On memos – Errol Morris in NYT:

‘Trying to understand another human being is often a dismal task. And if not dismal, thankless. What am I supposed to do? Disapprove of Donald Rumsfeld? That’s easy. Perhaps too easy. He was ambitious, driven — also lucky. And, as we all know, he was one of the chief architects of the disastrous war in Iraq.
It is impossible for me to write about Mr. Rumsfeld, the former U.S. secretary of defense who died on Tuesday, without writing about his memos. He played a role in making memo-writing the new frontier in governmental accountability. He also pioneered the memo as an obfuscatory instrument. Write one memo saying one thing, write another memo saying the exact opposite.’

(…)

‘President Richard Nixon was undone by his attempts to conceal and excise the official record. Mr. Rumsfeld knew better by the time he was serving under Mr. Nixon’s successor. The trick was to marginalize the record, to litter it with so many contradictions that a rebuttal to any future historian could always be found. His memos (known as “yellow perils” in the Nixon administration and “snowflakes” under Ford) would pile up in drifts, disguising the underlying historical landscape. It’s a level of genius that has not been acknowledged in the press — the founder of FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) is the guy who figured out how to render it almost totally worthless.’

(…)

‘I think of Mr. Rumsfeld as the epistemologist from hell. What are the grounds for rational belief? As often as not, the goal for Mr. Rumsfeld was not justifying belief but undermining it. For example, many people believed in the possibility of détente. Team B aimed to show that belief was stupid, or at best misplaced.’

(…)

‘George Packer recently called Mr. Rumsfeld America’s worst secretary of defense. But this isn’t a popularity contest. It’s not the man, so much, as the methodology. And the methodology, alas, seems ubiquitous. It’s not just him. It’s all of us.’

Read the article here.

Marginalize the record, litter it with contradictions.
A genius in obfuscation. A genius is a genius, it doesn’t matter in what field.

I wouldn’t dare to say that we are all geniuses in obfuscation, but definitely obfuscation has become an art, probably more than before. Although, I would dare to say the that the European aristocracy always had a weak spot for obfuscation.

Looking at Dutch politics, to name just one example, I realize that there are not too many Rumsfelds, there are just many would-be-Rumsfelds.

And the social media is proof that most of us believe in confession and not so much in obfuscation. On the other hand, we litter social media with all kinds of confessions and all sorts of moral outrage is also obfuscation. So maybe Mr. Morris is right, we are all Rumsfeld now.