…or: Hell is less a place we transit to than a ‘process’ we cultivate—radically and absolutely…

the final processing…

In considering the narrative of Empire from its inception and, continuing, reading the Fallujah account, please consider: what would your reaction have been if it came to light that one of our military agents—e.g., a Marine—had, nearing the culmination of battle, knelt down before the corpse of his recent victim, the abdomen torn open (the effect of ordnance) and lapped, with appreciation (and even zeal) at the still warm—but specifically—sanguineous flesh? With what emotional and intellectual metric would you have responded? Extreme dismay? Mild discomfort? Something between those two poles—e.g., apathy? As far as we know this has not occurred—or, it has not surfaced yet…

so, let us help one another, because, in Hell, there is no helping one another…

Hell, as reasoned, ought not to be viewed as a ‘place’ we embark towards, i.e., with a limen we approach and transit through. And this, in contradistinction to the literary construct of the portal notice in the Inferno, i.e., “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (“abandon all hope ye who enter here…”).

Far from existing solely as a literary—or, even fantastic—notion readily dismissed (as being merely an example of cultural artifice, imagining, etc.), the contention here is that Hell is, rather, the all-too-real—and condign—effect of our freely-willed acts and behaviour, i.e., what we as sentient, interdependent beings have chosen and actualized. And this, being all the more serious as our most elemental natures are at variance with a state of interminable alienation from the Other, as  is also the case with behaviour deemed self-destructive.

the opposite of helping (i.e., love, or caritas) is not hatred, but indifference…

We cultivate an ethic of indifference towards the Other—and even ourselves—and, as this willed behavior is essentially foreign to our natures as interdependent social beings, we undergo, almost imperceptibly, a…devolving—a changing at the most elemental level.

To continue: if the willed code of behaviour is sustained it would seem to follow that at some point the effect is final, and irrevocable.

our immortal souls have come undone…

But, the question arises as to the seemingly obscure progression of this moral pathology, we being heedless of the arc, from ‘worse’ to ‘worst’, without a saving sense of terror for its inevitable conclusion: no recovery, no deliverance for/from our own lapsed selves…

we, the commonwealth, never recovered…

The obscure nature of the devolving may be owing to an initial trauma—i.e., the damage occurring with the fundamental upset, leading to what the Hopi term the Koyaanisqatsi—“life out of balance”. It is altogether possible—and, in fact, even a great likelihood—that not only is there no recovery for many (which recovery presupposing an acknowledgement of personal failure and wrongdoing) but a predisposition establishes itself—a trend—and the subject corrupts, even in absolute terms. And, this sequence of malign events being as true for the Self as for the collective, or State.

More specifically for us, in broad terms the ‘trauma’ may well have been owing to the initial fact of the imperium, i.e., the Self is relegated to some demeaned status as the corporate reality is valorized. We grieve from an injustice and, prolonged, the grieving becomes an exhaustive event. We lose something of our humanity. Caring becomes dear, and we, then, cease to care. Consider, for example, the grieving we brought to Cambodia and the killing fields we then compelled. ‘Twas ever thus…

we visit our own Hell upon our neighbor…

As to our own failings as a nation, then, the false claim is made that what amounted to execrable behavior shown to, e.g., Native Americans, African Americans—or ‘minorities’, classes, etc., of every stripe—is a matter of history, i.e., “we’ve long since put ‘paid’ to what many view as our iniquitous past.” However, such self-serving, specious analysis only forestalls the reckoning of those acts of policy and procedure. And, this denial has its issue in, e.g., Fallujah. Said another way: we have put our own dis-ease into circulation.

the final processing, redux: “…there will be wailing and grinding of teeth…”

That we are in a downward arc as a collective (from My Lai, to Fallujah, to…) is apparent. That our national ethic—or, better, code of behaviour—is one of ‘safe’ uninvolvement, or indifference, is a virtual guarantee of the outcome. America, the horror film, is a work in progress, with new premises, new casting, new viewers caught in the glare of the projector…

Like morbid voyeurs, we have become inured to past horrific spectacle, and tone-deaf to the screams. We have adapted to the renewed litany of atrocities, even as we accommodate our elected Masters with monotonous detachment. Yes, Hell is less a place to which any one of us may embark upon one day than a process we’ve actualized today. Hell is here, now: we impart its features, forget that act, and the stark reality is now less apparent. We, literally, raise Hell, since misery disdains a vacuum but craves company. What a miserable thing it is to be an American, to be processed in America, to be processed by Americans…

so, let us help one another, because, in Hell, there is no helping one another…

What then does any possible alternative look like? It seems reasonable to conclude that since there is no caring for the Other—or, for the Self—in Hell (which solicitude we’ll then be in dire need of) the only true alternative is one of caritas, or caring for the Other/Self. By cultivating this practice, here and now—because that is all we’ve been vouchsafed, the ‘now’—we partake of an alternative scheme.

It is natural to our beings—to care for ourselves as we care for one another—in the same way that Empire is an unnatural fact of life. That is, Empire is aberrant, it is bizarre, it is the uncanny presence in our midst. Power exists via exclusion, and the Power-driven act begets same. Caring, by the same token, is the non-Power-driven act, par excellence. So, let us help one another. And, to that end, more is more.

US Media Iraq Reporting: See No Evil

FAIR: NY TImes Rewrites Fallujah History

A current vogue in OWS ‘scholarship’ has it that it the arc of the OWS cause is sorely needing a specific litany of core demands, i.e., or it risks deconstruction. The agent of such observations is, typically, a well-intentioned Liberal observer—not participant—who is seemingly intent upon conflating Left activism as all of a piece. All too often such observer/adviser figures employ an activist benchmark akin to late sixties/early seventies’ “special interest” politicking, e.g., as seen in opposition to war, Black liberation, feminism, Green activism, etc.

What is ignored in the academic assessment of the current regime—i.e., the era of Late finance capital—is the utterly diffuse havoc being played upon all cadres, all organizational fronts, etc., via the class war waged by rentiers, the Fortune 500 CEOs, the banks, etc., against a mutually dissociated collective, i.e., the working class. Further, this oppressive state of financial massacre has as its concomitant effect a dispiriting malaise of anomie, helplessness, depression, etc., all serving to keep any would-be activism by those being preyed upon in abeyance, with actors fragmented, and uninvolved. And this, a reality in Empire for time out of memory.

The unique nature of the current manifestation of investor-class hegemony, however, is seen in the highly accelerated and aggressive nature of the opponents of We, the People. That is, the financial gain for the 1% is so impossibly high that a seduction exists to destroy the 99%, which seduction running rampant and sustained by the state as well as the corporate-owned media.

That is, there exists an abiding moral social pathology which is sustained by denial, distraction (e.g., “entertainment”, consumerism, etc.), etc., in tandem to a prevalent suffering: suffering at the individual, familial and community levels—all occurring simultaneously!

To argue, then, as non-participant observers have been doing, that what is needed is a “structuring” and specific schedule of demands by OWS—in order to sustain the activism—is to engage in the sort of armchair activism (albeit well-intentioned, of course) that does more harm than is first apparent when reading seemingly innocuous commentary. And, this is so because, in the context of the period of Late (finance) capital, the OWS cause is a sui generis event, unique for the latter part of the last century, and probably as far back as the activism of Eugene Debs, Joe Hill, and the Wobblies after WWI. We are often feeling our way forward, creating paths where a moment ago no path existed. It elicits a highly creative spontaneity, an effort borne of humanist genius—borne of a genuine caring for the other. That this essential idea is lost on many may be a telling feature of their own impossibly anxious lives.

That is to say, the OWS cause resembles nothing less than the Bakhtinian notion of the Carnivalesque, as seen in the medieval subverting of the rule of order and control.

This notion of the Carnivalesque is seasonal—it may be lain down but freely reestablished—it has elements of the grotesque, the ludic (i.e., play) and the obviating of the spectator/player dyad: i.e., everyone was freely invited to play—i.e., at a time, place and manner of their choosing—anyone and everyone participated, all might be healed while engaged in a catharsis of sorts, etc. And, in the case of OWS, the Power elite are purposefully made ridiculous by any/all OWS players, in any/all fora and any/all social milieu. And this would occur in, e.g., the confrontation at residences of the hegemonic class (q.v., at Bloomberg’s pied-à-terre) right up to the Internet viral ridiculing of adversaries of the community of We, the People.

To correlate the event of the Carnivalesque to OWS—or, healing via an activist catharsis—this initially playful subverting of the authoritarian regime is a means of overcoming the imposed—and enforced—stasis placed upon the rank and file. It is in this joyous liberation from the conforming regime—the conforming regime of wage slavery, of a lack of affordable housing, of fear of employee collective bargaining, of fear of a police state, of fear of the suppressing of habeas corpus, etc.—that a space of social possibility comes to the fore. The ‘serious play’ of the Carnivalesque is the break with socio-politico-economic inertia and the setting into motion a dynamic of collectivized agency for the good of the Commons. This dynamic of serious play occurs at the site of the purloined Commons by the 99% as they, neighbors, meet on the now-level playing field, often for the first time. It is an event at once joyous, heartening and revelatory.

Again, it is a space of moral opportunity manifest where a moment ago no space existed. The invitation for serious play was set forth, the invitation heeded, and the ludic games began. To argue, then (as non-participant observers have done) that what is needful is “more structure”, and “more clarification”, etc., is to miss the efficacy of the Left activist moment: what is truly needful now is the serious play of the subverting Carnival to create a space of possibility, to create a healing of those whose rightful legacy is the Commons—long since appropriated from them—and even to invite the oppressor to join in the Carnival, since the social pathology at large has its provenance in their behavior, their state, and their media control.

In lieu of the calling for more specifically delineated agendas and the discrete naming of enemies of We, the People, what is needful is the Menippean satire of the ruling ‘code’. From Wiki:

“Bakhtin treats Menippean satire as one of the classical ‘serio-comic’ genres, alongside Socratic dialogue and other forms that Bakhtin claims are united by a ‘carnival sense of the world’, wherein ‘carnival is the past millennia’s way of sensing the world as one great communal performance’ and is ‘opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change’.”

http://is.gd/mZXwnr

The oppressor is convinced of the salutary nature of his/her behavior (q.v., Goldman-Sachs’ CEO Blankfein’s claim to be “doing God’s work”). The oppressor perpetuates this behavior via an abiding, radical faith in control, i.e., control in the world at large, the control of those, e.g., not in his social strata. By the ludic games of the Carnivalesque, OWS participants make manifest a new, healed order via a relinquishing of control—e.g., living in tents at Zuccotti, the free sharing of food, clothing, funds, etc., with all, the use of masks, body paint, communal drumming and chanting, the revealing of the ridiculous of the current order, etc. It is this essential inversion of the hegemon’s order (i.e., an “order” in the service of pandemic disorder) that strikes at the heart of the socio-politico-economic malaise.

This all-inclusive, yet seemingly ill-defined, ephemeral subverting of the hegemonic order panicks the academic as it makes anxious the careerist masquerading as fellow traveler. That they would then suggest an orthodox, ‘politically correct’ agency of opposition (in the interest of the movement “gaining strength”) is to miss completely the genius of the satirical moment, of the lack of subservience to “control”, and the all-inclusive nature of OWS. Those whose lives traffic in control crave control—those who crave control traffic in same. Both perpetuate the dis-ease.

OWS has managed to effect an eclectic synthesis of the rank and file to make common cause for change, in toto. To argue that OWS “at this point, really needs to be clearer in just what it is that they are about”—i.e., they need to make specific demands “in order to succeed as a cause”—is at best, misguided conjecture, and at worst, presumption from non-participant mainstays of the status quo—i.e., presumption from just who/what it is that we are opposing.

There are discrete activist organizations in the US, with their coterie attending this or that action. They have, in fact, announced for all the world their specific demands. And, by the way, this ‘clarification’ on their part has not necessarily manifest itself as a catalyst for activism on a broad scale—not to the degree that OWS has accomplished in a brief four months.

The very first, overwhelmingly needful step is to get the disassociated rank and file involved. And this, OWS is accomplishing, as an ongoing necessity. Many participants view OWS as being a forum for making manifest their suffering—no mean attribute of OWS, as the state/MSM/Wall Street “trifecta of evil” has made eminently clear that individual suffering is utterly meaningless. The maintenance of the investor-class-configured status quo has underwritten every salient narrative here at Empire, all serving to keep any incipient collective action at bay. And the effect has been accomplished to a distressful degree, with the undeniable, yet vital call for healing being paramount. Again, the ongoing necessity of healing-with-activism will occur as the participants are invited to engage the enemy in their own way. That is, OWS has created a space of action for everyone—i.e., not solely “activists”—quote-unquote.

Which is to say, the healing of We, the People, is an open, all-inclusive invitation—an invitation to the dance, as it were. The obsessive-compulsive behavior of the investor class demonstrates a profound need of the healing moment and by the overt, open nature of the Carnivalesque the possibility exists for their participation as well. And this, in contradistinction to the radically exclusive, occult, obscurantist nature of the ruling Power complex here at Empire.

There are several dynamics in play here, which need not be conflated as one needful Left agenda.

As Chomsky notes, there is an abiding mutual disassociation present among the working class which inertia hinders, at the most essential level, even the possibilty of a nascent Left activism. That is, OWS has inspirited a massive segment of the population to—voila!—get out of the house and become involved!

This fact needs to be valorized as the incipient moment of what may potentially be a coalescing of many seemingly disparate causes: anti-war, universal health care, EFCA and card check, doubling of the minimum wage, worker control of the means of production, etc.

To aver that OWS is remiss, i.e., “they really need to be doing more,” is to overlook the dynamics of Left activism. For example, to argue that “The absence of demands isn’t a strength,” is yet more effluent (institutionalized logorrhea) from anxious careerists who have been found out—i.e., who haven’t been at the barricades. To compensate for this egregious moral lack they cover their—’smell’ via learned disquisition…

In a word: academics have been shown to be suffering from chronic disconnect, again, all in the service (read: self-service) of their ever-tenuous careers.

OWS has managed to effect an eclectic synthesis of the rank and file to make common cause for change, in toto. To argue that OWS “at this point, really needs to be clearer in just what it is that they are about”—i.e., they need to make specific demands “in order to succeed as a cause”—is at best, misguided conjecture, and at worst, presumption from non-participant mainstays of the status quo–i.e., presumption from just who/what it is that we are opposing.

There are discrete activist organizations in the US, with their coterie attending this or that action. They have, in fact, announced for all the world their specific demands. And, by the way, this ‘clarification’ on their part has not necessarily manifest itself as a catalyst for activism on a broad scale–not to the degree that OWS has accomplished in a brief four months.

The very first, overwhelmingly needful step is to get the disassociated rank and file involved. And this, OWS is accomplishing, as an ongoing necessity. Individuals see OWS as being a forum for making manifest their suffering—no mean attribute of OWS, as the state/MSM/Wall Street “trifecta of evil” has made eminently clear that individual suffering is utterly meaningless. This maintenance of the investor-class-configured status quo has underwritten every salient narrative here at Empire, with the insidious—but anticipated—effect of anomie, disinterest and depression, all serving to keep any incipient collective action at bay. And this effect has been accomplished to a distressful degree., with the undeniable, yet vital call for healing being paramount. Again, the ongoing necessity of healing-with-activism will occur as the participants are invited to engage the enemy in their own way. That is, OWS has created a space of action for everyone—i.e., not solely “activists”—quote-unquote.

This clearing of a space must not be eclipsed via well-meaning advisors–like you, Professor Jodi Dean.

That is, announcing one’s group as designed for ‘this’ (but not necessarily for ‘that’)—may in fact be the weakness that your argument seeks to warn us away from. And thank you so much for the warning—you, the academic, in your never-ending quest for self-preservation (q.v., the “publish/perish” dyad), have, indeed, managed to make yourself ‘necessary’. And, p.s., mind your business.

also…to address the claims of opaqueness, intrigue, hierarchy, and even “cabals” within the OWS movement, the following argument is posited:

Of course it will be the case that for organizational skills, direction, etc., some individuals will come forth to make those personal/professional skills available to the group. And how could it be otherwise? Or, said another way, someone utterly lacking those skills would certainly eschew any prominent role in such ’teaching’ activity—until such time that they develop themselves as individuals in those areas…

This isn’t a ”cabal” but, rather, an eclectic, dynamic mosaic of many, many persons, often from disparate walks of life, with a welter of experiences (both personal and professional), skill levels, etc., making common cause to address—what?—the abiding suffering caused by the investor-class-configured status quo. They conjoin to revolutionize—non-violently—a 236-year-old imperium wreaking havoc upon them, their families and communities. This is not a cabal.

Rather, consider that we are, each and every one of us, both students and educators—i.e., we all have something to share—as educators—as well as a need to learn. Let those deemed ’cabalists’ be henceforth viewed as only the first of many educators in a particular area.

Dean Taylor

Maintaining the Economic Disparity by Handling the Working Class

—in which the State/investor-class regime co-opts a child’s death…

Last year, while speaking near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Ralph Nader offered the irrefutable observation that “there was a seamless transition from Bush to Obama.” In that vein, another journalist has observed that Obama is enacting Bush’s third term. Both accurate, both incontrovertible statements.

With the connivance of the State, i.e., the Right and near-Right (both parties are corporatist),  there is, in fact, a war being waged here at home—that being economic warfare as gross incivility—to maintain the investor-class-configured status quo by an elite coterie of five per cent, consisting of rentiers, their consiglieri, the Fortune 500 CEOs and their major stockholders, and bankers, as the never-to-be-sated fund overlords. The brazen manipulation of the non-participant ninety-five per cent of American labor is seen most recently in the utility found in a child’s senseless death, a death co-opted in the service of manufacturing the consent of the “bewildered herd.”

quem dii volunt perdere dementant prius…

The investor class/State-induced inequity here at Empire is so inherently tenuous—by virtue of the purposefully volatile nature of market activity—that the status quo complex must be finessed on an ongoing basis via MSM duplicity, disinformation, etc., in order to maintain momentum. Hence, the grotesque contrivance at Tucson lamenting the death of a child at the very same moment that Obama’s murderous military programme—in only one of a myriad of examples: Afghanistan—effects the deaths of scores of children struck down by drone shock-and-awe of, e.g., wedding parties! A pipeline connecting vast natural gas resources in the Caspian Sea to India^1,2 compels ongoing war crimes conducted in plain sight: this is merely our 235-year-old narrative of aggression and acquisition writ large in the era of Late (i.e., finance) Capital.

That is, we are witnessing the death throes of an ostensible “experiment” in democracy gone terribly—but quite predictably—awry. The Greek-tragedian notion of “whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” has relevance to the State as well, as Empire proceeds blithely in its final horrific turns of global bloodletting and rapine. It is nothing short of evil run rampant, and the reckoning, too, will be appalling.

And, what of the identity on the Right, that largely working-class collective of enraged, primarily non-ethnic, whites seeking redress of grievances? Owing to an abiding mistrust—and fear—of “the other” they gather to effect a catharsis of sorts (an unloading of diffuse anxiety and rage—a temporary relief, to be sure, but one clung to en masse ) via corporate-owned-media demagogues as spokesmodels who further cultivate the reactionary themes of American exceptionalism, racialism, etc. That is, they are less a collective of informed adults confronting economic disparity at its source than a haphazard mob seeking reassurances through prejudice and commonly held biases. They are a latent element now actualized, and also valued, of course, for their utility in sustaining the privilege, entitlements, etc., for Empire’s opulent minority. In return for this essential service individual and collective hysteria, angst, etc., was subdued—until the horrific events in Tucson.

