the tables turn, somewhat expectedly:
Rebels killed in clashes with Iranian forces this week had recently infiltrated border areas of the Islamic Republic carrying U.S.-made arms, an Iranian commander was quoted as saying on Thursday.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
the lines blur...:
An extraordinary claim that Israeli intelligence may have had a hand in an airline hijacking before sending in commandos to rescue the hostages at Entebbe was made to the Foreign Office. It came via David Colvin, the first secretary at the British embassy in Paris, according to a newly released National Archives file.
An extraordinary claim that Israeli intelligence may have had a hand in an airline hijacking before sending in commandos to rescue the hostages at Entebbe was made to the Foreign Office. It came via David Colvin, the first secretary at the British embassy in Paris, according to a newly released National Archives file.
one man's terrorist...:
In 1986, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose emotional invectives against "terrorists" were second to none, welcomed Abdul Haq, an Afghan rebel leader who admitted that he had ordered the planting of a bomb at Kabul airport in 1984 which killed at least 28 people. Such, then, were the scruples of cold-war anti-communists in late 20th century. As Anastasio Somoza had been "our son of a bitch", the Moujahedeen were now "our fanatic terrorists".
In 1986, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose emotional invectives against "terrorists" were second to none, welcomed Abdul Haq, an Afghan rebel leader who admitted that he had ordered the planting of a bomb at Kabul airport in 1984 which killed at least 28 people. Such, then, were the scruples of cold-war anti-communists in late 20th century. As Anastasio Somoza had been "our son of a bitch", the Moujahedeen were now "our fanatic terrorists".
monbiot on complacency and peak oil:
We don't need to invoke peak oil to produce an argument for cutting our use of transport fuel. But you might have imagined that the government would have shown just a little curiosity about whether or not its transport programme will bring the economy crashing down.
We don't need to invoke peak oil to produce an argument for cutting our use of transport fuel. But you might have imagined that the government would have shown just a little curiosity about whether or not its transport programme will bring the economy crashing down.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
After returning to Cambridge not too long ago, just as all underclassfolk were leaving, many friends have asked me what I learned/did/enjoyed in the three months in Nicaragua I substituted for my Harvard spring. I've found it nigh on impossible to 'summarize', let alone describe, my time abroad - not because the depth or awesomeness of the experience makes conveying it impossible (doubtless that's how some very nice people have interpreted my inability to list 'lessons learned'), but really only because a few sentences, well thought-out or not, can never do justice to a whole semester (whether in Managua or in Harvard Yard). For those reasons I think it may not be best to post here about what happened there - at the very least, I'd be 'forcing it', a habit which my campers last summer made me promise to kick. Furthermore, all that's relevant about my trip, in the cambridgecommon sense, will probably make itself explicit in the course of posting soon enough.
For example: my final paper for the program I was enrolled in tried to discuss the 'gutting' of politics that follows from today's forced coupling of 'democracy' and capitalism. I looked at the Free Trade Zone in Nicaragua with this theme in mind - in my opinion, the premises of these types of mega-Projects - the idea, however expressed, that development can be planned by an educated, 'expert' elite - make clear the emptiness of what passes for democracy today.[1] I recently came across this news story looking at past speeches given by America's commander-in-chief (excerpt below), notable not merely because his words are shown to be flatly absurd, but also because his posturing demonstrates excellently the weakness of this country's democratic fabric.
In a "Rose Garden news conference", Bush is quoted as saying (on Iraq):
Some might suggest that I've picked an easy target - that Bushisms are hardly indicative of a political climate in critical condition. However, I insist that the Democrats are minimally different, and excluding the fringe 'hopefuls without hope' (Gravel, Kucinich), politicking in the USA requires that certain assumptions central to the sanctity of the political arena remain unshaken, if ever even challenged. Most obviously these include the belief in the essential benevolence of US foreign policy (have Democrats read "Killing Hope", by William Blum?) [we could surely name others: that the American Dream is glorious and viable, that anti-capitalism is inadmissable, that we must not question our founding fathers, etc.] Paul Street, a radical historian and activist who writes regularly for ZNet, has made it his pre-election mission to discredit Obama (in particular) and the Democrats (more generally) on these points (see, for example this and this).
What we should be challenging, more broadly and more crucially, is the "rule of experts"-ideal ensconced in this political model. Its incompleteness facilitates the calcification of these aforementioned "Points of Unity". Politicians live a politician's life; they are funded by certain groups, educated in similar ways, and usually isolated from their constituents in very real ways (financially, spatially, racially, etc.). Yet they monopolize Power. This obviously defies democracy, since democracy most deeply demands the entering of everyone into politics; it is highly egalitarian, and ideally extremely hostile to this paternalism. No one should be empowered to decide for anybody else. Instead, we must all participate in the making of our world. In the case of the Free Trade Zone in Managua, for example, Nicaragua grants a group of dogmatically-educated technocrats (a man I interviewed had five textbooks on his desk, one of which was Mankiw's "Principles of Economics" in Spanish) the right to chart a course for the future of the hundreds of thousands of people directly or indirectly affected by their proposals. The structure of today's politics subscribes to this basic belief in the ability of a smart, well-educated class of people to direct a country. [2] Does the autocratic essence of this arrangement not trouble us? Surely we, even as Harvardians who (all other things being equal) benefit from this status quo, still understand the integrity of a radically democratic polity?
[1] In my opinion, development should never be understood as a technology of government, since that necessarily de-links it from politics. It is not simply the likely result of certain, correct set of policies, but most importantly a state of politics - a way of organizing government that empowers and liberates each citizen.
[2] Immanuel Wallerstein, pioneer of world-systems theory, traces the origins of this arrangement very persuasively: "Liberals put their faith in one key premise of Enlightenment thought: that rational thought and action were the path to salvation, that is, to progress. (...) It followed that ‘normal political change’ ought to follow the path indicated by those who were most rational—that is, most educated, most skilled, therefore most wise. These men could design the best paths of political change to pursue; that is, these men could indicate the necessary reforms to undertake and enact." (from this essay; PIN needed).
For example: my final paper for the program I was enrolled in tried to discuss the 'gutting' of politics that follows from today's forced coupling of 'democracy' and capitalism. I looked at the Free Trade Zone in Nicaragua with this theme in mind - in my opinion, the premises of these types of mega-Projects - the idea, however expressed, that development can be planned by an educated, 'expert' elite - make clear the emptiness of what passes for democracy today.[1] I recently came across this news story looking at past speeches given by America's commander-in-chief (excerpt below), notable not merely because his words are shown to be flatly absurd, but also because his posturing demonstrates excellently the weakness of this country's democratic fabric.
In a "Rose Garden news conference", Bush is quoted as saying (on Iraq):
"I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, `Get out, you know, it's just not worth it. Let's just leave.' I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well."Not only, as the article notes, does Bush totally misinterpret public polls, his analysis is pathetic. Those who say - "get out" - are not necessarily also arguing "it's just not worth it". His need to characterize those who advocate for immediate withdrawal as pessimistic nationalists, only lacking faith, willpower, and the manly courage of their fearless leader, reflects how American politics is framed to exclude viewpoints that are fundamentally distasteful. This is so obviously inimical to democracy, precisely because it prohibits productive, deliberative, and inclusive discourse. It can never be asked, within the limits of the paradigm that Bush defines here, whether people oppose the war for reasons more principled than blind nationalism. Perhaps because the war was completely illegal and illegitimate under international law? Perhaps because its architects manufactured, cooked, and fabricated the intelligence? Perhaps because of imperial designs?
Some might suggest that I've picked an easy target - that Bushisms are hardly indicative of a political climate in critical condition. However, I insist that the Democrats are minimally different, and excluding the fringe 'hopefuls without hope' (Gravel, Kucinich), politicking in the USA requires that certain assumptions central to the sanctity of the political arena remain unshaken, if ever even challenged. Most obviously these include the belief in the essential benevolence of US foreign policy (have Democrats read "Killing Hope", by William Blum?) [we could surely name others: that the American Dream is glorious and viable, that anti-capitalism is inadmissable, that we must not question our founding fathers, etc.] Paul Street, a radical historian and activist who writes regularly for ZNet, has made it his pre-election mission to discredit Obama (in particular) and the Democrats (more generally) on these points (see, for example this and this).
What we should be challenging, more broadly and more crucially, is the "rule of experts"-ideal ensconced in this political model. Its incompleteness facilitates the calcification of these aforementioned "Points of Unity". Politicians live a politician's life; they are funded by certain groups, educated in similar ways, and usually isolated from their constituents in very real ways (financially, spatially, racially, etc.). Yet they monopolize Power. This obviously defies democracy, since democracy most deeply demands the entering of everyone into politics; it is highly egalitarian, and ideally extremely hostile to this paternalism. No one should be empowered to decide for anybody else. Instead, we must all participate in the making of our world. In the case of the Free Trade Zone in Managua, for example, Nicaragua grants a group of dogmatically-educated technocrats (a man I interviewed had five textbooks on his desk, one of which was Mankiw's "Principles of Economics" in Spanish) the right to chart a course for the future of the hundreds of thousands of people directly or indirectly affected by their proposals. The structure of today's politics subscribes to this basic belief in the ability of a smart, well-educated class of people to direct a country. [2] Does the autocratic essence of this arrangement not trouble us? Surely we, even as Harvardians who (all other things being equal) benefit from this status quo, still understand the integrity of a radically democratic polity?
[1] In my opinion, development should never be understood as a technology of government, since that necessarily de-links it from politics. It is not simply the likely result of certain, correct set of policies, but most importantly a state of politics - a way of organizing government that empowers and liberates each citizen.
[2] Immanuel Wallerstein, pioneer of world-systems theory, traces the origins of this arrangement very persuasively: "Liberals put their faith in one key premise of Enlightenment thought: that rational thought and action were the path to salvation, that is, to progress. (...) It followed that ‘normal political change’ ought to follow the path indicated by those who were most rational—that is, most educated, most skilled, therefore most wise. These men could design the best paths of political change to pursue; that is, these men could indicate the necessary reforms to undertake and enact." (from this essay; PIN needed).
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
1948:
By the time he was half-way through the material in his cousin's attic Yaacov knew he had hit a gold mine. "More like a minefield," retorted his cousin Yigal. He could not understand Yaacov's excitement: why did he care about a bunch of old diaries left behind by his wife's father? The father had been an officer in the units that carried out military operations along the Palestine coast in May 1948. One of the entries detailed the frenzied events that ended with the slaughter of all the men and male teenagers in Fatima's village. A manic deputy commander, a very harsh battle the day before, and above all, the atypical decision of the villagers to stay and not run, as was usual in the hundreds of villages the troops had entered. Why he had recorded the description in his diary was a question that did not bother Yaacov for long. It was there, it was hot, and even 'sexy,' he told Yigal, and he hastened not only to Musalem, but also to the press.
(...) Finally he found the courage to look directly at Fatima's face. "I listened to the tape ... the one in which you talk." Fatima dropped her eyes. Here it comes, she thought. "I listened again and again. You say they piled the bodies, you never said they dug in the bodies. Did they dig holes? Did they throw the bodies into a mass grave"? Fatima did not answer. Ali seemed to awake from a dream or a nap:
"Did they, Mama?"
Of course they did not, but why should she tell this, her secret, to Yaacov; and what would happen to her beloved Ali if it all came out? The bulldozers needed only five to ten minutes to move the bodies into lorries, and Fatima, the best runner in her class, had followed them. Three miles she ran, and nearly collapsed, but then the vehicles stopped and the roaring bulldozers came in behind them. They excavated huge holes in the ground and shoveled the bodies into them, tidying the ground by running over it back and forth, back and forth. Years later, she found that they had planted pine trees over it, and the woods were named after the unit that had occupied her village and in memory of its own casualties in the conflict. Such pine trees became the recognized symbol of the recreation areas built over the ruined Palestinian villages of 1948.
By the time he was half-way through the material in his cousin's attic Yaacov knew he had hit a gold mine. "More like a minefield," retorted his cousin Yigal. He could not understand Yaacov's excitement: why did he care about a bunch of old diaries left behind by his wife's father? The father had been an officer in the units that carried out military operations along the Palestine coast in May 1948. One of the entries detailed the frenzied events that ended with the slaughter of all the men and male teenagers in Fatima's village. A manic deputy commander, a very harsh battle the day before, and above all, the atypical decision of the villagers to stay and not run, as was usual in the hundreds of villages the troops had entered. Why he had recorded the description in his diary was a question that did not bother Yaacov for long. It was there, it was hot, and even 'sexy,' he told Yigal, and he hastened not only to Musalem, but also to the press.
(...) Finally he found the courage to look directly at Fatima's face. "I listened to the tape ... the one in which you talk." Fatima dropped her eyes. Here it comes, she thought. "I listened again and again. You say they piled the bodies, you never said they dug in the bodies. Did they dig holes? Did they throw the bodies into a mass grave"? Fatima did not answer. Ali seemed to awake from a dream or a nap:
"Did they, Mama?"
Of course they did not, but why should she tell this, her secret, to Yaacov; and what would happen to her beloved Ali if it all came out? The bulldozers needed only five to ten minutes to move the bodies into lorries, and Fatima, the best runner in her class, had followed them. Three miles she ran, and nearly collapsed, but then the vehicles stopped and the roaring bulldozers came in behind them. They excavated huge holes in the ground and shoveled the bodies into them, tidying the ground by running over it back and forth, back and forth. Years later, she found that they had planted pine trees over it, and the woods were named after the unit that had occupied her village and in memory of its own casualties in the conflict. Such pine trees became the recognized symbol of the recreation areas built over the ruined Palestinian villages of 1948.
achievement-based rhetoric:
One week ago when I read in the newspaper about the achievements I tried to remove the fog from my eyes to see these achievements … they should be somewhere here or there but, sorry I can’t find any of these except infamous achievements like absence of electricity for four year ...
(...) But this crisis has become worse within last year, that our refrigerator turned to ordinary box to hide useless things, no pure water or any kind of water, the tap is always dry, the prices have been doubled within this year, no building has been raised, on the contrary there are many buildings have been destroyed, no plot of land has been distributed to solve the housing problems although Iraq has large empty land that transfers to shelters of terrorists. ...
One week ago when I read in the newspaper about the achievements I tried to remove the fog from my eyes to see these achievements … they should be somewhere here or there but, sorry I can’t find any of these except infamous achievements like absence of electricity for four year ...
(...) But this crisis has become worse within last year, that our refrigerator turned to ordinary box to hide useless things, no pure water or any kind of water, the tap is always dry, the prices have been doubled within this year, no building has been raised, on the contrary there are many buildings have been destroyed, no plot of land has been distributed to solve the housing problems although Iraq has large empty land that transfers to shelters of terrorists. ...
extremism in pakistan:
From the vantage of the cosmopolitan capital, Islamabad, Pakistan is one of the most rapidly growing economies in Asia. But Swat, home to 1.5 million, is a reminder that the frontier has long been deprived of that wealth. The gradual death of an agrarian way of life in Swat, following increased mechanization and a series of land reforms that undercut sharecropping, has promoted the wealth of a few at the expense of thousands. With little local industry, residents of Swat have some of the lowest incomes per day in the province, a formula for discontent.
(...) Local officials in Swat complain they haven't received development funds from the federal government in more than two years. "If I had money, I would give [the city] a vision for development. But I don't have any money," says a frustrated Jamal Nasir Khan, a mayor of Swat based in Saidu Sharif, the district capital. Mr. Khan says he'd like to build more schools and health facilities for the area's population, 49 percent of whom live below the poverty line and 61 percent of whom are illiterate.
(...) Although NWFP has some of the highest rates of poverty, illiteracy, and violence in Pakistan, it received just $34 million in federal aid and development grants in 2006, compared with Punjab's $210 million – even though Punjab, by many accounts, already has the healthiest economic indicators in Pakistan.
(...) "In some villages, the largest employer is the jihadis," Mr. Bengali adds.
(...) Swat is a startling example. Because unemployment is high, Fazlullah is able to summon hundreds of volunteers – who receive meals in exchange – to help build his new madrassah in Mingora, the city of 175,000 where he lives. Situated along the Swat River, the large religious school will someday offer poor students of this city, which has no university, a free education in Fazlullah's ultraconservative brand of Islam. Aides say proudly it will cost nearly $2.5 million, suggesting that while Fazlullah's audiences may generally be poor, he has wealthy patrons.
(...) "Tell me, what wrong have I done? I am preaching religion, and religion is not terrorism," Fazlullah says in a brick room on the site of his new madrassah, surrounded by bearded aides.
(...) "There is no local justice, no economic justice. Corruption is a bigger problem than you imagine," says Shah Salam Khan, a lawyer of the district high court, mentioning payoffs to judges and police.
(...) "These people remain a good tool of policy in the region, in Afghanistan … as well as internally," says Ijaz Khattak, a professor at the University of Peshawar. "If other liberal parties become stronger, they will challenge the regime. These people are there to stop them."
From the vantage of the cosmopolitan capital, Islamabad, Pakistan is one of the most rapidly growing economies in Asia. But Swat, home to 1.5 million, is a reminder that the frontier has long been deprived of that wealth. The gradual death of an agrarian way of life in Swat, following increased mechanization and a series of land reforms that undercut sharecropping, has promoted the wealth of a few at the expense of thousands. With little local industry, residents of Swat have some of the lowest incomes per day in the province, a formula for discontent.
(...) Local officials in Swat complain they haven't received development funds from the federal government in more than two years. "If I had money, I would give [the city] a vision for development. But I don't have any money," says a frustrated Jamal Nasir Khan, a mayor of Swat based in Saidu Sharif, the district capital. Mr. Khan says he'd like to build more schools and health facilities for the area's population, 49 percent of whom live below the poverty line and 61 percent of whom are illiterate.
