Re: <nettime> Stormy weather? Daniele Ganser edit

[w <w@thing.net>]

Don't feed the NATO trolls.  They just want to nibble at your pinkie.


On Tue, 2023-02-14 at 17:53 +0100, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:
> Funny, that mail sounds in tone and attitude to me like something
> I've 
> encountered last time in the Berlin Stasi-archive.
> The censor has spoken ...
> 
> s
> 
> 
> Am 14.02.23 um 17:07 schrieb Ted Byfield:
> > On 14 Feb 2023, at 4:48, Michael Guggenheim wrote:
> > 
> > > I sent an email to NLR alerting them to this quote. Maybe I was
> > > not the only one. I was hoping, and suggesting, they would add a
> > > comment to D’Eramo’s text, explaining who Ganser is, and maybe
> > > asking D’Eramo to explain to the reader why he included the
> > > passage. Instead they deleted it, without leaving a note as to
> > > the alteration of the text.
> > > 
> > > I understand that the editors of NLR may not know who Ganser is,
> > > and that they cannot be expected to check every reference in
> > > every text.
> > 
> > Michael, I appreciate your conciliatory gesture here, but they
> > *can* be expected to do exactly that. Not every reference, you're
> > right: for mentions of some arcane scholarly debates about Jane
> > Austen or whatever, no. But D'Eramo's piece is a broadside in a
> > debate where counter/charges of antisemitism are rife all around.
> > The piece has only a handful of references — to Financial Times, to
> > Foreign Policy, and to a well-known, decade-old book by an
> > established Oxbridge historian. It's running in a journal in the
> > UK, where the Labour Party has been riven with accusations of
> > baked-in antisemitism. And, as you note, it's an ad for a book with
> > a recent publication date and a title that couldn't be more blunt:
> > D'Eramo's own words were "Daniele Ganser’s 2022 book _NATO’s
> > Illegal Wars_." This is *exactly* the kind of situation where an
> > editor should check that one, odd reference.
> > 
> > For ref, here's a screenshot of the D'Eramo piece before and after,
> > side by side:
> > 
> >         https://tldr.nettime.org/@tb/109863202886355396
> > 
> > Checking D'Eramo's reference took a few minutes: Ganser >
> > amazon[dot]de > title > publisher (Westend) > author bio > link to
> > his "Swiss Institute for Peace and Energy Research." And what did I
> > find? The lead story on SIPER's site is about the "9/11 debate,"
> > which claims "WTC7 was blown up, says the Hulsey study from 2019.
> > The history of the terrorist attacks must be rewritten." Uh, OK.
> > 
> > Here's my take as an editor: In a journal a closing paragraph
> > should distill what needs to be said. In D'Eramo's piece, the ( )
> > around the Ganser reference mean *by definition* this doesn't need
> > to be said. They got there one of two ways: either (1) D'Eramo
> > included them, in which case the editor should have said nope, cut
> > it, or (2) NLR's editor *did* take it up with D'Eramo but gave in,
> > then added them. My $5 says (2) is what happened, but it doesn't
> > matter because NLR's later decision to cut the reference without
> > comment works equally well with both.
> > 
> > Since D'Eramo likes to cast his argument in terms of US militarism,
> > here's another: When Clark Clifford, the famously fastidious
> > adviser to decades of US presidents, got caught up in the BCCI
> > scandal, he said, "I have a choice of either seeming stupid or
> > venal." (I was working on the book where he said that while the
> > scandal was breaking and I proposed a draft for that footnote — but
> > not that wording, which became a sort of ur-meme in East Coast
> > power-corridor circles.) That more or less sums up the NLR's
> > predicament here: compromised or stupid — or maybe both.
> > 
> > This 'forensicky' micro-stuff is ridiculous, but for one thing: It
> > suggests that NLR still has at least one foot stuck in the muck of
> > tankie horseshoe nonsense. They aren't alone. In the US, The Nation
> > does too, as Duncan Campbell recently documented in gruesome detail
> > for a less rump-y UK left outlet, Byline Times:
> > 
> >         https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/04/russia-and-the-us-press-
> > the-article-the-cjr-didnt-publish/
> > 
> > Bigger picture: D'Eramo's list of weaponry — which, after all, is
> > why Brian cited the article to begin with — is the kind of crude
> > "Soviet tank-counting exercise" I would have expected from the
> > Brookings Institution in the mid-'80s. And that's basically
> > D'Eramo's argument, isn't it? But for a war that's almost
> > universally seen as inaugurating a radically new era of conflict —
> > drones — that kind of 'untimely' analysis is itself plainly
> > nostalgic. That says a lot about the school of thought D'Eramo
> > follows: rather than face the future, it faces the past. There are
> > lots of reasons to be pessimistic, but people who actively and
> > explicitly embrace the past so they reduce the present to known
> > categories aren't likely to find much room for optimism, are they?
> > 
> > This is one of the main problems that dogs so much establishment
> > leftism now. The other is a categorical rejection of the use of
> > force to achieve  their political ends, a leftover of the excesses
> > of the hard left of the late '60s / early '70s, which the
> > chronically culturalist 'new new left' shares, unfortunately. It's
> > not that force is good, right, or even acceptable; rather, it's
> > that rejecting force as such concedes it to the right, whose
> > vanguard is happily embracing *violence*. Ultimately, if the left
> > wants to achieve more than a sort of meta-NIMBYism, it'll need to
> > get its shit together in terms of its attitude toward the state. A
> > 'lite' anarchism everywhere all at once approach was always a pipe
> > dream, but in the current technological climate it's *really* a
> > know-nothing dead-end.
> > 
> > I used specialize in books about postwar US mil/intel activities,
> > which involved spending too much time in archives that documented
> > those worlds in gruesome detail — and I nearly went into forensic
> > anthropology as a way to cope with what I learned. So I'm under no
> > illusions about the presumptive goodness of the US or the horrors
> > of war. Even so, I somehow managed to avoid falling for the idea
> > (if it even deserves that name) that we can sidestep historical
> > analysis of Russian imperialism by reflexively pivoting to
> > solipsistic criticisms of "the West" is — plainly — the worst kind
> > of whataboutism.
> > 
> > FWIW, here's what I said almost a year ago to the day, when someone
> > sent yet another NLR lopsided broadside to nettime — that one by
> > Wolfgang Streek:
> > 
> >         
> > https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2203/msg00115.html
> > 
> > The lack of word wrapping in that email makes it almost impossible
> > to read on the web, unfortunately, but I think it stand up well so
> > maybe just cut-and-paste it into something else.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Ted
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