Category Archives: United States

Why America is like imperial Spain

Michael Vlahos writes:

The Spain of Quixote was in 1568 a world empire — and the king’s holdings covered the globe. Its fleets and armies seemed to be everywhere. So, too, is the United States today. With 700 overseas bases, its military personnel are equally omnipresent.

Spanish world authority in the 16th century and that of the United States today are at the core challenged not by “peer competitors” — but by marginal non-state communities at the very rim of civilization itself. How did this happen?

Spain for its part faced insurgents in a place that had only recently become part of its realm, such as the northern provinces of the Netherlands. Areas like Friesland had always been fractious, and no big state had ever succeeded in taming them. Sound familiar?

The Netherlands had for so long been a menagerie of principalities with only the loosest governance. Spain took over and began to make something new — the essence of nation building. In addition, the Spanish effort was determinedly focused on a “whole of government” solution, with their Catholic Church franchise prefiguring the U.S. State Department’s heavy involvement in Afghanistan today. [Continue reading…]

Part Two: Imperial self-destructive perseverance

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What was Israel’s connection to the AQ Khan nuclear network?

The New York Times reports that the Stuxnet worm which was designed to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was a joint US-Israeli operation. One of the crucial elements in developing the plan was being able to test the malware’s ability to disable P-1 centrifuges — the type that Iran employs in cascades of thousands of centrifuges in it Natanz enrichment facility. Israel has row upon row of this type of centrifuge at its clandestine nuclear weapons production facility in Dimona.

The question is: how did Israel come to possess so many P-1 centrifuges? Did Israel obtain the centrifuges from AQ Khan?

The CIA was tracking the AQ Khan network for decades before it eventually shut it down in 2003. Douglas Frantz, co-author of Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking, told NPR: “By the time they finally acted in 2003, an enormous amount of the world’s most dangerous technology had been sold to the world’s most dangerous regimes. And that, in our view, was a policy failure, a policy failure of enormous proportions, really.”

Perhaps the most secretive part of the Stuxnet story centers on how the theory of cyberdestruction was tested on enrichment machines to make sure the malicious software did its intended job.

The account starts in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the Dutch designed a tall, thin machine for enriching uranium. As is well known, A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist working for the Dutch, stole the design and in 1976 fled to Pakistan.

The resulting machine, known as the P-1, for Pakistan’s first-generation centrifuge, helped the country get the bomb. And when Dr. Khan later founded an atomic black market, he illegally sold P-1’s to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

The P-1 is more than six feet tall. Inside, a rotor of aluminum spins uranium gas to blinding speeds, slowly concentrating the rare part of the uranium that can fuel reactors and bombs.

How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges.

“They’ve long been an important part of the complex,” said Avner Cohen, author of “The Worst-Kept Secret” (2010), a book about the Israeli bomb program, and a senior fellow at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He added that Israeli intelligence had asked retired senior Dimona personnel to help on the Iranian issue, and that some apparently came from the enrichment program.

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The reflexive call for fewer liberties

Glenn Greenwald writes:

William Galston — former Clinton adviser and current Brookings Institution Senior Fellow — has a column in The New Republic about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that illustrates the mentality endlessly eroding basic American liberty: namely, the belief that every tragedy must lead to new government powers and new restrictions on core liberties. The lesson of the Arizona tragedy, he argues, is that it’s too difficult to force citizens into mental institutions against their will. This, he says, is the fault of “civil libertarians,” who began working in the 1970s on legal reforms to require a higher burden of proof for involuntary commitment (generally: it must be proven that the person is a danger to himself or to others). As a result, Galston wants strict new laws imposing a litany of legal obligations on the mentally ill, their friends and family, and even acquaintances, as well as dramatically expanded powers to lock away those with mental illness (with broader definitions of what that means).

Listen to what he proposes: “first, those who acquire credible evidence of an individual’s mental disturbance should be required to report it to both law enforcement authorities and the courts, and the legal jeopardy for failing to do so should be tough enough to ensure compliance”; those reporting obligations should apply not only to family and friends, but extend to “school authorities and other involved parties.” And “second, the law should no longer require, as a condition of involuntary incarceration, that seriously disturbed individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others”; instead, involuntary commitment should be imposed whenever there is “delusional loss of contact with reality.” He concludes on this melodramatic note: ‘How many more mass murders and assassinations do we need before we understand that the rights-based hyper-individualism of our laws governing mental illness is endangering the security of our community and the functioning of our democracy?”

