By Jay A. Gupta · Tuesday, January 23, 2007 The Telos blog devoted much space to the war in Lebanon and the character of the reporting, especially the predisposition in the New York Times and elsewhere to tilt to Hizbollah. Exactly why the Western media more often than not express hostility toward pro-Western forces and trim journalistic vocabulary to give anti-Western forces a pass is part of the ideological constellation of the present. As a democratically elected government faces a mortal threat, the West is even less active than it has been in Darfur. Jay A. Gupta, a Telos contributor from Beirut, submits the following anatomy of the problem with the press—RB
Today in Lebanon one wonders what the media interest is in calling a violent mob “protesters”, and civic chaos a “strike”. This is the rhetoric of the self-styled “opposition”, terms uncritically picked up by the BBC, CNN, and the New York Times. They are the terms normally used to describe democratic processes. However, these news organizations are unwittingly, mystifyingly serving as propaganda engines for Hizbullah. The terms are not placed in quotation marks, which would serve to indicate that they reflect the opinions and views of an organization whose stated purpose is to bring down a democratically elected government (however when speaking of the views of that government, the word “coup” is put in quotation marks). “Strikes” normally do not involve nationwide blockage of highways and the burning of vehicles with the intention to bring down a government. It is therefore stunning to find these respectable news organizations so haplessly blinded by the rhetoric of an organization that generally appears to have outright contempt for democratic principles, but which finds it politically propitious to describe itself has having respect for them.
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By Danilo Breschi · Saturday, January 6, 2007 The radical lawyer John Cooke prosecuted the King of England, Charles I, in 1649—and in doing so opened a chapter in legal history that reverberates 357 years later. Lawyer and human rights campaigner Geoffrey Robertson, in an extract from his book The Tyrannicide Brief (2005), describes Cooke’s pivotal role and assesses its modern implications:
Cooke’s charge began with a fundamental proposition: the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern ‘by and according to the laws of the land and not otherwise’. It had been with the criminal object of securing unlimited and tyrannical power that Charles I had levied war against Parliament and had set out to destroy the very people whose life and liberty he was obliged to preserve. To bring home his guilt for the crippling loss of English life on both sides in the war he had started in 1642, Cooke invoked the doctrine which is called, in modern war-crimes courts, ‘command responsibility’:
‘By which it appears that he, the said Charles Stuart, has been and is the occasioner, author and continuer of the said unnatural, cruel and bloody wars and therefore guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to the nation acted and committed in the said wars or occasioned thereby.’
The charges against Milosevic at The Hague convey the same idea—the responsibility of the commander for all the natural and probable consequences of his commands. Cooke alleged not only high treason, but ‘other High Crimes’, which he spelled out in the final paragraph: Charles Stuart he impeached as ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England’. In a nutshell, what the Solicitor-General had created was a new offence, one that could condemn most of the crowned heads of Europe at the time, and many of the dictators and undemocratic rulers who would come to power in the nations of the world in the following centuries. He had made tyranny a crime.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, December 21, 2006 As noted previously here, the two points in the title need to be thought together: Baker’s ISG call to “talk” with Iran and the Iranian students’ protests against domestic repression in the Islamic Republic.
Critics of the ISG report regularly face the smarmy response: well, golly gee, what’s wrong with talking?
As a problem of theory, one could answer: plenty. Is talk a substitute for action? All talk and no action? Is talk a façade of comity designed to mask clandestine sins? Del dicho al hecho hay un gran trecho. Still, the advocates of talk can typically claim the moral high ground in a culture in which talk, discourse, and discussion are the ultimate values.
This valorization of discussion is pure enlightenment: Kant’s public use of reason. Yet the value of talk only holds if all the interlocutors participate in the public on equal terms. The moral standing of talk presumes that all arguments can be heard: otherwise the talk is conspiracy or “secret diplomacy.” The objection to the ISG’s call for talks is not a rejection of speech as such: it is an indication of the suspicion figures like Baker and Perry arouse. We suspect that they will use the moral (Kantian) resonance of talk in order to pursue immoral (Machiavellian) ends.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, December 18, 2006 The Iraq Study Group has, notoriously, called for “talks” with Iran, as if there were reasonable interlocutors in Ahmadinejad’s gang. The octogenarian sages of that bipartisan committee evidently know something that Iranian students don’t—or is it perhaps the other way around. While Baker, blinded by the rose-colored glasses of realism (“let’s make a deal” is the core of his philosophy), hopes to practice his conversational Farsi, people who really have to live in the Islamic Republic know better and, as reported widely, students in Tehran have courageously confronted the regime. Bloggers in the safety of the US may quibble over the terminological propriety of “Islamic fascism” (“how can they be fascist if they don’t speak German,” they ask cleverly). But when Mahmoud the Magnificent visited Tehran’s Amir Kabir University last week, he reportedly faced some clear language: “Fascist president, the polytechnic is not for you.”
According to the Mail and Guardian, Ahmadinejad
faced chants of “Death to the dictator” as he addressed a gathering in the university’s sports hall last week. Several hundred students forced their way in to voice anger over a clampdown on universities since he became president last year.
That’s a key point to remember: yes, a clampdown on the universities in Iran—even as former President Khatami was being feted in western universities, from Harvard to Saint Andrews. Do western academics care about repression of scholars and students anywhere? (Answer: yes, they care about Ward Churchill, but that’s about it.)
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By Russell A. Berman · Friday, December 15, 2006  The promises of modernity have always been problematic. The aspiration to draw a neat line between a rosy present and a benighted past, the paradigmatic modern historiography, never adequately gauged the force of tradition. The cultural legacy of the past can be heavy with inertia, but it can also draw on an organic vibrancy that can intrude abruptly into the up-to-date illusions of reason. What modern thought derides as old-fashioned just refuses to disappear—not because modernity has been too weak to expunge it (for it has surely tried hard to do so), but because modernity elicits its opposite, calls it forth, creates its own monsters, and then wonders why they won’t go away.
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By Jay Gupta and Russell Berman · Monday, December 11, 2006 Mass Hizbullah demonstrations continue in Beirut, calling for the government to step down and to grant Hizbullah a veto on all political decisions. Meanwhile, the Lebanese government accuses the Hizbullah leadership of planning a coup. On the other side of the globe, the “Iraq Study Group” in Washington has called for US negotiations with Syria, which would likely lead to a return of a greater Syrian role in Lebanon and a blocking of the investigation into the Hariri and Gemayel assassinations.
Jay Gupta, an editorial associate of Telos, lives and teaches in Beirut. Russell Berman, editor of Telos, teaches at Stanford. We make this exchange available as an invitation to open up the discussion of the political crisis of the moment and the repressive character of Hizbullah.
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