WB: Sucker Pitch
Billmon:But the fact that the GOP can afford to dump $330k into a race just to keep the opposition from scoring a few bragging points (or to punish the crime of lese majesty -- take your pick) is a sign of just how much of a financial supercharge 10 years of DeLayism have given the machine.
Posted by b on July 29, 2005 at 19:07 UTC | Permalink
« previous page | next page »Alabama: There is an amazing book by Adam Hoschild called "Bury the chains" about the start of the anti-slavery movement.
As for your other point, I don't see what is so principled about an "analysis" that is (a) wrong and (b) carries with it the injunction to help the wicked and powerful. Note that Lincoln was also pro-slavery when elected president. He argued that union was more important than principle and would have tolerated the continued existence of slavery if the South had not overplayed its hand.
"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." - from the first inaugural address.
So was voting as a Republican in 1859 endorsement of slavery?
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 14:11 utc | 102
Alabama: There is an amazing book by Adam Hoschild called "Bury the chains" about the start of the anti-slavery movement.
As for your other point, I don't see what is so principled about an "analysis" that is (a) wrong and (b) carries with it the injunction to help the wicked and powerful. Note that Lincoln was also pro-slavery when elected president. He argued that union was more important than principle and would have tolerated the continued existence of slavery if the South had not overplayed its hand.
"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." - from the first inaugural address.
So was voting as a Republican in 1859 endorsement of slavery?
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 14:13 utc | 103
I have no problem with Hackett being a millionaire and I think his support of small business is admirable and important.
I also think he would be more than willing to vote for programs in the public interest, health care, education, minimum wage, etc.
And I have absolutely no problem with the people who support him.
But, as long as the war in Iraq continues, as long as we are spending over 50% of our budget on the military, as long as our deficits are skyrocketing we will have NO money to spend on the programs and policies this otherwise, excellent candidate would support.
So, in my mind, first and foremost is his stand on Iraq. As long as he supports dying for his commander in chief's disaster in Iraq it makes absolutely no sense to support him or the party that promotes this type of candidate.
I don't believe that makes me a purist at all. Since this war doesn't make us 'safe' from terrorism - quite the opposite - it makes sense to first stop the flow of public money into such a disasterous mistake.
I don't know what else I can do. All I have is one voice, which up till now has been mostly silent, and one vote which up till now I have thrown away on losing candidates.
Furthermore, will the people of Ohio actually have their votes recorded, will they even get into the voting booths on election day if they are in working class neighborhoods. And where was the Democratic leadership on the issue of the stolen Ohio election.
As usual, they weren't there for us.
Posted by: jd | Jul 31 2005 14:29 utc | 104
Monoclyus - I'm puzzled about how you can even bear to cite the pro-slavery hypocritical swine Pat Henry in view of your pure political stands.
"Would any one believe that I am Master of Slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by ye. general inconvenience of living without them, I will not, I cannot justify it."
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 14:47 utc | 105
jd: Forgive me, but you seem rather naive. Of course they "weren't there for us". They are cowardly, dishonest, corrupt and unprincipled scum. The Ohio Democratic party organization is among the most worthless in the nation - a distinction requiring a level of sloth, ineptitude, gormless naivete, and third rate thievery that would have caused gasps of horror among hardened chroniclers of political hackery like Ambrose Bierce and H.L Mencken. As for the national leadership, just the idea of John Kerry or Joe Biden, not to mention a Lieberman or Clinton, makes me wince. Furthermore, as an American, for better or worse, brought up in a culture where "winning is the only thing", my instinctual reflex to step away from the Democrats as fast as possible is nearly ungovernable.
But you don't win political power sitting on your ass and complaining about how little power you have. The Right has spent 30 years winning school board by state rep district, crawling up the ladder, pushing the margin year after year, taking allies where they could be found and doing what needs to be done. Those guys come out and vote for Arlen Spectre and the Hollywood drug using gay-promoting Schwarzenegger and so on, because they understand that that's what they can get right now and the advantages of weak allies.
If you think the Iraq war is an unbearable evil, then what are you going to do to end it? My belief is that people like Hackett who know war is not a video game and that you can't pay for it indefinitely on funny money are poison to imperialism and I don't need them to utter some magic words. I may be wrong. But I don't see how you can be right.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 15:26 utc | 106
It's a sucker pitch because it is Ohio -- possibly the most corrupt state in the USA for elections. If Diebiolt doesn't want you, you may as well not run.
"Diebolt machine - worse than the Chicago Machine!"
an important modification confirming the special role of the executive was what has been called the `presidential government' introduced by Bruning. From 1931, on the basis of article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, providing for periods of `danger to the republic', Bruning governed by emergency decrees (Notverordnungen) not requiring the prior approval of parliament. Parliament could of course reject them. But what the government now sought was not so much a parliamentary majority to support it as to avoid one which could oppose and overthrow it.--Fascism & Dictatorship 335.
the KPD was right to fight the SPD, just as we are right to fight the DLC/DNC. cherrypick history how you want, but we face a moment much like early 30s in which the capitalist class, dems included, now reject "democracy." our democracy always stood in the shadow of its idea, but now the political class can no longer find its vindication there.
what history teaches...
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 31 2005 16:12 utc | 108
jd: Forgive me, but you seem rather naive.
citizen k, in safari hat, with riding crop, looking down at his men cutting his horse's hay: "I say, old chaps, haven't you read the histories I've selected for you?"
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 31 2005 16:25 utc | 109
"jd: Forgive me, but you seem rather naive. Of course they "weren't there for us". They are cowardly, dishonest, corrupt and unprincipled scum."
I don't get your point. They weren't there for us. That's naive because its 5 words instead of 75.
"But you don't win political power sitting on your ass and complaining about how little power you have."
Actually, I'm not sitting on my ass. I am the organizer of a group that is working hard to change things. Our members are on positions on school boards, holding office or running for office. We have a couple of very high profile candidates in our group. Our members definitely like me but I am nowhere near as smart as most of them are, as are the people on this thread. I have no problem with that. But in the end I am only one person, one vote, one voice. That's the truth. Does stating it make me naive?
"If you think the Iraq war is an unbearable evil, then what are you going to do to end it?"
I'm not going to support Paul Hackett unless he commits to changing his stance on the war. Oh and I'm also a member of a very active peace group and in constant contact with Veterans for Peace.
But you're right. I probably am naive. Every shred of hope isn't gone yet and these days that I guess that does make me naive.
Posted by: jd | Jul 31 2005 16:41 utc | 110
& k aalso to his mmen in the field - remember john smith - to wch the labouring men & women reply - which john brown. to which k responds
well well weel - history is a test my friends, my fellows - so as a betting men you will have to choose whether john brown is
a) a private investigator living out of sausilito
b) a marxist professor of the philosophy of science at the university at university of johannesburg
c) a librarian of braille texts in minnesota specialising in sanskrit
d) a real estate broker living in sussex
e) an advocate against slavery
f) a lawyer from new mexico
g) a liberian soldier
h) a kenyan bishop
& if you get that one right lads - i'm going to give you my cherished copy of norman podhoretz in a first edition & for that lassie over yonder i'm going to give you my nabakov also first edition becauseyou're a hell of a girl
& k returns t the barrack carefully underlining the muted words of uncle harold bloom
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 31 2005 16:44 utc | 111
jd: Ok. Good luck with your efforts.
sloth: You have a good career ahead of you in academia if you can straightfacedly endorse a policy that ended up with Hitler firmly in power. Either you believe that history is a machine run by the rich and immune to human intervention or you and Ernst Thalmann are singing "who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes".
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 17:05 utc | 112
& the men in the field thinking as if endlessly argue with one another wasn't john brown that constitutional lawyer from down georgetown way or if i am not completely mistaken maybe he is that logical posivist who now teaches in sydney
& the reflection continues as it always does with labouring men
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 31 2005 17:06 utc | 113
RG: John Brown died in a fiasco (although I admire Thoreau's brilliant defense of Brown). The compromised and ambivalent Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on the ashes of the slave regime.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 17:10 utc | 114
john brown is ; a) a principled loser or b) heroic fighter c) in a less dialectical world perhaps, both
ô thalmann what a guy - - the comintern built him & thorez from the same mold somewhere sevastapol or archangel
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 31 2005 17:16 utc | 116
straightfacedly endorse a policy that ended up with Hitler firmly in power.
Man. I just demonstrated, utilizing the history you conveniently kick into the ditch like a squashed squirrel, how the fight against the status quo social denmocrats was also a fight against fascism.
Same for us now. hurray for jd and alabama. the answer: don't vote for the bastards until the party can demonstrate honest opposition to repubs. period.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 31 2005 17:25 utc | 117
comrade s
today suggestion - neil young's 'on the beach' & cornelia schmitz- berning - vokabular des nationzocialismus - berlin - 1998
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 31 2005 17:39 utc | 118
citizen k,
Not opposing step-by-step victories at all, but "John Brown died in a fiasco"?
Are you kidding. He sparked the Civil War...
The fiasco was all owned by the slaveowners who demanded the death of an inspiring man.
Or do you think of the Iraqis as principled losers too? We are seeing whose fiasco that is. I'm not opposing step by step victories at all. Nor do I find jd and others here purists. Rather, I think they are fighting for victories worth having, or defeats that will bury our opponents.
Would you take such a 'defeat'? Or is history unimportant once you're dead?
Posted by: citizen | Jul 31 2005 18:15 utc | 120
citizen k, analogies of the kind you propose are always plausible and rarely pertinent--rarely pertinent because the analogy itself forecloses the analysis of too many differences between the two poles. I think you know where I'm coming from on the subject of the Democrats in the year 2005: they (or is it we? for I'm a life-long Democrat!) are fierce upholders of the status quo. I refuse to delude myself by expecting any Democrat to lead an effective counter-movement against the American war machine. I hope that a counter-movement will emerge, but I'd be very surprised (humbled and delighted as well) if a Democrat were to lead a movement of that kind, and this for structural reasons--meaning that the Democrats have completely sold out to the Likudites without ever admitting this fact. Republicans, at least, have a visible and manifest bond with the neo-cons to push against, and it would be very interesting indeed to see a Republican lead an effective break within his or her party against its current foreign policy.
Posted by: alabama | Jul 31 2005 18:26 utc | 121
Gosh guys, which war?
The 9.9/9.11/3.11 war?
