Happy birthday, Fidel!

FILE - In this July 26, 2006 file photo, Cuba's President Fidel Castro pauses as addresses a crowd of Latin American students gathered in Pedernales, in Holguin province, Cuba, for the anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks. As Fidel Castro gets ready to celebrate his 90th birthday on Aug. 13, 2016, many Cubans today openly describe themselves as capitalists, and say time has proven that Castro’s economic ideas do not work. (AP Photo/ Javier Galeano, File) — Fidel Castro, in a photo accompanying the Atlantic Monthly’s report on his 90th birthday

When Fidel Castro turned 90 on August 13, some of the leading news organs in the English-speaking world took the opportunity to commemorate the occasion. How? By recalling his decades of tyranny, torture, and terror? Nope. Mostly, they chose to portray Fidel as “the great survivor” – which, as it happens, was the title of Will Grant‘s piece for BBC News, for which Grant journeyed to Fidel’s hometown to collect cozy stories about the Great Man’s childhood.

JLA-Castro-2-830 — This heroic image accompanied the New Yorker’s 90th birthday tribute

It was dismaying, but hardly surprising, to witness the readiness of one major news organization after another to whitewash Fidel’s brutality and to pretend that he’s actually accomplished anything positive for his freedom-deprived people. Take CBS News, whose Portia Siegelbaum provided us with the adorable information that Fidel spends most of his birthdays “sharing a cake with young children.” Cuban TV, she noted, had recently been broadcasting “a massive class in Cuban history” every night; it seemed not to have occurred to her that this offering by the state-run media might be less history than propaganda.

Siegelbaum also told us that “most Cubans feel Fidel Castro has earned the right to celebrate reaching 90.” What was her evidence for this claim? She didn’t say. How do you perform a scientific survey of such questions in a country where the people risk being imprisoned and tortured if they whisper a single word in criticism of their leaders? (One thing’s for sure: very few of the 1.5 million Cubans who’ve fled their island prison to live in the U.S. feel the nonagenarian dictator “has earned the right to celebrate reaching 90.” Not to mention the opinions of the long-dead victims of Che’s firing squads and those who perished in Fidel’s prisons.)

fidel-castro-and-che-guevara-by-nytimes-photo — Fidel with Che Guevara, in a photograph for the New York Times – his revolution’s #1 international propaganda tool

Concluding her piece, in what was apparently meant as some sort of affectionate salute to Fidel’s enduring influence, Siegelbaum actually called him “the man who for more than five decades set the political discourse on what life should be like on the largest of the Caribbean islands.”

Um, yeah, Portia – that’s called dictatorship.

Then there was Jon Lee Anderson‘s Fidel piece for the New Yorker, in which the word dictator appeared exactly twice – not to label Fidel, but to describe, first, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and, second, Fidel’s predecessor, Fulgencio Batista. Anderson summed up the purported highlights of Fidel’s rule – the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the hundreds of alleged CIA attempts to kill Fidel – but there was no mention of the soul-crushing, economy-destroying Communist system itself, or of Fidel’s mass incarceration, torture, and murder of thousands of his own subjects.

castroguardian — The Guardian, in illustrating its Fidel-turns-90 piece, went with this touching shot

Calling Fidel an “elder statesman” in “the twilight of his life,” Anderson reflected that the ongoing changes in Cuba “must be deeply poignant” for the old man, accepted with credulity the claim that Fidel’s chief concerns nowadays are with “the risks posed by arms proliferation, global warming, and food scarcities,” and stated, in a sentimental concluding flourish, that Fidel, at the most recent Party Congress, “reaffirmed his faith in Communism, in the future of Cuba, and the legacy that he believed Cuba’s Communists had forged.” As if this “legacy” were anything other than pure, unadulterated evil.

CNN’s Patrick Oppmann made one of the most curious choices of all, putting front and center the hundreds of supposed murder attempts that Fidel supposedly survived over the decades. Fidel, Oppmann wrote, “has lived much of his long life in the spotlight – and much of it in the crosshairs – surviving a half century of assassination plots.” (It seemed highly likely that the authors of several of these birthday pieces were working from the same official Havana press release.) No mention, naturally, of the number of people Fidel managed to bump off during that half century. Oppmann cited Fidel’s “reputation as a cheater of death” – never mind, again, his longtime career as a dealer of death.

Instead of acknowledging, moreover, that the overwhelming majority of those who wanted Fidel dead were freedom-loving Cubans, many of whom had been tortured by Castro’s henchmen and forced to flee their beloved homeland, Oppmann painted Fidel as the victim in a struggle against (who else?) the Mob: “Few had as much reason to want Castro dead as the American mafia.”

In short, a shameful showing by the Western media. But of course we should have expected that the 90th birthday of Cuba’s vile old despot would bring the useful hack-journalist stooges crawling out of their ratholes.

Posted on September 16, 2016September 12, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

The talented M. de Man?

