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Title: Manufactured ignorance Author: David Graeber Date: 2/16/2018 Language: en Topics: Rojava, fascism, liberalism, propaganda Source: 9/30/22 from http://www.focaalblog.com/2018/02/16/david-graeber-manufactured-ignorance/
This is a story about how a well-meaning liberal American professor can
end up becoming an active propagandist for right-wing forces attempting
to destroy a feminist revolution.
•
Juan Cole is a Professor of History at the University of Michigan,
well-known for his blog Informed Comment, which has provided detailed
background and analysis on Middle Eastern affairs to a largely
university-based audience since 2002. Politically a Sanders Democrat, he
appears to operate within that sector of the progressive elite that
overlaps with the DC political establishment and therefore exists in at
least the same intellectual, social, and professional circuits (i.e.,
attends the same cocktail parties as members of what is delicately
referred to as “the intelligence community.”
What follows might then be read as a study in the moral perils of what
can happen when scholars come to operate too closely to circuits of
power. It bears in it lessons of no small relevance to anthropologists.
Cole approaches contemporary Middle Eastern politics from what is often
described as an anti-imperialist perspective—though he has been known to
depart from it in specific instances (he supported NATO intervention in
Libya). Much of the power of his analysis lies in his willingness to
carefully pick through Turkish-, Arabic-, and Persian-language opinion
pieces and news sources, and to examine the social and class basis of
Islamist social movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iraqi Sadrists.
Still, an anti-imperialist optic seems, oddly, much closer to an
imperialist one than that of someone who is doing something else
entirely; like the legates of empire he criticizes, Cole seems to share
an instinctual sympathy for “moderate Islamist” strongmen, and an
equally instinctual antipathy to anyone in his chosen area of study who
purports to share his own left-wing commitments.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his limitless animus against
Turkey’s Kurdish Worker’s Party, or PKK, and any other element of the
larger Kurdish Freedom Movement of which the PKK is a part. For almost
20 years, they have been trying to “change the game,” as it were, from a
story about empire and resistance to empire, to one where the Middle
East should be, rather than a plaything of strongmen and would-be
strongmen, the birthplace of a new phase in the history of democracy and
women’s rights.
Some background: around 2000, the PKK, a Marxist rebel group that had
been fighting a long guerrilla war for a separate Kurdish state, began
to undergo a profound ideological transformation. Sparked in part by the
evolution of the ideas of imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan—partly, too,
by the efforts of women’s groups within the movement—the PKK abandoned
Marxism-Leninism and turned to libertarian socialism with a focus on
overthrowing patriarchy. It also abandoned any call for a separate
Kurdish state for a call to develop a multiethnic, ecologically
conscious society based on principles of confederal direct democracy
inspired in part by the ideas of the American anarchist theorist Murray
Bookchin. Inspired by the example of the Mexican Zapatistas, they
pledged not just not to target civilians, but not to carry out offensive
actions against Turkish security forces, asking for a ceasefire and
peace negotiations aimed at a general decentralization and
democratization of Turkish society as a whole. Principles of democratic
confederalism and equal women’s representation in all political offices
were adopted across the broader Kurdish movement, including HDP (the
largely Kurdish-based left political party in Turkey), PYD in Syria, and
allied groups in Iraq and Iran.
The Turkish response was to lobby to have the PKK placed on the US,
Australian, Canadian, and EU “terror” lists, which they had not been
before, and—though Erdogan did make a brief strategic gesture at
negotiations—to use the “terrorist” designation as a pretext for
rounding up thousands of activists, journalists, and elected officials
who tried to pursue the new strategy of trying to build alternative
democratic structures, many of whom were systematically raped and
tortured in detention.
Some years later, in Syria in 2012, events took a very different course.