There’s so much warped reasoning embedded in this argument that it’s hard to know where to begin. Galston seems to be unaware of this, but what motivated the reforms in this area were the decades of severe, horrifying abuses which those with mental illnesses — and even those who had none — suffered as a result of permissive involuntary commitment standards and prolonged forced incarceration. Those who suffered mental illnesses were locked away for years and sometimes decades despite having done nothing wrong and despite not being a threat to anyone, while countless people who simply exhibited strange or out-of-the-ordinary behavior were deemed mentally ill and similarly consigned. The psychitaric social worker Alicia Curtis provided just one example: “There is also a large history of the forced treatment of homosexuality as mental ‘illness’.” Indeed, involuntarily committing people in mental hospitals is a time-honored way for stifling any individuality and dissent; see this 2010 New York Times article on how China uses that repressive tactic.

Then there are the factually incoherent claims Galston makes. He harkens back to some sort of Golden Age of the 1960s when thousands of people were incarcerated against their will who did nothing wrong — as though that era were relatively free of political assassinations because all the “crazies” were where locked up where they belonged. Of course, the opposite is true: there were far more violent attacks on political figures back then (MLK, JFK, RFK, George Wallace, Malcolm X, etc.) than there have been during the relatively peaceful time beginning in the 1980s when involuntary commitment became much more difficult.

Worse, Galston assumes, without offering any evidence, that there is a significant correlation between mental illness and violence, but the reality is the opposite: the vast, vast majority of people with mental illnesses never hurt anyone. [Continue reading…]

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America unhinged

Will January 8, 2011, be remembered as yet another date that will live in infamy?

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) was having a beer and eating pizza at a New Jersey bar when he heard the news via the television. Soon thereafter, he was contacted by his staff and was on the phone with other House members.

“It’s somewhat overwhelming. We are all flabbergasted, stunned,” he said.

While noting the obvious differences between the two events, Pascrell said Saturday reminds him of 9/11.

“I couldn’t believe I was really seeing this. This can’t be real,” he told The Hill in an interview Monday.

A mass shooting in America. No, that’s never happened before.

What’s an American to do when contemplating that danger by the next Glock-wielding gunman? Why, go out and buy a Glock!

After Saturday’s shootings:

Greg Wolff, the owner of two Arizona gun shops, told his manager to get ready for a stampede of new customers.

Wolff was right. Instead of hurting sales, the massacre had the $499 semi-automatic pistols — popular with police, sport shooters and gangsters — flying out the doors of his Glockmeister stores in Mesa and Phoenix.

“We’re at double our volume over what we usually do,” Wolff said two days after the shooting spree that also left 14 wounded, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition.

As for how to cool down the incendiary rhetoric that supposedly triggered Jared Lee Loughner’s rampage, well, maybe it would be better not just to cool it down but shut it down.

One lawmaker, Rep. Robert Brady (D-Pa.), has said he would introduce a bill to make it a crime to threaten or incite violence against a federal official.

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) suggested the Federal Communications Commission was “not working anymore,” adding she would look at ways to better police language on the airwaves.

But isn’t it time to get serious about gun control?

The Huffington Post has the improbable headline: “Peter King, Leading Republican, To Introduce Strict Gun-Control Legislation.”

A ray of sanity from the most unexpected place! Unfortunately not. King’s idea of strict gun control is a law against bringing a gun within 1,000 feet of a government official.

Aside from the fact that this would practically speaking be an unenforceable law, what about the rest of us outside government who also like the idea of being able to move around inside a gun-free perimeter?

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America’s permanent culture of political violence

Glenn W. LaFantasie, Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, writes:

