Ashes of Our Fathers » Men and Women

Censorship, War, and Bad Manners

N.S. Palmer — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:47:50 +0000

By N.S. Palmer, Ph.D.

I’m reading the Sunday New York Times and drinking coffee at McDonalds while I procrastinate about doing the real work of the day.

The Sunday print edition of The Times is about half the size that it used to be. The pages are smaller, there are fewer of them, and whole sections have been eliminated. Partly, it’s because of the recession. Mostly, it’s because there are fewer readers and thus lower advertising revenue. But it’s still a substantial newspaper, one of the few remaining examples of the species.

It’s also, as Churchill said of Russia, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

During the Bush-Cheney nightmare, The Times slavishly suppressed any stories that the administration wanted to keep secret, such as torture, illegal wiretapping, and anomalies in the official story of the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, it enthusiastically front-paged administration propaganda that it knew, or should have known, was false, such as the myth of Iraqi WMDs and various provocateur-fabricated “terror plots.”

Now, however, The Times is printing secrets all over the place. Partly, it might be because Executive Editor Bill Keller is ashamed of his actions during the Bush-Cheney years. Partly, it’s probably because he isn’t as afraid of the Obama administration as he was of Bush and Cheney.

Machiavelli, Nixon, and Obama

The Bush-Cheney regime asked a simple question to get people’s cooperation: “If you cross us, would you prefer to have your back broken or your neck broken?”

The Obama administration, however, wants to sit down and reason with you. If progressives say that white is white and Wall Street Republicans say that white is black, Obama’s instinct is to split the difference and say that white is gray. But as soon as he makes that concession, Wall Street Republicans insist that gray is black, and the negotiations begin again. Inch by inch, compromise by compromise, working Americans get scr*wed.

It’s not for nothing that Machiavelli said it’s better for a prince to be feared than to be loved.

We can see the difference not only in news media but in Congress, where obstructionist Republicans and spineless Democrats blocked or weakened legislation vitally needed by working and unemployed Americans. They’re not afraid of crossing the Obama administration as they were of Bush-Cheney. They’re more afraid of Wall Street, Fox News, and Glenn Beck.

Another brilliant political thinker, less admired than Machiavelli, was — believe it or not — disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon. As president, he tried to make people think he was slightly crazy, so that they believed his actions were not rationally predictable: “If you set him off, Heaven knows what he’d do: he might start a nuclear war!” Nixon called it his “madman theory.” Of course, it was a variation on Machiavelli, whose work Nixon had read.

Obama suffers from the opposite fault. He seems very calm and rational, so his actions and reactions are quite predictable. It enables his adversaries to play him like a violin.

Reporters Sneak Facts Past Censorship

The Times still carries water for the government, if less consistently than it did during the Bush-Cheney era. Having worked as a newspaper reporter in Washington DC, I can see that Times reporters often try to “sneak” forbidden facts past management censorship.

One news story about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after the 9/11 attacks noted, far down toward the end of the article, that (a) in addition to the two towers, WTC Building 7 collapsed but hadn’t been hit by anything; and (b) no comparable buildings before or since 9/11 have ever collapsed due to fire or airplane impacts. The reporter knew.

Another news story about the recent Wikileaks release of Afghan war documents dutifully parroted the government’s line that Wikileaks had not sought the Pentagon’s help in redacting potentially harmful information. But further down in the article, near the bottom, it recounted how Wikileaks contacted the Pentagon and sought its help to do exactly what the same article earlier said Wikileaks had not done. The reporter knew.

It’s how things work sometimes. When I was a reporter, I once wrote an important article about government security measures that was accurate and had no classified information. The newspaper’s editor re-wrote the first two paragraphs to say exactly the opposite of what the rest of the article documented. The theory was that most people wouldn’t read the entire article, which still had my byline. Anyone who read the whole article must have thought I was nuts.

Bringing Democracy to Iraq

On the other side, there’s still plenty of propaganda in The Times. A “Week in Review” article about “Winning, Losing, and War” states:

As the last officially designated American combat forces left Iraq, television cameras caught the exultation of a soldier finally heading home.

