Viva la Muerte!
By RICHARD BRODERICK
In his masterpiece, Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti proposed that one of our primal fears is of unwanted contact with strangers. Out in public places, he observed, to be touch, jostled, even brushed against, can trigger something akin to panic.
In an increasingly urbanized world such a phobia could be paralyzing (and for some people, is) absent the psychic mechanism Canetti also proposed that we possess and that compensates for this primal fear by allowing our sense of individual identity to dissolve, merging with the strangers around us in a collective persona.
In its positive forms this defense mechanism is responsible for the phenomenon of good-natured crowds at sporting events and along parade routes. In its destructive manifestation this defense mechanism is the driving force behind the sudden and unpredictable formation of mobs.
In our own history there are numerous examples of this destructive kind of crowd formation. Between 1890 and 1920, lynch mobs were responsible for murdering some 3,000 people – and those are only the cases that we know about. The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 lasted three days, resulted in the deaths of numerous innocent victims, and were only quelled when federal troops were commandeered from the front to restore order.
For most of history, mobs have formed spontaneously, dissipating their energy once they have achieved their immediate end of destroying property and/or harming or killing human beings, then disbanding as quickly as they form.
But one of the most sobering lessons of the 20th Century is the discovery that, under the right circumstances – the rise of skillful demagogues, the control of the organs of mass media by those demagogues – it's possible to generate a sustained mob mentality, and to direct its demonic energy toward specific, hellish goals.
Political science offers numerous definitions of fascism, but none strike us as definitive. That's because fascism is not simply a political ideology like Soviet-style Communism; that is to say, fascism is not just the product of reason gone awry.
Fascism is, essentially, the modern nation state as mob rule, with a national mob mentality constantly stirred up by the state with inflammatory rhetorical attacks directed against scapegoats – Jews, Blacks, immigrants, homosexuals, socialists, Muslims or whichever other group happens to bears the brand of The Other in a given culture.
Fascism's intentional harnessing of the defense mechanism that drives the formation of crowds explains fascism's allure, at least to some, which is the opportunity to unburden one's isolated, individual sense of self by identifying completely with the exhilarating collective energy of the "Volk." It is this dynamic that renders fascism, by whatever name, irredeemably irrational and destructive.
Thus institutionalized, and married to the apparatus, organizational power and armed might of the modern nation state, the mob energy harnessed by fascist regimes in the last century came very close to destroying the civilized world as we know it and could only be stopped by massive organized violence inflicted upon those regimes by other advanced nation states.
This critical mob mentality component of fascism also explains why countries do not "slide" into fascism, as some warn is happening in the United States; mobs do not form slowly. They gel, they materialize, they appear instantaneously, almost magically, with little or no forewarning.
In his speech this past week to military personnel, Barak Obama announced that the targeted assassination of Osama bin Laden reflected "The essence of America, the values that have defined us for more than 200 years" and that, furthermore, these values are "stronger than ever."
He was dead right, though not in the way he intended. The manner in which bin Laden's death was carried out reflects at least one face of American values as did, even more dramatically, the deprave celebrating that erupted in the wake of his killing in cities and on college campuses around the country.
From the extrajudicial execution of a dehumanized enemy to the choice of "Geronimo" as code name for Osama bin Laden to those outbursts of jubilation, the killing of The World's Most Wanted Man does indeed connect to those American values responsible for the country's history of violent racism, imperialism, repression, militarism, and near-genocide of the indians.
And those post-assassination victory celebrations were not analagous at all to the outpouring of relief and joy that accompanied the end of World War II. Bin Laden's extermination did not spare millions of Americans from the prospect of going off to fight in a global war or from the equally harrowing prospect of watching one's child, husband or brother being marched to the front.
The killing of OBL ended nothing, except his life. The celebrations were not about victory. They were about death. They were celebrations of death. Those dancing in the street were acting out their own version of the motto of the Falange – i.e., fascist -- movement during the Spanish Civil War. "Viva la Meurte."
Long live Death.
