A gray-haired, white-skinned, male journalist is savaging the first black President of the United States as an unreconstructed warmonger, under a headline lifted from the title of a Public Enemy track released back in 1988. Yes, it’s John Pilger.
Pilger’s latest column is a wonderful example of how churlishness, bitterness and a rather chilling openness towards conspiracy theories still pervade influential parts of the European left. “Don’t believe the hype,” he exhorts us, before delivering a solemn lecture about the dangers of “corporate journalism.” Pilger, you see, is one of that brave yet dwindling band of truth-speakers-to-power-worshippers.
Of what truths does he speak? Well, there’s the matter of the “brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood, in maintaining that superiority.”
No, actually - America is not the reincarnation of the Third Reich. It is an infinitely more complex place than Pilger dares allow for. On both the left and the right, there are powerful isolationist tendencies. Only the most pig-headed ideologue could not perceive the differences between Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon, say, or FDR and the younger Bush. American foreign policy has never been informed by a single principle and has never aimed for territorial aggrandizement. Hyperpower status is the object of decidedly mixed feelings.
As for the notion that America’s youth are schooled in the doctrine of their own superiority, that is just preposterous. Yet it appears in the pages of the New Statesman without question (one reason why, incidentally, I think Jonathan Freedland should pause before claiming that European anti-Americanism is largely about a loathing of the Bush Administration.)
Then we come to Pilger’s problem with Obama. Basically, he’s not black enough. Black, Pilger seems to believe, is a state of mind as well as a skin color. Increasingly, the black mindset is insufficiently radical, with the result that, as Pilger says, “the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class.” Obama belongs to that class. So do Colin Powell and Condaleezza (sic) Rice.
On the other hand, Martin Luther King, praised for his linkage of the civil rights struggle with the Vietnam War, is depicted as healthily authentic. If Pilger was aware that Dr. King also equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, he’d no doubt revise that assessment.
Some of you might have already concluded that this is all a bit, well….patronizing? Racist, even? At the very least reminiscent of the foul headline, “Uncle Barack’s Cabin,” which was emblazoned on the front page of the leftist German newspaper Die Tageszeitung?
As is often the case with Pilger, it gets worse.
“The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist,” he thunders. “Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent ‘neoliberal’ devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an ‘Israel-first’ Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians - an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people’s loathing of the US and the spawning of jihadism.”
Finally, we get to the nub of the complaint! Obama’s Administration may not have been installed in the White House yet, but it’s already in the grip of Zionists and aggressors.
Joe Biden is reliably reported to have called himself a “Zionist” - no shame in that unless you believe, as Pilger does, that Zionism leads inexorably to war and racism and other ills. Remember, as well, that Pilger has an axe to grind with Biden over the Balkans; while Pilger was offering words of comfort to Milosevic, Biden was courageously supporting Bosnia and Kosovo against Serbia’s onslaught.
As for Rahm Emanuel, he has trangressed against the anti-Zionist catechism beyond any hope of redemption. His loyalties are dual, and he prioritizes Israel over America. He wants to crush the Palestinians. Because of him, and like-minded people who share power with him, we have been propelled into a conflict with the Muslim world. The prospect of a black president igniting “a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people,” is what awaits us.
Again and again, Pilger trots out innunendo and hearsay as fact. Utterly convinced of his own righteousness, he walks straight into the analytical trap of portraying the Muslim world as a unified bloc facing a hostile America. With each passing day, there are different examples - uppermost in my mind today is the horrific story of the 13 year old girl in Somalia stoned to death by the Shabab Islamist militia for the crime of being raped - all of which make the same essential point: we are not dealing with a clash of civilizations stoked by Washington, but with a struggle against a form of Islamist radicalism which threatens Muslims first and foremost. In that sense, to echo the frankly antisemitic claim that Israel lies at the heart of Al Qaeda’s jihad against democracy and reason endangers not just Jews, but Muslim reformers too.
