It’s a Mad Mad World, Senator Harris
Aug 3rd, 2007 by Donagh
The sound of a thousand hands smacking against foreheads can be heard across the country following the news that among the Taoiseach’s 11 nominees to the Seanad is one Eoghan Harris, FF monkey grinder extraordinaire.
Eoghan Harris is of course a Sunday Independent columnist and a former RTE producer of the hit program Postbag as well as being a batty, illogical contrarian. But perhaps contrarian is too generous.
WorldbyStorm has a good analysis of one of Harris’ recent attacks on Pat Rabbitte, Joe Costello and Alex White, also a former RTE producer, for their criticism of Section 31.
But Hesitant Hack’s immediate reaction, at Empire State View is, I think, more succinct:
“This country gets to look more and more like Putin’s Russia every day. Eoghan Harris, the journalist whose column in the Sunday Independent offers a weekly window onto the fascinating, intricate anatomy of the human brain in the late stages of acute delusional lunacy, and whose lovelorn, jealous devotion to Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fail was one of the most entertaining aspects of the run-up to the General Election, has just been nominated to the Seanad by Ahern himself. Fair enough, it’s not like he can actually do anything from there - isn’t the Seanad just an ante-room to the Dail bar? - but it’s still somewhat staggering to see such a blatant display of Government-media mutual masturbation at work. And to think that just this week people were complaining that there was no official honours system in Ireland…”
Of course, Harris was a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, writing in May 2003:
“already as I predicted in the lead up to the war, the neoconservative hawks have done much better than the liberals in getting down to the dynamics of opening up the Gulf to democracy. Already, and this I predicted too, there is substantial hope for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, now that Saddam no longer scowls at Israel”.
There is little evidence that he has changed his right-wing opinion, despite it being contradicted by the facts. There are others on the left, however, who also supported the US invasion in 2003 but who have now changed their mind and taking the opportunity to attack those on the left who haven’t altered their views. I am of course talking about the spat between Johann Hari (who changed his mind since) and Nick Cohen (who hasn’t but who has reinforced his argument retrospectively).
I had meant to write about this myself, but so much has been said, in a more informed way that there never seemed to be a point. However, Lenin’s Tomb, who was cited in Hari’s original Dissent magazine article, has an interesting roundup on the latest in the spat and links to more chatter on Blood and Treasure. Virtual Stoa also does a here, here and here leading us around the webring of scoffers. From there we have a comment pointing to an article by Conor Foley on CiF about Cohen’s book, which also links to Indecent Left and a blog post that provides a detailed breakdown of what it sees as the errors in the book, which look substantial.
But Lenin makes a good point about how both Hari and Cohen misuse the term appeasement, which is brought against those who opposed the war:
“Anyone who examines the arguments about Political Islam from Hitchens, Amis, Cohen, Berman and others of that genus will encounter this facile psychologism, but Hari hasn’t really got to the point. The term ‘appeasement’ was a misleading coinage from the start, designed to paper over what was in fact the active support and collusion of the British ruling class with a German regime it admired. It was not pacifism, and it was not them being chickenshit, and it was not an acknowledgment of the iniquities of the Versailles Treaty. It was not necessary to choose between imperialism and fascism, because there was no essential antagonism between them. The war that eventually broke out was a continuation of a quarrel within capitalism, with regional powers eventually worried about Germany becoming the regional hegemon.”
As an historical primer on this point it would instructive to read the recent LRB review of Richard Evan’s The Third Reich in Power:
“Evans is keenly aware of the twin sirens of modern German history: on the one hand, the lure of determinism (German history leads inevitably to Nazism); on the other, the illusion of contingency (Hitler was an accident). Similarly, there is a balance to be maintained between admitting the peculiarities of German history – its much debated Sonderweg, or ‘special path’, to modernity – and seeing the Third Reich as simply the most horrific example of a much more general failure of democracy in interwar Europe. Evans acknowledges the strengths and weaknesses of each view. He reminds us at the outset that ‘things could easily have turned out very differently.’”
If anyone wants this article I can send it to them. Just email dublinopinionATgmailDOTcom.