The 1917 war?
The Shia Shiite war?
The Kurd Turkmen war?
The Iraqui Iran war?
The Berber Arab war?
The I'm better than you because I'm a pacifist war?
The war between the ones who say there is the war and the ones who say there isn't?
As the monk said,
Ahh, but won't you come on back to the war? Come on back to the war.
I mean the 9.9/9.11/3.11 war, not back to the pre 9.9./9.11/3/11 posturing wars.
Posted by: razor | Jul 31 2005 19:40 utc | 122
@citizen k
"I'm puzzled about how you can even bear to cite the pro-slavery hypocritical swine Pat Henry in view of your pure political stands.
Since the particular passage I quoted has absolutely nothing to do with the issue of slavery, except insofar as we should not allow ourselves to become slaves to special interests, it would be ad hominem of me not to have quoted him. The most detestable people in the world can hold worthwhile positions on some issues, and we, as rational adults, have within us the intellect to sort through and separate the philosophical wheat from the chaff. That is precisely why I can disagree with you in this thread and on this topic and still value your insight on other issues and in other threads. You seem to hold the same belief since you are objecting to inflexible purism.
If Pat Henry, Benedict Arnold or even Stalin voiced an argument that I felt were germane to the topic at hand, I would have no compunction about bringing their arguments to the table. My "pure" politics are concerned with addressing specific problems. At the time of this writing, I have no single monolithic political philosophy that I am convinced is inherently superior to all others. I only have a collection of beefs with policies that are being implemented and a firm conviction that the approaches we are using to address and solve them could not be more detrimental. I'm not selling a package; I'm examining things issue by issue and trying to address the faults I perceive as they arise.
My largest objection at this time is that "playing it safe" politically and throwing our support to those who are demonstrably at odds with a solution will not remedy anything.
I may be many things, but I am certainly not a purist. My particular take on the issue is that the people who will not consider options apart from the (increasingly misnamed) two-party system are the inflexible ones here. I do not even object to Hackett (except for his position on the Iraq War). My objection is advocating him on the sole grounds that he is a Democrat. If Hackett changed nothing, but called himself a member of the Constitution, Libertarian, Green, Reform or any other third party, nobody here would be sending him their $50... so he is not being endorsed simply because he is not a Republican. He is being endorsed because he calls himself a Democrat.
If I could be convinced that selling one's soul would actually ease the suffering of the world (or even the citizens of the United States), I would not be so strident in my objection of it. But to support every member of the Democratic Party at this stage in history seems to me to be the penultimate expression of Leo Strauss' Noble Lie.
Posted by: Monolycus | Jul 31 2005 20:21 utc | 123
dan of steele
How the hell can you not know what I am talking about?
Aside from the reference to Leonard Cohen, I simply listed wars that are part of the record, yet here people yammer away about being anti war. Anti which fucking war? And what does it mean to be anti war during a time of the 9.9/9.11/3.11 war? Whoever can't answer that question is just a fucking idiot.
Posted by: razor | Jul 31 2005 20:39 utc | 125
why so much anger dude or dudette?
If you were on the receiving end of all these "wars" you list you might not be so much in favor of supporting them. I really don't know what your angle is here.
I fully support defending my country from attack by external agressors and to an extremely limited degree could consider a pre-emptive strike on an enemy. I can not and will not support covert and overt agression toward others where the goal is to enrich a select few at the expense of all others.. If that makes me a fucking idiot than so be it.
Posted by: dan of steele | Jul 31 2005 21:24 utc | 126
Alabama: I'm not sure what you mean by saying the Dems have sold out to the Likudniks? Do you mean it literally in the sense that all or most Democratic office holders follow orders from Likud?
Monolycus: I certainly don't advocate supporting people just because they are democrats. My support of Hackett is that, although I don't agree with him on all positions, he seems like a smart decent person who would oppose torture, "unified executives", flim-flam accounts, and the other components of the Republican regime - and he would vote against Tom Delay and his election would embolden the weak and confuse the badly intentioned.
So I agree with you that blind support of Democrats is counter-productive. I disagree with some who think that replacing a Loyal Party Member with a decent person in opposition is worthless unless the opposition person SAYS the right thing on all issues. I voted against our local Democratic representative, because he was a clown and the Dems were in a majority anyways. But I see the Republicans cementing a theocratic despotism and I'm not going to apply a purity test to those who oppose them. Reasonable people can disagree on what to do in Iraq now, the danger is that we are reaching or perhaps have already passed a tipping point in which power is so consolidated and opposition is so demonized that nothing can be done until the regime self-destructs. I think that this will be an unspeakable disaster for the world.
Citizen: Frederick Douglass and William Garrison were effective in creating the northern rejection of slavery. My reading doesn't lead me to believe that Brown had a positive effect, but perhaps you have some suggested alternative readings?
RG: If you think America has caused damage to the world, you will be astounded at what will happen when the bourgeois democracy collapses and the new Imperialists and Apocalyptic Theocrats have free reign.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 22:13 utc | 127
america is not a victim it is a perpetrator
it is a perpetrator as all the other empires have been perpetrators.
like other empires it is doomed
like other empires it knows neither the rule of law nor does it know justice
it is inextricably linked with wars big a small since its inception as an empire - it will continue to do so until it is vanquished or it destroys itself & the latter seems much more likely
there is no war, intervention, destabilisation, coup d'état, constitutional coup corruption that it does not have a hand in
its allies are by nature of the organism itself criminal. ky, suharto & pinochet or videla were not the exception but the rule if you wanted to stay on the empire's payroll. pinochet or a chalabi are a logic consequence of u s imperialism not an aberration
the attacks on motherland of america were completely consistent with the direction & perversion of u s foreign policy
usama bin laden & george bush belong to the same firm - they share the same absolutes & the same brutality. they are effective allies in the war against the rest of us
& all things connsider it is a fight of the rich against the poor - as it always has been
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 31 2005 22:22 utc | 128
"The Iraqi army in Fallujah, who don't mind telling a journalist that they are all from cities in the south, don't seem particularly thrilled to be here. (When the US tried recruiting Fallujis to fight in Fallujah, they turned their guns on the US or turned them over to the guerillas.)
"Fallujah - death," says one of them, drawing a finger across his throat, a motion that I would like to go one day in Iraq without seeing someone make.
Most of the reconstruction that has taken place since the fighting has been the often partial rebuilding of houses. Iyad Allawi's government sent 20 percent of the promised compensation.
"It costs in Iraq right now at least 50 million dinars to build a house," Salam said. "What is someone supposed to do if he only gets three million dinars? And these people, they have had to spend time out of their houses, and there is not a single family in Fallujah that does not have someone killed."
I approach some of the Marines on a base inside the city, to try and find out what life is like for them. They say there is no one at the base who can speak on the record, but I pause for a minute and chat, not terribly excited about walking back outside into the thick dust and, potentially, a line of fire. They ask why I have come, I am the first journalist they have seen in four months.
"No one wants to talk about Fallujah," says one of the Marines."
david enders mother jones - truthout
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 31 2005 23:26 utc | 129
RG:
Ah RG, I wonder what would have happened if the CIO and Henry Wallace and others had adopted the KPD's point of view in the 30's and let the far right sieze control in the US. With Preston Bush and Mr. Scaife's grandpa and Father Coughlin in charge, there would have been no Lend Lease for the UK and no supplies to bail Comrade Joe out of the difficulties causes by slaughtering the entire officer corps and then relying on the good will of his Brother Leader, no second front in North Africa, no D-day.
"Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence" - Celine.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 23:44 utc | 130
I have just finished writing a long rant about how the personal nature of some of the debate in here shows that we are making the classic mistake of confusing what someone says with the type of person they are. It got too long but I want to say this; Hackett says he called Bush an SOB. What he did was go into Iraq and participate in the slaughter of innocent civilians. I could not support such a person.
Rgiap is correct when he criticises US the nation. This country continually talks about the rights of man and democracy yet just about every action taken by this country as a nation has been to supress those rights in others.
I don't want to confuse the actions of a nation with the morality of the individuals in that nation though. This would be as mistaken as confusing what people say with what they do because the nature of the machinery of the US state means that who people are rarely translates into what their nation does.
This becomes confusing though because we find ourselves in here continually talking about changing the point of view of individual US citizens when really we need to be discussing ways and means of destroying/modifying the machinery of nations whose actions don't reflect it's citizens.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 31 2005 23:52 utc | 131
what second front.
that is what is described in military circles as a skirmish k. as slothrop pointed out the red army was the decisive factor & whatever happened anywhere else was small potatoes & you know it
"the first thing i do in a rich mans hous is to spit in his face" diogenes
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 1 2005 0:00 utc | 132
debs
i don't confuse between the policies & the person. k & razor could either be corporate lawyers, escoplian bishops or urban guerrillas - i don't know who they are - i try to speak to what they say - not who they are - i have no idea
what i have quarreled with is a spurious form of historicism which tells a nice story but leaves something essential out - the truth
& as i imagine it is hard for people to get past the fervour or even the fanaticism of my anti imperialism - i find it difficult to get past their primitive anti communism
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 1 2005 0:05 utc | 133
Well RG, I wouldn't want to see you get too far out on that historicism deviationist limb, yourself.
While I will agree that the efforts in N. Africa, Italy, and NW Europe were a sideshow to the war in the East, they tied up 25-33% of the troops available to Hitler at any given time. And that was probably decisive in the long run, even if we were to call WWII the Great Patriotic War(which wouldn't hurt my feelings a bit).
And let's not forget the Allied convoy supply efforts thru the Russian arctic ports.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 0:33 utc | 134
@citizen k
"I certainly don't advocate supporting people just because they are democrats. My support of Hackett is that, although I don't agree with him on all positions, he seems like a smart decent person who would oppose torture, "unified executives", flim-flam accounts, and the other components of the Republican regime - and he would vote against Tom Delay and his election would embolden the weak and confuse the badly intentioned."
If that is truly your assessment of Hackett, then I can't fault you for lending him your support. I haven't seen much evidence to indicate that those are the directions he would actually lean in practice, but I am inherently inclined not to trust the wealthy (which Hackett undoubtably is) because it has been my experience that honest endeavors do not make a person very wealthy these days. My criticism was never that he should not be supported because of his party affiliation; my criticism was that he should not be supported exclusively for that reason.
