Of imperialism and second campists

I've been thinking this since Noam Chomsky's reply to Mearsheimer and Walt (Why now? I don't know) but I want to commit it, especially the emphasized part below, to paper.

The first thing to note about it is:

But recognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion.

I have to wonder why such an unconvincing argument (to Chomsky) would deserve praise and merit (from Chomsky). I've noted before that his explanation for the appeal of M&W looks a lot like Chomsky is accusing M&W of scapegoating Jews for American imperialism:

The reason, I think, is that it leaves the US government untouched on its high pinnacle of nobility, "Wilsonian idealism," etc., merely in the grip of an all-powerful force that it cannot escape.

Except Chomsky doesn't seem to recognize the familiar pattern of scapegoating Jews.

M-W focus on AIPAC and the evangelicals, but they recognize that the Lobby includes most of the political-intellectual class -- at which point the thesis loses much of its content.

What Chomsky seems to appreciate is not the argument, but the target.

Israel, for Chomsky, is a client state of the US, not the other way around. He cites several cases where Israel has furthered the interests of the US or bowed down to the interests of the US. (Here, Chomsky shares the definition of American interests with Mearsheimer and Walt as specifically being national security and business interests. I disagree with that definition.) But if Israel is a client state, it should follow that Israel has interests that we, the Left, ought to liberate Israel from American imperialism. I imagine Chomsky may agree with that so far. I've also seen others write in the same vein about how the Miltary Industrial Complex in the US profits off Israel's conflict. But it's plain that if we are to liberate Israel from American imperialism, then we, as Americans, ought to do a better job of listening to Israelis. Otherwise, we're only presenting a different face of American imperialism; you can't liberate anyone by forcing something on them. Israelis want security, and so American anti-imperialists ought to be concerned with Israeli security. Here, it's also plain that Chomsky disagrees that such a principle ought to be applied to Israel. He isn't interested in exploring how Israelis view their interests, except to criticize and undermine Israelis. It's exactly the sort of stance Moishe Postone singles out. Chomsky isn't interested in anti-imperialism, per se, but a perverted form of anti-imperialism. Chomsky is a second campist -- and here I choose the phrase second campist over similar terms such as Manichean entirely on purpose.

How would a realist deal with Lieberman?

Ezra Klein writes on the ascension of Avigdor Lieberman to Israel's Foreign Minister:

But it's difficult to know what to root for any longer.

It's tempting to focus on the pluses and misunderstandings, and I've probably erred in that direction. Jeff Goldberg notes here that Lieberman is "actually a person interested in a cold compromise with the Palestinians." And continues, "It's a disaster because he's made himself into a racist." But that's only an intro, as it should be, to denounce Lieberman's views and analyze them according to a better standard not terribly dissimilar to Klein's.

I'm, personally, rooting for a very short-lived coalition and new elections shortly. (I think that's a good bet.)

But while Israel has lately been off-putting for a great many, it seems as though world leaders are taking Israel's needs more seriously. Here, I'm probably making the same mistake again, but...

Not only are international leaders apparently more serious about Hamas's arms smuggling, but the EU is threatening to boycott Durban II.

I guess in a world of realists, it doesn't pay for Israel to bank on idealists - but that's certainly not an outcome I'd hope for. On the other hand, it's not an outcome I'd expect either. Chas Freeman's Mearsheimer-and-Walt-style rant against the Israel Lobby doesn't suggest it. (For me that rant would be reason enough to oppose his appointment. Of course, that rant came as he withdrew his nomination, but it wasn't the only indication of such a view. And I don't support "I was angry" as a justification for a style of thinking that's never as transient as anger.) But it's hard to deny that excessive realism (I feel so conservative saying this) is enabling. So let's blame American realists for Lieberman?

So, coming from a completely different place, like Ezra, it's hard for me to know what to root for.

Burn After Reading

Saw Burn After Reading by the Coen Brothers over the weekend. The following contains mild spoilers.

It begins with a God's-eye view descending into a CIA building in DC. Inside, the camera follows, from floor-level, someone. Because the camera is so low, we are necessarily looking up at this person, giving them a sense of stature and importance. Yet we can hardly see above his knees. Immediately, the film jokes by contrasting the all seeing, which lacks detail, with the all-detailed, which lacks context.

It's a farce about middle aged characters, most of whom are sleeping around with each other, all of whom are trying to assert control over their lives and world around them. The MacGuffin is a CD-Rom with, as Brad Pitt's character puts it, "intelligent shit" from the CIA. So in addition to being a sex farce, it also works as a spy farce. While everyone strives for control, nobody, not even the CIA, has any idea what's going on. It's a perfect parody of conspiracism.

