Traitors to their Own, II

As I pointed out at the end of the blog, “Class Traitors” (May 26, 2007), we are all, always, being trained in contempt for our own. Betrayal of our own. Those who are our masters know they must continually attend to this training. They know their survival depends on a continuous supply of underlings trained in contempt for our own, contempt for those below from whom we derive, and who have become, relative to our ascension, “other.” Americans, especially, are constantly being trained in this contempt, this scorn for all “others”—those in Europe, those in Mexico who “violate” our borders, those in Latin America who denounce our dominance, those in the Middle East who resent our attempt to “liberate” them, the entire third world which demands our aid and then steals what we have taught them including the very factories producing their, and now our, goods.
And of course the reason for training us in contempt is simple: those for whom you have contempt are those whom you can exploit and dominate, those whose exploitation and domination does not prick your conscience because they are, after all, born to that contempt, deserving of that contempt, I mean just look at how they live. Ten to a room. Thirty to a house. Dirt floors. Cardboard roofs. No running water. Filthy and diseased and shameless. Fortunate they are, damned lucky to have us Americans establishing our factories in their countries so they can have jobs, at least. Which is why they implore us to bring our factories. Only that sooner or later, they catch on and then the ingratitude begins to show, their resentment begins to erupt, and they arrogantly begin to think they can do without us. There’s gratitude for you.

It’s like the damn Japanese, the damn Europeans, both decimated by WWII, prostrate without food or water, and we spend our national treasure reviving them, saving them, only to have them what? Beat us at our own game. Out-produce us and undersell us with cars and TVs and record players and how could they not, they paid starvation wages just like the Chinese and the Indians and the Mexicans are doing now, again, once more pilfering our technology and know-how and expertise and management skills until before you know it the wogs are in charge and we’re damn near out of the game.

Except of course we can still kick ass. We can still, from above, shock ‘em and awe ‘em, shake ‘em and bake ‘em these Haggi’s, these ragheads who’ve never seen anything like the tech we bring to bear. So ignorant they can’t even get their electricity to run, their water to flow, their oil wells to work, much less a democratic government to function. What does it matter if one or two or two thousand or two hundred thousand get blown away? They care little about life in any case. Suicide bombers. Rag heads. Who you’d think would appreciate the fact we’ve brought them some civilization. But no, all they want is to blow us to hell. So be it, blow them away first, nobody’s counting….

Yes. We’re all traitors, or aspiring traitors, or traitors in training, there seems no help for it. Except perhaps this: understanding. Understanding that it works, how it works, why it works.

Consider, first, some cases. At the outset of World War II, and in fact, well before Pearl Harbor, the United States government was already planning for its “Orange War” with Japan. Part of those plans involved the anticipated need to build up its navy quickly, much of it having gone to seed in the period following the previous war for civilization, WWI. Documents show that the U.S. Navy intended to compensate for this lack, at least until production could be geared up, by seizing or buying or renting commercial boats and pleasure boats wherever it could and modifying them for war. On the West Coast, many of those boats were to come from Italian American fishermen. Crab boats in San Francisco could be used as patrol boats, while the 80-foot purse seiners in San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Pedro and elsewhere, nearly all owned by Sicilian fishermen, could be used as sub chasers. Around 1940, Naval officers set about making inventories of these boats, and contacting some of the more influential boat owners in the Italian community. Though the latter knew it would be a great hardship for any sardine fisherman to give up his boat, they agreed with the Navy to set the example. They would then do everything they could to convince their countrymen to be patriotic and give up their boats as well.

Thus, though there was some resistance—especially from those fishermen who saw that the United States had not only declared war on their home country of Italy, but that many of their wives and families were already under restriction and would soon be forced to remove themselves from their homes and evacuate to inland areas—the influence of these so-called “prominenti” proved invaluable in persuading other boat owners to let the Navy have their boats. The payoff came when the boats were returned. The first few boats returned—belonging to the same prominenti who led the way—were repaired and refitted as good as, or better than, new. After that, however, most boats were returned their owners in miserable shape, still sporting the scars from guns and cannons and other naval equipment that had been mounted on the fishing vessels. Though they tried to petition for monetary compensation, most of these little boat owners were dismissed out of hand. By this time, of course, the prominenti who had urged them to cooperate with the government were nowhere to be found.

It is always thus. Those who assimilate first, who have the intelligence or skill or canniness to curry favor with power by becoming “models” for their less fortunate brethren, always make off not only with their prizes, but also with a swollen sense of satisfaction at their own self-sufficiency. In managing to learn the new language or the new rules of the economic/social game, they never consider that it is precisely their demonstration of success that dooms their countrymen to opprobrium. “They did it. Why can’t you?” becomes the accusation. And always, inevitably, this turns into:
“I did it, made it big despite the obstacles; why can’t you?”

Not coincidentally, at about the same time Italian immigrants were being persuaded to give up their boats, something similar was taking place in the Japanese American community, only this time with graver results. When pressure began mounting to relocate the entire West Coast Japanese American community—including 70,000 American-born citizens—to remote camps in the desert, many community members wanted to fight this unprecedented and unconstitutional plan. Mike Masaoka, then head of the assimilationist Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), had other ideas. Considering it futile to resist the government, he testified publicly that not only would the JACL cooperate with the government’s planned internment of native-born citizens, it would welcome it on the grounds that Japanese Americans would actually be better off in camps. Thus, in answer to a question from Congressman John Sparkman of Alabama whether “as loyal Americans you are willing to prove your loyalty by cooperating?” Masaoka answered:
“Oh yes, definitely….if the military say ‘Move out,” we will be glad to move, because we recognize that even behind evacuation there is not just national security but also a thought as to our own welfare and security because we may be subject to mob violence and otherwise if we are permitted to remain.” (quoted in Peter Irons, Justice at War, p. 80.)

