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Iatrogenic
security threats
READER DAN writes
in response to our listing of American corporations tied to Israel:
"Do you have a comparable list of corporations that remain
silent when a Palestinian bomb explodes aboard an Israeli bus?
The policies of the Israeli government are abhorrent, but the
tactics of the Palestinians are inexcusable as well."
When I raised a
similar argument as a kid, my mother's response was, "If
Johnny were to jump off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff,
too?" I never could come up with good answer to that and
so eventually had to concede that somebody else's stupidity was
not a good excuse for my own.
The underlying problem
is that we are funding Israel's violence but not that of Palestine.
We are not directly responsible for the bombs on Israeli busses
but we are very much responsible for the wrongs that Israel does.
Further, if you occupy and oppress a people long and hard enough
they will do all sorts of things to fight back that don't fit
the definition of civil discourse.
The "well,
what about their violence?" argument was used against the
North Vietnamese and in just about every war since. Implicit
in this is the idea that what we do wrong is excusable because
it has been matched - or allegedly so - by the other side. Of
course, the other side doesn't see it that way so you end up
with a perfect stalemate of violence.
In fact, Israel
- as does America - largely faces a security threat that it has
created by its own supposed remedies. Both America and Israel
are far more in danger now than they were before 9/11 because
an ever growing portion of the world doesn't like the vicious
cure they are offering.
During a 1999 anti-war
speech in Washington's Dupont Circle, I addressed a similar problem
in the Balkans:
There
is a name for this sort of medicine. It is called iatrogenic
- in which the disease is caused by the physician. Doctors who
cause diseases or ruin the health of the patient through arrogance,
incompetence, and mindless machismo have large insurance policies
because people sue them for something we call malpractice. In
medicine this is considered a bad thing.
We have
just gone through yet another iatrogenic war, in which our elites
have argued falsely that their stated intentions outweigh any
actual consequences. The patient is in far worse shape than before
this war began, the victim of arrogance, incompetence, and mindless
machismo. . .
[Latest
research puts the Balkan military and civilian deaths in the
range of 100,000 with 1.8 million displaced]
We, of
course, have had other iatrogenic wars. This is what happened
in Vietnam when we declared that it was necessary to destroy
villages in order to save them. This is what happened in Iraq
when in the name defeating a modern Hitler we caused the post-war
death by disease and malnutrition of far more people than Hussein
himself had killed. And it is what happened when NATO declared
that Slobadon Milosevic's crimes against humanity were such that
they justified the brutal destruction of a country and the pain
and death and the very ethnic cleansing we said we sought to
avoid.
In fact,
every moral act in the face of mental or physical injury carries
twin responsibilities: to mend the injury and to avoid replacing
it with another. This twin burden is faced every day by doctors.
Every police officer faces it. Every firefighter. It was what
I was taught as a Coast Guard officer. It's well past time for
our politicians do so as well.
The point
of speaking of the evils of a Milosovec or a Hussein is to raise
the alarm. But once that has been successfully done, this alarm
may not rightfully be used as a perpetual excuse for our own
misdeeds. From the moment we commence a moral intervention we
become a part of the story, and part of the good and evil. We
are no longer the innocent bystander but a full participant whose
acts will either help or make things worse. Our intentions become
irrelevant; they are overwhelmed by the character of our response
to them. The morality of the disease is supplanted by the morality
of the cure. Any other course amounts to reckless and negligent
political malpractice.
The security threat
that both America and Israel now face is, in no small part, iatrogenic.
The first step towards a cure rather than continued harm is to
take responsibility for our own actions and not hide behind the
violence of those who oppose us.
This means doing
things that are an anathema to the politicians and media in this
country such as actually talking - even seemingly forever - with
those with whom we disagree. It means an end to showboating and
the beginning of endless tiny steps towards accommodation. It
means saying you're sorry when you have done wrong. It means
finding things - like economic projects and programs - that benefit
both sides and that make their former quarrels less important.
It means giving dollars instead of shooting bullets. It means
helping both sides choose to be survivors of their past rather
than its perpetual victims. And it means putting away the guns,
the threats and the bombast and looking for, in Benjamin Franklin's
phrase, "the little felicities of every day."
Above all, it means
taking constant and self-critical responsibility for our own
acts and for those of our allies and not finding false moral
shelter in the violent reactions they provoke. As Gandhi put
it, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world."
Dealing
with myth
Having been an anthropology
major, I don't get as riled up about mythology in public life
as many in the media and politics. Myths can be helpful, benign,
sad, or deadly but mostly they're there to fill the empty places
in reality.
Sometimes myths
are carried on the backs of famous people because the reality
isn't powerful enough to do the job. A classic case involves
the death of Dr Charles Drew, the famous black surgeon.
It is widely told
that Drew, then 46, died in North Carolina in 1950 following
a car accident for which he was unable to get treatment at a
white hospital and had to be transported to a much more distant
black hospital, wasting critical treatment time.
But the Annals of
American Survey notes:
"The
authoritative work by historian Spencie Love entitled, One Blood:
The Death and Resurrection of Charles Drew, described how the
myth has been cultivated because of the time and place of Dr.
Drew's death and serves as an unfortunate filler between living
memory and written history. True enough, a 23-year-old black
World War II veteran by the name Maltheus Avery was critically
injured in an auto crash on December 1, 1950, exactly 8 months
after Dr. Drew's death. He was a student at North Carolina A&T,
a husband, and a father of a small child. Like Dr. Drew, he was
treated initially at Alamance General Hospital. He was transferred
to Duke University Hospital and subsequently turned away because
they had exhausted their supply of beds for black patients. Mr.
Avery would die shortly after arrival at Lincoln Hospital, Durham,
North Carolina's black facility. Spencie Love's book discusses
how the story of the lesser-known Maltheus Avery confronted the
circumstances of the death of the more prominent Dr. Drew, and
thus a myth was born."
Something similar
was at work in the black response to the OJ Simpson case. To
many blacks, Simpson was carrying the mythic weight of decades
of ethnic abuse under the justice system. In a column at the
time for Pacific News Service, a black journalist, Dennis Schatzman,
outlined some of the black context for the Simpson trial:
Just last
year, Olympic long jumper and track coach Al Joyner was handcuffed
and harassed in a LAPD traffic incident. He has settled out of
court for $250,000.
A few
years earlier, former baseball Hall of Famer Joe Morgan was "handcuffed
and arrested at the Los Angeles airport because police believed
that Morgan 'fit the profile of a drug dealer.'" He also
got a settlement of $250,000.
Before
that, former LA Laker forward Jamal Wilkes was stopped by the
police, handcuffed and thrown to the pavement.
A black
man was recently given a 25-year to life sentence for stealing
a slice of pizza from a young white boy.
In 1992,
a mentally troubled black man was shot and killed by LA sheriff's
deputies while causing a disturbance in front of his mother's
house. Neighbors say they saw a deputy plant a weapon by the
body.
Simpson
case detective Mark Fuhrman was accused of planting a weapon
at the side of a robbery suspect back in 1988. The LAPD recently
settled for an undisclosed amount.
In North
Carolina, Daryl Hunt still languishes in jail for the 1984 rape
and murder of a white newspaper reporter, even though DNA tests
say it was not possible.
These examples would
be rejected as irrelevant by the average lawyer or journalist
but in fact OJ Simpson's case served as the mythic translation
of stories never allowed to be told. The stories that should
have been on CNN but weren't. Everything was true except the
names, times and places. In Washington, they do something similar
when stories can't be told; they write a novel.
Something parallel
took place around the same time when militia members imagined
that the Bloods & Crips were being armed by the US government
or when blacks believed the same thing about the militias. Or
when the UN was thought to on the verge of invading the U.S.
Like urban blacks
considering the justice system, the rural right saw things the
elite would prefer to ignore. It observed correctly phenomena
indicating loss of sovereignty for themselves, their states and
their country. They saw treaties replaced by fast-track agreements
and national powers surrendered to remote and unaccountable trade
tribunals. And they saw a multi-decade assault by the federal
government on the powers of states and localities.
Like urban blacks,
they were not paranoid in these observations, merely perceptive.
But because the story could not be told, could not become part
of the national agenda, they turned, as people in trouble often
do, to a myth -- and, yes, sometimes a violent myth -- that would
carry the story.
We tend to get very
self-righteous when dealing with other people's myths but very
tolerant about our own. Thus a conference dedicated to spreading
doubt about the Holocaust is an outrage but a generation of teaching
Americans fabrications about the economy in the name of robber
baron capitalism is perfectly fine even if it has done infinitely
more damage than an anti-Holocaust conference.
The Holocaust conference
was a mythological alternative to doing what many participants
would like to do but can't: invade and destroy Israel. Defeat
is a prime breeding ground of myth.
But even as the
Washington Post was attacking the conference, it was slipping
in its own myth, witness this report:
Even by
the standards of Neturei Karta, these most ultra of ultra-orthodox
Jewish Hasids took a step into the world of the very strange,
if not the meshuga, or crazy, when they showed up as honored
guests at a conference of Holocaust skeptics and deniers in Tehran.
With a hug and a smile for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
Rabbi Aharon Cohen walked into a conference room with former
Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, discredited academics, and more
than a few white supremacists and served up a rousing welcome
speech. . .
Neturei
Karta is best understood within the confines and context of Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, which harbors the world's largest ultra-orthodox Jewish
shtetl, or community. Here the garb -- black coats and hats for
the men, wigs and demure dresses for the women -- is that of
the 18th century, Yiddish is the lingua franca and there is no
deviation from the teachings of Torah and Talmud. The Satmar
sect dominates this ghetto, and anti-Zionism is central to their
identity. . .
Neturei
Karta acknowledged never before having gone to a Holocaust deniers
meeting but offered no apologies; they are practiced practitioners
of the outrageous. Chaim Freimann used to hang around hotels
in Washington during the 1992 Mideast peace talks, wearing a
Palestinian flag in his lapel and giving old-comrade greetings
to Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian spokeswoman.
The Post thus declared
as outrageous the idea of a Jew being on friendly terms with
a Palestinian. And what is a Jew doing at Mideast peace talks
anyway?
Once again, proof
that it's a lot easier to explode the other guy's myth than to
examine one's own.
America's view of
the Holocaust, for example, is filled with its own myths. Such
as the one that redefines Nazism and the European conflict primarily
by its anti-Semitic manifestations, safely exempting us from
considering the changes in German governance that led to these
manifestations, changes that are becoming uncomfortably familiar
in America.
And it is missing
important stories, stories like the one Richard Rubenstein tells
in the Cunning of History about a Hungarian Jewish emissary meeting
with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner in Egypt in 1944
and suggesting that the Nazis might be willing to save one million
Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies. Lord Moyne's
reply: "What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall
I put them?" Writes Rubenstein: "The British government
was by no means adverse to the 'final solution' as long as the
Germans did most of the work. " For both countries, it had
become a bureaucratic problem, one that Rubenstein suggests we
understand "as the expression of some of the most profound
tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th century."
And this one from
the Village Voice:
The infamous
Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number. And now it's been revealed
that IBM machines were actually based at the infamous concentration-camp
complex. . . The new revelation of IBM technology in the Auschwitz
area constitutes a final link in the chain of documentation surrounding
Big Blue's vast enterprise in Nazi-occupied Poland, supervised
at first directly from its New York headquarters, and later through
its Geneva office. . . IBM spokesman Carol Makovich didn't respond
to repeated telephone calls. In the past, when asked about IBM's
Polish subsidiary's involvement with the Nazis, Makovich has
said, "IBM does not have much information about this period."
When a Reuters reporter asked about Poland, Makovich said, "We
are a technology company, we are not historians."
Similarly, in a
mythology obsessed with Israel, the American story of secular
Judaism has all but disappeared. Last century's great immigration
of European Jews brought with it many rebels who had rejected
Zionism if not religion. As I wrote in Why Bother: "They
became part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the
politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century
America. It helped to create the organizations, causes, and values
that built this country's social democracy. While Protestants
and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics,
the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came
from native populists and immigrant socialists. It is certainly
impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement,
or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left. There is, in
fact, no greater parable of the potential power of a conscious,
conscientious minority than the influence of secular Jews on
20th century modern American politics."
These stories make
the Holocaust more complex than we would like it to be.
Elsewhere in Why
Bother, I discussed a less contentious example of myths at work:
Consider,
for example, the Ojibwa, described by Brian Morris in Anthropology
of the Self. These Indians, a group of nomadic hunters and fishers
living east of Lake Winnipeg, "do not make any categorical
or sharply defined differentiation between myth and reality,
or between dreaming and the waking state; neither can any hard
or fast line be drawn between humans and animals. . . . A bear
is an animal which unlike humans hibernates during the winter,
but in specific circumstances it may be interpreted as a human
sorcerer. . . . The four winds are thought of not only as animate
by the Ojibwa, but are categorized as persons."
Not only
may a culture define the four winds as persons under certain
circumstances, it may also define a slave or someone from another
tribe as not a person at all. Nonetheless the slave or the outsider
really exist so at some level are treated as a person anyway.
Hence people in such societies may trade goods with the stranger
or attempt to convert the slave to Christianity even though they
are not considered human. Or the society may try to quantify
such anomalies as Americans did when they declared a black legally
equal to three-fifths of a white person. Or it may create a hierarchy
as Aristotle did when he confidently declared that "the
deliberative faculty in the soul is not present at all in a slave:
in a female is present but ineffective, in a child present but
undeveloped." Or it may declare that "all men are created
equal" but really mean only white male property owners.
Or it may fight a revolution for liberty but leave women as chattel.
Or the culture can painfully change such values over two centuries
and still have to go repeatedly to court to fight over what was
really meant by the change. . .
