Peter Isackson

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      Kim Jung-un’s Understanding of Self-Reliance

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      Like Diogenes wandering through the streets of Athens seeking an honest man, The Guardian seems to have stumbled across the first political leader willing to recognize the disappointing reality of his own politics. Who is that rare honest leader? North Korea’s ruler, Kim Jong-un. The Guardian offers this headline: “North Korea: Kim Jong-un says economic plan a near-total failure at rare political meeting.”

      Unlike his good friend Donald Trump, Kim has the luxury of not having to appeal to the masses for votes to hold on to power. And unlike Trump, he can afford to admit failure, even disastrous failure. Al Jazeera reports Kim’s admission that “the country’s economic development plan had fallen short in ‘almost all areas.’” Unlike Western leaders who blame the opposition for undermining their cherished programs, Kim, having eliminated or assassinated any pretenders, has no opposition to blame. That makes it less risky to admit his own failings. It also permits him to propose the solutions to those problems while being certain they will be carried out, though less certain about whether they will succeed or fail.

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      The Yonhap news agency quotes its leader as saying that “The surest and fastest way to tackle the current multiple challenges facing us is to make every possible effort to strengthen our own power and our own self-reliant capacity.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Self-reliant:

      Indifferent to the regard of others, free to operate with no consideration of one’s eventual critics and only suspicion of their intentions.

      Contextual Note

      Self-reliance has long been considered the preeminent virtue in US culture. The iconic 19th-century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a famous essay with the title “Self-Reliance.” He quoted lines by Beaumont and Fletcher, contemporaries of Shakespeare:

      “Man is his own star; and the soul that can

      Render an honest and a perfect man,

      Commands all light, all influence, all fate.”

      For Emerson, self-reliance concerned the virtuous individual who can, through self-direction, become “honest” and “perfect,” meeting Diogenes’ strict requirement. Kim’s idea of self-reliance is the opposite. It has nothing to do with individuals. But for all their radical opposition, history has revealed a link between the two. For Kim, it is the state that must be self-reliant. Individual North Koreans under his regime must behave in conformity with his laws and rules. To Emerson’s assertion, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” Kim would respond, “Whoso fails to conform undermines the ability of the state to remain self-reliant.”

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      What do these totally opposed versions of self-reliance tell us about the world we live in today? They define two extremes on the spectrum of responsibility. Emerson assumes that the “self” in the expression “self-reliance” is an individual with the liberty to oppose the surrounding society. Kim assumes that “self” is the nation, in opposition to all other nations. Everyone must identify with the national self to assert and maintain its independence. Anthropologists sum this up as two easily recognizable cultural orientations: Western individualism versus Asian collectivism.

      Emerson enjoined his readers to brave the opinions of others: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” Although it was far from Emerson’s intention, successive generations of Americans interpreted his dictum as an obligation to focus only on their interests and desires. During the 20th century, Americans increasingly viewed themselves as autonomous individuals largely indifferent to the opinions of others. This produced a trend toward solipsism and narcissism, never more evident than in the personality of Donald Trump. Emerson, the moral philosopher, would have been shocked. He assumed the existence of a social consciousness because of what he called the “divine idea which each of us represents.”

      The subsequent romanticization of the idea of self-reliance, symbolized in the figures of Western pioneers and the lone cowboys, opened the floodgates to what would become the consumer society, ordered and managed by commercial interests. This led to an increasingly exacerbated form of consumerist individualism whose paradoxical effect was to create a new conformity in consumer habits that could no longer be challenged by a call to non-conformity. Nevertheless, Emerson’s expressed one idea that Kim might easily agree with: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Emerson saw this as applying to every individual American. Kim applies it only to himself, as the unique “mind” of his nation.

      Historical Note

      In his 1947 essay “The Engineering of Consent,” Edward Bernays, credited with inventing the profession of public relations, noted that broadcast media had radically transformed American culture. “All these media,” he wrote, “provide open doors to the public mind.” Bernays believed he was giving a practical application of the theories of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, about the unconscious and the role of raw impulses in human behavior. Bernays had been applying his new “science” of public relations to both business and politics for decades. In his 1928 book, “Propaganda,” he described his strategies as the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses” and claimed that it was “an important element in democratic society.”

      Freud would probably have disagreed with Bernays’ contention that “conscious and intelligent manipulation” of unconscious drives was a good thing. The founder of psychoanalysis famously wrote “wo Es war soll Ich werden,” which literally means “where it was I shall be.” American psychoanalysts have preferred another translation, “where the id was the ego shall be,” referring to Freud’s nomenclature that divides the personality into id, ego and superego. This suggested that the ego should control the id or even replace it. But Freudian purists, such as Jacques Lacan, claim that it should be read in a more mysteriously poetic vein as “I will come to where it was.” It’s more about having a look around the chaotic realm of the id than replacing it with the ego or using it for commercial purposes.   

      If Bernays represents the real impact of Freud’s theories on American culture, as Adam Curtis has demonstrated in “A Century of the Self,” it may paradoxically justify this remark Freud made to Carl Jung at the outset of their trip to America in 1909: “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.” What Freud could not himself realize was that two decades later, his nephew would turn that plague into a devious means of controlling the masses, converting them into passive consumers and provoking a form of voluntary conformism that would prove far more effective than the conformity enforced by despots like Kim Jung-un.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Emerson buttressed his idea of self-reliance by an appeal to the moral laws philosophers deem self-evident. The far more pragmatic Bernays appealed to the American worship of the law to justify his approach. He saw a legal justification for propaganda in the US Constitution. The guarantee of freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights became, in his words, “the right of persuasion.”

      Bernays made it clear that there is something common to all leaders in the age of media: “Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval, and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public’s consent to a program or goal. We expect our elected government officials to try to engineer our consent — through the network of communications open to them — for the measures they propose.”

      Even Kim Jung-un “depends ultimately on public approval,” though not in the form of an election. Kim engineers consent by decree. Whether their name is Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump or Blair, nations expect their leaders “to try to engineer our consent,” by exploiting what Bernays already called the “web of communications.” Bernays’ web of communications includes education, just as Kim’s does. It seeks “to bring about as complete an understanding as possible.” “Understanding” translates as approval of the programs the leaders promote, without having to “wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding.” People, for Bernays, are slow at understanding.

