One of the most surprising consequences of the rise of citizen journalism, which has now turned three years old -- and by citizen journalism, we mean the digital diffusion of the tools, skills, and distribution networks of traditional journalism among large numbers of citizens in almost every major nation on the planet -- is its effect on the work of traditional scholars, researchers, journalists and cultural theorists. Many of these latter have become obsolete almost overnight, for the simple reason that they do not understand the power of these new digital tools, and have ignored the proliferation of networked transnational audiences.
This first became obvious in the wake of the Arab Spring, which showed that nearly all the traditional observers and analysts of the Middle East were utterly wrong about... well, everything. Arab cultures are not innately reactionary or pro-dictatorship, women played a huge role in the various Arab revolutions, the masses organized themselves without leaders or authoritarian parties, and numerous facets of popular culture (everything from rap music to soccer clubs) generated lively forms of political contestation.
Why did the experts get it so wrong? For the most part, it was because most of them were following (some consciously, and some unconsciously) two of the most mainstream and widespread narrative stereotypes about the industrializing world. The first is what can be called negative Orientalism, and the second is positive Orientalism -- or put more pithily, Global Southophobia and Southophilia. The first is the toxic defamation of any aspect of an industrializing nation or society as regressive and evil (e.g. Islamophobia, Iranophobia or Sinophobia). The second is the equally toxic glorification of an industrializing nation as emancipatory and good.
These stereotypes are not new. They are the 21st century variants of those hoary chestnuts of 18th century Enlightenment thinking, the Oriental despot and the Noble Savage, respectively.
To see the toxic effects of Southophobia, consider the sad fate of Seymour Hersh, once the dean of US investigative journalism. Recently, Hersh went completely over the bend with crackpot allegations that Turkey's government was somehow responsible for the Assad dictatorship's murderous campaign of poison gas attacks on Syrian citizens. Hersh's only source of evidence for his allegations (
reported on here) was insider government gossip.
But there is a massive trove of medical and forensic evidence, assembled by UN investigators and by Syrian citizen journalists, as to the real source of the chemical attacks: artillery shells fired from Assadist positions, shells which used massive amounts of sarin which only the Syrian government could stockpile, weaponize and deploy in the field (
blogger Brown-Moses assembles the overwhelming evidence pointing to Assadist guilt here).
The simplest reason for Hersh's mistake is that he is still locked into a model of investigative journalism where the point is to get some government or corporate insider to leak some crucial piece of information. This strategy had some usefulness in the context of the Cold War-era mass media of the US, but doesn't work terribly well in the epoch of digital information abundance (Brown-Moses worked closely with a wide range of weapons and medical experts to uncover the truth). The deeper reason, though, is that Hersh clearly thinks of Turkey as a military dictatorship, a land of viziers and pashas.
This is absurd. Turkey is a democracy, with a vibrant free press and multiple forms of citizen mobilization and electoral contestation. It's far from a perfect democracy, with plenty of authoritarian legacies, everywhere from its inability to acknowledge the Ottoman genocide of Armenians to its mistreatment of its Kurdish citizens, but it has undergone a sweeping and genuine democratization over the past twenty years.
The second major stereotype is Southophoria. One of the best examples of this ailment is the amazing inability of self-proclaimed Leftists to comprehend that tinpot dictators such as Qaddafi, Ben Ali, and Assad were never anti-capitalist, but were brutal comprador thugs, postmodern paddyrollers who ran their countries like semi-feudal plantations for the ultimate benefit of Big Money. A more subtle and sophisticated version of this same disease is apparent in the recent work of historian Stephen F. Cohen.
Cohen was once a cogent and reasonably well-informed observer of Russian history and society. More recently, however, he has become a completely uncritical cheerleader of Putinism, the toxic and regressive ideology of ethnonationalism and Russo-imperialism which legitimates the rule of Russia's thuggish siloviki and plundering plutocrats. The latest sign of this degeneration is Cohen's truly lunatic accusation that Obama's mild sanctions on Russia (travel bans on a few high-ranking officials and small banks, nothing major) are tantamount to starting
a second Cold War.
Really, Cohen? Are you unaware that Russia invaded the Crimean district of Ukraine with 20,000 troops, despite there being no threat to ethnic Russians or to Russia itself? You do realize that existing national boundaries cannot simply be unilaterally revoked by armed force, without triggering the most terrible wars? Are you aware that Putinism's undemocratic, state-controlled media continues to broadcast the
most outrageous lies and threats against the people of Ukraine, including sponsoring armed, violent thugs who are
murdering Ukrainian citizens? Or that Putinism has
criminalized Russia's internet, making dissent impossible? Or that Putin's puppet parliament authorized the use of Russian armed forces on the territory of Ukraine?
The job of historians is to weigh and evaluate objective evidence. All the objective evidence at our disposal suggests that Russian imperialism is as ugly, murderous and poisonous as any other imperialism on this planet. If Cohen has evidence to suggest otherwise, then by all means present it. Otherwise, his legitimation of the crimes of Russian imperialism is as despicable as the legitimation of the criminal US invasion of Iraq by US media pundits and Orientalist ideologues.
