https://scotthorton.org/interviews/8-14-24-matthew-hoh-on-obamas-folly-in-afghanistan-and-recourses-for-managing-and-dealing-with-ptsd/
Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton recently interviewed former USMC Captain / former State Department official Matthew Hoh.
Famously, Hoh resigned from a State Department post in Afghanistan in 2009 and valiantly attempted to convince President Barack Obama’s administration to not go forward with a planned military surge in Afghanistan. He tried to convince them to get the hell out of there instead. That’s 12 years before we finally got the hell out of there. In disgrace.
The Obama administration passed on Hoh’s facts-based warning of impending disaster. It marched headlong into the disaster. But something interesting happened. Instead of having his voice repressed, Hoh found himself constantly invited to appear on MSNBC and tell the truth about how unwinnable the Afghan War was. And MSNBC was “controlled by the White House.”
What the hell?
Hoh’s experience highlights that despite the state’s patronage of sycophants and psychopaths, reality always gets a vote. And those who speak truth to (and about) power can find a place in the intellectual ecosystem.
There are two kinds of intellectuals, those who serve the state and those who don’t.
Regime intellectual is a sweet gig. As long as one commits to core elements of the state’s point of view (government supremacist, domestic imperialist, pro-war) one can be as lazy and/or insane as one wants to be. Case in point: 1999’s Tyranny’s Ally, by David Wurmser. Here is a book that reads like it was penned by an inmate at Arkham Asylum:
“Anti-Americanism among pan-Arabic nationalists emerges from the same source as did.
Communist and Nazi anti-Americanism: the nature of tyrannical regimes. The hostility is a product of neither the U.S. presence nor its policies. Since the concept of enemy is essential to legitimize internal repression, neighbors or superpowers that represent ideas antithetical
to tyranny are particularly threatening to the tyrant and are thus considered the most dangerous of its foes. In the Middle East, those enemies are the United States and Israel—not because of what they have done, but because of who they are, what they represent, and the fact of
their existence.”
Crazy stuff. Although the part about “the concept of enemy is essential to legitimize internal repression” rings true. But the rest is kooky. Not only was Wurmser not committed to a hospital for the criminally insane, he became Middle East Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
America does not have a monopoly on deranged regime intellectuals. A fascinating example in Russia is Alexander Dugin. An ultranationalist, his 1997 book The Foundations of Geopolitics reads like a Russian version of The Grand Chessboard. Dugin wrote:
“Then there is the Ukrainian issue. Ukrainian sovereignty is such a negative phenomenon for Russian geopolitics that, in principle, it could easily provoke an armed conflict. Without the Black Sea coastline from Ismail to Kerch, Russia gets such a long coastal strip, effectively controlled by who knows who, that its very existence as a normal and independent state is called into question.”
Actually, that doesn’t sound so crazy. But consider this passage from his 2009 book The Fourth Political Theory:
“American liberal Ayn Rand (Greenspan was one of her greatest admirers) has created an entire philosophy (“Objectivism”) based on the following blunt idea: if one is rich, then he is good. She
reached the limits of Weber’s idea about the origin of capitalism in the Protestant ethic and said that the “rich” is always and necessarily the “good” – almost a “saint”, while the “poor” is evil, lazy, bad, and corrupt – a “sinner”.”
Presenting Rand as the flag bearer of American Liberalism is so uncharitable as to be diabolical. Maybe not as delusional as Wurmser, but certainly tapped.
Anyway, regime publication Foreign Affairs called Dugin “Putin’s Brain” and portrayed his philosophy as driving the Russian state. Which is preposterous. Alex Hu explained Dugin’s role in The National Interest:
“…a cursory look at his career reveals that he is just one of many pawns in Putin’s curated media ecosystem. The regime’s “political technologists” are known to impersonally employ thousands of media personalities like Dugin to shape public opinion. These personalities do not control their public profile, nor do their ideas necessarily even reflect official policy. The regime also sponsors extremists and pseudo-oppositionists to make itself look moderate in comparison.”
One of those political technologists was Vladislav Surkov:
“As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the president is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in.”
Apparently, even though Russia is a repressive autocracy and American is an enlightened democratic republic, the White House deploys the same media tactics as the Kremlin. Which brings us back to Hoh. He told Horton he believes the White House authorized MSNBC to platform him because it had accepted the truth about Afghanistan:
“They keep having me on. I’m on MSNBC so often that the makeup ladies keep my mixture of… makeup ready for me because I’m in there a couple times a week, you know. And why, why do they keep having this guy come on arguing to get out of Afghanistan? Well, it’s because Barack Obama couldn’t be seen as weak or soft, but he also knew that he could lose the reelection, because Afghanistan was another Iraq. So, we’re going to surge in Afghanistan and then what happens Scott right we’re going to start pulling out in the summer of 2011.”
Now imagine if there were no intellectuals like Matthew Hoh out there speaking the truth. Imagine if we were fully a nation of Wurmsers. Reality would still get a vote. And at some point, reality would overwhelm the false narratives. But we would have already marched into Hell and obliterated civilization, possibly the species.
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