Daily Sabah, Turkey
March 1 2015
Soft power, Samantha Power and soft intellectuals
TAL BUENOS
While using the Armenian issue as a political leverage against Turkey,
the U.S. government has given Turkey a false sense of cooperation on
the genocide accusations for years
Power considerations explain the lingering genocide accusation
campaign against Turkey. In international relations, power means the
ability to get another state to do what it otherwise would not do.
>From the perspective of the U.S., how does it try to get Turkey to do
things that Turkey would otherwise not do? The fact that the U.S. and
Turkey have been enjoying mutually beneficial military and economic
cooperation has two clear meanings. One, it would not be rational for
the U.S. to threaten Turkey through military action or economic
sanctions and two, there is a strong incentive for the U.S. to find
ways to maintain this high level of cooperation either through obvious
rewards or through a semblance of them.
For years the U.S. government has given Turkey a false sense of
cooperation on the genocide accusation and the Armenian narrative.
Turkish diplomats would meet with their American counterparts and ask
for clarifications on the American position regarding the concerted
efforts to issue accusations against Turkey that are based on what
they call historical bias. In response, the Americans would gladly
communicate to the world that they are cooperating with Turkey on this
issue by refusing to recognize what an army of genocide scholars are
claiming to have been genocide.
In truth, however, the controlled academic discourse on genocide has
been in the service of U.S. interests all along. The genocide
accusation against Turkey had begun its march toward systemization and
institutionalization during the Vietnam War in the 1960s as the main
feature of an attempt to divert the genocide debate from the American
neocolonialist destruction of societies in Southeast Asia. Throughout
the decades since then, this American enterprise has grown into an
international machine that has been built through the unmatched power
to publish in internationally-read academic journals and popular
newspapers. The field of study of genocide had seemingly taken a life
of its own to make it easy for the U.S. government to claim
dissociation from the anti-Turkish content and then pretend to be
cooperating with Turkey on this issue.
To make matters worse, this feigned cooperation has also made it to
genocide literature. One of the common arguments made about the
Armenian issue is that genocide is not officially recognized because
of the U.S. government’s cooperation with the Turkish government. The
power of the pen would have people think that the U.S. is forced into
this “failure” to recognize genocide because of its political ties
with Turkey. This insincerity has thrown the debate into deep
confusion. First, the very notion that a genocide ought to be
recognized, or is on the verge of being recognized, is itself a
product of discourse control. A truly free academic debate on the
causes of the tragic events during the period, which affected many
especially Armenians, would have allowed for a focus on the intent and
actions of imperialist external forces to divide and conquer by
pinning the Christian Armenians against the Muslim Ottomans. The
entire genocide focus of the last decades is fundamentally
unnecessary, except for its politics. Second, the scripted headlines
on this supposed cooperation sustain the genocide claims because they
make it seem as if Turkey is defended by politics rather than history.
In other words, it keeps the genocide pressure alive and it keeps
Turkey coming back for more of this illusory American cooperation.
Bringing clarity to this confusion, it must be said that when it comes
to the Armenian issue, or through the Armenian issue, it is the U.S.
that is imposing cooperation on Turkey, and not vice versa. This cycle
of fake cooperation is an American achievement, a Hollywood
production. In the study of international relations it is called soft
power. In 1990, political scientist Joseph Nye began to articulate the
coopted power that the U.S. has and other states do not. Soft power is
the power to legitimize power, and it is the perfect complement to
hard physical power. It means having the ability to convert military
and economic dominance into information control through superior
access to minds around the world in a way that allows a powerful state
to get what it wants from weaker states without having to use coercive
power. In order for soft power to be effective, the U.S. government
has to make sure that the dissemination of information is successfully
controlled without a loss of credibility. That is why, as far as
American soft power is concerned, it is ideal to enlist “credible,”
independent experts, as the former U.S. administrator of the Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, suggested in a 2009
article written together with Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories:
Causes and Cures,” in the Journal of Political Philosophy.
The importance of credibility was highlighted by Nye in his 2001 book,
“The Future of Power,” in which he says: “The best propaganda is not
propaganda.” Meaning soft power is most effective when the intended
audience is clueless as to the material’s U.S. government origin.