This capitulation to what became one of the greatest violations of American civil liberties in U.S. history, was therefore facilitated by the willing cooperation of the major Japanese American organization—one that might well have led the resistance.

World War II proved to be fertile ground for this type of betrayal. A lesser-known instance occurred among those who suffered most—the European Jews targeted by Hitler’s extermination program. This betrayal derived from the longtime Zionist policy of currying favor with the major sources of power in the world—the British Empire, the newly powerful Americans, and, as we shall see, the Nazis themselves. It was also informed by Zionist ideas about the need for “sacrifice” in order to establish a Jewish state. Here is what Prof. Ilan Pappe (an Israeli historian) had to say about this in a recent interview:

In 1943 Rabbi Dov Weissmandl of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Slovakia arranged for Nazi officials to stop transports to concentration camps in exchange for $50,000. They in fact stopped them while waiting for the money, which had to come from abroad.

Weissmandl appealed to the Zionist Jewish Agency HQ in Switzerland and was told Zionists “must turn a deaf ear to the pleas and cries emanating from Eastern Europe” in order to establish the state of Israel.

“Remember this: all the allies have suffered many losses, and if we also do not offer human sacrifices, how can we gain the right to sit at the conference table when the territorial boundaries are reshaped? [Israel] Eretz Yisroel will be ours only by paying with blood, but as far as our immediate circle is concerned, ATEM TAJLU. The messenger bearing this letter will supply you with funds for this purpose”.

Weismandl interpreted the letter as follows: “The price of Eretz Yisroel is the blood of the men and women, hoary sages, and babes in arms - but not YOUR [Zionist] blood! Let us not spoil this plan by giving the Axis [i.e. Nazis] powers to save Jewish lives. But for you, [Zionist] comrades, I have enclosed carfare for your escape. What a nightmare! The Zionist agent “diplomat” comes to Czechoslovakia and says “Shed your blood cheerfully, for your blood is cheap. But for your blood, the Land (of Israel) will be ours!” (Min Hametzar, p. 92) by Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl, ZT L Dean of Nitra Yeshiva).

If you don't think this philosophy actuated the rise of Nazism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, you are kidding yourself. Nazism was a fraud on the German people, just as Zionism is a fraud on Jews. Both turned good people into cold blooded killers, pawns of the “Prince of Lies”. (22 April 2007, The Canadian.)

These cases make it clear that betrayal indeed arises from within, from those one would least expect to betray their own. To understand this, we must penetrate a little deeper into the syndrome described above. When we do, we notice that we must abandon comforting ideas about betrayal. That is to say, we must notice that whenever we humans aspire to move beyond that from which we have come, and towards that to which we have been lured or pressured or instructed, we are moving on something deeper than mere self-advancement, or self-improvement—though those dynamics certainly are operative. More fundamentally, however, we are moving on an instinct, or what appears to be as deeply imbedded as instinct, to transcend ourselves, transcend our origins, transcend who we are. In his way, Malcolm X saw this fifty years ago, saw that it is not simply that we reject our own, those from whom we derive. It is not just that, because in order to do even that, we are also necessarily rejecting ourselves. We are rejecting who we are. In short, the price for rising above our origins, the unavoidable field on which the diabolical bargain occurs, is the field of identity: We dis-identify with what we are, so we can identify with those we serve, and to whose position we aspire. Here is how Malcolm X put it:
The house Negro, if the master said, “We got a good house here,” the house Negro would say, “Yeah, we got a good house here.” Whenever the master said “we,” he said “we.” That’s how you can tell a house Negro.

In short, it is more than Malcolm’s house negro saying, “Yes, the goodness of this house helps not just you, the master, but trickles down to help me, the slave.” No. More deeply, he says, “The goodness of this house derives from the fact that it is now mine, which is to say that its interests are my interests, and take precedence over, indeed obliterate the interests I once thought were my own.” So when the house negro, in Malcolm X’s rendering, hears a proposal to revolt, to go back to Africa or African ways, he responds with scorn:
“What you mean, separate? From America? This good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get here?” I mean, this is what you say. “I ain’t left nothing in Africa…”

*

Now here is where it gets interesting. For we see that far from being simply a surface matter, a question of an individual who simply wants to get ahead, betrayal partakes of the deepest of human impulses. That is to say, betrayal is about betraying others in the effort to find some economic or social or physical advantage, yes, but it is also about something deeper. It is about betraying that which is deepest in us. It is about betraying our deepest, truest selves, the consequences of which cannot ever be fully calculated.

“I ain’t left nothing in Africa.” This sentence could serve as the chapter heading for the entire human race. For it is, according to population geneticists, the continent of Africa from which the human race derives. Mommy Africa. And ever since that fragment of a family or group or tribe made its way out of that continent onto one part or other of Arabia or Gibraltar or Sicily or Greece and then outwards—eastwards and northwards into Europe and Asia and Australia and finally the Americas—the human races of those areas, particularly those human races which made their way into Europe and then America, have been trying to forget, reject, transcend and obliterate those African origins. We northerns are different; we are better; we are smarter, lighter, cleverer, more intelligent, and indeed, of a different race altogether than those darker races to the south. In a word, “I ain’t left nothing in Africa.”

