defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

i don't think i'd want to see the greenwaldian style applied to brazil even for lols

Maybe Greenwald writes about the US for the Guardian because that's what they hired him to do?

political pundits who are uninterested about how politics works are strange people

― iatee, Tuesday, May 21, 2013 2:50 PM (26 seconds ago)

this is definitely a frustrating thing about GG but i think ppl would be better served not reading his columns as prescriptive (even if that's his intent!) and instead using them to be like "ok everything he's saying is otm, this is at least something to keep in mind"

like he can be ridiculous but he's necessary when he's at his best no one is/was writing about the things he was writing about, at least no one with a fraction of his audience

period after necessary

this aggrieved (or often enough, chuckling) attitude that a homosexual has to be a neocon because traditional or autocratic societies are sexually restrictive is so fucking gross

wait what?

that GG takedown has been written a hundred times before, only it went 'noam chomsky can't see anything good about america, but he NEVER writes about how bad the soviet union is.'

that's 'jacobinism' dude's argument!

xp

chomsky is a guy who i loved in high school. i used to listen to his (political) lectures all the time but i think in some ways he's even worse than greenwald. his theories about how power works are totally divorced from what i'd consider sharp analysis of the world, or politics, and though his style appealed to me when i was younger it became clear that he's just a really intelligent conspiracy theorist.

this is definitely a frustrating thing about GG but i think ppl would be better served not reading his columns as prescriptive (even if that's his intent!) and instead using them to be like "ok everything he's saying is otm, this is at least something to keep in mind"

Scolds are often right.

J.D. otm

I am essentially uninterested in how politics in 21st-century America works bcz Obama.

Chomsky even said after the election that Bam was the lesser evil, what more do you want?

http://972mag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/rsz_gp3.jpg

i have some issues with chomsky but i don't think it's accurate to call him a conspiracy theorist -- if anything the problem is that he's the opposite, someone who denies that human agency can make a difference in history at all. like, in his reading, the cold war somehow has almost nothing to do with harry truman and dean acheson, but 'about' america's corporate interests, which somehow (never specified) pulled all the strings behind the scenes and controlled american foreign policy. one thing i do like about GG is that he (mostly) doesn't do this.

"but 'about' america's corporate interests, which somehow (never specified) pulled all the strings behind the scenes and controlled american foreign policy"

how is this not a conspiracy theory? vague, non specified accusation of someone pulling all the strings behind the scenes!

"someone"

citizens united yo - it's the LAW

well conspiracy theorists tend to be fixated on the actions of actual individuals -- FDR and pearl harbor, the 'real' JFK assassins, et al. i guess you could call chomsky an institutional conspiracy theorist in that he blames everything on institutions -- the press is bad because it's owned by corporations, wars happen because wall street wants them, etc etc.

i think they're different versions. plenty of conspiracy theories about organizations/governments secretly doing x, y, z

chomsky's theories don't require anyone to know what they're doing, though

Here's a Greenwald phrase from a column of his that annoys me:

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers - over the last four years alone - have bombed and killed Muslims

Greenwald failed to acknowledge that in north Mali, fundamentalist Muslim extremists were taking over and killing and oppressing moderate Malian Muslims. His "key context" is based on his simplistic Western colonialists return to kill noble Muslims thesis, when the facts are more complicated. A better columnist might have addressed each country individually and as for Mali, not simply lumped together all types of Muslims, while better making his point re Western imperialism.

citizens united yo - it's the LAW

― Mordy , Tuesday, May 21, 2013 3:23 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the citizens united issue is actually a pretty good example of him breaking with party-line liberalism and convincing me to question my instincts. i see it as a much more complex issue after reading his writing on the case

i wasn't making a corporate personhood reference i meant i think the distinction between what jfk headz believe and what chomsky believes is a distinction between conscious conspiracy and the automatic self-perpetuating behavior of systems

i grew up on chomsky but nowadays i tend to think that (like a lot of leftists) his reflexive anti-americanism gets in the way. i know i sound like a conservative, but his worldview (or view of history) seems constructed around the unshakable notion of the United States as a Bad Actor (and not just a bad actor, but _the_ Bad Actor around which all other Bad Actors appear to swirl and take succor) and everything else just kind of falls in line with that. which is not to say that the United States has not been a Bad Actor many, many times and that Chomsky has not rightfully (and righteously) helped to expose some of those occasions. but I think Chomsky is basically a bad historian and does not respect due diligence in research, it's just too easy to drop each new event into this master template that he doesn't care to revise.