@R'Giap
I agree with your assessment that"...usama bin laden & george bush belong to the same firm - they share the same absolutes & the same brutality. they are effective allies in the war against the rest of us
& all things connsider it is a fight of the rich against the poor - as it always has been" , but I would like to caution you against another form of absolutism when you apply the doctrine of universal complicity to all Americans. It is not that the argument is without merit, it is that it is counterproductive. Even if we all share a cultural guilt (and I extend that to citizens the world over), by applying such broad strokes to assign guilt to the greatest number, you are diluting the responsibility of the most egregious. When everyone is assigned an equal partition of blame, and guilt is turned into a faceless abstract, nothing can be done to redress anything... and the individuals who initiated and perpetrated atrocities are no longer held to any particular degree of blame.
Further, many Americans are reasonable human beings. Many of them would agree with you until you antagonize them with anti-American sentiments. If you are contributing to the failure of Americans to wake up to what they are doing, even with entirely justifiable finger-pointing, you are contributing to the very problems you denounce and share the increasingly abstract blame with them. Being self-righteous might be justified, but it is not going to make the situation better for anyone and will only prolong hostilities. I understand where you are coming from and do not disagree with you, but I would like you to consider your approach to it. Simply being anti-American and blaming American citizens for the actions of their government is not going to wake up those Americans; it's just going to bleed away people who would otherwise support what you are saying and distances all of us from prosecuting the key perpetrators.
@Debs is dead
"This becomes confusing though because we find ourselves in here continually talking about changing the point of view of individual US citizens when really we need to be discussing ways and means of destroying/modifying the machinery of nations whose actions don't reflect it's citizens."
I agree entirely, and that is why I have been so vocal about the need for a populist/labour/proletarian party that is not a part of the very machinery that needs to be destroyed (I think it is already far too corrupt to be reformed). The problem with this, as I see it, is that it takes a great deal of fortitude and the willingness to operate away from the security blanket of an established party. "Playing it safe" is what has allowed the Dems/Repubs to become an indistinguishable threat to all of us. What we Americans need now is to examine our options outside that damnable machine. At the level to which the US has become an international pariah, I can guarantee that if we do not do this voluntarily, a combined international pressure will examine other options on our behalf sooner rather than later. I don't see how "playing it safe" politically is a viable alternative any longer.
Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 1 2005 0:46 utc | 135
Monolycus: Something like this? Or the party of the Republicans or Democrats, but different? Just (genuinely) curious.
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Aug 1 2005 0:59 utc | 136
g
it was not an ode to war ot its glory - it is man at his most debased - though there exist just wars & they are nearly always a case of the oppressed fighting a necessary battle against tyrants - therefore the maoist dictum - long live the victory of people's war - tho i have an immense quarrel with what constitutes elements of the iraqui resistance - it is in essence a people's war & in the end who the fuck am i to question the right of a people to their own self determination - whatever the outcome
what i argue aagainst here & often is imperilist wars & their legitimisation or sanitisation as if there are no cadavres at the end of it.
i cannot & will not forget that people are being torn to pieces in this war & torn to pieces because a tyranny that controls u s policy has decided they want the middle east in their pocket like so many coins
& despite all the good that was in a hackworth - the mythology of american armed force is exactly that - a myth - & you know that from yr reading of either beevor or hastings that you suggested. they were an abysmal failure in korea - an absolute disaster in vietnam & the only thing they do half well is covert operations - or if you like - murder pure & simple. it is their only military talent
& there is much in the american soul - the soul of dreisier or a hammet or a faulkner or a barnes or crane etc etc etc that have given me & have given the world something to cherish - but that was a long time ago - the culture itself has become impoverished && even the things i used to love in your culture specifically music painting a literature have turned to shit
what america does create & still creates & it is not so strange under a tyranny - is scholars of an exceptional calibre - on nearly all fronts - not because of american exceptionalism but because it is the living reaction to a dying culture
i was once interested in jurisprudence of all kinds for example & in a moment in american history there was some very interesting jurisprudence - now there is none at all - you have a supreme cout full of numbskulls & not a substantial jurist amongst them - extraordinary small minds - that a scalia & a thomas epitomise - & scalia lauded as if he was the gratest mind since a marshall or frankfurter - he hasn't an ounce of their jurisprudential brilliance - but perhaps that was an illussion - i wanted to believe in a possible america - an america at ease with itself - it is not & we now know that in our history it never will be
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 1 2005 1:03 utc | 137
monolycus
i am far from being self righteous. american imperialism destroys my nights & days as it does yours. i do much but i still do not do enough. i have worked in enough countries to know how this triumphant form of capitalism is operating in many places with a fuury unimaginable even ten years ago
in brief - for the left - it is a fucking mess & we are being demolished left right & centre
the only people who ware winning against u s imperiaism at the moment are thinkers no less impoverished than the cheney bush junta
once where multiplicity seemed to be openening the doors to life & culture - that door has firmly closed - & people are running to their absolutes as they once ran to guru mahara ji or rajaneesh - an absolutism that alllows people to live decadantly - that is to say at the cost of others
here in france - there has existed a civilise discourse for some time but that has been degraded also - even on mediumd that once offered substantial information - it is better than that on offer in the anglo saxon world - but it is no great shakes at best & is often - a peurile version of their masters voices
in this battle that is being waged it is almost impossible to not feel fatigued, to give up - to say the monopoly that these tyrants possess over power is so absolute - that we are incapable of doing anything other than sybolic act - what k call "principled losing' - but there is no space for that fatigue - if us imperialism was not fighting it out in the middle east - the growing democracies would feel even more the boot of us capital
those forces that are trying to creat something need our vivacity & our audacity & yes, to a great extent they need our fury
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 1 2005 1:16 utc | 138
@Jassalasca Jape I realise your question was directed primarily at Monolycus but after going to that site I decided I wanted to respond as well. In someways that is the opposite of what I think is required. I'm not talking about the Mondragon model which may be perfectly fine there is no real way of telling from that site.
The site is pretty inaccessible to the average human being though because it is needlessly abstract and verbose imo a bad way of communicating ideas.
There is a certain irony in parts of this discussion. Lend Lease was Roosevelt's way of instituting something that most people nowadays believe gave a 'good' outcome even though the feeling from most US citizens at the time was that being involved in another European war would be a 'bad' thing to do. Who really knows what FDR's motives were although subsequent events inform us that he wasn't motivated by concern for the wellbeing of European Jewry.
It is particularly ironic because this was probably the last time US citizens opposed involvement in war out of concern for humanity and the way that FDR ignored that feeling and bought into a war that his citizenry didn't want him to, has been used as a model for US involvement in conflicts since then.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 1 2005 1:19 utc | 139
t is particularly ironic because this was probably the last time US citizens opposed involvement in war out of concern for humanity
Well here we go again, Debs.
!What do you think the several millions of people in the US were protesting in fall 2002 winter 2003?
And since you have ascended so high onto your moral and ethical high podium that you might get a nosebleed, please explain to me, how Europe and Russia would have been better off under Nazi Germany's control--that is, if Roosevelt had not done what he did.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 1:40 utc | 140
I wonder what would have happened if the CIO and Henry Wallace and others had adopted the KPD's point of view in the 30's
presented with a credible account of facts about this claim, I would agree. But that's me.
you deceive here.
Posted by: slothrop | Aug 1 2005 2:09 utc | 141
Groucho: Obviously the victorious Red Army would have pushed through to the Thames, sparing Europe the indignity of coca-cola, "le week-end", and mere imperial compradore status. Comrade RG would have grown up in the Eden wisely administered by Maurice Thorez (and Francois mitterand would have served them too) and America, drowning in the depths of false consciousness would have sunk to the bottom of the trash bin of history to univeral applause. Hooray!
Did I get that right Sloth? RG?
Posted by: citizen k | Aug 1 2005 2:10 utc | 142
Citizen k:
>So I agree with you that blind support of Democrats is counter-productive. I disagree with some who think that replacing a Loyal Party Member with a decent person in opposition is worthless unless the opposition person SAYS the right thing on all issues.<
Yes, I agree with you that a decent person in opposition is electable even if they don't say the right thing on ALL issues.
However, Paul Hackett is running AS an Iraqi veteran, he is being marketed by the Democratic party because he IS an Iraqi war veteran and he shows pictures of himself with his marine buddies in Fallujah, Iraq on his web site. Cheerful, happy pictures.
Therefore what Paul Hackett says about Iraq IS of primary importance since its the focus of his marketing strategy for his campaign.
And might I add an issue that is literally a matter of life and death to thousands of human beings.
Posted by: | Aug 1 2005 2:28 utc | 143
Well dan o steele
ON one hand, when it comes to raising the invective, you start, I'll escalate.
On the other hand says, rude is rude and my mommy doesn't approve, though, my "fucking idiot" is like a Cosmo test, the reader determines whether I would apply the label to them. Whether it applies to you, for example, I did not know, and do not since you did not answer the question.
A third hand says, wake up.
If you were on the receiving end of all these "wars" you list you might not be so much in favor of supporting them. I really don't know what your angle is here.
turns out to be a nice example of what I am angry about.
I don't "support" any of those wars any more than I "support" diabetes or old age or crushing the ribs of someone having a heart attack in a crude attempt to keep blood pumping.
I do assert as empirical fact that these wars are ongoing and whether choices made increase or diminish human decency must take the reality of these wars into account before knowing what the moral action is. Those unwilling or unable to do so for whatever reason are not moral. I loathe them.
And I assert that there is a war for survival on, which has been lost in this whole Iraq adventure bullshit, and that the War for Survival Job One Priority is lost on many here, which, is inexcusable. If people proud of their superiority to conservatives are helping Bush blow the War for survival out of complacency isn't cause for anger, praytell, what is?
And I assert that many here are objective allies with George W, the Rovians, the Israel Firsters, the Straussians, the neo cons, and the whole deluded motley crew of insane egos, for, when this crew turned getting bin Laden and laying the groundwork to secure the world against a new age of threats, into a sideshow for an Iraq adventure, at least half the posters here have agreed by word and deed to forget the real threat, to forget the real enemy, in favor of recycling the same old shit in connection with the Iraq adventure. Nothing changed. Americao-centrism at its autistic worst, as strong here as in the Bush White House. 9.9? Who cares? 3.11? Who cares? Dozens of innocent Iraqui civilians burnt up in a fuel trank explosion as part of a religious war, with others to live the rest of their lives in misery, and such as rg gloat and dance jigs because it fits some dumb ass story about America.
