Peter Isackson

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      Nigeria’s Chaos Is the World’s Chaos

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      For the past two weeks, the youth of Nigeria have been in the streets protesting the ruling order of a nation in crisis. Having seized on the theme of police brutality that inspired the massive demonstrations this year in the US, they are now challenging their government on a much broader range of issues that will define the future of the country. The demonstrations have grown to monumental proportions, and the government has begun organizing its predictably brutal response.

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      The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week on the major accomplishment of the protesters in an article with this title, “Nigerian Protesters Shut Down Africa’s Largest City, Escalating Standoff With Government.” The subtitle reads, “Authorities vow to restore order as demonstrations grow across Nigeria.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Restore order:

      What all governments attempt to do in times of revolt, with the aim of returning to the status quo of untenable, organized disorder that reigned before the revolt

      Contextual Note

      Though the drama has intensified in the course of this week and the outcome is still uncertain, the Nigerian government has already begun to deploy massive force in its effort to end the protests. Despite official denial, it is now clearly established that government security forces fired on the demonstrators on Tuesday evening in a continuous barrage that lasted between 15 and 30 minutes. They reportedly removed the security cameras from the scene and turned off the streetlights shortly before the shooting began. By Wednesday evening, Amnesty International had reported the killing of 12 protesters.

      The government did make a gesture to meet the protesters‘ demands when President Muhammadu Buhari proclaimed that the government would dissolve the specific police unit — known as the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) — blamed for excessive use of force and acts of depraved brutality. To prove their sincerity, on Sunday, the authorities, as reported by Al Jazeera, “ordered all personnel to report to the police headquarters in the capital, Abuja, for debriefing and psychological and medical examination.” But that promise of disbanding and replacing SARS had been made several times in the past and each time the same pattern of behavior and the same culture of violence returned.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The protesters are now demanding more than superficial reorganization of the police. They want to see concrete acts of justice for victims, including compensation for their families, the creation of an independent body for oversight of the police and “psychological evaluation and retraining of all disbanded SARS officers before they can be redeployed.” Having reflected on the root of the problem, they have also wisely asked for “an increase in police salary so they are adequately compensated for protecting the lives and property of the citizens.”

      Whenever a government speaks of restoring order, the order they are referring to is an expectation of docile acceptance of the system of governance they represent. At least some of the protesters appear to understand that order is not the result of calm acceptance, but of systemic coherence combined with consistency about the mission of the police focused on protecting citizens rather than the government and the established order.

      Where the government takes “order” to mean little more than a stable structure of power, in which the powerful have the means to fend off various forms of disturbance, the protesters seem to understand that the very idea of order implies systemic coherence. Any stable, functioning system relies on being able to identify, respect and manage complex dynamic principles.

      Any reliable mechanical system, such as the rotors of a helicopter, must include a series of mechanisms designed to respond to and compensate automatically for excessive force or tension. Human organizations, from nations and cities to small enterprises, must elaborate behavioral systems that permit enough flexibility to self-organize when states of disequilibrium threaten. They will include hierarchies and laws but also a culture of interaction that involves shared understanding and common reflexes. For anthropologists, that is largely what the idea of culture represents.

      The conflict in Nigeria — but the same could be said of the US today — is one between two conceptions of “order.” The first, that of the government, is an order that is imposed. The second, that of the protesters, is an order that is built on principles allowing for self-organization. To some extent, the tension between the two sums up many, if not most, of the dramas affecting democracy in the world today.

      Historical Note

      Al Jazeera quotes entertainer and entrepreneur Sidney Esiri, who sums up the logic of the events that have taken place over the past few weeks. “We the people, we are committed to peacefully protesting and exercising our rights as citizens to demonstrate for our cause,” he said, “but some arms of government, of different people, have found ways to disrupt this peaceful process and turn it into something violent so that they have the excuse to bring in the military, which is what they did yesterday.”

      This reading of the situation was confirmed by Anietie Ewang, a Nigeria researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Nigerian authorities turned a peaceful protest against police brutality into a shooting spree, showing the ugly depths they are willing to go to suppress the voices of citizens,” she stated. The UN appears to agree: “United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for an end to what he called ‘brutality’ by police in Nigeria.”

      The prospect for some reasonable, peaceful reestablishment of order seems remote. Femi Adesina, the Nigerian presidential spokesman, appealed “for understanding and calm across the nation, as the implementation of the reform gathers pace at federal and state levels.” But the protesters see that as the old trick of gaining time as the old order falls back into place. The public debate has become a question of time management — in this case, managing historical time. Esiri, better than anyone else in the leaderless movement, articulated the core question when he said to Al Jazeera that the “situation in Nigeria had gone to the point, where you have to look at it and say, ‘if not now, then when?’”

      Nigeria has a rapidly growing population that is expected to overtake the US to become the world’s third-populous country in the world by 2050. It is also one of Africa’s richest nations because of its oil reserves, but it hosts one of the highest levels of poverty in the world. “More than 55% of Nigerians are underemployed or unemployed and youth unemployment is even higher, according to official statistics,” cited by The Wall Street Journal.

      Whether consciously or not, the protesters against police brutality were inspired by this year’s demonstrations in the US. They may also have been inspired by the visible, albeit inconclusive cultural effects, of the US protests. At least for a short period, they enhanced the status of the Black Lives Matter movement, suddenly embraced by the corporate world and revealed some of the untenable chaos at the heart of a political class that is no longer capable of governing the nation in a stable or coherent way.

      These are two powder kegs, dissimilar in so many respects, but both representative of the deep contradictions of this historical moment. No one can guess how things will develop in the coming months in either Nigeria or the US. It has become unthinkable, just in terms of probability, that either nation, however the politics plays out, will manage to achieve what their establishments hope, which is to restore at least a semblance of the old order. History is taking a chaotic and violent turn. In which direction, nobody knows.

      *[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 Russian Pathology Deepens at The NY Times

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      The Daily Devil’s Dictionary cannot help but love The New York Times, with increasingly diabolical ardor. Whenever the news cycle goes dry, we can turn to The Times and its documented paranoia for inspiration. The risk is repetition. The reward is the pleasure of picking and consuming low-hanging fruit.

