George Monbiot - The Left's McCarthy
7
October 2014
Questioning someone’s integrity is not something I do lightly,
especially when I share much ideological common ground with them. But
the unsavoury behaviour of
George
Monbiot, a leading columnist for the
Guardian and one of Britain’s most prominent progressive intellectuals,
is becoming ever harder to overlook – and forgive.
On a whole range of issues, such as corporate greed and threats to
the planet posed by climate change, I agree wholeheartedly with Monbiot.
It is also entirely possible for two people to disagree, even intensely,
but still believe their opponent’s views are legitimate and advanced in
good faith. That is how I regard, for example, Monbiot’s support for
nuclear power as the least-bad option for dealing with mounting carbon
emissions. It’s not a position I share, but he has set out his reasoning
clearly and honestly.
But I can extend no such understanding to his campaign of
vilification begun three years ago against several leading figures on
the progressive left.
It started with
an article in 2011 in which he attacked two scholars for publishing
a book, the
Politics Of Genocide, in which they collected together their
own and other experts’ research into two supposedly well-documented
genocides, in Rwanda and the Balkans. After examining the evidence, they
reached a controversial conclusion: that the nature of events in both
genocides had been distorted to fit western political agendas.
They did not question that large numbers of people had been killed in
either conflict. They and their contributors argued instead that the
term “genocide” had been used to draw a veil over the events, cementing
an official narrative that could not be questioned or re-assessed.
Instead, they suggested, the official narrative might be serving
political ends rather than reflecting accurately who had been killed and
why.
One of the two authors is Ed Herman, most famous for an influential
book,
Manufacturing Consent, jointly written with Noam Chomsky, which
argues that the mainstream media are not the democratic and pluralistic
institutions they claim to be but rather corporations advancing official
narratives designed to serve elite – including, of course, their own –
interests. Herman and Chomsky’s thesis has only found more adherents
over time, particularly as the internet has provided dissident writers,
including Chomsky himself, with a rival platform from which to challenge
the consensus policed by the corporate media.
So it is hardly surprising, given their starting point about the
media’s role in manufacturing consent, that Herman and his collaborator,
David Peterson, should be suspicious of two of the strongest consensual
narratives of recent times: the Rwanda and Balkan genocides, which even
had their own dedicated international tribunals established to very
publicly put on trial the official bad guys.
It may also not be stretching credulity to suspect that Monbiot, a
leftwing intellectual who has thrown in his lot and reputation with the
Guardian on the assumption that Herman and Chomsky are wrong about the
corporate media, might not look too kindly on their thesis. If
Manufacturing Consent is right, then Monbiot is not a guardian of our
moral consciences, as he likes to think, but a guardian of the outer
limits of a corporate-sanctioned consensus.
It is increasingly hard to shake off such suspicions given his
behaviour over the past three years. Monbiot’s 2011 column denounced
Herman and Peterson as genocide deniers, probably the most serious
accusation one can level against a fellow intellectual. One might have
assumed that Monbiot would marshal enormous evidence before making such
a serious allegation. Not a bit of it: in his column he made a brief and
sweeping condemnation of their thesis and their right to question the
official narrative.
A single ugly column by Monbiot might possibly have been excused as
an unfortunate lapse. But he then
revisited the theme a year later in what can only be characterised
this time as an exercise in leftwing
McCarthyism. Having no stronger
argument than before, Monbiot on this occasion recruited four academics
to his cause of denouncing Herman and Petersen as genocide deniers.
As someone who himself challenges orthodoxies – in my case
Israeli
ones – I know precisely how weak this kind of resort to an argument from
authority is. Were I to so wish, I could easily seek to discredit the
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in similar fashion for his argument – an
entirely correct one – that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in
1948 from their homeland by Israel. All I would need is to find a
handful of respected historians and public intellectuals like Benny
Morris, Anita Shapira and Ari Shavit to support my case. But what would
this prove? Only that the job of many, if not most, “experts” in any
field is to help construct and maintain official narratives. That is,
after all, why they are official narratives!
But not satisfied with tarring the reputations of Herman and
Peterson, this time Monbiot chose to drag in Chomsky too. On his
website, he published
a
lengthy correspondence between the two in which he tried first to
cajole, then demand that Chomsky join him in denouncing Herman as a
genocide denier. Chomsky staunchly refused, repeatedly providing Monbiot
with his reasoning.
Monbiot’s performance here was as ugly as watching McCarthy in his
heyday grilling American intellectuals to expose their Communist
sympathies. In full righteous mode, Monbiot ended by flaunting like some
diva his “depression” at the left’s “idiocy”. He lamented how Chomsky,
once his “hero”, had – by refusing to agree with him – proven himself a
fellow traveller with genocide deniers.
What underlies this argument, unexamined by Monbiot – presumably
because he lacks the self-awareness to understand it – is a serious
divergence of views about power.
Monbiot’s clash with Herman, Peterson and Chomsky is not really over
the facts of a genocide, but over who has a right to speak. Monbiot,
embedded in the camp of the corporate media, has adopted its ethos as
his own. Those who are respected – that is, those who stay within the
limits of officially sanctioned thought – have the right to advance
their claims. Those outside the magic circle – those not credited by the
corporate guardians of legitimate thought – do not. Herman, Peterson and
Chomsky’s work implicitly exposes the vacuous and circular logic of
Monbiot’s assumptions.