greenwald is not that programmatic, although he's becoming more by the day. but unlike chomsky I still find him readable.... usually. whenever he talks about popular culture you have to roll your eyes.

still, a lot of the greenwald quotes up above are pretty damning. at least in terms of painting him as a guy who can't see beyond a manichean logic (which is often chomsky's problem). but yeah he's capable (thus far) of more complex reasoning.

there is a kind of unnavigable interzone between analysis of how power works and 'conspiracy'. i don't know the names & schedules of the people working here http://www.api.org/ but i'm sure they're up to some shit. i suppose the difference is i woulnd't come out and say they're up to some shit w/o some proof of what it was

xpost

(there's a reason why historians don't like chomsky or zinn btw, and it's not because they're a conservative bunch.)

DLH otm, my problem is that chomsky takes his 'institutional' critique so far that he doesn't leave any room for individuals, their flaws and ambitions and motives. like, i don't believe that truman invaded korea or JFK invaded vietnam because of 'the automatic self-perpetuating behavior of systems.' (i've also never heard him talk about political parties, which is a huge hole in any attempt to analyze the politics of the u.s.)

my own worldview is v much anti-conspiratorial, since my belief is that power is exorcized out in the open, it's just too boring and complicated for anybody to pay attention to in a sustained way (cf. 19/20 supreme court cases, 999/1000 things congress does on a given day)

yeah i think you are right, plus even when the a.s-p.b.o.s. does matter, as in say lbj's decisions to escalate, it's still incomplete to ignore who lbj is and what he wants and why xp

i mean they both matter pretty much literally all the time

rather weird to study history and not care about personalities. Even Hobsbawm does.

i pretty much hate zinn, mainly because his chapter on the civil war has to be one of the worst things ever written on the subject. i blame it for every argument i had on the subject in college. (also at least partly to blame for some of the stupid kneejerk left-wing reactions to spielberg's 'lincoln').

yeah, it's kind of a piece of junk. there are a few high-profile takedowns of "people's history" by historians.

i had a kind of revelation about this around age 16, right around when folks around me were like "have you read this amazing book?" i realized that zinn was insulting my intelligence in not trusting me with a version of history tainted by complexity.

also zinn gave a "talk" at my school that was just a bunch of leftist/"movement" clichés strung together (I mean literally, he had no script and no "theme," he just got up there and riffed on "change begins with you" over and over). it was so lazy (and therefore so contemptuous of his audience and the honorarium they had presented to him) that it kind of shook me out of whatever remaining adulation I had for zinn.

'people's history' does have a lot of great quotes and excerpts from other authors -- it'd be a great oral history, except that zinn's commentary invariably reduces it all to the level of a bad fairy tale. this is a pretty good takedown:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/howard-zinns-history-lessons

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/337311650275278848

i apologize in advance for the length of this post.

i am confused about what i feel about howard zinn. my favorite part of the dissent article is when it argues that zinn's book does a disservice to the losers of history by describing them as naive, well-intentioned bumblers that keep getting defeated by the elites, and in that sense doesn't even make good on its promise to be a history of what is usually overlooked/deliberately marginalized, esp. in terms of workers' movements. i think an openly biased popular history book that tries to create a strong narrative of left wing radicalism as a counterbalance of the strong narrative people know about the founding fathers, lincoln, etc. might be a legitimate project, but i'm not sure if zinn's book is that.

