Regulating Historical Analogies

By Thomas Harrington,
August 19, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

WASHINGTON – Yesterday, a group of high-profile dignitaries from across the political spectrum celebrated the launch of the Society for the Management of Historical Reason (SMHR) in the nation’s capital. The all-day seminar took place in the headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and featured speeches by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), former Bush speechwriter David Frum, Obama Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, and Iraq surge architect and West Point professor Frederick Kagan.

In his opening remarks, the new organization’s executive director, Michael O’Hanlon, a longtime fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution, spoke with urgency about the new entity’s mission. "As Isaiah Berlin, the great prophet of the Open Society, once said, ‘Analogizing is the lifeblood of historical reason.’ We believe this to be true. However, we also know that in times like these, allowing anyone, anywhere to establish and publicize parallels between the policies of the U.S. and those pursued by other nations in the course of history can have far-reaching consequences for American security. We therefore seek to aid those habitually engaged in generating historical reasoning (or reporting it to the general public after a cursory reading of a commissioned think-tank position paper) to channel their ideas toward only those parallelisms which affirm that the U.S. and its close ally Israel stand outside the laws of causality that have governed the fates of other peoples on the earth."

When asked by a reporter to spell out how this actually works in practice, O’Hanlon replied, "Our enemies around the world have long-suggested that when the U.S. and Israel attack or invade other nations, they, like every other militarily strong state before them, do so in order to gain control of the land or resources of the invaded country. When disinformation like this appears, the first line of defense is, as it always has been, to greet the assertion with utter silence, and if that fails, to condescendingly mock the person as a Chomskyite loon. If, after all this, they still get an insufficiently trained reporter to put this ludicrous notion into print or on the air, that’s where our agents of historical reason spring into action. Within a matter of days, they will generate a minimum of five op-eds in the largest American dailies, designed, each in their own way, to reaffirm the wholly defensive and unfailingly moral underpinnings of American and Israeli foreign policy."

At the close of the day-long session, both the participants and the assembled members of the press received a small compilation of some of the more specious historical analogies currently being circulated by our enemies as well as the SMHR’s talking points for each. What follows is a small sample from that publication.

Analogy #1: People who invade other people’s lands have almost always done so to aggrandize their own standing in the world. Therefore, the U.S. and Israel are probably doing the same.

Talking point for analogy #1: These two nations attack other people’s nations for largely defensive reasons. Insofar as they have any broader goal, it is always to bring the invadees the gifts of either an advanced economy or democracy.

Analogy #2: All states in the past that had multiple, continuous, and far-flung military engagements with other nations (Spain in the 16th century, Napoleon’s France, Britain, Portugal in the 20th century) eventually became impoverished to point where they could neither maintain their international network of influence nor compete economically with the era’s other powerful nations. This is probably happening to the U.S.

Talking point for analogy #2: Unlike these nations, the U.S. is peopled by individuals with a special, socially programmed "entrepreneurial spirit" that will allow them to perpetually invent their way out of the type of decadence and decline that has traditionally befallen other nations.

Analogy #3: When the financial, political, and military elites of a country generally see themselves as being above the law and demonstrate far more loyalty to their fellow caste members than to the population as a whole, this usually portends an unstoppable decline into social decadence, factional infighting, and, ultimately, various kinds of coup-making. This is probably going on right now in the U.S.

Talking point for analogy #3: The U.S., unlike other nations, has a constitutional structure that was born in the glow of our founders’ more or less perfect wisdom and thus will always, through our court system and its assembled jurists, mutate in ways that will safeguard the common good and individual liberties over unwieldy concentrations of power. And even when larger than desirable concentrations of power do occur in a given moment of history, the pendulum will always swing back to correct them in the next generation of political actors.

Analogy #4: Since the dawning of the concept of total war in the 1930s and 1940s, terror has become, for the more militarily advanced states of the world, a prime tool for gaining geopolitical advantage. Thus when the U.S. and Israel use high-tech weaponry (B-52 bombers, Apache helicopter gunships, and drones) on largely unarmed civilian populations in territories that do not belong to them and are often thousands of miles from "the Homeland" (from the German Heimat), they are probably seeking to terrorize the inhabitants of these places to submit to their political will.

Talking point for analogy #4: As we have seen in talking point #1, Americans and Israelis almost always attack others for purely defensive reasons. Therefore the only real terrorists involved in situations where they operate are the persons who are foolish enough to try and fight back against their overwhelming force. For example, the Canadian-Afghani teenager Omar Khadr became a terrorist in Afghanistan, requiring several years of appeal-free, rehabilitative torture at Guantánamo, when he lobbed a hand grenade that killed an invading American soldier near his home in Khost. Terrorism will only stop when people like Khadr learn to recognize the core benevolence of American and Israeli actions and learn to stop reacting against it.

Analogy #5: When, as it did in 2006, Israel launched an essentially unprovoked war aimed at destroying the entire modern infrastructure of a neighboring country, some compared it to the German Blitzkrieg on Poland in 1939. Similarly, when the high-tech Israeli military laid siege to the already isolated and already starving population of Gaza at the end of 2008 and the first days of 2009, some compared it to the terrible tragedy of the Warsaw ghetto at the end of World War II.

Talking point for analogy #5: It must always be remembered that the only people licensed to make analogies between the horrors of Nazism and any present-day cataclysm are Israelis themselves and their many supporters in the American press. For example, if the Arab scholar Rashid Khalidi were to compare the present-day fate of the Palestinians in any way to that of Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945, he would be immediately guilty of trivializing the horrors suffered by the Jews under the Nazis. However, any time Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer wants to compare Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah, or Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to Hitler and their followers to the Nazis, no trivialization is involved. This is perfectly licit and, more often than not, will be roundly and positively reprinted in the mainstream press.

As they were exiting the conference auditorium, participants and observers were encouraged to sign a pledge that commits them to the guiding principles of the new think-tank. David Gregory (GE-NBC), Brian Williams (GE-NBC), John King (Time-Warner-CNN), Guy Raz (NPR), Charles Gibson (Disney-ABC), Mary-Louise Kelly (NPR), and Michael Gordon (NYT) were seen chatting amiably among themselves as they awaited their turn to sign up.

(Macondo News Service)

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