      Yesterday, we focused on a glossy piece of propaganda designed to dismiss US President Donald Trump’s warnings that the results of the US election will be invalid because the new generation of voting machines will be Russia-proof. Now, we have the pleasure of examining The Times’ latest contribution to the revival of the Cold War. This time it’s a spy-versus-spy story, a true Cold War classic.

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      A trio of Times journalists — Ana Swanson, Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes — has penned an article bearing the title, “U.S. Diplomats and Spies Battle Trump Administration Over Suspected Attacks.” It turns out to be a valiant effort of their part to resuscitate a story that officially died in 2018. That was when scientists proved that the sophisticated sonic weapon some American diplomats in Cuba believed was targeting their mental health turned out to be nothing more than the sound produced by a certain species of cricket. At no point in their article do the authors acknowledge the debunking.

      Patient readers will find the piece confusing, like so many other Times articles that flood the reader with random facts, creating the impression that some great investigative work has been undertaken. The following paragraph contains the core of the authors’ accusations (or rather insinuations). It illustrates the type of paranoid reasoning The Times has now routinely adopted as a key feature of its editorial policy.

      “The cases involving C.I.A. officers, none of which have been publicly reported, are adding to suspicions that Russia carried out the attacks worldwide,” the journalists report. “Some senior Russia analysts in the C.I.A., officials at the State Department and outside scientists, as well as several of the victims, see Russia as the most likely culprit given its history with weapons that cause brain injuries and its interest in fracturing Washington’s relations with Beijing and Havana.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Culprit:

      For The New York Times (and Democratic Representative Adam Schiff), whatever the crime: Russia.

      Contextual Note

      The article consists of a magma of unverified and contradictory accounts of impressionistically reported cases. What the authors cannot achieve by the quality and accuracy of their reporting they try to accomplish through the quantity of random examples. They punctuate the citations with passages of pseudo-reasoning meant to point the reader toward a conclusion that no responsible authority — political or scientific — appears to have reached.

      The paragraph cited above offers a glimpse of the modes of reasoning used to make the article’s thesis sound credible. It cites “cases” that “are adding to suspicions that Russia carried out the attacks worldwide.” In other words, the central fact is that suspicions exist, which is undoubtedly true. But whose suspicions, other than Times journalists? They do cite something that is factual rather than a mere suspicion: “The C.I.A. director remains unconvinced, and State Department leaders say they have not settled on a cause.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Admittedly suspicions exist. That should be true for any thesis that isn’t clearly established. In the same vein, if there are suspicions (in the plural), we might expect that there will also be suspects. But for The Times, there is only one: Russia. The journalists cite different categories of individuals who designate Russia as the culprit: “Some senior Russia analysts in the C.I.A., officials at the State Department and outside scientists, as well as several of the victims.” Now, if “some” Russia analysts see Russia as the culprit, it means that others don’t.

      Readers should always maintain a “suspicion” that journalists who rely on citing “some” of a designated group of people are more likely expressing opinion than reporting news. We know how eagerly climate change deniers love to cite “some scientists” who doubt the majority opinion. The Times reporters never tire of citing “some” authorities for their opinions or assessments. 

      Early in the article, to establish that there was a real and not imaginary health problem, they cite “some officers and their lawyers.” At one point, they tell us, “Some C.I.A. analysts believe Moscow was trying to derail that work.” At another, “Some senior officials at the State Department and former intelligence officers said they believed Russia played a role.”

      They occasionally use “some” disparagingly to identify those who have failed to reach their conclusion about Russian guilt. “Some top American officials insist on seeing more evidence before accusing Russia,” the journalists write. They cite the CIA director, Gina Haspel, who “has acknowledged that Moscow had the intent to harm operatives, but she is not convinced it was responsible or that attacks occurred.” Maybe this article will convince her.

      Critical readers should also be suspicious of sentences that begin with the phrase, “it’s obvious.” Quoting Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the article tells us, “It’s obvious how a U.S. adversary would have much to gain from the disorder, distress and division that has followed.” As Sherlock Holmes might observe, the obvious is the first thing to become suspicious of and the last thing to trust, even if what seems obvious does have a bearing on the truth. The Russians probably do think they have something to gain from disorder in the US. But so do others. That “obvious” fact doesn’t point in any specific direction, nor does it imply agency.

      Historical Note

      In the same edition of The New York Times (October 19), an op-ed by Michelle Goldberg has a rhetorical question as its title, “Is the Trump Campaign Colluding With Russia Again?” Goldberg’s suspects the omnipresent Russians were behind the story of Hunter Biden’s notorious hard disk that enabled The New York Post to publish compromising emails for the Joe Biden election campaign. National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, a Trump administration appointee, claims that there is not an iota of evidence to support the claim that Russia is behind the story. The Times counters with an op-ed by John Sipher, a former CIA man who worked for many years in Russia.

      Sipher complains that Ratcliffe’s denial represents nothing more than his willingness to toe Donald Trump’s line. He offers this astonishing moral reflection: “Rather than operating as an honest steward of the large and important intelligence community, Mr. Ratcliffe appears to regard the nation’s secrets as a place to hunt for nuggets that can be used as political weapons.”

      Let’s try to decipher Sipher’s thoughts. He may be right about Ratcliffe’s loyalty to Trump and the need to suspect he might be lying. No, let’s correct that and say he is absolutely right about not trusting anything Ratcliffe says. But his contention that a director of intelligence should be “an honest steward” is laughable. The whole point about working in intelligence is to be a loyally dishonest steward of somebody’s political agenda. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former CIA director, made that clear when he proudly admitted that the CIA trained its people to lie, cheat and steal.

      Presumably, Sipher worked for the CIA under George Tenet, who famously accepted to lie on behalf of President George W. Bush’s agenda and provide false evidence for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In his book, “At the Center of the Storm,” Tenet later complained that Vice President Dick Cheney and the Bush administration “pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a ‘serious debate’ about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.”

      By now, most people are aware of The New York Times’ role in supporting and encouraging the invasion of Iraq and confirming as news the Bush administration’s lies. For some people, it was obvious at the time. That in itself is a lesson in the language of the news. When speaking from a historical perspective about what “some” people did and what was “obvious” in a former time, those much-abused tropes of “some” and “obvious” no longer merit our suspicion. The New York Times doesn’t do history. What it does do, and with much insistence, is contemporary political agendas, despite its claim to be an objective vector of today’s news.

