RESPONSE TO FAREED ZAKARIA
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The Strawman's Revenge -
IMC's E-zine Of Media Analysis
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Protesters Are Nothing Like Pundit's Straw Men
A Response To Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek Essay "The New Face Of The Left"
By Larry George, professor of political science, Cal State, Long Beach
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The April 30 edition of Newsweek contains an essay (see link at end) attacking the movement against corporate globalization by Fareed Zakaria, an editor at Foreign Affairs, the premier mainstream US journal of international relations. Zakaria attacks the protesters in Quebec as ignorant, self-interested, anti-democratic, elitist nationalists who betray the heritage of what Zakaria calls the "democratic left". The following is a response by Larry George, a professor of political science who has spent over a year interviewing activists in the movement Zakaria criticizes from afar. Based on experience rather than rhetoric, George explodes the charges one-by-one.
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For over a year, I have been interviewing and
working alongside these activists. So why could I recognize
almost nothing I know of them in Zakaria's distorted portrait?
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Fareed Zakaria's essay "The New Face of the Left" (Newsweek,
April 30, 2001 p. 32) is a confused and confusing diatribe against the
international movement opposing corporate-directed globalization.
The essay is off the mark in so many places that it is hard to know where
to begin criticizing it. Certainly its most obvious problem lies
in Zakaria's apparently comprehensive ignorance regarding the actual people
who make up this movement. Zakaria feigns familiarity with the protesters,
their beliefs, even their motivations and intentions.
Yet he gets so many things wrong that it's obvious he has had little
if any direct contact with real movement activists. For over a year,
I have been interviewing and working alongside these activists.
So why could I recognize almost nothing I know of them in Zakaria's distorted
portrait? He seems to have constructed a sort of protester piñata
out of media caricatures and misrepresentations, and then whacks away at
it with stock neoliberal cliches, backed up only by a strained, if novel,
reading of left political history. The result is an uninformative
hatchet job.
Flippant Dismissal Ignores Serious Critics
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Let me try to tease out and respond to some of Zakaria's criticisms
of the anti-corporate globalization movement. He begins with a condescending
dismissal of the movement's views, moaning about how "pointless" it is
to have to "rebut, one more time, the arguments made by the protesters
in Quebec City. " Flippant and patronizing, his tone suggests that
by now any rational person who is not either deluded, naïve, or willfully
ignorant must have come to accept the predictable free market catechisms
and boilerplate apologies for corporate neoliberalism routinely penned
by commentators like Thomas Friedman.
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He completely ignores several recent economic
studies that undermine much of the theoretical and empirical grounds for
the neoliberal model of globalization.
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Zakaria accuses protesters in Quebec of "misunderstanding" what he calls "basic economics," as though
what is taught as "economics" in the American academy is some sort of genuine
science, like geology or physics, instead of what most real scientists
deem it to be: a partial, rather obviously ideological depiction of human
society as viewed from the perspective of businesses and consumers. He
fails even to gesture to the spate of denunciations of the neoliberal model
issued recently by prominent business leaders like George Soros and high-ranking
economic officials like former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz.
He completely ignores several recent economic studies
Original: Protesters Are Nothing Like Pundit's Straw Men |
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