      In 1953, Bernays designed the propaganda campaign that permitted the CIA to overthrow Guatemala’s popular, democratically elected president, Jacopo Arbenz. The team of Bernays, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers — Secretary of State John Foster and CIA Director Allen — engineered a faultless consensus that Kim Jung-un could only envy. Propaganda is the thing leaders can always rely on.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Did Emmanuel Macron Have It Coming?

      by

      After watching the video of a street battle raging directly below the Paris apartment I once occupied at a time when François Mitterand was president, I turned to The New York Times’ editorial board’s response to President Emmanuel Macron’s accusation that The Times and other English-speaking media have been unfair in their coverage of Macron’s campaign against Islamist separatism.

      In an excellent article examining recent developments in France, Glenn Greenwald is far too generous when he suggests that the proudly authoritarian Macron is acting either “out of political calculation, conviction or some combination of both.” For the past three years, most people in France have been wondering whether in fact their president has any convictions beyond electoral calculations. Just ask the gilets jaunes, whose legacy is far from over. The yellow vests have been seen reemerging to accompany the current protests against Macron’s new law on global security.

      To defend his policies, Macron has frequently quoted Jean Baubérot, a historian of laïcité, the French ideology of secularism. In an interview with the journal L’Obs, Baubérot excoriates the president, notably calling into question Macron’s pompous invocation of the “values” of “la République.” But as Baubérot notes, Macron’s idea of values “could disguise less than honorable intentions.” At the same time, the historian reminds the president that values are communicated by “convincing rather than constraining.”

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      Baudérot goes even further when he compares Macron to the revolutionaries of France’s Reign of Terror who worshipped the goddess of reason. He accuses Macron of attempting to turn laïcité itself into “a goddess of which France would be her chosen people.” No one has forgotten Macron’s ambition of becoming a Jupiterian leader. The supreme god must have his goddesses. 

      Macron’s pagan religion is clearly incompatible with Islam, but, as Olivier Roy and Régis Debray have pointed out, it is also incompatible with democratic rights and especially the freedom of expression. Roy points out that Macron’s latest initiatives brutally stifle the freedom of expression of schoolchildren as well as of an entire community bullied into conformity.

      The Times editorial board thinks that the issues Macron is concerned about “should be open to debate, both within France and among mature democracies.” In an effort to sound conciliatory, The Times agrees that “the debate cannot cross into any notion that any victim of Islamist terror ‘had it coming.’ Mr. Macron is right to reject any such suggestion.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Had it coming:

      An expression used by individuals and even political leaders — such as George W. Bush with regard to Saddam Hussein or Hillary Clinton with regard to Muammar Gaddafi — to justify not only acts of war but also their own gruesome terrorist methods.

      Contextual Note

      The Times editorial board politely makes its own significant point about President Macron’s simplistic approach to complex problems when it notes that “he goes too far in seeing malicious insult throughout the ‘Anglo-American media.’” Macron may not like this critique, but most lucid observers agree he “had it coming.” And it may be getting worse with the approach of the 2022 election.

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      As he always does, Emmanuel Macron insists on keeping his word — not to others, but to himself. This is his idea of remaining consistent with his convictions. He does so, especially when those who are directly concerned by his authoritarian measures express their disagreement. He then has no choice but to wait for the explosion and watch everything go up in flames.

      That is what happened when he chose to repeal France’s wealth tax and compensate by raising the tax on gas. It led to the yellow vest revolt. He claimed that it was all about ecology when it was essentially a means of shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor. It happened again with the stubborn promotion of retirement reform. The imminent explosion was only averted by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March that halted the legislative process.

      Even when Macron proclaimed that Islam was in crisis to justify putting France on a war footing against 10% of its own citizens, he admitted that the nation had failed its Muslim population by permitting their effective ghettoization, marginalizing most young Muslims. And concerning the depredations of the police, he admitted, in an interview with Brut, a media popular among the young, that “today, when the color of someone’s skin isn’t white, they will be much more subject to police controls.” 

      In the Brut interview, Macron characterized his proposed law to counter Islamic separatism as an attempt to “rearm the Republic against the supporters of radical Islam.” Who could not hear in this remark an echo of “The Marseillaise,” “Aux armes, citoyens”? Like Hillary Clinton with regard to Muammar Gaddafi, Macron seems to be anticipating the day when he will be able to chortle and say, “We came, we saw, [they] died.” While he admits that “French style integration failed,” he appears only to imagine a military-style response to that failure.

      Le Monde shows itself less indulgent than Greenwald on the possibility that Macron may be acting on principle. The newspaper comments that “during this free-flowing interview [with Brut], Mr Macron took the position of defending his record, with his eyes riveted on the 2022 election.” A French James Carville might be tempted to sum it up this way: “It’s the election, stupid.”

      Macron even allowed himself to enter into a spat with the writer, cineaste and ecological activist Cyril Dion, who had the temerity to remind the president that, in the wake of the yellow vest consultations, Macron had promised but failed to take on board the propositions of a committee of 150 citizens representing the full diversity of France. The president has now summarily dismissed the issue with a remark intended to sound insulting to anyone not belonging to the church of the goddess Laïcité: “Because 150 citizens wrote something, that doesn’t mean it’s the Bible or the Koran.”

      Historical Note

      The New York Times, as the voice of modern liberalism, has become hypersensitive to the question of diversity and racial justice. This may simply be a consequence of its alignment with the Democratic Party, which sees identity politics as the unique theme legitimizing its brand of “progressivism.” This focus on a single theme allows it to dispense with the need to show undue concern with distracting issues such as the militarism of the US empire, the trampling of civil liberties by the intelligence community or the need for economic justice in an increasingly indifferent capitalist plutocracy. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Consistent with this logic, in its response to Macron, The Times offers the truism that “racism and Islamophobia are major problems in France, as they are in the United States, Britain and elsewhere in the Western world.” Though obvious to everyone, it subtly suggests that Macron’s claim to universalism sounds more like French exceptionalism than a commitment to universal human rights.

      And The Times is absolutely right. The universalist “republican” values Macron embraces contain the idea that its institutions are color blind. On the instructions of the Ministry of the Interior, the police may or may not be color blind, but they are not blind. They have two eyes to see with, whenever they decide to stop someone in the street. Likewise, employers can discriminate when they see the name of a candidate on a resumé or at least discover the truth during the interview. In other words, France and the US both have a problem of white privilege, but they manage it — poorly, in both cases — in contrasting ways.