“In his writing, abstruseness, bristling abstraction, and a disorienting use of terms make his essays often difficult to penetrate. This was part of the key to his success: to his American admirers, with their cultural inferiority complex, it seemed that if things were difficult to grasp, something profound was being said.”

deman4 — De Man (left) with poet Theodore Weiss and Renee Weiss

That’s critic Robert Alter writing about Paul de Man (1919-83), the lit-crit god who, as we saw last week, came crashing down from Olympus four years after his death when an archivist ran across pro-Nazi articles he’d written during the war. In 2014, a CUNY prof named Evelyn Barish finished off the job, demonstrating, in an excellently researched biography that we examined yesterday, that de Man was not only a wartime Nazi and anti-Semite but a lifelong thief, user, and master of deceit.

As Alter pointed out in his review of Barish’s biography, de Man, famous in his lifetime for the supposed “rigor” of his criticism, was in fact a slippery customer not just in real life but in his work as well,

playing fast and loose with the texts he discussed, misquoting, inventing quotations, and mistranslating. The British Renaissance scholar Brian Vickers has demonstrated in a trenchant article that de Man, discussing Rousseau, at one point inserts a ne absent in the French, thus converting a positive assertion by Rousseau into a negative one that suits his own purposes. Again, as Vickers shows, de Man emphatically claims that “rhetoric” in Nietzsche has nothing to do with persuasion whereas Nietzsche repeatedly says the opposite.

Robert Alter

But in 2014, just as in 1987, de Man’s old friends did their best to fudge the facts and kill the messenger in an effort to salvage his reputation. Reviewing Barish’s book in the New York Review of Books, Peter Brooks, an old Yale buddy of de Man’s, played an especially slick game. From the very first sentence of his review and right up until the end, Brooks toyed with the conceit that the de Man of Barish’s book was not unlike Tom Ripley, the brilliantly deceitful antihero of Patricia Highsmith’s famous novel The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Brooks’s point: Barish’s de Man is not the real de Man, but just a character cooked up by Barish in an effort to reduce the complexities of a real man’s life to the crude outlines of the protagonist of some cheap thriller. Brooks’s approach to Barish’s biography was so transparently dishonest – so obviously an effort to avoid the questions raised by de Man’s lifelong duplicity and instead indict Barish herself for deliberate misrepresentation – that David Lehman replied with a splendid letter in which he reminded readers of the objective fact that de Man was, like it or not, “a cheat, a liar, a forger, a thief, a bigamist, a cad, a swindler, a moocher, not to mention an enthusiastic Nazi propagandist, whether out of conviction or opportunism.”

The “sleight of hand” Brooks employed in his review, wrote Lehman, “should fool no one,” although Lehman did express the concern that readers might come away from Brooks’s review “with the opinion that the biographer is the criminal for not recognizing that de Man’s is, in Brooks’s words, ‘a story of remarkable survival and success following the chaos of war, occupation, postwar migration, and moments of financial desperation.’” Lehman added, eloquently:

David Lehman

Those of us who lost family in the Holocaust have the right to insist that actions freely undertaken have consequences; that unquestioned brilliance of intellect does not justify misdeeds of the magnitude of de Man’s; and that special pleading in the face of overwhelming evidence is a species of dishonesty. No one forced de Man to write anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi articles—he did it on his own, and whether out of conviction or opportunism is beside the point.

Posted on September 15, 2016September 7, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Revisiting de Man

As we saw last week, Paul de Man was a revered literary critic – a pillar of the pretentious theoretical approach known as deconstruction – who died in 1983 only to have his reputation destroyed four years later when a young Belgian academic uncovered his pro-Nazi wartime writings.

The blow that de Man’s image suffered in 1987 was bad enough. But things got even worse in 2014, when Evelyn Barish, a professor at City University of New York, published a comprehensive and deeply researched biography of de Man that provided further proof of his moral bankruptcy – not only in wartime, but throughout his life.

For one thing, he was, as it turned out, a bigamist. In occupied Brussels, he and his first wife lived in an apartment that had most likely been appropriated from Jews. He was very close to his uncle Henri de Man, a top Nazi collaborator and member of the cabinet in Hitler’s puppet Belgian government, through whom he met a number of top-flight Nazis. In addition to writing for two Nazi papers, de Man worked at a Nazi publishing house and tried to get support for an art magazine that would “promote the entire range of the most bizarre Nazi ideologies.” During the war, and in the years immediately afterwards, de Man took out loans and never repaid them, accepted advances for books he had no intention of writing, and committed embezzlement. In the process he bankrupted his father, who never spoke to him again.

It was when the heat started getting too hot in Belgium that de Man fled to the U.S. He entered the country on a temporary visa, which he overstayed. Three years after his big move, a Belgian court sentenced him to five years in prison for forgery and other crimes. Somehow, word of this verdict apparently didn’t make its way to the appropriate authorities in the U.S. In any event, de Man didn’t look back – and didn’t change his ways. When a new friend, author Mary McCarthy, recommended him for what would be his first teaching job in America, at Bard College, he presented the administrators with an entirely fictitious CV, including a made-up master’s thesis and a position with a prestigious Paris publishing house. He also pretended to have been in the Resistance.