(...) Although NWFP has some of the highest rates of poverty, illiteracy, and violence in Pakistan, it received just $34 million in federal aid and development grants in 2006, compared with Punjab's $210 million – even though Punjab, by many accounts, already has the healthiest economic indicators in Pakistan.
(...) "In some villages, the largest employer is the jihadis," Mr. Bengali adds.
(...) Swat is a startling example. Because unemployment is high, Fazlullah is able to summon hundreds of volunteers – who receive meals in exchange – to help build his new madrassah in Mingora, the city of 175,000 where he lives. Situated along the Swat River, the large religious school will someday offer poor students of this city, which has no university, a free education in Fazlullah's ultraconservative brand of Islam. Aides say proudly it will cost nearly $2.5 million, suggesting that while Fazlullah's audiences may generally be poor, he has wealthy patrons.
(...) "Tell me, what wrong have I done? I am preaching religion, and religion is not terrorism," Fazlullah says in a brick room on the site of his new madrassah, surrounded by bearded aides.
(...) "There is no local justice, no economic justice. Corruption is a bigger problem than you imagine," says Shah Salam Khan, a lawyer of the district high court, mentioning payoffs to judges and police.
(...) "These people remain a good tool of policy in the region, in Afghanistan … as well as internally," says Ijaz Khattak, a professor at the University of Peshawar. "If other liberal parties become stronger, they will challenge the regime. These people are there to stop them."
the democratic mandate:
"Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq," he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. "I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course."
(...) "A lot of Americans want to know, you know, when?" he said at a Rose Garden news conference Thursday. "When are you going to win?" Also in that session, Bush said: "I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, `Get out, you know, it's just not worth it. Let's just leave.' I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well." In fact, polls show Americans do not disagree, and that leaving — not winning — is their main goal.
(...) In one released Friday by CBS and the New York Times, 63 percent supported a troop withdrawal timetable of sometime next year. Another earlier this month from USA Today and Gallup found 59 percent backing a withdrawal deadline that the U.S. should stick to no matter what's happening in Iraq. Bush aides say poll questions are asked so many ways, and often so imprecisely, that it is impossible to conclude that most Americans really want to get out.
(...) Terrorists remain dangerous, and fighting them in Iraq is key to neutralizing the threat, he says. "It's hard for some Americans to see that, I fully understand it," Bush said. "I see it clearly."
(...) It was the same the next day in Michigan. "If you make decisions based upon the latest opinion poll, you won't be thinking long-term strategy on behalf of the American people," the president said.
(...) "This is a very tricky thing in our politics. We want to think that we want our leaders to stand up to public opinion. But we also like to think of ourselves as being in a democracy where we are listened to," Fields said. "He risks either the notion of being thought out of touch ... or to be thought simply duplicitous." [how absurd! we want our leaders to stand up to public opinion!? in other words, declare themselves intentionally anti-democratic?]
"Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq," he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. "I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course."
(...) "A lot of Americans want to know, you know, when?" he said at a Rose Garden news conference Thursday. "When are you going to win?" Also in that session, Bush said: "I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, `Get out, you know, it's just not worth it. Let's just leave.' I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well." In fact, polls show Americans do not disagree, and that leaving — not winning — is their main goal.
(...) In one released Friday by CBS and the New York Times, 63 percent supported a troop withdrawal timetable of sometime next year. Another earlier this month from USA Today and Gallup found 59 percent backing a withdrawal deadline that the U.S. should stick to no matter what's happening in Iraq. Bush aides say poll questions are asked so many ways, and often so imprecisely, that it is impossible to conclude that most Americans really want to get out.
(...) Terrorists remain dangerous, and fighting them in Iraq is key to neutralizing the threat, he says. "It's hard for some Americans to see that, I fully understand it," Bush said. "I see it clearly."
(...) It was the same the next day in Michigan. "If you make decisions based upon the latest opinion poll, you won't be thinking long-term strategy on behalf of the American people," the president said.
(...) "This is a very tricky thing in our politics. We want to think that we want our leaders to stand up to public opinion. But we also like to think of ourselves as being in a democracy where we are listened to," Fields said. "He risks either the notion of being thought out of touch ... or to be thought simply duplicitous." [how absurd! we want our leaders to stand up to public opinion!? in other words, declare themselves intentionally anti-democratic?]
Monday, May 28, 2007
myth of preemption in '67, and more generally excellent background on israeli occupation and aggression:
The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin's (1977 - 83) August, 1982 speech saying: "In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
(...) General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: "Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it."
(...) Other Israeli leaders and generals voiced the same sentiment that in June, 1967 Israel was under no threat, yet preemptively undertook a war of aggression falsely telling the world it had no other choice. It had a clear one. It could have chosen peace, but didn't and never did earlier or since to the present because discretionary aggressive wars of choice serve Israeli interests as they do its US imperial partner.
(...) In 1967, it was the Jewish state's third major aggressive war that grew out of the founding of Zionism in 1897 by Theodor Herzl aiming to establish a permanent Jewish state. He planned the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, became its first president, and envisioned a permanent Jewish homeland in Palestine justified by what Professor Norman Finkelstein called the "colossal hoax" Jews got there first establishing their ancestral home on "a land without people for a people without land." It became the state of Israel in May, 1948 during the new Jewish state's first preemptive aggressive so-called "War of Independence" Palestinians call "al-Nakba" - the catastrophe.
(...) Israel used what it got then for its one-sided blitzkrieg ending June 10 with Israeli forces completing the job left unfinished following their 1948 "War of Independence." They took the remaining 22% of ancient Palestine comprising Gaza and the West Bank, and on June 6, 2007 will have held the territories for 40 repressive years of the longest continuous illegal occupation in the world under which Palestinians (including Israeli citizens and Palestinian Christians) lost their personal, political and economic freedoms under Israeli rule affording those rights only to Jews.
(...) Tiny Israel today (with six million Jews) gets more US financial aid (in all direct and indirect forms) than all other countries in the world combined.
(...) It must include a demand that the world community of nations ends the "last taboo" of silence when it comes to Israel. It must be willing to expose and denounce what no longer can be tolerated that current South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils calls worse than apartheid saying Israel "behav(es) like fascists when they do certain things (like attacking Palestinians with helicopter gunships and tanks)." What better time to do what Kasrils is surely calling for than on the 40th anniversary of the longest continuous occupation in the world that no longer can be tolerated.
The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin's (1977 - 83) August, 1982 speech saying: "In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
(...) General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: "Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it."
(...) Other Israeli leaders and generals voiced the same sentiment that in June, 1967 Israel was under no threat, yet preemptively undertook a war of aggression falsely telling the world it had no other choice. It had a clear one. It could have chosen peace, but didn't and never did earlier or since to the present because discretionary aggressive wars of choice serve Israeli interests as they do its US imperial partner.
(...) In 1967, it was the Jewish state's third major aggressive war that grew out of the founding of Zionism in 1897 by Theodor Herzl aiming to establish a permanent Jewish state. He planned the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, became its first president, and envisioned a permanent Jewish homeland in Palestine justified by what Professor Norman Finkelstein called the "colossal hoax" Jews got there first establishing their ancestral home on "a land without people for a people without land." It became the state of Israel in May, 1948 during the new Jewish state's first preemptive aggressive so-called "War of Independence" Palestinians call "al-Nakba" - the catastrophe.
(...) Israel used what it got then for its one-sided blitzkrieg ending June 10 with Israeli forces completing the job left unfinished following their 1948 "War of Independence." They took the remaining 22% of ancient Palestine comprising Gaza and the West Bank, and on June 6, 2007 will have held the territories for 40 repressive years of the longest continuous illegal occupation in the world under which Palestinians (including Israeli citizens and Palestinian Christians) lost their personal, political and economic freedoms under Israeli rule affording those rights only to Jews.
(...) Tiny Israel today (with six million Jews) gets more US financial aid (in all direct and indirect forms) than all other countries in the world combined.
(...) It must include a demand that the world community of nations ends the "last taboo" of silence when it comes to Israel. It must be willing to expose and denounce what no longer can be tolerated that current South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils calls worse than apartheid saying Israel "behav(es) like fascists when they do certain things (like attacking Palestinians with helicopter gunships and tanks)." What better time to do what Kasrils is surely calling for than on the 40th anniversary of the longest continuous occupation in the world that no longer can be tolerated.
green day and class:
More importantly, how many of them will hear the issue of class talked about for perhaps the first time in their lives? In a country that is perpetually mis-labeled as middle class, the blackout on the growing ranks of the working poor is not an accident. We hear about a prosperous economy, rags to riches stories and the exploits of the rich and famous. We don’t hear about the millions without health care, the growing amount of McJobs and the biggest wealth gap in the industrialized world. For a young Green Day fan, angry and alienated at the world, this song may actually be something to identify with.
More importantly, how many of them will hear the issue of class talked about for perhaps the first time in their lives? In a country that is perpetually mis-labeled as middle class, the blackout on the growing ranks of the working poor is not an accident. We hear about a prosperous economy, rags to riches stories and the exploits of the rich and famous. We don’t hear about the millions without health care, the growing amount of McJobs and the biggest wealth gap in the industrialized world. For a young Green Day fan, angry and alienated at the world, this song may actually be something to identify with.
imperial interventionism:
The UN estimates that 3 million to 4 million Congolese have been killed, compared with the estimated 200,000 civilian deaths in Darfur. A peace deal agreed in December 2002 has never been adhered to, and atrocities have been particularly well documented in the province of Kivu - carried out by paramilitary organisations with strong governmental links. In the last month alone, thousands of civilians have been killed in heavy fighting between rebel and government forces vying for control of an area north of Goma, and the UN reckons that another 50,000 have been made refugees.
(...) How curious, then, that so much more attention has been focused on Darfur than Congo. There are no pressure groups of any note that draw attention to the Congolese situation. In the media there is barely a word. The politicians are silent. Yet if ever there were a case for the outside world to intervene on humanitarian grounds alone - "liberal interventionism" - then surely this is it.
(...) The key difference between the two situations lies in the racial and ethnic composition of the perceived victims and perpetrators. In Congo, black Africans are killing other black Africans in a way that is difficult for outsiders to identify with. The turmoil there can in that sense be regarded as a narrowly African affair. In Darfur the fighting is portrayed as a war between black Africans, rightly or wrongly regarded as the victims, and "Arabs", widely regarded as the perpetrators of the killings. In practice these neat racial categories are highly indistinct, but it is through such a prism that the conflict is generally viewed.
(...) Humanitarian concern among policymakers in Washington is ultimately self-interested. The United States is willing to impose new sanctions on the Sudan government if the latter refuses to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force, but it is no coincidence that Sudan, unlike Congo, has oil - lots of it - and strong links with China, a country the US regards as a strategic rival in the struggle for Africa's natural resources; only last week Amnesty International reported that Beijing has illicitly supplied Khartoum with large quantities of arms.
(...) Highly seductive though the rhetoric of liberal interventionism may be, it is always towards hubris and disaster that it leads its willing partners.
The UN estimates that 3 million to 4 million Congolese have been killed, compared with the estimated 200,000 civilian deaths in Darfur. A peace deal agreed in December 2002 has never been adhered to, and atrocities have been particularly well documented in the province of Kivu - carried out by paramilitary organisations with strong governmental links. In the last month alone, thousands of civilians have been killed in heavy fighting between rebel and government forces vying for control of an area north of Goma, and the UN reckons that another 50,000 have been made refugees.
(...) How curious, then, that so much more attention has been focused on Darfur than Congo. There are no pressure groups of any note that draw attention to the Congolese situation. In the media there is barely a word. The politicians are silent. Yet if ever there were a case for the outside world to intervene on humanitarian grounds alone - "liberal interventionism" - then surely this is it.
(...) The key difference between the two situations lies in the racial and ethnic composition of the perceived victims and perpetrators. In Congo, black Africans are killing other black Africans in a way that is difficult for outsiders to identify with. The turmoil there can in that sense be regarded as a narrowly African affair. In Darfur the fighting is portrayed as a war between black Africans, rightly or wrongly regarded as the victims, and "Arabs", widely regarded as the perpetrators of the killings. In practice these neat racial categories are highly indistinct, but it is through such a prism that the conflict is generally viewed.
(...) Humanitarian concern among policymakers in Washington is ultimately self-interested. The United States is willing to impose new sanctions on the Sudan government if the latter refuses to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force, but it is no coincidence that Sudan, unlike Congo, has oil - lots of it - and strong links with China, a country the US regards as a strategic rival in the struggle for Africa's natural resources; only last week Amnesty International reported that Beijing has illicitly supplied Khartoum with large quantities of arms.
(...) Highly seductive though the rhetoric of liberal interventionism may be, it is always towards hubris and disaster that it leads its willing partners.
pesticides in central america:
Many had spent their lives toiling on banana plantations that U.S. companies operated in this region some 30 years ago. By day, the workers had harvested bunches of fruit to ship to North American tables. At night, some had sprayed pesticide into the warm, humid air to protect the trees from insects and rot.
(...) The U.S. firms that sold and used the pesticide have never faced a U.S. jury trial over its use abroad. Last month, a Los Angeles attorney named Juan J. Dominguez stood before a sea of nearly 800 dark, hard faces and predicted that the day of reckoning was at hand. "We are fighting multinational corporations. They are giants. And they are going to fall!" Dominguez thundered. The crowd exploded. They leapt to their feet, waved their hats, shook fists in the air. "Viva! Viva!" they chanted.
(...) Chaney linked Dominguez's case with four other pending lawsuits in Los Angeles involving sterility claims on behalf of more than 3,000 former banana workers from Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and Panama. In addition to Dow and Dole, Del Monte Fresh Produce Inc., Chiquita Brands Inc. and Shell Oil Co. are named as defendants in those cases.
(...) Dominguez and Miller filed legal briefs citing old corporate documents which, they said, showed that Dole officials were aware of the dangers. In a 1978 memo, a top Dole official warned that implementing all the procedures in a guide for safe use of DBCP was "well nigh impossible."
(...) Dominguez has registered about 12,000 clients in Nicaragua alone. Worldwide, the number of possible clients is estimated to be hundreds of thousands.
(...) The region around Chinandega has long been dominated by agriculture, producing cotton, sugar cane and other crops. For decades, growers -- from both the United States and Nicaragua -- sprayed DDT, DBCP and other highly toxic pesticides, many linked to developmental or health problems.
(...) "Those bananas weren't for us," she said. "But so many of us have died."
Many had spent their lives toiling on banana plantations that U.S. companies operated in this region some 30 years ago. By day, the workers had harvested bunches of fruit to ship to North American tables. At night, some had sprayed pesticide into the warm, humid air to protect the trees from insects and rot.
(...) The U.S. firms that sold and used the pesticide have never faced a U.S. jury trial over its use abroad. Last month, a Los Angeles attorney named Juan J. Dominguez stood before a sea of nearly 800 dark, hard faces and predicted that the day of reckoning was at hand. "We are fighting multinational corporations. They are giants. And they are going to fall!" Dominguez thundered. The crowd exploded. They leapt to their feet, waved their hats, shook fists in the air. "Viva! Viva!" they chanted.
(...) Chaney linked Dominguez's case with four other pending lawsuits in Los Angeles involving sterility claims on behalf of more than 3,000 former banana workers from Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and Panama. In addition to Dow and Dole, Del Monte Fresh Produce Inc., Chiquita Brands Inc. and Shell Oil Co. are named as defendants in those cases.
(...) Dominguez and Miller filed legal briefs citing old corporate documents which, they said, showed that Dole officials were aware of the dangers. In a 1978 memo, a top Dole official warned that implementing all the procedures in a guide for safe use of DBCP was "well nigh impossible."
(...) Dominguez has registered about 12,000 clients in Nicaragua alone. Worldwide, the number of possible clients is estimated to be hundreds of thousands.
(...) The region around Chinandega has long been dominated by agriculture, producing cotton, sugar cane and other crops. For decades, growers -- from both the United States and Nicaragua -- sprayed DDT, DBCP and other highly toxic pesticides, many linked to developmental or health problems.
(...) "Those bananas weren't for us," she said. "But so many of us have died."
america at the movies:
Robert Eaglestaff, the principal of the American Indian Heritage School in Seattle, commented at the time that portraying a love story between John Smith and Pocahontas was like "trying to teach about the Holocaust and putting in a nice story about Anne Frank falling in love with a German officer.'"
(...) THIS HIGHLIGHTS an aspect of the Hollywood system--that popular animated, fantasy or science fiction films can become vehicles for dealing with controversial subjects while a suffocating conformity is imposed on most high-profile mainstream films as studios search for the next mega-blockbuster.
Robert Eaglestaff, the principal of the American Indian Heritage School in Seattle, commented at the time that portraying a love story between John Smith and Pocahontas was like "trying to teach about the Holocaust and putting in a nice story about Anne Frank falling in love with a German officer.'"
(...) THIS HIGHLIGHTS an aspect of the Hollywood system--that popular animated, fantasy or science fiction films can become vehicles for dealing with controversial subjects while a suffocating conformity is imposed on most high-profile mainstream films as studios search for the next mega-blockbuster.
abukhalil on the lebanese shelling:
I have never felt more isolation as someone who speaks out on Palestine as I have felt in the past few days. There is an overwhelming, unanimous competition by people and organizations to rally behind the Lebanese army and to pay tribute to the troops. Not a single political party in Lebanon has spoken out, none, against the indiscriminate shelling of the refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. Hizbullah has taken a position in support of the army, as has the Lebanese Communist Party, and other organizations. Of course we didn't expect anything different from the March 14 movement, but among the opposition it has been a competition of who can show more support. General 'Awn, the main Christian opposition leader has been totally, unconditionally supportive of the Lebanese army and its resort to what is called the "decisive military option" -- which means to allow the Lebanese army to enter or invade the camps.