      The Times concludes by celebrating its vocation as a truth-teller ready to take on the challenge of racial justice: “That’s what the news media does, at home and abroad. It is its function and duty to ask questions about the roots of racism, ethnic anger and the spread of Islamism among Western Muslims, and to critique the effectiveness and impact of government policies.” The Times’ performance at this task has, over time, produced variable results. It still hasn’t admitted its complicity in the ongoing humanitarian disaster provoked by Bush’s wars in the Middle East. But with regard to Emmanuel Macron, we can congratulate it for showing the courage to stick to its principles.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Rapid Growth of Emmanuel Macron’s Authoritarianism

      by

      In early October, French President Emmanuel Macron, as a preparation for the 2022 election, made the decision to mount a campaign blaming France’s Muslims for their failure to embrace the country’s increasingly dogmatic “Republican culture.” To counter Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration extreme right, Macron calculated that his shambolic center-right party needed to find a way of steering votes away from the passably racist National Rally led by Le Pen.

      In Macron’s eyes, French Muslims have failed to prove the sincerity of their expected conversion to France’s national religion of laicité, or secularism, that has now definitively supplanted the traditional role of the Catholic Church. To outdo Le Pen, he deviated the blame to the world’s entire Muslim population, claiming that Islam was in the thralls of a global crisis that offended French republican sensibilities. Its credo of “equality, liberty, fraternity” now excluded tolerance for any group of people who did not unanimously adopt all its trappings. Fraternity has its limits.

      Even before the gruesome assaults on a schoolteacher and three citizens in a church in Nice that horrified the French nation, through his rhetoric about a global Islamic threat, Macron managed to convince a number of governments in Muslim countries that France was at war with their religion. Several nations responded by recommending a boycott of French products.

      Emmanuel Macron Defends His Crusade

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      Some went further. Since Macron felt himself in a position to signal their crisis, some Muslim authorities were tempted to focus on his own. Noticing that the French president was proposing increasingly authoritarian laws that had the effect of targeting Muslim children in schools, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari penned a tweet comparing Macron’s proposed laws, which included attributing ID numbers to school children, to the Nazi policy of requiring Jews to wear yellow stars.

      Mazari initially made the accusation on the basis of an article that was later amended to state that the IDs would be required for all children, not just Muslims. The reform aimed at obliging every child in France to receive civic instruction teaching them the “values of the Republic.” Those values include celebrating the publication of insulting cartoons that may even express bigotry and limiting the freedom to don clothing or symbols that may signify affiliation with a religion other than republicanism. Because France’s values are universal, they trump anyone else’s particular values. Conformity is a core republican value.

      France’s Foreign Ministry wasted no time reacting to Mazari’s comparison of the new measures with Nazi practices. NBC News’s headline on the story read: “France ‘deeply shocked’ as Pakistan minister compares Macron to Nazis.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Deeply shocked:

      1. Morally offended
      2. Embarrassingly surprised that one has been found out

      Contextual Note

      In the film “Casablanca,” Captain Renault, the French chief of the local police under German occupation gives the order to shut down Rick’s Café, a nightclub where he spends most of his evenings. When Rick, the American owner of the café played by Humphrey Bogart, asks why, Renault replies “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here” just as the croupier arrives to give him his winnings.

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      The French Foreign Ministry didn’t quite frame the message in the same terms as Captain Renault. NBC reports that “the minister spoke in ‘deeply shocking and insulting terms’ of Macron and the whole of France.” The ministry added, “These hateful words are blatant lies, imbued with an ideology of hatred and violence.” Clearly, Mazari had fallen into the trap of Godwin’s law (citing Nazis invalidates any argument) and the ministry jumped on it.

      France’s proposed law clearly applies the French anti-discriminatory republican rule that procedures must apply equally and uniformly to everyone. Unlike the policies of the Nazi regime, it doesn’t seek to exclude or eliminate groups of people considered different. Marine Le Pen’s party might be tempted to envisage measures of exclusion, but not France’s traditional parties. Not even Macron’s non-traditional Republic on the Move, which was cobbled together in 2017 by attracting a variety of traditional personalities from the political establishment to provide the president with a majority in parliament.

      The republican credo elevates universal civic values to the level of an alternative moral system, replacing all the traditional bases of morality, including the Christian principles of compassion, non-violence and concern for the oppressed. Universality implies uniformity. Individuals must show themselves not so much worthy of their neighbors and their community, but of the republic itself. In that sense, the spirit of the new policies put forward by Macron do vaguely resemble Hitler’s belief in a singular Aryan ideal.

      Historical Note

      Macron’s vision of la république takes Charles de Gaulle’s meme of aspiring to “a certain idea of France” beyond mere aspiration. Macron seeks to codify and monitor the behavior of individuals, who must now prove their conformity with the civic ideal.

      Recently, China’s President Xi Jinping inveighed against a trend that when translated into English is rendered as “splitism.” China is an immense country with a dominant ethnic group, the Han, and the ambition to control territory that includes other ethnicities and cultures. China enjoys the security that comes from governing a population that not only believes in its overwhelming ethnic unity but also, largely as a reaction to its humiliation by Western powers in the 19th century, embraces a fervent form of nationalism. This has permitted Xi in the 21st century to consolidate and reinforce the authoritarianism that Mao Zedong had pushed to a chaotic extreme half a century ago.

      Macron’s links his idea of Muslim separatism in France to the entire Muslim world. This curiously echoes Xi’s complaint about “splitism.” The two ideas are fundamentally different, of course, since Xi worries that the cultures and traditions of autonomous regions, such as Tibet or Xinjiang, might lead to movements of political independence. No risk exists in France of a Muslim nation splitting off, whereas in the past, there have been very real threats of Breton, Alsatian or Basque separatism.

      Historically, France achieved a sense of national unity by imposing the French language on its linguistically diversified regions. Forcing children whose native language was Breton, Alsatian, Basque or Occitan to think in French and imagine themselves as descendants of the Gauls (who obviously didn’t speak French) led to the virtual disappearance of the regional languages. Macron probably sees this historical reality as a policy that paid off in the end. Why not apply it to another important component of contemporary French demography: Muslims?

      Macron is now discovering that there are a number of problems with this approach. Unlike Basques or Bretons, French Muslims are geographically dispersed across the nation. The history of their relations with the French formerly colonialist nation is extremely complex. And the fact that it is their religion rather than their ethnicity or their geographical origin that defines them means that treating them as a coherent group is not just perilous, but impossible, especially if the reasoning is restricted to France itself. An important part of their identity derives from a global community that is also extremely diverse.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This may help to explain why Macron believes that Islam is in a crisis. Someone who has a “certain idea” of France itself expects other nations and groups of people to have a certain idea of themselves. For the universalist republican Macron, anything that isn’t uniform and unified must be in a state of crisis.

