ZNET UPDATE / CHOMSKY ON US , ALBERT ON CHURCHILL
Imperial Presidency: Strategies to Control the Great Beast
By Noam Chomsky
It goes without saying that what happens in the U.S. has an enormous impact on the rest of the world-and conversely: what happens in the rest of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the U.S., in several ways. First, it sets constraints on what even the most powerful state can do. Second, it influences the domestic U.S. component of "the second superpower," as the New York Times ruefully described world public opinion after the huge protests before the Iraq invasion. Those protests were a critically important historical event, not only because of their unprecedented scale, but also because it was the first time in hundreds of years of the history of Europe and its North American off shoots that a war was massively protested even before it was officially launched. We may recall, by comparison, the war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in1962, brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration campsor urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether "Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity" would escape "extinction" as "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size"-particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of the U.S. assault. When protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to the rest of Indochina-hideous crimes, but lesser ones. It's quite important to remember how much the world has changed since then.
As almost always, not as a result of gifts from benevolent leaders, but through deeply committed popular struggle, far too late in developing, but ultimately effective. One consequence was that the U.S. government could not declare a national emergency, which should have been healthy for the economy, as during World War II when public support was very high. Johnson had to fight a"guns-and-butter" war, buying off an unwilling population, harming the economy, ultimately leading the business classes to turn against the war as too costly, after the Tet Offensive of January 1968 showed that it would go on a long time.There were also concerns among U.S. elites about rising social and political consciousness stimulated by the activism of the 1960s, much of it reaction to the miserable crimes in Indochina, then at last arousing popular indignation. We learn from the last sections of the Pentagon Papers that after the Tet offensive, the military command was reluctant to agree to the president's call for further troop deployments, wanting to be sure that "sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control" in the U.S., and fearing that escalation might run the risk of "provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions."
The Reagan administration assumed that the problem of an independent, aroused population had been overcome and apparently planned to follow the Kennedy model of the early 1960s in Central America. But they backed off in the face of unanticipated public protest, turning instead to "clandestine war" employing murderous security forces and a huge international terror network. The consequences were terrible, but not as bad as B-52s and mass murder operations of the kind that were peaking when John Kerry was deep in the Mekong Delta in the South, by then largely devastated. The popular reaction to even the"clandestine war," so called, broke entirely new ground. The solidarity movements for Central America, now in many parts of the world, are again something new in Western history. State managers cannot fail to pay attention to such matters.
Routinely, a newly elected president requests an intelligence evaluation of the world situation. In1989, when Bush I took office, a part was leaked. It warned that when attacking"much weaker enemies"-the only sensible target-the U.S. must win "decisively and rapidly." Delay might "undercut political support," recognized to be thin, a great change since the Kennedy-Johnson years when the attack on Indochina, while never popular, aroused little reaction for many years. The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, not only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted. There are very important lessons here, which should always be uppermost in our minds-for the same reason they are suppressed in the elite culture. Without forgetting the very significant progress towards more civilized societies in past years, and the reasons for it, let's focus nevertheless on the notions of imperial sovereignty now being crafted. It is not surprising that as the population becomes more civilized, power systems become more extreme in their efforts to control the "great beast" (as the Founding Fathers called thepeople). And the great beast is indeed frightening. The conception of presidential sovereignty crafted by the statist reactionaries of the Bush administration is so extreme that it has drawn unprecedented criticism in the most sober and respected establishment circles. These ideas were transmitted to the president by the newly appointed attorney-general,Alberto Gonzales-who is depicted as a moderate in the press.
They are discussed by the respected constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson in the summer 2004 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Levinson writes that the conception is based on the principle, "There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos." The quote, Levinson comments, is from Carl Schmitt, the leading German philosopher of law during the Nazi period,who Levinson describes as "the true éminence grise of the Bush administration."The Administration, advised by Gonzales, has articulated "a view of presidential authority that is all too close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Führer," Levinson writes. One rarely hears such words from the heart of the establishment. The same issue of the journal carries an article by two prominent strategic analysts on the "transformation of the military," a central component of the new doctrines of imperial sovereignty: the rapid expansion of offensive weaponry, including militarization of space, and other measures designed to place the entire world at risk of instant annihilation. These have already elicited the anticipated reactions by Russia and recently China. The analysts conclude that these U.S. programs may lead to "ultimate doom." They express their hope that a coalition of peace-loving states will coalesce as a counter to U.S. militarism and aggressiveness, led by China. We've come to a pretty pass when such sentiments are voiced in sober respectable circles not given to hyperbole.
Going back to Gonzales, he transmitted to the president the conclusions of the Justice Department that the president has the authority to rescind the Geneva Conventions-the supreme law of the land, the foundation of modern international humanitarian law. Gonzales, who was then Bush's legal counsel, advised him that this would be a good idea because rescinding the Conventions "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution [of administration officials] under the War Crimes Act" of 1996, which carries the death penalty for "grave breaches" of Geneva Conventions. We can see on today's front pages why the Justice Department was right to be concerned that the president and his advisers might be subject to the death penalty under the laws passed by the Republican Congress in 1996-and under the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, if anyone took them seriously.
In early November, the NY Times featured a front-page story reporting the conquest of the Falluja General Hospital. It reported, "Patients and hospitalemployees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs." An accompanying photograph depicted the scene. That was presented as an important achievement."The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties." These "inflated" figures-inflated because our Leader so declares-were "inflaming opinion throughout the country" and the region, driving up "the political costs of the conflict." The word "conflict" is a common euphemism for U.S. aggression, as when we read on the same pages that the U.S.must now rebuild "what the conflict just destroyed": just "the conflict," with no agent, like a hurricane.
Let's go back to the NYT picture and story about the closing of the "propaganda weapon." There are some relevant documents, including the Geneva Conventions,which state: "Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict." So page one of the world's leading newspaper is cheerfully depicting war crimes for which the political leadership could be sentenced to death under U.S. law. The world's greatest newspaper also tells us that the U.S. military "achieved nearly all their objectives well ahead of schedule," leaving "much of the city in smoking ruins." But it was not a complete success. There is little evidence of dead "packrats" in their "warrens" or the streets, which remains "an enduring mystery." The embedded reporters did find a body of a dead woman, though it is"not known whether she was an Iraqi or a foreigner," apparently the only question that comes to mind. The front-page account quotes a Marine commander who says, "It ought to go down in the history books." Perhaps it should. If so, we know on just what page of history it will go down and who will be right beside it, along with those who praise or, for that matter, even tolerate it. At least, we know that if we are capable of honesty.
One might mention at least some of the recent counter parts that immediately come to mind, like the Russian destruction of Grozny ten years ago, a city of about the same size; or Srebrenica, almost universally described as "genocide" in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from a Dutch government report andother sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages and, when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs.
It could be argued that all this is irrelevant. The Nuremberg Tribunal, spelling out the UN Charter, declared that initiation of a war of aggression is "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that itcontains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Hence the war crimes in Falluja and Abu Ghraib, the doubling of acute malnutrition among children since the invasion (now at the level of Burundi, far higher than Haiti orUganda), and all the rest of the atrocities. Those judged to have played any role in the supreme crime-for example, the German Foreign Minister-were sentenced to death by hanging. The Tokyo Tribunal was far more severe.
There is a very important book on the topic by Canadian international lawyer Michael Mandel, who reviews in convincing detail how the powerful are self-immunized from international law. In fact, the Nuremberg Tribunal established this principle. To bring the Nazi criminals to justice, it was necessary to devise definitions of "war crime" and"crime against humanity." How this was done is explained by Telford Taylor,chief counsel for the prosecution and a distinguished international lawyer and historian: "Since both sides [in World War II] had played the terrible game of urban destruction-the Allies far more successfully-there was no basis for criminal charges against Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought.... Aerial bombardment had been used so extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that neither at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials." The operative definition of "crime" is: "Crime that you carried out, but we did not." To underscore the fact, Nazi war criminals were absolved if the defense could show that their U.S. counterparts carried out the same crimes. Taylor concludes that "to punish the foe-especially the vanquished foe-for conduct in which the enforcer nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves." That is correct, but the operative definition also discredits the laws themselves, along with all subsequent tribunals. Taylor provides this background as part of his explanation of why U.S. bombing inVietnam was not a war crime. His argument is plausible, further discrediting the laws themselves. Some of the subsequent judicial inquiries are discredited in perhaps even more extreme ways, such as the Yugoslavia vs. NATO case adjudicated by the International Court of Justice.
The U.S. was excused, correctly, on the basis of its argument that it is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Court in this case. The reason is that when the U.S. finally signed the Genocide Convention(which is at issue here) after 40 years, it did so with a reservation stating that it is not applicable to the United States. In an outraged comment on the efforts of Justice Department lawyers to demonstrate that the president has the right to authorize torture, Yale LawSchool Dean Harold Koh said, "The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide." The president's legal advisers, and the new attorney-general, should have little difficulty arguing that the president does indeed have that right-if the second superpower permits him to exercise it.
The sacred doctrine of self-immunization is sure to hold for the trial of Saddam Hussein, if it is ever held. We see that every time Bush, Blair, and other worthies in government and commentary lament over the terrible crimes of SaddamHussein, always bravely omitting the words: "with our help, because we did not care." Surely no tribunal will be permitted to address the fact that U.S.presidents from Kennedy until today, along with French presidents and Britishprime ministers, and Western businesses, have been complicit in Saddam's crimes, sometimes in horrendous ways, including current incumbents and their mentors. In setting up the Saddam tribunal, the State Department consulted U.S. legal expert professor Charif Bassiouni, recently quoted as saying: "All efforts are being made to have a tribunal whose judiciary is not independent but controlled, and by controlled I mean that the political manipulators of the tribunal have to make sure the U.S. and other western powers are not brought in cause. This makes it look like victor's vengeance: it makes it seem targeted, selected, unfair. It's a subterfuge." We hardly need to be told.
