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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

GroupThink – what always brings power down

One of the features of systems of power is what Noam Chomsky has called “Manufacturing Consent” – or the insidious imprinting by national educational systems and media empires of simplistic stories of heroes, villains and other questionable narratives….. Unfortunately, however, for the powerful they end up believing their own propaganda – dissenters who suggest that the world is not as the official organs are portraying it are ridiculed and marginalised.

Groupthink” came into our language as a result of a 1972 book - and Paul t’Hart’s subsequent  Groupthink in Government” (1994) helped spawn a veritable industry…

Organisations and governments should therefore all be alive to the dangers of complacency and some indeed have gone to the lengths of appointing “devil’s advocates” to challenge the status quo…. “Rebel Ideas” is a recent good read on this. 

But, somehow, all the checks consistently fail – as we have just seen, tragically, in Afghanistan. To many of us, of course, we should never have been there in the first place but the question on everyone’s lips these days is how on earth so-called “intelligence” – let alone the “chattering classes” - could have got things so wrong. It is a question that seems to have been recurring rather too frequently these past few years – vide Brexit and Trump 

One of the answers is that people have been looking in the wrong places – if they really wanted answers about Afghanistan, they should have been asking basic questions about money flows and social systems.

-      Take, for example, this report just issued by the independent British Think-tank ODI – Lessons for Peace which demonstrates that the cash from the poppy trade outstrips disbursements from the Kabul government by a factor of 10 to 1.

-      Or this short article from Anatol Lieven that explains the role that social networks have played in the collapse of any resistance to the Taliban 

But Presidents and governments prefer to listen to the assured voices of the military who promise victory – and seem to have a built-in resistance to listening to the doubtsayers who bring bad news….. And, since the start of the Vietnam war, there have been any number of voices questioning the conventional wisdom. One of the most prominent has been Paul Rogers (suffering perhaps from his designation as Professor of Peace Studies – although increasingly recognised by security advisers). Even before 9/11 he was making the argument against the belief that military power could defeat guerrilla tactics – as you can see from his collected writing here 

Update; 

Of all the analysis I've seen since the weekend about the Afghan tragedy, this is the best I've read. It's from a marvellous small weekly E-journal Scottish Review

Tariq Ali has a good briefing - another excellent source of information is here

But perhaps the best is this recent briefing from a couple of anthropologists who worked in the country some decades ago and this one from an unknown pakistani  

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