Julie Chung and fire hoses of falsehoods

US Ambassador Julie Chung was spot on. A few days ago, she pointed out, correctly, that ‘fake news - and fake tweets - are a real problem.’ She urged one and all, ‘don’t be misled.’ This particular tweet, apparently, was a response of sorts to ‘fake tweets mimicking [her] account’ which ‘have been spreading on social media.’

Indeed, I’ve seen some ‘Julie Chung tweets’ which, at first glance, aren’t exactly out of sync with the tone and substance of Her Excellency’s utterances — they are as hilarious, condescending and ill-informed — which perhaps, if we take her word for it, are fake. In these dismal times some light humour is not misplaced of course. Satire, as she knows, is legit. It’s good that she has alerted the general public who could be, in her words, misled. The lady, however, might want to review her overall operational thrust in Sri Lankan affairs, tweets and other statements included. Just to be sure that clever mimickers cannot make an already pathetic public image even worse.

But. She got it right. Fake news (and news) and indeed fake anything can be a real problem. The rise of social media, for all the communicative benefits, has its own pitfalls, especially considering that those who run the platforms are not politically neutral and those who use it can get away with murder. Ms Chung should know, after all, her government, through the National Endowment of Democracy (NED) and other lovely-sounding-but-nefarious outfits have been funding all kinds of people and organizations with dubious histories for several years now. Sri Lanka had her fill of fake-news/tweets traceable to such people, consequently, especially during the aragalaya.

[Interestingly, those who seem to be even more upset than Chung about her being parodied in social media (yes, those fake tweets she refers to) uttered not a word of objection about deliberate efforts to mislead people. Maybe, for them, and by extension, Chung, such activity was never a problem but in fact a solution to a problem they were taxing their brains over. Yes, one is reminded of sauces, geese and ganders.]

But. She got it right. Fake anything is a problem. And it’s not something that started happening just the other day. Any half-way decent study into the antecedents of what is supposed to be the origins of European (or white) civilisation would yield rich, sophisticated and thriving black culture, science and social organisation. Jesus Christ was not a blond haired, blue-eyed white man. He was black (Source: the Bible, no less). He was not born on December 25th either. A lot of Christian symbols and iconography are borrowed from what are called pagan religions.

But. She got it right. It’s not just a long ago thing, but something that’s evident in remembered, recorded and verified history. It’s evident in a not-long-ago, in the yesterday and today of human affairs, political and otherwise, not excluding the machinations of the corporate sector and self-styled aragalists.

Joe Biden, her President, put it well: ‘There is no subject off-limits to this fire hose of falsehoods.  Everything from human rights and environmental policy to assassinations and civilian-killing bombing campaigns are fair targets.’ Of course he was targeting Russia, but when it comes to firehoses and falsehoods the USA would be tough to beat. Chung and Biden ought to know.

Way back in 2010, Thomas L Carson wrote an essay titled ‘Lying and Deception about Questions of War and Peace: Case Studies,’ in which he documented ‘political leaders and public figures [who] told lies or engaged in deception as a pretext for fighting wars.’ Chung would find references to William Randolph Hearst, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney. Obviously hardly an exhaustive list of liars. Fake news (no tweets back then) was not a problem for the USA even then. Remember Woodrow Wilson coming to power refusing to enter the way but in six months doing just that?

According to John R. MacArthur (Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War) George Bush (Snr) went about it professionally. The public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, among other things, arranged for a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah to testify before Congress prior to a key vote. She claimed, MacArthur recounts, ‘that she had volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. She had said, ‘While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming into the hospital with guns and going into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.’

Turned out that ‘it turned out that the witness was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., and human rights organizations found no evidence that anything like what she described had actually happened.’ Fake news. No problem for the USA.

We all know about non-existent weapons of mass destruction as pretext to invade Iraq. There’s the bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant. Then the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Exhaustive enumeration would force me to exceed the prescribed word-count for this piece.

The USA has a long history of interfering in other countries, beginning with the Ottoman colony Tripolitania in 1805 to the more recent examples of Ugly Americanism in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. Yes, another word-count exceeding exercise.  Maybe Chung wants her name somewhere in this long and disgusting history, we don’t know.  What is relevant is that in these machinations too, fake-news played a role, A plaint media did its part, one might add.    

