By Rod Such

The prominent Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, author of Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, admired the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci for his views on cultural hegemony. What might have transpired if these two intellectual giants were able to collaborate on strategy and tactics for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005, two years after Said’s death and 68 years after Gramsci’s?

This essay explores Gramsci’s concepts of moral leadership, common sense and good sense, cultural hegemony, superstructure, “taking inventory,” “war of position,” and the philosophy of praxis, their influence on Said’s thinking, and their relevance to the BDS movement. Underpinning this exploration, I seek to answer whether a Marxist or socialist perspective on BDS is even needed, let alone desired. Why is it not enough that socialists simply answer the call of Palestinian civil society and find ways to support the BDS movement in practical activity? Does Marxist theory contribute anything of importance to this movement? The conclusion reached is that both Gramsci and Said left behind a legacy that provides invaluable insights and reasons for why and how BDS can succeed in Western capitalist countries, particularly the United States, and become part of a global Intifada that works in tandem with Palestinian resistance on the ground in Palestine.

Marxism is unique as a philosophy that goes beyond merely interpreting the world by announcing that its intention is to change the world. This essay, therefore, also explores a three-year-long BDS campaign in Portland, Oregon. The goal is to determine if the Gramscian-Said legacy might have helped guide it. A dialectical relationship exists between theory and practice in which neither is complete without the other. Theory guides practice, and practice in turn deepens, corrects, and enriches theory. Theoretical precepts, according to this view, must be tested in the laboratory of human activity.

Moral Leadership, Hegemony, and ‘Good Sense ‘vs. ‘Common Sense’

Gramsci’s concept of “moral leadership” is apt in this context. For Gramsci the working class was “economist” if it spoke only for itself. He urged Italy’s Socialist Party and later its Communist Party to take up the “Southern Question”—that is, the plight of the peasantry, particularly in the less-industrialized southern part of Italy. But Gramsci was not content with just a worker-peasant alliance. He called for the working-class parties to provide “moral leadership” for all “subalterns,” who he defined as anyone in a subordinate position in capitalist society or what today we would call the 99 percent.

Similarly, in his book Orientalism Said stakes out a viewpoint of moral leadership in his underlying theme of challenging the way Western colonialism and its literature dehumanized and denied agency to colonized peoples. Said’s critique of the West’s conception of the Orient is ultimately based on a radical understanding and rejection of the notion of superior cultures, placing the “Orientalist” framework firmly in the context of colonialism and imperialism.

Gramsci’s notions of common sense and good sense are intimately linked to his idea of cultural hegemony and superstructure. For Gramsci the advanced capitalist countries enforced their rule and control not just through the repressive state apparatus—the police, the courts, the prisons, the military—but also through the institutions that emerge in civil society. The state apparatus is primarily based on force and coercion to maintain capitalist rule while institutions of civil society—ranging from trade unions to churches to the media to what we call today nongovernmental organizations—often help manufacture consent with the established order of things rather than challenge that order.

The notion of cultural hegemony derives in part from Marx’s famous dictum in The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

Gramsci pondered why workers succumb to these ruling ideas when their class interests are diametrically opposed to those of the capitalists. He invoked the ideas of common sense and superstructure to explain how ruling class ideas establish hegemony over society at large and make it seem as though the capitalist order is merely the common sense outcome of human affairs.

In a sense Gramsci anticipated by nearly 100 years Thomas Frank’s exploration in his best-selling What’s the Matter with Kansas of why voters in the state of Kansas, once a center of abolitionism and agrarian socialism, voted against their own economic interests by embracing the Republican Party’s social agenda.

To establish this cultural hegemony and to keep it functioning smoothly, the ruling class also helps sustain a superstructure, such as the academy, civil society organizations, and the media, to ensure that its ideas remain supreme. The chief architects of “common sense”are our media and academic pundits who manage to disguise or obscure the systemic nature of capitalist oppression and exploitation. People learn to embrace and accept ideas contrary to their own interests because they are surrounded daily by a virtual gestalt of hegemonic ideas that must be true because seemingly everyone believes them to be true. To be controversial is to be dissident, an outlier from the established order of common sense.

Edward Said and Common Sense

In The Question of Palestine and The Politics of Dispossession, Said deconstructs the “common sense” ideas that have buttressed the Israeli narrative for decades and made the existence of a Jewish state seem reasonable to many people. These include the argument that the crimes of the Holocaust left the Jewish people with no alternative but to establish a Jewish state of their own for their own protection and refuge. Palestinian resistance to Zionist displacement in the “common sense” narrative then became simply a continuation of the persecution of the Jews. Israel became heroic David to the Goliath of surrounding Arab countries, according to this hegemonic narrative.

To counter this narrative, Said applied “good sense,” as opposed to the prevailing “common sense,” unerringly dissecting every hypocrisy, lie, and contradiction within the Israeli narrative by showing how they contravened established ideas of human rights and democracy. In doing so, Said, along with many others, established the Palestinian narrative as a hegemonic alternative to the dominant paradigms.

In Orientalism, Said acknowledges the influence of Gramsci, calling out in particular the distinction Gramsci made between civil society and state institutions and the role played by civil society in establishing cultural hegemony. Said writes:

“Gramsci has made the useful analytic distinction between civil and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary (or at least rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools, families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West. It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far.” 

Said was also particularly taken with another concept of Gramsci’s—the idea of “personal discovery” and “taking an inventory” of one’s own subjectivity and conditioning due to one’s historical circumstances. As we’ll see, this is also of particular relevance to the BDS movement. In another passage in Orientalism, Said writes:

“The personal dimension. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: ‘The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.’ The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci’s Italian text concludes by adding, ‘therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.’ Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. This is why for me the Islamic Orient has had to be the center of attention. Whether what I have achieved is the inventory prescribed by Gramsci is not for me to judge, although I have felt it important to be conscious of trying to produce one.”

Said admittedly was not a Marxist and even criticized Marx for succumbing to Orientalist ideas himself. At the time of writing Orientalism, the influence of French philosopher Michel Foucault was much more apparent, although Said never fully embraced Foucault’s denial of an objective reality. As Zachary Lockman notes in Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, “Said’s embrace of Foucault was always partial and ambivalent.” Together with Gramsci, Said also admired the Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams and later openly broke, as Lockman notes, with “Foucault’s ‘overblown’ conception of power,” insisting “on the possibility of a more just future society. . . .”

Said’s appreciation for the importance of the concept of cultural hegemony surfaced again in his later critique of the way the corporate media promulgated Islamophobia with his book Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981).

Case In Point: Portland

How do these theoretical concepts translate into practice? A BDS campaign in Portland, Oregon, led by a coalition of religious, social justice, peace, and secular left groups known as Occupation-Free Portland, provides some insights.

The objective of the campaign was to persuade the City Council to divest from any corporations involved in the Israeli occupation. It was the Palestine solidarity community’s first attempt at a political BDS campaign aimed at a representative, democratic institution; all previous campaigns having been economic—that is, aimed at convincing retailers to deshelve Israeli products. Tellingly, this political BDS campaign was the first to garner public opposition from the local Zionist Lobby, particularly the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, which had previously ignored economic boycott campaigns.

The campaign’s first major victory came when the city’s Human Rights Commission (HRC) voted unanimously to endorse the call for the city to divest any holdings in four corporations—Caterpillar, G4S, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions—due to their complicity in the Israeli occupation. The endorsement was itself a signal that the dominant narrative was changing inasmuch as this voluntary, unpaid civil society institution understood completely that Palestinian human rights were being violated, especially after witnessing the massacre of Gaza in 2014. As the former chair of the HRC put it to me when I asked if the HRC would consider our resolution “controversial,”she responded, “Not anymore.”

The HRC endorsement led to a campaign of intimidation launched by the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation, also a civil society institution. The Federation issued a statement condemning the HRC which was signed by leaders of the Democratic Party establishment—the mayor, a leading mayoral candidate, and a member of Congress—along with the president of Portland State University. Negative media coverage also ensued. In effect, the Federation revealed the principal pillars of its civil society support—the media, the academy, and the Democratic Party—all of whom supported the bipartisan hegemonic narrative that denies Palestinian rights and upholds Israel as a strategic U.S. ally.

It’s worth dwelling on this campaign of intimidation because it proved to be a pivotal moment in the campaign and because it shows that cultural hegemony also has a component of coercion and in effect acts as an adjunct to state repression. In addition to issuing its statement, the Federation also appears to have organized an email and telephone campaign that included physical threats made against members of the HRC. As the chair of the HRC acknowledged in an email to other members, “the threats of bodily harm are not to be taken lightly.” One of the strengths of the HRC as an institution derived from its role as a voluntary, unpaid advisory commission made up of people with an interest in human rights. It was also made up predominantly of people of color, in part because of its role in civilian oversight of a racist police force. Because HRC members were unpaid, the intimidation campaign could not use the coercive method of firing someone and depriving them of income. If that option had been available, it surely would have been used.

The head of the Federation’s Community Relations Council also threatened the chair of the HRC with the promise that “the shit is about to hit the fan.”He warned that negative media coverage was about to appear in the Willamette Week, a local “alternative”newspaper. Sure enough a disparaging article soon appeared in that publication, dismissing the HRC as an “obscure Commission.”

Communal pressure also appeared to have caused the two Jewish members of the HRC to reconsider their vote, with both claiming they didn’t know what they were voting on when they voted to approve the divestment resolution. The intimidation campaign succeeded in pressuring the HRC to schedule a second community hearing where it would consider a motion to rescind its vote.

Several factors came into play here. The fact that physical threats had been used led the mayor to back off from his promise to attend the second hearing. His community liaison director told us that death threats had been made. The mayor clearly did not want to be associated with those tactics, and so did not show up at the second hearing, where his mere presence might have swayed the HRC’s position. Instead the issue would be decided solely on the basis of persuasion rather than coercion. A huge community turnout in support of the resolution and the failure of the opposition to even address the facts presented regarding corporate complicity in the Israeli occupation led the HRC to refuse to reconsider its original vote. The HRC chair cited the fact that they had not heard any evidence rebutting our argument of corporate complicity in Israel’s illegal occupation.

As Gramsci might have said, the people put forward their own counter hegemonic narrative and won. Progressive civil society groups and organizations, particularly from the faith community, from traditional civil rights groups, from Jewish Voice for Peace, and from the Palestinian-American community, used moral leadership “good sense” and defeated the dominant hegemonic narrative that attempted to deny Palestinian human rights.

What Said might have said about the differing roles and narratives emanating from civil society also bears examination. I believe Said would have “taken an inventory” and noted that a white male used abusive hegemonic language against an African-American woman, the chair of the HRC, when he threatened that “the shit was going to hit the fan.” Said might have pointed out that one of the Jewish members of the HRC also told the chair that she needed to be “educated,” as if she was a member of an inferior culture that couldn’t understand the “superior”culture, the wellsprings of which Said described so effectively in Orientalism. And finally he probably would have noted that the sole Native American member of the HRC remarked that she could not vote otherwise than to uphold Palestinian rights considering “what happened to my ancestors.”  This woman had taken her own inventory and knew that what happened to Native Americans was the same ethnic cleansing that the Palestinians experienced under Zionist colonization.

In a sense the Federation had unwittingly mirrored the racism Israel exhibits toward Palestinians. Our campaign enabled people to get a glimpse of the Palestinian experience. When the dominant culture is a culture of white and male supremacy, it’s inevitable that the dominant hegemonic narrative will reflect these characteristics, as the Federation did with its intimidation tactics.

In the end, the opposition had so discredited itself that subsequently one of the members of Congress who signed the Federation statement appeared to disown it when she told a visiting delegation that she “really hadn’t read what it said.”

The clash between the Federation and the HRC resulted in another crack in civil society’s role of upholding the dominant paradigm; namely, the role played by the media. In addition to the negative coverage in the Willamette Week, the editor/publisher of that publication also submitted a public records request asking for the HRC’s internal email correspondence, apparently assuming that it could base another disparaging article on the email it obtained. In the event, however, no subsequent article on the HRC was ever published. Curious, I submitted my own request for the exact same records, thinking that the Willamette Week might have decided to drop its coverage because the records revealed information damaging to the Federation. Sure enough references to “threats of bodily harm”appeared in the emails. The newspaper would have been obligated to report that or risk its credibility. Its subsequent coverage of the OFP campaign proved to be much more even-handed.

Similarly, a campaign organized by Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights (SUPER) at Portland State University helped undermine and isolate the role played by the PSU president in backing the Federation. SUPER successfully brought a divestment resolution to the Student Senate, which backed it by an overwhelming vote of 20-2. Thus, the students offered a convincing and dramatic counter narrative to the university administration.

The OFP campaign in effect heralded the emergence of a people’s counter hegemonic narrative that enlisted its own support within civil society. That support included not just institutions like the Human Rights Commission but also the city’s Socially Responsible Investments Committee and the religious community, including Christian, Muslim, and Jewish groups, and students. Traditional secular left groups were also involved and helped provide leadership but lacked the mass base and energy generated by the human rights, student, and faith communities.

It became obvious that a sea change had occurred in civil society, especially after the Socially Responsible Investments Committee (SRIC) voted 4-2 to recommend that the City divest from Caterpillar due to its human rights violations in Israel/Palestine. When that occurred, the city’s leading newspaper, The Oregonian, finally took note of the changing narrative and editorialized against the SRIC recommendation, claiming lamely that Caterpillar “just makes tractors.”

Despite these successes, however, the campaign ultimately failed to break the dominant Progressive Except Palestine (PEP) paradigm. The City Council voted to stop investing in all corporate securities. One councilor said the issue took up too much of his time, while another suggested that citizens’ objections to corporate investments was likely to be never ending and it was probably best to get out of all corporate investments. One OFP supporter remarked that when confronted with the argument that Palestinian Lives Matter, the Council responded by saying All Lives Matter. The third and deciding vote on the five-member council came from a councilor who was prepared to accept the SRIC report, including its recommendation to stop investing in Caterpillar, and joined with the other two Councilors to ensure the City would divest from corporate bonds. However, not one of the Councilors ever said anything openly against Caterpillar’s role in the Occupation; in effect, keeping the PEP paradigm intact. One councilor even suggested that she could not say anything publicly about Palestine because she had so many Jewish friends, as if “identity politics”was the sole determiner of her political positions.

OFP activists were themselves divided on how to assess the end results. Some considered it a partial victory because objectively the city of Portland did stop investing in Caterpillar. Moreover, the Palestine solidarity movement demonstrated that it was a political force that could not be ignored or disrespected. We succeeded not only in marshaling community pressure but also in allying with other progressive forces, particularly the Prison Divestment Campaign, which was targeting Wells Fargo. At the April City Council hearing, an alliance of environmental, Palestine, and Prison Divestment activists came together to demand adoption of the SRIC’s final report. Palestine had never before been such a prominent focus of City Council hearings.

All of this was true, and yet not one word from the City Councilors about Palestine. In the end it proved too difficult for them politically to risk stating open support for Palestinian rights. Ironically the only political nod the campaign ever received was when one councilor chastised the Federation for suggesting that Jewish Voice for Peace was made up of “fringe Jews” and “extremists.” But our campaign was not about Jewish support for Palestine. It was about Palestine itself.

Summary and Key Points

Here are my takeaways from what a Gramscian-Said analysis reveals:

—civil society is increasingly divided over Israel/Palestine. The cultural hegemony exercised by pro-Israel institutions can be successfully challenged with a Palestinian counter-narrative that one day will itself become hegemonic.

—pro-Israel civil society institutions will attempt to use coercion when it can, knowing that its ability to persuade or to establish hegemony by consent no longer works due to increased awareness and knowledge of the injustice done to Palestinians.

—Palestine solidarity activists need to exercise moral leadership, showing that the Palestinian struggle is a liberation struggle and therefore a moral movement. By exercising moral leadership, it can unite broad sections of civil society, especially in the faith and human rights communities, to challenge, neutralize or even win over those sections of civil society most likely to support the dominant hegemonic narrative—that is, the Democratic Party leadership, the academy, and the media.

—By directly challenging the principal proponents of the Israeli narrative, the opposition can be counted on to expose its own “inventory”of racism, sexism, arrogance, authoritarianism, and colonialism.

—Palestine solidarity activists must “take their own inventory,”understanding that they, too, are influenced by the dominant hegemonic culture. Suggestions of downplaying Palestine in intersectional alliances because Palestine is considered controversial are an example of internalizing the dominant narrative and succumbing to it rather than challenging it. Palestine solidarity activists must guard against a tendency toward national chauvinism, “condescending savior” paternalism, prioritizing domestic issues over international issues (a kind of left-wing American Firstism), and Palestine isolationism.

–Finally, Gramsci’s concept of a “war of position” provides further guidance for the BDS movement. By “war of position,” Gramsci acknowledged that in advanced capitalist countries with well-established constitutionalism, the forces for change face a protracted struggle in which a principal objective is to establish a people’s counter-hegemonic narrative to the dominant neoliberal narrative of the ruling class. This struggle demands engaging with all sectors of civil society and winning them to the people’s narrative.

As the German activist Rudi Duetscke, a student of Gramsci’s, put it, we must begin the “long march through the institutions.” The longest march begins with a single step.

Rod Such is a former reporter and editor for The Guardian, the independent radical newsweekly, and is a regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada

Interfaith meeting with Muslims in Pittsburgh

By J.D. Prose

Beaver County Times

March 31, 2017 – BEAVER — If any two things bring Beaver Countians together, it’s food and religion, and Center Township resident Toni Ashfaq will incorporate both to educate residents about Islam during events in Beaver.

“There are a lot of misunderstandings, a lot of false information floating around,” said Ashfaq, a Muslim and the organizer of two Spread Hummus, Not Hate: Meet Your Muslim Neighbor gatherings Wednesday and Saturday at Beaver Area Memorial Library. “We just want people to meet us and see that we’re just like everybody else.”

A Wisconsin native and convert from Catholicism, Ashfaq said she and two friends — Julia Chaney, a Christian, and fellow Muslim Dr. Raniah Khairy, an OB/GYN specialist at Heritage Valley Beaver hospital in Brighton Township — began brainstorming ideas “just to kind of build bridges and promote understanding” because of the “current political climate.”

That brainstorming has resulted in the Spread Hummus, Not Hate gatherings at the library from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday and 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday. Ashfaq said they got the idea after learning of a group in Australia doing meetings.

“We thought it was a pretty catchy title,” Ashfaq said with a laugh. Just one gathering was initially planned, but after receiving an “overwhelming” response, she said a second one was added.

Islam has been distorted by politicians and certain media, she said, not naming anyone specifically. Regardless, Ashfaq said Muslims are “not in denial” about Muslims committing violence, but the media too often focuses solely on Islam.

“People get the wrong idea that those people represent the whole faith, and they don’t,” Ashfaq said, recalling a recent conversation in which she told a woman that equating terrorists with Islam would be akin to equating the Ku Klux Klan with Christianity.

Critics have accused President Donald Trump of fanning anti-Muslim sentiments with his proposed immigration ban, since halted by courts, that targeted Muslim-majority countries. He has argued that the ban is necessary to make sure terrorists are not entering the United States as refugees.

Ashfaq said she has not experienced any overt discrimination, but has seen an increase in people’s curiosity about Islam and Muslims.

“People are really starting to ask questions,” she said. “They are really wanting to understand.”

Most questions, Ashfaq said, concern sharia, Islamic canonical law; jihad, an Arabic word meaning “struggle,” but which has taken on the connotation of “holy war”; the treatment of women in Islamic societies; and how some Muslim women dress in public, which can include wearing a hijab that covers the head and chest. Those aspects of Islam, including its basic beliefs and similarities with Christianity, and a question-and-answer session will be on the agenda Wednesday and Saturday.

Ashfaq said she and her friends are hoping the events raise enough interest that others might want to organize similar gatherings to promote interfaith relationships and understanding.

“If you see somebody face-to-face, it’s harder to hate them,” she said.

Editor’s Note: We are quite aware that the author below is no Marxist. But his views on world affairs are always interesting, and have recently been taken seriously by both Obama and Sanders, but not Clinton. So with more than a grain of salt, he’s worth a read.

By Zbigniew Brzezinski

The American Interest

April 17, 2016 – As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture.

Five basic verities regarding the emerging redistribution of global political power and the violent political awakening in the Middle East are signaling the coming of a new global realignment.

The first of these verities is that the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power. But neither is any other major power.

The second verity is that Russia is experiencing the latest convulsive phase of its imperial devolution. A painful process, Russia is not fatally precluded – if it acts wisely – from becoming eventually a leading European nation-state. However, currently it is pointlessly alienating some of its former subjects in the Islamic southwest of its once extensive empire, as well as Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, not to mention the Baltic States.

The third verity is that China is rising steadily, if more slowly as of late, as America’s eventual coequal and likely rival; but for the time being it is careful not to pose an outright challenge to America. Militarily, it seems to be seeking a breakthrough in a new generation of weapons while patiently enhancing its still very limited naval power.

The fourth verity is that Europe is not now and is not likely to become a global power. But it can play a constructive role in taking the lead in regard to transnational threats to global wellbeing and even human survival. Additionally, Europe is politically and culturally aligned with and supportive of core U.S. interests in the Middle East, and European steadfastness within NATO is essential to an eventually constructive resolution of the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

The fifth verity is that the currently violent political awakening among post-colonial Muslims is, in part, a belated reaction to their occasionally brutal suppression mostly by European powers. It fuses a delayed but deeply felt sense of injustice with a religious motivation that is unifying large numbers of Muslims against the outside world; but at the same time, because of historic sectarian schisms within Islam that have nothing to do with the West, the recent welling up of historical grievances is also divisive within Islam.

Taken together as a unified framework, these five verities tell us that the United States must take the lead in realigning the global power architecture in such a way that the violence erupting within and occasionally projected beyond the Muslim world—and in the future possibly from other parts of what used to be called the Third World—can be contained without destroying the global order. We can sketch this new architecture by elaborating briefly each of the five foregoing verities.