In the largely Kurdish-speaking northern cantons of Cezire, Kobane, and
Afrin (collectively referred to as Rojava), the movement managed to
negotiate a general withdrawal of Syrian government forces (government
officials, and oligarchs close to the regime, almost all took off as
well). Kurdish revolutionaries suddenly had a space to be able to
realize their dream of democratic confederalism. This happened, however,
in a tense relation with other areas in rebellion. While in the early
days of the Syrian revolution, Arab communities too created directly
democratic councils, many on a model inspired by a Syrian anarchist
named Omar Aziz, the militarization of the conflict had very different
effects; where in the Kurdish areas, the revolutionaries created their
own militias, the People’s Protection Forces (YPG) and the Women’s
Protection Forces (YPJ), most of the secular, left revolutionary
organizations in the rest of Syria made a conscious decision not to join
the armed struggle, leaving that to military defectors who made up the
Free Syrian Army, then, increasingly, to Islamist militias armed and
supplied by outside powers such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
There were tensions between the two forces, especially over the YPG/J’s
decision not to conduct offensive operations against the Syrian
government but simply to protect the social experiments in its own
territories. This, already, took a great deal of effort, however, as
Islamists allied—openly or tacitly—with Turkey soon began launching
major unprovoked assaults on Rojava, culminating in the famous siege of
Kobane. International pressure gradually forced the United States to aid
the YPG/J, which ultimately agreed to take the battle home to root out
ISIS from the entirety of Syria, in the process, spreading the
confederalist model and feminist mobilization well beyond
Kurdish-majority territories, through about two-fifths of Syrian
territory, in what’s now called the Democratic Confederation of North
Syria—somewhat bizarrely, working in coordination with some two thousand
US troops.
This is the kind of information one might have imagined would feature
prominently in a blog ostensibly intended to disentangle events in the
region for a left-of-center, largely university-based Western audience.
But one can search in vain for virtually any of it in Juan Cole’s blog.
After his initial accounts of the Arab Spring, the revolutionary
infrastructure in Arab areas—and the intriguing fact that in many areas,
it has managed to coexist with Islamist militias—disappears. The
treatment of the Kurdish movement, on the other hand, crosses the line
from mere neglect to active hostility. This is especially directed
against the PKK. While Cole made a point of describing Sunni rebels
opposing the US occupation in Iraq, even those who placed bombs in
marketplaces frequented by rival ethnic groups, as “guerrillas” he never
referred to the PKK, who are fighting a classic guerrilla insurgency and
never make such attacks, as anything but “terrorists.” Frequently, these
denunciations slip into what appear to be simple fabrications,
exemplified in statements such as “The PKK waged a dirty war in the
1970s-1990s and was guilty of massive war crimes, and is still a
ruthless and brutal purveyor of terror.”
While the first statement is contestable, to say the least, the second
is simply untrue, and in the particular blog post linked above, five
different commenters demanded Professor Cole give at least one example
of a recent PKK attack on a civilian target. He ignored all of them.
(The very fact that they remained up was somewhat anomalous; Cole
systematically censors comments that challenge his editorial decisions
on such issues, and preemptively blocks anyone on twitter who seems too
sympathetic to the Kurdish left.) Cole’s signature rhetorical move is
false evenhandedness, such as, in the same piece:
Although the PKK is guilty of horrific acts of terrorism, Erdogan’s
military has sometimes besieged civilian Kurdish villages in the
southeast (they are Turkish citizens). When dozens of Turkish academics
signed a letter protesting these state tactics, they met with state
harassment and some were even arrested (over what was essentially a
petition).
If one knows anything of the real history, one cannot see paragraphs
like this, coming from a world-renowned academic expert with
long-standing knowledge and research interests in the region, as
anything but calculated deception. These are the actual events being
referred to, all of which would have been familiar to anyone following
political events in Turkey, many of them widely reported in the press:
legal political wing of the Kurdish Freedom Movement, swept local
elections in much of the Turkish southeast. Many of its elected
officials, including numerous mayors, and hundreds community organizers
were subsequently arrested, beaten, tortured, or killed by Turkish
security forces and allied fascist or Islamist death squads.
cities) responded by voting to declare their municipalities
self-governing on principles of democratic confederalism, took up arms
and dug trench systems to defend their cities.
surround and besiege these cities, imposing 24-hour curfews that created
mass starvation, and ultimately flattening city centers and many
neighborhoods with artillery and helicopter gunships. Hundreds died.
deployment of rape against female activists.
provided supplies and training to the youth groups, (2) calling for
peace talks to head off armed conflict before the Turkish attack, and
(3) descending, once the attacks began, from the mountains to make a
largely unsuccessful military attempt to break the sieges.
presented a petition demanding the government negotiate rather than
attack its own population; hundreds of these signatories have since been
purged from their jobs, most were threatened, attacked, or arrested, and
at least 148 face trial for “terrorist propaganda.”
