LIBYA 2011 IS NOT IRAQ 2003
March 22, 2011
PROFESSOR JUAN COLE
Here are the differences between George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the current United Nations action in Libya:
1. The action in Libya was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. That in Iraq was not. By the UN Charter, military action after 1945 should either come as self-defense or with UNSC authorization. Most countries in the world are signatories to the charter and bound by its provisions.
2. The Libyan people had risen up and thrown off the Qaddafi regime, with some 80-90 percent of the country having gone out of his hands before he started having tank commanders fire shells into peaceful crowds. It was this vast majority of the Libyan people that demanded the UN no-fly zone. In 2002-3 there was no similar popular movement against Saddam Hussein.
3. There was an ongoing massacre of civilians, and the threat of more such massacres in Benghazi, by the Qaddafi regime, which precipitated the UNSC resolution. Although the Saddam Hussein regime had massacred people in the 1980s and early 1990s, nothing was going on in 2002-2003 that would have required international intervention.
4. The Arab League urged the UNSC to take action against the Qaddafi regime, and in many ways precipitated Resolution 1973. The Arab League met in 2002 and expressed opposition to a war on Iraq. (Reports of Arab League backtracking on Sunday were incorrect, based on a remark of outgoing Secretary-General Amr Moussa that criticized the taking out of anti-aircraft batteries. The Arab League reaffirmed Sunday and Moussa agreed Monday that the No-Fly Zone is what it wants).
5. None of the United Nations allies envisages landing troops on the ground, nor does the UNSC authorize it. Iraq was invaded by land forces.
6. No false allegations were made against the Qaddafi regime, of being in league with al-Qaeda or of having a nuclear weapons program. The charge is massacre of peaceful civilian demonstrators and an actual promise to commit more such massacres.
7. The United States did not take the lead role in urging a no-fly zone, and was dragged into this action by its Arab and European allies. President Obama pledges that the US role, mainly disabling anti-aircraft batteries and bombing runways, will last “days, not months” before being turned over to other United Nations allies.
8. There is no sectarian or ethnic dimension to the Libyan conflict, whereas the US Pentagon conspired with Shiite and Kurdish parties to overthrow the Sunni-dominated Baathist regime in Iraq, setting the stage for a prolonged and bitter civil war.
9. The US has not rewarded countries such as Norway for entering the conflict as UN allies, but rather a genuine sense of outrage at the brutal crimes against humanity being committed by Qaddafi and his forces impelled the formation of this coalition. The Bush administration’s ‘coalition of the willing’ in contrast was often brought on board by what were essentially bribes.
10. Iraq in 2002-3 no longer posed a credible threat to its neighbors. A resurgent Qaddafi in Libya with petroleum billions at his disposal would likely attempt to undermine the democratic experiments in Tunisia and Egypt, blighting the lives of millions.
Thursday 24 March 2011
Sunday 20 March 2011
EVERY SQUARE IS A TAHIR SQUARE
EVERY SQUARE IS A TAHIR SQUARE
BREAKING THE CRUST OF SILENCE
EVERY SQUARE IS A TAHIR SQUARE
By AHMAD BARQAWI
Amman, Jordan.
WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN BY Mr. FISH
DICTATORS DOMINOES BY MIKE LUCHOVICH
For thirty years; generations of Arab people were deliberately spoon-fed a fallacious reality about themselves; a reality of passiveness, instinctive capitulation and quiet submission; a reality that seemed to contradict –and indeed often wrestled with- their true identity, their heritage and honorable history of rising against social injustices, rule of force and corruption; from the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman rule to the 1936 Palestinian Revolution against the British, from the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 to the two blessed Intifadas in Palestine in 1987 and 2000, still oddly enough; for thirty years we've found ourselves admiring the history of the French revolution instead, romanticizing the American War of Independence and cheering –from afar- for the fall of the Berlin wall.
For thirty years, Arab youngsters were raised on the unshakable conviction that waking up in the morning and feeling a bitter contentment with what little is remaining of their diminishing social rights and freedoms is actually an unquestionable "winning formula" for safety and happiness, that "people's power" means absolutely nothing in the midst of their daily and backbreaking task of securing the scarce necessities of life, that even if a "change" is due; it'll be in the form of a destructive foreign military occupation –such was the case in Iraq-; and even then, we'd roll along and adopt some kind of a darwinian approach in dealing with and adapting to it; and just like that; we were programmed to settle for this brand of democracy at the point of a gun and its twisted sense of "nobility".
For thirty years, silence has become compelling with governments' inexcusable laxity towards pressing social matters; and a collective sense of powerlessness was carefully nurtured as inglorious exploits of Arab nations' resources ran amok and a ludicrous gap between the very thin layer of the rich class and the rest of society grew glaringly wider, for thirty years; successive Arab generations surrendered each day to this somber "reality"; that every struggle for dignity they might get into is a foregone conclusion, and that the collective Arab nation is nothing but a sad ghost of glories past; buried in the grave and wretched morass of rising unemployment rates, sinister poverty lines and gag orders.
Now, in what seemed like a fleeting moment, Arab youngsters in Tunisia and Egypt have broken this decades-old thick crust of silence; and managed to weather the storm of fear and mass intimidation and clung onto their god given right of free speech and peaceful expression of popular will, they're setting a fine example for even the most civilized nations in the world; Arab nations no longer bear the moral stigma of self-defeat and stagnation, they no longer want to hide their light under a bushel; they too have a voice and they are making sure it is being heard loud and clear the world over.
We no longer survive on nostalgia for an ancient storied history of pride and free will; these days; a new history is being written for future generations, in our hearts; every square is a freedom square.
Ahmad Barqawi, a Jordanian freelance columnist & writer based in Amman, he has done several studies, statistical analysis and researches on economic and social development in Jordan.
BREAKING THE CRUST OF SILENCE
EVERY SQUARE IS A TAHIR SQUARE
By AHMAD BARQAWI
Amman, Jordan.
WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN BY Mr. FISH
DICTATORS DOMINOES BY MIKE LUCHOVICH
For thirty years; generations of Arab people were deliberately spoon-fed a fallacious reality about themselves; a reality of passiveness, instinctive capitulation and quiet submission; a reality that seemed to contradict –and indeed often wrestled with- their true identity, their heritage and honorable history of rising against social injustices, rule of force and corruption; from the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman rule to the 1936 Palestinian Revolution against the British, from the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 to the two blessed Intifadas in Palestine in 1987 and 2000, still oddly enough; for thirty years we've found ourselves admiring the history of the French revolution instead, romanticizing the American War of Independence and cheering –from afar- for the fall of the Berlin wall.
For thirty years, Arab youngsters were raised on the unshakable conviction that waking up in the morning and feeling a bitter contentment with what little is remaining of their diminishing social rights and freedoms is actually an unquestionable "winning formula" for safety and happiness, that "people's power" means absolutely nothing in the midst of their daily and backbreaking task of securing the scarce necessities of life, that even if a "change" is due; it'll be in the form of a destructive foreign military occupation –such was the case in Iraq-; and even then, we'd roll along and adopt some kind of a darwinian approach in dealing with and adapting to it; and just like that; we were programmed to settle for this brand of democracy at the point of a gun and its twisted sense of "nobility".
For thirty years, silence has become compelling with governments' inexcusable laxity towards pressing social matters; and a collective sense of powerlessness was carefully nurtured as inglorious exploits of Arab nations' resources ran amok and a ludicrous gap between the very thin layer of the rich class and the rest of society grew glaringly wider, for thirty years; successive Arab generations surrendered each day to this somber "reality"; that every struggle for dignity they might get into is a foregone conclusion, and that the collective Arab nation is nothing but a sad ghost of glories past; buried in the grave and wretched morass of rising unemployment rates, sinister poverty lines and gag orders.
Now, in what seemed like a fleeting moment, Arab youngsters in Tunisia and Egypt have broken this decades-old thick crust of silence; and managed to weather the storm of fear and mass intimidation and clung onto their god given right of free speech and peaceful expression of popular will, they're setting a fine example for even the most civilized nations in the world; Arab nations no longer bear the moral stigma of self-defeat and stagnation, they no longer want to hide their light under a bushel; they too have a voice and they are making sure it is being heard loud and clear the world over.
We no longer survive on nostalgia for an ancient storied history of pride and free will; these days; a new history is being written for future generations, in our hearts; every square is a freedom square.
Ahmad Barqawi, a Jordanian freelance columnist & writer based in Amman, he has done several studies, statistical analysis and researches on economic and social development in Jordan.
Tuesday 15 March 2011
PEOPLE POWER VS. WASHINGTON
PEOPLE POWER VS. WASHINGTON
Mar 15, 2011
By Juan Cole
The claim that George W. Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq somehow opened up the Middle East to reform is an affront to the brave crowds that have risked their lives to change the American-backed order in that part of the world. Bush’s invasion was followed by no significant reforms in the region, whereas the outbreak of people power today has scared autocratic regimes into making unheard-of concessions. Iraq itself is no shining beacon on a hill for the people of the Middle East, but rather is a target of protests and an object lesson among the protesters of what to avoid.
Among those who brought down Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, and those now challenging Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, none put forward Iraq as a model. An activist who had witnessed both scenes contrasted the elation and feeling of achievement among crowds in Cairo with the sullen apprehension in Baghdad after the American military occupied Iraq. In the aftermath of the Jan. 25 demonstrations in Cairo I saw tweets in Arabic from protesters warning against allowing internal divisions to rip Egypt apart. We don’t, they said, want to end up like Iraq.
In fact, the protests in Egypt inspired crowds to come out in Iraq to rally against the corruption and incompetence of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Thousands were in the streets on a “day of wrath” Feb. 25, when 18 were killed and 140 injured as security forces in Mosul, Hawija and elsewhere shot at the crowds. Maliki cut off access to downtown Baghdad by closing key bridges. Since then, there have been almost daily protests in Iraq. Last Friday, thousands of Kurds again gathered in Sulaimaniya to demand the ouster of the autocratic president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, and one man attempted to set himself alight, in emulation of North African protesters. Maliki castigated the demonstrators as terrorists and closed the party offices of two small groups calling for rallies. He continues to hold most of the powerful government portfolios in his own hands.
If Bush’s misadventure in Iraq had indeed been a positive impetus for change in the region, then at least some protesters elsewhere would have credited it as an inspiration. If the U.S. occupation had actually produced a functional, democratic system, so many Iraqis would not have emulated the Egyptian protesters and taken to the streets. Moreover, we would have seen political openings in the years after 2003 in the Arab world. Rather, the reforms are coming only now, impelled by the protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt.
On Sunday, the Algerian parliament voted to lift the country’s state of emergency, a measure that had suspended civil liberties since 1992. In the fall of 1991, the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front had won parliamentary elections, an outcome unacceptable to the country’s secular-minded officer corps. The generals overturned the election results and dissolved parliament, plunging the country into civil war as the fundamentalists took up arms. In recent years, under President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a semblance of normality has returned, though many critics in the public accuse him of conducting elections that are not entirely aboveboard, and of tolerating extensive corruption high in the state. The government is acceding to a demand of Algeria’s small protest movement in hopes of averting a larger movement of the sort that chased out the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt.
Even in a country such as Morocco, where the protest movement has been smaller than in some other Arab nations, the winds of change have prompted a pre-emptive response. King Mohammed VI has pledged that the constitution will be rewritten to allow the prime minister to be elected by parliament rather than appointed, and to give the position more power. In other words, he will take steps toward becoming a constitutional monarch.
At the other end of the Arab world, in the Persian Gulf sultanate of Oman, Sultan Qaboos bin Said has announced that he will devolve legislative powers to the legislature, which has so far been just a debating society. Until these changes, only the cabinet, appointed by the sultan, could make laws. The reforms were impelled by strikes and protests by petroleum workers in provincial cities, as well as by the object lesson delivered by crowds in North Africa.
The handful of powerful neoconservatives in Washington who plotted the war on Iraq never pushed democratization as a goal until after it became clear that their primary justifications for military action were false. Even then, their notion of democracy involved dissolving Iraqi unions and gaining promotions for their Iraqi political cronies, who promptly created a secret police force. The constitution crafted at their insistence was almost universally rejected by Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, setting the stage for a civil war. Prime Minister Maliki has ruled as a soft strongman, creating tribal levies loyal to himself and asserting control over the Ministry of Defense and the officer corps.
The demands of the protesters throughout today’s Arab world have nothing in common with earlier U.S. neoconservative plots. Today’s democratic forces want the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. They want a better deal economically, and government intervention to ensure the public welfare. They want genuine grass-roots input into legislation and governance. They want an end to censorship and secret police. They want national resources to benefit the common person, not foreign corporations. Their ideals are far closer to FDR’s New Deal than to W.’s White Tie Society. And they are well on the way to realizing their goals in key countries of the region even as the Kleptocratic Bush era recedes into the mists of history, attendant with more major failures of policy than any other regime in American history.
Mar 15, 2011
By Juan Cole
The claim that George W. Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq somehow opened up the Middle East to reform is an affront to the brave crowds that have risked their lives to change the American-backed order in that part of the world. Bush’s invasion was followed by no significant reforms in the region, whereas the outbreak of people power today has scared autocratic regimes into making unheard-of concessions. Iraq itself is no shining beacon on a hill for the people of the Middle East, but rather is a target of protests and an object lesson among the protesters of what to avoid.
Among those who brought down Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, and those now challenging Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, none put forward Iraq as a model. An activist who had witnessed both scenes contrasted the elation and feeling of achievement among crowds in Cairo with the sullen apprehension in Baghdad after the American military occupied Iraq. In the aftermath of the Jan. 25 demonstrations in Cairo I saw tweets in Arabic from protesters warning against allowing internal divisions to rip Egypt apart. We don’t, they said, want to end up like Iraq.
In fact, the protests in Egypt inspired crowds to come out in Iraq to rally against the corruption and incompetence of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Thousands were in the streets on a “day of wrath” Feb. 25, when 18 were killed and 140 injured as security forces in Mosul, Hawija and elsewhere shot at the crowds. Maliki cut off access to downtown Baghdad by closing key bridges. Since then, there have been almost daily protests in Iraq. Last Friday, thousands of Kurds again gathered in Sulaimaniya to demand the ouster of the autocratic president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, and one man attempted to set himself alight, in emulation of North African protesters. Maliki castigated the demonstrators as terrorists and closed the party offices of two small groups calling for rallies. He continues to hold most of the powerful government portfolios in his own hands.
If Bush’s misadventure in Iraq had indeed been a positive impetus for change in the region, then at least some protesters elsewhere would have credited it as an inspiration. If the U.S. occupation had actually produced a functional, democratic system, so many Iraqis would not have emulated the Egyptian protesters and taken to the streets. Moreover, we would have seen political openings in the years after 2003 in the Arab world. Rather, the reforms are coming only now, impelled by the protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt.