Here is
how anthropologist Morris describes his own western culture:
"It is individualistic, and has a relatively inflated concern
with the self which in extremes gives rise to anxiety, to a sense
that there is a loss of meaning in contemporary life, to a state
of narcissism, and to an emphasis in popular psychology on 'self
actualization.' "
Bad as
this sounds, though, you will probably get along better in New
York or Chicago with a loss of meaning, state of narcissism,
or overflowing self-actualization than if you try to escape your
angst by acting like the Ojibwa. In the Big Apple, to lack a
sharply defined differentiation between myth and reality, between
dreaming and the waking state; or between humans and animals,
risks not only ridicule but actual legal sanctions. Even in a
culture that celebrates the power of the individual, the restraints
on that individualism are substantial and we, like peoples everywhere,
go about our daily business regarding them as largely normal."
Mythology soars
when a culture is under threat or in great isolation. Might the
fact that the U.S. hasn't talked with Iran for 27 years have
anything to do with the latter's current treatment of the Holocaust?
And what changes
this? I have argued that if you want to bring peace in the Israeli-Palestine
conflict you just put a few Wal-Marts. Thus you would rid the
area of both feuding cultures and replace them with Wal-Mart
customers.
The theory behind
this is more serious than it appears. People get on better when
there is something more important going on than what it is that
divides them. Thus, despite all the talk about cultural diversity
in liberal circles and on campuses, the places where you are
most likely to find people of different ethnic backgrounds mixing
well include shopping malls, the military, sports teams and ethnic
restaurants. Key to the relationship is the fact that everyone
thinks they're getting something out of the deal.
The same principle
would work in foreign policy. The best way to deal with a harmful
myth is to eliminate the anger, isolation and other problems
that caused it to thrive in the first place. You replace them
with a deal that works well for everyone.
These myths are
not the problem; they are just good warning signs of the problem.
Solve the problem and you'll get much better myths.
Mideast
paradigms
Israel is a state
like all the rest.
AIPAC is just another
political group like the National Rifle Association. It is not
a religion but one more Washington lobby corrupting the political
process and making American voters less powerful.
The policy of the
Israeli government is clearly distinguishable from the theology
of Judaism to all but a small yet powerful and noisy crowd including
neo-conservatives, cable TV anchors and semantic bomb throwers.
Israeli policy reflects Judaism about as well as George Bush
reflects Christianity.
Our policy towards
Palestine, based on polling, is one of the major issues dividing
us from the Muslim world. This policy helped lead to the World
Trade Center attack and the international disasters that have
occurred since. It has also made Israel less safe. We can not
solve our current crises nor end our manic fears of the Muslim
world without changing our policies towards Palestine and the
Middle East.
Osama bin Laden
is a monster created by American foreign policy. You can kill
him but unless our foreign policy changes, there are more monsters
where he came from.
If what goes on
in the synagogue doesn't stay in the synagogue than it can not
be expected to be treated as though it were still there. In other
words, if you're going to ask American taxpayers to subsidize
Israel and back its policies, the matter should be handled no
differently than building a B2 bomber or putting a federal agency's
office in some congress member's district. If you want to play
by religion's rules act like a religion. Otherwise, the rules
of politics govern. And anyone who calls that anti-Semitic is
either a cry baby or a scoundrel.
Just because you're
pro-Israel doesn't mean you have to be anti-Muslim. The present
crisis stems in no small part from conflating the two. American
policy has been anti-Muslim or cynically manipulative of Islamic
states for decades. No policy of ours has been more wrong-headed.
If there is another
disaster such as the World Trade Center, it will also be in no
small part due to our policies in the Middle East including that
towards those toward Palestine. No issue has done more damage
to America and none continues to cause a greater threat.
Why you
want to talk with terrorists
Bush's history is
as bad as his politics. Of course, there can be peace with so-called
terrorist organizations; it's just a matter of whether one waits
the better part of a century like the British in Northern Ireland
or you start talking and negotiating now. The latter course would
seem advisable in the Mid East given the prospects for the PA
even with the "democratic institutions" the American
empire is "acting to establish" - a neat trick not
unlike forced consensual sex. Besides terrorists are just people
with weapons with whom America doesn't agree; the other ones
are called allies and by definition there isn't all that much
to negotiate with them about.
Further, one of
the reasons America is in so much trouble is because it happily
makes all sorts of compromises in order to get along with large
dictatorships such Russia and China, but thinks it can handle
smaller operations like Hamas, North Korea, and Iran by simple
obstinacy and belligerence. In other words, it is happy to talk
with big terrorists, just not little ones. In fact, most of these
small entities - and those who lead them - suffer from extreme
inferiority complexes. By threatening war, imposing massive embargos
and so forth, America merely feeds the sense of persecution and
encourages the least rational reaction. A more sensible approach
would be to constantly negotiate with these leaders and edge
them towards reasonable participation in world affairs.
Dealing
with evil
LISTENING TO Peter
Kornbluth the other evening discuss the progress of the Pinochet
case brought to mind some questions seldom discussed in such
celebrity prosecutions:
- Beyond the obvious
requirements for justice what is achieved by such cases? For
example, Kornbluth suggests that the Chilean elite is now far
less favorable toward Pincochet because of revelations of his
secret financing dealings. But what is the effect outside of
Chile?
- Some of these
cases morph into political tools - both positive and negative
- not directly related to the cases themselves. For example,
the Pinochet case might have improved democracy in Latin America
but, on the other hand, the arrest of Osama bin Laden before
November 2 will clearly be used to help George Bush win reelection.
- What have we really
learned from such noted examples as the Nuremburg trials or Holocaust
education? Do we overestimate the importance of such examples
given the frequent reappearance of truly bad guys in world politics,
our failure to deal in a timely manner with African genocide,
or the failure of even Israel to grasp some of the lessons of
the Holocaust? Is the way we handle these events actually an
iconic escape valve by which we indicate our concern without
dramatically changing our ways?
- Under what circumstance
are truth & reconciliation commissions, reparations or major
miscreant trials the desired course?
- What are some
of the best and worst examples of post-evil reaction by specific
countries or international groups?
Exploratory
hypothesis
Imagine if we had
told Israel and Palestine a couple of years ago that if they
would just make nice we would give them enough money to equal
Israel's GDP for one year and Palestine's for three. Take the
time off, go to the Riviera or the Catskills, forget about productivity,
and just party thanks to the American taxpayer. Or if Israel
and Palestine wanted to be really sensible, they could have invested
in their country's future instead.
Think how much safer
we would be today.
But where would
such a large sum of money come from?
Well, gentle reader,
all we would have had to have done was to cancel the planned
invasion of Iraq and used the money as a carrot rather than as
a bludgeon. For that is just what it has cost us so far.
PS: Name one major
American news outlet that offered you an option even close to
this.
2006
Preserving
a Jewish state or the Jewish soul?
VIGDOR LIEBERMAN,
that nasty member of the Israel cabinet, wants to get rid of
the Arabs so his country can remain a Jewish state. It's not
a new idea; shoving Arabs around helped Israel get started. And
it didn't work all that well. Fifty years of misery as the Israelis
and the Arabs competed to prove whose victimhood was the worse,
a battle no one ever wins. And Israel still has more Arabs than
America has Latinos.
Gene McCarthy once
said that 80% of the world's problems could be attributed to
British mapmakers. A slight exaggeration to be sure, but it is
still true that souls and governments don't live in the same
places. And when governments "settle" a dispute they
don't pay much attention to how people really live. They just
draw a line and say, Well, now, that's taken care of." And,
of course, it isn't.
One of the rare
exceptions happened in Switzerland. Dietrich Fischer described
it in the Progressive Review in 1991:
"[The] conflict
developed in the 1950s in the canton Bern in Switzerland, where
a French speaking Catholic minority in the Jura region felt constantly
overruled by the German speaking Protestant majority. The cantonal
government in Bern sought to persuade the French speaking minority
that it was in their own best interest to remain with the canton,
since they received economic subsidies.
"But only the
people of the Jura themselves could decide what they valued more,
economic subsidies or self-government. As the process dragged
on, demonstrations became more frequent, and some cases of politically
motivated arson occurred. No one was killed, but there is little
doubt that if the conflict had remained unsolved, it could ultimately
have developed into a civil war like that in Northern Ireland.
"After a long
delay, the Bernese government finally agreed to hold a referendum
to let the people in the Jura decide whether they preferred to
form their own canton or to remain within the canton Bern. The
first vote was about evenly split. So a second vote was held
separately in each of six districts. Three districts, bordering
on the German speaking part of the canton, had majorities preferring
the old arrangement, while the three districts that were farther
removed from the center preferred separation.
"After that
vote, each community along the borderline was allowed to choose
whether it preferred to stay where it was or switch sides. Some
switched. In 1978 the new canton Jura was founded and welcomed
by the voters of Switzerland as a member of the confederation.
Since then, the violence has subsided, since most people got
what they wanted, or respected the verdict of the voters.
"Self-determination
is an effective means of conflict resolution. It does not guarantee
that the optimal decision will be taken in all cases. But if
people make a mistake and suffer the consequences, they have
nobody but themselves to blame, and they simply have to try to
do better at the next opportunity. If, however, some far removed
central government makes a decision for the people and they suffer,
they have good reason to project their anger at those responsible.
. .
"The secret
of Switzerland's long-lasting unity and stability may lie in
its diversity. It does not impose uniformity from a center, but
allows a great deal of local self-determination. Cooperation
is the result of negotiations between all of the parties involved
and is entirely voluntary, not forced upon them."
A number of factors
involved in the Swiss case have been absent in the Middle East:
- Opportunity for
self-determination
- Flexibility in
drawing borders based on small scale preferences that reflect
community desires rather than those of nation states.
- The substantial
devolution of power so that subcultures call their own shots
wherever possible.
- Change by negotiation
and cooperation.
Of course, it was
easier since the parties all had loyalty to a common state. But
it would be a far more sensible route than the one that Israel
has been following.
Israel faces the
prospect of one day becoming like much of the world - a culturally
diverse and contentious population living under a single flag.
It can, in fact, point to few parallels - the Vatican is among
the lonely - for its dream of ethnic purity. The last big country
to try it included Jews among its victims and, in the end, lost
the battle.
The mythology of
a Jewish state as a noble goal can be easily punctured by imagining
someone campaigning in the U.S. for a white Christian state and,
in the spirit of Lieberman, proposing to moving our latinos down
to Mexico. But then you don't have to imagine. We have such people.
Only we call them Nazis but they also hate Jews which makes it
all a bit confusing.
The fact is that
the airplane and television pretty much sabotaged any dreams
of ethnic purity around the world. No lawyer or dictator in the
world has yet figured how to get around them. And it's probably
time for Israel to accept the fact.
Admittedly the job
of retaining a culture is incredibly difficult these days but
using apartheid and cluster bombs isn't going to help. Having
something that others admire and encourage will.
Most of all, a culture
is transmitted by the magic of its nature and the witness of
its members. This Anglo-Irish kid was raised in an era when Jews
were saving our politics, writing some of our best literature,
and keeping us laughing. You couldn't help but become a citizen
of the Jewish state of mind. That's one reason I'm both angry
and sad about Israel's present course. It purports to be preserving
itself but is really tearing itself apart and alienating the
very people it should instead be offering passports to its soul.
A good place to
start getting things back on track would be to pull out the Declaration
of the Establishment of the State of Israel which describes a
place that "will foster the development of the country for
the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom,
justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it
will ensure complete equality of social and political rights
to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex;
it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language,
education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all
religions; and
And the nice thing
is, you don't need cluster bombs to get people to go along with
that.
Why is
the military sacred?
ONE OF THE MOST
costly and immoral lies of our culture is that the military is
a sacred institution. John Kerry recently bumped into this lie
while telling a truth, that as a practical matter, one shouldn't
mention a week before the election, namely that the military
has always been a haven for those who couldn't hack it in the
civilian economy. "Education. . . if you make the most of
it and you study hard and you do your homework, and you make
an effort to be smart, you can do well," said Kerry "If
you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
You need only watch
the military's own recruiting ads to know the importance of the
economic harbor. Which is why these ads promise to train you
so you'll be able make it in the 'free market' when you go back.
The military is
America's largest religion. If in public office, you may no more
take its name in vain than those of the lesser gods revered by
more modest religions like Christianity.
In fact, the military
has a permanent exemption from the strictures of Christianity.
Otherwise, instead of going after cohabiting gays, the church's
rightwing would be attacking the Pentagon for violating such
strictures as:
"The law will
go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will
judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears
into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore."
"You have heard
that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell
you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on
the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants
to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.
If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one
who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said,
'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love
your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may
be sons of your Father in heaven.
"Never pay
back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight
of all men. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace
with all men. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave
room for the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is Mine,
I will repay,' says the Lord. 'But if your enemy is hungry, feed
him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing
you will heap burning coals upon his head.' Do not be overcome
by evil, but overcome evil with good."
"Put your sword
back into its place; for all those who take up the sword shall
perish by the sword."
But none of that
matters to the Christian apostates who control the discussion
of both religion and the military in our political debates. These
frauds have blasphemed their own purported religion and betrayed
its fundamental principles. And nowhere is this more apparent
than their allegiance to the military, the most un-Christian
institution of our world.
Of course, if you're
a Seventh Day Agnostic like your editor, you can get away with
saying such things. It is those who seek power but can't quite
get the hypocritical rhetoric down who end up in trouble.
Like John Kerry
who was taken to the reamers for violating the first law of heroism
- let someone else do the talking about what you did - and who
now is in trouble for not seeing the military as heroic enough.
It's often like that; it's the errant priests who get into real
trouble, not the outlanders, the unsalvageable.