The pretext for U.S.-UK aggression in Iraq is what is called the right of
"anticipatory self-defense," now sometimes called "preemptive war" in aperversion of that concept. The right of anticipatory self-defense was affirmed officially in the Bush administration National Security Strategy of September2002, declaring Washington's right to resort to force to eliminate any potential challenge to its global dominance. The NSS was widely criticized among the foreign policy elite, beginning with an article in the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, warning that "the new imperial grand strategy" could be very dangerous. Criticism continued, again at an unprecedented level, but on narrow grounds-not that the doctrine itself was wrong, but rather its style and manner of presentation. Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright summed the criticism up accurately, also in FA. She pointed out that every president has such a doctrine in his back pocket, but it is foolish to smash people in the face with it and to implement it in a manner that will infuriate even allies. That is threatening to U.S. interests and therefore wrong. Albright knew, of course, that Clinton had a similar doctrine. The Clinton doctrine advocated "unilateral use of military power" to defend vital interests,such as "ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources," without even the pretexts that Bush and Blair devised. Taken literally, the Clinton doctrine is more expansive than Bush's NSS. But the more expansive Clinton doctrine was barely even reported. It was presented with the right style and implemented less brazenly. Henry Kissinger described the Bush doctrine as "revolutionary," pointing out that it undermines the 17th century Westphalian system of international order and of course the UN Charter and international law. He approved of the doctrine,but with reservations about style and tactics and with a crucial qualification:it cannot be "a universal principle available to every nation." Rather, the right of aggression must be reserved to the U.S., perhaps delegated to chosen clients. We must forcefully reject the principle of universality-that we applyto ourselves the same standards we do to others, more stringent ones if we are serious.
Kissinger is to be praised for his honesty in forthrightly articulating prevailing doctrine, usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured legalisms. He understands his educated audience. As he doubtless expected, there was no reaction. His understanding of his audience was illustrated again, rather dramatically, last May, when Kissinger-Nixon tapes were released, over Kissinger's strong objections. There was a report in the world's leading newspaper. It mentioned, in passing, the orders to bomb Cambodia that Kissinger transmitted from Nixon to the military commanders. In Kissinger's words, "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." It is rare for a call for horrendous war crimes-what we would not hesitate to call "genocide" if others were responsible-to be so stark and explicit. It would be interesting to see if there is anything like it in archival records. The publication elicited no reaction, refuting Dean Koh. Apparently, it is taken for granted in the eliteculture that the president and his National Security adviser do have the right to order genocide.
Imagine the reaction if the prosecutors at the Milosevic Tribunal could find anything remotely similar. They would be overjoyed, the trial would be over,Milosevic would receive several life sentences, the death penalty if theTribunal adhered to U.S. law. But that is them, not us. The principle of universality is the most elementary of moral truisms. It is the foundation of "just war theory" and of every system of morality deserving of anything but contempt. Rejection of such moral truisms is so deeply rooted in the intellectual culture as to be invisible. To illustrate again how deeply entrenched it is, let's return to the principle of "anticipatory self-defense,"adopted as legitimate by both political organizations in the U.S. and across virtually the entire spectrum of articulate opinion, apart from the usual margins. The principle has some immediate corollaries. If the U.S. is granted the right of "anticipatory self-defense" against terror, then, certainly, Cuba,Nicaragua, and a host of others have long been entitled to carry out terrorist acts within the U.S. because there is no doubt of its involvement in very serious terrorist attacks against them, extensively documented in impeccable sources and, in the case of Nicaragua, even condemned by the World Court and the Security Council (in two resolutions that the U.S. vetoed, with Britain loyally abstaining). The conclusion that Cuba and Nicaragua, among many others, have long had the right to carry out terrorist atrocities in the U.S. is of course utterly outrageous and advocated by no one. Thanks to our self-determined immunity from moral truisms, there is no fear that anyone will draw the outrageous conclusions.
There are still more outrageous ones. No one, for example, celebrates PearlHarbor day by applauding the fascist leaders of Imperial Japan. But by our standards, the bombing of military bases in the U.S. colonies of Hawaii and the Philippines seems rather innocuous. The Japanese leaders knew that B-17 FlyingFortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines and were surely familiar with the public discussions in the U.S. explaining how they could be used to incinerate Japan's wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases-"to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bombing attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps," as retired Air Force General Chennault recommended in 1940, a proposal that "simply delighted"President Roosevelt. That's a far more powerful justification for anticipatory self-defense than anything conjured up by Bush-Blair and their associates-and accepted, with tactical reservations, throughout the mainstream of articulate opinion. Examples can be enumerated virtually at random. To add one last one, consider the most recent act of NATO aggression prior to the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq:the bombing of Serbia in 1999. The justification is supposed to be that there were no diplomatic options and that it was necessary to stop on going genocide.It is not hard to evaluate these claims. As for diplomatic options, when the bombing began, there were two proposals on the table, a NATO and a Serbian proposal. After 78 days of bombing a compromise was reached between them-formally at least. It was immediately undermined byNATO. All of this quickly vanished into the mists of unacceptable history, to the limited extent that it was ever reported. What about ongoing genocide-to use the term that appeared hundreds of times inthe press as NATO geared up for war? That is unusually easy to investigate.There are two major documentary studies by the State Department, offered to justify the bombing, along with extensive documentary records from the OSCE,NATO, and other Western sources, and a detailed British Parliamentary Inquiry. All agree on the basic facts: the atrocities followed the bombing, they were not its cause. Furthermore, that was predicted by the NATO command, as General Wesley Clark informed the press right away and confirmed in more detail in his memoirs. The Milosevic indictment, issued during the bombing-surely as apropaganda weapon, despite implausible denials-and relying on U.S.-UK intelligence as announced at once, yields the same conclusion: virtually all the charges are post-bombing. Such annoyances are handled quite easily. The Western documentation is commonly expunged in the media and even scholarship. The chronology is regularly reversed, so that the anticipated consequences of the bombing are transmuted into its cause. There were indeed pre-bombing atrocities: about 2,000 were killed in the year before the March 1999 bombing, according to Western sources. The British, the most hawkish element of the coalition, made the astonishing claim-hard to believe just on the basis of the balance of forces-that until January 1999 mostof the killings were by the Albanian KLA guerrillas attacking civilians and soldiers in cross-border raids in the hope of eliciting a harsh Serbian response that could be used for propaganda purposes in the West, as they candidly reported, apparently with CIA support in the last months. Western sources indicate no substantial change until the bombing was announced and the monitors withdrawn a few days before the March bombing. In one of the few works of scholarship that even mentions the unusually rich documentary record, Nicholas Wheeler concludes that 500 of the 2,000 were killed by Serbs. He supports the bombing on the grounds that there would have been worse Serbian atrocities had NATO not bombed, eliciting the anticipated crimes. That's the most serious scholarly work. The press, and much of scholarship, chose the easier path of ignoring Western documentation and reversing the chronology.
It is all too easy to continue. But the-unpleasantly consistent-record leaves open a crucial question: how does the "great beast" react, the domestic U.S.component of the second superpower? The conventional answer is that the population approves of all of this, as just shown by the election of GeorgeBush. But as is often the case, a closer look is helpful. Each candidate received about 30 percent of the electoral vote, Bush a bit more,Kerry a bit less. General voting patterns were close to the 2000 elections; almost the same "red" and "blue" states, in the conventional metaphor. A few percent shift in vote would have meant that Kerry would be in the White House. Neither outcome could tell us much of any significance about the mood of the country, even of voters. Issues of substance were as usual kept out of the campaign or presented so obscurely that few could understand.
It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars. Their professional concern in their regular vocation is not to provide information. Their goal, rather, is deceit.But deceit is quite expensive: complex graphics showing the car with a sexy actor or a sports hero or climbing a sheer cliff or some other device to project an image that might deceive the consumer into buying this car instead of the virtually identical one produced by a competitor. The same is true of elections, run by the same public relations industry.
The goal is to project images, and deceive the public into accepting them, while sidelining issues-for good reasons. The population seems to grasp the nature of the performance. Right before the2000 elections, about 75 percent regarded it as virtually meaningless, some game involving rich contributors, party managers, and candidates who are trained to project images that conceal issues, but might pick up some votes. This is probably why the "stolen election" was an elite concern that did not seem to arouse much public interest; if elections have about as much significance as flipping a coin to pick the King, who cares if the coin was biased? Right before the 2004 election, about 10 percent of voters said their choice would based on the candidate's "agendas/ideas/platforms/goals"; 6 percent for Bush voters, 13 percent for Kerry voters. For the rest, the choice would be based on what the industry calls "qualities" and "values." Does the candidate project the image of a strong leader, the kind of guy you'd like to meet in a bar, someone who really cares about you and is just like you? It wouldn't besurprising to learn that Bush is carefully trained to say "nucular" and"misunderestimate" and the other silliness that intellectuals like to ridicule.That's probably about as real as the ranch constructed for him and the rest of the folksy manner. After all, it wouldn't do to present him as a spoiled frat boy from Yale who became rich and powerful thanks to his rich and powerful connections. Rather, the imagery has to be an ordinary guy just like us, who'll protect us, and who shares our "moral values," more so than the windsurfing goose-hunter who can be accused of faking his medals. Bush received a large majority among voters who said they were concerned primarily with "moral values" and "terrorism." We learn all we have to know about the moral values of the Administration by reading the pages of the business press the day after the election, describing the "euphoria" in boardrooms-not because CEOs are opposed to gay marriage. Or by observing the principle, hardly concealed, that the very serious costs incurred by the Bush planners, in their dedicated service to power and wealth, are to be transferred to our children and grandchildren, including fiscal costs, environmental destruction, and perhaps "ultimate doom." These are the moral values, loud and clear. The commitment of Bush planners to "defense against terrorism" is illustrated most dramatically, perhaps, by their decision to escalate the threat of terror ,as had been predicted even by their own intelligence agencies, not because they enjoy terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens, but because it is, plainly, a low priority for them-surely as compared with such goals as establishing secure military bases in a dependent client state at the heart of the world's energy resources, recognized since World War II as the "most strategically important area of the world," "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." It is critically important to ensure that "profits beyond the dreams of avarice"-to quote a leading history of the oil industry-flow in the right directions, i.e., to U.S. energy corporations, the Treasury Department, U.S. high tech (militarized) industry, huge construction firms, and so on.