It’s my belief,… that American political violence is a direct legacy of the American Revolution, for the patriots’ victory in that conflict proved to the American people that violence could achieve a positive end: independence and the creation of a new nation. It is a troubling, but inescapable, bequest that stems from the fact that our nation was born in violence, and it derives from the reality that violence has ever since become not only the device of criminals, but also of government and those who disagree with the government. Public officials who condone the use of torture in recent times should, by rights, give pause when they try to condemn the actions of Jared L. Loughner, Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber. But, typically, our public servants see no contradiction, no hypocrisy, in advocating extreme political violence against our alleged enemies around the globe while condemning political violence when it is aimed against the government — or, more precisely, against them. In other words, political violence is legitimate when the government commits it; but it is appalling when individuals commit it against the government or its representatives. Political violence committed by individuals is explained by marginalizing those perpetrators as crackpots. Political violence committed by the government is justified as guaranteeing national security.
[…]
In reckoning with the extremity of the political rhetoric of our own time, a longer view of American political hyperbole and violence suggests that as bad as the dialogue between Democrats and Republicans is right now, it pretty much pales in comparison with the virulence that has characterized American political language since the nation’s founding. That rhetoric, more often than not, has been accompanied by violence. Whether the rhetoric causes the violence is, I think, a moot point — something of a chicken-and-egg proposition. You only need to take stock of the incredibly large number of assassination attempts, aborted or successful, that have been made against our presidents or presidential candidates to understand how endemic political violence has been in our history and culture: Andrew Jackson (assaulted in May 1833; unsuccessful assassination attempt in January 1835), Abraham Lincoln (aborted attempt, February 1861; aborted attempt, August 1864; assassinated, April 1865), James A. Garfield (assassinated, 1881), William McKinley (assassinated 1901), Theodore Roosevelt (unsuccessful attempt, October 1912), Franklin D. Roosevelt (unsuccessful attempt, February 1933), Harry S. Truman (aborted attempt, November 1950), John F. Kennedy (aborted attempt, December 1960; assassinated, November 1963), Robert F. Kennedy (assassinated June 1968); George C. Wallace (unsuccessful assassination attempt resulting in serious injuries, May 1972); Richard M. Nixon (aborted attempt, February 1974), Gerald Ford (two different unsuccessful attempts, September 1975), Ronald Reagan (unsuccessful attempt, March 1981), George H.W. Bush (foiled attempt, April 1993), Bill Clinton (unsuccessful attempt, September 1994; unsuccessful attempt, October 1994; aborted attempt, November 2006), George W. Bush (unsuccessful attempt, February 2001; possible target, September 11, 2001; unsuccessful attempt, May 2005; possible aborted attempt, November 2008), Barack Obama (at least two foiled attempts). Then, of course, one must not forget the numerous political assassinations committed during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., in April 1968.

Nothing, however, compares to the political violence that climaxed in the American Civil War, when Northerners and Southerners enlisted by the thousands for the sole purpose of killing one another. They turned out to be very successful in what they set out to do. More than 620,000 soldiers died in the war and hundreds of thousands were wounded, many of them maimed for the rest of their lives. No one has ever come up with a reasonable estimate of civilian casualties during the war, but it’s safe to conclude that the Civil War — by any measure — was this nation’s worst episode of political violence.

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Mental health in the United States of Alienation

In his New York Times column, “Climate of Hate,” Paul Krugman writes: “It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.”

Because? Reality is constituted from a complex web of interdependent relationships in which one thing cannot be separated from everything else? Krugman doesn’t really connect the dots and show why Loughner’s violence is inextricably tied to the political climate that is the focus of the column.

The Washington Post, however, provides some background that suggests the gunman’s mind was populated with ideas far removed from the world around him and that his unusual behavior raised grave fears among teachers and classmates.

Referring to his Pima Community College attendance last year, the report said:

A student in the class, Lynda Sorenson, 52, said she was immediately worried about him. She said Loughner sat in class with a crazed-looking grin and she had seen him walking in tight circles, around and around, in the school courtyard. She feared that Loughner might become violent, and she would have to flee – concerns she shared with friends and family in a series of e-mails.

“We do have one student in the class who was disruptive today,” Sorenson wrote on June 1. “He scares me a bit . . . Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon.”

Ten days later, Sorenson was writing about Loughner again: “Class isn’t dull as we have a seriously disturbed student in the class, and they are trying to figure out how to get rid of him before he does something bad.”

Sorenson’s fears grew more acute four days after that, when her e-mail said that “we have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird.”

“I sit by the door with my purse handy,” the e-mail continued. “If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast.”

The instructor of the class, Benjamin McGahee was no less concerned. “I always felt, you know, somewhat paranoid,” he said. “When I turned my back to write on the board, I would always turn back quickly – to see if he had a gun.”

McGahee said Loughner disrupted his very first class by yelling, “How can you deny math instead of accepting it?” In later classes, he shouted, listened to his MP3 player and wrote nonsensical answers on his tests. One said “Eat + Sleep + Brush Teeth = Math.”

McGahee said he sought repeatedly for college officials to remove Loughner, but they did not.