When all is said and done, I can’t help thinking that Pilger’s venting against the US, slavishly repeated in many of the comments on his piece, is a rather clumsy attempt to avoid another issue. Namely, why western Europe, which elevates commentators like Pilger to heights they could never hope to occupy in the US, is not going to have a black leader at the helm any time soon.
I know, I know: that last point does sound a tad conspiratorial. I guess it’s infectious.
“As for Rahm Emanuel, he has transgressed against the anti-Zionist catechism beyond any hope of redemption. His loyalties are dual, and he prioritizes Israel over America. He wants to crush the Palestinians.”
Here is something to chew on, Melanie Phillips a rigt wing commentator for the Spectator has accused Rahm of being a Quisling:
“Rahm Emanuel himself was involved in the catastrophic Oslo appeasement process, which led directly to the second intifada and helped fuel the rise of Hamas. What is little understood in a western world in thrall to the noxious narrative of Jewish control over the American agenda is that American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal or on the left – and Jews on the left who support Israel often espouse policy positions which threaten to destroy it, thus making themselves the useful idiots for Israel’s enemies. Indeed Israel’s own politicians on the left, including the current Prime Minister — who has now said that Israel should revert to the pre-1967 ‘Auschwitz’ borders, a remark which caused even Haaretz to choke on its falafel — have gone down precisely the same suicidal road.”
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/2592291/deeper-into-the-trap.thtml
Nice, eh?
What is it with these British “intellectuals?”
I suppose it’s hard being a member of just another Island after having ruled the world for half a millennium!
What is it with these British “intellectuals?”
Just to be pedantic, I should point out that Pilger is an Australian. Same monarch, I suppose.
Seems to me that Melanie Phillips has to engage in more complex mental acrobatics than Pilger does. With Pilger, it’s straight, down the line, anti-imperialism. Melanie, on the other hand, has to attack not just Obama, but those on the left who also attack Obama. This she does by saying that the anti-Obama left is so blinded by antisemitism, they don’t understand that most US Jews are also on the left - and therefore a danger to Israel.
I’m developing a mild headache…
What they each have in common, it seems to me, Ben, is a tendency to extreme interpretation. Yes, Melanie’s does some fancy footwork (mental acrobatics) yet she finally reaches the same banal conclusion that Pilger does, albeit for diametrically opposed reasons.
To each of them, Obama will be an inadequate President because he will not support their fantastic view of the world. It’s interesting to me that each of them has used Rahm Emmanuel as image of what is “wrong with Obama.”
To Pilger Obama’s choice of chief of staff proves that the Zionists are in control of Washington. To Melanie Rahm’s presence shows that Obama will be an “appeaser.”
The left’s hatred for Rahm has taken on hysterical proportions. Our friend the torpid Tartuffean Michael Lerner (like Pilger) recently attacked him for being the son of “an extremist” Zionist.
“Emanuel’s got dead eyes — but let’s look at the bright side”
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2008/11/emanuels-got-de.html
Marty Peretz tried to satirize him here:
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/archive/2008/11/07/michael-lerner-sings-a-sad-tune.aspx
though it seems to me that Michael is beyond satire.
The attacks on Rahm and is father by the extreme left is laughable given that he has been living in Chicago for many decades and is a well respected Pediatrician. Rahm’s brother is also a well respected medical researcher. (I am certain that the family will survive these vile attacks.)
Charlie Rose interviewed the family here:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9130
In any case since when is the son responsible for the deeds of his father in the US?
During the Clinton years his joint chief of staff JOHN M. SHALIKASHVILI was found to have had a father who had served in a Nazi Legion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Shalikashvili
Yet one didn’t read even half the vitriol form the left about it that one reads about Rahm’s father.
For a blunter analysis of Bilger:
http://ollysonions.blogspot.com/2008/11/journalist-permitted-to-write-about.html
Shriber, your last comment was deleted because you quoted from a letter allegedly written by Martin Luther King which has been unmasked as a hoax:
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=21&x_article=370
The quote linked above in my article is genuine.