      By taking on the entire Muslim world, Macron may end up disastrously achieving the goal of unifying Muslims by posing as their common enemy. His policies that now insist on shaping all young Muslims in France into the universalist republican mold is creating rather than resolving tension. For one thing, it inevitably provokes more irrational attacks by unhinged fanatics — and every community has its unhinged fanatics.

      Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut writing in The New York Times call the system Macron is putting in place “France’s Dragnet,” a policing campaign that now focuses on Muslim children as young as 10. Teachers have been instructed to denounce children who show signs of thinking differently about the values of the republic. It has already left numerous children “traumatized” and fearful to speak freely in class for fear of being suspected of terrorist intentions. That is how, in the wake of drama surrounding the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, France promotes its republican version of “freedom of expression.” 

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in World Politics

      Yuval Harari Conspires to Dismiss Conspiracy Theory

      by

      In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari attempts to clear up our thinking about conspiracy theories, a major feature of modern political culture, which, like so many others, has been aggravated and blown out of proportion by the advent of social media.

      Instead of tracing the complex history of conspiracy theory and its various components, as Harari did for human knowledge itself in his best-selling book, “Sapiens,” he focuses on one particular aspect of it, which he calls “global cabal theory.” More precisely, he defines this as a particular type of theory that depends on the belief in “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”

      Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road?

      READ MORE

      In limiting the discussion to the idea of global all-powerful cabals, he neglects the most common and confusing use of the conspiracy theory meme, which has been popularized by media personalities as diverse as Alex Jones, Rachel Maddow and even European leaders such as Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron.

      Jones has built a business out of finding or inventing conspiracies that enable him to present alternative explanations of news stories that result in some form of a catastrophe or public tragedy. It functions like the improvised American religions set up to extract money from people seeking to believe a narrative concocted by a charismatic preacher with a divine channel toward understanding the ways evil functions in the world.

      Establishment Democrats in the media, especially those who work for MSNBC, have been running a conspiracy theory show for the past four years, led by Rachel Maddow. It draws its strength from the obvious fact that US President Donald Trump is an inveterate liar. This means that anything Trump denies may actually be true, including the idea invented to explain away Hillary Clinton’s ignominious defeat to a charlatan politician that could only be explained by collusion between the 2016 Trump election campaign and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in person.

      Johnson’s stab at conspiracy theory in early 2019, months before he secured the serious and sobering responsibilities of prime minister in the UK, was simply part of his fanciful discourse defending the incontrovertible “truth” of Brexit. Worried at the time that Parliament might find the means of canceling the sacred result of the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union, he blurted out: “I think that people will feel betrayed. And I think they will feel that there has been a great conspiracy by the deep state of the UK, the people who really run the country, to overturn the verdict of the people.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Conspiracy:

      Any coordinated activity by a group of people that produces an outcome disagreeable to the speaker

      Contextual Note

      Harari’s piece is puzzling. It leaves the reader wondering about his intent as well as why The New York Times chose to publish it. His point seems to be we must never take conspiracy theories seriously because they can’t be true. But this contradicts his explicit assertion that conspiracies do exist: “There are, of course, many real conspiracies in the world.” This is nothing more than the truism that people do conspire for a lot of different reasons.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Instead of citing some of these and exploring how they work and why they occur, he dismisses these very real conspiracies with the following reasoning: “Sometimes a corporation, a political party or a dictatorship does manage to gather a significant part of all the world’s power into its hands. But when such a thing happens, it’s almost impossible to keep it hush-hush.”

      Harari seems to be saying that a global cabal theory can’t be true because at some point the truth will spill out, for the simple reason that some people are chattier than others. To make his case convincing, he had to fabricate a straw man hypothesis that supposes the existence of a conspiratorial system with the capacity “to puppet master nearly eight billion” individuals. Because that sounds impossible, the idea must be false.

      There are several problems with this reasoning. The first is that effective conspiracies do not require 100% secrecy. The “Omertà” system of the Mafia — the law of silence — actually does attain close to 100% obedience from its members. Its perfect record is sometimes broken not because of disobedience but due to the existence of a higher authority, the law itself, that sometimes captures a potential squealer. But in a conspiracy that controls the law itself, no higher authority exists to induce the confession of a rat. No logical reason exists why such a conspiracy couldn’t exist. There is even historical evidence that such conspiracies have existed.

      In today’s world, an effective conspiracy with potentially global reach can, without compromise, allow squealers to emerge publicly, simply because it knows how to control the media and the news. Powerful systems of government easily undermine the credibility not only of eventual rats but also of dissidents and objective investigators, those who have effectively seen through the facade. This has never been easier than in this era of “alternative facts.”

      Historical Note

      The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, in the 1960s have both produced numerous and sometimes conflicting conspiracy theories. Any of those theories may be mistaken in its details because so much has been so carefully hidden. But that doesn’t mean there was no conspiracy. It simply means that no single theory may tell the complete truth. But in both of those historical cases, there have been witnesses and even insiders who have blurted out facts at odds with the official narrative. For a logician, this means that the official narrative is just one more competing conspiracy theory.

      Thanks to the ability of the operatives of any true modern conspiracy to manage the media, none of this contradictory testimony, credible or not, ever achieves the status of courtroom truth. The established media understands that it can be harmful to their reputation for seriousness to give too much credence to anything that can be branded a “conspiracy theory,” even if it is the result of serious investigative reporting. It is all part of the now well-honed skill set described by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky: manufacturing consent.

      Yuval Noah Harari has no time for Chomsky’s analysis of complexity. He concludes on this upbeat note: “Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about.”

      The New York Times has every reason to frown upon conspiracy theories. More than ever, The Times has become an organ of the establishment whose essential role is to manufacture consent for the dominant power structure that functions at the cultural level like a cabal but at the pragmatic level like an ordinary competitor in a wide-open commercial game. By failing to distinguish between those two functions — the pursuit of business interests and the construction of a common culture with shared symbols and rules — Harari ends up trivializing the very idea of conspiracy, hiding its cultural reality.

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      Does that mean Harari is a complicit member of a conspiracy in which The New York Times plays a crucial role? Like anything that concerns conspiracies, the answer can only be both yes and no. Conspiracies are essentially elaborate games played according to a set of rules that everyone recognizes but only a few on the margins even try to understand. Once the game is underway, everyone agrees that the players’ action must be motivated by their shared consent to achieve something within the rules.

