james traub on "anti-americanism"

p.s. i realize my comma placement there is a little condescending

xpost: well he's no artist

I know. It's like, who are all these horrible lib-leftists that people like Traub seem to know? I know lots of lefties but somehow don't run across these. (And Traub and a friend made bets about the war? WTF?)

xpost!

ethan, shut the fuck up. seriously.

and holy cow is pinter's poetry shitty

So far I haven't seen the NYRB or LRB's takes on Pinter's Nobel Prize, but maybe they'll be in the next issue. The thing is, in terms of how literary intellectuals are thinking, Pinter's views are fairly normal.

Unlike Brockes herself, apparently.

It certainly isn't. Reporters Sans Frontiers have just published their latest World Press Freedom Index. Following increasing judicial pressure on the press, and the imprisonment of a journalist from Traub's own paper for refusing to reveal her sources, the USA has fallen more than 20 places since last year, to 44. Which leaves it behind every country in Western Europe, Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Namibia, El Salvador, the Czech Republic and Hong Kong.

The newly-"liberated" Iraq stands at 157 in the list.

-- Patchouli Clark (noodle_vagu...), November 1st, 2005.

yes i for one would like to see more journalist beheadings, homophobic apocalypse rhetoric, and attack dogs released on naked pyramids of iraqi prisoners

uh, that lead essay "the way we live now" has tackled "controversial stuff" as long as i can remember seriously reading the times (since about high school?).

Cool, measured deconstructions of US foreign policy are all well and good, but bullshit emotional rhetoric might be a good response to "On one stretch of highway alone, there were more than fifty civilian cars, each with four or five people incinerated inside, that sat in the sun for ten or fifteen days before they were buried nearby by volunteers."

Sorry for being hysterical.

linx?

"circumvented the UN Security Council, the latter of which is supposed to be the sole arbiter of such things"

silly

i think there *was a case* for both of these imperialist adventures, but pinter a) won't acknowledge any opposing pov, b) which makes his argument all the weaker because c) he can't really account for imperialism in terms other than 'they're just bloodthirsty bastards'.

enrique, i am aware of the case that was made (was there more than one case?) for the bombing in the balkans, i just find it massively insufficient as an explanation for why NATO suddenly exceeded its mandate after 50 years of not doing so.

NRQ, you provide links for why the UN being sole arbiter of these kinds of disputes is silly and i'll do research on the last twenty years of serbian history for you and post links to it here for you

Which is ironic, since it's your whole schtick.

"I am a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp. As such I was shocked by some of the views of Noam Chomsky in the article by Emma Brockes. Chomsky describes the revisionist work of a journalist, Diana Johnstone, on the camps and events at Srebrenica 1995. The importance of this issue is not about the number of people who were killed in and around Srebrenica, but about deliberate attempts to at best trivialise, at worst deny, genocidal acts committed by Serb nationalists in Bosnia.

If Srebrenica has been a lie, then all the other Bosnian-Serb nationalists' crimes in the three years before Srebrenica must be false too. Mr Chomsky has the audacity to claim that Living Marxism was "probably right" to claim the pictures ITN took on that fateful August afternoon in 1992 - a visit which has made it possible for me to be writing this letter 13 years later - were false. This is an insult not only to those who saved my life, but to survivors like myself.

Ed Vulliamy, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams were the first foreign witnesses to the existence of the camps at Omarska and Trnopolje, where Bosnian Muslims and Croats were incarcerated, tortured and executed in a manner that merits no justification. However, saying that Vulliamy "happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true" has the effect of excusing these crimes. And because I was incarcerated in Omarska in August 1992, when Vulliamy arrived there, I guess I am also a liar. My experiences in that horrendous period, shared by thousands of others, were far from a "story". My imagination could never have anticipated the gritty taste of the cruelty delivered by an ugly collaboration of strangers alongside neighbours, teachers and schoolmates. My memories don't come from a storybook.

