People who are terrified of a Bush win mostly don't talk about such things as John Pilger and Saul Landau recently have, but this straight talk strangely calms me in the state of agitation in which I find myself given the whole election playing field. It's not because these pieces are comforting that I like them but because they are true, whereby they provide a platform from which to move forward which is an improvement on this feeling of dread I have in the face of participating in what to a significant degree is a no-win situation. Given the fierce strength of the Anybody But Bush sentiment I can't imagine any of what's here putting votes in the Bush column or else I wouldn’t put this out, but if Kerry squeaks through we need immediate vigilance to accompany what relief would ensue:
By John Pilger
There is a surreal quality about visiting the United States in the last days of the presidential campaign. If George W Bush wins, according to a scientist I met, who escaped Nazi-dominated Europe, America will surrender many of its democratic trappings and succumb to its totalitarian impulses. If John Kerry wins, according to most Democrat voters, the only mandate he will have is that he is not Bush.
Never have so many liberal hands been wrung over a candidate whose only memorable statements seek to out-Bush Bush. Take Iran. one of Kerry's national security advisers, Susan Rice, has accused Bush of 'standing on the sidelines while Iran's nuclear programme has been advanced'. There is not a shred of evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, yet Kerry is joining in the same orchestrated frenzy that led to the invasion of Iraq. Having begun his campaign by promising another 40,000 troops for Iraq, he is said to have a 'secret plan to end the war' which foresees a withdrawal in four years. This is an echo of Richard Nixon, who in the 1968 presidential campaign promised a 'secret plan' to end the war in Vietnam.
Once in office, he accelerated the slaughter and the war dragged on for six and a half years. For Kerry, like Nixon, the message is that he is not a wimp. Nothing in his campaign or his career suggests he will not continue, even escalate, the 'war on terror', which is now sanctified as a crusade of Americanism like that against communism. No Democratic president has shirked such a task: John Kennedy on the cold war, Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam.
This presents great danger for all of us, but none of it is allowed to intrude upon the campaign or the media 'coverage'. In a supposedly free and open society, the degree of censorship by omission is staggering. The New York Times, the country's liberal standard-bearer, having recovered from a mild bout of contrition over its abject failure to challenge Bush's lies about Iraq, has been running tombstones of column inches about what-went-wrong in the 'liberation' of that country.
It blames mistakes: tactical oversights, faulty intelligence. Not a word suggests that the invasion was a colonial conquest, deliberate like any other, and that 60 years of international law make it 'the paramount war crime', to quote the Nuremberg judges. Not a word suggests that the American onslaught on the population of Iraq was and is systematically atrocious, of which the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was merely a glimpse.
The coming atrocity in the city of Fallujah, in which British troops, against the wishes of the British people, are to be accessories, is a case in point. For American politicians and journalists – there are a few honourable exceptions – the US marines are preparing for another of their “battles”. Their last attack on Fallujah, in April, provides a preview. Forty-ton battle tanks and helicopter gunships were used against slums. Aircraft dropped 500lb bombs: marine snipers killed old people, women and children; ambulances were shot at. The marines closed the only hospital in a city of 300,000 for more than two weeks, so they could use it as a military position.
When it was estimated they had slaughtered 600 people, there was no denial. This was more than all the victims of the suicide bombs the previous year. Neither did they deny that their barbarity was in revenge for the killing of four American mercenaries in the city; led by avowed cowboys, they are specialists in revenge. John Kerry said nothing; the media reported the atrocity as 'a military operation', against 'foreign militants' and 'insugents', never against civilians and Iraqis defending their homes and homeland.
Moreover, the American people are almost totally unaware that the marines were driven out of Fallujah by heroic street fighting. Americans remain unaware, too, of the piracy that comes with their government's murderous adventure. Who in public life asks the whereabouts of the 18.46 bn dollars which the US Congress approved for reconstruction and humanitarian aid in Iraq?