Please can we all check our sources before quoting something. And please can we keep comments brief. Thanks.
Thanks for alerting me to the fraudulent nature of the letter.
I had seen claims to that effect on some websites but since most of the websites that made those claims also posted antisemitic comments I didn’t pay any attention to their claims.
In hindsight I should have been skeptical since the title of the letter was a give away:
“Letter to an anti-Zionist Friend.” Why would Dr. King call an anti-Zionist a friend in the title and then equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism? He was very sensitive to the use of language and he would have bristled if a white person had written a letter to a “racist friend.”
As to the rest of the analysis I agree that it was a bit long. I had originally posted it at the New Statement site as a counter to the other comments.
I will rewrite the analysis and repost it later on as I think it’s important to do hard work of analysis. People like Pilger count on their opponents merely calling them antisemites (which they are) without showing how their comments are antisemitic and this case also anti African American.
Then we come to Pilger’s problem with Obama. Basically, he’s not black enough.
I’d bet Pilger’s problem with Obama is that he’s too black. Pilger’s politics are staked to the axiom that America is awful. The replacement of Bush’s conservative Republican administration with a Democratic one, peacefully with a free, fair and effective election, is a knock against that idea. (Remember all the people 4 and 8 years ago who were promising us that democracy in America was dead; the Republicans would never allow an honest election to unseat them?) American democracy is working pretty well, and the fact that the winner of the election was black, to boot, is a real problem for Pilger’s convictions. It gives people the idea that America is not a bad place at all. What else can he do, but try to show why Obama is really, despite appearances, just another face of American awfulness? Anyone who Americans might actually elect is going to be bad according to Pilger, because they’re not going to deliberately tear the country to pieces, which is his minimal requirement. Obama is an extra affront because he’s living proof that America isn’t quite as racist as it’s supposed to be.
Two kinds of people will sign up to Pilger’s view: Simple racists, and far-left anti-American (self-described anti-imperialist) bigots.
Here is a slightly emended version of the analysis. Please delete the previous version.
Ben if you think it’s too long than go ahead and delete it.
An analysis of Pilger’s attack on Obama “Don’t believe the hype”
http://www.newstatesman.com/print/200811130021
Begin with an attack on “objective journalism” which he sees as fostering “mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around those whose “professionalism” and “objectivity” carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth.”
For Pilger objectivity is not the same as “truth,” he further sees its professional pursuit as being in the service of the liberal power structure in America.
He offers as an example of the kind of engaged journalism he admires the work of Penn Jones Jr who “was the antithesis of the Texas stereotype. Having exposed the racists of the John Birch Society, his printing press had been repeatedly firebombed. Week after week, he painstakingly assembled evidence that all but demolished the official version of Kennedy’s murder.”
Hence Pilger form the beginning sets up a binary dichotomy between good journalism which goes against the powers that be and institutional journalism which looks for objectivity but doesn’t investigate stories that challenge the liberal power structure in America.
Pilger is very good at setting up dichotomies of the good guys and the bad guys and his article is replete with such binarism.
A quick look at the objective facts, though will flatten his binary house of cards:
Penn Jones not only wrote about the Kennedy assassination he was obsessed with it. He wrote that a government conspiracy was behind the killing of the former President. From 1967 till 1980 he wrote “Forgive My Grief” parts 1, (1967) 2 (1967) and 3 1967) and then in 1980 “Continuing Inquiry.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_Jones,_Jr.
In this he was not alone, of course, there are dozens of “journalist” and writers obsessed with the assassination. None of their efforts have yielded any concrete proof that anyone but Oswald murdered John F Kennedy.
While it may seem curious that Pilger would fixate on a minor Kennedy assassination buff the reasons become pretty obvious when we read that Pilger himself seems to blame the Johnson administration for his murder and not only his death, but the death of Martin Luther King also:
“The courageous Martin Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by a “liberal” Democratic administration.”