If one rereads Cole’s above-quoted passage with all this in mind (and
Cole was certainly in a position to known all of this), we can see what
a calculated act of dissimulation it really was. He clearly wants to
write in such a way as to provoke mild sympathy among his audience for
his fellow academics but, at the same time, to make the Turkish
government’s actual “horrific acts of terrorism” (to use his own words
in an appropriate context) and the destruction of Kurdish cities as
palatable as possible to an audience of liberal intellectuals—in this
case, largely by obfuscating and in some cases completely reversing the
actual events.
Such interventions are political acts—just as is the piece you are
reading now—and all the more so in a context rife with censorship.
Turkey by now has more journalists in prison than any other country on
Earth. Crucially, the fact that the PKK is listed as a “terror group”
means that, whatever its behavior, false statements about it will always
pass unchecked in the mainstream media, but even accurate statements
that contradict the terror narrative are well-nigh impossible to
publish.
The fact that it was the PKK (and the YPG) who fought their way through
ISIS lines to rescue the Yazidis of Mount Sinjar from genocide, when no
one else was willing to intervene, is largely ignored by Western
journalists. This suppression extends to the Kurdish movement more
generally: I myself had visited some of the Turkish cities in question
in 2015, just before the army attacks began, and while they were
happening wrote a piece clarifying the background—yet found myself
incapable of finding a single American or European newspaper willing to
run with it. To this day, almost no one outside Turkey is aware any of
these events even took place.
Clearly, the brave Turkish academics who signed the petition did so
hoping that people like Cole would report why they did it, and that
outrage among precisely the very sort of people who read Cole’s blog
(call them, if you like, the international liberal intelligentsia…)
would then lead to pressure on Erdogan’s government to return to peace
talks. By strategically—and consistently—misrepresenting the situation
to that very audience, Professor Cole appears to be intentionally trying
to ensure the efforts of those Turkish academics were in vain. Again, it
seems extremely unlikely that Cole was somehow unaware that, as he
wrote, a dozen Turkish cities lay in ruins. What were his motives in
representing things as other than they were?
The exact same game is now being played for the horrific events and mass
murder now taking place in northern Syria, where the Turkish army has
launched a full-scale invasion of the previously peaceful canton of
Afrin, on the grounds that its defenders are “terrorists”—for no other
reason than that they are part of the larger Kurdish movement that
includes the PKK. Unprovoked military aggression, is of course, a war
crime—“the supreme war crime,” according to the Nuremberg tribunal, as
Cole himself so pointedly noted in his critique of the Rumsfeld memo
that prepared the US for the invasion of Iraq—and the Turkish army is
conducting the invasion using not just Turkish troops but former ISIS
and Al-Qaeda militiamen (along with FSA foot soldiers basically
dragooned into the campaign against their will).
Again, this might seem to be just the sort of case where international
outrage might be expected, and might actually have a positive effect. To
draw international attention to the situation, the North Syria
Confederation organized a solidarity march of Kurds, Arabs, and Yezidis,
as well as Syriac, Armenian, and Assyrian Christians, from across the
region. Here is how Cole chose report on this event. If nothing else it
might serve as a handy guide for any reader who might at any point in
the future be interested in justifying atrocities:
Image 1: Screenshot from Juan Cole’s blog
(https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/against-turkish-offensive.html,
accessed 11 February 2018).
The first clever move here is not to report an event, but to report a
report of an event. The source is clearly unfriendly. But this allows
Cole to leave the reader with the false impression that this is a purely
Kurdish nationalist event, when the organizers intended the opposite.
The final line that “it is alleged” that some protesters were Kurdish
militia is also rather odd. In fact, both YPG/J volunteers from other
parts of Syria, and Syriac Christian militia, have arrived in Afrin in
recent days, but since the Syrian government is allowing safe passage
there would be no reason for them to hide within a civilian march.
Rather, the suggestion they might have been hiding reflects a recent
Turkish propaganda line. Since Turkish army shelling and airstrikes
against Afrin’s cities, towns, and villages have created hundreds of
civilian casualties in Afrin, and photos of victims have begun to spark
some international concern, the new line is that Kurdish militia are
intentionally dressing in civilian clothes to fake such claims. The
image of marchers with guns—invoked by this passage—is often used to
reinforce this.
Image 2: Screenshot from Juan Cole’s blog
(https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/against-turkish-offensive.html,
accessed 11 February 2018).
Again, this passage is hard to understand except in the context of an
ongoing info-war in which Cole, while apparently writing in a coolly
evenhanded way, is, in fact, echoing another Turkish propaganda line.
