Belen Fernandez - The Imperial Messenger - Thomas Friedman at Work

BELN FERNNDEZ is an editor and feature writer at Pulse Media. Her articles have also appeared at Al Jazeera, The Electronic Intifada, CounterPunch and many other publications.

COUNTERBLASTS is a series of short, polemical titles that aims to revive a tradition inaugurated by Puritan and Leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when, in the words of one of their number, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was running up like parchment in the fire. From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century.

In a period where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it is time to revive the tradition. Versos Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.

First published by Verso 2011
Blen Fernndez 2011

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-749-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84467-839-6

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v3.1

for my amazing parents, with love and gratitude

The House Republicans dont seem to have noticed that todays U.N. is not the U.N. of the 1970s when the Soviets and their pals could pass a resolution that the world was flat.

Thomas Friedman, 1995

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Thomas Friedman, 2005

In the first chapter of his bestseller on globalization, The World Is Flat, three-time Pulitzer Prizewinning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times Thomas Friedman suggests that his repertoire of achievements also includes being heir to Christopher Columbus. According to Friedman, he has followed in the footsteps of the fifteenth-century icon by making an unexpected discovery regarding the shape of the world during an encounter with people called Indians.

Friedmans Indians reside in India proper, of course, not in the Caribbean, and include among their ranks CEO Nandan Nilekani of Infosys Technologies Limited in Bangalore, where Friedman has come in the early twenty-first century to investigate phenomena such as outsourcing and to exult over the globalization-era instructions he receives at the KGA Golf Club downtown: Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.

The Columbus-like discovery process culminates with Friedmans conversion of one of the components of Nilekanis idiomatic expression into a more convenient synonym: What Nandan is saying, I thought to myself, is that the playing field is being flattened Flattened? Flattened? I rolled that word around in my head for a while and then, in the chemical way that these things happen, it just popped out: My God, hes telling me the world is flat!

The viability of the new metaphor has already been called into question by Friedmans assessment two pages prior to the flat-world discovery that the Infosys campus is in fact a different world, given that the rest of India is not characterized by things like a massive resort-size swimming pool and a fabulous health club. No attention is meanwhile paid to the possibility that a normal, round earthon which all circumferential points are equidistant from the centermight more effectively convey the notion of the global network Friedman maintains is increasingly equalizing human opportunity.

An array of disclaimers and metaphorical qualifications begins to surface around page 536, such that it ultimately appears that the book might have been more appropriately titled The World Is Sometimes Indefinitely Maybe Partially FlatBut Dont Worry, I Know Its Not, or perhaps The World Is Flat, Except for the Part That Is Unflat and the Twilight Zone Where Half-Flat People Live. As for his announcement that unlike Columbus, I didnt stop with India, Friedman intends this as an affirmation of his continued exploration of various parts of the globe and not as an admission of his continuing tendency to errwhich he does first and foremost by incorrectly attributing the discovery that the earth is round to the geographically misguided Italian voyager.

Leaving aside for the moment the blunders that plague Friedmans writing, the comparison with Columbus is actually quite apt in other ways, as well. For instance, both characters might be accused of transmitting a similar brand of hubris, nurtured by their respective societies, according to which the Other is permitted existence only via the discoverer-hero himself. While Columbus is credited with enabling preexisting populations on the American continent to enter the realm of true existence by reporting them to European civilization, Friedman assumes responsibility for the earths inhabitants in general without literally having to encounter them.

As the world becomes ever more interconnected, Friedman appears to be under the impression that he is licensed to extrapolate observations of select demographic groups, such as Indian call center employees pleased with the opportunities provided them by U.S. corporations, and to issue pronouncements like the following on behalf of humanity: Three United States are better than one, and five would be better than three.

Friedman initially hocks the possibility of a democratizing war on Iraq as the most important task worth doing and worth debating,

Though he never disputes the idea that war on Iraq was a legitimate choice, it is not at all far-fetched to resurrect the comparison with Columbus in order to suggest that the designated heir is also complicit in the decimation of foreign populations standing in the way of civilizations demands.

The foundations of Friedmans journalistic education consist of a tenth-grade introductory course taught by Hattie M. Steinberg at St. Louis Park High School in a suburb of Minneapolis in 1969, after which Friedman claims to have never needed, or taken, another course in journalism.

Friedmans writing is characterized by a reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality. His vacuous but much-publicized First Law of Petropoliticswhich Friedman devises by plotting a handful of historical incidents on a napkin and which states that the price of oil is inversely related to the pace of freedomdoes not even withstand the test of the very Freedom House reports that Friedman invokes as evidence in support of the alleged law.

In the case of Friedmans musings on the Arab/Muslim world, the reduction process produces decontextualized and often patronizing or blatantly racist generalizations, such as that suicide bombing in Israel indicates a collective madness