The pragmatic NY Times

The New Neo Posted on by

Right from the start–its very title–this NY Times article is a good example of what’s wrong with the paper.

Are there any incorrect facts in the piece? I doubt it. My guess is that, strictly speaking, it contains not a single lie. But the wording, the shading, and the placement of information are all quite stunning in their subtle bias.

To start with the title, “Pragmatic Hamas figure is likely to be next premier”–that’s a little bit like calling Goehring pragmatic as compared to Hitler. It’s true, but somewhat irrelevant. In this case, the Times offers not single example of Ismail Haniya’s “pragmatic” views. In fact, it doesn’t even identify who finds him so very pragmatic:

Hamas plans to nominate Ismail Haniya, viewed as one of its less radical leaders, for prime minister.

Does the Times see fit to report anything about the policies he advocates, his past, or his attitude towards certain little details such as the right of the state of Israel to exist, of the suicide bombers, and of the Second Intifada? Just this, which occurs towards the end of the lengthy article rather than the beginning (is the Times counting on the fact that its readership might not get that far?):

Mr. Haniya, 42, has good relations with other Palestinian factions. He was at the top of the Hamas election list and has been viewed as the most important Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, the group’s stronghold, since the parliamentary election. While considered to be part of the more pragmatic side of Hamas, he endorses its fundamental positions.

So, he endorses all the fundamental (is that a pun?) Hamas postions. Boy, I’d dearly love to know what “pragmatic” could mean in that context. More willing to pretend to be reasonable, in order to get concessions, like the very pragmatic Mr. Arafat? I really don’t know what the Times means, and I read the article a few times in a vain effort to find out, since they saw fit to highlight the word in the headline.

There’s food for thought in almost every paragraph of the article, I’m afraid. But I’ll just highlight a few. The opening paragraph is a good example:

The militant group Hamas on Thursday appeared poised to name its candidate for Palestinian prime minister, while Israel’s Defense Ministry drew up sanctions likely to be imposed after the new Palestinian parliament dominated by Hamas is sworn in on Saturday.

So (from the headline) we’ve got the “pragmatic” (read: “reasonable?”) Prime Minister elect of the “militant” (surely if any group richly deserved the appellation “terrorist” instead, it would be Hamas) Hamas, and then the Israelis preparing those nasty sanctions, without even giving the pragmatic militant a chance! How vengeful of them!

The next few parapraphs focus on what form the sanctions will take, without giving further background about Hamas except that the Israelis consider it a terrorist group and say that they will not transfer money to terrorists. An example of what the Israelis are planning:

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz held talks about possible restrictions to be imposed to reduce Israel’s already limited contact with the Palestinians. The measures would include preventing Palestinian workers from entering Israel and making it even more difficult for Palestinians and their goods to move between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Then there’s a delicately nuanced paragraph about Europe:

The European Union, the largest single donor to the Palestinians, prefers a wait-and-see approach before any punitive measures are imposed. That position was reaffirmed Thursday by Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, who met with Ms. Livni. After the Palestinians began an uprising against Israel in late 2000 their economy crashed, and they depend heavily on roughly $1 billion in annual aid.

Aren’t those Europeans kind and forgiving compared to the punitive Israelis? But it’s the last sentence in the paragraph that is especially masterful in what it says–and what it doesn’t say. Yes, after refusing the offers made at Camp David and launching the murderous and repellent Intifada (oh, I forgot, let’s just use the Palestinians’ own definition of the Intifada: “uprising”–they’re just freedom fighters), the Palestinian economy fell on hard times. But let’s not explicitly blame that on the Infitada and what it did to relations with Israel.

And then there’s this (still with me?), the next to last paragraph of the piece. Note that the Times finally calls Hamas a terrorist organization, perhaps long after most people have stopped reading:

Israel, the United States and the European Union regard Hamas as a terrorist organization. Israel, which has been hit by dozens of Hamas suicide bombings, is seeking to isolate the group internationally.

Oops, my error. I guess the Times doesn’t call Hamas a terrorist organization after all. It reports that Israel, the US, and the European Union regard Hamas as a terrorist organization. At least the Times does acknowledge that Hamas is responsible for suicide bombings–almost at the end of the lengthy article.

This may all seem needlessly picky, a fuss about semantics. But as a former believer in the NY Times as the paper of record, I can attest to the power of such subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) shadings to shape opinion. There is no doubt that, whatever faults they may have, the writers and editors of the Times know the meaning of words. I cannot believe that they are not purposeful in their choice of exactly which words to use, and how and when to use them–and which ones to leave out.

The Saddam WMD tapes: smoking gun or cap pistol?

The New Neo Posted on by

The WMD tapes story that aired last night contained no smoking gun. In fact, as presented on Nightline, it was almost a nonevent. Sandwiched between Dick Cheney’s hunting accident and another feature, the story was given short shrift.

So, how are we to evaluate whether the tapes have any meaning or not? The people behind the release of the tapes–a former weapons inspector named Bill Tierney and attorney John Loftus–have both been labeled as having a few skeletons in the closet.

Loftus’s official bio, found on the website of the group with which he’s affiliated (“The Intelligence Summit”), seems on the up and up. But then again, so did Ramsey Clark’s–for a while. A quick Googling of Loftus reveals only vague charges of sketchiness from various critics on the left (if you have something more specific, please let me know).

As for Bill Tierney, the situation is similar, although there’s a bit more to go on there. He’s been fingered as a demonstrator on the right during the Schiavo affair (oh, no![/sarcasm off]), and as a believer in his own ESP. His biography seems otherwise rather impressive, but that doesn’t really tell us much about the man.

So I’ll just stick to what I heard on Nightline. Brief though the presentation was, it indicated the following (assuming the tapes are authentic, which they so far appear to be):

(1) Saddam had the will, determination, and ability to reconstitute his WMD programs, just as the Duelfer Report alleged.

