Is there a politician in the house? - part deux
Sixty-nine weeks ago, so LJ informs me, I posted a disgusted note titled "Is there a politician in the house?", commenting on the folly and incompetence of Gordon Brown as a politician, and wondering how someone who had spent his whole life in politics could be so lamentably incapable of the slightest properly political act and thought - of any act and thought intended to achieve an end, rather than posture for the newspapers (who hated him anyway). However, the last few months have shown nearly every political leader in the West, and nearly every media person, in such a lamentable light as to make me wonder whether I had not been, in fact, unfair to Mr.Brown. As we seem to have raised a generation of journalists who don't know what news reporting is, so we have raised a generation of politicians whose expensive degrees from top universities never once awakened them to the fact that politics is about achieving ends.
Mental flabbiness from journalists and politicians is not exactly news, but this year has been astounding - and, mind you, in matters that come close to our most essential interests. The untroubled, universal assumption that the riots of Tunisia and Cairo were, in spite of wholly different political and cultural conditions, the dawn of a continent-wide democratic revolution similar to the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989-1991, was so imbecilic as to suggest that there would be no need to deprive media or political classes of any freedom, since they were incapable of thinking for themselves in the first place. A culture of universal mutual interviewing led people to repeat each other's talking points to the extent that it would take advanced research to find where each cliche had first been uttered. And then there was the frightful ignorance that assumed that "popular movements" and street revolts, indeed street politics, were anything new to the Arab world in general and to Egypt in particular, rather than a regularity of Arab and Muslim history; that had never heard of the frightful manners - to avoid description - of Cairene males, let alone other Egyptians, towards women; that did not realize that Egypt did not end at the Cairo city limits; that had never even began to appreciate the Muslim Brotherhood, even if it had ever heard of it; and that did not seem to know the significance - that any Muslim or resident could have explained - of the fact that each bout of revolt followed with metronomic regularity the morning Friday prayers in the mosques. Until the appalling gang rape of Lara Logan - and even that does not seem to have wholly awakened her colleagues - every Western journalist was wholly taken by the puppet show, and did not even think of lifting the green baize backloth a little to try and see what was going on behind.
Of course the public followed suit. If no journalist reported that several dozen Christians were being murdered, and two ancient churches razed and then claimed as mosques, outside Cairo, why should the public not be taken in by the mummery of Cairene Christian demonstrators guarding Muslims at prayer, as the Cairene Muslims did for them in their turn? Why should the public doubt? And so lies by omission are foisted on the public, and the public rejoices at what should trouble them deeply. For this we send people to journalism school? Abolish every degree in journalism, forbid people to study anything except the subjects they intend to report about, and we might have an improvement, though God knows the human material is unpromising enough to begin with. Mencken, thou shouldst be living at this hour. But a journalist who is an ex-policeman, or who has walked the beat with them all his life; who is a permanent long-term resident of a foreign city; who really is a fan of a particular sport; has at least a chance of having a reasonable understanding of what he is reporting about. I am lucky enough to know one such, a woman who reports from Paris because she has been born in the city and knows it and its scandal from the cradle. Inevitably, one line of her articles is worth twenty pages of the usual kind of France-bashing or France-mocking nonsense poured out from the European desks of the BBC and most newspapers. (No such person seems to have been found in Italy, which is why what little reporting is done from my country is even worse and more uncomprehending than the average.) A journalist, on the other hand, sent to cover the city streets, or farming stories, or a foreign country, or even sports, with a degree in journalism as his or her main qualification, is nothing more than a certified ignoramus with a training in glibness; and we have seen the result.