The time is not yet ripe for the clock to strike Midnight in America, but it won't take much to push us over the edge. Another major terrorist attack on the "Homeland." Another financial crisis on the scale of the most recent one, which could easily be triggered by the failure to raise the federal debt ceiling. The appearance on the scene of a skillful demagogue with the organizational ability to marshal a mass movement and an unslakable thirst for politcal power.
Even now, egged on by the rightwing demagogues already among us and bankrolled by rightwing billionaires plotting in undisclosed locations, the American mob longs to shake its collective fist and cry out for vengeance and blood in a hoarse collective voice.
Long live Death! And long live the Death of Democracy!
Does It Matter?
Portrait of the US Press in the Hour of Its Fall
By PATRICK COCKBURN
I once shot at Donald Trump, property magnate and possible Republican candidate for the presidency, with a small green plastic frog that squirted water. It was at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton in about 1994. His chunky form was an easy target as he walked between the tables, though he was clearly mystified by his sudden wetness. I heard him mutter: “Even in New York they don’t spit at me.”
I had gone to the dinner with my friend Nina Burleigh, an author and journalist, then working for People magazine. Male guests in tuxedos and women in formal dresses sat at round tables in the Hilton’s gloomy and cavernous hall. Nina recalls: “The White |House dinner can be boring and one must bring one’s own entertainment. I believe those frogs would still make it past the metal detectors at the Hilton. I think we hit or aimed at Janet Reno [then attorney-general] as well.”
I remembered the incident when watching on television President Obama deride Trump at the most recent White House Correspondents’ dinner 14 years after we squirted him with the frogs. The reason for Obama’s jabs was Trump’s successful campaign to get the president to publish his long-form birth certificate proving that he was born in the US and not in Kenya and was therefore eligible to occupy the White House. Obama was full of snide remarks about Trump, after his victory on the birth certificate question, suggesting that Trump now move on to the big serious issues like aliens landing or whether the moon landing was faked. In the end Trump glowered sullenly as he sat at the Fox table.
The White House Correspondents’ dinner has always been a gruesome affair with journalists, celebrities and politicians in unseemly embrace. The president addresses the throng in a spirit of phony self-deprecation and lumbering jocularity which is often reported, as were Obamas’s jibes at Trump, as subtle and witty barbs.
It is curious to see the dinner with its embarrassing rituals go on year after year regardless of the state of American journalism. US newspapers and television networks have famously been in a state of deepening crisis in the last few years. But the Arab Awakening has been a watershed in this decline. It was CNN’s reporting of the first Gulf War from Baghdad in 1991 that made it the channel that presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and journalists around the world had to watch. Back in 2003, CNN and the US networks still had the most ample coverage of the start of the war in Iraq. But since the start of the Arab Awakening even the White House has reportedly been watching al-Jazeera English to find out what was happening (though the BBC has not been far behind).
It is depressing how swiftly the corps of American foreign correspondents has shrunk over the last five years. Papers like the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe, which once had a full roster of reporters, no longer do so. US television networks that used to rent whole floors of hotels, to the envy of non-American broadcasters, are now down to a single journalist to cover a story. At least one US network did not send a single correspondent to report the uprising in Tunisia in January that began the capsizing of the regional political status quo.
Does it matter? In one sense it obviously does, since there are fewer effective journalists in the business. The drop in their numbers would be more evident if so many Arab countries in turmoil like Syria and Yemen had not banned reporters from obtaining entry visas. The consequences of more limited journalistic resources being deployed is also masked by the use of YouTube, photographs taken on mobile phones, and conversations with eyewitnesses on satellite phones.
This sort of evidence is powerful but easier to manipulate than it looks. Governments that kick out foreign correspondents may breathe a sigh of relief without realizing that they have created a vacuum of information that can easily be filled by their enemies. Thus much of the reporting of demonstrations, arrests, shootings and killings in Syria now comes courtesy of opponents of the regime.
It is difficult to feel much sympathy for governments whose abortive attempts at censorship make them vulnerable to hostile propaganda, but it does make it very difficult to verify what is going on. For instance, at the end of February I was in Tehran where exile websites reported that there were continuing street demonstrations. I could see none of these though there were plenty of black-helmeted riot police. Local Iranian stringers for foreign publications had mostly had their press credentials suspended so they could not write.