That point becomes especially clear if one reads through Monbiot’s
correspondence with Chomsky. Chomsky struggles to hide his exasperation
at Monbiot’s inability to grasp the elementary arguments he is making,
even though he is forced to make them repeatedly. Monbiot, on the other
hand, thinks he has cornered Chomsky in some kind of intellectual
hypocrisy. What he has revealed instead is how deeply embedded he is in
the corporate mindset, one that reserves for itself the right to
determine the limits of the thinkable.
Interestingly this month, however, Monbiot found his own assumptions
threatened from an unlikely quarter: the BBC [ the
well known protectors of Paedophile pervertss - Editor ]. The corporation – one of
the most powerful of the enforcers of official narratives – made an
unusually daring programme,
Rwanda’s Untold
Story, questioning the consensus on the Rwandan genocide, all be it
20 years after the events. The programme-makers’ conclusions echoed
those of Herman and Peterson: that census figures and death toll
estimates do not support the accepted narrative of a genocide in which
the Tutsis were the main victims of the slaughter. The data, in fact,
indicate the exact opposite: more Hutus were killed than Tutsis,
possibly many times more.
This has ramifications beyond the historical. Paul Kagame, the leader
of the Tutsi militia the RPF, and therefore now potentially in the frame
as the chief perpetrator of a genocide against the Hutus, is today the
much-respected leader of Rwanda, a man feted by western leaders.
On my blog I
suggested last week, given that even the hyper-cautious BBC appears
ready to concede that the Rwanda genocide needs a reassessment, it might
be time for Monbiot to apologise for his ugly accusations against
Herman, Peterson, Chomsky and others.
So far Monbiot has made no proper response, despite receiving similar
demands for a retraction from a number of people on social media. It
would be nice to think that his silence suggests he is engaged in
soul-searching and formulating the necessary response. But unfortunately
the omens are not good.
Monbiot has not yet spoken himself but he has not remained entirely
silent either. In an indication that this may be more about his ego and
self-appointed status as guardian of a left righteousness, he retweeted
a
flippant dismissal of his critics, including me, provided by a group
called Mediocre Lens.
Sadly, that is very much of a piece with Monbiot’s behaviour on this
issue. Mediocre Lens is the poor cousin of what Monbiot has rightly
exposed elsewhere as the phenomenon of “fake persuaders”, usually
corporate lobbyists hiding behind front organisations that pose as
“concerned ordinary citizens”. The point of the fake persuaders is to
create the impression of popular support for corporate policies that
harm our interests, such as destroying forests and polluting rivers. In
short, the fake persuaders are there to uphold official narratives that
serve business interests.
Mediocre Lens does something similar, if rather more feebly. In its
case it claims to be a group of ordinary journalists with a “left
perspective” who promote the idea that the mainstream media is there to
serve our interests. More precisely, its sole rationale is to discredit
Media Lens, an increasingly popular website whose editors – wait for it
– advance the thesis of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
Monbiot’s promotion of a tweet from Mediocre Lens should make about
as much sense – if he were the independent thinker he claims to be – as
Naomi Klein retweeting approvingly an attack on the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change by a climate change denial group.
But it makes rather more sense if we understand that Monbiot is no
longer what he claims to be or seems. Years of being embedded in the
corporate media have eroded his ability to remain truly independent or
to appreciate those like Herman, Peterson and Chomsky who demand the
right to retain that privilege for themselves.
Tagged as:
media criticism
- See more at:
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2014-10-07/george-monbiot-the-lefts-mccarthy/#sthash.f1xog8Pt.dpuf
George Monbiot, the left’s McCarthy
7
October 2014
Znet – 7 October 2014
Questioning someone’s integrity is not something I do lightly,
especially when I share much ideological common ground with them. But
the unsavoury behaviour of George Monbiot, a leading columnist for the
Guardian and one of Britain’s most prominent progressive intellectuals,
is becoming ever harder to overlook – and forgive.
On a whole range of issues, such as corporate greed and threats to
the planet posed by climate change, I agree wholeheartedly with Monbiot.
It is also entirely possible for two people to disagree, even intensely,
but still believe their opponent’s views are legitimate and advanced in
good faith. That is how I regard, for example, Monbiot’s support for
nuclear power as the least-bad option for dealing with mounting carbon
emissions. It’s not a position I share, but he has set out his reasoning
clearly and honestly.
But I can extend no such understanding to his campaign of
vilification begun three years ago against several leading figures on
the progressive left.
It started with
an article in 2011 in which he attacked two scholars for publishing
a book, the Politics of Genocide, in which they collected together their
own and other experts’ research into two supposedly well-documented
genocides, in Rwanda and the Balkans. After examining the evidence, they
reached a controversial conclusion: that the nature of events in both
genocides had been distorted to fit western political agendas.
They did not question that large numbers of people had been killed in
either conflict. They and their contributors argued instead that the
term “genocide” had been used to draw a veil over the events, cementing
an official narrative that could not be questioned or re-assessed.
Instead, they suggested, the official narrative might be serving
political ends rather than reflecting accurately who had been killed and
why.
One of the two authors is Ed Herman, most famous for an influential
book, Manufacturing Consent, jointly written with Noam Chomsky, which
argues that the mainstream media are not the democratic and pluralistic
institutions they claim to be but rather corporations advancing official
narratives designed to serve elite – including, of course, their own –
interests. Herman and Chomsky’s thesis has only found more adherents
over time, particularly as the internet has provided dissident writers,
including Chomsky himself, with a rival platform from which to challenge
the consensus policed by the corporate media.
