Why John Feffer’s Careful Reasoning Still Looks like Propaganda
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| Why John Feffer’s Careful Reasoning Still Looks like Propaganda |
John Feffer is a seasoned Washington DC “thinktanker” at Institute for Policy Studies. He is not only a distinguished political commentator and author. Feffer writes regularly for Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), a publication of which he is co-director. Fair Observer is always pleased and honored to republish his articles.
I mention these facts concerning his background to remind readers that Fair Observer is a crowdsourced journal open to a great diversity of points of view. We feel it is important for readers to hear varied arguments concerning the issues of the day. We also believe that it is important to understand, wherever possible, the background and backstory of the voices who share their punditry with the world. In everyone’s writing, reasoning and rhetoric stand side by side and even hold hands. Understanding means coming to grips with both.
Most of Fair Observer’s authors, unlike Feffer, are not professional pundits or seasoned writers. We encourage unknown voices to contribute. These are people who have something valuable to share with the world in a space where seasoned journalists and pundits are also published. We invite our authors to enter the arena of public debate alongside heavyweights we regularly publish, such as Feffer, Medea Benjamin, Gary Grappo or Tom Engelhardt, to mention only a few.
At Fair Observer, we never presume to know who is right or wrong about any issue, a fact that doesn’t prevent the members of the editorial team from having their own viewpoints. And the naked, but also stimulating truth is that we in the team have our own very real, sometimes deep divergences. Disagreement can and should be productive. It is the foundation of the kind of dialogue that true democracy requires.
Alas, in times of geopolitical tension, the tolerance of diversity and the taste for constructive dialogue tend to wane. An opposite trend, strongly encouraged by governments themselves, pushes many people to suppress all divergences from official truth, often branding it disinformation. When the idea of some noble common cause, especially of a military nature, comes to the fore, the dominant forces in society seek to apply subtle, and sometimes less subtle pressure aiming at establishing and enforcing conformity of thought around what emerges.
9/11 defined the political culture of the 21st century
There are moments – think of the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks on New York’s trade towers and the Pentagon – when all voices are expected to sing in unison. One false note, one example of dissonance, will bring instant opprobrium. When comedian Bill Maher blurted out only a few days later, “We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building – say what you like about it, it’s not cowardly,” the sponsors of his TV show canceled their contracts. Maher was forced to apologize. Then there was the case of the avant-garde German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen who, six days after the event, called the events of 9/11 “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.”
Stockhausen’s music had always been ultra-provocative, built of planned and random dissonance, but no one ever reacted with shock or disapproval to the most outlandish musical examples composed and performed by a man considered to be the leader in the field of electronic classical music. I attended a Stockhausen which in 1964 at UCLA’s Royce Hall where, exposed to the deliberately chaotic assemblage of jarring sounds, the audience sat in solemn, respectful silence. Everyone, that is, but the most respected professor of UCLA’s music department, a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg’s, who was falling out of his seat roaring with delighted laughter. He was clearly the only one in the auditorium with a clue to what Stockhausen was doing. His behavior upset the man sitting behind him, who upbraided him for his lack of decorum, scolding him to be quiet.
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Stockhausen’s outrageously unharmonic musical creations could thus draw rapt admiration from an intellectual elite; his equally unharmonic verbal notes in 2001 turned him into a pariah. Yet in both cases, he developed a cutting irony that targeted conventional taste and conventional thinking. Six months earlier, in the same hall, I had sat listening in stunned silence to John Coltrane make musical history. John Kennedy had been assassinated the previous day. Coltrane’s challenge to the order took place on a different plane and its effects are still being felt. Deviating from the norm even at the cost of being misunderstood was possible then. That era was a moment in history when non-commercial music could still have a powerful impact on people’s lives.
The world in which musicians like Stockhausen and Coltrane could thrive — both considered masters of a music that pushed art too far for most people’s taste — has definitively disappeared. In 2001 Stockhausen learned a fundamental lesson about the character of the 21st century. Saying something deemed inappropriate can be fatal, at least in the US. Speech and thought must now be policed. That is even true for artists whose activity traditionally belonged to a world unconnected to political discourse and social norms.