(2) Saddam had the will, determination, and ability to deceive the weapons inspectors.

Most reports on these tapes are short, and emphasize the fact that they contain no information about events immediately prior to the Iraq War. That is certainly true. Nightline indicated (without being extremely precise on the matter) that the tapes were made mainly during the mid-90s. And this very short Newsweek piece emphasizes the age of the tapes. However, the Intelligence Summit website states that the tapes continue into the year 2000, which certainly would make some of them far more relevant to the question of later events.

I will be interested in knowing whether there is anything further these tapes will end up revealing. According to the Intelligence Summit website, there will be an unveiling and discussion this coming Saturday. But don’t expect that event to be covered by the MSM in any more depth than the original Swift Vets’ news conference was.

I have no idea how this will pan out. It may wind up like so many previous WMD “smoking guns”–a cap pistol.

But if all that the tapes ever reveal is what was shown on Nightline last evening, I think they still tend to bolster the WMD argument rather than negate it. Certainly, they substantiate the Duelfer report’s conclusions about the dangers of the fact that Saddam could easily reconstitute his weapons programs.

For me, this is actually enough. For me, the combination of the human rights benefits of liberating (yes, I do still use that word) the Iraqi people from Saddam’s violent and tyrannical regime, coupled with his clear intent to restart his weapons programs as soon as his European friends helped the sanctions to be lifted, coupled with his clear violations of UN resolutions and inspections, were enough to justify the invasion.

But hey, that’s just me–and after all, what would you expect? I’m a neocon.

Let’s hear it from those moderate Palestinians

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back, I speculated on how many Palestinians who voted for Hamas in the recent elections were playing a voting game.

An article from the Telegraph had quoted a young Palestinian voter as experiencing post-election regret:

Like many others, a young Fatah activist wished yesterday he could go back in time and replay the Palestinian elections all over again.

“I voted Hamas so that my own Fatah Party would be shocked and change its ways,” he said, giving his name only as Mohamed, in the Palmeira cafe in Gaza City. “I thought Hamas would come second.

“But this is a game that went too far. Nobody thought Hamas would win – even them. I know lots of people who voted Hamas, who regret it now. If I could vote again, I would vote for Fatah.”

At the time I wrote, “I wonder how large a group he represents.”

I still wonder. And I still haven’t read anything that would allow me to answer the question with anything approaching authority.

But I have read two more articles that would indicate–if the Palestinians they feature are at all representative of the majority–that the Mohamed quoted above may in fact be extremely typical of Palestinian voters, and not just in his name. An awful lot of them–at least the ones who seem to find their way to journalists to be interviewed, agree with him on the reasons they cast their precious votes for Hamas.

Case in point: an article that appeared one week ago in the Boston Globe, entitled “They voted for Hamas but were surprised by its victory.”

Here are some excerpts:

Muayad Abu Ghazaleh, 36, is the ultimate Palestinian swing voter. A lifelong backer of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party, he grew so disgusted with its cronyism and corruption that in parliamentary elections on Jan. 25 he cast his ballot for Hamas, never suspecting the militant group would actually win.

What he wants from Hamas now, he said, is good government, plus something that the group’s charter says it can never deliver — a peace deal with Israel.

Swing voters such as Abu Ghazaleh — who doesn’t share Hamas’s vision of Islamic rule and unending war with Israel — handed Hamas its surprise victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections. Now those voters are confronting the confusing reality of the day after.

Many say they voted with specific and sometimes contradictory hopes — for a government that won’t let Israel push it around but will ultimately make peace — that they now have to square with Hamas’s uncompromising record. While these voters say they believe Hamas will turn more pragmatic as it moves from violent outsider to governing party, Hamas leaders so far have not given any indication that they plan to abandon their more fiery tenets.

Whether or not Hamas will abandon these “fiery tenets” is a question I’ve answered here (and my answer is “probably not”). But the intentions and hopes of the Palestinian voters who actually cast their lots with Hamas are another thing.

The Globe article is, unfortunately, quite mum on how its author, Anne Barnard, selected her pro-Hamas but relatively reasonable-sounding Palesinian voter interviewees. It’s even more silent on whether we should consider them to be representative of anything more than the particular point of view the writer wishes to promote. And I haven’t seen any polls on the matter.

So it may be a case of quote selection by Ms. Barnard. Or it may be a real phenomenon: that the Palestinian support for Hamas itself is much less than the vote would indicate, and that a huge number of voters were voting as a protest against the corruption of Fatah, never expecting that Hamas would actually win a majority, much less the solid majority it now owns.

According to the article, many of these voters have the (somewhat delusional, IMHO) hope that Hamas–perceived by them as a sort of “strong horse”–might actually be able to get results if they could ever be convinced to enter into negotiations with the Israelis. How they might thus be persuaded is left rather vague–and rightly so, since, as the article points out, there is absolutely no sign that this might be the case.

But that doesn’t stop some–such as the following Hamas voter–from hoping:

”We want peace,” he said. ”I have children. I want to live. I don’t want the Israel Army to come in here. The extremists [in Hamas] are very few. I love Jews and Israel, I just don’t like their politicians.”

The article makes the excellent point that, even if it were theoretically open to moderation, Hamas now is riding high, and therefore has little to no incentive to listen to such voters.

Some voters realize this, including a man named Zakaria, who actually ended up as campaign manager for a Hamas-backed candidate. Now he is experiencing a sort of “buyer’s remorse;” he sounds rather worried:

Ameed Zakaria, a lifelong Fatah member who dresses in the uniform of Palestinian secular nationalists — leather jacket, jeans, no beard — broke from the party to manage the campaign of a Hamas-backed independent candidate. He wanted Hamas to win a solid opposition bloc; the competition, he felt, would shock Fatah into reforming corruption, while the burdens of office would make Hamas more pragmatic.