On Sunday, the Algerian parliament voted to lift the country’s state of emergency, a measure that had suspended civil liberties since 1992. In the fall of 1991, the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front had won parliamentary elections, an outcome unacceptable to the country’s secular-minded officer corps. The generals overturned the election results and dissolved parliament, plunging the country into civil war as the fundamentalists took up arms. In recent years, under President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a semblance of normality has returned, though many critics in the public accuse him of conducting elections that are not entirely aboveboard, and of tolerating extensive corruption high in the state. The government is acceding to a demand of Algeria’s small protest movement in hopes of averting a larger movement of the sort that chased out the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt.
Even in a country such as Morocco, where the protest movement has been smaller than in some other Arab nations, the winds of change have prompted a pre-emptive response. King Mohammed VI has pledged that the constitution will be rewritten to allow the prime minister to be elected by parliament rather than appointed, and to give the position more power. In other words, he will take steps toward becoming a constitutional monarch.
At the other end of the Arab world, in the Persian Gulf sultanate of Oman, Sultan Qaboos bin Said has announced that he will devolve legislative powers to the legislature, which has so far been just a debating society. Until these changes, only the cabinet, appointed by the sultan, could make laws. The reforms were impelled by strikes and protests by petroleum workers in provincial cities, as well as by the object lesson delivered by crowds in North Africa.
The handful of powerful neoconservatives in Washington who plotted the war on Iraq never pushed democratization as a goal until after it became clear that their primary justifications for military action were false. Even then, their notion of democracy involved dissolving Iraqi unions and gaining promotions for their Iraqi political cronies, who promptly created a secret police force. The constitution crafted at their insistence was almost universally rejected by Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, setting the stage for a civil war. Prime Minister Maliki has ruled as a soft strongman, creating tribal levies loyal to himself and asserting control over the Ministry of Defense and the officer corps.
The demands of the protesters throughout today’s Arab world have nothing in common with earlier U.S. neoconservative plots. Today’s democratic forces want the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. They want a better deal economically, and government intervention to ensure the public welfare. They want genuine grass-roots input into legislation and governance. They want an end to censorship and secret police. They want national resources to benefit the common person, not foreign corporations. Their ideals are far closer to FDR’s New Deal than to W.’s White Tie Society. And they are well on the way to realizing their goals in key countries of the region even as the Kleptocratic Bush era recedes into the mists of history, attendant with more major failures of policy than any other regime in American history.
POWER CONCEDES NOTHING WITHOUT A DEMAND
POWER CONCEDES NOTHING WITHOUT A DEMAND
Posted on Mar 14, 2011
By Chris Hedges
The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.
The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders and armed battles with hired gun thugs and state militias. The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Morgans—the Koch Brothers Industries, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart of their day—never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as “Mother” Jones, United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies as well as the socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.
Lewis said, “I have pleaded your case from the pulpit and from the public platform—not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”
Those who fought to achieve these rights endured tremendous suffering, pain and deprivation. It is they who made possible our middle class and opened up our democracy. The elite hired goons and criminal militias to evict striking miners from company houses, infiltrate fledgling union organizations and murder suspected union leaders and sympathizers. Federal marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush and stymie worker revolts. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, La., in 1887. Steel workers were shot to death in 1892 in Homestead, Pa. Railroad workers in the Pullman strike of 1894 were murdered. Coal miners at Ludlow, Colo., in 1914 and at Matewan, W.Va., in 1920 were massacred. Our freedoms and rights were paid for with their courage and blood.
American democracy arose because those consciously locked out of the system put their bodies on the line and demanded justice. The exclusion of the poor and the working class from the systems of power in this country was deliberate. The Founding Fathers deeply feared popular democracy. They rigged the system to favor the elite from the start, something that has been largely whitewashed in public schools and by a corporate media that has effectively substituted myth for history. Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, were viewed by the privileged as commodities to exploit. Slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, and men without property were not represented at the Constitutional Conventions. And American history, as Howard Zinn illustrated in “The People’s History of the United States,” is one long fight by the marginalized and disenfranchised for dignity and freedom. Those who fought understood the innate cruelty of capitalism.
“When you sell your product, you retain your person,” said a tract published in the 1880s during the Lowell, Mass., mill strikes. “But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.”
As Noam Chomsky points out, the sentiment expressed by the Lowell millworkers predated Marxism.
“At one time in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, a hundred and fifty years ago, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery,” Chomsky told David Barsamian. “That was not an unusual position. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which Northern workers went to fight in the Civil War. We’re against chattel slavery and wage slavery. Free people do not rent themselves to others. Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, to put it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others. That’s an Enlightenment ideal. Incidentally, this was not coming from European radicalism. There were workers in Lowell, Mass., a couple of miles from where we are. You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time. It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills, let’s say, a hundred and fifty years ago. … [I]t’s an [unfortunate] achievement [of indoctrination in our culture].”
Our consumer society and celebrity culture foster a frightening historical amnesia. We chatter mindlessly about something called the “American Dream.” And now that the oligarchic elite have regained control of all levers of power, and that dream is being exposed as a cruel hoax, we are being shoved back into the cage. There will be hell to pay to get back to where we were.
Slick public relations campaigns, the collapse of public education—nearly a third of the country is illiterate or semiliterate—and the rise of amoral politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who posed as liberals while they sold their souls for corporate money, have left us largely defenseless. The last vestiges of unionized workers in the public sector are reduced to protesting in Wisconsin for collective bargaining—in short, the ability to ask employers for decent working conditions. That shows how far the country has deteriorated. And it looks as though even this basic right to ask, as well as raise money through union dues, has been successfully revoked in Madison. The only hope now is more concerted and militant disruptions of the systems of power.
The public debate, dominated by corporate-controlled systems of information, ignores the steady impoverishment of the working class and absence of legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent mounting corporate fraud and abuse. The airwaves are saturated with corporate apologists. They ask us why public-sector employees have benefits—sneeringly called “entitlements”—which nonunionized working- and middle-class people are denied. This argument is ingenious. It pits worker against worker in a mad scramble for scraps. And until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping, as those who went before us did, that the rich will always protect themselves at our expense, we are doomed to a 21st century serfdom.
The pillars of the liberal establishment, which once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, have collapsed. The liberal church forgot that heretics exist. It forgot that the scum of society—look at the new Newt Gingrich—always wrap themselves in the flag and clutch the Christian cross to promote programs that mock the core teachings of Jesus Christ. And, for all their years of seminary training and Bible study, these liberal clergy have stood by mutely as televangelists betrayed and exploited the Gospel to promote bigotry, hatred and greed. What was the point, I wonder, of ordination? Did they think the radical message of the Gospel was something they would never have to fight for? Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers. They make little attempt to equip students to make moral choices, stand up for civic virtues and seek a life of meaning. These moral and ethical questions are never even asked. Humanities departments are vanishing as swiftly as the ocean’s fish stocks.
The electronic and much of the print press has become a shameless mouthpiece for the powerful and a magnet for corporate advertising. It makes little effort to give a platform to those who without them cannot be heard, instead diverting us with celebrity meltdowns, lavish lifestyle reports and gossip. Legitimate news organizations, such as NPR and The New York Times, are left cringing and apologizing before the beast—right-wing groups that hate “liberal” news organizations not because of any bias, but because they center public discussion on verifiable fact. And verifiable fact is not convenient to ideologues whose goal is the harnessing of inchoate rage and hatred.
Artists, who once had something to say, have retreated into elite enclaves, preoccupied themselves with abstract, self-referential garbage, frivolous entertainment and spectacle. Celebrities, working for advertising agencies and publicists, provide our daily mini-dramas and flood the airwaves with lies on behalf of corporate sponsors. The Democratic Party has sold out working men and women for corporate money. It has permitted the state apparatus to be turned over to corporate interests. There is no liberal institution left—the press, labor, culture, public education, the church or the Democratic Party—that makes any effort to hold back the corporate juggernaut. It is up to us.
We have tolerated the intolerant—from propaganda outlets such as Fox News to Christian fascists to lunatics in the Republican Party to Wall Street and corporations—and we are paying the price. The only place left for us is on the street. We must occupy state and federal offices. We must foment general strikes. The powerful, with no check left on their greed and criminality, are gorging on money while they busily foreclose our homes, bust the last of our unions, drive up our health care costs and cement into place a permanent underclass of the broken and the poor. They are slashing our most essential and basic services—including budgets for schools, firefighters and assistance programs for children and the elderly—so we can pay for the fraud they committed when they wiped out $14 trillion of housing wealth, wages and retirement savings. All we have left is the capacity to say “no.” And if enough of us say “no,” if enough of us refuse to cooperate, the despots are in trouble.
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms,” Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “The whole history of the progress of human history shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. ... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...”
Posted on Mar 14, 2011
By Chris Hedges
The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.
The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders and armed battles with hired gun thugs and state militias. The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Morgans—the Koch Brothers Industries, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart of their day—never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as “Mother” Jones, United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies as well as the socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.
Lewis said, “I have pleaded your case from the pulpit and from the public platform—not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”
Those who fought to achieve these rights endured tremendous suffering, pain and deprivation. It is they who made possible our middle class and opened up our democracy. The elite hired goons and criminal militias to evict striking miners from company houses, infiltrate fledgling union organizations and murder suspected union leaders and sympathizers. Federal marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush and stymie worker revolts. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, La., in 1887. Steel workers were shot to death in 1892 in Homestead, Pa. Railroad workers in the Pullman strike of 1894 were murdered. Coal miners at Ludlow, Colo., in 1914 and at Matewan, W.Va., in 1920 were massacred. Our freedoms and rights were paid for with their courage and blood.
American democracy arose because those consciously locked out of the system put their bodies on the line and demanded justice. The exclusion of the poor and the working class from the systems of power in this country was deliberate. The Founding Fathers deeply feared popular democracy. They rigged the system to favor the elite from the start, something that has been largely whitewashed in public schools and by a corporate media that has effectively substituted myth for history. Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, were viewed by the privileged as commodities to exploit. Slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, and men without property were not represented at the Constitutional Conventions. And American history, as Howard Zinn illustrated in “The People’s History of the United States,” is one long fight by the marginalized and disenfranchised for dignity and freedom. Those who fought understood the innate cruelty of capitalism.
“When you sell your product, you retain your person,” said a tract published in the 1880s during the Lowell, Mass., mill strikes. “But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.”
As Noam Chomsky points out, the sentiment expressed by the Lowell millworkers predated Marxism.
“At one time in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, a hundred and fifty years ago, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery,” Chomsky told David Barsamian. “That was not an unusual position. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which Northern workers went to fight in the Civil War. We’re against chattel slavery and wage slavery. Free people do not rent themselves to others. Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, to put it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others. That’s an Enlightenment ideal. Incidentally, this was not coming from European radicalism. There were workers in Lowell, Mass., a couple of miles from where we are. You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time. It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills, let’s say, a hundred and fifty years ago. … [I]t’s an [unfortunate] achievement [of indoctrination in our culture].”
Our consumer society and celebrity culture foster a frightening historical amnesia. We chatter mindlessly about something called the “American Dream.” And now that the oligarchic elite have regained control of all levers of power, and that dream is being exposed as a cruel hoax, we are being shoved back into the cage. There will be hell to pay to get back to where we were.
Slick public relations campaigns, the collapse of public education—nearly a third of the country is illiterate or semiliterate—and the rise of amoral politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who posed as liberals while they sold their souls for corporate money, have left us largely defenseless. The last vestiges of unionized workers in the public sector are reduced to protesting in Wisconsin for collective bargaining—in short, the ability to ask employers for decent working conditions. That shows how far the country has deteriorated. And it looks as though even this basic right to ask, as well as raise money through union dues, has been successfully revoked in Madison. The only hope now is more concerted and militant disruptions of the systems of power.
The public debate, dominated by corporate-controlled systems of information, ignores the steady impoverishment of the working class and absence of legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent mounting corporate fraud and abuse. The airwaves are saturated with corporate apologists. They ask us why public-sector employees have benefits—sneeringly called “entitlements”—which nonunionized working- and middle-class people are denied. This argument is ingenious. It pits worker against worker in a mad scramble for scraps. And until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping, as those who went before us did, that the rich will always protect themselves at our expense, we are doomed to a 21st century serfdom.
The pillars of the liberal establishment, which once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, have collapsed. The liberal church forgot that heretics exist. It forgot that the scum of society—look at the new Newt Gingrich—always wrap themselves in the flag and clutch the Christian cross to promote programs that mock the core teachings of Jesus Christ. And, for all their years of seminary training and Bible study, these liberal clergy have stood by mutely as televangelists betrayed and exploited the Gospel to promote bigotry, hatred and greed. What was the point, I wonder, of ordination? Did they think the radical message of the Gospel was something they would never have to fight for? Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers. They make little attempt to equip students to make moral choices, stand up for civic virtues and seek a life of meaning. These moral and ethical questions are never even asked. Humanities departments are vanishing as swiftly as the ocean’s fish stocks.
The electronic and much of the print press has become a shameless mouthpiece for the powerful and a magnet for corporate advertising. It makes little effort to give a platform to those who without them cannot be heard, instead diverting us with celebrity meltdowns, lavish lifestyle reports and gossip. Legitimate news organizations, such as NPR and The New York Times, are left cringing and apologizing before the beast—right-wing groups that hate “liberal” news organizations not because of any bias, but because they center public discussion on verifiable fact. And verifiable fact is not convenient to ideologues whose goal is the harnessing of inchoate rage and hatred.
Artists, who once had something to say, have retreated into elite enclaves, preoccupied themselves with abstract, self-referential garbage, frivolous entertainment and spectacle. Celebrities, working for advertising agencies and publicists, provide our daily mini-dramas and flood the airwaves with lies on behalf of corporate sponsors. The Democratic Party has sold out working men and women for corporate money. It has permitted the state apparatus to be turned over to corporate interests. There is no liberal institution left—the press, labor, culture, public education, the church or the Democratic Party—that makes any effort to hold back the corporate juggernaut. It is up to us.
We have tolerated the intolerant—from propaganda outlets such as Fox News to Christian fascists to lunatics in the Republican Party to Wall Street and corporations—and we are paying the price. The only place left for us is on the street. We must occupy state and federal offices. We must foment general strikes. The powerful, with no check left on their greed and criminality, are gorging on money while they busily foreclose our homes, bust the last of our unions, drive up our health care costs and cement into place a permanent underclass of the broken and the poor. They are slashing our most essential and basic services—including budgets for schools, firefighters and assistance programs for children and the elderly—so we can pay for the fraud they committed when they wiped out $14 trillion of housing wealth, wages and retirement savings. All we have left is the capacity to say “no.” And if enough of us say “no,” if enough of us refuse to cooperate, the despots are in trouble.
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms,” Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “The whole history of the progress of human history shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. ... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...”
Monday 14 March 2011
WHERE DID ALL THE FATWAS GO? THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE NIGHTMARE ARAB
WHERE DID ALL THE FATWAS GO?
By James Carroll
A week or so ago, a friend of mine noticed a poster taped to a wall inside the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol building, where American demonstrators were camped out. It showed a lone demonstrator walking toward a line of helmeted Egyptian police, holding high a protest sign. Under the photo, a caption said simply: “Walk like an Egyptian.”