i used to be a big chomskyite and thought that institutions had lives of their own, basically, and perpetuated their interests somewhat independently of human agents, who are always relegated to niche roles and never really get a sense of the bigger picture, and might well be deluding themselves as to the real meaning of the roles that have been prescribed for them. i think this is true of corporations... i think they are like this, because they need to maximize short term profits and can't do anything, really, that would undermine this narrow goal. i think i might have been attracted to thinking "institutionally" bc i have an aversion to judging individuals morally and didn't want my politics to be based on calling individuals greedy, corrupt, whatever because i suspected that these things are diversions, and have little effect on what is really going on.

i think i am at a confusing juncture in my political thinking because i don't have a good answer for what the united states should do with the immense power it has, and the postcolonial legacy that comes with it, which involves a large part of the world being really fucked up for reasons relating to US interventionism, military, covert, or otherwise. i suspect there isn't a good answer for when "intervention" becomes necessary, or even for what the "actual reasons" for our past "interventions" have been, which is frightening. wtf was even the point of the war in iraq for instance? chomsky's shrugging answer that it was just about perpetuating the interests of the ruling class seems wrong, but then again, i don't think it was about anything the bush administration said it was about either. i think dick cheney himself has a different perspective today on why he was into the idea of war in iraq than he did in 2003.

one thing i agree with greenwald on though, unreservedly, is that the US needs to hold itself to a way higher standard than fucking assad or whomever, i don't think it's at ALL hypocritical for him to argue that if nations like the US and israel aren't hewing to strict human rights standards -- not torturing people, giving POWs fair trials, not bombing densely populated areas all the time because come on, how necessary really was it to kill anwar al-awlaki -- then NOBODY EVER WILL.

nobody ever has, nobody ever will

dude really does love dogs i'll give him that

i guess i mostly agree with kevin itt... i haven't read greenwald regularly in years and find him a bit ridiculous and borderline self-parodic at this point but he says things that a lof people won't/don't and he's often right so eh

i think the war in iraq is a good example of leftist blind spots re How Things Happen because i don't think it was a cynical project. oil and contracts and father issues matter but more than anything else (and especially given the i guess the word is carelessness w which the invasion was handled) i think the war was real earnest hubris. the imperial disease. athens in sicily, britain vs the boers. it's about getting the upper hand w the spartans and it's about the gold mines in the transvaal but it's also just about power and the terror that power not grown will shrink. alcibiades: "it is not possible for us to calculate, like housekeepers, exactly how much empire we want to have. the fact is we have reached a stage where we are forced to plan new conquests." in that sense i guess i do think it was an institutional reflex? but one that also depended on devout individuals being busy busy beavers. (behind alci's theorizing he's lusting for personal glory.) trotsky sometimes hints he understands how history is both inevitable and dependent but i never follow him when he explains.

the problem with a people's history is it conveys exactly the same sense of untroubled certainty you get from the textbooks it's supposedly correcting. zinn never doubts and he never muddies. it's just the textbooks backwards and it sucks for all the same reasons.

ignore that part about the boers i don't really know what i'm talking about.

lots of leftists saw the iraq war as earnest imperial hubris! that's something that stands out in my memory about the discussion and protests of the time, the exasperation at how *belated* and out of time so much of the appeal to invasion seemed.

don't disagree with your larger point obv

yeah you're right. lots had NO WAR FOR OIL bumper stickers too, though.

i feel like the iraq war was such a perfect storm of carefully nurtured (for decades!) imperial dream-lust and blowback historical circumstance, that no opposition argument is really *too* reductive, no matter much it may seem. they really were after oil! and regional hegemony! and looking for new piles of rubble to cheer on. it's all there no matter how distractedly you look.

this is a great thread. treeship and difficult listening hour are BRINGING IT.

in 2003 my international relations professor said that if you weren't a fan of american hegemony there was something encouraging about the iraq war, because truly powerful hegemons don't need to send in troops. that america was reduced to going to war in order validate its hegemonic credentials was the first sign of its decline as hegemon.

i'm wrong, there's totally a professor out there somewhere with an argument too reductive, i take it all back

do you think he was wrong? seems pretty on point to me

i don't believe that truman invaded korea or JFK invaded vietnam because of 'the automatic self-perpetuating behavior of systems.'

oh, rrrrreally

Truman didn't invade Korea.