Idiotic though the journalists may have been, the politicians were worse. With one and a half exceptions, they proved as incapable to discern events as to set a course five minutes ahead of events - proved, in other words, incapable of the very things they are paid, and paid generously, to do. As soon as the elderly and tired tyrant of Tunisia decided that he did not want to make the effort of crushing the revoultionary movement by main force, everyone was jumping up and down, complimenting the whole Arab nation (though Tunisia is both small and untypical); when the equally elderly and possibly equally tired pharaoh of Egypt also opted for the quiet life, everyone lined up to congratulate the Egyptian nation on its novel love of liberty. (We should remember that when Nasser's whole policy, not to mention his military credentials, were shattered and discredited by the Six-Day War, Nasser was honourable and honest enough to try to resign - only to be balked by a sudden mass movement of the whole Egyptian nation, that took to the streets to beg him to go on being their Pharaoh. As I said, street movements and revolts are hardly new in Egypt.) A chorus of prophets was heard, prophesying the morning of democracy in the Arab world; and never mind that the Army was still in charge in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood as its main rival and prospective "loyal" opposition.
Suddenly, however, just as the news about Lara Logan's terrible rape were slowly filtering past the self-built wall of her own colleagues' silence, it happened that one Arab monarch (never mind whether crowned or not) refused to follow the script. Muammar el Gheddafi, lord of Libya since his early twenties, arrogant, crafty, bloodthirsty, and not yet as tired as the two men in their eighties who had left Tunisia and Egypt, made it clear that anyone who wanted his crown would have to rip it from his cold dead hands. Not that there weren't volunteers; the disaffected province of Cyrenaica, home of the king whom Gheddafi had overthrown, had soon driven every one of his supporters out - or watched them turn into opposition leaders overnight. But while Western leaders, with Sarkozy and Cameron in the vocal van, set off in a perfect morning chorus of hooray for Libyan liberty, masses of armed rebels - barely orderly enough to qualify as an armed force - were facing the reaction of loyal and/or mercenary army units. And guess what? The professionals were winning, as they always tend to do. By the time France intervened, they were in the suburbs of the rebel capital Bengasi.
So why did France intervene? There has been much talk about Mediterranean ambitions, about Franco-Arabic politics, about oil; but following President Sarkozy's words and deeds, and indeed those of his fellow-blusterer David Cameron, one cannot shake off the feeling that the political leaders of France and Britain just did not want to look foolish in public. As Gheddafi recovered, their rhetoric of congratulation and encouragement was growing more and more separate from the facts on the ground; until the only hope the rebels had to fulfil the role that Sarko and Call-me-Dave had imagined for them was massive intervention from a real armed force.
I am no pacifist. But nobody sshould take their people into the horror and ruin of war unless there was no other choice and unless a clear goal was set. Certainly "I don't want to look stupid by accepting I made a wrong forecast on Libya" does not count. And yet the fallacious sense of an irresistible momentum, spread ignorant and irresponsible media, was so dominant that nobody noticed that war was being started merely to fit the agony of reality to the fallacious pattern of the leaders' speeches. The thing is, most people and all journalists had been swept up in that unreal bombast. If Call-me-Dave was speaking as though the Libyans were free already, so did the newspaper and the bloke down at the pub - at least temporarily. People barely noticed that the line between congratulating the Libyans on their insurrection and intervening in Libya was being crossed, and there they were.
Only two political leaders seem to have realized that they were being dragged into danger by the unchallenged force of windy words. I once told inverarity that I did not dread what President Obama knew about Islam, but what he didn't know. Although culturally marginal, his experience of Islam has always been that of rich and civilized elites. Nothing I know of him suggests that he has ever seen grassroots Islam in its poorer and more populous settings, or experienced the preaching of an ignorant, resentful cleric with more ambition than mind. However, he does at least seem to have absorbed the Islamic upper classes' instinctive distaste for street manifestations and revolts, a distaste based on centuries of bad experiences. So when the cry went up across the West for ARab liberty and power in the streets, Obama's voice was notably late and tinny. And when the Anglo-French, for the first time since the Suez crisis, started pushing for intervention autonomously from the US, he gave the bare minimum of help and made it clear that he wanted them to take the leadership. Maybe he couldn't keep the USA out of the Libyan mess, but at least he reduced involvement as much as he could.
Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel once again proved the best European leader and the only man of the lot. Unpoetic and uninspiring though she is, she has proved, when necessary, ready and willing to risk her authority and throw every card on the table; in particular, when she risked her authority and her majority on her decision to rescue Greece against the desire of considerable amounts of Germans. I remember her facing down an unwilling Bundestag and getting her way, and she was right. Now she refused to let Germany be dragged into a mess that shows every sign of degenerating and ending up with allied troops in Libya, where nobody, including them, wants them to go.
Mental flabbiness from journalists and politicians is not exactly news, but this year has been astounding - and, mind you, in matters that come close to our most essential interests. The untroubled, universal assumption that the riots of Tunisia and Cairo were, in spite of wholly different political and cultural conditions, the dawn of a continent-wide democratic revolution similar to the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989-1991, was so imbecilic as to suggest that there would be no need to deprive media or political classes of any freedom, since they were incapable of thinking for themselves in the first place. A culture of universal mutual interviewing led people to repeat each other's talking points to the extent that it would take advanced research to find where each cliche had first been uttered. And then there was the frightful ignorance that assumed that "popular movements" and street revolts, indeed street politics, were anything new to the Arab world in general and to Egypt in particular, rather than a regularity of Arab and Muslim history; that had never heard of the frightful manners - to avoid description - of Cairene males, let alone other Egyptians, towards women; that did not realize that Egypt did not end at the Cairo city limits; that had never even began to appreciate the Muslim Brotherhood, even if it had ever heard of it; and that did not seem to know the significance - that any Muslim or resident could have explained - of the fact that each bout of revolt followed with metronomic regularity the morning Friday prayers in the mosques. Until the appalling gang rape of Lara Logan - and even that does not seem to have wholly awakened her colleagues - every Western journalist was wholly taken by the puppet show, and did not even think of lifting the green baize backloth a little to try and see what was going on behind.
Of course the public followed suit. If no journalist reported that several dozen Christians were being murdered, and two ancient churches razed and then claimed as mosques, outside Cairo, why should the public not be taken in by the mummery of Cairene Christian demonstrators guarding Muslims at prayer, as the Cairene Muslims did for them in their turn? Why should the public doubt? And so lies by omission are foisted on the public, and the public rejoices at what should trouble them deeply. For this we send people to journalism school? Abolish every degree in journalism, forbid people to study anything except the subjects they intend to report about, and we might have an improvement, though God knows the human material is unpromising enough to begin with. Mencken, thou shouldst be living at this hour. But a journalist who is an ex-policeman, or who has walked the beat with them all his life; who is a permanent long-term resident of a foreign city; who really is a fan of a particular sport; has at least a chance of having a reasonable understanding of what he is reporting about. I am lucky enough to know one such, a woman who reports from Paris because she has been born in the city and knows it and its scandal from the cradle. Inevitably, one line of her articles is worth twenty pages of the usual kind of France-bashing or France-mocking nonsense poured out from the European desks of the BBC and most newspapers. (No such person seems to have been found in Italy, which is why what little reporting is done from my country is even worse and more uncomprehending than the average.) A journalist, on the other hand, sent to cover the city streets, or farming stories, or a foreign country, or even sports, with a degree in journalism as his or her main qualification, is nothing more than a certified ignoramus with a training in glibness; and we have seen the result.
Idiotic though the journalists may have been, the politicians were worse. With one and a half exceptions, they proved as incapable to discern events as to set a course five minutes ahead of events - proved, in other words, incapable of the very things they are paid, and paid generously, to do. As soon as the elderly and tired tyrant of Tunisia decided that he did not want to make the effort of crushing the revoultionary movement by main force, everyone was jumping up and down, complimenting the whole Arab nation (though Tunisia is both small and untypical); when the equally elderly and possibly equally tired pharaoh of Egypt also opted for the quiet life, everyone lined up to congratulate the Egyptian nation on its novel love of liberty. (We should remember that when Nasser's whole policy, not to mention his military credentials, were shattered and discredited by the Six-Day War, Nasser was honourable and honest enough to try to resign - only to be balked by a sudden mass movement of the whole Egyptian nation, that took to the streets to beg him to go on being their Pharaoh. As I said, street movements and revolts are hardly new in Egypt.) A chorus of prophets was heard, prophesying the morning of democracy in the Arab world; and never mind that the Army was still in charge in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood as its main rival and prospective "loyal" opposition.