Even more important is the stupendous strategic power. Having a firm hand on the spigot guarantees "veto power" over rivals, as George Kennan pointed out over 50 years ago. In the same vein, Zbigniew Brzezinski recently wrote that control over Iraq gives the U.S. "critical leverage" over European and Asian economies, a major concern of planners since World War II. Rivals are to keep to their "regional responsibilities" within the "overal lframework of order" managed by the U.S., as Kissinger instructed them in his "Year of Europe" address 30 years ago. That is even more urgent today, as the major rivals threaten to move in an independent course, maybe even united. The EU and China became each other's leading trading partners in 2004 and those ties are becoming tighter, including the world's second largest economy, Japan. Critical leverage is more important than ever for world control in the tripolar world that has been evolving for over 30 years. In comparison, the threat of terror is a minor consideration-though the threat is known to be awesome. Long before 9/11 it was understood that, sooner or later, the Jihadist terror organized by the U.S. and its allies in the 1980s was likely to combine with WMDs, with horrifying consequences. Notice that the crucial issue with regard to Middle East oil-about two-thirds of estimated world resources, and unusually easy to extract-is control, not access.U.S. policies towards the Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of oil and remain the same today when U.S. intelligence projects that the U.S.will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources. Policies would be likely to be about the same if the U.S. were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control the "stupendous source of strategic power" and to gain "profits beyond the dreams of avarice" would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes reflects similar concerns.
There are plenty of other illustrations of the same ranking of priorities. To mention one, the Treasury Department has a bureau (OFAC, Office of ForeignAssets Control) that is assigned the task of investigating suspicious financial transfers, a crucial component of the "war on terror." OFAC has 120 employees. Last April, the White House informed Congress that four are assigned to tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen are dedicated to enforcing the embargo against Cuba-incidentally, declared illegal by every relevant international organization, even the usually compliantOrganization of American States. From 1990 to 2003, OFAC informed Congress, there were 93 terrorism-related investigations with $9,000 in fines; and 11,000Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in fines. Why should the Treasury Department devote vastly more energy to strangling Cuba than to the war on terror? The basic reasons were explained in secret documents 40 years ago, when the Kennedy administration sought to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba, as historian (and Kennedy confidante) Arthur Schlesinger recounted in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who ran the terror operations as his highest priority. State Department planners warned that the "very existence"of the Castro regime is "successful defiance" of U.S. policies going back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; no Russians, but intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere. Furthermore, this successful defiance encourages others, who might be infected by the "Castro idea of taking matters into their own hands," Schlesinger had warned incoming President Kennedy, summarizing the report of the President's Latin American mission. These dangers are particularly grave, Schlesinger elaborated, when "the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes...and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living."
Let's return to the great beast. U.S. public opinion is studied with great care and depth. Studies released right before the election showed that those planning to vote for Bush assumed that the Republican Party shared their views, even though the Party explicitly rejected them. Pretty much the same was true of Kerry supporters. The major concerns of Kerry supporters were economy and healthcare and they assumed that he shared their views on these matters, just as Bush voters assumed, with comparable justification, that Republicans shared their views. In brief, those who bothered to vote mostly accepted the imagery concocted by the PR industry, which had only the vaguest resemblance to reality. That's apartfrom the more wealthy who tend to vote their class interests.
What about actual public attitudes? Again, right before the election, major studies were released reporting them-and we see right away why it is a good idea to base elections on deceit, very much as in the fake markets of the doctrinal system. Here are a few examples: A considerable majority believe that the U.S.should accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; sign the Kyoto protocols; allow the UN to take the lead in international crises (including security, reconstruction, and political transition in Iraq); rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the "war on terror," and use force only if there is "strong evidence that the country is in imminent danger of being attacked," thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on"pre-emptive war" and adopting a rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter. A majority even favor giving up the Security Council veto. Overwhelming majorities favor expansion of purely domestic programs: primarily health care (80 percent), but also aid to education and Social Security. Similar results have long been found in these studies, carried out by the most reputable organizations that monitor public opinion. In other mainstream polls, about 80 percent favor guaranteed health care even if it would raise taxes-a national health care system is likely to reduce expenses considerably, avoiding the heavy costs of bureaucracy, supervision, paperwork, etc., some of the factors that render the U.S. privatized system the most inefficient in the industrial world. Public opinion has been similar for a long time, with numbers varying depending on how questions are asked. The facts are sometimes discussed in the press, with public preferences noted, but dismissed as "politically impossible." That happened again on the eve of the 2004 elections. A few days before (October 31), the NY Times reported, "There is so little political support for government intervention in the health care market in the United States that Senator JohnKerry took pains in a recent presidential debate to say that his plan for expanding access to health insurance would not create a new government program"-what the majority want, so it appears. But it is politically impossible and there is too little political support, meaning that the insurance companies,HMOs, pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc., are opposed. It is notable that these views are held by people in virtual isolation. Their preferences do not enter into the political campaigns and only marginally into articulate opinion in media and journals. The same extends to other domains and raises important questions about a "democratic deficit" in the world's most important state, to adopt the phrase we use for others. What would the results of the election have been if the parties, either of them,had been willing to articulate people's concerns on the issues they regard asvitally important? Or if these issues could enter into public discussion within the mainstream? We can only speculate about that, but we do know that it does not happen and that the facts are scarcely even reported. It seems reasonable to suppose that fear of the great beast is rather deep.
The operative concept of democracy is revealed very clearly in other ways as well. Perhaps the most extraordinary was the distinction between Old and New Europe in the run-up to the Iraq war. The criterion for membership was so clear that it took real discipline to miss it. Old Europe-the bad guys-were the governments that took the same stand as the large majority of the population. New Europe-the exciting hope for a democratic future-were the Churchillian leaders like Berlusconi and Aznar who disregarded even larger majorities of the population and submissively took their orders from Crawford, Texas. The mostdramatic case was Turkey, where, to everyone's surprise, the government actually followed the will of 95 percent of the population. The official administration moderate, Colin Powell, immediately announced harsh punishment for this crime. Turkey was bitterly condemned in the national press for lacking "democratic credentials." The most extreme example was Paul Wolfowitz, who berated theTurkish military for not compelling the government to follow Washington's orders and demanded that they apologize and publicly recognize that the goal of a properly functioning democracy is to help the U.S. In other ways, too, the operative concept of democracy is scarcely concealed.The lead think-piece in the NY Times on the death of Yasser Arafat opened by saying, "The post-Arafat era will be the latest test of a quintessentiallyAmerican article of faith: that elections provide legitimacy even to the frailest institutions." In the final paragraph, on the continuation page, we read that Washington "resisted new national elections among the Palestinians"because Arafat would win and gain "a fresher mandate" and elections "might help give credibility and authority to Hamas" as well. In other words, democracy is fine if the results come out the right way; otherwise, to the flames. To take just one crucial current example, a year ago, after other pretexts for invading Iraq had collapsed, Bush's speech writers had to come up with something to replace them. They settled on what the liberal press calls "the president's messianic vision to bring democracy" to Iraq, the Middle East, the whole world.The reactions were intriguing. They ranged from rapturous acclaim for the vision, which proved that this was the most noble war in history (DavidIgnatius, veteran Washington Post correspondent) to critics who agreed that the vision was noble and inspiring, but might be beyond our reach because Iraqi culture is just not ready for such progress towards our civilized values. We have to temper the messianic idealism of Bush and Blair with some sober realism, the London Financial Times advised. The interesting fact is that it was presupposed uncritically across the spectrum that the messianic vision must be the goal of the invasion, not this silly business about WMDs and al-Qaeda, no longer credible to elite opinion. What is the evidence that the U.S. and Britain are guided by the messianic vision? There is indeed a single piece of evidence: our leaders proclaimed it. What more could be needed? There is one sector of opinion that had a different view: the Iraqis. Just as the messianic vision was unveiled in Washington to reverent applause, a U.S.-run poll of Baghdadis was released. Some agreed with the near-unanimous stand of Western elite opinion that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy to Iraq. One percent. Five percent thought the goal was to help Iraqis. The majority assumed the obvious: the U.S. wants to control Iraq's resources and use its base there to reorganize the region in its interest. Baghdadis agree that there is a problem of cultural backwardness: in the West, not in Iraq. Actually,their views were more nuanced. Though 1 percent believed that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy, about half felt that the U.S. wanted democracy,but would not allow Iraqis to run their democracy "without U.S. pressure and influence." They understand the quintessentially American faith very well, perhaps because it was the quintessentially British faith while Britain's boot was on their necks. They don't have to know the history of Wilsonian idealism or Britain's noble counterpart or France's civilizing mission or the even more exalted vision of Japanese fascists and many others-probably also close to a historical universal. Their own experience is enough.