(...) What is so ironic is yes, they said all that and they said more. They used the same words uttered by the Israelis when they bombed the refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. It's the same language the US uses in Afghanistan and Iraq: 'They are hiding behind civilians. They are using civilians as human shields. Hitting civilians is a mistake, the army cares about the civilian population.' All this propaganda of collateral damage is being used by the government.
(...) You look at Gaza and you find that the American funded, financed and armed militias of Muhammad Dahlan and [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas were tasked with fighting and killing other Palestinians. You look at Lebanon today and you find a Lebanese government financed, funded and armed by the American government and they are doing the same. Palestine and Lebanon have become more important not so much because of any attention that the US administration is willing to pay to those places, but particularly because of the failure of the American project in Iraq. So with victory eluding Bush in Iraq there is a desperate attempt to make some progress -- to use that cliché -- somewhere other than Iraq. And the places favored are Palestine and Lebanon because in those places there are US-armed and financed puppet militias that the US can use against its enemies and the enemies of Israel.
I have never felt more isolation as someone who speaks out on Palestine as I have felt in the past few days. There is an overwhelming, unanimous competition by people and organizations to rally behind the Lebanese army and to pay tribute to the troops. Not a single political party in Lebanon has spoken out, none, against the indiscriminate shelling of the refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. Hizbullah has taken a position in support of the army, as has the Lebanese Communist Party, and other organizations. Of course we didn't expect anything different from the March 14 movement, but among the opposition it has been a competition of who can show more support. General 'Awn, the main Christian opposition leader has been totally, unconditionally supportive of the Lebanese army and its resort to what is called the "decisive military option" -- which means to allow the Lebanese army to enter or invade the camps.
(...) What is so ironic is yes, they said all that and they said more. They used the same words uttered by the Israelis when they bombed the refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. It's the same language the US uses in Afghanistan and Iraq: 'They are hiding behind civilians. They are using civilians as human shields. Hitting civilians is a mistake, the army cares about the civilian population.' All this propaganda of collateral damage is being used by the government.
(...) You look at Gaza and you find that the American funded, financed and armed militias of Muhammad Dahlan and [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas were tasked with fighting and killing other Palestinians. You look at Lebanon today and you find a Lebanese government financed, funded and armed by the American government and they are doing the same. Palestine and Lebanon have become more important not so much because of any attention that the US administration is willing to pay to those places, but particularly because of the failure of the American project in Iraq. So with victory eluding Bush in Iraq there is a desperate attempt to make some progress -- to use that cliché -- somewhere other than Iraq. And the places favored are Palestine and Lebanon because in those places there are US-armed and financed puppet militias that the US can use against its enemies and the enemies of Israel.
fisk in lebanon:
The Lebanese soldiers claim they try never to hurt civilians (I can think of another army which says that!), but did so many Palestinians have to be killed or wounded for the crimes of a few, some - we do not know how many - not even from "Palestine" but from Syria or Yemen or Saudi Arabia? Just behind me was the checkpoint where the gunmen of Chaker el-Absi (born Jericho 1955, later a MiG pilot in Libya, according to his brother in Jordan) butchered four soldiers at the weekend, slitting their throats and leaving their severed heads on the road.
(...) But victimhood - and let us not doubt the integrity or the dignity of that victimhood - has become almost a pit for the Palestinians, into which they have fallen. The catastrophe of their eviction and flight from Palestine in 1948, their near-destruction in the Lebanese civil war, their cruel suffering at the hands of Israeli invaders - the massacre of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 where 1,700 were slaughtered - and now this, have sealed these people into a permanent prison of suffering.
The Lebanese soldiers claim they try never to hurt civilians (I can think of another army which says that!), but did so many Palestinians have to be killed or wounded for the crimes of a few, some - we do not know how many - not even from "Palestine" but from Syria or Yemen or Saudi Arabia? Just behind me was the checkpoint where the gunmen of Chaker el-Absi (born Jericho 1955, later a MiG pilot in Libya, according to his brother in Jordan) butchered four soldiers at the weekend, slitting their throats and leaving their severed heads on the road.
(...) But victimhood - and let us not doubt the integrity or the dignity of that victimhood - has become almost a pit for the Palestinians, into which they have fallen. The catastrophe of their eviction and flight from Palestine in 1948, their near-destruction in the Lebanese civil war, their cruel suffering at the hands of Israeli invaders - the massacre of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 where 1,700 were slaughtered - and now this, have sealed these people into a permanent prison of suffering.
street on post-WW2 imperial imperative:
The Bible is loaded with such material. Some of the worst is found in the Book of Revelation, which portrays a final and bloody battle between the forces of Good – led by a Warrior Christ that would make George the Crusader Bush II proud – and the forces of evil. Concluding with great birds of prey feasting on the flesh of vanquished non-Christians, it is “a story of God’s ruthless, terrifying and violent power unleashed on nonbelievers” (p. 5).
(...) Edwards is angry at George W. Bush and the neoconservatives for weakening America’s power by perverting the basic goodness of U.S. foreign policy once epitomized and advanced by Cold War leaders like “the great Dean Acheson,” “President Harry Truman,” “General George Marshall,” and George Kennan. Edwards is upset because Bush II’s toxic combination of corruption, arrogance, and crass, incompetent imperialism has “risk[ed] squandering our [U.S.] prestige” and “strained our military to the breaking point.” Edwards told the CFR that Bush’s Iraq policy has compromised the United States’ global “force structure,” and “distracted” the nation from the broader tasks of global management, which require the direction that only America can provide.
(...) Edwards is hardly alone among the Democrats in heaping praise on U.S. Cold War foreign policy makers and in framing Bush’s foreign policy negatively against the noble background of the “Greatest Generation.” You could find similar phrases and formulations in the phrases in the foreign policy speeches of Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama. They all read from the same doctrinal bible when it comes to post-WWII America’s glorious and benevolent role in the world.
(...) In his ponderous, power-worshipping campaign book The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s obedient reverence for the great white masters of the past peaks with the rise of the glorious Cold War. He “ponders” with a sense of awe “the work” of Cold War architect George Kennan, which he contrasts with what he sees as the repulsive nihilism of the 1960s New Left. He applauds the wonderful (for him) “post-[World War Two] leadership of president Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall and George Kennan” for “craft[ing] …a…new…order that married [Woodrow] Wilsonian idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of American power with a humility regarding America’s ability to control events around the world.” He praises the architects of the Cold War for checking the Soviet Union’s nefarious designs “to spread [in Obama’s words] its totalitarian brand of communism.”
(...) The problem with this mainstream Democratic take on post-WWII U.S. foreign policy is the same problem that Hedges finds with many Christians’ take on the Bible. It’s a whitewash. It leaves out the full and ugly truth. It’s Orwellian. It airbrushes out terrible facts that don’t fit the happy, nationally narcissistic story line.
(...) There’s a lot to delete. The post-World War II era and the Cold War began, after all, with Truman’s perpetration of one of the greatest war crimes in history. He ordered the monumentally mass-murderous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki well after U.S. authorities knew that Japan was decisively defeated and looking to surrender. He did so with full knowledge that the Japanese only required assurances that the institution of the Emperor could remain intact in postwar Japan – a condition Truman met after but not before dropping the bombs. His decision to use the atom bomb (which he called the “greatest thing in the world” after radioactively murdering tens of thousands of “Jap” civilians) was about advancing U.S. global power vis-Ã -vis Russia and the rest of the world in the post-WWII era. It was not about saving American or Japanese lives.
(...) “Greatest Generation” U.S. planners and policymakers restored fascist power structures in “liberated” Italy and intervened for elite class rule and against popular social revolution in the Balkans. In proclaiming the militantly U.S.-globalist Truman Doctrine, Washington smeared democratic struggles in Greece as a Soviet “Communist” export. It did this to “Scare the Hell out of the American people” (in the wonderful terminology of US Senator Arthur Vandenburg) so they would accept the permanent imperial re-militarization of U.S. society and policy – helping thereby to sustain and expand the powerful “military-industrial complex” that Dwight Eisenhower left the White House warning Americans about.”
(...) Consistent with that goal, Truman and two key members of his cabinet, including Edwards’ hero Marshall, “systematically deceived Congress and the public into thinking that the USSR was about to launch World Wear III with an invasion of Europe in 1948.” They did this, Frank Kofsky has shown, in order “to push through their foreign policy program, inaugurate a huge military buildup and bail out the near bankrupt airline industry” (Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 [New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 1993]. It was another early example of the well-known Washington game of “threat inflation.”
(...) From the Truman Doctrine on, the basic Cold War pattern was set for the U.S. subversion of democracy and national independence across the planet. Some of the most egregious subsequent examples came in Iran (CIA coup 1953), Guatemala (U.S.-sponsored and directed coup and military takeover 1954), Chile (U.S.-sponsored coup and military takeover, 1973), Indonesia (U.S. sponsored military takeover 1965) are just some of the more spectacular examples in a long list. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, leftists and intellectuals paid with their lives for the brutal U.S. covert war against independent development and social justice in the Third World. The Bushcons did not invent U.S.-imposed “regime change.”
(...) In making the case for a bloody U.S. invasion of Haiti, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing argued that the effective meaning of the Monroe Doctrine was simply that “the United States considers its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end”
(...) The illusory specter of the Soviet quest for “world domination” and the related “domino theory” were always covers for the real specter haunting “Greatest Generation” planners: the danger that peripheral states would follow their own road of development, outside and against the selfish “needs’ of the inherently noble industrial-democratic (state-capitalist) core, run by and for the United States.
(...) we can consult an interesting formulation from Obama’s wise “Wilsonian” hero Kennan. As Kennan explained in Policy Planning Study 23, crafted for the State Department planning staff in 1948: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…to do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives...We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better...We should not hesitate before police repression by the local government” (Quoted in Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, pp. 9-11).
(...) The Marshall Plan, the U.S. reconstruction project for the war-ravaged European core, was loaded with selfish imperial content. U.S. assistance was predicated on investment and purchasing rules that favored U.S.-based corporations and on the political marginalization of Left parties that had gained prestige leading the fight against fascist forces the U.S. had initially appeased and even welcomed as counters to the European Left. U.S. forces stood ready to intervene directly in the event of Left electoral victories in Western Europe. Throughout the war against fascism – a war won primarily by the workers, soldiers and peasants of the Soviet Union – U.S. planners worked behind the scenes to make sure that the U.S. would emerge as the unchallenged hegemon in the world investment and trading system.
(...) Expressing Washington’s timeworn determination to “choose military solutions when diplomatic ones were possible,” it led to masses of unnecessary deaths. Thousands of ethnic Albanians paid a severe price when the U.S.-ordered bombing escalated the pace of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Prior to the air attack, the U.S. and NATO and presented flatly impossible “peace” terms at Rambouillet. Clinton’s proposal to Serbia included NATO control of all of Kosovo and NATO military occupation of all the rest of Yugoslavia. The Serbian National Assembly’s counterproposal for negotiations leading to wide-ranging Kosovo autonomy was ignored by U.S. policymakers and dominant U.S. war media. The bombing of Yugoslavia, including the Serbian capital Belgrade, produced untold civilian casualties. Weapons containing depleted uranium were used to terrible effect against the Serbian people.
(...) Beneath claims of humanitarian and anti-terrorist concern, Edwards does not call for full withdrawal from the occupied nation or the region. He proposes to adjust, not reject Washington’s imperial presence in the super-strategic because fabulously oil-rich Middle East. The U.S., he feels, must stand ready to strike in and against a region we claim the special right to police and colonize for a reason neither he nor any of the Democratic candidates except Kucinch and Gravel can acknowledge given dominant Washington and media “taboos.”
(...) Smith’s analysis also provides some context for Edwards’ comment that “the worst thing about [Bush’s] Global War on Terror approach is that it has backfired – our military has been strained to the breaking point and the threat from terrorism grows.” That is an unfortunate formulation. The worst thing about Bush’s foreign policy is that it has killed more than 700,000 Iraqis, a not-so-little detail that helps explain why millions around the world and especially in the Middle East will not mourn when the United States is hit by its next 9/11 – an eventuality that the Clintons are now saying will “probably” happen shortly “after the next president is sworn in” (Karen Tumulty and James Carney, “Hillary Pushes Back,” Time, May 7, 2007, p. 43).
The Bible is loaded with such material. Some of the worst is found in the Book of Revelation, which portrays a final and bloody battle between the forces of Good – led by a Warrior Christ that would make George the Crusader Bush II proud – and the forces of evil. Concluding with great birds of prey feasting on the flesh of vanquished non-Christians, it is “a story of God’s ruthless, terrifying and violent power unleashed on nonbelievers” (p. 5).
(...) Edwards is angry at George W. Bush and the neoconservatives for weakening America’s power by perverting the basic goodness of U.S. foreign policy once epitomized and advanced by Cold War leaders like “the great Dean Acheson,” “President Harry Truman,” “General George Marshall,” and George Kennan. Edwards is upset because Bush II’s toxic combination of corruption, arrogance, and crass, incompetent imperialism has “risk[ed] squandering our [U.S.] prestige” and “strained our military to the breaking point.” Edwards told the CFR that Bush’s Iraq policy has compromised the United States’ global “force structure,” and “distracted” the nation from the broader tasks of global management, which require the direction that only America can provide.
(...) Edwards is hardly alone among the Democrats in heaping praise on U.S. Cold War foreign policy makers and in framing Bush’s foreign policy negatively against the noble background of the “Greatest Generation.” You could find similar phrases and formulations in the phrases in the foreign policy speeches of Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama. They all read from the same doctrinal bible when it comes to post-WWII America’s glorious and benevolent role in the world.
(...) In his ponderous, power-worshipping campaign book The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s obedient reverence for the great white masters of the past peaks with the rise of the glorious Cold War. He “ponders” with a sense of awe “the work” of Cold War architect George Kennan, which he contrasts with what he sees as the repulsive nihilism of the 1960s New Left. He applauds the wonderful (for him) “post-[World War Two] leadership of president Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall and George Kennan” for “craft[ing] …a…new…order that married [Woodrow] Wilsonian idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of American power with a humility regarding America’s ability to control events around the world.” He praises the architects of the Cold War for checking the Soviet Union’s nefarious designs “to spread [in Obama’s words] its totalitarian brand of communism.”
(...) The problem with this mainstream Democratic take on post-WWII U.S. foreign policy is the same problem that Hedges finds with many Christians’ take on the Bible. It’s a whitewash. It leaves out the full and ugly truth. It’s Orwellian. It airbrushes out terrible facts that don’t fit the happy, nationally narcissistic story line.
(...) There’s a lot to delete. The post-World War II era and the Cold War began, after all, with Truman’s perpetration of one of the greatest war crimes in history. He ordered the monumentally mass-murderous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki well after U.S. authorities knew that Japan was decisively defeated and looking to surrender. He did so with full knowledge that the Japanese only required assurances that the institution of the Emperor could remain intact in postwar Japan – a condition Truman met after but not before dropping the bombs. His decision to use the atom bomb (which he called the “greatest thing in the world” after radioactively murdering tens of thousands of “Jap” civilians) was about advancing U.S. global power vis-Ã -vis Russia and the rest of the world in the post-WWII era. It was not about saving American or Japanese lives.
(...) “Greatest Generation” U.S. planners and policymakers restored fascist power structures in “liberated” Italy and intervened for elite class rule and against popular social revolution in the Balkans. In proclaiming the militantly U.S.-globalist Truman Doctrine, Washington smeared democratic struggles in Greece as a Soviet “Communist” export. It did this to “Scare the Hell out of the American people” (in the wonderful terminology of US Senator Arthur Vandenburg) so they would accept the permanent imperial re-militarization of U.S. society and policy – helping thereby to sustain and expand the powerful “military-industrial complex” that Dwight Eisenhower left the White House warning Americans about.”
(...) Consistent with that goal, Truman and two key members of his cabinet, including Edwards’ hero Marshall, “systematically deceived Congress and the public into thinking that the USSR was about to launch World Wear III with an invasion of Europe in 1948.” They did this, Frank Kofsky has shown, in order “to push through their foreign policy program, inaugurate a huge military buildup and bail out the near bankrupt airline industry” (Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 [New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 1993]. It was another early example of the well-known Washington game of “threat inflation.”
(...) From the Truman Doctrine on, the basic Cold War pattern was set for the U.S. subversion of democracy and national independence across the planet. Some of the most egregious subsequent examples came in Iran (CIA coup 1953), Guatemala (U.S.-sponsored and directed coup and military takeover 1954), Chile (U.S.-sponsored coup and military takeover, 1973), Indonesia (U.S. sponsored military takeover 1965) are just some of the more spectacular examples in a long list. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, leftists and intellectuals paid with their lives for the brutal U.S. covert war against independent development and social justice in the Third World. The Bushcons did not invent U.S.-imposed “regime change.”
(...) In making the case for a bloody U.S. invasion of Haiti, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing argued that the effective meaning of the Monroe Doctrine was simply that “the United States considers its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end”
(...) The illusory specter of the Soviet quest for “world domination” and the related “domino theory” were always covers for the real specter haunting “Greatest Generation” planners: the danger that peripheral states would follow their own road of development, outside and against the selfish “needs’ of the inherently noble industrial-democratic (state-capitalist) core, run by and for the United States.
(...) we can consult an interesting formulation from Obama’s wise “Wilsonian” hero Kennan. As Kennan explained in Policy Planning Study 23, crafted for the State Department planning staff in 1948: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…to do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives...We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better...We should not hesitate before police repression by the local government” (Quoted in Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, pp. 9-11).
