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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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, August 17, 2006 The front page of the New York Times of August 16 gives prominent play to a story headlined “Hezbollah Leads Work to Rebuild, Gaining Stature.” The phrasing seems clear enough: Hezbollah, so the title claims, stands in the forefront of the labor of rebuilding war-torn Lebanon, and this activity enhances its reputation: objective work (rebuilding) has a subjective consequence (stature). The header for the continuation of the story on page 8 again emphasizes again how “Hezbollah Leads Work to Rebuild in Lebanon.”
Yet on closer scrutiny, the story turns out to be less than it claims. Little or no real work is reported, and the gain in stature is demonstrated only through a set of selective quotations—although this NYT story itself may in fact contribute to polishing Hezbollah’s image and enhancing its stature. Such a result would of course be consistent with a very political agenda: to combat the understanding of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, promoting it instead as a social welfare agency. That spin moreover is symptomatic of a broader program of denial: combating terrorism by pretending that it isn’t there. Close reading helps to show what is at stake.
The August 16 story interweaves two sorts of evidence: accounts of elite opinion and anecdotes from the field. The first level involves reports on the thoughts of a handful of experts, presumably in Beirut—a government minister, a professor, and a political analyst, interviewed, one assumes, by reporter John Kifner, under whose name the article is run—enhanced by quotations from Beirut newspapers. The gist of all these comments is the assertion of Hezbollah’s mounting popularity.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, August 8, 2006 In his presentation to the press on August 6, President Bush again starkly distinguished his foreign policy from what prevailed in the past. His own democratization agenda faces resistance, he argued, because of the legacy of former U.S. policies that, opting for regional stability at all costs, entered into alliances with repressive regimes, particularly during the Cold War when competition with the Soviet Union led to the embrace of local dictators who could deliver on an anti-Communist agenda. That history, according to Bush, continues to stoke resentment and feeds into anti-Americanism and terrorism. In his words:
“And as far as this administration is concerned, we clearly see the problem and we’re going to continue to work to advance stable, free countries. We don’t expect every country to look like the United States, but we do want countries to accept some basic conditions for a vibrant society—human rights, human decency, the power of the people to determine the fate of their governments. And, admittedly, this is hard work because it flies in the face of previous policy, which basically says stability is more important than form of government. And as a result of that policy, anger and resentment bubbled forth with an attack, with a series of attacks, the most dramatic of which was on September the 11th.” (emphasis added)
The watershed in U.S. foreign policy has long been discussed, but this statement is valuable for its clarity; it certainly separates Bush from his father, but not only from him. It also gives expression to the notion that a genuine realism (pursuing stability) cannot do without values, and that while the national interest may be larger than democratization, it cannot be understood as separate from democratization.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, July 31, 2006 Against the backdrop of the violence between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, an interesting letter-to-the-editor appeared in the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel on July 30. The author, Dr. Mounir Herzallah, self-identifies as a Lebanese Shiite and comments:
“Until 2002, I lived in a small village in the south of Lebanon near Mardschajun, with a majority population of Shiites, like myself. After Israel’s departure from Lebanon, it did not take long for Hezbollah to show up and to take over, not only with us but in all the neighboring villages as well. Greeted as successful resistance fighters, they came loaded with arms and, in our village too, they constructed missile storage facilities in an underground bunker. The social work of the Party of God entailed building a school and an apartment building right on top of the bunker! A local sheikh explained to me, with a smile, that the Jews would lose in any case: either because they would be hit with the missiles or because, should they attack the missile storage, they would be condemned by the world public due to ensuing civilian deaths. The [Hezbollah] was not at all interested in the Lebanese people; they only used them as shields and—when they were dead—as propaganda. As long as Hezbollah remains there, there will be no peace and quiet.” (my translation)
The connection between war and welfare—schools on top of bunkers—is intriguing and reminiscent of other “guns and butter” debates. So is the simultaneous suggestion that Hezbollah merely instrumentalizes the local population: it may claim to be fighting in the name of some population, in order to invoke a democratic legitimacy, but in fact it only uses the locals as human shields. Hence also the reports that in some instances Hezbollah has prevented civilian departures from the warfront in Southern Lebanon precisely in order to increase casualty rates. One notes similarly the willingness to tolerate deaths when its own missiles hit Israeli Arabs. This predisposition of an extremist political movement to argue, occasionally, with a democratizing rhetoric (defending a people) while in fact disregarding the lives of the people is a symptomatic feature of totalitarian mentalities: neither Hitler nor Stalin cared much about the numbers of their own who were lost.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, June 7, 2006 Telos 135: Germany after the Totalitarianisms, Part I is available for purchase in our store.
 With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, a widespread rethinking of political history and social theory commenced. Questions long frozen in the glacial stand-off between East and West began to thaw out, and the ideological mythologies of the twentieth century were subjected to new scrutiny. Why had the century of modernity been so centrally catastrophic? What was the nature of the worst offenders, the totalitarian regimes—especially in Germany, Italy, and Russia—that had generated so much violence? How could intellectuals and public opinion alike have facilely regarded Nazi Germany and fascist Italy as nearly identical formations (when they displayed so many differences)? And how could Stalinist Russia have been hailed as a positive alternative to Nazi Germany (when they displayed so many similarities)? With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, these interrogations could be pursued without the agenda, baggage, and defensiveness of the previous historical era. The question of the totalitarian state could finally be posed with the advantage of historical distance..
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