Nor is this the beginning or the end of the move to transcend origins. A little reading in the anthropological literature makes it plain that within Africa, the same movement has long gone on and continues to go on. Most vividly, those Africans who have made the transition from hunting and gathering to cattle raising and agriculture, display the same contempt for those who haven’t—the hunter-gatherers. The most recent account of this I have read occurs in the book, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Farrar Strauss: 2006). There, Marshall demonstrates that the way of life maintained until almost the present day by the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert is very nearly the simplest that we can imagine: living in small groups, men hunt for specific game animals, while women gather roots and plants and all the other vegetal materials that sustain life. The savannah, barren as it seems to a modern visitor, provides all that the indigenous people need. As for shelter, Bushmen make use of only the most temporary of structures—literally half dome lean-tos made of brush, each one erected in a few minutes, and built anew each time the group moves, which is often. These shelters are used mainly for sleeping, providing the minimal visual obstruction against surprise attack by predatory leopards that is needed. It is clear that until the last few thousand years, all humans, all of our ancestors without exception, lived in much the same way, with variations depending on whether the home ground was savannah or temperate woodland or rainforest. What Marshall makes plain, however, is that today, the Bushmen’s African neighbors, who have taken up the settled life of agriculture in villages and cities, regard them with open contempt. They look upon Bushmen, that is, as primitives, animals, or worse. And why is this so? Because the village dwellers know that only a few years back, they, too, lived in the same way—and might be drawn back into that same primitive life again. Carl Jung referred to this fear of reversion to the Old Way by those, especially Europeans, who have transcended it as “the fear of going native.”

The same syndrome is described by Colin Turnbull in his books about the pygmies of the Congo rainforest. The pygmies, too, live comfortably and peacefully in the forest by hunting and gathering. And they, too, are looked upon with utter contempt and loathing by their now-agricultural neighbors who live in cleared and settled villages. The reason is clearly the same: to those who now farm in settled villages, the pygmies represent the precarious life of muck and mire from which they have “liberated” themselves. No one wants to go back.

The response of the first settlers in the New World to the indigenous Americans they set about replacing partook of this same fear and loathing. Living in the forests of New England, exposed to the elements, half naked, eating whatever they could gather or hunt or scavenge, susceptible to famines if the natural supplies of food ran out due to environmental conditions, the natives were considered not only uncivilized humans but more often not human at all. Subhuman savages. A people with no constraints or restraints on their “animal-like” behavior. And hence, animals that could be displaced and exterminated without a thought, or with no more thought than would pertain to forcing forest animals to flee their one-time territories to make room for their betters.

The only challenge to this attitude arose when, on occasion, some settler child was captured and raised among these subhumans. Then, there would arise a conflict, because often, the attempted rescue of the formerly civilized child would run up against an astonishing roadblock: a pronounced preference by the captive for the life in the forest, the life of the natives. This was a catastrophe in the minds of most English settlers, comparable perhaps to the revulsion they felt when they encountered the occasional French trapper who had taken a squaw wife. Both could only be seen as some sort of pathological reversion to a fallen state, the consequences of which were too awful to contemplate or countenance.

Enough. We get the picture. We humans tend to see ourselves as we see evolution (those of us who see it, that is)—as the story of constant movement upwards: from the primitive state of forest-dwelling primates living on bushes and berries and roots, to the wandering state of pastoralists moving with their herds in a more or less constant round, to the more settled state of basic agriculturalists cultivating grains and other foods that can be stored against hard times, to the glory of cities and settled civilizations redolent of gods and rules and priestly classes who regulate consumption and behavior and war to the beneficial survival of all. (Though it should be noted that the submission of nomadic hunters to settled life in cities was anything but guaranteed or automatic, many of them putting up fierce resistance to such circumscribed [which to them meant imprisoned and dependent] existence.) Anything, therefore, that reminds us of the condition of animals—living in intimate contact with the earth, dependent for survival on the vagaries of soil and plants and weather and the successful reproduction of animals—also reminds us of our origins, and the possibility of reverting to them. It reminds us that we are of the earth, rather than on the earth. And that is the reminder most of us can least tolerate.

Here we come back to Malcolm X’s formulation. Betrayal is about identity. And the identity we are all, always, trying to transcend is the true realization of who and what we are. Because who/what we are is creatures of the earth. We derive from earth and mud and muck, no, we are earth and mud and muck. That is what we are. We are dependent on each element of earth and mud and muck, on the bacteria that make up that earth and mud and muck, that create that earth and mud and muck no less than they make up and create the earth and mud and muck that we are. Our bodies, our cells are, literally, composed of bacteria. As Lewis Thomas once put it, ‘humans are giant taxis for bacteria to get around safely in.’ But we do not, most of us, want to know this. And so, we dress ourselves up, we clean ourselves up, we develop disgust for anything that reminds us of the malodorous stuff which lies beneath our veneer of civilization, and we try desperately, whenever we get the chance, to leave it behind. To betray it.

Thus, what is at play in betrayal is not simply the yearning to procure some advantage over those we betray. What is at play is the attempt, literally, to reject them as reminders of what we always, and forever, are. To reject ourselves as reminders of what we always and forever must be—no matter how elevated our speech patterns, or our dry homes or our aspirations or our pretensions to purity and freedom—creatures of the earth. Of the mud. Of the slimy interaction of billions upon billions of other creatures, prior creatures, creatures of which we are still made, and from whom we derive. And hunters and gatherers, immigrants, Africans, are only the very tip of the iceberg.