      Thinkers like Harari and the stable of editorialists at The New York Times are there to tell us a simple message: Learn the rules so that you can play the game. And, especially, don’t get distracted by the meaning of the rules. Harari makes this absolutely clear when he says that everyone’s task is to join their preferred teams. But team members don’t just “ally” out of self-interest. They identify with the team they join. That is how the team achieves the optimal level of consent that makes it competitive.

      For Harari, that game logic defines politics. But politics plays a dual role. It defines culture and is defined by it. In the end, culture is the true cabal.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road?

      by

      During his presidency, Donald Trump found a new way to keep the American public and its media alert. It was a kind of educational game called “Spot the Lie.” If the media had understood how the game worked, the nation and the world would have benefited. Instead, it tended to degenerate into a shouting match in which each side would shriek with increasing volume to express its indignation.

      What was special about his prevarication? It was systematic and provocative, attention-getting. Traditionally, US presidents lied quietly, covering their reprehensible acts in expressions of virtuous intentions. Even the most obvious lie of the 21st century — George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding a massive store of weapons of mass destruction — was presented as a concern for ensuring peace by preventing an imminent act of war by a mad Iraqi dictator. It turned out that both the madness and the capacity for war were on the American side. But nobody noticed because, well, the American military is by definition “a force for good.”

      The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions

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      With the incoming Biden administration, there will be fewer obvious lies. Given President-elect Joe Biden’s limited rhetorical skills, there may even be moments when Americans have access to the true intentions of a government that ordinarily seeks to hide them.

      After the signature by 15 Asian nations of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) last week, Biden explained what would be behind US strategy after he becomes president on January 20, 2021. “We make up 25% of the world’s trading capacity, of the economy of the world,” he said. “We need to be aligned with the other democracies, another 25% or more, so that we can set the rules of the road instead of having China and others dictate outcomes because they are the only game in town.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Rules of the road:

      The prescription of behavior for a group of supposed equals that clearly favors the interests of one member of the group whose dominant status allows it to impose its values and preferred behaviors on other members of a group without having to consult an external authority or waste too much time negotiating among equals

      Contextual Note

      Leaders of hegemons rarely explicitly lay out their hegemonic agenda. No one could doubt the bold claim Biden has made about the “rules of the road.” The United States always seeks to set the rules rather than play by them. But his statement deviates from the truth when he compares the US attitude with China’s. When it’s about the US defining the rules, Biden uses the verb “set.” But when it’s China, he uses the verb “dictate.” After all, China is a communist dictatorship, so logically anything it does can be called dictating.

      That’s how clever diplomatic language works, at least in the hands of Democrats. They prefer to select the effective verb to instill the idea of good versus evil. Republicans prefer to use the language of moral judgment or downright insult. President Trump likes to call them purveyors of evil, “illegitimate” or even “shitholes.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      But the major difference between the rhetoric of the two parties is that the Republicans shy away from admitting the hard reality that results from the muscular use of power relationships. They prefer to present it as the logic of history, divine will or predestination that have put the US in the role of unique decision-maker for the rest of the world. The shining city on the hill spreads its light across the globe by virtue of being the shining city, not through its complex interplay with other nations. It has an existential quality that can no one can ever doubt.

      That is what Trump means by “America First.” He presented the slogan as if it turned around the idea that the US should decide to tend only to its own needs and not worry about what happens elsewhere in the world. But it also contained the idea that because America was “first” by virtue of its might, it produced the light that illuminated the rest of the world. It didn’t actually have to be good and fair to stand as a model for everything that was good and fair.

      The primary difference between these two interpretations of American exceptionalism lies in the respective rhetorical strategies rather than policy. That is why Biden’s foreign policy may not be very different from Trump’s in its overall effect on the rest of the world. It will be a variation on hegemonic rhetoric, but the military and financial base will be nearly identical. 

      Democrats believe that American exceptionalism, the success story of the nation, endows it with the authority to write the rules of the road for the rest of humanity. The Republicans see it as the result of writing the rules for themselves which they expect the rest of the world will naturally follow.

      Historical Note

      When, alluding to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the RCEP, Joe Biden compared the attitude of the US quite naturally seeking to “set the rules of the road” and the Chinese who “dictate outcomes.” The case can be made that he inverted the truth concerning the history of these two trade arrangements.

      When the TPP was still awaiting signature at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, the BBC noted that the deal designed to put the US in the position to set the rules of the road was contested inside the US. The BBC reports: “US opponents have characterised the TPP as a secretive deal that favoured big business and other countries at the expense of American jobs and national sovereignty.” That highlights the problem Biden will be facing in many of his future decisions: how to define the US and its interests. In other words, who defines the rules? Is it big business or the American people?

      Commenting on the historical background of the “secretive deal,” Vox reported: “Negotiations over the TPP’s terms were conducted in secret, with well-connected interest groups having access to more information — and more opportunities to influence the process — than members of the general public.” Even Congress was refused full access to the terms of the draft.

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      In other words, when Biden refers to setting the rules of the road, it is anything but an openly negotiated procedure. In contrast, the RCEP was drafted conjointly and largely democratically by all the interested parties, which include some of the strongest allies of the US: Australia, Japan and South Korea. It is a lie of Trumpian proportions to suggest that the RCEP was dictated by the Chinese.

      Statements of that kind by the president-elect do not bode well for the future foreign policy we can expect from the Biden administration. Biden’s future secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, sounds refreshing when he more realistically characterizes the state of the world at a forum at the Hudson Institute in July: “Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and as a planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions. Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t handle them alone.” 

      Blinken’s approach to foreign policy is likely to be similar to Obama’s, which does indeed appear refreshing in comparison to Donald Trump’s. But it is likely to be a return to a certain form of wishing to write the rules alone, if not handling the problems alone. In an interview in July, Blinken regretted that, under Trump, the US had lost the ability to dictate the rules. “If we’re not doing a lot of that organizing in terms of shaping the rules and the norms and the institutions through which countries relate to one another,” he said, “then one of two things, either someone else is doing it and probably not in a way that advances our own interests and values or maybe just as bad, no one is and then you tend to have chaos and a vacuum that may be filled by bad things.”

      The problem Biden will face is that the world has changed. Unlike a few decades ago, few now believe the US has a divine right to “shape the rules” or the ability to stave off chaos.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions

      by

      In a Fair Observer column this week analyzing the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election, Steve Westly echoes the tendentious conclusions of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Not only do they seek to place the blame for the ambiguous outcome of the election on the rhetoric of the left, they clearly want that wing of the party simply to shut up.