If you want to know something new about our American world, just think about that. No further explanation was needed. Across this country Americans undoubtedly understood just what that meant and what it represented: an unbelievably brave explosion of desire for freedom in the Arab world. If that caption had said, “Walk like a Tunisian (or Bahraini, Algerian, Iranian, Iraqi, Omani, Libyan, etc.),” few would have found that strange either. It’s already as normal here as mom and apple pie. And yet, had you predicted that this was coming as 2010 ended, you would have been laughed out of the American living room by experts, among others, who assured you that Arabs were incapable of such acts, that their religion prevented it, and that “walk like an Egyptian” was nothing more than a 1986 hit by the Bangles about the bizarre way Egyptians of old moved.
Sometimes the tectonic plates of our cultural world shift radically and we hardly know it’s happened. This seems to be such a moment and today one of my favorite columnists, James Carroll of the Boston Globe, considers just that shift. In the disastrous early years of the George W. Bush era, Carroll put the rest of the mainstream media and the punditocracy to shame. As a weekly columnist, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice -- and warn against -- a presidential "slip of the tongue" just after the assaults of 9/11, when President Bush referred to his new Global War on Terror as a "crusade." He was possibly the first mainstream columnist to warn against the consequences of launching a war on Afghanistan in response to those attacks. In September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq War "lost" in print.
He’s still ahead of the game. As he so strikingly summed up events in the Middle East in his column last week, “The revolutions in the Arab streets, whatever their individual outcomes, have already overturned the dominant assumption of global geopolitics -- that hundreds of millions of impoverished people will uncomplainingly accept their assignment to the antechamber of hell.” Tomorrow, his newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World, is officially published. It is a stunning reconsideration of much of Western (even American) as well as Middle Eastern history. It offers a new way of looking at the origins and development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, of the Christopher Columbus story, of the history of printing, and of so much else, including the moment in 1973 when the Middle East nearly went nuclear. There is no way to sum it up, except to indicate that the bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword has done it again. Here’s my advice: buy this book. It will change the way you see our world. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE NIGHTMARE ARAB
HOW A REVOLUTION OF HOPE IS CHANGING THE WAY AMERICANS LOOK AT ISLAM
By James Carroll
Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, “God is great!” Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations.
For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary.
The Absence of Arab Perfidy, the Presence of God
For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya took up arms, but defensively, in order to throw back the murderous assaults of Muammar Qaddafi’s men.
In the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East, none of the usual American saws about Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of Israel, anti-Semitic sloganeering, the burning of American flags, outcries against “Crusaders and Jews” -- all have been absent from nearly every instance of revolt. Osama Bin Laden -- to whom, many Americans became convinced in these last years, Muslims are supposed to have all but sworn allegiance -- has been appealed to not at all. Where are the fatwas?
Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without Islamic “fanatics” chanting hate-filled slogans.
Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion actually looks like?
In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens again and again. In this period of transformation, every week has been punctuated with the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast scenes of masses of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in every contested Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech savvy, those in flowing robes and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such observances. From mosque pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and corruption, but no blood-thirst and none of the malicious Imams who so haunt the nightmares of Europeans and Americans.
Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action, with resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent weekends. (The Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled regime of autocrat Zine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in February.) These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.
It’s an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie bad Muslim behavior to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behavior “secular.” In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now considered little but an “afterthought” to the revolution. In this, the media is simply wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have swept across the Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the irreducible sense of self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt closeness to God, who is as near to each person -- as the Qu’ran says -- as his or her own jugular vein. The call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of that infinite individual dignity.
A Rejection Not Only of Violence, But of the Old Lies
The new Arab condition is not Nirvana, nor has some political utopia been achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out. History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and naturally as nonviolence and peace.
History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the preferred and perennial scapegoat, and the State of Israel is a ready target for that hatred. Arab bigotry has not magically gone away, nor has the human temptation to drown fear with blood. But few, if any, revolutions have been launched with such wily commitment to the force of popular will, not arms. When it comes to “people power,” Arabs have given the concept several new twists.
Because so many people have believed in themselves -- protecting one another simply by standing together -- they have been able to reject not only violence, but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The stark absence of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks, to take a telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the challenged or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually exploited both anti-semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through Arab newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and the plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their own citizens).
Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought incidents of Jew-baiting in its wake -- in late February in Tunis, for example, by a mob outside the city’s main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly denounced and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia movement. When a group of Cairo thugs assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan, they reportedly hurled the word “Jew” at her as an epithet. So yes, such incidents happened, but what makes them remarkable is their rarity on such a sprawling landscape.
To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians, readily identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with Israel, but something different is unfolding now. When the United States vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the very thick of February’s revolutionary protests, to flag one signal, the issue was largely ignored by Arab protesters. In Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the spirit of Arab revolt showed itself mainly in a youth-driven and resolutely non-violent movement to overcome the intra-Palestinian divisions between Fatah and Hamas. Again and again, that is, the Arab Muslim population has refused to behave as Americans have been conditioned to expect.
The Mainstreaming of Anti-Muslim Prejudice
Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in particular is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the knee-jerk suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams, who said, “I get worried. I get nervous” around those “in Muslim garb,” those who identify themselves “first and foremost as Muslims.”
Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for simply speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged, was to be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself by forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim bigotry was resoundingly vindicated in America, no matter the intentions of the various players.
Scary, indeed -- but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into every fiber of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade, a period when the overheated watchword was “Islamofascism.” In 2002, scholar Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of intellectual respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have occurred to Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves an answer at all, in the Arab context it should be: “we” did -- with that “we” defined as Western civilization.
Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798 for Napoleon’s arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian peninsula --- all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favor of a preoccupation with a religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to democracy.
How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start, although the seventh century Qur’an was not translated into Latin until the twelfth century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam’s origins and meaning finally appeared in the eighteenth century, it was quickly added to the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still at the mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That’s readily apparent in the fact that a fourteenth century slander against Islam -- that it was only “spread by the sword” -- was reiterated in 2006 (on the fifth anniversary of 9/11) by Pope Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had been encouraged.
Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust of all religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence that killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is remembered as the “religious wars,” even though religion was only part of a history that included the birth of nations and nationalism, as well as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the “age of exploration,” also known as the age of colonial exploitation.
“Secular” sources of violence have always been played down in favor of sacred causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic anti-modernism. “Enlightened” nation-states were all-too-ready to smugly denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being “religious.”
No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be “against evil,” with God “not neutral,” as George W. Bush blithely put it. And never mind that U.S. forces (both the military and the private contractors) are strongly influenced by a certain kind of fervent Christian evangelicalism that defines the American enemy as the “infidel” -- the Muslim monster unleashed. In any case, ask the families of the countless dead of America’s wars if ancient rites of human sacrifice are not being re-enacted in them? The drone airplane and its Hellfire missile are weapons out of the Book of the Apocalypse.
The Revolution of Hope
The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion of great hope. At the very least, “we” in the West must reckon with this overturning of the premises of our prejudice.
Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare to erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats to falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defense, can open onto vistas of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can reignite, and the never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can reemerge. But that one of the world’s great religions is essential to what is unfolding across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious -- an ancient hatred of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.
James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 James Carroll
By James Carroll
A week or so ago, a friend of mine noticed a poster taped to a wall inside the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol building, where American demonstrators were camped out. It showed a lone demonstrator walking toward a line of helmeted Egyptian police, holding high a protest sign. Under the photo, a caption said simply: “Walk like an Egyptian.”
If you want to know something new about our American world, just think about that. No further explanation was needed. Across this country Americans undoubtedly understood just what that meant and what it represented: an unbelievably brave explosion of desire for freedom in the Arab world. If that caption had said, “Walk like a Tunisian (or Bahraini, Algerian, Iranian, Iraqi, Omani, Libyan, etc.),” few would have found that strange either. It’s already as normal here as mom and apple pie. And yet, had you predicted that this was coming as 2010 ended, you would have been laughed out of the American living room by experts, among others, who assured you that Arabs were incapable of such acts, that their religion prevented it, and that “walk like an Egyptian” was nothing more than a 1986 hit by the Bangles about the bizarre way Egyptians of old moved.
Sometimes the tectonic plates of our cultural world shift radically and we hardly know it’s happened. This seems to be such a moment and today one of my favorite columnists, James Carroll of the Boston Globe, considers just that shift. In the disastrous early years of the George W. Bush era, Carroll put the rest of the mainstream media and the punditocracy to shame. As a weekly columnist, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice -- and warn against -- a presidential "slip of the tongue" just after the assaults of 9/11, when President Bush referred to his new Global War on Terror as a "crusade." He was possibly the first mainstream columnist to warn against the consequences of launching a war on Afghanistan in response to those attacks. In September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq War "lost" in print.
He’s still ahead of the game. As he so strikingly summed up events in the Middle East in his column last week, “The revolutions in the Arab streets, whatever their individual outcomes, have already overturned the dominant assumption of global geopolitics -- that hundreds of millions of impoverished people will uncomplainingly accept their assignment to the antechamber of hell.” Tomorrow, his newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World, is officially published. It is a stunning reconsideration of much of Western (even American) as well as Middle Eastern history. It offers a new way of looking at the origins and development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, of the Christopher Columbus story, of the history of printing, and of so much else, including the moment in 1973 when the Middle East nearly went nuclear. There is no way to sum it up, except to indicate that the bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword has done it again. Here’s my advice: buy this book. It will change the way you see our world. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE NIGHTMARE ARAB
HOW A REVOLUTION OF HOPE IS CHANGING THE WAY AMERICANS LOOK AT ISLAM
By James Carroll
Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, “God is great!” Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations.
For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary.
The Absence of Arab Perfidy, the Presence of God
For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya took up arms, but defensively, in order to throw back the murderous assaults of Muammar Qaddafi’s men.
In the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East, none of the usual American saws about Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of Israel, anti-Semitic sloganeering, the burning of American flags, outcries against “Crusaders and Jews” -- all have been absent from nearly every instance of revolt. Osama Bin Laden -- to whom, many Americans became convinced in these last years, Muslims are supposed to have all but sworn allegiance -- has been appealed to not at all. Where are the fatwas?
Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without Islamic “fanatics” chanting hate-filled slogans.
Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion actually looks like?
In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens again and again. In this period of transformation, every week has been punctuated with the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast scenes of masses of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in every contested Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech savvy, those in flowing robes and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such observances. From mosque pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and corruption, but no blood-thirst and none of the malicious Imams who so haunt the nightmares of Europeans and Americans.
Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action, with resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent weekends. (The Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled regime of autocrat Zine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in February.) These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.
It’s an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie bad Muslim behavior to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behavior “secular.” In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now considered little but an “afterthought” to the revolution. In this, the media is simply wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have swept across the Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the irreducible sense of self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt closeness to God, who is as near to each person -- as the Qu’ran says -- as his or her own jugular vein. The call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of that infinite individual dignity.
A Rejection Not Only of Violence, But of the Old Lies
The new Arab condition is not Nirvana, nor has some political utopia been achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out. History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and naturally as nonviolence and peace.
History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the preferred and perennial scapegoat, and the State of Israel is a ready target for that hatred. Arab bigotry has not magically gone away, nor has the human temptation to drown fear with blood. But few, if any, revolutions have been launched with such wily commitment to the force of popular will, not arms. When it comes to “people power,” Arabs have given the concept several new twists.
Because so many people have believed in themselves -- protecting one another simply by standing together -- they have been able to reject not only violence, but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The stark absence of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks, to take a telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the challenged or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually exploited both anti-semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through Arab newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and the plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their own citizens).
Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought incidents of Jew-baiting in its wake -- in late February in Tunis, for example, by a mob outside the city’s main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly denounced and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia movement. When a group of Cairo thugs assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan, they reportedly hurled the word “Jew” at her as an epithet. So yes, such incidents happened, but what makes them remarkable is their rarity on such a sprawling landscape.
To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians, readily identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with Israel, but something different is unfolding now. When the United States vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the very thick of February’s revolutionary protests, to flag one signal, the issue was largely ignored by Arab protesters. In Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the spirit of Arab revolt showed itself mainly in a youth-driven and resolutely non-violent movement to overcome the intra-Palestinian divisions between Fatah and Hamas. Again and again, that is, the Arab Muslim population has refused to behave as Americans have been conditioned to expect.
The Mainstreaming of Anti-Muslim Prejudice
Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in particular is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the knee-jerk suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams, who said, “I get worried. I get nervous” around those “in Muslim garb,” those who identify themselves “first and foremost as Muslims.”
Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for simply speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged, was to be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself by forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim bigotry was resoundingly vindicated in America, no matter the intentions of the various players.
Scary, indeed -- but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into every fiber of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade, a period when the overheated watchword was “Islamofascism.” In 2002, scholar Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of intellectual respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have occurred to Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves an answer at all, in the Arab context it should be: “we” did -- with that “we” defined as Western civilization.
Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798 for Napoleon’s arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian peninsula --- all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favor of a preoccupation with a religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to democracy.
How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start, although the seventh century Qur’an was not translated into Latin until the twelfth century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam’s origins and meaning finally appeared in the eighteenth century, it was quickly added to the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still at the mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That’s readily apparent in the fact that a fourteenth century slander against Islam -- that it was only “spread by the sword” -- was reiterated in 2006 (on the fifth anniversary of 9/11) by Pope Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had been encouraged.
Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust of all religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence that killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is remembered as the “religious wars,” even though religion was only part of a history that included the birth of nations and nationalism, as well as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the “age of exploration,” also known as the age of colonial exploitation.
“Secular” sources of violence have always been played down in favor of sacred causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic anti-modernism. “Enlightened” nation-states were all-too-ready to smugly denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being “religious.”
No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be “against evil,” with God “not neutral,” as George W. Bush blithely put it. And never mind that U.S. forces (both the military and the private contractors) are strongly influenced by a certain kind of fervent Christian evangelicalism that defines the American enemy as the “infidel” -- the Muslim monster unleashed. In any case, ask the families of the countless dead of America’s wars if ancient rites of human sacrifice are not being re-enacted in them? The drone airplane and its Hellfire missile are weapons out of the Book of the Apocalypse.
The Revolution of Hope
The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion of great hope. At the very least, “we” in the West must reckon with this overturning of the premises of our prejudice.
Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare to erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats to falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defense, can open onto vistas of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can reignite, and the never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can reemerge. But that one of the world’s great religions is essential to what is unfolding across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious -- an ancient hatred of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.
James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 James Carroll
REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT IN THE ARAB WORLD
REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT IN THE ARAB WORLD
WHAT ROLE IS THE US MEDIA PLAYING?
By Diana Mukkaled
Over the past few weeks, western political commentators, particularly those in the US, have been involved in discussing how modern western technologies, particularly social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook, have served as the catalyst for the revolutionary movement in the Arab world.
The US internet industry has, in effect, given itself credit for overthrowing the regimes of both Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
What is most striking about these discussions, other than their obvious ignorance about the distinctions between different countries and societies in the Middle East, is that they have neglected the role played by WikiLeaks and the leaked diplomatic cables, which is something that we must not disregard when discussing the initial reasons behind the population uprisings in the Arab world.
