Putin & Trump and Journalists

[ish mailian]

"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only
in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be
left within the reach of anyone in Power,-- who need but touch her,
and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never
been" (MD 350).

We used to say that truth is the first casualty of war. Or something
like that. The governments are withholding information, manipulating
facts, images, fabricating, marginalizing dissidents, forestalling
with propaganda any public debate.

Of course we assumed there was a truth, but we can't assume that
anymore. Or can we?

Or will the Trump Presidency undermine, through a kind of exhaustion,
the project that rejected all truth claims, that characterized those
who would cling to a grand narrative or an enlightenment value as
deluded and probably, latently, at least, bound then to the nostalgia
project of an authority that claimed history and wrote it?

Have we, in the age of Trump, a turning away from an indeterminacy
with all the ontological implications of a turn toward truth and
facts, to a binary even,  where we can once more have the confidence
to say, here are the facts, here are the lies, this is false and this,
this much I know is true?


On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 3:34 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course you know that the insurgents were doomed from the start, by
> Assad's ruthlessness.  And all insurgencies are ripe for cooption,
> especially in that region.
>
> I must admit I hate everything about the US presence in the whole region.
> After WW2 the US became the de facto prime arbiter there, with Israel and
> Saudi-Arabia the prime players, and Iran...  Would we were able to quit the
> whole game over there.  Not possible.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Sunday, January 29, 2017, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> How would you have played this out, Thomas?  I would really like to know
>>> how this mess would have been improved were you the US President instead
>>> of Obama.
>>
>>
>> I would not have imposed sanctions on Syria. I would not have permitted
>> the CIA and the Pentagon to provide weapons and/or training to the
>> insurgents. I would have told my open-minded and democratic "friends" from
>> Qatar and Saudi-Arabia as well as my "partners" in Europe to stop providing
>> weapons and training to the insurgents. I would never have said "Assad must
>> go!" And so on and so forth.
>>
>> Of course, I would have tried to find a diplomatic solution.
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l