… whether it occurs in the field of economics, or in analysis of Arab-Israeli issues.
All US citizens (along with billions of other people around the world) are currently suffering greatly because the group of “market fundamentalists” who had taken over both the decisionmaking in, and nearly all the commentary about, US economic policy had succeeded to such a great degree, until very recently, in their campaign to muzzle economists who raised questions about their free-market model.
This post— on, interestingly, a blog run by the Wall Street Journal sketches out some of those earlier discourse-suppression attempts. (HT: Krugman.)
It includes this quote from University of Chicago economist (but also, periodic critic of market fundamentalism) Luigi Zingales:
- “This is a common feature of people when they come across dissent – they want to put you in a box and label you and dismiss you.”
In this field, the “toxic” accusation was that a certain economist– Zingales, or his colleague Raghuram Rajan, or Nouriel Roubini, or whoever– was “anti-market.”
In the field of Middle East studies, a parallel role is played by the accusation that someone is “anti-Semitic” or “anti-Israel.”
In both fields, well-funded and powerful interest groups have worked for years to suppress free discussion that is based on an open-ended, fair-minded examination of the facts at hand. Now, in the wake of the September-October financial collapse, there is some attempt to rehabilitate the analysis of those stalwart economists who over the years have worked to try to challenge the assumptions of the market fundamentalists. (Though I note that the WSJ blogger reports that Larry Summers was a notable belittler of the critics at one key 2005 Fed conference… Summers is, of course, one of the key members of Obama’s incoming economics team. Not good news.)
And then, there’s the Arab-Israeli field– one where discourse suppression campaigns and the systematic attempt to exclude, marginalize, or belittle anyone who challenges the “Israel is always right” orthodoxy continue unabated in the US. See, for example, all the cases documented by Muzzlewatch, which still represent only the tip of a much, much deeper iceberg of the discourse suppression practices by the pro-Israel hasbaristas.
This is not only completely unjust, and a serious violation of any rules of fair discourse. It is also extremely hazardous to the longterm interests of the US citizenry. It is certainly not in our interest as citizens to have our elected government give such strong and uncritical support to the actions of the government of Israel– even when, as now, these actions completely violate all the “laws of war” requirements regarding the need for proportionality and discrimination in the conduct of military operations.
Our country needs to have a full and fair discussion both of what is going on the current Israel-Gaza war, and of our government’s policy regarding it, which has been marked by:
- 1. Our government continuing to supply Israel with the extremely lethal weaponry that is being used in this inhumanely pursued conflict; and
2. Our government acting vigorously in the international scene, right now, to prevent the conclusion of the speedy ceasefire that the peoples of Gaza, Israel– and the US– all so desperately need.
The risks that accrue to us from not having this discussion on a full, fair, and fact-derived basis, and on not making the kinds of changes in our government’s policy that would minimize the hazard to all concerned, are large indeed. (Quite apart from the raw morality of the issues involved.)
If we do not have this discussion, and do not make the requisite policy changes in an urgent way, then we can expect our country’s real power and influence around the world to continue plunging just as surely as the financial markets crashed in the latter parts of 2008.
Wilfull ignorance is the worst kind. Wilfull suppression of free, fact-based discourse is no less bad. And in Arab-Israeli affairs as in a discussion of national economic policies, discourse suppression is extremely hazardous to our country’s health.
I really dislike the term “market fundamentalist.” It’s too close to “market fundamentals,” so the meaning gets muddied. Better to use terms like “market militants” or “market true believers” or “savage capitalists’ (my favorite).
Yes, the War on Dissent has been a prominent in America for years. Bush took it to new levels. Of course, any discussion of the War on Dissent was on of its early casualties.
Excellent review of past efforts on peace.
New York Review: How Not to Make Peace in the Middle East. By Hussein Agha and Robert Malley.
They review several books on the subject.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22230
One ‘discrete event’ follows another, in our consciousness. And so we are not permitted to understand.
Ilan Pappe, via Mondoweiss:
“It seems that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. In this new year, we have to try to realign the public opinion to the history of Palestine and to the evils of the Zionist ideology as the best means of both explaining genocidal operations such as the current one in Gaza and as a way of pre-empting worse things to come.”
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10100.shtml
Also from Weiss, this line about NPR: “NPR, which administers the IV drip every morning on what Elite Blue Staters Are Allowed to Think.” NPR, so effectively stroking our self image as highly educated and reasonable people, and never disturbing our intellectual comfort, denies us any connection between discreet events. There is no history, only categories, and for ‘the other,’ particularly if he is Arab or Muslim, no category that is truly human.
Gaza is Guernica, it is Lidice, it is Deir Yassin, it is Dresden, it is Sabra and Chatila, it is Kafr Qassem, it is Qana. It is most of all the Warsaw Ghetto. But recognizing that would cause discomfort. As would recognizing that the rockets from Gaza fall on lands from which the Gazan’s were expelled. Their lands.
Is is even possible to change the discourse amongst ‘Elite Blue Staters’ while NPR functions as it does?
International activists, especially prominent non-Israeli Jewish figures, must start speaking out about the crimes of Israel committed since 1947. The Palestinians have been screaming about these crimes for sixty years, and for at least half that time the Western world and its influential citizens denied the truth about these crimes.
It is now time for the international community to sponsor a full “truth and reconciliation”-style process which can, first, recognize the crimes of everyone involved in the long nightmare of Palestine, and second, enforce the viable two-state settlement (shared capital city) which everyone knows is the only sane way to move forward.