Thus, U.S. government interests are best served when in the guise of
scholarly work. By producing an academic infrastructure of vast
publications and various international institutions, its narratives
then become prominent and impenetrable to outsiders or, as Nye put it:
“Powerful actors can make sure that the less powerful are never
invited to the table, or if they get there, the rules of the game have
already been set by those who arrived first.” This seems to describe
what the field of genocide study has done to late Ottoman history.
Samantha Power’s 2002 book, “A Problem from Hell,” is the capstone of
the genocide discourse that was constructed over decades by American
soft power. Through the utilization of power, it combines the ability
to promote a product with the ability to dictate the acceptance of its
content. Characterized by bias, it is a masterful recitation of the
artful language established by genocide scholarship. Significantly, it
marks the transition accomplished by the U.S. handling of the language
of genocide, from having to defend its military operations in faraway
places in the 1960s to arguing – in the name of morality – for
military operations in faraway places in the 21st century. In the
process, she shamelessly tarnishes the name of the entire Turkish
nation, without expressing any remorse to this day. It was convenient
for her, as for the U.S. government, to make it seem as if the story
of genocide begins with, and should be pivoted on, a “race murder”
conducted by Turks. She is currently the U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations, not without relation to how the book was a big winner with
soft intellectuals.
Soft intellectuals are readers, but not careful readers. They are
those intellectuals who would accept the narrative of a seemingly
scholarly book because of the author’s public image because of a
Pulitzer Prize and because of The New York Times best-sellers list.
This is done without engaging in source criticism, without questioning
the author’s analysis and without grasping the soft-power purpose of
the book.
Soft intellectuals in the U.S. would mock those who believe everything
they see on Fox News, but they themselves would ignore the possibility
that they are being mobilized by articles in the New Yorker, such as
the one by Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence,” published in
the Jan. 5, 2015 issue. Most readers of this magazine trust it so much
that they would not think to question the integrity of the 22 page
display of a twisted narrative or consider its soft-power purpose.
Instead they would rather believe that it fell from the sky to the
desk of the editor, and that sheer quality or human interest rather
than political purpose had warranted the allocation of substantial
space for it on this mainstream platform.
Among the targeted soft intellectuals are members of general American
society who passively internalize the information they receive about
Ottoman-Armenian history, leading to a designed consensus view. It
also targets the members of the Armenian-American community who are
expected to react zealously to these advertised notions of historical
injustice against their people. Interestingly, Turks are also among
the targeted soft intellectuals.
This was apparent in Thomas de Waal’s article, “The G-Word: The
Armenian Massacre and the Politics of Genocide,” that was published in
the January/February 2015 issue of Foreign Affairs, which is run by
former U.S. government personnel. Aside from tampering with
perceptions of history, de Waal attempts to prescribe a reality in
Turkey by describing “a Turkish thaw” and commending those who oppose
an “old dominant narrative” in Turkey. In other words, de Waal is
using his U.S.-given soft power to affect Turkish readers in ways that
a Turkish author would not be able to affect American readers, and to
rhetorically manipulate his readers into thinking that there is denial
in Turkey that ought to be negated.
In this manner, de Waal is trying to appeal to those who are
intellectual enough to be reached by his writing and want to be
accepted as intellectuals by the West, but not intellectual enough to
notice his de-contextualization or recognize his soft-power purpose in
the service of U.S. government interests. Soft-intellectual agreement
with what people like de Waal are advocating adds pressure on the
Turkish government and maintains leverage for the U.S. government to
ensure that Turkey stays cooperative. It is the magic of soft power
that makes a stick appear as a carrot. While American soft power preys
on soft intellectuals, Turks might rise above it by showing the
ability to discern between American-controlled information and genuine
Ottoman history, just as one would be able to discern between a Big
Mac and a doner kebab.
* M.A. in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and is
currently a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of
Utah
From: A. Papazian
http://www.dailysabah.com/op-ed/2015/03/01/soft-power-samantha-power-and-soft-intellectuals