Pilger’s aim then is to indict liberalism which he sees as being as much responsible for the war in Iraq as George W Bush.
Pilger also mentions Studs Terkel as a journalist he admires but “the Jewish” Terkel, a radio personality and writer rather than a journalist is there to acquit Pilger of the charge of antisemitism when he will later on offer his intemperate attacks on Rahm Emmanuel and Vice President elect Joe Biden:
“The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent “neoliberal” devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an “Israel-first” Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians - an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people’s loathing of the US and the spawning of jihadism.”
This intemperate and yes antisemitic outburst is of a piece with his indictment of liberalism.
Liberalism one would guess is an evil because it doesn’t deal in binary dichotomies. Liberals tend to see the in-between in moral issues. Pilger’s mode of thinking is then not that different from those right wing extremist who also divide the world into us and them, good and bad.
Against Pilger it can be pointed out that not Penn Jones but Robert Upshur Woodward and Carl Bernstein whose objective and professional reporting brought down a corrupt President Nixon offers the example of professional journalism at its best.
Pilger also gets both Martin Luther King and General Powell. They are not opposing figures but people who worked for both the betterment of the lives of African Americans and reconciliation between the races and they did it out of love for their country. Neither of them embraced the dead-endedness of dichotomous thinking.
M. L. King’s message is lost on Pilger: for he was above a liberal thinker imbued with enlightenment values and he believed that those values could best be fulfilled through the strengthening of liberal institutions not their abolition.
King’s tragic death hastened the day when these values became tangible. Ironically, it was the liberal Johnson administration (which Pilger wildly and without proof blamed for the death Of Dr King) that helped enact civil rights legislation which made the election of an Obama Presidency possible.
This too is a reason why Pilger hates Obama and has to take refuge behind vile and conspiratorial accusations: he is the symbol of the triumph of liberalism.
European academic life is replete with the kind of illiberal values expressed by Pilger. This is one reason his views are not seen there as extraordinary. To understand the intellectual underpinning of his idea one can do no better than start with a review in the current issue of The New Republic on a book by Slavoj Zizek: “In Defense of Lost Causes,” by Adam Kirsch.
“The Deadly Jester”
Here are the concluding paragraphs of the review:
“It makes sense, then, that Zizek should finally cast his anti-Judaism in explicitly theological terms. Why is it that so many of the chief foes of totalitarianism in the second half of the twentieth century were Jews–Arendt, Berlin, Levinas? One might think it is because the Jews were the greatest victims of Nazi totalitarianism, and so had the greatest stake in ensuring that its evil was recognized. But Zizek has another explanation: the Jews are stubbornly rejecting the universal love that expresses itself in revolutionary terror, just as they rejected the love of Christ. “No wonder,” he writes in the introduction to In Defense of Lost Causes, “that those who demand fidelity to the name ‘Jews’ are also those who warn us against the ‘totalitarian’ dangers of any radical emancipatory movement. Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards allembracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror.”
Stalinism, in this reading, is the heir to Christianity, and yet another attempt to overcome law with love. Here Zizek is explicating the views of Badiou, to whom the book is dedicated, but it is safe to say that Zizek endorses those views, since precisely the same logic is at work in The Fragile Absolute, where he writes of “the Jewish refusal to assert love for the neighbor outside the confines of the Law,” as against the Christian “endeavor to break the very vicious cycle of Law/sin.” “No wonder,” Zizek says, “that, for those fully identified with the Jewish ‘national substance’ … the appearance of Christ was a ridiculous and/or traumatic scandal.”
It does not bother Zizek that this hoary dichotomy is built on a foundation of complete ignorance of both Judaism and Christianity. Nothing could be lazier than to recycle the ancient Christian myth of Judaism as a religion of “mere law.” And nothing could be more insulting to Christianity than to reduce it romantically to antinomianism, which has always been a Christian heresy. “Christianity,” Zizek remarks, “is … a form of anti-wisdom par excellence, a crazy wager on Truth.” But surely it is no part of the Pascalian wager that murdering millions of people will help to win it.
