[T]his is the prism through which people like Fisk (Third-Worldists, Post-Colonialists, Nativists, Arabists, etc.) see the "West-East" relationship (just read Said or Khalidi). It completely dictates how they see and interpret events.
All that is in play with Juan Cole, with the addition of severe anti-Bushism. It's such an ideological thing with Cole, that it goes well beyond any sense of rationality. So, when Cole is writing a concise history of Lebanon, he's really not concerned with Lebanon. He's concerned with Bush. As Fouad Ajami once wrote, this is an old genre. A writer would be writing about Persia, but in his mind he's thinking about Paris. So it comes as no surprise that Cole's ill-informed "Lebanese history for dummies" was actually enveloped by two references to Bush and his policy. That alone should've made it clear to the reader that what you are about to read is not about Lebanon, it's about Bush, and about Cole's antithetical view.
These types see American policy in the ME (including Israel of course) as the root of all the ills of that region. By so doing (as I pointed out with Seale and others), they turn the people of the region into passive tools to be viewed either with pity or (if they "collaborate") angry scorn and contempt.
He continues:
This, my friends, is not history. This is ideological discourse. This is, to the tee, the rhetoric used not just by Arabist professors like Khalidi, this is the discourse you hear in the speeches of the region's tyrants.
And this:
Cole is not only driven by Arab nationalist ideology, he's also driven by ignorance.
And this:
[I]n the end, Cole's history is nothing more but an uncritical endorsement of the Nasserist discourse, plain and simple. It's an ideological singular chain of causality that inevitably leads to the US.
The whole detailed indictment is too long to reproduce here, but it is devastating. Read the whole thing here. You'll never trust Cole's analysis on anything again.
No comments:
Post a Comment