And the reason he
is in trouble is because not just the GOP spin machine but everyone
in public office and the bulk of the media believe one should
speak no evil of the military. On no single issue, is the media's
pretension of objectivity more regularly violated. Its true purpose
in this matter is to perpetuate the myth of the sacred role of
the warrior.
In fact, as Joseph
Conrad noted, the hero and the coward are those who, for one
brief moment, do something out of the ordinary. At least the
ones we honor, that is. The career firefighter, the inner city
grandmother raising six grandchildren whose father is in jail
and mother has a lousy job, or the teacher year after year helping
to save those who society has preemptively discarded are not
treated as sacred, as heroes, or as worthy of special honor during
political campaigns and or on the evening news. But killing some
Iraqis, or being killed by them: that's the real thing.
That's why you won't
hear any politician or commentator quoting Eugene Debs: "I
would no more teach children military training than I would teach
them arson, robbery, or assassination."
There is also the
little problem of winning. If you're going to justify war without
concern for its morality, you still are left with the practical
problem of victory. Since World War II, America has had no victories
save against minor military enemies such as Granada. Even if
we were to declare victory against Iraq it would be the equivalent
of Notre Dame defeating St Joseph's Junior High School.
I sometimes fantasize
that war will be the slavery of the 21st century, which is to
say a concept once widely accepted is turned into the pariah
practice it should always have been. For this to happen abolitionism
will have to replace pacifism; it is not the good of the resister
that is important but rather the evil of the practitioner. We
need to demystify the military, pointing out not just its moral
weaknesses but its logical fallacies. We should sensibly regard
people who walk around with pins on their chests celebrating
their life as, at best, somewhat unstable. And we need to remind
the media that it can not call itself objective and repeatedly
rebuff the voices of peace.
Why we
need history
Now that Frances
Fukuyama has rediscovered history, the Nation Magazine's Katrina
Vanden Heuvel would like to put it to bed again. In the best
tradition of the establishment's view of "civil discourse"
- i.e. avoiding the real issues - Vanden Heuvel suggested in
the :Washington Post that we "stop equating our opponents
with famous dictators, their chief executioners, police apparatus
or ideologies. I'm all for learning from history, but times are
hard enough in American politics - with war, threats to national
security, the greatest divide between rich and poor in our history
and deep cultural divisions. Present differences deserve to be
described in contemporary terms. The purpose of public speech
is not just to restate anger but to clarify the principles and
evidence that fuel it -- in ways that invite discussion, not
inhibit it."
Vanden Heuvel is
dead wrong. The reason people get away with bad historical analogies
is because we don't discuss history enough. We are left with
an assortment of myths, stereotypes, and trite metaphors. Our
present state is in no small part the result of not understanding
and discussing our past. For example:
Have we always been
so publicly callous about torture before?
Why have we passed
more laws in the past 30 years than we did in our first two hundred?
Whatever happened
to the Tenth Amendment?
Have corporations
always been granted the status of individuals in our society?
The list is endless,
but let's just consider the aspect of history that Vanden Heuvel
doesn't want us to mention: similarities between present day
American politicians and politics and some unpleasant precedents.
Her examples remind
us that people can make these analogies crudely, wrongly, or
for nefarious purposes. But if Vanden Heuvel felt more at home
with history she would realize that this is part of a great American
tradition: putting up with a certain amount of nonsense in order
to preserve our freedoms including that of speech.
But what if we ignore
Vanden Heuvel's advice and ask ourselves, for example: how close
are we to Hitler's Germany? What can we learn from even a cursory
consideration of history?
In the first place,
one needs to separate Hitler, Nazism and fascism. Conflating
these leads the unwary to assume easily that all three are inevitably
characterized by anti-Semitism, when in fact only the first two
are. By avoiding this distinction we don't have to face the fact
that America is closer to fascism than it has ever been in its
history.
To understand why,
one needs to look not at Hitler but at the founder of fascism,
Mussolini. What Mussolini founded was the estato corporativo
- the corporative state or corporatism. Writing in Economic Affairs
in the mid 1970s, R.E. Pahl and J. T. Winkler described corporatism
as a system under which government guides privately owned businesses
towards order, unity, nationalism and success. They were quite
clear as to what this system amounted to: "Let us not mince
words. Corporatism is fascism with a human face. . . An acceptable
face of fascism, indeed, a masked version of it, because so far
the more repugnant political and social aspects of the German
and Italian regimes are absent or only present in diluted forms."
Thus, although the
model generally cited in defense of organized capitalism is that
of the contemporary Japanese, the most effective original practitioners
of a corporative economy were the Italians. Unlike today's Japanese,
but like contemporary America, their economy was a war economy.
Adrian Lyttelton,
describing the rise of Italian fascism in The Seizure of Power,
writes: "A good example of Mussolini's new views is provided
by his inaugural speech to the National Exports Institute on
8 July 1926. . . Industry was ordered to form 'a common front'
in dealing with foreigners, to avoid 'ruinous competition,' and
to eliminate inefficient enterprises. . . The values of competition
were to be replaced by those of organization: Italian industry
would be reshaped and modernized by the cartel and trust. . .There
was a new philosophy here of state intervention for the technical
modernization of the economy serving the ultimate political objectives
of military strength and self-sufficiency; it was a return to
the authoritarian and interventionist war economy."
Lyttelton writes
that "fascism can be viewed as a product of the transition
from the market capitalism of the independent producer to the
organized capitalism of the oligopoly." It was a point that
Orwell had noted when he described fascism as being but an extension
of capitalism. Lyttelton quoted Nationalist theorist Affredo
Rocco: "The Fascist economy is. . . an organized economy.
It is organized by the producers themselves, under the supreme
direction and control of the State."
The Germans had
their own word for it: wehrwirtschaft. It was not an entirely
new idea there. As William Shirer points out in the Rise and
the Fall of the Third Reich, 18th and 19th century Prussia had
devoted some five-sevenths of its revenue on the Army and "that
nation's whole economy was always regarded as primarily an instrument
not of the people's welfare but of military policy."
Has "civil
discourse" been harmed by knowing the foregoing and the
uncomfortable similarities it bears with what is happening to
our country today?
Another more complex
example is Adolph Hitler. On many grounds, the analogy does not
serve us well:
Germany's willingness
to accept Hitler was the product of many cultural characteristics
specific to that country, to the anger and frustrations in the
wake of the World War I defeat, to extraordinary inflation and
particular dumb reactions to it, and, of course, to the appeal
of anti-Semitism. Still, consideration of the Weimar Republic
that preceded Hitler does us no harm. Bearing in mind all the
foregoing, there was also:
- A collapse of
conventional liberal and conservative politics that bears uncomfortable
similarities to what we are now experiencing.
- The gross mismanagement
of the economy and of such key worker concerns as wages, inflation,
pensions, layoffs, and rising property taxes. Many of the actions
were taken in the name of efficiency, an improved economy and
the "rationalization of production." There were also
bankruptcies, negative trade balance, major decline in national
production, large national debt rise compensated for by foreign
investment. In other words, a hyped version of what America and
its workers are experiencing today.
- The Nazis as the
first modern political party. As University of Pennsylvania professor
Thomas Childers explains, the Nazis discovered the importance
of campaigning not just during campaigns but between elections
when the other parties folded their tents. With this "perpetual
campaigning" they spread themselves like a virus, considering
the public reaction to everything right down to the colors used
for posters and rally backgrounds. Knowing this, one can not
watch the manic manipulations of public moments by the Bush regime
without a sense of déjà vu.
- The use of negative
campaigning, a contribution to modern politics by Joseph Goebbels.
The Nazi campaigns argued what was wrong with their opponents
and ignored stating their own policies.
- The Nazis as the
inventors of modern political propaganda. Every modern American
political campaign and the types of arguments used to support
them owes much to the ideas of the Nazis.
- The suddenness
of the Nazi rise. The party went from less than 3% of the vote
to being the largest party in the country in four years.
- The collapse of
the country's self image. Childers points out that Germany had
had been a world leader in education, industry, science, and
literacy. Much of the madness that we see today stems from attempts
to compensate for our battered self-image.
So while many of
the behaviors that would come to be associated with Nazis and
Hitler - from physical attacks on political opponents to the
death camps - seem far removed from our present concerns, there
is still much to learn from their history.
We are clearly in
a post-constitutional era; the end of the First American Republic.
Depending on what day it is we think of its replacement variously
- ranging from an adhocracy to proto-fascism. But one does not
need to know the end of the story to know that we headed at a
rapid pace away from the extraordinary principles of American
democracy towards the dark hole of power with impunity, to the
sort of world in which, as Rudolph Giuliani has calmly asserted,
"freedom is about authority."
If we describe present
differences only in contemporary terms then we have nothing to
guide us but what happened yesterday.
George Bush and
his capos have capitalized on this disinterest in history to
rewrite the Constitution and other things. He's not the first.
For example, Article
48 of the constitution of the Weimar Republic stated, "In
case public safety is seriously threatened or disturbed, the
Reich President may take the measures necessary to reestablish
law and order, if necessary using armed force. In the pursuit
of this aim, he may suspend the civil rights described in articles
114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153, partially or entirely.
The Reich President must inform the Reichstag immediately about
all measures undertaken . . . The measures must be suspended
immediately if the Reichstag so demands."
It was this article
that Hitler used to peacefully establish his dictatorship. And
why was it so peaceful and easy? Because, according to Childers,
the 'democratic" Weimar Republic had already used it 57
times prior to Hitler's ascendancy.
There are eerie
similarities between Article 48 and George Bush's approach. When
you add to this the remarkable incompetence of the current regime,
the collapse of both traditional liberal and conservative politics,
and the economic crises, it feels like a new Weimar Republic
setting the stage for awful things we can not at this point even
imagine. It may be that history has something to tell us after
all.
The immigration
myth
IT IS taken as a
given in the immigration debate that our current system for dealing
with the issue has some sort of historical logic. It doesn't.
The story of immigration in the U.S. is a mishmash of hospitality
and hatred, encouragement and restriction.
The Naturalization
Act of 1790, for example, said that "any alien, being a
free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the
United States." Blacks, indentured servants, and most women
couldn't be citizens no matter where they came from, but the
underlying approach to immigration would boggle the mind of today's
strict constructionists. If you were a free white male, you came,
you saw, and you signed up. As the Citizenship and Immigration
Services describes ti, "the law required a set period of
residence in the United States prior to naturalization, specifically
two years in the country and one year in the state of residence
when applying for citizenship. When those requirements were met,
an immigrant could file a Petition for Naturalization with "any
common law court of record" having jurisdiction over his
residence asking to be naturalized. Once convinced of the applicant?s
good moral character, the court would administer an oath of allegiance
to support the Constitution of the United States."
The essence of immigration
as we know it today - i.e. the restriction of immigration - didn't
become a major issue until the Chinese exclusion Act of 1882,
hardly something of which Americans should be proud. This was
the period of the great post-reconstruction counter revolution
during which corporations gained enormous power but the rest
of America and its citizens lost it.
The counter-revolution
was not only an attack on would-be immigrants, it was aimed at
American ethnic groups who had proved far too successful at adding
to their political clout in places like Boston and New York City.
Richard Croker,
a tough 19th century county boss of Tammany Hall, grew almost
lyrical when he spoke of his party's duty to immigrants:
"They do not
speak our language, they do not know our laws, they are the raw
material with which we have to build up the state . . . There
is no denying the service which Tammany has rendered to the republic.
There is no such organization for taking hold of the untrained,
friendless man and converting him into a citizen. Who else would
do it if we did not? . . . [Tammany] looks after them for the
sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens
of them."
Alexander B. Callow
Jr. of the University of California has written that Boston pol
Martin Lomansey even met every new immigrant ship and "helped
the newcomers find lodging or guided them to relatives. James
Michael Curley set up nationalization classes to prepare newcomers
for the citizenship examination . . . Friendly judges, anticipating
election day, converted their courts into naturalization mills,
grinding out a thousand new Americans a day. . . . Flags were
waved, prose turned purple, celebrations were wild on national
holidays. . . . Patriotism became a means for the newcomer to
prove himself worthy."
By 1891 the federal
government had assumed control of admitting or rejecting all
immigrants and one year later Ellis island opened. By 1903 we
had a law restricting Mexican laborers and during and after World
I, laws were expanded greatly including a ban on all Asians save
the Japanese.
We did not have
the equivalent of a green card until 1940 and the actual card
of that name only came in during the anti-communist hysteria
of the 1950s. What we think of as our immigration system is in
no small part a leftover from the McCarthy era.
It is common today
to discuss immigration as though it were primarily an employment
and economic matter. The trouble with this claim is that many
of the people who are most anti-immigration are the same who
have caused infinitely more economic harm to the country through
globalization and outsourcing.
In truth, what really
scares the exclusionists is the politics of immigrants, potentially
more progressive than they would like. From Nordic populists
in the northern middle west to European socialists, to the right
immigration has meant left.
This, of course,
isn't always true as in the case of Cuba but it helps to make
the debate a bit clearer to understand what it is about.
In the end, we don't
really have an immigration policy but an exclusion policy, outsourcing
our prejudices by not letting their targets enter the country.
How the
media and the politicians make the Mid East worse
Although Hamas says
it is interested in a political truce with Israel, the news got
little attention and even in the AP story it was coupled with
a death dealing qualifier:
"The Palestinians'
incoming prime minister said Sunday that Hamas is interested
in a long-term truce with Israel but has no intention of seeking
a formal peace agreement that would recognize the Jewish state."
