by Jonathan Kay
History Belongs to the YouTube Victors
In September of 2009, after I’d marched around with a group of “We Are Change” Truthers on the anniversary of 9/11, I asked some of them what they thought about the day’s activities. There had been a few hundred of us parading up and down Midtown Manhattan with our banners and leaflets. Yet none of the onlookers had seemed particularly interested. “Aren’t you discouraged?” I asked.
Just the opposite, they told me: The day had been a massive success.
The whole event, they explained, had been filmed from start to finish, and a lot of the footage was already on the Internet. One “We Are Change” organizer, Matt Lepacek, had even shown up with a backpack of network-connected computer gear, and apparently had been simulcasting every second of it. The marchers I spoke with were particularly excited about a segment in which a Truther gave an excited speech to a bored-looking police officer. “That thing is going to be all over YouTube!” one exclaimed to me. “A million people are going to see it!”
That seemed to be an exaggeration. But the number was beside the point. What mattered to these people was that a million people could be watching—that their activities were part of the historical archive, and so would mark their role as prophets and pioneers when the revolution finally came.
Early in my research of the 9/11 Truth movement, I interviewed Philip Zelikow, the American diplomat and historian who served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission. At first, our conversation focused on the history of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the various strategies that Truthers had used to distort the facts. But as we talked, Zelikow increasingly homed in on the aspect of the movement he found most bizarre and exasperating—the Truthers’ obsession with video.
“Whenever these folks try to accost me, they always film it,” he told me. “It happened in Chicago when I was trying to check in at a hotel—and someone accosted me. Or they’ll stand up at a speech I’m giving, and someone will stand up and scare everyone by blowing a loud whistle, and then post it to YouTube. It’s happened many times.
“By doing this, it makes their movement real,” Zelikow adds. “They’re basically trying to set themselves up as chroniclers of an alternative history, in which they are the key truth-tellers and their story is chronicling the story of how that truth unfolded. It’s the same with all cult-like groups [in the modern era]—even al-Qaeda.”
Chapter Eight
Tin-Foil Mortarboards: Conspiracism’s Ivy League Enablers
I have heard it confidently stated . . . that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
—George Orwell, 1945
Jacques Derrida’s Hall of Mirrors
Though his name will forever be associated with “deconstruction” and other avant-garde literary doctrines, Paul de Man was an anachronism—a throwback to an age when gentleman scholars with scant formal credentials could be catapulted into the loftiest reaches of the Ivy League on the strength of charm, native intelligence, and personal connections.
After fleeing postwar Belgium in his late twenties, de Man began life in American letters at the bottom rung—serving customers at a Grand Central Station bookshop. But he managed to make friends at Partisan Review, and a letter of introduction from Mary McCarthy landed him a teaching position at Bard College. That in turn led to postings at Harvard’s Society of Fellows (where he overlapped in the 1950s with an up-and-coming linguist named Avram Noam Chomsky), Cornell and, finally, Yale. There, he bestrode the comparative literature program until his death in 1983, preaching austere sermons to graduate students about the “limitations of textual authority.” Conventional literary criticism, he argued, is a sham—a naïve and romantic project aimed at extracting intrinsic meaning from written words that, by their nature, are mere chicken scratches on paper.
As the fad for such ideas crested in the 1970s and 1980s, and scholars made increasingly radical claims about their capacity to reimagine language, de Man became a sort of secular prophet. At his university memorial service, recalls David Mikics, a Yale PhD who later went on to teach English at the University of Houston, onlookers were “struck by the fervent devotion, almost religious in tone, shown to the dead de Man by his disciples. They would carry his work on, in his memory; he had shown the way for all future reading.” Jacques Derrida himself, the father of the deconstructionist creed, and de Man’s close friend, spoke at the event, praising “the ever so gentle force of his thought.”
It is only in this context that one can understand the traumatic impact of what happened three years after his death, when a researcher discovered that de Man had written collaborationist articles during his years as a journalist in Nazi-occupied Belgium. In the most notorious essay, “The Jews and Contemporary Literature,” de Man described the Jews as a “foreign force,” and expressed relief that European cultural forms had not been “enjuivées.” It was published next to a crude anti-Semitic caricature of two elderly Jews, with a caption reading: “May Jehovah confound the Gentiles!” “By keeping, in spite of Semitic interference in all aspects of European life, an intact originality and character, [our civilization] has shown that its basic character is healthy,” the article concluded—this, at a time when Belgium recently had passed laws excluding Jews from a variety of professions, including de Man’s own, journalism. To those who took deconstructionism as their religion, these revelations constituted the secular equivalent of a sex-abuse scandal implicating the Vatican’s most powerful cardinal.