The collective defect of the Right is betrayed through only one dimension of their “ethic”: they quite openly have chosen to project their animus upon a segment of humanity, versus the only appropriate focus of indignation: investor-class behaviour. It is this dire malignancy that identifies them as merely another face of the Power/money elite: both traffic in exclusion. The saving grace of the anarcho-syndicalist Left will be precisely the opposite: anarchism valorizes the individual considered via inclusive community. From Charles Péguy:

“The revolution will be moral or it will not be revolution.”

Charles Péguy

¹Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI): “Due to increasing instability, the project has essentially stalled; construction of the Turkmen part was supposed to start in 2006, but the overall feasibility is questionable since the southern part of the Afghan section runs through territory which continues to be under de facto Taliban control” [Wiki].

²Engelhardt/Escobar: “Welcome to Pipelineistan”: “In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question — why Afghanistan matters — is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten. And yet, rest assured, nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle. In the case of Afghanistan, keep in mind that Central and South Asia have been considered by American strategists crucial places to plant the flag; and once the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to future U.S. global power” [Escobar].

the rhizome model

anarcho-syndicalism

Imagine for a moment that the Bolsheviks had chosen, on principle, not to do away with the worker’s councils (i.e., the soviets), not insisting, as they nevertheless did, upon a “temporary”, top-down, controlling vanguard–i.e., taking their cue from Marx (his essential error?). Further–and in contradistinction to that failed attempt, and the ruin that ensued–Bakunin’s view is that one can never undo “old” top-down control (Tsarism, the kulaks, feudalism in Russia, etc.) by instilling “new” top-down control, however transient.

That is, the essential fact of our lives is that we must work, and, therefore, it makes nothing but good sense to establish the democracy we insist we want–i.e., a participatory democracy–at the syndicalist level, that being a decentralized matrix of worker’s collectives, or unions.

There, we establish the distinct possibility of 1) ongoing dialogue, 2) effective arbitration, 3) mutuality, and 4) participation of the kind sorely lacking in the highly centralized, top-down, hierarchical arborescent-model (i.e., Ponzi?) construct under which we suffer.

Hayek (Mises, and, more recently, Summers, et al.) argue to the necessity of control via “the unseen hand of the market”–i.e., the centralized market. If, however, we prescind from the idea of the Federal-as-God-as-needed-control mantra and consider the reality of “smaller,” decentralized (i.e., the rhizome model of, e.g., Deleuze and Guattari) local collectivization with localized, non-hierarchical communication displacing the virtually religious idée fixe of control, then a space of negotiation exists when one was lacking a moment ago.

Localized union consent via dialogue–i.e., consent which prescinds from individual greed as the salient, malign dynamic in this equation–has a better than equal chance at establishing a sustainable environment in which to flourish, not merely survive. This is not a utopian moment proffered here. It is highly workable, pace Hayek, Mise, Greenspan, and the other supposed Ivy-League “geniuses” in our midst.

Anarchism, as posited here, has nothing to do with lawlessness, chaos, disorganization, nihilism, etc. Rather, it is adult men and women determining the course of their own lives. The element of “organization” comes from the radical (i.e., fundamental) fact of the basic necessities we all need on an equal basis. That “equal”–when acknowledged as such–is all the foundation, organization, management, order, etc., we, as a collective will ever need.

When, however, we move away from the logical construct of a community of adult men and women–considered as a localized, non-hierarchical collective existing via ongoing consent–towards an eminently adversarial construct–i.e., capitalism–we have consented to (tacitly or otherwise), aided and abetted an abiding 1) dissonance, 2) antagonism, 3) contention, 4) rancor and wars of every stripe.

We do not need the “unseen hand of the market” for the commonweal. That is an academic (institutionally-derived) ruse–and an ersatz substitute–for what is essential (unremittingly so) to us for the long haul.

Capitalism is not a fait accompli! The history of civilization in the West does not begin with the Inclosure Acts!

the rhizome model

anarcho-syndicalism

Mikhail Bakunin

primitive accumulation of capital

the Commons

the tragedy of the Commons

Inclosure Acts

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many – they are few.

[Shelley; an homage to anarchy]

the killing fields of St. Peter…

“The Peterloo Massacre has been called one of the defining moments of its age. Many of those present at the massacre, including local masters, employers and owners, were horrified by the carnage. One of the casualties, Oldham cloth-worker and ex-soldier John Lees, who died from his wounds on 7 September, had been present at the Battle of Waterloo. Shortly before his death he said to a friend that he had never been in such danger as at Peterloo: ‘At Waterloo there was man to man but there it was downright murder.’” ¹

“On 16th August 1819 in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, armed cavalry charged a peaceful crowd of around 60,000 people gathered to listen to anti-poverty and pro-democracy speakers. It is estimated that 18 were killed, and over 700 seriously injured.”², ³

To honor and preserve the memory of both the incident as well as the martyrs to participatory democracy Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) wrote the following ninety-one stanzas to commend and magnify a non-centralized, non-hierarchical political economy, i.e., anarchy:⁴

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’

With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude.

And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.

And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.

O’er fields and towns, from sea to sea,
Passed the Pageant swift and free,
Tearing up, and trampling down;
Till they came to London town.

And each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken
Hearing the tempestuous cry
Of the triumph of Anarchy.

For with pomp to meet him came,
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired murderers, who did sing
‘Thou art God, and Law, and King.

‘We have waited, weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our Purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold.’

Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,
To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud,
Whispering – ‘Thou art Law and God.’ -

Then all cried with one accord,
‘Thou art King, and God and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!’

And Anarchy, the skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.

For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the sceptre, crown and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.

So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower,
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned Parliament

When one fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said:
But she looked more like Despair,
And she cried out in the air:

‘My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!

He has had child after child,
And the dust of death is piled
Over every one but me -
Misery, oh, Misery!’

Then she lay down in the street,
Right before the horses’ feet,
Expecting, with a patient eye,
Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.

When between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose,
Small at first, and weak, and frail
Like the vapour of a vale:

Till as clouds grow on the blast,
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,
And glare with lightnings as they fly,
And speak in thunder to the sky,

It grew – a Shape arrayed in mail
Brighter than the viper’s scale,
And upborne on wings whose grain
Was as the light of sunny rain.

On its helm, seen far away,
A planet, like the Morning’s, lay;
And those plumes its light rained through
Like a shower of crimson dew.

With step as soft as wind it passed
O’er the heads of men – so fast
That they knew the presence there,
And looked, – but all was empty air.

As flowers beneath May’s footstep waken,
As stars from Night’s loose hair are shaken,
As waves arise when loud winds call,
Thoughts sprung where’er that step did fall.

And the prostrate multitude
Looked – and ankle-deep in blood,
Hope, that maiden most serene,
Was walking with a quiet mien:

And Anarchy, the ghastly birth,
Lay dead earth upon the earth;
The Horse of Death tameless as wind
Fled, and with his hoofs did grind
To dust the murderers thronged behind.

A rushing light of clouds and splendour,
A sense awakening and yet tender
Was heard and felt – and at its close
These words of joy and fear arose

As if their own indignant Earth
Which gave the sons of England birth
Had felt their blood upon her brow,
And shuddering with a mother’s throe

Had turned every drop of blood
By which her face had been bedewed
To an accent unwithstood, -
As if her heart had cried aloud:

‘Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;

‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many – they are few.

‘What is Freedom? – ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well -
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.

‘Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants’ use to dwell,

‘So that ye for them are made
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,
With or without your own will bent
To their defence and nourishment.

‘Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak, -
They are dying whilst I speak.

‘Tis to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye;

‘Tis to let the Ghost of Gold
Take from Toil a thousandfold
More that e’er its substance could
In the tyrannies of old.

‘Paper coin – that forgery
Of the title-deeds, which ye
Hold to something of the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.

‘Tis to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.

‘And at length when ye complain
With a murmur weak and vain
‘Tis to see the Tyrant’s crew
Ride over your wives and you -
Blood is on the grass like dew.

‘Then it is to feel revenge
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
Blood for blood – and wrong for wrong -
Do not thus when ye are strong.

‘Birds find rest, in narrow nest
When weary of their wingèd quest
Beasts find fare, in woody lair
When storm and snow are in the air.

‘Asses, swine, have litter spread
And with fitting food are fed;
All things have a home but one -
Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none!

‘This is slavery – savage men
Or wild beasts within a den
Would endure not as ye do -
But such ills they never knew.

‘What art thou Freedom? O! could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand – tyrants would flee
Like a dream’s dim imagery:

‘Thou art not, as impostors say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.

‘For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
In a neat and happy home.

‘Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude -
No – in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.

‘To the rich thou art a check,
When his foot is on the neck
Of his victim, thou dost make
That he treads upon a snake.

‘Thou art Justice – ne’er for gold
May thy righteous laws be sold
As laws are in England – thou
Shield’st alike the high and low.

‘Thou art Wisdom – Freemen never
Dream that God will damn for ever
All who think those things untrue
Of which Priests make such ado.

‘Thou art Peace – never by thee
Would blood and treasure wasted be
As tyrants wasted them, when all
Leagued to quench thy flame in Gaul.

‘What if English toil and blood
Was poured forth, even as a flood?
It availed, Oh, Liberty,
To dim, but not extinguish thee.

‘Thou art Love – the rich have kissed
Thy feet, and like him following Christ,
Give their substance to the free
And through the rough world follow thee,

‘Or turn their wealth to arms, and make
War for thy belovèd sake
On wealth, and war, and fraud – whence they
Drew the power which is their prey.

‘Science, Poetry, and Thought
Are thy lamps; they make the lot
Of the dwellers in a cot
So serene, they curse it not.

‘Spirit, Patience, Gentleness,
All that can adorn and bless
Art thou – let deeds, not words, express
Thine exceeding loveliness.

‘Let a great Assembly be
Of the fearless and the free
On some spot of English ground
Where the plains stretch wide around.

‘Let the blue sky overhead,
The green earth on which ye tread,
All that must eternal be
Witness the solemnity.

‘From the corners uttermost
Of the bounds of English coast;
From every hut, village, and town
Where those who live and suffer moan,

‘From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen,
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain, and weep for cold -

‘From the haunts of daily life
Where is waged the daily strife
With common wants and common cares
Which sows the human heart with tares -

‘Lastly from the palaces
Where the murmur of distress
Echoes, like the distant sound
Of a wind alive around

‘Those prison halls of wealth and fashion,
Where some few feel such compassion
For those who groan, and toil, and wail
As must make their brethren pale -

‘Ye who suffer woes untold,
Or to feel, or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold -

‘Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free -

‘Be your strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With their shade to cover ye.

‘Let the tyrants pour around
With a quick and startling sound,
Like the loosening of a sea,
Troops of armed emblazonry.

Let the charged artillery drive
Till the dead air seems alive
With the clash of clanging wheels,
And the tramp of horses’ heels.

‘Let the fixèd bayonet
Gleam with sharp desire to wet
Its bright point in English blood
Looking keen as one for food.

‘Let the horsemen’s scimitars
Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars
Thirsting to eclipse their burning
In a sea of death and mourning.

‘Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war,

‘And let Panic, who outspeeds
The career of armèd steeds
Pass, a disregarded shade
Through your phalanx undismayed.

‘Let the laws of your own land,
Good or ill, between ye stand
Hand to hand, and foot to foot,
Arbiters of the dispute,

‘The old laws of England – they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo – Liberty!

‘On those who first should violate
Such sacred heralds in their state
Rest the blood that must ensue,
And it will not rest on you.

‘And if then the tyrants dare
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew, -
What they like, that let them do.

‘With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away.

‘Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

‘Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand -
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street.

‘And the bold, true warriors
Who have hugged Danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company.

‘And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

‘And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again – again – again -

‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many – they are few.’

["The Mask of Anarchy", 1819]

¹Wiki: Peterloo Massacre

²Peterloo Massacre

³Peterloo Massacre Campaign

⁴Anarcho-syndicalism

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”
Josef Mengele, der Todesengel (“the Angel of Death”)

As Empire proceeds in its death-courting danse macabre—both globally and here at home—its proximate victims, i.e., those wage-earners now facing both foreclosure as well as the rescinding of unemployment aid, appear to fall like grass under a scythe: the Left activism so desperately needed in the US to curtail the Wall Street-bred bloodbath is almost indiscernible.

The State responds to the economic maelstrom, a class-engineered upward displacement of rank-and-file hard-won equity, pension fund accounts and savings by establishing a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—i.e., the Deficit Commission—whose mandate is, nevertheless, seen as (and, quite typically) safeguarding the status quo of “the opulent minority.”¹

Their “report” recommends austerity measures unilaterally, i.e., the spending reductions, if implemented, would cause grave hardship to that group having little to no advocacy on Capitol Hill, even as it unfailingly accommodates elitist interests—being that sector having virtually direct access to the State—sparing same from the burden of deficit reduction proposals.

The Commission members’ corporate alignment is seen, e.g., in Republican Senator Tom Coburn’s stonewalling on unemployment aid—i.e., he was the sole lawmaker to block a benefit extension in April.²

And, co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Simpson figured in an earlier incarnation of this State-underwritten pogrom, i.e., the Kerrey-Danforth Commission (1993),³ with Morgan-Stanley board member Bowles attempting to broker a deal between the new Congressional Right (Bowles being the White House liaison to Republican House Speaker Gingrich) and centrist Clinton over Social Security cutbacks after Kerrey-Danforth disbanded without consensus.⁴

Kerrey, too, had voted to repeal Glass-Steagall, aiding and abetting the economic apocalypse which followed (Kerrey: “The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown”).⁵ In addition hedge-fund billionaire—and former Lehman Brothers CEO and NY Fed Chairman—Pete Peterson, as Kerrey-Danforth appointee, is the Social Security and Medicare cutback zealot who exempts rentiers, major stockholders and Banking CEOs the suffering American labor would incur by virtue of an elitist entitlement ethic, i.e., the Masters of the Universe are to be spared discomfiture to avert capital flight.^{6, 7, 8}

Corporatist-driven Capitol Hill prescinds from the fact of the unemployment crisis as national emergency (versus, e.g., a “downturn” in the labor market) and does little to nothing to stem the hemorrhage. It is the perennial bi-partisan token gesture granted to placate the rank and file, i.e., the new mandarins of Empire’s Power precincts are banking—literally—on the reality of consent manufactured via a compliant, equally corporate-driven media.

Further, those victims of the calamitous securitized debt bubble collapse who lost savings, pension monies, and endure—as the meltdown now enters its third year—vanishing jobs, can only count upon brazen insult to cruel injury, being identified recently (and, with glaring contempt) as “the lesser people” by Deficit Commission co-chair, former US Senator Alan Simpson.⁹

Michael Hudson [CounterPunch] writes of yet another malign contrivance en route to American labor by this spring. That is, the flat tax contrivance will shift a tax revenue accruing to the propertied class onto wage earners:

“The flat tax actually would tax wage earners much more steeply than the wealthy, whose income it would largely exempt! The flat tax is supposed to fall on employment, not returns to wealth. Employees and their employers would pay the tax, as they pay today’s 12.4 per cent FICA paycheck withholding, but the flat tax would not be levied on financial and property income” [Hudson].

Hudson allows that the flat tax had been considered in the 2000 primary by presidential hopeful Steve Forbes and abandoned as being too obvious, i.e., it lacked the obscurantist value seen in, e.g., the credit default swaps used to great effect by Goldman-Sachs and its insurer-of-choice AIG-FP.

However, Hudson notes that if the federal debt limit is not raised this spring then faced with the ultimatum of federal govenrment collapse the flat tax—and its concomitant VAT on consumer goods—would be ushered through in order to forestall economic failure:

“Here’s how I think the plan is intended to work. Given the fact that voters have already rejected the flat tax in principle, it can only be introduced by fiat under crisis conditions. Alan Simpson…already has suggested that Republicans close down the government by refusing to increase the federal debt limit this spring. This would create a fiscal crisis and threat of government shutdown. It would be a fiscal 9/11, for the Republicans to trot out their ‘rescue plan’ for the emergency breakdown of government.

“The result would cap the tax shift off finance and wealth onto wage earners. Supported by Blue Dog Democrats, President Obama would shed crocodile tears and sign off on the most right-wing, oligarchic, anti-labor, anti-black and anti-minority, anti-industrial tax that anyone has yet been able to think up. The notorious Flat Tax would fall only on wage income (paid by employees and employers alike) and on consumer goods (the value-added tax, VAT), while exempting returns that accrue to the wealthy in the form of interest and dividend income, rent and capital gains.”¹⁰

The corollary to all of this, then, might be that Simpson and his cohort at the commission, as emissary and factotum of the ruling triumvir of Wall Street, the US banking cartel, and the Fortune 500, and considered collectively, self-identify as the latter-day Übermenschen (Simpson: “I can’t wait for the blood bath in April. … When debt limit time comes…”).¹¹ They evince, that is, the fascistic Right seen in Europe in the thirties, i.e., a kind of economic Arianism, with the elect determing life and death for, first, American labor and, via Empire’s militaristic network, labor in toto.

¹Deficit Commission

²DemocracyNow

³Kerrey-Danforth Commission report

⁴Erskine Bowles

⁵Robert Kerrey

⁶Kerrey-Danforth Commission: Peterson report

⁷FAIR: Pete Peterson’s Real Crisis: America Speaks and Says the Wrong Thing

⁸Pete Peterson at large

⁹Alan Simpson and “the lesser people”

¹⁰Michael Hudson

¹¹Simpson: There Will Be Blood

The self-serving Ivy League whores in DC–and, in keeping with investor-class world ruination–have, once again, dictated terms to the global community, i.e., in this case–and quite evidently–they’ve “instructed” Swedish authorities to crucify Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

What has prompted this pending transnational witch hunt (a State-underwritten persecution claiming sexual assault) is the posting at his website, Wikileaks, of thousands of files of classified documents revealing US war crimes in Iraq. The current legal feint occurs despite the facts having been examined–and the matter dropped–months ago (DemocracyNow, 2 September 2010):

“WikiLeaks Founder Speaks Out Against Swedish Probe”

“Sweden’s top prosecutor has reopened an investigation of rape allegations against the co-founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks despite dropping the same case last month. The probe of Julian Assange comes less than two months after his group released thousands of classified US government documents on the Afghan war. In a television interview, Assange again denied the allegations and said he’s the target of a smear campaign.”

“Julian Assange: ‘In a system that has rule of law, the police should have the burden to prove their case. However, we can see here that what is happening is not happening inside a court of law, it is happening in the jury of public opinion, because of deliberate attempts to push this into the public opinion, starting from the very beginning and including either major errors or outright complicity by the prosecution’” [Democracy Now, 2 September 2010].

DemocracyNow

and, from CounterPunch, 27 August 2010:

“Swedish bloggers uncovered the full story in a few hours. The complaint was lodged by a radical feminist Anna Ardin, 30, a one-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service. She’s spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. She had invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape. The prosecutor immediately issued an arrest warrant, and the press was duly notified. Once the facts were examined in the cold light of day, the charge of rape seemed ludicrous and was immediately dropped. In the meantime the younger woman, perhaps realizing how she had been used, withdrew her report, leaving the vengeful Anna Ardin standing alone” [CounterPunch, Shamir, Israel, and Paul Bennet].