”I want Hamas to get into the heart of the event, rather than shouting from the sidelines,” he said. ”They will have to admit reality. It’s not good for Hamas to keep saying, ‘We want Palestine from the river to the sea’ ” — its demand for a Palestinian state that would not only include the West Bank and Gaza but also replace Israel on the map.

But when Hamas won outright, taking five of the six district seats in Nablus, Zakaria began to fear for the secular order — and for the prospects for a pragmatic deal with Israel.

”They use religion for political purposes,” he said last week.

As I wrote earlier, it’s always dangerous to vote for someone in whom you don’t believe, thinking it will register only as a protest. If enough people do the same thing, you may find that you’ve actually voted the bums in. To the voters, it probably seemed impossible that Hamas could win, and that therefore a vote for Hamas would be a relatively harmless protest. A miscalculation, and perhaps a fatal one.

The following is the only indication I could find in the article of how many of these protest votes there might have been:

Yasser Mansour, who ran Hamas’s Nablus campaign and won a parliament seat, now spends much of his time offering reassurances. Nearly half of Palestinians are independents without strong loyalties to Hamas or Fatah, he said. ”These are the people who gave us the victory.”

So, it’s those swing voters again. If Mansour is correct, there may be a great many of them among the Palestinians. And one can’t really say they had much of a choice, either: Fatah hatred and proven corruption vs. Hamas ultra-hatred and promises (most likely empty) of ending corruption.

If we can trust the article, there doesn’t seem to be a groundswell of popular support for an Islamic state among the Palestinians. Note the article’s conclusion, from brokerage manager Numaan Khosrawi, who voted for a secular party:

“But if [Hamas members] start trying to control Palestinians’ lifestyles,” he added, “it will be their grave.”

I’m afraid this is bluster; Hamas would have even less hesitation than Fatah did about killing off the opposition. But it seems, at least, that there may be more internal opposition than originally thought. And that–if we can believe the sincerity of the people quoted–does offer some hope that there is more than a small chink in the seemingly monolithic Palestinian support for those who would like nothing better than to blow all Israelis to kingdom come.

I offer as a companion piece this article from the NY Sun. It gives more background on the vote for Hamas. The article features interviews with two Palestinian expatriates, Khaled Abu Toameh and Nonie Darwish–the former was a Palestinian reporter, and the latter grew up in Gaza City as the daughter of a man who was head of Egypt’s fedayeen.

Here’s what they have to say:

Mr. Abu Toameh’s views are shaped by what he has seen as a reporter – not so different from what the Palestinian Arabs who voted for Hamas have seen. He sees former Arafat officials like Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan – “icons of corruption, warlords” – depicted by some Western Arabists as a “younger generation, reformists.”

“The Palestinians don’t buy it,” Mr. Abu Toameh said. Mr. Dahlan, with no official government position, moves around Gaza in a 12-car convoy with 70 bodyguards. “People look at him and say, ‘This is all the CIA money.’ I think Mohammed Dahlan is one of the main reasons why people in Gaza voted for Hamas.”

Much of what Mr. Abu Toameh and Ms. Darwish have to say is unconventional. “A lot of times we hear, ‘Is America going to pressure Israel for peace?'” Ms. Darwish said. “I don’t hear the media asking, ‘When are the Arabs going to pressure the Palestinians for peace?'”

Mr. Abu Toameh said American policy in advance of the Palestinian elections can be summed up as “If you don’t vote for the same thieves who have been stealing your money for ten years, we are going to punish you.”

He said that the linkage between Gaza and the West Bank is more in the minds of Western diplomats and even Israelis than in the culture of the Palestinians. The West Bank feels more Jordanian, Gaza more Egyptian. They are “two separate entities,” Mr. Abu Toameh said…

Both Ms. Darwish and Mr. Abu Toameh emphasized the limits to free speech and freedom of the press in the Middle East. “If I speak in the Arab world, I will be shot,” Ms.Darwish said. Mr. Abu Toameh notes that an independent free press does not exist in the West Bank or Gaza. “They burn it down. They beat you up,” he says. “The media there is controlled by the PLO.”

So we cannot discount the existence of those “moderate Moslems,” those “moderate Arabs,” and those especially elusive “moderate Palestinians.” But with their voices quite understandably muted, we have no way of knowing how many there actually are.

Nightline tonight?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t often recommend watching Nightline, but this should be–interesting.

Prediction: if in fact this is what it purports to be, it will be countered with the following arguments from the left:

(1) who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

(2) Saddam was delusional

(3) It doesn’t matter, because Cheney is a killer

Problems posting

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m having some fairly severe technical problems with the blog. The previous post was published even though Blogger said it wasn’t. It has some errors (typos, and a couple of sentences I wanted to change and qualify). I cannot seem to get back to Blogger to change it; I get an error message when I try. Nor can I seem to comment.

So I’m trying to correct it his way–perhaps I will be able to post a new message.

For example, in the old one, I mean to change, “In fact, they in have become de facto propagandists…” to “In fact, they have often become de facto propagandists…” I’m not sure whether the problem with access to Blogger is a Blogger problem, or some glitch with my new and spiffy computer. So, please bear with me.

I’m going to be away from my computer for a number of hours, till later in the evening, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to correct the original.

Odd.

[ADDENDUM: All better now. Apparently it was a Blogger problem, which is a relief to me. I’d hate to think my brand new computer was on the fritz.]

The West–reluctant self-propagandists

The New Neo Posted on by

Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez has written this thought-provoking post on the enlistment of Batman–yes, you heard me right, Batman–in the fight against Al Qaeda.