The Turkish public was prepared to believe the invasion would be a
cakewalk, over in a matter of days. Eighteen days later, despite
overwhelming advantage in numbers and technology (the Turkish army is in
fact larger than the entire population of Afrin, and their troops can
deploy hundreds of high-end German-manufactured tanks, fighter jets, and
helicopter gunships), they have nowhere managed to advance more than
roughly five or six kilometers into Democratic Federation of Syria
territory, stopped in their tracks by determined male and female
partisans armed with AK-47s and anti-tank missiles. Their response has
been to insist the anti-tank missiles are supplied by the United States
(in fact they appear to be Russian-made and bought or captured from
other rebels). Even if these claims were true, however, they would be
bizarre: US assurances that troops it armed would not be “deployed
against” Turkey obviously referred to offensive actions, not that they
would not be used to shoot back if Turkey launched an unprovoked attack
against them. The article proceeds:
Image 3: Screenshot from Juan Cole’s blog
(https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/against-turkish-offensive.html,
accessed 11 February 2018).
Such criticism of Turkey is intended to create an impression of
evenhanded neutrality, but in fact, considering the overwhelming
evidence that Turkey was actively trading with Daesh, and cooperating
politically and militarily, it is at best extremely understated. This
sort of gentle touch is, however, certainly not what Cole deploys when
speaking of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria:
Image 4: Screenshot from Juan Cole’s blog
(https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/against-turkish-offensive.html,
accessed 11 February 2018).
This passage is crucial largely for what it does not say. In fact,
Afrin’s total population had increased by 400,000 since the start of the
war because it was an island of peace and stability, and most of those
who fled there from other parts of Syria were not Kurdish. Cole seems to
have felt the reader should not know this as it might undercut the tacit
message that this is all about Kurdish nationalism.
Cole also wants to ensure the reader remains ignorant of almost anything
else that might show Afrin in a favorable light: for instance, the fact
that its previously peaceful conditions had allowed it to go furthest
with Rojava’s experiment in revolutionary feminism, to the point where
two-thirds of all officeholders there are women. Or the fact that Rojava
as a whole is conducting the most radical experiment in women’s
empowerment, perhaps, in history, and that this experiment is being
attacked by overtly patriarchal Islamists partly for this very reason.
One might be forgiven for thinking a “left” commentator on the region
might find this fact, or the experiments with direct democracy, worthy
of discussion; or at the very least, worthy of remark. But Cole is
careful to ensure his readers are not privy to any of this information.
Image 5: Screenshot from Juan Cole’s blog
(https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/against-turkish-offensive.html,
accessed 11 February 2018).
Here, Cole again employs the technique of the selective reporting of
accusations (accusations against the YPG are regularly reproduced, with
no comment on whether or not they ought to be credited; equivalent
accusations against Turkey or FSA forces are simply not reported).
Critical background is excluded: the fact, for instance, that the “Arab
belt” populations between the three cantons that fear ethnic cleansing
might do so largely because they are themselves mostly there as a result
of Syrian government ethnic cleansing population against Kurds in the
’50s and ’60s, or that a UN investigation confirmed that, when the other
two cantons (Cezire and Kobane) were united, no ethnic cleansing by
YPG/J forces took place. Similarly, Manbij, a territory between Afrin
and Kobane, was seized by the YPG from ISIS two years ago; even though
it was a formerly Kurdish majority city that had been ethnically
cleansed by the Syrian government in the ’60s and then again by Daesh
over the last several years, until Kurds had been reduced to a mere 5%
of the population, “Kurdish rule” has seen its population swell
dramatically as 120,000 mostly Arab refugees came to live there from
other parts of Syria. This is the very opposite of ethnic cleansing.
In fact, the very existence of the Democratic Federation of Northern
Syria, let alone the fact that it has put its model forward as a
multiethnic democratic solution for all of Syria, or that it has
nonetheless been excluded from official peace talks on Turkish
insistence, is entirely left out Cole’s account.
Finally, crucially, Cole uses the selective reporting trick to provide a
pretext for Turkey’s unprovoked attack: its claims that the YPG is
attacking its cities. The reality according to virtual all foreign
observers until now has been the exact opposite: Turkey has been
periodically shelling and bombing Afrin and other parts of Rojava for
more than a year now, with the YPG refusing to take the bait and not
returning fire.