The deal is simple: right and left can use Iraq to stick to their old dumb ass stories and ignore the reality out there. It is disgusting.
Posted by: razor | Aug 1 2005 2:28 utc | 144
@Groucho I apoligise for not clearly stating what I meant which was that the will of the majority of US citizens was opposed to involvement in WW2, prior to Pearl harbor. This is why Roosevelt resorted to ploys like Lend Lease to aid Britain/France. He had no show of getting overt support for this war through a congress who knew the implacable opposition of their constituency to it.
I guess I omitted this specificity since I assumed, incorrectly that this was common knowledge.
If I had been in the US at the same time I would have agreed with the people who had either witnessed the horror that was WW1 or heard of it from those who had.
Very few of the people in any country anywhere opposed Hitler for any humanitarian reason initially. Diferent countries had different agendas and Roosevelt's appears to have stemmed from some Anglophile tendencies more than anything else.
I wasn't aware that I was arguing that Europe would be better off under Hitler, I believe that WW2 worst legacy was that ultimately the Nazi empire proved to be so evil that it made citizens of the victorious countries deceive themselves into thinking that they had fought a morally just war, when their entry into it had little to do with moral justness and it also led them to believe that future conflicts they involved themselves in would also carry the same aura of morality.
If you maintain I see myself on a high moral and ethical podium I suggest you reread what I write. I do not see the outcomes of the endeavours of the vast majority of people on this planet, no matter where they come from, myself included as being anything other than the result of people attempting to do the best they can in a complex and ambiguous existence.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 1 2005 2:48 utc | 145
the principle enemy of humanity is u s imperialism - there is no greater threat than that. ubl & his little seclets ùay as wel be a part of u s covert operations. they are neither an army or a political force. even militant islam of the salafist variety are not hegemonic
razor wants to make a sob story into concrete history. 19 people for the most part saudi took part in an action financed by a yemeni/saudi multi millionaire with the complicity or the incompetence of forces within this administration
to make of that action - a holy war is not only ridiculous it is dangerous & has proved to be. far from solving any problems it has accelerated them in every sense
razor brings a white russians sense of hyperbole & exaggeration which serves neither fact or reality
the reality of our current situation is something else entirely
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 1 2005 3:14 utc | 146
OK, debs.
What really grated on me with your post was that you seemed to be saying that the several millions of people in the US who opposed the Iraq War did not exist.
The protest movement in this country before the war began totally amazed me. A lot of good people did everything they could to stop it.
The majority of people in this country were against the war until it started, and even then the percentace went the other way by only 10%.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 3:19 utc | 147
Ah Sloth: Americans are just too vulgar to be in your revolution anyways. We'd rather be selling soap, and we're more into just plain materialism or material girls than that there dialectical materialism you fellers are so het up about. Hell, ifn a prefessor of marxist theory wants some respect, he better head on out to some place like France where they still know how to bend the knee. That's how come we have gone and messed up the world with our greed and soldiers, we just don't have the savoir faire that them Europeans or even the Japs and China-dudes bring to colonialism. Good thing we're getting our butts kicked in Iraq and the shady Democrats are being crushed here, becuase the world's gonna be a whole like nicer when Al Queda and Focus on Family are trading embassies. Umm hmm. Praise Allah and Jaysus.
Posted by: citizen k | Aug 1 2005 3:26 utc | 148
@RG:
Not much to say about it.
It is so tragic and criminal what these Bush fools have done since September 2001.
OBL sure got a bang with his 19, didn't he now?
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 3:37 utc | 149
Shucks, CK:
I was busy out buyin some soap and pork rinds at Sam's Club, and watchin NASCAR.
Didn't get to this ole drawing room till 2 hours ago.
Did I miss much?
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 3:46 utc | 150
For f***s sake aren't we smart enough not to see everything in black and white? Dislike of the invasion of Iraq and the forces that created it doesn't mean slavish adherence to fundamentalism. Opposition to US imperialism doesn't equate to opposition to US citizens.
I'm begining to think I should have posted my rant from this am, if only to try to convince someone/anyone that this whole personal affront business that we're all pulling is wasteful and negative. The reason I didn't was that I wouldn't want to read a screed like that so why would anyone else? However in it I tried to explain the difficulty I had in reconciling my rabid sometime anti-americanism with the good times I had with US friends and acquaintances.
Monocyclus pretty much said it all upthread when he pointed out to remembering giap that although his anti american imperialism statements were understandable, they didn't contribute to any solution because many people in the US would take such raw expression personally, which would cause them to reject his contentions out of hand.
That doesn't make rgiap wrong or those that are offended right either it just means we have all fallen into the territorial trap so frequently abused by disingenuous politicians.
When Rgiap has had a ping at Australia I have been known to reply with a post about Algeria or the oppression of Islamic schoolchildren in France. There is then a chance that rgiap will respond in kind and nothing is assisted apart from our disinclination to take notice of the other worthwhile bits of what each other is saying.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 1 2005 3:51 utc | 151
razor wants to make a sob story into concrete history
The life of death of mortals not being concrete history.
Posted by: razor | Aug 1 2005 3:52 utc | 152
The navies of the world made the switch from coal to oil as a prelude to WWI. Thus the skirmishes in Mexico concerning America, Germany and Japan.
Germany did not have its own sources of oil. In World War II, Germany fought to get the oil in Russia and lost. The fighing in North Africa dealt directly with the issue of denying Germany oil to fuel its war machine.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they left the oil storage tanks alone, though they were in easy striking distance, and it the people who could keep them from that oil.
America was able, at that time, to supply its own oil for the myriad military uses of that black gold.
If Germany had been able to get to the oil, the outcome of WWII might have been different, in the same way that American Generals needed their pipelines to keep feeding their tanks and making material and keep advancing on the western front. the same with the eastern front. The same with North Africa. Saudi Arabia's oil came on line in 1938, so that WWII also marked the beginning of the fight for the middle east in relation to oil, not empire.
And now we're seemingly at the end of a cycle of wars based upon the limited nature of oil and the military's reliance on it, corresponding with the dawn of peak oil.
Einstein said he didn't know how the third world war would be fought, but that the one after that would be fought with sticks and stones.
Posted by: | Aug 1 2005 4:40 utc | 153
@debs:
Madame de Stael moderates this salon in the early hours, while Bernhard sleeps.
She is partial to pork rinds, and does not cotton to foul language, such as f***s. If you continue to use such words, you will find out what the soap I bought today is for, and you won't get any pork rinds.
Got to go now. Got community college exams on Hegel and Cant today, Need to hit the Cliff Notes a bit.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 4:46 utc | 154
@Jassa
"Monolycus: Something like this? Or the party of the Republicans or Democrats, but different? Just (genuinely) curious."
I can't say for sure, Jassa. I couldn't read much of the page you linked to (I kept getting Spanish "no access allowed" messages). I've not heard of the Mondragon system, but if it is what I got the impression it is from the bits I was able to access, then I think it is very, very much the way to go.
Autonomous collectives (geez, I hope I'm not starting to sound like Dennis) empower people from the bottom-up, give meaning to their lives as their labour is something in which they are actually invested, promote greater access and equity for the members and, to top off, are more environmentally-friendly than the corporate structure (which I hasten to remind everyone is less than one-hundred years old and does not, repeat NOT, represent a "natural" social or economic development). Problem is, these collectives only work if there are a large number of them. One isolated commune in Spain (or anywhere else) is just a monastic retreat even if it serves as a nice model. I'll have to look more deeply into it, but it sounds like a start.
As for the "like the party of Republicans or Democrats but different" question... I'd have to say very, very different. Political parties are not part of the US Constitutional arrangement. Our founding fathers were familiar with interest groups but not old-boy's-clubs on this scale. If we are talking about making a genuine political change in the form of a new party, it would have to have some very binding checks and balances written into it to avoid becoming just another corrupt player like our friends "The Only Game In Town Party".
This is a danger inherent to all nascent movements, from class revolutions to labor unions; when they are in their infancy and addressing a specific evil, they are necessary vehicles for social justice... but they quickly become the new evil once they gain formal recognition and start becoming exploited. In order not to be trading a frying pan for a fire, some method of transparency must be implented into their design. That is why I am fond of the community-level model. Local chapters, each having equal weight, inhibit a movement from becoming another bloated political-favour machine as soon as they win some public recognition.
Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 1 2005 6:03 utc | 157
@groucho
try and read past the first line in Cliff's notes. It's a dead giveaway.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 1 2005 7:48 utc | 158
@Monolycus, Debs
Sorry about the links, I hadn't checked them. I studied Mondragon (cursorily) long ago, and I just grabbed the site reference as a shorthand explanation. Sorry for the static.
As I understand it, the Mondragon cooperative system is a closed-circuit economic system supporting both business finance and worker retirement retirement. Mondragon is a Basque community, which suffered from lack of services and economic depression. The Mondragon model was introduced by a Catholic priest who was also a smart economist (and, again if I remember correctly, a returnee). It is an economic model that does not aspire to affect Spanish national politics directly.
A common problem for cooperatives is that the value of the enterprise builds up, and this inflates the value of the initial shares. The founders have a disincentive to issue new shares, because their shares effectively represent their retirement fund. The end result is generally that the initial shareholders (originally the workers who did the buyout) ultimately sell their interest to some larger firm or holding company, and the coop dies.
If I remember correctly, Mondragon solves this problem through a cooperative banking system. I don't remember the details. Here's a better link.
Your response is interesting. I was curious about whether you felt some alternative principle of organization was desireable. As you point out, political parties on the old boy network plan ("faction" as Federalist 10 has it, I think) have a way of degrading into raw pork barrel frenzy and tyranny of the majority, and that way lies ever expanding industry capture and then oligarchy. Something else would be required to prevent that from happening, although I have no idea whether Mondragon fits into the picture.
The problem is that the props for collective action, on the Mondragon or any other peaceful model, depend ultimately on the legal environment. If some organization comes to be perceived as a threat to the hegemony of an R/D hammerlock on political power, its survival, or its cohesiveness, can be torpedoed by changes to law (i.e. the relevant corporate law or the tax codes).
That said, the idea that organizational structure is a threshold issue is interesting. I'll settle back to lurking now ...