Indeed, a recent book by Franz deWaal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: 2006), takes aim at our most cherished human trait, the one that, above all, is thought to separate us from the rest of nature. That trait is morality. The idea, in brief, is that where animals can contemplate the pain or death of their fellow creatures with indifference, humans, equipped with a deep moral sense, cannot. Humans have empathy for the suffering of others, even those of different families or nationalities or species, and it is this which sets us apart from, gives us dominion over all other life. DeWaal, however, disagrees, and provides us with vivid examples of animal empathy, which is, for him, the fundamental ingredient in morality. Perhaps the most striking concerns the behavior of a female bonobo (a relative of the chimpanzee) named Kuni in a zoo in England. DeWaal (p. 30) describes the incident as follows:

“One day, Kuni captured a starling. Out of fear that she might molest the stunned bird, which appeared undamaged, the keeper urged the ape to let it go...Kuni picked up the starling with one hand and climbed to the highest point of the highest tree where she wrapped her legs around the trunk so that she had both hands free to hold the bird. She then carefully unfolded its wings and spread them wide open, one wing in each hand, before throwing the bird as hard as she could towards the barrier of the enclosure. Unfortunately, it fell short and landed onto the bank of the moat where Kuni guarded it for a long time against a curious juvenile (de Waal, 1007a, p. 156).
What Kuni did would obviously have been inappropriate towards a member of her own species. Having seen birds in flight many times, she seemed to have a notion of what would be good for a bird, thus offering an anthropoid version of the empathic capacity so enduringly described by Adam Smith as “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.”

The point deWaal is making, and which he cements with many more examples, is simple: humans are not unique. Our most precious trait, our moral sense based in empathy for others, is shared by and no doubt derives from our primate ancestors. We are not separate from all other life, from nature. We are in a continuum with nature, we are nature. Therefore, any notion that we have somehow risen above nature, transcended nature, and now stand outside it or above it, stems from simple ignorance. So, too, does any sense that we can separate from, by betrayal, that which gave us birth. We are always, everywhere, indelibly marked by and connected to that from which we derive. And though betrayal seems deeply ingrained in our aspiring natures, that connection must make it just as deeply futile.

To realize this, to realize that betrayal in many of its guises actually masks the fundamental but ultimately futile yearning to be freed from our origins, may be the best we can hope for.

Lawrence DiStasi

I Slept Well?

On Thursday November 1, death claimed the pilot who guided his B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, over Hiroshima to drop the first (and only) atomic bomb on a war-time target. The drop resulted in the instant deaths of over 100,000 human beings, non-military residents of a Japanese city that included men, women, and children. The city itself was totally flattened, indeed vaporized. Thousands more of the humans in the vicinity eventually died of radiation-caused diseases. And yet, this pilot, Paul Tibbets, who named his bomber after his mother, was quoted as testifying:

“I sleep clearly every night.”

How are we to understand this? This man performs an action that directly causes the deaths of at least 100,000 people, and he sleeps well? What of responsibility for one’s actions? What of Christian (or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist) ethics, responsibility, morality?

The question is one that haunts all of us these days. Any American who sleeps well while his taxes are paying for a war in Iraq that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, displaced 4 million more, and, together with 12 years of sanctions enforced before the war, left an entire nation in ruins, has the same problem as Tibbets. Are we or are we not responsible for the effects of our actions? Even though we do not wield the gun or the knife or the bomb, are we answerable for the actions our inaction makes possible? Nor is it just Iraq. American taxpayers fork up $3 billion a year in direct military aid to Israel, and that money goes to occupy and oppress and kill and ethnically cleanse an entire people, the Palestinians, who before WWII lived in the land now called Israel. Do Israelis sleep well? Do we? Did we sleep well when our tax dollars went to destroy a country called Vietnam? How about sleeping well as the cars we drive and the energy we use fills the atmosphere with carbon dioxide that threatens global warming and the accelerated extinction, not only of masses of humans, but of animal species on a mammoth scale. Does this disturb our dreams? Are we responsible for all of this? Part of this? None of this? Can we simply go on as if nothing were the matter and keep telling ourselves, ‘Well, I recycle my newspapers so I’m doing my part. If the earth dies, it’s not my fault?’

It appears we can. Because we are. Right now, today, we are all doing this, thinking in this way. And the question then becomes: what of morality? What of rationality? What of the divine plan? Can we believe in God, any god, if those who carry his or her banner act in such a way as to destroy all life? Apparently. Because it is going on now. And the worst violators seem to be those who noisily claim to be acting in his name.

Paul Tibbets, for instance, knew exactly what he was doing. In a 1975 interview, he is quoted as saying:
“I’m not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did…You’ve got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. We were at war.... You use anything at your disposal.”

So there it is. The gasoline engine is at our disposal. Plastic and chemicals and pesticides and urban sprawl are at our disposal. Electricity for all our gadgets is at our disposal. Uranium-tipped bullets to defeat the enemy are at our disposal. Useless junk in every imaginable form is at our disposal and we use it and throw it away and it fills our garbage dumps and every corner of our earth and poisons our oceans and kills countless creatures in countless ways, and yet we sleep well at night. And imagine that we will survive because, after all, God is on our side.

Which either means that God is a mindless, self-destructive consumer too, or is a figment of the fevered, guilt-ridden imagination of a very self-serving animal known as homo sapiens—a figment who equips us to commit unimaginable crimes in violation of the laws he allegedly lays down, and then to sleep well at night.