Suddenly, however, just as the news about Lara Logan's terrible rape were slowly filtering past the self-built wall of her own colleagues' silence, it happened that one Arab monarch (never mind whether crowned or not) refused to follow the script. Muammar el Gheddafi, lord of Libya since his early twenties, arrogant, crafty, bloodthirsty, and not yet as tired as the two men in their eighties who had left Tunisia and Egypt, made it clear that anyone who wanted his crown would have to rip it from his cold dead hands. Not that there weren't volunteers; the disaffected province of Cyrenaica, home of the king whom Gheddafi had overthrown, had soon driven every one of his supporters out - or watched them turn into opposition leaders overnight. But while Western leaders, with Sarkozy and Cameron in the vocal van, set off in a perfect morning chorus of hooray for Libyan liberty, masses of armed rebels - barely orderly enough to qualify as an armed force - were facing the reaction of loyal and/or mercenary army units. And guess what? The professionals were winning, as they always tend to do. By the time France intervened, they were in the suburbs of the rebel capital Bengasi.
So why did France intervene? There has been much talk about Mediterranean ambitions, about Franco-Arabic politics, about oil; but following President Sarkozy's words and deeds, and indeed those of his fellow-blusterer David Cameron, one cannot shake off the feeling that the political leaders of France and Britain just did not want to look foolish in public. As Gheddafi recovered, their rhetoric of congratulation and encouragement was growing more and more separate from the facts on the ground; until the only hope the rebels had to fulfil the role that Sarko and Call-me-Dave had imagined for them was massive intervention from a real armed force.
I am no pacifist. But nobody sshould take their people into the horror and ruin of war unless there was no other choice and unless a clear goal was set. Certainly "I don't want to look stupid by accepting I made a wrong forecast on Libya" does not count. And yet the fallacious sense of an irresistible momentum, spread ignorant and irresponsible media, was so dominant that nobody noticed that war was being started merely to fit the agony of reality to the fallacious pattern of the leaders' speeches. The thing is, most people and all journalists had been swept up in that unreal bombast. If Call-me-Dave was speaking as though the Libyans were free already, so did the newspaper and the bloke down at the pub - at least temporarily. People barely noticed that the line between congratulating the Libyans on their insurrection and intervening in Libya was being crossed, and there they were.
Only two political leaders seem to have realized that they were being dragged into danger by the unchallenged force of windy words. I once told inverarity that I did not dread what President Obama knew about Islam, but what he didn't know. Although culturally marginal, his experience of Islam has always been that of rich and civilized elites. Nothing I know of him suggests that he has ever seen grassroots Islam in its poorer and more populous settings, or experienced the preaching of an ignorant, resentful cleric with more ambition than mind. However, he does at least seem to have absorbed the Islamic upper classes' instinctive distaste for street manifestations and revolts, a distaste based on centuries of bad experiences. So when the cry went up across the West for ARab liberty and power in the streets, Obama's voice was notably late and tinny. And when the Anglo-French, for the first time since the Suez crisis, started pushing for intervention autonomously from the US, he gave the bare minimum of help and made it clear that he wanted them to take the leadership. Maybe he couldn't keep the USA out of the Libyan mess, but at least he reduced involvement as much as he could.
Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel once again proved the best European leader and the only man of the lot. Unpoetic and uninspiring though she is, she has proved, when necessary, ready and willing to risk her authority and throw every card on the table; in particular, when she risked her authority and her majority on her decision to rescue Greece against the desire of considerable amounts of Germans. I remember her facing down an unwilling Bundestag and getting her way, and she was right. Now she refused to let Germany be dragged into a mess that shows every sign of degenerating and ending up with allied troops in Libya, where nobody, including them, wants them to go.