By Russell A. Berman · Sunday, August 27, 2006 Since Adorno and Horkheimer published their Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, the question of the “culture industry” has remained a key topic for Critical Theory. In its specific sense, the term refers to the production of art primarily for commercial purposes: books, movies, paintings produced above all with an eye to the market rather than to questions of artistic integrity. Artists always needed to find material support, but in the context of the culture industry, commercial considerations are understood to outweigh artistic independence. The focus for Horkheimer and Adorno was Hollywood film—they were living in Los Angeles and belonged to a German exile community that sometimes maintained a European “high cultural” distance to forms of American mass culture. On the one hand, they inherited an idealist expectation that works of art participate in a project of human emancipation; on the other, they faced the dream factories of the studio system—just before it plunged into crisis with the advent of television.
The interest in the culture industry makes questions of “culture and politics” absolutely germane. What’s at stake in the adoption of political positions by artists? How do politics pervade the works themselves or are the political contents separate from aesthetic value? Are the political postures of writers, actors, painters, etc. of any greater import than those of ordinary citizens? European publics tend to give more credence to the public pronouncements of artists than is the case in the United States, but there is also a long tradition of prominent Hollywood personalities defending political causes—a tradition that probably goes back to World War II and the support by the entertainment industry for U.S. forces fighting imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, August 26, 2006 The work of György Konrad has played an important role in the history of Telos. In 1978 he published The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power together with Istvan Szelenyi; a critique of the emergence of an intellectual managerial class in socialist eastern Europe, that book contributed to Telos‘s distinctive critique of a parallel “new class” in the West. This perspective merged with a long-standing left critique of Leninist party structures, a Husserlian phenomenological insistence on the priority of a preconceptual Lebenswelt, and Adorno’s critical-theoretical defense of particularity against totalizing logics of domination.
Born in 1933, Konrad lived through fascism in Hungary, Nazi occupation, and the dreary decades of Communist rule. His writings, which range from social theory through political essayism to novels, convey a visceral opposition to totalitarianism and an advocacy for human freedom. No wonder he has supported the U.S. war in Iraq.
On August 26, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published an essay by Konrad under the title “What comes after the missiles? More missiles? Israel has good reasons and the right to fear a new Holocaust.” The piece appears just as we learn that the “robust” United Nations force has no mandate to disarm Hezbollah (in an uncanny parallel to the Sudan, where the government is preventing any significant UN action to stop the genocide). Yet, for all its contemporary relevance, the theoretical core of Konrad’s argument involves the long shadow of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
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By Russell A. Berman · Friday, August 25, 2006 In the immediate aftermath of the fighting in Lebanon, the nearly uniform message broadcast by the western media involved the heroization of Hezbollah. Not least of all the New York Times published puff pieces, hyping the Lebanese population’s affection of Hezbollah and its adoration of Nasrallah, not to mention the terrorist organization’s success as a welfare agency and construction company. Critical voices were nowhere to be found—especially if journalists chose not to look for them.
But inquiring minds want to know, and questions were raised in the world of blogs, including this one. Were there no critics of Hezbollah in Lebanon? Could reporters do nothing more than republish Hezbollah press releases? Did the much touted social welfare benefits extend to non-Shi’a, or even to Christians?
Finally, there seems to be a crack in the monolithic story heretofore purveyed by the NYT. Buried on page 10, with no leader on the front page (taken up by urgent matters like the fate of Pluto and Duke Lacrosse), a powerful story by Hassan M. Fattah provides some sorely missed complexity to the account of post-war Lebanon. Reporting from the largely Sunni village of Marwaheen just north of the Israeli border, Fattah breaks the ban on criticizing Hezbollah, as he describes a mass burial of war dead, where however the anger was directed more at Hezbollah than at Israel.
