Recently, he asserts that exposing the grotesque fraud perpetrated on the public by ITN in the service of the creation of a personified, evil racial horde - wicked 'the Serbs' - and the fabrication of an ersatz genocide, in order to gain public support for massive and massively profitable crimes against humanity commited by the British among other governments can be described as - these are the vague, insinutating, weasly words - downplaying the atrocities of the Milsoevic regime.:
I had a fleeting moment of deep joy the other day. Dsquared had mentioned the RCP (this being the British RCP, not the butt of Scott McLemee’s jokes) in some comments thread, and, via the Virtual Stoa, I saw that spiked-online are described as British Conservatives at What is Liberalism?
The RCP was, for a while, the coolest group on the left. They were so cool that people like me couldn’t even speak to them. They wore clothes that even I could see were hip as hip could be. They were all tall, and dark, and good-looking. They were also articulate (all, I gather now, having been to the University of Kent—scroll down), and there was a rumour that the SWP had banned its members from attending RCP events, for fear of losing grips on them. The group is now defunct not, as with so many others, because it collapsed, but because it members became converted to the joys of capitalism en masse, and created a journal called Living Marxism (devoted to promoting libertarian capitalism and downplaying the atrocities of the Milosevic regime), the descendent of which is spiked-online.
Downplaying the atrocities - that is, interfering with the corporate media's creation of fictional atrocities to whip up public enthusiasm for a barbarian adventure of (re)conquest, the completion of capital's business left unfinished by Nazis. Insisting on the truth from journalism, exposing the manipulations and lies, is not playing with the truth at quite the right level for consent manufacture for the neo-Nazi policy.
Downplaying. With this craven choice of word, the Crooked avoids having actually to find an inaccuracy in the article he is condemning as pro-atrocity. Rather than trouble himself to dispute the article - an endeavour sure to fail - he suggests the reporter was guilty enough simply for holding the wrong point of view, for feeling the wrong sentiments, for addressing the evils of the home team rather than the official enemy, for showing insufficient outrage and seeking to deliver to the public the undramatic but substantiated - poorly played! - facts that interfere with the official narrative of Europe's and the US' humanitarian foreign policy.
Presumably ITN was then innocently 'playing up'? Or something worse?
(It turned out to be the latter, but Harry is counting on your teevee-stunted memory span.)
The only way not to 'downplay' the atrocities of official enemies, it appears for Harry, is to applaud the commercial and public service news outfits which attract eyeballs to advertisers with fabricated evidence and deceptions in the ancient tradition of war propaganda.
Even if it is only a fiction, it's still not nice to throw babies out of incubators and we must not downplay the fiendishness of this famous non-practice of our enemies since the days of the oriental Hun. Nuclear retaliation, unleasing the minions of Osama Bin Laden on unarmed populations, foreclosure of industry and seizure of the public treasury are surely the very least a Crooked Liberal can urge his government to do when a country is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to contain barbed wire in the midst of the civil war the US so magnanimously arranged for its defenceless citizenry.
That's the trouble with Harry: that signature Crooked timbre in which he downplays the atrocities the television has failed to advise him to deplore.
Oh, such as those ITN's skillful, sly propaganda fabrications, debunked by Harry's targeted reporter, helped to justify and accomplish:
10th Anniversary of 'Single Greatest' Ethnic Cleansing of Yugoslav War:
Thisweek also marks the 10th anniversary of what the New York Times called the "single greatest" ethnic cleansing of the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s. In a 4 day blitzkrieg in August, 1995, US trained Croatian forces expelled more than a quarter of a million Serbs from their homes in the Krajina region of Croatia. It was called Operation Storm. One of the leaders of the operation was trained by the Virginia-based paramilitary firm, Military Professional Resources Inc. He is now a senior official in the US-installed government of the Kosovo province of Serbia. - DemocracyNow!
Downplaying atrocities is of course a Crooked Liberal speciality. The last time I visited the Crooked coop, Henry (not to be confused with Harry) was insisting that the right wing ideologue Bernard Lewis is a legitimate historian (whom he compares to Furet!) of Israel/Palestine, and that an IR curriculum devoting equal time to the mendacious, racist, Orientalist, polemical screeds of this character and his ilk and to that of Israeli 'new historians,' and no time to Henry Laurens - the leading authority on the history of Zionism and the modern history of Palestine by a very wide margin - is 'balanced' between equally legitimate 'perspectives' and therefore innocent of Juan Cole's charge that "the master narrative of Zionist historiography is dominant in the American academy."
