Bush's Useful Idiots
From Robert Boyers: Most
American liberal intellectuals surely agree with Tony Judt about the
catastrophe that is the Bush foreign policy, and the Bush
administration's 'sustained attack on civil liberties and international
law' (LRB, 21 September).
As a consequence, it seems necessary to say that the charges he levels
are, to a considerable degree, misleading, and reflect a deplorable 'cultural provincialism' (Judt's words) that is surprising in so
seasoned a critic. To read Judt, one would think that the only liberal
intellectuals that matter in the United States – and the only ones he
reads – are the handful of journalists who contribute pieces to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
The only other so-called or one-time liberals who apparently wield any
influence, according to Judt, are the new hawks who write to urge a war
against Islamofascism, people like Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff and
Leon Wieseltier.
The truth is that the pages of American journals
are filled with attacks on Bush's foreign policy, and indeed on the
entire record of the current administration in Washington. The op-ed
pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post
regularly contain blistering attacks on Bush and his policies, attacks
which do not at all buy into the 'binary division of the world along
ideological lines' that Judt rightly condemns. To be sure, Thomas
Friedman has not given up his hectoring about 'the larger struggle
we're in', but the New York Times has done a good deal to
rally the liberal intelligentsia with hard-hitting pieces by Frank
Rich, Paul Krugman and others. Beyond the newspapers of record, there
is a whole other world in the United States that Judt seems either to
know nothing about or to ignore.
Why does he not cite the American liberal intellectuals who write for Harper's, or Daedalus, or my own quarterly, Salmagundi? Why not mention the lengthy pieces contributed to Harper's in recent months by its just-retired editor, Lewis Lapham? The current issue of Salmagundi,
a special number on 'Jihad, McWorld, Modernity', contains contributions
from liberal intellectuals like Benjamin Barber, Martha Nussbaum,
Orlando Patterson, James Miller and Carolyn Forche, not to mention
other intellectuals like Breyten Breytenbach, Peter Singer and Tzvetan
Todorov. Not one of these people has 'acquiesced' in the Bush
programme. Not one has agreed to the silence that Judt contends has
spread across the American intellectual scene. Not one is other than
committed to resisting what Judt calls 'the unilateral promotion of
empire'.
Yes, quite as Judt contends, 'many of America's most
prominent liberals have censored themselves in the name of the war on
terror,' but many other prominent and not so prominent intellectuals
have refused to 'provide the ethical fig leaf' for the brutal policies
Judt would have us identify and resist. To suggest otherwise is not to
get the picture right.
Robert Boyers
Saratoga Springs, New York
From Harold Jaffe:
Tony
Judt names a dozen or so former 'liberals' who have seemingly deserted
the cause by backing Bush's war in Iraq. Nearly all of the so-called
liberals he cites happen to be mainstream and Jewish, and one can
readily infer that many of them put their concern for Israel's welfare,
as they interpreted it, ahead of their liberalism. The greater omission
in Judt's article is the plethora of dissenting opinion in organs that
are simply not represented in mainstream media. From blogs to Z-Magazine
online, and from Chomsky and Zinn to graduate students throughout the
US, there is and has been a great deal of informed dissent. That this
dissent is marginalised or utterly unacknowledged is the fault of the
corporatised media, which ought really to be the subject of Judt's
interrogation.
Harold Jaffe
San Diego, California