Living in New York, de Man kept moving from flat to flat because he had a bad habit of never paying rent; when he pulled the same scam at Bard, where his landlord was on the faculty, Bard fired him.

From Bard he went to Harvard. To get in, he proffered a new set of fake credentials: on the bottom of a legitimate document from the University of Brussels that identified him as a dropout – but, notes critic Robert Alter, “in language by no means clear to American eyes” – de Man forged a handwritten addendum stating that he’d “passed the actual ‘Licence’ exam before a State Board in 1942.” The folks at Harvard had no way of knowing, apparently, that there was no such thing in Belgium as the State Board.

When he finished his work at Harvard, de Man failed the written part of his comprehensive exams, but his doctoral advisor passed him anyway. Eventually the INS got his number and showed up in his life, from time to time, like Inspector Javert in Les Miserables; but de Man was luckier than Jean Valjean, managing each time to talk his way out of getting taken into custody.

demanderrida — Paul de Man with Jacques Derrida

As Alter put it in his review of Barish’s book, the “full picture” of de Man’s life “is actually far worse” than even his severest critics had thought back in 1987. Describing de Man as “a person who flagrantly disregarded rules and obligations, shamelessly and repeatedly lied about himself, and had a criminal past,” Alter praised him as “an extraordinarily gifted con man, persuading the most discerning intellectuals that he had credentials he did not possess and a heroic personal history, rather than a scandalous one, while he worked his charm on generations of students.”

Once, in his youth, De Man told a relative: “Principles are what the idiots substitute for intelligence.” He seems to have lived his whole life by this precept.

More tomorrow.

Posted on September 14, 2016September 13, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Corruption at the chaebols

Yesterday we began looking at the chaebols, the family-controlled conglomerates that dominate the South Korean business world. Here’s a quick overview of three of the very largest chaebols. See if you notice any running themes:

Lee Kun-hee

Samsung – the largest of all the chaebols, making up no less than 17% of the South Korean economy – is chaired by Lee Kun-hee, son of the firm’s founder. Lee resigned in 2008 after being caught with a secret slush fund that he used to bribe government officials, but was pardoned by President Lee Myung-bak and promptly resumed his chairmanship. He continues to stay in office despite a book, published in 2010, that describes in detail how he stole about $9 billion of Samsung’s money.

Hyundai Motor Chairman Chung Mong-koo attends the company's opening ceremony for the year in Seoul in this January 2, 2012 file photo. South Korea's smartphones and cars may have won global acceptance, but back home Koreans are increasingly disturbed by the influence the chaebol have over their lives. That very public anxiety is coming at a sensitive time for the conglomerates as they prepare the transtion to a third generation of family owners and face a strong, unwelcome, focus of attention in the run-up to 2012's parliamentary election. Hyundai Motor's Chung Mong-koo was sentenced to a three year jail term in 2007 for fraud which was suspended in exchange for community service and a $1 billion charity donation as he was deemed too important to the economy to be jailed. To match Insight KOREA-CHAEBOL/ REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji/Files — Chung Mong-koo

Hyundai is another of the so-called “Big Four” chaebols. Its chairman, Chung Mong-koo, son of the firm’s founder, was convicted in 2007 of embezzling $100 million to bribe government officials, but he was pardoned by Lee Myung-bak and remained in office.

Choi Tae-won

Yet another one of the “Big Four,” SK Group, is chaired by Choi Tae-won, son of the group’s founder. In 2013, Choi was found guilty of embezzling over $40 million and sentenced to four years behind bars, but was pardoned by President Park Geun-hye and still runs the company.

South Koreans have – to put it mildly – mixed feelings about the families that run the chaebols. They still respect the firms’ very elderly or (mostly) deceased founders who made South Korea rich; but they increasingly resent the outrageous sense of privilege enjoyed by those founders’ children and (especially) grandchildren – who are widely resented for their unearned wealth, their princely airs, their thoroughgoing corruption, and the impunity they enjoy no matter how massive their crimes.

The simple fact is that pretty much everybody in the South Korean government is on the chaebols’ payrolls – or wants to be. And the growing popular resentment of this grand corruption is an extremely good sign. It tells us that a people who, not so long ago, were comfortable with a degree of authoritarianism are now impatient for more democracy. People who were accustomed to class division want more equal opportunity. Though grateful to the chaebols for their contribution to South Korea’s development, they’re not happy that those chaebols have developed into arrogant aristocratic dynasties, that they use their wealth to buy off public officials, and that their domination of the economy is impeding further development.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak speaks to the nation during a news conference at the presidential house in Seoul November 29, 2010. Lee on Monday labelled North Korea's artillery attack on a southern island a crime against humanity and said Pyongyang will pay the price for any further provocation. REUTERS/Ahn Young-joon/Pool (SOUTH KOREA - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST) — South Korean President Lee Myung-bak