It was thanks to WikiLeaks that the Tunisians were able to read the truth about the corruption of the regime that was oppressing them. WikiLeaks also allowed the Egyptians to view secret information about their own regime, which was no less scandalous than some of the details surrounding the Ben Ali regime.
However, the role of WikiLeaks, Twitter, and Facebook pale in comparison to the role played by satellite news channels, and particularly Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. Millions of Arabs are unable to access the afore-mentioned websites, but they are all able to watch satellite television. It might be useful here to cite the admission made by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton a few days ago when she acknowledged that her country is losing the information war. Clinton criticized the US media and its superficial approach to the news, whilst praising Al Jazeera, particularly its English language news service, describing this as presenting "real news."
Even if US technologies have – via social networking websites – contributed, in one way or another to the momentum of the popular uprisings in the Arab world, or helped the Arab reform movements to develop, this is something that in no way, shape, or form applies to the Western news media, and particularly the American news. This is not just because the majority of Arabs do not watch these channels, and these television channels are not interested in targeting Arab viewers.
The US media's view of the world has informed its view of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, for it divides the world into good and evil as if real life is like a Hollywood movie where the hero bravely fights against the forces of evil and always triumphs. The US media, or rather the prevailing current within the US media, views and understands the world through a patriotic lens. Hillary Clinton's praised Al Jazeera as if she has forgotten that her country continues to ban this channel, despite the fact that it is the US State Department that is always criticizing the policies of censorship in countries like Iran.
American technology might have played a role in the great changes being witnessed by the Middle East, and it is only right that this technology should be praised for this, however as much as these revolutions require technology that facilitates communication, they also requires a spirit of open discussion and debate rather than bias and prejudice. Indeed, it is incomprehensible how the American media can cover Arab revolutions and uprisings and focus almost exclusively on the extent of the impact that these will have on Israel, and future Arab relations with Tel Aviv.
Indeed, a new ethical question is beginning to be asked of Western news media, a question that reflects a similar question being asked of Western governments, namely; why have they been silent about the corruption and despotism of certain Arab regimes until now, the extent of which has only been revealed following the ouster of two Arab regimes?
WHAT ROLE IS THE US MEDIA PLAYING?
By Diana Mukkaled
Over the past few weeks, western political commentators, particularly those in the US, have been involved in discussing how modern western technologies, particularly social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook, have served as the catalyst for the revolutionary movement in the Arab world.
The US internet industry has, in effect, given itself credit for overthrowing the regimes of both Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
What is most striking about these discussions, other than their obvious ignorance about the distinctions between different countries and societies in the Middle East, is that they have neglected the role played by WikiLeaks and the leaked diplomatic cables, which is something that we must not disregard when discussing the initial reasons behind the population uprisings in the Arab world.
It was thanks to WikiLeaks that the Tunisians were able to read the truth about the corruption of the regime that was oppressing them. WikiLeaks also allowed the Egyptians to view secret information about their own regime, which was no less scandalous than some of the details surrounding the Ben Ali regime.
However, the role of WikiLeaks, Twitter, and Facebook pale in comparison to the role played by satellite news channels, and particularly Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. Millions of Arabs are unable to access the afore-mentioned websites, but they are all able to watch satellite television. It might be useful here to cite the admission made by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton a few days ago when she acknowledged that her country is losing the information war. Clinton criticized the US media and its superficial approach to the news, whilst praising Al Jazeera, particularly its English language news service, describing this as presenting "real news."
Even if US technologies have – via social networking websites – contributed, in one way or another to the momentum of the popular uprisings in the Arab world, or helped the Arab reform movements to develop, this is something that in no way, shape, or form applies to the Western news media, and particularly the American news. This is not just because the majority of Arabs do not watch these channels, and these television channels are not interested in targeting Arab viewers.
The US media's view of the world has informed its view of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, for it divides the world into good and evil as if real life is like a Hollywood movie where the hero bravely fights against the forces of evil and always triumphs. The US media, or rather the prevailing current within the US media, views and understands the world through a patriotic lens. Hillary Clinton's praised Al Jazeera as if she has forgotten that her country continues to ban this channel, despite the fact that it is the US State Department that is always criticizing the policies of censorship in countries like Iran.
American technology might have played a role in the great changes being witnessed by the Middle East, and it is only right that this technology should be praised for this, however as much as these revolutions require technology that facilitates communication, they also requires a spirit of open discussion and debate rather than bias and prejudice. Indeed, it is incomprehensible how the American media can cover Arab revolutions and uprisings and focus almost exclusively on the extent of the impact that these will have on Israel, and future Arab relations with Tel Aviv.
Indeed, a new ethical question is beginning to be asked of Western news media, a question that reflects a similar question being asked of Western governments, namely; why have they been silent about the corruption and despotism of certain Arab regimes until now, the extent of which has only been revealed following the ouster of two Arab regimes?
A PLANET ON THE BRINK: ECONOMIC CRASH WILL FUEL SOCIAL UNREST
A PLANET ON THE BRINK: ECONOMIC CRASH WILL FUEL SOCIAL UNREST
GOVERNMENTS ACROSS THE PLANET ARE PREPARING FOR A SURGE OF VIOLENT PROTESTS FROM ECONOMIC UPHEAVAL. WARS MAY FOLLOW.
The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.
As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.
Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations -- none as yet in the United States -- your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you're a gambling man or woman, it's a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.
For the most part, such upheavals, even when violent, are likely to remain localized in nature, and disorganized enough that government forces will be able to bring them under control within days or weeks, even if -- as with Athens for six days last December -- urban paralysis sets in due to rioting, tear gas, and police cordons. That, at least, has been the case so far. It is entirely possible, however, that, as the economic crisis worsens, some of these incidents will metastasize into far more intense and long-lasting events: armed rebellions, military takeovers, civil conflicts, even economically fueled wars between states.
Every outbreak of violence has its own distinctive origins and characteristics. All, however, are driven by a similar combination of anxiety about the future and lack of confidence in the ability of established institutions to deal with the problems at hand. And just as the economic crisis has proven global in ways not seen before, so local incidents -- especially given the almost instantaneous nature of modern communications -- have a potential to spark others in far-off places, linked only in a virtual sense.
A Global Pandemic of Economically Driven Violence
The riots that erupted in the spring of 2008 in response to rising food prices suggested the speed with which economically-related violence can spread. It is unlikely that Western news sources captured all such incidents, but among those recorded in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were riots in Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.
In Haiti, for example, thousands of protesters stormed the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince and demanded food handouts, only to be repelled by government troops and UN peacekeepers. Other countries, including Pakistan and Thailand, quickly sought to deter such assaults by deploying troops at farms and warehouses throughout the country.
The riots only abated at summer's end when falling energy costs brought food prices crashing down as well. (The cost of food is now closely tied to the price of oil and natural gas because petrochemicals are so widely and heavily used in the cultivation of grains.) Ominously, however, this is sure to prove but a temporary respite, given the epic droughts now gripping breadbasket regions of the United States, Argentina, Australia, China, the Middle East, and Africa. Look for the prices of wheat, soybeans, and possibly rice to rise in the coming months -- just when billions of people in the developing world are sure to see their already marginal incomes plunging due to the global economic collapse.
Food riots were but one form of economic violence that made its bloody appearance in 2008. As economic conditions worsened, protests against rising unemployment, government ineptitude, and the unaddressed needs of the poor erupted as well. In India, for example, violent protests threatened stability in many key areas. Although usually described as ethnic, religious, or caste disputes, these outbursts were typically driven by economic anxiety and a pervasive feeling that someone else's group was faring better than yours -- and at your expense.
In April, for example, six days of intense rioting in Indian-controlled Kashmir were largely blamed on religious animosity between the majority Muslim population and the Hindu-dominated Indian government; equally important, however, was a deep resentment over what many Kashmiri Muslims experienced as discrimination in jobs, housing, and land use. Then, in May, thousands of nomadic shepherds known as Gujjars shut down roads and trains leading to the city of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, in a drive to be awarded special economic rights; more than 30 people were killed when the police fired into crowds. In October, economically-related violence erupted in Assam in the country's far northeast, where impoverished locals are resisting an influx of even poorer, mostly illegal immigrants from nearby Bangladesh.
Economically-driven clashes also erupted across much of eastern China in 2008. Such events, labeled "mass incidents" by Chinese authorities, usually involve protests by workers over sudden plant shutdowns, lost pay, or illegal land seizures. More often than not, protestors demanded compensation from company managers or government authorities, only to be greeted by club-wielding police.
Needless to say, the leaders of China's Communist Party have been reluctant to acknowledge such incidents. This January, however, the magazine Liaowang (Outlook Weekly) reported that layoffs and wage disputes had triggered a sharp increase in such "mass incidents," particularly along the country's eastern seaboard, where much of its manufacturing capacity is located.
By December, the epicenter of such sporadic incidents of violence had moved from the developing world to Western Europe and the former Soviet Union. Here, the protests have largely been driven by fears of prolonged unemployment, disgust at government malfeasance and ineptitude, and a sense that "the system," however defined, is incapable of satisfying the future aspirations of large groups of citizens.
One of the earliest of this new wave of upheavals occurred in Athens, Greece, on December 6, 2008, after police shot and killed a 15-year-old schoolboy during an altercation in a crowded downtown neighborhood. As news of the killing spread throughout the city, hundreds of students and young people surged into the city center and engaged in pitched battles with riot police, throwing stones and firebombs. Although government officials later apologized for the killing and charged the police officer involved with manslaughter, riots broke out repeatedly in the following days in Athens and other Greek cities. Angry youths attacked the police -- widely viewed as agents of the establishment -- as well as luxury shops and hotels, some of which were set on fire. By one estimate, the six days of riots caused $1.3 billion in damage to businesses at the height of the Christmas shopping season.
Russia also experienced a spate of violent protests in December, triggered by the imposition of high tariffs on imported automobiles. Instituted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to protect an endangered domestic auto industry (whose sales were expected to shrink by up to 50% in 2009), the tariffs were a blow to merchants in the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok who benefited from a nationwide commerce in used Japanese vehicles. When local police refused to crack down on anti-tariff protests, the authorities were evidently worried enough to fly in units of special forces from Moscow, 3,700 miles away.
In January, incidents of this sort seemed to be spreading through Eastern Europe. Between January 13th and 16th, anti-government protests involving violent clashes with the police erupted in the Latvian capital of Riga, the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, and the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. It is already essentially impossible to keep track of all such episodes, suggesting that we are on the verge of a global pandemic of economically driven violence.
A Perfect Recipe for Instability
While most such incidents are triggered by an immediate event -- a tariff, the closure of local factory, the announcement of government austerity measures -- there are systemic factors at work as well. While economists now agree that we are in the midst of a recession deeper than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s, they generally assume that this downturn -- like all others since World War II -- will be followed in a year, or two, or three, by the beginning of a typical recovery.
There are good reasons to suspect that this might not be the case -- that poorer countries (along with many people in the richer countries) will have to wait far longer for such a recovery, or may see none at all. Even in the United States, 54% of Americans now believe that "the worst" is "yet to come" and only 7% that the economy has "turned the corner," according to a recent Ipsos/McClatchy poll; fully a quarter think the crisis will last more than four years. Whether in the U.S., Russia, China, or Bangladesh, it is this underlying anxiety -- this suspicion that things are far worse than just about anyone is saying -- which is helping to fuel the global epidemic of violence.
The World Bank's most recent status report, Global Economic Prospects 2009, fulfills those anxieties in two ways. It refuses to state the worst, even while managing to hint, in terms too clear to be ignored, at the prospect of a long-term, or even permanent, decline in economic conditions for many in the world. Nominally upbeat -- as are so many media pundits -- regarding the likelihood of an economic recovery in the not-too-distant future, the report remains full of warnings about the potential for lasting damage in the developing world if things don't go exactly right.
Two worries, in particular, dominate Global Economic Prospects 2009: that banks and corporations in the wealthier countries will cease making investments in the developing world, choking off whatever growth possibilities remain; and that food costs will rise uncomfortably, while the use of farmlands for increased biofuels production will result in diminished food availability to hundreds of millions.
Despite its Pollyanna-ish passages on an economic rebound, the report does not mince words when discussing what the almost certain coming decline in First World investment in Third World countries would mean:
"Should credit markets fail to respond to the robust policy interventions taken so far, the consequences for developing countries could be very serious. Such a scenario would be characterized by... substantial disruption and turmoil, including bank failures and currency crises, in a wide range of developing countries. Sharply negative growth in a number of developing countries and all of the attendant repercussions, including increased poverty and unemployment, would be inevitable."
In the fall of 2008, when the report was written, this was considered a "worst-case scenario." Since then, the situation has obviously worsened radically, with financial analysts reporting a virtual freeze in worldwide investment. Equally troubling, newly industrialized countries that rely on exporting manufactured goods to richer countries for much of their national income have reported stomach-wrenching plunges in sales, producing massive plant closings and layoffs.
The World Bank's 2008 survey also contains troubling data about the future availability of food. Although insisting that the planet is capable of producing enough foodstuffs to meet the needs of a growing world population, its analysts were far less confident that sufficient food would be available at prices people could afford, especially once hydrocarbon prices begin to rise again. With ever more farmland being set aside for biofuels production and efforts to increase crop yields through the use of "miracle seeds" losing steam, the Bank's analysts balanced their generally hopeful outlook with a caveat: "If biofuels-related demand for crops is much stronger or productivity performance disappoints, future food supplies may be much more expensive than in the past."
Combine these two World Bank findings -- zero economic growth in the developing world and rising food prices -- and you have a perfect recipe for unrelenting civil unrest and violence. The eruptions seen in 2008 and early 2009 will then be mere harbingers of a grim future in which, in a given week, any number of cities reel from riots and civil disturbances which could spread like multiple brushfires in a drought.
Mapping a World at the Brink
Survey the present world, and it's all too easy to spot a plethora of potential sites for such multiple eruptions -- or far worse. Take China. So far, the authorities have managed to control individual "mass incidents," preventing them from coalescing into something larger. But in a country with a more than two-thousand-year history of vast millenarian uprisings, the risk of such escalation has to be on the minds of every Chinese leader.
On February 2nd, a top Chinese Party official, Chen Xiwen, announced that, in the last few months of 2008 alone, a staggering 20 million migrant workers, who left rural areas for the country's booming cities in recent years, had lost their jobs. Worse yet, they had little prospect of regaining them in 2009. If many of these workers return to the countryside, they may find nothing there either, not even land to work.
Under such circumstances, and with further millions likely to be shut out of coastal factories in the coming year, the prospect of mass unrest is high. No wonder the government announced a $585 billion stimulus plan aimed at generating rural employment and, at the same time, called on security forces to exercise discipline and restraint when dealing with protesters. Many analysts now believe that, as exports continue to dry up, rising unemployment could lead to nationwide strikes and protests that might overwhelm ordinary police capabilities and require full-scale intervention by the military (as occurred in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989).
