Liberal authoritarians and radical liberals

I'm not a liberal reformist in my temperment. In my ideology, perhaps some might see me that way. I don't argue against radical change -I'm all for it- but I do think the means matter. Anyway, Alan Johnson has a piece at Dissent's blog in which one line particularly hits me:

“Revolutionary politics” he told us, “is not a matter of opinions but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the ‘opinion of the majority’ and to impose the revolutionary will against it.”

That "he" in "he told us" is Slavoj Žižek, and what hits me is the incredible inadequacy of any revolution that requires authoritarianism to quell the masses it has failed to persuade. I'm going to go ahead and call Žižek a liberal reformist for his indifference to the radical project of convincing people. He's still attached to the view that it's only what the elites do that matters, but I don't think you can ever have real, meaningful change (especially on issues such as racism) merely by switching one set of elites for another.

Johnson links to an older piece he wrote for Workers' Liberty (some punctuation corrected here, for clarity):

[Noberto] Bobbio made many other contributions to socialist thinking. A leading figure in the peace movements of the 1980s, he had criticised the post-war pro-Soviet fake "peace movements". His words of 1952 should cause some - those waving the "victory to the Resistance" placards - to think about the kind of "anti-war movement" they are building today.

"Strange peacemakers, these 'partisans of peace'. They offer themselves as mediators to establish peace between the two contenders. But they announce from the outset and without any reticence that one of the contenders is right and one is wrong."

I'm definitely gonna use that! In that piece, he calls Bobbio "part of an Italian tradition of radical liberalism." Perhaps that's what I am, a radical liberal, but I'll probably just go on using the catch-all term, Leftist.

Confirmation bias in the media (and in us)

They won't post audio until Wednesday, but if I didn't post this today, we'd both forget. Listen to this episode of Hearing Voices. Here in New York, the show's on at 7 am on Sundays. It's a shame because I only ever hear it when I'd rather be sleeping in. Actually, I missed half the show today. I'm guessing the first half is as good, but what I did hear is important in so many ways that I don't really want to describe it.

I will offer that it deals with how the media misheard Al Gore in a particular instance (Love Canal). That same process of mishearing is basic to our experience. We all go through life mishearing one thing after another.

Steve Cohen vs. Nikki Tinker

[Update: Cohen has won overwhelmingly. My thanks to the voters of the Tennessee Ninth for rejecting Tinker's bigotry.]

Tinker is running this add, which blatantly attacks Rep. Cohen (who recently sponsored the apology for slavery in the House of Representatives) for being Jewish.

It's remarkably offensive.



(Via Joel Pollack, though I don't endorse his take. Saw it later at The Debate Link. David Schraub is pretty thorough.)

far right candidates in elections

Via Hatewatch

Lakes Wales, Florida has a new city commissioner, a former Grand Dragon for the KKK. Residents aren't, apparently, certain if his views on race have changed, but everyone wonders how no one noticed.

In Indiana's 2nd Congressional District, Tony Zirkle was defeated. Soundly. He came in third with 16% of the vote. How does a candidate attend a birthday party for Hitler to talk about the "porn dragon" and "porn mule womb slaughter," and then get 16% of the vote?

In other news, David Duke and others on the far right have endorsed Obama. Sort of. They think an Obama presidency might provoke a white backlash and race war.

Obama, the progressive patriot

Jeff Weintraub and Andrei Markovits have written a fairly remarkable article about Barack Obama's campaing at the Huffington Post. Also available at Weintraub's place, with a bit of additional stuff.

Oh, that Hitler! (hits forehead)

U.S. Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle is facing criticism from one of his primary opponents, and a host of people on the Internet, for speaking at an event over the weekend that celebrated Adolf Hitler's birthday.

Yet he has our best interests at heart:

Let's save our Jewish brothers and sisters from this tyrant king porn dragon before we get to another world-wide pogrom after a war with Iran or some other conflict and after the Jews get blammed again.

He is, fortunately, something of a fringe figure:

Zirkle received 30 percent of the vote in the 2006 primary, losing to incumbent Chris Chocola, who was defeated in the general election. Zirkle said Tuesday that winning the election is not his primary goal.

But, that fringe figure makes a point. This response to criticism is about the only thing I'd agree with him on:

He compared his speech to other politicians appearing at Bob Jones University.

Yes, those other Republicans need to stop appearing at Bob Jones University. That points to how Zirkle is maybe just the fringe of an ugly trend that is much broader in society.

His campaign website is a hoot. For evidence that Jews were disproportionately represented among early, male performers in pornography, that Jews are major players in international sex slavery, and that Jews make kiddie-porn snuff films, he cites a number of sources. Including David Duke, the wakeupfromyourslumber blog, the Historical Review Press (I'd expect it's a branch of the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review), and the JewWatch website. No wonder he didn't realize that the group that invited him to speak in front of a giant picture of Hitler, with swastikas all around was a bunch of Nazis.

When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn't know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it... He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn't believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn't Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party.