How do they impede development? Well, for one thing, they make it extremely tough for aspiring entrepreneurs to make a go of it. “It’s almost impossible for a small Korean business to take on a chaebol subsidiary – and everything is a chaebol subsidiary,” wrote one observer in 2013. The chaebols’ dominance, reported the Toronto Globe and Mail last year, “is now suffocating the country’s attempt to shift gears and foster a more innovative services-oriented economy powered by small businesses.”

roh_tae-woo_ — Former South Korean president Roh Tae-woo

Note well: what we’re talking about here isn’t ordinary crony capitalism or the kind of revolving-door system whereby state officials often go on to become corporate execs. And vice-versa. No, it’s more as if the chaebols are a separate, permanent branch of government, whose political sway is founded partly on decades-long personal ties (Choi Tae-won’s wife is the daughter of former President Roh Tae-woo), partly on those vast slush funds that they use to grease officials’ palms, and partly on everyone’s keen awareness that the country’s fate is inextricably tied to that of the chaebols, the top ten of which account for fully 80% of South Korea’s GDP.

Simply put: at times it can be hard to know where the elected South Korean government ends and the unelected government of the chaebols begins. Not only do the chaebol kings hold sway over elected officials; they also wield extraordinary power over their mid- to lower-level employees – who have little leverage at contract time, because there’s not really anyplace else for them to go. (Chaebols, according to software start-up founder Ahn Cheol-soo, treat workers like “caged animals in a zoo”.) Operating in a mind-boggling range of sectors – Samsung has its fingers in everything from financial services to shipbuilding – they have the reach and resources to effortlessly crush fledgling would-be competitors in any of them.

samsung_shareholders_citiaug12 — A graph showing Samsung’s shareholder structure

Last but not least – and this is one bizarre detail that must certainly be unique to South Korea – not even the chaebols’ boards of directors can stand up to the hegemony of the family dynasties, even if the directors hold large stakes in the firms and the latter own almost no stock at all. Indeed, a 2012 study found that eight chaebol chairmen weren’t even on their firms’ boards, meaning that they exercised enormous power without shouldering a concomitant amount of responsibility.

What this means, in practice, is that however criminal or incompetent the head of a chaebol may be, he enjoys invulnerability and unaccountability on a scale unheard of in any other developed democracy. As one South Korean business journal has put it: “At companies in advanced countries, a faulty CEO is replaced. But at South Korean conglomerates, the head of a conglomerate wields absolute authority and is not replaced no matter how grievous his mistakes are.” Or how horrendous his crimes.

samsung-family-tree-korean — A family tree showing the descendants of Samsung founder Lee Byung Chul, color-coding their involvement in different subsidiaries and their intermarriage with members of other chaebol families

No, the situation south of the DMZ isn’t remotely comparable to that in Kim Jong-un’s Hermit Kingdom. But, thanks to the chaebols, South Korea’s business community is characterized by a thuggishness, a creepiness, a crookedness, of which the outside world is almost entirely unaware. And those who continue to prop all this up – either out of some misguided sense of loyalty to dead or dying national idols, or out of sheer personal self-interest – are, quite simply, stooges, aiding and abetting a corrupt system that’s actively preventing the emergence of an even freer, more equitable, and more prosperous South Korea.

Posted on September 9, 2016September 7, 2016 by usefulstooges 4

What are the chaebols?

Corruption takes a variety of forms. In Brazil, as we’ve seen, innumerable politicians have grown rich by ripping off the state-owned oil firm, Petrobras. In neighboring Argentina, a gang of Kirchner cronies diverted billions from infrastructure projects into private offshore accounts. In Gabon, President Bongo plays it simple: he treats the national treasury as his own piggy bank and buys himself mansions, yachts, limos, and planes while the average Gabonese citizen scrapes by on $12 a day.

Then there’s Korea. Not Kim Jong-un’s Hermit Kingdom, which is undoubtedly the most totalitarian corner of the planet. No, today we’re talking about South Korea.

“South Korea?” you ask. “Benign, prosperous, democratic, free-market South Korea, America’s steadfast ally and Ground Zero for the East Asian economic miracle? How corrupt can South Korea be?”

samsung-headquarters — Samsung headquarters

This corrupt. In South Korea, as it happens, the power structure consists of two intimately interlocking parts: on the one hand, the president and other duly elected government leaders; on the other hand, a small number of huge family-run conglomerates that are uniquely South Korean in their origins, configuration, and societal significance, that have not been elected to anything by anybody, and that are, in effect, themselves the corporate equivalent of dictatorships.

These companies – among them such world-famous enterprises as Samsung, Hyundai, and LP – are known as chaebols, from the Korean words for wealth (chae) and clan (bol). They function like no other companies in the world.

lee_kun_hee2 — Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee was Fortune Korea’s CEO of the Decade

“In English-speaking countries,” explains a Seoul professor of public administration, “there really are no business groups, but singular companies that own [their] subsidiaries 100 percent. In Europe, conglomerates are never as big as the chaebols and ownership and management [are] usually strictly divided.” A chaebol, by contrast, consists of “multiple companies with robust internal transactions, all controlled by a single, near all-powerful chairman that act[s] as both manager and the de facto owner of the entire enterprise.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that the chaebols made South Korea. Over the last half century, they led the way in turning a poor agricultural backwater into an international technology center and economic powerhouse. In the process, they assumed a role in South Korean society that can be hard to explain to outsiders. The members of the families that run the chaebols are national celebrities; the companies themselves are mighty, majestic, nearly mythical colossi, looming above the everyday world of ordinary citizens in such a way that their very names almost carry a touch of magic.

sk-group-headquarters — SK Group headquarters

Look at it this way: elected officials are mere mortals who come and go; the chaebol clans, like so many royal families, stay on forever, never yielding power or stepping down from Olympus.