At the outset, I mentioned the notable successes of popular struggles in the past decades, very clear if we think about it a little, but rarely discussed, for reasons that are not hard to discern. Both recent history and public attitudes suggest some straightforward strategies for short-term activism on thepart of those who don't want to wait for China to save us from "ultimate doom."We enjoy great privilege and freedom, remarkable by comparative and historical standards. That legacy was not granted from above, it was won by dedicated struggle, which does not reduce to pushing a lever every few years. We can abandon that legacy and take the easy way of pessimism-everything is hopeless, so I'll quit. Or we can make use of that legacy to work to create-in partre-create-the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle. These are hardly radical ideas. They were articulated clearly, for example, by the leading 20th century social philosopher in the U.S., John Dewey, who pointed out that until "industrial feudalism" is replaced by "industrial democracy,"politics will remain "the shadow cast by big business over society." Dewey was as "American as apple pie," in the familiar phrase. He was in fact drawing from a long tradition of thought and action that had developed independently in working class culture from the origins of the industrial revolution. Such ideas remain just below the surface and can become a living part of our societies,cultures, and institutions. But like other victories for justice and freedom over the centuries, that will not happen by itself. One of the clearest lessons of history, including recent history, is that rights are not granted; they are won. The rest is up to us. ----
Raise Your Voice but Keep Your Head Down
By Michael Albert
I first met Ward Churchill when I was working at South End Press twenty five years ago and Ward submitted his first book which was about Marxism and Native Americans. It was a collection of essays which revealed why indigenous people distrust Marxists' cultural politics and community norms. I found Churchill's insights very compelling and became friends with him. I haven't seen Ward for years, but every so often we publish a piece by him on ZNet, where I now work. I offer all this in case anyone might feel our ties bias my viewpoint. I think the current controversy about Ward Churchill is a manipulative attack on free speech aimed at the whole left. I remember when Ward's post 9/11 essay came out. My reaction was to wish he hadn't written it. Ward took clear and cogent insights about the causes of international hostility to U.S. policies and weighed them down with not so clear and not so cogent non insights about the general population of the U.S. This kind of mix is always a problem, not least because astute but reactionary readers will try to dismiss the good by pointing to the bad. It doesn't matter that that is like trying to dismiss Newton's positive contributions about gravity on grounds that he believed in alchemy. When attacked with manipulative skill, tangential flaws can be used to undercut important truths.On a larger scale, that's what people are now trying to do to Ward himself, as well: dismiss him in toto, as a person and as an employee of a university, over a single essay some key parts of which were, I would agree, worthy of criticism.
There are two problems that should not be confused with one another. One problemis that no person should be seen as only the tangential worst that he or she does, even if there is a complete consensus about the failings, unlike in this case. Ward Churchill, for example, over the years, has contributed a great deal to the comprehension of cultural concerns and possibilities as well as to revealing the dynamics of repression and international relations. Ward is a prodigious writer and an effective speaker and organizer who has fought for just causes over and over. I don't agree with Ward's views on some health issues, on population issues, and on certain particular cultural matters, much less on the efficacy of what we might call political trash talk about strategies of struggle. But none of that has interfered with my liking Ward the person and feeling positive about his many contributions. Ward Churchill should not be judged solely on a single essay written the day after a gargantuan calamity, whatever anyone may think of that piece. Parts ought to be criticized, yes, but not the person who wrote it. It isthe difference between ad hominem and substantive argument. But second, and in this case more important, there is the little matter of free speech. Criticizing what someone says is not the same as writing them death threats and trying to terminate their career. The right-wing thugs who are after Ward Churchill are stalking horses for more astute and sober folks in the rear. The troops in the field are Ward's proximate problem, but the powers that be--at the University of Colorado, in the Colorado state government, in major media from Fox to The Wall Street Journal and from ABC and the New York Times, through to the halls of Washington DC--are ultimately far more important.
Are reactionary elites going to coercively remove Ward Churchill from U.S.academia? That needs to be prevented by all of us, including people annoyed at having to wage the free speech fight over words they do not like. Raise your voice. Why is it so hard for people, often on both sides of the left/right divide, to understand that what free speech means, if it means anything at all, is freedom to speak what others do not like or even cannot stand to hear? Tolerating what you like is hardly a major achievement. Hitler tolerated what he liked. So did Stalin. Idi Amin did too. So did Genghis Khan, the Shah, and HenryKissinger. Free speech only becomes an issue when someone says what others don't want to hear. Ward Churchill did that and so free speech is now an issue. If the wrong side wins, the precedent will be dangerous.This dynamic is not new but it is growing bolder. A recent report in the NewYork Times relayed how teachers in many states and counties in the U.S. are avoiding evolution by natural selection as a topic in their public school classes. The teachers fear fallout from fundamentalist parents, scared schoolboard members, and even politically cowed principals. Ward's fight and the fight of these teachers are logically of one cloth. The difference is that so far Ward has more guts. Ward used to tell me, after a visit, "Keep your head down." He had seen war at home and abroad and he knew what he was talking about. Now Ward is in another kind of war. I doubt any of these right-wing thugs will come after him bodily.But the harm they can do institutionally is bad enough. Keep your head down.
Why Ward Churchill? I think Ward would probably say it is because what he is doing is very effective. Ward may even see the attacks on his essay as evidence that the essay had great dissident merit. I think Ward would be wrong in that.Ward is being attacked not because he is the strongest possible target, but because he is one of the weakest possible targets. His essay is featured not because it was seriously threatening, but because it is easily ridiculed. Ward provided right wingers fodder they could manipulatively use. The right wingers are hoping that Ward has sufficiently irritated those who would otherwise defend him so that he is left without defenders. We can't allow that. The right is along way from going after stronger targets. Everyone on the left has to be sure no targets they do go after are vulnerable.
Since 9/11 at public talks I often compare George Bush and Osama bin Laden. I note that if you could have been a fly on the wall of the inner circle meeting rooms of the U.S. government leading up to the bombing of Afghanistan, I believe you would have heard no discussion, not even a minutes worth, taking into account the well being of the Afghan people in the face of possible massive starvation induced by our assault. Mass media at the time reported (on backpages only) that bombing Afghanistan could lead to five million deaths. No mainstream paper had a headline "U.S. contemplates killing millions to prove we are tough," though all knew it was true.I also indicate in the public talks that if I were to now have the opportunity to ask bin Laden how he could possibly have chosen to undertake the assault on the Twin Towers, despicable as this act was, I think he would probably understand the question and would reply, roughly, that he thought the gains (in trying to propel the U.S. into reactions that would provoke fundamentalism throughout the Mideast) were worth the price in human loss. Bin Laden, as evil as his designs surely were and are, would understand, that is, that there was something untoward that occurred on 9/11, piles of corpses, and that the negative deaths had to be weighed against what he saw as positive political gains. Sane people will reject his moral calculus, of course, but I am guessing that at least he had one. On the other hand, I say in these talks that if I were to now have the opportunity to ask Bush and Cheney how they could possibly have chosen to undertake the bombing of Afghanistan, I think they would not even understand the question. They would not see any need to weigh off benefits against costs because they saw no costs. For them the general estimates made by all responsible parties that literally millions of Afghans might suffer starvation if bombing were to commence counted for naught. For them, Afghans are like bugs outside our front door are for the rest of us. To Bush and Cheney Afghans are expendable. Bush and Cheney have no moral calculus. They reduce humans to the status of fleas. And then I say in these talks, if there is a deep hell for sinners surely Osama bin Laden is headed for at least its seventh floor down, but George Bush andDick Cheney are going to ride an elevator even further down to a deeper basement. Everyone at talks like this given in the U.S. understands these images and few have any problem with the harsh tone.
When I have given talks like this in Europe, however, I have been asked why I am alive. I was confused the first time I heard this question in France, and then in Belgium and Italy, and then I realized what they meant. "If the U.S. is as bad as it seems, why don't Bush and Co. eradicate people as radical and militant as you? That's what our really bad guys did here in Europe, after all." Well, the answer is that things in the U.S. are not that bad. Our fundamentalists can only pick on targets that are relatively weak and effectively repress them in states that are relatively congenial to right wing thuggery, and even then they can do so only in relatively limited ways, at least so far. But if we let our fundamentalists get away with that much, which is already more than bad enough, then it will be just an opening act. If they succeed at first, their efforts will expand. So why do O'Reilly and the Wall Street Journal pick on Ward? I think it's because his words can be made to seem indiscriminate, and indeed arguably were indiscriminate, and because as a result they felt he would have a hard timefighting back. Pick Ward off, then work on all those teachers still having the gall to tell students that Darwin knew what he was talking about, and then move on from there.
I don't want to rally around Ward Churchill's specific words. They aren't my cup of freedom. I want to rally around Ward Churchill's right to write whatever words he chooses. More, I want to fight for our need to have institutions and social conventions that respect and support dissidence rather than institutions and social conventions that try to extinguish dissidence at every opportunity. Indeed, when we attain that level of free and supported speech, we might have reason to claim a degree of civilization.
P.S. There are plenty of historical instances of individuals being judged for more than one dimension of their lives and writing, even when one dimension had no redeeming logic at all.
Here is another comment from W. Churchill(compliments of Mickey Z): "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."Whoops, that wasn't Ward Churchill, it was Sir Winston Churchill, the man U.S.News and World Report called "The Last Hero." Sir Winston also said: "I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes," and askedBritish scientists to cook up "a new kind of weather" for the citizens of Dresden.I wouldn't recommend taking Winston Churchill out of the library, but I would recommend strongly criticizing his vile words that had far fewer redeeming features than the worst things Ward Churchill has ever even fantasized saying.