Batman, of course, is not real–I assume that at least we can all agree on that. But he is nevertheless entering the arena of public opinion–otherwise known as propaganda–in this war.

The author of a planned book featuring the Batman character fighting modern-day terrorists is far from apologetic about this development:

Miller doesn’t hold back on the true purpose of the book, calling it “a piece of propoganda,” where ‘Batman kicks al Qaeda’s ass.”

The reason for this work, Miller said, was “an explosion from my gut reaction of what’s happening now.” He can’t stand entertainers who lack the moxie of their ’40s counterparts who stood up to Hitler. Holy Terror is “a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we’re up against.”

It’s been a long time since heroes were used in comics as pure propaganda. As Miller reminded, “Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That’s one of the things they’re there for.”

“These are our folk heroes,” Miller said. “It just seems silly to chase around the Riddler when you’ve got Al Qaeda out there.”

Belmont Club writes:

Like politics, to which it is related as much as to war, terrorism is a vehicle for the propagation of ideas…Foad Ajami, writing in the Toronto Star understands that al-Qaeda has nothing whatsoever in common with the classical Islam of his memory. It’s a made for television psychodrama, a comic-book scam…And what we need, apart from robotic fighting platforms, laser gunships and networked battlefields is something that can reach into the realm of ideas and engage Osama Bin Laden — and Khomeini too for that matter — on their own level of reality. It sounds like a job for Batman.

Or, I might say, for Ymarsakar, frequent commenter here on the subject of propaganda.

As usual, the Belmont Club post raises an important and complex subject: the use of propaganda by the terrorists and their supporters, vs. the use (or lack of use) of propaganda on the other side.

It was famously said by Robert Frost, of all people, that “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” These days, however, we can see by the evidence on the liberal side of the blogosphere that this problem has been remedied, and perhaps even overcorrected–today’s liberals certainly don’t seem to be shy about sticking up for their point of view in an argument.

But in the larger sense, as a liberal (read: pro-Enlightenment) society, we have indeed somewhat lost the ability to take our own side in the rather intense argument with extreme and violent Islamicists. They, in the meantime, have become master propagandists who are not the least bit hesitant to enlist every tool of the trade to further their cause, including lies.

This reluctance on our part was certainly was not present during WWII against the Nazis, even though we were fighting foes who had a master propagandist in Goebbels. And Radio Free Europe, in my youth, had a similar effect–on Europe, that is. In those days, domestic propaganda was taken care of, at least partly, by what has now become known as the MSM.

I’ve taken a lot of time to write about how and why this changed during the Vietnam/Watergate era. Some of the impetus behind the change was good, I am certain: the idea that blind and simplistic rah-rah support of country can lead to wretched excesses and wrongdoing. But, like most corrections, this one was an overcorrection. The pendulum has swung so far the other way that our press sometimes appears to effectively function as propaganda for the other side, although I don’t believe this is intentional.

Am I guilty of hyperbole here? I don’t think so. But, as I said, it’s a complex dilemma. We are all behind the idea of a free press, and a free press will always speak some unpleasant truths that go against our own interests. But it’s a question of balance, and I think the balance at the moment is skewed in such a way as to be counterproductive to our own ability to defend ourselves in the marketplace of ideas.

This is another post that could turn into a book if I tried to trace just why and how this has happened, and I don’t intend to do that here. But I think one of the reasons I’ve labored so long and hard (and in such picayune detail) on criticizing media such as the NY Times is to make it clear that, not only are such sources no longer acting as supporters for our side, they are doing so with slipshod methods and with a decided lack of devotion to the truth. In fact, they have often become de facto propagandists–if not exactly for the other side, then certainly against ours.

There is some history of this in the Times going back even before Vietnam. One famous example that comes to mind is that of Walter Duranty, Stalin apologist who wrote for the paper back in the Thirties. He was a particularly egregious but fairly unique case at the time.

Now, however, it appears to be a relatively common point of pride for journalists to refuse to jump on the bandwagon of our present war, and to emphasize instead the errors we have committed. Again, this is all well and good, up to a point–we very much need what Socrates called “gadflies” to point out errors, and this should be one of the functions of a press. But it is not the only one, and if the gadflies predominate (and especially if they play fast and loose with the truth), we become weakened in our ability to prosecute this war effectively. Propaganda is part of the prosecution of this or any other war, and we ignore that fact at our peril.

Thanks to Goebbels and others, the word “propaganda” has become synonymous in many people’s minds with “lies in the service of a political cause.” But propaganda need not be lies. It is simply information spread to influence a populace towards a certain opinion (see definitions here; most of the definitions make no mention whatsoever of deception).

Propaganda, by its very nature, is of course not a reasoned and leisurely debate in which both sides are given equal time and equal measure. Neither is it an academic exercise in politically correct fairness, nor a well-intentioned effort in being kind to the other side. It is most-decidedly one-sided. But the best propaganda is truthful, especially in this day of internet fact-checking. The best propaganda understands the arguments of the other side and counters them effectively. But all propaganda does have one thing in common: a conviction that it is acceptable to use it.

I believe the West, to some degree, has lost that conviction–or, at least, its press has. I’m not totally sure of the reasons behind this, although I’ve explored the historical details in my Vietnam “change” posts. Some of it is mere habit, no doubt. Some comes from an entrenched belief that the press should function more in opposition to the government than in lockstep with it. Some of it, I’m afraid, stems from the fact that it’s a Republican administration that so far has been in charge of this particular war, and most journalists are Democrats. Some of it is a real denial of the seriousness of the foe we face. Some of it is a repugnance towards war itself. Some is a lack of understanding of the military, stemming partly from the fact that a smaller percentage of journalists have served there as compared with earlier conflicts.