As Iain Marlow wrote last year in the Toronto Globe and Mail, “all South Korean mothers dream of their children working at chaebol companies.” And yet even those mothers realize that the chaebols – which a generation ago were universally revered for having effected South Korea’s miraculous transformation – now pose a threat to their country’s continued growth, to its people’s economic and political freedom, and to its attempts to achieve full legitimacy and recognition on the world stage.

They realize, indeed, that these conglomerates that liberated them from poverty now – in a very real sense – are enshackling them.

How so? We’ll get around to the fascinating details tomorrow.

Posted on September 8, 2016September 7, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

Defending de Man

Deconstruction seeks to turn coherence into incoherence. Paul de Man‘s own variation on it can fairly be described as outright nihilistic, systematically taking statements that have explicit meanings and dissolving them (as a murderer dissolves a corpse in quicklime) until the statements are utterly barren of even the slightest hint of signification.

So it was that when de Man, who died in 1983, was exposed four years later as a wartime Nazi, defenders sought to take his newly discovered pro-Nazi wartime writings and deconstruct the Nazism – and anti-Semitism – out of them. At the same time, they did their best to twist the arguments of de Man’s critics out of all recognition.

Bloom_Harold_031-1024x702 — Harold Bloom

One example. When it was announced that a symposium would be held to discuss de Man’s Nazi articles, The Nation quoted an anonymous critic described as being “close to de Man” (and widely assumed to be another Yale eminence, Harold Bloom) who expressed disgust: “Paul must have known the Jews of Belgium were being carted away. We are discussing the butchery of the Belgian Jewish community, down to the babies. To treat this as one more item about which to have a symposium is outrageous.”

In response to this statement, Jacques Derrida, deconstruction’s founder, professed outrage, pretending that the unnamed critic had sought “to forbid the right to assembly and discussion.” (“What,” he asked, “does that remind you of?”) In other words, forget de Man’s Nazi past – Bloom (if Bloom it was) was acting like Hitler himself! Of course, the critic “close to de Man” had never proposed forbidding anything.

That was only the beginning of Derrida’s dubious, desperate defense. In the spring 1988 issue of Critical Inquiry, he published a 62-page essay that, as David Lehman put it, oozed “slithering elusiveness.” Employing a wide range of slick rhetorical devices, Derrida sought to prove that de Man’s written words don’t necessarily mean what you think they do – and/or that he may have written one thing even as he was thinking something else. Had de Man, asked Derrida, articulated anti-Semitic views even as he criticized “vulgar antisemitism” in the very same piece? Well, then, didn’t criticizing “vulgar antisemitism” amount to criticizing “the vulgarity of antisemitism” itself? Was he not, in fact, condemning the very anti-Semitism he had pretended to profess?

It was by means of such lame language games that Derrida sought to get de Man off the hook. “Borrowing Derrida’s logic,” commented Lehman dryly, “one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that its author was conflicted on the subject of the Jews.”

lehman-credit-W.-T.-Pfefferle — David Lehman

Other champions of de Man were even more brazen than Derrida. One critic named S. Heidi Krueger actually tried to sell the case that de Man’s most offensive wartime piece, entitled “The Jews in Contemporary Literature,” was, like Jonathan Swift’s famous essay “A Modest Proposal,” meant ironically. In other words, it was one big joke. De Man may have assumed the voice of someone who hated Jews, but his underlying point, maintained Krueger, was to mock anti-Semitism.

1EN-625-B1945 Orwell, George (eigentl. Eric Arthur Blair), engl. Schriftsteller, Motihari (Indien) 25.1.1903 - London 21.1.1950. Foto, um 1945. — George Orwell

Then there was deconstructionist Richard Rand, who, by means of a truly audacious example of rhetorical sleight of hand, claimed to establish that de Man could not be anti-Semitic because, in a very important sense, de Man was himself Jewish. Huh? Rand went on to acknowledge that de Man was not Jewish “biographically speaking,” but explained that this didn’t matter: what counted was that those who were now accusing de Man posthumously of anti-Semitism were themselves, in reality, anti-Semites, who were displacing their anti-Jewish bigotry by charging de Man with the offense that they themselves were actually guilty of.

As Lehman observed, Rand’s argument illustrated “the eerie similarity” of deconstruction to the totalitarian up-is-down, yes-is-no rhetoric that George Orwell dubbed doublethink.

“Happy the deconstructor,” wrote Lehman, “who can prove, or at least get himself to believe, that black is white, that the four raised fingers of a hand make five, and that those who excoriate Paul de Man’s anti-Semitism reveal themselves to be anti-Semites.”