But this quote may damn him more than anything else:

I'm considering discussing divorce aids and my plans for a "Derrenger's for Dildos" policy to put guns in American women's hands instead of divorce aids... When a women turns in her stash of divorce aids, then give her a free gun to defend America when the jihadists follow us home.

I may discuss the historical fact that before there were Nazi doctors, there were divorce aid doctors who used these divorce aids to "treat" "hysterical" women. Is there an etymological connection between hysterical and hysterectomy? http://www.dailycal.org/article/9535/sex_on_tuesday_history_69

I may also call attention to the fact that one of the biggest commercial frauds is that divorce aids market themselves as being for "novelty purposes only" so that they can avoid all consumer safety inspections; yet ,they then go to court and claim they have a 1st Amendment so called right to privacy to abuse their bodies. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19333870/page/2/ Who knows what toxic chemicals these women are inserting into the most intimate areas of their bodies and how many men chase children because they can not find comfort from an adult women.

Ezekiel noted women made male images and committed whoredom with them just before their 70 years of slavery, and Bertrand of Worms implored women to set aside their divorce aids about a generation before the crusades began. (I'm still looking for the cite on Bertrand (sp?) of Worms).

Jeremiah 3:9: And it came to pass through the lightness of her whoredom, that she defiled the land, and committed adultery with stones and with stocks.

Ezekiel 16:17 (Whole Chapter)
Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them.

Ezekiel 16:26 (Whole Chapter)
Thou hast also committed fornication with the Egyptians thy neighbours, great of flesh; and hast increased thy whoredoms, to provoke me to anger.

(That last one did not sound like a ringing endorsement for Jungle Fever to me. Maybe that should go into the self-determination segregation section).

By giving our soccor moms guns, they will be better able to take out the suicide bombers once they start following us home. Isn't that what the republicans are saying will happen if the deomcrats get elected and even dare to withdraw our troops from Iraq prematurely?

So, maybe we need a whole army of Sen. Hillary Clinton styled Annie Oakleys? Didn't Sen. Obama recently say that one would think she was Annie Oakley or something.

If the Derrengers for Dildos idea doesn't get me an invite to John Stewart's Comedy Center or the Colbert bump, I'm not sure what will.

That's right, he actually says the crusades were the result of dildos. And, in case you missed it, he's not too fond of the mixing of the races. But he expects we ought to forgive his ignorance for speaking before the sort of Nazis who wear their bigotry on their sleeves.

h/t David Neiwert at Orcinus

Political Landscapes: Anti-Zionism as a Cultural Code

Marko Hoare has a post on the redefined political landscape worth reading. I rather resent being lumped in with Bush in a broad "pro-Western" camp, but there's something to Hoare's post. Something that's been noted before by a number of others. Something that, even if confined to some outskirts - and I don't think it quite is, is worth discussing. I'm reproducing here something I had written for Newsvine some time ago. Some links go to Newsvine pages that may eventually disappear.
________

Reading an excerpt from Andrei Markovits's Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America in the latest issue of Democratiya, I find myself instantly struck.

Over the last 35 years, a steady anti-Americanism and an uncompromising anti-Zionism which surely not always but most definitely occasionally borders on the anti-Semitic, have become key characteristics that both divide and determine political identity absolutely. They are "wedge issues" - clear articles of faith or "dealbreakers" -- whose importance overshadows, and even negates, many related components of the "clusters" that characterize such an identity.

Markovits goes on to describe himself, all the leftist and leftish causes he supports and the one thing that divides him from the left.

Yet I am increasingly avoided by leftists on both sides of the Atlantic owing solely to the two wedge issues mentioned above. As a reaction against this, I find myself having withdrawn from the established American and European lefts in whose presence I feel increasingly misplaced. I am not writing this to elicit sympathy for my increasing political marginalization but rather to make a point of how central anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism have become to virtually all lefts on both sides of the Atlantic - and beyond.

I am struck because this is my experience as well. Not in Europe, because I haven't been there in some 33 years. And not among my friends, with whom I've almost always been the furthest to the left. But here on Newsvine. I feel frequently compelled to write disclaimers and point out that I am a leftist. I've seen more than a few people, including some Newsviners I respect and plenty of others, assume otherwise. Following left-Zionist politics fairly closely, I've seen others express the same frustration and take the same tactics. Why do so many left-zionists feel that we must explain that we are not right-wingers? Because, in my experience, what Markovits says is absolutely true - Zionism/anti-Zionism has become a “cultural code.”

The other reason I am struck has to do with that phrase there. Markovits doesn’t use it (at least in the excerpt), but it aptly describes what he elaborates.

Codes are interpretive frameworks which are used by both producers and interpreters of texts. In creating texts we select and combine signs in relation to the codes with which we are familiar 'in order to limit... the range of possible meanings they are likely to generate when read by others' (Turner 1992, 17). Codes help to simplify phenomena in order to make it easier to communicate experiences (Gombrich 1982, 35). In reading texts, we interpret signs with reference to what seem to be appropriate codes. Usually the appropriate codes are obvious, 'overdetermined' by all sorts of contextual cues. Signs within texts can be seen as embodying cues to the codes which are appropriate for interpreting them… With familiar codes we are rarely conscious of our acts of interpretation, but occasionally a text requires us to work a little harder - for instance, by pinning down the most appropriate signified for a key signifier (as in jokes based on word play) - before we can identify the relevant codes for making sense of the text as a whole.