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By Noam Chomsky
It goes without saying that what happens in the U.S. has an enormous impact on the rest of the world-and conversely: what happens in the rest of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the U.S., in several ways. First, it sets constraints on what even the most powerful state can do. Second, it influences the domestic U.S. component of "the second superpower," as the New York Times ruefully described world public opinion after the huge protests before the Iraq invasion. Those protests were a critically important historical event, not only because of their unprecedented scale, but also because it was the first time in hundreds of years of the history of Europe and its North American off shoots that a war was massively protested even before it was officially launched. We may recall, by comparison, the war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in1962, brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration campsor urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether "Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity" would escape "extinction" as "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size"-particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of the U.S. assault. When protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to the rest of Indochina-hideous crimes, but lesser ones. It's quite important to remember how much the world has changed since then.
As almost always, not as a result of gifts from benevolent leaders, but through deeply committed popular struggle, far too late in developing, but ultimately effective. One consequence was that the U.S. government could not declare a national emergency, which should have been healthy for the economy, as during World War II when public support was very high. Johnson had to fight a"guns-and-butter" war, buying off an unwilling population, harming the economy, ultimately leading the business classes to turn against the war as too costly, after the Tet Offensive of January 1968 showed that it would go on a long time.There were also concerns among U.S. elites about rising social and political consciousness stimulated by the activism of the 1960s, much of it reaction to the miserable crimes in Indochina, then at last arousing popular indignation. We learn from the last sections of the Pentagon Papers that after the Tet offensive, the military command was reluctant to agree to the president's call for further troop deployments, wanting to be sure that "sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control" in the U.S., and fearing that escalation might run the risk of "provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions."
The Reagan administration assumed that the problem of an independent, aroused population had been overcome and apparently planned to follow the Kennedy model of the early 1960s in Central America. But they backed off in the face of unanticipated public protest, turning instead to "clandestine war" employing murderous security forces and a huge international terror network. The consequences were terrible, but not as bad as B-52s and mass murder operations of the kind that were peaking when John Kerry was deep in the Mekong Delta in the South, by then largely devastated. The popular reaction to even the"clandestine war," so called, broke entirely new ground. The solidarity movements for Central America, now in many parts of the world, are again something new in Western history. State managers cannot fail to pay attention to such matters.
Routinely, a newly elected president requests an intelligence evaluation of the world situation. In1989, when Bush I took office, a part was leaked. It warned that when attacking"much weaker enemies"-the only sensible target-the U.S. must win "decisively and rapidly." Delay might "undercut political support," recognized to be thin, a great change since the Kennedy-Johnson years when the attack on Indochina, while never popular, aroused little reaction for many years. The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, not only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted. There are very important lessons here, which should always be uppermost in our minds-for the same reason they are suppressed in the elite culture. Without forgetting the very significant progress towards more civilized societies in past years, and the reasons for it, let's focus nevertheless on the notions of imperial sovereignty now being crafted. It is not surprising that as the population becomes more civilized, power systems become more extreme in their efforts to control the "great beast" (as the Founding Fathers called thepeople). And the great beast is indeed frightening. The conception of presidential sovereignty crafted by the statist reactionaries of the Bush administration is so extreme that it has drawn unprecedented criticism in the most sober and respected establishment circles. These ideas were transmitted to the president by the newly appointed attorney-general,Alberto Gonzales-who is depicted as a moderate in the press.
They are discussed by the respected constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson in the summer 2004 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Levinson writes that the conception is based on the principle, "There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos." The quote, Levinson comments, is from Carl Schmitt, the leading German philosopher of law during the Nazi period,who Levinson describes as "the true éminence grise of the Bush administration."The Administration, advised by Gonzales, has articulated "a view of presidential authority that is all too close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Führer," Levinson writes. One rarely hears such words from the heart of the establishment. The same issue of the journal carries an article by two prominent strategic analysts on the "transformation of the military," a central component of the new doctrines of imperial sovereignty: the rapid expansion of offensive weaponry, including militarization of space, and other measures designed to place the entire world at risk of instant annihilation. These have already elicited the anticipated reactions by Russia and recently China. The analysts conclude that these U.S. programs may lead to "ultimate doom." They express their hope that a coalition of peace-loving states will coalesce as a counter to U.S. militarism and aggressiveness, led by China. We've come to a pretty pass when such sentiments are voiced in sober respectable circles not given to hyperbole.
Going back to Gonzales, he transmitted to the president the conclusions of the Justice Department that the president has the authority to rescind the Geneva Conventions-the supreme law of the land, the foundation of modern international humanitarian law. Gonzales, who was then Bush's legal counsel, advised him that this would be a good idea because rescinding the Conventions "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution [of administration officials] under the War Crimes Act" of 1996, which carries the death penalty for "grave breaches" of Geneva Conventions. We can see on today's front pages why the Justice Department was right to be concerned that the president and his advisers might be subject to the death penalty under the laws passed by the Republican Congress in 1996-and under the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, if anyone took them seriously.
In early November, the NY Times featured a front-page story reporting the conquest of the Falluja General Hospital. It reported, "Patients and hospitalemployees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs." An accompanying photograph depicted the scene. That was presented as an important achievement."The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties." These "inflated" figures-inflated because our Leader so declares-were "inflaming opinion throughout the country" and the region, driving up "the political costs of the conflict." The word "conflict" is a common euphemism for U.S. aggression, as when we read on the same pages that the U.S.must now rebuild "what the conflict just destroyed": just "the conflict," with no agent, like a hurricane.
Let's go back to the NYT picture and story about the closing of the "propaganda weapon." There are some relevant documents, including the Geneva Conventions,which state: "Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict." So page one of the world's leading newspaper is cheerfully depicting war crimes for which the political leadership could be sentenced to death under U.S. law. The world's greatest newspaper also tells us that the U.S. military "achieved nearly all their objectives well ahead of schedule," leaving "much of the city in smoking ruins." But it was not a complete success. There is little evidence of dead "packrats" in their "warrens" or the streets, which remains "an enduring mystery." The embedded reporters did find a body of a dead woman, though it is"not known whether she was an Iraqi or a foreigner," apparently the only question that comes to mind. The front-page account quotes a Marine commander who says, "It ought to go down in the history books." Perhaps it should. If so, we know on just what page of history it will go down and who will be right beside it, along with those who praise or, for that matter, even tolerate it. At least, we know that if we are capable of honesty.
One might mention at least some of the recent counter parts that immediately come to mind, like the Russian destruction of Grozny ten years ago, a city of about the same size; or Srebrenica, almost universally described as "genocide" in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from a Dutch government report andother sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages and, when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs.
It could be argued that all this is irrelevant. The Nuremberg Tribunal, spelling out the UN Charter, declared that initiation of a war of aggression is "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that itcontains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Hence the war crimes in Falluja and Abu Ghraib, the doubling of acute malnutrition among children since the invasion (now at the level of Burundi, far higher than Haiti orUganda), and all the rest of the atrocities. Those judged to have played any role in the supreme crime-for example, the German Foreign Minister-were sentenced to death by hanging. The Tokyo Tribunal was far more severe.
There is a very important book on the topic by Canadian international lawyer Michael Mandel, who reviews in convincing detail how the powerful are self-immunized from international law. In fact, the Nuremberg Tribunal established this principle. To bring the Nazi criminals to justice, it was necessary to devise definitions of "war crime" and"crime against humanity." How this was done is explained by Telford Taylor,chief counsel for the prosecution and a distinguished international lawyer and historian: "Since both sides [in World War II] had played the terrible game of urban destruction-the Allies far more successfully-there was no basis for criminal charges against Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought.... Aerial bombardment had been used so extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that neither at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials." The operative definition of "crime" is: "Crime that you carried out, but we did not." To underscore the fact, Nazi war criminals were absolved if the defense could show that their U.S. counterparts carried out the same crimes. Taylor concludes that "to punish the foe-especially the vanquished foe-for conduct in which the enforcer nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves." That is correct, but the operative definition also discredits the laws themselves, along with all subsequent tribunals. Taylor provides this background as part of his explanation of why U.S. bombing inVietnam was not a war crime. His argument is plausible, further discrediting the laws themselves. Some of the subsequent judicial inquiries are discredited in perhaps even more extreme ways, such as the Yugoslavia vs. NATO case adjudicated by the International Court of Justice.
The U.S. was excused, correctly, on the basis of its argument that it is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Court in this case. The reason is that when the U.S. finally signed the Genocide Convention(which is at issue here) after 40 years, it did so with a reservation stating that it is not applicable to the United States. In an outraged comment on the efforts of Justice Department lawyers to demonstrate that the president has the right to authorize torture, Yale LawSchool Dean Harold Koh said, "The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide." The president's legal advisers, and the new attorney-general, should have little difficulty arguing that the president does indeed have that right-if the second superpower permits him to exercise it.
The sacred doctrine of self-immunization is sure to hold for the trial of Saddam Hussein, if it is ever held. We see that every time Bush, Blair, and other worthies in government and commentary lament over the terrible crimes of SaddamHussein, always bravely omitting the words: "with our help, because we did not care." Surely no tribunal will be permitted to address the fact that U.S.presidents from Kennedy until today, along with French presidents and Britishprime ministers, and Western businesses, have been complicit in Saddam's crimes, sometimes in horrendous ways, including current incumbents and their mentors. In setting up the Saddam tribunal, the State Department consulted U.S. legal expert professor Charif Bassiouni, recently quoted as saying: "All efforts are being made to have a tribunal whose judiciary is not independent but controlled, and by controlled I mean that the political manipulators of the tribunal have to make sure the U.S. and other western powers are not brought in cause. This makes it look like victor's vengeance: it makes it seem targeted, selected, unfair. It's a subterfuge." We hardly need to be told.
