Tom Friedman’s Orwellian flip-floppery

It is a well-known story. When we like what foreigners are doing, they are “moderate,” “democratic” and “peaceful”. When we don’t like them, they are “radical,” “totalitarian,” “terrorist,” or simply “evil.”

These Orwellian “flip-flops” are necessary in the modern era of propaganda in international relations. Joseph Stalin went from evil tyrant, to “Uncle Joe” during World War II, and back to evil tyrant. The Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan (including Osama Bin Laden and other Arab expats) went from noble freedom fighters defending a venerable culture against the Soviet Union to evil thugs who hate women.

Now Thomas Friedman has done the same with Turkey. Once upon a time, Friedman loved Turkey as “the hinge of Europe and the Middle East that manages to be at once modern, secular, Muslim, democratic”… Yet, now, dark things are afoot: ”it is quite shocking to come back today and find Turkey’s Islamist government seemingly focused not on joining the European Union but the Arab League — no, scratch that, on joining the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran resistance front against Israel.” Dire indeed!

Is Friedman’s worrisome assessment based on fraudulent elections in Turkey? On the abrogation of the secular constitution? Support for terrorism and wars of aggression abroad? Well, actually, no. Turkey has had the audacity of having its own foreign policy, first on Iran, second opposing the Israeli strangulation of Gaza (in addition to colonizing the West Bank, and the years of gratuitous attacks on the Palestinians).

Note that the newly “Islamist” Recep Erdogan has been leading Turkey since 2003. Friedman explicitly acknowledges that “He’s no dictator.” This gets to the heart of the matter. Opposition to U.S. policies, and nothing else, will force Friedman to go from one set of memes (secular, democracy, Westernizing, moderate, etc.) to another (Islamist, radical, terrorist, “Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran resistance front” (Axis of Evil?)).

There was a time when such shenanigans by Western commentators actually killed people and destroyed democracies. Salvador Allende of Chile, Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran all found themselves tarred by the brush of “radicalism” and “Communism” when, as democratically elected leaders, they asserted their independence from the West (particularly on economic issues). Each of them found their governments destroyed in Western-backed coups. Mossadegh lived in exile, Allende committed suicide, Lumumba was murdered.

Happily, we live in a different world today. The words of a man like Tom Friedman can no longer kill a man like Recep Erdogan. The peoples of the world are growing more balanced with one another, so that even if those with an imperial mind do not change their ways, their ability to act upon their dark impulses are continuously declining.

PS: Friedman had a similar article in early 2003, when he was upset by France’s opposition to the coming Iraq War. Then, as an ardent proponent of invasion,  he mused that France should have its seat on the United Nations Security Council removed, preferably replaced by India. (He saw nothing at all wrong with Great Britain’s seat.) History will not be kind to the “thoughtful hawks” that gave a veneer of respectability to an unprovoked imperial enterprise. I suspect that on Gaza, and the Palestine question more broadly, Friedman finds himself once again on the wrong side of things.

Trois polygames, un seul métèque

Le Monde diplomatique se demande : est-ce que Brice Hortefeux aurait tenter d’ôter la nationalité à François Mitterrand ? Est-ce qu’il veut l’ôter au célèbre chef Paul Bocuse, qui réclame ouvertement sa polygamie ? Il s’agit bien d’une démagogie néo-maurrassienne. Elle est d’ailleurs très inquiétante étant donné la réaction silencieuse aux propos d’Hortefeux, à gauche comme à droite.

Notons que Hortefeux fut récemment condamné, dans l’indifférence générale, à 750 euros d’amende pour injure raciale.

Chomsky avec le Monde diplomatique

Une conférence et des questions/réponses avec Noam Chomsky, organisées par le Monde diplomatique. Bien introduites par le directeur du Diplo, Serge Halimi. On notera le public enthousiaste. Texte en français, audio mostly in English (bottom of the page).

Des excellentes questions de la part du public. Le remplacement du Juif par le Musulman (criminel, terroriste et mysogène) et la Musulmane voilée (donc aggressive, communautariste et totalitaire) en tant que “ennemi intérieur” pour la réaction française. Chomsky défend, en bon libertaire, le droit d’une femme de porter n’importe quel vêtement, et considère l’interdiction du voile comme une pratique impériale. Il note la futilité des manifestations violents face à l’Etat tout-puissant. Il y aussi quelques bon mots : “People who tell us that facts don’t exist. That’s a particular Paris pathology. One solution is to leave Paris.” (!)

