Stephen Kinzer | CiF Watch

‘Comment is Free’ contributor Stephen Kinzer, much like fellow contributors Glenn Greenwald and Michael Cohen, is angry with the foes of Chuck Hagel.

Hagel, a far-right Republican hostile to abortion rights, gay rights and civil rights, and who has come under fire for his views on Israel, the Middle East and the Islamist regime in Tehran, has strangely become a progressive cause celeb among the Guardian-style left.

At the heart of the case against Senator Hagel’s nomination, according to Kinzer, is the Nebraska Senator’s opposition to the powerful pro-war movement.

He writes:

“What do Nebraska and Iran have in common? Not much – but enough to cause big trouble for former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, whose possible nomination to be secretary of defense is being challenged by the powerful bomb-Iran-yesterday lobby.”

Also troubling Kinzer are the “militarists” controlled by the pro-Israel lobby.

“Militarists in Washington, taking their cue from pro-Israel lobbyists, are trying to derail the appointment because Hagel doubts the wisdom of starting another war in the Middle East.”

Kinzer helpfully contextualizes the political debate in Washington by evoking a political debate in the US which took place 95 years ago.

“Nebraska Senator George Norris, who voted against both United States entry into first world war and American membership in the League of Nations…told Americans that the push toward global engagement was the project of “munition manufacturers, stockbrokers, and bond dealers“; and he warned that it “brings no prosperity to the great mass of common and patriotic citizens.”

Hagel is in the great American tradition of the prairie populist. He has sought to speak a word or two of truth to power. Power is not amused. That is why his nomination is in trouble before it has even been announced.”

An isolationist who warns of the hidden hand of militarists, unpatriotic Zionists, the military industrial complex, and monied classes?

The fact that such hysterical, sophomoric agitprop – which manages to evoke the nativist fear-mongering of Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford – has found its way onto the pages of ‘Comment is Free’ would only come as a surprise to those who still entertain the fanciful notion that the Guardian is a liberal institution.

The stranglehold on the US by one lobby: One minute with Glenn Greenwald (cifwatch.com)
The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald again smears pro-Israel American Jews (cifwatch.com)

This is cross posted from the blog of Terry Glavin, and is a powerful response to Stephen Kinzer’s CiF piece on Dec. 31, titled, “End Human Rights Imperialism Now“.

The headline on Stephen Kinzer’s unintentionally self-incriminating display of the rot that has eaten away at the rich world’s “left” spoke sufficient volumes all by itself last week: “End Human Rights Imperialism Now”.

Apart from being a classic study in deception masquerading as revelation and self-deception masquerading as reflection (and a workshop-worthy specimen of straw-man argument, besides), what was exceptionally useful about the spectacle Kinzer made of himself was the service he provided in presenting a textbook example of the madhouse delusion that will inevitably result from the muddles of moral, epistemic and cultural relativism.

There’s no point in resorting to empirically-derived evidence if you’re trying to talk sense to someone whose very arguments rest on the absence of such universal standards if not their wholesale rejection. The dialectic, as we used to say, is simply not going to move forward. There will be rot in both form and content. Some people are just numpties.

But today, also in the Guardian, in an essay well-titled Beware those who sneer at ‘human rights imperialism’, our friend Sohrab Ahmari does yeoman service in exposing the bankruptcy of the pseudo-left orthodoxy that Kinzer so helpfully distilled. Sohrab does so by simply raising this question:

“If the isolationist, provincial left manages to convince us that the blessing of liberty is to be allocated randomly – along geographic lines and according to the accident of birth – will the heart still beat on the left?”

It’s my own view that on the so-called “anti-imperialist” left, the truly progressive heart had already stopped beating at least a decade ago. True enough, the zombies have been stumbling around for much longer than that. Ahmari begins by citing Albert Camus’s observations of his erstwhile French comrades in the 1950s. In its response to the Hungarian Uprising, the “left” had betrayed itself as having fallen into useless decadence, “caught in its own vocabulary, capable of merely stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws.”

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