So it is hardly surprising, given their starting point about the
media’s role in manufacturing consent, that Herman and his collaborator,
David Peterson, should be suspicious of two of the strongest consensual
narratives of recent times: the Rwanda and Balkan genocides, which even
had their own dedicated international tribunals established to very
publicly put on trial the official bad guys.
It may also not be stretching credulity to suspect that Monbiot, a
leftwing intellectual who has thrown in his lot and reputation with the
Guardian on the assumption that Herman and Chomsky are wrong about the
corporate media, might not look too kindly on their thesis. If
Manufacturing Consent is right, then Monbiot is not a guardian of our
moral consciences, as he likes to think, but a guardian of the outer
limits of a corporate-sanctioned consensus.
It is increasingly hard to shake off such suspicions given his
behaviour over the past three years. Monbiot’s 2011 column denounced
Herman and Peterson as genocide deniers, probably the most serious
accusation one can level against a fellow intellectual. One might have
assumed that Monbiot would marshal enormous evidence before making such
a serious allegation. Not a bit of it: in his column he made a brief and
sweeping condemnation of their thesis and their right to question the
official narrative.
A single ugly column by Monbiot might possibly have been excused as
an unfortunate lapse. But he then
revisited the theme a year later in what can only be characterised
this time as an exercise in leftwing McCarthyism. Having no stronger
argument than before, Monbiot on this occasion recruited four academics
to his cause of denouncing Herman and Petersen as genocide deniers.
As someone who himself challenges orthodoxies – in my case Israeli
ones – I know precisely how weak this kind of resort to an argument from
authority is. Were I to so wish, I could easily seek to discredit the
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in similar fashion for his argument – an
entirely correct one – that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in
1948 from their homeland by Israel. All I would need is to find a
handful of respected historians and public intellectuals like Benny
Morris, Anita Shapira and Ari Shavit to support my case. But what would
this prove? Only that the job of many, if not most, “experts” in any
field is to help construct and maintain official narratives. That is,
after all, why they are official narratives!
But not satisfied with tarring the reputations of Herman and
Peterson, this time Monbiot chose to drag in Chomsky too. On his
website, he published
a
lengthy correspondence between the two in which he tried first to
cajole, then demand that Chomsky join him in denouncing Herman as a
genocide denier. Chomsky staunchly refused, repeatedly providing Monbiot
with his reasoning.
Monbiot’s performance here was as ugly as watching McCarthy in his
heyday grilling American intellectuals to expose their Communist
sympathies. In full righteous mode, Monbiot ended by flaunting like some
diva his “depression” at the left’s “idiocy”. He lamented how Chomsky,
once his “hero”, had – by refusing to agree with him – proven himself a
fellow traveller with genocide deniers.
What underlies this argument, unexamined by Monbiot – presumably
because he lacks the self-awareness to understand it – is a serious
divergence of views about power.
Monbiot’s clash with Herman, Peterson and Chomsky is not really over
the facts of a genocide, but over who has a right to speak. Monbiot,
embedded in the camp of the corporate media, has adopted its ethos as
his own. Those who are respected – that is, those who stay within the
limits of officially sanctioned thought – have the right to advance
their claims. Those outside the magic circle – those not credited by the
corporate guardians of legitimate thought – do not. Herman, Peterson and
Chomsky’s work implicitly exposes the vacuous and circular logic of
Monbiot’s assumptions.
That point becomes especially clear if one reads through Monbiot’s
correspondence with Chomsky. Chomsky struggles to hide his exasperation
at Monbiot’s inability to grasp the elementary arguments he is making,
even though he is forced to make them repeatedly. Monbiot, on the other
hand, thinks he has cornered Chomsky in some kind of intellectual
hypocrisy. What he has revealed instead is how deeply embedded he is in
the corporate mindset, one that reserves for itself the right to
determine the limits of the thinkable.
Interestingly this month, however, Monbiot found his own assumptions
threatened from an unlikely quarter: the BBC. The corporation – one of
the most powerful of the enforcers of official narratives – made an
unusually daring programme,
Rwanda’s Untold
Story, questioning the consensus on the Rwandan genocide, all be it
20 years after the events. The programme-makers’ conclusions echoed
those of Herman and Peterson: that census figures and death toll
estimates do not support the accepted narrative of a genocide in which
the Tutsis were the main victims of the slaughter. The data, in fact,
indicate the exact opposite: more Hutus were killed than Tutsis,
possibly many times more.
This has ramifications beyond the historical. Paul Kagame, the leader
of the Tutsi militia the RPF, and therefore now potentially in the frame
as the chief perpetrator of a genocide against the Hutus, is today the
much-respected leader of Rwanda, a man feted by western leaders.
On my blog I
suggested last week, given that even the hyper-cautious BBC appears
ready to concede that the Rwanda genocide needs a reassessment, it might
be time for Monbiot to apologise for his ugly accusations against
Herman, Peterson, Chomsky and others.
So far Monbiot has made no proper response, despite receiving similar
demands for a retraction from a number of people on social media. It
would be nice to think that his silence suggests he is engaged in
soul-searching and formulating the necessary response. But unfortunately
the omens are not good.
Monbiot has not yet spoken himself but he has not remained entirely
silent either. In an indication that this may be more about his ego and
self-appointed status as guardian of a left righteousness, he retweeted
a
flippant dismissal of his critics, including me, provided by a group
called Mediocre Lens.
Sadly, that is very much of a piece with Monbiot’s behaviour on this
issue. Mediocre Lens is the poor cousin of what Monbiot has rightly
exposed elsewhere as the phenomenon of “fake persuaders”, usually
corporate lobbyists hiding behind front organisations that pose as
“concerned ordinary citizens”. The point of the fake persuaders is to
create the impression of popular support for corporate policies that
harm our interests, such as destroying forests and polluting rivers. In
short, the fake persuaders are there to uphold official narratives that
serve business interests.