Il exprime aussi des critiques assez sévères, mais fondées, sur la France et ça politique envers Haïti, Israël et l’Afrique.

A lire et écouter !

Stephen Walt on Tony Judt

Stephen Walt gives us an eloquent memoir and homage to British historian Tony Judt. He mentions his initial hostility and apathy. Their competition for literary prizes for their books Taming American Power and Postwar. And their coming together on the controversial subject of Israeli colonialism and Israeli-American relations.

I wrote a similar homage to Judt on my previous blog, also published in The Beaver.

Sceptique sur l’appui de Sarkozy à l’Afrique

Le journal burkinabé le Pays ne prend pas très au serieux la promesse de Nicolas Sarkozy de soutenir un siège permanent pour l’Afrique au Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU.

Chomsky on French Intellectuals

I think one of the healthy things about the United States is precisely this: there’s very little respect for intellectuals as such. And there shouldn’t be. What’s there to respect? I mean, in France if you’re part of the intellectual elite and you cough, there’s a front-page story in Le Monde. That’s one of the reasons why French intellectual culture is so farcical — it’s like Hollywood. You’re in front of the television cameras all the time, and you’ve got to keep doing something new so they’ll keep focusing on you and not on the guy at the next table, and people don’t have ideas that are that good, so they have to come up with crazy stuff, and the intellectuals get all pompous and self-important.

And who could disagree?

One the one hand you have “BHL,” Attali, Duhamel, Zemmour, Finkielkraut and other éditocrates who dominate France’s intellectual scene and revel in the TV cameras, the new very deep books and polemic essays, making a career from hopping from one vacuous controversy and “principled stand” to the next.

On the other, you have French intellectuals (usually older/dead) who are actually read outside France. Sartre, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Althusser and Baudrillard being some of the most prominent. I don’t want to tar them all with the same brush. Some of what they wrote and did was very good. But their writing has only become more dense and unreadable with time. One has the sense that empty thoughts are being masked in line after line of impenetrable prose and pseudo-profundity.

Althusser and Baudrillard are really awful in this regard. Tony Judt described American studies of Althusser’s Marxism as “unreadable excursions into the Higher Drivel.” Baudrillard is best quoted directly, he has given us these gems :

The close-up of a face is as obscene as a sexual organ seen from up close. It is a sexual organ. The promiscuity of the detail, the zoom-in, takes on a sexual value. (The Ecstasy of Communication)

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true. (The Perfect Crime)

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced, the hyper-real. (Simulations)

Lovely.

An interview with Chomsky on the French intelligentsia. A report by France 24 on Chomsky’s visit to France (followed by unrelated story on a sell-out concert with Elton John in Morocco, opposed by Islamists who fear it will spread homosexuality).

Noam Chomsky en France

Une vidéo fascinante (deuxième partie) avec Noam Chomsky sur le plateau de Frédéric Taddeï.

Les journalistes et intellectuels français et américain ont au moins une chose en commun : la haine de Noam Chomsky. Ce dernier est assez mal connu en France alors qu’il est une star dans le reste du monde. Je pense que l’hostilité envers Chomsky de la part des grand moralisateurs français vient du fait qu’il fait son travail beaucoup, beaucoup mieux qu’eux. Il critique surtout l’Amérique, ce qui steal the thunder de certains petits polémistes en quête de notoriété.

Taddeï anime bien l’entretient pour introduire Chomsky à son public français. Ils abordent toutes les questions essentielles. Ils parlent de la Flotille de Gaza. De l’hostilité mutuelle entre Chomsky et l’Union soviétique. De la théorie de la manufacture du consentement. Chomsky explique “la moralité élémentaire” : nous sommes responsables de nos propres actions et non celles des autres. Donc on critique et on agit où l’on peut, principalement contre notre propre gouvernement. (On ne célèbre pas les anciens dissidents soviétiques pour leur attitude envers la Guerre du Vietnam..)

Pour ma part, j’ai souri par rapport à la distance culturelle. Chomsky pense que la théorie du inside job par rapport au Onze septembre a été inventé en France. Il n’a pas été en France (ou en Europe continentale) depuis 20 ou 25 ans. A vrai dire ça ne lui intéresse pas, et les Français ont la même attitude. Comme quoi un Fanon, un Derrida ou un Foucault peuvent connaître un succès foudroyant dans l’Université anglo-saxonne, un intellectuel américain peut être arrêté au mur francophone.