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Aug 1 2005 12:56 utc | 159
Sloth: You keep calling me a liar and wrong on the history, but you never actually cite like references to empirical facts. The best you've been able to do is "Braudel obviously draws from Marx and my understanding of Marx contradicts what you say, so neyah-neyah." This reminds me of the famous pilpul proof that Moses wore a kippah (like all good Orthodox Jews). The proof is something like: And it says in Torah that "then Moses went out", and its obvious that a pious man like Moses wouldn't go out without his kippah. My observation is that like some sheltered cheder boy, you've never encountered an environment where people who have read more than one book consider the entire enterprise of academic marxism to be a jobs program for hacks. And stop making basketball references until you can keep all those different black guys separate in your mind.
Anon: 10:28: You want a choice who cannot win an election in OH-2. I'm tired of losing and I have faith in smarts and honesty as more important than ideology.
RG: You are obviously not stupid, but if you talk in 72point cliches, you will confuse yourself. Also, like many self-professed Marxists, you fail to remember the most important points made by the old bastard. Everything solid melts into air, including nation states. Capitalism is a world system, not a nasty plot of crass Yankees. All that surplus value incarnated as cash doesn't give a damn about Zionism or the neo-cons or the CIA. It's idiotic for a resident of the 4th largest national economy to claim to be "Marxist" and then pretend that the US is the source of all evil as if French bankers and industrialists operated under different rules than the ones in the US or Australia. As the sainted Bakunin, of blessed memory, pointed out at the time, Marx made the standard economists error of thinking that money would subsume nationalism/ethnic-identity, religion, and sheer naked desire for power. The obvious feature of our time is that as the capitalist system burrows its way into every nook and cranny in the world, destroying and upturning every established relation, the old powers don't go away, but themselves start to float over the globe and flare up in new ways. And one symptom is that representatives of displaced European intellectual classes grab onto nationalism in the guise of Marx flavored anti-americanism as if it could save them from the flood.
Well, the work week is starting, and I'm late as usual. Gotta go dig up the workshirt with the "Citizen K" label, start the pick-up, drop the kids at Wal-mart so they get some air-conditionaing, and peel on out to the plant.
Posted by: citizen k | Aug 1 2005 13:41 utc | 160
k
both you & comrade slothrop agree on that point that imperialism has no national character. i believe the opposite to be true despite the fact that as part of trnsnational corporations others are beneficiaries, secondary beneficiaries of that empire
i will argue this with my 72 point cliches some time this week
slothrop - the cd morning glory - tim buckley - sublime & alabama has a precise mind in the affairs of the heart
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 1 2005 19:53 utc | 161
citizen k @ 6:13 PM (30 July): I mean that ALL Democrats holding elective office at the national level either benefit directly from AIPAC contributions, or live in mortal fear that AIPAC, frowning on them, will, with its infinite supply of dedicated dollars, lend its support either to an opponent in a party primary, or to an opponent from another party in a general election. For this reason, no Democratic candidate for any national office--those cited by anna missed @ 6:53 PM (30 July) included, all opponents of the Iraqi war, though surely on agreeable terms with AIPAC--could hope to survive if he or she were to campaign on a platform of fairness and even-handedness in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. I invite you to deal with this fact--for it is a fact-- forthrightly, citizen k, because you seem to suppose that there's something adventitious, or slightly accidental, about the relationship of the Democrats to AIPAC, on the one hand, and their incapacity to oppose the war in Iraq with any credibility or conviction whatsoever. Lip-service is what they pay, and it doesn't make for effective opposition. We who oppose the war in Iraq must not look to Democrats or Republicans for any succor or relief--not ever; if, indeed, an effective movement against this war is ever to arise at any moment, anywhere, it will have to do so from outside the American political system--from outside, I'll make bold to say, the territorial boundaries of the USA itself.
Posted by: alabama | Aug 1 2005 20:32 utc | 162
@Alabama:
if, indeed, an effective movement against this war is ever to arise at any moment, anywhere, it will have to do so from outside the American political system--from outside, I'll make bold to say, the territorial boundaries of the USA itself
Well that's rather harsh and a little too much hyperbole for my taste.
See my post 1119 PM, 31 July.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 20:46 utc | 163
considering the track record of the united states, a war-mongering nation defined by continuous conflict since its bloody birth, i'd have to side w/ Alabama on this point. but i'll hang in there w/ groucho as long as we actually keep trying.
we have a record of conquest, colonization, and expansion unequaled by any people in the 19th century. we are not about to be curbed now. -- senator henry cabot lodge (mass)
Posted by: b real | Aug 1 2005 20:59 utc | 164
What if nationalism is merely an extension of humanity's innate territorial jealousy? Some countries have a sense of patriotism which appears to rule most of their decisions but others don't. Is this because the ones that do have been subjected to 'winding up' by politicians seeking to control their sheeple? Or is it because the ones that don't haven't perceived threats to their territorial integrity.
When one considers how infrequently a country such as the US has had its territory threatened against the strength of patriotic fervour in that nation it is difficult to accept that it's flag waving jingoism is a reaction to actual physical threat.
However I also believe that it would be a mistake to think that just because US agression likely stems more from a systemic abuse of it's people's instinctual self protection, that an actual threat from outside wouldn't inspire a huge self protective reaction.
So when Alabama says that "if, indeed, an effective movement against this war is ever to arise at any moment, anywhere, it will have to do so from outside the American political system--from outside, I'll make bold to say, the territorial boundaries of the USA itself." I must respectfully disagree. Any attempt to force change upon a nation from outside it's borders will always meet with far more resistance. People won't even stop to consider the merit of the change before it is rejected.
If Stalin et al hadn't commingled the spread of Marxist ideology with Russian Imperialism, it would have been much tougher for US politicians to convince their people to resist it. How many times were dedicated and able labour leaders dismissed as "Russian Agents"? The McCarthy witch hunt got its impetus from politicians convincing the people that US communists weren't operating in the best interests of US citizens, they were "selling atom secrets to the Russkies" etc.
MoA is a compelling site for many us and one of the reasons for that is that there is a genuine interchange of ideas from people generally opposed to the invasion of Iraq, and those people appear to be about equally spread between those that live in the US and those that don't. This gives all of us a unique oportunity to 'reality check' our thoughts.
Time and time again we have seen what happens if a US resident makes a statement that appears to place the interests of people in the US above those elsewhere or someone outside the US says something that denigrates US people and places their needs below those of the rest of the world. There is generally an explosion of invective which never advances the discussion.
Any attempt from outside the US to bring change to that country would meet with such strong resistance that it could only be introduced by force of arms which IMO would make it both self defeating and temporary.
Those of us on the outside can make gentle suggestions but overt cheerleading much less any indication of 'glee' at the US predicament will hinder any change.
My 'gentle suggestion' is that like so many other places in the world, change must come from outside the established political order. We can debate the best strategy/outcome for that change, in the end that change will come when US citizens force change upon the status quo.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 1 2005 22:10 utc | 165
Any attempt from outside the US to bring change to that country would meet with such strong resistance that it could only be introduced by force of arms which IMO would make it both self defeating and temporary.
don't know what Alabama had in mind, but i wasn't thinking in terms of an armed overthrow or anything that confrontational. change can be effected by external observers being honest about what they see. a global movement to call the u.s. on its hypocrisy & war crimes would be a great start. if we can kick that off from inside, even better. but it is in everyone's best interests if those outside the u.s. don't wait for that to happen.
Posted by: b real | Aug 1 2005 22:25 utc | 166
this time alabama & i converge. momentarily my friend - tho yr counsel on affairs of the heart was wiser than i wanted it to be.
as i've written here before - even extra parliamentiary opposition seems difficult in the u s based on two levels - a greater part of the people believing against all evidence to the contrary that the situation - politicaly, judicially, will return to normal. for me, such a return is not envisigable in the immediate or near future - if at all. the other, is that the repressive state apparatus in america is finely tuned for any effective opposition & it would not be strange for a person to understand what may be the cost of an effective engagement; the patriot acts are not written for foreign warriors but for internal dissent & an unprecedented control over the population - though it seems rupert murdoch & his allies have corrupted potentialities
the apaic connection & the righteous attack on it by alabama are not - i repeat not dressed up anti semitism. the extreme right of both countries have a mutual benfiting relatonship. the attack on aipac needs to be made with vigour. they are but one element of the corruption of the political process & there are many
on nights like these i wonder where he 12 million people are while iraquis are dying in great numbers & i want to say to in trlation to the 'sob story' that on any given month for over 50 years at least 3000 people die a month directly or indirectly from the policies of u s imperialism & some of that number within the belly of the beast itself
what hapened on sept 11 was armed propoganda - it was not & never contained any real military threat. in much the same way that the fraktion armee rouge in germany never posed any real threat to the state - in fact it was quickly absorbed by it & allowed for necessary changes in jurisprudence. the red brigades in italy are another question - because there it was carried over to the mass & it possesses deep & strong connections to the people. however, even in this case - buiness(mafia) continued as usual & the right was able to use its strategy of tension to allow italy to go from one mafiosi (andreotti) to another (berlusconi)
the wars against the arab people is a war of rich against poor. it was set in motion a long time before the cadre of 19 conducted their action
i'm not a brute razor but i'm not going to accept special pleading. america is not a victim though it is playing it as austria did until waldheim was completely unmsked & so too the fraudelent rewrting of austrian history
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 1 2005 22:27 utc | 167
There is a study of the conquest of Meso-America by Tzvetan Todorov which I read a number of years ago. One of his theses I still find terrifyingly apt: A people that ensconces itself behind hermetic and hypertrophied systems of signs and beliefs inadvertently develops a kind of cultural death drive.
When I read that, I thought that the best modern illustration was Hitler-Germany. Any other nation (or a large part of it) that comes to mind? Nah.
Posted by: teuton | Aug 1 2005 22:32 utc | 168
Debs is dead, I've had some experience with American protest movements on the inside. I admire their courage, their energy, their ingenuity and good faith. But there are many such protests on many topics, only a few gaining the intensity and focus that can alter a bad trend in an urgent way. Has the anti-war movement risen to the scope and motion of a movement, from within, that could compel the civilian-military American institutions to change its ways? It hasn't, and it won't--least of all in the political sphere of our party politics. So something from elsewhere else will have to fan the flames, And this is hardly news. After all, the Abolitionist Movement, the one that citizen k so rightly applauds--did not "start" in the United States, It did nothing of the sort: Abolitionism was imported from England, mostly by clerics under the influence of Bishop Wilberforce, long before anything of the kind got started in New England in 1837.