The pretext for U.S.-UK aggression in Iraq is what is called the right of
"anticipatory self-defense," now sometimes called "preemptive war" in aperversion of that concept. The right of anticipatory self-defense was affirmed officially in the Bush administration National Security Strategy of September2002, declaring Washington's right to resort to force to eliminate any potential challenge to its global dominance. The NSS was widely criticized among the foreign policy elite, beginning with an article in the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, warning that "the new imperial grand strategy" could be very dangerous. Criticism continued, again at an unprecedented level, but on narrow grounds-not that the doctrine itself was wrong, but rather its style and manner of presentation. Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright summed the criticism up accurately, also in FA. She pointed out that every president has such a doctrine in his back pocket, but it is foolish to smash people in the face with it and to implement it in a manner that will infuriate even allies. That is threatening to U.S. interests and therefore wrong. Albright knew, of course, that Clinton had a similar doctrine. The Clinton doctrine advocated "unilateral use of military power" to defend vital interests,such as "ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources," without even the pretexts that Bush and Blair devised. Taken literally, the Clinton doctrine is more expansive than Bush's NSS. But the more expansive Clinton doctrine was barely even reported. It was presented with the right style and implemented less brazenly. Henry Kissinger described the Bush doctrine as "revolutionary," pointing out that it undermines the 17th century Westphalian system of international order and of course the UN Charter and international law. He approved of the doctrine,but with reservations about style and tactics and with a crucial qualification:it cannot be "a universal principle available to every nation." Rather, the right of aggression must be reserved to the U.S., perhaps delegated to chosen clients. We must forcefully reject the principle of universality-that we applyto ourselves the same standards we do to others, more stringent ones if we are serious.
Kissinger is to be praised for his honesty in forthrightly articulating prevailing doctrine, usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured legalisms. He understands his educated audience. As he doubtless expected, there was no reaction. His understanding of his audience was illustrated again, rather dramatically, last May, when Kissinger-Nixon tapes were released, over Kissinger's strong objections. There was a report in the world's leading newspaper. It mentioned, in passing, the orders to bomb Cambodia that Kissinger transmitted from Nixon to the military commanders. In Kissinger's words, "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." It is rare for a call for horrendous war crimes-what we would not hesitate to call "genocide" if others were responsible-to be so stark and explicit. It would be interesting to see if there is anything like it in archival records. The publication elicited no reaction, refuting Dean Koh. Apparently, it is taken for granted in the eliteculture that the president and his National Security adviser do have the right to order genocide.
Imagine the reaction if the prosecutors at the Milosevic Tribunal could find anything remotely similar. They would be overjoyed, the trial would be over,Milosevic would receive several life sentences, the death penalty if theTribunal adhered to U.S. law. But that is them, not us. The principle of universality is the most elementary of moral truisms. It is the foundation of "just war theory" and of every system of morality deserving of anything but contempt. Rejection of such moral truisms is so deeply rooted in the intellectual culture as to be invisible. To illustrate again how deeply entrenched it is, let's return to the principle of "anticipatory self-defense,"adopted as legitimate by both political organizations in the U.S. and across virtually the entire spectrum of articulate opinion, apart from the usual margins. The principle has some immediate corollaries. If the U.S. is granted the right of "anticipatory self-defense" against terror, then, certainly, Cuba,Nicaragua, and a host of others have long been entitled to carry out terrorist acts within the U.S. because there is no doubt of its involvement in very serious terrorist attacks against them, extensively documented in impeccable sources and, in the case of Nicaragua, even condemned by the World Court and the Security Council (in two resolutions that the U.S. vetoed, with Britain loyally abstaining). The conclusion that Cuba and Nicaragua, among many others, have long had the right to carry out terrorist atrocities in the U.S. is of course utterly outrageous and advocated by no one. Thanks to our self-determined immunity from moral truisms, there is no fear that anyone will draw the outrageous conclusions.
There are still more outrageous ones. No one, for example, celebrates PearlHarbor day by applauding the fascist leaders of Imperial Japan. But by our standards, the bombing of military bases in the U.S. colonies of Hawaii and the Philippines seems rather innocuous. The Japanese leaders knew that B-17 FlyingFortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines and were surely familiar with the public discussions in the U.S. explaining how they could be used to incinerate Japan's wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases-"to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bombing attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps," as retired Air Force General Chennault recommended in 1940, a proposal that "simply delighted"President Roosevelt. That's a far more powerful justification for anticipatory self-defense than anything conjured up by Bush-Blair and their associates-and accepted, with tactical reservations, throughout the mainstream of articulate opinion. Examples can be enumerated virtually at random. To add one last one, consider the most recent act of NATO aggression prior to the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq:the bombing of Serbia in 1999. The justification is supposed to be that there were no diplomatic options and that it was necessary to stop on going genocide.It is not hard to evaluate these claims. As for diplomatic options, when the bombing began, there were two proposals on the table, a NATO and a Serbian proposal. After 78 days of bombing a compromise was reached between them-formally at least. It was immediately undermined byNATO. All of this quickly vanished into the mists of unacceptable history, to the limited extent that it was ever reported. What about ongoing genocide-to use the term that appeared hundreds of times inthe press as NATO geared up for war? That is unusually easy to investigate.There are two major documentary studies by the State Department, offered to justify the bombing, along with extensive documentary records from the OSCE,NATO, and other Western sources, and a detailed British Parliamentary Inquiry. All agree on the basic facts: the atrocities followed the bombing, they were not its cause. Furthermore, that was predicted by the NATO command, as General Wesley Clark informed the press right away and confirmed in more detail in his memoirs. The Milosevic indictment, issued during the bombing-surely as apropaganda weapon, despite implausible denials-and relying on U.S.-UK intelligence as announced at once, yields the same conclusion: virtually all the charges are post-bombing. Such annoyances are handled quite easily. The Western documentation is commonly expunged in the media and even scholarship. The chronology is regularly reversed, so that the anticipated consequences of the bombing are transmuted into its cause. There were indeed pre-bombing atrocities: about 2,000 were killed in the year before the March 1999 bombing, according to Western sources. The British, the most hawkish element of the coalition, made the astonishing claim-hard to believe just on the basis of the balance of forces-that until January 1999 mostof the killings were by the Albanian KLA guerrillas attacking civilians and soldiers in cross-border raids in the hope of eliciting a harsh Serbian response that could be used for propaganda purposes in the West, as they candidly reported, apparently with CIA support in the last months. Western sources indicate no substantial change until the bombing was announced and the monitors withdrawn a few days before the March bombing. In one of the few works of scholarship that even mentions the unusually rich documentary record, Nicholas Wheeler concludes that 500 of the 2,000 were killed by Serbs. He supports the bombing on the grounds that there would have been worse Serbian atrocities had NATO not bombed, eliciting the anticipated crimes. That's the most serious scholarly work. The press, and much of scholarship, chose the easier path of ignoring Western documentation and reversing the chronology.
It is all too easy to continue. But the-unpleasantly consistent-record leaves open a crucial question: how does the "great beast" react, the domestic U.S.component of the second superpower? The conventional answer is that the population approves of all of this, as just shown by the election of GeorgeBush. But as is often the case, a closer look is helpful. Each candidate received about 30 percent of the electoral vote, Bush a bit more,Kerry a bit less. General voting patterns were close to the 2000 elections; almost the same "red" and "blue" states, in the conventional metaphor. A few percent shift in vote would have meant that Kerry would be in the White House. Neither outcome could tell us much of any significance about the mood of the country, even of voters. Issues of substance were as usual kept out of the campaign or presented so obscurely that few could understand.
It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars. Their professional concern in their regular vocation is not to provide information. Their goal, rather, is deceit.But deceit is quite expensive: complex graphics showing the car with a sexy actor or a sports hero or climbing a sheer cliff or some other device to project an image that might deceive the consumer into buying this car instead of the virtually identical one produced by a competitor. The same is true of elections, run by the same public relations industry.
The goal is to project images, and deceive the public into accepting them, while sidelining issues-for good reasons. The population seems to grasp the nature of the performance. Right before the2000 elections, about 75 percent regarded it as virtually meaningless, some game involving rich contributors, party managers, and candidates who are trained to project images that conceal issues, but might pick up some votes. This is probably why the "stolen election" was an elite concern that did not seem to arouse much public interest; if elections have about as much significance as flipping a coin to pick the King, who cares if the coin was biased? Right before the 2004 election, about 10 percent of voters said their choice would based on the candidate's "agendas/ideas/platforms/goals"; 6 percent for Bush voters, 13 percent for Kerry voters. For the rest, the choice would be based on what the industry calls "qualities" and "values." Does the candidate project the image of a strong leader, the kind of guy you'd like to meet in a bar, someone who really cares about you and is just like you? It wouldn't besurprising to learn that Bush is carefully trained to say "nucular" and"misunderestimate" and the other silliness that intellectuals like to ridicule.That's probably about as real as the ranch constructed for him and the rest of the folksy manner. After all, it wouldn't do to present him as a spoiled frat boy from Yale who became rich and powerful thanks to his rich and powerful connections. Rather, the imagery has to be an ordinary guy just like us, who'll protect us, and who shares our "moral values," more so than the windsurfing goose-hunter who can be accused of faking his medals. Bush received a large majority among voters who said they were concerned primarily with "moral values" and "terrorism." We learn all we have to know about the moral values of the Administration by reading the pages of the business press the day after the election, describing the "euphoria" in boardrooms-not because CEOs are opposed to gay marriage. Or by observing the principle, hardly concealed, that the very serious costs incurred by the Bush planners, in their dedicated service to power and wealth, are to be transferred to our children and grandchildren, including fiscal costs, environmental destruction, and perhaps "ultimate doom." These are the moral values, loud and clear. The commitment of Bush planners to "defense against terrorism" is illustrated most dramatically, perhaps, by their decision to escalate the threat of terror ,as had been predicted even by their own intelligence agencies, not because they enjoy terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens, but because it is, plainly, a low priority for them-surely as compared with such goals as establishing secure military bases in a dependent client state at the heart of the world's energy resources, recognized since World War II as the "most strategically important area of the world," "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." It is critically important to ensure that "profits beyond the dreams of avarice"-to quote a leading history of the oil industry-flow in the right directions, i.e., to U.S. energy corporations, the Treasury Department, U.S. high tech (militarized) industry, huge construction firms, and so on.