Turns out this person we're following, played by John Malkovich, wearing a 3-piece suit and bow tie, enters a meeting where he is demoted. The stature and importance the camera gave to him in the hallway is a bit of a joke. A coworker accuses the Malkovich character, Ozzie Cox, of being a drunk. The accusation is true (a later allusion to the Rio Bravo scene where Dean Martin pours a shot of whiskey back into the bottle without spilling a drop makes this clear), but Cox responds by accusing his Mormon coworker of seeing everyone as a drunk. Cox claims in the meeting he is being crucified.

At home, his wife walks in and asks if he picked up the cheeses. It's intentionally difficult to hear, as his wife is at the front door while the audio is from the kitchen. It wasn't just me - after the reference to crucifixion in the previous scene, Soo also heard some mumbling about "Jesus" instead of "cheeses." The mishearing speaks to limited information with which to understand the world, undermining notions of knowability.

Later, after meeting the Frances McDormand character, after her insurance company has refused to cover several cosmetics surgeries, she is seen with her head down and palms up as if pleading in frustration. On the wall behind her is a meditating Buddha, head up and palms on knees, which really digs in at her inability to accept change.

All of these references to religion so early on -counting liberally, there's 5 that I mentioned; to be overly conservative, there's at least 3- made me wonder if the Coens were saying something from a Jewish perspective. We know they picked up the adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, so it seems they'd like to say at least a little from that particular perspective. The timing is about right for the film to be a response to Mearsheimer and Walt. But I doubt it. It seems like an over-determined reading.

Except for one minor character being Mormon, all of the religious references -even the cheeses- speak directly to power and control, obvious themes in the film. So they don't really push for a "Jewish" interpretation. Unless we deny that the Mormon reference can just be folded into the others. (For what it's worth, there's no reason to think religion should suggest morality. There is no sense of morality, just absurdity and irony.)

I wonder if anyone else would argue for the film as a response to antisemitic conspiracism?

More on M&W, still.

Jeffrey Goldberg points to this post by Jonathan Chait at TNR:

Alterman, perhaps using hyperbole to compensate for the lack of evidence, called the authors "Thought Police." You may recall that the term "Thought Police" was coined by George Orwell's "1984" to describe a breed of futuristic secret police that would exceed even the draconian methods employed by Stalin and Hitler. Apparently Alterman believes equivalent powers are now wielded by a handful of Zionist bloggers. I'm trying to imagine what Alterman would say if fascism really does come to America. Perhaps he'll think to himself, while hanging from his thumbs in some dungeon, "Well, this is pretty bad, but not as bad as when I was criticized by Commentary online."

I'm not sure Chait is right that hyperbole is meant to compensate for a lack of evidence, though he might be. (Though it is funny Alterman would rebuke the Thought Police by saying, "Pollak's attacks are characterized by a similar lack of personal grace or sense of proportion.") However, it is certainly true that the lack of evidence points to something. To use specific examples where people were actually silenced (funny how many of the examples of the "silenced" are usually bestsellers) opens those examples up to inspection. We might then be forced to accept unpleasant things about, for example, Mearsheimer and Walt's polemic. They weren't exactly silenced. In fact, their careers seem to have benefited in many ways. However, it is true that The Atlantic refused to publish their original work (on the grounds that it was just plain bad). Chait writes about it:

even by the account of fair-minded and even ideologically sympathetic critics, [it] is a shoddy, paranoid screed.

People like Stephen Zunes, who has spent most of his career trying to get Washington to cut funding to Israel (though he is Jewish and a supporter of Israel's existence, which, unlike Mearsheimer and Walt, who are merely supporters of Israel's existence, surely makes him a member of the lobby), wrote:

What progressive supporters of Mearsheimer and Walt's analysis seem to ignore is that both men have a vested interest in absolving from responsibility the foreign policy establishment that they have served so loyally all these years. Israel and its supporters are essentially being used as convenient scapegoats for America's disastrous policies in the Middle East. And though they avoid falling into simplistic, anti-Semitic, conspiratorial notions regarding Jewish power and influence for the failures of U.S. Middle East policy, it is nevertheless disturbing that the primary culprits they cite are largely Jewish individuals and organizations.

So Zunes, who would seem a natural ally, actually comes quite close (particularly with "scapegoats") to calling M&W's screed antisemitic. Chait also writes, and here I disagree with him:

Terms like anti-Semite create questions about definitions--does it mean hating all Jews? Thinking Jews are too powerful? Agreeing with ideas primarily favored by people who want to kill the Jews?--that tend to bring a debate to a screeching halt. Goldberg took a slight step away from the term "anti-Semite," but not far enough for my taste.