As Unicef reports, most hospitals are bereft even of pain-killers, and acute malnutrition among children has doubled since the 'liberation'. In fact, less than 29m dollars has been allocated, most of it on British security firms, with their ex-SAS thugs and veterans of South African apartheid. Where is the rest of this money that should be helping to save lives? Non-wimp Kerry dares not ask.
Neither does he nor anybody else with a public profile ask why the people of Iraq have been forced to pay, since the fall of Saddam, almost 80m dollars to America and Britain as 'reparations'. Even Israel has received an untold fortune in Iraqi oil money as compensation for its 'loss of tourism' in the Golan Heights – part of Syria it occupies illegally. As for oil, the 'o-word' is unmentionable in the contest for the world's most powerful job. So successful is the resistance in its campaign of economic sabotage that the vital pipeline carrying oil to the Turkish Mediterranean has been blown up 37 times. Terminals in the south are under constant attack, effectively shutting down all exports of crude oil and threatening national economies. That the world may have lost Iraqi oil is enveloped by the same silence that ensures Americans have little idea of the nature and scale of the blood-letting conducted in their name.
The most enduring silence is that which guards the system that has produced these catastrophic events. This is Americanism, though it dares not speak its name, which is strange, as its opposite, anti-Americanism, has long been successfully deployed as a pejorative, catch-all response to critical analysis of an imperial system and its myths. Americanism, the ideology, has meant democracy at home, for some, and a war on democracy abroad.
>From Guatemala to Iran, from Chile to Nicaragua, to the struggle for
>freedom in South Africa, to present-day Venezuela, American state
>terrorism, licensed by both Republican and Democrat administrations,
>has fought democrats and sponsored totalitarians. Most societies
>attacked or otherwise subverted by American power are weak and
>defenceless, and there is a logic to this. Should a small country
>succeed in breaking free and establish its own way of developing, then
>its good example to others becomes a threat to Washington.And the serious purpose behind this? Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's secretary of state, once told the United Nations that America had the right to 'unilateral use of power' to ensure 'uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources'. Or as Colin Powell, the Bush-ite laughably promoted by the media as a liberal, put it more than a decade ago: “I want to be the bully on the block.” Britain's imperialists believed exactly that, and still do; only the language is discreet.
That is why people all over the world, whose consciousness about these matters has risen sharply in the past few years, are 'anti-American'. It has nothing to do with the ordinary people of the United States, who now watch a Darwanian capitalism consume their real and fabled freedoms and reduce the 'free market' to a fire-sale of public assets. It is remarkable, if not inspiring, that so many reject the class and race based brainwashing, begun in childhood, that such a class and race based system is called 'the American dream'.
What will happen if the nightmare in Iraq goes on? Perhaps those millions of worried Americans, who are currently paralysed by wanting to get rid of Bush at any price, will shake off their ambivalence, regardless of who wins on 2 November. Then, will a giant awaken, as it did during the civil rights campaign and the Vietnam war and the great movement to freeze nuclear weapons? one must trust so; the alternative is a war on the world.
[John Pilger is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University, New York. His latest book is Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and its triumphs (Jonathan Cape).]
Terrible v. Worse: The Reality of Empire and Campaign Rhetoric
By Saul Landau
Try to digest radio blasts of campaign rhetoric amidst nerve-wracking traffic jams and insistent billboards. In a massive mall parking lot, designed to divert the brain from human themes, I try to understand my country's empire. The energy spent involved in avoiding promotional barrages leaves me with barely enough motivation to parse John Kerry's convex sentences or George Bush's convolutions.
Check claims against facts and maybe light will shine through? The candidates offer to “keep the faith” in Iraq and “fulfill our mission.” What faith? Islam? Bush's faith? What mission? Before invading, Bush defined his goal as ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, which Bush's appointed weapons inspectors did not find, and cutting Iraq's ties to Al-Qaeda terrorists, which didn't exist before March 2003 but now do.