      *[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 New York Times Confesses to Paranoia

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      In carrying out its mission to promote themes dear to the Democratic Party establishment, The New York Times has produced a slick video on voting technology. The document counters US President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election will be rigged. The video’s title sums up its case and sets the tone: “This U.S. Election Could Be the Most Secure Yet.”

      Some viewers may notice that the verb “could” contains some serious ambiguity. In contrast with “will,” “could” expresses deep uncertainty. This should tip off viewers that they may be in for a rhetorical ride as they sift through the strong innuendo and shaky evidence of the nearly 14-minute video.

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      It doesn’t take long to realize that the entire thesis is built on two sweeping generalizations with nothing to back them up. The first is the assertion in the title that the US presidential election will be secure. It wants us to feel convinced a serious problem has been solved. The second is the thesis that can be found in so many Times articles that the only problem with US democracy is Russian interference. 

      Early in the video, we meet the first figure of authority, David Sanger. His title appears on the right side of the screen: The New York Times national security correspondent. He authoritatively announces the gist of the problem: “The Russians managed to get us paranoid about the security of our own election systems.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Paranoid:

      In the world of journalism, a productive mental state that incites editors and journalists at The New York Times to produce an unending series of stories that blame Russia for every political problem in the United States.

      Contextual Note

      The self-confessed paranoiac Sanger is immediately followed by David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). He informs viewers that all is well in the asylum thanks to this reassuring message: “I think it is safe to say that this is the most secure election we’ve ever held in the United States.” In case the viewer isn’t sure whether this unknown personality can be trusted, the video editor provides a caption in the middle of the screen with an arrow pointing to Becker’s head. It says, “Expert.” The curious will have to Google CEIR to learn that Becker’s institute was funded by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Google will also lead them to stories that tell the true story about voting machine vulnerabilities, such as this one.

      Once we are reassured by what the “expert” thinks, the voiceover reminds us that vigilance is still required because the Russians are still there. “In 2015, Russians infiltrated our voting in every single state,” the female voice tells us against a background listing the states, whose names, one by one, flip from black to red (the color everyone associates with Soviet Russia). Then comes a curiously honest disclaimer: “Now, there’s no evidence Russians altered votes but… .” The “but” is followed by Sanger offering the analogy of a cat burglar that “got into your house and cased the joint but didn’t take anything.” Russia is a cat burglar.

      Embed from Getty Images

      All of the above occurs in the first minute of the video with 13 more to come. It leads to Sanger’s ominous rhetorical question, “Could the Russians actually affect the vote?” The cat burglar will of course return. Suitably alarmed, the viewer is now prepared to hear the heroic story that will follow of a brave woman in Texas who is about to save the nation from the Russian threat.

      Apart from the sophisticated video editing worthy of Madison Avenue, the heavy-handed messaging of this video can best be compared to… Soviet propaganda. (What else, since it’s all about Russia?) The opening sequence alone merits careful rhetorical analysis. It plays on questions asking with no answers, suppositions with no evidence and speculation that things not only could have gone awry in the past but might go awry in the future, while neglecting the real history of US elections manipulated not by Russians, but by Americans.

      The voiceover mentions dire interference by the Russians in 2015, suggesting that it can explain Trump’s election in November 2016. Sanger had previously called this “one of the most successful intelligence operations in modern history.” But the voiceover also admits that this hadn’t changed any votes. How could one of the most successful operations in history have produced no result? No matter. The point was simply to justify the alarming question: “Could the Russians actually affect the vote?” Though no answer is given, we assume that it should be yes.

      The rest of the video turns around the premise that voting machines may be unreliable, which means that Russians (and only Russians) could hack them. The idea that Republicans, Democrats or mafiosi might hack them is never raised.

      The video then goes on to develop the moral tale of a brave woman in Texas who fought for new technology with a “voter-verified paper trail.” She tells us about “a rough world out there in the elections voting system business” without noticing that the problem may have something to do with mixing business and election procedures. We learn about how the established actors, sharing a monopoly on technology designed to exclude a paper trail, successfully stifled competitive innovation, until the dramatic moment when the forces of good succeeded in imposing a better technology now in use in some places (but not everywhere).

      At this point, the voiceover reminds us of an essential truth proving that all’s well that ends well: “It took Russia’s hacking to improve our voting technology.”

      Historical Note

      Over the past two decades, the investigative journalist Greg Palast has done more focused work than anyone in the public eye to expose the scandal of election manipulation in the US. Unlike The New York Times, he didn’t wait for Russian manipulation of the 2016 presidential election to get to work.

      In December 2003, Palast clearly identified the danger that was emerging. It stemmed from President George W. Bush’s 2002 reform — the Help America Vote Act that imposed voting machines as the national norm for elections. Bush, a Republican, hoped for something more manageable than Florida’s controversial hanging chads as the means for turning future elections in his party’s favor. Democrats voted for the bill. Since then, in election after election, including Democratic primaries, Palast and others (including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), have provided documented evidence of both parties finding ways of exploiting the technologies for their particular needs.

      Back in 2003, Palast correctly predicted that the machines would be conducive to rigging and highlighted the critical factor: “The administration has put to death any plan that would allow you to have some type of backup paper ballot or receipt.” Seventeen years later, The New York Times — always abreast of the latest news fit to print — attributes this insight to an election clerk in Austin, Texas, who, after 18 years of using the paperless machines, came to the conclusion that what was missing was “a paper trail.”

      David Sanger’s claim that “the Russians managed to get us paranoid” is only half-true. The evidence clearly shows that The New York Times is paranoid. Even in yesterday’s edition, The Times revived a debunked theory about Russian interference with US diplomacy across the globe. For the past four years, The NYT has demonstrated its unbending fixation on blaming Russia for every problem in the US, starting with the unanticipated election of Donald Trump in 2016.

      What is untrue is the idea that the Russians are responsible for The Times’ paranoia. It’s more likely that The Times’ paranoia was a preexisting condition. But a third hypothesis may be closer to the truth. It was the Democratic Party seeking an excuse for Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump that encouraged The NYT to go paranoid.

      Or maybe it isn’t about paranoia at all, but cynicism. In today’s hyperreal news cycles, even the Gray Lady needs sensationalism and false drama to sell their reporting. The mere presence of Trump created a permanent background of sensationalism. For The Times, in its service to the Democratic establishment, the idea of grafting evil Russia onto the Trump pantomime could only be a godsend.