“In any case,” one of the stringers complained to me, “the news agenda for Iran is now being set by exiles and, if we report that nothing much is happening, nobody will believe us.” On YouTube I noticed one video of a demonstration in Tehran that had supposedly taken place in February showing all the men in shirts and without jackets, though the temperature in the Iranian capital was only a couple of degrees above freezing. I suspected that the video had been taken at the height of the Iranian protests in the summer of 2009.
This is not to say that flickering films of atrocities by the Syrian security forces are not true, but collection and control of such information by the exiled opposition, makes it impossible to judge the extent of the violence.
It is naïve to be too nostalgic about the passing of the age when the US dominated the foreign news media. What made CNN’s coverage so distinctive in 1991 was that Peter Arnett, their correspondent in Baghdad, was prepared to take a sceptical approach to US government claims about the accuracy of its bombing and the identity of its victims. CNN lost its critical edge over the years, while network correspondents, often privately critical about US government policy, were prevented by their bosses in New York from straying too far from conventional political wisdom
The press has always been more dependent on the powers-that-be than it likes to admit. American journalists outside Washington often express revulsion and contempt at the slavish ways of the Washington press corps. But it is difficult to report any government on a day-to-day basis without its cooperation, cooperation that can be peremptorily withdrawn to bring critics into line. Also, contrary to every film about journalism, people tend not to admit voluntarily to anything that might do themselves damage. Woodward and Bernstein learned about Watergate almost entirely from secondary sources such as judges, prosecutors and government investigative agencies which could force witnesses to come clean by threatening to put them in jail.
The media is often credited or blamed for an independent sceptical spirit which it seldom shows in reality. In wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan effective media criticism has tended to follow rather than precede public opinion. Even then it usually needs important politicians to be standing on the same side of the fence. The Afghan war is unpopular in the US, but there is no effective anti-war movement because the Democrats, once so critical of the Iraq war, are now in the White House and, if Obama goes on being presented with targets as vulnerable as Trump, are likely to stay there.
By RICHARD BRODERICK
In his masterpiece, Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti proposed that one of our primal fears is of unwanted contact with strangers. Out in public places, he observed, to be touch, jostled, even brushed against, can trigger something akin to panic.
In an increasingly urbanized world such a phobia could be paralyzing (and for some people, is) absent the psychic mechanism Canetti also proposed that we possess and that compensates for this primal fear by allowing our sense of individual identity to dissolve, merging with the strangers around us in a collective persona.
In its positive forms this defense mechanism is responsible for the phenomenon of good-natured crowds at sporting events and along parade routes. In its destructive manifestation this defense mechanism is the driving force behind the sudden and unpredictable formation of mobs.
In our own history there are numerous examples of this destructive kind of crowd formation. Between 1890 and 1920, lynch mobs were responsible for murdering some 3,000 people – and those are only the cases that we know about. The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 lasted three days, resulted in the deaths of numerous innocent victims, and were only quelled when federal troops were commandeered from the front to restore order.
For most of history, mobs have formed spontaneously, dissipating their energy once they have achieved their immediate end of destroying property and/or harming or killing human beings, then disbanding as quickly as they form.
But one of the most sobering lessons of the 20th Century is the discovery that, under the right circumstances – the rise of skillful demagogues, the control of the organs of mass media by those demagogues – it's possible to generate a sustained mob mentality, and to direct its demonic energy toward specific, hellish goals.
Political science offers numerous definitions of fascism, but none strike us as definitive. That's because fascism is not simply a political ideology like Soviet-style Communism; that is to say, fascism is not just the product of reason gone awry.
Fascism is, essentially, the modern nation state as mob rule, with a national mob mentality constantly stirred up by the state with inflammatory rhetorical attacks directed against scapegoats – Jews, Blacks, immigrants, homosexuals, socialists, Muslims or whichever other group happens to bears the brand of The Other in a given culture.
Fascism's intentional harnessing of the defense mechanism that drives the formation of crowds explains fascism's allure, at least to some, which is the opportunity to unburden one's isolated, individual sense of self by identifying completely with the exhilarating collective energy of the "Volk." It is this dynamic that renders fascism, by whatever name, irredeemably irrational and destructive.