Who dictated this mission? Did God, posing as a neo-con, tell Bush to invade Iraq during a prayer session? Kerry's more historical view warns: don't repeat the terrible mistakes in Iraq that we made in Vietnam by denying that we are making them. Thus, sending more troops to Iraq might make our original mistakes worse, but we cannot simply walk away from the terrible mistake without making worse the original mistake. So, Kerry would or wouldn't send more troops to Iraq to support our troops there because they do or don't need extra help. Bush would not send more because they don't need it. Both candidates agree that shouting “support our troops” is the best support our troops can get. Have I missed something?
On Israel, one candidate declares 100% support for whatever she does. The other contender favors giving full support for all of Israel's policies. See the difference?
The candidates don't object to spending $400 plus billion on “defense.” Neither explains how that money actually defends our country since we have no likely attackers. Over the last decades, defense money got spent offensively. Ask the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, the former Yugoslavia or nations attacked covertly, like Chile, Cuba, Brazil, etc.
The candidates differ about imperial strategy. Bush invaded Iraq without junior partners like France and Germany — because he could. Kerry would invade weak countries with allied support because it looks better. What does “ally” mean after the Soviet monster collapsed?
Kerry and Bush agree to aggressively pursue the global mission of freedom. In practice, freedom has meant Halliburton's right to do business with scum like Saddam Hussein before the United States invaded Iraq and then make billions repairing the damage done after the invasion; plus feeding, housing and building latrines for “our troops” (Is that what “supporting our troops” means?).
Freedom also embodies Wal-Mart's right to expand globally. The vast corporation serves as means and ends of vast empire. Monster-sized stores wage peaceful aggression, seeking to re-conquer indigenous Mexico by demanding the placement for sale of its weapons (Chinese-made wares) at the 2,000 year-old Teotihuacan ruins. The globalizing giant has challenged the Indian gods by building its new superstore under the shadows of the ancient pyramids. Ironically, the Spanish built their churches and government edifices on top of the Aztec civilization they had just conquered. Now, we visit Mexico and admire the ruins of both old cultures.
Local residents petitioned the court to stop Wal-Mart, which threatens small business, distorts the ecology and mocks the ruins. It will decimate a way of life. Wal-Mart demands freedom to sell. The State Department denies that Mexican courts have jurisdiction in questions about freedom to trade. Didn't NAFTA (The North American Free Trade Agreement) settle that issue?
Indeed, Wal-Mart's freedom to operate megastores defines imperial goals. Nations that reject Wal-Mart, a symbol of corporate freedom, become international human rights violators in the media, which doesn't condemn Wal-Mart, however, for its contempt for labor rights. Instead, the press offers a “balanced picture” of Wal-Mart's ruthless resistance to organizing attempts. Political authorities offer the language. The media accepts it, without evaluating labels given to enemies: communism, socialism, nationalism — or “terrorist regimes.” Journalists assume that these regimes ipso facto violate the human spirit.
Cuba, the media's arch-typical rogue nation, has suffered forty-five years of distortion. Reporters have filed tens of thousands of negative stories about Cuba's lack of freedom along with a handful of “balanced” tales that praise its health care and education.
“Communist China” became just China when the ruling Communist Party switched from state to private sector economics. Ironically, in school we don't learn that democracy and freedom mean the need to have unrestricted global access for Wal-Mart or post war contracts for Halliburton.
Likewise, the candidates don't discuss corporate freedom. Instead, they intone on how Lincoln and Roosevelt fought for freedom, which the candidates will adapt to the war against terrorism. The public remains awash in conflicting facts and messages. The 9/11 Commission presented evidence that Iraq had no role in the 9/11 attacks. Yet, a Newsweek poll in September had 42% believing that Saddam Hussein authored the World Trade Center attacks. Vice President Cheney repeats this myth in his speeches. Fox, the privatized ministry of propaganda posing as a news organization, underscores that message.
The public receives language that conceals both imperial intentions and the logical outcome of aggression. The torture of Iraqis resulted from an imperial invasion and occupation. Bush and Rumsfeld at least tacitly approved the torture, but now blame Abu Ghraib horrors on “a few bad apples.” Yet, according to Heather Wokusch in the September 14 Common Dreams New Center, prison conditions in Texas under Governor Bush were a model for US prisons in Iraq. Wokush quotes federal Judge William Wayne Justice: “Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions.”