Image 6: Screenshot from Juan Cole’s blog
(https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/against-turkish-offensive.html,
accessed 11 February 2018).
As a summary of the war so far this is bizarre (in fact, the Turkish
army had by that time failed to advance more than five kilometers into
Afrin; the YPG/J had already released videos of as many as 20 armored
vehicles destroyed or captured). The crucial thing to notice here though
is how what were earlier reported as mere Turkish accusations of
cross-border attacks has suddenly morphed into a flat-out a statement of
fact. This rhetorical slippage is all the more striking considering,
again, all the contextual information that’s left out, such as:
(1) the fact that recordings have been released of Hakan Fidan, the head
of Turkish intelligence, proposing faking just such cross-border missile
attacks as a pretext for invasion, and considerable evidence the rocket
attacks were indeed launched from the Turkish side, and
(2) the fact that there are no similar doubts about the reality of
Turkish artillery and bombing attacks on civilian targets in Afrin.
These latter have included attacks on villages, urban neighborhoods,
dams, bakeries, and water filtration plants, which have caused hundreds
of civilian casualties. The Turkish air force has even carried out an
ISIS-like attack on a famous archaeological site, the Ain Dara Hittite
temple complex, which, sitting alone in a desert far from any other
conceivable target, appears to have been blown apart for no other reason
than to destroy the region’s cultural heritage.
(This latter might be of some interest to anthropologists. In fact, both
sides of the conflict are fighting a mythic battle. Islamists, now
including the Turkish army, which has been increasingly taken over by
Islamist loyalists since the coup, take aim at ruins as vestiges of a
pagan past. The Kurdish movement in particular treasures them for that
very reason, seeing Kurds as descendants of the Neolithic,
goddess-worshipping peoples of the region, and their revolution as the
beginning of historical reversal of patriarchy in its birthplace. A YPJ
statement responding to Turkey’s Islamist auxiliaries’ mutilation of the
corpse of a female fighter declared, “This time, my sisters will make
history. We will avenge our Goddess Tiamat and smash the legacy of
Marduk.”)
Not a single mention of any of these facts about Turkish bombing of
civilian targets and past threats of false-flag attacks appears anywhere
in Cole’s piece, or in anything else he’s written. The piece ends:
Image 7: Screenshot from Juan Cole’s blog
(https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/against-turkish-offensive.html,
accessed 11 February 2018).
The conclusion, alas, rather gives the game away. “Some observers” is
again bizarre, since Erdogan himself has stated he intends to take Afrin
city. He has also declared that Kurds have historically only represented
35 percent of the Afrin population (a statement that seems to have no
historical basis whatsoever) and that he intends to give the territory
back to its “rightful owners,” which has been taken by almost everyone
else as public admission that ethnic cleansing is precisely what he has
in mind. So, this is hardly something Cole just somehow figured out.
A radical feminist experiment in direct democracy, of world-historic
significance, is currently being attacked by forces of the far-right
intent on carrying out war crimes to suppress it. While the women and
men defending Afrin have shown extraordinary tenacity in blunting the
Turkish offensive, the only long-term chance they have of fending off
the onslaught is to hold out until global outrage forces world powers to
withdraw their “green light” to Turkey’s military aggression. In this
context, words are weapons. Erdogan’s regime is keenly aware of this and
has showered untold millions on Western PR firms and influence peddlers
to tar anyone associated with the Kurdish Freedom Movement as
“terrorists.”
As intellectuals we are used to being relatively marginal players in the
global game. This is one unusual situation where the role of
intellectuals, and particularly the broad left intellectual public is
potentially crucial. Our thoughts, our potential interventions, actually
do matter. The Women’s Defense Forces for instance have declared that
they are fighting for all women against patriarchy, but above all they
have appealed to women’s movements across the world for support. Those
trying to put the ideas of Murray Bookchin and other Western left
libertarians into practice have similarly called for the solidarity of
all those trying to broaden and deepen democracy. This is what makes
projects like Cole’s Informed Comment so strategically important, and
makes his systematic hostility to the women’s revolution beginning to
take place in the Middle East so insidious. What he has effectively done
in the piece above is produced an elaborate case for war crimes, dressed
up to be palatable to an educated foreign public: if Erdogan’s army, and
its allied Grey Wolf fascist death squads, and Salafist Jihadi militias,
actually do manage to destroy Afrin’s feminist experiment, the men like
Juan Cole will have played a key role in making it possible.