      *[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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      France’s Problem With Freedom of Expression

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      The French nation has expressed its unqualified horror and revulsion at the brutal assassination of a teacher last Friday by a deluded fanatic convinced he was applying some kind of divinely ordained justice. Any crime directed against a person because of their beliefs or positions on issues of political significance effectively wounds the human collectivity itself. It denies the most basic principles of any human society.

      We live in a society in which acts of this kind are repeated frequently enough for us to seek the means of understanding the psychology behind them. Society typically reacts initially with a feeling of dismay and fear. It attempts to purge its emotion before seeking to unearth the meaning behind such acts. In the public accounting that follows inevitably two extreme reactions emerge.

      The first comes from those who focus on the fact that the perpetrator’s motivation stemmed from the perception of a real injustice that needs to be addressed. Because every act of violence, including domestic crimes, contains a meaning and a motive, this analysis is justified. It becomes extreme as soon as the focus on understanding leads to dismissing the act as simply an illegitimate form of protest or even justifying it as an act of war.

      The reaction at the opposite extreme comes from those who use the act to extend responsibility to entire groups of people. This implicitly and sometimes explicitly accuses a significant portion of an entire community of approving such acts to the point of encouraging other individuals to engage in similar acts. The assumption is objectively true in times of political or cultural clash, though it usually applies to a limited number of individuals. It becomes extreme when it attributes complicity to an entire community, threatening retribution beyond the scope of criminal justice.

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      Alas, both extreme reactions inevitably appear in the aftermath of crimes like this one. For the moment, no one has claimed complicity or sought to justify the murder, certainly not France’s Muslim community. The entire political class in France has mobilized to categorically condemn the act, refusing to emit any sympathy for the killer’s possible motives. Some politicians, however, have detected an opportunity to exploit the shock to further their own ends.

      Emmanuel Macron has long understood the electoral value of casting suspicion on France’s Muslim community. The president recently renewed his effort to stake an anti-immigrant position in anticipation of the 2022 election. As soon as the news of the teacher’s assassination broke, Macron called it “a terrorist attack.” Prime Minister Jean Castex claimed to understand the deceased killer’s deeper, broader motives: “Secularism, the backbone of the French Republic, was targeted in this vile act.”

      Macron managed to suggest the blame should be placed on a vast category of people sharing the same worldview. “They’ll never succeed,” he asserted. “Obscurantism will not win.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Obscurantism:

      A term of insult used by dogmatic rationalists to condemn other people for failing to adhere to every one of their dogmas, including their political opinions, which they firmly believe represent scientific truth and philosophical correctness.

      Contextual Note

      Merriam-Webster offers this definition of obscurantism: “opposition to the spread of knowledge: a policy of withholding knowledge from the general public.” Macron conflates the assassination of a teacher with an attack on knowledge itself. But in the era of sophisticated hyperreality, governments, including Emmanuel Macron’s, systematically seek to suppress the spreading of knowledge they find disagreeable while, in the name of national security, withholding from the general public knowledge they deem too precious to share. They also manipulate the media to circulate knowledge that comforts the beliefs associated with their ideology.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The background to this story reveals a series of events that call into question two belief systems: one dogmatically religious, the other dogmatically secular. The assassin believed that the teacher, who claimed to use the cartoon to illustrate the secular dogma of “freedom of expression” was an active infidel assaulting Islam in the classroom. The cartoon in question depicted Mohammed with the message “a star is born” on his naked buttocks. The Muslim girl present saw this as pornographic.

      The teacher could have taught his course on freedom of expression in the way education has done for centuries, by verbally explaining the events surrounding the 2015 attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. But in our age of audiovisual media, he chose to use a visual prop. Understanding that the images may be toxic for some — one of his students advised him against showing the photo — instead of changing course, he took the extraordinary initiative of inviting Muslim children to leave the room. Because one girl decided to stay and subsequently described what she had seen to her parents, the lesson provoked a public scandal. The school attempted to deal with the issue in a series of meetings.

      None of the commentators seems to have remarked that, though framed as voluntary, the teacher’s suggestion that the Muslims leave the room was a divisive, humiliating and discriminatory act. Imagine the effect of a German teacher in the 1930s inviting Jewish children to leave the room before a lesson on the “Elders of Zion.” Or a teacher in an American school inviting Christian children to leave the room during an illustrated lesson on pornography in the modern world. What responsible educator could be so lacking in cultural delicacy as to fail to assess the psychological impact of such an initiative?

      Macron’s government calls this an attack on secularism. The absurdity of the complaint becomes evident when we consider that the content of the lesson, illustrated by controversial imagery, refers to religion. The French have elevated the idea of secularism — laïcité — beyond the status of the simple principle of the separation of church and state. It has become a republican dogma, with all the irrationality associated with any ideological dogma. The dogma admits two interpretations: that neutral secularism banishes the question of religious beliefs from public life and that aggressive secularism claims superiority over religion.

      The assassinated teacher appears to have applied the second. For a history teacher, he also seems to have been curiously unaware of the historical context. For three decades, the Western world has experienced the troubling ambiguities of what Samuel Huntington called “the clash of civilizations.” Teachers in today’s multicultural societies should be aware of danger zones and understand how to navigate them with ordinary delicacy. They should also be aware that in the West’s specific culture of exacerbated individualism, unhinged individuals who decide they have a mission often feel empowered by the culture itself to carry out the mission to prove their identity.

      Historical Note

      Treating this assassination as a crime by an unhinged individual would have had no electoral value for Macron. He needed to make it not just political but philosophical. The journal L’Obs quotes Macron as saying: “He wanted to overthrow the Republic and the Enlightenment. This is the battle we are facing, and it is existential.”

      Macron wants us to believe that the 18-year-old assassin is a political and cultural revolutionary intent not only on overthrowing the French republic but endowed with the greater historical mission of canceling the nation’s proudest accomplishment, the 18th century Enlightenment, consigning to the dustbin of history Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Condorcet and the other thinkers of the age.