A September 1996 “videotaped raid on inmates at a county jail in Texas showed guards using stun guns and an attack dog on prisoners, who were later dragged face-down back to their cells.” Same apples in Iraq?
But the public, distracted by consumption and media distortions, move politically in a fog. Far right Republicans emphasize peripheral issues: abortion, guns, gay marriages and prayer in school–not war or the distribution of wealth and health.
Kerry himself appears unfocused, almost hypnotized by his own monotone. Yes, a Kerry victory means better judges and heads of agencies.
And Kerry wouldn't prematurely ejaculate “Mission Accomplished” as Bush did after landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. The pilot who flew Bush to that publicity stunt died in Iraq on August 10. Bush did not attend Lt. Commander Scott Zellem's funeral — just one more number in the 1,000 plus Americans who perished in Iraq.
“We've turned the corner,” Bush instead proclaimed (lied). Did this sick joke refer to 7,000 plus wounded who will no longer turn corners on their own feet? Did he mean by corner-turning his ability to sell imperial needs as a “war against terrorism”? Bush holds the presidential record for launching two wars and occupations in two years. If elected, more military operations will likely follow since he has apparently convinced tens of thousands of poor youth on the virtues of giving their lives — not his for causes like “liberating Afghanistan.”
He omits the thousands of Afghan dead, cities destroyed and the $400-billion spent on wars that have not yet produced Osama bin Laden. Foreign troops occupy “liberated Afghanistan.” That country undergoes extreme poverty, while its opium production soars and instability runs rampant. In the August 27, 2004 Baltimore Chronicle Jane Stillwater reported an eyewitness' account: “Since the American takeover of Afghanistan, the major crops there are now opium, human organs and children.”
But reality has not pricked the “success and democracy” bubble; nor assuaged the “security” fears that guide election rhetoric. Kerry whines about “losing our allies” as if the nearly 55 year old and moribund NATO alliance served some purpose. New power realities have removed the need for junior partners (allies).
160,000 troops occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting for “freedom” by killing residents who get in their way. No end in sight. The Democrats have no clear alternative. Let rhetoric ring!
The Pentagon's new bases in Bulgaria and Romania link “America's new imperial lifeline” to bases across Central Asia, Iraq and the Gulf. The 100,000 troops who staff those 700 plus outposts, writes Eric Margolis in the August 22 Toronto Sun, are “designed to cement Washington's hold on the Muslim world and its natural resources.” The Pentagon outfits itself for 'expeditionary warfare', Margolis continues, which the British called “the `imperial mission'.”
Kerry also envisions new bases to stage operations in volatile strategic regions, but cautions against wasting money on “excess bases.”
The bi-partisan militarized foreign policy makes the United States resemble the British Empire, Margolis concludes, but most Americans “remain unaware of their government's new imperial plans to rule oil and the Muslim world, and of the unexpected conflicts that lie in wait for America's increasingly far-flung expeditionary forces.”
Halliburton and Wal-Mart CEOs understand. After all, it's their profits that the new armed forces will protect no matter who wins in November.
There's an argument for John Kerry, but it comes down to terrible is better than worse.
[Saul Landau is the Director of Digital Media and International Outreach Programs for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences. His new book is The Business of America.]
These cautionary tales that dare to speak truth to what we wish weren't so are in line with a previous post of a piece by Robert Jensen that made us more thoughtful than we'd have liked to be about Fahrenheit 9/11. As I said about this piece, Stupid White Movie: What Michael Moore Misses About the Empire, “Let's not be a non-discriminating cult in our zeal to right the horrors that Bush is so culpable for.”
One more thing. I sent an email to the people on my list who write pieces I post. It was food for thought about what our post-election activity might be. Here's what I sent:
With a Kerry win over Bush looming as some version of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, a la what Anthony Arnove says, below, what do we do? I suggest that instead of focusing all our efforts on getting Kerry in, significant energies go to strategizing for what to do WW — Whomever Wins.