The main point I was originally going to make it that it’s ultimately a facile argument, made by those who originally supported a war now tearing themselves apart in the light of the disaster that is Iraq and the suffering that is clearly now the result of a Western superpowers intervention.
Another reason for this argument is because of the patent incompetence (and mendacity) of the US Administration’s attempt to govern Iraq after the invasion.
James Meek, reviewing the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill writes a chilling essay on the US Administration’s use of mercenaries in Iraq.
Blackwater was the company which employed the four men killed by a crowd in Fallujah and hung from a bridge. Meek describes what the men’s families discovered when they tried to get compensation:
“As the families’ lawyers dug, they discovered the rat’s nest of intertwined contracts and mutual buck-passing which is an Iraqi contract gone wrong. The men who died in Fallujah were working for Blackwater, sure. But Blackwater was under contract to Eurest Support Services, which belonged to the Compass Group in the UK. The Blackwater team was supposed to protect a delivery Eurest was contracted to make on behalf of Kellogg Brown Root (which belonged to Halliburton then, but doesn’t now) to the US military. After Blackwater was sued, Kellogg Brown Root said they’d never hired Blackwater for the delivery; that they hadn’t had anything to do with the delivery; and anyway had such a delivery ever in fact taken place? Blackwater pointed to the general contracts the dead men had signed, which warned that they could be shot, permanently maimed and/or killed by a firearm or munitions, falling aircraft or helicopters, sniper fire, landmine, artillery fire, rocket-propelled grenade, truck or car bomb, earthquake or other natural disaster, poisoning, civil uprising, terrorist activity, hand-to-hand combat, disease, poisoning, etc., killed or maimed while a passenger in a helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft, suffering hearing loss, eye injury or loss; inhalation or contact with biological or chemical contaminants (whether airborne or not) and/or flying debris etc.
As the lawsuit got under way, George Bush was re-elected, and Blackwater executive Gary Jackson sent out a round robin email with the subject line: ‘BUSH WINS FOUR MORE YEARS!! HOOYAH!!’”
Suddenly, in the light of this, the news that Eoghan Harris is going to be a Senator doesn’t seem so bad. He’s mad, certainly, but almost harmless, mostly.
He was also an adviser to Ahmad Chalabi, you know. Gave Chalabi a bit of advice on how to work a TV audience, apparently, and also on how to refer to Aristotle and ‘good authority’ once a week for fifteen years.
Ah well, the RoI is merely catching up with the UK where media gofers are regularly given gongs of one sort or another. Despite his tunnel vision
Eoghan was often a good read, even if one disagreed with every word he wrote. Thus when this type of thing happens I find it sad if predictable, for when a journalist openly takes the politicos coin; and make no mistake this is a pension top up as I understand there is a decent salary when one becomes a member of the Seanad, they lose all credibility, even amongst those they serve.
Last I heard Eoghan was raging about a secret LP-SF deal to get SF into the Seanad, whoops.
[…] but her somewhat eccentric demeanour is interesting and colourful. Donagh also has an interesting critique of Harris on a left/right political […]
[…] still hanging open, you can read detailed accounts of Eoghan’s political peregrinations from Donagh and […]
A cynic might wonder if a deal was done with Bertie for the Seanad before Harris’s Late Late appearance on the final Friday of the campaign which (along with Waters) had a huge impact in turning the campaign in FF’s direction.
My take is that it is purely a distracting curve ball from Bertie, probably originally timed to provide cover from any new information that would have been coming from the Mahon tribunal if Bertie had got his chance to take the stand last week. Now he’ll have to come up with a plague of frogs/an Irish space mission/additional grandchildren come September instead.
And I’m still sitting here mouth agape at the ‘explanation’ of pre-WWII appeasement.
Hmmm, Pavement Trauma, in retrospect I’m not happy with the explanation’ of pre-WWII appeasement either. I guess I was reacting to the use of the abusive term ‘appeasment’ used by Berman, Cohen and others whenever anyone suggests that invading Iraq was a bad idea.
