Limited Hangout

It's taken many years for me to figure out the meaning of the conspiracy and espionage term limited hangout.

I kept thinking it was just certain people hanging out together.  But it has a similar meaning as another term I heard years ago in the dramatization of the novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: chickenfeed.

Both of these terms apply to a kind of propaganda where you include some elements of the truth, including details previously not revealed, but of course not the whole story, in order to protect some new lies or spin around that whole story.

So a "limited hangout" means that part of the previously unrevealed story is put out, but not the whole story just a limited part.  There's a classic quotation from the Nixon tapes where Haldeman is talking to Nixon and suggesting a limited hangout exactly like this.

Now we are seeing a similar phenomenon, or maybe I just see it that way, in which writers properly denounce Israeli atrocities, and lump them in with the defensive actions of Russia in Ukraine.  On the first part they may do admirably but on the second it's pretty much just all smear job (no details or arguments, simply relying on predjudices from earlier disinformation).

So for example this story in London Review of Books does an excellent job of deconstructing Israeli misuse of the Holocaust (which it call Shoah), including this little tidbit about Biden:

In 1982, shortly before Reagan bluntly ordered Begin to cease his ‘holocaust’ in Lebanon, a young US senator who revered Elie Wiesel as his great teacher met the Israeli prime minister. In Begin’s own stunned account of the meeting, the senator commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken aback by the words of the future US president, Joe Biden. ‘No, sir,’ he insisted. ‘According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war ... This is a yardstick of human civilisation, not to hurt civilians.’

I knew Biden was not merely a recently purchased tool in the toolbox, but a longstanding supporter of Israel going way back.  But I would never have imagined Biden an the far side of Begin.

Is it no wonder that in "Our Democracy" we are not allowed to chose any other serious alternative to Trump (who himself was so captured by Zionism that he moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, a longstanding Zionist goal that previous US Presidents had rebuffed).

It's Uber Zionist B vs Uber Zionist T.

Anyway, even while going way beyond ordinary western media in it's deconstruction of the western misguided love affair towards Israel, the above LRB article simultaneously just loves to smear Russia and Russian allies at every opportunity, without any argument, such as:

Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine.

Not a word about protecting ethnic Russians from western backed Nazis who want to ethnically cleanse if not genocide them.

Actually, people like me and those I follow in alternative media and X/Twitter see the similarities, not the differences, in US support for both Israel and Ukraine.  In both cases, the US is arming and assisting its client states (Ukraine and Israel) to perform genocide against an ethnic group (though in the case of supporting Ukraine, US support has done little except enable massive Ukrainian casualties).

But while many (and probably most) westerners are now beginning to understand the heinous crimes of Israel since and before its creation, few are understanding what has been happening in Ukraine for the past 75 years, even though at their roots, it's a similar story of US imperial rule through meddling and war.

Basically, all of western media, including the above average LRB, is a limited hangout.

In every case, I have to make a rough judgement as to whether the plusses from an article outweigh its minuses before posting to social media.  In the case of Mishra's article, though the digressions are rather small, I think I'll pass.  In two minutes of editing I could have made it acceptable.