Mediocre Lens does something similar, if rather more feebly. In its
case it claims to be a group of ordinary journalists with a “left
perspective” who promote the idea that the mainstream media is there to
serve our interests. More precisely, its sole rationale is to discredit
Media Lens, an increasingly popular website whose editors – wait for it
– advance the thesis of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
Monbiot’s promotion of a tweet from Mediocre Lens should make about
as much sense – if he were the independent thinker he claims to be – as
Naomi Klein retweeting approvingly an attack on the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change by a climate change denial group.
But it makes rather more sense if we understand that Monbiot is no
longer what he claims to be or seems. Years of being embedded in the
corporate media have eroded his ability to remain truly independent or
to appreciate those like Herman, Peterson and Chomsky who demand the
right to retain that privilege for themselves.
Tagged as:
media criticism
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2014-10-07/george-monbiot-the-lefts-mccarthy/#sthash.f1xog8Pt.dpuf
George Monbiot, the left’s McCarthy
7
October 2014
Znet – 7 October 2014
Questioning someone’s integrity is not something I do lightly,
especially when I share much ideological common ground with them. But
the unsavoury behaviour of George Monbiot, a leading columnist for the
Guardian and one of Britain’s most prominent progressive intellectuals,
is becoming ever harder to overlook – and forgive.
On a whole range of issues, such as corporate greed and threats to
the planet posed by climate change, I agree wholeheartedly with Monbiot.
It is also entirely possible for two people to disagree, even intensely,
but still believe their opponent’s views are legitimate and advanced in
good faith. That is how I regard, for example, Monbiot’s support for
nuclear power as the least-bad option for dealing with mounting carbon
emissions. It’s not a position I share, but he has set out his reasoning
clearly and honestly.
But I can extend no such understanding to his campaign of
vilification begun three years ago against several leading figures on
the progressive left.
It started with
an article in 2011 in which he attacked two scholars for publishing
a book, the Politics of Genocide, in which they collected together their
own and other experts’ research into two supposedly well-documented
genocides, in Rwanda and the Balkans. After examining the evidence, they
reached a controversial conclusion: that the nature of events in both
genocides had been distorted to fit western political agendas.
They did not question that large numbers of people had been killed in
either conflict. They and their contributors argued instead that the
term “genocide” had been used to draw a veil over the events, cementing
an official narrative that could not be questioned or re-assessed.
Instead, they suggested, the official narrative might be serving
political ends rather than reflecting accurately who had been killed and
why.
One of the two authors is Ed Herman, most famous for an influential
book, Manufacturing Consent, jointly written with Noam Chomsky, which
argues that the mainstream media are not the democratic and pluralistic
institutions they claim to be but rather corporations advancing official
narratives designed to serve elite – including, of course, their own –
interests. Herman and Chomsky’s thesis has only found more adherents
over time, particularly as the internet has provided dissident writers,
including Chomsky himself, with a rival platform from which to challenge
the consensus policed by the corporate media.
So it is hardly surprising, given their starting point about the
media’s role in manufacturing consent, that Herman and his collaborator,
David Peterson, should be suspicious of two of the strongest consensual
narratives of recent times: the Rwanda and Balkan genocides, which even
had their own dedicated international tribunals established to very
publicly put on trial the official bad guys.
It may also not be stretching credulity to suspect that Monbiot, a
leftwing intellectual who has thrown in his lot and reputation with the
Guardian on the assumption that Herman and Chomsky are wrong about the
corporate media, might not look too kindly on their thesis. If
Manufacturing Consent is right, then Monbiot is not a guardian of our
moral consciences, as he likes to think, but a guardian of the outer
limits of a corporate-sanctioned consensus.
It is increasingly hard to shake off such suspicions given his
behaviour over the past three years. Monbiot’s 2011 column denounced
Herman and Peterson as genocide deniers, probably the most serious
accusation one can level against a fellow intellectual. One might have
assumed that Monbiot would marshal enormous evidence before making such
a serious allegation. Not a bit of it: in his column he made a brief and
sweeping condemnation of their thesis and their right to question the
official narrative.
A single ugly column by Monbiot might possibly have been excused as
an unfortunate lapse. But he then
revisited the theme a year later in what can only be characterised
this time as an exercise in leftwing McCarthyism. Having no stronger
argument than before, Monbiot on this occasion recruited four academics
to his cause of denouncing Herman and Petersen as genocide deniers.
As someone who himself challenges orthodoxies – in my case Israeli
ones – I know precisely how weak this kind of resort to an argument from
authority is. Were I to so wish, I could easily seek to discredit the
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in similar fashion for his argument – an
entirely correct one – that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in
1948 from their homeland by Israel. All I would need is to find a
handful of respected historians and public intellectuals like Benny
Morris, Anita Shapira and Ari Shavit to support my case. But what would
this prove? Only that the job of many, if not most, “experts” in any
field is to help construct and maintain official narratives. That is,
after all, why they are official narratives!
But not satisfied with tarring the reputations of Herman and
Peterson, this time Monbiot chose to drag in Chomsky too. On his
website, he published
a
lengthy correspondence between the two in which he tried first to
cajole, then demand that Chomsky join him in denouncing Herman as a
genocide denier. Chomsky staunchly refused, repeatedly providing Monbiot
with his reasoning.