First, America can only be effective in dealing with the current Middle Eastern violence if it forges a coalition that involves, in varying degrees, also Russia and China. To enable such a coalition to take shape, Russia must first be discouraged from its reliance on the unilateral use of force against its own neighbors—notably Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic States—and China should be disabused of the idea that selfish passivity in the face of the rising regional crisis in the Middle East will prove to be politically and economically rewarding to its ambitions in the global arena. These shortsighted policy impulses need to be channeled into a more farsighted vision.

Second, Russia is becoming for the first time in its history a truly national state, a development that is as momentous as it is generally overlooked. The Czarist Empire, with its multinational but largely politically passive population, came to an end with World War I and the Bolshevik creation of an allegedly voluntary union of national republics (the USSR), with power resting effectively in Russian hands, took its place. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 led to the sudden emergence of a predominantly Russian state as its successor, and to the transformation of the former Soviet Union’s non-Russian “republics” into formally independent states. These states are now consolidating their independence, and both the West and China—in different areas and different ways—are exploiting that new reality to Russia’s disadvantage. In the meantime, Russia’s own future depends on its ability to become a major and influential nation-state that is part of a unifying Europe. Not to do so could have dramatically negative consequences for Russia’s ability to withstand growing territorial-demographic pressure from China, which is increasingly inclined as its power grows to recall the “unequal” treaties Moscow imposed on Beijing in times past.

Third, China’s dramatic economic success requires enduring patience and the country’s awareness that political haste will make for social waste. The best political prospect for China in the near future is to become America’s principal partner in containing global chaos of the sort that is spreading outward (including to the northeast) from the Middle East. If it is not contained, it will contaminate Russia’s southern and eastern territories as well as the western portions of China. Closer relations between China and the new republics in Central Asia, the post-British Muslim states in Southwest Asia (notably Pakistan) and especially with Iran (given its strategic assets and economic significance), are the natural targets of Chinese regional geopolitical outreach. But they should also be targets of global Sino-American accommodation.

Fourth, tolerable stability will not return to the Middle East as long as local armed military formations can calculate that they can be simultaneously the beneficiaries of a territorial realignment while selectively abetting extreme violence. Their ability to act in a savage manner can only be contained by increasingly effective—but also selective—pressure derived from a base of U.S.-Russian-Chinese cooperation that, in turn, enhances the prospects for the responsible use of force by the region’s more established states (namely, Iran, Turkey, Israel, and Egypt). The latter should also be the recipients of more selective European support. Under normal circumstances, Saudi Arabia would be a significant player on that list, but the current inclination of the Saudi government still to foster Wahhabi fanaticism, even while engaged in ambitious domestic modernization efforts, raises grave doubts regarding Saudi Arabia’s ability to play a regionally significant constructive role.

Fifth, special attention should be focused on the non-Western world’s newly politically aroused masses. Long-repressed political memories are fueling in large part the sudden and very explosive awakening energized by Islamic extremists in the Middle East, but what is happening in the Middle East today may be just the beginning of a wider phenomenon to come out of Africa, Asia, and even among the pre-colonial peoples of the Western Hemisphere in the years ahead.

Periodic massacres of their not-so-distant ancestors by colonists and associated wealth-seekers largely from western Europe (countries that today are, still tentatively at least, most open to multiethnic cohabitation) resulted within the past two or so centuries in the slaughter of colonized peoples on a scale comparable to Nazi World War II crimes: literally involving hundreds of thousands and even millions of victims. Political self-assertion enhanced by delayed outrage and grief is a powerful force that is now surfacing, thirsting for revenge, not just in the Muslim Middle East but also very likely beyond.

Much of the data cannot be precisely established, but taken collectively, they are shocking. Let just a few examples suffice. In the 16^th century, due largely to disease brought by Spanish explorers, the population of the native Aztec Empire in present-day Mexico declined from 25 million to approximately one million. Similarly, in North America, an estimated 90 percent of the native population died within the first five years of contact with European settlers, due primarily to diseases. In the 19^th century, various wars and forced resettlements killed an additional 100,000. In India from 1857-1867, the British are suspected of killing up to one million civilians in reprisals stemming from the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The British East India Company’s use of Indian agriculture to grow opium then essentially forced on China resulted in the premature deaths of millions, not including the directly inflicted Chinese casualties of the First and Second Opium Wars. In the Congo, which was the personal holding of Belgian King Leopold II, 10-15 million people were killed between 1890 and 1910. In Vietnam, recent estimates suggest that between one and three million civilians were killed from 1955 to 1975.

As to the Muslim world, in Russia’s Caucasus, from 1864 and 1867, 90 percent of the local Circassian population was forcibly relocated and between 300,000 and 1.5 million either starved to death or were killed. Between 1916 and 1918, tens of thousands of Muslims were killed when 300,000 Turkic Muslims were forced by Russian authorities through the mountains of Central Asia and into China. In Indonesia, between 1835 and 1840, the Dutch occupiers killed an estimated 300,000 civilians. In Algeria, following a 15-year civil war from 1830-1845, French brutality, famine, and disease killed 1.5 million Algerians, nearly half the population. In neighboring Libya, the Italians forced Cyrenaicans into concentration camps, where an estimated 80,000 to 500,000 died between 1927 and 1934.

More recently, in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 the Soviet Union is estimated to have killed around one million civilians; two decades later, the United States has killed 26,000 civilians during its 15-year war in Afghanistan. In Iraq, 165,000 civilians have been killed by the United States and its allies in the past 13 years. (The disparity between the reported number of deaths inflicted by European colonizers compared with the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan may be due in part to the technological advances that have led to the ability to use force more precisely, and in part as well to a shift in the world’s normative climate.) Just as shocking as the scale of these atrocities is how quickly the West forgot about them.

In today’s postcolonial world, a new historical narrative is emerging. A profound resentment against the West and its colonial legacy in Muslim countries and beyond is being used to justify their sense of deprivation and denial of self-dignity. A stark example of the experience and attitudes of colonial peoples is well summarized by the Senegalese poet David Diop in “Vultures”:

In those days,
When civilization kicked us in the face
The vultures built in the shadow of their talons
The blood stained monument of tutelage…

The growing evocation of these memories, in the Muslim world and increasingly beyond, shows how the past still influences the present, but it certainly does not justify the violent behaviors that are transpiring in the Middle East today.

Given all this, a long and painful road toward an initially limited regional accommodation is the only viable option for the United States, Russia, China, and the pertinent Middle Eastern entities. For the United States, that will require patient persistence in forging cooperative relationships with some new partners (particularly Russia and China) as well as joint efforts with more established and historically rooted Muslim states (Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia if it can detach its foreign policy from Wahhabi extremism) in shaping a wider framework of regional stability. Our European allies, previously dominant in the region, can still be helpful in that regard.

A comprehensive U.S. pullout from the Muslim world favored by domestic isolationists, could give rise to new wars (for example, Israel vs. Iran, Saudi Arabia vs. Iran, a major Egyptian intervention in Libya) and would generate an even deeper crisis of confidence in America’s globally stabilizing role. In different but dramatically unpredictable ways, Russia and China could be the geopolitical beneficiaries of such a development even as global order itself becomes the more immediate geopolitical casualty. Last but not least, in such circumstances a divided and fearful Europe would see its current member states searching for patrons and competing with one another in alternative but separate arrangements among the more powerful trio.

A constructive U.S. policy must be patiently guided by a long-range vision. It must seek outcomes that promote the gradual realization in Russia (probably post-Putin) that its only place as an influential world power is ultimately within Europe. China’s increasing role in the Middle East should reflect the reciprocal American and Chinese realization that a growing U.S.-PRC partnership in coping with the Middle Eastern crisis is an historically significant test of their ability to shape and enhance together wider global stability.

The alternative to a constructive vision, and especially the quest for a one-sided militarily and ideologically imposed outcome, can only result in prolonged and self-destructive futility. For America, that could entail enduring conflict, fatigue, and conceivably even a demoralizing withdrawal to its pre-20^th century isolationism. For Russia, it could mean major defeat, increasing the likelihood of subordination in some fashion to Chinese predominance. For China, it could portend war not only with the United States but also, perhaps separately, with either Japan or India or with both. And, in any case, a prolonged phase of sustained ethnic, quasi-religious wars pursued through the Middle East with self-righteous fanaticism would generate escalating bloodshed within and outside the region, and growing cruelty everywhere.

The fact is that there has never been a truly “dominant” global power until the emergence of America on the world scene. Imperial Great Britain came close to becoming one, but World War I and later World War II not only bankrupted it but also prompted the emergence of rival regional powers. The decisive new global reality was the appearance on the world scene of America as simultaneously the richest and militarily the most powerful player. During the latter part of the 20^th century no other power even came close.

That era is now ending. While no state is likely in the near future to match America’s economic-financial superiority, new weapons systems could suddenly endow some countries with the means to commit suicide in a joint tit-for-tat embrace with the United States, or even to prevail. Without going into speculative detail, the sudden acquisition by some state of the capacity to render the America militarily broadly inferior would spell the end of America’s global role. The result would most probably be global chaos. And that is why it behooves the United States to fashion a policy in which at least one of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.

Since the next twenty years may well be the last phase of the more traditional and familiar political alignments with which we have grown comfortable, the response needs to be shaped now. During the rest of this century, humanity will also have to be increasingly preoccupied with survival as such on account of a confluence of environmental challenges. Those challenges can only be addressed responsibly and effectively in a setting of increased international accommodation. And that accommodation has to be based on a strategic vision that recognizes the urgent need for a new geopolitical framework.

^*The author acknowledges the helpful contribution of his research assistant Paul Wasserman, and the scholarship on the subject of colonial brutality by Adam Hochschild, Richard Pierce, William Polk, and the Watson Institute at Brown University, among others.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and was the National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977-81. He is the author, most recently, of Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.

By Martin Nicolaus

My Soap Box

November 16, 2015

In the turmoil of the moment, French President Francois Hollande probably should be forgiven for calling the terrorist attacks of last Friday in Paris “an act of war.”  It’s the kind of grandiose nonsense politicians say.  Really, calling these massacres “war” is like referring to shooting fish in a barrel as “sport.”

Is he a “warrior” who turns his Kalashnikovs on a concert hall full of unarmed teenagers?  How is this person any different than the sociopath who machine-gunned movie viewers in Colorado, or the pervert who calmly murdered 77 students in Norway, or the numerous shooters who are taking young lives in American schools?  The claim that these crimes deserve esteem because they are done in the name of an ideology or a religion is laughable. The bullets and bombs in Paris sprayed death at random.  No target of military significance was touched.  No perceived symbol of religious insult like Charlie Hebdo was in the cross-hairs.  The attacks hit no architectural icon of imperial domination, like the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. The only ideology that these acts expressed, if they expressed any, was anarchism and nihilism.

It does not dignify the cowards who carried out these killings that they took their own lives by triggering their suicide vests.  If suicide made heroes or martyrs then Hitler was one.  Almost all the school shooters in the U.S. also killed themselves. Their self-destruction was not heroism or martyrdom.  It was an evasion of responsibility. If they had to stand before a tribunal, they would ultimately be overcome with shame.

But perhaps, in the larger picture, Hollande is not so far off, after all, to call this kind of encounter “war.”  We have people sitting at computer screens in air-conditioned offices in Nevada committing mass murder of wedding parties by drone on the other side of the earth, and we call that “war.”  We have pilots whose main fear is fuel shortage or mechanical failure flying bombing runs to obliterate unarmed villages and clearly marked hospitals.  Our close allies and arms customers the Saudis, who behead more people each year than Daesh, drop an enormous tonnage of explosives on civilian targets in Yemen every week.  Others have done and are doing the same.  And all of that, and more, our press calls “war,” even though most of the time no one is shooting back.

Perhaps Hollande is right.  The deliberate military massacre of civilians has been an integral part of war for as long as I’ve been alive.  The Nazi bombardment of Rotterdam and of Guernica, the V-2 attacks on London were early examples. After overcoming initial scruples, the Allies answered with massive bombing of civilian populations in Hamburg, Essen, Dresden, and other cities.  And what was the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki except an extreme act of terrorism against the civilian population?

So this is what war has come down to.  Cowards with AK47s v. cowards with drones.  There will be no quick end to this kind of conflict because it is all too easy for both sides.  We can always build more drones.  Daesh can easily recruit another eight or ten small-time criminals and misfits willing to end their meaningless lives in a media spotlight to the applause of the Salafist cheering squads.

Where is this going?  France and the US and possibly others will retaliate with further and heavier air strikes, as they have begun to do with attacks on Raqqa. The pressure will grow to expand these strikes, to reduce the whole town to rubble, much as Hafez al-Assad did to crush the Islamist rebellion in Hama in 1982. But it’s probably too late for that.  Daesh is far more deeply rooted and better organized.  It is a devil’s medley of Salafist jihadism with Iraqi Baath party professionalism. It draws popular support from a Sunni minority ousted by the U.S. invasion and victimized by the Shia-based Baghdad regime that the U.S. installed and supports.

Of all the strategic stupidities committed by the U.S. in the Mideast, the invasion of Iraq stands as the poster child.  Joe Biden is the author of an infamous paper advocating as war goal the breakup of Iraq into three countries: Shia, Sunni, and Kurd.  Well, that has largely occurred.  But the Shia section, which still controls Baghdad, is now virtually a satellite of neighboring Iran. The Sunni section has evolved into Daesh. Only the Kurds are still allies if not agents of U.S. policy, but at the price of renewed war with neighboring Turkey.  Washington has spent trillions and killed hundred of thousands strengthening its old enemies and manufacturing new ones.

While the ideological message of the 11/13 Paris attacks is null and void, the provocative political intent is clear enough. Petty criminals and cowards are pawns in big and bold ambitions.  Daesh reads French and probably also American politics as the ongoing slide of a fake liberalism and a hypocritical democracy into bankruptcy.  It seeks to accelerate what it sees as the inevitable takeover of state power by the right wing.  In this regard, Daesh is a kin of certain ultra-leftist fractions in the old Leninist movements who believed that “worse is better.”  With the xenophobic and quasi-fascist right wing in power (so goes the reasoning) the substantial Islamist minority in France will become radicalized and will massively support Daesh.  But much more important, Daesh calculates that the right-wing regime will muster the political will to do what neither Hollande nor Obama intend, namely to send large numbers of ground troops (back) into the Mideast theatre.

Neither side can win the current war of cowards. The 11/13 terrorist acts were inconsolable tragedies for the families and friends of the victims, but they are trivial scratches for France as a whole.  France lost more than 25 times as many lives in traffic collisions in 2013.  Neither this act nor its expected sequels will bring France to its knees.  Similarly, as U.S. military experts have admitted, Daesh cannot be defeated by air power alone.  Hence the political vortex toward returning “boots on the ground.”

That would be a real war, not an exchange of massacres as at present.  It would bring opposing troops within mortar and rifle range of one another.  There would be fighting from house to house, the setting of booby traps and the throwing of grenades.  It would be Fallujah and Vietnam all over again. And that is precisely the kind of confrontation that Daesh is confident it can win.  The 11/13 attacks were a piece of bloody bait to draw the Western powers into a Mideast ground war.

It looks like both Paris and Washington get this, at the moment.  That’s why we hear the new emphasis on motivating “allies”  and “local forces.”  They understand that they need to win on the ground, but they want others to donate the necessary blood and treasure.  The candidates are three: Iran and its Shia militias in Iraq, the Kurds, and a hypothetical Sunni force loyal to the Iraqi regime.  But there are problems.  There is not and will not be a meaningful Sunni force loyal to the Iraqi regime until there is regime change in Baghdad.  Does the U.S. have the will and the power to make that happen?  Secondly, the Kurds are being bombarded and hamstrung by the Turks.  The U.S. has to lean on the Turkish regime to back off the Kurds and fight Daesh instead.  Does the U.S. have the will and the power to lean hard on Turkey?  Finally, there is the Shia militia allied with and largely controlled by Iran — by all accounts the only fighting force in the area with the capacity and scale to match Daesh.  Does the U.S. have the will to throw its support to Iran and its allies (including Syria and Hezbollah) and to push back against the chief state sponsor of Salafist terror, Saudi Arabia?  The answer to all three questions would have to be yes, before the strategy of relying on “local boots” to defeat Daesh has a chance.

If the U.S. will not or cannot bring about regime change in Baghdad, lean hard on the Turks and the Saudis, and make a wartime alliance with Iran and Iran’s allies, then this war of cowards will probably continue.  The chances are good that a similar provocation will take place in the U.S. some time before the 2016 presidential election.  It’s not unthinkable that such an event will bring into the White House a candidate pledged to send American ground troops back into Iraq. If that happens, Daesh will have won its greatest victory.

Very few struggles in history have centered on how a nation should treat a third group of people, but there are strong parallels between black slavery and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Palestinian workers from Hebron at Tarqumiya Checkpoint. Photo by Emil Salman

By Eva Illouz

Haaretz

Feb. 7, 2014 – Open Haaretz on any given day. Half or three quarters of its news items will invariably revolve around the same two topics: people struggling to protect the good name of Israel, and people struggling against its violence and injustices.

An almost random example: On December 17, 2013, one could read, on a single Haaretz page, Chemi Shalev reporting on the decision of the American Studies Association to boycott Israeli academic institutions in order to “honor the call of Palestinian civil society.” In response, former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers dubbed the decision “anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent.”

On the same page, MK Naftali Bennett called the bill to prevent outside funding of left-wing NGOs in Israel “too soft.” The proposed law was meant to protect Israel and Israeli soldiers from “foreign forces” which, in his view, work against the national interest of Israel through those left-wing nonprofits (for Bennett and many others in Israel, to defend human rights is to be left-wing).The Haaretz editorial, backed by an article by regular columnist Sefi Rachlevsky, referred to the treatment of illegal immigrants by the Israeli government as shameful, with Rachlevsky calling the current political regime “radical rightist-racist-capitalist,” because “it tramples democracy and replaces it with fascism.” The day after, it was the turn of Alan Dershowitz to call the American Studies Association vote to boycott Israel shameful, “for singling out the Jew among nations. Shame on them for applying a double standard to Jewish universities” (December 18).

This mudslinging has become a normal spectacle to the bemused eyes of ordinary Israelis and Jews around the world. But what’s astonishing is that this mud is being thrown by Jews at Jews. Indeed, the valiant combatants for the good name of Israel miss an important point: the critiques of Israel in the United States are increasingly waged by Jews, not anti-Semites. The initiators and leaders of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement are such respected academics as Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Rose and Larry Gross, all Jews.

If Israel is indeed singled out among the many nations that have a bad record in human rights, it is because of the personal sense of shame and embarrassment that a large number of Jews in the Western world feel toward a state that, by its policies and ethos, does not represent them anymore. As Peter Beinart has been cogently arguing for some time now, the Jewish people seems to have split into two distinct factions: One that is dominated by such imperatives as “Israeli security,” “Jewish identity” and by the condemnation of “the world’s double standards” and “Arabs’ unreliability”; and a second group of Jews, inside and outside Israel, for whom human rights, freedom, and the rule of law are as visceral and fundamental to their identity as membership to Judaism is for the first group. Supreme irony of history: Israel has splintered the Jewish people around two radically different moral visions of Jews and humanity.

If we are to find an appropriate analogy to understand the rift inside the Jewish people, let us agree that the debate between the two groups is neither ethnic (we belong to the same ethnic group) nor religious (the Judith Butlers of the world are not trying to push a new or different religious dogma, although the rift has a certain, but imperfect, overlap with the religious-secular positions). Nor is the debate a political or ideological one, as Israel is in fact still a democracy. Rather, the poignancy, acrimony and intensity of the debate are about two competing and ultimately incompatible conceptions of morality. This statement is less trivial than it sounds.

For a long time, the debate between different factions of Jews was framed as an ideological, strategic or political one (“when, how and what to negotiate with Palestinians”). But with time, in the face of the systematic colonization of the land, the pervasive exclusion of Arabs from the body collective, the Judaization of Israel, the tone of the debate has changed and been replaced by a question about the moral nature of Zionism. Moral evaluations – whether we think people are “good” or “bad,” “just” or “unjust,” “worthy” or “unworthy” – are more fundamental to judgment than political opinion or aesthetic taste. In that sense, moral evaluations are far less negotiable than any other form of evaluation.

I will call one group the “security as morality” group. For this group, Israel is twice morally beyond reproach. First, because Jews were the super victim of history and because of Israel’s inherently vulnerable state amidst a sea of enemies. The status of victim – whether potential or actual – disculpates Israel from the crimes of the strong. Second, because its weakness commits it to the forceful defense of its military security, its land and its identity.

Surveying history, the “security as morality” group observes that might has regularly been right, and that Israel is no less entitled to its violent policies than America or other countries have been to their own. For this group, then, Israel is exonerated by the fact that it’s at once a victim and doesn’t have a worse historical record than the strong nations of the world. Israel’s morality becomes defined by the outrages of its enemies, Nazis or Hamas, and by the worst deeds of the enlightened nations.

The second group of Jews derives its positions from universal standards of justice, and from the observation that Israel is fast moving away from the pluralistic, multiethnic, pacific democracies of the world. Israel stopped being a valid source of identification for these Jews not because they are self-hating, but because many of them have been actively involved, in deed or thought, in the liberalization of their respective societies – that is, in the extension of human, economic and social rights to a wider variety of groups.

From the standpoint of that struggle, successfully waged in most Western countries, Israel makes an unacceptable demand: it requests from Jews loyalty to its policies, claims to have a moral and political status superior to that of its neighbors, yet consistently violates the human rights of Palestinians, Arabs, and liberal Judaism; uses violence; violates international law; and practices state-sanctioned discrimination toward non-Jews. For liberal Jews, Israel bullies like a Goliath, yet persists in wanting to be admired as a David.

Interestingly enough, there are not many episodes in history where groups have fought over moral issues. Most struggles in history are usually connected to belief and dogmas (e.g., religious wars), economic interests (class struggles) or to political power (nationalist liberation movements). Very few struggles have been about a moral debate on how a group or nation should treat a third group of people.

There is, however, one well-known episode of history in which a single group divided itself in two sides around the moral question of how a third group of people should be treated, and this episode was the American antislavery movement.

