Fisking Sullivan

I have been watching the Palin obsession on Andrew Sullivan’s blog with a kind of fascinated horror. The blog was suspended to digest the almost content-free Palin book, but from the resumption notice it is clear that others have been raising their concerns.

No doubt It is part of the theatre, one of the many reasons, without wishing to be cynical, that I think Sullivan is such a successful blogger. However, as Ezra Klein cleverly points out, Palin is getting her revenge on her media critics. They exposed her lack of substance in the campaign and she is replying in kind, revealing their own vacuousness, while making her and her publishers a great deal of money.

Sullivan spends much of his remaining blog bandwidth reminding us of how demented movement conservatism has become–and well he might know. Before I come to that, I must through a sickening article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer on The Predator War in Afghanistan.  I won’t try to rerun the extraordinarily disturbing thesis of the article about how we have readily accepted that a governments can operate a relatively cheap and risk-free, rolling, assassination campaign, collateral damage and all. Lots of collateral damage, as this incident–just one–from the recent campaign to kill the Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, illustrates.

A few Pakistani and international news stories, most of which rely on secondhand sources rather than on eyewitness accounts, offer the basic details. On June 14, 2008, a C.I.A. drone strike on Mehsud’s home town, Makeen, killed an unidentified person. On January 2, 2009, four more unidentified people were killed. On February 14th, more than thirty people were killed, twenty-five of whom were apparently members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, though none were identified as major leaders. On April 1st, a drone attack on Mehsud’s deputy, Hakimullah Mehsud, killed ten to twelve of his followers instead. On April 29th, missiles fired from drones killed between six and ten more people, one of whom was believed to be an Al Qaeda leader. On May 9th, five to ten more unidentified people were killed; on May 12th, as many as eight people died. On June 14th, three to eight more people were killed by drone attacks. On June 23rd, the C.I.A. reportedly killed between two and six unidentified militants outside Makeen, and then killed dozens more people—possibly as many as eighty-six—during funeral prayers for the earlier casualties. An account in the Pakistani publication The News described ten of the dead as children. Four were identified as elderly tribal leaders. One eyewitness, who lost his right leg during the bombing, told Agence France-Presse that the mourners suspected what was coming: “After the prayers ended, people were asking each other to leave the area, as drones were hovering.” The drones, which make a buzzing noise, are nicknamed machay (“wasps”) by the Pashtun natives, and can sometimes be seen and heard, depending on weather conditions. Before the mourners could clear out, the eyewitness said, two drones started firing into the crowd. “It created havoc,” he said. “There was smoke and dust everywhere. Injured people were crying and asking for help.” Then a third missile hit. “I fell to the ground,” he said.

The local population was clearly angered by the Pakistani government for allowing the U.S. to target a funeral. (Intelligence had suggested that Mehsud would be among the mourners.) An editorial in The News denounced the strike as sinking to the level of the terrorists. The Urdu newspaper Jang declared that Obama was “shutting his ears to the screams of thousands of women whom your drones have turned into dust.” U.S. officials were undeterred, continuing drone strikes in the region until Mehsud was killed.

Needless to say, while this may be tactically successful (in taking out a rebel leader) it is difficult to see how it can’t unite the Afghan countryside being terrorised by these aerial assassins against the invaders and their quislings (and likewise destabilising Pakistan).

Now cut back to the piece by Andrew Sullivan that gave us the term Fisking. It is a blog post of 2001 critiquing Robert Fisk’s report of his encounter with a group of rural Afghans in December of 2001, a little unhappy at having their country bombed and invaded.

So why record my few minutes of terror and self-disgust under assault near the Afghan border, bleeding and crying like an animal, when hundreds — let us be frank and say thousands — of innocent civilians are dying under American air strikes in Afghanistan, when the “War of Civilisation” is burning and maiming the Pashtuns of Kandahar and destroying their homes because “good” must triumph over “evil”?

Fisk provided a vivid description of being on the sharp end of a lynching. Having escaped–mostly by giving as good as good as he was getting and making use of the stunned reaction to make off–he fetches breath and tries to make sense of what has happened to him. Fisk spends a lot of time reporting from various points of the world, and some of them quite troubled, and people don’t generally behave like this. Being the curious creatures we are it is natural on nearly losing your life for a misjudgement to work out what has happened and thus avoid further nasty surprises.

Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist — the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man’s jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world. [...]

And — I realised — there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us — of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the “War for Civilisation” just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them “collateral damage”.

So I thought I should write about what happened to us in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions would produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was “beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees”.

And of course, that’s the point. The people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted by us — by B-52s, not by them. And I’ll say it again. If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

Fisk (at least as of 2006) holds more British and international journalism awards than any other journalist, much of it covering wars and conflicts. Fisk understands the consequences (and futility) of war.