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki recently expressed surprise that anyone could doubt the US military’s claims when it came to civilian casualties. Oh well! Sums it up doesn’t it? Not only are their damned lies but perhaps uttered so often that the utterers believe it all to be truth beyond a shadow of doubt. Julie Chung, on the other hand, got one thing right. She knows that fake news/tweets are a problem. Maybe she’s more enlightened than Jen Psaki — she doesn’t believe the fake news manufactured by her country but uses it anyway.

So. Retire moral posturing, already, Ms Chung and just encourage the laughs, huh? 

malindadocs@gmail.com
[Malinda Seneviratne is the Director/CEO of the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute. These are his personal views.]

Read more

Ambassador Chung and xeroxable change

 

Aragalaya. Translatable as revolt, uprising, protest, agitation, struggle or even insurrection. Aragalaya is singular, but considering statements and actions it was certainly not marked by concert, ideological agreement, unity of purpose etc. Eclecticism was the signature of the rumbling. There was mumbling, nothing more, about system-change, but a revolution it certainly was not. So, aragalaya: singular; aragala: plural. The latter is the better descriptive. And perhaps it is exactly this eclectic and disjointed character that forced the agitators to dilute whatever revolutionary fervour there may have been to a project that targeted an individual and once that ouster was obtained shift focus to another individual.

Let’s elaborate if only to dismiss those who still harbour illusions about what transpired over the past three months was about system-change, revolution or a political shift of tectonic proportion.

History teaches lessons. The Russian Revolution was about land, peace and bread. It wasn’t #Czar-out. Land and peace were obtained; bread took a while. The Czar was assassinated, sure, but in a political sense it was incidental. The Czar was not replaced some Royal heir. Tsarist rule came to an end. In France, it was ‘liberty, equality and fraternity,’ and not #Louis-out.  Capitalism is anti-equality and one might argue anti-liberty and anti-fraternity, but the French ended the monarchical system. Louis was assassinated. Again, incidental. A Royal heir didn’t succeed him.

In China, the slogan of the Communist Party was ‘Serve the people,’ admittedly a different tune to those played in Russia and France. In any event the Chinese weren’t maniacally invested in  banishing Chiang Kai-shek. The target was the Kuomintang and what it represented, and the overall relations of production. Chiang Kai-shek fled. The Communists did stumble and worse in serving the people, but all things considered all Chinese received what was previously the luxury of a few.

In all three cases, like in any revolution such as what took place in Cuba and Vietnam for example, the movements were marked by a clear vision about what kind of political and economic system should replace the one being challenged and organisational cohesion which enabled implementation.

In Sri Lanka, over the past three months, it was different. In Sri Lanka, we had #gohomegota and in a smaller font size and in normal text as opposed to bold and italicised, #gohomeranil, only, the latter was made impossible along the way for Ranil Wickremsinghe’s house was torched. Talk, if any, of land, peace and bread, of liberty, equality and fraternity, got drowned in the individual-focused slogans, As for serving the people, well, the agitators weren’t short on rhetoric. Indeed, as is often the case, all of it (and we need to include, sadly, the destruction of public property, stifling of expression-freedom, arson, theft, thuggery and murder as part of the ‘all’) was done ‘in the name of the people.’ At the end of the day, it was ‘same-old, same-old.’


Enzo Traverso, I am told, put it much better in the book ‘Revolution: an intellectual history’: ‘The aim of revolt is not to put down a political regime; it is rather to change its representatives; usually their targets are individuals, not classes or institutions, nor power itself. This is why they have a limited horizon and a short duration: they can be endemic, but are always territorially circumscribed. Revolutions, on the contrary, raise hopes supported by ideologies and utopian projections; they are frequently carried out by forces that embody political projects, like the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks. They consciously wish to change the social and political order. In short, they express great, sometimes universal ambitions.’

So what was it all about then? Let us not be unforgiving. There was serious anxiety, fear and anger regarding multiple depravations. Fertile ground, then, for all manner of agent provocateurs and there were veritable legions in operation. Some on the ground, some behind the scenes, some cheering on (only to go silent after, perhaps, true objective was achieved) and some in the giddiness of it all compromising professional ethics and tripping gaily over their own contradictions. Names can be named, if necessary, for screen-shots of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posts have been filed. Meticulously, I might add.

