zenpundit.com

HNN is running a symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning:

While I know a great deal about the historical period in question, I have not read Goldberg’s book, so I am not going to comment on his core proposition except to say that IMHO, I tend to find arguments that the intellectual roots of Fascism and Nazism are located exclusively on one side of the political spectrum are flatly and demonstrably wrong. Goldberg’s polemical thesis though, yields a hysterical reaction because he is jubilantly shredding the hoary (and false) assertion of the academic Left, going back to the pre-Popular Front Communist Party line of the 1930’s, that Fascism is a form of radicalized conservatism and a secret pawn of big business capitalism.

Therefore, the following series amounts to an intellectual food fight between Goldberg and (mostly) a band of clearly enraged Leftist professors. Enjoy!:

HNN Special: A Symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism

• Neiwert: Introduction
• Paxton: The Scholarly Flaws
• Griffin: An Academic Book – Not!
• Feldman: Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions
• Berlet: The Roots of the Book
• Michael Ledeen Responds to Liberal Fascism
• Goldberg: Definitions and Double Standards
• Feldman: An Open Letter to Mr. Jonah Goldberg
• Griffin: Definitions and Double Standards – A Rebuttal
• Neiwert: Goldberg’s Response Fits His History of Evasion

After all, who doesn’t like an intemperate, online argument about Nazs? 🙂

Strategy and  “The Rectification of Names“.

LTC. Matt Morgan, USMC and Director of Public Affairs at US Marine Corps Forces Command, rolls up his sleeves and takes the highest ranking member of the US Armed Forces to task in a take-down guest post at Mountainrunner:

Guest Post: The Rosetta Stone for Strategic Communication? More like Speak ‘N Spell

….Unfortunately, the reason for this gap can be laid at the feet of a few members of the Chairman’s own personal staff. Over the past few years, Adm. Mullen’s Public Affairs Office has systematically refused to take part in DoD’s various attempts to develop its integration processes or other Joint Staff and DoD efforts to coordinate organizational communication. As such, select members of the office appear ignorant to the efforts of other professionals across the U.S. military. They have failed to be the good listeners they claim to hold in such high esteem, and have consequently produced what reads like a condescending lecture from the Chairman.

Let us all be clear as to what this is really about. This is a turf war, and the authors have committed the ultimate sin of a staff officer: They have used their boss’ visage to advance their agenda, and in the process drawn an unfair portrait of a senior leader blind to the most progressive thinkers in his organization.

The authors are quick to undermine the term Strategic Communication, writing that the Chairman doesn’t care for it because, “We get too hung up on that word, strategic.” I don’t know who the “we” is in this case, but I can assure the Chairman that this is only true among those afflicted by what I call the “Type A” misunderstanding; that is, those who cannot get beyond the most literal comprehension of the word strategic. Oh, yes, a few of these types are out there. But when it comes to military leadership, anyone who has ever used the now-cliché term strategic corporal has at least a basic understanding of the notion that tactical actions can affect communication – for better or worse – at the strategic level.

The stated thesis of the essay, however, is belied by its conclusion:

Strategic communication should be an enabling function that guides and informs our decisions and not an organization unto itself. Rather than trying to capture all communication activity underneath it, we should use it to describe the process by which we integrate and coordinate.

Ah, there it is. The fear of subordination revealed.

Ouch! Read the rest here.

If in fact, CJCS ADM Michael Mullen did not write his editorial, as LTC. Morgan asserts, I will have to retract my earlier praise. “Leadership” is not lending your name out to your staff to play el supremo. It’s fine for a busy man to lay out an outline of positions to an aide and then edit the aide’s draft; Eisenhower and Reagan, both excellent speechwriters, stopped writing their own speeches once they became POTUS. But saying “Here…do my thinking for me”, is not ok. It’s weak.

Assuming that Admiral Mullen did write his editorial, then the exchange with LTC. Morgan is what a healthy, intellectually open, adaptive organization should encourage and reward. Ideas matter, not rank.

Blogfriend Matt Armstrong had an important post regarding The Strategic Communication Science and Technology Plan, April 2009. An excerpt:

The plan describes current efforts within the Department of Defense, the military services, the combatant commands and other agencies on SC. In total, these efforts could be linked together to form the foundation of an S&T thrust area for strategic communication. The report also includes a macro-analysis of capability gaps not being addressed by ongoing initiatives and lays out potential areas for future S&T investment.

While the request for the plan itself represents recognition from Congress that SC plays a critical role in the public and private response to current and emerging threats, it also highlights that there is much research and development already underway and many tools available to increase the government’s effectiveness in global engagement. The rub today is the need for strong leadership and coordination to ensure: 1) awareness of the long list of capabilities; 2) incorporating these capabilities into plans; and 3) participation by stakeholders across the US government, NGO’s, industry, and private citizens.

The S&T plan sorts current efforts into the following categories:

• Infrastructure: Enabling and facilitating access to information from news to markets to vocational
• Social Media: Knowledge Management, Social Media, and Virtual Worlds
• Discourse: Analysis of radical and counter-radical messages and ideas
• Modeling and Forecasting: Gaming and anticipating adversarial messages and ideas as well as our counters and pre-emptive measures
• Collaboration: Increasing collaboration and training across and beyond Government
• First Three Feet: Empowering, Equipping, Educating, and Encouraging media and others to exist and freely report on events for what they really are
• Understanding: Develop country, culture, and regional expertise, including polling
• Psychological Defense: Planning and capacity building for dealing with critical strains on society in peacetime and wartime

The interesting thing here for me is that “strong leadership” is lacking because the people spread across and outside government who have the shared awareness of technology, social media and national security at a level of sophistication where they could actually craft a strategic communication policy, are usually many levels removed from the appointee policy deciders for whom these variables are (usually) fuzzily understood.

To use an analogy, the chefs are valet parking cars outside while trying to get the manager of the restaurant to acknowledge their recipes. Or, maybe that there should be cooking going on in the kitchen if they want to have any customers. Or that the business is, in fact, a restaurant and not a nicely organized room full of tables.

DNI has an excellent link to a powerpoint from a British military institution ( Defence Academy). The early slides, however poorly constructed from a visual standpoint, have conceptual density. And Dr. Marc Tyrell of The Small Wars Council gets a special mention in it to boot.

A Framework for Strategic Cultural Analysis

They are trying to build a new analytical paradigm here and they get many elements right, in my view.