It seems easy for these people to say that being soft on ‘Islamofacism ‘ as they call it is the same as those who allowed the Nazis to take power in Germany.
On the point “It was not necessary to choose between imperialism and fascism, because there was no essential antagonism between them. The war that eventually broke out was a continuation of a quarrel within capitalism”. This analysis seems far to simplistic to me. Imperialism had given way to a fledgling democracy in Germany in the Interwar years. It was this domocracy’s inability to be maintained under the pressures from economic collapse (a combination of the Great Depression and the after effects of the Versailles Treaty) that arguably led to war.
In Johnathan Writes LRB article he gives a very good summary of the situation, which was an education to me:
“What is not in doubt is that pragmatism provided an insufficient basis for resisting the Nazis once the Depression took hold. The left, both Socialist and Communist, and the Catholic Centre party were able to hold their own, but the Protestant Nationalists lost heavily to the Nazis while the two Liberal parties and various middle-class splinter groups were virtually wiped out. The Social Democrats lost ground to both the Communists and the Nazis: as they were the party with consistently the largest vote until the elections of July 1932, between 20 and 30 per cent, that is hardly surprising. The Nazis also did well with new voters and previous non-voters, who were caught up in the general excitement.
But that was not enough to deliver a majority of the electorate. In fact, the Nazi vote fell in November 1932 to 33 per cent, suggesting they had peaked. More than half of voters continued to support the Social Democrats, Communists and Catholic Centre. Why were they not able to stop the Nazis? The Centre had lost faith in democratic politics and the Vatican looked instead for security in Hitler’s promises and a Reich Concordat. The Communists and Socialists were enemies, competing for the same vote. The Social Democrats were demoralised, particularly once they had lost their bulwark in Prussia in 1932, when Nazi gains made majority government impossible and Chancellor von Papen took over the government as part of an inept and illegal attempt to establish an authoritarian state. The Social Democrats turned to the law for protection but, although they won a partial victory, it did not restore them to power. Options for direct action were limited. A general strike, which had been effective against a military putsch in 1920, was impractical in conditions of mass unemployment. They could have resorted to armed resistance, using their paramilitary units, the Reichsbanner, but if the army, the Nazis and their allies in the ex-servicemen’s ‘Steel Helmets’ organisation had been deployed against them, they would have had no chance. Nevertheless, Evans suggests that this would have been their best hope; the army might have held back for fear of being seen to provoke a civil war.
Evans’s conclusion demonstrates that the polarisation of the electorate during the Depression had made democracy unworkable. But the anti-Nazi opposition had not gone away. The last section of The Coming of the Third Reich deals with the way in which it was overwhelmed and ‘co-ordinated’. Hitler showed political skill in adapting his rhetoric to his audience, exploiting legal loopholes to provide cover for the suspension of civil liberties, reassuring potential allies of his good intentions in order to secure a two-thirds majority of the Reichstag for an enabling act which in effect made the suspension permanent, while at the same time presiding over a campaign of terror against his enemies. Stormtroopers took their cue from above without waiting for specific orders, in a way that anticipated future patterns of violence. When this was not enough, Goering and Himmler provided direct encouragement. Individual acts of terror were soon complemented by the first concentration camps and legal restrictions on Jews.
Fear and the desire to conform combined to make the process of co-ordination, in Evans’s word, ‘breathtaking’ in its scale and scope. Civil servants, lawyers, teachers, those involved in universities, the press, film, broadcasting, music, literature, theatre, painting – all were to be brought into line in the new ‘total’ state, orchestrated by Goebbels’s propaganda ministry. There are painfully few examples of anyone showing solidarity with colleagues who were identified as political or racial enemies. That moral collapse – part opportunism, part an overwhelming desire to be identified with a ‘national’ awakening – was what ultimately made the Third Reich possible.”
Sorry for the long quote, but I think its facinating.
On Bertie, I think you’re exactly right. According to The Pheonix, Bertie is shit scared of the Sunday Indo, and with the Tribunal looming is looking to keep them on side, considering that they pretty much went for him before Eoghan conversion to the FF cause.