      Westly finds himself in the company not just of subtle political thinkers like Representative and former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, but also of apostate Republicans such as John Kasich and Meg Whitman. These are people who have discovered — thanks to the four-year run of Donald Trump’s White House reality-TV show — that the Democratic Party feels a lot like the Republican Party of old.

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      Westly makes the following bold claim: “Democrats need to understand that America is still a center-right country with a large, highly motivated evangelical base.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Center-right country:

      A nation that in its majority seeks to believe in and fulfill the ideals of democracy and equality but whose power brokers have the clout to convince the media that it prefers the stability of oligarchic control

      Contextual Note

      The Democrats seized on the idea of Russian meddling in 2016 to explain their defeat in the presidential election. This time, the scapegoat is the group of Democrats who pledge allegiance to “democratic socialism” and shout “defund the police.” Those words and ideas must now be stricken from the vocabulary of the party. All language must be formulated to soothe the fears of “moderates.” 

      This exercise in pre-digested, reductionist analysis leading to the simplification of discourse and debate seeks to brand an entire swath of the population as un-American. The US is increasingly divided and visibly fragmented. The Democrats apparently want to use President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral success to dictate to the American people who they are as a group and how they should think of themselves.

      Embed from Getty Images

      There may be a statistical sense that justifies calling the country “center-right.” But this has no meaning when a wide range of cultural values are at play. When people are pushed toward the edges, no statistical mean accurately identifies a center. Westly is right to mention the existence of a highly motivated evangelical base. But even that fact requires further analysis. The Republicans have to a large extent created the fiction that it exists as a coherent voting bloc.

      There are two reasons not to think of the US as a center-right country. The first is that it has never been more diversified and divided. That two extremes may exist does not mean that the mid-point between them defines the nature of a people.

      Furthermore, polls taken during the election campaign have consistently shown that issues identified with the left and branded by Republicans and Democrats alike with the deliberately toxic term “socialism” are in fact endorsed by a large majority of the population. The most obvious is Medicare for All, consistently denigrated by centrists and the right as “socialist medicine” and rejected by Biden, but massively approved by Americans (70%) and even by a near majority of Republicans.

      Even Andrew Yang’s theme of the universal basic income (UBI) — a “socialist” measure of redistribution if ever there was one — also has majority support. If we consider single-payer health care and UBI centrist policies because a majority approves them, then we need to redefine who is a centrist on the political spectrum. Certainly not Joe Biden.

      The second reason concerns the nature of the two extremes. They are radically different. In the US, the extreme right is indeed a powerful force, as the tea party movement demonstrated. It expresses its extremism by eschewing all forms of rationality, insisting that personal beliefs, opinions and prejudices trump any form of reasoning. Evangelical faith is one example of this, but not the only one. Blind nationalism is another, but to a large extent that is also a feature even of the Democratic center, which embraces the slogan of American exceptionalism. The idea of exceptionalism itself is anti-rational, an implicit rejection of the democratic principle of equality, if not of the rule of law itself.

      The extreme left contrasts radically with the extreme right. First, just in terms of comparative size, the extreme left is marginal. This imbalance may contribute to the mistaken impression that the nation can be defined as center-right. More significantly, the left as a whole, with its many variants, clings to the value of rationality. It is fundamentally an intellectual movement promoting reasoned rather than emotional approaches to addressing social problems. 

      In Shakespearean terms, the left is Hamlet, the thinker, as opposed to Polonius, the busybody focusing on executing the will of King Claudius, the wielder of power. Hamlet rebelled intellectually, but Claudius ruled Denmark until he was replaced in the final act by the Norwegian Fortinbras (literally “strong-in-arm”).

      Like most establishment Democrats, Westly singles out “democratic socialism,” treating it as a kind of virus that has infected the Democratic Party. It encourages the idea that the incoming Biden administration’s essential task will be the production of a vaccine to eliminate it or at least contain any further contamination.

      That theme of ostracizing the left seems to be the flavor of the month. Just now, Al Jazeera informs us that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has declared that the US will label the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign — a movement focused on contesting the politics of the Israeli government — as “anti-Semitic.” It is a theme the Labour Party in the UK has just used effectively to purge the left. The left everywhere is accused of toppling statues. The center, both right and left, topples people.

      That kind of purge may not be what Westly has in mind, but it’s becoming more and more likely that that’s what the Democrats will be seeking to do.

      Historical Note

      The history of 21st-century elections tells a tale that contradicts the characterization of the US as a center-right country. The center-right epithet implies the public’s preference for stability and adherence to the status quo. But recent elections have revealed a profound and growing unease with the status quo.

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      The presidential election of 2000 should have resulted in the election of a center-left candidate, Al Gore. Instead, the Supreme Court crowned George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote and even failed to win the Electoral College. Bush managed to get that close to winning by defining himself as a “compassionate conservative.” That was his way of claiming to be dead center: conservative to please the Republicans, compassionate to please the Democrats.

      President Bush very quickly abandoned the compassionate side and sought to impose an aggressive neocon, neoliberal agenda that Americans had not voted for. It began with the notorious Bush tax cuts at a time when polls showed Americans were ready to accept tax hikes if the goal was to repair a crumbling infrastructure. Bush doggedly pursued his agenda rather than the people’s.

      Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 promising hope and change. His first challenge was to resolve the financial crisis Bush left in his lap. This may have sobered his impulse to effectuate change. President Obama spent the next eight years consolidating the status quo. Then, in 2016, the status quo candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost to an irresponsible clown promising an irrational, undefined program of radical change.

      These recent elections show that voters regularly come out to vote against the status quo. It defines a nation that consistently expresses its impatience with the center-right but is repeatedly given little choice. The centrist Republicans invented the idea of “anyone but Trump.” The voters have shown an attitude closer to “anything but the center.” The Democrats fared poorly in 2020 because “anyone but Trump” trumped “anything but the center.”

      The massive go-out-and-vote campaign in the wake of the George Floyd killing helped the uninspired and uninspiring candidate, Joe Biden, to attain nearly 80 million votes as opposed to Clinton’s 65.85 million. Without the mobilization of those protesting the status quo, Biden’s numbers would have been closer to Clinton’s. He most likely would have lost massively in the Electoral College to Donald Trump’s 74 million.