Even more important is the stupendous strategic power. Having a firm hand on the spigot guarantees "veto power" over rivals, as George Kennan pointed out over 50 years ago. In the same vein, Zbigniew Brzezinski recently wrote that control over Iraq gives the U.S. "critical leverage" over European and Asian economies, a major concern of planners since World War II. Rivals are to keep to their "regional responsibilities" within the "overal lframework of order" managed by the U.S., as Kissinger instructed them in his "Year of Europe" address 30 years ago. That is even more urgent today, as the major rivals threaten to move in an independent course, maybe even united. The EU and China became each other's leading trading partners in 2004 and those ties are becoming tighter, including the world's second largest economy, Japan. Critical leverage is more important than ever for world control in the tripolar world that has been evolving for over 30 years. In comparison, the threat of terror is a minor consideration-though the threat is known to be awesome. Long before 9/11 it was understood that, sooner or later, the Jihadist terror organized by the U.S. and its allies in the 1980s was likely to combine with WMDs, with horrifying consequences. Notice that the crucial issue with regard to Middle East oil-about two-thirds of estimated world resources, and unusually easy to extract-is control, not access.U.S. policies towards the Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of oil and remain the same today when U.S. intelligence projects that the U.S.will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources. Policies would be likely to be about the same if the U.S. were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control the "stupendous source of strategic power" and to gain "profits beyond the dreams of avarice" would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes reflects similar concerns.
There are plenty of other illustrations of the same ranking of priorities. To mention one, the Treasury Department has a bureau (OFAC, Office of ForeignAssets Control) that is assigned the task of investigating suspicious financial transfers, a crucial component of the "war on terror." OFAC has 120 employees. Last April, the White House informed Congress that four are assigned to tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen are dedicated to enforcing the embargo against Cuba-incidentally, declared illegal by every relevant international organization, even the usually compliantOrganization of American States. From 1990 to 2003, OFAC informed Congress, there were 93 terrorism-related investigations with $9,000 in fines; and 11,000Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in fines. Why should the Treasury Department devote vastly more energy to strangling Cuba than to the war on terror? The basic reasons were explained in secret documents 40 years ago, when the Kennedy administration sought to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba, as historian (and Kennedy confidante) Arthur Schlesinger recounted in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who ran the terror operations as his highest priority. State Department planners warned that the "very existence"of the Castro regime is "successful defiance" of U.S. policies going back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; no Russians, but intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere. Furthermore, this successful defiance encourages others, who might be infected by the "Castro idea of taking matters into their own hands," Schlesinger had warned incoming President Kennedy, summarizing the report of the President's Latin American mission. These dangers are particularly grave, Schlesinger elaborated, when "the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes...and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living."
Let's return to the great beast. U.S. public opinion is studied with great care and depth. Studies released right before the election showed that those planning to vote for Bush assumed that the Republican Party shared their views, even though the Party explicitly rejected them. Pretty much the same was true of Kerry supporters. The major concerns of Kerry supporters were economy and healthcare and they assumed that he shared their views on these matters, just as Bush voters assumed, with comparable justification, that Republicans shared their views. In brief, those who bothered to vote mostly accepted the imagery concocted by the PR industry, which had only the vaguest resemblance to reality. That's apartfrom the more wealthy who tend to vote their class interests.
What about actual public attitudes? Again, right before the election, major studies were released reporting them-and we see right away why it is a good idea to base elections on deceit, very much as in the fake markets of the doctrinal system. Here are a few examples: A considerable majority believe that the U.S.should accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; sign the Kyoto protocols; allow the UN to take the lead in international crises (including security, reconstruction, and political transition in Iraq); rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the "war on terror," and use force only if there is "strong evidence that the country is in imminent danger of being attacked," thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on"pre-emptive war" and adopting a rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter. A majority even favor giving up the Security Council veto. Overwhelming majorities favor expansion of purely domestic programs: primarily health care (80 percent), but also aid to education and Social Security. Similar results have long been found in these studies, carried out by the most reputable organizations that monitor public opinion. In other mainstream polls, about 80 percent favor guaranteed health care even if it would raise taxes-a national health care system is likely to reduce expenses considerably, avoiding the heavy costs of bureaucracy, supervision, paperwork, etc., some of the factors that render the U.S. privatized system the most inefficient in the industrial world. Public opinion has been similar for a long time, with numbers varying depending on how questions are asked. The facts are sometimes discussed in the press, with public preferences noted, but dismissed as "politically impossible." That happened again on the eve of the 2004 elections. A few days before (October 31), the NY Times reported, "There is so little political support for government intervention in the health care market in the United States that Senator JohnKerry took pains in a recent presidential debate to say that his plan for expanding access to health insurance would not create a new government program"-what the majority want, so it appears. But it is politically impossible and there is too little political support, meaning that the insurance companies,HMOs, pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc., are opposed. It is notable that these views are held by people in virtual isolation. Their preferences do not enter into the political campaigns and only marginally into articulate opinion in media and journals. The same extends to other domains and raises important questions about a "democratic deficit" in the world's most important state, to adopt the phrase we use for others. What would the results of the election have been if the parties, either of them,had been willing to articulate people's concerns on the issues they regard asvitally important? Or if these issues could enter into public discussion within the mainstream? We can only speculate about that, but we do know that it does not happen and that the facts are scarcely even reported. It seems reasonable to suppose that fear of the great beast is rather deep.
The operative concept of democracy is revealed very clearly in other ways as well. Perhaps the most extraordinary was the distinction between Old and New Europe in the run-up to the Iraq war. The criterion for membership was so clear that it took real discipline to miss it. Old Europe-the bad guys-were the governments that took the same stand as the large majority of the population. New Europe-the exciting hope for a democratic future-were the Churchillian leaders like Berlusconi and Aznar who disregarded even larger majorities of the population and submissively took their orders from Crawford, Texas. The mostdramatic case was Turkey, where, to everyone's surprise, the government actually followed the will of 95 percent of the population. The official administration moderate, Colin Powell, immediately announced harsh punishment for this crime. Turkey was bitterly condemned in the national press for lacking "democratic credentials." The most extreme example was Paul Wolfowitz, who berated theTurkish military for not compelling the government to follow Washington's orders and demanded that they apologize and publicly recognize that the goal of a properly functioning democracy is to help the U.S. In other ways, too, the operative concept of democracy is scarcely concealed.The lead think-piece in the NY Times on the death of Yasser Arafat opened by saying, "The post-Arafat era will be the latest test of a quintessentiallyAmerican article of faith: that elections provide legitimacy even to the frailest institutions." In the final paragraph, on the continuation page, we read that Washington "resisted new national elections among the Palestinians"because Arafat would win and gain "a fresher mandate" and elections "might help give credibility and authority to Hamas" as well. In other words, democracy is fine if the results come out the right way; otherwise, to the flames. To take just one crucial current example, a year ago, after other pretexts for invading Iraq had collapsed, Bush's speech writers had to come up with something to replace them. They settled on what the liberal press calls "the president's messianic vision to bring democracy" to Iraq, the Middle East, the whole world.The reactions were intriguing. They ranged from rapturous acclaim for the vision, which proved that this was the most noble war in history (DavidIgnatius, veteran Washington Post correspondent) to critics who agreed that the vision was noble and inspiring, but might be beyond our reach because Iraqi culture is just not ready for such progress towards our civilized values. We have to temper the messianic idealism of Bush and Blair with some sober realism, the London Financial Times advised. The interesting fact is that it was presupposed uncritically across the spectrum that the messianic vision must be the goal of the invasion, not this silly business about WMDs and al-Qaeda, no longer credible to elite opinion. What is the evidence that the U.S. and Britain are guided by the messianic vision? There is indeed a single piece of evidence: our leaders proclaimed it. What more could be needed? There is one sector of opinion that had a different view: the Iraqis. Just as the messianic vision was unveiled in Washington to reverent applause, a U.S.-run poll of Baghdadis was released. Some agreed with the near-unanimous stand of Western elite opinion that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy to Iraq. One percent. Five percent thought the goal was to help Iraqis. The majority assumed the obvious: the U.S. wants to control Iraq's resources and use its base there to reorganize the region in its interest. Baghdadis agree that there is a problem of cultural backwardness: in the West, not in Iraq. Actually,their views were more nuanced. Though 1 percent believed that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy, about half felt that the U.S. wanted democracy,but would not allow Iraqis to run their democracy "without U.S. pressure and influence." They understand the quintessentially American faith very well, perhaps because it was the quintessentially British faith while Britain's boot was on their necks. They don't have to know the history of Wilsonian idealism or Britain's noble counterpart or France's civilizing mission or the even more exalted vision of Japanese fascists and many others-probably also close to a historical universal. Their own experience is enough.