CounterPunch

The only one being “raped” here is Assange–and that is occurring solely because he has the temerity to defy the dictates of Empire. Which is to say, the investor class–and its coterie of DC Ivy League prostitutes–overseeing the globe can ill afford to have a first-class example of what participation democracy actually looks like go forth with impunity.

Shame on Sweden!

“Before reading [his autobiography], I knew and greatly admired Dave Dellinger. Or so I thought. After reading his remarkable story, my admiration changed to something more like awe. There can be few people in the world who have crafted their lives into something truly inspiring. This autobiography introduces us to one of them.” — Noam Chomsky, from the dustjacket of From Yale to Jail

Anarchist Dorothy Day on being asked about how best to address militancy and the violent:

“you don’t argue…I mean, you can’t argue with somebody who’s very…I saw Dave Dellinger get a broken jaw from one of the militants who came up and gave him a terrific crack on the side of the face…and, with the blood coming out of his mouth, and spitting blood, why, he went right on talking…he lost a few teeth…he went right on talking–perfectly calm, perfectly self-possessed: Dave Dellinger is really a non-violent person. And, the man went up and apologized to him afterward–he was completely taken aback…” [from Marquette University lecture, 1969].

from Wiki:

Dellinger was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts to a wealthy family. His father was a lawyer and a prominent Republican. A Yale University and Oxford University student, he also studied theology at Union Theological Seminary. Rejecting his comfortable background, he walked out of Yale one day to live with hobos during the Depression, whilst at Oxford he visited Nazi Germany and drove an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he was an imprisoned conscientious objector and anti-war agitator. In federal prison, he and fellow conscientious objectors — including Ralph DiGia and Bill Sutherland — protested racial segregation in the dining halls, which were ultimately integrated due to the protests.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Dellinger joined freedom marches in the South and led many hunger strikes in jail. As US involvement in Vietnam grew, Dellinger applied Gandhi’s principles of non-violence to his activism within the growing anti-war movement, of which one of the high points was the Chicago Seven trial.

In 1956, he and A. J. Muste founded the magazine Liberation, as a forum for the non-Marxist left, similar to Dissent.

Dellinger had contacts and friendships with such diverse individuals as Eleanor Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abbie Hoffman, A.J. Muste, Greg Calvert, David McReynolds and numerous Black Panthers, including Fred Hampton, whom he greatly admired. As chairman of the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee he worked with many different anti-war organizations, and helped bring Dr. King and James Bevel into leadership positions in the 1960s anti-war movement. He sat on the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America and the Young People’s Socialist League, its youth section, until he left in 1943; and was also a long-time member of the War Resisters League.

Dellinger appeared at the December 1971 gathering of music and political views in favor of the then-jailed John Sinclair.

Anti-war activist, socialist and author for his lifelong commitment to pacifist values and for serving as a spokesperson for the peace movement, Dellinger was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience on September 26, 1992.

In 1996, at the first Democratic Convention held in Chicago since 1968, Dellinger was arrested along with nine others (including his own grandson as well as Abbie Hoffman’s son Andrew) during a sit-in protest at Chicago’s Federal Building. Later, in 2001, he led a group of young activists from Montpelier, Vermont, to Quebec City, to protest the creation of a free trade zone.

David Dellinger died in Montpelier, Vermont, in 2004.

from Ron Jacobs’ CounterPunch article:

“Although I only met Dave five years ago when a group of us sat in on Representative Bernie Sanders’ office in opposition to his support of the bombing of Yugoslavia, he has been an influence on my life and thought ever since I first heard about him in junior high. As a young peacenik who found the militancy and flamboyance of activists and groups like the Black Panthers and Yippies quite appealing, it was David Dellinger’s thoughtful, yet militant antiwar stance that provided me (and millions of others, it seems) with a fundamental belief that what I was doing was worthwhile. After all, this man had devoted his entire adult life to opposing imperialism and the wars that system demands without ever even throwing a brick at a cop. Like the Berrigan brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., his commitment to nonviolence was total. At the same time, he understood that pacifism was not passivism.

“His presence at antiwar actions in his chosen home of Vermont and around the world was something one depended on. He never stood on the sidelines and watched. His analysis was as clear as his commitment. Although an ally of all those who oppose the system of war and racism, he remained a staunch pacifist, but never let that get in the way of his opposition to the ills of capitalism or his solidarity with those who shared that opposition but differed with his tactics.

“Live like him” [Jacobs, CP].

Dave Dellinger

From Yale to Jail

Goodbye, Dave Dellinger

“the banality of evil”…

…having at last managed to shed the remnants of self respect and conscience they may once have claimed for themselves—i.e., and, therefore, with their moral ground now lost to them—they then give themselves over to being seduced by money/Power, i.e., money/Power pursued as useful diversions over the course of now effete lives…this is then rationalized as realpolitik—not moral depravity, corruption, degenerate behavior, or—as Arendt put it—”the banality of evil”…

(l. to r., top: Forwardlooking, Cheney, Hillary;   second:  Bill, Pelosi, Geithner; third: W., Condi, Blankfein, Harman; bottom:  Schapiro, Bernanke, Rumsfeld, Reno)

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

John Dalberg-Acton

from On Civil Disobedience:

“Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it.

“Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet.

“The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as that are called the ‘means’ are increased. The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. Christ answered the Herodians according to their condition. ‘Show me the tribute-money,’ said he–and one took a penny out of his pocket–if you use money which has the image of Caesar on it, and which he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the State, and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar’s government, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it. ‘Render therefore to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God those things which are God’s'–leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which; for they did not wish to know.”

Henry David Thoreau

(“I feel that there are many people who are in despair over me, and are extraordinarily scandalized by what I have done. I feel, at times, in great despair over…Christians.”)

DB: Oh…I think we didn’t realize that the waters were very apt to turn to blood—that might happen…it has happened…If fires were reborn…might actually cause—might actually cost the death of very good men…These waters of time have become dipped in a great deal of blood since then. From innocent Vietnamese blood to innocent American blood.

[scene: narrator voiceover to DB photo stream]

VO: Father Daniel Berrigan is a poet and a Jesuit priest who defied the law as a means of dramatizing his opposition to the war in Vietnam. On May 17, 1968, Father Berrigan, his brother Philip—also a priest—and seven other men and women entered the Selective Service office at Catonsville, Maryland and burned several hundred draft files with homemade napalm. The Catonsville Nine were later tried and convicted of destroying government property. On April 9, 1970, the date he was due to begin serving his prison sentence of three-and-a-half years, Father Berrigan went underground. He successfully evaded capture for four months. On August 11th, Father Berrigan was finally arrested by agents of the FBI on Block Island, Rhode Island.

[scene: Howard Zinn reflects]

HZ: …the first priest I’d ever been close to..a Jesuit: I’d always thought the Jesuit was something out of the Middle Ages…you know…the 16th century…that’s where the Jesuits were…and, I…I’d never thought of a real live Jesuit, but here was one…and a poet to boot…and a marvelous man…In Hanoi…our experience in Hanoi…I…I guess, had a profound effect on him. I think it has a profound effect on all who go there…and…you must remember, we went there in early 1968, when the United States was still bombing the north, and still bombing Hanoi…and, it was something about that…that, I think, did a lot to Dan because he spent a lot of time in shelters. And…in fact, there was one scene that Dan wrote a poem about…

[scene: DB at safe house, reflects]

DB: …so, we were in the shelter and, very unexpectedly, came out three children who were crouching in there too—against all expectations…and, one of the elder children feeding rice to one of the younger ones…and, I wrote this little verse within a couple of days…and, tried to read it later at our trial—to the great anger and discomfiture of the judge…But, it seemed to sum up for me everything that Catonsville was about in one image…one reality…It’s called “Children in the Shelter.”

Imagine; three of them./as though survival/were a rat’s word,/and a rat’s death/waited there at the end./And I must have/in the century’s boneyard/heft of flesh and bone in my arms./I picked up the littlest/a boy, his face/breaded with rice (his sister calmly feeding him/as we climbed down)./In my arms fathered/in a moment’s grace, the messiah/of all my tears. I bore, reborn/a Hiroshima child from hell.

[scene: Howard Zinn reflects]

HZ: And, so, when months later we were back in the States—and I read in the newspapers about what he had done at Catonsville—I was a little surprised…you know…because it was a surprising event…But, I wasn’t that much surprised…because, I…I knew that he felt after coming back from north Vietnam…that…somebody had to cry out in the streets, you know…somebody had to do something special—something…somebody had to keep doing something that would arouse the American people to even begin to sense what was happening…and what we were doing with our bombs—what we were doing with our silence…even those of us who weren’t dropping the bombs…So, I wasn’t surprised…And, he felt that burning draft records was a statement: yeah, a flaming statement…

[scene: Selective Service office lot, Catonsville, Md., 17 May 1968]

DB: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. May He make it possible by this action for others to live…may He make it more difficult for men to kill one another…We make our prayer in the name of that God whose name is peace and decency and unity and love. Amen.

[scene: DB voiceover to Catonsville action film]

DB: In nineteen-hundred and sixty-seven I had a sense only just under the skin that I was at the end of something. I had been to Hanoi and seen the charnel house our military had made of a quite beautiful society. That Easter Sunday, on returning, I visited a boy in Syracuse, New York who had immolated himself in front of the cathedral—he later died. And, then, there was horror upon horror: Martin Luther King’s murder, and so on…Suddenly, I saw that my sweet skin was hiding out behind others. So, with eight other felons I went into a draft board in Catonsville in May of that year, removed about three-hundred draft files, and burned them with homemade napalm under the utterly absurd and totally un-American assumption that it is better to burn papers than children.

[scene: DB speaking during Catonsville action]

DB: We regret very much, I think, all of us, the inconvenience—and even suffering—that we’ve brought to these clerks here…It was done so quickly…and we had hoped that they wouldn’t be so excitable over a few files…it’s very hard to bring home to people exactly what they’re doing by being custodians of such files…

[scene: Selective Service office clerk]

OC: I was sitting at my desk doing my work, and these two ladies were in the office with me, and those two gentlemen came up in the hall outside there, and, I said, “Yes Sir, may I help you?” And…so then, right on top of him came another man…And, then, he started to come in…he looked right…he looked in here, and then he looked over in there…and…he said…they walked into the office, and I said, well, “What can I do for you?” And, with that, then all the rest of them came—all of a sudden…quickly…And, they…one man with the trash burner…he went around to my files, and stood there and started dumping files into this trash burner…And, this one…I tried to prevent it…and, this one man…attempted to stop me from doing it…and…he did…he did succeed…

[scene: DB voiceover to Catonsville action, and police officer counting activists before their transport]

DB: So, when we…decided that those files had no right to exist, they say we were trying to be profoundly historical about the thing. What kinds of property, protected by what kinds of law, actually serve human life?: this is a question that cannot be evaded in war time…For us to go in there, therefore, is in a long line of dissent—a long line of…overtly-illegal activity that goes back in the West to Old Testament prophecy…more nearly to our own times, the activity of Jesus Himself, in the world: His invasion of the property of the occupying power—even the property of the temple.

PO: …four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

[scene: Selective Service office clerk being interviewed]

Q: What would you say is going to happen to your office here? Are you…has this…seriously disrupted your service?

OC: Yes, it has: seriously disrupted it, it really has…It’s going to take hours and hours and hours of intense, hard labor to reconstruct—and, bring back—all of these…And, it’s doing a great injustice to the boys themselves, because, in many instances, these boys have gone to a lot of trouble to get doctor’s statements—which cost them a lot of money—these things are all inside of these files…

[scene: DB, at safe house, reflects]

It was certainly with a great heave of relief that we were able to say afterwards, “it’s all over…and no one was hurt,” and this really seemed to have been something different than what was current. Almost as many people said…gradually…like a new day…like a new day of creation…Because, before us—at least in this century—that kind of thing had not happened, you know…But, there was a non-violent, explicit attack upon property as an attempt to vindicate human life in the midst of…say…the…idolatries paid to property and the absolute cheapening of human life that war spells…

[scene: Howard Zinn reflects]

HZ: …and, he knew, you see…he knew that…it made people uncomfortable—as it still makes people uncomfortable: breaking the law, burning draft-board records, setting fire to something…because we have…I guess we have—not only in this country, but in the modern world—we have this fetish about property, about things, much more than we have about people…I guess that’s one of the points he wanted to make: people are more important than pieces of paper. People were being burned and killed…I guess it’s like Garrison, not far from here…1835: William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution, which…upset people…you don’t burn the U.S. Constitution…Garrison did it to make a point about slavery, and, I guess Dan was doing something like the same thing…

[scene: DB outdoors, reflects]

DB: Well, I don’t want to become complicated about it: we went in there, destroyed a few files, placed ourselves in a very interesting position with regard to communicating with our society…hung around until the Keystone Kops arrived, stood trial…in a way that was very much according to their rules and expectations of us…we were very straight, trousers were pressed…we didn’t go in for any of the delightful antics of the later Chicago trials…We played their rules—which, I must add by way of a footnote, I would never do again.

[scene: Howard Zinn reflects]

HZ: He was brought up in the American tradition—even the American liberal tradition. The American liberal tradition is…it’s alright to commit civil disobedience…maybe…but, if you do, you should take your punishment—sometimes, people add, “like a man.” You take your punishment. You go to jail: that’s the “sporting” thing to do, it’s the “right” thing to do, it’s what Socrates did.

Socrates said, “I’ll accept the punishment on the supposition…”—and, this was Socrates’ supposition—”that, basically, this government is a decent government. Athens has made a mistake with me…and, they’ve done something wrong, there’s a flaw…but, fundamentally, it’s a decent government to which I owe some allegiance.” And, I guess Dan Berrigan said…”I’ve watched what the government has done to human beings—our brothers…because the world consists of our brothers…in Vietnam—and…I don’t believe our government is behaving like a decent government, and, I don’t believe we owe it allegiance.”

And, I think, maybe, he was going back to the idea in the Declaration of Independence…which is an even older American idea than the idea that you take your punishment for civil disobedience—and, that is, that when a government becomes destructive of certain very fundamental things—like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—then that government does not deserve the allegiance of its people any more.

Anyway, I’m just trying to recapture in my mind what he was thinking about at that moment when he decided, “No, I’m not going to go to jail. This government doesn’t deserve that kind of…subservience.”

[scene: voiceover narrator]

VO: During the time he was in hiding Father Berrigan changed his location often. He stayed with thirty-seven different families in ten eastern and mid-western cities. Ten days prior to his arrest Father Berrigan was interviewed by Lee Lockwood for N.E.T. in an underground location, an apartment in New York City.

[scene: DB interviewed at safe house]

LL: Father Dan, you’ve been underground for some time now…what’s it like to be underground in the United States of America?

DB: Well, I’d say that it looks as though it could go on for ever. It looks good enough—it looks useful enough for the movement…I think it’s been an enormous opportunity to work up close with people—with small groups, to meet with the media, to reflect and meditate, to do a great deal of reading…in fact, to do everything that I was doing before, but do it squared…do it twice as intensely…twice as much…

LL: How long have you been underground now? How long has it been?

DB: Well, it’s going into its fourth month now, and I can remembered very vividly in the beginning, when, if I could have promised myself one week or two weeks, I would have been very content. So, I’m delighted at that. My delight, of course, is always, always mitigated—and, even embittered—by the fact of the war, and the fact that whatever one can do is so small. But, one does what he can—it’s alright…

LL: I understand that you’ve got something planned for tomorrow. Do you want to tell us what that is?

DB: Well, it’s a very simple, little project. Tomorrow, for the first time since I went underground I’m going to preach in a church—in an urban church…and, I’m doing that with deliberation, with understanding of the danger involved…I’m doing it very simply because I haven’t been allowed, so far, I haven’t had the opportunity to be in a church…I think I’ve been preaching the gospel in other ways—at least I hope I have…But, I want, really…I want to be with a group of worshipping Christians—not necessarily Catholics—and, I want to refer to the New Testament, and, I want to relate it to what we have done, and to invite people in as practical and simple and direct a way as I know to consider this—even though they are shocked by it.

LL: You think they will be shocked by it?

DB: Well, I predicted, I think…you know…this tremendous cleavage among peoples is occurring also…among the Christian communion, as a result of the war…and, I feel that very deeply…I feel that there are many people who are in despair over me, and are extraordinarily scandalized by what I have done. I feel, at times, in great despair over…over Christians…

[scene: church interior, Philadelphia, Pa.; Dr. John Raines and DB speak]

JR: We live in extraordinary times, and, in extraordinary times we must be ready to take advantage of suddenly emerging possibilities. So it is with us this morning. We have a visitor. For reasons that will become obvious with a little reflection it was not possible to anticipate his arrival amongst us in advance. For reasons that are equally obvious he will have to leave directly following the sermon. He doesn’t want to have to do this. He is a person who would like nothing more than to be able to come under normal circumstances [gesturing to camera] without this paraphernalia, and talk to us about the state of this nation, and the state of the Christian church within this nation. As a person, I’m sure he’d like to stay all afternoon…and into the long hours of the morning…But, we no longer live in a time and a place where that is possible. Perhaps, some day, it will be possible once again in this nation…So, now, if you would join me in welcoming our guest—our visitor—Father Daniel Berrigan.

DB: Dear friends, I must thank, first of all, so many who have made this morning possible…that I should be in a church with my fellow Christians in such circumstances…as my life has brought me to. I come to you, really, in the name of all those who have said “No” to this war—from prison, from the underground, from exile, from the law courts: from death itself. I do not hesitate to say in the light of the readings we have heard—from scripture—that I come to you, also, in the name of the unborn.

To present, on an ordinary Sunday morning, to fellow Christians, the scandal of one who lives outside the law…the added scandal of one whose brother—also a priest—is in federal prison…the first political prisoner…in our history…who was a priest. To present you with a further scandal: that I have refused to submit before the law and to go to prison myself, and that I am hunted, and underground, for the duration of the war, at least. To suggest to you that my life may open questions, also, for yours…for your families, for your work, for your attitude to human life and death: especially the death of children, and the innocent.

Dear friends, I believe we are in such times as makes such demands upon us also. I believe we are in such times as make it increasingly impossible for Christians to obey the law of the land…and to remain true to Christ. And, this is the simple word that I bring to you as a brother in Christ…I bring it with a full consciousness that in bringing it I increase my own jeopardy. But, for my brother and myself the choice is already made: we have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power. We have chosen to be branded as “peace criminals” by war criminals.

This is how we have tried to read the simple words that you heard this morning…This is how we have tried to read and translate and embody in our own lives the will of God. To respond to the voices of those great men and women who speak to us out of eternity…out of the past…But, most of all, out of today…out of today’s prisons and exile and underground…and death itself.

Good men and women are increasingly perplexed. They listen, and their hearts are sore with the continual ill news of the daily press and television…They find themselves cornered by life, with fewer and fewer decisions to take in regard to conscience. They ask, again and again, night and day, “What can we do?”

A Christian can confront the law of the land—that law which protects the warmakers, even as it prosecutes the peacemakers. The Christians can refuse to pay taxes. They can aid and abet and harbor people like myself who are in legal jeopardy for resistance—along with AWOLs. They can work with GIs on bases helping those young men to awaken to the truth of their condition and their society—in coffee houses or in hospitality in their own homes. They can organize within their profession and neighborhood and churches, so that a solid wall of conscience confronts the deathmakers. They can make it increasingly difficult for local draft boards to function.