Regardless, there were and still are idealists who wanted more than name-change, who genuinely believed that this was a necessary first step in the long march to meaningful social transformation. Maybe they didn’t expect to play pawn, maybe they believe(d) that it was a price they may have to pay, maybe they will learn and become smart enough distinguish enemy from friend and outwit the small-minded and pernicious as well as those who saw a larger picture and preferred outcomes that they, the genuine agitators, never believed was part of this whole exercise.

US Ambassador Julie Chung’s tweets are hilarious but seriously they could feed several doctoral dissertations on international political economy. It is no secret that the US backed several vocal outfits and individuals who backed the aragalaya (and who have since been more cautious in their missives). She was jubilant when Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned. She’s reproached the government for evicting protestors from Galle Face, but in guarded tones.

Check the language. On the 9th of May she used the word ‘condemn’ and on the 22nd of July, merely expressed ‘concern’. Earlier it was ‘violence’ and later ‘actions.’ Perhaps all the social media  ‘activists’ (who would like people to believe they wanted real change and weren’t just being willing pawns of US interests) could do some content analysis of her tweets. She was and is, after all, the point person in Colombo for US interests and knows which individuals and which organizations were and are funded by US organizations dedicated to pushing Washington’s agenda forward around the world, for example the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The attacks (actions/violence) happened. No argument there. The magnitude of course, as claimed/tweeted, is debatable, but violence there was. There is of course a difference between attacking those who are engaged in peaceful protest and taking action against those violating the law. All things considered and especially comparing with the way the USA has treated peaceful protestors (outright brutality including murder, Chung would know), it could have been much worse. But here’s something for the lady to chew on: President Biden recently tweeted, ‘Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think inciting a mob that attacks a police officer is “respect for the law.” You can’t be pro-insurrection and [at the same time be] pro-cop or pro-democracy or ‘pro-American.’

Inciting a mob. There were mobs among the idealists, there were arsonists, looters, murderers and paddlers of virulent ideologies that were square-in-the-middle of racism, intolerance and such. Chung knew. Chung knows. Chung didn’t tweet a sweet ‘no, no, not like that!’  

And we have Derek Grossman a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation (established in 1948 in California with the purpose of military planning, research, and decision development, has 1,950 employees from 50 different countries), gloating thus: ‘China’s window of opportunity to one day control Sri Lanka probably just closed.’ Is he saying 'our window of opportunity just got opened that much more'? Would Chung nod in agreement?

Well, when CIA agents cheer a protest, the conscientious protestors should  say something to the effect of,‘we don’t need your endorsement; you are part of the problem, part of the system.’ Didn’t see any of that though.

All this is in a land called ‘bound to happen’ and that inevitability has everything to do with the key flaws of the aragalaya outlined above and the inability of those who truly wanted change to rise to the challenge of taking on and defeating the enemy within, so to speak, even as they targeted symbols and not the system they represented.

Lessons for the future, hopefully.

RELATED ARTICLES: 

ජනසතු අරගලය ජනතාකරණයට ලක් වුනාද?

The Aragalaya: A Postscript

ව්‍යවස්ථා සංශෝධන මාෆියාව/මේනියාව

 Vee da (වීද) hoo da (හූද) people?

When the centre cannot hold...

Recipes for co-opting and subverting #peoplepower

#De-dollarize!

The international community, the opposition and 'the people'

The 'ada davase mahanakama'

#Aragalayaleft?

Personalities and systems

The 'aragalists' and the challenge of re-mapping Sri Lanka

Tomorrow, tomorrow and so forth...

A season of (il)legitimacies 

The brink and beyond

Spontaneity and its discontents 

ලෙයට ලෙය වෙනුවට ආලය

පුද්ගල චරිත මතුවේ, නිර්පාක්ෂික හැව ගැලැවේ, අරගලය ඉදිරියටම....

The BASL Proposals: A review

malindadocs@gmail.com

[Malinda Seneviratne is the Director/CEO of the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute. These are his personal views.]

Read more