By Russell A. Berman · Sunday, September 3, 2006 One of the features of the historical totalitarian regimes was the refusal to concede losses or defeats. In part this reflects ideological blinders, a refusal to recognize reality—or to test one’s views against reality—as was the case with the last Minister of Propaganda under Saddam, who claimed the American forces had been repelled, even as they were entering the capital. In addition, this inability to admit to defeat functions as ideology, a way to coerce support to movements or regimes, which promote themselves as victors in order to cement loyalty. Finally, the insistence on maintaining the appearance of victory despite losses reflects a willingness to sacrifice both resources and people: no matter how many have been killed, the totalitarian PR apparatus calls it a win. It is callousness in the face of suffering.
Hezbollah’s declaration of victory follows these patterns. While it is true that the Israelis were not able to oust Hezbollah, neither did Hezbollah achieve its goals—which is only a “victory” if the standard is dumbed down far enough. Journalistic echoing the credo of a victory amplifies Hezbollah ideology, but the claim just does not match reality. Sober and moderate voices in the Arab world are beginning to point that out. To the extent that this blog has made the argument regarding “Islamic fascism,” it is equally important to take note of the critical analyses within the Arab world itself. . . .
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, September 2, 2006 With so much to criticize in the character of public discussion, it is welcome to run into a rare moment of journalistic integrity. A Washington Post editorial of September 1 brings an end to the ridiculous obsession—a good example of Heidegger’s “chatter”—with the non-story about Valerie Plame, the minor CIA functionary whose “cover” was allegedly blown. Her media-hungry husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, claimed that the higher ups in the Bush administration had leaked her identity to the press in order to punish him (and, no doubt, it was all about him, as far as he is concerned). In fact however, this was not a matter of cloak-and-dagger or subterfuge or conspiratorial betrayal. A much more mundane human rhetoric was at stake:
“Unaware that Ms. Plame’s identity was classified information, [former Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak ‘in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip,’ according to a story this week by the Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith, who quoted a former colleague of Mr. Armitage.”
Gossip? This was a big story as long as the press tried to pursue a trail that would bring down Rove or Cheney; now that it turns out only to have been Armitage, “one of the Bush administration officials who supported the invasion of Iraq only reluctantly . . . a political rival of the White House and Pentagon officials who championed the war,” the presumably criminal activity of revealing the CIA operative’s identity ceases to be of interest. If you have the right politics, breaking the law doesn’t matter.
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, September 2, 2006 In the debates during and after the recent war in Lebanon, supporters of Hezbollah have tried to represent it as a deliverer of social welfare and not as a terrorist organization. Let us leave aside the question as to why a social welfare organization would be armed to the teeth and dwell for a moment in order to consider the claim itself and its theoretical/political implications. The utopia of the social welfare state has been phrased for a more than a century in terms of providing benefits to its client-citizens “from cradle to grave.” In other words, the whole life course would become an object of state administrative practices. This bureaucratic apparatus logically necessitates some level of intrusion by the state into the private sphere of family life: care-taking, starting with the cradle, means a politicization of the nursery, and so forth. Hence Hayek’s anxieties that even a modest social state would not stay modest for long and set out on a “road to serfdom.”
To talk about Hezbollah as only a welfare state is an apologistic misrepresentation, akin to discussing Hitler in terms of managing unemployment and building the Autobahn (the way the press praises Hezbollah for its Iran-bankrolled big-spending in the Lebanese reconstruction). Hezbollah is however like a “welfare state” in the Hayekian sense: leveraging its resources and political clout to extend a tyrannical control over the private sphere. This is nowhere more evident than in the fate of the Hezbollah children.
 
The intrusion of Nazi ideology into nascent pan-Arabism in the 1930s in fact included the establishment of youth movements modeled on the Hitlerjugend, and the lynchpin in this connection was none other than Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Nazi youth program. This sort of fascist politicization of youth therefore has a long history, but Hezbollah has taken it to new heights. Its message to the Lebanese is evidently this: the price for the social welfare benefits is sacrificing your children. The content of Hezbollah’s welfare state practice is to accelerate the itinerary from cradle to grave: straight from the cradle, into the grave.
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By Russell A. Berman · Friday, September 1, 2006 Of course, it was Imperial Japan, not Nazi Germany, that attacked Hawaii. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the day of infamy, the United States entered a war both in Europe and in the Pacific. Although the political structures and ideologies of Japan and Germany were hardly identical and their geopolitical ambitions were not at all thoroughly aligned (who would replace the British in India?), President Roosevelt was able to articulate a clear opposition between the democracies and the fascist powers. Differences among the various fascist regimes could still leave room for nuanced policies and strategic decisions: there was no allied invasion of Franco’s Spain. Yet the fact that Mussolini was not Hitler did not prohibit the invasion of Sicily, a crucial link in the chain that would lead to victory in both theaters.
Such was the ability of American society then and its political leadership to resist and defeat the dictatorships of the Second World War, followed decades later by the successful conclusion of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union. That capacity for such political and military resolve is however of a completely different nature than academic inquiry which, characteristically, has developed a rich insight into the specific features and differences among the dictatorships. Scholars distinguish and differentiate, and this variegated knowledge can, at times, inform policy decisions, but, in the end, academics have the professional luxury of never having to act and certainly not to take action to contribute to national security.