Thus institutionalized, and married to the apparatus, organizational power and armed might of the modern nation state, the mob energy harnessed by fascist regimes in the last century came very close to destroying the civilized world as we know it and could only be stopped by massive organized violence inflicted upon those regimes by other advanced nation states.
This critical mob mentality component of fascism also explains why countries do not "slide" into fascism, as some warn is happening in the United States; mobs do not form slowly. They gel, they materialize, they appear instantaneously, almost magically, with little or no forewarning.
In his speech this past week to military personnel, Barak Obama announced that the targeted assassination of Osama bin Laden reflected "The essence of America, the values that have defined us for more than 200 years" and that, furthermore, these values are "stronger than ever."
He was dead right, though not in the way he intended. The manner in which bin Laden's death was carried out reflects at least one face of American values as did, even more dramatically, the deprave celebrating that erupted in the wake of his killing in cities and on college campuses around the country.
From the extrajudicial execution of a dehumanized enemy to the choice of "Geronimo" as code name for Osama bin Laden to those outbursts of jubilation, the killing of The World's Most Wanted Man does indeed connect to those American values responsible for the country's history of violent racism, imperialism, repression, militarism, and near-genocide of the indians.
And those post-assassination victory celebrations were not analagous at all to the outpouring of relief and joy that accompanied the end of World War II. Bin Laden's extermination did not spare millions of Americans from the prospect of going off to fight in a global war or from the equally harrowing prospect of watching one's child, husband or brother being marched to the front.
The killing of OBL ended nothing, except his life. The celebrations were not about victory. They were about death. They were celebrations of death. Those dancing in the street were acting out their own version of the motto of the Falange – i.e., fascist -- movement during the Spanish Civil War. "Viva la Meurte."
Long live Death.
The time is not yet ripe for the clock to strike Midnight in America, but it won't take much to push us over the edge. Another major terrorist attack on the "Homeland." Another financial crisis on the scale of the most recent one, which could easily be triggered by the failure to raise the federal debt ceiling. The appearance on the scene of a skillful demagogue with the organizational ability to marshal a mass movement and an unslakable thirst for politcal power.
Even now, egged on by the rightwing demagogues already among us and bankrolled by rightwing billionaires plotting in undisclosed locations, the American mob longs to shake its collective fist and cry out for vengeance and blood in a hoarse collective voice.
Long live Death! And long live the Death of Democracy!
++++++++
Does It Matter?
Portrait of the US Press in the Hour of Its Fall
By PATRICK COCKBURN
I once shot at Donald Trump, property magnate and possible Republican candidate for the presidency, with a small green plastic frog that squirted water. It was at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton in about 1994. His chunky form was an easy target as he walked between the tables, though he was clearly mystified by his sudden wetness. I heard him mutter: “Even in New York they don’t spit at me.”
I had gone to the dinner with my friend Nina Burleigh, an author and journalist, then working for People magazine. Male guests in tuxedos and women in formal dresses sat at round tables in the Hilton’s gloomy and cavernous hall. Nina recalls: “The White |House dinner can be boring and one must bring one’s own entertainment. I believe those frogs would still make it past the metal detectors at the Hilton. I think we hit or aimed at Janet Reno [then attorney-general] as well.”
I remembered the incident when watching on television President Obama deride Trump at the most recent White House Correspondents’ dinner 14 years after we squirted him with the frogs. The reason for Obama’s jabs was Trump’s successful campaign to get the president to publish his long-form birth certificate proving that he was born in the US and not in Kenya and was therefore eligible to occupy the White House. Obama was full of snide remarks about Trump, after his victory on the birth certificate question, suggesting that Trump now move on to the big serious issues like aliens landing or whether the moon landing was faked. In the end Trump glowered sullenly as he sat at the Fox table.
The White House Correspondents’ dinner has always been a gruesome affair with journalists, celebrities and politicians in unseemly embrace. The president addresses the throng in a spirit of phony self-deprecation and lumbering jocularity which is often reported, as were Obamas’s jibes at Trump, as subtle and witty barbs.