Monbiot’s performance here was as ugly as watching McCarthy in his
heyday grilling American intellectuals to expose their Communist
sympathies. In full righteous mode, Monbiot ended by flaunting like some
diva his “depression” at the left’s “idiocy”. He lamented how Chomsky,
once his “hero”, had – by refusing to agree with him – proven himself a
fellow traveller with genocide deniers.
What underlies this argument, unexamined by Monbiot – presumably
because he lacks the self-awareness to understand it – is a serious
divergence of views about power.
Monbiot’s clash with Herman, Peterson and Chomsky is not really over
the facts of a genocide, but over who has a right to speak. Monbiot,
embedded in the camp of the corporate media, has adopted its ethos as
his own. Those who are respected – that is, those who stay within the
limits of officially sanctioned thought – have the right to advance
their claims. Those outside the magic circle – those not credited by the
corporate guardians of legitimate thought – do not. Herman, Peterson and
Chomsky’s work implicitly exposes the vacuous and circular logic of
Monbiot’s assumptions.
That point becomes especially clear if one reads through Monbiot’s
correspondence with Chomsky. Chomsky struggles to hide his exasperation
at Monbiot’s inability to grasp the elementary arguments he is making,
even though he is forced to make them repeatedly. Monbiot, on the other
hand, thinks he has cornered Chomsky in some kind of intellectual
hypocrisy. What he has revealed instead is how deeply embedded he is in
the corporate mindset, one that reserves for itself the right to
determine the limits of the thinkable.
Interestingly this month, however, Monbiot found his own assumptions
threatened from an unlikely quarter: the BBC. The corporation – one of
the most powerful of the enforcers of official narratives – made an
unusually daring programme,
Rwanda’s Untold
Story, questioning the consensus on the Rwandan genocide, all be it
20 years after the events. The programme-makers’ conclusions echoed
those of Herman and Peterson: that census figures and death toll
estimates do not support the accepted narrative of a genocide in which
the Tutsis were the main victims of the slaughter. The data, in fact,
indicate the exact opposite: more Hutus were killed than Tutsis,
possibly many times more.
This has ramifications beyond the historical. Paul Kagame, the leader
of the Tutsi militia the RPF, and therefore now potentially in the frame
as the chief perpetrator of a genocide against the Hutus, is today the
much-respected leader of Rwanda, a man feted by western leaders.
On my blog I
suggested last week, given that even the hyper-cautious BBC appears
ready to concede that the Rwanda genocide needs a reassessment, it might
be time for Monbiot to apologise for his ugly accusations against
Herman, Peterson, Chomsky and others.
So far Monbiot has made no proper response, despite receiving similar
demands for a retraction from a number of people on social media. It
would be nice to think that his silence suggests he is engaged in
soul-searching and formulating the necessary response. But unfortunately
the omens are not good.
Monbiot has not yet spoken himself but he has not remained entirely
silent either. In an indication that this may be more about his ego and
self-appointed status as guardian of a left righteousness, he retweeted
a
flippant dismissal of his critics, including me, provided by a group
called Mediocre Lens.
Sadly, that is very much of a piece with Monbiot’s behaviour on this
issue. Mediocre Lens is the poor cousin of what Monbiot has rightly
exposed elsewhere as the phenomenon of “fake persuaders”, usually
corporate lobbyists hiding behind front organisations that pose as
“concerned ordinary citizens”. The point of the fake persuaders is to
create the impression of popular support for corporate policies that
harm our interests, such as destroying forests and polluting rivers. In
short, the fake persuaders are there to uphold official narratives that
serve business interests.
Mediocre Lens does something similar, if rather more feebly. In its
case it claims to be a group of ordinary journalists with a “left
perspective” who promote the idea that the mainstream media is there to
serve our interests. More precisely, its sole rationale is to discredit
Media Lens, an increasingly popular website whose editors – wait for it
– advance the thesis of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
Monbiot’s promotion of a tweet from Mediocre Lens should make about
as much sense – if he were the independent thinker he claims to be – as
Naomi Klein retweeting approvingly an attack on the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change by a climate change denial group.
But it makes rather more sense if we understand that Monbiot is no
longer what he claims to be or seems. Years of being embedded in the
corporate media have eroded his ability to remain truly independent or
to appreciate those like Herman, Peterson and Chomsky who demand the
right to retain that privilege for themselves.
Tagged as:
media criticism
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2014-10-07/george-monbiot-the-lefts-mccarthy/#sthash.f1xog8Pt.dpuf
George Monbiot, the left’s McCarthy
7
October 2014
Znet – 7 October 2014
Questioning someone’s integrity is not something I do lightly,
especially when I share much ideological common ground with them. But
the unsavoury behaviour of George Monbiot, a leading columnist for the
Guardian and one of Britain’s most prominent progressive intellectuals,
is becoming ever harder to overlook – and forgive.
On a whole range of issues, such as corporate greed and threats to
the planet posed by climate change, I agree wholeheartedly with Monbiot.
It is also entirely possible for two people to disagree, even intensely,
but still believe their opponent’s views are legitimate and advanced in
good faith. That is how I regard, for example, Monbiot’s support for
nuclear power as the least-bad option for dealing with mounting carbon
emissions. It’s not a position I share, but he has set out his reasoning
clearly and honestly.
But I can extend no such understanding to his campaign of
vilification begun three years ago against several leading figures on
the progressive left.
It started with
an article in 2011 in which he attacked two scholars for publishing
a book, the Politics of Genocide, in which they collected together their
own and other experts’ research into two supposedly well-documented
genocides, in Rwanda and the Balkans. After examining the evidence, they
reached a controversial conclusion: that the nature of events in both
genocides had been distorted to fit western political agendas.