There are a hundred non-violent means of resisting those who would inflict death as the ordinary way of life. There are a hundred ways of non-violent resistance—up to now untried, or half tried, or badly tried. But, the peace will not be won…without such serious and constant and sacrificial and courageous actions on the part of large numbers of good men and women. The peace will not be won without the moral equivalent of the loss and suffering and separation that the war itself is exacting.

Dear friends, dear brothers—I thank you for being patient…I thank you for accepting me in this very brief span…I ask your prayers for all those who are in deep trouble with the law…who have had to face separation from families and friends…and to forge new lives for themselves in such times—a very small price, indeed, for the death of a single child. May the peace of Christ—which is promised to the courageous, and the patient, and the cheerful of heart—be yours also.

[scene: outside church after service; two women discuss DB's sermon]

W1: It was a surprise sermon to me…because I thought that Dr. Raines would have been the main speaker. But, of course, we had a visitor, as he announced…and…I think the emphasis was mostly on Father Berrigan’s speech…

LL: What did you think of Father Berrigan’s sermon?

W1: Well…I think he was very sincere…I think he…brought the facts to the people…I…I assume that…that he…is very interested in the peace movement, and, perhaps…was…because of his activities in the peace movement he probably…I don’t want to use the term “unfrocked,” but that’s what I think happened…

W2: I had a grandson that was killed in the war…and, of course, I…I don’t like war…my son was in the war—World War II-war—for five years…he came home without a scratch, and I thought my grandson would do the same—but he didn’t. So it’s…I don’t like war…

LL: I don’t think anybody likes war…

W2: …no…

LL: Do you sympathize with Father Berrigan’s act of…burning draft files…and, then running away from his jail sentence…and appearing in situations like this in the underground?

W1: Oh, I see…that…I didn’t quite understand the…the facts in the case. That is why he…he…he…in other words, he should be in jail—is that the idea?

LL: That’s right—he’s got a jail sentence hanging over him.

W1: In another section of the country—is he from another section of the country?

LL: He’s from the east.

W1: Oh, I see…

LL: Do you sympathize with that kind of action?

W1: No…no…

LL: He’s a war protestor…

W1: No…I…I do not sympathize with the burning of draft cards—I think that’s very un-American. And…but, that…that’s his…way of speaking…way of sympathizing…I think there’s other ways of being a Conscientious Objector…I’ve read about…they’re sending these young men to camps, and to other military camps, where they are assigned different duties…

LL: That doesn’t stop the war…the point he made is that doesn’t stop the war…

W1: No…no…

LL: Did you…what did you feel about his…Father Berrigan asking everybody to…to put themselves in jeopardy, and to commit actions that are actually illegal, in order to resist the war—and to bring it to an end?

W2: Well, that’s his idea…and, then, he thinks it’s right to do that…I can understand his point of view, thinking it is right to do those kinds of things…but, personally, I…I…I wouldn’t do it myself…

W1: I believe in law and order first—I don’t believe in breaking the law in any respect…

W2: I agree with her—I don’t believe in violence…I think that… that’s wrong…but…I wish everybody could sign a petition and say “we do not want war,” and the war would be over…

[scene: outside church after service; first man discussing DB's sermon]

M1: When John Raines spoke of an unexpected guest who could only stay for the sermon I was trying to imagine whether he was speaking allegorically of Jesus Christ or…or, who he was speaking of. So, I was completely amazed that we could have this privilege…

LL: How do you feel, precisely, about Father Berrigan’s type of witness? The…illegality…

M1: Well, his is the kind of heroic witness that I wish I had the courage to do…but which seems so…so very removed from the kind of thing that a person can do and still function in middle-class society. It’s a…a brave witness, indeed.

LL: Of course, that’s what Father Berrigan was trying to get people like yourself to confront…the idea of going one step further…and actually letting go of your middle-class position, and your middle-class values, and taking a chance…raising the ante. Do you feel that…that his sermon made you want to do that…or…is there any chance that your life could change as a result of Father Berrigan’s sermon?

M1: I’ve made that decision quite a long time ago…really…that…I want to be within, rather than outside—his position was that a person has to be willing to lose friends, and change his whole life for the kind of position that he’s taking…and, my own choice is to work within, rather than from without…and, I have only admiration for those who can take that kind of position—and, it’s possible that I should too.

[scene: outside church after service; second man discussing DB's sermon]

LL: In all your fifty-years of church going have you ever had an experience similar to this one?

M2: Nothing like it, no—and I wish we had more.

LL: Were you surprised…were you surprised at Father Berrigan’s appearance?

M2: Yes—very much surprised.

LL: And, what did you think of his sermon?

M2: To tell you the truth I couldn’t hear it. I have hearing devices—new ones—and, I couldn’t hear it. I just get a little now and then…

LL: But, you now who he is, and what he stands for? What…Do you know anything about him?

M2: No.

LL: I see…

M2: Who was it—Father Berrian?

LL: Father Berrigan—the priest…the Father…the priest who delivered the sermon this morning…

M2: Well, I know…I know that…somebody told that he had been a priest…

LL: I see…

M2: And, he’s left the church?

LL: No—he’s still a member of the church.

M2: …still a member of the church…

LL: Yes…

M2: …but, he’s one of the recalcitrant members…

LL: Well, perhaps so…

M2: …he doesn’t just agree with everything…

[scene: Father Mitchell, DB's superior, at his office]

FM: …he’s a member of the Province, and…I, myself…I know Dan rather well—we were together at one time when he was teaching at Le Moyne. I was on the same faculty with him—and, I was Dean of Le Moyne College for a period of years…that would have been in nineteen-hundred fifty-nine to nineteen-hundred and sixty- three—during that period…And…so, I…you know, I am very fond of Dan, and…he’s a very good friend of mine—I have a great deal of admiration and regard for him—even when we disagree about things sometimes…

LL: As Father—as Dan Berrigan’s superior, Father Mitchell, how would you evaluate his performance as a priest, and as a Jesuit?

FM: Oh, I think anyone who has ever known Dan, or been closely associated with him…can’t help but be impressed by his tremendous concern for men…I think, for Christianity, for the gospel…And, even when one disagrees with Dan—and, there are many who do—I think…you know, they…they always see him, really, as…as someone who is, evidently, a…a man of the gospel, and a man of God: he’s a priestly person…

[scene: baptism at Fordham University, with DB and Father Philip Berrigan]

DB: I’ve already checked with the parents, and they say that we should say something. It’s one of those points at which we feel that silence is a great gift to everyone…I think that my brother and I have always mysteriously been marked by the presence of a baptism or a wedding—or something heavily charged with the Mystery of Life—as we entered upon new phases of our lives. And this is also true tonight in the gift of this child—this child who stands for all children…and, in virtue of that, for the children of Vietnam…the children of Brazil…the children of south Africa—all of those children whose chances we are trying to widen by an evening like this, and, what is to follow this evening.

I am sure it would be entirely according to the hopes of the parents that everyone here would declare themselves godparents…and human parents of this child—which, by and large, is the same thing. That is to say that, incorporated into their hopes for one innocent and defenseless life would be the hopes of all…for all those who are victims of wrong power—wrongheaded and wronghearted power…which is crushing the innocent around the world. So that we accept such a child, not into an abstract community whose existence is a matter of conjecture in the real world of blood and tears…but that this child would be accepted here—and, would accept us here as those who might stand proxy for a human future.

Shortly before his death, A. J. Muste—the man who never grew old—declared that the need of our country was for a foreign policy for children. We declare that again tonight…with the help of all those who stand for something except death as a social method.

We baptize you, dear child, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. And all of us. How’s that!

PB: I’ll even give you a kiss. Kiss…kiss…

[scene: Father Mitchell, DB's superior, at his office]

LL: He’s in good standing as a priest and as a Jesuit?

FM: Yes—oh yes: Dan is in good standing as a priest and as a Jesuit.

LL: What things do you disagree with Dan on?

FM: Yes, well, I do disagree with Dan on the…particular method that he’s chosen to…dramatize his opposition to the war in Vietnam. I…you know, I’ve never been able to…see it…it seems to me to turn, ultimately, into an attack on the legal system, and I cannot see how that is, in the long run, going to be beneficial to anybody.

[scene: DB at safe house]

LL: How do you view the Church?

DB: Well, the Jesuits are…I would say supportive, to a degree—they’re not exactly delighted—I’m sure that many of them are very puzzled…That’s really my family within the Church: that’s why I bring that up…But, they’re certainly much more willing to go with the idea of a Jesuit underground than they would have been even a year ago, you know…After all, we have a long history of Jesuits in trouble with the State and the Church…seen in modern Russia, but in Elizabethan England…

LL: …but never in the United States…

DB: No, never in the United States—regrettably: I wish we had begun this long ago…we’d be more used to it now…

[scene: Father Mitchell, DB's superior, at his office]

FM: I think you could find priests with almost any opinion on the…you know, on our civil life and our legal system and our political life, and so on—and they express their opinion…and, I think, especially today, Catholics are able to see and know that priests do have various opinions, and that this is not an official position of the Church in any way—it is Dan Berrigan’s opinion, which he is expressing…

[scene: Frida Berrigan, brother Jerry Berrigan, at their home]

FB: I’ve heard from Dan, and he seemed in, as you said, in good spirits, and, the…flash I got of him on TV showed me that…he seemed in good health…much better health than I saw him when he left Cornell.

LL: I’d like to ask you what you think, personally, of the actions which your two sons—Phil and Dan—have taken in the…resisting the war?

FB: I feel I’m with them…with them wholeheartedly…because…of…these young boys that are slaughtered, leave home, and then come home to be buried, and a few are…a few, that I’ve heard…who did come back…after…their time was up…are not clear about what they’re fighting for. So…I’m in hopes that their work has done some good…I mean Dan and Phil’s.

LL: Do you feel, as they do, that it is proper to break the law…in…in showing your resistance to the war?

FB: Yes…Yes, I do, because…it’s…it’s not God’s law.

[scene: DB at safe house]

LL: How do you stand with the Federal people at the moment—are they…do you think they’re on your trail…do you expect your life in the underground to be short-lived, or do you think you have some time ahead?

DB: Well, I’m proceeding now on the…on the very open assumption that this thing can go on, and I think that…you know, we have a solid background now of these months, in order to show that. I think that we’re able to show, concretely, that people are able, still, to organize their lives and, still, to organize their imagination and their resources—that they’re able to help in a way which will keep this thing going…you know…

LL: You see yourself as a teacher in…for the movement…?

DB: Well…if that’s a little bit too pretentious, I see myself as somebody who, from, let’s say, a geography of personal jeopardy is opening up new ways for other people, by way of invitation—they’re invited in new directions, as a result of my presence: they’re invited to respond to this in a way that is…that is really concrete in the lives they’re leading: whether within their family, within their profession, within their church or synagogue…you know…to worship in new ways, to see themselves as teachers or doctors or lawyers in new ways…because, so many of them are reaching personal and professional impasses anyway…and are finding very great difficulty in going ahead with the structures—the American structures—as they are.

[scene: Howard Zinn interviewed]

HZ: Well, I guess an underground requires two…two…it requires criminals—or, as Dan Berrigan put it, “criminals for peace,” refugees from injustice…and then, of course, people who will help them…and, if the government continues to supply refugees and criminals by trying to put in jail those who act militantly against the war…those who commit civil disobedience…then, I think, more and more, those people who are…want to be…who the government wants to put away are going to, maybe, follow Dan Berrigan’s example. Some of them will, maybe…many of them will…and, I think that if they do they will find people who will help them…as people helped Dan Berrigan. And, to me, this is a …a sign of health in the American society.

LL: Are you one of the people who helped Dan Berrigan when he was underground?

HZ: I don’t think…I don’t think that kind of question should be asked, frankly…you know…and, I don’t think it should be answered…because…you know, it’s not a game, and it’s not a drama, and it’s not…martyrdom…I don’t see how…I don’t think Daniel Berrigan did what he did in…in an act of martyrdom, and I don’t think the people who helped him should…should treat it that way, and, I don’t think that’s the kind of thing that should be talked about on television. I guess the only thing I would say is that I would help Dan Berrigan in every way I could, and I would help any refugee who was…you know, well, a refugee from injustice…somebody in that position…and…because, I know…the law—what we call “the law”—hunts out…it hunts down some of the best people in society…the people we need to really…build the kind of country that we need. So, my hope is that people will help in situations like this…

[scene: DB at safe house]

LL: Do you mean to say that you feel that by raising the level of your own risk, and your own jeopardy, that you have a greater appeal, or a sharper appeal to other people, in terms of their raising their own level of commitment?

DB: Well, I think that’s exactly part of the…of the struggle that we’ve had in these months since I’ve been under. It’s an effort, not merely to talk to many Americans through the media, but, really, to get to people I live with, people who harbor and who aid and keep me afloat, and keep me…in communion with others—to raise, exactly, these questions…That is to say, what is the virtuous man today, and what, especially, is his attitude toward the law, when the law is being used by those in power to break the law of humanity.

[scene: Frida Berrigan, brother Jerry Berrigan, at their home]

LL: Was Dan a very rebellious boy?

FB: No. No. No…he probably was, at times, a little so, but…as a rule, I can’t say that he was. Would you Jerry?

JB: No. Dan had kind of a rough time…from Pop. Dan tended to be somewhat frail, physically…and…wasn’t able to take his share of the outside chores and duties that my father would assign the rest of us. I’m talking again, now, about the farm where we lived. Consequence, in a sense, forced him to a…an interior role. That is, he would be in the house, he would be helping my mother with her…chores around the house, and he would be doing a good deal of reading and, I’m sure, thinking that the others of us didn’t have…you might say, an opportunity for—whether or not we had the inclination is another matter. But…Dan had a pretty rough time…with Pop. And…it’s a mark of Dan’s greatness that, during my father’s last days—when he was ill, and even dying—Dan was, of all of us…the most solicitous and the most attentive…That’s just the way Dan is…

[scene: Howard Zinn reflects]

HZ: The effect he had on me was a kind of effect that is very hard to measure—an emotional effect…poetic effect…

[scene: poet Anthony Towne reflects]

AT: His poetry is…is like himself: it is extemporaneous, and it is…inventive, and very…unstructured…and…I believe that…if one may assume a time will come when history settles down, and scholars look at all these matters—which is doubtful—that he will finally be remembered…perhaps, more as a poet than anything else, quite likely…and, not as a fugitive or a felon or…a burner of instruments of death…

[scene: DB reads "To Philip" to photo stream]

Compassionate, casual as a good face/(a good heart goes without saying)/someone seen in the street; or/infinitely rare, once, twice in a lifetime/that conjunction we name brother or friend./Biology, mythology, cast up clues./We grew together, stars made men/by cold design; instructed/sternly (no variance, not by a hair’s/breadth) in course and recourse. In the heavens/in our mother’s body, by moon and month/were whole men made./We obeyed then, and were born.

[scene: Howard Zinn reflects]

HZ: He seems to have, in his bones, inside of him that…you know…these images, and those sounds, that we only get at rare times…in that way, he’s made me feel things more deeply…

Maybe I should say one other thing, and that is he’s made me aware…of…friendship. You know, it’s very easy, in large movements, to forget about friendship. There were friends you had outside of movements, and then there’s the movement—which is a kind of large, amorphous thing…And, what he made me aware of is, that, if any movement that’s worth anything has to consist of friendships.

[scene: voiceover, and Milwaukee 14 Tony Mullaney and Robert Connane reflect]

VO: Tony Mullaney and Robert Connane are priests, and members of the Milwaukee 14. They are among the more than one hundred priests, nuns, and laymen who have been indicted for destroying draft files since Catonsville. Father Mullaney and Father Connane—both strongly influenced by Daniel Berrigan—have served their jail sentences and are now searching for new ways of resistance.

TM: If you allow yourself to really listen to Berrigan—and that’s not an easy thing to do, because he’s a threat—but, if you allow yourself to listen to him then you begin sharing, you know, what he’s experienced…and…and, before you know, you’re saying something like this, that, well…you know, “How do I respond…” you know, “to this type of thing?” And…and you find yourself getting deeper and deeper into resistance.

See, the step from dissent to resistance is a very great step. It’s…you know, everything up to that point—from letter writing, to…you know, visiting congressman—that…that’s a pretty clear continuum…But, then, to step into the area of resistance—say, through the burning of draft cards, and receiving draft cards—that’s…that’s a much tougher step to take…

RC: I like…I like Tony’s—excuse me, I didn’t mean to butt in on you—but I like your point about listening to Dan, because there seems to be among a lot of people—whether on, sort of one extreme or the other—you know, one crowd says he’s a nut…and they dismiss him…and the other crowd says he’s a prophet…and they dismiss him as well. I’m really…I think the crowd that call him a nut are probably more honest than the one’s that call him a prophet. He’s an ordinary human being…He is a great poetic talent, but, he’s no different from you or from me…And, this sort of saying, “He’s a prophet—therefore, I can never do what he does,” is a beautiful cop-out.

[scene: DB at safe house]

LL: Do you have any concrete knowledge, Father Dan, that your actions have really made a change—or helped to make a change—in the lives of individuals or groups of people with whom you’ve come in contact?

DB: Well, I have a certain evidence of all that. You know, I think, really, the first evidence of anything really occurring in the lives of others is some evidence that…that some change has occurred to oneself, you know…and I’m quite certain that…that has occurred…I’m also reasonably confident, because of the way we have talked—the intensity with which groups of us have talked together—I’m reasonably confident that other people, also, find this as…this combination of non-violence and of…you know, fidelity to one’s actions, and of…even the upping of the original jeopardy of our action—that they find that…that…that’s moving, that means something to them, and they’re willing to follow through on it…

[scene: Milwaukee 14 Tony Mullaney and Robert Connane reflect]

TM: We’ve both turned the corner, you know…and…and…I think once you…you make that jump from dissent to resistance that it’s very, very difficult to…to withdraw, you know…Now, what forms the resistance will take is…is another problem, and, and in fact, I…I just wouldn’t be willing to discuss them even if…if my path were clear, because…you know, this is not 1968—it’s 1970, and discussions of this sort are…because of the times, are not appropriate in…in this medium, I’m afraid…But…the style of resistance is, you know…I…I…I’ve made my…my choice…so…

RC: You know, it would seem that you’re educated by jail, and all that we went through, and it’s almost like, you know, becoming a lawyer and then not practicing, in a way—you know, you’re almost in it, and you can’t help but…see, you know, the way things are, and that, you know, you’re bound to—at least, it seems to me, if you try and stay a little bit honest with yourself—you’re bound to at some future date to commit to something. You know, you just can’t help it.

TM: Certainly, one problem, as I mentioned earlier, is the problem of non-violence. I…I still feel this commitment…But, I also feel a commitment to actions that are proportionate to the continuing insensitivity of national leadership. And, it’s very difficult to come up with a form of resistance that…that has those two qualities.

[scene: DB at safe house]

LL: Do you feel that you’re offering a kind of alternative to the Weatherman-type of underground operation?