(...) The Marshall Plan, the U.S. reconstruction project for the war-ravaged European core, was loaded with selfish imperial content. U.S. assistance was predicated on investment and purchasing rules that favored U.S.-based corporations and on the political marginalization of Left parties that had gained prestige leading the fight against fascist forces the U.S. had initially appeased and even welcomed as counters to the European Left. U.S. forces stood ready to intervene directly in the event of Left electoral victories in Western Europe. Throughout the war against fascism – a war won primarily by the workers, soldiers and peasants of the Soviet Union – U.S. planners worked behind the scenes to make sure that the U.S. would emerge as the unchallenged hegemon in the world investment and trading system.
(...) Expressing Washington’s timeworn determination to “choose military solutions when diplomatic ones were possible,” it led to masses of unnecessary deaths. Thousands of ethnic Albanians paid a severe price when the U.S.-ordered bombing escalated the pace of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Prior to the air attack, the U.S. and NATO and presented flatly impossible “peace” terms at Rambouillet. Clinton’s proposal to Serbia included NATO control of all of Kosovo and NATO military occupation of all the rest of Yugoslavia. The Serbian National Assembly’s counterproposal for negotiations leading to wide-ranging Kosovo autonomy was ignored by U.S. policymakers and dominant U.S. war media. The bombing of Yugoslavia, including the Serbian capital Belgrade, produced untold civilian casualties. Weapons containing depleted uranium were used to terrible effect against the Serbian people.
(...) Beneath claims of humanitarian and anti-terrorist concern, Edwards does not call for full withdrawal from the occupied nation or the region. He proposes to adjust, not reject Washington’s imperial presence in the super-strategic because fabulously oil-rich Middle East. The U.S., he feels, must stand ready to strike in and against a region we claim the special right to police and colonize for a reason neither he nor any of the Democratic candidates except Kucinch and Gravel can acknowledge given dominant Washington and media “taboos.”
(...) Smith’s analysis also provides some context for Edwards’ comment that “the worst thing about [Bush’s] Global War on Terror approach is that it has backfired – our military has been strained to the breaking point and the threat from terrorism grows.” That is an unfortunate formulation. The worst thing about Bush’s foreign policy is that it has killed more than 700,000 Iraqis, a not-so-little detail that helps explain why millions around the world and especially in the Middle East will not mourn when the United States is hit by its next 9/11 – an eventuality that the Clintons are now saying will “probably” happen shortly “after the next president is sworn in” (Karen Tumulty and James Carney, “Hillary Pushes Back,” Time, May 7, 2007, p. 43).
sadr, sectarianism, withdrawal:
An account given Pentagon officials by a military officer recently returned from Iraq suggests that Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province, who have generally reflected the views of the Sunni armed resistance there, are open to working with Sadr.
(...) Sadr's aides say he was encouraged to launch the new cross-sectarian initiative by the increasingly violent opposition from nationalist Sunni insurgents to the jihadists aligned with al Qaeda. One of his top aides, Ahmed Shaibani, recalled that the George W. Bush administration was arguing that a timetable was unacceptable because of the danger of al Qaeda taking advantage of a withdrawal. Shaibani told Raghavan that sectarian peace could be advanced if both Sadr's Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgent groups could unite to weaken al Qaeda.
(...) The demonstration not only showed that Sadr could mobilize crowds comparable to the largest ever seen in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, but also made clear Sadr's commitment to transcending sectarian interests. The demonstrators carried Iraqi flags instead of pictures of Sadr or other Shiite symbols. It also included a small contingent of members of the Sunni-based Islamic Party of Iraq.
(...) a Navy Seal special operations officer recently returned from eight months in Anbar province, who discussed the situation there with high-ranking Pentagon officials at the end of April, suggests that that the views of Sunni leaders are quite compatible with those of Sadr. A source familiar with the officer's account said the Sunni Sheiks in Anbar have been telling U.S. commanders that the United States must withdraw its troops, and that the Sunnis know how to handle both al Qaeda and the Shiites.
(...) Sadr's project for a Sunni-Shiite united front against both al Qaeda and U.S. occupation offers a potential basis for an eventual settlement of the sectarian civil war in Iraq as well as for U.S. withdrawal. But it could also be the basis for a new and more deadly phase of fighting if Sadr returns once more to military resistance.
An account given Pentagon officials by a military officer recently returned from Iraq suggests that Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province, who have generally reflected the views of the Sunni armed resistance there, are open to working with Sadr.
(...) Sadr's aides say he was encouraged to launch the new cross-sectarian initiative by the increasingly violent opposition from nationalist Sunni insurgents to the jihadists aligned with al Qaeda. One of his top aides, Ahmed Shaibani, recalled that the George W. Bush administration was arguing that a timetable was unacceptable because of the danger of al Qaeda taking advantage of a withdrawal. Shaibani told Raghavan that sectarian peace could be advanced if both Sadr's Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgent groups could unite to weaken al Qaeda.
(...) The demonstration not only showed that Sadr could mobilize crowds comparable to the largest ever seen in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, but also made clear Sadr's commitment to transcending sectarian interests. The demonstrators carried Iraqi flags instead of pictures of Sadr or other Shiite symbols. It also included a small contingent of members of the Sunni-based Islamic Party of Iraq.
(...) a Navy Seal special operations officer recently returned from eight months in Anbar province, who discussed the situation there with high-ranking Pentagon officials at the end of April, suggests that that the views of Sunni leaders are quite compatible with those of Sadr. A source familiar with the officer's account said the Sunni Sheiks in Anbar have been telling U.S. commanders that the United States must withdraw its troops, and that the Sunnis know how to handle both al Qaeda and the Shiites.
(...) Sadr's project for a Sunni-Shiite united front against both al Qaeda and U.S. occupation offers a potential basis for an eventual settlement of the sectarian civil war in Iraq as well as for U.S. withdrawal. But it could also be the basis for a new and more deadly phase of fighting if Sadr returns once more to military resistance.
parenti on globalization, free trade:
The goal of the transnational corporation is to become truly transnational, poised above the sovereign power of any particular nation, while being served by the sovereign powers of all nations. Cyril Siewert, chief financial officer of Colgate Palmolive Company, could have been speaking for all transnationals when he remarked, “The United States doesn’t have an automatic call on our [corporation’s] resources. There is no mindset that puts this country first.”[i]
(...) Not one of GATT’s five hundred pages of rules and restrictions are directed against private corporations; all are against governments. Signatory governments must lower tariffs, end farm subsidies, treat foreign companies the same as domestic ones, honor all corporate patent claims, and obey the rulings of a permanent elite bureaucracy, the WTO. Should a country refuse to change its laws when a WTO panel so dictates, the WTO can impose fines or international trade sanctions, depriving the resistant country of needed markets and materials.[ii]
(...) It has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food. It has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby fo
od. It has eliminated the ban in various countries on asbestos, and on fuel-economy and emission standards for motor vehicles. And it has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban on endangered-species products. The European Union’s prohibition on the importation of hormone-ridden U.S. beef had overwhelming popular support throughout Europe, but a three-member WTO panel decided the ban was an illegal restraint on trade. The decision on beef put in jeopardy a host of other food import regulations based on health concerns. The WTO overturned a portion of the U.S. Clean Air Act banning certain additives in gasoline because it interfered with imports from foreign refineries. And the WTO overturned that portion of the U.S. Endangered Species Act forbidding the import of shrimp caught with nets that failed to protect sea turtles.[iii] [the cha-ching of democracy!]
(...) Free trade is not fair trade; it benefits strong nations at the expense of weaker ones, and rich interests at the expense of the rest of us. Globalization means turning the clock back on many twentieth-century reforms: no freedom to boycott products, no prohibitions against child labor, no guaranteed living wage or benefits, no public services that might conceivably compete with private services, no health and safety protections that might cut into corporate profits.[iv]
(...) In this way agribusiness can better penetrate locally self-sufficient communities and monopolize their resources. Ralph Nader gives the example of the neem tree, whose extracts contain natural pesticidal and medicinal properties. Cultivated for centuries in India, the tree attracted the attention of various pharmaceutical companies, who filed monopoly patents, causing mass protests by Indian farmers. As dictated by the WTO, the pharmaceuticals now have exclusive control over the marketing of neem tree products, a ruling that is being reluctantly enforced in India. Tens of thousands of erstwhile independent farmers must now work for the powerful pharmaceuticals on profit-gorging terms set by the companies.
(...) If the current behavior of the rich countries is anything to go by, globalization simply means the breaking down of the borders of countries so that those with the capital and the goods will be free to dominate the markets.[vi]
(...) Under free-trade agreements like General Agreements on Trade and Services (GATS) and Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), all public services are put at risk. A public service can be charged with causing “lost market opportunities” for business, or creating an unfair subsidy. To offer one instance: the single-payer automobile insurance program proposed by the province of Ontario, Canada, was declared “unfair competition.” Ontario could have its public auto insurance only if it paid U.S. insurance companies what they estimated would be their present and future losses in Ontario auto insurance sales, a prohibitive cost for the province. Thus the citizens of Ontario were not allowed to exercise their democratic sovereign right to institute an alternative not-for-profit auto insurance system. In another case, United Postal Service charged the Canadian Post Office for “lost market opportunities,” which means that under free trade accords, the Canadian Post Office would have to compensate UPS for all the business that UPS thinks it would have had if there were no public postal service. The Canadian postal workers union has challenged the case in court, arguing that the agreement violates the Canadian Constitution.
(...) International free trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA have hastened the corporate acquisition of local markets, squeezing out smaller businesses and worker collectives. Under NAFTA better-paying U.S. jobs were lost as firms closed shop and contracted out to the cheaper Mexican labor market. At the same time thousands of Mexican small companies were forced out of business. Mexico was flooded with cheap, high-tech, mass produced corn and dairy products from giant U.S. agribusiness firms (themselves heavily subsidized by the U.S. government), driving small Mexican farmers and distributors into bankruptcy, displacing large numbers of poor peasants. The lately arrived U.S. companies in Mexico have offered extremely low-paying jobs, and unsafe work conditions. Generally free trade has brought a dramatic increase in poverty south of the border.[viii]
(...) We North Americans are told that to remain competitive in the new era of globalization, we will have to increase our output while reducing our labor and production costs, in other words, work harder for less. This in fact is happening as the work-week has lengthened by as much as twenty percent (from forty hours to forty-six and even forty-eight hours) and real wages have flattened or declined during the reign of George W. Bush. Less is being spent on social services, and we are enduring more wage concessions, more restructuring, deregulation, and privatization.
(...) What is seldom remarked upon is that NAFTA and GATT are in violation of the U.S. Constitution, the preamble of which makes clear that sovereign power rests with the people: “We the People of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution reads, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Article I, Section 7 gives the president (not some trade council) the power to veto a law, subject to being overridden by a two-thirds vote in Congress. And Article III gives adjudication and review powers to a Supreme Court and other federal courts as ordained by Congress. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” There is nothing in the entire Constitution that allows an international trade panel to preside as final arbiter exercising supreme review powers undermining the constitutionally mandated decisions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
(...) What is being undermined is not only a lot of good laws dealing with environment, public services, labor standards, and consumer protection, but also the very right to legislate such laws. Our democratic sovereignty itself is being surrendered to a secretive plutocratic trade organization that presumes to exercise a power greater than that of the people and their courts and legislatures. What we have is an international coup d’état by big capital over the nations of the world.
(...) It is not only national sovereignty that is at stake, it is democratic sovereignty. Millions, of people all over the world have taken to the streets to protest free trade agreements. Among them are farmers, workers, students and intellectuals (including many Marxists who see things more clearly than the aforementioned ones), all of whom are keenly aware that something new is afoot and they want no part of it. As used today, the term globalization refers to a new stage of international expropriation, designed not to put an end to the nation-state but to undermine whatever democratic right exists to protect the social wage and restrain the power of transnational corporations.
(...) So the fight against free trade is a fight for the right to politico-economic democracy, public services, and a social wage, the right not to be completely at the mercy of big capital. It is a new and drastic phase of the class struggle that some Marxists–so immersed in classical theory and so ill-informed about present-day public policy–seem to have missed. As embodied in the free trade accords, globalization has little to do with trade and is anything but free. It benefits the rich nations over poor ones, and the rich classes within all nations at the expense of ordinary citizens. It is the new specter that haunts the same old world.
The goal of the transnational corporation is to become truly transnational, poised above the sovereign power of any particular nation, while being served by the sovereign powers of all nations. Cyril Siewert, chief financial officer of Colgate Palmolive Company, could have been speaking for all transnationals when he remarked, “The United States doesn’t have an automatic call on our [corporation’s] resources. There is no mindset that puts this country first.”[i]
(...) Not one of GATT’s five hundred pages of rules and restrictions are directed against private corporations; all are against governments. Signatory governments must lower tariffs, end farm subsidies, treat foreign companies the same as domestic ones, honor all corporate patent claims, and obey the rulings of a permanent elite bureaucracy, the WTO. Should a country refuse to change its laws when a WTO panel so dictates, the WTO can impose fines or international trade sanctions, depriving the resistant country of needed markets and materials.[ii]
(...) It has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food. It has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby fo
od. It has eliminated the ban in various countries on asbestos, and on fuel-economy and emission standards for motor vehicles. And it has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban on endangered-species products. The European Union’s prohibition on the importation of hormone-ridden U.S. beef had overwhelming popular support throughout Europe, but a three-member WTO panel decided the ban was an illegal restraint on trade. The decision on beef put in jeopardy a host of other food import regulations based on health concerns. The WTO overturned a portion of the U.S. Clean Air Act banning certain additives in gasoline because it interfered with imports from foreign refineries. And the WTO overturned that portion of the U.S. Endangered Species Act forbidding the import of shrimp caught with nets that failed to protect sea turtles.[iii] [the cha-ching of democracy!]
(...) Free trade is not fair trade; it benefits strong nations at the expense of weaker ones, and rich interests at the expense of the rest of us. Globalization means turning the clock back on many twentieth-century reforms: no freedom to boycott products, no prohibitions against child labor, no guaranteed living wage or benefits, no public services that might conceivably compete with private services, no health and safety protections that might cut into corporate profits.[iv]
(...) In this way agribusiness can better penetrate locally self-sufficient communities and monopolize their resources. Ralph Nader gives the example of the neem tree, whose extracts contain natural pesticidal and medicinal properties. Cultivated for centuries in India, the tree attracted the attention of various pharmaceutical companies, who filed monopoly patents, causing mass protests by Indian farmers. As dictated by the WTO, the pharmaceuticals now have exclusive control over the marketing of neem tree products, a ruling that is being reluctantly enforced in India. Tens of thousands of erstwhile independent farmers must now work for the powerful pharmaceuticals on profit-gorging terms set by the companies.
(...) If the current behavior of the rich countries is anything to go by, globalization simply means the breaking down of the borders of countries so that those with the capital and the goods will be free to dominate the markets.[vi]
(...) Under free-trade agreements like General Agreements on Trade and Services (GATS) and Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), all public services are put at risk. A public service can be charged with causing “lost market opportunities” for business, or creating an unfair subsidy. To offer one instance: the single-payer automobile insurance program proposed by the province of Ontario, Canada, was declared “unfair competition.” Ontario could have its public auto insurance only if it paid U.S. insurance companies what they estimated would be their present and future losses in Ontario auto insurance sales, a prohibitive cost for the province. Thus the citizens of Ontario were not allowed to exercise their democratic sovereign right to institute an alternative not-for-profit auto insurance system. In another case, United Postal Service charged the Canadian Post Office for “lost market opportunities,” which means that under free trade accords, the Canadian Post Office would have to compensate UPS for all the business that UPS thinks it would have had if there were no public postal service. The Canadian postal workers union has challenged the case in court, arguing that the agreement violates the Canadian Constitution.
(...) International free trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA have hastened the corporate acquisition of local markets, squeezing out smaller businesses and worker collectives. Under NAFTA better-paying U.S. jobs were lost as firms closed shop and contracted out to the cheaper Mexican labor market. At the same time thousands of Mexican small companies were forced out of business. Mexico was flooded with cheap, high-tech, mass produced corn and dairy products from giant U.S. agribusiness firms (themselves heavily subsidized by the U.S. government), driving small Mexican farmers and distributors into bankruptcy, displacing large numbers of poor peasants. The lately arrived U.S. companies in Mexico have offered extremely low-paying jobs, and unsafe work conditions. Generally free trade has brought a dramatic increase in poverty south of the border.[viii]
(...) We North Americans are told that to remain competitive in the new era of globalization, we will have to increase our output while reducing our labor and production costs, in other words, work harder for less. This in fact is happening as the work-week has lengthened by as much as twenty percent (from forty hours to forty-six and even forty-eight hours) and real wages have flattened or declined during the reign of George W. Bush. Less is being spent on social services, and we are enduring more wage concessions, more restructuring, deregulation, and privatization.
(...) What is seldom remarked upon is that NAFTA and GATT are in violation of the U.S. Constitution, the preamble of which makes clear that sovereign power rests with the people: “We the People of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution reads, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Article I, Section 7 gives the president (not some trade council) the power to veto a law, subject to being overridden by a two-thirds vote in Congress. And Article III gives adjudication and review powers to a Supreme Court and other federal courts as ordained by Congress. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” There is nothing in the entire Constitution that allows an international trade panel to preside as final arbiter exercising supreme review powers undermining the constitutionally mandated decisions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
(...) What is being undermined is not only a lot of good laws dealing with environment, public services, labor standards, and consumer protection, but also the very right to legislate such laws. Our democratic sovereignty itself is being surrendered to a secretive plutocratic trade organization that presumes to exercise a power greater than that of the people and their courts and legislatures. What we have is an international coup d’état by big capital over the nations of the world.
