Three, I too think that reasonable people can disagree over the war in Afghanistan. I still believe it was justified, and I took my cues on this from people like Richard Falk, no imperialist warmonger he, who took seriously the possibility of further attacks; but many of the consequentialist claims of people who opposed the war have turned out to be quite accurate. I don’t, however, think it was accurate to say, in early October, “looks like what’s happening is some kind of silent genocide,” and I don’t believe it made sense to keep digging in on that claim for years afterward. As for Hitchens, well, there we’re talking about someone who was chortling that Afghanistan was the first country to be bombed out of the Stone Age, and who rapidly devolved to the point at which he was calling the Dixie Chicks “fucking fat slags.” George’s essay on him in What Are Intellectuals Good For? is a thing of beauty.

To me the following facts remain inescapable: US elite opinion apparently took for granted that the war in Afghanistan was just and humanitarian. Yet, taking in account how the US army was structured at the time (and not a fantasy military campaign), it was certain that there would be massive civilian casualties from bombing, and taking in account the way Afghanistan was structured at the time, it was certain that there would be a famine in the following winter. This was certain on Sept. 11 (indeed, in the game of “what were you doing when you learnt of the attack”, my answer is “writing a memo on that very subject for the French Air Force”, not literally true of course, but that’s what I started doing at this very moment). If pressed to give an evaluation of the number of casualties, I would have said (at the time) 3000 from bombing, 5000 from famine within 6 months. Aid agencies gave a much direr evaluation of the second part. It turned out that I was apparently underestimating widely myself.

I think reasonable people can differ on whether, based on these facts, one should have supported the war in Afghanistan on Sept. 11. I did not, but I can understand people who did at the time.

However, I do think it was criminal to support the war in Afghanistan without knowing these facts or without paying any attention to them and I do emphatically think that writing “Was the aid groups’ opposition to bombing ideological?”, not to mention “the opposition was mostly limited to the people who are reflexively against the American use of power,” either timid supporters or “isolationists, the doctrinaire left and the soft-headed types Christopher Hitchens described as people who, ‘discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’” is, well, I will strive to remain civil but, let’s say hopefully not the best instance of moral clarity and intelligence displayed by the authors of these quotes.

Indeed it is. It is an iron law of the Internet, I know, that when Martin Wisse shows up, the thread goes swiftly downhill.

So let me get back to George, and let me try put this plainly. Yes, the US media coverage of the Afghanistan war was terrible. The media’s behavior in the runup to war in Iraq was also terrible. Completely ordinary critiques, like Al Gore’s, were ridiculed beyond reason. (That, indeed, was central to my point in this very post! You could look it up!) And Chomsky is right about stuff approximately 88 percent of the time, which is pretty good.

But Chomsky is mischaracterizing the critics of his “silent genocide” claim. He is claiming that people who predicted massive famine in Afghanistan were ridiculed—and studiously ignoring the people who simply contested the prediction on the merits, as here. He is thereby suggesting that everyone who took issue with the “silent genocide” line (again, wholly an invention of Chomsky’s, not used by any aid organization in the world—for those of you who care about the use and abuse of the word “genocide”) was a moral imbecile. I humbly beg to differ. That is all.

For the record, Chomsky also said that the 9/11 attacks demonstrated yet again the foolishness of “missile defense”; that they would very likely lead to a curtailment of civil liberties and a dramatic expansion of the apparatus of state surveillance within the US; and that the most likely response from the Bush-Cheney Administration would be– as he put it– “the one that probably answers Bin Laden’s prayers” by “escalat[ing] the cycle of violence, in the familiar way, but in this case on a far greater scale.” I don’t think a reasonable person could find anything to disagree with there.

Frankly, Michael, this is getting a bit tedious. It might be true true that Chomsky doesn’t name names in the passage of Hegemony and Survival you quote, but he gives a handful of examples in other places that shows up in a five minute google search. Anyway, you could start with this link:

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200303—.htm

And there you have Bill Keller having incredibly offensive words. Besides, what Chomsky repeats tediously is usually sourced in one of his earlier work. In that case, I distinctly remember the existence of (rather funny) precise quotes in one of my audio book. If you are sincere about a fair assessment of this question, Michael, then I will make the effort of listening to them until I find the relevant passage, but I will do so only if I have the assurance that you in turn will acknowledge that his characterization was not baseless once I find the direct sourced quote (as I know I will). I write if because I must confess that your apparent unwillingness to concede that Geo is right in your conflicting interpretations of the passage under dispute, something which is evident even to someone with such a limited command of English as myself, does not suggest you approach this issue with the maximum possible good faith.

