Paul Berman and the soCIAlists
Press Action
Friday, September 24, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/cummings09242004/
By Jordy Cummings
Legend has it, and it’s a good one, that Michael Moore was fired as editor of Mother Jones magazine because he shit-canned a story about the Sandinistas by one Paul Berman. The story, which later appeared in Dissent, was a boldfaced sneer at how the U.S. had used propaganda to ensure the defeat of Ortega. Mixing a faux-left critique that sounded not dissimilar to the Trotskyite critics of the Sandinistas (they didn’t nationalize things fast enough) and conversely and nonsensically, a capitalist critique (they destroyed the market for foreign capital) he obfuscates to a point where he can mention, in language welcoming to any Cold Warrior, the creeping Stalinism inherent in Ortega’s faction, compared to Violetta Chamorro.
Berman has been the superstar of the liberal bomber movement, since he is a talented writer and adept at understanding left psychology and how it can be undermined by polemicizing a mix of contradictory facts, logical leaps and simple Imperialist sympathy. Like others of his ilk, he is dangerous because he uses left-language against the left. Yet unlike others, he appears too intelligent to believe that he is actually arguing from the left, hence his success at simply repeating Langley talking points, or his Chutzpah-dik reference to the Congress of Cultural Freedom in his Terror and Liberalism.
The Congress, of course, was a CIA operation to manipulate American and European opinion, specifically to create a “non-communist” left. The CCF, however, funded very talented writers who were truly critical. Some original members, according to Frances Stonor Saunders’ classic Cultural Cold War: The CIA in the World of Arts and Letters, had an admixture attitude of anti-Stalinism “who’s using who” and hoped that the United States would not become an Empire. Hence Dwight McDonald, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler all came to resent the CCF for attempting to tailor them to fit specific Cold War interests.
Today’s Cruise Missile Leftists would probably gladly take NED money and think of it as socialism. Their attitude toward capitalism is at the farthest left a dull social democratic reformism, with a core of magnanimity toward socialists, anarchists and others. Still, some writers like Richard Rorty, Michael Berube or even Christopher Hitchens seem to be speaking from some principle, abstract pragmatism, duped and deluded, or drunken dialectics. But despite Rorty’s admitted Straussianism, which is the guiding light behind Dissent and this movement, Berman is not even a believer. He instead has carved himself a long-time and no doubt profitable niche as a cynical reactionary who cravenly dupes even his fellow CMLrs with his historical revisionism.
Paul Berman is David Horowitz’s kind of leftist. How do I know this? For a laugh, I try to read Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine as often as possible. And today, Berman’s piece about Che Guevara and The Motorcycle Diaries is front and centre. Like Christopher Hitchens, Berman is a regular contributor to the website, which has advocated the transfer of Palestinians from their homeland, and even the assassination of Ariel Sharon (if he goes through with his “Gaza Withdrawal.") Hitchens, former friend of Palestine, may not notice or care, but Berman is Horowitz’s tender comrade in a sort of neoconservative Maoism, a politics of purity derived from Jabotinksy and Nietzsche.
Now critiques of Che are to be expected and if made fairly, they are perfectly acceptable. If specifically coming from a left wing position, the critique may be tactical. If coming from the right it may be simply truth about bourgeois fear of democracy, which is what the Latin American guerillas, beneath ideological veneer, were fighting for, and in some places have gained. Coming from Berman, it is lies that serve to justify not only the failure of the Latin American revolutionary movements that he has always derided for profit, but of the military regimes that replaced them ... this is Berman on Latin American politics, at his heart, a Miami reactionary:
"And yet he [Che] succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale."
In other words—to Berman—it was not the military regimes staffed by the likes of Klaus Barbie and a whole host of neo-Nazis and Latifundias that were responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands. It was the guerillas. Just like it is not the occupation that deprives Palestinians, it is the terrorism. It is not John Ashcroft that is bad for civil liberties, it is the ACLU. Welcome to Paul Berman’s soCIAlism.
More Berman—getting to his point…
"Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights"
Never mind the fact that there may well be a really sad situation in Cuba, which is imperfect—though not to the degree arguably of the United States in regard to liberty and jails—and overreacts to people who have been manipulated by the State Department and CIA. One wonders if the dissident liberals in Cuba have any solidarity with “dissident liberals in the United States demanding fundamental human rights.” One assumes that if the Cuban dissidents were sincere, they probably would, though Berman does not. If there really is a struggle, it would best be completely divorced from American support, otherwise it pollutes itself. More likely it is a situation in which America is destabilizing Cuba for fun and profit, as is Paul Berman. Would America not jail people who work as registered agents for Al Qaeda or France?
It shouldn’t be surprising that the mainstream liberal press would be so welcoming to counter-revolutionary bottom feeders like Berman. Specifically in terms of Latin America, it is not at all surprising that when Tom Hayden and Alexander Cockburn advocate the left position on Bolivia and Venezuela respectively, The Nation feels obliged to print prominent letters arguing with their position, yet when a piece appears that critiques the genuinely abysmal human rights record in China or Taliban era Afghanistan, there is no letter refuting it from Deng or Mullah Omar.
Human Rights is not necessarily a sword of empire. At its heart, it is the concept upon which future human relations and planetary survival depend. Paul Berman doesn’t give a shit about human rights. He is an insult even to those who share his (overt, exoteric) peculiar ideology. Like Kissinger or Sharon, he blames victims for their problems. Even Slate magazine, which while centrist is usually fair, should think twice about him in the future. He is a hustler, nothing more.
Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.