(...) It is not only national sovereignty that is at stake, it is democratic sovereignty. Millions, of people all over the world have taken to the streets to protest free trade agreements. Among them are farmers, workers, students and intellectuals (including many Marxists who see things more clearly than the aforementioned ones), all of whom are keenly aware that something new is afoot and they want no part of it. As used today, the term globalization refers to a new stage of international expropriation, designed not to put an end to the nation-state but to undermine whatever democratic right exists to protect the social wage and restrain the power of transnational corporations.
(...) So the fight against free trade is a fight for the right to politico-economic democracy, public services, and a social wage, the right not to be completely at the mercy of big capital. It is a new and drastic phase of the class struggle that some Marxists–so immersed in classical theory and so ill-informed about present-day public policy–seem to have missed. As embodied in the free trade accords, globalization has little to do with trade and is anything but free. It benefits the rich nations over poor ones, and the rich classes within all nations at the expense of ordinary citizens. It is the new specter that haunts the same old world.
building wall on pak-iran border:
He said excesses were being committed against the Baloch since 1948 in West Pakistan. The building of this wall would futher divide the Baloch families. He said the Germans had built a wall, which was demolished. But neither the Pakistani nor the Iranian Baloch were taken into confidence over the construction of the wall along the Gold Smith Line. "We demand that the construction of the wall should be stopped immediately."
He said excesses were being committed against the Baloch since 1948 in West Pakistan. The building of this wall would futher divide the Baloch families. He said the Germans had built a wall, which was demolished. But neither the Pakistani nor the Iranian Baloch were taken into confidence over the construction of the wall along the Gold Smith Line. "We demand that the construction of the wall should be stopped immediately."
chronicling obscene politics:
In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would "follow us home" from Iraq -- a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.
(...) Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that "these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago." However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.
(...) "They want to bring down the West, particularly us," Romney declared. "And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent."
(...) The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush's supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks -- a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had "strong links" with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed.
(...) Romney said Friday: "You see, the terrorists are fighting a war on us. We've got to make sure that we're fighting a war on them."
(...) Romney's national press secretary, Kevin Madden, said the former governor's linking of Shia, Sunni, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood was based on their common hostility to the West. "I think [Romney's statement] was much more directed at intent -- they all share a common ideology or intent to bring down Western governments," Madden said. "There's a shared attempt to fight any beachhead of democracy in that region."
In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would "follow us home" from Iraq -- a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.
(...) Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that "these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago." However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.
(...) "They want to bring down the West, particularly us," Romney declared. "And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent."
(...) The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush's supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks -- a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had "strong links" with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed.
(...) Romney said Friday: "You see, the terrorists are fighting a war on us. We've got to make sure that we're fighting a war on them."
(...) Romney's national press secretary, Kevin Madden, said the former governor's linking of Shia, Sunni, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood was based on their common hostility to the West. "I think [Romney's statement] was much more directed at intent -- they all share a common ideology or intent to bring down Western governments," Madden said. "There's a shared attempt to fight any beachhead of democracy in that region."
Saturday, May 26, 2007
harvard needs a living wage, testimony two:
I clean 8am to 4pm at MIT and then 6pm to 10pm at Harvard. I've been cleaning at Harvard about 5 years now. I came to Cambridge from Barbados in '83, and ever since I first come here, I was always working two full0time jobs. 80 hours a week. I always do cleaning. always liked cleaning. The thing lots of work places try to do now is they try to get away from paying a lot of full-time workers. They see if they can cut the staff in half and get the same quantity of work done. and then they want part-tie people, because then they don't have to pay the benefits. That's just like what Harvard do.
I leave my house at about 6:30 in the morning every weekday. and I don't get back until 10:30 at night, so that's a lot of time from home. Sometimes it's not enough sleep. Depends on how the body feels. In the morning, your body wants to sleep but your mind tells you, you got to go, you got to go. I have three kids - 4, 9, and 21. On the weekends, I do spend a lot of time with my kids. I try not ot give to myself, to improve my kids.
Harvard is great as far as school is concerned, but in our department, it's not great for working. We work for a company - Harvard is a company. Sometimes a name fools a lot of people. When you say Harvard or MIT, you have a great name, but when you see the environment and you seewhat's going on, you're not happy just to have a good name. When people hear you're working at Harvard, they think you get a ot of money because it's a big college. But as far as I'm concerned, the working environment is bad. Right now, one guy's out sick, nearly seven weeks and he didn't get a paycheck yet. Every day they tell him, it's in the mail. How long will it take a paycheck to go from one part of Cambridge to another? You have to work with the worker to make him happy in the environment he's working.
You have people who don't want to talk because they scared to lose their job, or scared the supervisor is going to put more work on them. And you get treated sometimes different depending on where you come from. The boss is no going to say, because you from Haiti, I don't like you. I give you more work, but his actions speak louder than words. The money here in Cambridge is better than in Barbados, but I didn't really come here from the money. I come here because my family lives in this country. My grandfather lived in this country from the time he was a boy, so he sent for my mother and she brought me here. I used to live in Cambridge with my grandfather, but now I live in Malden.
It's bettter at MIT, because MIT is a better environment than Harvard. Sometimes my supervisor here talks to me, live we were talking about how to clean this desk, and I tell him so and so and he said, If you don't like it, you can go home, meaning to quit. He just talk down to me, so sometimes I get so mad. MIT pays better than Harvard. Other placdes for part-time pay more money than Harvard. Harvard needs to pay a little bit more money, because they want the work done nice and clean. No specks. As I say, I don't mind that, but pay me something to do that.
I haven't gotten a good raise since I've been at Harvard. I still don't get $10/hour. They freeze our raises for three years. You never get enough money, but you try to live with that, and you try to make ends meet. I put my money togethter with my wife to pay the bills. But other guys whose wives don't work or who don't make a good salary at their other job, I know they have a hard time. Sometimes they don't have money to buy groceries. I know one individual that works here - sometimes he can't buy any meat because he's back on his rent. But we try to strive to be thankful. We can't do no more.
-- Neil, Law School Janitor
I clean 8am to 4pm at MIT and then 6pm to 10pm at Harvard. I've been cleaning at Harvard about 5 years now. I came to Cambridge from Barbados in '83, and ever since I first come here, I was always working two full0time jobs. 80 hours a week. I always do cleaning. always liked cleaning. The thing lots of work places try to do now is they try to get away from paying a lot of full-time workers. They see if they can cut the staff in half and get the same quantity of work done. and then they want part-tie people, because then they don't have to pay the benefits. That's just like what Harvard do.
I leave my house at about 6:30 in the morning every weekday. and I don't get back until 10:30 at night, so that's a lot of time from home. Sometimes it's not enough sleep. Depends on how the body feels. In the morning, your body wants to sleep but your mind tells you, you got to go, you got to go. I have three kids - 4, 9, and 21. On the weekends, I do spend a lot of time with my kids. I try not ot give to myself, to improve my kids.
Harvard is great as far as school is concerned, but in our department, it's not great for working. We work for a company - Harvard is a company. Sometimes a name fools a lot of people. When you say Harvard or MIT, you have a great name, but when you see the environment and you seewhat's going on, you're not happy just to have a good name. When people hear you're working at Harvard, they think you get a ot of money because it's a big college. But as far as I'm concerned, the working environment is bad. Right now, one guy's out sick, nearly seven weeks and he didn't get a paycheck yet. Every day they tell him, it's in the mail. How long will it take a paycheck to go from one part of Cambridge to another? You have to work with the worker to make him happy in the environment he's working.
You have people who don't want to talk because they scared to lose their job, or scared the supervisor is going to put more work on them. And you get treated sometimes different depending on where you come from. The boss is no going to say, because you from Haiti, I don't like you. I give you more work, but his actions speak louder than words. The money here in Cambridge is better than in Barbados, but I didn't really come here from the money. I come here because my family lives in this country. My grandfather lived in this country from the time he was a boy, so he sent for my mother and she brought me here. I used to live in Cambridge with my grandfather, but now I live in Malden.
It's bettter at MIT, because MIT is a better environment than Harvard. Sometimes my supervisor here talks to me, live we were talking about how to clean this desk, and I tell him so and so and he said, If you don't like it, you can go home, meaning to quit. He just talk down to me, so sometimes I get so mad. MIT pays better than Harvard. Other placdes for part-time pay more money than Harvard. Harvard needs to pay a little bit more money, because they want the work done nice and clean. No specks. As I say, I don't mind that, but pay me something to do that.
I haven't gotten a good raise since I've been at Harvard. I still don't get $10/hour. They freeze our raises for three years. You never get enough money, but you try to live with that, and you try to make ends meet. I put my money togethter with my wife to pay the bills. But other guys whose wives don't work or who don't make a good salary at their other job, I know they have a hard time. Sometimes they don't have money to buy groceries. I know one individual that works here - sometimes he can't buy any meat because he's back on his rent. But we try to strive to be thankful. We can't do no more.
-- Neil, Law School Janitor
harvard needs a living wage, testimony one:
I work at Harvard from 7:00 'til 4:00. Then I go to the Supermarket - that's my second job, bagging groceries. I do that 'til 10:30pm. I'm home by 11:30pm. In bed by midnight. Yeah, I'm tired physically, and I;m tired up here, in the head. I'm at the point where things start to bug me that normally don't. Sometimes I just need to back off and cool down a little bit before it's too much. I don't need to be a 50k man. All I'm talking about is a living. Basic stuff - a roof over my head, a meal. Right now, I've got that, but only because I'm at the supermarket 'til 10:20 each night... Of course, sometimes you have a day that's not too bad. But boy, I'll tell you, there are a lot of days when you're walking around in a fog. You're just pooped out. You just can't think on it too much. You just go. You run like hell... See, managers always try to cut expenses, and they see wages as expenses. They're trained that way. They get trapped in that mindset, and they forget that it's people they're talking about. It's a person, a guy, trying to live on that.
--Lewis, Harvard Custodian
I work at Harvard from 7:00 'til 4:00. Then I go to the Supermarket - that's my second job, bagging groceries. I do that 'til 10:30pm. I'm home by 11:30pm. In bed by midnight. Yeah, I'm tired physically, and I;m tired up here, in the head. I'm at the point where things start to bug me that normally don't. Sometimes I just need to back off and cool down a little bit before it's too much. I don't need to be a 50k man. All I'm talking about is a living. Basic stuff - a roof over my head, a meal. Right now, I've got that, but only because I'm at the supermarket 'til 10:20 each night... Of course, sometimes you have a day that's not too bad. But boy, I'll tell you, there are a lot of days when you're walking around in a fog. You're just pooped out. You just can't think on it too much. You just go. You run like hell... See, managers always try to cut expenses, and they see wages as expenses. They're trained that way. They get trapped in that mindset, and they forget that it's people they're talking about. It's a person, a guy, trying to live on that.
--Lewis, Harvard Custodian
Friday, May 25, 2007
astonishing!:
"We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation," he said at a White House press conference.
(...)"If they were to say 'leave', we would leave.
"We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation," he said at a White House press conference.
(...)"If they were to say 'leave', we would leave.
mainstream media vs. public on iraq:
As ever in mainstream journalism, our side merely makes “mistakes”, while the ‘bad guys’ mete out “ruthless intimidation”. The problem centres on the West’s favourite bogeymen, “al Qaeda”, not Iraqi resistance fighters waging war on a brutal occupation. Local people are being intimidated by these monsters, we are told, although a September 2006 World Public Opinion (WPO) poll found that 61 per cent of Shia and 92 per cent of Sunni approved of attacks on US forces, while 78 per cent of Iraqis (including 82% Shia and 97% Sunni) believed the US presence was “provoking more conflict than it is preventing”. (‘The Iraqi Public on the US Presence and the Future of Iraq,’ September 27, 2006; www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep06/ Iraq_Sep06_rpt.pdf)
(...) Curiously, an August-September, 2003 Gallup poll found that forty-three per cent of Iraqis believed US and British forces invaded primarily "to rob Iraq's oil". 5 per cent believed the United States invaded Iraq "to assist the Iraqi people", and 1 per cent believed it was to establish democracy. (Walter Pincus, ‘Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows,’ Washington Post, November 12, 2003)
(...) This fits well with a January 2006 WPO which found that 80 per cent of Iraqis believed that the US government planned to have permanent bases in Iraq. A further 76 per cent said they thought the US would not withdraw if asked to do so by the Iraqi government. (‘What the Iraqi Public Wants,’ January 31, 2006; http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/jan06/Iraq_Jan06_rpt.pdf)
(...) An April 2007 WPO poll of Islamic countries found that an overwhelming majority in Egypt (93%) said that maintaining “control over the oil resources of the Middle East” was a goal of the United States (84% definitely), as well as strong majorities in Morocco (82%), Indonesia (74%) and Pakistan (68%). On average 79 per cent had this perception. (Muslim Public Opinion on US Policy, Attacks on Civilians, and al Qaeda, April 24, 2007; http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/apr07/START_Apr07_rpt.pdf)
As ever in mainstream journalism, our side merely makes “mistakes”, while the ‘bad guys’ mete out “ruthless intimidation”. The problem centres on the West’s favourite bogeymen, “al Qaeda”, not Iraqi resistance fighters waging war on a brutal occupation. Local people are being intimidated by these monsters, we are told, although a September 2006 World Public Opinion (WPO) poll found that 61 per cent of Shia and 92 per cent of Sunni approved of attacks on US forces, while 78 per cent of Iraqis (including 82% Shia and 97% Sunni) believed the US presence was “provoking more conflict than it is preventing”. (‘The Iraqi Public on the US Presence and the Future of Iraq,’ September 27, 2006; www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep06/ Iraq_Sep06_rpt.pdf)
(...) Curiously, an August-September, 2003 Gallup poll found that forty-three per cent of Iraqis believed US and British forces invaded primarily "to rob Iraq's oil". 5 per cent believed the United States invaded Iraq "to assist the Iraqi people", and 1 per cent believed it was to establish democracy. (Walter Pincus, ‘Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows,’ Washington Post, November 12, 2003)
(...) This fits well with a January 2006 WPO which found that 80 per cent of Iraqis believed that the US government planned to have permanent bases in Iraq. A further 76 per cent said they thought the US would not withdraw if asked to do so by the Iraqi government. (‘What the Iraqi Public Wants,’ January 31, 2006; http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/jan06/Iraq_Jan06_rpt.pdf)
(...) An April 2007 WPO poll of Islamic countries found that an overwhelming majority in Egypt (93%) said that maintaining “control over the oil resources of the Middle East” was a goal of the United States (84% definitely), as well as strong majorities in Morocco (82%), Indonesia (74%) and Pakistan (68%). On average 79 per cent had this perception. (Muslim Public Opinion on US Policy, Attacks on Civilians, and al Qaeda, April 24, 2007; http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/apr07/START_Apr07_rpt.pdf)
aboriginies in australia:
On the 40th anniversary of a vote that recognised them as Australian citizens for the first time, Aboroginal groups have signed two deals that will generate millions of dollars.
(...) In Queensland the Chinese aluminium group Chalco signed an agreement on Friday with a local group and the local council to develop bauxite reserves in the region. Elsewhere in the Northern territory another group agreed to have a nuclear waste dump placed on their outback land in return for millions of dollars in benefits.
(...) An early blueprint calls for 3,800 construction jobs over three years, including 700 for the mine and washing plant at Aurukun and 3,100 for the refinery. It would also require a permanent workforce of about 600.
(...) News.com.au reported Neville Pootchemunka, Aurukun’s mayor, as saying the agreement ushered in a new beginning for the community of about 1100 people in Cape York. Australia is experiencing a mining boom. "It's opening the corridors for employment and training enterprise and business. This is an historic milestone for my people." [when 600 permanent jobs is historic, we know that this world is not worth its weight in salt]
(...) [on the nuclear deal] Christine Milne, a member of the senate representing the Green party, sait the deal exploited Aborigines and showed Prime Minister John Howard's eagerness to embrace nuclear power.
On the 40th anniversary of a vote that recognised them as Australian citizens for the first time, Aboroginal groups have signed two deals that will generate millions of dollars.
(...) In Queensland the Chinese aluminium group Chalco signed an agreement on Friday with a local group and the local council to develop bauxite reserves in the region. Elsewhere in the Northern territory another group agreed to have a nuclear waste dump placed on their outback land in return for millions of dollars in benefits.
(...) An early blueprint calls for 3,800 construction jobs over three years, including 700 for the mine and washing plant at Aurukun and 3,100 for the refinery. It would also require a permanent workforce of about 600.
(...) News.com.au reported Neville Pootchemunka, Aurukun’s mayor, as saying the agreement ushered in a new beginning for the community of about 1100 people in Cape York. Australia is experiencing a mining boom. "It's opening the corridors for employment and training enterprise and business. This is an historic milestone for my people." [when 600 permanent jobs is historic, we know that this world is not worth its weight in salt]
(...) [on the nuclear deal] Christine Milne, a member of the senate representing the Green party, sait the deal exploited Aborigines and showed Prime Minister John Howard's eagerness to embrace nuclear power.
al-sadr back in the public eye:
Al-Sadr said: "I say to our Sunni brothers in Iraq that we are brothers and the occupier shall not divide us. They are welcome and we are ready to co-operate with them in all fields. This is my hand I stretch out to them." Al-Sadr's call came a few days after Shia leaders from his east Baghdad stronghold met with Sunni tribal heads from western Iraq. Both sides promised to work together for national reconciliation and against extremism.
He said: "I received complaints from brother Sunnis and some Christians about the aggressions of the Nawasib. I am ready to defend them and will be a shield for them, although the occupier would not accept that." "I say that our houses and cities are open for them and that for Iraqis to kill Sunnis and Christians is a sin. What the Nawasib are doing to compel the Christians to embrace Islam is despicable."