It is curious to see the dinner with its embarrassing rituals go on year after year regardless of the state of American journalism. US newspapers and television networks have famously been in a state of deepening crisis in the last few years. But the Arab Awakening has been a watershed in this decline. It was CNN’s reporting of the first Gulf War from Baghdad in 1991 that made it the channel that presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and journalists around the world had to watch. Back in 2003, CNN and the US networks still had the most ample coverage of the start of the war in Iraq. But since the start of the Arab Awakening even the White House has reportedly been watching al-Jazeera English to find out what was happening (though the BBC has not been far behind).
It is depressing how swiftly the corps of American foreign correspondents has shrunk over the last five years. Papers like the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe, which once had a full roster of reporters, no longer do so. US television networks that used to rent whole floors of hotels, to the envy of non-American broadcasters, are now down to a single journalist to cover a story. At least one US network did not send a single correspondent to report the uprising in Tunisia in January that began the capsizing of the regional political status quo.
Does it matter? In one sense it obviously does, since there are fewer effective journalists in the business. The drop in their numbers would be more evident if so many Arab countries in turmoil like Syria and Yemen had not banned reporters from obtaining entry visas. The consequences of more limited journalistic resources being deployed is also masked by the use of YouTube, photographs taken on mobile phones, and conversations with eyewitnesses on satellite phones.
This sort of evidence is powerful but easier to manipulate than it looks. Governments that kick out foreign correspondents may breathe a sigh of relief without realizing that they have created a vacuum of information that can easily be filled by their enemies. Thus much of the reporting of demonstrations, arrests, shootings and killings in Syria now comes courtesy of opponents of the regime.
It is difficult to feel much sympathy for governments whose abortive attempts at censorship make them vulnerable to hostile propaganda, but it does make it very difficult to verify what is going on. For instance, at the end of February I was in Tehran where exile websites reported that there were continuing street demonstrations. I could see none of these though there were plenty of black-helmeted riot police. Local Iranian stringers for foreign publications had mostly had their press credentials suspended so they could not write.
“In any case,” one of the stringers complained to me, “the news agenda for Iran is now being set by exiles and, if we report that nothing much is happening, nobody will believe us.” On YouTube I noticed one video of a demonstration in Tehran that had supposedly taken place in February showing all the men in shirts and without jackets, though the temperature in the Iranian capital was only a couple of degrees above freezing. I suspected that the video had been taken at the height of the Iranian protests in the summer of 2009.
This is not to say that flickering films of atrocities by the Syrian security forces are not true, but collection and control of such information by the exiled opposition, makes it impossible to judge the extent of the violence.
It is naïve to be too nostalgic about the passing of the age when the US dominated the foreign news media. What made CNN’s coverage so distinctive in 1991 was that Peter Arnett, their correspondent in Baghdad, was prepared to take a sceptical approach to US government claims about the accuracy of its bombing and the identity of its victims. CNN lost its critical edge over the years, while network correspondents, often privately critical about US government policy, were prevented by their bosses in New York from straying too far from conventional political wisdom
The press has always been more dependent on the powers-that-be than it likes to admit. American journalists outside Washington often express revulsion and contempt at the slavish ways of the Washington press corps. But it is difficult to report any government on a day-to-day basis without its cooperation, cooperation that can be peremptorily withdrawn to bring critics into line. Also, contrary to every film about journalism, people tend not to admit voluntarily to anything that might do themselves damage. Woodward and Bernstein learned about Watergate almost entirely from secondary sources such as judges, prosecutors and government investigative agencies which could force witnesses to come clean by threatening to put them in jail.
The media is often credited or blamed for an independent sceptical spirit which it seldom shows in reality. In wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan effective media criticism has tended to follow rather than precede public opinion. Even then it usually needs important politicians to be standing on the same side of the fence. The Afghan war is unpopular in the US, but there is no effective anti-war movement because the Democrats, once so critical of the Iraq war, are now in the White House and, if Obama goes on being presented with targets as vulnerable as Trump, are likely to stay there.
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