Posted by: alabama | Aug 1 2005 22:38 utc | 169
@b real
"don't know what Alabama had in mind, but i wasn't thinking in terms of an armed overthrow or anything that confrontational. change can be effected by external observers being honest about what they see. a global movement to call the u.s. on its hypocrisy & war crimes would be a great start."
I know what you're saying but if the challenge to US actions come from outside it's borders, the challenge will be immediately and effectively denounced on the grounds that it is an attempt by outsiders to use US 'errors' for selfish gain.
Of course those of us outside the US need to do everything we can to hold US imperial expansion to account but change will only occur when US citizens themselves act against Imperial excess.
If those of us outside the US focus solely upon US slaughter and are believed to ignore other nation's excesses, it will be that much easier for those in power in the US to persuade citizens that they are being held to account for selfish reasons.
A while ago I posted a link from a NZ paper which told of a failure by National Geographic to gather support from indigenous people in the South Pacific for a study on human migration patterns. I didn't post that to go Nyah Nyah see how the US has stuffed up so bad that even a previously respected organisation such as National Geographic is no longer trusted. I posted it in the hope that people inside the US would be so appalled that their leaders' actions had reduced the esteem their country is held in, that it would inspire them to continue to consider ways of overcoming their leaders' 'short termist stupidity'.
I think that is why most of the MoA posters from outside the US do what they do but even here if we don't clearly demonstrate that our criticisms are come from some sort of knee-jerk anti-americanism, we are just pissing in the wind.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 1 2005 22:59 utc | 170
"criticisms are come from some sort of knee-jerk anti-americanism"
should of course read: criticisms aren't coming from some sort of knee-jerk anti-americanism
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 1 2005 23:03 utc | 171
debs
perhaps i am a brute
but bolton the new un ambassador puts my brutishness in the shadow
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 1 2005 23:06 utc | 172
@RG:
Get the landing craft, and the Chinese 4th Field Army Propaganda and Debate Elements ready to liberate us,for, as we have just been informed, we Americans cannot possibly accomplish anything, in this area, by ourselves.
Alabama, you are starting to sound as humorous as Tom Friedman. Need to stop reading NYT so much.
Aside from what the protest movement did, or did not produce, it looks like to me there is a plan to get most troops out of Iraq before the 06 elections.
This was foisted on Bush by the declining popularity of this war.
I must have missed something.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 23:07 utc | 173
"Why do they hate us?" (The pronoun clearly indicates that the people who allegedly hate all the time are not addressed at all. The answer is to come from the peer group.)
"Um, sorry, we don't hate 'you'. We abhor your government and what it does in the name of democracy, freedom and what not."
"But we mean well. We stand for all that is good."
"Beg your pardon, but you don't. You don't do anything except feel good about your goodness. Look at what your gov is doing in your name outside the US."
"But our media tell us that our boys and girls are doing good all over the world."
"Your media stink. Independent and/or truthful reporting has all but vanished in your country."
"That's a lie." [Turning away, addressing their peer group:] "Why do they hate us?"
Hope the contributors at MoA do not feel that they are being addressed here, but I have had at least two conversations along those lines fairly recently.
Posted by: teuton | Aug 1 2005 23:16 utc | 174
That was a low blow Groucho. And I come to 'bama's defense. I was in a couple of those big antiwar gatherings that gained so little recognition. The systematic wall of public mind control has grown since then, and so yes it is helpful, or even necessary to get help from abroad.
That said, I do expect a coup to be executed soon by the factions of govt. that have been dissed so badly by the neocons. We have reached the tipping point.
Posted by: rapt | Aug 1 2005 23:19 utc | 175
@rapt:
2-3 million Americans got in the streets, even before the war started.
I consider that one hell of an achievement.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 23:27 utc | 176
And when I say 2-3 million that was in the major Metro areas. Little cities and towns had little protests.
And of course everbody in the world can help end this.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 1 2005 23:34 utc | 177
The Mondragon system made it to the US in at least the SF bay area, to a very limited extent.
http://www.eurotrib.com/comments/2005/7/23/9345/86678/26#26>Some reading here
listening to the acrimonious exchanges on this thread I sometimes think I hear a tone common to the angry squabbles of any political force or faction that is losing, whose members feel helpless and/or hopeless to get any traction or grip on events. blame and scorn are generously shared around :-) it must be someone's fault that we're losing.
and obviously we need a strategy now, and obviously your strategy won't work, and obviously we don't have the luxury of time to try it out and see -- the situation is urgent -- so just shut up and follow my strategy, which self-evidently has a better chance of working, but only if we all follow it, so if you don't follow my strategy then it will be your fault that we didn't turn this around, yada yada yada... the sense of urgency and of disaster subverts our civility. no one has any patience -- the ship is sinking under us, decisive action is required.
I've been thinking and talking to some folks in face-space lately,e and their take is that national politics in the US (Fed level) has reached a pitch of corruption and malfeasance which renders it fruitless to invest our effort as citizen reformers in trying to prune at the top of the tree. hope, they said to me (not dogmatically but tentatively), may be more likely nearer the bottom -- i.e. BushCo spits on Kyoto, but mayors across America are trying to meet its provisions, city by city.
it is as if imperial Rome has gone rotten to the core, but out in the provinces there are spaces for action, opportunities to win on progressive/environmental issues in more limited playing fields. I'm leaning towards Hakim Bey at this time (on the concept of temporary autonomous zones): the power of the corporate/totalitarian State is immense, its firepower is inconceivable, and until it shoots itself in both clodhopping feet with said firepower, we "little people" are unlikely to take it down with a slingshot. maybe we would be better advised to tunnel under it and around it, build temporary autonomous zones where we can, do the same work the Rethugs did as they built up their political juggernaut, school board by school board, district by county?
at the very least we might achieve genuine ameliorations or protections (of rights, of privacy, of the commons, of civic life) on the local level. if there is a coherent political future for this country then this local consolidating and activism might form the base for a new populist/greenish/labourish party, whether it be called Democrat or something else. if there is no coherent political future for this country then at least local efforts at democratic govt, sustainable economic revitalisation, regional self-suffiency etc. might improve the chances for our local communities to weather a period of chaos or unrest or financial depression.
am I suggesting "sauve qui peut"? maybe so. it is hard for me to say at this point which is the less responsible course -- to invest our efforts locally in resilience and grass roots democracy, or to tilt at Washington's windmills in an effort to affect the Big Picture. an argument can be made that either one is a waste of time or an abandonment of responsibility.
what a shift of focus to the local would do to stop the neocons' war -- nothing much perhaps. given the vast profitability of that enterprise for the cabal of industrialists now controlling DC, I am not sure there is anything that will stop this war, or this series of wars, other than a resounding defeat and/or collapse of US armed forces. but support could be established locally for draft dodging, for going AWOL, for publicising the plight of the wounded troops and the sad state of vets' pay and benefits, for publicising the absence of middle and upper class inductees in the present armed forces, etc. a base could be built for war resistance.
I am not sure that the behaviour of the US is not situational -- that there isn't some global version of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment going on here, and that any nation which finds itself in the Most Wealthy Most Powerful seat wouldn't behave about the same. the relatively cleaner recent (only relative, only recent) histories of European powers is, I suggest, a byproduct of decolonisation (the loss of their empires) which compelled them to accept a more modest role on the world stage. the national behaviour of the US may be symptomatic of its current position in geopolitics, and hence unalterable (Acton being axiomatic) until its grandiose power is reduced by peak oil, a collapse of its economy or its military, or perhaps sufficient climate destabilisation to inflict crippling damage on its coastline or its agriculture.
note that I don't regard these as happy outcomes. what I fear is that the behaviour of the US -- politically -- at present is structural, and that changing the personnel in power is perhaps not likely to change the behaviour (note the Dems' support for the same policies of imperial/totalitarian dreamtime that make the neocons drool). if the US crashes as a superpower in the next few years and China assumes the throne, I don't expect the Chinese government at that time to behave much differently. suddenly it will be a few billion Chinese who are wondering about their complicity in the crimes of empire -- or driving their SUVs adorned with Support Our Troops stickers in Mandarin or Cantonese -- while their army "pacifies" Venezuela or Malaysia. at least that is my semi-informed (and entirely depressed) guess.
Posted by: DeAnander | Aug 1 2005 23:50 utc | 178
war what fucking war? it's been a war all my fucking life
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 2 2005 0:06 utc | 179
sorry for that outburst but i have never known waht privelege means & it seems to me - that from the first to the last it has been a long war & one that does not look like ending any time soon
& it is clear that my anger is rooted in the uselessness i feel in front of the depravity of u s imperialism & its compradors all over this globe & what work is done seems so little & the dead of fallujah are the dead of fallujah
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 2 2005 0:27 utc | 180
Maybe for you, RG, but not for us:
At most, 500,000 American troops are at risk of being deployed to these war theaters at some time. Assume that for each of them some 20 members of the wider family sweat with fear when they hear that a helicopter crashed in Afghanistan or that X number of soldiers or Marines were killed or seriously wounded in Iraq. It implies that no more than 10 million Americans have any real emotional connection to these wars.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 2 2005 0:29 utc | 181
@rgiap
I don't believe I've ever considered your comments brutish a bit intemperate perhaps but the intemperacy is at least understandable.
Venting the spleen is an essential part of survival in this horrific world but one shouldn't expect that venting to deliver a positive outcome for anyone except oneself.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 2 2005 0:35 utc | 182
Aside from what the protest movement did, or did not produce, it looks like to me there is a plan to get most troops out of Iraq before the 06 elections.
This was foisted on Bush by the declining popularity of this war.
Not so fast, Groucho. See this.
Aug. 8, 2005 issue - Donald Rumsfeld doesn't like long-term occupations. He's always made that clear. After U.S. forces took Baghdad, the Defense secretary had plans to reduce the U.S. presence in Iraq to 40,000 troops by the fall of 2003. Then the insurgency struck.Now Rumsfeld is quietly moving toward his original goal—three years late.....