Al-Sadr said: "I say to our Sunni brothers in Iraq that we are brothers and the occupier shall not divide us. They are welcome and we are ready to co-operate with them in all fields. This is my hand I stretch out to them." Al-Sadr's call came a few days after Shia leaders from his east Baghdad stronghold met with Sunni tribal heads from western Iraq. Both sides promised to work together for national reconciliation and against extremism.
He said: "I received complaints from brother Sunnis and some Christians about the aggressions of the Nawasib. I am ready to defend them and will be a shield for them, although the occupier would not accept that." "I say that our houses and cities are open for them and that for Iraqis to kill Sunnis and Christians is a sin. What the Nawasib are doing to compel the Christians to embrace Islam is despicable."
Thursday, May 24, 2007
from "hatred of democracy", by jacques ranciere, 2006:
The equation democracy = limitlessness = society, on which the denunciation of the 'crimes' of democracy is based, presupposes, then, a threefold operation: it is imperative, first, to reduce democracy to a form of society; second, to make this form of society identical to the reign of the egalitarian individual by grouping under the latter all sorts of disparate properties, everything from mass consumption to the claims of special minority rights, not to forget union battles; and finally, to charge 'mass individualist society', henceforth identical to democracy, with pursuing the limitless growth that is inherent to the logic of the capitalist economy. (20)
(...) The so-called republican thesis took exactly the opposite tack: bringing School closer to society meant making it more homogeneous to social inequality. So that School could work to achieve equality only to the extent that, within the sheltering walls that separate it from the rest of society, it could devote itself to its proper task: to supply everyone equally, irrespective of origins or social destination, with the universality of knowledge, using for its egalitarian aims the necessarily inegalitarian form of relation obtaaining between the one who knows and the one who learns. (24-25)
(...) The enemy that the republican School confronted, then, was no longer the unequal society from which it sought to rescue pupils, it was the pupil him- or herself, who had become the representative par excellence of democratic humanity - the immature being, the young consumer drunk with equality, and whose charter is the Rights of Man. School, it would soon be said, was badly afflicted by one, and only one, evil, which was embodied in the very beings that had to be taught: equality. And what was undermined along with the authority of the professor was not the universality of knowledges but inequality itself, understood as the manifestation of a 'transcendence'. (26)
(...) The republican schoolmaster, conveyor of the universal knowledge that renders virgin souls equal, simply becomes, then, the representative of an adult humanity in the process of disappearing at the hands of a generalized reign of immaturity; the schoolmaster becomes the last witness of civilization, vainly opposing the 'subtleties' and 'complexities' of his thought to the 'impenetrable wall' of a world doomed to the monstrous reign of adolescence. He becomes the disillusioned spectator of the great catastrophe of civilization, the synonyms of which are consumerism, equality, democracy, and immaturity. Before him stands 'the adolescent-punk who, against Kant and Plato, demands the right to his or her own opinion', that is, the representative of the inexorable spiral of democracy drunk with consumption, attesting to the end of culture, if not the becoming culture of everything, to the 'hypermarket of lifestyles' and 'turning the world into a "club-Med"', and to the 'plunging of all of existence into the sphere of consumption'. (26-27)
(...) The fatal 'democratic' equivalence of everything is indeed first and foremost the product of a method that has only one explanation for every phenomenon, whether it be a social movement, a religious or ethnic conflict, changing trends, or advertising or other campaigns. This is how the young girl who, in the name of her father's religion, refuses to remove her headscarf at school, the schoolchild who opposes the rationality of the Koran to that of science, and the schoolchild who physically attacks teachers or Jewish students, will all find their attitudes attributed to the reign of the democratic individual, unaffiliated and altogether cut off from transcendence. And the figure of the dmocratic consumer drunk on equality will,according to the mood and the needs of the cause, be identified with the wage earner, with the unemployed occupying the Unemployment Office, or with the illegal immigrant detained in airport detention centres. There is no need to be surprised if the representatives of this consuming passion that excite the greates fury in our ideologues are generally those whose capacity to consume is the most limited. Indeed, the denunciation of 'democratic individualism' works, at little cost, to make coincide two theses: the classic thesis of property-owners (the poor always want more), and the thesis of refined elites - there are too many individuals, too many people claiming the privileges of individuality. This is how the dominant intellectual discourse meets up with those 'censitaire' and knowing elites of the nineteenth century: individuality is a good thing for the elites; it becomes a disaster for civilization if everybody has access to it. (27-28)
(...) Under the name democracy, what is being implicated and denounced is politics itself. Now, politics was not born with modern unbelief. Before the Moderns cut off the heads of kings so they could fill up their shopping trolleys at leisure, there were the Ancients, and first of all those Greeks, who severed links with the divine shepherd and set down, under the double name of philosophy and politics, the public record of this farewell. The 'murder of the shepherd', Benny Levy informs us, is there for all of us to see in Plato's texts. It is in the 'Statesman', for example, where he evokes the age when the divine shepherd himself directly governed the huma n flock. And it is in the fourth book of the 'Laws', where he evokes the golden reign of the god Cronus, who knew that no man could govern others without becoming bloated on injustices and excesses, and who resolved the problem by giving the human tribes leaders chosen from the superior race of daimones. But Plato, that reluctant contemporary of the men who claimed that power belonged to the people, not being able to oppose to these men anything except a 'care of the self' incapable of bridging the distance between the many and the whole, effectively countersigned the farewell, relegating the reign of Cronus and the divine shepherd to the era of fables. But he did this at the cost of compensating fo the absence of this fable by means of another fable, that of a 'republic' founded on the 'beautiful lie' according to which God, in order to assure a good order in the community, had put gold in the sould of the governors, silver in those of the warriors, and iron in those of the artisans. (34)
(...) Let's grant it to the representative of God: it is quite true that politics is defined in contradistinction to the model of the shepherd feeding his flock. One can object to this separation, by staking a claim, on behalf of the divine shepherd or the human shepherds who interpret his voice, to the government of his people. The price to pay for this is that democracy is effectively only ever the 'empire of nothing', the latest figure of political separation calling for us to turn back, from the pit of despair, toward the forgotten shepherd. (34) [so despondent aristocrats frame democratic passions around this looking-backwards precisely in order to confirm their own pretensions and longings]
(...) Plato is the first one to invent that mode of sociological reading we declare to be proper to the modern age, the interpretation that locates underneath the appearances of political democracy an inverse reality: the reality of a state of society where it is the private, egotistical man who governs. For him, democratic law, then, is nothing but people's pleasure for its own sake, the expression of the liberty of individuals whose sole law is that of varying mood and pleasure, without any regard for collective order. The term democracy, then, does not simply mean a bad form of government and political life. It strictly means a style of life that is opposed to any well-ordered government of the community. (36)
(...) In history, we've known two great entitlements to govern: one that is attached to human or divine kinship, that is, the superiority of birth; and another that is attached to the organization of productive and reproductive activities, that is, the power of wealth. Societies are usually governed by a combination of these two powers to which, in varying degrees, force and science lend their support. But if the elders must govern not only the young but the learned and the ignorant as well, if the learned must govern not only the ignorant but also the rich and the poor, if they must compel the obedience of the custodians of power and be understood by the ignorant, something extra is needed, a supplementary title, one common to those who possesss all these titles but also to those who do not possess them. Now, the only remaining title is the anarchice title, the title specific to those who have no more title for governing than they have for being governed. (46)
(...) This is the paradox that Plato encounters in the government of chance and that, in his furious and amusing repudiation of democracy, he must nevertheless take into account when portraying governors as men without properties that only a happy coincidence has called upon to occupy this place. It is this paradox that Hobbes, Rousseau and all the modern thinkers of the contract and sovereignty in their turn encounter through the questions of consent and legitimacy. Equality is not a fiction. All superiors experience this as the most commonplace of realities. There is no master who does not sit back and risk letting his slave run away, no man who is not capable of killing another, no force that is imposed without having to justify itself, and hence without having to recognize the irreducibility of equality needed for inequality to function. ... it is a reality that is constatntly and everywhere attested to. There is no service that is carried out, no knowledge that is imparted, no authoirty that is established without the master having, however little, to speak 'equal to equal' with the one he commands or instructs. Inegalitarian society can only function thanks to a multitude of egalitarian relations. (47-48)
(...) The term democracy, then, does not strictly designate either a form of society or a form of government. ...Societies, today as yesterday, are organized by the play of oligarchies. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as democratic government. Government is always exercised by the minority over the majority. The 'power of the people' is therefore necessarily also heterotopic to inegalitarian soceity and to oligarchic government. It is what divides government from itself by dividing society from itself. It is therefore also what separates the exercise of government from the representation of society. (52)
(...) Nor is the vote in itself a democratic form by which the people makes its voice heard. It is originally the expression of a consent that a superior power requires and which is not really such unless it is unanimous. The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so in the name of the people that representation is obliged to recognize but that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government. ... 'Representative democracy' might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron. (53)
(...) This duality [of man and citizen] has been denouced by critics from Burke to Agamben, via Marx and Hannah Arendt, in the name of a single logic: if two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles must be illusory, if not both. For both Burke and Arendt, the rights of man are either empty or tautological. They are the rights of bare man; but bare man, the man who belongs to no constituted national community, has no rights. The rights of man, then, are the empty rights of those who have no rights. Or they are the rights of man who belong to a national community. They are, then simply the rights of the citizens of that nation, the rights of those who have rights, and hence a pure tautology. Marx, conversely, saw the rights of citizens as constituting an ideal sphere whose reality consisted in the rights of man, not bare man, but the male property-owner who enforces the law of his interest, the law of wealth, under the mask of the equal rights of all. (58)
(...) The democractic process is the process of a perpetual bringing into play, of invention of forms of subjectivation, and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life. Democracy really means, in this sense, the impurity of politics, the challenging of governments' claims to embody the sole principle of public life and in so doing be able to circumscribe the understanding and extension of public life. If there is a 'limitlessness' specific to democracy, the that's exactly where it lies: not in the exponential multiplicatoin of needs or of desires emanating from individuals, but in the movement that ceaselessly displaces the limits of the public and the private, of the political and the social. (62)
(...) Republicanism and sociolgy are, in this sense, two names for the same project: to restore beyond the democratic rupture a political order that is homogenoeous to the mode of life of a society. This is really what Plato proposes: a community whose laws are not dead formulae, but the very respiration of society - the advice of the wise and the movement that the bodies of citizens internalize from birth, expressed through the dancing choruses of the city. This is what sociological science suggested be undertaken in the aftermath of the French Revolution: remedy the "Protestant', individualist tearing of the ancient social fabric, which was organized on the basis of the privilege of birth; oppose to democratic dispersion the reconstitution of a social body that is evenly distributed in its functions and natural hierarchies, and united by common beliefs. (64)
(...) That individualism is so out of favour with people who otherwise declare their proufound disgust for collectivism and totalitarianism is an easily solved enigma. It is not the collectivity in general that is being defended by the denouncer of 'democratic individualism'. It is a certain collectiviy, the well-ordered collectivity of bodies, milieus and 'atmospheres' that adapts knowledges to rank under the wise direction of an elite. And it is not individualism as such that is being rejected but the idea that anyone at all can share in its prerogatives. The denunciation of 'democratic individualism' is simply that hatred of equality by which a dominant intelligentsia lets it be known that it is the elite entitled to rule over the blind herd. (68)
(...) Usually the mere existence of a representative system is regarded as the crucial criterion for defining democracy. But this system itself is an unstable compromise, the result of opposing forces. It tends toward democracy only to the extent that it moves nearer to the power of anyone and everyone. (72)
(...) Eliminating national limits for the limitless expansion of capital; bringing the limitless expansion of capital within the limits of the nation: at the intersection of these two tasks the finally discovered figure of the royal science takes shape. It will always be impossible to find the just measure of equality and inequality; impossible, on this basis, to avoid democratic supplementation, namely, the dividing of the people. Governments and experts, on the other hand, consider it possible to find the right balance between the limited and the limitless. This goes by the name of modernization. Modernization is not the simple task of gearing governments to the harsh realities of the world. It also implies marrying the principle of wealth and the principle of socience in order to give oligarchy a renewed legitimacy. (78)
(...) No doubt it imports very little to consensual logic if the popular decision designates an oligarch from the right or if it designates one from the left. But there is a risk in leaving the solutions that depend upon the exclusive science of experts up to this decision. Our governments' authority thus gets caught in two opposed systems of legitimation: on the one hand, it is legitimated by its ability to choose the best solutions for societal problems. And yet, the best solutions can be identified by the fact that they do not have to be chosen because they result from objective knowledge of things, which is a matter for expert knowledge and not for popular choice. (78)
(...) We also know that the oligarchs, their experts and ideologues managed to find the explanation for this fortune [the 'no' vote to the EC], in fact the same one they find for every disruption to the consensus: if science did not impress its legitimacy upon the people, it is because the people is ignorant. If progress does not progress, it is because of the backward. (80)
(...) And it is hoped that a single principle will come to be ascribed to this thus-constituted ensemble: the ignorance of the backward, the attachment to the past, be it the past of social advantages, of revolutionary ideals, or of the religion of ancestors. Populism is the convenient name under which is dissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy, that is, the difficulty the government of science has in adapting itself to manifestations of democracy and even to the mixed form of representative system. This name at once masks and reveals the intense wish of the oligarch: to govern without people, in other words, without any dividng of the people; to govern without politics. (80)
(...) That capital growth and investor interests have laws involving complicated mathematical equations is freely granted. That these laws enter into contradiction with the limits posed by national systems of social legislation is just as obvious. But that these laws are ineluctable historical laws that it is vain to oppose, and that they promise a prosperity for future generations that justifies sacrificing these systems of protection, is no longer a matter of science but a matter of faith. ... The 'ignorance' that people are being reproached for is simply its lack of faith. (81)
(...) Today's faith seems to be the prerogative of governors and their experts. This is because it lends a hand to their deeper compulsion: the compulsion to get rid of the people and of politics. Proclaiming themsleves to be simply administrating the local consequences of global historical necessity, our governments take great care to banish the democratic suppplement. Through the invention of supra-State institutions which are not States, which are not accountable to any people, they realize the immanent ends of their very practice: depoliticize political matters, reserve them for places that are non-places, places that do not leave any space for the democratic invention of polemic. (81-82)
(...) The result of this is the reinforcement of a State that becomes directly responsible for the health and life of individuals. The same State that enters into battle against the institutions of the Welfare State is mobilized to have the feeding tube of a woman in a permanent state of vegetation reconnected. The elimination of the so-called Welfare State is not the withdrawal of the State. It is a redistribution, between a capitalist logic of insurance and direct state-management, of the institutions and funcitons that intervened between the two. (83)
(...) We can easily see here th emajor argument through which May '68 was reinterpreted, the argument constantly repeated by historians and sociologists, and lengthily illustrated by bestselling novelists: the movement of '68 was only a movement of youth eager for sexual liberation and new ways of living. And as neither youth nor the desire for liberty know what they want or what they are doing, these youth ended up bringing about the contrary of what they were proclaiming but the truth of what they sought: both a rejuvenation of capitalism and the destruction of all the familial, educational and other structures that stood in the way of the unlimited reign of the market that was penetrating every deeper into the hearts and minds of individuals. (88-89)
(...) Everything and its contrary become the inevitable manifestation of the democratic individual that is dragging humanity to its ruin, a ruin that hte imprecators deplore but that they would deplore even more were it not there to deplore. Of this evil individual one says both that he drags the civilization of the Englightenment to its grave and that he pursues its deadly works, that he is communitarian and without community, that he has lost the sense of family values and that the sense of their transgression, the sense of the sacred and that of sacrilege. Thereby one repaints old edifying themes in the sulphurous colours of hell and blasphemy - man cannot do without God, liberty is not licence, peace enfeebles the character, the desire for justice leads to terror. (89-90)
(...) Those who dream of restoring a government of elites in the shadows of a rediscovered transcendence are perfectly happy with the current state of things in 'democracices'. And as they take the 'petty people', who contest this state of things, as their principal target, their imprecations ultimately unite with the admonitions of the progressives to come in support of the managerial oligarchs grappling with the rebellious moods of these petty people who, just like the assses and horses obstructing the streets in Plato's democratic city, obstruct the path of progress. (91-92)
(...) In a sense, then, the new hatred of democracy is only one of the forms of confusion affecting this term. It doubles the consensual confusion in making the word 'democracy' an ideological operator that depoliticizes the questions of public life by turning them into 'societal phenomena', all the while denying the forms of domination that structures society. It masks the domination of State oligarchies by identifying democracy with a form of society, and it masks that of the economic oligarchies by assimilating their empire to the mere appetities of 'democratic individuals'. Hence, it can, in all seriousness, attribute all the phenomena connected with heightening inequality to the fateful and irreversible triumph of the 'equality of conditions', and so provide the oligarchic enterprise with its ideological point of honour: it is imperative to struggle against democracy, because democracy is tantamount to totalitariansim. (93)
(...) Democracy is first this paradoxical condition of politics, the point where every legitimization is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy, confronted with the egalitarian contingency that underpins the inegalitarian contingency itself. (94)
(...) The 'government of anybody and everybody' is bound to attract the hatred of all those who are entitled to govern men by their birth, wealth, or science. Today it is bound to attract this hatred more radically than ever, since the social power of wealth no longer tolerates any restriction on its limitless growth, and each day its mechanisms become more closely articulated to those of State action. (95)
(...) Democracy ... is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy. (97)
The equation democracy = limitlessness = society, on which the denunciation of the 'crimes' of democracy is based, presupposes, then, a threefold operation: it is imperative, first, to reduce democracy to a form of society; second, to make this form of society identical to the reign of the egalitarian individual by grouping under the latter all sorts of disparate properties, everything from mass consumption to the claims of special minority rights, not to forget union battles; and finally, to charge 'mass individualist society', henceforth identical to democracy, with pursuing the limitless growth that is inherent to the logic of the capitalist economy. (20)