DB: Well, I don’t know the…I don’t know the inner workings of the Weathermen Underground—I don’t think many people do…But, I would like to say that…I think that the society in a…in a kind of base and…inhuman sense needs the Weathermen to be violent—and even secretly hopes that they will be. Because the society, just as it needs an army…and, in a sense, needs someone to kill, also needs someone to be killed…needs someone to pursue, as it needs the Mafia…it needs the Ku Klux Klan…it needs the Panthers…And I would like to say, also, that I’m very anxious to have contact with the Weathermen, and that I see whatever ministry I could have in the underground as also in that direction.

[scene: Howard Zinn reflects]

HZ: It’s like no other period in American history when we had reform movements because they were all sort of partial things—they were all based on the idea that something is wrong and we’ll fix it up, you know…There’s the race question, there’s the depression, there’s the Spanish-American war…you know…but, we’ll fix that up: basically, the country is okay, and the system is okay, and our system of government and our economic system—they’re all okay, and our values are okay…

And, what’s different now is that…a lot of people are beginning to say—particularly young people—it’s not okay…it’s deeper than that: what we’ve been thinking about, what we’ve been cherishing, what we’ve been valuing, how we’ve been proceeding, what we’ve been doing with our wealth, the way we think about other people in the world, the way we think about ourselves, who we give power to—all of that has got to be changed. That…that’s what going underground means…I think is a statement about America which is important today.

[scene: DB outdoors, and voiceover to arrest by FBI, 11 August 1970]

DB: I sense a kind of straight line—or, let’s say even a crooked line—a line in nature…a line of a stream maybe…between those beginnings or stirrings of social understanding, and where my brother and I and the other Catonsville people stand today…The cost of real change is going to be at least as deep and as bloody as the cost of immobility—and that’s, indeed, a very, very high price. But, I guess a few have to be willing to pay it—at least in principle.

[scene: William Stringfellow after DB's arrest by FBI]

WS: Right after his seizure at our house…in the days…in the next days, we were visited by a good many of our neighbors…expressing their interest and concern…and, overwhelmingly, their support…for our hospitality…for Dan…But, they came, many of them, it seemed to me, in a sort of a spirit of condolence—the way you might go to a house where there had been a death. And, that bothered me—and still bothers me—because nobody has died here…And, Dan is in prison, but he is not dead…and he is not really silent…

[scene: Newsmedia question DB before transport by FBI]

NM: Do you have any comment, Father, at all?

DB: Good to be here.

NM: What were you doing out on Block Island?

DB: Well, I was writing, and reading, and meditating—exactly what I’ll be doing in jail…

NM: What are your future plans?

DB: …Resistance.

[scene: DB voiceover to final arrest photo: his peace sign]

DB: I would say that our hope isn’t placed in the conversion of those who have power now. It’s placed in something arising very mysteriously from very different forces…you know, from Chicago to Saigon and Hanoi—and, even Catonsville. But the form of all that, I think, awaits upon the enduring of all that, and, then for me to announce some sort of clear vision of the next year, even, would be totally absurd. I don’t know if I’m going to survive the next year, and I don’t know if you are either.

“If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.

“And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.

“If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, (love) is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.

“It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

“Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing.

“For we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.

“When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.

“At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.

“So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

I Corinthians 13: 1-13

the fatal error in reifying desire: a “faith” in being chosen…

As activist Dorothy Day lived it—her ”message”—loving has nothing to do with liking…

What is gained, then? That is, what part of our make-up is gratefully, joyously transcended in loving as Paul reveals it?

Desire.

We inflect from the dis-ease of desire when we love—when we love truly.

What is taken, too, as desire’s adjunct, is fear, i.e., we live without fear if we love. Desire is of the Self. Like an infinite regression seen in mirroring desire replicates itself solely for its own sake. That is, the desiring Self seeks solely, endlessly, to be desired—i.e., to be chosen. No desire (it being literally a longing for what is not there) and fear—i.e., the impossible fear of not being chosen as a personal belief in death (that is, punishment)—is burned off as the sun burns mist.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.”

I John 4:18

We are called to mature in love, for both ourselves and for our neighbor (caritas), a radical learning which entails revisiting the ur-hunger first compelling the “I,” or ego construct. Then, as now, we “suggest” to our nascent Self that in unremitting desire only does there exist life. The supreme, tragic irony is that the “I” by itself is capable of nothing but engendering destruction, for example Narcissus’ own self-annihilation.

The still-inchoate consciousness first experiences itself as a sensate object, with absence or lack eventually suggested as a real possibility. And, in that dyad of “need” (that is, a sensed “I need!”) and of existence emerges the nascent Self. On some level, then, the Self is borne in negation or lack. By continuing to live in that “I” = “lack” moment, however, our lives become an investment in death (Thanatos), i.e., we are “devoted”—in thrall—to a thought-of death (as valorized by the “I”) to avoid a physical death (a believed-in Self destruction). We entertain the idea that there is nothing more than the ego-derived nightmare-echo endlessly calling to itself.

Yet, by revisiting that originating moment in and with Love—for example, Dorothy Day’s living out of voluntary poverty in community (q.v., her The Long Loneliness), we transcend our own radical faith in unremitting desire and assured death—the assured infinite regression of the mirrors—and, inflect from the nihilism of exclusion to what we are invited to be. We forego a false, mere echo-like “calling” to answer that authentic invitation to become via a dialogue with the Love of I Corinthians. The invitation is to a novel third possibility not considered in the mirroring scenario—becoming. We are now authentic participants in a dialectic of Life endlessly transcending itself. We have moved—been moved—from an exclusive, echo-like Self focus to one of a dialectic of inclusion.

The site of voluntary poverty—i.e., material poverty—even if assented to for only a time, is, paradoxically, fertile as it entails a community of participants which valorize the unique individual, the fulfillment of his potential and, ultimately, his contribution to the well-being of the collective. In contrast, Power—i.e., socio-political desiring—as the immediacy of fear, exclusion, domination, sacrifice, avarice, etc., cannot countenance the community of unique individuals as the individual-in-community prescinds from solipsistic fear, exclusion, etc. The conflicted Self in isolation, nevertheless, exists in that incessantly antagonistic, anxious state, competing amidst what is delimited by simple diffuse greed. Fear, in this milieu, is catching.

Power/desire and the anticipation of consuming…

More specifically, Power is a momentary construct negotiated outside of the community. Its attendants answer, not a call of transcendent participation in becoming but, rather a simple zero-sum shifting of the always-finite coffers, i .e., now this one has the Power, and now another, in ongoing exclusion. There obtains a false Siren seduction “calling” to Power in the sense that unheeded destruction, dominance, and theft are the norm as primal fear—its source—is left unnamed and volatile.

Again, the tragic irony is that it is effected in the service of that which it asserts it can avoid—radical, personal ruin. It has deceived both the momentary master as well as the slave, and both tend towards a narcissistic Self annihilation. And, again, both are in thrall to a thought-of death (as valorized by the “I”) to avoid a physical death (believed to be a Self destruction). What was suggested in the nascent Self at the earliest moment of inchoate “consciousness” is determinate. In his fear he is resolute, and in his terrors he has absolute confidence. In this state there is no becoming, only the immediacy of “negotiation” and an utterly willful straining against whatever tends towards some deferral—i.e., he is fixated, even as he is transfixed (q.v., auto-crucifying) by a mirroring echo.

the abject Self: “to be sated is to forego desire and, thus, invite death upon oneself…”

Those in thrall to Power/desire are waiting to be chosen (they must be chosen). They are not so much participants as much as they are in abeyance—those in thrall to desire (and, contrary to all striving) then do defer their lives to the internalized echo. The so-called “corridors of Power”—considered as a collective—is a grotesquerie in its deceit, i.e., a house of mirrors.

In this regard, the social theorist Marcuse, then, writes of the one-dimensional man, and the ongoing consuming (q.v., capitalism as handmaiden of Power)—or, even the anticipation of mere consuming as end-game of desiring—necessary to the myth of the “promise” of Power, endlessly deferred. The always-already decaying corpse of consumerism must of necessity receive fresh lipstick in order to shore up the “dream” (nightmare) of those in thrall to the praxis of the marketplace, the rigors of its demands and its exchange value. Marx, for example, cites a fetishism of commodities, whereby the object being marketed is seen to possess an inherent value, which prescinds from the labor—i.e., another human being—needed to fashion it. The abject, desiring Self, therefore, acquires to himself a thing believed to valorize his own existence, i.e., to confer Self worth in the mere possessing of it. Power-amidst-capitalism, then, obviates the community in favor of the isolated, desiring Self endlessly consuming to sustain his essential life. It sustains, therefore, the primal fear by reifying product consumption—i.e., not community—as the essential fact of man’s existence.

Again, as desire is literally a longing for what is not there, like Tantalus, no one may ever be sated—to be sated is to forego desire and, thus, invite death upon oneself—let alone be at peace. The seduction of Power is akin to an existential Ponzi scheme, with its attendants driven by their own primal fear and belief—now ideational investment—in death. In a word, they are living a lie. Considered over the course of one’s lifetime, however, that fantastic belief may become appalling.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.”

If, then, Power is a momentary construct negotiated outside of the community (i.e., there is no dialogue—only the rigors of the marketplace, its demands, enduring impoverishment, and its “exchange value”) then those, like Day, who respond to the calling of voluntary material poverty and community can be said to forego what is merely imagined—a mere idea of a life and the ephemeral—in favor of an inviting to an authentic life and something enduring: the ongoing becoming of community, its individual, unique members and the organic body. Participants in that community are more than sated, i.e., their lives may be fulfilled. And, although some may, in fact, move on for a time from that beatific, nurturing event, the nurturing goes with them to be demonstrated and shared elsewhere, as seen in the rhizome model of mutuality, inter-dependence, and equity.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Again, this is an invitation to a becoming, an unfolding of an ever-greater moment for the unique individual within the still-broader community. It is the beatific inflecting away from the primal fear of the solipsistic Self, its nihilistic faith, and dis-connection. Day, for example, cites Buber in his remarks upon the State: the State should be, in fact, “a community of communities.” The arborescent, “top-down,” centralized, hierarchical model of the current socio-political construct will yield, then, to the rhizome model of a decentered, an-archical, laterally-developing commonwealth. There is an “anticipation” here, of course, which nevertheless prescinds from the desperate, enduring impoverishment of Power/desire mere consuming in favor of an anticipation-as-becoming inflection away from the primal, radical fear of the nascent Self as inchoate consciousness. We become aware of there being something more than the always-momentary Power/desire construct in concurring with Love: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.”

Yet, the writer goes on to dispel any possibility of this, too, being merely a “dream” (nightmare) construct, i.e., via the ideational Self, with its attendant terrors and unremitting negotiation. Rather, the writer points to the reality of community with a beatific praxis as its core: this is not a mind construct but, rather, an Other-initiated prompting (agape) to personal, ongoing involvement in community: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” [I John 4: 20-21]. And, again: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength,” and, “The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” [Mark 12:30-31].

The Power/desire impoverishment of anticipation in mere consuming, cultivated in one’s lifetime, is also enduring. It is a vow, fearfully, awfully taken, to nothing, a solipsistic echo one day heard outside of time. We negotiate with the primal fear, convinced that in doing so Self destruction has been forestalled. The option of becoming—the beatific unfolding of the individual-in-community—is forfeited, possibly for all time, in favor of the preferred “safer” stasis, an eternity of nihilism, i.e., the abiding death of a Narcissus.

“We love because he first loved us”

[I John 4:19].

The voluntary poverty of Dorothy Day, however, is giving assent to experience a temporary fasting—akin to a Spirit-grounded “pruning”—wholly in the service of realizing something far greater, the caritas of the unique members of the collective as participants in a mystical project of Community, or, ultimately, Communion. We are called, then, to break the narcissistic cycle—to inflect from desire—borne of the primal fear, by assenting to experience a temporary voluntary poverty, e.g., a denial of Self, in the service of an Other encounter. We move, then, from the Power/desire solipsism of I-as-object/object to Buber’s I/Thou in community. Yet, the option to freely deny the one call to caritas in favor of the other, more primal, suggestion is our ever-present reality. And, we do deny the call. And, again, considered over the course of a lifetime the effects of the denial are ruinous, i.e., the fatal error of Thanatos.

Caritas

Agape

the rhizome model

narcissism

Thanatos

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

John Dalberg-Acton

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.”

Walter Scott

(“The reasons for intervention, subversion, terror, and repression are not obscure. They are summarized accurately by Patrice McSherry in the most careful scholarly study of Operation Condor, the international terrorist operation established with U.S. backing in Pinochet’s Chile: ‘the Latin American militaries, normally acting with the support of the U.S. government, overthrew civilian governments and destroyed other centers of democratic power in their societies (parties, unions, universities, and constitutionalist sectors of the armed forces) precisely when the class orientation of the state was about to change or was in the process of change, shifting state power to non-elite social sectors…Preventing such transformations of the state was a key objective of Latin American elites, and U.S. officials considered it a vital national security interest as well.’

“It is easy to demonstrate that what are termed “national security interests” have only an incidental relation to the security of the nation, though they have a very close relation to the interests of dominant sectors within the imperial state, and to the general state interest of ensuring obedience.”)

[from Noam Chomsky's "Humanitarian Imperialism: The New Doctrine of Imperial Right," copyright, Monthly Review, 2008]

Jean Bricmont’s concept “humanitarian imperialism” succinctly captures a dilemma that has faced Western leaders and the Western intellectual community since the collapse of the Soviet Union. From the origins of the Cold War, there was a reflexive justification for every resort to force and terror, subversion and economic strangulation: the acts were undertaken in defense against what John F. Kennedy called “the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” based in the Kremlin (or sometimes in Beijing), a force of unmitigated evil dedicated to extending its brutal sway over the entire world. The formula covered just about every imaginable case of intervention, no matter what the facts might be. But with the Soviet Union gone, either the policies would have to change, or new justifications would have to be devised. It became clear very quickly which course would be followed, casting new light on what had come before, and on the institutional basis of policy.

The end of the Cold War unleashed an impressive flow of rhetoric assuring the world that the West would now be free to pursue its traditional dedication to freedom, democracy, justice, and human rights unhampered by superpower rivalry, though there were some—called “realists” in international relations theory—who warned that in “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy,” we may be going too far and might harm our interests. [1] Such notions as “humanitarian intervention” and “the responsibility to protect” soon came to be salient features of Western discourse on policy, commonly described as establishing a “new norm” in international affairs.

The millennium ended with an extraordinary display of self-congratulation on the part of Western intellectuals, awe-struck at the sight of the “idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,” which had entered a “noble phase” in its foreign policy with a “saintly glow” as for the first time in history a state is dedicated to “principles and values,” acting from “altruism” and “moral fervor” alone as the leader of the “enlightened states,” hence free to use force where its leaders “believe it to be just”—only a small sample of a deluge from respected liberal voices. [2]

Several questions immediately come to mind. First, how does the self-image conform to the historical record prior to the end of the Cold War? If it does not, then what reason would there be to expect a sudden dedication to “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy,” or any hold at all? And how in fact did policies change with the superpower enemy gone? A prior question is whether such considerations should even arise.

There are two views about the significance of the historical record. The attitude of those who celebrate the “emerging norms” is expressed clearly by one of their most distinguished scholar/advocates, international relations professor Thomas Weiss: critical examination of the record, he writes, is nothing more than “sound-bites and invectives about Washington’s historically evil foreign policy,” hence “easy to ignore.” [3]

A conflicting stance is that policy decisions substantially flow from institutional structures, and since these remain stable, examination of the record provides valuable insight into the “emerging norms” and the contemporary world. That is the stance that Bricmont adopts in his study of “the ideology of human rights,” and that I will adopt here.

There is no space for a review of the record, but just to illustrate, let us keep to the Kennedy administration, the left-liberal extreme of the political spectrum, with an unusually large component of liberal intellectuals in policy-making positions. During these years, the standard formula was invoked to justify the invasion of South Vietnam in 1962, laying the basis for one of the great crimes of the twentieth century.

By then the U.S.-imposed client regime could no longer control the indigenous resistance evoked by massive state terror, which had killed tens of thousands of people. Kennedy therefore sent the U.S. Air Force to begin regular bombing of South Vietnam, authorized napalm and chemical warfare to destroy crops and ground cover, and initiated the programs that drove millions of South Vietnamese peasants to urban slums or to camps where they were surrounded by barbed wire to “protect” them from the South Vietnamese resistance forces that they were supporting, as Washington knew. All in defense against the two Great Satans, Russia and China, or the “Sino-Soviet axis.” [4]

In the traditional domains of U.S. power, the same formula led to Kennedy’s shift of the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense”—a holdover from the Second World War—to “internal security.” The consequences were immediate. In the words of Charles Maechling—who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning through the Kennedy and early Johnson years—U.S. policy shifted from toleration “of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes, to U.S. support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”

One critical case was the Kennedy administration’s preparation of the military coup in Brazil to overthrow the mildly social democratic Goulart government. The planned coup took place shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, establishing the first of a series of vicious National Security States and setting off a plague of repression throughout the continent that lasted through Reagan’s terrorist wars that devastated Central America in the 1980s. With the same justification, Kennedy’s 1962 military mission to Colombia advised the government to resort to “paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents,” actions that “should be backed by the United States.” In the Latin American context, the phrase “known communist proponents” referred to labor leaders, priests organizing peasants, human rights activists, in fact anyone committed to social change in violent and repressive societies.

These principles were quickly incorporated into the training and practices of the military. The respected president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vásquez Carrizosa, wrote that the Kennedy administration “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads,” ushering in what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine,…not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game [with] the right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.

In 2002, an Amnesty International mission to protect human rights defenders worldwide began with a visit to Colombia, chosen because of its extreme record of state-backed violence against these courageous activists, as well as labor leaders, more of whom were killed in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined, not to speak of campesinos, indigenous people, and Afro-Colombians, the most tragic victims. As a member of the delegation, I was able to meet with a group of human rights activists in Vásquez Carrizosa’s heavily guarded home in Bogotá, hearing their painful reports and later taking testimonials in the field, a shattering experience.

The same formula sufficed for the campaign of subversion and violence that placed newly independent Guyana under the rule of the cruel dictator Forbes Burnham. It was also invoked to justify Kennedy’s campaigns against Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. In his biography of Robert Kennedy, the eminent liberal historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger writes that the task of bringing “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba was assigned by the president to his brother, Robert Kennedy, who took it as his highest priority. The terrorist campaign continued at least through the 1990s, though in later years the U.S. government did not carry out the terrorist operations itself but only provided support for them and a haven for terrorists and their commanders, among them the notorious Orlando Bosch and joining him recently, Luis Posada Carilles. Commentators have been polite enough not to remind us of the Bush Doctrine: “those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves” and must be treated accordingly, by bombing and invasion; a doctrine that has “unilaterally revoked the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists,” Harvard international affairs specialist Graham Allison observes, and has “already become a de facto rule of international relations”—with the usual exceptions.

Internal documents of the Kennedy-Johnson years reveal that a leading concern in the case of Cuba was its “successful defiance” of U.S. policies tracing back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control over the hemisphere. It was feared that Cuba’s “successful defiance,” particularly if accompanied by successful independent development, might encourage others suffering from comparable conditions to pursue a similar path, the rational version of the domino theory that is a persistent feature of policy formation. For that reason, the documentary record reveals, it was necessary to punish the civilian population severely until they overthrew the offending government.

This is a bare sample of a few years of intervention under the most liberal U.S. administration, justified to the public in defensive terms. The broader record is much the same. With similar pretexts, the Russian dictatorship justified its harsh control of its Eastern European dungeon.