Now let’s get serious and forget about that retired linguistics professor. The covering of the Afghan war in the US media was terrible beyond imagination. If you have any doubt about it, you could start from this page and work your way through a few of the links. All the necessary details about ridiculing protesters are meticulously archived.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=18&region_id=10&pager_start=20

Nothing will be rolled back, any more than it was by Carter or by Clinton. There are about as many crazies as ever, and they haven’t lost their spirit in the slightest. Obama was tossed the biggest hot potato since the Civil War, and if he doesn’t succeed, the crazies will be back.

A propaganda model also helps us to understand how media personnel adapt, and are adapted, to systemic demands. Given the imperatives of corporate organization and the workings of the various filters, conformity to the needs and interests of privileged sectors is essential to success. In the media, as in other major institutions, those who do not display the requisite values and perspectives will be regarded as “irresponsible,” “ideological”, or otherwise abberant, and will tend to fall by the wayside. While there may be a small number of exceptions, the pattern is pervasive, and expected. Those who adapt, perhaps quite honestly, will then be free to express themselves with little managerial control, and they will be able to assert, accurately, that they perceive no pressures to conform. The media are indeed free – for those who adopt the principles required for their “societal purpose.” There may be some who are simply corrupt, and who serve as “errand boys” for state and other authority, but this is not the norm.

Stuff like self-deception, groupthink, instinctive understandings of some very subtle signals (and some not so subtle, as in your example) along with accompanying rationalisations, self-regulating selection processes (what Nozick called ‘Filter’ mechanisms), unspoken understanding of common (class) interests, concentric circles of power and knowledge, all sorts of stuff is involved in what you or I or Chomsky or Marx might take it as obvious is really going on. The invisible fist? (or finger…)

Take the media for example – and a a media organisation which is fairly clearly (or better, somewhat less clearly) a propaganda outfit tightly controlled from the top. There is a whole range of attitudes, some only feigned, some partly iternalised, others entirely sincere, held by those involved which do not align with the fairly evident facts of what is going on at a naked power relations level. Many of the journos involved probably do not think that they are following orders to produce ideological propaganda. There are great subtleties – just as with the academic taboo on discussing contemporary history as far as large-scale official criminality is involved.

On a sligh tangent, I also don’t think there is a sharp line between ‘conspiracy theories’ – as those involving criminal activity, and the kind of analysis that Chomksy gestures at. Both involve some quite intricate human interactions of the kind I’m gesturing towards. And neither are as clear cut as the parody

I take it that understanding this kind of stuff and propagating that understanding – is pretty important. ((I have that much in common with ‘conspiracy theorists’, even silly grandiose ones – and those interested in unrelated matters like aliens, the occult etc., with which covert action researchers are routinely associated – for obvious reasons but with less obvious delivery mechanisms. That’s contrary to one strand of the multifarious cod-psych theories about them – that they seek to guard an esoteric truth in order to feel special – why all the websites then, Sigmund?))

That involves convincing people who tend to trust authority- and other high-status figures. And the former include those who assent to propositions like ‘big business only cares about profit, ‘most politicians aren’t really engaged in providing democracy’, ‘the ruling class stick together’ etc, but who don’t apply such general attitudes in particular cases.

Part of that is because of the exaggerated nature of both conspiracy theories and Chomskyite corruption-as-usual theories. Neither the puerile Manichaean Hollywood baddies of ‘traditional’ conspiracy theories, nor the faceless powermongers of Chomsky’s Corporate Intersts match the experienced normality of the exemplars people actually encounter. ‘Manufacturing Consent’, for example, IIRC (and I may not), basically assumes a false dichotoy between producer and consumer of propaganda,

Perhaps that kind of info is best got across in fiction – I suppose Orwell just about managed it without being overbearingly didactic – but think there are aspects that are not really fully understood, as well as possbly these days – better delivery mechanisms, such as new coinages describing such phenomena – like ‘passiveaggressive, which is an immensely useful expression which seems to crustallise a previously inchoate understanding of an independently recognisable phen. and is now current among almost all parts of society.