“They just said, ‘Well, he hasn’t taken any action to hurt anyone. He hasn’t provoked anybody. He hasn’t brought any weapons to class,’ ” McGahee recalled. ” ‘We’ll just wait until he takes that next step.’ “

Three weeks later Loughner provided the college with what it deemed suitable grounds for action: he publicly denounced the college as “unconstitutional.”

There are two things that are immediately instructive in the college’s action:

  • That it needed a pretext for action that it could easily document — Loughner provided that in the form of his YouTube statements.
  • That the college’s view of an acceptable “solution” to the problem that Loughner presented was to persuade him to go away. In other words, that he could be turned into someone else’s problem.

Behind these two responses are two broader social trends that have had a highly corrosive effect on American society:

  • Where the fear of lawsuits and the coercive effect of social conformity have the combined effect of inhibiting the exercise of individual judgment, those who have the capacity to intervene in situations that demand intervention are more likely to hold back and sidestep the problem. And when they do act, it is with the preference of being able to say, “I had no choice,” rather than to intervene sooner by making a choice which would demand a higher level of personal accountability.
  • The assumption that it is easier and cheaper to physically or chemically restrain this society’s most troubled members than it would be to create the conditions in which their minds might heal.

When America dismantled its antiquated institutional psychiatric system, the result was that for many of the most seriously mentally ill there was little adequate community care — the most likely fate for society’s abandoned members became homelessness or prison.

America now incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any country in the world and more than half of those in jail have symptoms or a recent history of mental health problems, according to Human Rights Watch.

As a tragic victim of senseless violence and as a prominent public figure, Gabrielle Giffords has been at the center of a story in which she might be more accurately be viewed as a random victim. The fact that Jared Loughner “specifically targeted” her says far less about the Congresswoman than it says about the condition of the gunman’s mind.

Rather than treat the shootings as a threat to American democracy, we should attend to the fact that dangerous thoughts can’t easily result in devastating consequences in the absence of easily available deadly weapons and that troubled minds won’t heal by being ignored.

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The pitfalls of generalizing from the particular — what Jared Lee Loughner does and doesn’t tell us about the state of America

Was the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords an historic moment in American politics?

The media frenzy, a presidential response and now a national moment of silence — all join together to suggest that at 10am on January 8, something happened not just in Tuscon, Arizona, but across the whole of America.

I suppose historic moments are by their nature social fabrications, yet some have a palpable authenticity that others lack.

The Tuscon shootings might have provided an opportunity for some national soul searching on the vitriol that now pollutes American political discourse, but it’s a bit premature to conclude that the wider phenomenon and Saturday’s bloodshed can be reduced to cause and effect.

The idle willingness with which the actions of individuals are treated as representations of the character of social groups is no more justifiable when Jared Lee Loughner is instantly tied to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, than it is when Major Nidal Malik Hasan is tied to the American Muslim community. Granted, Palin and others on the right should now have pause to reconsider what kind of language and imagery they use, but in trying to understand why Loughner pulled the trigger it seems just as likely that he was motivated by anticipation of the reaction he would provoke as much as anything else.

At Salon, Laura Miller challenges those who want to read a great deal into Loughner’s reading favorites — books that ranged the gamut from Hitler’s Mein Kampf to Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. She writes:

Loughner is almost certainly insane and, like the countless other mentally disturbed people who send similar ravings to media outlets around the world, his ideas would have been ignored as incoherent and irrelevant if he hadn’t fired a gun into a crowd of people Saturday. The fact that he did fire that gun, however, doesn’t make his delusions suddenly meaningful. It doesn’t make his list of favorite books significant. Crazy people who make headlines and change history are still crazy.

By studying Loughner’s book list for clues to the political leanings that somehow “drove” him to commit murder, commentators are behaving a lot like crazy people themselves. Paranoids are prone to scouring newspaper articles and the monologues of late-night comedians for imaginary coded messages that confirm their “secret knowledge” about the world. But those coded messages aren’t there — it’s just random stuff with no special significance. The truth about mental illness is that it strikes without regard to political affiliation or ideological orientation, and it turns beautiful minds into nonsense factories. We can debate a social order that allows its victims access to firearms and talk about finding better ways to intervene before the minority of mentally disturbed individuals with violent impulses are able to act on those impulses. But trying to find the cause for this disease in politics, ideas or books is just plain nuts.

