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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