I forgot about this thread. It's usually a bad sign when people use the word "frankly" in a sentence--it often means that the hostility level has risen to the point of no return. I'd just as soon lower it a notch.
Patrick, I'm sure you're right--Andrew wasn't mocking the Timorese and that's where I was wrong. In fact, I was even wrong in the way I worded the previous post, though more from the carelessness than from intention.
But I think your alarm bells ought to ring a for an entirely different reason when you consider the fact that Chomsky was virtually the only prominent American who has treated our role in East Timor with the seriousness it deserved. It wasn't just Kissinger who betrayed the Timorese-it was a bipartisan affair (though some politicians were on the right side). Chomsky is dead right--it says a tremendous amount about how Americans deal with their own complicity in crimes against humanity. It's become fashionable to look askance at Kissinger, but the fact is that the Carter Administration continued the Ford/Kissinger policies and virtually no one talks about this. I greatly admire Carter in most ways, but he ought to be questioned very hard about his policy towards East Timor while he was President. And you don't have to rely on Chomsky for info about this--my own copy is out on permanent loan, but I once had a book by Arnold Kohen (In the Place of the Dead) about the Timorese Nobel Prize winner Bishop Belo which one could read instead, and you wouldn't come away from that book feeling that Chomsky had misled his readers about the American government's behavior. I also read Ramos-Horta's autobiography many years ago. Same reaction. (Totally tangential sidenote--Ramos-Horta wrote an opinion piece for the NYT in the spring supporting the Iraq invasion for humanitarian reasons.)
As for someone trying to "morally get up on someone" without earning it, I didn't feel like writing a very long post and gathering together supporting citations. If you're skeptical, do your own research. But I think you'll find, if you didn't already know it, that the US played an important role under successive Administrations in helping Indonesia kill 200,000 Timorese. And given that unpleasant fact, then yeah, I think it's way too early in the day to be making jokes about the one of the few Americans who tried to call attention to the fact. Chomsky has said things which arguably deserve Andrew's ridicule. Nothing he's said about East Timor falls under that category. Should news stories be all East Timor, all the time? Well, no, but maybe it'll be time for people to ridicule Chomsky's obsession when most Americans know what we did to the Timorese. We aren't there yet, are we? And chances are, we never will be.
To spell it out a little more, if Chomsky always brought up America's treatment of Native Americans or the history of slavery whenever someone raised the issue of terrorism, I'd have giggled a little myself when I read Andrew's joke. Everyone knows what we did to the Indians and the African slaves and nearly everyone outside the KKK agrees it was wrong. But well-educated Americans commonly talk about the need for the Arab world to admit its shortcomings and face up to the fact that Arab countries often either support or breed terrorist groups, without ever seeming to notice how many innocent people America has helped kill with our own support of murderers. So yeah, when American politicians commonly face questions about these sorts of issues, then I for one will stop reading Chomsky, who I agree sometimes goes too far. His niche will vanish the day Americans start practicing what we preach to others (fat chance) and then he can stick to annoying people in linguistics, where I gather his personality brings out the same mixture of adulation and hatred.
Mitch, my very limited understanding is that corporations have some sort of status as persons, with rights, and that before this was put into law (maybe in the late 1800's), corporations were under a different set of laws.
A corporation and the people that work for it are two different sorts of entities. (Um, duh.)
If a corporation is sued for every penny it has, the people who work for it won't be bankrupted if it loses. If a corporation's right to lie about conditions in overseas sweatshops is revoked, individuals working for it can still buy ads and lie with their own money on their own time.
The Henley quote was priceless. Hopefully none of my friends in the real world read blogs and I can casually slip it into conversation as though it were my own.
Darn Google--it could spoil everything.
I'm sure you won't want to buy it, but Nader-haters (and Nader-lovers and those of us in-between) can find out what the man thinks from reading his book "Crashing the Party". In the index, under "major political parties", there 23 cites for "convergence of" and 4 citations for ""differences between".
Glancing through it, I still think he makes some very good points and the fact is that since 2000 mainstream "liberals" have moved away from Clinton/Gore policies and towards the views of Nader. You can see this in that flagship of the supposedly liberal media, the New York Times, which used to treat the anti-globalization movement with complete disdain, as did the Clinton/Gore administration. (See virtually any column by Tom Friedman during the Clinton era or even by Paul Krugman, though he's become much more balanced since then. And I think the NYT news coverage of antiglobalization protestors was at best patronizing). It wasn't until Joseph Stiglitz came out with his insider's perspective and started saying that antiglobalization protestors were making some valid points that the NYT suddenly seemed to wake up to this. Nader was there all along. Tom Friedman, that towering liberal guru of the Clinton/Gore era, generally saw antiglobalization protestors as half-witted Stalinists in puppet suits.