The implication
is that if Palestine won't "recognize" the Jewish state,
then nothing much has changed. In fact, a political truce is
a highly desirable goal whatever Palestinians and Israelis continue
to think of each other. It's a little bit as if the Catholic
Church were interested in ordaining women but still refused to
approve of contraception. The two issues are important but they
are not inexorably intertwined. Americans should be able to understand
this being a society which has integrated much of its life but
still leaves the Confederate flag flying abundantly.
The best way to
make progress in such situations is to concentrate on people's
behavior, not their beliefs and symbols. Both Israel and Palestine
have arguable mythical versions of the past that will last for
the indefinite future, but at the moment debating whatever should
have happened decades ago to the land in dispute does not advance
sanity or peace one iota. In such situations it is far better
to win a compromise over reality than a controversy over myth.
What is needed is
a Palestinian and a Israeli state based on the most reasonable
agreement that can be reached to this effect. Every increment
in this direction should be hailed and used like a cane to help
the weak legs of those in conflict make the next step. The symbolic
syrup that politicians and media like so much - such as "recognizing
Israel's right to exist" - will come naturally after far
more important work has been achieved, which is to get the two
sides to stop killing - and start dealing with - each other.
The real
Holocaust denial
THE jailing of Holocaust
denier David Irving in Austria is a reminder of how easy it is
to imitate evil even as one excoriates it. The law that convicted
Irving is of the sort the Nazis would have invoked, albeit for
far different purposes, and was a routine offense in Orwell's
1984.
Many fail to see
this irony because they are engaged in the greatest Holocaust
denial of all: a refusal to look seriously at why there was a
Holocaust in the first place. To blame it all on anti-Semitism
is as dangerously ahistorical as to deny its existence. Yes,
Jews were the victims, but why did an ancient and widespread
prejudice produce such an extreme result in this case?
We avoid this question
because it takes us places we don't want to go. Like the role
of modern bureaucracy and technology in the magnification of
evil. Like the commingling of corporate and state interests in
a way the world had never seen before. Like the failure of Germany's
liberal elite to stand effectively against wrong eerily echoed
today in the failure of America's liberal elite to do likewise.
Some of the most
important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed. Among these,
as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could only
have been carried out by 'an advanced political community with
a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service
bureaucracy.'
In The Cunning of
History, Rubenstein also finds uncomfortable parallels between
the Nazis and their opponents. For example, a Hungarian Jewish
emissary meets with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner
in Egypt in 1944 and suggests that the Nazis might be willing
to save one million Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies.
Lord Moyne's reply: "What shall I do with those million
Jews? Where shall I put them?" Writes Rubenstein: "The
British government was by no means adverse to the 'final solution'
as long as the Germans did most of the work. " For both
countries, it had become a bureaucratic problem, one that Rubenstein
suggests we understand "as the expression of some of the
most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th
century."
How many school
children are taught that, worldwide, wars in the past century
killed over 100 million people? In World War I alone, the death
toll was around ten million. Much of this, including the Holocaust,
was driven by a culture of modernity that so changed the power
of institutions over the individual that the latter would become
what Erich Fromm called homo mechanicus, "attracted to all
that is mechanical and inclined against all that is alive."
Becoming, in fact, a part of the machinery -- willing to kill
or to die just to keep it running.
Thus, with Auschwitz-like
efficiency, over 6,000 people perished every day during World
War I for 1,500 days. Rubenstein recounts that on the first day
of the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men and half
of the officers assigned to them. But the bureaucratic internal
logic of the war did not falter at all; over the next six months,
more than a million British, French and German soldiers would
lose their lives. The total British advance: six miles. No one
in that war was a person anymore. The seeds of the Holocaust
can thus be found in the trenches of World War I. Individuals
had became no better than the bullets that killed them, just
part of the expendable arsenal of the state.
But we don't talk
about this do we? We don't teach our children about it, do we?
The problem with
using the outcome rather than the origins of the Holocaust as
our metaphor and our message is that we are totally unprepared
for those practices, laws, and arguments that can produce similar
outcomes. We study the death chambers when we should be learning
about the birth places.
New Republic
calls
Review editor 'idiotic'
THE NEW REPUBLIC,
purveyor of cheap paradigms to the Washington elite, has included
some of your editor's comments on the current crisis in its "Idiocy
Watch," described as "our attempt to keep up with all
the dumb and outrageous things being said and written about America
and the terrorists."
The words in question
- "The World Trade Center disaster is a globalized version
of the Columbine High School disaster. When you bully people
long enough they are going to strike back," - were delivered
in a speech to a Green Party conference.
For a two sentence summation of a half century of Middle East
policy it's not all that bad. It certainly compares favorably
to the deadly and disastrous advice the New Republic has been
giving on the subject. Hear, for example, what comforting words
NR's Martin Paretz had to say back in 1982. He advised Israel
to deliver Palestine a "lasting military defeat" that
would "clarify to the Palestinians in the West Bank that
their struggle for an independent state has suffered a setback
of many years." Then "the Palestinians will be turned
into just another crushed nation, like the Kurds or the Afghans,"
and the Palestinian problem - which "is beginning to be
boring" - will be resolved."
The New Republic
staff, rather than describing as "idiots" those urging
a rational response, could better use their time apologizing
for their part in creating the crisis that America now faces.
And while they're it, they might explain how those crushed Afghans
came back to life.
Learning
Vietnam
[The following
is an excerpt from your editor's memoirs that documents some
of the steps I went through to arrive at full opposition to the
war in Vietnam. It may helpful - and perhaps hopeful - to those
trying to change minds about the current Bush war. Note how eerily
contemporary my earliest comments about Vietnam seem.]
SAM SMITH, "MULTITUDES"
- Although a researcher stumbling upon The Idler might regard
it as an early example of the alternative press, I initially
saw myself more as an unconventional member of the establishment
rather than its opponent. Early on, I tried to explain to readers
I suspected were considerably more traditional than myself some
of the remarkable changes that were occurring in America and
how they might best adapt to them. If anything, my view of American
radicalism was that of a sympathetic, albeit sometimes patronizing,
observer. Among other things, The Idler in its three short years
of existence, tracked my sometimes awkward, equivocating, or
pompous pilgrimage away from what I had been taught and still
in many ways believed I was. In June 1965, for example, I wrote:
"There is a
new radical spirit. It has drawn much of its strength from the
civil rights movement, but it goes far beyond that, challenging
not just America's racial attitudes but some of her most cherished
and smug assumptions, It protests the whole humdrum, humbug world
of white urban American sophistication with its self-serving
definition of success, its indifference towards the socially
and economically disenfranchised of the country, its phony values
and its 8 oz. drip-dry culture. It is as purposeful as a March
on Montgomery and as pointless as an obscene sign on the University
of California campus."
Yet when it came
to applying such principles to our increasing involvement in
Vietnam, I found myself on far less certain ground. For example,
from a piece in September 1965:
"President
Johnson is faced with two major dangers. He must not let this
war expand beyond reasonable limits and he must not negotiate
a phony and ignominious settlement. The president is fully aware
of these dangers and, no doubt, personally confident that he
can avoid them. At present our strategy appears to be based on
the concept of holding Saigon and selected areas along the east
coast, then moving out into the countryside as conditions permit.
According to news reports, we have also determined not to waste
American troops in missions with high ambush potential, and instead
will reserve them for battalion-size action. This is a realistic
strategy. It makes much more sense than one based on the false
hope of negotiation or false faith in expansion. It implies a
lengthy stay in Vietnam and it means, for perhaps years to come,
something less than total victory against the V.C. But it also
represents our best hope of saving what is left of South Vietnam
without paying an unreasonable price . . .But the public must
be conditioned to the realities of the situation. They must be
made to understand the necessity of the undramatic, sufficient,
and lengthy application of American force in South Vietnam."
This was written
by a 27-year-old barely a year out of the military, raised in
the bosom of cold war liberalism, conscious of my responsibility
to realpolitik, and influenced by friends and media to whom even
such cautious words bordered on questionable. It perhaps provides
some perspective to quote a small item that appeared in a box
in the same issue:
"We sent a
classified ad up to the Saturday Review not so long ago and got
back a reply which said, in part, 'After careful consideration,
our Acceptability Board came to the conclusion that it would
prefer not to run your ad.' We had hoped that the Saturday Review
would be able to find a little space for us amongst their other
ads concerning Sell's Famous Liver Pate, WBAI-FM, exotic tropical
fruit, work for an ex-convict, sex education records, and a private
party wishing to buy Horatio Alger books. So we called them up
to find out what was wrong. Nothing wrong with the ad, the lady
told us. 'The board just decided your magazine was a little too
liberal.'"
It was not the harshest
view. Among the notes received was a subscription blank that
read: "You all go to hell as Reds. We're on to you and we'll
fight you to the death." The subscription form was made
out for "Martin Luther Coon" Further expiation may
be found in the fact that I wrote those words only months after
the anti-war movement had begun. Howard Zinn remembers because
he was there:
"The movement
against the war in Vietnam started with isolated actions in 1965.
Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first
to resist the draft. SNNC's Bob Moses joined historian Staughton
Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington
against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the
three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint
by angry super patriots. In the spring of 1965 I spoke at what
was to be the first of many anti-war rallies on the Boston Common.
It was a discouragingly small crowd - perhaps a hundred people.
. . ."
Over the next year,
my views, like that of many others would undergo major transformation.
By March 1966 I was still writing things such as:
"We must learn
the limits of a realistic American role and not exceed them.
The specific extent of this role is hard for one sitting at a
desk half a world away to suggest. But it would seem to include
defense of major South Vietnamese population centers and areas
of strategic importance, including all or part of the Mekong
Delta. It includes the presence of large numbers of American
troops, the provision of technical assistance and supplies to
the South Vietnamese army and a far higher level of economic
assistance than that at present.'
But I was also suggesting
limits and alternatives:
"[The proper
role] does not include bombing North Vietnam, ravishing South
Vietnam's villages in order to flush out a few Vietcong. or wasting
American lives in battle for ground not worth the powder to blow
it to hell. We may have to stay in Vietnam a long time. The American
public will accept this if it feels the course we pursue there
is reasonable, just as the public has accepted the large number
of American troops in Europe for over two decades. But if we
repeatedly engage in actions that are neither moral nor productive,
the public at home and the nations abroad will reject our role.
The Americans in Vietnam will become lonely, hated men fighting
a lonely, hated war. As I write, the big peace offensive is still
underway. I hope it will be by the time this reaches the reader.
For we have not, until recently, been as diligent in escalating
the peace as we have been in escalating the war. We could too
easily slip back into the old ways of battle. The big lesson
of the Cold War is that careful, conscientious escalation of
the peace works to the benefit of everyone, despite the minor
immediate losses of face and compromised ideological goals. We
can always risk taking a few halting steps away from disaster."
Then in April 1966:
"Perhaps it
is not too late to salvage our position in Vietnam, but if we
are to do it there are going to have to be some fairly dramatic
changes made,. . . .The overriding fact of the Vietnamese war
is that neither we nor the South Vietnamese are doing a good
job at it. One does not improve a bad situation by enlarging
its scope."
June 1996:
"[LBJ's] Vietnam
escapade has been an abject failure."
April 1967:
"If we pursue
the war to ultimate military victory, which appears the present
goal of our government, we shall have surrendered reason and
justice to the temptations of brazen power. We may defeat the
communists, but we shall have also defeated ourselves."
November 67:
"Some, including
myself, are not psychologically inclined to have their heads
bashed in by a US Marshall guarding the Pentagon. Still it seems
almost inevitable that extraction from the mess of SE Asia or
of our cities will not come without vehement, even violent, confrontation,
Those willing to risk that confrontation on behalf of those less
bold are more to be honored than censured."
The same issue contained
an article by Howard Zinn defending radical protests against
the napalm-maker, Dow Chemical. I had become a full-winged dove.
The story came from Liberation News Service, which I described
as a "news service for the so-called underground press."
That month I turned thirty, the age that one could no longer
be trusted. In fact, most of those on the streets were younger
than I; those condemning and suppressing them were older. I had
wandered into a generational no-man's land and never would have
guessed that over thirty years later, I would be one of the few
members of the "so-called underground press" still
at it.
Entropy
beat
ONE SIGN OF CULTURAL
DETERIORATION is when once foul words lose their derogatory meaning
or - as presently the case with the word "torture"
- you eliminate meanings from the definition. Thus things that
once were considered torture, like sleep deprivation and forced
painful posture, are now enhanced interrogation techniques and,
if you believe the Pentagon, not criminal at all.
Another case comes
from CNN, which reports that "North Korea kept up its anti-U.S.
rhetoric today, saying that economic sanctions against the communist
regime would amount to an act of war."
While North Korea
did engage in anti-U.S rhetoric, saying that sanctions are an
act of war was not part of it. It was the truth. Sanctions, when
acting as a de facto blockade, are clearly an act of war; the
only thing that has changed is our spin on the word. Similarly,
our sanctions against Iraq have been an act of war, thus what
is pending is not really war but a new phase of an existing one.
Finally, we have
in the NY Times a Harvard official making us feel much better
about the word "empire." Michael Ignatieff, director
of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government, writes,
"Those who want America to remain a republic rather than
become an empire imagine rightly, but they have not factored
in what tyranny or chaos can do to vital American interests.
The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq,
the last hope for democracy and stability alike."
When the NY Times
promotes empire over a republic without so much as a debate on
its op ed page, you know things are collapsing pretty fast. As
for Iraq, let's hope Ignatieff's prescience is better than his
colleagues' was when they tried to serve as a new Russia's "last
hope for democracy and stability alike."
