The Weaponization of History and Journalism
I n the United States, facts, an important element of truth, are not important. They are not important in the media, politics, universities, historical explanations, or the courtroom. Non-factual explanations of the collapse of three World Trade Center buildings are served up as the official explanation. Facts have been politicized, emotionalized, weaponized and simply ignored. As David Irving has shown , Anglo-American histories of World War II are, for the most part, feel-good histories, as are “civil war” histories as Thomas DiLorenzo and others have demonstrated . Of course, they are feel good only for the victors. Their emotional purpose means that inconvenient facts are unpalatable and ignored.
Writing the truth is no way to succeed as an author. Only a small percentage of readers are interested in the truth. Most want their biases or brainwashing vindicated. They want to read what they already believe. It is comforting, reassuring. When their ignorance is confronted, they become angry. The way to be successful as a writer is to pick a group and give them what they want. There is always a market for romance novels and for histories that uphold a country’s myths. On the Internet successful sites are those that play to one ideology or another, to one emotion or the other, or to one interest group or another. The single rule for success is to confine truth to what the readership group you serve believes.
Karl Marx said that there were only class truths. Today we have a large variety of truths: truths for feminists, truths for blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, homosexuals, transgendered, truths for the foreign policy community that serves the military/security complex, truths for the neocons, truths for the One Percent that control the economy and the economists who serve them, truths for “white supremacists,” itself a truth term for their opponents. You can add to the list. The “truth” in these “truths” is that they are self-serving of the group that expresses them. Their actual relation to truth is of no consequence to those espousing the “truths.”
Woe to you if you don’t go along with someone’s or some group’s truth. Not even famous film-maker Oliver Stone is immune. Recently, Stone expressed his frustration with the “False Flag War Against Russia.” Little doubt that Stone is frustrated with taunts and accusations from completely ignorant media talking heads in response to his documentary, Putin , based on many hours of interviews over two years. Stone came under fire, because instead of demonizing Putin and Russia, thus confirming the official story, he showed us glimpses of the truth.
The organization, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, published a report that completely destroyed the false accusations about Trump/Russian hacking of the US presidential election. The Nation published an objective article about the report and was assaulted by writers, contributors, and readers for publishing information that weakens the case, which the liberal/progressive/left in conjunction with the military/security complex, is orchestrating against Trump. The magazine’s audience felt that the magazine had an obligation not to truth but to getting Trump out of office. Reportedly, the editor is considering whether to recall the article.
So here we have left-leaning Oliver Stone and left-wing magazine, The Nation , under fire for making information available that is out of step with the self-serving “truth” to which the liberal/progressive/left and their ally, the military/security complex, are committed.
When a country has a population among whom there are no truths except group-specific truths, the country is so divided as to be over and done with. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The white liberal/progressive/left leaders of divisive Identity Politics have little, if any, comprehension of where the movement they think they lead is headed. At the moment the hate is focused on the “alt-right,” which has become “white nationalists,” which has become “white supremacists.” These “white supremacists” have become epitomized by statues of Confederate soldiers and generals. All over the South, if local governments are not removing the statues, violent crazed thugs consumed by hate attempt to destroy them. In New Orleans someone with money bused in thugs from outside flying banners that apparently are derived from a communist flag to confront locals protesting the departure of their history down the Orwellian Memory Hole.
What happens when all the monuments are gone? Where does the hate turn next? Once non-whites are taught to hate whites, not even self-hating whites are safe. How do those taught hate tell a good white from a bad white? They can’t and they won’t. By definition by Identity Politics, whites, for now white heterosexual males, are the victimizers and everyone else is their victim. The absurdity of this concept is apparent, yet the concept is unshaken by its absurdity. White heterosexual males are the only ones without the privilege of quotas. They and only they can be put at the back of the bus for university admissions, employment, promotion, and only their speech is regulated. They, and only they, can be fired for using “gender specific terms,” for using race specific terms, for unknowingly offending some preferred group member by using a word that is no longer permissible. They can be called every name in the book, beginning with racist, misogynist, and escalating, and no one is punished for the offense.
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Just the Facts Please ;)
This reminded me of an old Harvard magazine article I had read many years ago.
Abolish the White Race
September-October 2002
This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine ’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.”
"The good news is that there are now a host of writers and a growing number of courses and workshops designed to enlighten white people as to the real benefits and the great cost of their property in whiteness," writes former Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell in his epilogue to When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, LL.M. '76 (Lawrence Hill Books, $26.95). Many of those engaged in this Herculean task are white, Bell notes, among them Noel Ignatiev, Ed.M. '85, Ph.D. '94, C.A.S. '95, author of How the Irish Became White and a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, who writes: In the interests of survival, Afro-Americans have always studied whiteness. There is a long tradition among them that the white race is a peculiar sort of social formation, one that depends on its members' willingness to conform to the institutions and behavior patterns that reproduce it. By the early 1900s...it was becoming commonplace in the academy to speak of race, along with class and gender, as a social construct....