On my own personal human rights obsession, Nader said that the sanctions on Iraq were wrong. It was Madelaine Albright who said on Sixty Minutes that she thought that the containment of Saddam justified a sanctions policy which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. To my mind, that was a difference between Nader and Gore/Bush that mattered. People in the Gore camp rightly think they can score some good points showing the important differences between Gore and Bush, but to some of us Nader voters, the differences between Gore and Nader loomed just as large. I've come to realize that we're screwed-- we have to pick the Presidential candidate who is likely to accumulate a lower bodycount, but the outrage of Gore voters doesn't impress me much, because I can work up a fair amount of outrage myself on some issues. Big deal. If you can't work up some genuine moral outrage over some of the Democratic policies that Nader condemned, then you aren't trying very hard.
And just to make it clear, in case people reading this didn't notice my earlier posts, I'm a firm almost fanatical convert to "lesser of two evilism" who is voting for the Democrat next year no matter who he is.
Just to elaborate further on what I said earlier, the problem with the Gore/Nader war is that both sides then and now "debated" serious issues by screaming oversimplified soundbites at each other. Nader and his supporters in their demagogic moments would talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum. In their more sensible moments, Nader and his supporters would admit that there were differences, but there was a steady rightward drift in the Democratic Party, caused in part because unlike Republicans with their conservative supporters, the Democrats as a whole took their liberal/left supporters for granted and constantly shifted to the right looking for votes. Gore spent much of his second debate agreeing with Bush, and again if my memory is correct, Lieberman was very deferential to Dick Cheney, almost as if the Democrats themselves took this claim that Cheney was a seasoned stateman seriously. Gore supporters in their turn would focus on the more extreme Nader claim, because it is something they could easily refute. They usually refused to admit that there was any problem.
So I agree that the Nader candidacy as a solution to the rightward drift of the Democrats was the wrong medicine, but it's not exactly comforting to see people pretend that Nader's diagnosis of the illness was completely incorrect. Anyone watching prominent Democrats supporting Bush at crucial times in the past few years knows that Nader had a point. Gore, to his great credit, has been one of the outstanding exceptions to this, but the Gore of late 2002 to the present isn't the same Gore that picked Lieberman as his running mate.
Liberals pride themselves on their superiority over conservatives for preferring to engage in serious polite discussions rather than shouting matches where each side spouts its favorite bumper-sticker slogans, but that alleged distinction vanishes when Nader's name comes up. I'd like to see people discussing how to keep the Democrats from veering right while still managing to win elections. On the other hand, there are many Democrats who want the Democrats to be a centrist or maybe even slightly right-of-center party-- these people would actually be glad to have Nader around to siphon off liberal votes if they could win without them. Since they can't, they want liberals to vote Democratic and then sit back and shut up as the rightward drift continues.
I tried the"it's never correct to joke about a genocide, especially when you're a citizen of the country that supplied the weapons that committed it" line against a particular very popular liberal blogging humorist and I don't think too many people agreed with me. There's no need to name the humorist, but the genocide in question was the one committed in East Timor, and the target of the joke was a certain MIT linguist whose obsessive interest in the subject seemed funny to other people, apparently. To my mind, American citizens have absolutely no right to say anything about East Timor without prefacing it with a line about how awful it is that we helped murder so many innocent people.
But that said, I was probably too hard on the humorist, and people like me can be both right and wrong at the same time. And it'd be wrong to say that because somebody says something we think stupid or tasteless that they shouldn't be read or trusted ever again. Also, we humorless PC types sometimes only succeed in getting on other people's nerves and don't really do any good at all.
But then I lean back towards Patrick's position--cleverness doesn't excuse callousness.
I'll post again when I figure this stuff out.
You 2000 Gore-voters come across as every bit as self-righteous as we 2000 Nader-supporters. There's the same desire to score debating points and establish your own version of moral superiority.
It's what makes me feel an inextinguishable bond of kinship with you guys. Group hug, everyone.
I won't vote for Nader in 2004 and it saddens me that he isn't acting more like his supporter in 2000, Michael Moore. But Nader was right about one rather important point--if the Democrats take the left for granted, they'll continue moving to the right on the theory that that's where to go for new votes. It's what's been happening since maybe Reagan's day. I don't know what to do about this, except to harbor the rather forlorn hope that maybe a Dean victory (if that happens) will teach the Democrats they don't have to pick people like Lieberman as a VP candidate whose debate with Cheney seemed like a lovefest (at least in my memory). Voting for Nader isn't the solution. Bashing him and acting like there isn't any truth to what he said isn't a solution either. Of course there's a difference between Demos and Repugs, and even Nader admitted it, though it's easier to argue against his soundbite moments when he equated them.
If a Democrat does win, even a relatively moderate to centrist one, I will be very happy that Bush is out. But I'm also worried we'll see the Democrats resume their rightward drift.