.....earlier this year the Pentagon had been mum on a withdrawal timetable, in part so as not to encourage the insurgents. Now the conditions for U.S. withdrawal no longer include a defeated insurgency, Pentagon sources say. The new administration mantra is that the insurgency can be beaten only politically, by the success of Iraq's new government.
...
The Bush administration wants to pre-empt growing public pressure for withdrawal, which could give the insurgents a Vietnam-like strategic goal. Military planners, meanwhile, are deeply concerned about driving away Army careerists and recruits if current deployments are forced into 2007. If the U.S. Army has to do another rotation into Iraq in the fall of 2006 to keep force levels up to their current 138,000, it "goes off a cliff," says retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey.
And this.
This week's talk of "withdrawal in 2006" (20,000 troops, possibly, if the Constitution gets finished, things go well with the elections, the insurgents convert to Tibetan Buddhism, etc.) is a sham, as the New York Times' Bob Herbert points out. The long-term goal was, and still is, to establish a permanent base of operations in Iraq to control the world's last great oil reserves. That doesn't mean there couldn't very well be troop reductions next year. But they may have more to do with human resources than human rights.
As to the lack of an antiwar movement in this country, maybe a little more is happening than is commonly acknowledged.
Frustrated with seeing the largest street protests since Vietnam marginalized by the mainstream media and dismissed by the president as a "focus group," thousands of antiwar youth are targeting this Achilles' heel of the neocon master plan."We think counter-recruitment is the smartest way to intervene with the war in Iraq," John Sellers, founder of the Ruckus Society, told me. "Until Rumsfeld's robot army is up and running, they're going to need young men and women to fight. We feel the most effective strategy is to support the youth who are questioning our nation's values and resisting war for resources."
Ruckus has teamed up with Code Pink, the League of Independent Voters and other antiwar groups, to create Notyoursoldier.org, an organizing hub for counter-recruiting actions.....
Are their efforts having any effect? From the second link:
Last week, the Army's top personnel officer announced the Army won't meet its recruiting goals for 2005. So far this year, the active-duty Army has enlisted 47,121 recruits. The goal was 80,000. There's little chance to make up the gap the official conceded.....
What anti-war effort there is has targeted the War Party's most vulnerable area: the supply of kids willing to be cannon fodder. This isn't eye-catching march-in-the-street stuff, which doesn't work anyway since BushCo ignores it and demonizes the participants. But educating the kids who are going to risk their lives for this imperial lie is effective. If the cannon fodder won't volunteer, the Empire has a problem.
So, who's paying for our patriotism?
President Bush assures us that the ongoing twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are worth the sacrifices they entail. Editorialists around the nation agree and say that a steadfast American public was willing to stay the course.Should anyone be surprised by this national resolve, given that these wars visit no sacrifice of any sort -- neither blood nor angst nor taxes -- on well over 95 percent of the American people?
At most, 500,000 American troops are at risk of being deployed to these war theaters at some time. Assume that for each of them some 20 members of the wider family sweat with fear when they hear that a helicopter crashed in Afghanistan or that X number of soldiers or Marines were killed or seriously wounded in Iraq. It implies that no more than 10 million Americans have any real emotional connection to these wars.
A large part of the neocon strategy has been to insulate the populace from any whiff of sacrifice, relying on just a small percentage of less well off people to pay the real [American] price of this war. Get enough of those people to opt out and the Empire either has to change course or go to the draft and face a much larger possibility of popular unrest. To minimize the potential for popular opposition to the war to form, they needed a quick victory and to limit the percentage of the population that would feel the effects of the war.
The article continues:
The administration and Congress have gone to extraordinary lengths to insulate voters from the money cost of the wars -- to the point even of excluding outlays for them from the regular budget process. Furthermore, they have financed the wars not with taxes but by borrowing abroad.The strategic shielding of most voters from any emotional or financial sacrifice for these wars cannot but trigger the analogue of what is called "moral hazard" in the context of health insurance, a field in which I've done a lot of scholarly work. There, moral hazard refers to the tendency of well-insured patients to use health care with complete indifference to the cost they visit on others.....But if all but a handful of Americans are completely insulated against the emotional -- and financial -- cost of war, is it not natural to suspect moral hazard will be at work in that context as well?
A policymaking elite whose families and purses are shielded from the sacrifices war entails may rush into it hastily and ill prepared, as surely was the case of the Iraq war.....
I believe we could apply the author's moral hazard thesis to most of the country, not just the elites, especially the flag-waving decal-pasting morons who mindlessly support this war without the vaguest clue about the real reasons we are there. Things aren't going according to the original plan, but it isn't the lagging support for the war that is forcing a change in strategy; it is the inability of the small segment of Americans who are actually fighting the war to continue doing it that is the motivating factor.
Posted by: lonesomeG | Aug 2 2005 0:47 utc | 183
The middle section of this thread reads like a Woody Allen comedy essay circa 1968.
Posted by: mats | Aug 2 2005 0:55 utc | 184
Good Cites LonesomeG:
but it isn't the lagging support for the war that is forcing a change in strategy; it is the inability of the small segment of Americans who are actually fighting the war to continue doing it that is the motivating factor.
I think it's probably some of both.
May be wrong.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 2 2005 1:01 utc | 185
DeA won't hear any contradiction from me when he says "it is as if imperial Rome has gone rotten to the core, but out in the provinces there are spaces for action, opportunities to win on progressive/environmental issues in more limited playing fields."
but I am concerned that the humanists among us find it difficult to commit to any action local or national when we feel doing so means that some death and/or injustice will be ignored.
In other words when we make a decision to evolve change from the grassroots we are also consciously or no deciding that for eg the civilians of Iraq are just going to have to keep on dying dreadful deaths for a bit longer.
I find that too hard because once I do I ask myself what is the difference between that attitude and any despot who decides that a 'few million lives' are a neccessary sacrifice for the common good.
I try and resolve that by acting locally and communicating internationally but even that implies a sort of acceptance. I mean if I feel as strongly about the Iraqi slaughter as I do why aren't I in Iraq trying to save some from the slaughter or at the very least in the US physically trying to prevent the shipment of more men/arms to the 'theatre'?
Yeah how pointless and self indulgent is this sort of introspective inaction? But it is neccessary to devote some headspace to it even if only to ensure that we don't sacrifice our humanity to some nebulous and unattainable 'outcome'.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 2 2005 1:03 utc | 186
The middle section of this thread reads like a Woody Allen comedy essay circa 1968.
Comedic relief is sometimes necessary, Mats.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 2 2005 1:04 utc | 187
debs
i consider myself brutish. so a little history. to clear up misconceptions. i was born in the greatest poverty in australia to communist jewish parents in the fifties. my fatther was tubercular & dies of it at 42 - itself a scandal in a country as rich as australia. my mother whos communism had turned to profound anger at a world she saw turning to shit & she neither trusted or loved anyone. her love was to make her children soldiers
at 12 i was a member of a marxist leninist organisation - i kind of comedy in australia - but i can assure you it was not comic. the tragedy of understanding/understanding began at that time. there was no childhood - just preparation for war & it was a solid preparation i can assure you
perhaps i was consider a mascot but at the age of 15 & a half - i left australia with the help of a union a seamens union & i travelled then illegally to vietnam - giving material aid to the enemy - medical aid -i returned & as a promising cadre i was sent twice to china to be trained as a cadre. it was something i cherish bt also something that is not without a certain sadness. i was in & out of universities - but i left australia at 20 t do a reading tour of my poems in england. i hated it. i fell in love with france & i became engaged to it. i worked from this time - even during my time at university as a writer - during the antiwar movement i wrote & read poetry to factories , to demonstrations & to meetings. i worked constantly
from 20 i continually left australia because in it i always felt dread & i always understood it as a colony of the united states. this was onfirmed by the 1975 constitutional coup. chile without blood. the americans had sd to the australian govt & people to shut the fuck up - & being murdochs children this they dutifully did
i worked in france, italy, germany, holland, denmark, sweden, montreal, vancouver - i had & maintained contact with people who were concerned with social change in all these countries. i helped as a writer & as a man. i did what i could
the toll of this in my twenties was that i tried to eradicate the dialectical materialist in me with heroin & drink. i thought this the most scientific approach to take to see the world through different eyes. i have written over 40 pieces for performance & theatre. they are works of exception. i have no contemporaries
a comrade from the provos in the ira who had helped build in nicaragua counselled me against self destruction - counselled me on the devotion necessary to the struggle & to understand the nature & origins of my gift
all this time i returned to australia & each time i felt not only foreign but an enemy pure & simple. like debs the only honour was to be found in working with aboriginal people & the gift of working with people like theodor who comments here - to understand the communities of resistance are larger than the world have us believe. & these communities throughout my life have given me breath
all my life - from fiteen i worked for marginalised communities in schools prisons, hospitals community centres either teaching writing or theatre or performing. of course it was always more than that
in the lateeighties i decided to make france my home & i love her but it is a love informed by what i wness & take part in. she is a harsh mistress as jimmy webb might say but in her way she has honoured what i do - in 1990 i more or less cut off my connection to the theatre tho there are pieces performed here in scandinavia & elsewhere
i decided as an artist i wanted to give back to france what it had given me - & i have committed myself since that time to working almost exclusively only with communities
the world of 'culture' had become a ragged thing for me & the world of the people on the margins which i also considermyself to be became the subtlest & finest of my art because what i give become a trace - there is no bourgeois artisst - it works or it doesn't -- o work at an extremely complex level & i can think of no other country which woud have allowed me to work as i do
billmon can think i am as mad as a meataxz but my constant, daily relationship with these communities gives me th only kind of peace i have ever known
i am in love with what i do but interrogate it in front of the depravity of the tyrannies that surround us. the critical processes, theoretical interventions are extremely important & i write between 1 & 3 substantial theroetical texts a year
this work places me in environments where i winess in detail the destruction that capital creates
when i was 15 i wanted to be a revolutionary. at 50 i am one. the world i saw at 15 seem so terrible so hard but the world i witness now is 10 times that experience of brutality & i will say again - that i feel u s imperialism is the most depraved of all imperialisms - it has taken the civilising mission to such levels of crudity it is difficult for us to breathe at all
i know that my life will never know peace in the classic sense - that it will be done fighting & it will be done in a world where a dangerous empire collapses causing havoc for us all
i wanted you to understand that - yes it might be vulgar, crude brutl & certainly it appears counterproductive but the position i take here is one that has been in my stomach for all my years - it is neither spontaneous or at that level instinctive tho it is sometimes that. it is well considered & i will remain to my dying days a clear an open enemy of this empire that has brought with it so much wilfullness & destruction
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 2 2005 1:32 utc | 188
Thank you for the history Rgiap. I for one value greatly your experience and your perspective, mostly because it differs so much from mine and reinforces my limited world view.