They did not question that large numbers of people had been killed in
either conflict. They and their contributors argued instead that the
term “genocide” had been used to draw a veil over the events, cementing
an official narrative that could not be questioned or re-assessed.
Instead, they suggested, the official narrative might be serving
political ends rather than reflecting accurately who had been killed and
why.
One of the two authors is Ed Herman, most famous for an influential
book, Manufacturing Consent, jointly written with Noam Chomsky, which
argues that the mainstream media are not the democratic and pluralistic
institutions they claim to be but rather corporations advancing official
narratives designed to serve elite – including, of course, their own –
interests. Herman and Chomsky’s thesis has only found more adherents
over time, particularly as the internet has provided dissident writers,
including Chomsky himself, with a rival platform from which to challenge
the consensus policed by the corporate media.
So it is hardly surprising, given their starting point about the
media’s role in manufacturing consent, that Herman and his collaborator,
David Peterson, should be suspicious of two of the strongest consensual
narratives of recent times: the Rwanda and Balkan genocides, which even
had their own dedicated international tribunals established to very
publicly put on trial the official bad guys.
It may also not be stretching credulity to suspect that Monbiot, a
leftwing intellectual who has thrown in his lot and reputation with the
Guardian on the assumption that Herman and Chomsky are wrong about the
corporate media, might not look too kindly on their thesis. If
Manufacturing Consent is right, then Monbiot is not a guardian of our
moral consciences, as he likes to think, but a guardian of the outer
limits of a corporate-sanctioned consensus.
It is increasingly hard to shake off such suspicions given his
behaviour over the past three years. Monbiot’s 2011 column denounced
Herman and Peterson as genocide deniers, probably the most serious
accusation one can level against a fellow intellectual. One might have
assumed that Monbiot would marshal enormous evidence before making such
a serious allegation. Not a bit of it: in his column he made a brief and
sweeping condemnation of their thesis and their right to question the
official narrative.
A single ugly column by Monbiot might possibly have been excused as
an unfortunate lapse. But he then
revisited the theme a year later in what can only be characterised
this time as an exercise in leftwing McCarthyism. Having no stronger
argument than before, Monbiot on this occasion recruited four academics
to his cause of denouncing Herman and Petersen as genocide deniers.
As someone who himself challenges orthodoxies – in my case Israeli
ones – I know precisely how weak this kind of resort to an argument from
authority is. Were I to so wish, I could easily seek to discredit the
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in similar fashion for his argument – an
entirely correct one – that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in
1948 from their homeland by Israel. All I would need is to find a
handful of respected historians and public intellectuals like Benny
Morris, Anita Shapira and Ari Shavit to support my case. But what would
this prove? Only that the job of many, if not most, “experts” in any
field is to help construct and maintain official narratives. That is,
after all, why they are official narratives!
But not satisfied with tarring the reputations of Herman and
Peterson, this time Monbiot chose to drag in Chomsky too. On his
website, he published
a
lengthy correspondence between the two in which he tried first to
cajole, then demand that Chomsky join him in denouncing Herman as a
genocide denier. Chomsky staunchly refused, repeatedly providing Monbiot
with his reasoning.
Monbiot’s performance here was as ugly as watching McCarthy in his
heyday grilling American intellectuals to expose their Communist
sympathies. In full righteous mode, Monbiot ended by flaunting like some
diva his “depression” at the left’s “idiocy”. He lamented how Chomsky,
once his “hero”, had – by refusing to agree with him – proven himself a
fellow traveller with genocide deniers.
What underlies this argument, unexamined by Monbiot – presumably
because he lacks the self-awareness to understand it – is a serious
divergence of views about power.
Monbiot’s clash with Herman, Peterson and Chomsky is not really over
the facts of a genocide, but over who has a right to speak. Monbiot,
embedded in the camp of the corporate media, has adopted its ethos as
his own. Those who are respected – that is, those who stay within the
limits of officially sanctioned thought – have the right to advance
their claims. Those outside the magic circle – those not credited by the
corporate guardians of legitimate thought – do not. Herman, Peterson and
Chomsky’s work implicitly exposes the vacuous and circular logic of
Monbiot’s assumptions.
That point becomes especially clear if one reads through Monbiot’s
correspondence with Chomsky. Chomsky struggles to hide his exasperation
at Monbiot’s inability to grasp the elementary arguments he is making,
even though he is forced to make them repeatedly. Monbiot, on the other
hand, thinks he has cornered Chomsky in some kind of intellectual
hypocrisy. What he has revealed instead is how deeply embedded he is in
the corporate mindset, one that reserves for itself the right to
determine the limits of the thinkable.
Interestingly this month, however, Monbiot found his own assumptions
threatened from an unlikely quarter: the BBC. The corporation – one of
the most powerful of the enforcers of official narratives – made an
unusually daring programme,
Rwanda’s Untold
Story, questioning the consensus on the Rwandan genocide, all be it
20 years after the events. The programme-makers’ conclusions echoed
those of Herman and Peterson: that census figures and death toll
estimates do not support the accepted narrative of a genocide in which
the Tutsis were the main victims of the slaughter. The data, in fact,
indicate the exact opposite: more Hutus were killed than Tutsis,
possibly many times more.
This has ramifications beyond the historical. Paul Kagame, the leader
of the Tutsi militia the RPF, and therefore now potentially in the frame
as the chief perpetrator of a genocide against the Hutus, is today the
much-respected leader of Rwanda, a man feted by western leaders.