“We won!” he yelled. “It’s over! America, we brought democracy to Iraq!”

When I first read that, I thought of the incident years earlier when news media reported that Iraqis had spontaneously pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Of course, the whole thing was staged by the Bush-Cheney administration for propaganda purposes, and many of the people pulling down the statue weren’t even Iraqis, having been flown in as actors for the “unreality TV” show.

Did a soldier really yell that nonsense about bringing democracy to Iraq? Possibly. Was the soldier instructed to say it, and was the incident staged for propaganda purposes? Almost certainly, and the reporter had to know it.

Fearless Leader Bush

But of course, we all remember how Fearless Leader Bush called Americans to arms in 2001-2002, saying that “it’s time we brought democracy to Iraq.”

Oops. He didn’t say that. He said that dat debbil Saddam Hussein, whose only difference from Bush and Cheney was that they dress better, had nookular bombs and anthrax-spraying aerial drones that he was going to unleash on American cities. Darth Cheney went on TV to say that “we know where the weapons labs are.”

General Colin “Uncle Tom” Powell went before the United Nations with a faked slide show purporting to prove that Iraq was bristling with illegal WMDs. Administration officials and surrogates also peddled the false story that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, thereby to provide a fig leaf of legality to an otherwise naked act of aggression.

The Bush-Cheney regime didn’t invade Iraq to make it into a democracy. Bush and Cheney lied and frightened Americans into supporting the war:

Because they wanted to conquer and loot the country.
Because Dubya wanted the glory of being a “war prezadent.”
Because they wanted to enrich their friends and military contractors.
Because they wanted to regain control of Iraqi oil resources for themselves and their friends in the oil industry.
Because they wanted to satisfy their perverse lust for murder and destruction.
Because they wanted to increase the threat of terrorist attacks, real and imaginary, so that they could destroy the tattered remains of Constitutional protections for ordinary Americans.

Saddam Hussein is dead. Bush and Cheney are still walking around free, and they will be supported in luxury by taxpayers for the rest of their evil lives. You couldn’t write this stuff as fiction. Nobody would believe it.

Gay Marriage Redux

N.S. Palmer — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:03:59 +0000

By N.S. Palmer, Ph.D.

One of the advantages of having smart friends who disagree with you is that they make you work harder to prove what you say.

My recent blog opposing “gay marriage” produced just such a response. My correspondent thought that I was merely playing with words. In my blog article, I argued that “civil unions” should give gays all the same rights as heterosexual married couples. So why make such a fuss about denying the word “marriage” to gay unions? There are three main answers.

Words Have Power

First, words have power by their connection with the things they denote. To apply a word to something is to commit oneself to a particular way of acting and looking at the world. To apply the word “marriage” to gay unions is to admit gays to the “heterosexual club.” For the reasons I enumerated in my previous article, many people find that either illogical, uncomfortable, or outrageous.

Inflating Concepts Empties Them of Meaning

Second, concepts such as “marriage” have meaning both by inclusion and by exclusion. For example, to be Jewish means, positively, (a) to follow or at least know Jewish religious practices and traditions, (b) to have seen the inside of a synagogue at least a few times, and (c) either to have been born as part of the historic Jewish people or to have converted by an accepted Jewish ritual.

But to be Jewish also has a negative meaning. If you are a Jew, you are not (a) a believer in the Christian doctrines of the Trinity or the Incarnation; (b) a formal communicant of some other religion; or (c) completely indifferent to and unconnected with the Jewish people and Israel.

Suppose the government decreed that henceforth, everyone would be considered Jewish. Would Jews be indifferent to that? No. Such a decree, to the extent it was followed, would empty the concept of Jewishness of virtually all its meaning. The wider the application of a concept, the less meaning it has. A concept that excludes nothing, means nothing. (Interestingly, the French word “rien” and the Hebrew word “khloom” both can mean either “anything” or “nothing,” depending on the context.)