Posted by: rapt | Aug 2 2005 2:11 utc | 189
Alabama: I think your comments re AIPAC are, with all respect, absurd. When US "geopolitical" interests conflict with AIPAC and Likud, AIPAC and Likud are unceremoniously reminded that even the most favored client states must heel when master says. I refer you
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1505209,00.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/27/AR2005062700351.html
for an instructive recent example of what happens when a poodle, even a Likud poodle, tries to drive the car. Note the Sherlockian absence of barking by the supposed AIPAC stooges in Congress. Here we see the Pentagon demanding and receiving rights to supervise and control the arms sales of what is supposedly a sovereign nation and only a few whimpers before poodle nose is firmly between paws. AIPAC may self-spin into an hallucination of control, people who are predisposed to fear the Yids may be convinced, but the reality is what you'd expect of the relationship between a mighty power and a sliver of land without even any oil to sell.
The reason the US government does not prevent Likud from bulldozing Palestinians is that our government, in perfect unity with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and every other government in the world - doesn't give a flying fart about the Palestinians. As for whether Democrats can win without following the AIPAC line, I refer you to Cynthia McKinney, back in Congress after remembering to campaign in her district despite the best efforts of both AIPAC and the Indian-American organizations.
Posted by: citizen k | Aug 2 2005 2:15 utc | 190
@rgiap if you consider yerself brutish fine although I don't. There is much in your history that is common to mine and much that isn't.
NZ is the country that I avoided for most of my life (Gough Whitlam was sacked but Norman Kirk was almost certainly murdered) and even now I find being here difficult and would not be living here if mine were the only considerations.
I vent my spleen in other way than MoA and if I am coming across as some sort of self appointed 'moderator/mediator' I regret it.
When I have attempted to temper anything that you may have posted it has been more in an attempt to convince others not to take this criticism of US imperialism personally than to chide rgiap.
Anyway without lowering MoA to some sort of middle class exercise in esteem building through mutual admiration let me say that I'm honoured that you directed this explanation to debs.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 2 2005 2:15 utc | 191
here is a reasonably accurate link to Norman Kirk, although the references to his health are questionable.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 2 2005 2:29 utc | 192
but I am concerned that the humanists among us find it difficult to commit to any action local or national when we feel doing so means that some death and/or injustice will be ignored.
we've been ignoring death and injustice -- or rather, murder and injustice -- for so long... still to this day the majority of Americans believe that http://www.counterpunch.org/dixon08012005.html>the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and justified, or are fully aware of how many Americans died in the Viet Nam adventure but have no idea how many Vietnamese were killed by the US... and so on. ignoring death is something we are very good at -- that all populations can be very good at. http://www.monitor.upeace.org/innerpg.cfm?id_article=288>recent book about the Rwanda genocide underscores this amazing, terrifying ability of human beings to come to terms with mass murder, so long as it serves our private interests. even those wielding the machetes or dropping the napalm can reconcile themselves to their "work," so how much easier for a comfortable public a thousand miles removed to ignore what its occupying army does...
I share your unease DebsID, and your sense of moral inadequacy, wrt my own response. what is needed to empower all of us imho is a mass movement -- that is what it takes, traditionally, to change the course of national policy. right now for whatever reasons -- media control, dumbing-down, fear, pick your poison -- the public mood in the US seems to be one of obedience, conformity, acquiescence. we meekly submit to stupid "security" procedures in airports that we all know are a joke. we meekly submit to having our constitution revoked. why do we continue to be meek? I dunno. it's not even true that most of us have security or a good job or the prospect of a brighter future -- the usual reasons why people are happy with the system. where's the mass unrest as ordinary Americans are slowly deprived of their traditional privileges, even their pension plans looted by the plutes?
how do we build a mass movement? all those that I can remember were built from the grass roots up, though "leadership cadres" and "vanguardists" always play a role as propagandists and rhetors.
meanwhile some of us dream of flight, some have already run (for euroland, for canada, for s or meso america). some keep hoping for reform from within, that the ailing system can fix itself. I no longer know what strategy I think will succeed in turning the tide. what I do know is that the damage is mounting with every passing week -- damage to the biotic infrastructure (aka our life support systems), damage to international law and stability, damage to the economic order on which my parents' and my own security were predicated, vile and often lethal damage to millions of people in "those other countries" that we (the royal we, that is, the "we" who are complicit by our meekness in the actions of our masters) invade, destabilise, impoverish, loot, destroy. it is like watching someone bleed to death while bystanders and paramedics argue urgently and passionately about the best course of treatment.
and vexingly I have no convincing answer to the burning question "What Is To Be Done"? all I feel, day by day, scandal by scandal, with the drip, drip, drip of bad news, is despair. maybe despair really is a sin.
Posted by: DeAnander | Aug 2 2005 2:31 utc | 193
maybe it is DeA but I doubt it. When rgiap spoke of Australian acquiescence to the coup or NZers acceptance of assasination I always considered these to have occurred because few were starving. Most western leaders are sophisticated enough to understand that bread and circuses must be kept on tap. They only fall when their arrogance allows them to ignore that simple and easily attained objective.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 2 2005 2:38 utc | 194
And so it's interesting to come here, from my physical home out in Bush's America, otherwise known as DumbFuckistan, and listen to the intellectual left explain why there is no organized opposition.
1. Checklistism. I won't support an ally unless they sign the checklist on some item X. i.e. someone who is steadfastly against torture and oligarchy does not sign onto my preferred but both dangerous and unpopular solution in Iraq - instead I am, de-facto, supporting the pro-torture, pro-sleaze candidate.
2. Embarassment about the crassness of America. A nation founded by peasants and workers and slaves and the refuse of all nations - NASCAR and hoops and vulgar jokes and grubby "traders" , skeptical of them big word perfessors.
3. Anti-reformism. We all know that the reformers who brought social democracy to Europe and the New Deal to the US are crap, unlike the steadfast dialecticians who either lost big time paving the way for Hitler or won and built their own police states.
4. Odd conspiracy theories - it's the Jews, er, Likud.
5. And help from our European friends who know it's all the Yanks fault because when the Beligians, for example, had free range, they epitomized the milk, the very clotted cream, of human kindness towards the natives.
What an appealing package. Amazing the streets are not packed with the revolutionary masses.
Posted by: citizen k | Aug 2 2005 3:08 utc | 195
mats
you are right. This is all great comedy once you catch the premise.
considering the track record of the united states, a war-mongering nation defined by continuous conflict since its bloody birth
compared to who?
And when looking for atrocities in the twentieth centruy, why always Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Yes Americans are woefully unaware of the number of Vietnmese dead, but expert, how many Vietnmese were re educated to death? And quick now, in the measured tones of those who come and go talking about Michelangelo, chatting comfortably about whose atrocity tops whose and so confirms the prejudices you find more satisfying, did Americans kill more gooks, or Japns more chinks? Or, should I used the politically correct, Big Noses, and, Dwarf Barbarians? And did MacArthur kill more slant eyes, or, Mao?
Americo-centrism is indeed a powerful diseases. It equally infects the scrupulous rejecters of Americo-ism. Karl Rove did it I bet!
And while suicide bomers roam and weapons technology spreads and North Koreans starve to death in the name of greed wrapped in rotting ideology, the proper deference is shown for people who gloat over "sob stories" about dead incinerated innocent people and those who are in agony as I comfortably type. Let's talk about me. My basque ancestors legitimate my right to the floor.
Got your priorities straight there. But that Bush, he must be an evil genius to be in power with opponents such as yourselves. The Few. The Proud. The True Elite. The straight line on that Bell shapred curve so many deviations from the masses.
Posted by: razor | Aug 2 2005 3:49 utc | 196
Ah its not worth perpetuating this discussion but what if ppl such as razor and citizen k stopped being so damned defensive about what their democratically elected government has been up to and actually attempted to change things instead of taking others' criticism of their nation's excesses so personally that finger pointing became the easiest option.
The worst US slaughter coincides with it's time at the top of the tree and IMO is little different to any other empire's rule of the roost but that neither makes the slaughter inevitable nor forgivable.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 2 2005 4:20 utc | 198
DAmnnnN!
what if ppl such as razor and citizen k stopped being so damned defensive about what their democratically elected government has been up to and actually attempted to change things instead of taking others' criticism of their nation's excesses so personally that finger pointing became the easiest option.
Flat out lying to maintain cognitive sonance will lower my stress level and make me a more attractive person even if dishonest. It's a no brainer!
All the hot headed slurs on this site come from citizen k and myself! Why couldn't I see it just because the text on the site is to the contrary! I am so ashamed of myself for taking any of this talk seriously. You have what it takes to belong to the club or you don't.
Posted by: razor | Aug 2 2005 4:31 utc | 200
The comments to this entry are closed.
Gmac: You don't have to bet, there are these amazing internets:
"Hackett countered that he, as a high-income earner, should take the brunt of the tax burden rather than a low-income worker. He also assailed the cost of the Iraq War, which is approaching $200 billion, saying it has resulted in budget cuts for domestic programs."
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"America gives us all the opportunity to be successful and small businesses are the lifeblood of American ingenuity. More than half of our work force is employed by companies of five hundred or fewer workers. That's why I believe we should redirect the tax break and financial incentives going to big corporations to our small businesses.
Giving a boost to small businesses is denounced as “big government.” But when a huge oil company receives a taxpayer subsidy, it’s hailed as “good government” and “growing the economy.” That’s Un-American. That’s wrong.
I’m a small-business owner. I have five employees. When Hackett Law Offices has a bad month, we don’t fire half the staff and then get a handout from the government for doing it.
Yet that’s exactly what’s happening with American corporations. The government is offering financial incentives to corporations for outsourcing our jobs overseas.
Those are our tax dollars. They should benefit us, the American taxpayers. They shouldn’t be funneled to some large corporation with an American name and an offshore bank account that is relocating thousands of jobs a hemisphere away.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 13:56 utc | 101