> ...I have provided, I think, the first stab at showing the
> shallowness or entire absence of reasoning of Berube's rant.
[That seems to me about right. Here's another skewering. --CGE]
Much More Severe Problems On The Cruise Missile Left
Herman Responds To Berube
by Edward Herman; December 09, 2002
I am happy to have this opportunity to reply to Michael Berube, partly because it will allow me to introduce Z Net readers to his article "Toward an Ideal Antiwar Movement: Mature, Legitimate, and Popular," in The Chronicle of Higher Education of November 29, 2002. In that article, as I will show below, Berube tacitly or explicitly accepts all the premises of the war party, except initiating war without going through UN channels. Colin Powell and Berube--and Berube's cruise missile left colleagues--might lead this "mature" and "legitimate" protest movement.
As regards his present reply, he speaks about "acerbic name- calling" and his unwillingness to compete "for the moral high ground," but he is quite a name-caller himself: his reference to Noam Chomsky's "repellent mixture of hysteria and hauteur" is a not very charming smear, and in his reply here he is a self-designated "leftist of conscience," in contrast with me and Chomsky. The title of his Chronicle of Higher Education article could hardly be surpassed for self-righteous moral posturing as he lectures the antiwar movement on proper behavior.
In his first paragraph, Berube misinterprets my analogy with William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionists, which was not about race but about adherence to principles in the face of unpopularity. I was saying that Garrison couldn't be popular because he was fighting for a principle not yet acceptable to the vast majority, in the North as well as the South. A leftist sticks with those principles, and Garrison couldn't have written an article on "The Ideal Anti-Slavery Movement: Mature, Legitimate and Popular."
In defending his vicious ad hominem attack on Chomsky, Berube now says "Perhaps I should have credited him for speaking out at all [on the interruption of food supplies for Afghanistan], at a time when most Americans were thinking only of revenge." Instead, he latched on to Chomsky's charge that "the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill millions of people..." Berube doesn't explain WHY he didn't give Chomsky credit for speaking out, but I can do this very easily: Berube has been a consistent strong defender of the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, and at no time has he himself expressed any great concern for Afghan civilian victims of the U.S. war. Chomsky's charge, on the other hand, was an attack on U.S. Afghan policy, and Berube can't abide that. He doesn't even challenge Chomsky's facts: that the United States instructed Pakistan to cut off the flow of fuel and food supplies to a starving population, to the horror of the international aid groups. The population at starvation risk was estimated at 5-7.5 million people. This doesn't arouse Berube's indignation at all--only Chomsky's alleged hysterical inflation.
But Berube also misrepresents facts on this exchange, as well as displaying zero indignation at a murderous policy. He now claims he didn't critize Chomsky for repeating a New York Times report that the U.S. had ordered the cutoff, but a reader of his original text will see that he never suggested that Chomsky was reporting those facts from a reputable source--Berube made it appear that they were concocted by Chomsky, and he even said "we can learn a great deal about the moral level of the antiwar left by its willingness to debate claims like these;...," clearly implying they were untrue, or why couldn't they even be debated? He now says he only objected that "Chomsky was wrong to overstate so hyperbolically the legitimate concern of UN aid workers..." But Chomsky overstated nothing. He said that the U.S. had ordered Pakistan "to kill possibly millions of people." This was on target. Berube's distinction between the "legitimate concerns" of the UN aid workers and the illegitimate concerns of Chomsky is thus fraudulent, and is simply Berube's rhetorical device to denigrate Chomsky while deflecting attention from his original denial of what are now "legitimate concerns" but previously were not even debatable.
In Berube's view, Chomsky's alleged hyperbole justifies the words "repellent mix of hysteria and hauteur" and illustrates "the hard left's myopia and intransigence." I would suggest that what is really repellent--and illustrative of the cruise missile left's politics and morality--is the fact that it is the strong condemnation of a U.S. policy that arouses Berube's anger, not the murderous policy itself, linked to the imperial crusade that Berube (and the other cruise missile leftists) supported...
The rest at <http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=2722>.