In case you haven't noticed, one of my political projects here is to push the shiddach, which is Yiddish for an arranged marriage, of American realists and leftists over Palestine because it's so potentially transformative. I began this process personally three years ago when I embraced Walt and Mearsheimer. At the time their editor at the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers, told me that the American left also is claimed by the Israel lobby, and truer words were never spoken. A lot of Jewish lefties can't warm up to the realists. This is the purport of the event at the 92d Street Y the other night, at which good liberal Jews went out of their way to insult Walt and Mearsheimer, thereby signalling to the Jewish audience that they are on Israel's side against the realist goyim.
The shiddach is happening nonetheless. It happens when Glenn Greenwald and Dan Levy and Avi Shlaim publish on Gaza in the American Conservative, a magazine started by Pat Buchanan. It happens when a whole mob of lefty Jewish bloggers supports Chas Freeman in the face of the neocons. We understand that divided we're hapless, but together we're a powerful coalition that may be able to give Obama footing to put pressure on thuggish Israel.
That said, there are real intellectual differences between realists and leftwingers that will have to be ironed out. One is, human rights. When the neoconservatives were destroying Chas Freeman, they battened on to an email he'd written about the Chinese prerogative to crush the dissidents in Tiananmen Square in '89. They said he had kissed up to the Chinese government and rationalized atrocities. My side said that they were taking the email out of context and offered a lot of squirrely explanation.
On this issue the neocons were right. They didn't have the goods (the email wasn't dispositive) and it doesn't really matter anyway (No one's perfect; Freeman is a fine public servant and a brilliant guy), but Freeman is wrong about Chinese human rights. The dumb neocons never found this; but below you will see a partial transcript of an oral history Freeman did in 1995 for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training in which he laid out his China Tiananmen views–and also his Tibet views–in true Kissingerian form.
I bring this up not to dampen the Freeman moment. It's on us, America. But to say, the realists differ from the lefties on human rights and national interest issues. John Mearsheimer, for instance, supported the Gulf War–long before his noble opposition to the Iraq War. I was against the Gulf War. No blood for oil. I wouldn't have wanted to fight it. As a lefty I'm happy to make some compromises to work with the realists. And I think they're happy to make some too. Still, I need to signal, I don't wish the Chinese government had moved more quickly on Tiananmen, and I support self-determination for the Tibetans, as for the Palestinians.
Here's the excerpt:
FREEMAN: [T]here is still, after the past 150 years of tortured Chinese
history, a strong sense among Chinese that the country cannot be
allowed to fall apart, that unity is all important, and that the
maintenance of social and political order has to take priority over
virtually everything else. The Chinese have this conclusion because,
literally, over this period, something on the order of one hundred
million of them have died in disorders either caused internally or by
foreign invasion.
So I believed that these psychological and political factors would outweigh others, and I continue to believe that.
I think Tiananmen is a perfect example…
Q: We're talking about the shooting of students in Tiananmen Square. This was when?
FREEMAN: June 4, 1989. I think that is a perfect example of
the sort of local disturbance, albeit in the national capital, to which
I was referring. The only thing that surprised me about it was that the
government did not move quicker to put this down. And I wish, in
retrospect, that they had, because the loss of life would have been far
less if they had been more resolute early on, rather than allowing the
students to, in effect, get out of control and pose a direct challenge
to their authority.
Q: Again going back to this '79 to '81 period, did Tibet raise
any political problems? We're talking about the Chinese takeover, as
many people feel, of Tibet. And this has become sort of a cause.
FREEMAN: Not really.
The background on Tibet, as you know, is that, in the 1950s, the CIA
spent a vast amount of money to produce a rebellion in Tibet. And that
rebellion was the precipitate cause of the Dalai Lama's flight over the
border to India. That is, we attempted, as part of our general policy
of destabilizing China, to destabilize Tibet and, if possible, detach
it from China.
I think we were all very sensitive, in the 1980s, as perhaps people
are not now, to the way in which American maneuvers on Tibet might be
viewed in Beijing, given this history, which the Chinese are well aware
of, even if Americans have forgotten it. So Tibet and the Dalai Lama
loomed as an issue in the realm of religious freedom, but it was not a
political issue.
Subsequently, the issue of Tibet has been embraced by quite a range
of people in the United States: some are simply drawn to exotic
cultures and favor primitive peoples out of some sentimental impulse;
others, for one reason or another, as the United States has become more
anti-scientific, are more drawn to mysticism. There is a significant
portion of the American public now that is avowedly dedicated to what
is, in my view, superstition and mystical malarkey, and Tibetan
Buddhism is about as mystical a malarkey as you can find.
Q: What are sometimes known as the New Age people.
FREEMAN: Exactly. So there is a natural affinity between Tibetan Buddhists and this segment of American opinion.