In using this example as a soundboard to think about the moral debate that is dividing the Jewish people, I do not claim that slavery and the occupation are equivalent. They differ significantly. But there are some analogies, in that the Jewish world has become splintered around two intractable moral claims about the treatment of Palestinians. An analogy is nothing more than a tool to probe thinking. Suppose someone didn’t know what a tiger was. If I had to explain what a tiger is, I’d say: “It is like a lion, only with stripes.” In giving this answer, I remain fully aware that a tiger is not a lion, but only like a “lion,” and this is because a tiger is closer to a lion than it is to a fish, a bird or a horse. An analogy helps us imagine and think about something we do not fully grasp, even when that analogy is an imperfect one.

The debate about the occupation is not equivalent to the debate about slavery, but it bears, here and there, some resemblance to it. And it is for this reason that I use it as a strategy for thinking.

****

The United States was established as a British colony in the 17th and 18th centuries. Slavery was a crucial part of the violent colonization of the American territory. Great Britain then allowed the slave trade with the Caribbean, the Americas and Brazil, thus enabling the wide use of slaves in the vast and powerful plantation system in the South and in cities such as New York. Both the North and South enjoyed the benefits of labor produced by slaves in houses, farms, land and small workshops. At the beginning of the 19th century, however, Britain – who had a vast and brutal Empire – forbade the transatlantic commerce of slaves. This was because Britain, like much of Europe, was caught in its own contradictions: it became aware that the violent use of other people went against the value of “progress” and “enlightenment” it otherwise used to justify its own superiority over world populations.

Arguments against slavery were advanced in the 18th century, but only in the 19th century did the argument against slavery gain momentum and become widespread, especially among city dwellers. Many reasons were offered for the striking change of attitude, the most obvious being the circulation of enlightenment ideas about the basic rights of human beings; the emergence of mass circulated newspapers and novels that depicted stories of suffering and made empathy into a civilized emotion; the increasing recognition that distant strangers were human beings equal and similar in rights. The eminent historian of slavery, David Brion Davis, claims that, ultimately, it was a moral argument that compelled England to claim the Transatlantic Commerce of Slaves illegal, and it was a moral argument that gave rise to what historians have called “humanitarian sensibility” in Britain and in the United States – that is, a new awareness for the suffering of strangers and for the sacredness of the human person.

In the United States, once the American Constitution was written, many started to question the flagrant contradiction between the ideals it endorsed and the brutal domination of an entire group of people that slavery represented. Christians (Quakers and Methodists mostly) joined in this struggle as well, because some slaves were converted to Christianity – and as Christians, they had a soul, and if they had a soul, they could not be animals and were by definition free. (As early as 1772, James Somersett, a black man who had escaped from his master, was freed by the judge because the slave had been baptized.)

In the United States, abolishing slavery proved to be a difficult task, as the internal slave system was very lucrative (slaves being sold within the American territory rather than imported) and so much of the plantation economy relied on slave labor. But the most significant obstacle was the proslavery ideology that was everywhere: in schoolbooks, political speeches, Church sermons, laws and fictional literature. As is always the case in history, once a group of people controls economic, human or territorial resources, it justifies its domination over a group with an ideology.

What is ideology? The set of beliefs and stories a group that dominates another tells to itself in order to make its domination seem natural, deserved and necessary (for example, if Jews are both powerful and dangerous, it is easy to justify their persecution; or if Mizrahim are stupid and uneducated, they naturally deserve to live in the periphery). When the ideology is pervasive, present in different arenas (school textbooks, politics, newspapers) and when it is sustained by concrete economic and political interests, ideology becomes an automatic way of thinking, an irresistible way of explaining reality and acting – or not acting – in it.

In order to defend and justify their domination over Africans, the proslavery camp used a number of arguments and diffused them widely: the first argument was a hierarchical view of human beings. Whites were unquestioningly superior to Africans, who were compared to animals, and as animals they were dangerous, to be domesticated and controlled. It is interesting to note that here, as in other and subsequent forms of racism, blacks were viewed both as weak (inferior) and strong (dangerous).

Proslavery people in Britain and the United States further argued that Africa itself practiced slavery, and that Britain and America in fact were contributing to the cultural development of the slaves – because African societies were unskilled and primitive, they stood to benefit by being exposed to the “advanced” European civilization. The domination of a people is not only caused by the belief that a people is inherently inferior and dangerous, but the very act of domination makes these beliefs seem true: the proof of the racist was in the pudding of the plantation owner.

Proslavers also argued that the land itself was crucial for the nation and for economic prosperity. Owners of farms and plantations viewed the land as something to fight for and cherish, a source of national pride and moral identity. In England and America, the proslavery lobby despised industrial and wage capitalism, which they viewed as creating a society of selfish strangers. They, the plantation owners, defended a less selfish view of society and the nation. Slaves were a part of the household and could help maintain a society of large units who cared for each other.

But perhaps the strongest element justifying the proslavery outlook was the use of the Bible. For the many Christian believers who made up the South, control over human beings was based on, and justified by, the famous Bible passage (Genesis 9:18-27) in which Noah curses Ham (presumably of dark color) and dooms him to be subjugated by Japheth (presumably of lighter color). This biblical narrative played a crucial role in justifying slavery because it made God and the holy scriptures give it a seal of sanctity and inevitability (it was later shown by Christians themselves that this interpretation had no basis in the actual biblical text). Any domination of human beings is far more powerful if it uses grand historical and collective narratives that lend to it an aura of historical mission.

Slavery provoked one of the greatest moral wars of modern times and, for a while, threatened to divide the nascent American nation into two distinct national entities. The two camps went to war and although the reasons for the war were not only connected to slavery, both parties saw slavery as the essential moral cause to oppose or defend.

***

Roman law defined human beings as either slaves or as free, and history has inherited this dichotomous division. Because of this legal division, we conventionally think that slavery has disappeared from the modern world. But slavery has not disappeared. It is more accurate to think of slavery on a continuum, as one of the most extreme forms of human domination, characterized by the fact that a human being is treated as the property of another person, and can be sold and bought like an object or animal.

But slavery is not only that. If a person or group creates mechanisms to alienate the freedom and life of another, that person is not technically speaking a slave, but s/he is subject to conditions of slavery. If an immigrant worker’s passport has been taken away from them by their employers and made to work 12 hours a day without legal rights and protection, they live in conditions of slavery. If women are trafficked for sex purposes and held in conditions of quasi-captivity by their pimps, they live in conditions of slavery. Slavery, then, is not only the fact of being turned into a tradable property. It is a set of social conditions that make someone’s existence closely determined by someone else’s decision, will and power.

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, a specialist in the history and sociology of slavery, defines slavery thus: “The permanent, violent and personal domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (quoted in Brion Davis’ "Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World"). Note that this definition does not assume that a slave is necessarily a tradable property. Rather, as Patterson defines it, a slave is someone who is born in a condition in which his life at birth is dependent on the will of a master; it is someone who is born in a condition of dishonor. From this definition, we can describe a condition of slavery as having a number of characteristics.

Slavery is a state where one does not have access to citizenship. In that sense, slaves are by definition deprived of the security that membership to a sovereign political community provides. It also means that they don’t develop the skills that come with the exercise of rights and duties toward a political community. This is what Patterson means when he speaks of general “dishonor”: a slave is deprived of the possibility of being recognized by a sovereign cultural or political community.

Another characteristic follows: a slave is submitted to a different legal system than the one by which the ordinary, free population is regulated (in many cases in the American South, the law was changed so as to be applied specifically to African-Americans). Hence, in a slave society, the law is naturally made to fit the needs of the ruling group, to exonerate them when needed, and to be especially harsh on the slaves.

Third, slaves are used to maintain and extend the property of a master but are denied the right to acquire or extend their own property, through various legal and forceful means. The capacity of slaves to own or increase land and property is very limited or nonexistent.

A fourth characteristic is that slaves are the object of arbitrary physical punishment, and their life and death are often the master’s decision. Slaves live in fear, because they know that they can be physically punished, beaten, lashed, killed at any time.

Fifth, slaves have very limited social space to move in and out of. In the 19th century, seeing an unknown African-American somewhere was enough to raise suspicion that he had run away. Sixth, the personal life – sexuality and marriage – of slaves is controlled by the master – such as the fact that slaves could marry only with the permission of the master (in the Roman world, masters had almost unlimited rights to rape slaves).

***

Ideology is made of stories and powerful metaphors that define how we perceive and understand reality. Thus, when Israelis cast their relationship to Palestinians as a purely military one, the label of “military conflict” has a number of logical, moral and political consequences. Palestinians are “soldiers,” not civilians; they are enemies to be subdued, not ordinary civilians; they threaten Israelis, are not helpless; they must be subjugated by force, in a zero-sum game – if one loses, the other wins.

But the military metaphor with which Israelis have made sense of their relationship to Palestinians hides a disturbing fact: what started as a national and military conflict has morphed into a form of domination of Palestinians that now increasingly borders on conditions of slavery. If we understand slavery as a condition of existence and not as ownership and trade of human bodies, the domination that Israel has exercised over Palestinians turns out to have created the matrix of domination that I call a “condition of slavery.”

The Palestinian Prisoner Affairs Ministry has documented that between 1967 and 2012, Israeli authorities arrested some 800,000 Palestinians by power of the “military code.” (A more conservative assessment from Israeli sources documented that 700,000 Palestinians were detained between 1967 and 2008.) This number is astounding, especially in light of the fact that this represents as much as 40 percent of the entire male population. When a large part of the adult male population is arrested, it means that the lives of a large number of breadwinners, the heads of a family, are disrupted, alienated and made into the object of the arbitrary power of the army. In fact, which nation would create a Prisoner Affairs Ministry if imprisonment was not such a basic aspect of its life?

These facts also mean that a significant portion of the non-incarcerated population lives under the constant fear and threat of imprisonment. The Israeli NGO Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI) has established that, once arrested, hundreds are categorized as “ticking bombs” or “serious threats.” Once labeled as such, they are treated with a violence prohibited by international law: prisoners are bound to their chairs in painful positions for hours, held in isolation, beaten, shaken, prevented from sleeping, verbally abused, cursed and psychologically humiliated.

The violence exercised by the military does not stop there. During Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, the IDF used Gazan civilians as “human shields,” a practice prohibited by Israeli and international law and conventionally viewed as barbarian. Using others as human shields consists of taking civilians as hostages, using them for Israeli military purposes, threatening their families with injury if they don’t cooperate with the Israel Defense Forces’ attempt to obtain information.

Palestinian boys, from age 13-17, are frequently arrested by the IDF. Military Court Watch, an Israeli NGO, has found that 50 percent of these children are arrested in night raids, and that 80 percent  are blindfolded. In a widely publicized news story, PCATI found that children are also the object of treatment that is equivalent to torture, and that the IDF engages in such practices as putting Palestinian children guilty of minor crimes in cages (for two days), exposed to the cold in the deep of winter.

To the military violence, we must add the fact that Palestinians are regularly exposed to acts of violence by civilians. The settlers known as “hilltop youth” and “price tag” attacks aim to hurt Palestinians in various ways, in their lands, property or body. These acts are only sporadically prosecuted by Israel, and when they are, more often than not it ends with no conviction.

Indeed, Palestinians are subject to a legal system that is different from the one in Israel. As the Calcalist blogger Yossi Gurvitz writes: “[R]esidents of one street in Hebron are judged according to one legal system, and residents [of a] nearby street under a different legal system. If a Palestinian child is suspected of throwing stones at soldiers, IDF gunmen break into his home at night, take him, blindfolded, to interrogation, accompanied by torture at times, and he will be put in custody. If a settler is suspected of throwing a stone at a soldier, it is likely nothing will happen to him. Naturally, no one would think of breaking into his house during the night.”

Another example of the stringency of the laws existing in the territories is that there’s no possibility for a Palestinian to get a verdict of "non-conviction" in relation to petty crime. Or a Haaretz editorial titled “An apartheid legal system just got worse,” which addresses the new military order issued by the GOC Central Command, Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, prohibiting Palestinians from appealing military court decisions to confiscate their property.  As the article argues, the order “embodies the essence of the story of the occupation and demonstrates the different law applied to Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories. This order violates the rights of the Palestinians, and allows arbitrary damage to them, contrary to international law and the laws of basic justice. The military can make decisions of this nature – contrary to justice – due to the existence of two different legal systems in a given geographical area: one for Jews and one for Arabs.”

These facts mean, de facto, that Palestinians live not only with a legal system different from the one used in Israel, but without serious legal protection as well. Moreover, since the 1990s, Israel has imposed severe restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank. During the second intifada, Israel placed dozens of checkpoints in the West Bank that impede the movement of Palestinians within the area itself. To the Israeli, this seems only a problem of wasted hours, but the hindrance of movement touches on the very essence of freedom. It creates a wide-reaching feeling of imprisonment. (As prime minister, Ariel Sharon cut Gaza City from Ramallah, for no other reason, probably, than to create such constraints on movement.)

This feeling of spatial imprisonment is accompanied by economic strangulation. An essential part of Israeli domination is achieved by making Palestinian livelihoods depend on Israel, and monitoring permits of entry to Israel. By making entry to work in Israel conditional upon good behavior, Israeli powers create fear and extreme psychological dependency. Moreover, because Israel restricts Palestinians’ capacity to build new industries, they force them to work in the very settlements that take their own land, thus increasing their sense of humiliation and expropriation.

As for the capacity to own property, Israel has long practiced land expropriation, and made it impossible for Palestinians to extend their property. The NGO Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) established that, in 2013 alone, 634 Palestinian buildings were demolished, 1,033 people displaced and 3,688 injured by the IDF. From these figures, it can be inferred that a basic condition of life – to have a shelter and home – has been systematically and widely undermined by the policy of house demolition.

Finally, when it comes to marriage, here, too, the occupation has torn families apart. According to a report by B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Israeli restrictions on the passage from and to Gaza Strip split families and force on couples – where one of them is from Gaza, and the other the West Bank or Israel – a series of bureaucratic restrictions, with no possibility of conducting a reasonable routine. The simplest thing – raising a family, living with spouse and children, and maintaining contact with families of origin of both partners – become unachievable.

In traditional Palestinian society, the custom is that the women will move in with the husband’s family, so the procedures established by the Israeli offensive affect mainly women: Married Gazans living in the West Bank are forced to leave their family and familiar surroundings, without any possibility to visit the Gaza Strip, except for the most exceptional cases. Those who failed to update their address are in constant danger of expulsion from their homes.

We can say conservatively and impressionistically that 70 percent of the Palestinian population live with a permanent sense of dishonor, conduct their lives without predictability and continuity, live in fear of Jewish terror and of the violence of the Israeli military power, and are afraid to have no work, shelter or family. When we put these numbers under a single coherent picture and ask sociologically what kind of life this is, we are compelled to observe that a large quantity of Palestinians live in conditions in which their freedom, honor, physical integrity, capacity to work, acquire property, marry and, more generally, plan for the future are alienated to the will and power of their Israeli masters. These conditions can only be named by their proper name: conditions of slavery.

It should be clear, however, that the occupation is a condition of slavery, but not slavery: a striped lion is like a tiger, but isn’t a tiger. The occupation started as a military conflict and, unbeknown to itself, became a generalized condition of domination, dehumanizing Palestinians, and ultimately dehumanizing Israelis themselves. This magnificent people – which distinguished itself historically by its love of God, its love of texts and its love of morality – has become the manager of a vast enterprise of brutal military domination.

***

Without ever intending to, Israelis have become the Lords and Masters of a people, and the only interesting question about this is not how we got there (domination has its own internal incremental and implacable dynamic), but why so many Jews outside and inside of Israel are not more disturbed by this.

The reason for this is that Israel has its own proslavery lobby, which is now in the corridors of power, shapes Israel’s policy and has successfully managed to make the occupation appear to be a containable casualty of war and nation-building. The settlers’ discourse – which only 20 years ago was marginal in Israeli society –has become mainstream, and one can only be struck by its resemblance to the 19th-century American proslavery ideology.

***

The idea that Jews are inherently superior to Arabs is so widespread, deep and unquestioned, that it is hardly worth my time dwelling on it here. The idea of Jewish superiority exists everywhere in Israel, but is most blatant in the territories. Like the whites in the American South, Jews view themselves as obviously more moral, superior, civilized, technologically and economically far more accomplished than the inferior Arabs (Arab nations are indeed politically and economically backward, but this in no way makes Arabs inferior). In the same way that it was entirely obvious to proslavers that Africans were primitive and animal-like, Arabs are viewed as unreliable, liars, stupid and dangerous. These views dictate official policy. And in the same way that the whites in the South claimed to be civilizing the primitive Africans, one can frequently hear that Arabs have benefited from the technological and political enlightenment of Israel.

An example of Jewish supremacy can be seen in the book “The King’s Torah” (“Torat Hamelech”), written by the head rabbi of Yeshivat Od Yosef Chai (which was located in Nablus and then moved to the Yitzhar settlement). According to the book, Jews are superior to non-Jews, with Gentiles being close to animals because they did not accept the Seven Laws of Noah. In an amended world, killing a non-Jew who does not accept the commandments of Noah will become necessary. The book also suggests that because Jews are now at war, it is permissible – based on traditional sources – to kill Gentiles, including children, because of the fear that they will grow and become dangerous adults. In a review of the book, the highly respected historian Yehuda Bauer suggests that the book is not a marginal phenomenon of a handful of extremists. According to him, the book was endorsed by famous rabbis, such as Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg (the former head of Yeshivat Od Yosef Chai) and the well-known Hebron Rabbi Dov Lior. Yeshivas teach this book or at least contents that are very similar to it, and Yeshiva students are recruited into the IDF in increasing numbers. Some of these young people become an important nucleus of hilltop youth and price-tag launchers who reject the laws of the state, illegally take possession of the land, and attack Palestinians. Even the Hebrew University Hillel hosted an official event to discuss the book with its author, thus putting it on a par with academic books.

Prof. Bauer concludes that the book should be taken seriously because it indicates the direction of a growing part of the settlers’ movement. One hopes that the price tag attacks, which have grown at a staggering rate in the last few years, create an atmosphere of (Jewish) terror among Palestinians and have remained unpunished by the state, do not end up resembling the Ku Klux Klan in the American South.

Like their 19th-century counterparts, the settlers hold in contempt the “individualism” and “egoism” of the city dwellers of Tel Aviv, the city most likely to oppose the occupation – much like the white farmers held in contempt the abolitionists of America’s urban east coast. They view the “state” of Tel Aviv as a place in which raw economic forces and crass materialism destroy the idealism of the land.

Israel Harel, the first chairman of the Yesha Council of settlements, claimed in a Haaretz article that the environment in Tel Aviv projects an atmosphere that encourages evading military service, and that Tel Aviv conveys a degree of detachment from Israel’s survival needs. In his book on the settlement movement (“The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism”), Gadi Taub quotes Harel as saying that the Israelis have lost their identity and spine, and are a metastasis of the West. Using fears of decadence familiar to the European right, Harel claims that the West has observed a steady deterioration in values, materialism and Nihilism.

Finally, and most strikingly, exactly like their southern 19th-century counterparts the settlers have abundantly sanctified the land through Bible narratives and see themselves, like the proslavery owners, as executing God’s will. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the son of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, claimed that the “Lord of the universe has its own politics, according to which the politics of Earth is managed … part of this redemption is the conquest of the land and settlement in it. No earthly politics can stand against this assertion of divine politics.” Hanan Porat, one of the leaders of the settlement movement, argued that the “commandment to settle the land increases the lifetime value of the individual.” The Bible has been used both as a way to sanctify the land and justify its conquest.

Given what precedes them, the positions of MKs such as Miri Regev, Yariv Levin, Danny Danon and Naftali Bennett seem to be a “vanilla” version of the worldview defended by settlers. If indeed the settlers and their representatives in the Knesset have “mainstreamed” views that are strangely reminiscent of those of slave owners, then this only begs further the question of why so many are unable or unwilling to grasp this.

I will venture one explanation. Jews around the world view themselves as a minority in need of protection. Israel itself, because of its inherent connection to the Jewish people, has kept alive the memory of persecutions. Jews around the world live their identity as a weak one, as belonging to a minority, as bound to a history of perennial struggle against Amalek. Such vision is bound to project its own existential anxieties and sense of vulnerability, even on a military superpower such as Israel and to view its justification of military violence as a simple strategy of (ancestral) survival.

Undoubtedly, there are major differences between Palestinians and black slaves: Some Palestinians are virulently anti-Semitic and are supported by even more violent anti-Semites in the surrounding Arab countries; Palestinians have their own police force; from time to time, they send suicide bombers or launch missiles on Israel.

But my point is precisely the following: The occupation is like a photomontage that superposes two different pictures of two different realities. I ask my reader to see two images at once: the occupation as a humanitarian disaster, superposed on the occupation as a military conflict. More than that, the enslavement of the life condition of Palestinians has prevented the possibility of making this conflict into a military one. Israel, the most security-conscious state on the planet, has failed to make its conflict with the Palestinians into a military one. Instead, it has been dragged into a humanitarian disaster that has provoked a moral war and unbridgeable rift within the Jewish people. The public relations strategies of the state will not silence this moral war.

***
Conclusion
What does it mean for a country to have created such conditions of slavery for a people, and yet fail to register it? The question here is not only about the (im)morality of the occupation, but, more fundamentally, about the increasing difficulty of articulating a moral language to grasp the very nature of the occupation – initially the result of a military conflict and now a humanitarian disaster. If 19th-century slavery was known as slavery to all involved, the occupation has not produced its own adequate moral label.

We do not know what the occupation is, and we do not know what it is because language itself has been colonized. By defining it in military terms, Israelis fail to see what the world sees. Israelis see terrorists and enemies, and the world sees weak, dispossessed and persecuted people. The world reacts with moral outrage at Israel’s continued domination of Palestinians, and Israel ridicules such moral outrage as an expression of double standards. The world sees Israeli tanks and military technology against Palestinian, homeless people, but Israel sees these denunciations as self-hatred or anti-Semitism. The world wants a just solution, and Israel sees the demand for justice as a threat to its existence.