No foolin', that's his Crooked contention.
Due to Henry Farrel's complaint that the above mischaracterizes his remarks, here he is for himself in case anyone chooses not to use the link to his words as he and I both advise (my italics):
Juan Cole makes a claim that I find hard to buy.
Personally, I think that the master narrative of Zionist historiography is dominant in the American academy. Mostly this sort of thing is taught by International Relations specialists in political science departments, and a lot of them are Zionists, whether Christian or Jewish. Usually the narrative blames the Palestinians for their having been kicked off their own land, and then blames them again for not going quietly. It is not a balanced point of view, and if we take the NYT seriously (which we could stop doing after they let Judith Miller channel Ahmad Chalabi on the front page every day before the war), then the IR professors should be made to teach a module on the Palestinian point of view, as well. That is seldom done.
This doesn’t at all gel with my experience of how international relations is taught or practiced, which is that IR courses which cover Middle East politics usually provide readings that cover both sides of the argument. I did a quick Google search on “international relations”+syllabus+Israel to see whether my impression bore out for the first twenty or so course syllabi that I could locate. While I came across one site where the readings tended heavily towards the Bernard Lewis school of analysis, it was the exception – and there was another course where the readings seemed to me to lean equally heavily towards the Palestinian side. The vast majority, covered both arguments, or covered the question from a perspective such as peace and conflict studies, where the emphasis is on solving the conflict rather than addressing the underlying merits of either sides’ claims.
To which I commented:
It sounds like you discovered exactly with Juan Cole contends exists. A ‘balanced’ approach to truth and falsehood is not neutral, surely. University courses in zoology giving ‘equal time’ to intelligent design and evolution would be rightfully identified as a evidence of dangerous christian fundamentalist influence. ‘Balancing’ the Bernard Lewish approach (malicious fictions of no scholarly integrity) with Ilan Pappé-Segev-Morris-Khalidi etc., is a pretty dreadful state of affairs awash in disinformation. And you found only one instance of leaning toward what you are calling – tendentiously – the ‘Palestinian’ side, as if both ‘pov’s were equally valid and equally flawed, and as if a course dominated by history practised with integrity and one dominated by the fabrications and mythology of right wing ideologues, were somehow pedagogical equivalents.
There is an historical record of the history of Palestine and Israel, just as there is one of the History of France. It is not that unique spot on the planet where nothing is clear, and it all comes down in the end to heresay.
It is astonishing that the most valuable, ideologically neutral work on the history of Zionism and the colonization of Palestine, Henry Laurens’, is not even available in English.
To which Henry replied:
Alphonsevanworden – you’re probably not going to convince anyone who doesn’t share your priors on this – sounds as though any course which doesn’t give primacy to your particular interpretation is going to be, in your eyes, biased. What I will say is that the idea that there is a non-contested “History of France” out there is a nonsense- there isn’t a non-contested history of any spot on the globe worth talking about. Take a look at the vehement contestation over the French revolution (Furet etc) and what it meant, for example. Any course worth its salt should cover the axes of contestation.
Now you tell me: is not Henry asserting that Bernard Lewis is among 'the axes of contestation'? What is in question is whether the inclusion of the Bernard Lewis school of analysis (the extreme of Israeli propaganda) in the vast majority of University courses substantiates Juan Cole's assertion of the dominance of the Israeli master narrative. Does not Harry then directly compare the unfactual and polemical noise Lewis makes to the debate regarding interpretation (not the factual record) of the French Revolution raised by Furet?
Does not Henry characterize the established factual record - plentifully documented since the early days of Zionism, established and presented by reputable historians - as at once The Palestinian side and my priors and my particular interpretation? [All I have said is that Bernard Lewis 'school of analysis' is grossly at odds with the factual record; what my 'interpretation' is and whether I have one is not something he can know.]He asserts that the historical record is a question of heresay, Lewis' word against Somebody Else's (mine or that ever useful puppet 'The Palestinian.')