Bottom
line
The curable cause
of the present disaster is not to be found in a cave in Afghanistan
nor at a military headquarters in Palestine. Rather it is to
be found in a half century of abusive American policy towards
the Islamic world including a deadly, criminal embargo against
Iraq; the permanent suppression of Palestinian statehood; the
promotion, assassination and/or manipulation of a string of leaders
against the best interests of peace and our own security; the
covert employment (to our later regret) of the likes of Osama
bin Laden and Saddam Hussein; and our repeated refusal to listen
to the nearly unanimous voice of the United Nations in general
assembly. We have wantonly - and at enormous damage to our creditability,
safety and honor - pursued the goals of militarists, CIA adventurists,
the oil industry, the Israeli lobby, and the Ivy League imperialists
of the Council on Foreign Relations - all mindlessly cheered
on by a servile and slanted media.
We have absolutely
nothing to gain by continuing to follow the self-serving, avaricious,
and reckless goals of those who have caused our nation such hurt.
By admitting that these policies have been wrong, we have nothing
to lose but decades of bad advice and the shame that has accompanied
it.
These policies have
not been American policies in any indigenous sense; rather they
have been the work of greedy corporations, arrogant intellectuals
in search of machismo, violent militarists, and a stunningly
uncritical press. Nowhere is the defense of Israeli aggression
mentioned in the Constitution. Patrick Henry did not say, "Give
me a pipeline or give me death." Nathan Hale did not declared,
"I regret have but one life to give for hegemony in Eurasia."
In fact, no policy
by any president has been more alien to American ideals than
that now being pursued by George W. Bush. He is destroying our
Constitution, bringing disgrace to our history, and endangering
the entire planet.
Many say there is
no other course, but this is absolutely false. One reason it
doesn't seem so is because the media refuses to give time or
space to other than apostles of violence and revenge. The voices
of calm, reason, and rational resolution have been blacklisted
by almost all the major media - including those supported by
tax dollars and public contribution.
If it were otherwise,
we might realize that even the far from adequate efforts of the
Clinton administration brought a calm to the world that has been
abruptly destroyed by the codependent, abusive egos of bin Ladin,
Sharon, and Bush. In 1995, by the State Department's own count,
there were 6,400 terrorist casualties around the world, including
70 Americans. By 1999 there were only 939 including 11 Americans.
Only seven casualties occurred in North America.
Clinton, in a last
burst of self-aggrandizement, attempted to reach a Middle East
settlement before leaving office. But he so built up his effort
that when it failed, it was seen not merely as his failure but
that of all future possibility. Within months, the violence began
escalating and the voices of vengeance with it.
We can still stop
the madness. All we need is enough humility to admit that our
country has been wrong, enough rationality to understand that
one does not eradicate evil by compounding it, and enough courage
to oppose the evisceration of our liberties and values by those
whose words do not reflect patriotism but blasphemy.
Or, on the other
hand, we can condemn ourselves and our children to lives of fear,
anger, and confusion - and perhaps even worse - all because our
leaders were unwilling to act with the honor, decency, and sense
of fair play that were once the hallmark of an American.
Not Pearl
Harbor but Dien Bien Phu
It was less than
a year ago that Bill Clinton was hoping to strike a deal between
the Palestinians and Israel. In fact, it can be argued that if
he had been willing to leave office simply with some progress
rather than with a major personal triumph, the next months might
have worked out differently. Instead, the failure of his efforts
seemed an excuse to all sides to revert to their worst behavior.
If George Bush had picked up the pieces, this might have been
prevented; instead he turned his back on the Middle East, obsessed
with a far less fatal but still misbegotten tax policy. There
was, in short, nothing inevitable about what happened. In fact,
guerilla attacks had plummeted in the 1990s, thanks in part to
peace efforts such as those in the Middle East.
Now we are told
that we must take effective action. And what, pray tell is that?
We seem to have forgotten, for example, that in the spring of
1996, President Clinton signed a top secret order authorizing
the CIA to use any and all means to destroy Osama bin Laden's
network.
The media and politicians
call what happened terrorism. This is a propagandistic rather
than a descriptive term and replaces the more useful traditional
phrases, guerilla action or guerilla warfare. The former places
a mythical shroud around the event while the latter depicts its
true nature. Guerillas do not play by the rules of state organization
or military tactics. This does not make them cowardly, as some
have suggested, but can make them fiendishly clever. The essence
of guerilla warfare is to attack at times and places unsuspected
and return to places unknown. You can not invade the land of
guerillas, you can not bomb them out of existence, you can not
overwhelm them with your technological wonders.
This was a lesson
we were supposed to have learned in Vietnam but appear to have
forgotten. The journalist Bernard Fall early noted that the French,
after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia.
America, with its vast military, financial, and technological
resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep
making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against "terrorism"
has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy.
We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until
now, we could afford to. One of these has been to define the
problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns
a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical
problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions
to the Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the
guerilla violence that grows from the failure to end it.
In other words,
if you define the problem as "a struggle against terrorism"
you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will always
have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent
society such as ours. We will always be blindsided, just as Bernard
Fall said the French were under much simpler circumstances: "What
surprised the French completely was the Viet-Minh's ability to
transport a considerable mass of heavy artillery pieces across
road less mountains to Dien Bien Phu and to keep it supplied
with a sufficient amount of ammunition to make the huge effort
worthwhile."
There is one way
to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems
that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence
of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of
the most rational. As we have demonstrated in the Middle East,
one need not even reach a final solution as long as incremental
progress is being made. But once that ceases, as has happened
in the past year, the case for freelance violence is quickly
strengthened and people simply forget that peace is possible.
In the present instance,
we may have met our own Dien Bien Phu in our long, senseless,
and self-defeating effort to subdue and control those of the
Muslim states. The answer - humiliating as it may seem over the
short run but courageous as it really would be - is not to commence
yet another war of empire against the Muslim world, but to end
the one we have conducted for far too long.
This is what France did. By 1961, with Kennedy contemplating
involvement in Vietnam, General de Gaulle strongly urged him
not to get involved in that "rotten country." Said
de Gaulle, "I predict to you, that you will, step by step,
be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire."
The French had lost 55,000 troops there, almost as many as the
Americans would. This was not the advice of a pacifist or a warrior
gone soft, but of a hard-nosed general who understood the importance
of reality in military and political strategy. A few years earlier
he had become prime minister and begun not only France's extrication
from but from its other colonies. In 1958 he had proposed the
"peace of the brave" but within one year was supporting
full Algerian self-determination. He held to this position despite
an attempted coup by members of the Foreign Legion and a secret
army organization determined to keep Algeria French.
Among those supporting
the liberation of Algeria was the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre.
As Danielle Costa has written, he "argued that the violence
in Algeria was the French people's collective responsibility.
He felt that the initial and fundamental violence in the Algerian
situation was colonialism itself. He argued that the colonial
system was based on violence - first conquest, then different
forms of exploitation and oppression, and then pacification.
By its own violence, colonialism had taught the natives to understand
only violence. By colonialism's intransigence, it forced the
native to resort to violence."
We have built our
own colonialism using corporations rather than cavalry and with
foreign trade rather than with the Foreign Legion. But the effects
have been much the same.
The trouble
with moats
So here we are a
year later, $37 billion out of pocket and still scared as hell
someone's going to attack us. We're not the first with the problem.
Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and
moats to keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner
or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the
moats and climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected
compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces
during their siege of Siena.
The people who built
castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their
efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit
their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.
Like the castle-dwellers
behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves
inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide
either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for
we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.
This is not the
way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations,
and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically
based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists
not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naiveté but
because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works
for everyone.
This discovery is
often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly,
and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem
to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle
and hope the moat keeps the others out.
End of
empire
The initial theme
for today is a modest one: the collapse of the American empire
and its associated culture. One test of the state of an empire
is whether a handful of angry young men with box cutters can
wreck your major economic and military edifices and throw the
country into total panic. One test of the state of your culture
is whether you can think of much over the past few years to which
you reacted by thinking "that's the best [whatever] that
I've seen-heard-read in a long time." Another test is when
you find yourself saying of some public figure, "I'm sure
glad such people are around at a time like this."
Based on these tests,
it seems that, at the very least, America will have to be held
back next year - no matter how hard are media and our politicians
try to give it a social promotion. When you can't trust your
presidents of either major party, your beloved Constitution is
in tatters, you have to submit to investigative fondling before
flying to Des Moines, your Catholic cardinals say it's okay to
bugger little boys as long as you don't do it too often and it
doesn't become "notorious," a corporation thrice declared
by Fortune Magazine to be the most innovative in the country
turns out to be a den of thieves, the accountants who are meant
to protect us from such scoundrels turn out to be co-conspirators,
our lawmakers spend most of their time finding new things to
prohibit, we feel we have to give kids drug tests to make sure
they're safe to sing in the choir, our teachers have forgotten
how to teach our children how to read, our journalists have forgotten
how to write or to tell a lie from a fact, and our music doesn't
even have 7th chords in it anymore, you've got a problem and
one that's not really Al-Queda's fault.
Empires and cultures
are not permanent and while thinking about the possibility that
ours is collapsing may seem a dismal exercise it is far less
so than enduring the dangerous frustrations and failures involved
in having one's contrary myth constantly butt up against reality
like a boozer who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive
home. Instead of defending the non-existent we could turn our
energies instead towards devising a new and saner existence.
September
12
THROUGHOUT THE DAY
came contrasting images of Americans. The indefatigably courageous
rescue workers - turned gray and white by pulverized matter -
pressing on despite reports in the case of the firefighters of
a 50% casualty rate. The innocent survivors resourcefully joining
hands to follow the one flashlight out of a building or using
a cell phone to locate themselves under the rubble. The Washington
officials noisily locking the barn door too late and creating
a new crisis (of the sort they could understand): a massive traffic
jam. The glamorous anchors and TV correspondents, children of
Pleasantville II, suddenly discovering that news can be real.
And too often during
the day there were the incompetent, mendacious, and terminally
hubristic voices of an American elite who had helped create a
country so hated that some would kill themselves to define their
antipathy. There was Madeleine Albright who five years ago said
that killing a half million Iraqi children as a result of the
sanctions was worth the price. There was Charlie Rose, listening
even more intently that usual, to his roundtable of failed, fatuous
experts. The only bright spot was when Tom Clancy mercilessly
quizzed Clinton-in-waiting John Edwards as to what specifically
he would do and Edwards could produce nothing but photogenic
platitudes. There was talk of instant revenge, of instant action,
talk that echoed that of our generals in Vietnam. We have only
failed in quantity and not in quality, they repeatedly told us
then.
The Washington Post,
as during Vietnam, helped lead the macho masochists. It even
published a column by Robert Kaman which declared, "Congress,
in fact, should immediately declare war. It does not have to
name a country." The rest of the media was not far behind.
Notably absent from
the airwaves were Muslim Americans and those who favored resolution
rather than retribution. Instead, there was a steady procession
of figures who had supported or helped form a foreign policy
that has made us the earth's most despised nation, who had insisted
that the way to a better world was to arm Israel and anathematize
Arabs, who had claimed that the civil liberties we have surrendered
over the past two decades would make us safer, and who have told
us we must choose between security and freedom and in the end
have denied us both. In the face of such overwhelming evidence
of their failure, if they did not have the grace to resign, they
should at least shut up.
Follow
the limousines
THE VARIOUS stories
about the Bush regime's reaction to September 11 bring to mind
the Cold War advice for DC residents: in case of emergency follow
the black limousines out of town. It is clear that our leaders
are more interested in their own safety than ours, thus such
phenomena as John Ashcroft not flying on commercial planes last
August while not letting us in on the secret. Or George Bush
deserting us on Air Force One right after the attacks.
It has been clear
from the start that the best thing the government could do to
insure our safety would be to change its foreign policy but since
that has been ruled out, its next best idea has been to protect
itself from the consequences of its insanity and let the rest
of us pretty much fend for ourselves.
A thought occurred
to me as I sat in my car the other day waiting for a presidential
cavalcade to make its way noisily down a Washington street: perhaps
we should insist on a bit less protection for our leaders based
on the theory that if they felt more endangered they would have
more sympathy for the rest of us. And their policies might improve.
After all, the justification behind the hyper security is that
the lives of presidents and the like are simply too valuable
to risk. The logic of this can be easily refuted by simply listening
to one of their speeches. Sooner or later even the terrorists
would realize that when it comes to George Bushes, we've got
a million of them - and give up in frustration.
Before the Bush
regime, I caught then Governor Tommy Thompson down on the Mall
during the Folk Life Festival. He was surrounded by Wisconsinites,
some of them drunk, some of them merely enthusiastic. I think
I spotted the governor's security man but I wasn't certain. In
any case no one - unlike much of downtown Washington on a typical
day - looked afraid of anything.
Thompson had clearly
not yet become accustomed to Washington ways where even the mayor
of this city gets a security detail worthy of a small dictatorship
fearing an imminent coup.
In the end, a lot
of what passes for security is just a matter of culture. There
are two basic ways of securing oneself against others: (1) not
making them mad at you and (2) defending yourself when they are.
What is so striking about our leaders is that they spend so little
effort on the first option and so much on the second.
The problem with
this is that you not only shield yourself from bullets but from
the rest of life as well. And it's worth remembering that no
one lives in a medieval castle for protection anymore. It turned
out that they weren't as safe as the inhabitants thought. - Sam
Smith
Toward
a more perfect union
This essay appeared
in a Tom Paine ad on the op ed page of the New York Times on
September 11, 2003
Still missing in
the rubble of 9/11 is the idea of America that enriched, strengthened
and protected us for more than two centuries. Overcome with fear
and anger, and later in denial parading as pride, we hardly noticed
it was gone. The idea that we lost was not a superlative -- most
powerful or richest -- but rather a promise. The wondrous mystery
of America is found not in its perfection but in its ability
to improve, its perpetual search for a more perfect union. The
idea had been fading for some time, not just because we came
to think of power as an adequate substitute, but because we came
to ignore such mundane matters as teaching children democracy
with the same vigor that we teach them how to drive or about
the dangers of drugs. And so we tried to recover from 9/11 with
a flag and loyalty to a place called America, but without its
dream. We used instead military power, anti-democratic security
measures, seductive technology, and yet another elephantine bureaucracy
-- offering still more temptations for guerillas with simple
weapons and no love of life. The 9/11 attackers, and the tens
of millions around the world who share some measure of their
anger, have only seen our money and our fist -- not the decency,
democracy, and dream that made America strong in the first place.
