Week of July 26, 2010

In 1947, when excusing Soviet totalitarianism had become quite the rage in fashionable progressive circles, George Orwell eviscerated a British politician who consistently defended totalitarians but nevertheless denied that he was a defender of totalitarianism. “But of course he does,” Orwell wrote. “What else could he say? A pickpocket does not go to the races with a label ‘pickpocket’ on his coat lapel, and a propagandist does not describe himself as a propagandist.”

Orwell’s point holds true for today’s debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His pickpocket metaphor seems particularly applicable to those critics of Israel who can always be counted upon to decide that Israel has behaved miserably in defending herself, regardless of the suffering of Israeli civilians that their government is seeking to prevent and regardless of the actions of those who have caused that suffering.

At the very least, he’s probably had it with people who compare him with Roosevelt. At the time of his inauguration, he let reporters know he was reading up on FDR’s Hundred Days, that rush of legislation that transformed the country. This was probably a mistake. As a general rule, it’s best not to invite comparison to the most successful president of the 20th Century. It may be better to tee yourself up against, say, Harding.

We have learned from the 4th-century sacking of the Alexandrian Library or the mysterious demise of the Maya that knowledge can be inadvertently lost to all time through chaos and battle. But can knowledge be lost on purpose?

General Motors sold more cars in China than in the United States in the first half of 2010, and China now accounts for one-quarter of the company's global sales. That seems like a lot of capitalism for a country that calls itself communist. How communist is China, really?

Not very.

Despite Republican senator John McCain’s conviction that “We’ve already won that one,” i.e. the Iraq War, actually you couldn’t say either that the war is over or that things are going well politically in that country. It lacks a new government, the political wrangling is interminable, the apparatus of state is paralyzed, and big bombings are undertaken with frightening efficiency.

Shirley Sherrod, as presented last Monday, was a woman robbed of history. The immediate history of her comments were removed, as anyone can see from the tape. But the broader history--the murder of her father by the Klan, her subsequent devotion to a war against domestic terrorists inaugurated by her rifle-toting mother, the sad years of unpunished murder of black people in the South, and the accompanying pillage of black farmland--was also necessarily excised. What you saw last week was rather profound--like a watching tribunal in which the zeal to render a verdict was only matched by the zeal to ignore all evidence.

Mr. Assange has said that the publication of these documents is analogous to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, only more significant. This is ridiculous. The Pentagon Papers offered the public a coherent internal narrative of the conflict in Vietnam that was at odds with the one that had been given by the elected and uniformed leadership.

The publication of these documents, by contrast, dumps 92,000 new primary source documents into the laps of the world’s public with no context, no explanation as to why some accounts may contradict others, no sense of what is important or unusual as opposed to the normal march of war.

I've been trying to absorb the details of the Wikileaks story, and I don't really have anything too profound to say yet. Kudos of course to the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel. True the source came to them with everything laid out, but even those cases, believe you me there's a lot of hard work to do, especially when dealing with something this sensitive, so cheers to the great David Leigh, and the gang.

I wonder if Wikileaks becomes the Walter Cronkite of the 21st century. For our British friends. Cronkite, who died just recently, was America's most authoritative TV newsman. In February 1968, when he told America after spending some time in Vietnam that the war wasn't winnable, public support for the war went through the floor. The Tet offensive was going on at the same time too, meaning stories of US defeats were appearing with more urgency on the news.