The willingness of a journalist to glibly write that mental illness “turns beautiful minds into nonsense factories,” says less about the nature of mental illness than it says about the degree to which introspective reflection is undervalued in the contemporary world, fixated as we are on the stuff around us at the expense of our interior life.

It’s easy to marginalize the mentally ill by regarding them as people with broken minds filled with nonsense, but that neither advances a wider understanding of mental illness as it exists within the wild territory of human experience, nor addresses the need to bridge a divide between the mentally ill and the society in which they lack support.

Alienation — which can be described as the feeling of not being heard and of becoming socially invisible — is not a marginal dimension of modern life. On the contrary, the quest for identity in a world where electronic connections increasingly serve as substitutes for physical relationships, is an expression of the degree to which alienation has become so ordinary, universal and normal, that it is also now regarded as natural and thus unworthy of being named.

Mental illness exists on the continuum of alienation and although most people’s experience might not extend so far out on that continuum, those who regard themselves as mentally healthy derive a false comfort in imagining that the Loughners in our world merely reveal the distortions of their own troubled minds and nothing about the world they struggle to inhabit.

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The gun — preeminent symbol of the impotence of the American citizen

A paradox embedded in many popular symbols of power is that their greatest appeal is often found among those who perceive themselves as the most weak. Nowhere is this marriage of power and weakness more evident than in the American fetish of the handgun.

Jared Lee Loughner is apparently none too enamored with the US Constitution (though chooses right now to seek its protection), but if in the coming weeks he reveals more about the inner workings of his mind, it should come as no surprise if it turns out that he targeted Representative Gabrielle Giffords not solely because of what she represented politically but also in part because she was a woman. For an alienated young man in America, it is all too easy for sexual frustration to seek violent release through the culturally-validated possession and use of a gun.

Predictably there will now be renewed calls for stronger forms of federal gun control, though if she recovers, whether Giffords will modify her own position on gun control seems doubtful. She believes gun ownership is a constitutional right and an “Arizona tradition” and like her assailant, owns a Glock handgun.

The rational arguments in favor of tight restrictions on gun ownership are so numerous and so easy to grasp, the one thing their lack of traction makes clear is that thanks to the efforts of the gun lobby, “gun rights” has been turned into such an emotive issue that it has effectively been sequestered from rational debate.

Were any other major country to suddenly declare that it was going to adopt the American way and provide its citizens with ready access to weapons and ammunition, most observers — including most Americans — would surely recognize this as an act of national lunacy.

Gun rights in America rest solely on the claim that they represent a dimension of America’s national heritage and the character of its people. In other words, the right to bear arms can be reduced to a reason impervious to reason: because we are Americans — the Second Amendment is just a fig leaf.

But in spite of this rational dead end, I still can’t help wonder whether some leverage might be derived from linking the issue to other aspects of the American way of life which are regulated by law with little protest.

There is as far as I’m aware no movement defending the right of Americans to drive their automobiles without a licence or insurance — even though nothing underpins the American way of life more clearly than the right to drive.

If this American right can nevertheless by girded by legal restrictions, why should there not be limitations at least as equally rigorous on the ownership of guns?

If the use of a car is potentially so dangerous that it cannot be allowed without insurance, why shouldn’t someone who wants to own a lethal weapon also be required to have insurance? If legislators can’t agree on the risks involved in gun ownership, I doubt that insurance actuaries would suffer the same problem.

And if someone driving a car is required to carry a photo ID showing that they are licensed to drive, why shouldn’t every American who owns a gun?

When Arizona last summer made it legal to carry a concealed weapon without a permit, one of the cockeyed arguments among the proponents of the law was that armed Arizonans would be able to defend themselves when under attack.

It turned out yesterday in Tuscon that only one man had taken full advantage of the new law: Jared Loughner.

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Arizona has become ‘the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry’

The New York Times reported:

The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others at a neighborhood meeting in Arizona on Saturday set off what is likely to be a wrenching debate over anger and violence in American politics.

While the exact motivations of the suspect in the shootings remained unclear, an Internet site tied to the man, Jared Lee Loughner, contained antigovernment ramblings. And regardless of what led to the episode, it quickly focused attention on the degree to which inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence have become a steady undercurrent in the nation’s political culture.

Clarence W. Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff, seemed to capture the mood of the day at an evening news conference when he said it was time for the country to “do a little soul-searching.”

“It’s not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included,” Sheriff Dupnik said. “That’s the sad thing about what’s going on in America: pretty soon we’re not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office.”