      As a new Democratic administration prepares to take office in January 2021, it would be wise to take the time to assess the deeper meaning of the vote.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Alex Acosta and the Guidelines of the Elite

      by

      Two fundamentally ambiguous events concerning the Jeffrey Epstein affair have left many people wondering how far the web of influence around the convicted sex offender extended. The first was the trial that ended with a sweetheart deal allowing Epstein, an American financier, to be virtually free while serving prison time. The second event was his apparent suicide in prison as he was awaiting trial on separate charges. 

      The conditions surrounding his suicide are so spectacularly equivocal that any rational person can only be dumbfounded by the uncritical acceptance by the media of New York City’s medical examiner’s declaration of suicide as definitive. CNN, for example, reporting on the most recent news concerning the 2005 trial and the sweetheart deal writes drily: “Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail in August 2019.”

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      In the article, CNN cites a review by the Department of Justice finding “that Alex Acosta, President Donald Trump’s former Labor secretary, exercised poor judgment when, as a US attorney in Florida, he gave sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein a non-prosecution agreement.” It adds that “the review did not find that Acosta or other prosecutors engaged in professional misconduct.”

      The article mentions that Acosta was guilty of a second count of poor judgment “when he failed to notify the girls and young women who alleged they were sexually abused by Epstein about the decision to not prosecute the multi-millionaire on federal charges.

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Poor judgment:

      The commonly attributed failing that explains why a crime committed by any member of the elite (defined as those empowered to judge the acts of others and exempt from being judged by others than their own) cannot be considered a crime since the mistake of showing poor judgment eclipses in gravity the crime itself

      Contextual Note

      As a federal prosecutor and then President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta belongs to the middle ranks of the judicial and political elite just as Epstein belonged to the middle ranks of the financial and social elite. Epstein appears also to have been associated with the international intelligence elite. That offered him supplementary security because intelligence can never be accused of crimes since its duty is to be engaged in serious criminal activity. By virtue of their belonging to the elite, both Epstein and Acosta knew they were at least theoretically protected from ever being convicted of serious crimes. But so were people like Harvey Weinstein, who belonged to the entertainment elite, or Bernie Madoff, who worked his way into the financial elite.

      Epstein, Weinstein and Madoff demonstrate that it’s possible to go too far in exercising poor judgment. All three had, at some point, probably lost any notion of there being such a thing as “too far.” They thus learned they weren’t quite as elite as they imagined themselves to be.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Epstein case helps us to understand one important principle: that in the circles of the elite, there are always two levels of logic that protect them. The first is the phenomenon of the first offense, or the first occasion in which the subject crosses a line that could expose the nature of the game. The less timid or cautious actually push their luck to discover where that line may be before pulling back to their safety zone.

      The second is the security deriving from the self-interested solidarity of the elite. They will never betray the secrets of their peers, whom they learn to protect passively. Passive protection translates as the rhetorical skill of denying even awareness of actions deemed compromising. It is important to avoid recourse to active protection, such as rising to the defense of a peer. This is frowned upon because it may raise suspicions of complicity. Individual sins can be brushed away. Collective sins require more effort.

      Sexual crimes (Epstein, Weinstein) — typically individual sins, but not crimes — if found out and verified, are paradoxically the least forgivable, especially today, after the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo. Judicial crimes and crimes of political influence, such as Acosta is accused of, are easily dismissed because they are generally viewed as part of the job of balancing interests out among the elite.

      Then there are serious political crimes, including war crimes. In some sense, they are the easiest to gloss over because they are motivated by “noble” (i.e., nationalistic) intentions. But because they concern public policies, they become highly visible and can draw the attention of political opponents. Protecting them becomes more complicated, requires working closely with the media and takes time.

      Take the example of Elliot Abrams, President Trump’s special envoy, first for Venezuela and then for Iran. He was convicted of lying to Congress in the context of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. He even admitted in an interview to being seriously involved in the micro-management of the Contra death squads in El Salvador. President George H.W. Bush pardoned Abrams in 1992, who continued to provide his services to George W. Bush and now Trump.

      All this is public knowledge, which means mildly embarrassing but not compromising. It explains why a prominent member of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, Kelly Magsamen, can even today justify her active collaboration with Abrams in a now-deleted 2019 tweet visible here. Defending her work with Abrams on the Trump administration’s shambolic effort to provoke regime change in Venezuela, Magsamen explains: “I worked for Elliot Abrams as a civil servant. He is a fierce advocate for human rights and democracy. Yes, he made serious professional mistakes and was held accountable. I’m a liberal but I’m also fair. We have a lot of work to do in Venezuela. We share goals.”

      Goals justify everything. But mistakes happen, leading to accusations of “poor judgment.” Convictions also happen, sometimes followed by presidential pardons. That is what is called “being held accountable.” Most significantly, bygones become bygones.

      The elite has a job to do and solidarity is an essential part of that job.

      Historical note

      The capacity of elite networks to protect their members, especially when it involves national security (i.e., the intelligence community), has always been impressive. Not only can they accomplish enormous tasks that may or may not involve serious criminal activity — from massacres of civilian populations to assassinations of political leaders and even scientists — they are particularly skillful at covering them up, delaying and distorting the perception of truth and influencing the commercial media to disseminate their version of the “truth” while characterizing all other accounts as conspiracy theories.

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      Alex Acosta’s public explanations of his sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein was anything but convincing, as any spectator should be able to notice. In response to the question raised by his own explanation that Epstein was an “intelligence asset,” he responded: “There’s been reporting to that effect, and let me say, there’s been reporting to a lot of effects … and I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact.” He then added: “I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines but I can tell you a lot of reporting is just going down rabbit holes.”

      The strategy is impeccable. Call the issue “reporting,” meaning it could just be hearsay. Then mention that other hearsay exists, suggesting that it is all equally incredible. Then invoke “guidelines” that no one understands but everyone accepts as being crucial to our common security. The final touch consists of asking for questions from another reporter to avoid follow-up questions to one’s evasive answers.

      History provides us with many examples of how the work of the elite to cover up its most public crimes produces effects that last decades and disqualify the truth, even when it finally emerges to the light of day.   

      Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated 52 years ago. The evidence that the bullet that killed the senator was fired by a second gunman is overwhelming. A lengthy interview half a century later with one of the forensic pathologists consulted for the autopsy (but not for the trial) not only presents that evidence but reveals how and why it was covered up at the time.