But this doesn’t account for the government‘s lack of ability to get into the propaganda business, as opposed to the press. There have been a few recent efforts at the foreign market, but domestic propaganda is not very effective at present (although some would say that bloggers and Fox News are taking up the slack).

One problem is Bush himself as orator. But in fact, oration has become a dying art in the last few decades. One way that domestic propaganda has always been delivered is through Presidential (or Prime Ministrial) speeches: think, if you will, of Roosevelt’s fireside chats and Churchill’s stirring and somber words. They both were masters of domestic propaganda at a time when the Western world had not yet turned its back on it, and both realized its great importance in the fight against Nazism.

Let me repeat: propaganda should not consist of lies. This is true both for ethical reasons (although some would say–especially today, on Valentine’s Day–that all’s fair in love and war) and for practical ones. I believe that truth is a far more effective weapon than lies, because it is much harder to discredit, and far less likely to backfire, especially in our modern world of sophisticated communications.

Somehow many of us have become convinced of the idea that patriotism is identical with chauvinism, and that both are identical with bigotry; also, that propaganda is equal to lies. None of this is the case. And, in fact, we need to reclaim both patriotism and propaganda, or we may find ourselves in a struggle similar to the one described by that master of propaganda, Winston Churchill (which I hereby offer without a hint of apology):

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, and still yet if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you, and only a precarious chance for survival. – There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

And here is another example. It is how Churchill appealed to his fellow-citizens in the first speech he made as their new Prime Minister, during the dark days of 1940:

You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

A different situation, of course. Certainly a different man, and a different time.

But one thing is quite the same, and that is his thought: without victory, there is no survival. I believe that we are actually fighting for the survival of the Western world of the Enlightenment, of the protection of human rights, and of respect for all of humankind. If those ideals are sometimes violated by the West–and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are–these are nothing as to what would occur if jihadist Islamicists were to be triumphant instead.

And to that end–the survival of the Western world of the Enlightment–and towards that victory, I’m willing to enlist Batman, as well as other propagandists such as Churchill–Winston, that is, not Ward.

Your mother (or grandmother, or great-grandmother) should know: gloves and the flu

The New Neo Posted on by

An article appeared in this Sunday’s NY Times advising us that our relations with our neighbors may need to change if the much-feared bird flu pandemic ever arrives. This is what will be necessary if we want to protect ourselves from contagion:

To the pantheon of social arbiters who came up with the firm handshake, the formal bow and the air kiss, get ready to add a new fashion god: the World Health Organization, chief advocate of the “elbow bump.”…If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is “social distancing,” which is the new politically correct way of saying “quarantine.”

But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators ”” and the bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us….the social revolution is likely to focus on the most basic goal of all: keeping other people’s cooties at arm’s length. The bump, a simple touching of elbows, is a substitute for the filthy practice of shaking hands, in which a person who has politely sneezed into a palm then passes a virus to other hands, whose owners then put a finger in an eye or a pen in a mouth. The bump breaks that chain. Only a contortionist can sneeze on his elbow.

It’s a sobering prospect indeed. But everything old is new again, and as I read the article, an image from childhood came to my mind: the top drawer of my mother’s bureau, fully one-third of which was filled with gloves.

No, not gloves like those we wear today: bulky, thinsulate, or fleece, made to shield from the cold and wet. Her gloves were fashion statements: the thinnest and supplest of leather (kid, I suppose), soft and silky materials, a rainbow of colors, short and medium and long.

The longest were actually the best: gloves meant to be worn with sleeveless ball gowns. In addition to being elegant, they did the double duty of hiding any jiggling imperfections of the upper arm (although, of course, as a child, such things never occurred to me). They sported a row of tiny buttons that opened them up in the middle as they stretched their seemingly endless way from fingertip almost to armpit.

Oh, the glamour, and the fun I had as a little girl rooting around in there and trying them on! Even then, I suppose, the fad for gloves was fading, and many of these were already relics, from my mother’s young womanhood during the 30s and 40s.

But gloves as proper fashion statement were still around; I myself was outfitted as a tiny girl with short, white (and, one memorable year when I was four, little pink) gloves for dress-up occasions, making me feel sophisticated beyond belief. Oh yes, and hats, too, with bows on them.

I never for a moment stopped to think that these glorious gloves (now gone the way of the dodo) might have had a protective function, as well–after all, what did grownups or old people know that we didn’t? Much as the parasols and sunhats of those fussbudget Victorians ended up having an actual purpose (as some of us discovered, much to our surprise, when skin began to collect the debt owed for all those year of sunbathing coated with baby oil)–so, perhaps, did the lowly glove. Might it not have acted to prevent the spread of illness through hand-to-hand contact, when contagious disease was so prevalent and difficult to treat?

I couldn’t find too much on the subject when I researched the role of the glove, but my guess is that slowing down the spread of disease has always been one of its functions. At the very least, wearing gloves may have given people the reassuring idea that they were protecting themselves, whether they actually were or not.

On the latter point, my mother tells a story that occurred when she was in her twenties, during the 1930s. She and a friend were traveling from New York to California on a cruise ship that made the journey via the Panama Canal. They were two attractive women–my mother’s friend, in fact, was exceptionally beautiful–and they received a certain amount of attention from the ship’s crew and the officers, who were a rather handsome bunch themselves.

The evening before the ship was to dock for a day visit in Havana,Cuba (isn’t this story quaint?), my mother and her friend were talking with some of the officers when my mother mentioned that one thing she’d really love to see was a Cuban house.

“Really?” asked the officer, raising an eyebrow. My mother nodded.

“Well, it can be arranged,” he said, with a charming and mysterious smile.

The next day several of the officers escorted my mother and her friend to a Cuban house, and started showing them around. The place seemed a bit strange; there were a number of women lazing about, and the officers explained that there were rooms decorated in the fashion of different countries of the world: would they like to view them?