Kemal Pervanic
Author, The Killing Days: My Journey Through the Bosnia War"

Yeah: hearts and minds, people. And plenty of folks seem to have not much of the latter.

but is often an effective one. can be very effective in terms of whipping up populist fervour

some of em also think bush masterminded 9/11 and that our soldiers in iraq are serving as a zionist army

yea, both of these are thought of, by, uh, at least a reasonable number of people (but, are we talking america? the west? the middle east?) find these plausible. the 2nd can easily be seen as an effective truth (rightly or wrongly). the first, while hugely more implausible, has had some currency beyond fringist conspiracy theory nuts?

well, it's 'wrongly' obviously; but how could it possibly be effective for non-anti-semites?

i meant its possible to argue that americas presence in the middle east effectively serves the zionist cause (ie, whether intended to or not, it is arguable that it does, on some level?). im not saying this is my opinion, i am saying that it is not necessarily 'bullshit' either, and a lot of people in the middle east believe it, and they are not all anti-semites.

whether intended to or not, it is arguable that it does, on some level?

which is why i use the qualifier, 'effectively'. intention or not, its easy to see why millions of people think the american presence does serve a zionist cause. so, while im not saying the americans are there for that specific cause, i think its not easy to say its 'bullshit' either.

'easy to see' that bush knew about 9/11 beforehand and allowed it to happen? or 'easy to see' that bush knew about 9/11 beforehand but failed to prevent? the latter almost certainly true (if not bush, certainly the govt)

but, ok, lets go back to the question. yes, i think the american presence in the middle east, helps israel out much more than any other nation there (well, other than for saudi arabia or kuwait, the american presence hasnt helped anyone there). and allows israel to pursue stronger policies towards the right. and that yes, that, in effect certainly doesnt hinder zionism

israel gained more than turkey, because israel had one of its enemies weakened, (and one would think the aim to create a client state, though of course, the irony is, theres potentially more danger there now thjan before)

but it depends. i mean, the talk from the US was of then moving onto syria, and the perpetual sabre rattling towards iran. but these things take on more significance if you have a safe client state with your forces on (which, presumably SK and germany like, is the long term intention?)

...but the invasion of iraq was not undertaken for the zionist cause.

you're kinda right, but one of the post-facto justifications from the bush administration and their neoconservative apologists for invasion was to "enhance" israel's security. i agree that zionism and israel shouldn't be conflated, but there it is.

anyway we invaded iraq to serve iran's interests, not israel's.

And more importantly, why does everyone devote page after page of space to analyzing tone and rhetoric and panty-twisting about "anti-American" semantics -- why not cover things that actually happen, as opposed to the tone people take when they recount it? (And is anyone in Traub's position smart enough to notice that "anti-Americanism" is pretty noticeably spurred not by America itself, but by moments when particular American leaders do shit that nobody else likes?)

"why not cover things that actually happen"

But my point is something besides that: are we really going to sit in a country where Pat Robertson can publically speculate about assassinating foreign leaders and then get all offended that someone offered some fast-and-loose rhetorical criticisms of us? How exactly is Pinter's looseness of tone any different from what we do all day long?

This is one of those absolutist statements that overlooks the intersection of interests that were served by the Iraq invasion. I don't like the phrase "zionist cause", for the reasons discussed above, but protection of Israel is/was certainly a key part of the neocon Middle East agenda. Read their policy papers, Israel is central to how they see American interests there -- and not without reason, either. So saying it wasn't about Israel is a little like saying it wasn't about oil -- neither of those were the sole reasons, but they were both on the list of reasons that made the establishment of a U.S.-friendly government in Iraq a priority for Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/etc. The problem, of course, is that it's hard to talk about Israel at all reasonably, because people on all sides tend to respond hyperbolically.