These virtues are still lying in the rubble of the past year.
Our job is to recover them, revive them, share them, and become
once more a model rather than a target. Only then will we be
both safe and free.
Privatize
war not social security
IF THE CONSERVATIVES
insist in leading us into war, they should at least follow their
own principles as they do so. This would mean putting the whole
thing on a pay-as-you-go basis - which is to say paying for conflict
at the gas pump. During the earlier iteration of the Gulf War
I figured that about $15 a gallon would do the trick.
Now it's true that
the Bush administration is a little confused on this matter -
for example it wants to privatize Social Security but use the
Treasury to subsidize religion - but surely the oil industry
is pure capitalism at its best and ought to act that way by paying
a user fee to the Pentagon for its war, which it can then retrieve
from its customers. And if the latter are not quite as patriotic
as they were when the true cost of war was better hidden, it
will merely prove again the omnipotent magic of market forces.
Time Warp
I was 34 when the
draft ended. In the preceding years my own views had shifted
from those of a cold war liberal to those of an ambivalent apathetic
and finally to those of a situational pacifist. But whatever
my personal beliefs, I was deeply and constantly conscious of
the inevitability of the military's involvement in, and power
over, my life. The impact of this certainty on young men was
profound and it led also to a sense of inevitability about the
purposes for which the draft had been created.
My eldest son is
34. He was almost six when the draft ended. Our only conversation
on the subject I remember took place a bit earlier. We were driving
in the car and he, in a bit of precocious career planning, asked,
"Dad, do they draft baseball players?" I was troubled
to hear the fear and sense of inevitability being passed to yet
another generation.
I knew about it
because they had been passed on to me as well. Both my parents
had lost brothers in World War I and my mother had also lost
a cousin.
The fears, however
were soon gone and my son joined a generation coming to maturity
with war being only a distant, surrogated, and sanitized interruption
to the regular programming.
In this parable
of fathers and sons may lie an important part of today's story:
a generation raised to see war and its military instruments as
an essential part of life confronting another to whom war and
its accessories had become, for the most part, history.
Nothing has been
so moving and heartening as the young students walking out of
high schools and middle schools to protest this war and the millions
in the streets marching while there was still time to do something
about the madness rather than as a belated expression of regret.
For these seem manifestations of a changed consciousness in the
human spirit, one of those moments when the weak and many leap
ahead of the powerful and the few and alter history forever.
I have seen this
once before - during the civil rights movement, a rebellion not
just against the specifics of power but against the paradigms,
paradoxes, and presumptions that created that power, the lies
that made segregation as inevitable, say, as war.
One of the great
turnings in this struggle - and it happened like a virus rather
than as a revolution - was when the merely reprehensible became
truly incomprehensible as well.
Segregationists
were no longer only evil; they became anachronistic as well,
eventually so much so that when they would reappear, it would
be as if suddenly confronting a strange and vicious animal thought
long extinct.
I have had this
feeling in recent months, as though - totally unexpected and
unprepared - I had been tossed back into a Jurassic ecology surrounded
by violent creatures I believed gone except in memory and that
my sons would only have to confront in books and on film.
This is frightening,
it is surprising, it is unpredictable. But history moves in both
directions and America may well have run out of progress. Yet
even in the barbaric awfulness cabled into our homes there is
reason for hope - if the protests are truly what they seem: not
merely a complaint about policy but the rising of a new definition
of decency, calling not just for the end of a war but for an
abolition of our deepest assumptions about the inevitability
of war.
Hopeful as the manifestations
may be, the new abolitionism faces mighty hurdles. Among them,
of course, is a media that has become the pet poodle of power,
one inundates us with assurances of the normalcy of violence.
The semiotic bunker bombs began landing deep inside our brains
long before Iraq; you can find their provenance in TV's celebration
of state violence against drug users or in the tacitly approved
brutality of reality police shows.
Less noted is the
continued allegiance to state violence by the Anglo-American
academic elite. To unlearn what those middle schoolers walking
out of class already know about war requires some heavy education.
Places like Harvard
and Oxford - and their after-school programs such as the Washington
think tanks - teach the few how to control the many and it is
impossible to do this without various forms of abuse ranging
from sophism to corporate control systems to napalm. It is no
accident that a large number of advocates of this war - in government
and the media - are the products of elite educations where they
were taught both the inevitability of their hegemony and the
tools with which to enforce it.
It will be some time before places such as Harvard and the Council
on Foreign Relations are seen for what they are: the White Citizens
Councils of state violence. Still, in a little gift of history,
one of their lesser offspring, George W. Bush, may speed things
up a bit as he brags and blithers about, gleefully brutalizes,
perversely exaggerates, and cynically promotes cruel and authoritarian
ideas his brighter colleagues have worked so hard to wrap in
the costume of decency and democracy. He is the Council on Foreign
Relations out of the closet, the carefully contrived paradigm
run amuck, the great man of history turned dangerous fool, real
politik turned into absurdist caricature. For that at least,
we should thank him: he has shown us the true nature of a great
lie.
The final challenge
is the most confounding: violence resulting from the demands
of technological and bureaucratic 'progress.' What we call modern
warfare developed because we had the means to carry it out. Richard
Rubenstein has pointed out that Nazism could not have arisen
without the sort of bureaucracy needed to support the Holocaust.
It is no accident that both Hitler and Lenin turned to the teachings
of American technocratic apostle Frederick Winslow Taylor to
carry out their evil or that the Nazis used IBM cards to help
manage their death camps.
We prefer a simpler
story of the Holocaust as one of power and hate and ignore the
much more relevant one of technocratic organization. Thus we
don't hear its echoes in the Department of Homeland Security
or in journalistic celebration of new technologies of war.
At the heart of
a technocratic system is the willingness of individuals to give
up their own morality, judgment, and perceptions in return for
a job, perceived safety, or escape from fear - to become in Eric
Fromm's term, homo mechanicus, "attracted to all that is
mechanical and inclined against all that is alive." Our
society is increasingly structured on this mechanization of the
human spirit and while the military may be the ultimate example,
the modern American corporation is not far behind.
So it's far too
early to cheer, but we have also come too far in the past few
months to despair. We must just keep on leading our leaders until
they also see war as wrong - and as archaic - as slavery or segregation.
September
11, 2003
TODAY WE memorialize
a tragic result of fifty years of bad foreign policy towards
the Arab and Muslim world. We do it in what has become typically
hyperbolic fashion - with a disneyfication of death that exploits
the pain of those who lost friends and relations and the memory
of those who were lost.
We also memorialize
two years of denial. Although surveys show we feel no safer now
than before the attacks, we continue to act as though the foolish,
ineffective, oppressive and anti-constitutional steps taken in
reaction are our only choice. Thus, America has become to the
rest of the world as Israel is to the Middle East - a moated
castle massively armed, ready for vengeance, suppression, and
revenge, yet incapable of defending itself against shoe bombs
and box cutters, or the lone attacker to whom suicide seems the
only option.
This irony is not
only without resolution, it is driving us mad. Like Israel, we
have traded our ideals, our decency, and our raison d'etre for
the illusion of safety and the transitory satisfaction of retribution.
We are destroying ourselves rather than admit we have been wrong
and must now try another way.
No more billions
of dollars, star chamber proceedings, de facto constitutional
amendments, or invasions with CNN as bugle boy will change this.
To be safe, we must start over, removing the causes of anger
and distrust against us with the same vigor as if we were dismantling
weapons of mass destruction, which, after all, is what they really
are.
Can Israel
avoid multi-ethnicity?
An aspect of the
Middle East crisis that is not getting the coverage it deserves
is Israel's fear of having to become a multicultural state. Many
Israeli Arabs have lived in the country as long as Jewish citizens
and have no particular desire to be evicted. They are, however,
growing faster than the Jewish population especially since Jewish
immigration isn't what it once was.
Thus it is not surprising
that Haaretz reports, "More than half of Israelis think
the government should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate
from Israel, according to an annual survey by the Israel Democracy
Institute. A poll published Tuesday on the state of democracy
in Israel found that 62 percent of Israelis support government-backed
Arab emigration. . . "
The leadership is
even more insistent. Reports Ynet: "The Knesset will mark
a special day dedicated to Theodor Herzl on Monday evening, in
accordance with a law passed two years ago. Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert said during a speech that 'we must ensure that there will
be a proven Jewish majority in the State of Israel, otherwise
the term Jewish state becomes empty of meaning. The obligation
of the national leadership is to be responsible to the vision
of Herzl and to ensure a Jewish majority in the State.'"
"Olmert said
that 'this special Knesset session is dedicated not only to marking
Herzl's birthday but also the discussion of his heritage. . .
He didn't invent Zionism, which existed before him, but he turned
the dream into a political destination and the dreamers into
a national movement. We must live as one people, connected not
only to all of the scattered Jewish nation, we must lived as
united nation here too. That is Herzl's vision. His vision, that
the Jewish nation has an independent state, was realized, but
the mission is not over,' added Olmert."
There remains, of
course, the irony of Jews supporting the emigration of those
of a socially undesirable ethnic background as well as the anomaly
of America supporting apartheid in the name of democracy and
religious freedom. In the end, however, Israeli Jews may be left
with two choices: either have a lot more babies or get used to
multi-ethnicity much as white America did after segregation.
Further, the idea
of a Jewish state flies in the face of both history and current
trends. There are exceptions but they tend to be along the lines
of Utah polygamists or Pennsylvania Amish. There's also the Vatican,
to be sure, but the popes have had a number of centuries to establish
their ground rules and most of their neighbors believe in them.
For its own happiness and even survival, Israel might want to
reconsider its mono-cultural myth. Who knows, with some more
Arab ministers, judges and legislators, they might even find
themselves living in a more peaceful Middle East.
The role
of respect in peace
If you deconstruct
the language of those who Bush would have us believe form the
axis of evil, one finds not so much megalomania as insecurity,
hurt feelings, and bitterness over their global inferiority.
This has become
particularly apparent with the rise of Chavez and Ahmadinejad,
two national leaders who have proved unusually adept at using
contemporary media to make their case. They represent, perhaps,
a new generation of national figures who - all politics aside
- make the staid habits and behavior of the Council on Foreign
Relations genre of diplomacy seem pointless, lifeless and antiquated.
In other words, while Bush is still stuck in the politics of
a Masterpiece Theatre plot, Ahmadinejad, despite the pull of
his traditional culture, is working overtime to join the hip
hop generation.
At the core, the
language and behavior of a Bush or Blair is based on notions
of purportedly deserved power and how the less powerful are supposed
to behave towards their betters. The language and behavior of
Ahmadinejad and Chavez is popular, populist and evangelical and
directed at winning the very hearts and minds of which Bush speaks
repeatedly but doesn't have the faintest idea how to reach.
Thus we find the
Islamic Republic News Agency reporting that Ahmadinejad plans
to come to the UN and speak the same day as Bush and a day before
Chavez. Both and Chavez will fly from Havana after meeting with
the longest plank holder of power of our era: Fidel Castro. This
isn't diplomacy; this is show business.
Castro, in his early
days, also spoke at the UN. But, just as Mitt Romney recently
refused state police protection for the ex-president of Iran,
so the hotels of New York refused space for Castro. The result:
Malcolm X found him a hotel in Harlem and a key step was taken
in the alienation of a man who, with just a little respect and
effort, might not have tormented every American president since
by refusing to die or fade away.
The U.S. is in a
similar stage with Chavez and Ahmadinejad. It is slamming every
door that possibly opens between our country and theirs, gratuitously
shunning and dissing them along the way - with the media helping
on the ridicule end. But, as Castro proved, it doesn't work.
What can work is
respect.
A letter from Ahmadinejad
to German prime minister Merkel is remarkable not only in its
words of respect expressed towards her and her country but in
the clear longing for a similar respect for himself and his own
land. This guy is smart and articulate and desperately wants
the bigger guys to admit it. You don't have to agree with a single
political point he makes to note this.
For example, even
if one fully supports the creation of Israel, there is still
room for empathy for those displaced to make way for it. Those
who mediate for a living will tell you that you must hear the
pain of both sides. Not just the threats felt by Israelis, but
those felt by its neighbors.
And you might even
find yourself faintly nodding your head as you read: "You
are familiar with the pains and sufferings currently afflicting
our world. Today, the pain and suffering of the people of Iraq
that come from occupation, absence of security and daily acts
of terrorism are tormenting the entire humanity. Relentless interferences
of some bullying powers in the internal affairs of other nations,
antagonism toward the inalienable rights of nations to have access
to more advanced technologies, subjecting nations to permanent
threats by relying on arsenals of chemical and nuclear weapons
and weapons of mass destruction, opposition to popular governments
in Latin America, supporting coup d'etat and dictatorial regimes,
absence of due attention to Africa and taking advantage of the
power vacuum there to plunder their wealth are among the problems
facing our world today."
Respect is important
because it is one of the few doors wide enough for peace to enter.
It is the antithesis of the bullying, bombastic, holier-than-thou
approach of the Bush regime. It is also futile to speak only
to one's friends or to establish impenetrable concessions one's
opponents must make before you sit down with them. Now that we
have seen how pointless such approaches have been, it is perhaps
time to try something else.