And there is no doubt that this scale of killing is what Zizek looks forward to in the Revolution. “What makes Nazism repulsive,” he writes, “is not the rhetoric of a final solution as such, but the concrete twist it gives to it.” Perhaps there is supposed to be some reassurance for Jews in that sentence; but perhaps not. For in In Defense of Lost Causes, again paraphrasing Badiou, Zizek writes: “To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the ‘Jewish question’ is the ‘final solution’ (their annihilation), because Jews … are the ultimate obstacle to the ‘final solution’ of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility.” I hasten to add that Zizek dissents from Badiou’s vision to this extent: he believes that Jews “resisting identification with the State of Israel,” “the Jews of the Jews themselves,” the “worthy successors to Spinoza,” deserve to be exempted on account of their “fidelity to the Messianic impulse.”
In this way, Zizek’s allegedly progressive thought leads directly into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor. In his New York Times piece against torture, Zizek worried that the normalization of torture as an instrument of state was the first step in “a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone.” This is a good description of Zizek’s own work. Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse. Is Zizek’s audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? I hope so, because the idea that they can hear him without recoiling from him is too dismal, and frightening, to contemplate.”
Read the whole article here:
http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=097a31f3-c440-4b10-8894-14197d7a6eef
At what point can we say that the European left has crossed the Rubicon of the enlightenment and landed on the ‘darkening plain.’
It seems to me that with Zizek we are already there.
The best way to fight for liberal values and against Pilger and his ilk is to engage the whole spectrum of illiberal thinking in vogue in the capitals of Europe and there is no better way than to begin with Professor Zizek.
We miss the likes of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt who whatever differences they had they knew how to take on and defeat this new fascist ideology.
I’d bet Pilger’s problem with Obama is that he’s too black…American democracy is working pretty well, and the fact that the winner of the election was black, to boot, is a real problem for Pilger’s convictions. It gives people the idea that America is not a bad place at all.
That’s quite a compelling way of looking at it, Paul. Thanks.
Also, please can we avoid posting essays (Shriber, you are not the only one doing this.) It would be good if we could get some discussion threads going on this blog, but that’s not going to happen if people don’t limit the length of their contributions. The point about comments is to keep them brief. If you are seized by the desire to write more, then why not start your own blog? Thanks, all.
“It would be good if we could get some discussion threads going on this blog, but that’s not going to happen if people don’t limit the length of their contributions. The point about comments is to keep them brief.”
I agree.
“If you are seized by the desire to write more, then why not start your own blog?”
There is always more to say. However, I will limit myself as clarity often comes with brevity.
And brevity as that old Shakesperean blogger once said “is the soul of wit.”
Shriber, but thanks for the Zizek jewel — he sure is something.
I’m sometimes doubtful if it makes sense to really waste a serious analysis on writers like Pilger — he so obviously lives in an ideological straight-jacket, far beyond the reach of reasoned argument.
Petra: “I’m sometimes doubtful if it makes sense to really waste a serious analysis on writers like Pilger — he so obviously lives in an ideological straight-jacket, far beyond the reach of reasoned argument.”
Yes, by many people read him and if some of them could be brought to think critically about what he writes then it would have been worth it.
Besides, it’s not obvious what stands behind his hatred of the US. He says he is an anti-imperialist but a even the briefest critical reading of his articles would show that his real target is liberal democracy.
Like many anti-imperialists he believes that liberal democracy offers itself as a cover for “imperialism.”
Zizek holds a similar view though it’s couched in more sophisticated language. This is why I seem him as even more dangerous than Pilger.
In any case, Ben wants short posts so I’ll stop right here.
Zizek reply to ignorant ‘liberal’ and thicko Adam Kirsch:
http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=c6570f94-f4b8-4b2a-b3f5-6adefe8d15ca