And nabisco otm as usual.

point taken. how about "soldiers in iraq serve a zionist cause"?

so the lesson learned here and on every other ile thread regarding dems or leftists making blatantly untrue, inflammatory statements is that its ok because pat robertson/ann coulter/bill oreilly does it too

because pat robertson holds some actual power, and pinter doesnt? because robertson is ruminating on specific assasination targets, and pinter is rambling loosely, and isnt advocating the assasination of bush? because robertson/coulter are talking about enemies, and pinter et al are talking about allies, and hoping to be able to affect some change on our popns?

no reason we cant. but this is assuming everyone here disagrees with robertson AND pinters comments?

well in 2005 yeah unless you just mean as a mouthpiece for homophobes, i dont think he dictates foreign policy
-- _ (...), November 3rd, 2005.

and homophobia has about as much to do with iraq as pinter's plays
-- _ (...), November 3rd, 2005.

not sure why everything has to be an absolute to mean something to you. it's undeniable that pat robertson has an "influence" on american politics, not all of it domestic. the guy ran for president a couple of times, pushing george h.w. bush further right, started the most influential american political organization in recent times, launched the career of ralph reed, etc., etc.

...i dont see how this one negative reaction to pinters comments somehow means that i excuse his.

who's saying that, exactly? i'm not sure that's what nabisco was saying, but i can't speak for him.

i dont count myself as a pinter-defender, but i also dont necessarily disagree with anything he's said here

sometimes these threads move too fast, and you end up talking past each other!

So I'm not saying "it's okay because they do it" -- I'm saying it's okay, full-stop. It makes perfect sense to me that writers talk in terms like Pinter's in that specific quote; he's not a politician, and he's not an American, so I can't imagine what reason he'd possibly have not to express his view as he understands it. And I would feel the same way about Pat Robertson's Chavez comment, except for the prime difference between them -- Robertson was advocating murdering Chavez, whereas I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that Pinter has never suggested killing Bush.

This is the source of my comment about panty-twisting: using that quote up-front immediately casts Traub as essentially saying "look, a non-politician foreign national disagrees with our government, and instead of writing detailed policy papers about it he's just saying it in everyday figure-of-speech terms!" Which is pathetic: that's what people do in our country and in every countery, all day long.

that sorta seems to be the point of this thread, no?

So I'm saying I feel like condemning that comes close to condemning the idea that people anywhere might advance a worldview on its own terms, instead of engaging in endless detailed point-by-point evidence-only debate. It comes close to asking that not only of politicians, but of writers / "public intellectuals," whose whole purpose is often to interpret all those details into some coherent act of "speech," active use of language and all. There's a very good reason detail-type political writers love to pick on the political comments of academics and people in literature and so on: they want desperately to read those people's words as detailed political speech, when in reality they're another kind of speech entirely. They're personal analysis; they're less concerned with fact-arrangement and more concerned with interpretation and the effective use of language to advance moral arguments. And -- again, speaking strictly of that line -- Pinter's interpretation is demonstrably accurate (how many of this administration's policy papers are completely up-front about looking for total world hegemony?), and his emotional ante-upping with the "murder" line is not particularly bizarre. (Once again, the continuum: I don't think it's particularly bizarre of pro-life folks to refer to abortion as "murder," even though our detailed legalistic notion of "murder" doesn't include it -- they're using the word to advance a moral belief. So is Pinter.)

so am i! and i'm american, even.

argh, wait a minute. now we are getting close to the "well, coulter probably would have said xyz" territory you criticized on the other thread.

i think the phrase "anti-american" needs some serious examination and unpacking.

CHARACTERS:
America (a really fat guy)
Europe (a really ugly guy)

SCENE 1

America does something really stupid and annoying.

EUROPE: Hey! Why the hell did you do that, fat-ass?
AMERICA: That was so anti-me of you to call me a fat-ass, you ugly little jerk!
EUROPE: Well maybe I wouldn't have to call you a fat-ass if you'd stop doing that stupid annoying shit you keep doing.
AMERICA: Yeah right, like I care if you think it's stupid -- you're clearly just prejudiced against me for being fat.
EUROPE: Whatever, jerk.
AMERICA: Fine, jerk.
POLAND: Guys? Guys?

now you have it as a pinter