On my blog I
suggested last week, given that even the hyper-cautious BBC appears
ready to concede that the Rwanda genocide needs a reassessment, it might
be time for Monbiot to apologise for his ugly accusations against
Herman, Peterson, Chomsky and others.
So far Monbiot has made no proper response, despite receiving similar
demands for a retraction from a number of people on social media. It
would be nice to think that his silence suggests he is engaged in
soul-searching and formulating the necessary response. But unfortunately
the omens are not good.
Monbiot has not yet spoken himself but he has not remained entirely
silent either. In an indication that this may be more about his ego and
self-appointed status as guardian of a left righteousness, he retweeted
a
flippant dismissal of his critics, including me, provided by a group
called Mediocre Lens.
Sadly, that is very much of a piece with Monbiot’s behaviour on this
issue. Mediocre Lens is the poor cousin of what Monbiot has rightly
exposed elsewhere as the phenomenon of “fake persuaders”, usually
corporate lobbyists hiding behind front organisations that pose as
“concerned ordinary citizens”. The point of the fake persuaders is to
create the impression of popular support for corporate policies that
harm our interests, such as destroying forests and polluting rivers. In
short, the fake persuaders are there to uphold official narratives that
serve business interests.
Mediocre Lens does something similar, if rather more feebly. In its
case it claims to be a group of ordinary journalists with a “left
perspective” who promote the idea that the mainstream media is there to
serve our interests. More precisely, its sole rationale is to discredit
Media Lens, an increasingly popular website whose editors – wait for it
– advance the thesis of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
Monbiot’s promotion of a tweet from Mediocre Lens should make about
as much sense – if he were the independent thinker he claims to be – as
Naomi Klein retweeting approvingly an attack on the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change by a climate change denial group.
But it makes rather more sense if we understand that Monbiot is no
longer what he claims to be or seems. Years of being embedded in the
corporate media have eroded his ability to remain truly independent or
to appreciate those like Herman, Peterson and Chomsky who demand the
right to retain that privilege for themselves.
Tagged as:
media criticism
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2014-10-07/george-monbiot-the-lefts-mccarthy/#sthash.f1xog8Pt.dpuf
George Monbiot, the left’s McCarthy
7
October 2014
Znet – 7 October 2014
Questioning someone’s integrity is not something I do lightly,
especially when I share much ideological common ground with them. But
the unsavoury behaviour of George Monbiot, a leading columnist for the
Guardian and one of Britain’s most prominent progressive intellectuals,
is becoming ever harder to overlook – and forgive.
On a whole range of issues, such as corporate greed and threats to
the planet posed by climate change, I agree wholeheartedly with Monbiot.
It is also entirely possible for two people to disagree, even intensely,
but still believe their opponent’s views are legitimate and advanced in
good faith. That is how I regard, for example, Monbiot’s support for
nuclear power as the least-bad option for dealing with mounting carbon
emissions. It’s not a position I share, but he has set out his reasoning
clearly and honestly.
But I can extend no such understanding to his campaign of
vilification begun three years ago against several leading figures on
the progressive left.
It started with
an article in 2011 in which he attacked two scholars for publishing
a book, the Politics of Genocide, in which they collected together their
own and other experts’ research into two supposedly well-documented
genocides, in Rwanda and the Balkans. After examining the evidence, they
reached a controversial conclusion: that the nature of events in both
genocides had been distorted to fit western political agendas.
They did not question that large numbers of people had been killed in
either conflict. They and their contributors argued instead that the
term “genocide” had been used to draw a veil over the events, cementing
an official narrative that could not be questioned or re-assessed.
Instead, they suggested, the official narrative might be serving
political ends rather than reflecting accurately who had been killed and
why.
One of the two authors is Ed Herman, most famous for an influential
book, Manufacturing Consent, jointly written with Noam Chomsky, which
argues that the mainstream media are not the democratic and pluralistic
institutions they claim to be but rather corporations advancing official
narratives designed to serve elite – including, of course, their own –
interests. Herman and Chomsky’s thesis has only found more adherents
over time, particularly as the internet has provided dissident writers,
including Chomsky himself, with a rival platform from which to challenge
the consensus policed by the corporate media.
So it is hardly surprising, given their starting point about the
media’s role in manufacturing consent, that Herman and his collaborator,
David Peterson, should be suspicious of two of the strongest consensual
narratives of recent times: the Rwanda and Balkan genocides, which even
had their own dedicated international tribunals established to very
publicly put on trial the official bad guys.
It may also not be stretching credulity to suspect that Monbiot, a
leftwing intellectual who has thrown in his lot and reputation with the
Guardian on the assumption that Herman and Chomsky are wrong about the
corporate media, might not look too kindly on their thesis. If
Manufacturing Consent is right, then Monbiot is not a guardian of our
moral consciences, as he likes to think, but a guardian of the outer
limits of a corporate-sanctioned consensus.
It is increasingly hard to shake off such suspicions given his
behaviour over the past three years. Monbiot’s 2011 column denounced
Herman and Peterson as genocide deniers, probably the most serious
accusation one can level against a fellow intellectual. One might have
assumed that Monbiot would marshal enormous evidence before making such
a serious allegation. Not a bit of it: in his column he made a brief and
sweeping condemnation of their thesis and their right to question the
official narrative.
A single ugly column by Monbiot might possibly have been excused as
an unfortunate lapse. But he then
revisited the theme a year later in what can only be characterised
this time as an exercise in leftwing McCarthyism. Having no stronger
argument than before, Monbiot on this occasion recruited four academics
to his cause of denouncing Herman and Petersen as genocide deniers.