Some intellectuals nonetheless have the ability to see the big picture. Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism of 1951 draws primarily on the examples of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, between which she describes important similarities. Aside from the left, which has always resented the impugning of Communism, academic objections to Arendt’s study have pointed out the undeniable differences between Hitler and Stalin, and their respective regimes. Within scholarly research, such criticisms should not be discounted, but there is a point, particularly when one moves from the university into the political arena, where this quibbling becomes a debilitating fixation: insistence on the specificity of each tree, while refusing to take note of the forest.
This is a problem with categories as such. Individual phenomena retain an irreducible particularity, which makes up the texture of lived life, the Lebenswelt; at the same time, we cannot do without a conceptual vocabulary to describe commonalities and to enable action in the world. Action is a defining condition of humanity, the ability to build on reflection to transform the world through creative innovation. Without the conceptual tools of thought, action becomes blind; but without an active pursuit of human goals—telos—thought diminishes.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, August 31, 2006 Ramin Jahanbegloo, a leading proponent of Iranian democratization, has just been released from several months of incarceration in Teheran. Active in building bridges to Western intellectuals (including dialogues with Isaiah Berlin and George Steiner), Jahanbegloo—also a Canadian citizen—was arrested in April of this year at the Teheran airport on his way to a conference in Europe. Accusations included spying and efforts to pursue a US-inspired “Velvet Revolution” in Iran. Other accounts suggest that an interview he gave with a Spanish newspaper, critical of Ahmadenijad’s Holocaust denial, led to his arrest.
The release may represent an effort to pursue a minor distraction from the crisis over Iran’s nuclear technology. There is certainly no indication of a larger thaw. There may be some more complex ideological and tactical connection, discussed below. This is however an important opportunity to pursue the connections between “theory,” which is clearly Jahanbegloo’s passion, and the urgent political questions of the moment.
In his essay “Iranian Intellectuals: from Revolution to Dissent,” Jahanbegloo distinguishes between reformist/revolutionary and conservative forces. Note the intellectual genealogy of the conservatives of the Mullahocracy.
“Unlike the reformist intellectuals, the neo- conservative intellectuals in Iran are in favor of the supremacy of the Leader and against concepts such as democracy, civil society and pluralism. This movement includes figures such as Reza Davari Ardakani, Javad Larijani and Mehdi Golshani. The famous personality among these is Reza Davari Ardakani, who as an anti- Western philosopher is very familiar with the works of Martin Heidegger. Davari, unlike Soroosh, takes some of the features of Heidegger’s thought, mainly the critic of modernity and puts it into an Islamic wording. He rejects the Western model of democracy, which is based on the separation of politics and religion.”
Heidegger in Teheran as an account of anti-modernism? But beyond the dialectic of left and right from the generation of the Iranian revolution, Jahanbegloo describes a younger generation which approaches modernity from what appears to be a post-modern perspective: not post-modern in the sense of giddy relativism or irresponsibility but with liberal openness and an interest in dialogue.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, August 31, 2006 On Tuesday, August 29, a motorist from Fremont, California, Omeed Aziz Popal, identified in the press as an Afghan, struck and killed a pedestrian near his home, before driving to San Francisco where he went on rampage: targeting pedestrians both on sidewalks and in the streets, he wounded at least fourteen, leaving some in critical condition. However this carnage would simply be a sad story of local road rage, except for the distorted character of the reporting and the related discussion, which shed important light on the predispositions of the press and the official public sphere.
Initial references to Popal’s ethnicity and Muslim religion came from family members, who attributed his disturbed mental state to his recent arranged marriage. Yet this ethnic identification quickly disappeared; a press fearful of accusations of ethnic profiling is simply willing and anxious to avoid the topic. Yet because the press cannot discuss Popal’s ethnicity, it also cannot address another glaring fact: his path of terror culminated in a brutal ride on the sidewalk in front of the recently constructed Jewish Community Center. Why the Jewish Community Center? I have no privy information as to Popal’s intentions, but I can certainly see that the press and prominent politicians are avoiding the question, in order to suppress the possibility that a Muslim man set out on a bloody rampage with an intention to target the vicinity he might have reasonably identified as heavily Jewish.
Evidence: the San Francisco Chronicle begins its account by stating emphatically that “Twenty-nine-year-old Omeed Aziz Popal did not care about age, race or sex as he purposefully plowed down pedestrians in an unexplained hit-and-run rampage Tuesday, according to authorities.” Exactly how staff writer Adam Martin or the “authorities” know what Popal did or did not care about is not clear. The point of the article is presumably the diversity of the victims: Popal was an equal-opportunity killer, a poster child for non-discrimination. Mayor Gavin Newsome has also assured the public that the victims were randomly chosen—and they probably were, considered one by one. Popal targeted whomever he could find, taking aim at people in crosswalks, for example. The point however is the neighborhood in which he chose to carry out his attacks. The question which the press refuses to pose is why he chose to drive nearly forty miles from Fremont into San Francisco, and then drove directly to an area between a major synagogue and the prominent Jewish Community Center. His itinerary took him past many other urban areas—Hayward, Oakland or Berkeley, or he might have crossed the Bay to Palo Alto or Redwood City, all of which would have been much closer to Fremont with their own “target rich environments.” Instead he seems to have driven intentionally to San Francisco—but when he arrived there, he avoided the immediate targets, the downtown or Mission areas, where he might have found dense crowds, and curiously drove to a fairly out-of-the-way district, where he eventually started mowing down his victims.
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