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US should exercise green power

Kevin Gallagher writes:

To kick off 2011, the Obama administration has had the audacity to file suit at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against China’s policies to build green technologies.

This action is deeply flawed. The US should not try to beat China down, but should pursue its own green jobs policy and reform the WTO, so the rules allow countries to combat climate change.

The United States and China are the world’s largest emitters of the greenhouse gases. Together and separately, each nation should be doing all it can to develop clean technologies to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

That is not how the Obama administration has seen it. Repeatedly, at United Nations climate negotiations, the US has said that it will do little to combat climate change unless China does. Moreover, the US has stated it will not provide any financial assistance to China to help reduce emissions. With no US support, China was left to its own devices.

Fortunately, the government rose to the challenge. In 2009, China added more wind power than any other country, including the United States. China already has the largest solar thermal capacity in the world and now leads the world in installed renewable energy capacity.

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Turks see US as biggest external threat, poll results show

Hürriyet Daily News reports:

Some 43 percent of Turks perceive the United States as the country’s biggest threat, followed by Israel, according to a broad survey carried out in December.

“This the highest ratio ever on the external threat question among our surveys,” Professor Özer Sencar, chairman of Ankara-based MetroPOLL Strategic and Social Research Center, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on Wednesday.

“The U.S. foreign politics since the Iraqi invasion, the hood incident [the U.S. detention of Turkish soldiers during the Iraq war], the war in Afghanistan, repeated Armenian bills in the U.S. Congress and the negative statements that Turkish leaders make about the U.S. and Israel play a major role in this perception,” Sencar said.

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The tyranny of the national security state

Andrew Bacevich writes:

American politics is typically a grimy business of horses traded and pork delivered. Political speech, for its part, tends to be formulaic and eminently forgettable. Yet on occasion, a politician will transcend circumstance and bear witness to some lasting truth: George Washington in his Farewell Address, for example, or Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural.

Fifty years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower joined such august company when, in his own farewell address, he warned of the rise in America of the “military-industrial complex.” An accomplished soldier and a better-than-average president, Eisenhower had devoted the preponderance of his adult life to studying, waging, and then seeking to avert war. Not surprisingly, therefore, his prophetic voice rang clearest when as president he reflected on matters related to military power and policy.

Ike’s farewell address, nationally televised on the evening of January 17, 1961, offered one such occasion, although not the only one. Equally significant, if now nearly forgotten, was his presentation to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953. In this speech, the president contemplated a world permanently perched on the brink of war—“humanity hanging from a cross of iron”— and he appealed to Americans to assess the consequences likely to ensue.

Separated in time by eight years, the two speeches are complementary: to consider them in combination is to discover their full importance. As bookends to Eisenhower’s presidency, they form a solemn meditation on the implications—economic, social, political, and moral—of militarizing America.

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‘The Left has nowhere to go’

Chris Hedges writes:

Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4 million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted, his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore.

“The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes,” Nader said when I reached him at his home in Connecticut on Sunday. “The more outrageous they become, the more the left has to accept the slightly less outrageous corporate Democrats.”

Nader fears a repeat of the left’s cowardice in the next election, a cowardice that has further empowered the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, maintained the role of the Democratic Party as a lackey for corporations, and accelerated the reconfiguration of the country into a neo-feudalist state. Either we begin to practice a fierce moral autonomy and rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance that have no discernable short-term benefit, or we accept the inevitability of corporate slavery. The choice is that grim. The age of the practical is over. It is the impractical, those who stand fast around core moral imperatives, figures like Nader or groups such as Veterans for Peace, which organized the recent anti-war rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, which give us hope. If you were one of the millions who backed down in the voting booth in 2008, don’t do it again. If you were one of those who thought about joining the Washington protests against the war where 131 of us were arrested and did not, don’t fail us next time. The closure of the mechanisms within the power system that once made democratic reform possible means we stand together as the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration. If we do not engage in open acts of defiance, we will empower a radical right-wing opposition that will replicate the violence and paranoia of the state. To refuse to defy in every way possible the corporate state is to be complicit in our strangulation.