The reasons for intervention, subversion, terror, and repression are not obscure. They are summarized accurately by Patrice McSherry in the most careful scholarly study of Operation Condor, the international terrorist operation established with U.S. backing in Pinochet’s Chile: “the Latin American militaries, normally acting with the support of the U.S. government, overthrew civilian governments and destroyed other centers of democratic power in their societies (parties, unions, universities, and constitutionalist sectors of the armed forces) precisely when the class orientation of the state was about to change or was in the process of change, shifting state power to non-elite social sectors…Preventing such transformations of the state was a key objective of Latin American elites, and U.S. officials considered it a vital national security interest as well.” [5]

It is easy to demonstrate that what are termed “national security interests” have only an incidental relation to the security of the nation, though they have a very close relation to the interests of dominant sectors within the imperial state, and to the general state interest of ensuring obedience.

The United States is an unusually open society. Hence there is no difficulty documenting the leading principles of global strategy since the Second World War. Even before the United States entered the war, high-level planners and analysts concluded that in the postwar world the United States should seek “to hold unquestioned power,” acting to ensure the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. They recognized further that “the foremost requirement” to secure these ends was “the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament,” then as now a central component of “an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.” At the time, these ambitions were limited to “the non-German world,” which was to be organized under the U.S. aegis as a “Grand Area,” including the Western hemisphere, the former British Empire, and the Far East. As Russia beat back the Nazi armies after Stalingrad, and it became increasingly clear that Germany would be defeated, the plans were extended to include as much of Eurasia as possible.

A more extreme version of the largely invariant grand strategy is that no challenge can be tolerated to the “power, position, and prestige of the United States,” so the American Society of International Law was instructed by the prominent liberal statesman Dean Acheson, one of the main architects of the postwar world. He was speaking in 1963, shortly after the missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. There are few basic changes in the guiding conceptions as we proceed to the Bush II doctrine, which elicited unusual mainstream protest, not because of its basic content, but because of its brazen style and arrogance, as was pointed out by Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who was well aware of Clinton’s similar doctrine.

The collapse of the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” led to a change of tactics, but not fundamental policy. That was clearly understood by policy analysts. Dimitri Simes, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, observed that Gorbachev’s initiatives would “liberate American foreign policy from the straightjacket imposed by superpower hostility.” [6] He identified three major components of “liberation.” First, the United States would be able to shift NATO costs to its European competitors, one way to avert the traditional concern that Europe might seek an independent path. Second, the United States can end “the manipulation of America by third world nations.” The manipulation of the rich by the undeserving poor has always been a serious problem, particularly acute with regard to Latin America, which in the preceding five years had transferred some $150 billion to the industrial West in addition to $100 billion of capital flight, amounting to twenty-five times the total value of the Alliance for Progress and fifteen times the Marshall Plan.

This huge hemorrhage is part of a complicated system whereby Western banks and Latin American elites enrich themselves at the expense of the general population of Latin America, who are then saddled with the “debt crisis” that results from these manipulations.

But thanks to Gorbachev’s capitulation the United States can now resist “unwarranted third world demands for assistance” and take a stronger stand when confronting “defiant third world debtors.”

The third and most significant component of “liberation,” Simes continues, is that the decline in the “Soviet threat…makes military power more useful as a United States foreign policy instrument…against those who contemplate challenging important American interests.” America’s hands will now be “untied” and Washington can benefit from “greater reliance on military force in a crisis.”

The Bush I administration, then in office, at once made clear its understanding of the end of the Soviet threat. A few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the administration released a new National Security Strategy. On the domestic front, it called for strengthening “the defense industrial base,” creating incentives “to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and development.” The phase “defense industrial base” is a euphemism referring to the high-tech economy, which relies crucially on the dynamic state sector to socialize cost and risk and eventually privatize profit—sometimes decades later, as in the case of computers and the Internet. The government understands well that the U.S. economy is remote from the free market model that is hailed in doctrine and imposed on those who are too weak to resist, a traditional theme of economic history, recently reviewed insightfully by international economist Ha-Joon Chang. [7]

In the international domain, the Bush I National Security Strategy recognized that “the more likely demands for the use of our military forces may not involve the Soviet Union and may be in the Third World, where new capabilities and approaches may be required.” The United States must concentrate attention on “lower-order threats like terrorism, subversion, insurgency, and drug trafficking [which] are menacing the United States, its citizenry, and its interests in new ways.” “Forces will have to accommodate to the austere environment, immature basing structure, and significant ranges often encountered in the Third World.” “Training and research and development” will have to be “better attuned to the needs of low-intensity conflict,” crucially, counterinsurgency in the third world. With the Soviet Union gone from the scene, the world “has now evolved from a ‘weapon rich environment’ [Russia] to a ‘target rich environment’ [the South].” The United States will face “increasingly capable Third World Threats,” military planners elaborated.

Consequently, the National Security Strategy explained, the United States must maintain a huge military system and the ability to project power quickly worldwide, with primary reliance on nuclear weapons, which, Clinton planners explained, “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict” and permit free use of conventional forces. The reason is no longer the vanished Soviet threat, but rather “the growing technological sophistication of Third World conflicts.” That is particularly true in the Middle East, where the “threats to our interests” that have required direct military engagement “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door,” contrary to decades of pretense, no longer useful with the Soviet Union gone. In reality, the “threat to our interests” had always been indigenous nationalism. The fact was sometimes acknowledged, as when Robert Komer, the architect of President Carter’s Rapid Deployment Force (later Central Command), aimed primarily at the Middle East, testified before Congress in 1980 that its most likely role was not to resist a (highly implausible) Soviet attack, but to deal with indigenous and regional unrest, in particular, the “radical nationalism” that has always been a primary concern, worldwide.

The term “radical” falls into the same category as “known Communist proponent.” It does not mean radical. Rather, it means not under our control. Thus Iraq at the time was not radical. On the contrary, Saddam continued to be a favored friend and ally well after he had carried out his most horrendous atrocities (Halabja, al-Anfal, and others) and after the end of the war with Iran, for which he had received substantial support from the Reagan administration, among others. In keeping with these warm relations, in 1989 President Bush invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in nuclear weapons development, and in early 1990, sent a high-level Senatorial delegation to Iraq to convey his personal greetings to his friend Saddam. The delegation was led by Senate majority leader Bob Dole, later Republican presidential candidate, and included other prominent Senators. They brought Bush’s personal greetings, advised Saddam that he should disregard criticisms he might hear from some segments of the irresponsible American press, and assured him that the government would do what it could to end these unfortunate practices.

A few months later Saddam invaded Kuwait, disregarding orders, or perhaps misunderstanding ambiguous signals from the State Department. That was a real crime, and he instantly switched from respected friend to evil incarnate.

It is instructive to consider the reaction to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, both the rhetorical outrage and the military response, a devastating blow to Iraqi civilian society that left the tyranny firmly in place. The events and their interpretation reveal a good deal about the continuities of policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and about the intellectual and moral culture that sustains policy decisions.

Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was the second case of post-Cold War aggression. The first was Bush’s invasion of Panama a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in November 1989. The Panama invasion was scarcely more than a footnote to a long and sordid history, but it differed from earlier exercises in some respects.

A basic difference was explained by Elliott Abrams, then a high official responsible for Near East and North African Affairs, now charged with “promoting democracy” under Bush II, particularly in the Middle East. Echoing Simes, Abrams observed that “developments in Moscow have lessened the prospect for a small operation to escalate into a superpower conflict.” [8] The resort to force, as in Panama, was more feasible than before, thanks to the disappearance of the Soviet deterrent. Similar reasoning applied to the reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. With the Soviet deterrent in place, the United States and Britain would have been unlikely to risk placing huge forces in the desert and carrying out the military operations in the manner they did.

The goal of the Panama invasion was to kidnap Manuel Noriega, a petty thug who was brought to Florida and sentenced for narcotrafficking and other crimes that were mostly committed when he was on the CIA payroll. But he had become disobedient—for example, failing to support Washington’s terrorist war against Nicaragua with sufficient enthusiasm—so he had to go. The Soviet threat could no longer be invoked in the standard fashion, so the action was depicted as defense of the United States from Hispanic narcotrafficking, which was overwhelmingly in the domain of Washington’s Colombian allies. While presiding over the invasion, President Bush announced new loans to Iraq to achieve the “goal of increasing U.S. exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record”—so the State Department replied to the few inquiries from Congress, apparently without irony. The media wisely chose silence.

Victorious aggressors do not investigate their crimes, so the toll of Bush’s Panama invasion is not known with any precision. It appears, however, that it was considerably more deadly than Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait a few months later. According to Panamanian human rights groups, the U.S. bombing of the El Chorillo slums and other civilian targets killed several thousand poor people, far more than the estimated toll of the invasion of Kuwait. The matter is of no interest in the West, but Panamanians have not forgotten. In December 2007, Panama once again declared a Day of Mourning to commemorate the U.S. invasion; it scarcely merited a flicker of an eyelid in the United States.

Also gone from history is the fact that Washington’s greatest fear when Saddam invaded Kuwait was that he would imitate the U.S. invasion of Panama. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that Saddam “will withdraw, [putting] his puppet in. Everyone in the Arab world will be happy.” In contrast, when Washington partially withdrew from Panama after putting its puppet in, Latin Americans were far from happy.

The invasion aroused great anger throughout the region, so much so that the new regime was expelled from the Group of Eight Latin American democracies as a country under military occupation. Washington was well aware, Latin American scholar Stephen Ropp observed, “that removing the mantle of United States protection would quickly result in a civilian or military overthrow of Endara and his supporters”—that is, the regime of bankers, businessmen, and narcotraffickers installed by Bush’s invasion.

Even that government’s own Human Rights Commission charged four years later that the right to self-determination and sovereignty of the Panamanian people continues to be violated by the “state of occupation by a foreign army.” Fear that Saddam would mimic the invasion of Panama appears to be the main reason why Washington blocked diplomacy and insisted on war, with almost complete media cooperation—and, as is often the case, in violation of public opinion, which on the eve of the invasion, overwhelmingly supported a regional conference to settle the confrontation along with other outstanding Middle East issues. That was essentially Saddam’s proposal at the time, though only those who read fringe dissident publications or conducted their own research projects could have been aware of that.

Washington’s concern for human rights in Iraq was dramatically revealed, once again, shortly after the invasion, when Bush authorized Saddam to crush a Shi’ite rebellion in the South that would probably have overthrown him. Official reasoning was outlined by Thomas Friedman, then chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times. Washington hoped for “the best of all worlds,” Friedman explained: “an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein” that would restore the status quo ante when Saddam’s “iron fist…held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia”—and, of course, the boss in Washington. But this happy outcome proved unfeasible, so the masters of the region had to settle for second best: the same “iron fist” they had been fortifying all along. Veteran Times Middle East correspondent Alan Cowell added that the rebels failed because “very few people outside Iraq wanted them to win”: The United States and “its Arab coalition partners” came to “a strikingly unanimous view [that] whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country’s stability than did those who have suffered his repression.”

The term “stability” is used here in its standard technical meaning: subordination to Washington’s will. There is no contradiction, for example, when liberal commentator James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs, explains that the United States sought to “destabilize a freely elected Marxist government in Chile” because “we were determined to seek stability” (under the Pinochet dictatorship).

With the Soviet pretext gone, the record of criminal intervention continued much as before. One useful index is military aid. As is well known in scholarship, U.S. aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,…to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.” That includes military aid, is independent of need, and runs through the Carter period. [9] More wide-ranging studies by economist Edward Herman found a similar correlation worldwide, also suggesting a plausible explanation. He found that aid, not surprisingly, is correlated with improvement in the investment climate.

Such improvement is often achieved by murdering priests and union leaders, massacring peasants trying to organize, blowing up the independent press, and so on. The result is a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights. It would be wrong, then, to conclude that U.S. leaders (like their counterparts elsewhere) prefer torture; rather, it has little weight in comparison with more important values. These studies precede the Reagan years, when the questions were not worth posing because the correlations were so overwhelmingly obvious.

The pattern continued after the Cold War. Outside of Israel and Egypt, a separate category, the leading recipient of U.S. aid as the Cold War ended was El Salvador, which, along with Guatemala, was the site of the most extreme terrorist violence of the horrifying Reagan years in Central America, almost entirely attributable to the state terrorist forces armed and trained by Washington, as subsequent Truth Commissions documented. Washington was barred by Congress from providing aid directly to the Guatemalan murderers. They were effusively lauded by Reagan, but he had to turn to an international terror network of proxy states to fill the gap. In El Salvador, however, the United States could carry out the terrorist war unhampered by such annoyances.

One prime target was the Catholic Church, which had committed a grave sin: it began to take the Gospels seriously and adopted “the preferential option for the poor.” It therefore had to be destroyed by U.S.-backed violence, with strong Vatican support. The decade opened with the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Romero while saying mass, a few days after he had sent a letter to President Carter pleading with him to cut off aid to the murderous junta, aid that “will surely increase injustice here and sharpen the repression that has been unleashed against the people’s organizations fighting to defend their most fundamental human rights.”

Aid soon flowed, paving the way for “a war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population,” as the aftermath was described by Archbishop Romero’s successor. The decade ended when the elite Atlacatl Brigade, armed and trained by Washington, blew out the brains of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, after compiling a bloody record of the usual victims. None of this enters elite Western consciousness, by virtue of “wrong agency.”

By the time Clinton took over, a political settlement had been reached in El Salvador, so it lost its position as leading recipient of U.S. military aid. It was replaced by Turkey, then conducting some of the worst atrocities of the 1990s, targeting its harshly oppressed Kurdish population. Tens of thousands were killed, 3,500 towns and villages were destroyed, huge numbers of refugees fled (three million, according to analyses by Kurdish human rights organizations), large areas were laid waste, dissidents were imprisoned, hideous torture and other atrocities were standard fare. Clinton provided 80 percent of the needed arms, including high-tech equipment used for savage crimes. In the single year 1997, Clinton sent more military aid to Turkey than in the entire Cold War period combined before the counterinsurgency campaign began. Media and commentary remained silent, with the rarest of exceptions.

By 1999, state terror had largely achieved its goals, so Turkey was replaced as leading recipient of military aid by Colombia, which had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, as the programs of coordinated state-paramilitary terror inaugurated by Kennedy took a shocking toll.

Meanwhile other major atrocities continued to receive full support. One of the most extreme was the sanctions against Iraqi civilians after the large-scale demolition of Iraq in the bombing of 1991, which also destroyed power stations and sewage and water facilities, effectively a form of biological warfare. The horrific impact of the U.S.-UK sanctions, formally implemented by the UN, aroused so much public concern that in 1996 a humane modification was introduced: the “oil for food” program, which permitted Iraq to use profits from oil exports for the needs of its suffering people.

The first director of the program, the distinguished international diplomat Denis Halliday, resigned in protest after two years, declaring the program to be “genocidal.” He was replaced by another distinguished international diplomat, Hans von Sponeck, who resigned two years later, charging that the program violated the Genocide Convention. Von Sponeck’s resignation was followed immediately by that of Jutta Burghardt, in charge of the UN Food Program, who joined the declaration of protest by Halliday and von Sponeck.

To mention only one figure, “During the years when the sanctions were imposed, from 1990 to 2003, there was a sharp increase in mortality from 56 per thousand children under five years of age in the early 1990s to 131 per thousand under five years of age at the beginning of the new century,” and “everyone can easily understand that this was due to the economic sanctions” (von Sponeck). Massacres of that scale are rare, and to acknowledge this one would be doctrinally difficult. Accordingly, great efforts were made to shift the blame to UN incompetence, “the largest fraud ever recorded in history” (Wall Street Journal). The fraudulent “fraud” was quickly exposed; it turned out that Washington and U.S. business were the major culprits. But the charges were too valuable to be allowed to vanish.

Halliday and von Sponeck had numerous investigators all over Iraq, which enabled them to know more about the country than any other Westerners. They were barred from the U.S. media during the buildup to the war. The Clinton administration also prevented von Sponeck from informing the UN Security Council, which was technically responsible, about the effects of the sanctions on the population. “This man in Baghdad is paid to work, not to speak,” State Department spokesman James Rubin explained. U.S.-UK media evidently agree. Von Sponeck’s carefully documented account of the impact of the U.S.-UK sanctions was published in 2006, to resounding silence. [10]

The sanctions devastated the civilian society, killing hundreds of thousands of people while strengthening the tyrant, compelling the population to rely on him for survival, and probably saving him from the fate of other mass murderers and torturers who were supported to the end of their bloody rule by the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies: Ceau?escu, Suharto, Mobutu, Marcos, and a rogues gallery of others, to which new names are regularly added. The studied refusal to give Iraqis an opportunity to take their fate into their own hands by releasing the stranglehold of the sanctions, as Halliday and von Sponeck recommended, eliminates whatever thin shred of justification for the invasion may be concocted by apologists for state violence.

Also continuing without change through the 1990s was strong U.S.-UK support for General Suharto of Indonesia—“our kind of guy,” the Clinton administration happily announced when he was welcomed in Washington. Suharto had been a particular favorite of the West ever since he took power in 1965, presiding over a “staggering mass slaughter” that was “a gleam of light in Asia,” the New York Times reported, while praising Washington for keeping its crucial role hidden so as not to embarrass the “Indonesian moderates” who took over.

The general reaction in the West was unconcealed euphoria after the mass slaughter, which the CIA compared to the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Suharto opened the country’s wealth to Western exploitation, compiled one of the worst human rights records in the world, and also won the world record for corruption, far surpassing Mobutu and other Western favorites. On the side, he invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975, carrying out one of the worst crimes of the late twentieth century, leaving perhaps one-quarter of the population dead and the country ravaged.

From the first moment, he benefitted from decisive U.S. diplomatic and military support, joined by Britain as atrocities peaked in 1978, while other Western powers also sought to gain what they could by backing virtual genocide in East Timor. The U.S.-UK flow of arms and training of the most vicious counterinsurgency units continued without change through 1999 as Indonesian atrocities escalated once again, far beyond anything in Kosovo at the same time before the NATO bombing. Australia, which had the most detailed information on the atrocities, also participated actively in training the most murderous elite units.

In April 1999, there was a series of particularly brutal massacres, as in Liquica, where at least sixty people were murdered when they took refuge in a church. The United States reacted at once. Admiral Dennis Blair, U.S. Pacific commander, met with Indonesian army chief General Wiranto, who supervised the atrocities, assuring him of U.S. support and assistance and proposing a new U.S. training mission, one of several such contacts at the time. Highly credible church sources estimated that 3,000–5,000 were murdered from February through July.

In August 1999, in a UN-run referendum, the population voted overwhelmingly for independence, a remarkable act of courage. The Indonesian army and its paramilitary associates reacted by destroying the capital city of Dili and driving hundreds of thousands of the survivors into the hills. The United States and Britain were unimpressed. Washington lauded “the value of the years of training given to Indonesia’s future military leaders in the United States and the millions of dollars in military aid for Indonesia,” the press reported, urging more of the same for Indonesia and throughout the world. A senior diplomat in Jakarta explained succinctly that “Indonesia matters and East Timor doesn’t.” While the remnants of Dili were smoldering and the expelled population were starving in the hills, Defense Secretary William Cohen, on September 9, reiterated the official U.S. position that occupied East Timor “is the responsibility of the Government of Indonesia, and we don’t want to take that responsibility away from them.”