The truth dawned on my mother and her friend at around the same time: they were actually in a Cuban brothel. They two young women made eye contact and then, both minds with a single simultaneous thought, opened their purses, took out their white gloves, and put them on for the remainder of the tour, satisfied that they were protected from whatever dreadful diseases might be swirling around the place.

So I advocate the return of the glove: it might work even better than an elbow bump in the event of the feared pandemic. Your mother–or perhaps your grandmother, or even your great-grandmother–should know.

Nor’easter

The New Neo Posted on by

Today has been one of those days when the weather intervenes and dictates things: snow and more snow, all up and down New England. It’s one of the largest accumulations of this year, a season in which snowfall has been unusually light–so far.

I’ve got visitors, and so I’m not planning any big posts today. But it’s fun to have this day of snow, especially on a Sunday when most people don’t really have to go anywhere, and we can sit around and read the paper, talk, eat, and generally do a lot of nothing without feeling much pressure to do any more than that. And tonight, when things clear a bit, we’re even planning to go out to eat.

So, no “Outcasts of Poker Flat” action here, I’m glad to report. When I was a child, something about that tale and the images it evoked gripped my imagination: the band of assorted people trapped in a cabin in a blizzard, day after day of snow and a dwindling food supply, drifts piling ever higher as the windows were obscured and the hut became buried. What started out as a cozy idyll ended up a horror story.

Snow in New England ordinarily has its plusses, as long as we don’t get too much of it. The ski areas have been hurting this year, and now they’ll be happy for a while. The kids–well, the kids love it, except for the unfortunate timing of this particular storm, that comes on a weekend and means they don’t get a longed-for snow day. The rest of us get to enjoy the beauty of it–let’s face it, it’s just not winter without snow, and this year’s snow cover has been a sometime thing.

Today brings us a nor’easter, one of those colorful old-fashioned words that basically means a big winter storm, with wind. Not a good time to be out at sea, but with modern weather forecasting the commercial fishermen and anyone else who might think of going out there in February are given plenty of advance warning.

Unlike the Outcasts, we here on land have also got the modern conveniences of electricity (so far), heat, refrigerators stocked with food, a market down the street, and snowplows hard at work to clear the way. It makes the storm a pleasant interlude rather than a fearful encounter with an overwhelming and sometimes harsh nature. But it’s still a reminder–although a relatively tame one–of how essentially vulnerable we all remain.

See you tomorrow!

Trust, but verify: David Irving and the writing of history

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David Irving, historian/Holocaust denier (although if anything should be an oxymoron, that would be it), is facing trial in Austria soon for violating a law against Holocaust denial (or, to be technical for “minimizing the crimes of the Third Reich“).

I’ve been doing some research lately on the despicable Irving. I’ve developed ideas for a number of posts related to him, some of which I may actually get around to writing some day.

But right now I’m going to deal with only one aspect of Irving’s tale. (All the information and quotes in the following post that are not otherwise linked come from the extraordinarily excellent book Lying About Hitler by historian Richard J. Evans, which I’m now in the process of reading).

I only vaguely followed Irving’s sensational trial in 2000, in which he sued Deborah Lipstadt for allegedly libeling him in her book Denying the Holocaust. In it, she wrote that Irving was “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial,” whose practice was to:

…misstate, misquote, falsify statistics, and falsely attribute conclusions to reliable sources.

British libel laws are notoriously skewed in favor of the plaintiff, and Irving fully expected to win or to force Lipstadt to settle for a tidy sum. But Lipstadt’s publisher Penguin, to its everlasting credit, decided to spare no expense to defend her, and itself.

Historian Richard J. Evans was hired by Penguin as a consultant, and became the star witness for the defense, which was ultimately victorious. They mounted the risky strategy of asserting that everything Lipstadt said about Irving was in fact true, which meant that the burden of proof was on them to prove it to be so. And yet they succeeded, and a verdict was rendered that stated unequivocally that Irving was indeed everything Lipstadt had alleged, and more (or, one might say, less).

Irving was ordered to pay millions, but so far has cannily avoided doing so, as well as somehow managing to keep up his pace of speaking engagements–that is, until he made the mistake of entering Austria, a country from which he’d been banned many years ago and where he knew if he set foot he ran the risk of being arrested. And arrested he was.

Even Lipstadt, however, has defended his right to freedom of speech, (ironic, since he tried so hard to trample on hers), saying Irving should not face imprisonment. Many agree, and I am among them, although I certainly would like to see him pay the money he owes from the British trial.

All of this is mere background, however, to my main topic, which is: how is it that Irving got away for so long with the lies and distortions in his books? After all, is there no fact-checking for historians?

In a certain sense, Irving hadn’t gotten away with it; some criticized him from the start for playing fast and loose with the facts. but only in a general way. No one had taken the time and expended the effort to do a systematic study of his research methods. So when Richard Evans was hired by the defense in the Lipstadt trial he had only a vague familiarity with Irving’s controversial works, and he sat down to a monumental task: to evaluate whether in fact Irving had consistently misrepresented his sources as Lipstadt alleged.

Irving, a university dropout who had never received formal training as a historian and who therefore stood outside the usual professorial system of networking and collegiality, had received mixed reviews from historians but universal praise for his ability to do original research: to dig deep into archival sources, diaries, and arcane papers. He spoke fluent German, and was acknowledged as a tireless worker who ferreted out information no one else could find.

Irving’s specialty was debunking the work of other historians. Irving alleged that other historians (unlike him) were lazy; that they relied on each other’s work far too much, something he referred to contemptuously as “inter-historian incest.” He turned his lack of academic credentials into a point of pride rather than embarrassment, superiority rather than inferiority. According to Evans:

Irving contemptuously almost never cited, discussed, or used the work of other historians in his books. Irving was evidently very proud of his personal collection of thousands of documents and index cards on the history of the Third Reich.