Since part of the point of your post was to bash the NYT, let me add my two cents. The NYT is the most overrated news organization on the planet. They've had their rare moments of glory (publishing the Pentagon Papers is maybe at the top of a short list), but for the most part it's the paper you read if you want to find out how a bunch of timid Establishment centrist types wants you to view reality. They'd rather be respectable than right.
End of rant.
I'd put Chomsky in there, not only for his linguistic achievements, but because his writings make it clear (to open-minded people, that is), that the phrase "American crimes against humanity" isn't an oxymoron. It's a point that needs to be made over and over again, until Americans come to realize that we're down in the muck with the rest of sinful humanity and I'm glad Chomsky has been doing this even if I don't always agree with him. I think he's made his share of mistakes and said some stupid things, but that could be said about virtually anyone who could be placed on a list of great (in the positive sense) people. (Gandhi and Mandela are both great men, greater than Chomsky on my personal list, but I wouldn't want to defend every position they ever took.)
What's really interesting about Chomsky is how polarizing a figure he is--people tend to either see him as an infallible guru or start frothing at the mouth when his name is mentioned in a positive way. Both attitudes are ludicrous.
PNH, notice how you've let rightwingers set the tone in this comment section. Learn anything?
Sarcasm aside, I agree with your general point, but am unclear what you advocate as a remedy.
To -K
I still disagree, but don't have time to, um, basically repeat myself. But I don't think you're a monster. I also don't think Graydon is a monster. Many Americans defend the bombing of Hiroshima, sometimes on the grounds that it "saved American lives", but sometimes on the grounds that deliberately killing 100,000 civilians saved more lives on both sides in the long run. Graydon's proposed legal hanging of a large number of traitors seems less horrible than that, though I think the bitterness it would have caused probably would have meant it wouldn't have had the effect he thinks it would. I'm not sure why the destruction of Japanese cities didn't stir up more hatred of Americans.
To CJ Colluci--
Some of us here probably know that if born into the 19th century we might have been on the wrong side of the slavery issue, depending on the circumstances. The same point also applies to any discussion of Nazi Germany.
It also applies when discussing current or recent American wrongdoing and as someone said earlier, our descendants might look at us with some degree of horror for the way we condoned policy X.
Like nearly everyone else here, I don't agree with Graydon's proposal of mass executions. But I disagreed with someone upstream who contrasted the actual number of lynchings with the hundreds of thousands of slaveowners that Graydon might have executed.
There are a couple of problems here. First, owning a slave is just about as bad as killing someone, in my book. One should make allowances for the fact that a person raised in the antebellum South was socialized to think that slavery was good, just as I would make allowances for someone raised in an environment where murder was fine. But executing a slaveowner for owning slaves and funding a traitorous war is not morally the same as lynching an innocent person.
The other point I'd make is that in the real world, for all practical purposes the southern United States merely exchanged the slave system for a form of apartheid. (Not that the North was that much better.)
I'm utterly opposed to Graydon's proposal of mass executions for slave-owning, war-supporting traitors and I don't think it would have led to the good consequences that he imagines for it. But the path we actually did follow was in its own way even more monstrous and one should not obscure this point by looking at the narrow question of how many lynchings occurred. Those lynchings occurred (and were recorded on postcards) as part of a social system for keeping millions of blacks in their place.
Graydon wants an alternate history where slaveowners get what was coming to them and then someone else attacks Graydon's position by minimizing the evil of what actually did occur. So long as we're choosing parallel universes, I'd prefer one where the top southern leaders were more severely punished (but not hung) and the South forced to give the newly freed slaves equal rights.
I'm sure practically everyone agrees with this, but I was a little bothered when one person attacked Graydon's alternate history by preferring the one which actually did occur.
I normally agree with you Zizka, but I think you are being a little too hard on Slate. Slate, as you recognize, thought it was being hip and cool and funny by alluding to the John Kerry thing. I'm a little fuzzy on the details now, but I think some media jerk jumped on Kerry for allegedly concealing a Jewish background.
Slate probably thinks that it is making fun of anti-Semites with that headline, like Mark Twain ridiculed racists by depicting them as saying exactly what racists would have said. I'm thinking of the scene where a steamship accident kills a black man and when someone is asked "Did anyone die? ", another person replies "No ma'am. Killed a
*******."
Of course, the danger in trying to ridicule racism in this way is that some people might miss the point and take it literally. People might laugh with Archie Bunker and not at him. Twain could pull it off, Norman Lear couldn't quite but made a good try, but Slate's attempt was just clumsy and stupid.
Though, having said all that, Slate tries so hard to be hip and cool and funny and above it all that comparing them in any way to Mark Twain gives them far too much credit. They're just jerks.
Okay, Zizka, maybe I agree with you on this.
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