I propose that smart people put their heads together. As is, we have some abundance of articulate, passionate gadflies. Let those gadflies unite.
There are precedents for uniting. Here are two cooperative efforts amongst the intelligentsia that were hugely productive:
“…50 years ago, the Macy Conferences. Over ten years time, a unique group of thinkers from diverse fields birthed the field of cybernetics and system’ s thinking. The Macy Conferences were central to the pioneering years of cybernetics and resulted in an impressive series of concrete achievements. The surprise is that the Macy Conferences were annual conversations among friends who recognized possible connections and implications beyond their individual specialties. They committed to be in a conversation that explored the connections and transcended the boundaries, searching for a shared theory that could support their individual work.”
Ten Events from 1946 through 1953
“The coalescence of cybernetics in the 1940's was a historical process that involved many interactions among a variety of thoughtful and inquisitive people.
“These people, all eminent in their many respective fields, would go on to disseminate their individual impressions of and elaborations upon 'cybernetics' for decades thereafter. This made for a new field whose many facets make it easy to treat as a significant intellectual innovation but difficult to delineate as a coherent whole. The historical records for the field's birth have never been readily accessible, owing to an almost total lack of documentation for the first 5 conferences and the obscure status of the last 5 events' proceedings. This resulted in a reliance on personal recollections and anecdotal evidence in exploring how that process occurred. In other words, the process' product (cybernetics itself) is many things to many people, and the process' narrative is either a mystery or a matter of hearsay. It is therefore no surprise that the coalescence of cybernetics has been mythologized by both its adherents and its critics.”
2. THE TWILIGHT CLUB
This is an encyclopedia listing: “The Twilight Club is an organization founded in the late 19th century, with the intention to counter the moral decline by bolstering up the spiritual and ethical awareness of the society. Illustrious members were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Walt Whitman, Andrew Carnegie, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mark Twain. The name of the club refers to their meetings at the twilight of the day, but also to the evening twilight of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th century. From this club, service clubs such as the Rotary Club and the Lions evolved at a later stage.”
There were other impressive things that the Twilight Club gave rise to. Here's a history.
Is there any interest in thinking along these lines?Suzanne Taylor
http://TheConversation.org
http://MightyCompanions.orgThe Dead End of ABB [Anybody But Bush]
By Anthony ArnoveABB — Anybody But Bush — is one of the most harmful slogans progressives have put forward in decades.
The slogan tells John Kerry and the Democrats that they don't need to do anything to win our vote.
As the satiric Onion newspaper joked, Kerry can safely run on a “one-point program”: that he is not George Bush.
But even that one-point program is in question. Kerry said he supports Bush's policies on Israel “100 percent,” his tax cuts “98 percent,” and the Patriot Act (which his aides boast he helped to write, in addition to having voted for it) “94 percent.”
On Iraq, as we now know, Kerry says he would have voted to authorize the invasion even if he knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
Kerry's real argument with Bush is over how best to have run the invasion and occupation, not over its logic or morality.
Kerry thinks he can oversee the “war on terror” more effectively, with more international support, and, as Arundhati Roy has noted in a recent speech, with “Indian and Pakistani soldiers to do the killing and dying in Iraq.”
As Ali Abunimah argued on Electronic Iraq web site on April 29, “What Kerry's plan boils down to then is this: he is more charming than Bush.”
ABB tells the Democrats that they can ignore the vibrant antiwar movement we have built over the past two years; that they can take workers, trade unionists, women, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans — and anyone else who rejects Bush's policies –for granted.
ABB also leads to apologetics for Kerry and the Democrats: the deliberate downplaying of their role in passing the Patriot Act, supporting the invasion of Iraq (and before that the brutal sanctions and the regular bombing of the country), and justifying wars in the name of humanitarianism.
Perhaps worst of all, ABB creates a false sense of how change happens: at the ballot box and through the Democratic Party.
In fact, history suggests the opposite: that we have achieved substantive change only when collectively acting outside “official” institutions to force politicians, whether Democrat or Republican, to meet our demands and to make concessions that they otherwise would not have made.