It is a sad story of infiltration by Hezbollah, despite protests by the villagers. In response to villagers’ opposition, the Hezbollah fighters reportedly insisted that they “were all in the same boat.” But as a bereaved village orphan commented, “Why should our children die for their cause.” Their cause: in other words, the local Sunnis do not at all identify with the cause of that same Hezbollah, which the press, including the NYT, had led us to believe was cherished uniformly by all Lebanese.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, August 24, 2006 Exploring the validity of the designation “fascist” to strands of contemporary Islamic extremism becomes complicated not only because of ambiguities in the adjective—what is fascist?—but also because of the different levels of political organization under scrutiny: states controlled by extremist regimes (contemporary Iran or Taliban Afghanistan); mixed political and military, or paramilitary, structures (Hamas, Hezbollah); and terrorist conspiracies of varying degrees of coherence (al-Qaeda). With local nuances, a jihadist ideology of expansionist conquest and anti-modernity links them, despite whatever political competition may occasionally separate them.
Part of the difficulty in accepting the term “fascist” as appropriate to describe these phenomena is the inescapable association with what in memory seem to have been strong “states” of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet of course there were fascist movements prior to their seizure of state power, just as there were fascist movements in countries where they failed to come to power. Therefore “Islamic fascist” may hold as a term, even in the absence of a state apparatus. But if the political actor is not a state, who is?
In a speech of August 9 entitled “Security, Freedom and the Protection of Our Values,” delivered to Demos (a London think tank), John Reid made a pertinent argument. Western structures of civil liberties were formed in opposition to the fascist challenge of the twentieth century and matured through the Cold War. This modernity is threatened today by opponents who do not act primarily as agents of states but with greater independence as “individuals.”
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, August 23, 2006 In classical liberalism, the free press plays a crucial role as the major institution of public discussion. Of course there are other venues of debate: gatherings of individuals, meetings of associations, and the lofty debating halls of the legislature. They are locations in which opinion can grow, subject to rational scrutiny, in order to articulate values and policies to confront executive power. Or so the Enlightenment tells us.
All these institutions undergo transformations in modernity. The real work of Congress, for example, takes place in committees or behind other closed doors on K Street, and not in the main chambers, reserved for public performance, not public debate.
But what about the press? As it developed in the United States, at least, it depended on a stark distinction (at least in theory) between the opinion on the editorial page (or associated comments in letters or short essays) and the facts of the “news.”
Yet the “news” is increasingly a matter of displaying cherry-picked information designed to support preformed editorial opinion. The skepticism necessary for good journalism is reserved only for political opponents. Otherwise reportage has become a function of selective hearing: all the news that fits your views. (A similar process takes place, when internet users design their news pages to collect only information on certain topics.)
This is nowhere clearer than in the reporting on the war on terror and the recent developments in Lebanon. In its war on the Bush administration, the New York Times has no compunctions about revealing secret security measures, no matter how legal; just as the press insists on referring to the recently foiled plot to bring down airplanes over the Atlantic as an “alleged plot.”
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, August 21, 2006 The designation of Hezbollah and other jihadists as “Islamic fascists” has ruffled some feathers. The mixture of a religious adjective and a political substantive apparently goes too far for the defenders of a wall of separation between Church and State. Unfortunately (or not?) the life-world in which real experience transpires does not necessarily correspond to the strictures of political correctness. Existence precedes essence, sometimes religion does enter politics, and sometimes Muslims are fascists. To be sure, not always, nor even frequently: there are Islamic liberals, Islamic reformers, Islamic traditionalists, Islamic Communists, and . . . Islamic fascists, for example, Hezbollah, or the various terrorist gangs that planned murdering civilians in airplanes. The war against them is an anti-fascist war, as I wrote last week.
In a similar spirit, the former editor-in-chief of the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat and current director of Al-Arabiya TV, Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, endorsed President Bush’s use of the term “Islamic fascists” with regard to those who attempted to carry out the plot against air travel. His article “They Are Fascists” appeared in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat on August 14 and included passages such as the following:
“Many of us are only concerned with reputation and image, our image in the media, and the reputation of the Muslims in the world, but they do not care about reforming the original source, their children.
“When U.S. President George W. Bush described those who plotted to kill thousands of passengers in ten airliners as Muslim fascists, protests from a number of Islamic societies in the West and the East were voiced against this description.
“What is wrong with using a bad adjective to describe a terrorist as long as he is willing to personally call himself an Islamist; declares his stance, schemes, and aims; while his supporters publicly call for killing of those whom they consider infidels, or disagree with them religiously or politically?”
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