So Irving was a maverick right from the start, a sort of Indiana Jones of the history trade, going his own swashbuckling way. He burst on the scene as a very young man in his twenties, and had a great deal of success early on. But as time passed and his views became more strident, eccentric, and clearly Nazi-philic, and he lost a libel suit in the 70s, his reputation began to suffer greatly. It tanked when he became a Holocaust-denier. But he continued to write, and often to be read.

But still, by the time of the Lipstadt trial, it is a remarkable fact that no one seems to have actually done an in-depth study of Irving’s sources and methods, not even Lipstadt. It seems that history, like many other academic disciplines (research science comes to mind), is an endeavor based at least partially on trust. There is a sort of tacit gentleman’s agreement (forgive the sexism, I’m using it in the metaphoric sense) that we’re all playing by the same rules here.

But with Irving, it turns out it would have been far better to trust, but verify. Because it wasn’t until the lawyers for the defense obtained access to the bulk of Irving’s notes and papers through the liberal British discovery process, and Evans was paid to use his knowledge of German to take the time to do an in-depth study of how Irving’s original sources matched up with Irving’s depiction of them in his writing, that the truly colossal magnitude of Irving’s deception was revealed, as well as the depth of his anti-Semitism.

It’s one of those stories that is very satisfying in its denouement: it turns out that Irving’s own desire to silence his critics started a process in motion that ended up discrediting him in a comprehensive way that most likely would never have occurred had he not started the lawsuit. The wheels of historical justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.

The larger fact is, however, as Evans writes in his book:

Historians…had to rely on each other’s works. There was noting wrong with this, where the work relied on conformed to the accepted canons of scholarly research and rested on thorough, transparent, and unbiased investigation of the primary sources. So vast was the material with which historians dealt, so numerous were the subjects they covered, so consuming of time, energy, and financial resources was the whole process of historical research, that it would be completely impossible for new historical discoveries and insights to be generated if every historian had to go back to the original sources for everything he or she wanted to say. The need to rely on each other’s work had nothing to do with copywriting or plagarism: on the contrary, the conventions of scholarship ensured that footnotes and other references were used in scholarly historical work to pinpoint precisely where the historian had obtained information, and to allow the reader to check up on this if so desired.

All those conventions of scholarship (that bored most of us to tears back in college), the careful and rigorous footnoting and sourcing, are designed to ensure that errors will not happen and that, if they occur, they will be discovered. But the entire edifice nevertheless rests on trust, because it is difficult if not impossible to check every footnote–and Irving cleverly made sure his were extra-impossible to check.

Not only was Irving in disagreement with other historians, but his footnotes were also unconventional, which should have been a tipoff. Many referred to private papers, and those that didn’t were often lacking crucially important information such as page numbers. In fact, according to Evans’s description, my guess is that if Irving had actually written his books in pursuit of a doctorate, his slipshod methods would probably have led to the degree being denied.

But Irving wasn’t going for a doctorate; he didn’t need one. He became successful without one. And, in fact, part of his stated motive for writing his books appears to have been his desire to show up the more regularly-credentialed historians–at the same time he was relying on their gentlemanly (and gentlewomanly) trust that he was following the same rules they were.

It turns out that he was not following those rules, but it took Evans’s remarkable scholarship and persistence to uncover it, and the peculiar circumstances of the libel trial to prove it. As Evans writes, historians do not ordinarily commit the following offenses, or imagine that other historians have committed them:

…manipulate and distort documents, suppress evidence that ran counter to their interpretations, wilfully mistranslate documents in a foreign language, consciously use unreliable or discredited testimony when it suited their purpose, falsify historical statistics, or apply one standard of criticism to sources that undermined their views and another to those that supported them.

But Evans was able to prove that Irving had consistently done just that.

Historians face a dilemma: they must rely on trust, as Evans says, or otherwise spend all their time checking each others’ work and re-inventing the wheel. And although one of the mottos of the blogosphere is, “we fact-check your ass,” even the internet would have been of no assistance at all in uncovering Irving’s game, unfortunately. He had an almost perfect m.o.: he choose arcane and difficult-to-find sources, and quoted them in ways that made them doubly difficult to trace. He became suspect, but no one had the actual goods on him until classic hubris drove Irving to push the envelope and sue someone who was accusing him of doing exactly what he was in fact doing.

Irving was arrogant enough to believe he would get away with it. Fortunately, he hasn’t. But his tale tells us how very fragile truth can be, if one is determined to falsity it, especially if one adopts the guise of historian (or perhaps, for that matter, journalist).

The purpose of movies and movies with a purpose

The New Neo Posted on by

First of all, a confession is in order: I’m not much of a moviegoer, especially recently. I think most of the movies I’ve seen in last ten years or so are just plain inferior to the older ones. So now–if there was any doubt before–I am officially an Old Fart, because I think They Just Don’t Make Them Like They Used To.

So I’m not holding myself out to be any sort of film buff. But I was interested in a discussion at Donkelephant, in which blogger Callimachus complains about a recent announcement from some moviemakers that they consider themselves to be social change agents. He cites a Guardian article in which the makers of the film “Syriana” are quoted as stating that this is their explicit goal in making movies:

Set up in 2004 by Jeff Skoll, billionaire co-founder of eBay, Participant’s express purpose is to make movies that will help to change the world. In the words of Meredith Blake, the firm’s executive vice-president: ”˜Our product is social change, and the movies are a vehicle for that social change.’

The statement reminds me a bit of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate press. Long ago, reporters ordinarily used to enter their field (it wasn’t really thought of as a profession yet) to write stories, not to change the world. And moviemakers–at least in this country–used to be more inclined to entertain (and make money) than to teach. Although teaching was somewhere in there, too, for some of them, it tended to be secondary rather than primary.