Or take many of the Third World petro-states that experienced heady boosts in income when oil prices were high, allowing governments to buy off dissident groups or finance powerful internal security forces. With oil prices plunging from $147 per barrel of crude oil to less than $40 dollars, such countries, from Angola to shaky Iraq, now face severe instability.
Nigeria is a typical case in point: When oil prices were high, the central government in Abuja raked in billions every year, enough to enrich elites in key parts of the country and subsidize a large military establishment; now that prices are low, the government will have a hard time satisfying all these previously well-fed competing obligations, which means the risk of internal disequilibrium will escalate. An insurgency in the oil-producing Niger Delta region, fueled by popular discontent with the failure of oil wealth to trickle down from the capital, is already gaining momentum and is likely to grow stronger as government revenues shrivel; other regions, equally disadvantaged by national revenue-sharing policies, will be open to disruptions of all sorts, including heightened levels of internecine warfare.
Bolivia is another energy producer that seems poised at the brink of an escalation in economic violence. One of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, it harbors substantial oil and natural gas reserves in its eastern, lowland regions. A majority of the population -- many of Indian descent -- supports President Evo Morales, who seeks to exercise strong state control over the reserves and use the proceeds to uplift the nation's poor. But a majority of those in the eastern part of the country, largely controlled by a European-descended elite, resent central government interference and seek to control the reserves themselves. Their efforts to achieve greater autonomy have led to repeated clashes with government troops and, in deteriorating times, could set the stage for a full-scale civil war.
Given a global situation in which one startling, often unexpected development follows another, prediction is perilous. At a popular level, however, the basic picture is clear enough: continued economic decline combined with a pervasive sense that existing systems and institutions are incapable of setting things right is already producing a potentially lethal brew of anxiety, fear, and rage. Popular explosions of one sort or another are inevitable.
Some sense of this new reality appears to have percolated up to the highest reaches of the U.S. intelligence community. In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 12th, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, declared, "The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications... Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period" -- certain to be the case in the present situation.
Blair did not specify which countries he had in mind when he spoke of "regime-threatening instability" -- a new term in the American intelligence lexicon, at least when associated with economic crises -- but it is clear from his testimony that U.S. officials are closely watching dozens of shaky nations in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia.
Now go back to that map on your wall with all those red and orange pins in it and proceed to color in appropriate countries in various shades of red and orange to indicate recent striking declines in gross national product and rises in unemployment rates. Without 16 intelligence agencies under you, you'll still have a pretty good idea of the places that Blair and his associates are eyeing in terms of instability as the future darkens on a planet at the brink.
GOVERNMENTS ACROSS THE PLANET ARE PREPARING FOR A SURGE OF VIOLENT PROTESTS FROM ECONOMIC UPHEAVAL. WARS MAY FOLLOW.
The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.
As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.
Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations -- none as yet in the United States -- your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you're a gambling man or woman, it's a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.
For the most part, such upheavals, even when violent, are likely to remain localized in nature, and disorganized enough that government forces will be able to bring them under control within days or weeks, even if -- as with Athens for six days last December -- urban paralysis sets in due to rioting, tear gas, and police cordons. That, at least, has been the case so far. It is entirely possible, however, that, as the economic crisis worsens, some of these incidents will metastasize into far more intense and long-lasting events: armed rebellions, military takeovers, civil conflicts, even economically fueled wars between states.
Every outbreak of violence has its own distinctive origins and characteristics. All, however, are driven by a similar combination of anxiety about the future and lack of confidence in the ability of established institutions to deal with the problems at hand. And just as the economic crisis has proven global in ways not seen before, so local incidents -- especially given the almost instantaneous nature of modern communications -- have a potential to spark others in far-off places, linked only in a virtual sense.
A Global Pandemic of Economically Driven Violence
The riots that erupted in the spring of 2008 in response to rising food prices suggested the speed with which economically-related violence can spread. It is unlikely that Western news sources captured all such incidents, but among those recorded in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were riots in Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.
In Haiti, for example, thousands of protesters stormed the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince and demanded food handouts, only to be repelled by government troops and UN peacekeepers. Other countries, including Pakistan and Thailand, quickly sought to deter such assaults by deploying troops at farms and warehouses throughout the country.
The riots only abated at summer's end when falling energy costs brought food prices crashing down as well. (The cost of food is now closely tied to the price of oil and natural gas because petrochemicals are so widely and heavily used in the cultivation of grains.) Ominously, however, this is sure to prove but a temporary respite, given the epic droughts now gripping breadbasket regions of the United States, Argentina, Australia, China, the Middle East, and Africa. Look for the prices of wheat, soybeans, and possibly rice to rise in the coming months -- just when billions of people in the developing world are sure to see their already marginal incomes plunging due to the global economic collapse.
Food riots were but one form of economic violence that made its bloody appearance in 2008. As economic conditions worsened, protests against rising unemployment, government ineptitude, and the unaddressed needs of the poor erupted as well. In India, for example, violent protests threatened stability in many key areas. Although usually described as ethnic, religious, or caste disputes, these outbursts were typically driven by economic anxiety and a pervasive feeling that someone else's group was faring better than yours -- and at your expense.
In April, for example, six days of intense rioting in Indian-controlled Kashmir were largely blamed on religious animosity between the majority Muslim population and the Hindu-dominated Indian government; equally important, however, was a deep resentment over what many Kashmiri Muslims experienced as discrimination in jobs, housing, and land use. Then, in May, thousands of nomadic shepherds known as Gujjars shut down roads and trains leading to the city of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, in a drive to be awarded special economic rights; more than 30 people were killed when the police fired into crowds. In October, economically-related violence erupted in Assam in the country's far northeast, where impoverished locals are resisting an influx of even poorer, mostly illegal immigrants from nearby Bangladesh.
Economically-driven clashes also erupted across much of eastern China in 2008. Such events, labeled "mass incidents" by Chinese authorities, usually involve protests by workers over sudden plant shutdowns, lost pay, or illegal land seizures. More often than not, protestors demanded compensation from company managers or government authorities, only to be greeted by club-wielding police.
Needless to say, the leaders of China's Communist Party have been reluctant to acknowledge such incidents. This January, however, the magazine Liaowang (Outlook Weekly) reported that layoffs and wage disputes had triggered a sharp increase in such "mass incidents," particularly along the country's eastern seaboard, where much of its manufacturing capacity is located.
By December, the epicenter of such sporadic incidents of violence had moved from the developing world to Western Europe and the former Soviet Union. Here, the protests have largely been driven by fears of prolonged unemployment, disgust at government malfeasance and ineptitude, and a sense that "the system," however defined, is incapable of satisfying the future aspirations of large groups of citizens.
One of the earliest of this new wave of upheavals occurred in Athens, Greece, on December 6, 2008, after police shot and killed a 15-year-old schoolboy during an altercation in a crowded downtown neighborhood. As news of the killing spread throughout the city, hundreds of students and young people surged into the city center and engaged in pitched battles with riot police, throwing stones and firebombs. Although government officials later apologized for the killing and charged the police officer involved with manslaughter, riots broke out repeatedly in the following days in Athens and other Greek cities. Angry youths attacked the police -- widely viewed as agents of the establishment -- as well as luxury shops and hotels, some of which were set on fire. By one estimate, the six days of riots caused $1.3 billion in damage to businesses at the height of the Christmas shopping season.
Russia also experienced a spate of violent protests in December, triggered by the imposition of high tariffs on imported automobiles. Instituted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to protect an endangered domestic auto industry (whose sales were expected to shrink by up to 50% in 2009), the tariffs were a blow to merchants in the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok who benefited from a nationwide commerce in used Japanese vehicles. When local police refused to crack down on anti-tariff protests, the authorities were evidently worried enough to fly in units of special forces from Moscow, 3,700 miles away.
In January, incidents of this sort seemed to be spreading through Eastern Europe. Between January 13th and 16th, anti-government protests involving violent clashes with the police erupted in the Latvian capital of Riga, the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, and the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. It is already essentially impossible to keep track of all such episodes, suggesting that we are on the verge of a global pandemic of economically driven violence.
A Perfect Recipe for Instability
While most such incidents are triggered by an immediate event -- a tariff, the closure of local factory, the announcement of government austerity measures -- there are systemic factors at work as well. While economists now agree that we are in the midst of a recession deeper than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s, they generally assume that this downturn -- like all others since World War II -- will be followed in a year, or two, or three, by the beginning of a typical recovery.
There are good reasons to suspect that this might not be the case -- that poorer countries (along with many people in the richer countries) will have to wait far longer for such a recovery, or may see none at all. Even in the United States, 54% of Americans now believe that "the worst" is "yet to come" and only 7% that the economy has "turned the corner," according to a recent Ipsos/McClatchy poll; fully a quarter think the crisis will last more than four years. Whether in the U.S., Russia, China, or Bangladesh, it is this underlying anxiety -- this suspicion that things are far worse than just about anyone is saying -- which is helping to fuel the global epidemic of violence.
The World Bank's most recent status report, Global Economic Prospects 2009, fulfills those anxieties in two ways. It refuses to state the worst, even while managing to hint, in terms too clear to be ignored, at the prospect of a long-term, or even permanent, decline in economic conditions for many in the world. Nominally upbeat -- as are so many media pundits -- regarding the likelihood of an economic recovery in the not-too-distant future, the report remains full of warnings about the potential for lasting damage in the developing world if things don't go exactly right.
Two worries, in particular, dominate Global Economic Prospects 2009: that banks and corporations in the wealthier countries will cease making investments in the developing world, choking off whatever growth possibilities remain; and that food costs will rise uncomfortably, while the use of farmlands for increased biofuels production will result in diminished food availability to hundreds of millions.
Despite its Pollyanna-ish passages on an economic rebound, the report does not mince words when discussing what the almost certain coming decline in First World investment in Third World countries would mean:
"Should credit markets fail to respond to the robust policy interventions taken so far, the consequences for developing countries could be very serious. Such a scenario would be characterized by... substantial disruption and turmoil, including bank failures and currency crises, in a wide range of developing countries. Sharply negative growth in a number of developing countries and all of the attendant repercussions, including increased poverty and unemployment, would be inevitable."
In the fall of 2008, when the report was written, this was considered a "worst-case scenario." Since then, the situation has obviously worsened radically, with financial analysts reporting a virtual freeze in worldwide investment. Equally troubling, newly industrialized countries that rely on exporting manufactured goods to richer countries for much of their national income have reported stomach-wrenching plunges in sales, producing massive plant closings and layoffs.
The World Bank's 2008 survey also contains troubling data about the future availability of food. Although insisting that the planet is capable of producing enough foodstuffs to meet the needs of a growing world population, its analysts were far less confident that sufficient food would be available at prices people could afford, especially once hydrocarbon prices begin to rise again. With ever more farmland being set aside for biofuels production and efforts to increase crop yields through the use of "miracle seeds" losing steam, the Bank's analysts balanced their generally hopeful outlook with a caveat: "If biofuels-related demand for crops is much stronger or productivity performance disappoints, future food supplies may be much more expensive than in the past."
Combine these two World Bank findings -- zero economic growth in the developing world and rising food prices -- and you have a perfect recipe for unrelenting civil unrest and violence. The eruptions seen in 2008 and early 2009 will then be mere harbingers of a grim future in which, in a given week, any number of cities reel from riots and civil disturbances which could spread like multiple brushfires in a drought.
Mapping a World at the Brink
Survey the present world, and it's all too easy to spot a plethora of potential sites for such multiple eruptions -- or far worse. Take China. So far, the authorities have managed to control individual "mass incidents," preventing them from coalescing into something larger. But in a country with a more than two-thousand-year history of vast millenarian uprisings, the risk of such escalation has to be on the minds of every Chinese leader.
On February 2nd, a top Chinese Party official, Chen Xiwen, announced that, in the last few months of 2008 alone, a staggering 20 million migrant workers, who left rural areas for the country's booming cities in recent years, had lost their jobs. Worse yet, they had little prospect of regaining them in 2009. If many of these workers return to the countryside, they may find nothing there either, not even land to work.
Under such circumstances, and with further millions likely to be shut out of coastal factories in the coming year, the prospect of mass unrest is high. No wonder the government announced a $585 billion stimulus plan aimed at generating rural employment and, at the same time, called on security forces to exercise discipline and restraint when dealing with protesters. Many analysts now believe that, as exports continue to dry up, rising unemployment could lead to nationwide strikes and protests that might overwhelm ordinary police capabilities and require full-scale intervention by the military (as occurred in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989).
Or take many of the Third World petro-states that experienced heady boosts in income when oil prices were high, allowing governments to buy off dissident groups or finance powerful internal security forces. With oil prices plunging from $147 per barrel of crude oil to less than $40 dollars, such countries, from Angola to shaky Iraq, now face severe instability.
Nigeria is a typical case in point: When oil prices were high, the central government in Abuja raked in billions every year, enough to enrich elites in key parts of the country and subsidize a large military establishment; now that prices are low, the government will have a hard time satisfying all these previously well-fed competing obligations, which means the risk of internal disequilibrium will escalate. An insurgency in the oil-producing Niger Delta region, fueled by popular discontent with the failure of oil wealth to trickle down from the capital, is already gaining momentum and is likely to grow stronger as government revenues shrivel; other regions, equally disadvantaged by national revenue-sharing policies, will be open to disruptions of all sorts, including heightened levels of internecine warfare.
Bolivia is another energy producer that seems poised at the brink of an escalation in economic violence. One of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, it harbors substantial oil and natural gas reserves in its eastern, lowland regions. A majority of the population -- many of Indian descent -- supports President Evo Morales, who seeks to exercise strong state control over the reserves and use the proceeds to uplift the nation's poor. But a majority of those in the eastern part of the country, largely controlled by a European-descended elite, resent central government interference and seek to control the reserves themselves. Their efforts to achieve greater autonomy have led to repeated clashes with government troops and, in deteriorating times, could set the stage for a full-scale civil war.
Given a global situation in which one startling, often unexpected development follows another, prediction is perilous. At a popular level, however, the basic picture is clear enough: continued economic decline combined with a pervasive sense that existing systems and institutions are incapable of setting things right is already producing a potentially lethal brew of anxiety, fear, and rage. Popular explosions of one sort or another are inevitable.
Some sense of this new reality appears to have percolated up to the highest reaches of the U.S. intelligence community. In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 12th, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, declared, "The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications... Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period" -- certain to be the case in the present situation.
Blair did not specify which countries he had in mind when he spoke of "regime-threatening instability" -- a new term in the American intelligence lexicon, at least when associated with economic crises -- but it is clear from his testimony that U.S. officials are closely watching dozens of shaky nations in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia.
Now go back to that map on your wall with all those red and orange pins in it and proceed to color in appropriate countries in various shades of red and orange to indicate recent striking declines in gross national product and rises in unemployment rates. Without 16 intelligence agencies under you, you'll still have a pretty good idea of the places that Blair and his associates are eyeing in terms of instability as the future darkens on a planet at the brink.
