and does influence real world events. If the big story is that Obama or Clinton is winning, instead of the much more prosaic truth that they both have now picked up roughly the same number of delegates, chances are people alter their voting. Doesn’t always work of course; the big Hillary Crying Jag that was such a sure sign to the pundits that she had lost the plot seems to have done exactly the opposite. Because the media blew it up so much it galvanised some groups of voters into voting for her.

The Fall of Yugoslavia – Misha Glenny

books and books review, Europe, history
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Cover of The Fall of Yugoslavia


The Fall of Yugoslavia
Misha Glenny
314 pages, including index
published in 1996

The Fall of Yugoslavia was the first book I read in 2007, I got it as a Christmas present from Sandra. I had put this book on my Amazon UK wishlist quite a while back, after having read Glenny’s The Balkans 1804-1999, which was an impressive overview of the modern history of the Balkans. I thought it would be a good book to start the new year with and was not disappointed.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned the past few years blogging the War on Iraq it’s that you can follow the news on tv, read the newspaper reports and magazine coverage on a subject and think you know what’s going on, when in fact you’ve only gotten part of the facts, often arranged in a preconcieved narrative. Even if the news media are basically honest in their reporting, it is too immediate to see beyond the story being reported, to put them in context and digest them. At the same time, news thrives on new and unusual incidents, which greatly distorts the picture we get: in reality more people may die in single car crashes than multicar pileups, but the latter is the one featured on the evening news. Only the simplest of narratives can survive this process and governments and other propagandists make grateful use of it to push through their reality.

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