Unless activists around the world compel politicians to sponsor this type of process, which will shine the light of the bright sun on the history of Palestine, then the fanatics on all sides of this issue will continue to cause blind violence. The violence results from the continued denial of history and the crimes of Palestine. This denial is what allows the manufacturers of war to remain in business.
The International Community, the National Public Radio? A TRC? Sure.
Now, if you had the means to do a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, yourself, i.e. to collect the testimony, make a judgement, and publish it; and if you had the media of communication to spread its words; if you were put to that test, would you then be able to avoid the narrowness and the prescriptiveness that you decry in the incumbents and the hegemons of the “MSM”?
Who put them there, by the way?
As a matter of fact, the means for people to express themselves never got less. They always got more. And now, with means in our hands such as this one (called what, a blog?), no-one can say he does not have the means to gather facts, express opinions, and publish them.
It is not “the media” or “the politicians” that we should look to, either as alien, blame-carrying goats to be driven away, or alternatively, as in the case of your pleas, to be re-elevated so that we continue to depend upon them.
If anyone, it is as much ourselves who are unable to create and to sustain the breadth and critical openness that you, Sd and Anon, say you crave and lack. If, in fact, it really is lacking, as you say it is.
Look at Helena. What did she do? Is she MSM or is she a lay person like you? What use is such a distinction?
The bell tolls for thee! Do like Helena! Just do it!
The great revolutionary pedagogue of the oppressed, Paulo Freire (beloved of the Liberation Theologists) wrote that activism is of no use, but action is of use. Dialogue is of use.
Our government continuing to supply Israel with the extremely lethal weaponry that is being used in this inhumanely pursued conflict;
This true for last 60 years of the creation of state of Israel. nothing changed since. the west have augured by 1973 oil embargo to states that support Israeli the fact is same as it today Arabs angry from western countries for their blind support of terrorist state which have no respect and for UN resolutions and also other humans lives.
Helena you know well that your government and your country support more than just weaponry, your government pay 3billions US dollars each year for state of Israel as aide and supporting her, moreover only donation for other countries by US citizens, all the money donating to Israel the is tax detectable.
“market fundamentalists”
How on earth taxpayer money goes to car manufactures. For century they selling cars to people and people pay for those car whatever prices tag, after 100 years where all that money went from those cars people around the world paid for them. now same car companies comes screaming we can not continue unless you help us!!
where is the money and revenue each for the past 100 years went?
Dominic-
As usual, you presume to know more than a decent person should ever presume to know.
How can you judge what any one of us who comment on this website is doing in his or her free time to bring justice to Gaza ?
The rest is just you blowing a lot of hot air.
For a TRC to have a genuine impact on the Israel-Palestine problem, it must 1) have the legitimacy of the international community, and 2) possess an official governmental authority, because of a) the international nature of the problem and b) the fact that the early UN is responsible for starting the “I-P” problem.
Sd, I am not entirely sure how or why you feel yourself to be judged. But certainly, I am challenging your view that “activists… compel politicians to sponsor… process”. You cannot oblige me to accept that view of yours, or stop me from telling you and the world that it does not work, and why it does not work, if I please to do so.
You think that institutions that were createed to oppress and have been oppressing all these years can suddenly be turned around, and that “we”, as “activists”, can somehow force that miraculous switch to happen. Yours is a variation of the absurd, self-contradictory and fraudulent slogan: “They’ve got the power and we can make them use it”. Fraudulent!
All you are doing is worshipping at the shrine of the same principalities and powers that you pretend to oppose.
You have contempt of individual and popular agency. Any advocate of direct popular agency is “blowing hot air” according to you. Because you have got things backwards, and what you think is action is only its shadow, activism, whereas when you see action you call it air.
If there are to be any more TRCs, and I attended the one in South Africa, they should be TRCs of the whole people. Ours was a failure, to be honest. It was not a complete waste of time but in its own terms and in terms of the expectations that were created, and because of all that was layed aside for it, it was a failure and we are still suffering because of that here in SA.
Yes, guilty as charged, I think there must be a connection between the demands of political activists and the effective institutions of government at all levels, local, national, international.
Fair enough. There must be a connection. Only connect! as E M Forster used to say. But why must the “government” be the established and anchored point in this chain? Why not the people, and better still, why not the armed people? Christopher Caudwell wrote in an essay on Rousseau (in The Concept of Freedom, or alternatively in Studies in a Dying Culture), that it is institutions that make us human and free, whereas the Rousseauvian man in the woods without any institutional constraints is not free, and not even a man any more, but only a beast. I agree with Caudwell, but then what are the institutions that we are talking about? Of course they must be revolutionary ones and not the institutions of the status quo. In your reformist view, the institutions of bourgeois class dictatorship and of Imperialism can somehow, by a vote perhaps, be turned to another purpose. But there are no such versatile institutions. They are all built for purpose and cannot be turned, but only overthrown and replaced. The new institution in this case is the voice of the people, the “I write what I like” voice (Steve Biko) and the “no innocents and no onlookers” voice (Frantz Fanon). It is the free willing collective social Subject, the Revolutionary Subject, that I prophesy. Your Washington and your Wall Street and your White House are empty, like sounding brasses and tinkling cymbals. Reality has left them. The TRC was all wrong in the first place, relying as it did on “the great and the good” like Bishop Tutu and Alex Boraine. It was sunk by its avuncularity. Frozen in its solemnity. Unable to dance. Not a drama but a confessional. A stuffy deposit-box for sins. A bed of nails upon which no new life could be conceived.