Lawrence DiStasi

Violence Against Their Own People

The recent violent repression against the Burmese population, including the apparent arrest and jailing—and perhaps murder—of nonviolent Buddhist monks, brings to the fore a dominant paradigm of our time. I mean the increasing inclination of nation-states to employ most of their violence against their own people. And when that is not at issue, the violence of nation-states is most often used against defenseless civilian populations.

There was a time—though one can hardly imagine instances in our lifetimes—when war meant the clash of armies, all elements of whom were equipped with weapons, defensive gear, and the knowledge that they were engaging in violent activity against others like themselves. Though they were clearly insane, conflicts like World War I and the American Civil War illustrate the type. Huge groups of raging men would hurl themselves at each other until one side or the other’s leaders grew tired of dying, and ordered a retreat. Again, though many saw this as organized insanity, at least the conflict was limited, in these pitched battles, to combatants, and a kind of battlefield protocol (it was once called “honor”) pertained.

More recently, however, (and I do not mean to exclude the depradations against civilians that both WWI and the Civil War inflicted), war has become more weighted in favor of massive strikes against civilian populations. As Ken Burns’ recent documentary on WWII made clear, the firebombing of German and Japanese cities by American forces were deliberate attacks on civilians meant to inspire despair in the general population of a kind that would convince enemy leaders that the price for persisting in battle was too high. More recent American (or American-inspired and -supported) attacks on civilian populations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and twice in Iraq, have the same purpose.

Even these attacks, however, can be rationalized as part of the horror of war, and, more locally, as attacks against a perceived “enemy.” What cannot be so easily justified are the ever more common attacks by military forces against their own populations. The victims of such attacks are not “enemies,” nor foreigners, nor outsiders. They are the citizens of the nation-state mounting the attacks. In Burma’s case, the monks are not only citizens, but the soul of the entire country. And yet, the generals in charge of the Burmese government seemed to have no compunction whatever about ordering their troops to invade the sanctity of monasteries, usually in the middle of the night, and beat and bludgeon some of the monks and spirit thousands of others off to prison for further beatings and god knows what else. The troops also seemed to have no reservations about firing into crowds to break up rallies and intimidate the population into staying off the streets. (It may have been Napoleon Bonaparte who inaugurated this tactic in 1795, when, as his first act for France’s revolutionary leaders, he ordered artillery to fire grapeshot directly into a crowd of royalists in Paris, quickly ending an uprising. He was just as quickly promoted.)

But rather than an exception to the rule, this type of violence against the state’s own population has become commonplace. The military in the aforementioned places—Guatemala and El Salvador, as well as Colombia, Chile and elsewhere—has routinely attacked villagers or dissidents and either tortured or killed them. The ranks of the “disappeared” in Latin American countries in recent years have grown exponentially, while the massive exterminations in Cambodia, China and the Soviet Union are legendary.

It would be comforting if we could point to Burma or Guatemala or Chile or China and say, ‘Well, it’s those barbaric countries where such things happen. Thank God we’re in America.’ Unfortunately, no such comfort pertains. Increasingly in our own country, we are witness to state power being employed against civilian populations. The United States Army, for example, under General Douglas MacArthur was ordered to clear Washington of impoverished soldiers who had served in WWI, and who, in 1932, were demanding that the nation give them the bonus legislated by Congress several years earlier. The government had already paid off debts and bonuses owed to corporations, and the veterans, devastated by the expanding Depression, wanted theirs too. Thousands camped out in Washington, DC to demand this payment. President Herbert Hoover, fearing revolution, ordered the Army to get rid of what became known as the Bonus Army. On July 28, Gen. MacArthur, aided by future “heroes” Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, led 200 cavalrymen, 400 infantrymen with fixed bayonets, and five tanks against the biggest protesters’ encampments near the Anacostia River. The troops dispersed the veterans and burned the camp to the ground, in the process killing two veterans and wounding many more.

This pattern has continued right down to our time. Anyone who lived in Berkeley during the anti-Vietnam war protests of the 1960s, knows that it was a common sight to see not just policemen, but armed soldiers and barbed wire guarding the streets and controlling demonstrations during those days. Helicopters routinely attacked demonstrations by spraying tear gas at demonstrators on the UC Berkeley campus. In one incident, a soldier fired at a lone man on a rooftop observing a demonstration, killing him. This tactic was repeated at many other campuses, including, most infamously, the Kent State campus in Ohio, where national guardsmen opened fire on demonstrators and killed four students. And in Chicago during the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, police literally rioted, clubbing peaceful demonstrators without mercy.

More recently, the cooperation between police and the military has grown ever more sophisticated, but the end result is the same. The United States government has proven, time and again, that it will employ whatever force is necessary to break up demonstrations and disperse crowds it deems disruptive or dangerous. It has also employed more covert means—including the infiltration of protest groups to incite the type of violence that will give it the excuse it requires to attack—to keep Americans from freely exercising their democratic right to peacefully assemble and protest. Thus, the current President, despite his clearly illegal actions in the so-called War on Terror, has never faced a real demonstration: all groups are kept well outside the zone where the President appears, and anyone who manages to gain entry is forcefully ejected as soon as he or she is discovered.