A few days later, under intense international and domestic pressure (much of it from influential right-wing Catholics), Clinton quietly informed the Indonesian generals that the game was over, and they instantly withdrew, allowing an Australian-led UN peace-keeping force to enter the country unopposed. The lesson is crystal clear. To end the aggression and virtual genocide of the preceding quarter-century there was no need to bomb Jakarta, to impose sanctions, or in fact to do anything except to stop participating actively in the crimes. The lesson, however, cannot be drawn, for evident doctrinal reasons. Amazingly, the events have been reconstructed as a remarkable success of humanitarian intervention in September 1999, evidence of the enthralling “emerging norms” inaugurated by the “enlightened states.” One can only wonder whether a totalitarian state could achieve anything comparable.

The British record was even more grotesque. The Labor government continued to deliver Hawk jets to Indonesia as late as September 23, 1999, two weeks after the European Union had imposed an embargo, three days after the Australian peace-keeping force had landed, well after it had been revealed that these aircraft had been deployed over East Timor once again, this time as part of the pre-referendum intimidation operation. Under New Labour, Britain became the leading supplier of arms to Indonesia, over the strong protests of Amnesty International, Indonesian dissidents, and Timorese victims. The reasons were explained by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, the author of the new “ethical foreign policy.”

The arms shipments were appropriate because “the government is committed to the maintenance of a strong defence industry, which is a strategic part of our industrial base,” as in the United States and elsewhere. For similar reasons, Prime Minister Tony Blair later approved the sale of spare parts to Zimbabwe for British Hawk fighter jets being used by Mugabe in a civil war that cost tens of thousands of lives. Nonetheless, the new ethical policy was an improvement over Thatcher, whose defense procurement minister Alan Clark had announced that “My responsibility is to my own people. I don’t really fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is doing to another.” [11]

It is against this background, barely sampled here, that the chorus of admired Western intellectuals praised themselves and their “enlightened states” for opening an inspiring new era of humanitarian intervention, guided by the “responsibility to protect,” now solely dedicated to “principles and values,” acting from “altruism” and “moral fervor” alone under the leadership of the “idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,” now in a “noble phase” of its foreign policy with a “saintly glow.”

The chorus of self-adulation also devised a new literary genre, castigating the West for its failure to respond adequately to the crimes of others (while scrupulously avoiding any reference to its own crimes). It was lauded as courageous and daring. Few allowed themselves to perceive that comparable work would have been warmly welcomed in the Kremlin, pre-Perestroika.

The most prominent example was the lavishly praised Pulitzer Prize-winning work “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power, of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. It is unfair to say that Power avoids all U.S. crimes. A scattering are casually mentioned, but explained away as derivative of other concerns.

Power does bring up one clear case: East Timor, where, she writes, Washington “looked away”—namely, by authorizing the invasion; immediately providing Indonesia with new counterinsurgency equipment; rendering the UN “utterly ineffective” in any effort to stop the aggression and slaughter, as UN ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan proudly recalled in his memoir of his UN service; and then continuing to provide decisive diplomatic and military support for the next quarter-century, in the manner briefly indicated.

Summarizing, after the fall of the Soviet Union, policies continued with little more than tactical modification. But new pretexts were needed. The new norm of humanitarian intervention fit the requirements very well. It was only necessary to put aside the shameful record of earlier crimes as somehow irrelevant to the understanding of societies and cultures that had scarcely changed, and to disguise the fact that these crimes continued much as before. This is a difficulty that arises frequently, even if not as dramatically as it did after the collapse of the routine pretext for crimes. The standard reaction is to abide by a maxim of Tacitus: “Crime once exposed has no refuge but audacity.” One does not deny the crimes of past and present; it would be a grave error to open that door. Rather, the past must be effaced and the present ignored as we march on to a glorious new future. That is, regrettably, a fair rendition of leading features of the intellectual culture in the post-Soviet era.

Nevertheless, it was imperative to find, or least to contrive, a few examples to illustrate the new magnificence. Some of the choices were truly astonishing. One, regularly invoked, is the humanitarian intervention of mid-September 1999 to rescue the East Timorese. The term “audacity” does not begin to capture this exercise, but it proceeded with little difficulty, testifying once again to what Hans Morgenthau, the founder of realist international relations theory, once called “our conformist subservience to those in power.” There is no need to waste time on this achievement.

A few other examples were tried, also impressive in their audacity. One favorite was Clinton’s military intervention in Haiti in 1995, which did in fact bring an end to the horrendous reign of terror that was unleashed when a military coup overthrew the first democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991, a few months after he took office. To sustain the self-image, however, it has been necessary to suppress some inconvenient facts.

The Bush I administration devoted substantial effort to undermine the hated Aristide regime and prepare the grounds for the anticipated military coup. It then instantly turned to support for the military junta and its wealthy supporters, violating the OAS embargo—or as the New York Times preferred to describe the facts, “fine tuning” the embargo to exempt U.S. businesses, for the benefit of the Haitian people. Trade with the junta increased under Clinton, who also illegally authorized Texaco to supply oil to the junta. Texaco was a natural choice. It was Texaco that supplied oil to the Franco regime in the late 1930s, violating the embargo and U.S. law, while Washington pretended that it did not know what was being reported in the left press—later conceding quietly that it of course knew all along.

By 1995, Washington felt that the torture of Haitians had proceeded long enough, and Clinton sent the Marines in to topple the junta and restore the elected government—but on conditions that were sure to destroy what was left of the Haitian economy. The restored government was compelled to accept a harsh neoliberal program, with no barriers to U.S. export and investment. Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but cannot compete with highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness, leading to the anticipated collapse. One small successful business in Haiti produced chicken parts. But Americans do not like dark meat, so the huge U.S. conglomerates that produce chicken parts wanted to dump them on others. They tried Mexico and Canada, but those are functioning societies that could prevent the illegal dumping. Haiti had been compelled to be defenseless, so even that small industry was destroyed. The story continues, declining to still further ugliness, unnecessary to review here. [12]

In brief, Haiti falls into the familiar pattern, a particularly disgraceful illustration in light of the way that Haitians have been tortured, first by France and then by the United States, in part in punishment for having dared to be the first free country of free men in the hemisphere.

Other attempts at self-justification fared no better, until, at last, Kosovo came to the rescue in 1999, opening the floodgates. The torrent of self-congratulatory rhetoric became an uncontrollable deluge.

The Kosovo case is, plainly, of great significance in sustaining the self-glorification that reached a crescendo at the end of the millennium, and in justifying the Western claim of a right of unilateral intervention. Not surprisingly, then, there is a strict Party Line on NATO’s bombing of Kosovo.

The doctrine was articulated with eloquence by Vaclav Havel, as the bombing ended. The leading U.S. intellectual journal, the left-liberal New York Review of Books, turned to Havel for “a reasoned explanation” of why the NATO bombing must be supported, publishing his address to the Canadian Parliament, “Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State” (June 10, 1999). For Havel, the Review observed, “the war in Yugoslavia is a landmark in international relations: the first time that the human rights of a people—the Kosovo Albanians—have unequivocally come first.” Havel’s address opened by stressing the extraordinary significance and import of the Kosovo intervention.

It shows that we may at last be entering an era of true enlightenment that will witness “the end of the nation-state,” which will no longer be “the culmination of every national community’s history and its highest earthly value,” as has always been true in the past. The “enlightened efforts of generations of democrats, the terrible experience of two world wars,…and the evolution of civilization have finally brought humanity to the recognition that human beings are more important than the state,” so the Kosovo intervention reveals.

Havel’s “reasoned explanation” of why the bombing was just reads as follows: “there is one thing that no reasonable person can deny: this is probably the first war that has not been waged in the name of ‘national interests,’ but rather in the name of principles and values… [NATO] is fighting out of concern for the fate of others. It is fighting because no decent person can stand by and watch the systematic state-directed murder of other people….The alliance has acted out of respect for human rights, as both conscience and legal documents dictate. This is an important precedent for the future. It has been clearly said that it is simply not permissible to murder people, to drive them from their homes, to torture them, and to confiscate their property.”

Stirring words, though a few qualifications might be appropriate: to mention just one, it remains permissible, indeed obligatory, not only to tolerate such actions but to contribute massively to them, ensuring that they reach still greater peaks of fury—within NATO, for example—and of course to conduct them on one’s own, when that is necessary.

Havel had been a particularly admired commentator on world affairs since 1990, when he addressed a joint session of Congress immediately after his fellow dissidents were brutally murdered in El Salvador (and the United States had invaded Panama, killing and destroying). He received a thunderous standing ovation for lauding the “defender of freedom” that had armed and trained the murderers of the six leading Jesuit intellectuals and tens of thousands of others, praising it for having “understood the responsibility that flowed” from power and urging it to continue to put “morality ahead of politics”—as it had done throughout Reagan’s terrorist wars in Central America, in support for South Africa as it murdered some 1.5 million people in neighboring countries, and many other glorious deeds. The backbone of our actions must be “responsibility,” Havel instructed Congress: “responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success.”

The performance was welcomed with rapture by liberal intellectuals. Capturing the general awe and acclaim, the editors of the Washington Post orated that Havel’s praise for our nobility provided “stunning evidence” that his country is “a prime source” of “the European intellectual tradition” as his “voice of conscience” spoke “compellingly of the responsibilities that large and small powers owe each other.” At the left-liberal extreme, Anthony Lewis wrote that Havel’s words remind us that “we live in a romantic age.” A decade later, still at the outer limits of dissidence, Lewis was moved and persuaded by the argument that Havel had “eloquently stated” on the bombing of Serbia, which he thought eliminated all residual doubts about Washington’s cause and signaled a “landmark in international relations.”

The Party Line has been guarded with vigilance. To cite a few current examples, on the occasion of Kosovo’s independence the Wall Street Journal wrote that Serbian police and troops were “driven from the province by the U.S.-led aerial bombing campaign of [1999], designed to halt dictator Slobodan Milošević’s brutal attempt to drive out the province’s ethnic Albanian majority” (February 25, 2008). Francis Fukuyama urged in the New York Times (February 17, 2008) that “in the wake of the Iraq debacle,” we must not forget the important lesson of the 1990s “that strong countries like the United States should use their power to defend human rights or promote democracy”: crucial evidence is that “ethnic cleansing against the Albanians in Kosovo was stopped only through NATO bombing of Serbia itself.”

The editors of the liberal New Republic wrote that Milošević “set out to pacify [Kosovo] using his favored tools: mass expulsion, systematic rape, and murder,” but fortunately the West would not tolerate the crime “and so, in March 1999, NATO began a bombing campaign” to end the “slaughter and sadism.” The “nightmare has a happy ending for one simple reason: because the West used its military might to save them” (March 12, 2008). The editors added that “You would need to have the heart of a Kremlin functionary to be unmoved by the scene that unfolded in Kosovo’s capital Pristina,” celebrating “a fitting and just epilogue to the last mass crime of the twentieth century.” In less exalted but conventional terms, Samantha Power writes that “Serbia’s atrocities had of course provoked NATO action.”

Citing examples is misleading, because the doctrine is held with virtual unanimity, and considerable passion, or perhaps “desperation” would be a more appropriate word. The reference to “Kremlin functionaries” by the editors of the New Republic is appropriate in ways they did not intend. The rare efforts to adduce the uncontroversial and well-documented record elicit impressive tantrums, when they are not simply ignored.

The record is unusually rich, and the facts presented in impeccable Western sources are explicit, consistent, and extensively documented. The sources include two major State Department compilations released to justify the bombing and a rich array of documents from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), NATO, the UN, and others. They also include a British parliamentary inquiry. And, notably, the very instructive reports of the monitors of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission established at the time of the October cease-fire negotiated by U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The monitors reported regularly on the ground from a few weeks later until March 19, when they were withdrawn (over Serbian objections) in preparation for the March 24 bombing.

The documentary record is treated with what anthropologists call “ritual avoidance.” And there is a good reason. The evidence, which is unequivocal, leaves the Party Line in tatters. The standard claim that “Serbia’s atrocities had of course provoked NATO action” directly reverses the unequivocal facts: NATO’s action provoked Serbia’s atrocities, exactly as anticipated. [13]

Western documentation reveals that Kosovo was an ugly place prior to the bombing—though not, unfortunately, by international standards. Some 2,000 are reported to have been killed in the year before the NATO bombing. Atrocities were distributed between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas attacking from Albania and Federal Republic of Yugoslav (FRY) security forces. An OSCE report accurately summarizes the record: The “cycle of confrontation can be generally described” as KLA attacks on Serb police and civilians, “a disproportionate response by the FRY authorities,” and “renewed KLA activity.”

The British government, the most hawkish element in the alliance, attributes most of the atrocities in the relevant period to the KLA, which in 1998 had been condemned by the United States as a “terrorist organization.” On March 24, as the bombing began, British Defense Minister George Robertson, later NATO secretary-general, informed the House of Commons that until mid-January 1999, “the [Kosovo Liberation Army] were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Serbian authorities had been.” In citing Robertson’s testimony in A New Generation Draws the Line, I wrote that he must be mistaken; given the distribution of force, the judgment was simply not credible. The British parliamentary inquiry, however, reveals that his judgment was confirmed by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who told the House on January 18, 1999, that the KLA “has committed more breaches of the ceasefire, and until this weekend was responsible for more deaths than the [Yugoslav] security forces.” [14]

Robertson and Cook are referring to the Racak massacre of January 15, in which 45 people were reported killed. Western documentation reveals no notable change in pattern from the Racak massacre until the withdrawal of the Kosovo Verification Mission monitors on March 19. So even factoring that massacre in (and overlooking questions about what happened), the conclusions of Robertson and Cook, if generally valid in mid-January, remained so until the announcement of the NATO bombing. One of the few serious scholarly studies even to consider these matters, a careful and judicious study by Nicholas Wheeler, estimates that Serbs were responsible for 500 of the 2,000 reported killed in the year before the bombing. For comparison, Robert Hayden, a specialist on the Balkans who is director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Pittsburgh, observes that “the casualties among Serb civilians in the first three weeks of the war are higher than all of the casualties on both sides in Kosovo in the three months that led up to this war, and yet those three months were supposed to be a humanitarian catastrophe.” [15]

U.S. intelligence reported that the KLA “intended to draw NATO into its fight for independence by provoking Serb atrocities.” The KLA was arming and “taking very provocative steps in an effort to draw the west into the crisis,” hoping for a brutal Serb reaction, Holbrooke commented. KLA leader Hashim Thaci, now prime minister of Kosovo, informed BBC investigators that when the KLA killed Serb policemen, “We knew we were endangering civilian lives, too, a great number of lives,” but the predictable Serb revenge made the actions worthwhile. The top KLA military commander, Agim Ceku, boasted that the KLA shared in the victory because “after all, the KLA brought NATO to Kosovo” by carrying out attacks in order to elicit violent retaliation.

So matters continued until NATO initiated the bombing, knowing that it was “entirely predictable” that the FRY would respond on the ground with violence, General Wesley Clark informed the press; earlier he had informed the highest U.S. government officials that the bombing would lead to major crimes, and that NATO could do nothing to prevent them. The details conform to Clark’s predictions. The press reported that “The Serbs began attacking Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds on March 19,” when the monitors were withdrawn in preparation for the bombing, “but their attack kicked into high gear on March 24, the night NATO began bombing Yugoslavia.” The number of internally displaced, which had declined, rose again to 200,000 after the monitors were withdrawn. Prior to the bombing, and for two days following its onset, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported no data on refugees. A week after the bombing began, the UNHCR began to tabulate the daily flow.

In brief, it was well understood by the NATO leadership that the bombing was not a response to the huge atrocities in Kosovo, but was their cause, exactly as anticipated. Furthermore, at the time the bombing was initiated, there were two diplomatic options on the table: the proposal of NATO, and the proposal of the FRY (suppressed in the West, virtually without exception). After 78 days of bombing, a compromise was reached between them, suggesting that a peaceful settlement might have been possible, avoiding the terrible crimes that were the anticipated reaction to the NATO bombing.

The Milošević indictment for war crimes in Kosovo, issued during the NATO bombing, makes no pretense to the contrary. The indictment, based on U.S.-UK intelligence, keeps to crimes committed during the NATO bombing. There is only one exception: the Racak massacre in January. “Senior officials in the Clinton administration were revolted and outraged,” Samantha Power writes, repeating the conventional story. It is hardly credible that Clinton officials were revolted or outraged, or even cared. Even putting aside their past support for far worse crimes, it suffices to consider their reaction to the massacres in East Timor shortly after, for example in Liquica, a far worse crime than Racak, which led the same Clinton officials to increase their participation in the ongoing slaughter.

Despite his conclusions on the distribution of killings, Wheeler supports the NATO bombing on the grounds that there would have been even worse atrocities had NATO not bombed. The argument is that by bombing with the anticipation that it would lead to atrocities, NATO was preventing atrocities. The fact that these are the strongest arguments that can be contrived by serious analysts tells us a good deal about the decision to bomb, particularly when we recall that there were diplomatic options and that the agreement reached after the bombing was a compromise between them.

Some have tried to support this line of argument by appealing to Operation Horseshoe, an alleged Serbian plan to expel Kosovar Albanians. The plan was unknown to the NATO command, as General Clark attested, and is irrelevant on those grounds alone: the criminal resort to violence cannot be justified by something discovered afterwards. The plan was exposed as a probable intelligence forgery, but that is of no relevance either. It is almost certain Serbia had such contingency plans, just as other states, including the United States, have hair-raising contingency plans even for remote eventualities.

An even more astonishing effort to justify the NATO bombing is that the decision was taken under the shadow of Srebrenica and other atrocities of the early ’90s. By that argument, it follows that NATO should have been calling for the bombing of Indonesia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, under the shadow of the vastly worse atrocities they had carried out in East Timor and were escalating again when the decision to bomb Serbia was taken—for the United States and United Kingdom, only a small part of their criminal record. A last desperate effort to grasp at some straw is that Europe could not tolerate the pre-bombing atrocities right near its borders—though NATO not only tolerated, but strongly supported far worse atrocities right within NATO in the same years, as already discussed.

Without running through the rest of the dismal record, it is hard to think of a case where the justification for the resort to criminal violence is so weak. But the pure justice and nobility of the actions has become a doctrine of religious faith, understandably: What else can justify the chorus of self-glorification that brought the millennium to an end? What else can be adduced to support the “emerging norms” that authorize the idealistic New World and its allies to use force where their leaders “believe it to be just”?