As someone who himself challenges orthodoxies – in my case Israeli
ones – I know precisely how weak this kind of resort to an argument from
authority is. Were I to so wish, I could easily seek to discredit the
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in similar fashion for his argument – an
entirely correct one – that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in
1948 from their homeland by Israel. All I would need is to find a
handful of respected historians and public intellectuals like Benny
Morris, Anita Shapira and Ari Shavit to support my case. But what would
this prove? Only that the job of many, if not most, “experts” in any
field is to help construct and maintain official narratives. That is,
after all, why they are official narratives!
But not satisfied with tarring the reputations of Herman and
Peterson, this time Monbiot chose to drag in Chomsky too. On his
website, he published
a
lengthy correspondence between the two in which he tried first to
cajole, then demand that Chomsky join him in denouncing Herman as a
genocide denier. Chomsky staunchly refused, repeatedly providing Monbiot
with his reasoning.
Monbiot’s performance here was as ugly as watching McCarthy in his
heyday grilling American intellectuals to expose their Communist
sympathies. In full righteous mode, Monbiot ended by flaunting like some
diva his “depression” at the left’s “idiocy”. He lamented how Chomsky,
once his “hero”, had – by refusing to agree with him – proven himself a
fellow traveller with genocide deniers.
What underlies this argument, unexamined by Monbiot – presumably
because he lacks the self-awareness to understand it – is a serious
divergence of views about power.
Monbiot’s clash with Herman, Peterson and Chomsky is not really over
the facts of a genocide, but over who has a right to speak. Monbiot,
embedded in the camp of the corporate media, has adopted its ethos as
his own. Those who are respected – that is, those who stay within the
limits of officially sanctioned thought – have the right to advance
their claims. Those outside the magic circle – those not credited by the
corporate guardians of legitimate thought – do not. Herman, Peterson and
Chomsky’s work implicitly exposes the vacuous and circular logic of
Monbiot’s assumptions.
That point becomes especially clear if one reads through Monbiot’s
correspondence with Chomsky. Chomsky struggles to hide his exasperation
at Monbiot’s inability to grasp the elementary arguments he is making,
even though he is forced to make them repeatedly. Monbiot, on the other
hand, thinks he has cornered Chomsky in some kind of intellectual
hypocrisy. What he has revealed instead is how deeply embedded he is in
the corporate mindset, one that reserves for itself the right to
determine the limits of the thinkable.
Interestingly this month, however, Monbiot found his own assumptions
threatened from an unlikely quarter: the BBC. The corporation – one of
the most powerful of the enforcers of official narratives – made an
unusually daring programme,
Rwanda’s Untold
Story, questioning the consensus on the Rwandan genocide, all be it
20 years after the events. The programme-makers’ conclusions echoed
those of Herman and Peterson: that census figures and death toll
estimates do not support the accepted narrative of a genocide in which
the Tutsis were the main victims of the slaughter. The data, in fact,
indicate the exact opposite: more Hutus were killed than Tutsis,
possibly many times more.
This has ramifications beyond the historical. Paul Kagame, the leader
of the Tutsi militia the RPF, and therefore now potentially in the frame
as the chief perpetrator of a genocide against the Hutus, is today the
much-respected leader of Rwanda, a man feted by western leaders.
On my blog I
suggested last week, given that even the hyper-cautious BBC appears
ready to concede that the Rwanda genocide needs a reassessment, it might
be time for Monbiot to apologise for his ugly accusations against
Herman, Peterson, Chomsky and others.
So far Monbiot has made no proper response, despite receiving similar
demands for a retraction from a number of people on social media. It
would be nice to think that his silence suggests he is engaged in
soul-searching and formulating the necessary response. But unfortunately
the omens are not good.
Monbiot has not yet spoken himself but he has not remained entirely
silent either. In an indication that this may be more about his ego and
self-appointed status as guardian of a left righteousness, he retweeted
a
flippant dismissal of his critics, including me, provided by a group
called Mediocre Lens.
Sadly, that is very much of a piece with Monbiot’s behaviour on this
issue. Mediocre Lens is the poor cousin of what Monbiot has rightly
exposed elsewhere as the phenomenon of “fake persuaders”, usually
corporate lobbyists hiding behind front organisations that pose as
“concerned ordinary citizens”. The point of the fake persuaders is to
create the impression of popular support for corporate policies that
harm our interests, such as destroying forests and polluting rivers. In
short, the fake persuaders are there to uphold official narratives that
serve business interests.
Mediocre Lens does something similar, if rather more feebly. In its
case it claims to be a group of ordinary journalists with a “left
perspective” who promote the idea that the mainstream media is there to
serve our interests. More precisely, its sole rationale is to discredit
Media Lens, an increasingly popular website whose editors – wait for it
– advance the thesis of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
Monbiot’s promotion of a tweet from Mediocre Lens should make about
as much sense – if he were the independent thinker he claims to be – as
Naomi Klein retweeting approvingly an attack on the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change by a climate change denial group.
But it makes rather more sense if we understand that Monbiot is no
longer what he claims to be or seems. Years of being embedded in the
corporate media have eroded his ability to remain truly independent or
to appreciate those like Herman, Peterson and Chomsky who demand the
right to retain that privilege for themselves.
Tagged as:
media criticism
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2014-10-07/george-monbiot-the-lefts-mccarthy/#sthash.f1xog8Pt.dpuf