Chavez and Ahmadinejad
are leaders of weak countries with a strong need for respect.
It does not hurt our oil supplies, our military strength or our
economy to grant them this. Our continued refusal will, just
as it did with Castro, only makes the times harder and the hard
times longer.
The end of treason
If treason, in one of its typical
forms, consists of trading the national interest of one's country
to another for profit, then FBI Agent Robert Hanssen had some
stiff competition. In the past decade or so this form of disloyalty
has been codified, advocated, and revered not only by our own
leaders in the government, media, and business, but by their
peers in what is still quaintly known as the "free world."
You can find it in its most precise form in various trade agreements
such as NAFTA and GATT, in its mathematical form in the listing
of foreign contributions to our political campaigns, and its
rhetorical form in the statements of many of our most favored
political commentators.
Beyond doubt, the new trade agreements
have done more damage to our national, state and local sovereignty
than any foreign enemy or all the spies of American history combined.
The last three presidents have helped give the Chinese more secrets
than they could ever have hoped to acquire through archaic techniques
of personal espionage. And in the end, we have learned not to
worry because it has all occurred for trade not treason, corporate
not individual profit, and public policy rather than private
perversion.
Consider, for example, some words
Vaclav Havel wrote in that intellectual Leisure World for lemming
liberals, the New York Review of Books:
"In the next century I believe
that most states will begin to change from cult-like entities
charged with emotion into far simpler and more civilized entities,
into less powerful and more rational administrative units that
will represent only one of the many complex and multileveled
ways in which our planetary society is organized."
"The practical responsibilities
of the state -- its legal powers -- can only devolve in two directions,
downward or upward; downward, to the non-governmental organizations
and structures of civil society; or upward, to regional, transnational
and global organizations."
Thus in a few paragraphs, Havel
scraps democracy at every level of society leaving us to be run,
presumably, by business improvement districts and NATO. It is
a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-patriotic view, because
at none of Havel's levels is the consent of the governed considered.
He is not alone. Here was Strobe
Talbott writing in the July 20, 1992 issue of Time: "Within
the next hundred years . . . nationhood as we know it will be
obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority
. . . All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations
to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred
they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial
and temporary."
Agent Hanssen, you are hereby charged
with betraying the sacred trust of a cult-like entity - basically
a social arrangement that is artificial and temporary, otherwise
known as the United States of America. It just doesn't have quite
the ring of a capital crime.
In fact, though, nothing has been
more central to the character of American politics over the past
few decades than a cynical, corrupt, unconstitutional and, yes,
commercial betrayal of the national interest. The continuing
symbiosis of drug lords, politicians, and law enforcement has
betrayed our land and our constitution. The Iran-Contra affair
involved not just bad politics but the betrayal of America for
profit. The cover-up of the BCCI scandal by the first Bush administration
was a betrayal of America to protect, in no small part, foreign
profits.
Perhaps China represents the best
case in point since the Chinese know as much about espionage
as anyone. While the Soviets and then the Russians were allegedly
playing their John LeCarre games with Agent Hanssen, the Chinese
were taking care of serious business.
As journalist Robert Parry has noted,
"Little-noticed evidence from the Iran-contra files reveals
that it was the Reagan-Bush administration that opened the door
to sharing sensitive national security secrets with communist
China in the 1980s. This clandestine relationship evolved from
China's agreement to supply sophisticated weapons to the Nicaraguan
contras beginning in 1984, a deal with the White House that entrusted
China with one of the government's most sensitive intelligence
secrets, the existence of Oliver North's contra supply network.
In the years after that secretly brokered deal, the Republican
administration permitted trips in which US nuclear scientists.
. . visited China in scientific exchange programs. Those visits
corresponded with China's rapid development of sophisticated
nuclear weapons, culminating in the apparent compromise of sensitive
US nuclear secrets by 1988. Seven years later, in 1995, a purported
Chinese defector walked into US government offices in Taiwan
and turned over a document. Dated 1988, the document contained
detailed information about US-designed nuclear warheads. The
document showed that Chinese intelligence possessed the secrets
of the W-88 miniaturized nuclear bomb by the last year of Ronald
Reagan's presidency. China's first test of a light warhead similar
to the W-88 was conducted in 1992, the last year of George H.W.
Bush's presidency."
The Chinese connection exploded
with the arrival of the Clinton administration. A younger crowd
of American politicians had skipped the part about patriotism,
about the pledge of allegiance, about loyalty not only to country
but to much of anything other than themselves. The Clinton policy
towards China was merely an extension of these values: what's
in for us and how soon? The notion of national security was almost
alien to them; besides they had the new paradigm of globalization
to keep them warm. Here are just a few of the things that happened
along the way:
- Named Commerce Secretary, Ron
Brown treated his post as just another place to wheel and deal.
He was irrepressible, on one occasion okaying the sale of new
American engines for China to put in its cruise missiles. The
engines had been built as military equipment but Brown reclassified
them as civilian.
- Neither was Brown above doing
a little business on the side. The Saudis wanted some American
planes; Brown told them: you want the planes you also want a
phone contract with ATT. Cost of the planes and hardware: $6
billion. Cost of the phone contract: $4 billion. Part of the
deal, it turned out, was an ATT side agreement with a firm called
First International. The owner: Ron Brown
- According to the New York Times,
Clinton removed $2 billion in trade with China from national
security scrutiny. Among the results: 77 supercomputers - capable
of 13 billion calculations per second - that could scramble and
unscramble secret data and design nuclear weapons. These were
purchased by the Chinese without a peep stateside. At least some
of them would be used by the Chinese military.
- With the transfer of the Panama
Canal, four of Panama's ports ended up being controlled by a
company partially owned by Hutchinson-Whampoa Ltd., which in
turn was owned by Li Ka-Shing, a billionaire so close to the
Chinese power structure that he was offered the governorship
of Hong Kong. Another owner of the Panamanian ports was China
Resources Enterprise, called an "agent of espionage"
by Senator Fred Thompson. CRE was also a partner of the Lippo
Group, owned by the Riady family that played a central if mysterious
role in the rise of William Clinton. According to congressional
testimony by ex-JCS chief Admiral Thomas Moorer, Hutchinson-Whampoa
won the right to pilot all ships thought the Panama Canal, including
US naval vessels.
- President Clinton signed national
security waivers to allow four US commercial satellites to be
launched in China, despite evidence that China was exporting
nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan and Iran, among other
nations. One of these satellites belonged to Loral. Nine days
later a Chinese Long March rocket carrying a $200 million satellite
belonging to Loral failed in mid-flight. A subsequent law suit
charged that the circuit board from the highly classified encryption
device in the satellite was found to be missing when the Chinese
returned debris from the explosion to US authorities, even though
a control box containing the circuit board was recovered intact.
After the crash, NSA reportedly changed the encoded algorithms
used by US satellites because of the apparent release of highly
classified information.
- President Clinton approved a waiver
allowing the launch of another satellite on board a Chinese rocket,
despite a recommendation by the Department of Justice that the
waiver would have a significant adverse impact on any prosecution
arising from its pending investigation of Loral.
- The NY Times reported in 1998
that the Defense Technology Security Administration said Loral's
unauthorized release of sensitive technology to the Chinese gave
rise to at least three "major" violations of US national
security, three medium violations and twelve "minor"
infractions.
- Throughout these dealings, the
CEO of Loral, Bernard Schwartz, contributed at least $1.5 million
to the Democrats, making him the single largest contributor to
these groups during the period in question.
- Softwar newsletter reported that
that some of the radios and cell phones being used by Chinese
police in their campaign against dissidents were those sold the
Chinese by Motorola after Clinton overrode human rights objections
by the State Department.
- In the end, the brunt of the evidence
was that the Chinese had obtained more American military secrets
over the past two decades than all the previous spies in American
history put together. They had basic information on all nuclear
weapons systems, they got our most advanced supercomputers, they
gained extraordinarily important information about satellite
systems. Some of this knowledge they used for themselves; some
they retrofitted and repackaged and sold to other countries like
Iraq, where it was used against our own fighter planes. While
the problem occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations,
it got completely out of hand under Clinton. Some of the information
was stolen, some was given to China in the classic manner of
spies, but a stunning proportion was obtained either as a direct
result of political and economic decisions by the Clinton administration
or as a result of what can best be described as premeditated
indifference.
- Three major players in the China
scandal - John Huang, Charlie Trie and Johnny Chung - were all
allowed by the Justice Department to cop pleas.
- Carol Cameron of Fox News reported
that cover stories provided by Chinese operatives to hide China's
illegal campaign contributions may have come from or been approved
by President Jiang Zemin. Johnny Chung told Congress he was under
orders from the Chinese to keep the whole thing quiet. His orders,
he said, came from a suspected Chinese intelligence operative
named Robert Luu, who worked for a Los Angeles law firm. In a
phone conversation tapped by the FBI, Chung was told by Luu to
say the campaign money came from the so-called princelings: Chinese
leaders' grown sons, who live, study and often live lavishly
in the West.
A transcript of the wiretap, obtained
by Fox News, contains the following:
LUU: "Shove the blame on the
shoulders of the princelings."
CHUNG: "So blame it on the
princelings. Do not implicate the Chinese government."
LUU: "Yes. Chairman Jiang agreed
to handle it like this; the president over here also agreed."
- Newsweek quoted intelligence officials
as saying that the Chinese "penetration is total. They are
deep into the (US nuclear weapons) labs' black programs."
- In an AP story ignored by major
media, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey accused the Clinton
administration of pursuing a policy of appeasement toward China
and likened it to the way Britain and France dealt with Nazi
Germany on Czechoslovakia before World War II.
- The Wall Street Journal wrote:
"Top business executives are issuing a blunt warning to
federal lawmakers: Vote against the trade deal with China, and
we will hold it against you when writing campaign checks.
- Operating with an interim top
secret clearance (but without FBI investigation or foreign security
check) Commerce official Huang requested several top secret files
on China just before a meeting with the Chinese ambassador. Huang
and the Riadys then held a meeting with Clinton. Not long after,
Huang went to work as a Democratic fund-raiser, but remained
on Commerce's payroll as a $10,000 a month consultant. Huang
raised $5 million for the campaign. About a third of that was
returned as having come from illegal sources. Among the problem
contributions: $250,000 to the DNC from five Chinese businessmen
in order to have a brief meeting with Clinton at a fund-raiser.
- Macao businessman Ng Lap Seng,
closely linked to a couple of major Chinese-owned enterprises,
was regularly bringing in large sums of money to the US, according
to customs records. On one occasion, he arrived with $175,000
and then two days later met with Charlie Trie and Mark Middleton
at the White House. That evening Ng sat at Clinton's table at
a DNC fund-raiser.
This is just a sample, not of treason,
but of politics as it has been practiced. Now, let's turn to
the recently arrested Agent Hanssen. So far there is no evidence
that he helped the Russians build a missile, suppress dissidents,
or buy US politicians. Instead, in the FBI's own words, "The
affidavit alleges that Hanssen compromised numerous human sources
of the US Intelligence Community, dozens of classified U.S. Government
documents, including "Top Secret" and "code word"
documents, and technical operations of extraordinary importance
and value. It also alleges that Hanssen compromised FBI counterintelligence
investigative techniques, sources, methods and operations, and
disclosed to the KGB the FBI's secret investigation of Felix
Bloch, a foreign service officer, for espionage."
Hanssen's major alleged crime, in
other words, is not the betrayal of America but of the (note
capital letters used in the charge) US Intelligence Community,
its personnel, its manuals, and its tricks of the trade. Open
up Robert Hanssen and - as with a Russian doll - you just get
another spy who is busily betraying another spy, all of whom
are keeping secrets not so much from some foreign country as
from the citizens of their own.
It is all bizarre, incestuous, of
little known purpose, and, in the best postmodern manner, flexible.
Just as American politicians and lawyers have redefined bribery
so that the official bribee can escape punishment for the same
crime for which the citizen briber, so the rules of loyalty to
one's country now vary immensely not according to the nature
of one's action but according to one's position.
Don't look for it written down anywhere.
Except for the basic rule, laid down in 1613 by John Harington:
"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why if it
prosper, none dare call it treason."
DOCTORS AND DESTROYERS
Text of talk by , June 26
by Sam Smith
Dupont Circle Rally, Washington
I want to tell you about a nightmare
I had. At first, it was pretty much your ordinary nightmare -
dragons, wraiths, witches, pterodactyls, poltergeists, Stygian
swamps, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, that sort of thing.
Then the dragons, wraiths, witches,
pterodactyls and poltergeists faded away. Clinton and Albright
were still there but they had been transformed into doctors and
the Stygian swamps had become the emergency room of a hospital.
There were other doctors with name tags that read Blair and Berger
and Bacon.
Then an ambulance drove up and deposited
a man in terrible pain from some bad food he had eaten. And Dr.
Clinton walked up and said to the man, "We must strike in
the name of freedom and gastronomy against the criminally heartless
restaurant that did this foul deed to you" and he drove
his scalpel into the man's stomach. Which of course, didn't help
much and after a few more such blows the patient died.
Then a man came in who had suffered
a heart attack and Dr. Albright stood over him and declared loudly,
"You are a victim of a evil disease; we shall not sleep
until it is exorcised. It is clear, though, that you must be
partitioned before we can reconstruct you" and so Dr. Albright
took a hatchet and cut off the man's arms and legs and instructed
a nurse to Fedex them to the far corners of the country. The
man, of course, died.
Finally a young woman arrived at
the cusp of childbirth but before Dr. Blair would attend to her
he demanded that a commission of nurses determine whether any
sex crimes had been committed against the woman and when he found
that the child was the consequence of a rape, he delivered the
baby but promptly threw it out the window declaring that democracy
had triumphed again.