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2011: A Brave New Dystopia

Chris Hedges writes:

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

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A happy Christmas — for the rich

Alexander Cockburn writes:

Nicely in time for the end-of-year job ratings, President Obama has crawled from the political graveyard, where only a month ago wreaths were being heaped around his sepulcher. The Commentariat now gravely applauds his recent victories in the US Congress: repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell inhibitions on gays in the military; Senate ratification of the new START treaty on nuclear weapons with the Russians; passage of a $4.3bn bill – previously blocked by Republicans – providing health benefits for emergency rescue workers in the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

Something missing from my list? You noticed? Yes indeed: first and absolutely foremost, the successful deal with Republicans on taxes, better described as a $4 trillion gift to America’s rich people, by extending the Bush tax cuts. With the all-important tax surrender under their belts the Republicans don’t seem too upset in having allowing Obama’s his mini-swath of victories. There aren’t too many votes in insisting that 1500 nukes aren’t enough for Uncle Sam, particularly since Obama did his usual trick a year ago of surrendering before the battle began, pledging vast new outlays to the nuclear-industrial-complex. Would it have been that smart to deny benefits to 9/11 responders or say that gays in the military have to stay in the closet. Presumably they’ll fight all the more fiercely now they can stand Out and Proud. On things that really matter, once they reassemble after the break, the Republicans will probably stay awake, though with a President who surrenders with the alacrity of Obama, excessive vigilance probably isn’t necessary.

You give $4 trillion to the rich and they express their thanks in measured terms. Their hired opinion formers laud the spirit of admirable compromise enabling responsible members of Congress to come together in bipartisanship to keep the hogwallow open for business.

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Lawless police state

Linh Dinh writes:

As we police the world and become more of a police state each day, basic police functions are being neglected here at home. In Detroit, seven out of ten murders are unsolved. In Oakland, the police will no longer respond to a host of crimes, including burglary, theft, embezzlement and extortion. The problem is mostly manpower. Atlantic City has axed 60 cops this year, on top of 13 who retired without being replaced. Last year, Camden was rated as the second most dangerous city in America. Two years ago, the most deadly. Faced with this, Camden is about to lay off half of its cops. Flint, MI, has also fired nearly half of its police. Its murder rate is at record high. In Illinois, more than 300 policemen have been let go in 2010.

With unemployment getting higher and higher, there will be less tax revenues, meaning more cops will be laid off even as crime rises. In Newark, 167 cops have been let go. With more murders and carjackings, the National Guard has been proposed as a solution, yes, the same National Guard that occupied Newark’s streets with tanks during the 1967 riot, where 26 people were killed and 725 injured.

In Camden, Guardian Angels have shown up. In Oakland, there are private security guards patrolling downtown. Called “Ambassadors,” quaintly enough, they are unarmed, for now. Gun packing security guards are already all over America, however, though usually confined to private properties. Expect this to change. (In England, even bona fide cops are not armed as they patrol the streets!) After Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired 150 Blackwater mercenaries to roam New Orleans. Wielding assault weapons, many were fresh from the mayhem of Iraq.

Recently, I was in Newark’s Ironbound, a working class neighborhood of mostly Portuguese, Brazilian and Latin American immigrants. Wandering around, I paused in front of a cartoon rooster towing a Volkswagen. Was this some weird allegory of our power-down future? A diss against the car? Against Hitler? A 40-ish man, Jose, appeared to explain that pollo al carbon, grilled chicken, has become Karpollo, the name of his restaurant. Thus, a chicken pulling a car. Jose has been in that location three years. So how’s business, I asked. Not too bad, Jose said, though he had expected it to be much better. Many people in the Ironbound do construction work, so they’re seriously hurting. A few years ago, a man could easily make $900 a week. Now they’re losing homes and apartments. Many have moved out. With fewer jobs and cops, crime has gone up even here, for long one of the safer parts of Newark. “Just a week ago,” Jose pointed down the street, “a guy was carjacked with a gun, right at that corner!”

Jobless, you can always sign up for flag-waving genocide and foddership. Granted, the starting pay isn’t all that great, but it sure beats McDonald’s. Plus, you’ll get grub, fox holes and trauma care au gratis. Discharged in pieces, you’d be done, but if you could come back sorta whole, you may luck into a well-armed job to patrol the good old USA terrorizing all these home-bound slobs, whether muggers, pickpockets or protestors, desperate and often angry folks, you know, just like you.

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The United States: imperial by design

In The National Interest, John Mearsheimer writes:

In the first years after the Cold War ended, many Americans had a profound sense of optimism about the future of international politics. President Bill Clinton captured that mood when he told the UN General Assembly in September 1993:

It is clear that we live at a turning point in human history. Immense and promising changes seem to wash over us every day. The Cold War is over. The world is no longer divided into two armed and angry camps. Dozens of new democracies have been born. It is a moment of miracles.