Future historians may remember this first quarter of the 21st century as an age of extreme censorship applied to anything deemed sensitive or capable of “triggering” a negative emotion in the mind or heart of someone who happens to be present. Visible in the purely social culture of PC (politically correct), it has become a fixture of serious political discourse and a major factor in democratic elections. This is an ear in which noticing that Israel has created something that resembles apartheid system brands the observer as anti-Semitic. Using the wrong English pronoun to refer to a person is a crime against identity. Citing a word associated with racism, even in the context of historical analysis, constitutes proof that one is a racist. Pointing out that Russia may have felt threatened by the growing military power of NATO is a proof of complicity in the evil designs of the Satanic Vladimir Putin.
The triumph of conformity in the name of security
Today thought must be controlled and discussion restrained. In the purely political realm, our modern nation states have elaborated exquisitely complex methods and means of both provoking and especially enforcing conformity of thought and ensuring that no one, whatever they may privately believe, may be permitted publicly to deviate from the official assessment of what is good and what is to be condemned. Joe Biden himself has made that clear. Democracy — even when controlled by money rather than people — is good and autocracy, even when it reflects the will of the majority, is bad. Believing that opens the door to the rule of money, identifying it with democratic virtue. It’s a system that makes political decision-making easier, since decision-making can be essentially confided in a moneyed elite.
But the ultimate effect of such conformist thinking imposed by a restricted elite is to divide society, possibly irreparably. The cultural examples of individuals choosing and imposing their pronouns and forbidden words, or designating as suspect expressions such as “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” foster ongoing cultural dramas that keep the two sides who revel in their binary opposition engaged in what each sees as a noble combat.
Bitter disagreement and binary opposition are now structuring elements of US culture. Every issue can and indeed must be reduced to two opposing positions. That deep-seated reflex explains why the US can never go beyond a two-party system. Even when the two parties agree in pragmatic terms on all the essentials — unbridled financialized capitalism, global military domination, the divine status of the dollar, gun ownership and the virtues of consumerism — they draw all their political energy from hating the other side.
But there are matters about which Americans are not free to disagree. The example of 9/11 showed there is at least one general idea everyone must uncritically embrace: the defense of the nation. In its most extreme form it has produced the popular slogan: “Love it or leave it.” It translates as the duty of ordinary Americans never to call into question America’s military cause of the moment. In a world beset by obvious dangers related in part to the increasingly destructive nature of technologies that may end up in the “wrong hands,” the insistence on conformity makes a lot of sense. Especially when one assumes that one’s own hands are always the “right hands.” So defense is such a fundamental priority that the decisions made in its name can never be criticized, just as ever-expanding defense budgets are never called into question by anyone other than marginal leftwing extremists and demented pacifists.
How did the “defense instinct” become so dominant in the culture? In former times, the notion of a nation’s foreign policy focused on trade and access to resources, in other words, the need to exchange with other regions and nations. Those exchanges could have a commercial or cultural nature. Power relationships were important but they weren’t defined in purely military terms.
World War II changed everything, partly because of its scale but also because of the invention and use of the atomic bomb. Today we accept the idea that foreign policy is less about the quality of international relations than it is about security in a purely physical sense. Defense is defined by weaponry to the detriment of social life and civilized behavior.
But there is another less obvious dimension of defense, the one George Orwell anticipated in his novel 1984: speech and thought control. No one can ignore the frequency with which, since 2001, policies focused on national security in the US have ended up challenging what people still refer to as “constitutional rights.” This sacrifice of traditional rights is always justified in the name of “national security.” No serious observer could doubt that the Patriot Act of October 2001, passed in the name of countering terrorism, has had, among its effects, the very real suppression of some of the rights Americans take for granted: notably the two pillars of the “Bill of Rights,” the first and fourth amendments (freedom of expression and freedom from unwarranted search).
The rights of a nation’s citizens are one thing. They will always be the object of internal debate. Foreign policy poses a problem of a different order. In recent decades, the idea of protecting “national security whatever the price” has led to the justification of the morally egregious concept of preventive war. This became the foundation of the Bush doctrine, used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The same logic lies behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It relies on the perception of a nation’s duty to respond militarily if necessary to an “existential threat.” We now know that the threat Iraq represented in 2002-3, with its dreaded “weapons of mass destruction,” was imaginary. Most analysts today agree that the threat to Russia by Ukraine’s dallying with NATO was exaggerated, but no one can credibly claim it was purely imaginary. However, making the claim that it could have been real is now treated as the equivalent of Stockhausen’s characterization of 9/11 as the “greatest work of art.”
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