This is not to say the left should call for a vote for Bush or that “things must get worse before they get better.”
That is a caricature of the argument against ABB.
The truth is, we will have to wage many of the same battles regardless of who wins November 2: against the occupations of Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan, against the ongoing attack on the basic rights of workers, immigrants, and the poor in this country, and for abortion rights, for environmental protection, for civil rights.
If Kerry wins, we can reasonably expect that we will also face some new
challenges: many of the people who marched with us on February 15 and March 22, 2003, and last week in New York will tell us to “give Kerry a chance” and that we can't do better than what Kerry has on offer.
Many liberal organizations will accept under Kerry what they otherwise would have opposed stridently under Bush.
People say “this time will be different than when Clinton is elected,” and that we won't get fooled again, but there's little reason to think that the dynamic of the Democrats' ability to co-opt and contain social movements will suddenly change, especially given the prevalence of ABB arguments that are sowing illusions about the kind of change a Kerry administration will bring.
In reality, the Democrats are likely to keep shifting the goalposts to the right, allowing the Republicans to then beat their chests even harder and expose the Democrats, who have accepted their warmongering assumptions.
On August 26, Todd Gitlin revealed the real dead end of the ABB position.
In a debate with journalist and global justice activist Naomi Klein on Democracy Now!, Gitlin argued, “My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics. Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.”
If we have a one-party state, it is because the Democrats, with Kerry prominently among them, have not acted remotely as an opposition party.
So this is hardly an argument for a Kerry vote.
Rather, it suggests the need to support a third (or, more honestly, “second” party) effort, since the Democrats and Republicans are in effect two wings of the same corporate party.
More importantly, contra Gitlin, politics did not stop with the election of George W. Bush, anymore than it stopped with the election of Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon.
Gitlin's argument is an insult to people who have been building opposition to racist attacks on immigrants, to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, to U.S. funding of Israel's apartheid wall and expansion of its settlements, and to the many social costs of the “war on terror” on home during the last three years.
Gitlin also ignores the victories we have won under the Republicans historically and even under Bush: including victories against the death penalty (notably in Illinois, under Governor George Ryan, a Republican, and even at the level of the Supreme Court) and in restricting the scope of civil rights rollback attempted by this administration.
It was under the Bush onslaught that the largest coordinated protest in human history took place, on February 15, 2003.
Millions of people — including military personnel and their families, and targeted groups such as Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants — have stood up against intimidation to oppose war and occupation.
History does not support the thesis that the Democrats are more open to pressure from below. They resisted the movement against the war in Vietnam every bit as viciously as the Republicans, escalating the war after running on a peace platform.
Under Clinton, we saw the end of welfare, a severe rollback in worker's rights, a major spike in the number of people without any health insurance or underinsured, declining real wages, and the indiscriminate bombing of Iraq, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan.
Much of the left was satisfied with the illusion of “access” to Clinton, actively undermining genuine mobilization against his agenda.
And Kerry's program stands even to the right of Clinton.
To those who suggest Kerry is just talking right to get elected, as many progressives have asserted (in a left version of faith-based politics), three questions must be asked.
First, when has a politician ever talked right and governed left? The history of the Democrats is that they talk left, and govern right, a frightening prospect in Kerry's case.
Second, why should we support a candidate whose election strategy is to chase Bush's social base, while ignoring the majority of people in the United States who now say they oppose the invasion of Iraq?
And finally, to whom is Kerry accountable? Us, the antiwar movement, the social movements, or his backers on Wall Street, many of whom prefer to have the less provocative Kerry at the helm of U.S. imperialism than the bridge-burning Bush?
Regardless of who you plan to vote for in November (if anyone at all), the assumptions behind ABB stand in the way of building movements that can bring about political change.
We need to chart a course that looks beyond the election to long-term efforts that will necessarily have to be independent of — and oppositional to — the Democrats, as well as the Republicans.
We can't do that while shilling for the Democrats, and letting them of the hook.
[Anthony Arnove is co-editor with Howard Zinn of Voices of a People's History of the United States, from Seven Stories Press.]
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