Sunday 13 March 2011
THE COMING AMERICAN REBELLION PART TWO
THE COMING AMERICAN REBELLION PART TWO
Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion
David DeGraw
THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION
Part Two :: The Most Repressive Regime: US Police State
X Torture: Made in the USA
XI American Gulag: World’s Largest Prison Complex
XII Loss of Civil Liberties
XIII Internet Crackdown
XIV Silencing Dissent
XV Protected By Anonymous
PART TWO
THE MOST REPRESSIVE REGIME: US POLICE STATE
X TORTURE: MADE IN THE USA
It is extremely hypocritical when well-paid mainstream “news” people talk about how repressive and barbaric the Mubarak regime is in Egypt. Once again, I doubt they’ve been to inner city America recently.
If you want to report on Egypt participating in torture, it is vital to point out where they were getting their weapons, training and funding from. Who paid them to commit horrific crimes against humanity? Look in the mirror US taxpayers; you may not like what you see.
WikiLeaks revealed information on a US-Egyptian torture program:
WikiLeaks Docs: Torture-Linked Egyptian Police Trained in U.S.
“Newly released classified U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks have shed more light on the key U.S. support for human rights abuses under Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. The cables show Egyptian secret police received training at the FBI’s facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as U.S. diplomats in Egypt sent dispatches alleging extensive abuse under their watch.
Coincidentally, Quantico also hosts the military base where alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning is being held in solitary confinement.
A cable from October 2009 cites allegations from ‘credible’ sources that some prisoners were tortured ‘with electric shocks and sleep deprivation to reduce them to a ‘zombie state.’ One cable from November 2007 shows then-FBI deputy director John Pistole praised the head of Egypt’s secret police for ‘excellent and strong’ cooperation between the two agencies. Pistole currently heads the Transportation Security Administration in the United States.”
America the beautiful… The Transportation Security Administration, from electric shocks, sleep deprivation and zombie states in Egypt, to cancer causing, civil liberty-destroying Naked Scanners at an airport near you.
XI AMERICAN GULAG: WORLD’S LARGEST PRISON COMPLEX
If you want to report on Egypt putting their citizens in prison, again, the hypocrisy is astonishing. The US, by far, has more of its citizens in prison than any other nation on earth. China, with a billion citizens, doesn’t imprison as many people as the US, with only 309 million American citizens. The US per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000. In the Middle East, the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia imprisons 45 per 100,000. US per capita levels are equivalent to the darkest days of the Soviet Gulag.
The majority of prisoners are locked up for non-violent crimes, with tens of thousands in Supermax cells. In addition to the heinous torture programs that the US government has carried out in Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Gitmo, we have our own solitary confinement torture programs for Americans in Supermax Units throughout the country. As Jim Ridgeway from Solitary Watch explains:
“Solitary confinement has grown dramatically in the past two decades. Today, at least 25,000 prisoners are being held in long-term lockdown in the nation’s ‘supermax’ facilities; some 50,000 to 80,000 more are held in isolation in ‘administrative segregation’ or ‘special housing’ units at other facilities. In other words, on any given day, as many as 100,000 people are living in solitary confinement in America’s prisons. This widespread practice has received scant media attention, and has yet to find a place in the public discourse or on political platforms.”
The US prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation” revealed, “A new prison opens every week somewhere in America.” If you want to report on the brutal suppression of citizens, consider that somewhere in America, every week, a new prison is being built to literally “house the poor.”
A Boston Globe article by James Carroll shined a light on our repressive regime:
“… as federal corrections budgets increased by $19 billion, money for housing was cut by $17 billion, ‘effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the poor.’ State budgets took their cues from Washington in a new but unspoken national consensus: poverty itself was criminalized. Although ‘law and order’ was taken to be a Republican mantra, this phenomenon was fully bipartisan.”
Again, just because you don’t hear this reported on TV, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
XII LOSS OF CIVIL LIBERTIES
In addition to the record-breaking imprisonment of the American population, since 9/11 our civil liberties have been violated in unprecedented fashion. Tom Burghardt, in an article entitled, “American Police State: FBI Abuses Reveals Contempt for Political Rights, Civil Liberties,” summed up a new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation “documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade:”
“As mass revolt spreads across Egypt and the Middle East and citizens there demand jobs, civil liberties and an end to police state abuses from repressive, U.S.-backed torture regimes, the Obama administration and their congressional allies aim to expand one right here at home.
Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released an explosive new report documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade. That report, ‘Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001-2008,’ reveals that the domestic political intelligence apparat spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continues to systematically violate the rights of American citizens and legal residents….
According to EFF, more than 2,500 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that:
* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI reported to the IOB approximately 800 violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations, although this number likely significantly under-represents the number of violations that actually occurred.
* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI investigated, at minimum, 7000 potential violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.
* Based on the proportion of violations reported to the IOB and the FBI’s own statements regarding the number of NSL [National Security Letter] violations that occurred, the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.
But FBI lawbreaking didn’t stop there. Citing internal documents, EFF revealed that the Bureau also ‘engaged in a number of flagrant legal violations’ that included, ‘submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts,’ ‘using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoenas’ and ‘accessing password protected documents without a warrant.’
In other words, in order to illegally spy on Americans and haul political dissidents before Star Chamber-style grand juries, the FBI routinely committed perjury and did so with absolute impunity.
Reviewing the more than 2,500 documents EFF analysts averred that they had ‘uncovered alarming trends in the Bureau’s intelligence investigation practices’ and that the ‘documents suggest the FBI’s intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed.’”
When the Egyptian regime shut down the Internet, they did so by using American made technology. Having been knocked offline here at AmpedStatus.com, we have firsthand experience in what it feels like to have your ability to communicate and First Amendment rights stripped away. We still don’t know who was behind the attacks on our website, but the situation in Egypt was an interesting case study. As it turned out, Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Bill Daley’s company provided the technology used to shut down the Internet in Egypt. No, I’m not referring to JP Morgan, it was the other company Bill Daley was a board member of up until last month, Boeing.
As media reform organization Free Press revealed:
“The Mubarak regime shut down Internet and cell phone communications before launching a violent crackdown against political protesters.
Free Press has discovered that an American company — Boeing-owned Narus of Sunnyvale, CA — had sold Egypt [Telecom Egypt, the state-run Internet service provider] ‘Deep Packet Inspection’ (DPI) equipment that can be used to help the regime track, target and crush political dissent over the Internet and mobile phones. Narus is selling this spying technology to other regimes with deplorable human rights records.
The power to control the Internet and the resulting harm to democracy are so disturbing that the threshold for using DPI must be very high. That’s why, before DPI becomes more widely used around the world and at home, the U.S. government must establish clear and legitimate criteria for preventing the use of such surveillance and control technology.”
It is probably just be an odd coincidence, but it was soon after we published the following report that we were knocked offline:
Obama Renews Commitment to Complete Destruction of the Middle Class – Meet the New Economic Death Squad
“…. Boeing certainly does love Wall Street. For those of you out of the loop, you may not recall that the most powerful and destructive WMD that Boeing executives ever helped develop was the CDO, that’s a Collateralized Debt (Damage) Obligation. Do you remember Edward Liddy? Liddy and Bill Daley were both Boeing board members, before Liddy temporarily moved to Goldman Sachs where he oversaw their Audit Committee. Liddy was the person who had the most knowledge of Goldman’s CDO exposure insured through, what was that company’s name?… Oh, AIG. Yeah, that was it. Then, Hank ‘Pentagon-Watergate-Goldman’ Paulson unilaterally made Liddy the CEO of AIG, before teaming up with Tim ‘Kissinger-Rubin-Summers-IMF’ Geithner to flush $183 billion tax dollars down the ‘too big to fail’ drain. And then… after the government was finished pumping our tax dollars to financial terrorists through the AIG SPV, Liddy scurried back to the board of Boeing where he could have cocktails with his ole pal Billy-Boy Daley. Yep, Goldman, JP Morgan, Boeing and the destruction of the US economy, birds of a feather…”
Within an hour of publishing that report, our site was knocked offline.
Something that has become very clear to me: when you accurately criticize the most powerful people, most people will ignore you, except the people who have the most power. They notice right away, and they let you know about it.
As I said, this is all probably just a coincidence.
However, this tangled web of interests between the Pentagon, Wall Street and the White House is fully exposed, yet again, with Obama’s special envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner Jr.
Wisner has just as many conflicts of interest as Bill Daley and Edward Liddy. Some reports have mentioned that Wisner was biased toward supporting the Mubarak regime because he is a longtime friend of Mubarak, and worked for a law firm that represented the regime, Patton Boggs. But that’s only part of the story. Wisner, like Bill Daley, is a Council on Foreign Relations member. He is the son of legendary CIA propaganda expert Frank Wisner Sr., who created and ran Operation Mockingbird. For those of you who haven’t heard of Frank Wisner Sr., he used to report on “his ‘mighty Wurlitzer,’ on which he could play any propaganda tune.”
Frank Jr. was also a board member of Enron, up until its collapse, and like Edward Liddy, he also worked for AIG, from 1997 until 2009. Wisner oversaw two of the greatest corporate catastrophes in American history, back to back. Given his track record, Barack “mighty Wurlitzer” Obama must have thought he was the perfect guy for a collapsing corporate puppet regime in Egypt. Wisner is a disaster capitalism expert, right up there with Edward Liddy and Chief of Staff Bill Daley. Birds of a feather…
XIV SILENCING DISSENT
The recent internal emails from cyber-security firm HB Gary, released by WikiLeaks, exposing online campaigns to crackdown on critical journalists, reveals some of the other common methods used by the financial elite, like the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America, to target and silence political adversaries.
As one of the targets of the revealed campaign, Brad Friedman reported:
US Chamber of Commerce Thugs Used ‘Terror Tools’ for Disinfo Scheme Targeting Me, My Family, Other Progressive U.S. Citizens, Groups.
“The US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful Rightwing lobbying group in the country, was revealed to have been working with their law firm and a number of private cyber security and intelligence firms to target progressive organizations, journalists and citizens who they felt were in opposition to their political activism, tactics and points of view.”
Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who was a constitutional law and civil rights litigator, was also a target of these planned attacks. In a report on the campaign to smear and discredit him, he focused on how common these illegal attacks are:
The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters.
“The real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained the unified axis of government and corporate power is. As creepy and odious as this is, there’s nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous’ hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it’s being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. “
Greenwald later added:
“Given the players involved and the facts that continue to emerge — this story is far too significant to allow to die due to lack of attention…. As the episode… demonstrates, simply relying on the voluntary statements of the corporations involved ensures that the actual facts will remain concealed if not actively distorted…. Entities of this type routinely engage in conduct like this with impunity, and the serendipity that led to their exposure in this case should be seized to impose some accountability… that these firms felt so free to propose these schemes in writing and, at least from what is known, not a single person raised any objection at all — underscores how common this behavior is.”
Dylan Ratigan recently interviewed Glenn Greenwald and they summed up the situation, here’s a brief excerpt:
DYLAN: Am I correct in understanding that substantial, legitimate, serious, powerful private security firms were pitching Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce a campaign for which they would be paid money, in which they would assassinate the reputations and intimidate and threaten the well-being of targeted private individuals. Is that true?
GLENN: Yes, the journalists, activists, political groups, and the like.
DYLAN: Whoever it may be. And that the law firm that brought these private security firms in was recommended by the U.S. Department of Justice. So it’s on a recommendation from the DOJ that private and substantial security firms are being brought in to pitch smear and intimidation campaigns against those who support transparency in information. Fair?
GLENN: Yes, exactly…
DYLAN: … they were saying, ‘You pay me money and those who are validating the efforts of WikiLeaks or the efforts of transparency, period, in the modern information world, we will threaten their careers such that they’ll give up the cause, if you pay us.’
GLENN: Right. ‘We’ll investigate them. We’ll find out dirt on them. We will destroy their reputation using all kinds of schemes and techniques.’
DYLAN: And this came out through another leak which is the ironic twist…
GLENN: Well, one ironic twist is that it came out through a leak and the other ironic twist is that these are internet security firms that held their expertise in providing internet security and yet their e-mail system was hacked.
XV PROTECTED BY ANONYMOUS
Propaganda doesn’t work as well when you have the Internet, a cyberspace Underground Railroad, a form of mass communication that allows citizens to interact without corporate gatekeepers effectively censoring critical thought. All of these attacks show the desperation of the ruling class, in attempting to maintain an obsolete propaganda system. Just look at how common and accepted unlawful practices have become in pursuit of their goals.
It is a strategic imperative that we protect Internet freedom from the forces of media concentration and censorship. Organizations such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous are playing a critical role in exposing information and protecting those who are critical of the most powerful and corrupt elements within society.
Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion
David DeGraw
THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION
Part Two :: The Most Repressive Regime: US Police State
X Torture: Made in the USA
XI American Gulag: World’s Largest Prison Complex
XII Loss of Civil Liberties
XIII Internet Crackdown
XIV Silencing Dissent
XV Protected By Anonymous
PART TWO
THE MOST REPRESSIVE REGIME: US POLICE STATE
X TORTURE: MADE IN THE USA
It is extremely hypocritical when well-paid mainstream “news” people talk about how repressive and barbaric the Mubarak regime is in Egypt. Once again, I doubt they’ve been to inner city America recently.
If you want to report on Egypt participating in torture, it is vital to point out where they were getting their weapons, training and funding from. Who paid them to commit horrific crimes against humanity? Look in the mirror US taxpayers; you may not like what you see.
WikiLeaks revealed information on a US-Egyptian torture program:
WikiLeaks Docs: Torture-Linked Egyptian Police Trained in U.S.
“Newly released classified U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks have shed more light on the key U.S. support for human rights abuses under Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. The cables show Egyptian secret police received training at the FBI’s facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as U.S. diplomats in Egypt sent dispatches alleging extensive abuse under their watch.
Coincidentally, Quantico also hosts the military base where alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning is being held in solitary confinement.
A cable from October 2009 cites allegations from ‘credible’ sources that some prisoners were tortured ‘with electric shocks and sleep deprivation to reduce them to a ‘zombie state.’ One cable from November 2007 shows then-FBI deputy director John Pistole praised the head of Egypt’s secret police for ‘excellent and strong’ cooperation between the two agencies. Pistole currently heads the Transportation Security Administration in the United States.”
America the beautiful… The Transportation Security Administration, from electric shocks, sleep deprivation and zombie states in Egypt, to cancer causing, civil liberty-destroying Naked Scanners at an airport near you.
XI AMERICAN GULAG: WORLD’S LARGEST PRISON COMPLEX
If you want to report on Egypt putting their citizens in prison, again, the hypocrisy is astonishing. The US, by far, has more of its citizens in prison than any other nation on earth. China, with a billion citizens, doesn’t imprison as many people as the US, with only 309 million American citizens. The US per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000. In the Middle East, the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia imprisons 45 per 100,000. US per capita levels are equivalent to the darkest days of the Soviet Gulag.