At the outset, I mentioned the notable successes of popular struggles in the past decades, very clear if we think about it a little, but rarely discussed, for reasons that are not hard to discern. Both recent history and public attitudes suggest some straightforward strategies for short-term activism on thepart of those who don't want to wait for China to save us from "ultimate doom."We enjoy great privilege and freedom, remarkable by comparative and historical standards. That legacy was not granted from above, it was won by dedicated struggle, which does not reduce to pushing a lever every few years. We can abandon that legacy and take the easy way of pessimism-everything is hopeless, so I'll quit. Or we can make use of that legacy to work to create-in partre-create-the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle. These are hardly radical ideas. They were articulated clearly, for example, by the leading 20th century social philosopher in the U.S., John Dewey, who pointed out that until "industrial feudalism" is replaced by "industrial democracy,"politics will remain "the shadow cast by big business over society." Dewey was as "American as apple pie," in the familiar phrase. He was in fact drawing from a long tradition of thought and action that had developed independently in working class culture from the origins of the industrial revolution. Such ideas remain just below the surface and can become a living part of our societies,cultures, and institutions. But like other victories for justice and freedom over the centuries, that will not happen by itself. One of the clearest lessons of history, including recent history, is that rights are not granted; they are won. The rest is up to us. ----
Raise Your Voice but Keep Your Head Down
By Michael Albert
I first met Ward Churchill when I was working at South End Press twenty five years ago and Ward submitted his first book which was about Marxism and Native Americans. It was a collection of essays which revealed why indigenous people distrust Marxists' cultural politics and community norms. I found Churchill's insights very compelling and became friends with him. I haven't seen Ward for years, but every so often we publish a piece by him on ZNet, where I now work. I offer all this in case anyone might feel our ties bias my viewpoint. I think the current controversy about Ward Churchill is a manipulative attack on free speech aimed at the whole left. I remember when Ward's post 9/11 essay came out. My reaction was to wish he hadn't written it. Ward took clear and cogent insights about the causes of international hostility to U.S. policies and weighed them down with not so clear and not so cogent non insights about the general population of the U.S. This kind of mix is always a problem, not least because astute but reactionary readers will try to dismiss the good by pointing to the bad. It doesn't matter that that is like trying to dismiss Newton's positive contributions about gravity on grounds that he believed in alchemy. When attacked with manipulative skill, tangential flaws can be used to undercut important truths.On a larger scale, that's what people are now trying to do to Ward himself, as well: dismiss him in toto, as a person and as an employee of a university, over a single essay some key parts of which were, I would agree, worthy of criticism.
There are two problems that should not be confused with one another. One problemis that no person should be seen as only the tangential worst that he or she does, even if there is a complete consensus about the failings, unlike in this case. Ward Churchill, for example, over the years, has contributed a great deal to the comprehension of cultural concerns and possibilities as well as to revealing the dynamics of repression and international relations. Ward is a prodigious writer and an effective speaker and organizer who has fought for just causes over and over. I don't agree with Ward's views on some health issues, on population issues, and on certain particular cultural matters, much less on the efficacy of what we might call political trash talk about strategies of struggle. But none of that has interfered with my liking Ward the person and feeling positive about his many contributions. Ward Churchill should not be judged solely on a single essay written the day after a gargantuan calamity, whatever anyone may think of that piece. Parts ought to be criticized, yes, but not the person who wrote it. It isthe difference between ad hominem and substantive argument. But second, and in this case more important, there is the little matter of free speech. Criticizing what someone says is not the same as writing them death threats and trying to terminate their career. The right-wing thugs who are after Ward Churchill are stalking horses for more astute and sober folks in the rear. The troops in the field are Ward's proximate problem, but the powers that be--at the University of Colorado, in the Colorado state government, in major media from Fox to The Wall Street Journal and from ABC and the New York Times, through to the halls of Washington DC--are ultimately far more important.
Are reactionary elites going to coercively remove Ward Churchill from U.S.academia? That needs to be prevented by all of us, including people annoyed at having to wage the free speech fight over words they do not like. Raise your voice. Why is it so hard for people, often on both sides of the left/right divide, to understand that what free speech means, if it means anything at all, is freedom to speak what others do not like or even cannot stand to hear? Tolerating what you like is hardly a major achievement. Hitler tolerated what he liked. So did Stalin. Idi Amin did too. So did Genghis Khan, the Shah, and HenryKissinger. Free speech only becomes an issue when someone says what others don't want to hear. Ward Churchill did that and so free speech is now an issue. If the wrong side wins, the precedent will be dangerous.This dynamic is not new but it is growing bolder. A recent report in the NewYork Times relayed how teachers in many states and counties in the U.S. are avoiding evolution by natural selection as a topic in their public school classes. The teachers fear fallout from fundamentalist parents, scared schoolboard members, and even politically cowed principals. Ward's fight and the fight of these teachers are logically of one cloth. The difference is that so far Ward has more guts. Ward used to tell me, after a visit, "Keep your head down." He had seen war at home and abroad and he knew what he was talking about. Now Ward is in another kind of war. I doubt any of these right-wing thugs will come after him bodily.But the harm they can do institutionally is bad enough. Keep your head down.
Why Ward Churchill? I think Ward would probably say it is because what he is doing is very effective. Ward may even see the attacks on his essay as evidence that the essay had great dissident merit. I think Ward would be wrong in that.Ward is being attacked not because he is the strongest possible target, but because he is one of the weakest possible targets. His essay is featured not because it was seriously threatening, but because it is easily ridiculed. Ward provided right wingers fodder they could manipulatively use. The right wingers are hoping that Ward has sufficiently irritated those who would otherwise defend him so that he is left without defenders. We can't allow that. The right is along way from going after stronger targets. Everyone on the left has to be sure no targets they do go after are vulnerable.
Since 9/11 at public talks I often compare George Bush and Osama bin Laden. I note that if you could have been a fly on the wall of the inner circle meeting rooms of the U.S. government leading up to the bombing of Afghanistan, I believe you would have heard no discussion, not even a minutes worth, taking into account the well being of the Afghan people in the face of possible massive starvation induced by our assault. Mass media at the time reported (on backpages only) that bombing Afghanistan could lead to five million deaths. No mainstream paper had a headline "U.S. contemplates killing millions to prove we are tough," though all knew it was true.I also indicate in the public talks that if I were to now have the opportunity to ask bin Laden how he could possibly have chosen to undertake the assault on the Twin Towers, despicable as this act was, I think he would probably understand the question and would reply, roughly, that he thought the gains (in trying to propel the U.S. into reactions that would provoke fundamentalism throughout the Mideast) were worth the price in human loss. Bin Laden, as evil as his designs surely were and are, would understand, that is, that there was something untoward that occurred on 9/11, piles of corpses, and that the negative deaths had to be weighed against what he saw as positive political gains. Sane people will reject his moral calculus, of course, but I am guessing that at least he had one. On the other hand, I say in these talks that if I were to now have the opportunity to ask Bush and Cheney how they could possibly have chosen to undertake the bombing of Afghanistan, I think they would not even understand the question. They would not see any need to weigh off benefits against costs because they saw no costs. For them the general estimates made by all responsible parties that literally millions of Afghans might suffer starvation if bombing were to commence counted for naught. For them, Afghans are like bugs outside our front door are for the rest of us. To Bush and Cheney Afghans are expendable. Bush and Cheney have no moral calculus. They reduce humans to the status of fleas. And then I say in these talks, if there is a deep hell for sinners surely Osama bin Laden is headed for at least its seventh floor down, but George Bush andDick Cheney are going to ride an elevator even further down to a deeper basement. Everyone at talks like this given in the U.S. understands these images and few have any problem with the harsh tone.
When I have given talks like this in Europe, however, I have been asked why I am alive. I was confused the first time I heard this question in France, and then in Belgium and Italy, and then I realized what they meant. "If the U.S. is as bad as it seems, why don't Bush and Co. eradicate people as radical and militant as you? That's what our really bad guys did here in Europe, after all." Well, the answer is that things in the U.S. are not that bad. Our fundamentalists can only pick on targets that are relatively weak and effectively repress them in states that are relatively congenial to right wing thuggery, and even then they can do so only in relatively limited ways, at least so far. But if we let our fundamentalists get away with that much, which is already more than bad enough, then it will be just an opening act. If they succeed at first, their efforts will expand. So why do O'Reilly and the Wall Street Journal pick on Ward? I think it's because his words can be made to seem indiscriminate, and indeed arguably were indiscriminate, and because as a result they felt he would have a hard timefighting back. Pick Ward off, then work on all those teachers still having the gall to tell students that Darwin knew what he was talking about, and then move on from there.
I don't want to rally around Ward Churchill's specific words. They aren't my cup of freedom. I want to rally around Ward Churchill's right to write whatever words he chooses. More, I want to fight for our need to have institutions and social conventions that respect and support dissidence rather than institutions and social conventions that try to extinguish dissidence at every opportunity. Indeed, when we attain that level of free and supported speech, we might have reason to claim a degree of civilization.
P.S. There are plenty of historical instances of individuals being judged for more than one dimension of their lives and writing, even when one dimension had no redeeming logic at all.
Here is another comment from W. Churchill(compliments of Mickey Z): "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."Whoops, that wasn't Ward Churchill, it was Sir Winston Churchill, the man U.S.News and World Report called "The Last Hero." Sir Winston also said: "I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes," and askedBritish scientists to cook up "a new kind of weather" for the citizens of Dresden.I wouldn't recommend taking Winston Churchill out of the library, but I would recommend strongly criticizing his vile words that had far fewer redeeming features than the worst things Ward Churchill has ever even fantasized saying.
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posted by T. Scott Brineman at 8:36 AM
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