On being correct?

I wanna apologize for trolling a bit. No, this essay isn’t about how I was correct about Rojava and the CIAnarchists and NGO-ified radlibs are wrong. I know very little about the recent events in northeastern Syria and I’m barely conversant in the history of Kurdish nationalism, the PKK, etc. What I do have (to my detriment) a strong grasp of is the underlying rhetorical architecture of the recent online conversation about the reports of the end of Rojava as an autonomous region and, ostensibly, an end to the Rojava Revolution. If I’m using the wrong terms let me know in the comments.

What I saw when I logged on to monitor the situation this week is a lot of other situation monitoring guys essentially gloating about having been correct that Rojava was a CIA/NATO plot to steal Syria’s oil, and that it had come to an end as a political project due to the downfall of Assad’s government, which these same guys also lamented last year, warning that the end of Assad’s rule would result in even more violence and mayhem in Syria as well as advancing the imperial ambitions of the United States (and the interests of Israel) in the region.

This perspective is, as the story goes, counter-posed to anarchists, Trotskyists, left communists, liberals, etc who are dupes of imperialism and the CIA and criticized Assad’s government’s human rights abuses and use of chemical weapons because they were hypnotized by Western propaganda.

Again, I am not qualified to comment on Syria at all but what I can say for certain is that the Syrian Civil War is another instance where the academic and journalistic consensus on the facts becomes so unclear in the fog of war and the rapid evolution of the situation that disputes over the facts become essentially ideological rather than descriptive or even historical. It has been very difficult to determine the truth of what’s been going on over there for logistical reasons, and the ways that power and interest shape the global media systems reporting the events necessarily distorts their truth value.

Much like the origins of COVID-19, the presence of neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian armed forces, links between the organized left and the CIA/MI6/George Soros/etc, and any ideologically contested truth claim, facts are washed away amidst the thought errors, pathologies, and supposed motives of the interlocutors. One rhetorical move that flourishes in this particular environment is what I’ll term today “being correct”, a big hit with online leftists who have logged thousands of hours on Wikipedia.

This usually takes the form of presenting facts about a complex situation that would seem to disprove an interlocutor’s argument, waiting for their hopefully outsized and aggressive reaction, and then pointing out that they are so reactive because on some level they know they are wrong. This performance is especially bizarre from people who have less of a direct connection to the events in question than others and take unthinkable carnage as an occasion to demonstrate their intellectual superiority.

Yeah, obviously I’m talking about myself and my peers. My early forays into “being correct” started during my first attempts at becoming a public intellectual during Bernie Sanders’ first primary campaign in 2015. I had the sense that a lot of people were suddenly interested in left wing politics and motivated to work in concert to make the world a better place in ways that I had never seen in the United States within my lifetime.

Obviously this was a threat to my fragile 25 year old self concept but more importantly I had the suspicion that there might be more than meets the eye with this guy. When a quick read of his voting record revealed support for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the extradition of Assata Shakur, and votes to fund military aid to Israel (despite being comparatively more willing to criticize the Israeli state and its human rights violations) my path forward was obvious: I would point out that Bernie Sanders was a major red line crosser for any serious leftist and anybody who thought we could get free college for voting for him was dumb. I would also take it a step further and argue that even if we did get student loan forgiveness out of Bernie Sanders, it would be morally outrageous to do so at the expense of Palestinians in the wake of Operation Cast Lead. As you can imagine this got a very vicious and at times incoherent reaction from the “Bernie Bros”, especially because I worded these positions intentionally so as to produce it.

I voted for Sanders twice anyway and I still defended him from liberal and conservative critics in other contexts, I’ve never really been a hardcore anti-electoralist if only for the simple fact that if you comment on electoral politics you can draw a much larger audience and a much wider array of interlocutors. I also find that the contradiction between my arguably hardline leftist politics and the inherent compromises and obstacles in our formal political system to be intellectually generative and interesting. This is immaterial though in the sense that pointing out basic facts about his political career and calling him “Bernie the Bomber” and “Officer Bernie Sanders” can get a big reaction out of democratic socialists.

Compare here to the meltdowns about Gabriel Rockhill’s basic observation that the Western academic left, given its home in Western academia, has some ideas that when carried out to their logical conclusion support Western/NATO/US hegemony globally. It seems obvious that the Frankfurt School wouldn’t be widely taught in US universities, grad programs especially, if anybody seriously thought that their ideas could end capitalism. After all, I had to read Dialectic of Enlightenment probably 4 different times in grad school after reading it for fun at least once before that. Factually speaking, yes Rockhill is probably correct in his underlying argument. Whether it is actually true that the CIA created critical theory to stop us from developing an anti-imperialist left in the United States can’t be proved or disproved via “credible sources” so the argument becomes a hamster wheel.

This is the flaw with “truther” arguments in general, the authorities in question would never admit to their nefarious plots and they ostensibly control the information regimes with which we could expose the plots, so we just go in circles. There is also an inherent assumption in both truther-ism and “being correct” where it is assumed that if the correct position (assuming it is correct) is demonstrated, whether ideological or descriptive, this automatically leads to some kind of political progress. This is obviously false given the huge gap between American public opinion and American policy, especially on the issues that online correct guys are most hyped up about, like war and universal healthcare. Obviously political organization and working together with those we disagree with is on some level necessary, and using global politics as an occasion to demonstrate one’s own intellectual superiority is a pretty bad strategy in that context. So yea score one for the critics of the extremely online.

As a final side note, reducing politics to “being correct” is how we got all these mind numbingly stupid arguments about leftists collaborating with the far right because they’re “against imperialism”. Yes Marjorie Taylor Greene said a couple correct things in the last few months. Who cares. She hates us!