Was it ethically exceptionable. Not at all. Is it Fisk’s job to look after the souls of the lynch mob? No. It should go without saying–if you aren’t either a sociopath  or psychopath–that it is not ethical to take part in a lynching, but that is the concern of people being tempted into lynching. (For reasons that will become clear the ethics of the situation have to be spelled out in gruesome detail–please bear with me.) Fisk was not just trying to make sense of his own experience, but also explain its significance to his readers, for we were all implicated in this tragedy. Fisk was attacked by the mob because he represented us and it was important for his piece that we understood the ethical significance of our part in this. In any case was, as Fisk rightly said, the attack on him was fairly trivial in the greater scheme of things. It might not be true to say that the sole cause of being attacked by an individual was the violence we were meting out to his or her community, but it is certainly fair enough to say that it was the sole cause of the mob attacking Fisk, as his piece makes clear.

The attack was clearly related to the violence we were collectively visiting on rural Afghans. It was therefore our business to look at what we were doing to contribute to the violence and suffering of the situation. Fisk was not making a normative judgement in saying that in their situation he would be doing the same (i.e., he ought to have attacked a foreign journalist), but was making a naturalistic (or causal) statement about the consequences of our actions. He was saying that he could understand how he could have gotten sucked up into a lynch mob if he was on the receiving end of what we were doing.

This is what all true philosophy and religion tells us–to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and through that empathetic connection establish a more constructive dynamic with them.

And here we have Sullivan’s blog entry of 9th December 2001, the blog entry that is reputed to have inaugurated the Fisking genre of blogging:

THE PATHOLOGY OF ROBERT FISK: His account of his ordeal at the hands of an Afghan mob – a mob that apparently cried “Infidel!” as they attacked and tried to rob him – is a classic piece of leftist pathology. You have to read it to believe it. Even when people are trying to murder Fisk, he adamantly refuses to see them as morally culpable or even responsible. I’ve heard of self-hatred but this is ridiculous: “They started by shaking hands. We said, ‘Salaam aleikum’ – peace be upon you – then the first pebbles flew past my face.” That sentence alone deserves to go down as one of the defining quotes of the idiotic left. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be downright hilarious. Who needs Evelyn Waugh when you have this? [...]

THE VICTIM OF THE WORLD: You know the expression: you wouldn’t understand a culture if it actually hit you in the head? Fisk has now officially retired that expression as a metaphor. He goes on: “There were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others…” Notice that phrase – “whose brutality was entirely the product of others.” What can that possibly mean? We’re not talking about extenuating circumstances – things that might help us understand or contextualize the hatred of one people for another. We’re talking about a priori moral absolution. Take this passage: “Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist – the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man’s jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world.” No, Mr. Fisk, that man who attacked you was not truly innocent of any crime. You were. He was not the victim of the world. You were the victim of a thieving, violent mob. For those who believe that the left-wing intelligentsia is capable of critical thought or even a modification of their ideology in the face of evidence, this incident is a wonderful example of why it won’t happen. They won’t recognize reality, or abandon their racism, or moderate their spectacular condescension to the inhabitants of the developing world – even when reality, literally, crushingly, punches them in the face.

It is difficult to know whether to laugh or cry at this advice on ‘reality’ from a keyboard commando to one of the most decorated journalists of our time. Firstly on a point of fact, Robert Fisk is no ‘leftist’ (see here or here). ‘His view of journalism is …

… that it must “challenge authority—all authority—especially so when governments and politicians take us to war”, and he quotes with approval the Israeli journalist Amira Hass: “There is a misconception that journalists can be objective … What journalism is really about is to monitor power and the centres of power.” Fisk has received widespread praise and criticism for his condemnation of violence against civilians, courageous reporting, and willingness to challenge the statements of governments.’

He might well be hated by the war-mongering, empire-addicted elements of the right because his skilful and widely recognised reporting of the ‘reality’ that they despise so much. Starting with the Northern Irish conflict in the 1970s, and thereafter nearly continuously, reporting the baleful and tragic consequences of trying to impose military solutions on political problems, coming to a deep understanding of the futility and awful suffering consequences of this pathology of empire. Thoughtful people, such as those to be found at antiwar.com or The American Conservative, could offer similar critiques from the right.

The Wikipedia page on Fisking quotes this entry.

[blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment. See also MiSTing, anti-idiotarianism

Quite apart from the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan, not least to the NATO personnel caught up in the maelstrom, this is in any case a stupid way to run an empire, as Stephen Walt’s ‘logical’ and ‘brutally factual’ assessment of Obama’s recent visit to China illustrates.

The follies of the past eight years were the greatest gift the United States could have given Beijing, and Obama’s conduct in Beijing was the inevitable result. And if we keep doing what we’ve been doing (see under: Afghanistan, Middle East, etc.), I wouldn’t expect things to change.

Robert Fisk’s reporting seems to stand the test of time better than Andrew Sullivan’s blogging. This is of course entirely understandable.  I don’t know whether Andrew Sullivan has ever apologised for his attack on Robert Fisk. If he hasn’t he should.

More importantly isn’t it time that the kind of people that take great pride in ‘Fisking’ should perhaps move beyond a somewhat pre-adolescent model of engagement with other people’s points of view. With the rising influence of the blogosphere it is perhaps in everyone’s interest that we aspire to better. Perhaps then people like Robert Fisk might start to take it seriously.