The majority of prisoners are locked up for non-violent crimes, with tens of thousands in Supermax cells. In addition to the heinous torture programs that the US government has carried out in Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Gitmo, we have our own solitary confinement torture programs for Americans in Supermax Units throughout the country. As Jim Ridgeway from Solitary Watch explains:
“Solitary confinement has grown dramatically in the past two decades. Today, at least 25,000 prisoners are being held in long-term lockdown in the nation’s ‘supermax’ facilities; some 50,000 to 80,000 more are held in isolation in ‘administrative segregation’ or ‘special housing’ units at other facilities. In other words, on any given day, as many as 100,000 people are living in solitary confinement in America’s prisons. This widespread practice has received scant media attention, and has yet to find a place in the public discourse or on political platforms.”
The US prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation” revealed, “A new prison opens every week somewhere in America.” If you want to report on the brutal suppression of citizens, consider that somewhere in America, every week, a new prison is being built to literally “house the poor.”
A Boston Globe article by James Carroll shined a light on our repressive regime:
“… as federal corrections budgets increased by $19 billion, money for housing was cut by $17 billion, ‘effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the poor.’ State budgets took their cues from Washington in a new but unspoken national consensus: poverty itself was criminalized. Although ‘law and order’ was taken to be a Republican mantra, this phenomenon was fully bipartisan.”
Again, just because you don’t hear this reported on TV, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
XII LOSS OF CIVIL LIBERTIES
In addition to the record-breaking imprisonment of the American population, since 9/11 our civil liberties have been violated in unprecedented fashion. Tom Burghardt, in an article entitled, “American Police State: FBI Abuses Reveals Contempt for Political Rights, Civil Liberties,” summed up a new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation “documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade:”
“As mass revolt spreads across Egypt and the Middle East and citizens there demand jobs, civil liberties and an end to police state abuses from repressive, U.S.-backed torture regimes, the Obama administration and their congressional allies aim to expand one right here at home.
Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released an explosive new report documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade. That report, ‘Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001-2008,’ reveals that the domestic political intelligence apparat spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continues to systematically violate the rights of American citizens and legal residents….
According to EFF, more than 2,500 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that:
* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI reported to the IOB approximately 800 violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations, although this number likely significantly under-represents the number of violations that actually occurred.
* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI investigated, at minimum, 7000 potential violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.
* Based on the proportion of violations reported to the IOB and the FBI’s own statements regarding the number of NSL [National Security Letter] violations that occurred, the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.
But FBI lawbreaking didn’t stop there. Citing internal documents, EFF revealed that the Bureau also ‘engaged in a number of flagrant legal violations’ that included, ‘submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts,’ ‘using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoenas’ and ‘accessing password protected documents without a warrant.’
In other words, in order to illegally spy on Americans and haul political dissidents before Star Chamber-style grand juries, the FBI routinely committed perjury and did so with absolute impunity.
Reviewing the more than 2,500 documents EFF analysts averred that they had ‘uncovered alarming trends in the Bureau’s intelligence investigation practices’ and that the ‘documents suggest the FBI’s intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed.’”
When the Egyptian regime shut down the Internet, they did so by using American made technology. Having been knocked offline here at AmpedStatus.com, we have firsthand experience in what it feels like to have your ability to communicate and First Amendment rights stripped away. We still don’t know who was behind the attacks on our website, but the situation in Egypt was an interesting case study. As it turned out, Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Bill Daley’s company provided the technology used to shut down the Internet in Egypt. No, I’m not referring to JP Morgan, it was the other company Bill Daley was a board member of up until last month, Boeing.
As media reform organization Free Press revealed:
“The Mubarak regime shut down Internet and cell phone communications before launching a violent crackdown against political protesters.
Free Press has discovered that an American company — Boeing-owned Narus of Sunnyvale, CA — had sold Egypt [Telecom Egypt, the state-run Internet service provider] ‘Deep Packet Inspection’ (DPI) equipment that can be used to help the regime track, target and crush political dissent over the Internet and mobile phones. Narus is selling this spying technology to other regimes with deplorable human rights records.
The power to control the Internet and the resulting harm to democracy are so disturbing that the threshold for using DPI must be very high. That’s why, before DPI becomes more widely used around the world and at home, the U.S. government must establish clear and legitimate criteria for preventing the use of such surveillance and control technology.”
It is probably just be an odd coincidence, but it was soon after we published the following report that we were knocked offline:
Obama Renews Commitment to Complete Destruction of the Middle Class – Meet the New Economic Death Squad
“…. Boeing certainly does love Wall Street. For those of you out of the loop, you may not recall that the most powerful and destructive WMD that Boeing executives ever helped develop was the CDO, that’s a Collateralized Debt (Damage) Obligation. Do you remember Edward Liddy? Liddy and Bill Daley were both Boeing board members, before Liddy temporarily moved to Goldman Sachs where he oversaw their Audit Committee. Liddy was the person who had the most knowledge of Goldman’s CDO exposure insured through, what was that company’s name?… Oh, AIG. Yeah, that was it. Then, Hank ‘Pentagon-Watergate-Goldman’ Paulson unilaterally made Liddy the CEO of AIG, before teaming up with Tim ‘Kissinger-Rubin-Summers-IMF’ Geithner to flush $183 billion tax dollars down the ‘too big to fail’ drain. And then… after the government was finished pumping our tax dollars to financial terrorists through the AIG SPV, Liddy scurried back to the board of Boeing where he could have cocktails with his ole pal Billy-Boy Daley. Yep, Goldman, JP Morgan, Boeing and the destruction of the US economy, birds of a feather…”
Within an hour of publishing that report, our site was knocked offline.
Something that has become very clear to me: when you accurately criticize the most powerful people, most people will ignore you, except the people who have the most power. They notice right away, and they let you know about it.
As I said, this is all probably just a coincidence.
However, this tangled web of interests between the Pentagon, Wall Street and the White House is fully exposed, yet again, with Obama’s special envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner Jr.
Wisner has just as many conflicts of interest as Bill Daley and Edward Liddy. Some reports have mentioned that Wisner was biased toward supporting the Mubarak regime because he is a longtime friend of Mubarak, and worked for a law firm that represented the regime, Patton Boggs. But that’s only part of the story. Wisner, like Bill Daley, is a Council on Foreign Relations member. He is the son of legendary CIA propaganda expert Frank Wisner Sr., who created and ran Operation Mockingbird. For those of you who haven’t heard of Frank Wisner Sr., he used to report on “his ‘mighty Wurlitzer,’ on which he could play any propaganda tune.”
Frank Jr. was also a board member of Enron, up until its collapse, and like Edward Liddy, he also worked for AIG, from 1997 until 2009. Wisner oversaw two of the greatest corporate catastrophes in American history, back to back. Given his track record, Barack “mighty Wurlitzer” Obama must have thought he was the perfect guy for a collapsing corporate puppet regime in Egypt. Wisner is a disaster capitalism expert, right up there with Edward Liddy and Chief of Staff Bill Daley. Birds of a feather…
XIV SILENCING DISSENT
The recent internal emails from cyber-security firm HB Gary, released by WikiLeaks, exposing online campaigns to crackdown on critical journalists, reveals some of the other common methods used by the financial elite, like the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America, to target and silence political adversaries.
As one of the targets of the revealed campaign, Brad Friedman reported:
US Chamber of Commerce Thugs Used ‘Terror Tools’ for Disinfo Scheme Targeting Me, My Family, Other Progressive U.S. Citizens, Groups.
“The US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful Rightwing lobbying group in the country, was revealed to have been working with their law firm and a number of private cyber security and intelligence firms to target progressive organizations, journalists and citizens who they felt were in opposition to their political activism, tactics and points of view.”
Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who was a constitutional law and civil rights litigator, was also a target of these planned attacks. In a report on the campaign to smear and discredit him, he focused on how common these illegal attacks are:
The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters.
“The real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained the unified axis of government and corporate power is. As creepy and odious as this is, there’s nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous’ hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it’s being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. “
Greenwald later added:
“Given the players involved and the facts that continue to emerge — this story is far too significant to allow to die due to lack of attention…. As the episode… demonstrates, simply relying on the voluntary statements of the corporations involved ensures that the actual facts will remain concealed if not actively distorted…. Entities of this type routinely engage in conduct like this with impunity, and the serendipity that led to their exposure in this case should be seized to impose some accountability… that these firms felt so free to propose these schemes in writing and, at least from what is known, not a single person raised any objection at all — underscores how common this behavior is.”
Dylan Ratigan recently interviewed Glenn Greenwald and they summed up the situation, here’s a brief excerpt:
DYLAN: Am I correct in understanding that substantial, legitimate, serious, powerful private security firms were pitching Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce a campaign for which they would be paid money, in which they would assassinate the reputations and intimidate and threaten the well-being of targeted private individuals. Is that true?
GLENN: Yes, the journalists, activists, political groups, and the like.
DYLAN: Whoever it may be. And that the law firm that brought these private security firms in was recommended by the U.S. Department of Justice. So it’s on a recommendation from the DOJ that private and substantial security firms are being brought in to pitch smear and intimidation campaigns against those who support transparency in information. Fair?
GLENN: Yes, exactly…
DYLAN: … they were saying, ‘You pay me money and those who are validating the efforts of WikiLeaks or the efforts of transparency, period, in the modern information world, we will threaten their careers such that they’ll give up the cause, if you pay us.’
GLENN: Right. ‘We’ll investigate them. We’ll find out dirt on them. We will destroy their reputation using all kinds of schemes and techniques.’
DYLAN: And this came out through another leak which is the ironic twist…
GLENN: Well, one ironic twist is that it came out through a leak and the other ironic twist is that these are internet security firms that held their expertise in providing internet security and yet their e-mail system was hacked.
XV PROTECTED BY ANONYMOUS
Propaganda doesn’t work as well when you have the Internet, a cyberspace Underground Railroad, a form of mass communication that allows citizens to interact without corporate gatekeepers effectively censoring critical thought. All of these attacks show the desperation of the ruling class, in attempting to maintain an obsolete propaganda system. Just look at how common and accepted unlawful practices have become in pursuit of their goals.
It is a strategic imperative that we protect Internet freedom from the forces of media concentration and censorship. Organizations such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous are playing a critical role in exposing information and protecting those who are critical of the most powerful and corrupt elements within society.
Friday 11 March 2011
BRADLEY MANNING AND THE REAL ENEMY
AIDING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
BRADLEY MANNING AND THE REAL ENEMY
By Rev. WILLIAM E. ALBERTS
March 11 - 13, 2011
Army intelligence analyst Private Bradley E. Manning, imprisoned in a Quantico, Virginia Marine brig since last summer for allegedly leaking to WikiLeaks tens of thousands of classified US documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, faces 22 new charges, one of which is “aiding the enemy” that could bring him the death penalty. (“Soldier Faces 22 New WikiLeaks Charges,” By Charlie Savage, The New York Times, Mar. 3, 2011) The real “enemy” Private Manning is actually aiding” are the American people.
Rather than being imprisoned, today under reportedly abusive conditions, for betraying his country, Private Manning should receive the Nobel Peace Prize for exposing the real betrayers of America. The Bush administration committed horrible crimes against humanity by knowingly lying about Saddam Hussein having “mushroom cloud”- threatening weapons of mass destruction and launching an unnecessary and illegal pre-emptive war against the people of Iraq. As a result, documented studies of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq reveal that well over a million Iraqi civilians have been killed, a shockingly far greater number than the politically watered-down numbers infrequently appearing in America’s status quo-guardian mainstream media. (See “Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields: A new study estimates that 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since Bush and Cheney chose to invade,” By Joshua Holland, AlterNet, Sept. 17, 2007; and “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide: 1.4 million violent deaths in US-occupied Iraq- eclipses Rwandan Genocide,” JUST FOREIGN POLICY )
The human toll in Iraq is staggering. An estimated one million women have been widowed, and five million children orphaned. (See “Breaking Barriers: Empowering Widows and Orphans in Iraq,” Feb. 25, 2011, CSW 2011, The National Council of Women of Canada) Some four million Iraqi families have been displaced. Deadly US-invasion-triggered sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis continues to rack the country. And, as reported in The New York Times, a violent “day of rage” demonstrations erupted in ten cities throughout Iraq, “with nearly 20 protesters killed in clashes with security forces. Dozens more were wounded, and several local government offices lay smoldering and ransacked.” The Times story continues, “The crowds in this young, war-torn democracy (italics added) did not call for an entirely new form of government, but for better jobs and improved services.” (Feb. 26, 2011)
Frightening is the glorification and thus normalization of war—which serves the endless conflict desired by America’s corporate war profiteers and their colluding political power seekers. The tip of the normalization of the permanent war iceberg is seen in that leading mainstream newspaper’s so-called objective news story’s description of Iraq as “this young, warn-torn democracy.” And in another “news” story, The New York Times camouflages America’s war crimes against Iraq by referring to “the fragile democracy struggling to take hold here.” (“Concerns Grow as Iraq Feels Its Premier Strengthen His Grip on Power,” By Michael S. Schmidt and Jack Healy, Mar. 5, 2011)
The normalization of unjust endless war is seen in the book contracts awarded to America’s top war criminals: former president George W. Bush, former vice present Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove, Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to “Bush’s Brain.” These are a few of the enemies within who transformed the Office of President into “Commander-in-Chief” and militarized the country to accommodate the normalization of endless war. This normalization of our government’s war crimes in our name even has a monument, no less on a Christian denomination’s university campus: ‘SMU: HOME OF THE GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL CENTER.’ (www.smu.edu/bush/library)
The subtle normalization of America’s wars without end is echoed in CBS Evening News national security correspondent David Martin’s report, on whether the US should enact a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent Col. Qaddafi’s air force from inflicting mass casualties on protesting rebels. Martin matter-of-factly said, “The U.S. military knows all about no-fly zones. It ran them over Iraq for more than a decade, but it took an invasion to get rid of that dictator.” (“Pentagon is wary of intervening in Libya,” By David Martin, CBS Evening News, Mar. 1, 2011)
“It took an” unncessary, falsely based, illegal “invasion” that has devastated the people of Iraq—and also left in its criminal wake the deaths of some 4,400 American sons and daughters and an estimated 100,000 more wounded in body, mind and spirit. In one sentence, national CBS correspondent David Martin justified and thus normalized a horrible US government-authorized crime against humanity and its endless war policies. It is as if the deaths and maiming of the lives of all of those Iraqi, American and Coalition forces were worth a falsely-based “invasion to get rid of that dictator.”
The insidious normalization of corporate-profiteering and political power-motivated American wars is seen in a new reality television show called “Coming Home.” Here a US soldier deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere may pay a surprise visit to a shocked wife at her work or their home with cameras rolling. Another soldier suddenly appears in the classroom or on the athletic field before his startled son. A third returning soldier may unexpectedly come through the door and be welcomed by his or her loved one’s screams and tears of joy.