That’s a nice little definition of codes from an introduction to semiotics page. But let’s limit it a bit. More or less this same notion of codes was applied to cultures by the famed anthropologist Clifford Geertz. I first came across this notion reading Shulamit Volkov. Volkov wanted to understand why her father didn’t leave Germany before the Holocaust, and (with limitations noted in the review) argued that it was surprisingly difficult for Jews and especially non-Jewish Germans to understand what was happening around them.

Antisemitism acted as a cultural code as political lines shifted. The left and right moved about, exemplified best by Wilhelm Marr's transition from the liberal left to the reactionary right. Marr was the godfather of antisemitism, responsible even for popoularizing the term antisemitism (often even credited as having coined the term) and for forming the League of Antisemites. His pamphlets "The Victory of Jewishness over German-ness" and "The Way to Victory for German-ness over Jewishness" were significant in the formation of the German antisemitism that ultimately led to the Holocaust. I tried to describe some of what happened here. As a cultural code, antisemitism was often able to disguise itself as something else, eg. a critique of capitalism or a critique of communism. Often it was scapegoating modernity. What grew most visibly between 1879 and 1938 was not so much hatred of Jews, but the centrality of the Jewish Question in German politics.

Today, as is evident from Markovits, anti-Zionism is acting as that same sort of cultural code. It is being used to establish new political lines, the old ones shaken up by globalization and postmodernism. The old leftists are joining forces with political reactionaries and authoritarians, mostly "oppressed" authoritarians but also some Western racists in thin disguises. Many of the arguments surrounding it are the same as in pre-Nazi Germany. Just as today people argue over the "New Antisemitism," then they argued over whether antisemitism was different from the old, disrespected Judenhass.

Recently, Volkov herself tried to address (.pdf) what is happening now.

Is that what we are experiencing today? If indeed the joint anti-Zionist and anti-Israel language of the left in the 1960s and 1970s served as a cultural code to indicate belonging to the camp of anti-imperialism, anticolonialism and a new sort of anticapitalism, has it now lost its symbolic meaning? Is it now a matter of direct and full-scale attack upon the Jews? I do not know. Perhaps.

Setting aside for the moment whether anti-Zionism is inherently discriminatory toward Jews, let's focus on this. Anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism cannot be allowed to be used as cultural codes in this way.

Presentographies

I recently linked to Benny Morris's article on how history is used to demonize Jews. The same sort of thing happens often with the present. Consider the case of the IAEA reports and the US National Intelligence Estimate when it comes to Iran. So much contextualization and minimization (in the name of not demonizing anyone) gets used to demonize Israel and Jews who are worried about the very real threat posed by Iran. Instead of dealing with the facts of the matter, Jews are accused of acting out of that "2,000 year old panic" (as it's described in Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite recently reviewed by Christopher Hitchens on the occassion of its re-release). The facts, as related in a New York Times article here at Middle East Analysis: the IAEA did write that Iran cooperated -in part, but not on some particularly concerning matters. And the NIE report not only concluded that Iran had been, at some point, working on nuclear weapons; it concluded that Iran was still working on part of its nuclear program:

Since the intelligence report came out, America's allies have spun all kinds of theories about the internal machinations that led to it, including that intelligence analysts were boxing Mr. Bush in, preventing him from taking military action against Iran's nuclear sites.

Officials who worked on the report have denied any such intent. The director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, told Congress he now regretted how the intelligence estimate was presented, saying it failed to emphasize that Iran was moving ahead with the hardest part of any bomb project: producing the fuel.

Are you now, or have you ever been Jewish? (I mean Zionist, of course.)

Malcolm Hoenlein has been telling everyone who will listen that something dangerous is happening among the American elite. A short version of his view holds that pro-Israel positions among American Jews are being delegitimized by being defined as "anti-American."

Of course, even if most Americans disagree, it is hardly un-American to hold an unpopular political opinion in America. In fact, protection for unpopular, political views is (theoretically) enshrined in our most basic values.

Yet it happens to be that most Americans happen to hold pro-Israel views. So what does it mean when the views of Jews are seen as illigitate even as they coincide with the views of most Americans? It is the Jewishness of those Jews holding such opinions that is being attacked.

Via Orthodox Anarchist, who also expresses concern about the rumors about Dennis Kucinich and AIPAC:

Before the rumor started circulating that Kucinich threw AIPAC out of his office, his Congressional campaign had no cash on hand. The following week, after the rumor had burned through the web leaving a trail of anti-Jewish outpourings in its wake, he had $4 million.

Among people donating to Kucinich, of course, there's likely to be a repudiation of all Americans holding pro-Israel views. But are most Americans getting called un-American for it?