Manufacturing dissent

In Berlin last month, protesters opposed to the U.S.-led war on terrorism hoisted a poster equating George W. Bush's response to Sept. 11 with Hitler's response to the Reichstag fire in 1933. Such exaggerations, says the author, have tightened the conspiracy-theory feedback loop between Western anti-war activists and Middle Eastern Islamo-terrorists.

Just before the kidnappers sawed through Daniel Pearl's neck, they forced the Wall Street Journal reporter to "confess" that his experiences in captivity had been equivalent to those of the prisoners being held by the United States in Guantanamo Bay.

"Uh, only now do I think about that some of the people in Guantanamo Bay must be in a similar situation," Pearl said, unconvincingly, after the obligatory bit about how his "father's side is definitely Zionist."

Meanwhile, in Cuba, suspected al-Qaeda members were being given prayer mats, individual copies of the Koran, reading glasses and three meals a day (with extra spices, to taste like home). Rather than being dismembered for the cameras, the detainees were busy being fitted for new prosthetic limbs, while the International Red Cross looked on.

So where did the Pakistani militants get such a monstrously inaccurate analogy? Perhaps from Gore Vidal, or international journalist/activist John Pilger, or the editorial board of London's Independent newspaper or countless dozens of anti-war Web sites in North America. Every one of these publishing entities had described the Guantanamo facility, in the days leading up to Pearl's decapitation, as a "concentration camp."

Such patently ridiculous exaggerations have, regrettably, become commonplace among the more persistent critics of U.S. foreign policy. What is new, and especially jarring since the Sept. 11 massacre, is how much the conspiracy- theory feedback loop has tightened between irresponsible Western anti-war activists and murderous Middle Eastern Islamo-terrorists.

When Noam Chomsky, the U.S. linguist and foreign policy critic, described U.S. policy toward Afghanistan last fall as a "silent genocide" aimed at killing "between three and four million" Afghans, the absurd slur was swallowed and regurgitated almost instantaneously by Berkeley students, state-owned Arab newspapers and vox-populists from the vaunted "Arab street."

When Marc Herold, a U.S. professor of women's studies and international economics at the University of New Hampshire, produced a study last December claiming the U.S. military campaign had killed 3,700 Afghan civilians, the figure was not just quoted approvingly, but presented as an undercount by columnists from The Nation, the Guardian UK, the Daily Mirror, Irish Times, Hartford Courant and Sydney Morning Herald. The Arab press jumped on the study, making room for Herold's numbers along with cartoons of Jews drinking the blood of young Palestinians, and interviews with poets who reckon that Israeli settlers ought to be "shot dead."

Like Chomsky's bogus prognosis, Herold's study turned out to be notable mostly for being so wildly off-base, yet so enduringly popular among anti-war circles. Within days of publication, an army of amateur online writers picked through Herold's math and discovered several instances of double-counting and heavy reliance on the Afghan Islamic Press, which got its data from the Taliban. Later, The Associated Press, Reuters and other organizations conducted their own inquiries into civilian deaths, arriving at numbers between 600 and 1,500.

In the real world of intellectual rigour and academic standards, such peer review might conceivably lead to recalculation and revision. In the fantasyland of the anti-U.S. Left, it does not even break the stride on the march to the printing press. For, despite being thoroughly discredited on arrival in 2001, Chomsky's "silent genocide" charge and Herold's 3,700-dead-Afghans howler have shown up, unaltered, in slim paperbacks that have been climbing the charts in 2002: Chomsky's best-selling pamphlet 9-11, and a City Lights Books offering titled September 11 and the U.S. War: Beyond the Curtain of Smoke.

If these books have their fingers on the pulse of the anti-U.S. Left, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the patient is in need of some serious attention.

Beyond the Curtain, brought out in April, is a collection of 41 essays by a who's who of the most irritating post-Sept. 11 commentators, including Independent war correspondent Robert Fisk, feminist novelist Barbara Kingsolver, Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, and cartoonist Ted Rall (who drew the infamous cartoon making fun of Daniel Pearl's grieving pregnant wife).

These names are particularly familiar to the readers and writers of the thousands of politically themed Web sites known as "blogs" (short for "Web logs") that have flourished since Sept. 11.

Fisk, Chomsky's favourite Middle East reporter, has three columns in this collection, though sadly not his unintentionally hilarious account of being gang-stomped by a mob in a Pakistani border town, in which he concludes: "If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find."

His loaded reporting, so reverently cited by Ralph Nader and other denizens of the Chomskyite Left (as if no other journalists had been working the Middle East these past decades), was nonetheless not very well known in the United States until Sept. 11. Now, his output is so routinely debunked by Yankee bloggers that "Fisking" has become a word used to describe any incidence of an online writer picking apart a particularly asinine column.

Arundhati Roy's essay "War is Peace," which alleges that "centuries of jurisprudence" were "carelessly trashed" by the bombing of Afghanistan, was challenged by San Diego blogger Steven Den Beste, who argued that "This is both false and irrelevant; the nations that saw the evidence (such as Pakistan) announced that it was sufficient to indict, and in any case this is war, not law enforcement."

Kingsolver's essay, a reprint of her Nov. 23 column, argues that the United States didn't care about "the millions of Afghan civilians placed at risk of starvation because of the war," even though when she wrote it the war was largely over, Afghans were dancing in their newly liberated streets and food shipments were beginning to roll in.