Terms like antisemite may create powerful questions about definitions, but they're typically answered before they need to be asked. Goldberg's article, in which Chait admits he "took a slight step away" from calling M&W's work blatantly antisemitic, for example, offered quite a lengthy description of just what he was talking about. (Some of which I quoted here.)

A Judeocentric view of history is one that regards the Jews as the center of the story, and therefore the key to it. Judeocentrism is a singlecause theory of history, and as such it is, almost by definition, a conspiracy theory. Moreover, Judeocentrism comes in positive forms and negative forms. The positive form of Judeocentrism is philo-Semitism, the negative form is antiSemitism. (There are philo-Semites who regard the Jews as the inventors of modernity, and there are anti-Semites who do the same; but the idea that Spinoza, Freud, and Einstein are responsible for us is as foolish as the idea that their ideas are judische Wissenschaft.) In both its positive and negative forms, Judeocentrism is always a mistake. Human events are not so neatly explained.

But, even more importantly, if there's anything that halts a conversation more surely than calling someone or some idea antisemitic, it's antisemitism. To be a Jew confronted with antisemitism is surely far worse than being called an antisemite. Intended or not, antisemitism carries a lot of baggage including the threat of genocidal violence. Meanwhile, even at their most ridiculous antisemitic notions still often seem to be common sense to people raised in antisemitic environments. Being called an antisemite, however unpleastant and distasteful, just doesn't measure up to that.

So I have no problem saying M&W's polemics are antisemitic. (As for their personal character, I'm indifferent.) There aren't questions about what I mean by that - those questions have long ago been answered. Those arguments are truly done with. The bigger problem is not that some Jews might dare to talk about antisemitism (and, yes, they might even be wrong from time to time) but that Jews find themselves not allowed to raise the issue of antisemitism without the permission of gentiles. And here, I think, is where we actually find the allegiances of the thought police.

Is "Israel" the same as "World Jewry"

Consider the statement, "World Jewry has a stranglehold on the American Congress." Most people with even a passing familiarity with antisemitism would consider that a typically antisemitic comment. On a scale of 1 to 100, it's pretty high up there. Keep in mind the idea of that scale and rate for yourself the following statements.

First, just a tiny, little change. "The international Jewish community has a stranglehold on the American Congress." It's really not much of a change in meaning, so, perhaps being generous we might call it a tiny bit less antisemitic.

"Zionists have a stranglehold on the US Congress." Probably worse than "The international Jewish community..."

"The Israel lobby has a stranglehold on the American Congress." It's not immediately clear to me (based on just the words themselves) that this statement is even meant to be any different in content than any of those above, except that it's meant to not be understood as antisemitic. But if it isn't immediately clear that the content is significantly different, shouldn't we be at least a little suspicious?

Yet, I think a lot of people would have immediately thought to themselves that the statement is fundamentally different. Mearsheimer and Walt put it this way in their famous article on the Israel lobby London Review of Books:

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world.

Well, they say "AIPAC" rather than "the Israel Lobby," but I don't think that's really so important. At once it's a more concretely defined object, but obviously less powerful than "organized Jewry" could be. And if we recognize that we ought not to say that organized Jewry controls Congress, why would we think that it makes so much more sense to say that a less powerful group has that much power. Ultimately, M&W rely on the full "Israel lobby" to try to explain AIPAC's power, anyway, so it becomes the same with a simple, logical substitution. (The phrase "de facto agent for a foreign government" is also really problematic, but we'll save that for another time.) A lot of people wrote that no matter how much antisemites might enjoy and profit from Mearsheimer and Walt's work, it's clearly not antisemitic.

But how can this be clearly not antisemitic if the only difference is a (superficial?) substitution of a few words. In a world where Canadian can be used to mean "black", how can we ever think that substituting just a few words could change meaning so much as to render such a statement objectively and unquestionably not antisemitic? Instead, I think it would serve us well to recognize that Israel often functions in the same was as "World Jewry" used to within antisemitism. So, if substituting one for the other makes a statement blatantly conspiratorial, we should probably be especially aware of the possibility.

like many Americans I've ridden in a car before

Okay, so this is old. It's new to me, and it's funny enough to make sure you don't miss it. Lee Smith on Mearsheimer and Walt (via Jeff Weintraub and Engage):

Walt and Mearsheimer's article explains how "the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics," which I agree with, because like many Americans I've ridden in a car before and I believe that the ability to get people and things from one place to another is a big part of successful domestic politics. It's not entirely clear that the authors of this really long article have ever been in a car before, because when they're talking about domestic politics, they're not talking about cars, or the economy or even our military, but "the activities of the 'Israel Lobby.'"