      The Guardian reported this observation by Macron: “One of our compatriots was assassinated today because he taught pupils freedom of expression, the freedom to believe and not believe.” Is that really what the teacher was teaching? The Charlie Hebdo affair was essentially about the freedom to use commercial media to shame a group of believers. That could have been an interesting topic to explore as a feature of modern history. It wouldn’t have required showing provocative cartoons to 13-year-olds, who in any case are too young to appreciate the economic and cultural intricacies of the controversy.

      One interesting historical development might have been to highlight the parallel phenomena of Donald Trump and Charlie Hebdo, who have more than one thing in common. That might have contributed to a reflection on the relationship between politics and the media. But none of that would serve the cause of Macron’s future electoral chances.

      *[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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      How to Make Money on the Pandemic

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      Anyone who knows how Wall Street works will not be surprised to learn that when the novel coronavirus epidemic began to turn into a full-fledged pandemic in the first two months of 2020, people in the know saw a major opportunity to play Monopoly. Any major shift affecting society and people’s behavior will lead to the possibility for the clever to cash in.

      In a New York Times article with the title “As Virus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration’s Private Briefings Fueled Sell-Off,” Kate Kelly and Mark Mazzetti report on how the arrival of a pandemic was received as good news for those in the know. Because of the way it was handled, it made some wealthy people close to the Trump administration if not happier, then at least wealthier.

      Kelly and Mazzetti tell the story of a president and his savvy economic team led by Larry Kudlow who, while publicly downplaying the probable consequences of an epidemic, privately encouraged their cronies to prepare for the worst. In Wall Street terms, of course, “the worst” translates as “potentially the best.” 

      Warren Buffett’s Struggle With Class Struggle

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      During times of instability, intelligent traders who get wind of a factor that has a high probability of affecting the price of some types of stocks at a time when the general public still sees things as either normal or unpredictable will know what to do and when to act. If they are already holding those stocks, they will sell them and eventually buy them back later at a lower price when things begin getting back to normal. If not — and this is far more convenient — they will short them. As everyone should be aware, people close to the halls of power, and often members of the government themselves, tend to think like traders.

      The Times article takes us back to the scene on February 24, when “President Trump declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was ‘very much under control’ in the United States.” Earlier on the same day, in a private meeting, the president’s economic team had with board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, informed them that the government “could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy.” Anyone with ears to hear understood what that meant: The economy was in for a rocky ride.

      According to The Times, from that moment on, things began accelerating: “The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Donors:

      Wealthy people, known for giving generously to political campaigns, who have developed the skill required in modern democracies of using a small portion of their immense wealth to get various kinds of favors from politicians, the most significant of which is access to inside information that will serve to make them wealthier and thereby better prepare them for future political campaigns, where their continued generosity will be required to ensure the stability of democracy.

      Contextual Note

      Larry Kudlow then became the key player. He had already claimed on CNBC that the virus was not only contained but reassuringly added that “it’s pretty close to airtight.” Shortly afterward on the same day, speaking to the donors, Kudlow nuanced the message, telling them that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know.” Savvy investors immediately understand the expression “to date” to mean: “Things are likely to change radically in the near future, so it may be time to act.” Kudlow was undoubtedly sincere when he added “now we just don’t know,” but the word “now” suggests that they already had assessed a strong probability.

      Kelly and Mazzetti sum up the entire story in a single sentence: “The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.” They describe the tight timeline in which events began accelerating. It started as soon as “elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.” The authors cite one investor who, after reading the memo of the meeting and having understood the scope of the threat a pandemic represents, gave the order: “Short everything.”

      Historical Note

      What would capitalism be without its recurrent crises that create the kinds of seismic shifts that enable the cleverest and wealthiest to increase their wealth, consolidate their power and drive the weaker actors in the Darwinian struggle for survival out of the marketplace? That is how the elite drafts new members and protects its own.

      Stock market crashes are usually followed by a recession or depression. That is when commentators in the media begin lamenting the suffering imposed on the economy as if they were reporting on a natural catastrophe unaffected by human agency. They often cite statistics that will incite the public to commiserate with the wealthy who might officially “lose” billions of dollars in a single day. They spend less time commiserating with the anonymous hordes who, several months later, will have lost their jobs and had their mortgages foreclosed, finding themselves homeless and, in the best cases, simply hopeful that no one comes to repossess their car since it might serve either as shelter from the cold or the means of making a living if they manage to become an Uber driver.

      When Lehman Brothers collapsed, not only did the thousands of people who worked for the bank find themselves rudderless, the tsunami that collapse unleashed across the globe affected the lives of millions of people in multiple ways. It led to an estimated 3.8 million foreclosures during the Great Recession. The implications of the drama the world is living through today as the pandemic and its consequences keep unfolding will be far greater. Not only has the pandemic directly killed over a million people, but its continuing effect — not just on the economy but on what was considered the “normal way of life” in a consumer society — has created severe social disarray, aggravating the consequences of the 2008 crisis from which society had never truly recovered. And what about the effect on the lives of the wealthy people who created the 2008 crisis? What has their suffering been like?

      In September 2018, The Guardian brought its readers up to date on the plight of Lehman Brothers chief executive, Dick Fuld, known familiarly as the “Gorilla of Wall Street.” He now runs Matrix Private Capital and advises “high-net-worth” clients. His net worth, which “once exceeded $1 billion,” is now estimated at a paltry $250 million. Philosophizing on his career seven years after the fall of Lehman, he famously said: “Whatever it is, enjoy the ride. No regrets.”

      The cronies and traders who benefitted from the diligent effort of Trump’s economic team to guide them in their investment strategies in the face of an impending pandemic have also been enjoying the ride and appear to have no regrets. Their traders have served them well. The stock market has prospered at the same time as small businesses are disappearing by the thousands and millions of people have become dependent on government handouts that have been slow in coming and not been adapted to the nature and the scale of the crisis.

      Today’s Wall Street donors, sensing an imminent Joe Biden victory, have been exercising their generosity in the Democrat’s direction in recent months. Many of them are probably the same who benefitted from the memo from that private meeting in the White House in February. How ungrateful of those disloyal bastards!