The whole 1987-88 de Man dustup is recounted at length in Lehman’s excellent 1991 book, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. In the end, despite the brilliant efforts by the Yale crowd to spin them into non-existence, the plain facts about de Man could not be shot down. And they destroyed his image forever.

As it turned out, however, there were even more revelations to come – years and years later. We’ll get to that next week.

Posted on September 7, 2016September 7, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

De Man’s deceptions

They were called the deconstructionists, and a few decades ago they were the stars of academic literary studies in the United States. Based largely at Yale University, the critical school was founded by Jacques Derrida, whose fame and influence were almost matched by the group’s second most important member, Paul de Man.

During his lifetime, this is what was generally known about De Man’s background: born in Belgium in 1919, he moved to America in 1948, taught at Bard, studied at Harvard, then joined the faculty at Cornell. At a 1966 conference he heard a speech by Derrida, whom he befriended and whose critical approach he began to adopt in his own work. His star rose steadily during the last years of his career, which he spent as chair of Yale’s department of comparative literature.

He died in 1983, fêted and respected around the world. And then the roof caved in. In 1987, a Belgian grad student and de Man devotee, Ortwin de Graef, was poking through some old archives when he ran across two hundred or so articles that de Man had written for a couple of Nazi-run newspapers, Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land, during the war. Now, it had never been entirely clear what de Man had done during the war. He had led people to believe that he’d belonged to the Resistance, but the details had always been sketchy. De Graef’s discoveries showed that de Man, far from standing up to the Nazis, had worked for them, written for them, and supported them. Although his topics were mostly literary, he managed to bring to them a political – which is to say a consistently pro-Nazi – approach. As lliterary critic and Harvard professor Louis Menand has put it, de Man “championed a Germanic aesthetic, denigrated French culture as effete, associated Jews with cultural degeneracy, praised pro-Nazi writers and intellectuals, and assured Le Soir’s readers that the New Order had come to Europe. The war was over. It was time to join the winners.”

The New York Times reported on de Graef’s findings in December 1987. The mainstream press, for the most part, crucified de Man. But many of his friends, colleagues, and fellow practitioners of literary theory tried to find a way to declare de Man innocent. To do so, they employed the slippery “logic” (which is anything but le mot juste here) of deconstruction itself, which revels in complexity, obscurity, and incertitude, and is eager to find ambiguity everywhere – even (or perhaps especially) in flat-out, perfectly clear statements that contain no real ambiguity whatsoever. In some cases, indeed, deconstruction essentially goes so far as to turn day into night, up into down, and wrong into right. We’ll look at a couple of those cockeyed defenses tomorrow.

Posted on September 6, 2016September 3, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

A “football voice on social issues”?

Colin who? For those who are not fans of American football, the name of Colin Kaepernick was, until recently, entirely unknown.

That changed on August 26, when the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers refused to stand up for the National Anthem at a pre-season game against the Green Bay Packers.

His explanation: the U.S. oppresses black people. Kaepernick, whose biological father was black and biological mother white, was raised in Wisconsin by adoptive white parents who took him into their family after losing two children to heart defects.

kaepernick standing for anthem in 2014 — At a 2014 game, Kaepernick stood for the anthem

Pretty much everybody in the football world had an opinion about Kaepernick’s action. So did countless politicians and commentators. Most acknowledged the obvious fact that Kaepernick has a right to his opinion and a right to decide not to stand up for the National Anthem. Views differed, however, on whether his opinion was correct.

Some compared him favorably with Muhammed Ali, who was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. Writing in The Guardian, Les Carpenter described Kaepernick as “a rare, strong football voice on social issues.” Others echoed these judgments.

Alejandro_Villanueva_(American_football) — Alejandro Villanueva

Then there were those like Pittsburgh Steelers left tackle Alejandro Villanueva, who served in the Army in Afghanistan, and who in response to Kaepernick’s action told ESPN that the U.S. is the best country in the world. “I just know that I am very thankful to be an American. I will stand very proudly, and I will sing every single line in the national anthem every single time I hear it,” he said. “I will stop whatever I am doing, because I recognize that I have to be very thankful to be in this country.” Kaepernick’s birth mother spoke up against him, too, tweeting that “there’s ways to make change w/o disrespecting & bringing shame to the very country & family who afforded you so many blessings.”

colin-kaepernicks-house — Kaepernick’s house

Critics were also quick to point out that the country whose anthem Kaepernick refuses to honor has made him rich. Photographs of his 4600-square-foot San Jose mansion, which he bought in 2014 for $2.7 million, appeared all over the media. Accusations of hypocrisy and ingratitude swirled. And anger mounted among gridiron junkies. How could a man to whom his country had given so much treat its flag with such disrespect? Had he given no thought to the innumerable members of the American military who were no longer able to stand for the anthem because they’d lost their legs on the battleground fighting under that flag?