In that sense, the debate dividing the Jewish people is more difficult than the debate about slavery, because there is no agreement even on how to properly name the vast enterprise of domination that has been created in the territories. If Britain at the beginning of the 19th century understood that it couldn’t keep claiming that it represented the enlightened values of freedom and humanity and engage in the barbaric commerce of slaves, Israel is more embarrassed, for in a way it doesn’t know that it’s engaged in an enterprise it cannot justify.

Israel is dangerously sailing away from the moral vocabulary of most countries of the civilized world. The fact that many readers will think that my sources are unreliable because they come from organizations that defend human rights proves this point. Israel no longer speaks the ordinary moral language of enlightened nations. But in refusing to speak that language, it is de facto dooming itself to isolation. Israel will not indefinitely have the cake of “democracy” and eat it in the occupation.

On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist, our reporter searches the north African nation for signs of his legacy

• By Joshua Hammer
• Smithsonian magazine, October 2013,

The Hotel El-Djazair, formerly known as the Hotel Saint-George, is an oasis of calm in the tense city of Algiers. A labyrinth of paved pathways winds through beds of hibiscus, cactuses and roses, shaded by palm and banana trees. In the lobby, bellhops in white tunics and red fezzes escort guests past Persian carpets and walls inlaid with mosaics. Beneath the opulence, violence lurks. During the week I was there, diplomats descended on the El-Djazair to repatriate the bodies of dozens of hostages killed in a shootout at a Sahara natural-gas plant between Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Algerian Army.

Violence was in the air as well in January 1956, when the celebrated writer Albert Camus checked into the Hotel Saint-George. The struggle against French colonialism was escalating, with civilians becoming the primary victims. Camus was a pied-noir—a term meaning “black foot,” perhaps derived from the coal-stained feet of Mediterranean sailors, or the black boots of French soldiers, and used to refer to the one million colonists of European origin living in Algeria during French rule. He had returned after 14 years in France to try to stop his homeland from sliding deeper into war. It was a perilous mission. Right-wing French settlers plotted to assassinate him. Algerian revolutionaries watched over him without his knowledge.

The Casablanca-style intrigue—freedom fighters, spies and an exotic North African setting—seemed appropriate. Camus, after all, was often thought of as a literary Humphrey Bogart—dashing, irresistible to women, a coolly heroic figure in a dangerous world.

Camus is regarded as a giant of French literature, but it was his North African birthplace that most shaped his life and his art. In a 1936 essay, composed during a bout of homesickness in Prague, he wrote of pining for “my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean…the summer evenings that I love so much, so gentle in the green light and full of young and beautiful women.” Camus set his two most famous works, the novels The Stranger and The Plague, in Algeria, and his perception of existence, a joyful sensuality combined with a recognition of man’s loneliness in an indifferent universe, was formed here.

In 1957, Anders Österling, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, acknowledged the importance of Camus’ Algerian upbringing when he presented him with the Nobel Prize in Literature, a towering achievement, won when he was only 43. Österling attributed Camus’ view of the world in part to a “Mediterranean fatalism whose origin is the certainty that the sunny splendor of the world is only a fugitive moment bound to be blotted out by the shades.”

Camus is “the single reason people outside Algeria know about this country,” says Yazid Ait Mahieddine, a documentary filmmaker and Camus expert in Algiers, as we sit beneath a photograph of the writer in the El- Djazair bar, alongside images of other celebrities who have passed through here, from Dwight Eisenhower to Simone de Beauvoir. “He is our only ambassador.”

***

Yet despite Camus’ monumental achievements and deep attachment to his native land, Algeria has never reciprocated that love. Camus is not part of the school curriculum; his books can’t be found in libraries or bookshops. Few plaques or memorials commemorate him. “Algeria has erased him,” says Hamid Grine, an Algerian novelist whose 2011 Camus dans le Narguilé (Camus in the Hookah) imagines a young Algerian who discovers that he is Camus’ illegitimate son, and embarks on a quest to learn about his real father.

In 2010, the 50th anniversary of Camus’ death in a car accident in France, a committee of intellectuals organized an event they called a “Camus Caravan”—readings in seven Algerian cities. But “the authorities refused to allow it,” I was told by one of the organizers, Fatima Bakhai, a lawyer in Oran, Algeria’s second-largest city. When Camus turns 100 this year, not a single official commemoration is planned. The neglect reflects, in part, the scars of the civil war that tore apart Algeria in the 1990s, leaving 100,000—mainly civilians—dead in fighting between Islamic militants and the military regime. Most Algerians “were too busy trying to survive to worry about our literary heritage,” say Mahieddine.

But it is also a product of Camus’ complex political views. Despite his revulsion toward French colonial prejudices and his sympathy toward Arabs, Camus believed until the end of his life that Algeria must remain part of France. Five decades later, as I discovered during a weeklong trip through Algeria on the eve of Camus’ centennial, memorials to the independence struggle are ubiquitous, resentment toward France remains strong and the Algerian government, largely made up of former freedom fighters, has willed a national forgetting of its country’s greatest writer. “Camus is regarded as a colonialist, and that’s taught in the schools,” says Catherine Camus, the author’s daughter, who lives in France and last visited Algeria in 1960, six months after her father’s death when she was 14, and who now manages his literary estate. But she insists that although her father spent his last decades in France, “he was entirely Algerian.”

“It is true that Camus positioned himself with his own little family of colonists,” says Mahieddine, who fought the resistance of superiors to make a documentary for state television about Camus’ life in Algeria. “But that should not deny his talent, his greatness as a writer, his Nobel Prize and his contribution to presenting the image of Algeria to the world.”

***

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, now Dréan, a town near Algeria’s northeast coast, 30 miles from the Tunisian border. His father, Lucien Auguste Camus, the grandson of poor immigrants from the Bordeaux region, worked in a wine cellar at a vineyard. In the opening weeks of World War I, at the Battle of the Marne, he was struck in the head by shrapnel, and died in a field hospital a few weeks later. Albert and his older brother, Lucien, were raised by their mother, Catherine Hélène Sintès-Camus, a deaf illiterate of Spanish origin. “Although she was able to read lips, some people thought her mute, or mentally retarded,” writes Olivier Todd in his authoritative biography Albert Camus: A Life. According to Camus, her vocabulary consisted of only 400 words.

When Albert was a boy, the family moved to an apartment at 93 rue de Lyon, in Algiers’ Belcourt neighborhood, a working-class district. Here Arabs and pieds-noirs lived side by side, but seldom intermingled. Albert shared three rooms with Lucien, their uncle Étienne, their maternal grandmother, and Catherine Hélène, who toiled as a cleaning woman. Camus admired her gentle stoicism, and she shaped his empathy for the poor and oppressed. “Camus always wanted to speak for those who had no voice,” says Catherine Camus. In addition, says Todd, “He was extraordinarily devoted to her.”

Camus’ boyhood home still stands: a two-story building with a wedding-dress shop on the ground floor. Out front, I meet the owner, Hamid Hadj Amar, a wary octogenarian who eventually leads my translator and me up a drab spiral staircase. The Camus place, in the rear, seems impossibly small: a tiny kitchen and three cramped bedrooms off a dark corridor. The room shared by Lucien and Albert is a 10- by 10-foot chamber with French windows opening onto a filigreed balcony. I stand on the tiny terrace and take in Camus’ view: a busy street, shade trees obscuring a block of three- and four-story buildings with deteriorating white facades, orange-tile roofs and balconies draped in drying laundry.

My translator-guide, Said, and I walk to the other landmarks of Camus’ Belcourt years, passing cafés filled with elderly Arab men playing dominoes and sipping mint tea. The streets present a microcosm of Algeria’s mixed society: fashionably dressed, Westernized women carrying baguettes home from French bakeries; a couple from the Salafist Islamic movement, the man with a long beard and white robe, the woman’s face concealed behind a black niqab.

A few blocks north, I can just make out Les Sablettes, the popular beach where Camus spent many a summer day. “I lived in destitution but also in a kind of sensual delight,” Camus once wrote, conjuring up a childhood of swimming, sunshine and soccer.

Down the block from 93 rue de Lyon, I come across the École Communale, Camus’ primary school. I push open the heavy metal gate and approach the late 19th-century Beaux-Arts relic, with curving, filigreed outdoor staircases. The stucco facade is peeling away. It was here that Camus met a compassionate teacher, Louis Germain, who “saw a bright young boy,” says Todd, tutored him after-hours, helped him obtain a high-school scholarship and introduced him to a “world of words.”

Two days after my visit to Belcourt, I’m hiking along the coast 40 miles west of Algiers. An intermittent drizzle washes over acres of Roman ruins that extend to the edges of the cliffs.

Tipasa, originally a Phoenician settlement, was captured by the Romans and developed into an important port nearly 2,000 years ago. It was one of Camus’ most beloved destinations. In his teens and 20s he and his friends would travel here by bus from Algiers and picnic among first-century temples and villas, and a fourth-century Christian basilica. “For me there is not a single one of those sixty-nine kilometers that is not filled with memories and sensations,” he wrote of his regular trip to Tipasa from Algiers in “Return to Tipasa,” a 1952 essay. “Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus’s motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening’s slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old heart.”

Camus’ years of teenage exuberance were cut short when, at the age of 17, doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. Constantly short of breath, he was forced to abandon a promising soccer career, and would suffer relapses throughout his life. Despite the often-debilitating illness, he graduated in 1936 from the University of Algiers with a philosophy degree. After a stint of uninspiring office work, Camus was hired in 1938 as a reporter for a new daily newspaper, the Alger Républicain, covering everything from murder trials to a famine in the mountain region of Kabylia, 50 miles east of Algiers. That exposé of government neglect infuriated colonial authorities. They shut down the paper and blacklisted Camus, making him unemployable as a journalist.

Said and I follow a trail along the cliffs, past grazing goats and gnarled olive trees. We thread through a field of truncated columns and tread gingerly across the disintegrating mosaic floor of a ruined villa. In “Nuptials at Tipasa,” one of four rapturous essays about his homeland published in 1938, Camus celebrated a world of sunshine and sensual pleasure. “In springtime, gods dwell in Tipasa,” he wrote, “speaking through the sun and wormwood perfume, the sea in its silver armor, and great bubbles of light in piles of rocks.”

***

One summer afternoon in 1939, on Bouisseville Beach, just west of Oran, an acquaintance of Camus’, Raoul Bensoussan, had a run-in with two Arabs who, he believed, had insulted his girlfriend. “Raoul returned with his brother to argue with the Arabs, and after a brawl he was injured by one of them, who had a knife,” Todd writes in his biography. Raoul came back armed with a small-caliber pistol, but the Arabs were arrested before he could pull the trigger.

From this encounter, Camus fashioned the novel that has come to define him. In the opening pages of The Stranger, his anthem of existentialism and alienation, Meursault, Camus’ strangely detached antihero, joins his mother’s funeral procession in the Algerian countryside. “The glare from the sky was unbearable,” he writes. “I could feel the blood pounding in my temples.” The sun of Tipasa has morphed into a sinister force in Meursault’s world—a catalyst for violence and symbol of a universe bleached of significance. Later, on a beach much like Bouisseville, Meursault encounters an Arab with a knife and shoots him to death for no other apparent reason than the unnerving brightness and heat. “It was the same sun as on the day I buried Maman and, like then,” he writes, “my forehead especially was hurting me, all of the veins pulsating together beneath the skin.”

Today the once-pristine beach that inspired Camus’ absurdist drama is barely recognizable. The sun that drove Meursault to distraction, then murder, is today buried behind a heavy cloud cover, typical of the Mediterranean winter. Trash covers the curving sweep of sand, a faint odor of urine is in the air and the beachfront is lined with dilapidated French villas, many abandoned. “My father used to see Camus and his wife here all the time,” a grizzled man who rents out sun umbrellas tells us. He directs us down the beach toward a trickle of raw sewage flowing into the sea. Seventy years ago, this stream might have been “the little spring, running down through the sand” where Meursault encountered the doomed Arab and his friends.

The Stranger concludes with Meursault in his cell, preparing for his execution, following a trial in which his lack of emotion at his mother’s funeral is cited as proof of his depravity. Facing imminent death on the guillotine, Camus’ protagonist acknowledges that existence is meaningless, yet he now rejoices in the sheer sensation of being alive. “For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the benign indifference of the world,” he declares in the last lines of the book, a cry of defiance and a joyful assertion of his humanity.

The Stranger was published in 1942, to ecstatic reviews. It earned the respect of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Left Bank philosopher with whom Camus soon formed a tempestuous friendship. Thanks in part to Sartre’s attention, Camus found himself transformed almost overnight from an obscure pied-noir journalist into a literary lion. In 1944, fifteen-year-old Olivier Todd found a dog-eared copy in the cupboard of a Jewish woman who had lent Todd and his mother her apartment in occupied Paris after she had fled the Nazis. “I went to the Luxembourg Garden, and read the novel there, 200 yards away from German sentries,” remembers Camus’ future biographer. He was taken, he says, by the “double-faced” nature of Camus, who found darkness and horror in the Algerian sunshine. “He will be remembered as a formidable prose writer, who was capable of dreaming up extraordinary stories,” Todd says.

***

In March 1940, unemployed in Algeria, Camus had gone into exile in France, arriving on the eve of the Nazi invasion. He found a job as a reporter for a newspaper in Lyon, a city under control of the collaborationist Vichy government. In January 1941, he married Francine Faure, a beautiful pianist and math teacher from Oran. But the same month, facing wartime privation, censorship and the threat of losing his job, Camus returned with his wife to Oran.

Late on a January afternoon, after a six-hour drive from Algiers, I arrive in Oran, a city of one and a half million near the Moroccan border. The narrow street where Camus and Francine lived during his Algerian interlude is lined in faded-white buildings. Camus often whiled away the hours at the nearby Brasserie la Cintra on an avenue flanked by date palms. High above the city looms the Murjajo, a stone fortress constructed by Oran’s Spanish conquerors, who ruled here between 1509 and 1708, when the city fell to the Ottomans.

Despite the city’s history and vibrant multi-ethnicity, Camus disparaged Oran as “the capital of boredom” and disliked the seedy dockyards and industrial works that separated the city from the Mediterranean. Camus was unemployed, debilitated by tuberculosis and appalled by the surge of anti-Semitism under the Vichy regime. More than 110,000 Algerian Jews lost their French citizenship. A close friend of Camus’ was fired from his job as a high-school teacher, the words “French citizen” replaced by “native Jew” in his passport. “The return to Oran, considering the conditions of my life here, is not a step forward,” he wrote a friend in 1941. But, says Todd, Camus also found much to love about the city. “The Spanish character of Oran meant a lot to him,” he says. “The Spanish architecture, the way people ate, the way they lived, reminded him of the part of him that was Spanish.” “He loved and hated the city at the same time,” Todd says.

Camus lived with Francine in Oran for 18 months. In August 1942, they traveled back to France, where Camus recuperated in the mountains from a relapse of tuberculosis. Francine returned to Algeria and Camus planned to join her. But in November, the Allies invaded North Africa; Camus was stranded in France.

Outraged by the Nazi occupation, he became editor in chief of the resistance newspaper Combat. He and the other editors—including Sartre, André Malraux and Raymond Aron—produced articles denouncing the Nazis, and secretly printed 185,000 weekly copies on clandestine presses in Paris. It was dangerous work: Camus had one close call in 1943, when he was stopped by the Gestapo and managed to dispose of a layout copy of the paper before being searched.

During the war, Camus also began working on what many regard as his masterpiece, the allegorical novel The Plague, a meditation on exile, occupation and resistance. Set in Oran, the fable unfolds with an outbreak of bubonic plague that kills hundreds of people a day and forces authorities to seal the gates to prevent the pestilence from spreading. The contagion, like the Nazi occupation of France, brings out both venal and noble qualities in Oran’s populace. One character profiteers by selling contraband cigarettes and low-quality liquor. Camus’ heroes, the physician Bernard Rieux and the journalist Raymond Rambert, courageously tend the sick and dying. Both are cut off from the women they love, but place a sense of moral responsibility over happiness. “In its calm and exact objectivity, this convincingly realistic narrative reflects experiences of life during the Resistance,” declared his 1957 Nobel Prize testimonial, “and Camus extols the revolt which the conquering evil arouses in the heart of the intensely resigned and disillusioned man.”

Camus, too, was afflicted by, as his character Rieux describes it, “those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.” But he was serially unfaithful to his wife during their long period of separation. Francine reunited with her husband in Paris after the German defeat. The Plague was published, to great acclaim, in 1947, two years after the birth of the Camus twins, Jean and Catherine, in Paris. Camus’ relationship with Francine remained rocky, but he developed a close bond with his children. “He was full of life, he laughed a lot, he was down-to-earth, he was a real father,” says Catherine, who recalls with deep affection her trips back to Algeria in the 1950s with her father. Catherine says that her father “didn’t communicate any idea of his importance,” even after winning the Nobel Prize. It was only after his death that she began to understand his significance to the world.

***

After my return to Algiers, I make my way to a hilltop overlooking the bay, crossing a plaza to the Martyrs’ Monument: three concrete palm fronds that soar to 300 feet, encasing an eternal flame. The bronze statue of an Algerian freedom fighter stands at the base of each giant frond. This colossus commemorates the conflict that erupted here on November 1, 1954, when National Liberation Front (FLN) guerrillas carried out attacks on gendarmeries. Nearby I visit the Military Museum, which traces the conflict through blood-curdling dioramas of ambushes by mujahedin and torture chambers run by the French military.

Camus had often demonstrated his opposition to the abuses of the colonial system, from his exposé of the famine in Kabylia to his May 1945 investigative trip for Combat to Setif, site of an anti-French protest by Algerian veterans that had triggered a massacre by French forces. As the war escalated, he looked on with horror at attacks against civilians by French ultranationalists and the army. But while he was sympathetic to the idea of greater autonomy for Algeria, he was also disgusted by FLN bombings of cafés and buses and rejected demands for independence. In 1956 he arrived in Algiers with the hope of arranging a truce between the FLN and French forces. “Camus came as a figure of great moral authority, granted to him by his status as a writer, his role in the Resistance and his editorials in Combat. But the idea that he could alone effect change is exaggerated,” says Alice Kaplan, a Camus scholar at Yale University who edited a new anthology of Camus’ Algeria-related writing, Algerian Chronicles.

The visit was a humiliating failure. The two sides had passed the point of reconciliation, and even supposedly neutral Algerian leaders who escorted Camus to meetings were working secretly for the FLN. Besieged by shouts of “death to Camus” from right-wing French zealots in an Algiers meeting hall, Camus returned to France, shaken.

Camus continued to seek a middle path. He intervened with French authorities to save the lives of dozens of condemned mujahedin, but refused to support the armed struggle. “People are now planting bombs on the tramways of Algiers,” he famously told an FLN sympathizer following his acceptance of the 1957 Nobel. “My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” The FLN never forgave him for rejecting its cause. Eventually, Camus stopped commenting altogether on the war, a retreat that some equated with cowardice, but that Camus justified, saying that any comment he made would inflame one side or the other.

In Camus’ “Letter to an Algerian Militant,” published in Kaplan’s Algerian Chronicles, he equates the pain he felt about the Algerian War with the “hurt in his lungs.” By the time the war ended in March 1962, anywhere from a half-million to more than one million Arab civilians and freedom fighters were dead, along with nearly 40,000 French soldiers and pieds-noirs. A million pieds-noirs fled to France; others were massacred in Oran and other Algerian cities, while still others disappeared. (Camus’ mother died of natural causes in Algiers in September 1960.) Outside the former Barberousse prison, next to the Casbah, I studied a stone tablet that listed, in Arabic, the names of hundreds of fighters executed on the guillotine by the French occupiers.

Camus’ equivocating role during the Algerian War has never stopped igniting controversy. Columbia University historian Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, berated Camus for having an “incapacitated colonial sensibility.” Particularly damning for Camus’ critics is the absence of developed Arab characters in the author’s body of fiction, a telling indication, they say, that while Camus sympathized with Arabs in general, he cared little about them as individuals. Kaplan says that Camus was simply a product of his time, and the deeply segregated society from which he came. “He knew the settler population, their poverty and their issues,” she says. Even so, many Algerian Arab writers “are deeply engaged with Camus.”

For Olivier Todd, the quality that resonates for him is Camus’ “honesty,” his refusal to insist on absolute truth. “He is constantly doubting. He has doubts about the Communists, about the future of Algeria, even about himself,” Todd says. Yet it took Todd decades to warm up to him. Todd met Camus twice, once in a Paris café in 1948, when the writer sat down at the counter with a newspaper and ogled Todd’s young wife. “I was furious,” says Todd. “I said aloud, ‘Who is this asshole? Who does he think he is?’” A decade later he was introduced to Camus on the Boulevard St. Germain and “disliked him intensely. His clothes were much too loud, and he was aggressive with me. He defended the pieds-noirs too much.” But after five years immersed in his life and literature, after hundreds of interviews and repeated trips to Algeria, “My feelings about him have changed completely,” Todd says. “I ended up liking him immensely.”

For Kaplan and other admirers, Camus was, above all, a humanist, who believed in the sanctity of life, the folly of killing for an ideology and the urgency of peaceful coexistence. “There is a Camus for every stage of life,” says Kaplan, trying to explain Camus’ staying power and relevance today. “Adolescents can identify with the alienation of Meursault. The Plague is for when you’re in college, politically engaged and sympathetic with resistance.” The Fall, Camus’ 1956 novel about the crisis of conscience of a successful Parisian lawyer, “is for 50-year-olds. It is angry, acrimonious, confronting the worst things you know about yourself.” And The First Man, a beautifully rendered, unfinished autobiographical novel published posthumously in 1994, “is Camus’ Proustian moment, his looking back on his life. You can spend your whole life with Camus.”