BTW I encountered a straightforward if trivial (for those without pushchairs) example of the ‘command and control’ case just a minute ago, when an EDF (that’s one of the state-sanctioned energy oligopolists) van parked on a dangerous double yellow line, ignoring the available (pay) parking spaces. I asked the bloke if that was company policy. He started wity what was clearly a wel-rehearsed speil about the 20 minutes permitted for loading. I explained I wasn;t havig ago at him but just interested and he confirmed that he was told to park on double yellows (even though there isn’t any loading going on) and expected to avoid paying for parking.

(Of course that’s partly to do with the fact that the council enforce payment and fines wrt designated spaces but the cops aren’t interested in those parked on double yellows or for that matter in the middle of minor roads, and publicly employed traffic wardens – those not associated with particular revenue streams – are now a distant memory.)

Sorry, this is a bit rambling, I had a few while watching the cricket ( not free to air you see and I can’t bear to pay for cola when lager is basically the same price), but more relevantly I’m not entirely clear on the findings of the required research.

PS - if you look at C’s ‘five filters’ in Manufacturing Consent basically non eof them address what you might call the ‘cui bono’ gap – he describes the interests involved and what they do, but not really exactly how they do it. Thta’s fine if you already know (or imagine you know, or are happy that some micro exaplnation muct be available), but not a useful way of changing minds.

#83 deserved perhaps (in ‘poetic justice’ terms), but not hilarious. (Sorry to be a spoilsport.)

And when it comes to state and other covert criminal activity, he wants none of it. He talks about alternative 9-11 consp. thys (to many aspects of which, btw, I can’t see any justifiable approach other than suspension of judgement) here, trotting out the usual ex cathedrisms about how easy it is for whistleblowers to pull down the covert-action house of cards (the ‘virulent plague’ model of truth), etc.

He then revealingly retrenches to ‘who cares?’. Yes, such matters are solely a distraction from preaching to the coverted about (yawn) Orwellian use of language, so, yes – who cares?

The consensus against ‘conspiracy theories’ (a propaganda term as loaded as ‘WMD’ but unreservedly used by Chomsky) pervades political print from Popper to Chomsky – and btw appears to include CT’s very own Henry, with this bit of censorship accompanied by gross misrepresentation. (Sorry, but it’s true – and rather surprising I thought.)

As Robin Ramsay points out, academia is not just unconcerned with deep politics, parapolitics, covert action hypothesising, whatever you care to call it, but enforce a pretty strong taboo against it – if it threatens to go anywhere near any of yer actual specifics.

Hilzoy was wrong to think the US is now sane again, even if the worst of the crazies have returned to the mental asylums from whence they came. We’re back to the nineties again folk, not a particular happy time for US politics.

At the same time, US foreign policy has not drastically changed since January, nor will it. The greatest mistake you can make looking back at 2001-2004 or so, which both Hilzoy and Michael make, is to think that it was some sort of aberration, a disruption. The rage may have been, but even that has its precedents: Pearl Harbour and the hysteria bout a Japanese fifth column, the Spanish-American War. You had this public rage stoked by a newish medum, but the foreign policy pushed by the Bush administration were a continuation of what Clinton had been doing as well. Desert Fox was 1998 and had the same lies about WMD that Bush would use and was widely supported by both liberals and conservatives. Without Bush and the Septmeber 11 attacks there probably wouldn’t have been the invasion of Iraq, but there would’ve been the War on Afghanistan and there would’ve been some pressure put on the other US bogeymen in the Middle East as well.

With Obama, we’re back to a foreign policy that’s not barking mad on the surface, but that’s still based on keeping the US as the world’s sole superpower, still based on keeping the Middle East subsurvient. Obama wants to leave Iraq, (though there will be a residual force left ), but only to strengthen Afghanistan. He wants to close Guantanamo, but wants other countries to solve the problem of what to do with the innocents tortured there and he hasn’t given up extraordinary rendition, the secret prisons or even a great desire to persecute those people involved in torture.

The evil and nastiness inherent in the US and its foreign policy did not disappear with Obama’s election , but I fear that Hilzoy’s attitude is probably widespread with liberal bloggers now…