Derrida, in particular, became obsessed with the issue—and published a lengthy essay about it in 1988. But astonishingly, this giant of textual analysis insisted on pretending that de Man’s words signified the exact opposite of their plain meaning, and that the “scandal” over his alleged collaboration was nothing but a conspiracy hatched by malevolent journalists, whose campaign resembled nothing so much as the Nazis’ own “exterminating gesture” against the Jews. Applying his deconstructionist art to “The Jews and Contemporary Literature,” Derrida performed a series of logical back-flips in arguing that de Man had in fact offered an “indictment” of anti-Semitism, not to mention an “uncompromising critique” of the Nazis. At the climax of this fantasy, de Man is claimed to be actually praising the Jews: “The manner in which he describes the ‘Jewish spirit’ remains unquestionably positive.”
Given deconstructionism’s unworkably bleak character (“existentialism at its height, without the existentialist’s belief in human heroism,” as Mikics concisely describes it), its fall from academic fashion was inevitable. But the descent was given a solid push by the de Man revelations. As one Boston University professor told a Newsweek journalist, the creed suddenly seemed like “a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II.”
Perhaps more than de Man’s words themselves, Derrida’s defense of them highlighted the true problem with deconstructionism: Pregnant within the view that words have no stable meaning outside their existence as symbols—Il n’y a pas de hors-texte—is the suggestion that they can mean anything, even their apparent opposite, depending on the perspective of the person communicating or interpreting them. In the political arena, in particular, deconstructionists often have fallen back on Michel Foucault’s maxim that all knowledge—including historical knowledge—is merely a pretext for justifying existing power relationships. There was no “truth,” Foucault declared—only a “regime of truth” that shifted day by day.
“The world begins to seem a realm of illusion, where we have tricked ourselves into supposing that we are real,” wrote Mikics in his 2009 book-length meditation on the subject, Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography. “The whole history of ideas seemed to him to be a debate, carried on between the lines of great philosophical texts, between the masterful coherence of metaphysics and its deconstructionist opponent, skeptici
sm.”
Out of this view came the idea that destroying the conventional, bourgeois construct of objective truth was not merely a tool of literary analysis, but a sacred intellectual duty to the world’s oppressed. The deconstructionist approach “revealed the volatile core of instability and indeterminacy lurking underneath every philosophical assertion, every scientific method, every work of literature,” literary critic Judith Shulevitz wrote in her reminiscence about studying at Yale under de Man. “Nothing we’d learned (we learned) meant what it claimed to mean. All texts were allegories of their own blindness . . . All this gave me an unusually palpable sense of purpose. I was a mole burrowing under the foundations of the tottering edifice of Knowledge.”
Contrary to caricature, Derrida did not inhabit a universe of pure subjectivity: In many cases, he argued, facts did matter. (Holocaust denial, for instance, was something he found quite troubling.) But the great thinker never found any coherent way to harmonize that concern with his insistence that truth is just a yarn that we spin at each other. In any event, as Derrida himself unwittingly demonstrated in the de Man affair, deconstructionism was the ideal smokescreen for scholars and activists peddling counterfactual interpretations of the world. Even after 9/11, just a few years before his own death, the ur-deconstructionist was still at it, babbling vapidly about the phrase “September 11”: “The telegram of this metonymy—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.” On the broader question of political violence, he served up to the same interviewer the usual left-wing digressions into state terrorism and Western imperialism, but also a turgid disquisition about the very unknowability of terrorism: “Semantic instability, irreducible trouble spots on the borders between concepts, indecision in the very concept of the border: All this must not only be analyzed as a speculative disorder, a conceptual chaos or zone of passing turbulence in public or political language.” By the popularization of such bafflegab to legions of impressionable modern-languages students, the great French scholar became the conspiracy theorist’s polite Ivy League cousin—a famous name, and a set of impressive-sounding terms of philosophical art, to be trotted out whenever the blurring of black into white requires a scholarly footnote.
In this regard, deconstructionism dovetailed with a separate intellectual trend that had been underway since the 1960s: modern identity politics, which involved the reconstruction (and in some cases, the wholesale invention) of history according to the viewpoint of women, blacks, gays, and other minorities—a project that replaced the historian’s once-unquestioned goal of objective truth with an explicitly political, Marxist-leaning agenda aimed at empowerment and solidarity-building.
While all good historical scholarship relies, to some degree, on challenging received wisdom about the past, many radicalized New Left historians took this approach to an extreme, romanticizing any historical narrative, however counterfactual or even conspiracist, that challenged dominant attitudes. Scholarship became a species of “resistance”—even to this day, the term appears everywhere in radicalized scholarship and activism—suggesting an analogy to warfare and its maidservant, propaganda. Many faculty-lounge guerillas took their cue from Franz Fanon’s 1961 opus, The Wretched of the Earth, which sanctioned any tactic (even wanton murder, as Jean-Paul Sartre emphasized in his famously nihilistic preface) in the service of anti-colonialism. Committed intellectuals, Fanon declared, must create “combat literature” to inspire the coming revolution. The question of objective “truth,” as most people would understand the term, was, of course, secondary. As Peter Novick put it in his extraordinary 1988 book, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question And The American Historical Profession: “Most leftist historians agreed with Barrington Moore’s observation that ‘in any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works,’ and that to the extent that radicals took a jaundiced view of dominant ideology they were more likely to penetrate to the truth, to resemble Mannheim’s ‘free floating intelligentsia.’ ”
Some scholars went farther and argued that no single set of truths about the world could be said even to exist for all peoples—since blacks, women, “queers,” and other oppressed groups all have inherently different cognitive approaches. Following on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, some academics turned the podium around, and made students the stars of the classroom: Since challenging oppression was the main goal of education, why should the theoretical ramblings of an educator be privileged over the more “authentic” life lessons related by female, black, and gay students?