In a field near the sea at Tipasa stands one of Algeria’s only monuments to the writer, a headstone erected by his friends after he died in January 1960, at the age of 46, in a car crash with his publisher, Michel Gallimard, near the French town of Sens. At the time he was living in Lourmarin, a village in the Vaucluse, where his daughter lives today. (According to Todd, Camus said that the hills near his home “always remind me of Algeria.”) Weathered by the wind, the French inscription is barely legible, and the name “Albert Camus” has been defaced with a knife by someone with a grudge. The inscription is a quote from the 1938 essay “Nuptials at Tipasa,” written before the horrors of war and the personal struggles that would shadow his rise to greatness. “Here I understand what they call glory,” it reads, in homage to the seaside ruins where he spent some of his most joyful moments. “The right to love without limits.”

…ON IMPERIALISM, WAR, AND UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY: 2012-2013

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By HARRY TARG

Monday, July 15, 2013

WAR, MILITARISM, AND RESISTANCE: REVISITING CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

Imperialism

I still find compelling the main points about modern imperialism articulated by Lenin in his famous essay on the subject. Reflecting on the transformations of capitalism from its early manufacturing days until the twentieth century he argued that economic concentration had replaced a multiplicity of semi-independent economic actors, manufacturing capital had merged with financial institutions creating a system of monopoly finance capital, and as a consequence the export of capital–what we would call today foreign investment, financial speculation, and the debt system–would replace the export of commodities as the dominant form of economic exchange on a global basis. During some periods capitalist states would divide up the world each extracting wealth of all kinds from its own sphere of influence and during other periods they would engage in competition and even war to pursue profits. Lenin could not foresee a time, from the mid-20^th century until now, when resistance would come not only from competing and militarized capitalist states but from masses of people in colonized, neocolonial, and dependent societies.

The Cold War and Post-Cold War International Systems

The latest phase of the system Lenin described was constructed at the end of World War II. The United States emerged from the war as the most powerful nation and used military, economic, political, and cultural tools to enshrine its dominance. This meant building a system to crush the emerging Socialist Bloc, controlling the drive toward independence of former colonies, and shaping the politics of lesser but significant capitalist states. To achieve these difficult goals, the United States began to construct a “permanent war economy.”

By the 1960s, the United States capacity to control the economic and military destiny of the world was severely challenged. The Tet Offensive of January, 1968 represented a metaphoric great divide as U.S. presumptions of hegemony were sorely challenged by a poor but passionate Vietnamese people’s army. From the late 1960s onward the U.S. was challenged not only on the battlefield but in the global economy. Rates of profit of U.S. corporations declined. Industrialization had led to overproduction. Working classes in the United States and other capitalist countries had gained more rights and privileges. Socialist countries were experiencing significant growth spurts. Countries of the Global South began to demand a New International Economic Order that regulated the way global capitalism worked. In addition, inter-capitalist rivalry grew. On top of all this the price of oil increased markedly.

The response of the global capitalist powers (the G7 countries) to the crisis of capitalism was a dramatic shift in the pursuit of profit from the production of goods and services to what became known as financialization, or financial speculation. The banks Lenin talked about became instrumental. With rising oil prices, oil rich countries awash in new profits, and banks swelling with petrodollars, nations were enticed and forced to borrow to pay for the oil that cost many times more than it had in the recent past. The global debt system was launched. When the United States freed the dollar from the gold standard, currencies themselves became a source of speculation.

The debt system gave international financial institutions and banks the power to impose demands on countries that required loans. Thus, the IMF, the World Bank, regional international banks, and private institutions demanded that the world’s countries open their doors to foreign investors, cut their government programs, privatize their economies, and shift to exporting commodities to earn the cash to pay back the bankers. The era of neoliberalism was advanced by globalization, the scientific, technological, and cultural capacity to traverse the globe. No geographic space could maintain autonomy from global capitalism. So a Cold War that was launched by creating a permanent war economy was transformed by financialization, neoliberalism, and globalization. With the shift of work from higher wage capitalist centers to low wage peripheries, deindustrialization became a common feature of the economic landscape.

By the 21^st century the system of neoliberal globalization was facilitated by new techniques of empire. Wars which traditionally had been fought between states were now fought within states. The United States established a military presence virtually all across the globe with an estimated 700 to 1,000 military installations in at least 40 countries. Major functions of the globalization of military operations had become privatized so massive U.S. corporations gained even more profits from war-making than they had during the days of the Cold War. The military—public and private—began to engage in assassinations and covert “humanitarian interventions.” And, aided by new technologies, the United States and other capitalist countries, using unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, could make war on enemies without “boots on the ground.” As we have learned, intelligence gathering, spying on people, has immeasurably advanced as well.

To put it succinctly, while imperialism remains generically as it has been throughout history today:

• -Imperialism has become truly global.
• -The military continues to be big business, sucking up at least half of the federal budget.
• -The United States has developed the capacity to fight wars without soldiers on the ground.
• -Empires, particularly the United States empire, kill with impunity.
• -The connections between economic interest and militarism remain central.
• -Ideologies defending 21^st century military interventions vary from those neoconservatives who argue that the United States must use its power to maximize our global position to the humanitarian interventionists who claim that the United States acts in the world for good.

Resistance

This narrative is not unfamiliar to us. What is less familiar is the idea that throughout history the forces of domination have been challenged by resistance, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. It is important to note that the drive for U.S. hegemony, for example, has been affected by resistance. A recent articulation of this narrative appears in the writings of Vijay Prashad, who has described the efforts of the newly independent nations of the Global South to achieve political and economic sovereignty. Many of these efforts from the 1950s to the 1970s faltered at the steps of the debt system and neoliberal globalization. But the struggle has continued. In addition, there have been examples of people such as the Cubans and the Vietnamese who, with much pain and suffering, were able to achieve some measure of economic sovereignty and political independence.

21^st century movements for change are varied and complicate the efforts of imperialism to achieve its goals. Resistance includes the following:

• -Mercosur, a trade organization that includes Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and others waiting for admittance constitutes the third largest trading bloc in the world.
• -The development of collaborative relationships among powerful Global South nations. For example, representatives from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) recently met to chart an independent agenda in global affairs.
• -The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) consists of ten Latin American/Caribbean countries which are launching a program of economic integration and political cooperation.
• -The Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) is a new grouping of some 33 Western Hemisphere nations, minus the United States and Canada, which will seek to expand regional collaboration.
• -Individual nations, based on their historic resistance to imperialism, such as Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Bolivia, continue to inspire activists.
• -The United Nations system, considerably weakened from the days of the Cold War, still engages in global mobilizations through its conferences, support for some progressive NGOs, and projects involving education, development, and peacekeeping. Affiliated organized such as the International Labor Organization pursue goals that are sometimes independent of imperial agendas.
• -Global anti-capitalist mobilizations, such as the World Social Forum, have brought together thousands of activists largely from the Global South to discuss the problems faced by workers, women, indigenous people, environmental activists, and others.
• -Perhaps most important at this time is the grassroots mobilizations of millions of people all across the globe demanding economic justice, worker rights, gender equality, environmental justice, and peace. Such mobilizations, while stimulated by local issues, are defined as part of a global movement such as “From Tahrir Square to Madison, Wisconsin.” People worldwide, particularly the young, workers, and women are seeing the common dimensions of struggle against imperialism.

Where Do Left and Progressive Forces Fit?

First, we on the left need to “bring imperialism back in;” that is socialist organizations can through education revisit and revise the theory of imperialism so that it is more serviceable for 21^st century socialist movements.

Second, progressives should link war/peace issues to environmental issues, to gender issues, to class issues, and race issues. As Martin Luther King declared in 1967: “I speak of the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

Third, every socialist and progressive organization should challenge the permanent war economy. Andrew Bacevich pointed out that the framers of the permanent war economy in the 1940s believed that the role of the citizenry was to remain quiescent, pliant, and supportive of the decisions made by the foreign policy establishment. That assumption must be resisted.

Fourth, local and national work should link economic justice, environmental preservation, and peace. These issues are inextricably connected.

Finally, left and progressive groups should respond to specific imperial transgressions by:

• -working to cut military budgets
• -opposing drone warfare
• -saying no to US military aid to Syrian rebels
• -supporting the just demands of the Palestinian people
• -challenging the construction of military bases in Asia
• -demanding an end to subversion in Latin America
• -calling for the release of the Cuban 5
• -insisting on the end of the Cuban blockade.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY, AGAIN!

In 2011 the grassroots revolts that spread all across the Middle East caught the traditional imperial powers in the region–the United States, Great Britain, and France– by surprise. Even more so, the Middle East theocracies and dictatorships–Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and others–were threatened by those young people, workers, unemployed, and women, who took to the streets motivated by the vision of another world. The United States watched the street protests hoping against hope that the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt would weather the storm. The Obama administration did not move publicly to aid these regimes to crush the protest but withheld its endorsement of the grassroots democracy movement. The idea of popular revolt spread to places all across the globe including Madison, Wisconsin; Santiago, Chile; Athens, Greece; Madrid, Spain; and Quebec, Canada. The Occupy Movements in the United States expanded. 
Globally, movements for a 21^st century democratization seemed to be replicating 1968.

In this historic context, the imperial powers needed to transform the Middle East narrative from demands for jobs, worker rights, women’s rights, and democratization to the more traditional religious and ethnic conflict model of Middle East politics. The United States organized a United Nations/NATO coalition to intervene to encourage rebellion in Libya coupled with a game-changing air war against the Libyan military. The result was the overthrow of the government of Muammar Gaddafi and its replacement by a quarrelsome ungovernable regime rife with ethnic strife. The UN/NATO war on Libya was billed as the next phase of Arab Spring, while actually it imposed religious and ethnic conflict on a relatively stable but authoritarian regime.

The anger over the US encouragement and military intervention in the Libyan civil war was reflected in the killings by Libyan terrorists of CIA operatives in Benghazi, Libya in September, 2012. What intervention in Libya did was to destabilize that society and eliminate its former dictator who was opposed to the growing US military expansion in North Africa. Most important, it took off the front pages and the hearts and minds of youth, the poor, women, and trade unionists the hope of mass movements to bring about democratic change in the region.

US covert and military intervention has shifted now from Libya to Syria. Mobilization against the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria was applauded by the United States. As the protest escalated into civil war in that country with contestants including secular and religious groups fighting against Assad’s army, the United States, Sunni countries of the Arab League, and NATO countries escalated their support to the rebels. Another Libya-style UN/NATO military operation was thwarted by strong opposition from Russia and China and the threat of growing military support for the Syrian regime by Iran.

Part of the ongoing story of Syria is the following:

• 1.The United States launched its diplomatic involvement in the Syrian civil war by insisting that Bashar al-Assad must step down. This precluded any possibility of a diplomatic settlement of the civil war and the eventual dismantling of the Assad regime. Most important, the United States non-negotiable demand made diplomatic collaboration between the United States and Russia all but impossible.
• 2.Support for various rebel factions, diplomatic and presumably covert, has encouraged the escalation of opposition violence which was matched by state violence.
• 3.Rebel factions, ironically, have included groups with profiles that resemble the terrorists who were responsible for the 9/11 murders in the United States and terrorist attacks on various targets in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
• 4.Violence and political instability have begun to spread to Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, and have drawn Israel and Iran closer into regional war.
• 5.As the Syrian civil war has escalated it has become a “proxy” war between the United States and Russia and Sunni and Shia Muslims.
• 6.In the United States, the civil war in Syria has rekindled the war factions. These include the “neoconservatives” who were responsible for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Using 9/11 and lies about weapons of mass destruction the neoconservatives influenced the Bush administration to pursue their agenda to use United States power to transform the globe in its interests.
• The neoconservatives, advocates of United States military intervention in Syria, are now joined by the “humanitarian interventionists” who in the Clinton Administration supported bombing campaigns in Iraq, Serbia, and Bosnia and live by the ideology that the United States must use its military power to promote human rights around the world.
• It is important to note that recent polling data suggests that only a small percentage of the American people, about 20 percent, give any support to United States involvement in Syria. Most Americans are suffering from declining jobs, income, and social safety nets, and reject the war economy and militarism that has characterized the U.S. role in the world since 1945.
• 7.The escalation of the civil war, the growing military role of the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, NATO, Hezbollah from Lebanon, and Israel has led to nearly 100,000 Syrian deaths and more than a million refugees. As in most international wars, innocent people suffer and die as military decisions are made in government capitals.

The case is clear that increasing the United States military involvement in Syria has negative consequences for the Middle East, international relations, the inspiration of Arab Spring, American politics, and the people of Syria. The hope for a more just and peaceful future requires support for the resumption of the spirit and vision of the original Arab Spring that began in Tunisia and Egypt and spread all across the globe. Otherwise the United States will once again be “waist deep in the big muddy” as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

COLD WAR IV: FIRST WILSON, THEN TRUMAN, CARTER, AND REAGAN, NOW THE HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONISTS

The Cold War began in 1917 as Woodrow Wilson marshaled money and political allies at home and abroad to isolate, subvert, and finally send troops to overthrow the new Bolshevik Revolution. After 15 years of non-recognition and economic blockade and seven years looking the other way as the Nazi war machine grew and grew, the United States collaborated with the militarily powerful Soviet Union to defeat fascist armies in Europe and the Far East.

After World War II, Cold War II started. The United States built a massive war machine, the biggest in world history, to challenge the global presence and influence of the Soviet Union. However, by the 1970s, with growing challenges to U.S. global power, the Nixon Administration launched a policy of “détente,” that is, warming of relations with its Cold War adversary.

Detente did not last as President Carter resumed the Cold War in 1979, by sending funds to help anti- government religious fundamentalist guerrillas fight the central government of Afghanistan, at that time allied with the Soviet Union. President Reagan in 1981 returned full-force to the Cold War spending more on defense during his first term, than all that was spent on the military throughout U.S. history. The enormous military expenditures, domestic economic crises, and declining political legitimacy of Soviet Bloc countries led to their collapse. The former Soviet Union broke up in 1991.

Now the Cold War is being resumed with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The size and name of the enemy country has changed but the key foreign policy decision-makers in Washington have not. Some, the “neo-conservatives” who dominated the Bush foreign policy team, argue that as the most powerful country in the world, the United States must take the opportunity to construct a world order based on political regimes we prefer. If we have the power, they say, use it.

And since the 1990s they have excoriated the other foreign policy faction, the “humanitarian interventionists” who dominated the Clinton presidency of the 1990s and seem to be influencing Obama foreign policy today. For the humanitarian interventionists U.S. foreign policy is not just about using American power. It is also about making the world a better place, at the point of a gun, through global propaganda, using the debt system to require countries receiving aid to change their economies, and sanctimoniously condemning others for not measuring up to U.S. standards of justice.

In the end, these foreign policy elite factions are two sides of a singular coin. They both advocate strong militaries. They both promote U.S. military institutions around the world. They both express criticisms of the shortcomings of others as to democracy, human rights, and so-called free markets and development.

Neither faction understands that the 21^st century international system is radically different than the one that existed during the height of the Cold War. The relative power of the United States militarily, economically, and ideologically is declining. New giants, China, India, and Brazil, for example, are encroaching on a once hegemonic international economic and political order. Countries of the Global South, in Latin America particularly, are coalescing around reformist agendas to transform their place in global society. Grassroots movements everywhere are rising up, not only against their own repressive regimes but the entire international system. And the newly emerging great powers, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) have been meeting to discuss transforming global institutions and processes.

The Obama foreign policy team, largely humanitarian interventionists but egged on by neoconservatives in the executive branch and the Congress, believes the U.S. can still influence global policy by condemning competing powers. They claim they are motivated by the good; for example condemnation of Russia’s odious homophobic policies. But they really are trying to turn back the clock.

Liberal media support the humanitarian interventionists and frame the narrative of today’s U.S./Russian conflict as one between the altruistic former and the dictatorial latter. Putin is driven by his own quest for absolute power at home. As in the cases of prior Cold Wars, according to liberal commentators, Putin supports evil regimes in the world: Iran and Syria for example. In addition, he gleefully gives a home to whistleblower Edward Snowdon. And, while America institutionalizes a racist “new Jim Crow” system of criminal justice, commentators appropriately castigate the Russians for their horrific repression of gays and lesbians, and at the same time imply mistakenly that the United States is the standard for human rights.
In short, as in the old days of the Cold Wars from Wilson through Reagan, the renewed narrative, which seems to be moving toward a new Cold War, is about “good guys versus bad guys,” not one in which new powers, from the streets to the networks of countries from the Global South are saying “enough is enough” to traditional imperial powers.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

THE EMPIRE IN DISARRAY: GLOBAL CHALLENGES TO THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

A whole generation of activists has “grown up” conversant with the central place of empire in human history. Children of the Cold War and the “Sixties” generation realized that the United States was the latest of a multiplicity of imperial powers which sought to dominate and control human beings, physical space, natural resources, and human labor power. We learned from the Marxist tradition, radical historians, scholar/activists with historical roots in Africa, and revolutionaries from the Philippines and Vietnam to Southern Africa, to Latin America. But we often concluded that imperialism was hegemonic; that is it was all powerful, beyond challenge.

A “theory of imperialism” for the 21^st century should include four interconnected variables that explain empire building and as well as responses to it. First, as an original motivation for empire, economic interests are primary. The most recent imperial power, the United States needed to secure customers for its products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, an open door for financial speculation, and vital natural resources such as oil.

Second, the pursuit of military control parallels and supports the pursuit of economic domination. The United States, beginning in the 1890s, built a two-ocean navy to become a Pacific power, as well as institutionalizing its control of the Western Hemisphere. It crushed revolutionary ferment in the Philippines during the Spanish, Cuban, American War and began a program of military intervention in Central American and the Caribbean. The “Asian pivot” of the 21^st century and continued opposition to the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions reflect the one hundred year extension of the convergence of economics and militarism in U.S. foreign policy.

Third, as imperial nations flex their muscles on the world stage they need to rationalize exploitation and military brutality to convince others and their own citizens of the humanistic goals they wish to achieve. In short, ideology matters. In the U.S. case “manifest destiny” and the “city on the hill,” that is the dogma that the United States has a special mission as a beacon of hope for the world, have been embedded in the dominant national narrative of the country for 150 years.

However, what has often been missing from the leftwing theoretical calculus is an understanding of resistance. Latin American and African dependency theorists and “bottom-up” historians have argued for a long time that resistance must be part of the understanding of any theory of imperialism. In fact, the imperial system is directly related to the level of resistance the imperial power encounters.

Resistance generates more attempts at economic hegemony, political subversion, the application of military power, and patterns of “humanitarian interventionism” and diplomatic techniques, called “soft power,” to defuse it. But as recent events suggest resistance of various kinds is spreading throughout global society.

The impetus for adding resistance to any understanding of imperialism has many sources including Howard Zinn’s seminal history of popular movements in the United States, “The People’s History of the United States.” Zinn argued convincingly that in each period of American history ruling classes were challenged, shaped, weakened, and in a few cases defeated because of movements of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, middle class progressives and others who stood up to challenge the status quo.

More recently, Vijay Prashad, author of “The Darker Nations,” compiled a narrative of post-World War II international relations that privileged the resistance from the Global South. World history was as much shaped by anti-colonial movements, the construction of the non-aligned movement, conferences and programs supporting liberation struggles and women’s rights, as it was by big power contestation. The Prashad book was subtitled “A People’s History of the Third World.”

The 21^st century has witnessed a variety of forms of resistance to global hegemony and the perpetuation of neo-liberal globalization all across the face of the globe. First, various forms of systemic resistance have emerged. These often emphasize the reconfiguration of nation-states and their relationships that have long been ignored. The two largest economies in the world, China and India, have experienced economic growth rates well in excess of the industrial capitalist countries. China has developed a global export and investment program in Latin America and Africa that exceeds that of the United States and Europe.

In addition, the rising economic powers have begun a process of global institution building to rework the international economic institutions and rules of decision-making on the world stage. On March 26-27, 2013, the BRICS met in Durban, South Africa. While critical of BRICS shortcomings Patrick Bond, Senior Professor of Development Studies and Director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, in a collection of readings on the subject introduces BRICS with an emphasis on its potential:

In Durban, five heads of state meet to assure the rest of Africa that their countries’ corporations are better investors in infrastructure, mining, oil and agriculture than the traditional European and US multinationals. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA summit also includes 16 heads of state from Africa, including notorious tyrants. A new ‘BRICS bank’ will probably be launched. There will be more talk about monetary alternatives to the US dollar.

On the Latin American continent, most residents of the region are mourning the death of Hugo Chavez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. Under Chavez’s leadership, inspiration, and support from oil revenues, Venezuela launched the latest round of state resistance to the colossus of the north, the United States.

Along with the world’s third largest trade bloc MERCOSUR (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela and associate memberships including Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru), Latin Americans have participated in the construction of financial institutions and economic assistance programs to challenge the traditional hegemony of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

The Bolivarian Revolution also has stimulated political change based on various degrees of grassroots democratization, the construction of workers’ cooperatives, and a shift from neo-liberal economic policy to economic populism. With a growing web of participants, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and, of course, Cuba, the tragic loss of Chavez will not mean the end to the Bolivarian Revolution. It might lead to its deepening.

But the story of 21^st century resistance is not just about countries, alliances, new economic institutions that mimic the old. Grassroots social movements have been spreading like wild fire all across the face of the globe. The story can begin in many places and at various times: the new social movements of the 1980s; the Zapatistas of the 1990s; the anti-globalization/anti-IMF campaigns going back to the 1960s and continuing off and on until the new century; or repeated mass mobilizations against a Free Trade Agreement for the Americas.

Since 2011, the world has been inspired by Arab Spring, workers’ mobilizations all across the industrial heartland of the United States, student strikes in Quebec, the state of California, and in Santiago, Chile. Beginning in 2001 mass organizations from around the world began to assemble in Porto Alegre, Brazil billing their meeting of some 10,000 strong, the World Social Forum. They did not wish to create a common political program. They wished to launch a global social movement where ideas are shared, issues and demands from the base of societies could be raised, and in general the neo-liberal global agenda reinforced at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland could be challenged.

The World Social Forum has been meeting annually ever since in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the United States. Most recently, the last week in March, 2013, 50,000 people from 5,000 organizations in 127 countries from five continents met in Tunis, the site of the protest that sparked Arab Spring two years ago. Planners wanted to bring mass movements from the Middle East and North Africa into the collective narrative of this global mobilization.

Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, reported that a Tunisian student, when asked whether the Social Forum movement should continue, answered in the affirmative. The student paid homage to the Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who committed suicide and launched Arab Spring. He declared that “for all those who have died struggling for justice, we must continue to learn from each other how to build a world that does not respond to the greed of dictators, bankers or corporations, but to the needs of simple people like Mohamed Bouazizi.”

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

WE NEED TO EXPAND THE IRAQ WAR SYNDROME

In a November/December 2005 Foreign Affairs article, “The Iraq Syndrome,” …. I argued that there would likely be growing skepticism about the notions that “the United States should take unilateral military action to correct situations or overthrow regimes it considers reprehensible but that present no immediate threat to it, that it can and should forcibly bring democracy to other nations not now so blessed, that it has the duty to rid the world of evil, that having by far the largest defense budget in the world is necessary and broadly beneficial, that international cooperation is of only very limited value, and that Europeans and other well-meaning foreigners are naive and decadent wimps.” Most radically, I went on to suggest that the United States might “become more inclined to seek international cooperation, sometimes even showing signs of humility.” John Mueller, “The Iraq Syndrome Revisited,” Foreign Affairs, March 28, 2011: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67681/john-mueller/the-iraq-syndrome-revisited

David Halberstam reported in his important book, “The Best and the Brightest,” that President Roosevelt directed his State Department to develop a position on what United States foreign policy toward Indochina should be after the World War in Asia was ended. Two choices were possible in 1945: support the Vietnamese national liberation movement that bore the brunt of struggle against Japanese occupation of Indochina or support the French plan to reoccupy the Indochinese states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

As the Cold War escalated the United States rejected Ho Chi Minh’s plea for support for independence and began funding the French in their effort to reestablish colonialism in Indochina. When the French were defeated by the Viet Minh forces in 1954, the United States stepped in and fought a murderous war until the collapse of the US South Vietnamese puppet regime in 1975.

Paralleling the struggle for power in Indochina, competing political forces emerged after the World War on the Korean Peninsula. With the Soviet Union and China supporting the North Koreans and the United States supporting a regime created by it in the South a shooting war, a civil war, between Koreans ensued in 1950 which continued until an armistice was established in 1953. That armistice, not peace, continues to this day as a war of words and periodic provocations.

Political scientist John Mueller analyzed polling data concerning the support for U.S. military action in Korea and Vietnam, discovering that in both wars there was a steady and parallel decline in support for them. Working class Americans were the most opposed to both wars at every data point. Why? Because working class men and women were most likely to be drafted to fight and their loved ones the most likely to suffer the pain of soldiers coming home dead, scarred, or disabled.

Polling data from the period since the onset of the Iraq war followed the pattern Mueller found in reference to Korea and Vietnam. In all three cases levels of support for U.S. war making declined as the length of the wars increased and casualties rose. The American people typically gave the Presidents some flexibility when the wars started and the rally round the flag phenomena prevailed. But then resistance grew.

Throughout the period from the end of the Vietnam War until the 1990s, each presidential administration was faced with what foreign policy elites called “the Vietnam Syndrome.” This was a pejorative term these elites used to scornfully describe what they correctly believed would be the resistance to foreign military interventions that they periodically wished to initiate.

President Reagan wanted to invade El Salvador to save its dictatorship and to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He would have preferred to send troops to Angola to defend the anti-communist forces of Jonas Savimbi of UNITA. To overcome the resistance to launching what could become another Vietnam quagmire, policymakers had to engage in “low intensity conflict,” convert operations that would minimize what the American people could learn about what their government was doing and who it was supporting. Reagan did expand globally and sent troops to tiny Granada, but even Reagan’s globalism, militarism, and interventionism was somewhat constrained by the fear of public outrage.

President George Herbert Walker Bush launched a six-month campaign to convince the American people that military action was needed to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Despite a weak endorsement of such action by the Congress, the American people supported Gulf War 1 because casualties were small and the war lasted only a month. During a press conference announcing the Gulf War’s end in February, 1991, Bush proclaimed that “at last we licked the Vietnam Syndrome.”

Clinton knew better. He limited direct US military action to supporting NATO bombing in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, bombed targets in Iraq in so-called “no-fly zones in 1998,” , bombed Serbia in a defense of Kosovo in 1999 and used economic embargoes to weaken so-called “rogue states” throughout his eight years in office.

It was President George Walker Bush who launched long and devastating wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration used the sorrow and anger of the American people after the 9/11 terrorist acts to lie, deceive, aggress, and qualitatively increase the development of a warfare state. As Mueller has suggested an “Iraq Syndrome” had surfaced by 2005 as the lies about that war became public, the war costs were headed toward trillions of dollars in expenditures, and troop deaths and disabilities escalated. And of course an historically repressive society, Iraq, was so destroyed that U.S. troops left it in shambles with hundreds of thousands dead, disabled, and in abject poverty.

As we reflect on the ten-year anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War in March, 2003, the madmen inside the beltway are talking about increasing U.S. military involvement in Syria, not “taking any options off the table” in Iran, and threatening North Korea. Meanwhile the United States is beefing up its military presence in the Pacific to “challenge” rising Chinese power, establishing AFRICOM to respond to “terrorism” on the African continent, and speaking with scorn about the leadership in Latin America of recently deceased Hugo Chavez.

The American people must escalate commitment to its “syndromes” demanding in no uncertain terms an end to United States militarism. Mueller’s call for a U.S. foreign policy that emphasizes cooperation over conflict motivated by humility over arrogance is the least the country can do to begin the process of repairing the damage it has done to global society.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

SIXTY YEARS OF BLOWBACK: IRAN

Chalmers Johnson wrote in 2001 about “blowback” that it “is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government’s international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA’s fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded.…. This misguided ‘covert operation’ of the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy.” (The Nation, October 15, 2001).

The CIA initiated overthrow of the regime of Mohammed Mossadegh sixty years ago on August 19, 1953 was precipitated by what Melvin Gurtov called “the politics of oil and cold war together.” Because it was the leading oil producer in the Middle East and the fourth largest in the world and it was geographically close to the former Soviet Union, President Eisenhower was prevailed upon to launch the CIA covert war on Iran long encouraged by Great Britain.

The immediate background for the ouster of Mossadegh was Iran’s nationalization of its oil production. Most Iranians were living in poverty in the 1940s as the Iranian government received only ten percent of the royalties on its oil sales on the world market. The discrepancy between Iran’s large production of oil and the limited return it received led Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a liberal nationalist, to call for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. Despite opposition from Iran’s small ruling class, the parliament and masses of the Iranian people endorsed the plan to seize control of its oil. Mossadegh became the symbol of Iranian sovereignty.

Ironically, Mossadegh assumed the United States would support Iran’s move toward economic autonomy. But, in Washington, the Iranian leader was viewed as a demagogue, his emerging rival the Shah of Iran (the sitting monarch of Iran) as “more moderate.”

After the nationalization, the British, supported by the United States, boycotted oil produced by the Iranian Oil Company. The British lobbied Washington to launch a military intervention but the Truman Administration feared such an action would work to the advantage of the Iranian Communists, the Tudeh Party.

The boycott led to economic strains in Iran, and Mossadegh compensated for the loss of revenue by increasing taxes on the rich. This generated growing opposition from the tiny ruling class, and they encouraged political instability. In 1953, to rally his people, Mossadegh carried out a plebiscite, a vote on his policies. The Iranian people overwhelmingly endorsed the nationalization of Iranian oil. In addition, Mossadegh initiated efforts to mend political fences with the former Soviet Union and the Tudeh Party.

As a result of the plebiscite, and Mossadegh’s openings to the Left, the United States came around to the British view; Mossadegh had to go. As one U.S. defense department official put it:

“When the crisis came on and the thing was about to collapse, we violated our normal criteria and among other things we did, we provided the army immediately on an emergency basis….The guns that they had in their hands, the trucks that they rode in, the armored cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the military defense assistance program…. Had it not been for this program, a government unfriendly to the United States probably would now be in power.” (Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, 1972).

The Shah, who had fled Iran after the plebiscite, returned when Mossadegh was ousted. A new prime minister was appointed by him who committed Iran to the defense of the “free” world. U.S. military and economic aid was resumed, and Iran joined the CENTO alliance (an alliance of pro-West regional states).

In August, 1954, a new oil consortium was established. Five U.S. oil companies gained control of forty percent of Iranian oil, equal to that of returning British firms. Iran compensated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for its losses by paying $70 million, which Iran received as aid from the United States. The Iranian ruling class was accorded fifty percent of profits from future oil sales. President Eisenhower declared that the events of 1953 and 1954 were ushering in a new era of “economic progress and stability” in Iran and that it was now to be an independent country in “the family of free nations.”

In brief, the United States overthrew a popularly elected and overwhelmingly endorsed regime in Iran. The payoff the United States received, with British acquiescence, was a dramatic increase in access by U.S. oil companies to Iranian oil at the expense of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The overthrow of Mossadegh and the backing of the return of the Shah to full control of the regime led to U.S. support for one of the world’s most repressive and militarized regimes. By the 1970s, 70,000 of the Shah’s opponents were in political prisons. Workers and religious activists rose up against the Shah in 1979, leading to the rapid revolutionary overthrow of his military state.

As Chalmers Johnson suggested many years later, the United States role in the world is still plagued by “blowback.” Masses of people all across the globe, particularly in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and East Asia, regard the United States as the major threat to their economic and political independence. And the covert operation against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran is one place where such global mistrust began.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

THE UNTOLD STORY IS NOT UNTOLD

Oliver Stone has made an enormous contribution to discussions of the United States role in the world. His films have described the horrific consequences of United States foreign policy for the people of El Salvador and Vietnam, the American political system, and the U.S. soldiers victimized by wars not of their making. While his films, such as JFK, raise controversial claims, they have stimulated important public conversations.

This television season, Showtime, a cable channel, is showing a ten-part series written and produced by Stone and his academic collaborator, historian Peter Kuznick. The series, “The Untold History of the United States,” is a brilliant and entertaining narrative of the United States role in the world since the onset of World War II. It warrants broad distribution within educational institutions and among communities of political activists. Because of our ahistorical culture people do not have a sense of the critical decisions that were made fifty or a hundred years ago which have structured the political and economic life of the country ever since.

Critical moments in United States history have channeled the prospects for progressive social change today and tomorrow. From the arrival of colonial armies to the “new world,” to the introduction of slavery to the Western Hemisphere, to revolution against British imperialism, to the civil war and the defeat of post-war reconstruction, the American experience has been shaped by class and race in the context of burgeoning industrial and financial capitalism. The Spanish/Cuban/American war stimulated the rise of the United States as the preeminent empire from the Philippines to the Western Hemisphere.

Most of us have received a sanitized history of these earlier historical moments. In addition, our understanding of the rise of socialist movements in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression and the global fascist threat, the realities of World War II, and the emerging U.S. hegemony after the war which led to the “Cold War” between global capitalism and socialism have been limited as well. Oliver Stone’s ten-part “untold history,” in collaboration with Professor Kuznick, fills in some of the void. Several themes about the onset of the Cold War are particularly important:

First, while the series overemphasizes the role of elites in shaping U.S. history Stone and Kuznick do point out that these elites always perceived the threat workers, radicals, and other rank-and-file activists meant to ruling class dominance. Much of foreign policy was designed to crush revolutionary ferment overseas and at home.

Second, in the first two episodes emphasis is placed on the lost opportunity for the left that resulted from the successful efforts of political elites, particularly in the Democratic Party, to force Henry Wallace, President Roosevelt’s third term vice president, and 1948 candidate for president on the Progressive Party ticket, from power. Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture during the New Deal was an economic populist, anti-racist, and pro-union sympathizer and after World War II an advocate for United States/Soviet Union collaboration.

Stone and Kuznick probably exaggerate Wallace as an alternative to the imperial, counter-revolutionary, and racist path the United States took after the war but correctly make it clear that CEOs from massive corporations and banks and political elites from both political parties were committed to crushing those left forces that flowered in the United States in the 1930s and grew in popularity all across the globe. The Soviet Union was one manifestation of global resistance to capitalism that paralleled the spread of massive anti-colonial ferment in the Global South.

Third, the film makers provide overwhelming evidence to show that the defeat of fascism in Europe was largely the result of the massive Soviet military machine. Americans suffered about 290,000 wartime dead and the Soviet Union 27 million. And Stone, who narrated the documentary, suggests that while Joseph Stalin was a cruel dictator, his policies must be understood in the context of the rise of fascism in Europe and the refusal of western powers, particularly Great Britain, France, and the United State, to stand up against it. He correctly portrays Stalin as a nationalist who was prepared to sacrifice all principles, in this case Communist ones, to prepare for and to defend the Soviet Union. This overriding commitment, Stone implies, carried over into Soviet diplomatic interaction with the rest of Europe and the United States after the war.

Fourth, in great detail Stone and Kuznick make it clear that the United States did not have to use two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force the Japanese to surrender in the summer of 1945. The Japanese leadership knew they were soon to be defeated. Many had advocated for surrender by the time of the Potsdam Conference of July, 1945 and American policymakers were aware of it.

President Truman’s advisors knew that if the Soviet Union declared war on Japan which the Soviets promised to do by August 8, the enemy would give up. But despite this, the film makers suggest, President Truman tried to use the powerful new weapon against the Japanese before the Soviet Union had a chance to enter the war, and thus be a diplomatic player in Asia after the war. Also, and this was critical, the bomb was designed to send a message to the Soviet Union as well as Japan. The United States in the years ahead would be the dominant military power in the world.

Stone and Kuznick point out that the decisions to drop two atomic bombs on Japan signaled the dawn of a new age. Now weapons of mass destruction would be used to pursue global hegemony. There no longer would be any limits on the possibility of death and destruction derived from world affairs.

In other words, Stone and Kuznick are making the case that at least from the onset of the Cold War to today, U.S. foreign policy has been driven by economic and political interests to dominate the world and has responded violently to a multiplicity of forms of resistance. The locales of struggle changed as would the forms of resistance. But the structure that was put in place after World War II remains the albatross around the necks of those who seek change today and tomorrow.

The series is an indispensable lesson for peace and justice activists today. However, it should be added that the “untold” story has been told before. As a result of the threats of nuclear war in the 1950s, United States policies toward Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s, and patterns of U.S. covert interventions and violence against peoples on every continent, progressive scholars began to use their methods to uncover this history fifty years ago.

Historians and activists were inspired by the classic text by William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams’ work, called then “historical revisionism,” inspired other groundbreaking studies of the onset and perpetuation of the Cold War by Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperovitz, Diane Clemens, Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Thomas Patterson, and many more. The works on McCarthyism, repression of labor militancy, and mystification in popular culture could fill libraries.

While it is true that documentary films cannot provide footnotes, it is important for viewers to realize that progressive scholars during the depths of the Cold War used their skills to research, teach, and for some, engage in political activism based on their findings.

And finally, if the “untold” story has in fact been told many times, a question that becomes important is why we as a people, even the political activists among us, are not apprised of it. And this leads to analyses of how knowledge has been appropriated in the service of United States foreign and domestic policy.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

DEFEAT NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL DOCUMENT 68 (NSC 68): THEN ATTACK NSC 68 LIGHT

After the outbreak of fighting on the Korean peninsula, NSC 68 was accepted throughout the government as the foundation of American foreign policy (U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian).
The third and last presidential debate of the 2012 election season, October 22, 2012, addressed issues of foreign policy and their connections to the United States economy. The debates reflected the idiosyncrasies of American politics, 2012, as well as the enduring features of the United States empire.

As to the candidate’s realization that he needed to “move to the center,” Mitt Romney tried to portray himself as peace-oriented. This approach contradicted the neo-conservative vision of the 17 of 24 key foreign policy aides advising him. These former Bush advisors and associates of the Project for a New American Century or (PNAC), stand for a foreign policy designed to reestablish United States global hegemony. PNAC, formed in the 1990s, in its official positions argued that the United States, as the last remaining superpower, must use that power to remake the world. The PNAC vision combines the ideology of the United States as the “city on the hill” and the “beacon of hope” for the world, with the advocacy of using overwhelming military force to achieve imperial goals.

Romney, contrary to prior statements, endorsed the Obama administration plans for withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014. He, like President Obama, supported the Syrian opposition short of U.S. direct military intervention. He called for maintaining sanctions against Iran to force the latter to end its alleged nuclear program while avoiding war. And Romney, like Obama, endorsed challenging China’s trade policy while engaging in constructive diplomacy with the burgeoning new superpower. These and other Romney statements mirrored (for better or worse) the foreign policies of President Obama. The flexible Republican candidate “moved to the center” on foreign policy because of his perceived need to present an image of wisdom and caution to the America voters who oppose a continued presence in Afghanistan, getting directly involved in wars against Syria and Iran, and the wars on “terrorism,” “drugs,” and other crusades.

However, candidate Romney was firm in his commitment to increasing U.S. defense spending over the next decade, while he would cut domestic programs. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reported in September, 2012 that a President Romney would cap total federal spending at 20 percent of GDP by 2016; maintain defense spending at 4 percent of GDP, and rapidly repeal the Affordable Care Act (Richard Kogan and Paul N. Van de Water, “Romney Budget Proposals Would Necessitate Very Large Cuts in Medicaid, Education, Health Research and Other Programs”). President Obama claims that the Romney military project would add two trillion dollars to military spending over the next decade. Even though figures are loosely introduced to debates, it is clear that a Romney presidency would add enormously to naval programs, maintain high levels of troops, and continue drone programs that were expanded during the Obama presidency. In short, military spending would grow in a Romney administration, especially because of ties to the neo-cons and a hawkish Congress which promotes military spending district by district.

The Obama defense budget projected for fiscal year 2013 would total $525 billion, a 2.5 percent decline from the 2012 budget (if inflation is considered). The basic DOD budget request does not include ongoing war costs, U.S. nuclear weapons systems, homeland security, military assistance, or other elements of security. The DOD recommended cuts in troop strength in the army, marines, and reserves. The National Priorities Project reports that an Obama defense budget would modestly increase from about $525 billion in 2013 to just less than $530 billion at the end of a second term.
A Romney administration would unleash the military in terms of expenditures, and, if he listens to his neo-con advisors, worldwide adventures. But, President Obama’s defense budget proposals continue the basic parameters of military spending into the future. As the National Priorities pie chart notes, the 2013 proposed federal budget allocates 57 percent of discretionary spending directly to the military, with 6 percent for education, 6 percent for housing and community, 5 percent for veterans benefits, 3 percent for science, 2 percent for labor, 2 percent for transportation, and 1 percent for food and agriculture.

National Security Council Document 68, written in the bleak Cold War winter of 1950 before the onset of the Korean War recommended that military spending should be the number one priority of every president before he/she discussed any other program or activity of government. NSC 68, just a wild proposal that winter became policy after the Korean War started and has for the most part continued ever since, costing American workers trillions of dollars in taxes.

The Romney proposal, based on a vision of reestablishing the United States as the global hegemonic power, is based on the principle articulated in NSC 68. Spend more and more on the military and pay for it by cutting everything else. The Obama budget, while more circumspect and committed to the military contributing “their fair share” to the health and well-being of the nation, maintains the same commitment to prioritizing the military.

The task of the peace movement over the coming months is to first challenge the candidacy of Mitt Romney who is committed to reinstituting the principle of NSC 68 and then, if the President is re-elected, to demand that President Obama reject the 60 year tradition of privileging unnecessary military spending over the basic needs of the American people.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

GROTESQUE MILITARY SPENDING IS BROADLY OPPOSED

Like a festering cancerous growth that has not been exorcised from the body politic for over sixty years, militarists continue to defend escalating military spending. This time it is former Vice President Dick Cheney visiting Washington to encourage his fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives to stand tall and oppose any cuts in military spending.

Of course, military imperatives have a long history. NATO was formed in 1949 and     the United States militarily and financially was its anchor. National Security Document 68 in 1950 called for military spending to be every president’s top priority. With subsequent “crises” in Korea, the Persian Gulf, the Caribbean, Indochina, Southern Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan, military spending continued to grow, taking up about half of all discretionary government spending.

Anticipating changes in challenges to U.S. global hegemony, President Carter in 1980 called for the establishment of a “Rapid Deployment Force” which could quickly move into trouble spots to address threats to allied regimes. Such a RDF might have prevented the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Carter’s advisers argued. President Reagan, of course, boosted military spending beyond the costs of the entire historical period before he came into office. And President Clinton, remained committed to being able to fight one and half wars and to be able to engage in “humanitarian interventions.”

The Bush Administration began a shift in defense doctrine even before the 9/11 tragedy was used to justify two huge, long, and unwinnable wars. Defense intellectuals warned of an “arc of instability” all along the equator from the northern portion of Latin America, to North Africa, the Persian Gulf and East Asia. With this new threat the military needed to be transformed into a new high speed force to move on a moment’s notice to any threatened area; a new high tech RDF.

After 9/11 the Bush Doctrine considered any military action as justified if the U.S. perceived that an enemy, state or non-state actor, might be considering an attack on the United States. The new high tech RDF required literally hundreds of military installations on every continent. Given the new technology, these bases did not have to be mini-cities like the old Cold War military installations of the past. And as Chalmers Johnson, Nick Turse, and others have documented, close to 1,000 military bases were in place before Bush left office.

David Vine, an anthropologist, (“The Lily-Pad Strategy: How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War,” at TomDispatch.com, July 17, 2012) uses an interesting metaphor, the lily-pad, to describe the latest generation of U.S. global military bases. The metaphor, Vine says, comes from the military who conceptualize bases as lily-pads, where like frogs, troops alight then jump across a pond to attack their prey. Vine describes the ‘lily-pads” as “small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.”

He points out that while hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan are being closed, the lily-pads are expanding. Consequently, the U.S. today still has some kind of military presence in 150 countries on every continent, 11 aircraft carrier task forces, and untold space-based military capabilities. So while the troops are being brought home, unbeknownst to the American people, the U.S. global military presence is growing.

In Vine’s words: “Beyond their military utility, the lily-pads and other forms of power projection are   also political and economic tools used to build and maintain alliances and provide privileged U.S. access to overseas markets, resources, and investment opportunities.”