The story seemed about to die down when more information materialized. In a widely quoted story, sports blogger Terez Owens wrote that it was actually Kaepernick’s girlfriend, Nessa Diab (known popularly as Nessa), a devout Muslim, Berkeley grad, and You Tube star turned MTV personality, who had talked him into staying seated for the anthem. Football experts offered another theory: Kaepernick is a third-string QB whose performance on the field has been less than stellar; was his anthem sit-down a desperate effort to force the front office to keep him on the roster, for fear that firing him might be construed as punishment for his opinions?

kaepernick2-1 — Kaepernick in his Castro T-shirt

Then there was the T-shirt. Kaepernick held a locker-room press conference after his fateful action. He was wearing a T-shirt. And not just any T-shirt. This one featured several pictures of Fidel Castro with Malcolm X.

Apparently, then, Kaepernick is a fan of the murderous Cuban dictator. Like a considerable number of other people in the Western world, he would seem to have a rosy – and deeply misinformed – picture of Cuban life under Castro. The preponderance of immediately available evidence suggests that he is one of many millions, indeed, who have bought the Cuban line that the Castro regime, among many other magnificent accomplishments, has created a colorblind society. Alas, that is a lie. A big one. In fact, official racism is fierce in Cuba. President Obama even mentioned it in his Havana speech last March. The other day, Mark Hemingway, in a piece about Kaepernick, cited a 2013 New York Times article whose headline says it all: “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun.”

(Of course, to the extent that the headline hints that Cuba’s revolution has benefited anybody other than Cuba’s elite, that’s a problem. But it’s also a blog entry for another day.)

So it goes. Colin Kaepernick won’t stand up for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the National Anthem of the democratic nation in which he lives and thrives far beyond the imagining of most people on this planet. But he wears with apparent pride an item of clothing celebrating a man who has oppressed an entire country for over half a century, denying its citizens even the most basic elements of freedom and human rights, all the while cruelly punishing dissenters with imprisonment, torture, and even execution.

We can only hope that Kaepernick will soon supplement his athletic skills with a more sophisticated and comprehensive understanding of the very real differences between the U.S. and Cuba. And that, if he doesn’t, the young people who look up to him as a sports hero will know better than to adopt his benighted political views.

Posted on September 5, 2016August 31, 2016 by usefulstooges 4

Worse than moral equivalence

Penny Red (Penny Laurie) speaking at rally. -- Several hundred people, mainly women, came to rally outside Parliament to oppose restrictions on abortions proposed by Nadine Dorries and others, and to campaign for a woman's right to chose, both here and Northern Ireland. UK. 9th July 2011 — Penny Laurie

Though she’s only 29, Laurie Penny‘s output is already depressingly large, and therefore impossible to cover adequately in just a few short pieces. Then again, a hell of a lot of it is the same thing over and over again. In other words, she’s a narrow-minded ideological scold, not an original and versatile thinker. Today we’ll conclude our week with Ms. Penny by looking at a few more bits and pieces from her oeuvre.

The first item, a July 2014 column, shows that Penny is, unsurprisingly, an eager – and vulgar – Israel-basher. Accusing Israel of murdering hundreds of Palestinians, including children, Penny (who is herself half Jewish) claimed to be pained by anti-Semitic rhetoric on the part of Palestinians and their supporters. But she quickly added:

Bad guys?

It is not anti-Semitic to suggest that Israel doesn’t get a free pass to kill whoever it likes in order to feel “safe.” It is not anti-Semitic to point out that if what Israel needs to feel “safe” is to pen the Palestinian people in an open prison under military occupation, the state’s definition of safety might warrant some unpacking. And it is not anti-Semitic to say that this so-called war is one in which only one side actually has an army.

Yesterday we noted Penny’s penchant for moral equivalence. But this was worse than moral equivalence. Penny wasn’t equating Israel’s defensive measures with the Islamic terrorism to which it’s a response; she was actually painting Israel as an armed aggressor and the Palestinians, because they don’t have an “army” in the same sense that Israel does, as helpless victims. She even managed to work in the word “genocide,” which she did in this sneaky fashion:

This is a conflict in which no one wants to edge towards saying the word “genocide,” because in this context that is a term so loaded that what’s left of reasoned debate staggers and falls to its knees.

Then why mention it?

Among the ticklish facts that did go unmentioned in Penny’s column, of course, was that Hamas, while targeting innocent Israeli civilians for coldblooded murder, hides behind its own children and mosques and schools and hospitals, making all of them vulnerable to retaliatory Israeli fire, while the IDF, in its effort to take down these savages, does its best to avoid harming civilians on either side (even those who may be aiding and abetting the savages).

Anyway, on to a more recent article, in which our heroine shared her thoroughly predictable reaction to the Brexit vote. She began as follows:

This morning, I woke up in a country I do not recognise…

There’s not enough tea in the entire nation to help us Keep Calm and Carry On today. Not on a day when prejudice, propaganda, naked xenophobia and callous fear-mongering have won out over the common sense we British like to pride ourselves on.