      *[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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      As Climate Change Worsens, How Far Will We Tip?

      by

      Although there are still those who deny it, the countdown for the planet under the threat of global warming began some time ago. If we were to seek an official starting point, it would probably be in the late 18th century, at the beginning of the industrial age. We now receive confirmation of melting at the poles and warming in the depths of the ocean on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

      The constantly accumulating evidence has overwhelmingly convinced the scientific community not only that the trend is real, but that the consequences will be particularly dramatic for human societies. Humans happen to be the only living species on Earth obsessed by the idea of controlling their environmental habitat for the sake of their own comfort and profit. The rest of the biosphere tries simply to get by with the hand it is dealt.

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      But now the dual goals of comfort and profit appear to be dangerously at odds. Responding to the demand for comfort of those who can afford it provokes increasing levels of discomfort for those societies and individuals that cannot. That simple fact has become one of the contributing factors to the increasingly evident revolt against growing income and wealth inequality.

      A report by the insurance company Swiss Re cited by The Guardian informs us that we are quickly approaching a point of no return. “One-fifth of the world’s countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing because of the destruction of wildlife and their habitats,” The Guardian reports. If 20% of the nations of the world succumb, it won’t be long before 30%, 40%, 50% and more are affected as well. It appears that Australia, Israel and South Africa are particularly exposed. The report also cites India, Spain and Belgium.

      In other words, this time it won’t be only the forgotten and neglected developing nations (Donald Trump’s “shithole countries”) that are the first to pay the cost. If people used to luxury and accustomed to thinking of themselves as sheltered from disaster are the ones who may suffer first, alarm bells will quickly start ringing.

      The Guardian cites some worrying figures: “More than half of global GDP — $42tn (£32tn) — depends on high-functioning biodiversity, according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is growing.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Tipping point:

      For capitalists, an abstract target to both aim for and avoid, since on the positive side it represents the maximum reward expected from any endeavor designed to exploit and eventually exhaust a market or a body of resources, while, on the negative side, it threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The balancing act consists of finding the point of equilibrium between maximum exploitation and braking before reaching the tipping point.

      Contextual Note

      In the year 2000, which marks the beginning of the age of internet marketing and social media, tipping points became something to aim for rather than avoid. Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” was released in that year. It reads like a recipe book encouraging the kind of viral development successful marketers manage to achieve for a new product or a new practice. 

      Gladwell praised and encouraged business models aimed at creating “social epidemics.” Though it may seem absurd and even macabre today, as the world battles an incomprehensible and unpredictable pandemic, Gladwell’s book offers advice on how to go viral. He even formulates laws and rules that describe the process: the “Law of the Few,” the “Stickiness Factor” and the “Power of Context.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic may have put a serious dent in the prestige our culture allotted to tipping points two decades ago. In the era of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good,” epidemic change represented seemed like a complementary and rather more respectable ideal. 

      The year 2000 marked the summit of the dot.com craze that quickly turned into the dot.com crash. Venture capitalists were hurting, but that was only temporary. Social media hadn’t yet taken off, but Gladwell clearly sensed its imminent arrival and understood its deeper logic. Global warming, with its threat of disastrous tipping points, had become an issue but it was already being dismissed by climate change deniers, who preferred to focus on a rapidly rising stock market.

      The rise and more recent fall of the image of tipping points raises a fascinating question about contemporary culture. If we admit that, in the year 2000, the idea of the tipping point promoted by Gladwell had mainly positive connotations and that, today, the prospect of a tipping point sets off alarm bells evoking the fear of imminent disaster, can we identify the tipping point that pushed us from the positive appreciation to the negative one? 

      There seem to be two candidates for the tipping point about tipping points: the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. If the dot.com crash of 2000 felt more like a thrilling roller-coaster ride than a traumatizing event, the 2008 crisis was an earthquake that leveled some institutions and seriously attacked the credibility of some of the previous decade’s ideals.

      The Gladwell version of a tipping point was associated with the inebriation that accompanies sudden commercial success and the rapid achievement of a monopoly position. That had become the goal of every economic actor’s ambition for the 30 years between 1980 and 2010. The current perception of a tipping point, as cited in The Guardian’s article, is one of a risk to be anticipated and avoided. The sense of having a mission of conquest eventually gave way to a simple hope for stability and survival.

      Historical Note

      A tipping point indicates a critical threshold beyond which the return to a previous state of equilibrium becomes impossible. Before Europe’s scientific and Industrial Revolution, people regarded tipping points as fatalities, the result of uncontrollable forces or trends. Since the industrial age, developed countries have evolved a culture of control that supposes human societies will have the ingenuity and the technology capable of fending off catastrophes and avoiding catastrophic tipping points.

      But that belief has recently been shaken by various uncontrollable events. And instead of ensuring mastery, the post-industrial culture of control has developed a perverse tendency to magnify its fear of tipping points. That is what’s behind the “science” of risk management and its method of contingency planning. Intended to increase our security, in the wrong hands it can become an irrational obsession. Instead of discovering solutions, it magnifies problems.

      In 2004, The Guardian broke a story about a secret Pentagon report warning “that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The Pentagon’s pessimism — or would it be more accurate to call it paranoiac optimism? — seems laughable today. It tells us more about the psychological climate inside America’s war machine and the budgeting rituals of the military-industrial complex than it does about the reality of the threats the world is facing.

      Today’s more realistic report by Swiss Re reveals that the trends the Pentagon identified are real and increasingly threatening, even if they don’t follow the logic of a Hollywood catastrophe movie that seemed to inspire the authors of the 2004 report. The threat is real, but the timeline was off by several decades. 

      In 2004, the Pentagon recommended to a refractory Bush administration that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.” What better way to secure funding from Congress than to amplify their dread of unmanageable catastrophe? Alas, the Pentagon’s fearmongering had no effect on the Bush administration’s policy, though it probably did enable them to slightly pad their budget.

      Swiss Re announced that its objective is “to help insurers assess ecosystem risks when setting premiums for businesses.” This is bound to be more realistic than the Pentagon’s speculation, but the motive similarly focuses on getting other people to pay for what they are told to fear. That principle seems to be baked into the mentality of control cultures. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated, understanding tipping points is all about getting richer.

      *[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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      Thoughts On Colonial History for Columbus Day

      by

      The 1619 Project, launched last year by The New York Times Magazine, injected the question of slavery into the core of the traditional narrative of US history. It raised the question not only of what counts in history but how history is taught. Implicitly, it calls into question the great dogma inculcated by schools and the media into generations of Americans: that they are citizens of the “greatest nation on earth.”