Although this story is not new, Vine suggests that opposition to military doctrine and spending is growing, an opposition that peace activists might use. “…. overseas bases have recently begun to generate critical scrutiny across the political spectrum from Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to Democratic Senator Jon Tester and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. With everyone looking for ways to trim the deficit, closing overseas bases offers easy savings. Indeed, increasingly influential types are recognizing that the country simply can’t afford more than 1,000 bases abroad.”

A recent survey sponsored by the Program of Public Consultation, the Stimson Center, and the Center for Public Integrity reinforce the argument Vine is making about military spending. In April, 2012 a representative sample of respondents from Democratic and Republican (Blue and Red) districts were asked their opinions about cutting military spending in 2013. Respondents were given arguments in support of and opposition to such spending before they answered questions. In so-called Blue districts 80 percent of respondents supported defense spending cuts and 74 percent of those in Red districts also supported the cuts. In addition, respondents in Congressional districts which received high levels of defense spending contracts were as supportive of the cuts as those in districts where DOD spending was lower.

The Director of the Program for Public Consultation, Steven Kull said that “The idea that Americans would want to keep total defense spending up so as to preserve local jobs is not supported by the data.”

Perhaps more Americans than one expects are aware of the fact that military spending, as economists have claimed, is a job killer. United For Peace and Justice, advocating active opposition to reversing the military spending cuts agreed to by Congress in 2011, has pointed out that $1 billion in government spending for the military creates 11,200 jobs, while an equal amount spent for creating clean energy would create 16,800 jobs, and education 26,700 jobs.

Now is a good time for peace activists to expand education about the history of unchallenged military spending, continued military basing all across the globe, the use of high technology and mobile troop formations to intervene everywhere, the consequences of military spending for making the world a more dangerous place, and the costs, not only in lives overseas but to a basic standard of living at home. The survey data indicates that a progressive peace majority might be ready to listen and act.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

NATO: FROM FIGHTING SOCIALISM TO GLOBAL EMPIRE

During World War II an “unnatural alliance” was created between the United States, Great Britain, and the former Soviet Union. What brought the three countries together, the emerging imperial giant, the declining capitalist power, and the first socialist state, was the shared need to defeat fascism in Europe. Rhetorically, the high point of collaboration was reflected in the agreements made at the Yalta Conference, in February, 1945 three months before the German armies were defeated.

At Yalta, the great powers made decisions to facilitate democratization of former Nazi regimes in Eastern Europe, a “temporary” division of Germany for occupation purposes, and a schedule of future Soviet participation in the ongoing war against Japan. Leaders of the three states returned to their respective countries celebrating the “spirit of Yalta,” what would be a post-war world order in which they would work through the new United Nations system to modulate conflict in the world.

Within two years, after conflicts over Iran with the Soviet Union, the Greek Civil War, the replacement of wartime President Franklin Roosevelt with Harry Truman, and growing challenges to corporate rule in the United States by militant labor, Truman declared in March, 1947 that the United States and its allies were going to be engaged in a long-term struggle against the forces of “International Communism.” The post-war vision of cooperation was reframed as a struggle of the “free world” against “tyranny.”

In addition to Truman’s ideological crusade, his administration launched an economic program to rebuild parts of Europe, particularly what would become West Germany, as capitalist bastions against the ongoing popularity of Communist parties throughout the region. Along with the significant program of reconstructing capitalism in Europe and linking it by trade, investment, finance, and debt to the United States, the U.S. with its new allies constructed a military alliance that would be ready to fight the Cold War against International Communism.

Representatives of Western European countries met in Brussels in 1948 to establish a program of common defense and one year later with the addition of the United States and Canada, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed. The new NATO charter, inspired largely by a prior Western Hemisphere alliance, the Rio Pact (1947), proclaimed that “an armed attack against one or more of them…shall be considered an attack against them all…” which would lead to an appropriate response. The Charter called for cooperation and military preparedness among the 12 signatories. After the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb and the Korean War started, NATO pushed ahead with the development of a common military command structure with General Eisenhower as the first “Supreme Allied Commander.”

After the founding of NATO and its establishment as a military arm of the West, the Truman administration adopted the policy recommendations in National Security Council Document 68 (NSC 68) in 1950 which declared that military spending for the indefinite future would be the number one priority of every presidential administration. As Western European economies reconstructed, Marshall Plan aid programs were shut down and military assistance to Europe was launched. Greece and Turkey joined NATO in 1952, and fueling the flames of Cold War, West Germany was admitted to NATO in 1955. (This stimulated the Soviet Union to construct its own alliance system, the Warsaw Pact, with countries from Eastern Europe).

During the Cold War NATO continued as the only unified Western military command structure against the “Soviet threat.” While forces and funds only represented a portion of the U.S. global military presence, the alliance constituted a “trip wire” signifying to the Soviets that any attack on targets in Western Europe would set off World War III. NATO thus provided the deterrent threat of “massive retaliation” in the face of first-strike attack.

With the collapse of the former Warsaw Pact regimes between 1989 and 1991, the tearing down of the symbolic Berlin Wall in 1989, and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, the purpose for maintaining a NATO alliance presumably had passed. However, this was not to be.

In the next twenty years after the Soviet collapse, membership in the alliance doubled. New members included most of the former Warsaw Pact countries. The functions and activities of NATO were redefined. NATO programs included air surveillance during the crises accompanying the Gulf War and the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. In 1995, NATO sent 60,000 troops to Bosnia and in 1998-99 it carried out brutal bombing campaigns in Serbia with 38,000 sorties. NATO forces became part of the U.S. led military coalition that launched the war on Afghanistan in 2001. In 2011 a massive NATO air war on Libya played a critical role in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime.

An official history of NATO described the changes in its mission: “In 1991 as in 1949, NATO was to be the foundation stone for a larger, pan-European security architecture.” The post-Cold War mission of NATO combines “military might, diplomacy, and post-conflict stabilization.”

The NATO history boldly concludes that the alliance was founded on defense in the 1950s and détente with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. With the collapse of Communism in the 1990s it became a “tool for the stabilization of Eastern Europe and Central Asia through incorporation of new Partners and Allies.” The 21^st century vision of NATO has expanded further: “extending peace through the strategic projection of security.” This new mission, the history said, was forced upon NATO because of the failure of nation-states and extremism.

Reviewing this brief history of NATO, observers can reasonably draw different conclusions about NATO’s role in the world than from those who celebrate its world role. First, NATO’s mission to defend Europe from aggression against “International Communism” was completed with the “fall of Communism.” Second, the alliance was regional, that is pertaining to Europe and North America, and now it is global. Third, NATO was about security and defense. Now it is about global transformation. Fourth, as its biggest supporter in terms of troops, supplies and budget (22-25%), NATO is an instrument of United States foreign policy. Fifth, as a creation of Europe and North America, it has become an enforcer of the interests of member countries against, what Vijay Prashad calls, the “darker nations” of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Sixth, NATO has become the 21^st century military instrumentality of global imperialism. And finally, there is growing evidence that larger and larger portions of the world’s people have begun to stand up against NATO.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

THE AFGHANISTAN WAR; OUR LONGEST WAR AND BIGGEST FANTASY

On May Day, 2012 President Obama made a secret trip to Afghanistan and spoke to the nation and the troops on the ground about past, present, and future policy. What the speech revealed was a replication of a ten-year fantasy narrative about why we went to war on Afghanistan, what our goals were, and what the future holds in the region for the United States and, most importantly, the Afghan people.

The President announced he was signing an agreement between the two countries which will define “a new kind of relationship” in which Afghans will assume primary responsibility for their security and “we build an equal partnership between two sovereign states.” The future of this relationship will be bright as “the war ends, and a new chapter begins.”

The announcement sounded eerily like the policy of “Vietnamization” which President Nixon put in place in 1969; handing over ground action to the South Vietnamese government while the United States escalated the bombing of targets in North and South Vietnam and invaded neighboring Cambodia. The South Vietnamese government and military were incapable of assuming “primary responsibility” and in the end were overthrown by powerful forces in the countryside.

The President explained that President Bush correctly launched a war on Afghanistan in October, 2001 because the country allowed terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden an al Qaeda “safe-haven” for terrorist planning and attacks, ultimately leading to the tragedy of 9/11. While Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan, the U.S. continued fighting the Taliban who have “waged a brutal insurgency.”

Subsequently, he claimed, using the dehumanized language of violence –prone discourse, the U.S. military has “taken out over 20 of their top leaders” including bin Laden himself. But the war continues. While the United States downsizes its troop commitments policy will include:

• –a transition of the war to our Afghan military allies. Importantly Obama proclaimed that at the NATO summit this month in Chicago, “our coalition will set a goal for Afghan forces to be in the lead for combat operations across the country next year.” However, “international troops will continue to train, advise and assist Afghans, and fight alongside them when needed.”
• –training of Afghan Security Forces, leading to an Afghan force of 352,000 troops which NATO will support to create “a strong and sustainable long-term Afghan force.”
• –increasing US/NATO/Afghan cooperation “including shared commitments to combat terrorism and strengthen democratic institutions.” President Obama declared that these commitments, in the short run involving counter-terrorism and continued training, do not include the building of permanent U.S. bases.
• –pursuing a negotiated peace with the Taliban if they break with al Qaeda, renounce violence and “abide by Afghan laws.”
• –working towards stability in South Asia, including partnering with neighboring Pakistan. The President assured viewers that “America has no designs beyond an end to al Qaeda safe-havens, and respect for Afghan sovereignty.” In short, the central goal of United States policy is to destroy al Qaeda, in the short run to stabilize Afghanistan, and “to finish the job we started in Afghanistan…”

The speech reflects the classic pattern of U.S. military globalization coupled with tortured ahistorical fantasy narratives that have characterized policy since the end of World War II.

The President rationalized a ten-year war on a nation in which terrorists resided because Afghan leaders refused to hand over alleged perpetrators without some evidence of the connection between them and 9/11.

Also, the initial narrative, reflected in the President’s speech last week, conflated the al Qaeda terrorists with the so-called Taliban. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s with support from the United States. Some of these Afghan government officials had been recipients of military aid in the 1980s when they fought against the regime in Kabul that was allied with the former Soviet Union.

Neither Bush nor Obama have ever explained to the public who our enemy is. Has al Qaeda been clearly defined? What political, ethnic, and regional constituencies do the Taliban come from? Do we know much about the political forces in Afghanistan the Karzai regime represents?

Is the president correct to suggest that the United States and the Karzai government are winning the hearts and minds of the people outside Kabul, despite consistently negative reports to the contrary in the media?

Along with not being told who the enemy is and why they are the enemy neither Bush nor Obama have described how many of them there are, where they are located, how they are connected in a presumed worldwide network, and most basically how we know that a worldwide network of terrorists really exists. Recently released documents from the bin Laden compound suggest that while he wanted to promote terrorist attacks on the United States there was a communications disconnect between the alleged worldwide terrorist leader and various related organizations around the world.

Mother Jones reported on their website on May 4 devastating statistics concerning the U.S war on Afghanistan since 2001. These included costs for military operations since 2001 of $443.3 billion; the estimated cost per soldier in country in 2011 of $694,000; U.S. soldiers killed in action 1,507 and wounded 15,560. Also U.S military spending has doubled since 2000.And between 2004-2112 there have been 296 drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 17 percent of those killed were not affiliated with targeted enemies. And civilians killed in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2011 totaled 12,793.

Former Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was interviewed in the Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds, about why he turned against the war in Vietnam in 1965. His friend, President Lyndon Johnson dramatically escalated U.S. military action in Vietnam, with Congressional approval, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident allegedly occurred. Johnson claimed that the North Vietnamese engaged in unprovoked attacks on two U.S. naval vessels in international waters on August 2 and 4, 1964. Johnson used these claims to get Congressional approval of military escalation in Vietnam.

Fulbright said in the documentary that: “We always hesitate in public to use the dirty word lie, but a lie is a lie. It is a misrepresentation of fact. It is supposed to be a criminal act if it’s done under oath. Mr. Johnson didn’t say it under oath. He just said it. We don’t usually have the president under oath.”

The war on Afghanistan since October, 2001 has been a lie and U.S troops, the Afghan people, and all those who could have been served by a more just allocation of our national treasure have been victims of this lie.

There are many reasons to support President Obama’s reelection. However, the peace movement must increase its attack on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, as it continues to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

MEASURING TARGETS OF US IMPERIALISM: HISTORY, ECONOMICS, GEOPOLITICS, CULTURE AND IRAN

U.S. Imperialism in the Beginning

Modern imperialism is intimately connected to the globalization of capitalism, the quest for enhanced military capabilities, geopolitical thinking, and ideologies of national and racial superiority. The rise of the United States empire occurred as the industrial revolution spread to North America after the civil war. Farmers began to produce agricultural surpluses requiring overseas customers, factories were built to produce iron, steel, textiles, and food products, railroads were constructed to traverse the North American continent, and financiers created large banks, trusts, and holding companies to parley agricultural and manufacturing profits into huge concentrations of cash.
Perhaps the benchmark of the U.S. emergence as an imperial power was the Spanish/Cuban/American war. The U.S. established its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, replacing the Spanish and challenging the British, and became an Asian power, crushing rebellion and planting its military in the Philippines. The empire has grown, despite resistance, to this day.
While U.S. expansion occurs wherever a vacuum of power exists, and an opportunity to formally or informally control a regime and/or territory, particular countries have had enduring salience for the U.S. Iran is such a country.

Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism

To help understand the attention U.S. policy-makers give some countries, it is possible to reflect on what is called here the Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism (SSUSI). The SSUSI has three interconnected dimensions that relate to the relative importance policy-makers give to some countries compared to others.

First, as an original motivation for expansion, economic interests are primary. Historically, United States policy has been driven by the need to secure customers for U.S. products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, opportunities for financial speculation, and vital natural resources.

Second, geopolitics and military hegemony matter. Empires require ready access to regions and trouble spots all around the world. When Teddy Roosevelt, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Vice President, and President of the United States, articulated the first warning of the need for global power he spoke of the development of a “two-ocean” navy. The U.S., he said, must become an Atlantic and a Pacific power; thus prioritizing the projection of military power in the Western Hemisphere and Asia. If the achievement of global power was dependent upon resources drawn from everywhere, military and political hegemony in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and parts of Africa also required attention.
Third, as the imperial project grows, certain political regimes and cultures take on particular importance for policy-makers and the American people. Foreign policy elites claim that the U.S. has a special responsibility for them. If these roles are rejected by the targeted country, the experience burns itself into the consciousness of the people. For example, Cuba was seen by U.S. rulers as far back as Thomas Jefferson as soon to be part of the United States. Cuba’s rejection of this presumption of U.S. tutelage has been a scar on the U.S. sense of itself ever since the spread of revolutionary ferment on the island.

The Danger of War With Iran Today

Reflecting on the SSUSI adds to the discussion about current United States foreign policy toward Iran. The history of U.S./Iranian relations has been long and painful. Before the dramatic United States involvement in that country, Iran’s vital oil resource had been under control of the weakening British empire. In 1901 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) consolidated control of much of the production, refining, and export of Iranian oil. Local oligarchs received only 16 percent of the oil revenue from the global sale of the oil.

After World War II, with a young monarch Mohammad Reza Shah serving as the Iranian ruler and Iranian masses living in poverty, Iranian nationalists mobilized to seize control of their valuable resource. Upper class nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh became Prime Minister and asserted the power of the parliament over the monarchy. The parliament voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The British government enlisted the United States in 1953 to overthrow the Mossadegh regime using covert operations directed by the CIA. After Mossadegh was imprisoned and the Shah given full power to impose his will on an angry population, a new oil consortium agreement was established in 1954 which allowed five U.S. oil companies to gain a 40 percent share of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian would retain another 40 percent, and the rest would be given to rich Iranians.

Over the years, the Shah’s regime became the bulwark of US power in the increasingly vital Persian Gulf region. In the Nixon period, Iran was defined as a key “gendarme” state, which would serve as a surrogate western police power to oversee the region. Presumably Iran would protect the flow of Gulf oil to the United States, Europe, and Japan. By the 1970s, the Shah’s military was the fifth largest in the world.

To the great surprise of left critics of the Shah’s dictatorship, the CIA, and the Carter administration, the Shah’s regime began to crumble in the summer of 1978 as large strikes were organized by oil workers against the regime. In January, 1979 secretly organized massive street protests led by the religious community doomed the regime. As Iranian soldiers refused to fire upon street demonstrators, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, urged the president to send troops to Iran to save the U.S. regional policeman, the Shah, from overthrow. That proposal was rejected by Carter.

After jockeying for power in the post-revolutionary period, religious leaders consolidated their power over the political system. To add embarrassment to loss of economic and geopolitical control over the vital Persian Gulf region, Iranian students took 52 U.S. diplomats and military attaches hostage and held them for 444 days. In 1980 Carter authorized a military rescue effort

that failed. The bungled military operation further damaged the image of infallibility that American foreign policy elites, and the public, held about the nation’s power and destiny.

In the 1980s, to challenge Iran’s potential for becoming the hegemonic power in the Gulf, the Reagan administration sided with Iraq in the brutal war between it and Iran. In 1988, shortly before the end of the Iraq/Iran war U.S. planes shot down a civilian Iranian airliner killing 290 people aboard.
Subsequent to the ignoble history of U.S. support for the Shah’s dictatorship, militarization, the overthrow of Mossadegh, the embarrassment of the hostage taking, funding Iraq in the brutal Gulf war of the 1980s, the United States has maintained hostility to Iran despite occasional signals from the latter of a desire to establish better relations. U.S. policy has included an economic embargo, efforts to create region-wide opposition to the regime, expressions of support for a large and justifiable internal movement for democracy and secularization in the country, and encouragement, more or less, for growing Israeli threats against Iran. Given this troubled history of US/Iranian relations spanning at least 60 years, the current threats of war expressed by both Israel and the United States are not surprising.

Returning to SSUSI and Iranian Relations

As an emerging global power, United States needs for natural resources, customers for consumer and military products, investment opportunities, and outlets for energy companies grew throughout the twentieth century. One of the significant historical junctures in the transfer of economic and geopolitical power in the world from the declining British empire and the rising U.S. empire was the agreement to redistribute control of Iranian oil in 1954. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was obliged to share Iranian oil with the then five U.S. oil giants.

As U.S. oil needs and those of its friends in Europe increased, control of the Persian Gulf region and access to its oil became more vital. Furthermore, since a hostile Iran could control the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian revolution of 1979 posed an increasing geopolitical problem for American dominance.
The impulse in 1979 to send U.S. troops to save the Shah’s regime was driven by both economics and geopolitics. It was only because other Carter advisers disagreed with the National Security Advisor on the possibility of saving the Shah that a U.S. intervention stalled in 1979. But in 1980 an Iraq/Iran war provided an opportunity, it was hoped, to weaken Iran’s potential control of the region.

Finally, the U.S. decision-makers since 1953 saw a special relationship between this country and Iran. The U.S. put the Shah in power, plied him with enormous military power, encouraged and facilitated significant cultural exchanges, and defined his regime as a junior partner in policing the region.
The rapidity of the Shah’s overthrow and the anger expressed by the Iranian people about its historic relationship to the American people communicated to the world declining U.S. power. Consequently, U.S. hostility to Iran in subsequent decades using a variety of issues including processing uranium is not surprising.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

BRING THE PEACE MOVEMENT BACK IN!

“From Forrestal’s day to the present, semi-warriors have viewed democratic politics as problematic. Debate means delay. To engage in give-and-take or compromise is to forfeit clarity and suggests a lack of conviction. The effective management of national security requires specialized knowledge, a capacity for clear-eyed analysis and above all an unflinching willingness to make decisions, whatever the cost. With the advent of the semi-war, therefore, national security policy became the preserve of experts, few in number, almost always unelected, habitually operating in secret, persuading themselves that to exclude the public from such matters was to serve the public interest. After all, the people had no demonstrable “need to know.” In a time of perpetual crisis, the anointed role of the citizen was to be pliant, deferential and afraid.” (from a review of a biography of James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense by historian Andrew Bacevich in The Nation).

Andrew Bacevich reminds us that a permanent war economy has been part of the political and economic landscape of the United States at least since the end of World War II. The War Resisters League pie chart of total government spending for fiscal year 2013 indicates that 47 percent of all government spending deals with current and past military costs. Despite lower government estimates that mask true military spending, by adding the Social Security Trust Fund to total spending and regarding past military spending– particularly veteran’s benefits– as non-military, it is clear that roughly fifty cents of every dollar goes to war, war preparation, covert operations, and military contractors.

In addition “war support” contractors, such as KBR, have made billions of dollars in the twenty-first century from military spending. Top producers of military hardware, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing earned 11, 8, and 5 billion dollars in contracts in 2010 alone. Ostensibly non-military corporations such as BP, FedEx, Dell, Kraft, and Pepsi received hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts in 2010. Virtually every big corporation is to some degree on the Department of Defense payroll.

A recent data-based report, “Don’t Bank on the Bomb,” prepared by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) identified “…more than 300 banks, insurance companies, pension funds and asset managers from 30 countries that invest significantly in 20 major nuclear weapons producers.” The report examined in detail financial connections to 20 major nuclear weapons companies. These 20 included US producers of nuclear weapons components such as Bechtel, Boeing, GenCorp, General Dynamics, Honeywell, and Northrop Grumman. US financial institutions investing in the nuclear weapons producers included Abrams Bison Investments, AIG, American National Insurance Company, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, JP Morgan Chase, New York Life, and Prudential Financial.

Because of the economic crisis which began in 2007, debate about military spending has increased. In 2010 Congressmen Barney Frank and Ron Paul initiated a study addressing needed cuts. The report prepared for them in 2010, “Debt, Deficits, and Defense,” called for across the board reductions in spending-procurement, research and development, personnel, operations and maintenance, and infrastructure–of $960 billion over the next decade. The report noted that over the last decade 65 percent of federal discretionary spending went to the military.