So, how much credit should these guys get for staking out a "realist" position on US Middle Eastern policy that does not account for the existence of cars, or something even bigger than a Hummer – the Arabian Peninsula? Unless they were drunk, they shouldn't get any at all. If they were drunk, kudos to them for no spelling mistakes! – none that I could find anyway. Maybe they were smoking some ace reef because Walt and Mearsheimer see spectacular forces at work everywhere in US regional policy – and a hangover would surely explain why they totally forgot about Saudi Arabia. Ouch! But that still doesn't make them realists, just big partiers who can type well when they're bombed.

White supremacists getting aggressive

White supremacists getting aggressive, going onto the blog of two anti-racist professors to spout their stuff. There was an article in Inside Higher Ed on Kevin MacDonald, who is a white supremacist and a tenured professor at Cal State Long Beach. The post at racismreview, a good one, shifts the question away from the limits of academic freedom (a difficult question since tenure is specifically designed to protect unpopular views) to one of how the system allowed him to get tenure. I pointed out that Kevin MacDonald is easy for everyone to hate, and that the controversy over him now might be timed to make up for a lack of serious response to Mearsheimer and Walt, Norman Finkelstein, and others.

The rest of the comments - which are what I'm trying to point to - are mostly white supremacists attacking critical theory as Jewish.

I read Culture of Critique and it was solid. It makes a very specific point — namely that Jewishly motivated actors did bad scholarship and their real motives were Jewish interests, such as Franz Boas. Franz Boas earlier in his career wrote things that would be considered “racist” nowadays, but then he realized that this went against the Jewish agenda and made a complete 180.

Also, the Frankfurt School was a whacky hate cult against a perfectly normal culture, and their “scholarship” was incredibly shoddy and pseudo. Look at “The Authoritarian Personality.” What a bunch of poppycock! Thank heavens someone like McDonald came along and exposed it for what it is.

Of course you guys don’t like that — those are your intellectual and ideological parents. But the Frankfurt School, like “Critical Theory” is not scholarship but rather a hate campaign of psychological warfare against white people and the civilization we built.

and

Multiculturalism is the Judaism of fools and scoundrels.

The thing, though - I have no fear of someone like this. That kind of message is never going to be mainstreamed, even if someone clever and controlled is able to present it in a polite sort of way. It's too obviously hateful. Mearsheimer and Walt might be less hateful, but they're already on the NYT Bestseller list. It's only by attaching that sort of message about "Jewish power" to an anti-war or otherwise "progressive" agenda that it'll ever gain any traction. That's a big part of the reason why I think we should be focusing more on left antisemitism.

Update: A slighly more polite debate on the same topic over at the SPLC's Hatewatch blog.

Mahakashyapa Smiled, everyone else wriggled nervously

I wasn't particularly happy with the way I ended of the last post:

The failure to treat marginal ideas as truly marginal can lead to their seeping in if they're repeated often enough. But I'm also concerned that some Jews - like me, I have to admit - desperately long to feel camaraderie from people who can see clearly what's going on.

These points are both true and important. However, there are also other considerations. Calling out Mearsheimer and Walt harshly isn't going to be the right way to convince them just how wrong they are. And it isn't going to convince a lot of people who think M&W are part of a legitimate and informative debate.

This is something I think about a lot on the cushion. I had wanted, last night, to include a reference to a time I tried to ask my Zen Master about something similar, but I couldn't find the words before I had to go meet a friend in Astoria. Hopefully, I can do a little better today, but I worry that this is still incoherent. The Buddha gave a dharma talk on Vulture Peak Mountain. As the crowd grew more and more anxious, waiting, the Buddha just kept silent. Eventually, the Buddha held up a flower, and Mahakashyapa, alone, smiled. This is called the second transmission from the Buddha to Mahakashyapa, the second time their minds met silently and they understood each other perfectly. I have a problem with this story, one thing I just don't get - when it starts talking about transmission, I start to ask, "What about all the other people there? Did you forget about them?" You always try to tailor your teaching to a particular audience, but sometimes there's a diverse audience that can be thought of as more than one audience. There's Mahakashyapa and there's everyone else.

