What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Hezbollah's Rise,
Israel's Fall
Peggy
Thomson visits Hezbollah's southern commander. Guerilla warfare Comanche-style: The greatest
light cavalry since Ghenghis Khan; How the whites got the Texas
that the Bush family moved to. Alexander Cockburn
on why Israel lost. What you just missed, but can still get,
in our last newsletter: Paul Craig Roberts on the Collapse of
America. CounterPunch Online is read by millions
of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by
the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains
fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation
towards the cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
One of the faults of academics (I speak
as one of them) is that we tend to imagine that having demonstrated
some fact to our own satisfaction, and to that of those we respect,
we can move on, job done, to the next illumination of fact without
tarrying to convince those we consider ignorant. If this pertains
to our colleagues who seem unable to grasp our wisdom, it applies
much more to the benighted masses who, so long as they remain
outside the campus gates and are unable to affect tenure and
promotion decisions, don't bother us much. Why waste time popularizing
what we ourselves already know so well, challenging ignorance
in the spirit of altruistic compassion, when we can be devoting
our time to career-advancing research?
But our Ivory Tower contempt
for the street-level may be a dangerous error. The regime in
power is being steered, after all, by a neocon cabal that has
expressed its distain for the "reality-based community."
It is principally concerned with constructing an alternative
version of facts that justifies ongoing war against the Islamic
world, but it also draws political support from groups whose
larger concerns include the substitution of religious myth and
dogma for science. The scientific community seems to have grasped
this, and alarmed by high officials' asinine statements on such
issues as evolution and global warming has mounted something
of a resistance movement. Humanities scholars in contrast, often
influenced by "postmodernist" relativism, and the anti-history
notion that "we can never know what really happened"
but should equally validate all narratives, have been all too
passive. It makes me recall Joseph Goebbels' words: "There
was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals
would never be converted [to fascism], [but] would anyway always
yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the
street.'" The orgy of mindless flag-waving after 9-11, and
the treatment meted out to Ward Churchill inclined a lot of intellectuals
to keep their mouths shut.
Times have changed. But there
is a real danger now that, rolling our eyes and even responding
with amusement to the idiotic statements pouring out of Washington,
encouraged by the savage lampooning of Bush that's become commonplace,
we will underestimate the power of stupidity, bigotry, and myth
so effectively deployed by the neocons seeking to reconfigure
Southwest Asia by military force. There's a danger that, not
wanting to sell the masses short, we will rather assume from
them greater savvy than those reliant upon Fox News and the fundamentalist
pulpit can likely acquire. Day after day we read, on reality-based
websites, articles from the mainstream newspapers as well as
the more progressive press that reconfirm what we've known for
a long time: the administration wants to follow up Afghanistan
and Iran with attacks on Iran and Syria, and is lying through
its teeth to create justification for more war. Vice President
Cheney is the key figure in campaign to attack Iran, and the
mentally challenged president having for a time listened more
to the (relatively) more "realist" Condi Rice has so
fallen under the neocon spell that he alone among world leaders
cheer-led the criminal Israeli assault on Lebanon. Nazi-like
defiance of both reason and morality prevail at the top level,
while the mainstream media either embraces the neocon program,
or questions it gingerly.
Much has been made of Joe Scarborough's
recent MSNBC "Scarborough Country" segment baldly raising
the question "Is Bush an Idiot?" Some have intimated
that the "conservative rebellion" against the mad president
has thwarted the president's ability to achieve his bellicose
agenda---a consummation devoutly to be wished, for sure. But
observe how the brainwashed public lines up behind the nonsensical
allegation that Iran constitutes a threat to U.S. national
security!
Observe how in Congress Republicans
and Democrats alike urge stronger action against the imagined
Iranian threat---while failing to insist on an investigation
of the "Office of Special Plans" that relentlessly
built the bogus case for attacking Iraq in 2003!
It is not enough to ask if
the president is an idiot. We must ask why the Congress and mainstream
media have cheered the idiocy on so long, and actively contributed
to it. They're like the townspeople in Hans Christian Anderson's
tale, praising the new clothes of the butt-naked king. But in
the story, once the little boy calls out, "The emperor has
no clothes!" the individuals in the crowd, having been frightened
into thinking only idiots couldn't see the monarch's elegant
new attire, come to their senses and realize they've been hoodwinked.
The word's been out on the street for a long time that this president
is an idiot---surrounded by shysters as cunning as the tailors
in the Anderson tale. MSNBC could have told us that some years
ago. Instead the political class and the media have maintained
a united front in support of the idiotic proposition that 9-11
justifies U.S.-forced regime change in any country that Washington
decides to call "terrorist." If it's an Islamic country
targeted by AIPAC, the roar of approval is deafening.
So on the one hand, the task
of exposure is done. Those who understand can talk until we're
blue in the face reiterating what is for us the obvious. But
there are so many out there, so exasperatingly dumb, at the mercy
of loud-mouthed media buttheads and low-life political disinformation
artists such as the congressmen insisting both that Iraqi WMD
have been found and that Iran poses a real "strategic threat"
to the U.S.
There are some in the crowd
who see the naked emperor but suffering from delusions actually
believe he's well-dressed. They need help. Therapy, even. Those
of us who see---or at least think we see---clearly, must guard
against complacency as we notice the new, welcome, belated mainstream
recognition of objective reality. We can't underestimate the
obstinate power of delusions as manipulated by the administration's
propaganda-disinformation apparatus. The neocons know (but probably
don't much care) that the majority of Americans now understand
they were taken for a ride on Iraq. "Let's just move on,"
the hoax perpetrators say. "Why dwell on that historical
issue?" They must take heart at the above-mentioned
poll. Fully 73% of the American crowd looks on at their disinformation
parade and thinks Iran is a national security threat to the U.S.
Over half anticipate a war with Iran within five years!
Plainly many people who understand
that Bush is a fool, and that they were lied to about Iraq, are
unable yet to see that all these regime-changing projects in
the Middle East are part of a broad plan to refashion the region
in the interests of U.S. imperialism---as interpreted by the
Cheney-Rumsfeld neocon cabal---by the end of Bush's second term.
Those who see it should argue it, relentlessly, even as we watch
with horror that which we fear unfold.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