In a way, the process of “conceptual inflation” is similar to monetary inflation. If the government increases the money supply, then other things being equal, the value of each unit of money decreases. More dollars chasing the same quantity of goods means that each dollar is worth less. If you have $10 in your wallet and the government doubles the money supply, it has imposed a significant cost on you without ever touching you. It wasn’t necessary to mug you in an alley and take your wallet. All that was needed was to increase the social supply of what you already had. The $10 in your wallet is now worth much less than it was before.

Likewise, the more government inflates the concept of marriage to include people and practices that it has not traditionally included, the more it devalues the institution of marriage and empties it of meaning. That imposes a significant cost on heterosexual married couples and on society at large. Imposing that cost would only be reasonable to rectify a serious injustice that could not be rectified in a less disruptive way.

Settled Practices Should Not Be Changed Without a Compelling Reason

Third, gays are a minority: depending on whose statistics you believe, between one and 10 percent of the population. Gays who want to get married are a minority of that minority. Moreover, many gays (such as lesbian feminist author Camille Paglia) think that the “gay marriage” crusade is a bad idea.

Gays should get the same respect as heterosexuals, but that doesn’t mean that the heterosexual majority should always give way. The gay-marriage crusade asks us to redefine and devalue the institution of marriage in order to placate a minority of a minority. If there were no other way for gays to get equal legal rights, then fine. But there is another way. If civil unions aren’t currently good enough, then amend those laws. But let the heterosexual majority keep its institution of marriage.

Let’s try putting that into an informal argument:

Settled practices are part of the psychological identity and heritage of people in the societies where those practices exist.
Changing settled practices imposes a psychological cost on the people in the society where they exist.
The longer that practices have been settled, and the more widely they are followed, the higher is the psychological cost of changing them.
Therefore, the longer established and more widespread a practice is, the higher must be the burden of proof on anyone who wants to change it.
Therefore, one should not change settled social practices unless there are compelling reasons to do so.

Coercion and violence should be avoided whenever possible.
Therefore, if changing a settled practice requires coercion or violence (i.e., government fiat), then the burden of proof for changing it must be even higher.

Gays’ lack of access to the social institution of marriage does not impose a significant material burden on them because they can achieve the same material results via civil unions (perhaps requiring amendments of relevant laws).
The lack of access to marriage does impose a psychological burden on gays who want to marry and would not be satisfied by civil union.
The traditional family (father, mother, children) is a vital institution for preserving and continuing civilisation. Giving marriage a special status encourages people to create traditional families. Removing that special status would harm not only the majority, but society as a whole.

Gays are a minority of the population, somewhere between one percent and 10 percent of the population, depending on whom you believe (though none of the statistics are probably very reliable).
Gays who want to get married are a minority of the gay population: hence, they are a minority of a minority. I do not know of any statistics, reliable or otherwise, about the size of this sub-minority.

Changing the long-settled, nearly-universal practice of marriage to include gays would require coercion.
Changing the settled practice of marriage to include gays would impose a psychological cost on the majority in order to remove a psychological cost previously imposed on a minority of a minority.

It might be defensible to impose a psychological cost on the majority to remove a material cost on a minority because material costs often matter more than psychological costs.
It is not defensible to impose a psychological cost on everyone (or the majority) to remove a psychological cost on a minority of a minority when there is no material issue involved.
Therefore, gays should settle for the compromise of civil union — which, remember, is still opposed by many in the majority — and let heterosexuals keep the institution of marriage.

Addendum: The December 2008 issue of Chronicles Magazine has an article by Robert Peters about the use of civil unions as a “Trojan horse” to legalize gay marriage through the courts, bypassing the legislative process and the wishes of the majority. The strategy, according to Peters, has two stages. The first stage is to legalize civil unions through the legislative process. The second stage is to appeal to the courts, claiming that allowing only “civil union” instead of marriage violates gays’ right to equal protection of the law. The Connecticut Supreme Court recently legalized gay marriage on precisely that basis. However, the equal-protection argument is not conclusive. If the court believes that there is a compelling state interest in promoting traditional marriage and the traditional family, it can reject gay activists’ equal-protection argument and reserve marriage for male-female couples, especially if gays get equivalent legal rights from civil unions.