The Patriot Act has given the government even more power to act against groups who challenge its decisions. More threatening still, the actions and thoughts that can elicit a government response have become ever more subtle—including simply contributing to groups the government deems suspicious, or even getting an email from someone the government deems suspicious. This comes under the category of aiding and abetting the enemy, and is strictly forbidden. As the essay, “Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: the Growth of an American Surveillance Society,” by J. Weinstein and B. Steinhart points out: “Under these changes and other authorities asserted by the Bush Administration, U.S. intelligence agents could conduct a secret search of an American citizen’s home, use evidence found there to declare him an “enemy combatant,” and imprison him without trial. The courts would have no chance to review these decisions – indeed, they might never even find out about them.” Putting all this together, the essay concludes:
“The massive defense research capabilities of the United States have always involved the search for ways of outwardly defending our nation. Programs like TIA15 [total information awareness] involve turning those capabilities inward and applying them to the American people…”

That is the real point here: the massive military capabilities of the United States, and many other nation-states, have now been turned inward to be directed against their own people.

The state is, by definition, that entity which arrogates to itself alone the use of violence. Vengeance by an individual is against the law. Only the state can kill, and it can kill sometimes deliberately, as in the death chamber, and sometimes wantonly, as in the mass slaughters in Hiroshima, or Dresden, or Vietnam, or Iraq. Increasingly, we are seeing states kill their own citizens—usually in order to maintain the power of whatever group of scoundrels happens to be in charge. If we add to this the growing power of nation states to kill their own environments as well, to kill every living thing that inhabits the space they claim as theirs, we can only conclude that the murderous nature of nation-states must soon reach the point at which the only object left to slaughter will be itself. More and more I find myself thinking of this as a “consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Lawrence DiStasi

The Great Disobedience

I have been thinking a lot lately about why people obey. More particularly about why people obey bad leaders. Think of them all: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Shah of Iran, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Idi Amin, Augusto Pinochet. The list is endless. And in each case it’s one insane fool somehow getting masses of people to do his insane bidding. Nor is it just politicians who manage to amass enough power—usually the power of armies they control—to enforce their decisions. It’s the CEOs of predatory corporations as well: the Waltons of Wal-Mart, the nameless CEOs of Chevron and Halliburton and General Electric and Disney and Microsoft and Boeing and Monsanto. I mean, what is it with people? The information surely gets out there—that the dear leader, as Korea’s Kim Jong Il styles himself, is a paranoid schizophrenic delusional asshole whose policies are killing millions, poisoning millions, amassing offshore fortunes for this psychopath to pass on to his equally psychopathic offspring and cronies after he’s gone. And yet. People obey. They shoulder their rifles, they salute their officers, they go off to war and likely death or maiming without a whimper. Standing tall. Proud to serve the cause. Or less grandly, we obey the traffic signals, pay our taxes that go to enrich scoundrels, support with our dollars the useless products that are destroying people and planet alike, and never stop to think why? Why do we do this? Why do we contribute to our own destruction?

I mean, no ruler rules out of absolute strength. Each one relies on the cooperation and collusion, the support and forebearance, tacit or otherwise, of millions. In China, to take the most extreme example, a few bureaucrats control the movements and lives of more than a billion people. Does it not ever occur to that billion that they could rise up and sweep away those heartless, pompous bureaucrats with one breath? Does it not ever occur to all of us in the United States that it is within our power, written in our founding documents that if those in power become too deceptive, too intoxicated with their own grandiosity, too royal or tyrannical, it is our right, our duty, to overthrow them? Or at least to disobey? To refuse to shoulder that rifle, refuse to kill that innocent family in Iraq, refuse to credit any more slick propaganda about the latest incarnation of evil allegedly threatening our homeland?

Apparently not. Partly, it must be, because disobedience, revolt can be messy. Can cost lives. As we see in Burma right now. And the mess can get even messier when disobedience triumphs, as it did in the French Revolution, when thousands of nobles lost their heads. Terror. The terror is never pretty. Never without loss. Though these days, with the monsters in power, with CEOs raking it all in without concern for starvation or murder or the destruction of the planet, the idea of such a terror begins to seem more and more appealing, for what else can be done with monsters?

But it’s not just the fear of consequences that keeps the masses obeying. It must also be training. Training beginning in childhood that inculcates obedience to those in charge. Those who are in charge must be right, the training seems to say, or they wouldn’t be in charge. And where disobedience can mean loss or injury or even death, it’s prudent to train the children in obedience to the wise and powerful Father.

Still. When the evidence becomes so overwhelming that the Father is a psychopath, that he countenances not only mass murder via Shock and Awe, and mass torture via Guantanamo, and mass exploitation and profit for his oilmen cronies, but is leading the nation to the brink of environmental and economic disaster—is there any way to understand continuing obedience? I mean only recently we have been treated to the spectacle of mothers of soldiers slain in Iraq screaming their support for their leader, screaming their rage at those who question that support, screaming that their sons have died for a noble cause. And all we can say is that surely there is nothing quite so sad as a mother who has lost her son in battle. Unless it be a mother who remains ignorant of the real truth about that loss: that her son’s death, far from being a sacrifice for the freedom we all allegedly enjoy, was really a sacrifice for megalomaniacs who never served, who are capable only of mouthing platitudes and staging photo ops while they enrich themselves and their friends—all those CEOs who are quite willing to sacrifice obedient slobs in uniform in order to protect their precious corporate investments.

And all we can hope is that the great disobedience that is the people’s right and duty is building and will arrive soon—or soon enough, at least, to cripple the current fool playing at leader long enough to prevent the next disaster he is surely, even now, drooling over.

