The Treason of Intellectuals
April 01, 2013 "Information
Clearing House"
-"Truthdig"
-
The rewriting of history by the power elite was
painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th
anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed
they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among
“Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted
in good faith on the information available; if they had
known then what they know now, they assured us, they
would have acted differently. This, of course, is false.
The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who
included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and
John Kerry, along with academics, writers and
journalists such as
Bill Keller,
Michael Ignatieff,
Nicholas Kristof,
David Remnick,
Fareed Zakaria,
Michael Walzer,
Paul
Berman,
Thomas Friedman,
George Packer,
Anne-Marie
Slaughter,
Kanan Makiya and the late
Christopher Hitchens—did what they always have done:
engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war
would have been a career killer. And they knew it.
These
apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in
most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who
questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York
Times,
attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy
theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing
what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that
those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam
Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war
protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting
neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these
courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most
pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to
the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out
against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing
“patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my
case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not
matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East,
including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not
matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I
and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well
grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn
by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own
“patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal
class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many
of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at
The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later,
remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly
sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of
innocents on their hands.
The power
elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to
sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement,
foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book
contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and
social status. They know what they need to say. They know which
ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be
told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues
that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long
time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily
sell us out again.
Leslie Gelb, in the
magazine Foreign Affairs, spelled it out after the invasion of
Iraq.
“My
initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate
tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the
disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political
and professional credibility,” he wrote. “We ‘experts’ have a
lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We
must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and
embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow
the common—often wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires
nothing less.”
The moral
cowardice of the power elite is especially evident when it comes
to the plight of the Palestinians. The liberal class, in fact,
is used to marginalize and discredit those, such as Noam Chomsky
and Norman
Finkelstein, who have the honesty, integrity and courage to
denounce Israeli war crimes. And the liberal class is
compensated for its dirty role in squelching debate.
“Nothing
in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in
the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic
turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you
know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take,”
wrote the late
Edward Said. “You do not want to appear too political; you
are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a
reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is
to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious
committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream;
someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps
even an ambassadorship.”
“For an
intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par
excellence,” Said went on. “If anything can denature,
neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it
is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have
encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary
issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the
greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered,
muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve
it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken
supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for
him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by
an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”
Julien Benda argued in
his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des
Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of
practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a
conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance
to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate
themselves intellectually and morally. Benda wrote that
intellectuals were once supposed to be indifferent to popular
passions. They “set an example of attachment to the purely
disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the
supreme value of this form of existence.” They looked “as
moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached,
in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract
principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.”
These intellectuals were not, Benda conceded, very often able to
prevent the powerful from “filling all history with the noise of
their hatred and their slaughters.” But they did, at least,
“prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a religion,
they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as they
carried out these activities.” In short, Benda asserted,
“humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good.
This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed
the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.” But once
the intellectuals began to “play the game of political
passions,” those who had “acted as a check on the realism of the
people began to act as its stimulators.” And this is why Michael
Moore is correct when he blames The New York Times and the
liberal establishment, even more than George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney, for the Iraq War.
“The
desire to tell the truth,” wrote
Paul Baran,
the brilliant Marxist economist and author of “The Political
Economy of Growth,” is “only one condition for being an
intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on
rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand …
comfortable and lucrative conformity.”
Those who
doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the
reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their
integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins.
They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will
often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the
outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry
alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give
a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the
difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful,
along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.
Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig,
spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in
Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He
has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for
The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The
Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was
a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
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