Apparently considering those nasty words insufficient, Penny went on to slur Brexit champion Nigel Farage as a “racist” and his supporters as “the frightened, parochial lizard-brain of Britain.” Then, without the slightest hint of irony or self-awareness, she said she wanted “to wake up tomorrow in a country where people are kind, and tolerant, and decent to one another.”

In any case, at no point in a very long article did Penny acknowledge that there might be any merit in the pro-Brexit argument that the EU is undemocratic – or that any of the pro-Brexit voters, far from being bigots, were simply voting for the right to choose their own rulers again.

We’ll close with a couple of YouTube videos. First, here’s one that shows her complete ignorance of – or indifference to? – the basic facts of economics (please excuse the inelegant title that the YouTube user has placed on it):

And finally, this next one shows her talking part in a 2013 discussion on BBC’s Question Time. The issue: should Muslim women in Britain be allowed to wear the full face-covering niqab, even in jobs like schoolteacher and nurse? Other participants had nuanced views, with a couple expressing concern about women wearing veils when working in hospitals and dealing with patients. But Penny was firm: it was, she pronounced, “brutally islamophobic and deeply sexist” to even discuss the question.

Admittedly, we haven’t given this prolific young lady her due. But we hope we’ve covered enough of her work to show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is, in sum, a totalitarian soul who, though she takes part in endless debates, doesn’t really believe in debate. As she sees it, the opponents who disagree with her on Twitter are trolls who should probably be banned from the Internet. And the very idea of holding TV discussions about issues on which 29-year-old Laurie Penny has come to an unequivocal conclusion are offensive in and of themselves, and should be outright verboten.

Posted on September 2, 2016August 29, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Exit Rousseff

Well, it’s over. On Wednesday, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was removed from office.

Back in January, we wrote about the increasing calls for Rousseff’s impeachment by ordinary Brazilians who had lost faith in her government’s disastrous socialist policies, who were disgusted by the massive scandal surrounding the government oil firm, Petrobras, and who – bottom line – were determined not to let her turn their country into another Venezuela.

Brazilians, commented Romanian-American political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu, were turning out to be less susceptible to utopian promises than their neighbors in Venezuelan and Argentina. Philosopher Olavo de Carvalho observed that Brazilians weren’t just rejecting Rousseff – they were rejecting “the whole system of power that has been created by the Workers’ Party, which includes intellectuals and opinion-makers in the big media.”

dilma1 — Dilma the terrorist: a mug shot

Today, on the other side of the Brexit vote and the GOP’s nomination of Donald Trump, it’s hard not to wonder whether the grassroots Brazilian effort to oust Rousseff is part of a spreading global thumbs-down for corrupt, supercilious socialist elites. If so, good show.

As it happens, we spent that whole week in January on Rousseff, recounting her beginnings as a rich girl who joined a revolutionary terrorist group called COLINA; her entry into politics (a career in which, from the outset, she distinguished herself by her combination of administrative incompetence and genius for making and exploiting connections); and, finally, her increasingly disastrous tenure as president, capped by the Petrobras scandal, described by the Wall Street Journal as “the biggest corruption case ever in a country with a long history of scandals.”

kim — Kim Kataguiri addressing an anti-Rousseff rally

We also profiled one of the leaders of the anti-Rousseff movement, 20-year-old Kim Kataguiri, whose activism was spurred when one of his college teachers praised the socialist policies of the ruling Worker’s Party. Kataguiri responded by making a series of You Tube videos promoting free-market capitalism and founding the Free Brazil Movement, which has grown like kudzu.

In March, we noted the arrest of a Rousseff sidekick, the imprisonment of two more of her cronies, and the resignation of her justice minister; in April, we reported on a government raid on the home of former president – and fallen saint – Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. (We also noted Rousseff’s unsuccessful, and patently ludicrous, attempt to shield him from prosecution by naming him as her chief of staff.) Not long after, we reported that Marcelo Odebrecht, the CEO of Brazil’s biggest construction firm – and, naturally, a close associate of Rousseff’s – had sentenced to 19 years for bribing authorities in connection with Petrobras contracts.

GREENWALDMIRANDA_2648116b — Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda

Later in April, we learned that notorious journalist Glenn Greenwald (of Edward Snowden scandal fame) and his husband, David Miranda, were on Team Rousseff, with Miranda signing his name to a Guardian op-ed accusing Rousseff’s opponents of seeking to engineer (what else?) a “right-wing coup.” In a July profile of callow, reliably far-left Salon columnist Ben Norton, we pointed out that he’d used the same exact words as Miranda, calling Rousseff the victim of a would-be “right-wing coup.”

And now – well – here we are. She’s out. Congratulations to the people of Brazil. Needless to say, this doesn’t mean an instant turnaround for their country –that’ll take serious, comprehensive reform – but it’s a necessary start.

Oh, and then there’s this news. In reaction to the “right-wing coup” in Brasilia, three of Rousseff’s fellow socialist economy-destroyers – Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, and Evo Morales of Bolivia – all recalled their ambassadors. Well, birds of a feather and all that. Let’s hope their days in power are numbered, too.

Posted on September 1, 2016September 2, 2016 by usefulstooges 5

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