      The liberal Times editors knew what they were doing when they decided to promote the project and glean the rewards that come from putting forward an original and potentially provocative thesis consistent with the Democratic establishment’s commitment to identity politics and the party’s quest for black votes. In effect, the 1619 Project seeks to magnify aspects of US history that promote civil rights and black identity.

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      The 1619 Project turned out to be an immediate commercial success as “people lined up on the street in New York City to get copies.” It quickly earned several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times had clearly made the right bet. It even provoked the kind of reaction from conservative Republicans that the Times revels in, since its readership is 91% Democrat or leaning Democrat. 

      Republicans wasted no time coming to the defense of traditional history. Mike Pompeo, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz attacked the project for undermining what they deem to be the true vocation of history, whose purpose, as it is taught in schools, is to bolster Americans’ belief in their institutions. Senator Cotton even defended the institution of slavery as a “necessary evil,” passing it off as an innocent accident of history that was easily rectified by Abraham Lincoln (at the cost of 600,000 American lives). 

      Embed from Getty Images

      The New York Times then discovered an unanticipated problem. Some of its own editorialists are uncomfortable with the idea of giving such prominence to the question of slavery, not because it might dim the glory of past heroes, but possibly because it risks casting a shadow on the nature of the American economy itself, an institution The Times prefers to protect and promote.

      Times editorialist Bret Stephens, a lifelong Republican, underwent a conversion in 2017 in reaction both to President Donald Trump, whom he refused to vote for, and to his party’s support for the alleged pedophile Roy Moore in Alabama. He declared on that occasion that he “can never vote Republican again.” In an op-ed last week, Stephens felt impelled to announce and explain what nevertheless amounts to his alignment with Trump and other Republicans who have taken a stance against the 1619 Project. Trump himself has proposed to withhold federal funding from states that adopt the program.

      In an involved rhetorical exercise, Stephens begins by acknowledging that the ambitious project had “succeeded.” He congratulates its principal author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, on her “patriotic thought.” He then goes on to develop his subtle thought on the distinction between journalism and history, before citing everything that’s wrong with the 1619 Project. His main charge is that “it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Totalizing assertions:

      The usual content of all official history books used in education in most nations and most obviously in American textbooks printed in Texas and distributed throughout the United States

      Contextual Note

      “The Revisionaries,” a documentary released in 2013, revealed the disproportionate influence on the teaching of history of the Texas State Board of Education. It explains how the Texas Board “has the power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.” 

      More recently, Times correspondent Dana Goldstein highlighted the ideological contrasts between history textbooks produced in Texas and California. If Stephens is truly concerned by assertions that cannot be defended on close examination, he might want to examine the current textbooks children use. As Goldstein points out, “Conservatives have fought for schools to promote patriotism, highlight the influence of Christianity and celebrate the founding fathers.”

      Goldstein cites some examples. Concerning the issue of immigration, the Texas but not the California textbook contains a clearly “totalizing assertion” designed to please President Trump: “But if you open the border wide up, you’re going to invite political and social upheaval.” On climate change, the Texas textbook asserts “that American action on global warming may not make a difference if China, India, Russia and Brazil do not also act.” This is patently absurd, since anything that the “greatest consumer nation on earth” does will always make a difference.

      Stephens blames the 1619 Project for provoking a political reaction, something he apparently believes both journalism and education should avoid at all costs. “This was stepping into the political fray in a way that was guaranteed to invite not just right-wing blowback, but possible federal involvement,” he writes. But conservatives can always be counted on for blowback against anything that calls into question their dogmas.

      Historical Note

      In his essay, “The Missing Key to the Texas History Textbook Debate,” educator Kyle Ward reviews the history of US  history textbooks, a narrative that begins in 1826. That first textbook by Joseph Worcester launched the still persistent theme of the nation’s exceptional “greatness.” As an example, Ward cites Worcester’s totalizing assertion concerning Christopher Columbus — that “the discovery of America was the greatest achievement of the kind ever performed by man; and, considered in connection with its consequences, it is the greatest event of modern times.”

      For well into the 20th century, all the history textbooks that followed — at least until Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” — “told a similar story: that progress, democracy and the American people were all good; especially if said were white Protestants.” Schools “had one goal in mind when teaching history: to make every student a good, patriotic citizen.”

      Textbooks did evolve. In the latter half of the 20th century, the idea of becoming “a good, patriotic citizen” began to include the complementary idea that a good citizen was also a good consumer. Once history could go beyond recounting the deeds of great leaders and violent warriors, questions such as flight to the suburbs and consumerist culture could be included and treated both as social problems to be studied and specifically American achievements, on a par with the discovery of America. 

      The 1619 Project undoubtedly contains some factual errors and exaggerations. All histories do. Certain events it highlights may or may not merit the attention given to them as to their impact on the course of history. But every historical narrative does precisely that by selecting what best illustrates and accounts for specific factors of change at work at any given time. 

      Bret Stephens objects to his newspaper’s appeal to the idea of truth. “It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the Times Magazine proclaimed on its on its 1619 cover page. Stephens legitimately casts doubt on its truthfulness, citing historians who have critiqued its details. But no matter how well researched, history is inevitably a story, not a repository of scientific truth. Stories are never true in the scientific sense. The traditional narrative highlighting the founders’ foresight and America’s greatness is one story. But as a story, it depends on excluding other narratives, such as the 1619 Project.

      Stephens pleads the case for history that focuses on a guiding ideal — Thomas Jefferson’s “all men are created equal.” But history is rarely about imposing ideals. It is about establishing and consolidating power. 1776 was clearly about power. If we had access to Jefferson’s mind when he set out to challenge the English king, we would most likely discover that his idea was closer to all British men of means are created equal. He wasn’t thinking about humanity in general, but about a group of people who had created a community on the east coast of North America.

      Kyle Ward deserves the last word: “At the end of the day, it is not the history textbook that educates students about America’s past, but rather the teachers who develop the lesson plans, organize the instruction and assess students on what they know about history.” The meaning of history can never be found in the content of textbooks. It exists in the shared understanding developed between real people, whether members or a community or teachers working with students.