Lawrence DiStasi

New Orleans: Deja Vu All Over Again

The more we hear about the attempt to "cleanse" New Orleans of its poor black population (while reconstruction and recovery from Hurricane Katrina proceeds rapidly for the white, heavily-touristed areas), the more we realize that history runs in repetitive cycles. For the truth is, Americans have always been suspicious of the exotic denizens of that most fascinating of all American cities. Were it not for its position as indispensable port city at the mouth of the Mississippi River, it probably would have been abandoned to floods and tides long ago. But it is important. And so Hurricane Katrina has been turned, in the rah rah atmosphere post-Katrina, into an "opportunity." And the opportunity, again, is not to rebuild New Orleans better, but to rebuild it cleaner, more like what Americans seem to prefer these days—a theme park without the problem of messy, unsightly poor folks.

Sadly, this is not new. From the time when New Orleans was transformed from an outpost of the French and Spanish empires to an American possession, many Americans have cast a disgusted eye on this outpost of foreignness. I am referring to the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The port of New Orleans, not all of Louisiana, was really the issue for President Thomas Jefferson. New Orleans was what he sent his envoys, James Monroe and Robert Livingston, to France to procure. Stunningly, Napoleon Bonaparte offered the Americans not just the port city, but the whole of the Louisiana Territory. And in history classes, we learn that Jefferson took the deal, paid $15 million, and doubled the size of the nation in one stroke. At 4 cents an acre, the Louisiana Purchase has gone down as one of the greatest real estate bargains in history.

What we are rarely told, however, is that there was great American resistance to the deal. Northerners worried that their influence in the new nation would be diminished by the addition of so large a western and southern territory. They also worried that slavery might be extended into the new territories. But the worry went beyond that. That was because in Article III of the treaty, Napoleon insisted that the inhabitants of New Orleans—the French, the Spanish, the free Blacks and part-Blacks and part Indians—must all become citizens of the United States. To many Americans, this was like giving the keys of their new acquisition to half-civilized people, to "savages and adventurers." New Orleans, to them, was "a place inhabited by a Mixture of Americans, English, Spanish and French, and crowded every year….with two or three thousand boatmen from the back country…" Others found the denizens of New Orleans and the whole West beneath even that. Josiah Quncy, who would become president of Harvard College, predicted that "thick skinned beasts will crowd Congress Hall, Buffaloes from the head of the Missouri and Alligators from the Red River."

In the end, Jefferson prevailed, and the Louisiana Purchase Treaty was ratified. And with it, came New Orleans and all its people. Clearly, however, what has been happening there since, and especially since Katrina, demonstrates that many Americans, in particular our conservative brethren of the heartland, have never quite accepted New Orleans as a place fit to be included in the lily-white, squeaky-clean America of their dreams. It’s too colorful, in every sense of that word, by far.

And so the bleach job goes on.

And most Americans watch it happen, maintaining all the while their dominant cover story: that America is indeed the land of the free and the home of the equally color-blind—except, of course, where property values are concerned.

Lawrence DiStasi

A Senate Gone Mad

The Senate this week has voted positively, and bi-partisanly on two proposals which, taken together, suggest that a kind of insanity has taken over Congress.

First, it voted to uphold a resolution introduced by Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden, that would divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions. There would be a Shiite region, a Sunni region, and a Kurdish region. The measure passed by a whopping 75-23 vote. Thankfully, the resolution is nonbinding. This means it has no force, but the vote is such a capitulation to the ethnic/sectarian rivalry that has consumed Iraq since the United States invasion that it essentially says, ‘Fine, you guys want to fight, we’ll separate you.’ And it essentially means: ‘You are no longer a united nation. You are now three tribes who cannot be trusted to live together.’ Of course, the fact that Sunni and Shia lived side by side, intermingled and intermarried, and generally prided themselves on being simply Iraqis before the United States destroyed their country and created sectarianism, is not mentioned in the resolution.

Be that as it may, our first question should be, "Who benefits?" As far as I can see, the plan would benefit mainly Israel. For from the very beginning, the chief instigator of the American attack on Iraq, and its chief beneficiary, was Israel. This was because Israel feared Iraq more than any other neighbor as a powerful Arab nation. And Israel has made clear over many many years that the one thing it will not abide is a powerful nation, other than itself, in the Middle East. To split Iraq into three separate regions, therefore, fits Israel’s overall design perfectly. Divide and conquer is and always has been its chief strategy. And of course, dividing and conquering is also the classic strategy of every empire, including the current American one.

That Israel cannot abide a powerful neighbor is also behind the second move in this week’s Senatorial clown show—-the move on Wednesday approving the nonbinding resolution to make U.S. policy one that "combats, contains, and rolls back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies." The measure was proposed by the reigning war mongers in the Senate, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. The Senate approved the measure by an equally large 76-22 majority.

And again we must ask, are these people mad? This is precisely the type of resolution that can be interpreted by our current Bomber-in-Chief as the authority he needs to launch the pre-emptive attack on Iran that many have been predicting.

And again, it is Israel which stands to benefit—-at least in the short run. For once again, we have a nation, Iran, which has grown powerful because of the ongoing American fiasco in Iraq, and which now can be characterized as a direct threat to Israel’s existence (an Israel, it should be noted, armed to the teeth with hundreds of nuclear weapons and no inspections because it simply refused to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty). Democrat (at least putatively) Lieberman and Republican Kyl, and increasingly the Bush Administration, not to mention the Israeli government, have been propagandizing about that "growing nuclear threat" for months now. And the accusations resemble nothing so much as the similarly dire warnings about Iraqi nuclear threats to the U.S. and its "allies" (i.e. Israel) before the bloody American invasion in 2003.