President Obama last January proposed more modest spending cuts of $480 billion over the next decade (reductions in projected increases not existing funding). He coupled announcement about future spending with a firm statement that the world must realize that the United States remains committed to maintaining its military superiority. The President indicated that spending reductions in the future will be tied to greater use of “special operations,” drones, and shifting existent forces from Europe to Asia.

The magnitude of military spending represents what Bacevich referred to as the permanent war economy articulated and defended by the “semi-warriors” dominating U.S. foreign policy in each administration since World War II. These semi-warriors gained influence after the Truman Administration accepted recommendations in National Security Document Number 68 (1950), which recommended that defense spending should always have priority over all other government spending. NSC 5412, approved by President Eisenhower, gave legitimacy to covert operations around the world allowing any president to “plausibly deny” any connections with such operations. Subsequently virtually each president proclaimed a doctrine–Eisenhower for the Middle East, Carter for the Persian Gulf, Reagan to rollback “the evil empire,” Clinton for “humanitarian interventions” and Bush for “preemptory attacks”– justifying more and more military spending.

The Obama administration, through speeches and actions has constructed what might be called “the Obama Doctrine.” First, as the last remaining superpower and the beacon of hope for the world, the United States once again reserves the right and responsibility to intervene militarily to enhance human rights around the world. Second, U.S. humanitarian military interventions will be carried out from time to time with our friends. Third, new technologies such as drones will allow these interventions to occur without “boots on the ground.” They will be cheaper in financial and human cost (mostly for American troops). Finally, assassinations and covert killings have made it clear that the Obama Doctrine overrides recognized judicial proceedings and the sanctity of human life.

Since the establishment of the permanent war economy in the 1940s millions of proclaimed “enemies” have been killed and seriously injured, mostly in the Global South. Permanent physical and psychological damage has been done to U.S soldiers, predominantly poor and minorities as they too are victims of war. In addition, military spending has distorted national priorities and invested U.S. financial resources in expenditures that do not create as many jobs as investments in construction, education, or healthcare. And the permanent war economy has created a culture that celebrates violence, objectifies killing, dehumanizes enemies, and exalts super-patriotism through television, music, video games, and educational institutions.

These issues need to be more vigorously related to those raised by the grassroots campaigns that have sprung up to defend worker’s and women’s rights, oppose growing income and wealth inequality, and defense of working people’s homes from foreclosures. A long time ago in reference to the massive U.S. war in Southeast Asia and desperate needs of workers at home Dr. Martin Luther King described the fundamental connections that peace activists and all progressives must pursue: “I speak of the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

Saturday, February 11, 2012

ON PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

I teach about United States foreign policy from the 1940s until the Obama Administration. I do briefly discuss the emergence of the United States as a world power in the 1890s, the so-called Spanish American War and the crushing of liberation forces in both Cuba and the Philippines, and date the onset of the Cold War with the Russian Revolution and Western intervention of military forces to overthrow the new Bolshevik regime in 1917. But my narrative is largely about the period of the Cold War and its implications for United States foreign policy since 1991.

This week I just began to discuss the foreign policy of the Eisenhower Administration. I tell the students that the trajectory of United States policy throughout much of its history is imperial but that within that general characterization different administrations have varied in their approach to the world.
What is interesting about the Eisenhower era is that the president projected competing images of imperial America. He did say upon assuming office that “every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies…a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” This speech made in the spring of 1953, included a plea for East-West dialogue and a diminution of the escalating tensions between the two powers, the Soviet Union and the United States. Of course, many of us remember with fondness Eisenhower’s “farewell address” warning of the encroachment of a “military-industrial complex” on American life.

But as historian Blanche Wiesen Cook pointed out in her important book, The Declassified Eisenhower, 1984, the president, while passionate about avoiding a third world war, articulated and authorized very contradictory policies. Wiesen Cook reports on a document, National Security Council Document 5412, that led to policies the president adopted (they were foreshadowed by the interventionism and covert operations launched by the Truman administration in the late 1940s). The language of NSC 5412 is as contemporary as today’s news.

NSC 5412 recommended that the Eisenhower Administration continue its “overt” diplomacy, including calls for peace with the former Soviet Union. In addition, however, diplomacy should be supplemented, it suggested, by “covert operations.” Central Intelligence Agency activities should be authorized to “create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communism.” Activities should be approved to further induce suspicion and conflict between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, exacerbate tensions inside Eastern Europe, and impair the image of the Soviet Union and “International Communism” every place in the world, including inside non-Communist nations where left political movements may hold some legitimacy.

In short every effort should be made to “develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations and ensure availability of those forces in the event of war.” Specifically NSC 5412 asserted such operations should include “…propaganda, political action; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition; escape and evasion and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states or groups including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, support of indigenous and anti-Communist elements ….and deception plans and operations.” (Wiesen Cook, 183).
As I was lecturing on this material, I was most taken by the recommendation that U.S. covert operations should be carried out in such a way that “U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident and if uncovered the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”
At the time that NSC 5412 was still secret, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles was proclaiming a policy of “liberation” which promised to “rollback” Communist regimes we abhorred. In addition, he made it clear that we might use “massive retaliation,” or nuclear weapons, to defend against the scourge of “International Communism.”

The rest of my course will describe United States policies in Iran, Guatemala, Hungary, and Cuba in the 1950s; the continuation of militarism on the Korean Peninsula, the escalating war in Vietnam, and U.S. policies toward Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Chile. When we get to the 1980s and beyond materials will be presented about Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, and in our own day ongoing support for repression of the Palestinian people, a NATO war on Libya, and claims about Iran producing nuclear weapons. Attention will be given to the U.S. global presence reflected in 700 bases in 38 countries supplemented by private contract armies everywhere and a military budget that is half that of the world.

In a recent example of media complicity with government distortion, Howard Kurtz, a television pundit who moderates a show critiquing the media, reported that a West Coast radio station played a narrative by a man claiming to have been a soldier in Iraq who killed numerous innocent civilians. The soldier’s background was checked with the Pentagon. The Army declared it had no record that a person with the soldier’s name had been in Iraq. For Kurtz, the case was closed. If the Pentagon declares it has no record of the soldier in question, the media report of atrocities committed by the soldier must have been false.

So I have to conclude from my own lectures that the historical record of United States foreign policy is defended by repeated lies; for example about who we were protecting in Korea and if two U.S. vessels in Vietnamese waters were attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats. In addition, the foreign policy establishment, both government and media, claimed that Juan Bosch and Salvador Allende were agents of International Communism, that Palestinians had no claim to the land from which they were ejected, and anti-government rebels in Afghanistan were freedom fighters. Both government spokespersons and the media communicated uncritically the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. To assist misrepresentations organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy proclaim that they in fact represent the interests of the people in countries in which they covertly operate.

Therefore, ever since the onset of the Cold War, as NSC 5412 codified in 1954, United States foreign policy decision-makers authorized covert operations, which if uncovered would allow them to “plausibly disclaim any responsibility.” The Kurtz example suggests that the media will
readily collaborate with such government misrepresentations.

Documents such as NSC 5412, the historical record of United States foreign policy, and news information about it, leaves little reason to believe what the American people are told by their government about its role in the world.

Egypt’s unions join protests.

By Bill Fletcher Jr.

Via The Progressive Magazine

August 24, 2013 – One of the most striking features of the current Egyptian crisis has been the response by most of the US Left and progressives. It is not that US leftists and progressives are ignoring the crisis, but that there has been an utter failure to engage with Egyptian leftists and progressives despite the fact that the latter have been writing regular analyses of events, analyses that frequently differ from that created on this side of the Atlantic.

In a political situation that ranks as among one of the most complicated and contradictory of our lifetime, the points of view of Egyptian leftists and progressives have been largely ignored here in the USA or treated as if they are mouthpieces for the Egyptian military if they have stood against the Morsi government.

In order for us—in the USA—to get a better sense of the complications and tragedies connected with the ongoing struggle in Egypt, one must recognize that there has been an on-oing battle for much of the last century between two distinct “projects.” Those projects, and their progeny, help to set the context for the engagements underway.

National populism vs. Islamism

Beginning with the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, which overthrew the monarchy and ultimately led to the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser as president, a particular current emerged that has been described by Egyptian Marxist theorist Samir Amin as a “national populist project.” Arising out of the Egyptian anti-monarchist/nationalist movement that had begun much earlier, this project was a nationalist initiative at progressive change that aimed at moving aside classes and formations that were compromised with colonialism and proceeded to engage in progressive and anti-imperialist development. It was not, however, the same thing as socialism. In national populist projects, as witnessed in Egypt under Nasser, there was limited political democracy, capitalism as such went unchallenged, and the process of change was led by a small group. Though Nasser had considerable popular support, there were very restricted means for the grassroots to involve themselves in the change process. Similar change processes were untaken in other states in the global South including in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the Sudan and much later, Libya.

Operating within the national populist coalitions was generally to be found the political Left, though the relationship was almost always rocky. Nasser, for instance, had a strong relationship with the Soviet Union, but would periodically turn on the domestic Egyptian Left. This tension resulted, throughout the Arab World, in constant debates and struggles within the Left as to how best to relate to nationalist leaders, such as Nasser in Egypt and Qassem in Iraq, who were perceived as anti-imperialists while at the same time being unwilling (and sometimes unable) to advance the domestic change process very far. This tension resulted in historic miscalculations by the Left, including in Iraq and the Sudan where the Left constituted a significant force but held an almost uncritical stand toward nationalist leaders.

Countering the national populist projects were two main forces. The obvious one was external and was represented by the imperial interests of the global North. They and their domestic allies were constantly trying to undermine independent development and turn these various nation-states into neo-colonies.

The other opponents were those forces who came to be known as Islamists. This movement has its origins in the 19th century and early 20th century where an intellectual movement emerged against both Western imperialism and republican-nationalism (and the imperialism of the Ottoman Empire). The Islamists of the 21st century, led by organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, had a very different project. Their project was Pan-Islamist in nature and thoroughly reactionary at its core. It called for a return to a mythical caliphate state.

Within the Islamist camp there was, and is, a wide variety of opinions and political tendencies ranging from forces such as the ruling Islamist party in Turkey (Justice and Development Party—a pro-neo-liberal party operating within the republic framework) to the clerical fascists of Al Qaeda. From the very beginning the Islamists have seen themselves at war with the national populist project, both literally and figuratively. In the case of Egypt this led to an attempted assassination of Nasser in the 1950s that was followed by the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in retaliation.

During the Nasser years the Egyptian military establishment had at least a progressive, nationalist veneer, supporting the ruling party (the Arab Socialist Union). It remained committed to a nationalist project but could never be described as a “people’s army.” With Nasser’s death and the rise of Anwar Sadat, things changed. Sadat realigned Egypt internationally, broke with the USSR and turned to the USA. The Egyptian political establishment was realigned and in so doing, forces on the Left had to be marginalized, if not crushed altogether.

It is fair to say that beginning with the Sadat regime but continuing under Mubarak, the Egyptian political establishment engaged in a bizarre dance with the Islamists. The establishment found them to be a convenient tool in moving against the Egyptian Left, the latter suffering bitterly from repression under Sadat and Mubarak. When the Left was successfully marginalized or when the Islamists appeared to be gaining too much strength, the Egyptian political establishment would turn against them. Nevertheless, and despite the repression that the Muslim Brotherhood experienced, it paled in comparison to that experienced by the Left. Additionally, the Brotherhood, in part due to the dance that it conducted with the Egyptian establishment and in part due to its base among small-scale entrepreneurs, was able to accumulate sufficient resources in order to sustain itself and its basic organization (including the provision of certain services to many among the poorest in Egyptian society).

Here we should hasten to add that despite the appearance of the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization of the Egyptian poor, the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood came from the landed gentry during the Sadat era and that, combined with their social base among the small-scale entrepreneurs, is more reflective of the Muslim Brotherhood’s politics and orientation than the social programs that they provide.

My enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend

The events that unfolded beginning January 2011 and which led to the overthrow of the Mubarak regime were not initiated by the formal political opposition to Mubarak. Ironically, the Muslim Brotherhood took, at least initially, a very passive role in the movement, and the uprising was explicitly not religious in orientation. In one of the most outstanding aspects of the 2011 uprising, when the Mubarak regime attempted to incite Muslim/Coptic Christian conflict, Muslims came to the defense of the Coptics and refused to fall into the trap set by the provocateurs.

The heady days of the 2011 revolution led many of its organizers to misunderstand a basic precept of struggle, one quite eloquently articulated by Machiavelli 500 years ago: a disciplined unit can always defeat a mob. In the case of 2011, the Mubarak regime was overthrown through popular will and the eventual unwillingness of the military to crush the movement. But in the subsequent months, the actual organizational structure and preparedness of the Muslim Brotherhood situated the Islamists to win the elections, albeit by a slim majority. The lack of effective organization among the Egyptian Left and progressive forces placed them at a decided disadvantage compared with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists, and, ultimately, the military.

It is becoming commonplace for commentators in the US media to bemoan the collapse of the anti-Mubarak alliance but historical context is frequently missing from such ruminations. The anti-Mubarak alliance was always fragile. It was not driven by a single organization or ideology. There was no national democratic front or national liberation front uniting the opposition and prepared to assume power and work through an effective government of national unity. The objectives of the constituencies of the anti-Mubarak alliance were dramatically different, as became clear almost as soon as Mohamed Morsi assumed the presidency of Egypt.

In the middle of this maelstrom sat the Egyptian military, well-funded, equipped and determined to assert a new role. To some extent analogous to the Turkish military, the Egyptian military sees itself as the inheritors and custodians of a particular nationalist project. They see themselves as, largely, Muslims who, nevertheless, have no interest in a caliphate project. They have shifted to the Right from being an army in a national populist project to being an army in service to neo-colonial project (under Sadat and Mubarak), but in either case, their self-conception appears to be that of a pro-nationalist army.

There is one other feature to the Egyptian military that is worth noting: it serves as an economic organization, to some extent housing a state bourgeoisie or capitalist class. The military, or at a minimum the top officer corps, control enterprises (analogous to the role played by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army). Thus, the Egyptian military not only serves and services other elements of the ruling class, but also plays an independent political and economic role in the Egyptian power bloc.

Morsi and the grand miscalculation

Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood became dizzy with success upon their election. As is all too common following an electoral victory, there is frequently a failure to properly judge the mandate upon which one has gained victory and instead to believe that one’s victory is a victory for one’s entire program. So it seems to have been the case with Morsi and the Brotherhood.

Instead of working to build a broader ruling coalition, the Morsi administration made steps towards what appeared to many Egyptians as a full-court press. Over the year of the Morsi administration, the Brotherhood embraced a neoliberal economic agenda, despite the fact that the anti-Mubarak uprising was as much an economic revolt as it was political. Coptic Christians came under attack and there appeared to be little energy by the Morsi administration to do anything about it. There were increased assaults on women—including the use of rape—as forms of political repression of anti-Morsi forces.

In one of the least covered arenas, workers continued to be suppressed and trade union rights were being undermined. And, of course, to add insult to injury, the Morsi administration made an authoritarian power grab that, while defeated, convinced many that this was an administration that had not the least bit interest in democracy.

It is important to delineate these points in order to better understand both the factors that led to the June 2013 events (resulting in the overthrow of Morsi), but also that the Islamists are perceived by a wide spectrum of the Egyptian progressive forces as being fascistic, if not outright fascists.

This is a point that has garnered almost no attention in the US progressive media despite its potential implications. This may be the result of some people literally not coming across such analyses, or it might be the result of such allegations being dismissed due to the common usage by US progressives of the term “fascist” to describe any sort of right-wing behavior with which we object. In either case, our failure to consider this is unacceptable because it makes it impossible to understand subsequent events and the responses that emerged on the ground.

The June quasi-uprising, coup, etc.

The events of June 2013 represented a convergence of issues and contradictions that had been developing over the past two years (even preceding the Morsi administration). The significance of a petition of 25 million to demand early elections has been largely ignored in the USA. While much attention has been given to the fact that Morsi was democratically elected, it was also the case that millions were demanding his ouster. Had this taken place in Latin America (as it has!!) against a clearly pro-US government one wonders whether there would have been the relative silence that accompanied the June 2013 events within most US Left and progressive circles. But in either case, millions were mobilized to end the Morsi administration.

Morsi could probably have pulled a rabbit out of the hat by making various concessions to the protestors, but the response from his administration was arrogant and dismissive. Earlier protests against his administration had been meet with repression and it appeared that things were gearing towards a repeat of this.

The entrance of the Egyptian army was a classic “Bonapartist” move. A popular movement had arisen against one element of the establishment (the Islamists) but had no cohesive organization or leadership. The Islamists, through their paramilitaries, was prepared to repress the popular movement. The Army saw this as their chance to take charge, and take charge they did. While many Egyptian progressives have stated or suggested that the Egyptian Army followed the will of the Egyptian people, it is probably more accurate to say that the Egyptian Army saw a potential for great instability and a developing power vacuum that they, themselves, were placed to fill. Though it is the case that the military made certain immediate appointments of civilians to key posts, it should have been clear from the beginning that despite the rhetoric, the Egyptian Army had no intention of going anywhere, at least in the near future.

The Tiananmen option

There is no reason to have expected anything other than resistance to the ouster of Morsi. Despite the millions who protested Morsi and called for his ouster (including a segment of the Islamists themselves), it remained the case that the Islamists constitute a mighty force in Egypt.

The pro-Morsi protests, and specifically the encampments, along with the knowledge that the pro-Morsi forces did have paramilitary capacity, presented a choice for the military. They could have proceeded forward with a government of national unity and prepared for elections, attempting to include some elements of the Islamists forces within this overall process. This seems to have been the course of action that was being advocated by several foreign governments and advisors. The other option was the one that was chosen: a Tiananmen-style massive crackdown aimed at destroying the capability of the Morsi forces to reorganize and prolong the crisis.

The choice of the crackdown probably flows from both the ambition of the military to regain its place as the hegemonic force advancing Egyptian capitalism as well as the conclusion that it would be impossible to achieve a lasting peace with the Brotherhood given the decades of tension, accompanied by low-intensity conflict (specifically, military actions taken by both sides at various points).

The crackdown/massacres, in addition to being heinous, have weakened the ability of the Egyptian military to assert that they are truly a force for national unity. They are claiming significant popular support, and various media reports seem to indicate a level of popular support for the crackdown, but there is no way to judge the depth of that backing at the moment.

In sum, the Egyptian military, in a fashion analogous to the circumstances in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution in France, seems to have decided that they will set the terms for the future of (capitalist) development in Egypt. The civilian class forces that would ordinarily lead such a process are either contained within the Islamists (although they do not have a nationalist project) or are weakened and fragmented. The military, then, acts the role of a political party and seeks to settle accounts with its rivals.

Whether it can do this or whether Egypt will enter into a civil war remains uncertain. In either case, the Egyptian military carried out an assault on the objectives of the original Egyptian revolutionary movement. The ability to overturn this and to place Egypt back on a course toward the social justice & democratic objectives of the 2011 Revolution will to a great extent depend on the ability of Egyptian Left and progressive forces to forge a popular, democratic alliance and split the military.

Implications

There are several implications flowing from events in Egypt that necessitate consideration.

First, in the USA the principal job of those of us on the left side of the aisle must be to insist upon non-intervention in the internal affairs of Egypt. That includes the cessation of military assistance.

While it is certainly conceivable that progressive forces in the Egyptian military pushed for the active intervention to oust Morsi, by now that debate has almost no importance. The nature and extent of the crackdown goes beyond removing a corrupt or tyrannical leader and instead moves towards a purge, one which while targeted at the Islamists at the moment, can just as easily be targeted at progressive opponents of the military in the very near future.

Second, and contrary to the conclusions raised by Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, who recently suggested that there was much in common between the lead up to the Rwanda genocide and the circumstances in Egypt, what we are witnessing is a very different sort of legacy conflict. This is not ethnic group vs. ethnic group but a struggle around two projects, though that struggle has been perverted and exists today between two main protagonists within the spectrum of capitalism.

Contrary to Rwanda or Darfur, this is a political conflict which, while quite bloody, probably has more in common with elements of the Algerian crisis that resulted in their civil war in the 1990s.

Third, within the global South there has developed new attention to what might be called “right-wing anti-imperialism.” Right-wing populism in various forms has reemerged in much of the world, but in the global South there are political tendencies and organizations that have a very particular and peculiar characteristic that is not unlike Imperial Japan at the time of World War II, i.e., the shrewd use of anti-Western and anti-imperialist rhetoric in order to advance horribly reactionary agendas (e.g., political misogynism; anti-worker; irrationalism; intolerance).

It is critically important that leftists and progressives in the global North pay attention to these developments and not assume that the mere fact that an organization, individual or tendency is at odds with global capitalism necessarily makes them progressive.

Fourth, uprisings take place even against elected governments. The fact that a government was elected does not mean that that government cannot and will not lose its mandate to govern. The circumstances for such a loss can be terribly unpredictable but under conditions where masses have concluded that there is a power-grab underway, the fact that a government has been democratically elected should not mean that the Left and progressives remain agnostic. In the case of Egypt in June 2013, a mass demand for the completion of the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution appears to have been in operation. The fact that the military intervened takes nothing away from the legitimacy of that original demand.

Fifth, it is not too late to seek a political solution to the conflict. As we are seeing in Syria at this very moment, circumstances can unfold differently than was originally intended and the optimal outcome may not be possible. Both the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood need to pull back from the military option. This may be very difficult and we may be witnessing the first acts of a play of the “war to the knife.” But this option may also be one that rests in the hands of the Egyptian grassroots and their ability to intervene against both the military and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Finally, and to go full circle, we in the USA must pay more attention to what left and progressive forces are saying within countries such as Egypt before jumping to conclusions. As the saying goes, “…seek truth from facts…” but to this should be added that we must pay attention to the analyses of people on the ground, those who have been engaged in the struggle. While we may or may not agree with their conclusions, and as such we should guard against lackey-ism, we should begin by respecting their experience and, where possible, engage in constructive dialogue in order to enrich our own analyses. To do otherwise ends up meaning objectively using an imperial frame of reference, albeit with red or pink coloring.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, a columnist for The Progressive, and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. He can be followed on Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.