In certain fields, entire areas of academic research and inquiry were declared off-limits. In my native Canada, for instance, it has become impossible to have any sort of intelligent debate about the relationship between the continent’s white European settlers, and the aboriginals whose ancestors first migrated from Asia at the end of the last glacial period. The historical truth about first contact between seafaring European explorers and North America’s animist hunter-gatherers—that it was a meeting between two peoples at vastly different stages of technological development—was progressively phased out in favor of a narrative that suggests a meeting of two equal “nations.” (Thus the rebranding of small, scattered aboriginal tribes as “First Nations” in the politically correct Canadian lexicon.) In the same vein, academic curricula were revised according to the fiction that our Western intellectual tradition had been built on the sayings and customs of wise old Indian chiefs.
In one trendy book, for instance, Aboriginal Education: Fulfilling the Promise, Brenda Tsioniaon LaFrance argued that science students should study “units of the Haudenosaunee teachings of the Four Winds, Thunder, Lightning and Sun, along with overall notions of conservation and ideas stemming from Western science.” The study of math should focus on “a survey of aboriginal number systems [as well as] the limits of counting.” In 2008, Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul went further, arguing in his book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada that Canada is “a Métis civilization” that owes all it has (except for the nasty racist bits) to “Aboriginal inspiration.” The question of how, exactly, groups of occasionally warring, preliterate aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies can claim credit for the creation of a modern, democratic, capitalist, industrial powerhouse built entirely in a European image never gets resolved. But most readers probably didn’t notice: For decades, the unspoken agreement in Canadian academia has been that scholars can peddle any sort of historical nonsense they like about aboriginals—so long as it functions to enhance their dignity. In 1997, no less an authority than the Supreme Court of Canada even declared that aboriginal “oral traditions” stood on a par with written documents as a form of legally admissible evidence.
Such doctrines typically have come packaged with a reductionist, militantly anti-Western view of history that draws a straight line from slavery and imperialism to such modern, “neoimperial” phenomena as globalization, free trade, counter-terrorism, humanitarian military intervention, and nation-building. Even the language we speak to one another became a weapon in the culture war against dead white males: Armed with deconstructionism and related theories, scholars began teasing out the hidden racist, sexist, and heterosexist messages encoded in everything from the Iliad to the Archie Comics to the SAT. University administrators created Black Studies and Women’s Studies departments, laboratories in which society’s bigotries could be diagnosed, and perhaps even cured. In the process, Novick notes, much historical scholarship was transformed into a form of abstruse cheerleading along a set of motifs preapproved by radicalized activists: “overcoming historical neglect; stressing the contributions of the group; an emphasis on oppression, with its troublesome complement, victimization and damage; a search for foreparents in protest and resistance; finally, a celebration of an at least semiautonomous separate cultural realm, with distinctive values and instit
utions.” It was in these “realms”—detached from the bourgeois conventions of objective truth-seeking, and insulated from mainstream criticism by a cult of political correctness—that deconstructionism and identity politics combined to produce a climate in which university professors felt entitled to spout historical fantasies (Afrocentrism being the most prominent example) and full-blown conspiracism so long as they were cast as doctrines of empowerment.
Consider, for instance, the manner in which men were portrayed by self-described “radical lesbian feminist” and “ecofeminist” Mary Daly, who taught courses in theology and “patriarchy” at Boston College from 1967 to 1999 (at which point she was fired for refusing to admit men into her classes). According to Daly, the human race was divided between “necrophilic” men and “biophilic” (life-loving) women. Christianity and other organized religions also were anathema to the pagan Daly—since she regarded them as interchangeably patriarchal. She even refused to identify herself as a “human being,” since this category was infected by the neurotoxin of maleness: “I hate the ‘human species’—look at it!” she told an interviewer in 1999. “I hate what it is doing to this earth: the invasion of everything. The last two frontiers are the genetic wilderness and the space wilderness; they’ve colonized everything else. It’s a totally invasive mentality—rapist. That is alien, and insofar as I’ve internalized any of that, I’m sorry. I’m contaminated by it. We all are.”
Like an early Zionist, Daly sought to create a geographical “homeland”—one reserved for “women who identify as women.” In her book Quintessence, she rhapsodized that such an all-female, “gynocentric” society wouldn’t need men: reproduction would be accomplished through parthenogenesis. When magazine interviewer Susan Bridle asked Daly what she thought about a related proposal put forward by another radical lesbian feminist, Sally Miller Gearhart, that “the proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race,” Daly responded: “I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.”