It doesn't take very long before the relentless assumption of the most evil of U.S. intentions, combined with the wildly inaccurate predictions that follow, causes one's eyes to glaze over. Still, it's instructive to diagram just how some purportedly smart people come to believe, in the timeless words of George Orwell, that "half a loaf is the same as no bread."

The first line in the opening essay of Beyond the Curtain provides a clue: "In the struggle of Good against Evil," Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano writes, "it's always the people who get killed." Feel the moral equivalence just bubbling under the surface of the child-like sentiment? "Good and evil, evil and good: the actors change masks, the heroes become monsters and the monsters become heroes, in accord with the demands of the theatre's playwrights."

With the moral compass thus cast aside, it is a quick and easy path to equating Osama bin Laden with, oh, American-style capitalists: "There is much common ground between low- and high-tech terrorism," Galeano writes, "between the terrorism of religious fanatics and that of market fanatics, that of the hopeless and that of the powerful, that of the psychopath on the loose and that of the cold-blooded uniformed professional. They all share a disrespect for human life."

This is what much of the anti-war Left has come to: No hypothesis is too sketchy, no fact too unsubstantiated and no emotive novelist is too under-qualified, as long as they all make the United States (and the U.S.-led globalization project) look bad.

If there were a patron saint for this kind of rhetorical one-sidedness, it would be Noam Chomsky. Over five decades of campus lectures, anthology introductions and pocket-sized paperback Q&A reactions to world events, the famous linguist has perfected the art of boiling each and every critique down to America's culpability as "a leading terrorist state."

When asked in 9-11 to react to the news of foreigners celebrating the Sept. 11 massacre, Chomsky replied: "A U.S.-backed army took control in Indonesia in 1965, organizing the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants...." When asked whether Arab nations "should have taken responsibility to remove terrorists" from their leadership, Chomsky concluded: "It is rather unfair to blame citizens of harsh and brutal regimes that we support for not undertaking this responsibility, when we do not do so under vastly more propitious circumstances."

Chomsky is chiefly concerned with condemning the history of U.S. foreign policy, with special emphasis on 1980s Nicaragua, the Soviet-era Afghanistan War, sanctions on Iraq, support for Israel and the 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan -- which he continues to describe as a much worse crime, comparatively, than Sept. 11.

Chomsky, however, is far less sloppy with the facts than the contributors to Beyond the Curtain, unless you count the many facts he chooses to leave out. As a result, it's his conclusions that are suspect, such as this reductive explanation of U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia: "In the early 90s, primarily for cynical power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients, hardly to their benefit."

What about public outcry over Serb atrocities and the siege of Sarajevo? Or former secretary of state Madeleine Albright's very personal belief that appeasing European dictators is bad strategy? Or eloquent and persuasive pressure from international leaders such as Vaclav Havel? Apparently irrelevant, compared to sliming Washington and spreading conspiracy theories.

Chomsky's logical gimmick, which involves taking the loftiest of U.S. rhetoric and comparing it with the grimiest of U.S. history, is seductive as it is paralytic, for those inclined to blame America or seek out subversive explanations for official history. The bombing of Serbia couldn't possibly have been motivated by "humanitarian intervention," he argues, because if humanitarian intervention was a real concern, Washington wouldn't have looked the other way while Indonesia massacred the East Timorese.

This rhetorical cul-de-sac gains a conspiratorial edge (as it must, to explain away that vast majority of international thinkers who find his theories bunk), by liberal use of the phrase "of course," sprinkled with sarcastic comments about how "the doors are better left closed" on certain topics.

But there is a lie in Chomsky's premise. Again and again, he presents his concerns as being rooted in humanism, yet more often than not, his rancid ideology produces analysis that sounds alarmingly inhumane. As in this horrifying exchange, which begins with a feeble stab at hope by one of Chomsky's softball interviewers:

"Q: If the Taliban regime falls and bin Laden or someone they claim is responsible is captured or killed, what next? What happens to Afghanistan? What happens more broadly in other regions?"

"A: The sensible administration plan would be to pursue the ongoing program of silent genocide, combined with humanitarian gestures to arouse the applause of the usual chorus who are called upon to sing the praises of the noble leaders who are dedicated to 'principles and values' for the first time in history and are leading the world to a 'new era' of idealism and commitment to 'ending inhumanity' everywhere."

Ultimately, the questions Chomsky never asks are the ones most damning for him and his followers, who number in the hundreds of thousands: Why is the world a much better place than it was 13 years ago? Why have more than 100 countries ended single-party or military rule?

The Chomskyites can rarely bring themselves to admit that the United States has been, in tangible ways, an agent for actual good in the world (though Chomsky's recent acknowledgement, on CNN, that the United States is "the greatest country in the world" was a surprising departure). This stance, coupled with the one-sided drumbeat of criticism, has created a distorting, if attractive, dogma of its own.

For years, this ideological subculture thrived in the academic shadows, far from the glare of public attention, comfortable in its grievances about being ignored.

After Sept. 11, this cushy arrangement came to a crashing end. When Islamo-fascists mouth Berkeley slogans while waving around severed American heads, an engaged citizenry is now bound to take note.

"It is important," Chomsky concludes in 9-11,"not to be intimidated by hysterical ranting and lies and to keep as closely as one can to the course of truth and honesty and concern for the human consequences of what one does, or fails to do." Unluckily for Noam Chomsky's false world, people are finally taking his advice to heart.

- Matt Welch is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. His archives and Web log can be found at http://www.mattwelch.com.

Matt Welch is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. His archives and weblog can be found at http://www.mattwelch.com