(...) The so-called republican thesis took exactly the opposite tack: bringing School closer to society meant making it more homogeneous to social inequality. So that School could work to achieve equality only to the extent that, within the sheltering walls that separate it from the rest of society, it could devote itself to its proper task: to supply everyone equally, irrespective of origins or social destination, with the universality of knowledge, using for its egalitarian aims the necessarily inegalitarian form of relation obtaaining between the one who knows and the one who learns. (24-25)
(...) The enemy that the republican School confronted, then, was no longer the unequal society from which it sought to rescue pupils, it was the pupil him- or herself, who had become the representative par excellence of democratic humanity - the immature being, the young consumer drunk with equality, and whose charter is the Rights of Man. School, it would soon be said, was badly afflicted by one, and only one, evil, which was embodied in the very beings that had to be taught: equality. And what was undermined along with the authority of the professor was not the universality of knowledges but inequality itself, understood as the manifestation of a 'transcendence'. (26)
(...) The republican schoolmaster, conveyor of the universal knowledge that renders virgin souls equal, simply becomes, then, the representative of an adult humanity in the process of disappearing at the hands of a generalized reign of immaturity; the schoolmaster becomes the last witness of civilization, vainly opposing the 'subtleties' and 'complexities' of his thought to the 'impenetrable wall' of a world doomed to the monstrous reign of adolescence. He becomes the disillusioned spectator of the great catastrophe of civilization, the synonyms of which are consumerism, equality, democracy, and immaturity. Before him stands 'the adolescent-punk who, against Kant and Plato, demands the right to his or her own opinion', that is, the representative of the inexorable spiral of democracy drunk with consumption, attesting to the end of culture, if not the becoming culture of everything, to the 'hypermarket of lifestyles' and 'turning the world into a "club-Med"', and to the 'plunging of all of existence into the sphere of consumption'. (26-27)
(...) The fatal 'democratic' equivalence of everything is indeed first and foremost the product of a method that has only one explanation for every phenomenon, whether it be a social movement, a religious or ethnic conflict, changing trends, or advertising or other campaigns. This is how the young girl who, in the name of her father's religion, refuses to remove her headscarf at school, the schoolchild who opposes the rationality of the Koran to that of science, and the schoolchild who physically attacks teachers or Jewish students, will all find their attitudes attributed to the reign of the democratic individual, unaffiliated and altogether cut off from transcendence. And the figure of the dmocratic consumer drunk on equality will,according to the mood and the needs of the cause, be identified with the wage earner, with the unemployed occupying the Unemployment Office, or with the illegal immigrant detained in airport detention centres. There is no need to be surprised if the representatives of this consuming passion that excite the greates fury in our ideologues are generally those whose capacity to consume is the most limited. Indeed, the denunciation of 'democratic individualism' works, at little cost, to make coincide two theses: the classic thesis of property-owners (the poor always want more), and the thesis of refined elites - there are too many individuals, too many people claiming the privileges of individuality. This is how the dominant intellectual discourse meets up with those 'censitaire' and knowing elites of the nineteenth century: individuality is a good thing for the elites; it becomes a disaster for civilization if everybody has access to it. (27-28)
(...) Under the name democracy, what is being implicated and denounced is politics itself. Now, politics was not born with modern unbelief. Before the Moderns cut off the heads of kings so they could fill up their shopping trolleys at leisure, there were the Ancients, and first of all those Greeks, who severed links with the divine shepherd and set down, under the double name of philosophy and politics, the public record of this farewell. The 'murder of the shepherd', Benny Levy informs us, is there for all of us to see in Plato's texts. It is in the 'Statesman', for example, where he evokes the age when the divine shepherd himself directly governed the huma n flock. And it is in the fourth book of the 'Laws', where he evokes the golden reign of the god Cronus, who knew that no man could govern others without becoming bloated on injustices and excesses, and who resolved the problem by giving the human tribes leaders chosen from the superior race of daimones. But Plato, that reluctant contemporary of the men who claimed that power belonged to the people, not being able to oppose to these men anything except a 'care of the self' incapable of bridging the distance between the many and the whole, effectively countersigned the farewell, relegating the reign of Cronus and the divine shepherd to the era of fables. But he did this at the cost of compensating fo the absence of this fable by means of another fable, that of a 'republic' founded on the 'beautiful lie' according to which God, in order to assure a good order in the community, had put gold in the sould of the governors, silver in those of the warriors, and iron in those of the artisans. (34)
(...) Let's grant it to the representative of God: it is quite true that politics is defined in contradistinction to the model of the shepherd feeding his flock. One can object to this separation, by staking a claim, on behalf of the divine shepherd or the human shepherds who interpret his voice, to the government of his people. The price to pay for this is that democracy is effectively only ever the 'empire of nothing', the latest figure of political separation calling for us to turn back, from the pit of despair, toward the forgotten shepherd. (34) [so despondent aristocrats frame democratic passions around this looking-backwards precisely in order to confirm their own pretensions and longings]
(...) Plato is the first one to invent that mode of sociological reading we declare to be proper to the modern age, the interpretation that locates underneath the appearances of political democracy an inverse reality: the reality of a state of society where it is the private, egotistical man who governs. For him, democratic law, then, is nothing but people's pleasure for its own sake, the expression of the liberty of individuals whose sole law is that of varying mood and pleasure, without any regard for collective order. The term democracy, then, does not simply mean a bad form of government and political life. It strictly means a style of life that is opposed to any well-ordered government of the community. (36)
(...) In history, we've known two great entitlements to govern: one that is attached to human or divine kinship, that is, the superiority of birth; and another that is attached to the organization of productive and reproductive activities, that is, the power of wealth. Societies are usually governed by a combination of these two powers to which, in varying degrees, force and science lend their support. But if the elders must govern not only the young but the learned and the ignorant as well, if the learned must govern not only the ignorant but also the rich and the poor, if they must compel the obedience of the custodians of power and be understood by the ignorant, something extra is needed, a supplementary title, one common to those who possesss all these titles but also to those who do not possess them. Now, the only remaining title is the anarchice title, the title specific to those who have no more title for governing than they have for being governed. (46)
(...) This is the paradox that Plato encounters in the government of chance and that, in his furious and amusing repudiation of democracy, he must nevertheless take into account when portraying governors as men without properties that only a happy coincidence has called upon to occupy this place. It is this paradox that Hobbes, Rousseau and all the modern thinkers of the contract and sovereignty in their turn encounter through the questions of consent and legitimacy. Equality is not a fiction. All superiors experience this as the most commonplace of realities. There is no master who does not sit back and risk letting his slave run away, no man who is not capable of killing another, no force that is imposed without having to justify itself, and hence without having to recognize the irreducibility of equality needed for inequality to function. ... it is a reality that is constatntly and everywhere attested to. There is no service that is carried out, no knowledge that is imparted, no authoirty that is established without the master having, however little, to speak 'equal to equal' with the one he commands or instructs. Inegalitarian society can only function thanks to a multitude of egalitarian relations. (47-48)
(...) The term democracy, then, does not strictly designate either a form of society or a form of government. ...Societies, today as yesterday, are organized by the play of oligarchies. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as democratic government. Government is always exercised by the minority over the majority. The 'power of the people' is therefore necessarily also heterotopic to inegalitarian soceity and to oligarchic government. It is what divides government from itself by dividing society from itself. It is therefore also what separates the exercise of government from the representation of society. (52)
(...) Nor is the vote in itself a democratic form by which the people makes its voice heard. It is originally the expression of a consent that a superior power requires and which is not really such unless it is unanimous. The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so in the name of the people that representation is obliged to recognize but that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government. ... 'Representative democracy' might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron. (53)
(...) This duality [of man and citizen] has been denouced by critics from Burke to Agamben, via Marx and Hannah Arendt, in the name of a single logic: if two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles must be illusory, if not both. For both Burke and Arendt, the rights of man are either empty or tautological. They are the rights of bare man; but bare man, the man who belongs to no constituted national community, has no rights. The rights of man, then, are the empty rights of those who have no rights. Or they are the rights of man who belong to a national community. They are, then simply the rights of the citizens of that nation, the rights of those who have rights, and hence a pure tautology. Marx, conversely, saw the rights of citizens as constituting an ideal sphere whose reality consisted in the rights of man, not bare man, but the male property-owner who enforces the law of his interest, the law of wealth, under the mask of the equal rights of all. (58)
(...) The democractic process is the process of a perpetual bringing into play, of invention of forms of subjectivation, and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life. Democracy really means, in this sense, the impurity of politics, the challenging of governments' claims to embody the sole principle of public life and in so doing be able to circumscribe the understanding and extension of public life. If there is a 'limitlessness' specific to democracy, the that's exactly where it lies: not in the exponential multiplicatoin of needs or of desires emanating from individuals, but in the movement that ceaselessly displaces the limits of the public and the private, of the political and the social. (62)
(...) Republicanism and sociolgy are, in this sense, two names for the same project: to restore beyond the democratic rupture a political order that is homogenoeous to the mode of life of a society. This is really what Plato proposes: a community whose laws are not dead formulae, but the very respiration of society - the advice of the wise and the movement that the bodies of citizens internalize from birth, expressed through the dancing choruses of the city. This is what sociological science suggested be undertaken in the aftermath of the French Revolution: remedy the "Protestant', individualist tearing of the ancient social fabric, which was organized on the basis of the privilege of birth; oppose to democratic dispersion the reconstitution of a social body that is evenly distributed in its functions and natural hierarchies, and united by common beliefs. (64)
(...) That individualism is so out of favour with people who otherwise declare their proufound disgust for collectivism and totalitarianism is an easily solved enigma. It is not the collectivity in general that is being defended by the denouncer of 'democratic individualism'. It is a certain collectiviy, the well-ordered collectivity of bodies, milieus and 'atmospheres' that adapts knowledges to rank under the wise direction of an elite. And it is not individualism as such that is being rejected but the idea that anyone at all can share in its prerogatives. The denunciation of 'democratic individualism' is simply that hatred of equality by which a dominant intelligentsia lets it be known that it is the elite entitled to rule over the blind herd. (68)
(...) Usually the mere existence of a representative system is regarded as the crucial criterion for defining democracy. But this system itself is an unstable compromise, the result of opposing forces. It tends toward democracy only to the extent that it moves nearer to the power of anyone and everyone. (72)
(...) Eliminating national limits for the limitless expansion of capital; bringing the limitless expansion of capital within the limits of the nation: at the intersection of these two tasks the finally discovered figure of the royal science takes shape. It will always be impossible to find the just measure of equality and inequality; impossible, on this basis, to avoid democratic supplementation, namely, the dividing of the people. Governments and experts, on the other hand, consider it possible to find the right balance between the limited and the limitless. This goes by the name of modernization. Modernization is not the simple task of gearing governments to the harsh realities of the world. It also implies marrying the principle of wealth and the principle of socience in order to give oligarchy a renewed legitimacy. (78)
(...) No doubt it imports very little to consensual logic if the popular decision designates an oligarch from the right or if it designates one from the left. But there is a risk in leaving the solutions that depend upon the exclusive science of experts up to this decision. Our governments' authority thus gets caught in two opposed systems of legitimation: on the one hand, it is legitimated by its ability to choose the best solutions for societal problems. And yet, the best solutions can be identified by the fact that they do not have to be chosen because they result from objective knowledge of things, which is a matter for expert knowledge and not for popular choice. (78)
(...) We also know that the oligarchs, their experts and ideologues managed to find the explanation for this fortune [the 'no' vote to the EC], in fact the same one they find for every disruption to the consensus: if science did not impress its legitimacy upon the people, it is because the people is ignorant. If progress does not progress, it is because of the backward. (80)
(...) And it is hoped that a single principle will come to be ascribed to this thus-constituted ensemble: the ignorance of the backward, the attachment to the past, be it the past of social advantages, of revolutionary ideals, or of the religion of ancestors. Populism is the convenient name under which is dissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy, that is, the difficulty the government of science has in adapting itself to manifestations of democracy and even to the mixed form of representative system. This name at once masks and reveals the intense wish of the oligarch: to govern without people, in other words, without any dividng of the people; to govern without politics. (80)
(...) That capital growth and investor interests have laws involving complicated mathematical equations is freely granted. That these laws enter into contradiction with the limits posed by national systems of social legislation is just as obvious. But that these laws are ineluctable historical laws that it is vain to oppose, and that they promise a prosperity for future generations that justifies sacrificing these systems of protection, is no longer a matter of science but a matter of faith. ... The 'ignorance' that people are being reproached for is simply its lack of faith. (81)
(...) Today's faith seems to be the prerogative of governors and their experts. This is because it lends a hand to their deeper compulsion: the compulsion to get rid of the people and of politics. Proclaiming themsleves to be simply administrating the local consequences of global historical necessity, our governments take great care to banish the democratic suppplement. Through the invention of supra-State institutions which are not States, which are not accountable to any people, they realize the immanent ends of their very practice: depoliticize political matters, reserve them for places that are non-places, places that do not leave any space for the democratic invention of polemic. (81-82)
(...) The result of this is the reinforcement of a State that becomes directly responsible for the health and life of individuals. The same State that enters into battle against the institutions of the Welfare State is mobilized to have the feeding tube of a woman in a permanent state of vegetation reconnected. The elimination of the so-called Welfare State is not the withdrawal of the State. It is a redistribution, between a capitalist logic of insurance and direct state-management, of the institutions and funcitons that intervened between the two. (83)
(...) We can easily see here th emajor argument through which May '68 was reinterpreted, the argument constantly repeated by historians and sociologists, and lengthily illustrated by bestselling novelists: the movement of '68 was only a movement of youth eager for sexual liberation and new ways of living. And as neither youth nor the desire for liberty know what they want or what they are doing, these youth ended up bringing about the contrary of what they were proclaiming but the truth of what they sought: both a rejuvenation of capitalism and the destruction of all the familial, educational and other structures that stood in the way of the unlimited reign of the market that was penetrating every deeper into the hearts and minds of individuals. (88-89)
(...) Everything and its contrary become the inevitable manifestation of the democratic individual that is dragging humanity to its ruin, a ruin that hte imprecators deplore but that they would deplore even more were it not there to deplore. Of this evil individual one says both that he drags the civilization of the Englightenment to its grave and that he pursues its deadly works, that he is communitarian and without community, that he has lost the sense of family values and that the sense of their transgression, the sense of the sacred and that of sacrilege. Thereby one repaints old edifying themes in the sulphurous colours of hell and blasphemy - man cannot do without God, liberty is not licence, peace enfeebles the character, the desire for justice leads to terror. (89-90)
(...) Those who dream of restoring a government of elites in the shadows of a rediscovered transcendence are perfectly happy with the current state of things in 'democracices'. And as they take the 'petty people', who contest this state of things, as their principal target, their imprecations ultimately unite with the admonitions of the progressives to come in support of the managerial oligarchs grappling with the rebellious moods of these petty people who, just like the assses and horses obstructing the streets in Plato's democratic city, obstruct the path of progress. (91-92)
(...) In a sense, then, the new hatred of democracy is only one of the forms of confusion affecting this term. It doubles the consensual confusion in making the word 'democracy' an ideological operator that depoliticizes the questions of public life by turning them into 'societal phenomena', all the while denying the forms of domination that structures society. It masks the domination of State oligarchies by identifying democracy with a form of society, and it masks that of the economic oligarchies by assimilating their empire to the mere appetities of 'democratic individuals'. Hence, it can, in all seriousness, attribute all the phenomena connected with heightening inequality to the fateful and irreversible triumph of the 'equality of conditions', and so provide the oligarchic enterprise with its ideological point of honour: it is imperative to struggle against democracy, because democracy is tantamount to totalitariansim. (93)
(...) Democracy is first this paradoxical condition of politics, the point where every legitimization is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy, confronted with the egalitarian contingency that underpins the inegalitarian contingency itself. (94)
(...) The 'government of anybody and everybody' is bound to attract the hatred of all those who are entitled to govern men by their birth, wealth, or science. Today it is bound to attract this hatred more radically than ever, since the social power of wealth no longer tolerates any restriction on its limitless growth, and each day its mechanisms become more closely articulated to those of State action. (95)
(...) Democracy ... is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy. (97)
fisk on clashes in lebanon's refugee camps:
And then comes the crackle-crackle of rifle fire and a shoal of bullets drifts out of the camp. A Lebanese army tank fires a shell in return and we feel the faint shock wave from the camp. How many are dead? We don’t know. How many are wounded? The Red Cross cannot yet enter to find out. We are back at another of those tragic Lebanese stage shows: the siege of Palestinians.
(...) Only this time, of course, we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the camp, in many cases shooting at Sunni Muslim soldiers who are standing in a Sunni Muslim village. It was a Lebanese colleague who seemed to put his finger on it all. “Syria is showing that Lebanon doesn’t have to be Christians versus Muslims or Shia versus Sunnis,” he said. “It can be Sunnis versus Sunnis. And the Lebanese army can’t storm into Nahr el-Bared. That would be a step far greater than this government can take.”
(...) And there is the rub. To get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the army has to enter the camp. So the group remains, as potent as it was on Sunday when it staged its mini-revolution in Tripoli and ended up with its dead fighters burning in blazing apartment blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on the streets.
And then comes the crackle-crackle of rifle fire and a shoal of bullets drifts out of the camp. A Lebanese army tank fires a shell in return and we feel the faint shock wave from the camp. How many are dead? We don’t know. How many are wounded? The Red Cross cannot yet enter to find out. We are back at another of those tragic Lebanese stage shows: the siege of Palestinians.
(...) Only this time, of course, we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the camp, in many cases shooting at Sunni Muslim soldiers who are standing in a Sunni Muslim village. It was a Lebanese colleague who seemed to put his finger on it all. “Syria is showing that Lebanon doesn’t have to be Christians versus Muslims or Shia versus Sunnis,” he said. “It can be Sunnis versus Sunnis. And the Lebanese army can’t storm into Nahr el-Bared. That would be a step far greater than this government can take.”
