thoughts on glenn greenwald & co

(readers of this post, please also read getting right down to it at salon.com and my parting shots at salon com, which generalise my criticism to the whole salon readership -RB)

As seems to be happening more frequently now, I am posting some thoughts of my own, without hanging them on any particular mass media item.

I have spent a lot of time recently reading Glenn Greenwald’s articles at Salon.com, and the comments threads therefrom.

Greenwald is primarily a constitutional lawyer, with a Burkean rather than a Lockean predisposition, but he is also a US Jew, and rather typically, he has what I can only describe as a “left zionist by default” agenda, possibly without even realising it.

The reason for this is as follows : all USAians, to a much greater extent than the citizens of any other state except Israel, have been exposed to vast quantities of visual propaganda concerning the Holocaust, much of it using sophisticated subliminal techniques.

This type of propaganda, as perfected in such films as Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” bypasses the verbal mind completely and installs itself in the subconscious in the form of an aversive stimulus cluster which actively prevents rational assessment of such claims as “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.”

Not only that, but it forces a rationalising system, or what one might call a system of red herrings, to escape the aversive stimulus. In the case of Greenwald and his cronies, this takes the form of an endless dispute concerning the role of government as such, and the different varieties of conservatism.

Just as, among the Christian zionists, we find baffling and distracting disputes between pre- and post-millenialist dispensationalism, so here we find endless baffling disputes between Lockean and Burkean conservatives.

The final straw for me though is his latest agenda-setting attempt to discuss the “Blue Dog Democrats” in constitutional terms, and to ignore the fact that they are quite evidently, one and all, zionist DINOs (democrats in name only, as per the paradigmatic Joe Lieberman). When the discussion is aimed at ignoring the zionist dimension, then even participating in it becomes worse than pointless.

(Theoretical postcript : what I mean by “Lockean conservatism.” In 1955, Dean Russell wrote an article pondering what to call those, such as himself, who subscribed to the classical liberal philosophy of individualism and self-responsibility. He said

Many of us call ourselves “liberals,” and it is true that the word “liberal” once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward, subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion : let those of us who love liberty trademark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word “libertarian.”

– wikipedia