In addition to the notion of race as a social construct, [an old friend, John Garvey, and I] shared another, which we owed to the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James: that ordinary Americans are drawn by the conditions of their lives in two opposite directions, one that mirrors and reproduces the present society of competition and exploitation, and another that points toward a new society based on freely associated activity. We believed that this internal antagonism played itself out as a civil war within the white mind, between the desire of whites to wall themselves off from black Americans and their desire to overcome the boundaries that kept them apart.
John and I decided that it was time to launch a journal to document that civil war. The result was Race Traitor, whose first issue appeared in the fall of 1992 with the slogan "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity" on its cover. The aim was to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness. My book on the Irish was the story of how people for whom whiteness had no meaning learned its rules and adapted their behavior to take advantage of them;
Speaking as an Irishman, I can state clearly and concisely, that I have never in any way shape or form considered my "whiteness" as meaningful, to who i am, as an individual, or as a human being. (plus My melanin count is quite high for an Irishman making me a light tan complexioned person)
Race Traitor was an attempt to run the film backwards, to explore how people who had been brought up as white might become unwhite....
The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists . Of course we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ...
I have said it repeatedly ever since some white as white bubba swung a pipe at white as white me from a pickup truck in Alabama in the 60's;
RACISM KNOWS NO SKIN COLOR!
It's a truth that every racist should have tattooed on their forehead!
RACISM KNOWS NO SKIN COLOR!
True that!
Evolutionary biologists claim it's an inherent part of human DNA. At one time through most of the human evolution, "the Other" was dangerous to family, community, tribe. It was beneficial in an evolutionary sense, to be wary or suspicious of those not within your clan or grouping of humans. It needs to be recognized and controlled as such. We are no longer hunter gathers struggling for survival. But the psychological memory is ingrained in the psyche of the human mind.
Got that from Jordan Peterson.
I'm convinced that "rejection of the other" is indeed gene-deep.
The consequence is that if we do not make a conscious effort to override that gene-deep tendency... it will drive us. We are "naturally racist".
OTOH, we are capable of imposing voluntary behavior over reflex behavior. If we firmly decide that we will not reject "the other" for irrational reasons, we can manage.
That's kinda harsh, but hey! We're Great Apes only some thousands of generations from our caves. Inborn behavior is powerful. Intellect is much more powerful... but only if we use it.
That's kinda harsh, but hey! We're Great Apes only some thousands of generations from our caves. Inborn behavior is powerful. Intellect is much more powerful... but only if we use it.
See that, something we agree on.
The author presumes to lecture about "truth" while writing an article filled with personal opinion masquerading as "fact".
Funny when you consider this recent post (LOL) Postmodern punditry at its finest.The Democrats never got a KKK member into the "white house"
White, Christian supremacy has been government policy in the United States for much of American history
The author complains that everyone claims their own truth... and then does exactly the same thing.
For information, Foreign Policy Journal is the personal blog of... a guy.
For information, Foreign Policy Journal is the personal blog of... a guy.
All of that may very well be true, but that "guy" did not publish the article you are commenting on.....this dude did. I am aware of him occasionally shilling for the Palestinians ( I find it distasteful) Yet I do not allow that to prejudice me against to his other writings.
Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor’s Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.
He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.
In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.
Dr. Roberts’ latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions—The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx’s Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.
Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper’s, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.
Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.
He is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence.
My bad for "a guy". The author has references.
I stand by my critique of the text, though. Example:
Recently, a professor in the business school of a major university told me that he used the word, girls, in a marketing discussion. A young woman was offended. The result was he received a dressing-down from the dean.
Horrible PC rears its head! But before we conclude... Does the same professor use "boys" for his male students? If he does, then he shows equal disdain for all the young adults (not "boys and girls") whom he is supposedly educating. If he does not use "boys"... then the young woman is correct that he should align his language one way or the other.
The author presents this case... and all his others as closed conclusions, without ever giving enough background to allow the reader to draw their own conclusions. We must take his opinion as gospel.
The same problem applies to most of his cases. Since his basic thesis concerns alternative facts, it's not cool to be unclear about his own.
Horrible PC rears its head! But before we conclude... Does the same professor use "boys" for his male students? then he shows equal disdain for all the young adults (not "boys and girls")
A wonderful off hand rejection of the reality in the world that we inhabit Bob. It's almost like you are not informed of the direction feminism has taken in the postmodern discourse at universities. Let me give you a little crash course in the rabbit hole of insanities the movement has gone down. (no pun intended)
See "love your enemy?" read the section on penetration.(LOL) Know this was second wave feminism, it's just gotten worse. These third wave "womben"
are far more "woke" than the last generations.
"love your enemy?"
it would be really, really funny if they were not serious, but sadly they are.
Have a good conversation with yourself. Since you make stuff up in my place, I'll leave you to it.