The truth of the matter is that no one has yet produced a shred of actionable evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons, or arming Iraqis, or planning to invade Israel. If anyone had such evidence, it surely would have been produced before now. The whole thing is preposterous. Not to mention dangerous. As Senator Jim Webb of Virginia said on Wednesday in his statement opposing the resolution:

"This proposal … is Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream. It’s not a prescription for success. At best, it’s a deliberate attempt to divert attention from a failed diplomatic policy. At worst, it could be read as a back-door method of … gaining congressional validation for action without one hearing or without serious debate."

In other words, another invasion, to divert attention from the first one, could seem reasonable to the madmen in the White House. Now, with the Senate unable to agree on any way forward in Iraq, it apparently seems reasonable to no less than 76 Senators as well. Nevermind that an attack on Iran could ignite a regional holocaust. Nevermind that Iran is a sovereign nation, with a democratically elected president (one more legitimately elected than our own.) Nevermind that Iranian forces have invaded no one, attacked no one, whereas the United States is knee-deep in an illegal invasion and occupation that has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destroyed a country. The Senate, including dozens of Democrats, overwhelmingly approved the measure.

A Senate gone mad. How else can one interpret such psychotic dithering while Rome burns?

Lawrence DiStasi

Monstrosity II

Though not exactly identical to what I had in mind with "Monstrosity I," the new book by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, also evokes the idea of the monstrous. This is especially true when one focuses on the source of the idea—-the shock treatments that were once the darling of the psychology establishment. The idea was simple: electroshocking a patient’s brain could so reconfigure the mental apparatus that whole areas of memory were wiped out. The intent was to regress the patient to a pre-verbal state where he or she might no longer control speech, or sometimes even excretory functions. The confused mental connections thought to be responsible for the mental illness were thereby wiped clean, and a new, better adaptation to the real world could take its place. This, at least, was the theory.

Even left to mental institutions, this was bad enough. The problem, as Klein points out, is that electroshock theory deeply impressed the dean of modern economics, Milton Friedman. Friedman’s economic vision, therefore, integrated the idea of shock treatment, only in this case, applied to whole economic systems. As Klein points out (see "The Shock Doctrine," London Guardian, 9/8/07, reprinted on commondreams.org), in one of his key essays Friedman noted that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change." The way to cure the economic system of its insane notions of state control and welfare, therefore, was through shocks, either natural or man-made. Hence, natural disasters like Katrina, wars, terror attacks like 9/11, and so on could so shock a population that it would regress to childlike dependency and be amenable to harsh economic manipulations it would otherwise reject. Though Friedman argued to President Nixon for the shock to be applied to the United States, the President knew that it would lose him elections. So Nixon outsourced the experimental treatment to Chile. Once the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown, the coup-leader General Pinochet could administer the shock treatment. And he did. State-owned enterprises were privatized, American corporate giants were allowed to buy up the country’s assets, and Pinochet administered more persuasive shock via arrests, torture, and the wholesale murder of his opponents.

In more recent times, Klein argues, the shock treatment has formed the core of the George W. Bush presidency. The attack on the World Trade Center did the initial softening of the population. In its wake Bush was able to impose the type of draconian measures that Americans would have rejected in less terrifying times. More specifically, the unprovoked war on Iraq was to make that long-suffering nation the main demonstration project. ‘Shock and Awe’ terror bombing began the treatment. The looting of the country followed, with American troops simply standing by while a 4,000-year-old civlization was destroyed. This was quite OK for the Bushies: all that history was akin to the noxious delusions that schizophrenics carry in their brains, and which are better off being shocked away. Paul Bremer’s provisional authority then extended the process—-wiping out the entire civil service and military systems via de-Baathification, and ringing in the new free-market utopia with his announcement that Iraq was "open for business" to multinational corporations. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be killed in the process, that thousands of recalcitrants who objected would be subjected to even greater "shock treatment" in places like Abu Ghraib, that an entire national and cultural heritage would be burned and bombed out of existence, seemed not to matter.

Now we can see why, in their recent testimony before Congress, General Petraeus and especially Ambassador Crocker kept repeating the same mantra: this is a difficult and complex undertaking; we are bringing a new nation into being. This seemed, on the surface, just another instance of Bush Aministration hubris and propaganda, meant to blame everything wrong in Iraq on 35 years of Saddam Hussein. With Klein’s insight, however, as well as her further example of the ethnic cleansing going on in New Orleans after the "fortuitous" shock of Hurricane Katrina, we can see that it is much more. These zealots actually believe that they can wipe out an entire people’s way of life and being, and replace it with their beloved free-market (predicated, of course, on the notion that U.S. corporate insiders get special access in picking the new nation’s low-hanging economic fruit.) These boys in white coats actually believe they can remake the entire world if only the world can be sufficiently diverted with pap about democracy and freedom while the shocks are administered.

It is as monstrous an idea as any that economists and politicians have ever conceived—-and that includes the Nazis, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, and acknowledged monsters like Idi Amin. Moreso. Because in the past, the aim of monsters like Idi Amin was simply to intimidate those who might resist their control, or plunder. Now, with our modern monsters, the aim is to shock the world (or make use of natural shocks like Katrina) sufficiently to regress it to a drooling state of abject infantilism, and remake it as a globe full of mindless, manipulable consumers celebrating the bread and circuses that enslave them. Sadly, it seems that at least in the United States, the job is already well on its way.

Lawrence DiStasi