Just then I awoke and realized that
it was just a dream and that all along I had been listening to
the home service of the Voice of America, better known as NPR.
The words were coming not from Doctors Clinton, Blair and Albright
but from Cokie Roberts and I realized that, in fact, all was
once again well with the world.
There is a name for this sort of
medicine. It is called iatrogenic - in which the disease is caused
by the physician. Doctors who cause diseases or ruin the health
of the patient through arrogance, incompetence, and mindless
machismo have large insurance policies because people sue them
for something we call malpractice. In medicine this is considered
a bad thing.
We have just gone through yet another
iatrogenic war, in which our elites have argued falsely that
their stated intentions outweigh any actual consequences. The
patient is in far worse shape than before this war began, the
victim of arrogance, incompetence, and mindless machismo.
This war was conducted, in no small
part, by people who called themselves, in their private lives,
killer litigators. Their speciality was making the other side
lose. So now we have seen what happens when you give a bunch
of corporate lawyers their own air force. These are the people
F Scott Fitzgerald described in the Great Gatsby when he wrote:
It was all very careless and confused.
They were careless people -- they smashed up things and creatures
and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness
or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people
clean up the mess they had made.
The difference was that the Gatsby
crowd didn't have cruise missles.
We, of course, have had other iatrogenic
wars. This is what happened in Vietnam when we declared that
it was necessary to destroy villages in order to save them. This
is what happened in Iraq when in the name defeating a modern
Hitler we caused the post-war death by disease and malnutrition
of far more people than Hussein himself had killed. And it is
what happened when NATO declared that Slobadon Milosevic's crimes
against humanity were such that they justified the brutal destruction
of a country and the pain and death and the very ethnic cleansing
we said we sought to avoid.
In fact, every moral act in the
face of mental or physical injury carries twin responsibilities:
to mend the injury and to avoid replacing it with another. This
twin burden is faced every day by doctors. Every police officer
faces it. Every firefighter. It was what I was taught as a Coast
Guard officer. It's well past time for our politicians do so
as well.
The point of speaking of the evils
of a Milosovec or a Hussein is to raise the alarm. But once that
has been successfully done, this alarm may not rightfully be
used as a perpetual excuse for our own misdeeds. From the moment
we commence a moral intervention we become a part of the story,
and part of the good and evil. We are no longer the innocent
bystander but a full participant whose acts will either help
or make things worse. Our intentions become irrelevant; they
are overwhelmed by the character of our response to them. The
morality of the disease is supplanted by the morality of the
cure. Any other course amounts to reckless and negligent political
malpractice.
Wars are one of the foul rituals
of misdeveloped, morally dyslectic men and women, whose power
has dangerously outstripped their integrity, their hearts, and
their wisdom. Yet we, too, must avoid treating this disease as
an excuse. Being against a barbaric invasion is not a policy
or a paradigm; it is simply a necessity.
Let's be honest; one of the reasons
thing deteriorated to the point that a Democratic president thought
he could get away with such a war is because throughout his life
far too few have held him accountable for his behavior. He has
come to rely upon the misguided support of those who have let
his words trump his acts. This has helped us to lose other wars
such as those against democracy, civil liberties, our planet's
health, people without wealth or power, the young, the non-conforming,
and citizens who prefer to use a mild drug such as marijuana
rather than the deadly yet legal one of nicotine.
The bombing has stopped over Belgrade
but we remain the targets in these other conflicts. And this
is the way it will be until we too can move beyond our words
to results. Is there a doctor in the house? |
Speech
April 23, 1999
Washington Mall Rally
I am a native of
this place. You might even call me an ethnic Washingtonian. For
two centuries, this little colony of America has been denied
the rights called for in the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution, and more recently in the Charter of the United
Nations.
At no time during
this 200 years, however, has a single bomb been dropped on our
behalf. In fact President Clinton and the Congress, now busy
saving the Kosovars -- whether they survive to thank us or not
-- conspired to remove what little self-government we had on
the grounds of a budget deficit worth about the cost of four
nights' Belgrade bombing runs. It was the greatest disenfranchisement
of African-Americans since the end of post-reconstruction in
the 19th century.
You will excuse
me, therefore, if I am a bit skeptical about current professions
of interest in democracy in distant places. As the Washington
Star said many years ago, "What right have we to hurl denunciations
and epithets at dictatorships and totalitarian states in other
parts, when an almost perfect example of irresponsible forms
of government is maintained by our national government in our
own national capital?"
We gather here exactly
31 years and one month after William Jefferson Clinton was reclassified
1-A by his draft board during a war of which he wrote, "I
didn't see how my going in the army and maybe going to Vietnam
would achieve anything except a feeling that I had punished myself
and gotten what I deserved." A lot has happened since then,
including, under Clinton, more frequent and gratuitous military
incursions into foreign lands than ever before.
To be sure, he merely
ices a long trend. By the count of author Bill Blum, since 1945
we have bombed China, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Congo,
Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Panama, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.
The most striking
exception to the ubiquitous futility of these deadly adventures
has been a single unqualified military triumph -- we brought
Grenada to her knees.
At what point does
the constant reiteration of failed and fatal policy become a
war crime and reckless incompetence become grotesque cruelty
and tactics of death become -- to use a term used casually these
days -- become genocide?
Well, consider this.
The Holocaust resulted in some six million deaths. Now here are
some other figures:
There were nearly
two million killed during the Vietnam war, most by air attacks
that dropped twice as many bombs as we did in all of World War
II -- nearly one 500-pound bomb per person. One million civilians
were killed by our strategic bombing in Japan even before we
got to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than two million civilians
were killed in our bombing runs over North Korea. And one million
Iraqi have died as a result of our sanctions.
Add these up and
you come to the same figure as the Holocaust. Which is shocking
enough until you realize that together, the Holocaust and our
bombing raids of the past fifty years represent less than ten
percent of all the deaths by warfare in our century.
.
Trace the American role in this extraordinary violence to its
source and you come not upon political extremes, but to the heart
of this country's establishment. Contrary to all myths the most
deadly place on the American political spectrum is in the center.
It is there that a fatal combination of power, machismo, incompetence,
avarice and delusions of adequacy has time and again caused murder,
mayhem and suffering for those who want only to live their lives
in peace and decency. Even the KKK, so often cited as an example
of the ever-present danger from extremism, was in fact powerful
not because it was extreme but because it was at the precise
center of so much of America -- holding political, judicial and
law enforcement office as well as hiding beneath its robes. In
some towns, lynching parties were even announced in the local
paper.
It is this violent,
extremist center of American politics and culture that plays
host today to the Armani coat mafia of globalization for corporations
and marginalization for people. Just as it is this violent, extremist
center that was responsible for the weapons, the ignorance, and
the anger that helped kill 15 young people in Colorado. Mass
murder is not genetic, it is a skill learned like other skills
from other adults. Consider this. The boy killer in the shootings
in Paducuh had never fired a real gun before, yet hit his target
eight times with eight shots. Trained police officers are lucky
to hit fifty percent of the time. The boy had learned his skill
by playing video games. The free market taught him how to kill.
Today, NATO is teaching others.
We have, of course,
been trained to think of our own leaders as normal, sane people.
That these destroyers of land, lives, and the ecological balance
of the earth are wise and honorable men and women engaged in
noble and difficult tasks. .
But ask yourself
this:
Is it normal to
kill millions of innocent people in the name of a freedom they
will never live to know?
Is it normal to
let the young and the ill suffer so you can support a military
budget so huge that $30 billion a year simply can't be accounted
for?
Is it normal to
lock up nearly two million citizens -- the most of any country
ever -- many of them for simply preferring marijuana over such
legal drugs as vodka and cigarettes?
Is it normal, because
of one's draconian penal system, to remove the franchise from
one out of every seven black men?
Is it normal to
damage the health of a planet for better 4th quarter profits?
Consider that the
use of nuclear weapons as well as other forms of mass destruction
presently depends upon the will of a brutal egomaniac in Belgrade,
a terminal dipsomaniac in Moscow, and a felonious serial sociopath
in Washington. This, my friends, is not normal.
When I was a child
in this town, the cruelties of segregation were considered normal.
An elite not unlike the one in charge today insisted it was so,
just as they told us that if we crawled under our school desks
we would be safe from the atom bomb.
Few in power dared
tell us that what was said to be normal was actually madness.
We had to find out for ourselves. And when we did, and when we
discovered that others had as well, things began to get better.
Today we must make
this same self-discovery, and learn from those on either side
of us, in front of us and behind us, that we are not alone. The
elite, including its media, will try to keep us from this news.
They will not tell us the biggest secret of our age -- that the
widest political, cultural and moral division on earth is not
between right and left, east and west, or black and white, but
between the peoples of the world and their own reckless leaders.
This weekend some
of the latter have come to town and erected a Berlin wall behind
which to conceal their deadly work. We on this side of the wall
are the resistance. Not just against nukes. Not just against
war. But a resistance against all the craven, cruel and corrupt
madness of those who lead. And against the apathy and surrender
that lets it happen.
Let me suggest a
simple platform to replace this madness. That:
We seek to be good
stewards of our earth, good citizens of our country, good members
of our communities, and good neighbors of those who share these
places with us. We seek a cooperative commonwealth based on decency
before profit, liberty before sterile order, justice before efficiency,
happiness before uniformity, families before systems, communities
before corporations, and people before institutions. And that
we, unlike so many who profess to lead us, seek to treat our
politics, our country and each other with common decency, common
sense and with a search for common ground.
So simple. So normal.
And yet so far. . . .
At the end of the
Second World War, Albert Camus wrote an imaginary letter to a
German friend in which he said,
"This is what
separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to
serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours
her truth."
That is our business
today, and every day, until those who lead us make it their's
as well -- and no longer hide behind barricades celebrating mindless
power, deadly weapons, and corrupt intentions. Until they turn
instead to their proper business which is to join us in giving
all the lands of this fragile earth their truth.
Writing
about war
[A TPR story
on the Balkan war won 12th place in Project Censor's list of
the top 25 censored stories of 1999. The folks at the project
asked your editor for some comments, so I wrote the following
which appears in "Censored 2000: The Year's Top 25 Censored
Stories"]
About the time the
Balkan War broke out, I was working on a memoir of the '60s and
read, with no little embarrassment, some of the things I wrote
as a 27-year-old in 1965 about Vietnam. I found there the tracks
of a Cold War liberal upbringing; recent service in the Coast
Guard; the memory of a friend who was among the first 40 killed
in Southeast Asia; but, most of all, of a young journalist unwilling
to risk looking foolish to others. It took about a year before
I could turn such influences aside and stare straight at the
facts.
In the end it was
a struggle that stood me in good stead. It taught me that war
was the most seductive drama most of us will ever encounter,
and that the media too often chooses the role of playwright rather
than of honest observer.
The task has become
much harder. Not only has military agitprop become infinitely
more sly and manipulative, today's typical journalists are without
personal experience of the system they celebrate. For this reason,
I sometimes suggest a revival of the draft -- but only for reporters.
That way they would not be so easily conned by the military "experts"
they so gladly interview and quote.
A less painful solution,
of course, would be a far more aggressive and skeptical journalism
that did not repeatedly serve, in Russell Baker's phrase, as
a "megaphone for fraud." For my part, I find myself
increasingly covering Washington's most ignored beat: the written
word. The culture of deceit is primarily an oral one. The sound
bite, the spin, and the political product placement depend on
no one spending too much time on the matter under consideration.
Over and over again,
however, I find that the real story still lies barely hidden
and may be reach by nothing more complicated than turning the
page, checking the small type in the appendix, charging into
the typographical jungle beyond the executive summary, doing
a Web search, and, for the bravest, actually looking at the figures
on the chart.
My work on the Balkan
War represents an effort of this sort. It is the result not of
investigative journalism, but of something that I fear is even
rarer these days: simple journalistic curiosity, a chronic dissatisfaction
with the loose ends of our culture and experience. The piece
was just a compilation of what should have been in my morning
paper, but was not.
What Tim
McVeigh and I had in common
TIMOTHY MCVEIGH
AND I had something in common: we both memorized William Ernest
Henley's poem "Invictus." I don't why McVeigh did it,
but I did it as part of a grim Sunday lunch ritual during which
my siblings and I were expected to demonstrate our mnemonic skills
to my father's satisfaction. One of the examples was "Invictus"
which went like this:
Out of the night
that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch
of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place
of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how
strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
It was written by
William Ernest Henley, an English editor, writer, playwright
and poet who by 1877 had proved himself so unmarketable that
he had to "addict" himself to journalism for the next
ten years. He died in 1903, 98 years to the day that Timothy
McVeigh was executed.
Learning "Invictus"
was about the only thing that Timothy McVeigh and I had in common.
I went to a Quaker school and later entered the Coast Guard where
I learned how to save people. McVeigh went into the U.S. Army
and where he learned how to kill people. He became so proficient
that his military colleagues admired him and the U.S. government
gave him a medal. The war in which he fought continues silently,
with many people still dying because of the embargo and the toxics
we left behind. We don't call it terrorism, however, because
a government did it and not an individual.
Iraq was a good
place for an American to learn how to kill large numbers of innocent
people and then dismiss it as "collateral damage."
That phrase wasn't from a poem; McVeigh may have picked it up
from a White House press statement.
After I left the
Coast Guard I got a job. After Timothy McVeigh left the Army,
he didn't. This was not unusual. In fact, the unemployment rate
of veterans 20-24 years old is twice that of those who have not
had the benefit of Army training.
McVeigh has been
made to take responsibility for his part in creating the Oklahoma
City disaster. When does America take responsibility for its
part in creating Timothy McVeigh? |