Star Price, Executive Producer of “Coming Home,” expresses the show’s distraction-serving normalcy dynamic: “The show is a recognition of the incredible sacrifice men and women make but their families go through a lot of worry, stress, yet put up with it with a smile.” “Price added, “They are worthy of an emotional response.” (“Lifetime reality show, ‘Coming Home’ premieres Sunday,” By Tavia D. Green, TheLeafChronicle, Mar. 3, 2011) James Hibbard of Entertainment Weekly ends his review of the show with its normalizing diversionary dynamic: “For those who haven’t seen these sort of videos before [“Coming Home” and “Army Wives], get ready to cry your eyes out.” (“Surprise military reunions reality show coming to Lifetime — EXCLUSIVE,” Feb. 16, 2011) That is the point! People cry their eyes out so that they do not have to see the tears of grief of real Iraqi, Afghanistani, Pakastini and American people whose sons and daughters and mothers and fathers are never coming home again.
The normalcy of America’s endless wars is slickly displayed in a television commercial produced by USAA, a military-focused banking, investments and insurance organization whose website states, “For those who stood tall for this country and for their families, we stand ready to return the favor.” USAA’s TV commercial shows a returning Navy officer holding and kissing his three-or four-year-old daughter, who is holding a small American flag in each hand. The next clip is of American soldiers in combat gear patrolling a street in an Arab populated country. The scene then quickly flips back home to an army wife and mother reading a story to her young daughter. Then on again to another group of deployed American GIs walking off a cargo airship, and patrolling a rural roadway along the mountainside of another country. Then back again to another soldier’s wife and mother tucking their young daughter into bed. Next are American flag-holding greeters welcoming returning soldiers at an airport with congratulatory smiles and handshakes. The final scene is of a little boy, carrying a “I love daddy” sign, running to his returning widely grinning father’s outstretched arms, with the father then holding his, now flag-waving, little son and baby daughter and tendering hugging his wife. The commercial ends with, “Insurance Banking Investments Retirement Advice” Then, “USAA.com 1-888- 461- USAA” Followed by, “We know what it means to serve.”
“Daddy’s home!” What did you do in the war, daddy?”
Tragically, in Iraq and Afghanistan—and in America-- it is not about “coming home” but about homes destroyed and lives ended and maimed. The trauma and tears of American mothers and fathers and sons and daughters are no more real than the trauma and tears of Iraqi and Afghanistan mothers and fathers and sons and daughters being demonized as “terrorists” and “Islamic extremists.”
It is not about the “radicalization” of Muslims in American and abroad, as Republican Representative Peter King of New York would have everyone believe with his racist anti-Muslim congressional hearings. It is about the normalization of the US government’s imperialistic, war-mongering, terror-producing foreign policy, which is the source of much of the so-called “extremism” of its victims.
War-profiteering and political power-maintaining imperialistic wars by any other name are still crimes against humanity. Whether it is the terrible destruction of Iraq. The continuing deaths of Afghan children and other civilians by US drones, which actually represent America’s immoral, apologies-riddled foreign policy in Afghanistan. Or the US’s immunity-demanding sociopathic foreign policy in Pakistan, symbolized now by a CIA operative who’s cowboy-like killing of two young Pakistani men has fueled even greater national outrage against America’s continuing violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. US foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not about “democracy” but about demonocracy. It is not about protecting America’s “national security” but about creating enemies.
Private Bradley Manning has provided a great service to his country by exposing the fallacy of the normalcy of America’s imperialistic wars. He has given the light of day to the truth, upon which justice and restitution and normalcy for all depend. He has sought to protect, not endanger, America’s national security by informing the people that the greatest threat to their security is the treasonous behavior of war-instigating and –accommodating members of their own government. The real threat his behavior poses is to the normalcy of endless US wars and support of repressive regimes.
Private Manning’s patriotism is powerfully expressed by attorney and member of the National Lawyers Guild Chase Madar, who writes,
The records allegedly downloaded by Manning reveal clear instances of war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, widespread torture committed by Iraqi authorities with the full knowledge of the U.S.military, previously unknown estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed at U.S. military checkpoints, and the massive Iraqi civilian death toll caused by the American invasions. (“Why Bradley Manning Is a Patriot, Not a Criminal,” TomDispatch.com, Feb. 10, 2011)
Who are “the enemy” Private Manning is charged with “aiding?” The international anti-war women’s group CODEPINK responds to that key question this way:
Who exactly is “the enemy” anyway? The cables that Bradley Manning is accused of leaking have helped spark democratic uprisings across the Arab world. They have brought us the truth about the brutality and atrocities of our continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they have given us a critical look at the underpinnings of our own government. They have created transparency beyond any we had before, and allow us as citizens to make more educated decisions. Of all the beneficiaries of the leaked cables, Democracy itself is the greatest. . . .With the leaked video”Collateral Murder,” Bradley put us in the back of a helicopter gunship in Iraq to show us how our wars are really fought. In his own words, he did it because “I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” Now he is being charged with telling the truth, and it may cost him his life. (“Who’s the enemy?,” Mar. 4, 2011)
Today Private Manning is reportedly forced to periodically stand exposed naked in a bare prison cell. His exposure of the truth wraps him in dignity and in real humanistic patriotic caring for Americans and for people everywhere. What is being done to him by the Pentagon and Obama administration will not detract from what he has done to help us Americans regain a human understanding of normalcy.
Rev. William E. Alberts, Ph.D. is a hospital chaplain and a diplomate in the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. Both a Unitarian Universalist and a United Methodist minister, he has written research reports, essays and articles on racism, war, politics and religion.
BRADLEY MANNING AND THE REAL ENEMY
By Rev. WILLIAM E. ALBERTS
March 11 - 13, 2011
Army intelligence analyst Private Bradley E. Manning, imprisoned in a Quantico, Virginia Marine brig since last summer for allegedly leaking to WikiLeaks tens of thousands of classified US documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, faces 22 new charges, one of which is “aiding the enemy” that could bring him the death penalty. (“Soldier Faces 22 New WikiLeaks Charges,” By Charlie Savage, The New York Times, Mar. 3, 2011) The real “enemy” Private Manning is actually aiding” are the American people.
Rather than being imprisoned, today under reportedly abusive conditions, for betraying his country, Private Manning should receive the Nobel Peace Prize for exposing the real betrayers of America. The Bush administration committed horrible crimes against humanity by knowingly lying about Saddam Hussein having “mushroom cloud”- threatening weapons of mass destruction and launching an unnecessary and illegal pre-emptive war against the people of Iraq. As a result, documented studies of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq reveal that well over a million Iraqi civilians have been killed, a shockingly far greater number than the politically watered-down numbers infrequently appearing in America’s status quo-guardian mainstream media. (See “Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields: A new study estimates that 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since Bush and Cheney chose to invade,” By Joshua Holland, AlterNet, Sept. 17, 2007; and “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide: 1.4 million violent deaths in US-occupied Iraq- eclipses Rwandan Genocide,” JUST FOREIGN POLICY )
The human toll in Iraq is staggering. An estimated one million women have been widowed, and five million children orphaned. (See “Breaking Barriers: Empowering Widows and Orphans in Iraq,” Feb. 25, 2011, CSW 2011, The National Council of Women of Canada) Some four million Iraqi families have been displaced. Deadly US-invasion-triggered sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis continues to rack the country. And, as reported in The New York Times, a violent “day of rage” demonstrations erupted in ten cities throughout Iraq, “with nearly 20 protesters killed in clashes with security forces. Dozens more were wounded, and several local government offices lay smoldering and ransacked.” The Times story continues, “The crowds in this young, war-torn democracy (italics added) did not call for an entirely new form of government, but for better jobs and improved services.” (Feb. 26, 2011)
Frightening is the glorification and thus normalization of war—which serves the endless conflict desired by America’s corporate war profiteers and their colluding political power seekers. The tip of the normalization of the permanent war iceberg is seen in that leading mainstream newspaper’s so-called objective news story’s description of Iraq as “this young, warn-torn democracy.” And in another “news” story, The New York Times camouflages America’s war crimes against Iraq by referring to “the fragile democracy struggling to take hold here.” (“Concerns Grow as Iraq Feels Its Premier Strengthen His Grip on Power,” By Michael S. Schmidt and Jack Healy, Mar. 5, 2011)
The normalization of unjust endless war is seen in the book contracts awarded to America’s top war criminals: former president George W. Bush, former vice present Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove, Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to “Bush’s Brain.” These are a few of the enemies within who transformed the Office of President into “Commander-in-Chief” and militarized the country to accommodate the normalization of endless war. This normalization of our government’s war crimes in our name even has a monument, no less on a Christian denomination’s university campus: ‘SMU: HOME OF THE GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL CENTER.’ (www.smu.edu/bush/library)
The subtle normalization of America’s wars without end is echoed in CBS Evening News national security correspondent David Martin’s report, on whether the US should enact a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent Col. Qaddafi’s air force from inflicting mass casualties on protesting rebels. Martin matter-of-factly said, “The U.S. military knows all about no-fly zones. It ran them over Iraq for more than a decade, but it took an invasion to get rid of that dictator.” (“Pentagon is wary of intervening in Libya,” By David Martin, CBS Evening News, Mar. 1, 2011)
“It took an” unncessary, falsely based, illegal “invasion” that has devastated the people of Iraq—and also left in its criminal wake the deaths of some 4,400 American sons and daughters and an estimated 100,000 more wounded in body, mind and spirit. In one sentence, national CBS correspondent David Martin justified and thus normalized a horrible US government-authorized crime against humanity and its endless war policies. It is as if the deaths and maiming of the lives of all of those Iraqi, American and Coalition forces were worth a falsely-based “invasion to get rid of that dictator.”
The insidious normalization of corporate-profiteering and political power-motivated American wars is seen in a new reality television show called “Coming Home.” Here a US soldier deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere may pay a surprise visit to a shocked wife at her work or their home with cameras rolling. Another soldier suddenly appears in the classroom or on the athletic field before his startled son. A third returning soldier may unexpectedly come through the door and be welcomed by his or her loved one’s screams and tears of joy.
Star Price, Executive Producer of “Coming Home,” expresses the show’s distraction-serving normalcy dynamic: “The show is a recognition of the incredible sacrifice men and women make but their families go through a lot of worry, stress, yet put up with it with a smile.” “Price added, “They are worthy of an emotional response.” (“Lifetime reality show, ‘Coming Home’ premieres Sunday,” By Tavia D. Green, TheLeafChronicle, Mar. 3, 2011) James Hibbard of Entertainment Weekly ends his review of the show with its normalizing diversionary dynamic: “For those who haven’t seen these sort of videos before [“Coming Home” and “Army Wives], get ready to cry your eyes out.” (“Surprise military reunions reality show coming to Lifetime — EXCLUSIVE,” Feb. 16, 2011) That is the point! People cry their eyes out so that they do not have to see the tears of grief of real Iraqi, Afghanistani, Pakastini and American people whose sons and daughters and mothers and fathers are never coming home again.
The normalcy of America’s endless wars is slickly displayed in a television commercial produced by USAA, a military-focused banking, investments and insurance organization whose website states, “For those who stood tall for this country and for their families, we stand ready to return the favor.” USAA’s TV commercial shows a returning Navy officer holding and kissing his three-or four-year-old daughter, who is holding a small American flag in each hand. The next clip is of American soldiers in combat gear patrolling a street in an Arab populated country. The scene then quickly flips back home to an army wife and mother reading a story to her young daughter. Then on again to another group of deployed American GIs walking off a cargo airship, and patrolling a rural roadway along the mountainside of another country. Then back again to another soldier’s wife and mother tucking their young daughter into bed. Next are American flag-holding greeters welcoming returning soldiers at an airport with congratulatory smiles and handshakes. The final scene is of a little boy, carrying a “I love daddy” sign, running to his returning widely grinning father’s outstretched arms, with the father then holding his, now flag-waving, little son and baby daughter and tendering hugging his wife. The commercial ends with, “Insurance Banking Investments Retirement Advice” Then, “USAA.com 1-888- 461- USAA” Followed by, “We know what it means to serve.”
“Daddy’s home!” What did you do in the war, daddy?”
Tragically, in Iraq and Afghanistan—and in America-- it is not about “coming home” but about homes destroyed and lives ended and maimed. The trauma and tears of American mothers and fathers and sons and daughters are no more real than the trauma and tears of Iraqi and Afghanistan mothers and fathers and sons and daughters being demonized as “terrorists” and “Islamic extremists.”
It is not about the “radicalization” of Muslims in American and abroad, as Republican Representative Peter King of New York would have everyone believe with his racist anti-Muslim congressional hearings. It is about the normalization of the US government’s imperialistic, war-mongering, terror-producing foreign policy, which is the source of much of the so-called “extremism” of its victims.
War-profiteering and political power-maintaining imperialistic wars by any other name are still crimes against humanity. Whether it is the terrible destruction of Iraq. The continuing deaths of Afghan children and other civilians by US drones, which actually represent America’s immoral, apologies-riddled foreign policy in Afghanistan. Or the US’s immunity-demanding sociopathic foreign policy in Pakistan, symbolized now by a CIA operative who’s cowboy-like killing of two young Pakistani men has fueled even greater national outrage against America’s continuing violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. US foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not about “democracy” but about demonocracy. It is not about protecting America’s “national security” but about creating enemies.
Private Bradley Manning has provided a great service to his country by exposing the fallacy of the normalcy of America’s imperialistic wars. He has given the light of day to the truth, upon which justice and restitution and normalcy for all depend. He has sought to protect, not endanger, America’s national security by informing the people that the greatest threat to their security is the treasonous behavior of war-instigating and –accommodating members of their own government. The real threat his behavior poses is to the normalcy of endless US wars and support of repressive regimes.
Private Manning’s patriotism is powerfully expressed by attorney and member of the National Lawyers Guild Chase Madar, who writes,
The records allegedly downloaded by Manning reveal clear instances of war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, widespread torture committed by Iraqi authorities with the full knowledge of the U.S.military, previously unknown estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed at U.S. military checkpoints, and the massive Iraqi civilian death toll caused by the American invasions. (“Why Bradley Manning Is a Patriot, Not a Criminal,” TomDispatch.com, Feb. 10, 2011)
Who are “the enemy” Private Manning is charged with “aiding?” The international anti-war women’s group CODEPINK responds to that key question this way:
Who exactly is “the enemy” anyway? The cables that Bradley Manning is accused of leaking have helped spark democratic uprisings across the Arab world. They have brought us the truth about the brutality and atrocities of our continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they have given us a critical look at the underpinnings of our own government. They have created transparency beyond any we had before, and allow us as citizens to make more educated decisions. Of all the beneficiaries of the leaked cables, Democracy itself is the greatest. . . .With the leaked video”Collateral Murder,” Bradley put us in the back of a helicopter gunship in Iraq to show us how our wars are really fought. In his own words, he did it because “I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” Now he is being charged with telling the truth, and it may cost him his life. (“Who’s the enemy?,” Mar. 4, 2011)
Today Private Manning is reportedly forced to periodically stand exposed naked in a bare prison cell. His exposure of the truth wraps him in dignity and in real humanistic patriotic caring for Americans and for people everywhere. What is being done to him by the Pentagon and Obama administration will not detract from what he has done to help us Americans regain a human understanding of normalcy.
Rev. William E. Alberts, Ph.D. is a hospital chaplain and a diplomate in the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. Both a Unitarian Universalist and a United Methodist minister, he has written research reports, essays and articles on racism, war, politics and religion.
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