(...) And there is the rub. To get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the army has to enter the camp. So the group remains, as potent as it was on Sunday when it staged its mini-revolution in Tripoli and ended up with its dead fighters burning in blazing apartment blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on the streets.
explaining iraq:
...most Iraqis agree with the tens of thousands of Shia who marched in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of its fall. They chanted: "Death to America" and "Leave, Occupier! Leave!" They know that the original motivations for the invasion no longer matter. Well over a million Iraqi citizens are dead or wounded. Between half and three quarters of the population is unemployed. More than a hundred thousand have been driven from their homes. The national infrastructure is in ruins; security is non-existent; the dinar has no value; crime is rife; oil production has sunk below pre-war levels; one third of the population lacks decent drinking water; and one quarter of Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition. No one suggests any longer that the sacrifices were "worth it": Iraq has been labeled among the top five "failed states" and "the most dangerous place on earth" by the United Nations.
(...) Consensual support existed for the invasion of Iraq that derived from consensual assumptions. Unless these assumptions are brought to light, most likely, "pragmatic" liberals will again endorse pulling the trigger once the next set of nitwits come up with their next plan to export democracy and human rights through the barrel of a gun. That is what makes it necessary to consider the mainstream arguments for why the debacle took place. Four positions have been articulated in terms acceptable to the political mainstream –- the same mainstream that brought us the war and greeted it with such acclaim in the first place. Each of them will be discussed in turn.
[argument #1]
(...) The most widely held view for the failure in Iraq concerns the incompetence of those running the military enterprise. That this interpretation should be so popular only makes sense since it simply recapitulates arguments already made familiar toward the close of the preceding debacle: the Vietnam War. The refrains echo: not enough troops were employed, equipment was shoddy, and too much emphasis was placed upon air power.
(...) This kind of argument is content to suggest that the plan was good and that, merely, the execution poor. It assumes that the great bulk of the Iraqi public was just waiting for an introduction to American "values" and ready to embrace the invaders as well as their puppet regime. None of this, of course, was the case. For all the talk of "integrating" former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, and the Sunni chieftains that gave it support, this view of events gives little attention to the long-standing ethnic divisions and religious tensions among the masses of Iraqis. It also essentially ignores what might be termed the "sociocide" -- the complete destruction of the social infrastructure and its norms -- that the invaders perpetrated in Iraq. Or, to put it a different way, this interpretation is content to concentrate upon the United States and its ability (or inability) "to get the job done" while the price paid by the Iraqis fades from view.
[argument #2]
(...) The second mainstream interpretation of the debacle in Iraq is based upon the failure of the American intelligence apparatus or, better, the manipulation of intelligence by the Bush administration. The now famous "Downing Street Memo" of 1 May 2005, minutes of a meeting taken by British national security aide Matthew Rycroft -- whose veracity is now generally acknowledged -- makes clear that Rumsfeld and his friends understood the difficulty in presenting "a good case" for war.
(...) Yet information contrary to that offered by the mainstream media and the bulk of the official intelligence community was all over the web in the months preceding the war. Democrats fearful of bucking the nationalist trend simply did not listen to experts like Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, and Mohamed El Baradei. In reality, whatever the degree to which official and mainstream intelligence was manipulated, critical information was easily available for those willing to seek it.
(...) Opposing the war was not very difficult: it demanded courage and a willingness to see clearly rather than "more information." No one asked what interest a secular regime headed by Saddam Hussein would have in making cause with Islamic fundamentalists. No one wondered how it was that a nation spending $4 billion dollars a year on the military would pose a threat to another nation spending more than $400 billion dollars a year. No one questioned how 30,000 bombs could be dropped on Baghdad in the first week of the war with only a few hundred casualties as a consequence.
[argument #3]
(...) Interpretation number three rests on the claim that the debacle ultimately derived from the refusal of the United States to turn over power to the Iraqis –- or, better, the "right" Iraqis -- quickly enough. But then the idea that "if only we had trusted the right people" -- is also an old refrain in imperialist circles. It highlights the arrogance of those "insiders" who substituted arbitrarily selected personal testimony –- or, better, simple gossip -- for knowledge of real conditions. This argument has been forwarded in various venues by neo-conservatives like Richard Perle. It is also the position now taken by his friend Ahmed Chalabi, a completely corrupt businessman later accused of acting as a double agent for Iran, who was virtually anointed by the Bush Administration to lead the new Iraqi government. Had friendly politicians like Chalabi been given power quickly, so the argument runs, Iraqi and American interests could both have been served.
(...) Unfortunately, however, this seemingly noble interpretation veils the desire by American imperialist policymakers to identify the interests expressed by their Iraqi friends in the political and economic elite with those of the Iraqi people. As it happened, Chalabi turned out to be a fraud: he had no support whatsoever among the Iraqi people and his party received 0.5% of the vote in the December 2005 elections. Left hanging is also a basic fact of political life in Iraq following the fall of Saddam: any set of leaders, friendly or not, would have had to face the lack of an army, a police force, a functioning bureaucracy, and a dilapidated infrastructure.
[argument #4]
(...) The fourth, and final, interpretation of why the war was lost is the exact opposite of the interpretation above. It suggests that the basic mistake lay in giving the Iraqis too much power too soon. This position also becomes a testament to the good intentions of the Bush Administration and its lack of ulterior motives in pursuing its course in Iraq. Of course, again, there is nothing new about this kind of claim when it comes to American foreign policy. Rumblings of this sort were heard as various puppet regimes of the United States fell during the Cold War and, again, especially when it came to the collapse of the South Vietnamese "republic." Ingratitude with respect to the "gift of freedom" that was bestowed upon the Iraqis by the United States, mixed with a kind of patronizing bigotry regarding the incompetence of the subaltern people in question, merge in this particular view of American interaction with the once colonized world. The classic line supporting this interpretation of what took place in Iraq was provided by the columnist Charles Krauthammer who wrote: "We have given the Iraqis a republic and they do not appear able to keep it."
(...) there is something profoundly misleading about claiming that the United States somehow gave too much autonomy to its puppet-regime in Iraq. Every meaningful strategic military decision since the fall of Saddam was made by the United States. Paul Bremer and his team of advisors attempted to introduce a free market by fiat. But this decision would help only the thousands of American contractors and the few huge corporations close to the Bush Administration, like Bechtel and Halliburton, whose "reconstruction" projects were mostly marked by incompetence and staggering levels of corruption. More than three thousand American soldiers have been killed and roughly ten times that many have been wounded, and the defense budget for 2008 will be close to $650 billion dollars. The war is now costing $2 billion per week and total costs will exceed what was wasted on the debacle in Vietnam. It beggars reality to claim that the United States would spend what will ultimately amount to $2 trillion without controlling the allocation of resources and the most important political and military decisions of the war.
(...) It would seem that the mainstream media has a great deal of trouble dealing with the American exercise of power and the world's view of American hegemony. What remains unexplored is the presupposition not only that the United States had the "right" to engage in a "pre-emptive strike," and lie to the entire world about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and supposed threats to the national interest in order to justify its policy, but that the rest of the world was -- or, at least, should have been -- grateful for the decision of the American government to pursue such an action. Or to put it another way, taken singly or together, the reigning explanations of how Iraq was lost leave untouched questions concerning the arrogance of power and the implications of understanding the United States as an "empire."
(...) The supposedly singular tragedy of 9/11 -- as if no other country had ever experienced anything as horrible -- also served to justify a demand for vengeance against "the Arabs" and the exercise of military might to extinguish what remained of the "Vietnam trauma." Such celebratory nationalism and provincial paranoia inspired a belief that the new "enemy" -- a convenient replacement for the communists -- was motivated more by hatred for the "American way of life" and its "freedoms" than by the policies pursued by the United States in the Middle East. This, in turn, helped generate a climate of contempt for all critics of American policy and inhibited a serious assessment of the looming dangers attendant upon the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
(...) No less than during the build-up to and the aftermath of the invasion, once again, the American mainstream media is abdicating its responsibilities. Its explanations of what happened in Iraq have raised no meaningful issues and yielded nothing of value for reflecting upon future events. The pity is that such a discussion is all the more necessary given that American diplomacy -- if that word still has any meaning -- is basically attuned toward three options: threats, sanctions, and military force. Bombing along the borders of Syria and Iran has already taken place and "warnings" of possibly "drastic" action have been extended to the Sudan. The propaganda machine is ready to be revved up at a moment's notice and it is only due to the weariness of the American public induced by failure in Iraq, and the over-extension of American troops, that yet another military conflagration has not broken out.
(...) There remains the naïve underestimation of self-serving economic and geo-political interests influencing the formation of American foreign policy. There remains the inability to grapple with the celebratory nationalism and paranoia that have played such a strong role in the history of the United States. All of this, which is so steadfastly ignored by mainstream interpretations of events, provides the backdrop for what took place in Iraq. The failure of American policy is not a function of what transpired following the "occupation." The road to ruin began with the first lie, the first bombing, and the first steps that led to the invasion of Iraq.
...most Iraqis agree with the tens of thousands of Shia who marched in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of its fall. They chanted: "Death to America" and "Leave, Occupier! Leave!" They know that the original motivations for the invasion no longer matter. Well over a million Iraqi citizens are dead or wounded. Between half and three quarters of the population is unemployed. More than a hundred thousand have been driven from their homes. The national infrastructure is in ruins; security is non-existent; the dinar has no value; crime is rife; oil production has sunk below pre-war levels; one third of the population lacks decent drinking water; and one quarter of Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition. No one suggests any longer that the sacrifices were "worth it": Iraq has been labeled among the top five "failed states" and "the most dangerous place on earth" by the United Nations.
(...) Consensual support existed for the invasion of Iraq that derived from consensual assumptions. Unless these assumptions are brought to light, most likely, "pragmatic" liberals will again endorse pulling the trigger once the next set of nitwits come up with their next plan to export democracy and human rights through the barrel of a gun. That is what makes it necessary to consider the mainstream arguments for why the debacle took place. Four positions have been articulated in terms acceptable to the political mainstream –- the same mainstream that brought us the war and greeted it with such acclaim in the first place. Each of them will be discussed in turn.
[argument #1]
(...) The most widely held view for the failure in Iraq concerns the incompetence of those running the military enterprise. That this interpretation should be so popular only makes sense since it simply recapitulates arguments already made familiar toward the close of the preceding debacle: the Vietnam War. The refrains echo: not enough troops were employed, equipment was shoddy, and too much emphasis was placed upon air power.
(...) This kind of argument is content to suggest that the plan was good and that, merely, the execution poor. It assumes that the great bulk of the Iraqi public was just waiting for an introduction to American "values" and ready to embrace the invaders as well as their puppet regime. None of this, of course, was the case. For all the talk of "integrating" former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, and the Sunni chieftains that gave it support, this view of events gives little attention to the long-standing ethnic divisions and religious tensions among the masses of Iraqis. It also essentially ignores what might be termed the "sociocide" -- the complete destruction of the social infrastructure and its norms -- that the invaders perpetrated in Iraq. Or, to put it a different way, this interpretation is content to concentrate upon the United States and its ability (or inability) "to get the job done" while the price paid by the Iraqis fades from view.
[argument #2]
(...) The second mainstream interpretation of the debacle in Iraq is based upon the failure of the American intelligence apparatus or, better, the manipulation of intelligence by the Bush administration. The now famous "Downing Street Memo" of 1 May 2005, minutes of a meeting taken by British national security aide Matthew Rycroft -- whose veracity is now generally acknowledged -- makes clear that Rumsfeld and his friends understood the difficulty in presenting "a good case" for war.
(...) Yet information contrary to that offered by the mainstream media and the bulk of the official intelligence community was all over the web in the months preceding the war. Democrats fearful of bucking the nationalist trend simply did not listen to experts like Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, and Mohamed El Baradei. In reality, whatever the degree to which official and mainstream intelligence was manipulated, critical information was easily available for those willing to seek it.
(...) Opposing the war was not very difficult: it demanded courage and a willingness to see clearly rather than "more information." No one asked what interest a secular regime headed by Saddam Hussein would have in making cause with Islamic fundamentalists. No one wondered how it was that a nation spending $4 billion dollars a year on the military would pose a threat to another nation spending more than $400 billion dollars a year. No one questioned how 30,000 bombs could be dropped on Baghdad in the first week of the war with only a few hundred casualties as a consequence.
[argument #3]
(...) Interpretation number three rests on the claim that the debacle ultimately derived from the refusal of the United States to turn over power to the Iraqis –- or, better, the "right" Iraqis -- quickly enough. But then the idea that "if only we had trusted the right people" -- is also an old refrain in imperialist circles. It highlights the arrogance of those "insiders" who substituted arbitrarily selected personal testimony –- or, better, simple gossip -- for knowledge of real conditions. This argument has been forwarded in various venues by neo-conservatives like Richard Perle. It is also the position now taken by his friend Ahmed Chalabi, a completely corrupt businessman later accused of acting as a double agent for Iran, who was virtually anointed by the Bush Administration to lead the new Iraqi government. Had friendly politicians like Chalabi been given power quickly, so the argument runs, Iraqi and American interests could both have been served.
(...) Unfortunately, however, this seemingly noble interpretation veils the desire by American imperialist policymakers to identify the interests expressed by their Iraqi friends in the political and economic elite with those of the Iraqi people. As it happened, Chalabi turned out to be a fraud: he had no support whatsoever among the Iraqi people and his party received 0.5% of the vote in the December 2005 elections. Left hanging is also a basic fact of political life in Iraq following the fall of Saddam: any set of leaders, friendly or not, would have had to face the lack of an army, a police force, a functioning bureaucracy, and a dilapidated infrastructure.
[argument #4]
(...) The fourth, and final, interpretation of why the war was lost is the exact opposite of the interpretation above. It suggests that the basic mistake lay in giving the Iraqis too much power too soon. This position also becomes a testament to the good intentions of the Bush Administration and its lack of ulterior motives in pursuing its course in Iraq. Of course, again, there is nothing new about this kind of claim when it comes to American foreign policy. Rumblings of this sort were heard as various puppet regimes of the United States fell during the Cold War and, again, especially when it came to the collapse of the South Vietnamese "republic." Ingratitude with respect to the "gift of freedom" that was bestowed upon the Iraqis by the United States, mixed with a kind of patronizing bigotry regarding the incompetence of the subaltern people in question, merge in this particular view of American interaction with the once colonized world. The classic line supporting this interpretation of what took place in Iraq was provided by the columnist Charles Krauthammer who wrote: "We have given the Iraqis a republic and they do not appear able to keep it."
(...) there is something profoundly misleading about claiming that the United States somehow gave too much autonomy to its puppet-regime in Iraq. Every meaningful strategic military decision since the fall of Saddam was made by the United States. Paul Bremer and his team of advisors attempted to introduce a free market by fiat. But this decision would help only the thousands of American contractors and the few huge corporations close to the Bush Administration, like Bechtel and Halliburton, whose "reconstruction" projects were mostly marked by incompetence and staggering levels of corruption. More than three thousand American soldiers have been killed and roughly ten times that many have been wounded, and the defense budget for 2008 will be close to $650 billion dollars. The war is now costing $2 billion per week and total costs will exceed what was wasted on the debacle in Vietnam. It beggars reality to claim that the United States would spend what will ultimately amount to $2 trillion without controlling the allocation of resources and the most important political and military decisions of the war.
(...) It would seem that the mainstream media has a great deal of trouble dealing with the American exercise of power and the world's view of American hegemony. What remains unexplored is the presupposition not only that the United States had the "right" to engage in a "pre-emptive strike," and lie to the entire world about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and supposed threats to the national interest in order to justify its policy, but that the rest of the world was -- or, at least, should have been -- grateful for the decision of the American government to pursue such an action. Or to put it another way, taken singly or together, the reigning explanations of how Iraq was lost leave untouched questions concerning the arrogance of power and the implications of understanding the United States as an "empire."
(...) The supposedly singular tragedy of 9/11 -- as if no other country had ever experienced anything as horrible -- also served to justify a demand for vengeance against "the Arabs" and the exercise of military might to extinguish what remained of the "Vietnam trauma." Such celebratory nationalism and provincial paranoia inspired a belief that the new "enemy" -- a convenient replacement for the communists -- was motivated more by hatred for the "American way of life" and its "freedoms" than by the policies pursued by the United States in the Middle East. This, in turn, helped generate a climate of contempt for all critics of American policy and inhibited a serious assessment of the looming dangers attendant upon the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
(...) No less than during the build-up to and the aftermath of the invasion, once again, the American mainstream media is abdicating its responsibilities. Its explanations of what happened in Iraq have raised no meaningful issues and yielded nothing of value for reflecting upon future events. The pity is that such a discussion is all the more necessary given that American diplomacy -- if that word still has any meaning -- is basically attuned toward three options: threats, sanctions, and military force. Bombing along the borders of Syria and Iran has already taken place and "warnings" of possibly "drastic" action have been extended to the Sudan. The propaganda machine is ready to be revved up at a moment's notice and it is only due to the weariness of the American public induced by failure in Iraq, and the over-extension of American troops, that yet another military conflagration has not broken out.
(...) There remains the naïve underestimation of self-serving economic and geo-political interests influencing the formation of American foreign policy. There remains the inability to grapple with the celebratory nationalism and paranoia that have played such a strong role in the history of the United States. All of this, which is so steadfastly ignored by mainstream interpretations of events, provides the backdrop for what took place in Iraq. The failure of American policy is not a function of what transpired following the "occupation." The road to ruin began with the first lie, the first bombing, and the first steps that led to the invasion of Iraq.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)