The basis of all this good feeling was laid out at the time in two famous articles by prominent neoconservatives. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama argued in “The End of History?” that Western liberal democracy had won a decisive victory over communism and fascism and should be seen as the “final form of human government.”1 One consequence of this “ideological evolution,” he argued, was that large-scale conflict between the great powers was “passing from the scene,” although “the vast bulk of the Third World remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of conflict for many years to come.” Nevertheless, liberal democracy and peace would eventually come to the Third World as well, because the sands of time were pushing inexorably in that direction.

One year later, Charles Krauthammer emphasized in “The Unipolar Moment” that the United States had emerged from the Cold War as by far the most powerful country on the planet.2 He urged American leaders not to be reticent about using that power “to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.” Krauthammer’s advice fit neatly with Fukuyama’s vision of the future: the United States should take the lead in bringing democracy to less developed countries the world over. After all, that shouldn’t be an especially difficult task given that America had awesome power and the cunning of history on its side.

U.S. grand strategy has followed this basic prescription for the past twenty years, mainly because most policy makers inside the Beltway have agreed with the thrust of Fukuyama’s and Krauthammer’s early analyses.

The results, however, have been disastrous. The United States has been at war for a startling two out of every three years since 1989, and there is no end in sight. As anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of world events knows, countries that continuously fight wars invariably build powerful national-security bureaucracies that undermine civil liberties and make it difficult to hold leaders accountable for their behavior; and they invariably end up adopting ruthless policies normally associated with brutal dictators. The Founding Fathers understood this problem, as is clear from James Madison’s observation that “no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Washington’s pursuit of policies like assassination, rendition and torture over the past decade, not to mention the weakening of the rule of law at home, shows that their fears were justified.

To make matters worse, the United States is now engaged in protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have so far cost well over a trillion dollars and resulted in around forty-seven thousand American casualties. The pain and suffering inflicted on Iraq has been enormous. Since the war began in March 2003, more than one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed, roughly 2 million Iraqis have left the country and 1.7 million more have been internally displaced. Moreover, the American military is not going to win either one of these conflicts, despite all the phony talk about how the “surge” has worked in Iraq and how a similar strategy can produce another miracle in Afghanistan. We may well be stuck in both quagmires for years to come, in fruitless pursuit of victory.

The United States has also been unable to solve three other major foreign-policy problems. Washington has worked overtime—with no success—to shut down Iran’s uranium-enrichment capability for fear that it might lead to Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons. And the United States, unable to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons in the first place, now seems incapable of compelling Pyongyang to give them up. Finally, every post–Cold War administration has tried and failed to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; all indicators are that this problem will deteriorate further as the West Bank and Gaza are incorporated into a Greater Israel.

The unpleasant truth is that the United States is in a world of trouble today on the foreign-policy front, and this state of affairs is only likely to get worse in the next few years, as Afghanistan and Iraq unravel and the blame game escalates to poisonous levels. Thus, it is hardly surprising that a recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey found that “looking forward 50 years, only 33 percent of Americans think the United States will continue to be the world’s leading power.” Clearly, the heady days of the early 1990s have given way to a pronounced pessimism.

This regrettable situation raises the obvious questions of what went wrong? And can America right its course? [Continue reading.]

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The House Committee for Promoting Islamophobia in America

The New York Times reports:

The Republican who will head the House committee that oversees domestic security is planning to open a Congressional inquiry into what he calls “the radicalization” of the Muslim community when his party takes over the House next year.

Representative Peter T. King of New York, who will become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he was responding to what he has described as frequent concerns raised by law enforcement officials that Muslim leaders have been uncooperative in terror investigations.

He cited the case of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan man and a legal resident of the United States, who was arrested last year for plotting to bomb the New York subway system. Mr. King said that Ahmad Wais Afzali, an imam in Queens who had been a police informant, had warned Mr. Zazi before his arrest that he was the target of a terror investigation.

“When I meet with law enforcement, they are constantly telling me how little cooperation they get from Muslim leaders,” Mr. King said.

The move by Mr. King, who said he was planning to open a hearing on the matter beginning early next year, is the latest example of the new direction that the House will take under the incoming Republican majority.

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