      This is just one startling example of how the media continue to create enough doubt about decades-old affairs to protect the elite of the past. It appears to be part of their job protecting today’s elite. Acosta has nothing to worry about.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      In Asia, a New Kid on the Trade Bloc

      by

      History undergoes serious change thanks in particular to slow events that fly below the media’s radar. Focusing on dramatic, immediate events, the media tends to neglect the major shifts that unfold over time. Paradoxically, slowly developing events that often go unreported tell the true story of history. Most often, the exciting, explosive events that dominate the news merely serve to accelerate longer-term trends.

      There is a simple scientific reason for this. Systems react immediately to dramatic events that occur quickly and unexpectedly. They typically mobilize their defenses to improvise a rapid reply. Rather than signaling change, such actions serve to protect and reinforce the status quo.

      The 9/11 attacks, clearly the most dramatic event of the past two decades, provoked a massive response from the US government. The effort to oppose the emergence of the new shape of terrorism appeared to mark a decisive shift in contemporary political history. The response consisted of a global military alliance intent on defending the prevailing “rule of law” and the elaboration of a powerful security state.

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      The effort piloted by George W. Bush and Tony Blair ended up simply reinforcing the focus of Western nuclear powers on the idea that sophisticated military technology provided the key for governing the world. It confirmed and consolidated the long-term trend of building the entire Western economy and culture around the American military-industrial complex.

      Distracted by a relatively meaningless transfer of power in the US following Joe Biden’s election and other colorful events such as the comic melodrama of relations within British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chaotic Brexit team, today’s media have paid scant attention to one event of monumental importance that took place on Sunday. The event itself was unremarkable, but it is a powerful indicator of historical change. The signing on Sunday of the act that brought Asia’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) into existence marked a crucial moment in a slowly evolving shift that began nearly a decade ago and will have a profound impact on history in the coming years.

      In its article on the event, Al Jazeera quotes one American expert, Jeffrey Wilson, who sees RCEP as “a much-needed platform for the Indo-Pacific’s post-COVID recovery.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Post-COVID recovery:

      The idea which some people consider to be phantasy that the global economy may some day return to normal once COVID-19 is eradicated.

      Contextual Note

      The New York Times notes that RCEP has been in the plans for eight years and describes it as “designed by Beijing partly as a counterweight to American influence in the region.” In other words, this is a chapter of a story that lives within the context of a massive and continual decades-long shift of momentum in the global economy. The center of gravity of the global economy has been silently but steadily migrating from the North Atlantic following World War II on a south-eastward course toward Asia.

      Back in 2015, Reuters market analyst John Kemp pointed to the West’s failure to sense this movement, stating that “Most western policymakers and journalists view the world economy through a framework that is 10-15 years out of date.” He further points out that “India’s economy has also started to become a major source of global growth, which will ensure the centre of gravity continues to move more deeply into Asia over the next 50 years.” Analysts who have even attempted to assess the speed of the shift appear to agree on a “rate of about 100 kilometres or more per year.” It may have accelerated since 2015, and even intensified as a consequence of the implicit isolationism of Trump’s “America First” philosophy.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Fearful of the threat to US hegemony posed by the RCEP, the Obama administration launched the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), designed to eclipse the RCEP and protect some of the key historical advantages that underpinned US economic hegemony. Once Trump decided to leave the TPP, the US could no longer take advantage of its provisions to protect industrial property rights or oblige other nations to respect unified labor standards.

      The US has literally been left behind in the race to define and enforce the rules that will govern commerce and economic development throughout the Asia zone over the next 50 years. Most commentators suspect that once president-elect Joe Biden is in office, he will not in the short term make an effort to catch up. In the midst of a complex health and economic crisis, there are other priorities. But Jeffrey Wilson’s comment about “Indo-Pacific’s post-COVID recovery” reveals that Asia, under China’s leadership, today has a clear head start and can set the tone for what a post-coronavirus world will look like. This is a question every nation is grappling with. There are no obvious answers. But there can be little doubt that the world that emerges once COVID-19 is completely under control or eradicated will be very different from what preceded the pandemic.

      The Times signals the fact that “to some trade experts, the signing of the R.C.E.P. shows that the rest of the world will not wait around for the United States.” Many commentators have noted that four years of Donald Trump have convinced European leaders that depending on the ideological and geopolitical framework provided by the US is too risky an engagement. It may even transpire that, despite the intensified military cooperation between India and the US directed against the Chinese threat, as reported in this column by Vikram Sood, Atul Singh and Manu Sharma, India could eventually be attracted to the RCEP. Security is one thing. A humming economy is another.

      India could, for example, be positioned to profit from a key feature of RCEP. The Times quotes Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, who notes that “R.C.E.P. gives foreign companies enhanced flexibility in navigating between the two giants. Lower tariffs within the region increase the value of operating within the Asian region, while the uniform rules of origin make it easier to pull production away from the Chinese mainland while retaining that access.” Narendra Modi’s India has not yet managed to fulfill its promises to expand manufacturing in India. Could RCEP be the key to providing conditions favorable to that evolution?

      In short, the world is faced with a formidable number of variables that combine in a variety of different ways. As Brexit demonstrated, today’s political alignments can be nullified in a trice as the perception of economic opportunities and the pressure of uncontrollable crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic lead to new geopolitical configurations. Those trends are far more powerful than bilateral agreements.

      Historical Note

      Asia’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership will only begin to produce practical effects two or three years down the line. But it already opens channels of communication and coordination between fifteen countries. This will not only confirm the shift of the global economy’s center of gravity but also accelerate the shift toward a new power relationship between the US and China. As the recent presidential campaign highlighted, Americans tend to see this as a binary relationship. Yet all the indicators point toward a multipolar reordering.

      The Times article reminds readers of the historical situation when RCEP was first proposed: “The prospect of China’s forging closer economic ties with its neighbors has prompted concern in Washington. President Barack Obama’s response was the T.P.P.” Trump’s action upon taking office of killing the TPP before it could be signed opened the door to the eventual 15 nation agreement, with the roles of the US and China inverted. Obama designed the TPP to allow China in through the back door. RCEP is designed to allow the US in through the back door.

      The world awaits the evolution and hoped-for denouement of a series of crises nested each within the other. However painful and disruptive, these crises have the merit of signaling the existence of a common interest for all of humanity in stark contrast with the traditional model of geopolitical reasoning based on national rivalries. It is in everyone’s interest to keep our eyes fixed on the slow but deep movements of history as well as the superficial ones that the media throw in our faces every day.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More