      *[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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      The Uncertain Future of the Great Tradition of Propaganda

      by

      The Guardian’s world affairs editor, Julian Borger, has lambasted the Trump administration for undermining a vestige of US foreign policy dating from the Cold War. In an extraordinarily sloppy article with the title “Trump cuts aid for pro-democracy groups in Belarus, Hong Kong and Iran,” Borger excoriates the Trump administration for its radical decision to block the funding of political organizations working to destabilize certain foreign governments. He accuses the White House of putting “at increased risk” this vital work of supporting subversive movements in nations considered insufficiently deferential to the US.

      The victim Borger wants us to pity in the drama is the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a private non-profit technology company spawned by Radio Free Asia in 2012. In 2019, the OTF received a mandate for funding by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a global media agency of the US government. USAGM’s historic mission is “to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” In other words, though putatively independent, it is the US media propaganda arm, supervising Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Televisión Martí, Radio Free Asia and Alhurra, the historical pillars of what was once anti-Soviet, anti-communist propaganda.

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      Borger defines the OTF as “a small non-profit organization that develops technologies for evading cyber-surveillance and for circumventing internet and radio blackouts imposed by authoritarian regimes.” He avoids mentioning the fact, reported by Eli Lake for Bloomberg, that it was created at the initiative of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It reflected her “vision heavily influenced by the Internet activism that helped organize the green revolution in Iran in 2009 and other revolutions in the Arab world in 2010 and 2011.”

      Borger presents OTF as a Silicon Valley-style innovative tech company seeking to do good in the world by providing “daily help to pro-democracy movements in installing and maintaining them, with the aim of staying at least one step ahead of the state.” These movements are, of course, agents of America’s expansive regime-change strategy that has effectively destabilized entire regions of the globe in the name of promoting democracy.

      Borger supposes that his readers will uncritically endorse the idea that promoting democratic ideals in places where people can’t vote is the honorable thing to do. He consciously hides from view the easily observable consequences of such campaigns in the past. These include the enduring chaos that typically follows the overthrow of regimes judged hostile to the US. It usually leads to installing and then supporting iron-fisted authoritarian regimes. And in the worst cases, the havoc spawns uncontrollable migration crises affecting entire regions.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Pro-democracy movement:

      Any political organization dependent on resources and propaganda originating in the United States and dedicated to opposing a regime considered hostile to the US, whether or not the organization and its leaders have a real interest in, or respect for, democratic processes.

      Contextual Note

      The various “pro-democracy movements” the US has supported in the past have used the proclaimed commitment to democracy to mask what is essentially their intent of bolstering US political influence and paving the way for American and multinational business interests to control key features of state economies.

      The idea of democracy put forward by such movements has less to do with giving the people a voice than it does with imposing the “liberal” economic ideology that ensures social decisions will be delegated to the private sector. Instead of aiming at “the good of the people,” it puts in place policies focused on “the good of the economy,” which translates as the effective integration of a local economy into the global network of finance and trade.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Another key feature of the transformations effectuated by pro-democracy movements lies in the fact that they tend to be amenable to tolerating, if not encouraging, US military presence on or within their borders. In terms of the economy itself, following a pattern established in the US, what this means is that democracy has literally come to mean little more than a system of government open to control by the highest bidders. Such systems justify their claim to being a democracy by installing a constitution and organizing elections.

      The idea of democracy, even in the cultures of the developed nations of the West, has been reduced to a checklist with a single item: the holding of elections. The kinds of democratic regimes created by pro-democracy movements enable citizens to vote and even to organize political parties. But with an economy controlled essentially by external forces, any idea of independent rule quickly loses all meaning. Only those parties and those leaders that know how to comport with the major financial and industrial actors as well as comply with the requirements of an economy built around the dollar will have a chance of taking over the reins of government. And even that will be a game of appearances since the reins of the economy are in the hands of others.

      Historical Note

      Writing for the independent policy watchdog, Global Policy Forum, in 2008, Stephen Zunes described the observable patterns related to US support of pro-democracy movements in recent history. He emphasizes the largely negative effect that support has consistently produced across the globe, seriously tarnishing the nation’s image: “The United States has done for the cause of democracy what the Soviet Union did for the cause of socialism. Not only has the Bush administration given democracy a bad name in much of the world, but its high-profile and highly suspect ‘democracy promotion’ agenda has provided repressive regimes and their apologists an excuse to label any popular pro-democracy movement that challenges them as foreign agents, even when led by independent grassroots nonviolent activists.”

      The Guardian’s Julian Borger has no time to waste on helping his readers understand the broad historical context. That is not the business of newspapers like The Guardian, who see themselves as the voice of the reasonable left, like The New York Times and The Washington Post in the US. They prefer stories crafted as an attack on their perceived enemies on the right, even at the cost of obscuring understanding of the issues they expose. Borger’s story is newsworthy simply because it appears to reveal another of Trump’s many failings.

      No one can doubt that Trump has contributed singularly to compromising the international prestige and image of the United States. But as Zunes observed, the damage was already visible in 2008. President Barack Obama’s administration and Hillary Clinton’s State Department maintained and sometimes amplified the existing trend. But Obama became famous for deploying his charm and rhetorical skills to create a much-needed veneer of comforting hyperreality. It changed little other than temporarily obscuring the perception of the real intentions for those who weren’t paying attention. 

      Borger doesn’t even bother to reveal to his readers the recent historical background of the conflict between OTF and USAGM, the details of which were compendiously reported by Axios on September 1. A paragraph labeled “Between the lines” provides the gist of the entire affair, based on “fresh evidence to support charges that the USAGM is trying to dismantle the OTF and other government-funded media agencies.”

      Even Axios fails to take the further step of exploring the deeper implications of this conflict. It helpfully reveals the suspicion some have that “the agency is withholding OTF funds in order to shift them to [a] new agency.” Though many of Trump’s actions have been in total contradiction with his stated aims, he has always expressed his desire to move US foreign policy away from the aggressive trends of the past and reduce overseas commitments. This latest move appears to be part of an attempt to dismantle some elements of the neo-imperial infrastructure.

      It would have been interesting to learn more about the “new agency” that USAGM intends to create: the Office of Internet Freedom. But neither article delves into that crucial question, though Axios at least mentions it and points to its importance. The journalistic result is that Axios provides some factual though inconclusive information on the story whereas Borger offers a what is little more than gossip and backbiting as part of a squabble, with the intention of confirming our impression that Trump is an irresponsible loser.

      *[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