I think (and I can't stress enough that this is just my present thinking and I'm still fairly new to Zen, given that most people qualified as teachers have at least 20 years of experience behind them) part of the answer is that you tailor your speech to one group by offering a model of interacting with another. The Buddha and Mahakashyapa both were teaching everyone else there through their interaction. Or, to take a different sort of example, my girlfriend and her sister could (at least, if I knew how to say more than, "I don't speak Korean well") teach me about the Korean language while talking about something entirely different by using clear and proper Korean.

I was reminded that I wanted to elaborate on that last post, that our speech serves multiple purposes for different listeners and that we can become more effective, when I read this in a description of April Rosenblum, who made The Forward's list, the "Forward 50."

In recent years, many Jews have been alarmed by an apparently rising tide of antisemitism on the left. April Rosenblum, 27, a Philadelphia-based progressive activist, is also concerned about antisemitism. But she's skeptical of the community's response. While studying at Temple University, she saw fellow Jews responding to antisemitism in ways she thought were ineffective and counterproductive, circling the wagons and alienating potential allies.

The meaning here isn't to be dishonest or play down Jewish oppression, though. In her pamphlet, where she combines pretty standard lessons of anti-racism to the problem of anti-Jewish oppression with a genuinely radical perspective, she writes:

If people use opposition to the term 'antisemitism' to shut down discussion, by all means, speak of anti-Jewish oppression. But speak of it. Don't let fellow activists silence conversation about antisemitism by complaining that the word is wrong, and blaming Jews for the problem.

When we're angry or frustrated about antisemitism - and it shows - hopefully people will recognize that for what it is. But my desire to see others speak more clearly about what is and isn't antisemitism wasn't a call for allies to be angrier. Speaking clearly and speaking angrily are different things. And, as Rosenblum notes, the Left has struggled with these ideas of suppressing dissent in order to preserve unity before.

The Old Left's perspective that all struggles were second to the class struggle meant all kinds of groups were shut up, dismissed and disrespected... all in the name of unity for the revolution.

It was a mistake then, and it would be a tragedy to repeat that mistake today. We've already learned that we can't prioritize one struggle against oppression to the exclusion of another without reinforcing the structures of oppression against us all, but too often wannabe radical leftists refuse to understand that.

Why are people so soft on M&W?

There's a great passage from a Martin Kramer article I found through a posting at Engage:

Frankly I'm astonished when even skeptical reviewers of the book preface their criticisms by saying that the authors have done us some sort of service by opening the discussion. Can you imagine them saying the same thing about a book on intelligent design? That the details are preposterous, but the basic proposition deserves to be discussed seriously by serious people? Yet here we have a thesis, insisting that U.S. foreign policy is run by Zionist intelligent design, and Mearsheimer and Walt have made it a perfectly legitimate subject for academic discussion and tony dinner party conversation. If you say otherwise, you're accused of "stifling debate."

I'm astonished, too. And with a number of other things critics have said of M&W to avoid being accused of "stifling debate" as well. Also via Engage, this article from The Daily Princetonian includes one such reaction:

In an open letter sent to the event's organizers on Monday, Wilson School professor Aaron Friedberg cast aspersions on the book's academic merit. "[T]his is not a work of objective academic analysis but rather a one-sided and tendentious polemic," he wrote, also questioning the broader implications of the authors' portrayal of a large, unduly influential Israel lobby in the United States.

"Much attention has been paid to the question of whether the authors or their work are in any sense anti-Semitic. I do not believe that this is relevant," he said. "Whether out of ignorance or a desire to court controversy, the authors have chosen to make use of language and imagery similar to that deployed in the past by avowed anti-Semites."

I am truly grateful to Professor Friedberg for the strong language he does see fit to use, but I wonder how one can characterize a "one-sided and tendentious polemic" that "make[s] use of language and imagery similar to that deployed in the past by avowed anti-Semites" as anything but antisemitic. Friedberg uses bizarre, rhetorical acrobatics to avoid that precise formulation. It would be one thing to temper criticism by noting that M&W do not evidence any personal animosity toward Jews (I haven't seen any evidence that they do), but history includes plenty of blatant racism that was not characterized by animosity. Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden" expressed anything but animosity. On the right, there is still an unwillingness to acknowledge that racist topoi are racist per se regardless of intention, but the left is uniquely reluctant to accept this when those topoi target Jews.

This is another example of what I complained about with the Amis affair - the attempt to characterize what people say by who they are rather than by what they actually say - the circular definition of racism as that said by racists, which precludes any meaningful discussion of what racism is.

The failure to treat marginal ideas as truly marginal can lead to their seeping in if they're repeated often enough. But I'm also concerned that some Jews - like me, I have to admit - desperately long to feel camaraderie from people who can see clearly what's going on.