The comments section following Callimachus’s post is rather long, and features a great deal of back and forth, and some further comments by Callimachus, including this one:

Hollywood producers are free to do was they wish; that’s the beauty of the free market. The other beauty is, if it sucks, people won’t go see it. And Hollywood seems to have forgotten that, along with the fact that a great chunk of its potential audience has a vague resentment about attempts to socially engineered them by the people who created the culture of Hollywood. Especially when there are so many other entertainment alternatives these days.

Somehow it all made more sense when the “insiders” made status-quo insider films like “The Green Berets” and left the outsiders to make social statement films like “Easy Rider.” Both seemed more relevant then, and more honest.

As far as I know, the founders of Participant are not out to make documentaries, like Michael Moore’s (or films that masquerade as documentaries, like Michael Moore’s). Nor are they making fictionalized biopics a la Oliver Stone, films that occupy some sort of postmodern halfway position where they purport to be a sort of “higher”–though fictionalized–truth. Participant is out to make movies that are straight fiction, but with a purpose–and that purpose is didactic, a form of propaganda.

This, of course, is nothing new. There have always been some movies (although, except for during World War II, I think they were a very small percentage of the whole) that functioned as propaganda. But the political movies of the past, up till the mid-to-late 60s (surprise, surprise–the Vietnam/Watergate era again), for the most part had an agenda that supported the actions of America and agreed with that of mainstream America and the majority of its population.

If we were at war, these movies supported that war, sometimes in an inspirational way. I can’t pinpoint the exact date of the change, but as Callimachus points out, at first it seemed to be an insider/outsider thing; the insiders kept making the old-fashioned films and the renegade outsiders were starting to make films that challenged the status quo.

Now, however, those in charge in Hollywood are mostly the liberals of that Boomer generation and their heirs. The politics of Hollywood are well known to veer quite to the left of mainstream America. Although Hollywood still make movies intended for the masses, the moviemakers seem likely to regard them in just that way–as “the masses.” And they, the moviemakers, are going to teach those masses, by gum–to educate them to their way of thinking, using their highly developed film-making skills as subtle propaganda.

I repeat: many films, especially historic or political or war films, were always at least partly propaganda. But this propaganda used to be in the service of what might be called the mainstream point of view of most Americans; now it is in the service of changing that point of view. Once it glorified America (perhaps in an overly simplistic way); now it critiques it (also in an overly simplistic way).

As Callimachus says, Hollywood can do whatever it wants, and people can go to the movies or stay home as they wish. I myself much prefer movies without a heavy-handed political message of any sort (one of my recent favorites was “Groundhog Day,” which had a message all right, but it wasn’t political).

And I find that whenever Hollywood turns its hand to history, it tends to get things wrong, and then I get angry about it. Film biographies are notorious for that sort of thing. There’s the abominable Oliver Stone, and before him the sanctimonious and distorting but Oscar-winning “Gandhi.” I’m not too familiar with many earlier film biographies, but my guess is that they also played fast and loose with the facts or the portrayals (a fairly minor one that comes to mind is watching Anthony Perkins throw–well, there’s just no other way to put it than “like a girl”–in a movie I enjoyed very much as a child, “Fear Strikes Out”).

Recently I did go to the movies, to a film that is supposed to be non-fiction: “Capote.” I really wanted to see it; as a writer and therapist, I was very interested in the premise, which is the exploitation of others that authors sometimes commit in the act of writing. The film contained material with which I’m unusually familiar; I had read the Capote biography on which it was based, and also In Cold Blood, the source of a great deal of the subject matter. I’d heard it was a very well-done movie, and that the actor who played Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman, gave a tour de force performance.

But the movie itself disappointed me. It was a cold and repellent film. It made Capote himself into an even more cold and repellent character than I recalled from the biography, and simplified his relationships into the solely manipulative, whereas I remembered them as being more mixed (although Hoffman’s performance was indeed excellent). The actor who played murderer Perry Smith was markedly inferior to Robert Blake, who had played him in the original “In Cold Blood.”.

But what was far worse to me than all of this was that some important facts were changed in the scene in which Smith described his motivation for the murders. The whole film leads up to this revelation of Smith’s, which Capote has been coaxing and manipulating him into giving for most of the movie. So, why did the moviemakers see fit to change the facts?

First, a caveat: I’m relying on memory here (I don’t have the script of the scene in the film). But the reason I am relatively sure that there was a change, and why the change especially offended me, was that I’d recently gone back to the book and studied that exact section of it (Smith’s confession) in order to compose this post about shame, murder, and terrorism.

If you read the last half of my post, the one that deals with Smith’s confession and the shame he reveals as the motivation for the murders, you’ll see that it was an emotion apparently triggered by his being misled by his accomplice and a prison friend into thinking that the two would score big, monetarily, in the crime, and his resultant rage. But the “Capote” movie ignores all that, and makes Smith’s pivotal confesson revolve around some sort of class issue between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” In the movie (again, this is as best I can recall), Smith says he killed Mr. Clutter because the latter looked at him as though he were nothing, as though he were looking down at him.

Not only is this incorrect and gratuitous, it happens to be a libel against the murder victim, who actually did nothing of the sort. My guess is that the makers of the film altered the truth to suit a political agenda, even in this rather non-political film.

I have no doubt that films have always dealt in political messages–sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. And I have no doubt that moviemakers have always bent the truth to their purposes. I know that both things (but especially the latter) have made me turn more and more away from movies.

I’m really not asking for movies to go back to the days of all rah-rah America, all the time (if those days in fact ever existed). But more balance would be nice, and less lecturing. Oh, and it would be awfully good if movies that purported to be based on facts didn’t gratuitously change those facts to meet a didactic agenda.