(Image Credit: Substack)
So, we’re in this interesting moment where top Biden administration foreign policy officials are kind of going out into the country, trying to craft a public narrative about what they did in office as they prepare to leave office. There was Antony Blinken’s interview with the New York Times a week ago or so, which I commented on last week. And then, recently I just came across the video that was put out of a public conversation that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, did at the 92nd Street Y with Ian Bremmer.
And these are really remarkable documents because they are really exercises in what George Orwell wrote about so famously, which is, the creation of a kind of dishonest and euphemistic language to try to defend things that if stated in kind of clear concrete ways, would clearly be too brutal for most people to accept. And so, I think they’re worth looking at at the level of language, which is what Orwell urged political writers to do to challenge the dishonesty of language as a way of getting at the brutality of government and the action of people in power who act brutally.
So, I want to quote something from what Sullivan says at the 92nd Street Y. He’s asked about Israel’s policies vis-a-vis the people of Gaza. And he says: ‘We believe Israel has a responsibility as a democracy. As a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law, that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.’
So, the formulation is really fascinating, right. He’s being asked about what Israel’s doing, but he starts by just stipulating a set of assumptions, right, which don’t need to be proved, right, because these are the assumptions that he begins with, right. And they’re never challenged by the interviewer. The first is that Israel is a democracy. Again, something one hears constantly, but if you think about it, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians, right?