Some have speculated on the actual reasons for the NATO bombing. The highly regarded military historian Andrew Bacevich dismisses humanitarian claims and alleges that along with the Bosnia intervention, the bombing of Serbia was undertaken to ensure “the cohesion of NATO and the credibility of American power” and “to sustain American primacy” in Europe. Another respected analyst, Michael Lind, writes that “a major strategic goal of the Kosovo war was reassuring Germany so it would not develop a defense policy independent of the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance.” Neither author presents any basis for the conclusions. [16]

Evidence does exist however, from the highest level of the Clinton administration. Strobe Talbott, who was responsible for diplomacy during the war, wrote the foreword to a book on the warby his associate John Norris. Talbott writes that those who want to know “how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved” in the war should turn to Norris’s account, written with the “immediacy that can be provided only by someone who was an eyewitness to much of the action, who interviewed at length and in depth many of the participants while their memories were still fresh, and who has had access to much of the diplomatic record.” Norris states that “it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform—not the plight of Kosovar Albanians—that best explains NATO’s war.” That the motive for the NATO bombing could not have been “the plight of Kosovar Albanians” was already clear from the extensive Western documentary record. But it is interesting to hear from the highest level that the real reason for the bombing was that Yugoslavia was a lone holdout in Europe to the political and economic programs of the Clinton administration and its allies. Needless to say, this important revelation also is excluded from the canon. [17]

Though the “new norm of humanitarian intervention” collapses on examination, there is at least one residue: the “responsibility to protect.” Applauding the declaration of independence of Kosovo, liberal commentator Roger Cohen writes that “at a deeper level, the story of little Kosovo is the story of changing notions of sovereignty and the prising open of the world” (International Herald Tribune, February 20, 2008). The NATO bombing of Kosovo demonstrated that “human rights transcended narrow claims of state sovereignty” (quoting Thomas Weiss).

The achievement, Cohen continues, was ratified by the 2005 World Summit, which adopted the “responsibility to protect,” known as R2P, which “formalized the notion that when a state proves unable or unwilling to protect its people, and crimes against humanity are perpetrated, the international community has an obligation to intervene—if necessary, and as a last resort, with military force.” Accordingly, “an independent Kosovo, recognized by major Western powers, is in effect the first major fruit of the ideas behind R2P.” Cohen concludes: “The prising open of the world is slow work, but from Kosovo to Cuba it continues.” The NATO bombing is vindicated, and the “idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity” really has reached a “noble phase” in its foreign policy with a “saintly glow.” In the words of international law professor Michael Glennon, “The crisis in Kosovo illustrates…America’s new willingness to do what it thinks right—international law notwithstanding,” though a few years later international law was brought into accord with the stance of the “enlightened states” by adopting R2P.

Again, there is a slight problem: those annoying facts. The UN World Summit of September 2005 explicitly rejected the claim of the NATO powers that they have the right to use force in alleged protection of human rights. Quite the contrary, the Summit reaffirmed “that the relevant provisions of the Charter [which explicitly bar the NATO actions] are sufficient to address the full range of threats to international peace and security.” The Summit also reaffirmed “the authority of the Security Council to mandate coercive action to maintain and restore international peace and security…acting in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter,” and the role of the General Assembly in this regard “in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Charter.” Without Security Council authorization, then, NATO has no more right to bomb Serbia than Saddam Hussein had to “liberate” Kuwait. The Summit granted no new “right of intervention” to individual states or regional alliances, whether under humanitarian or other professed grounds.

The Summit endorsed the conclusions of a December 2004 high-level UN Panel, which included many prominent Western figures. The Panel reiterated the principles of the Charter concerning the use of force: it can be lawfully deployed only when authorized by the Security Council, or under Article 51, in defense against armed attack until the Security Council acts. Any other resort to force is a war crime, in fact the “supreme international crime” encompassing all the evil that follows, in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Panel concluded that “Article 51 needs neither extension nor restriction of its long-understood scope,…it should be neither rewritten nor reinterpreted.” Presumably with the Kosovo war in mind, the Panel added that “For those impatient with such a response, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of nonintervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all.”

There could hardly be a more explicit rejection of the stand of the self-declared “enlightened states.”

Both the Panel and the World Summit endorsed the position of the non-Western world, which had firmly rejected “the so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention” in the Declaration of the South Summit in 2000, surely with the recent NATO bombing of Serbia in mind. This was the highest-level meeting ever held by the former non-aligned movement, accounting for 80 percent of the world’s population. It was almost entirely ignored, and the rare and brief references to their conclusions about humanitarian intervention elicited near hysteria. Thus Cambridge University international relations lecturer Brendan Simms, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement (May 25, 2001), was infuriated by such “bizarre and uncritical reverence for the pronouncements of the so-called ‘South Summit G-77’—in Havana!—an improvident rabble in whose ranks murderers, torturers and robbers are conspicuously represented”—so different from the civilized folk who have been their benefactors for the past centuries and can scarcely control their fury when there is a brief allusion, without comment, to the perception of the world by the traditional victims, a perception since strongly endorsed by the high-level UN Panel and the UN World Summit in explicit contradiction to the self-serving pronouncements of apologists for Western resort to violence.

We might ask finally whether humanitarian intervention even exists. There is no shortage of evidence that it does. The evidence falls into two categories. The first is declarations of leaders. It is all too easy to demonstrate that virtually every resort to force is justified by elevated rhetoric about noble humanitarian intentions. Japanese counterinsurgency documents eloquently proclaim Japan’s intention to create an “earthly paradise” in independent Manchukuo and North China, where Japan is selflessly sacrificing blood and treasure to defend the population from the “Chinese bandits” who terrorize them.

Since these are internal documents, we have no reason to doubt the sincerity of the mass murderers and torturers who produced them. Perhaps we may even entertain the possibility that Japanese emperor Hirohito was sincere in his surrender declaration in August 1945, when he told his people that “We declared war on America and Britain out of Our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from Our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.” Hitler’s pronouncements were no less noble when he dismembered Czechoslovakia, and were accepted at face value by Western leaders. President Roosevelt’s close confidant Sumner Welles informed him that the Munich settlement “presented the opportunity for the establishment by the nations of the world of a new world order based upon justice and upon law,” in which the Nazi “moderates” would play a leading role. It would be hard to find an exception to professions of virtuous intent, even among the worst monsters.

The second category of evidence consists of military intervention that had benign effects, whatever its motives: not quite humanitarian intervention, but at least partially approaching it. Here too there are illustrations. The most significant ones by far during the post–Second World War era are in the 1970s: India’s invasion of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), ending a huge massacre; and Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, driving out the Khmer Rouge just as their atrocities were peaking. But these two cases are excluded from the canon on principled grounds. The invasions were not carried out by the West, hence do not serve the cause of establishing the West’s right to use force in violation of the UN Charter. Even more decisively, both interventions were vigorously opposed by the “idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity.” The United States sent an aircraft carrier to Indian waters to threaten the miscreants. Washington supported a Chinese invasion to punish Vietnam for the crime of ending Pol Pot’s atrocities, and along with Britain, immediately turned to diplomatic and military support for the Khmer Rouge.

The State Department even explained to Congress why it was supporting both the remnants of the Pol Pot regime (Democratic Kampuchea) and the Indonesian aggressors who were engaged in crimes in East Timor that were comparable to Pol Pot’s. The reason for this remarkable decision was that the “continuity” of Democratic Kampuchea with the Khmer Rouge regime “unquestionably” makes it “more representative of the Cambodian people than the Fretilin [the East Timorese resistance] is of the Timorese people.” The explanation was not reported, and has been effaced from properly sanitized history.

Perhaps a few genuine cases of humanitarian intervention can be discovered. There is, however, good reason to take seriously the stand of the “improvident rabble,” reaffirmed by the authentic international community at the highest level. The essential insight was articulated by the unanimous vote of the International Court of Justice in one of its earliest rulings, in 1949: “The Court can only regard the alleged right of intervention as the manifestation of a policy of force, such as has, in the past, given rise to most serious abuses and such as cannot, whatever be the defects in international organization, find a place in international law…; from the nature of things, [intervention] would be reserved for the most powerful states, and might easily lead to perverting the administration of justice itself.” The judgment does not bar “the responsibility to protect,” as long as it is interpreted in the manner of the South, the high-level UN Panel, and the UN World Summit.

Sixty years later, there is little reason to question the court’s judgment. The UN system doubtless suffers from severe defects. The most critical defect is the overwhelming role of the leading violators of Security Council resolutions. The most effective way to violate them is to veto them, a privilege of the permanent members. Since the UN fell out of its control forty years ago the United States is far in the lead in vetoing resolutions on a wide range of issues, its British ally is second, and no one else is even close. Nevertheless, despite these and other serious defects of the UN system, the current world order offers no preferable alternative than to vest the “responsibility to protect” in the United Nations. In the real world, the only alternative, as Bricmont eloquently explains, is the “humanitarian imperialism” of the powerful states that claim the right to use force because they “believe it to be just,” all too regularly and predictably “perverting the administration of justice itself.”

Notes
1. New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, quoting a high government official, January 12, 1992.
2. For more, and sources, see my New Military Humanism (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1999).
3. Boston Review (February 1994).
4. For detailed examination of the role assigned to China in the “virulence and pervasiveness of American visionary globalism underlying Washington’s strategic policy” in Asia, see James Peck, Washington’s China (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).
5. McSherry, Predatory States (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
6. Simes, “If the Cold War Is Over, Then What?,” New York Times, December 27, 1988.
7. Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (Random House, 2007).
8. Reporters’ paraphrase; Stephen Kurkjian and Adam Pertman, Boston Globe, January 5, 1990.
9. Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
10. Hans C. Von Sponeck, A Different Kind of War (New York: Berghahn, 2006); Spokesman 96, 2007. On the oil for food program fraud, see my Failed States (Metropolitan, 2006).
11. For a review of the miserable denouement, see my A New Generation Draws the Line (Verso, 2000).
12. See Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood (New York: Verso, 2007), for an expert and penetrating study of what followed, through the 2004 military coup that overthrew the elected government once again, backed by the traditional torturers, France, and the United States; and the resilience of the Haitian people as they sought to rise again from the ruins.
13. A New Generation Draws the Line. On what was known at once, see my New Military Humanism.
14. Robertson, New Generation, 106–7. Cook, House of Commons Session 1999-2000, Defence Committee Publications, Part II, 35.
15. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention and International Society (Oxford, 2000). Hayden, interview with Doug Henwood, WBAI, New York, reprinted in Henwood, Left Business Observer #89, April 27, 1999.
16. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2003); Michael Lind, National Interest (May–June 2007).
17. John Norris, Collision Course (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).

(Thanks to Monthly Review for reprint permission)

(photo: aboard Air Force One at Love Field, Dallas, Tx., soon en route to Bethesda, Md.; 22 November 1963, c. 2:45 PM)

Noam Chomsky’s website

Monthly Review

(“With the $57 she and four friends put together in 1933, partly from an article she published in America magazine, they printed an eight-page tabloid called The Catholic Worker and handed out 2,500 copies at the May Day Communist rally in Union Square. With only the $5 she had to her name a few months later, she rented a vacant apartment to provide emergency shelter for six homeless women after hearing that one of their friends had thrown herself in front of a subway. These two acts launched one of the most elegantly simple revolutions in history.”)

When the poor man died he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried, and from the netherworld, where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.

And he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.’

Abraham replied, ‘My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.

Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.’

He said, ‘Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.’

But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.’

He said, ‘Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

Then Abraham said, ‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.’”

Luke 16: 19-31

“one of the most elegantly simple revolutions in history…”

In the final days of Rudy Giuliani’s term as mayor of New York, three months after the heroism of 9/11, he quietly approved a politically wired project to build twenty-five multimillion-dollar mansions on Staten Island. An expediter for the project’s mob-tied developer was already under indictment for forging the demolition permit that had illegally cleared the site. Nonetheless, Giuliani’s deputy mayor secretly summoned his reluctant planning commission chairman to City Hall to read him the riot act over delaying it, forcing the final go-ahead.

“Lord, I’m one, Lord, I’m two, Lord, I’m three, Lord, I’m four, Lord, I’m five hundred miles away from home.
Away from home, away from home, away from home, away from home, Lord, I’m five hundred miles away from home.”
[from a popular folksong by Hedy West, heard in the sixties]

[Rosa Parks, with Dr. King]

Parks: “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”

Regarding Parks’ decision to remain seated on the Montgomery, Alabama bus she was riding, many issues had come to a head, with the Emmet Till murder on 28 August 1955 being only the most recent crisis in the Southland.

Having just finished her studies that summer at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee—being a rural, adult program of social and labor activism training—Parks’ decision on 1 December 1955 galvanized a collective of both Blacks and whites preparing to effect racial equality and dismantle segregation in America.

The first result of Parks’ action was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which resulted in the Supreme Court ruling citing bus segregation laws in Alabama to be unconstitutional.

[Emmett Till, 1941-1955]

from Wiki:

“Some kind of action against segregation had been in the works for some time before Rosa Parks’ arrest, under the leadership of E.D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP chapter and a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Nixon intended that her arrest be a test case to allow Montgomery’s black citizens to challenge segregation on the city’s public buses. With this goal, community leaders had been waiting for the right person to be arrested, a person who would anger the black community into action, who would agree to test the segregation laws in court, and who, most importantly, was ‘above reproach.’ When fifteen year old Claudette Colvin was arrested early in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, E.D. Nixon thought he had found the perfect person, but the teenager turned out to be pregnant. Nixon later explained, ‘I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.’ Parks, however, was a good candidate because of her employment and marital status, along with her good standing in the community.”

“Parks was charged with a violation of Chapter 6, Section 11 segregation law of the Montgomery City code, even though she technically had not taken up a white-only seat—she had been in a colored section. E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr bailed Parks out of jail the evening of December 2.”

“That evening, Nixon conferred with Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson about Parks’ case. Robinson, a member of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), stayed up all night mimeographing over 35,000 handbills announcing a bus boycott. The Women’s Political Council was the first group to officially endorse the boycott.”

“The day of Parks’ trial — Monday, December 5, 1955 — the WPC distributed the 35,000 leaflets. The handbill read, ‘We are…asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial…You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.’”

“It rained that day, but the black community persevered in their boycott. Some rode in carpools, while others traveled in black-operated cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents. Most of the remainder of the 40,000 black commuters walked, some as far as 20 miles (30 km). In the end, the boycott lasted for 381 days. Dozens of public buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit company’s finances, until the law requiring segregation on public buses was lifted.”

[one year later: after the Supreme Court decision, riding with UPI reporter Nicholas C. Chriss, 21 December 1956]

Rosa Parks

Highlander Folk School

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Emmett Till

the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

(“Nearly ten years ago I declared myself a pro-lifer. A Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer. Immediately, three women editors at The Village Voice, my New York base, stopped speaking to me. Not long after, I was invited to speak on this startling heresy at Nazareth College in Rochester (long since a secular institution). Two weeks before the lecture, it was canceled. The women on the lecture committee, I was told by the embarrassed professor who had asked me to come, had decided that there was a limit to the kind of speech the students could safely hear, and I was outside that limit. I was told, however, that I could come the next year to give a different talk. Even the women would very much like me to speak about one of my specialties, censorship in America. I went and was delighted to talk about censorship at Nazareth.”)

[Journalist Nat Hentoff, from "Pro-choice bigots: a view from the pro-life left"; 30 November 1992]

“At the heart of the controversy in these cases are those recurring pregnancies that pose no danger whatsoever to the life or health of the mother but are, nevertheless, unwanted for any one or more of a variety of reasons — convenience, family planning, economics, dislike of children, the embarrassment of illegitimacy, etc.”

“I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the court’s judgment. The court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes.”

[U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White, one of two dissenters in Roe v. Wade, 22 January 1973]

“Aware that in Roe it essentially created something out of nothing and that there are many in this country who hold that decision to be basically illegitimate, the Court responds defensively…. I do not share the warped point of view of the majority, nor can I follow the tortuous path the majority treads in proceeding to strike down the statute before us. I dissent.”

[U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White, dissenting in Thornburgh v. American College of Obst. & Gyn., 1986]

“It was my pseudonym, ‘Jane Roe,’ which had been used to create the ‘right’ to abortion out of legal thin air. But [attorneys] Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, ‘Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn’t have been possible.’ Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.”

[Norma McCorvey, the anonymous litigant known as "Jane Roe" in the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade, in testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights, 21 January 1998]

[N.B.: graphic photos posted on the next page depicting abortion's aftermath]

[all photos: The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform]

[letter to Daphne Claire de Jong, former member of Feminists for Life, 20 December 2009]

Thanks again for taking the time to help.

I have, in fact, some ideas on the matter of feminism—quote-unquote—which have coalesced into an essay I wrote at a blog I keep.

My intention was to develop further the argument I posed, and address the abortion issue—or ought one more properly refer to it either as the abortion crisis or abortion holocaust?

I had mentioned that I spotted your name at Wikiquote. It is instructive for me to look over the ocean of opinions on the matter at that web page. They have them alphabetized and I’ve managed to get through them to the ‘B’s—with much digressive research when I spot something particularly compelling.

Some of the pro-abortion commentary is clearly misandrist in its impetus—there can be no doubt whatsoever about it. And, further, I know that the writer’s focus had become clouded by personal animus, and ought to be read—or dismissed—with that in mind.

http://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Abortion&printable=yes

If time—and inclination—permit, please visit the blog I had mentioned. It is:

…[current blog URL]

…with one essay addressing misandry. If there is one theme which underwrites that commentary it is this: the “feminist” is a Self  (with a history, psychology, etc.) prior to being a member of a collective, and to lose sight of this fact is to see the vital cause of women’s rights degenerate into something else. If truth—as Keats writes—is beauty, then a lie may be viewed as something grotesque. Such is my conclusion when considering the “feminist” and abortion rights—so-called: “feminism” as grotesquerie.

To the degree that I am a humanist (and that is so) I am a feminist. However, 1) I cannot abjure my belief that freedom exists as a relative construct—relative to, e.g., yours—and, 2), that Lord Acton was correct in his pronouncement upon Power being a corrupting dynamic—whoever courts it, and whoever wields it.

Yet, within the realm of basic human rights every human being has a categorical right to nine months gestation—full stop. And, that fundamental right supersedes always-relative freedom. And, the violent halting of gestation is not a fundamental human right but merely a now-juridical “privilege” that one lays claim to.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are termed unalienable rights—i.e., unalienable, even via legislation—with the right to life superseding the other two. How can there be any doubt about that essential truth?

About the blog: it is decidedly left-of-center in its political outlook. That is, I am an anarchist—non-violent anarchist, of course.

Dean

[What follows is a survey of the commentary (from Wikiquote)]

“If partial-birth abortions remain legal, if Congress allows them to continue, what next? Killing a child who has emerged from the womb 3 or 4 more inches… Opponents of this bill keep asking whether it would be the first step in an effort to ban all abortions, but the real question is whether allowing this procedure is not a step toward legalized infanticide.”

Helen Alvare, US Conference of Catholic Bishops, before Senate sub-committeee, 1996

[Abortion is] the dirty work of our field. The sad truth is that the people who moonlight at the clinics are grade-B doctors. They’re not the cream of the crop

Anonymous pro-choice OB/GYN, quoted by Jack Hitt in “Who Will Do Abortions Here?

“All the articles on this subject that I have read have been from men. They denounce women as alone guilty, and never include man in any plans for the remedy. . . Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed [abortion]. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!”
“We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil [abortion]…It is practiced by those whose inmost souls revolt from the dreadful deed.”

Susan B. Anthony, women’s suffrage movement leader, The Revolution.(August 8, 1869)

“I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria [head], for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure that destroys a fetus, kills a baby.”

Anonymous abortion provider, “Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts” Diane M. Gianelli, American Medical News, July 12, 1993

“Nobody wants to perform abortions after ten weeks because by then you see the features of the baby, hands, feet. It’s really barbaric. There are a lot of tears. Sometimes patients turn on you. They say ‘Let’s get out of here,’ after the abortion, like you are some dirty person. It’s vicious. Then you get these teenyboppers in the office who laugh their way through it. It doesn’t mean a thing to them. That bothers me…I do them [abortions] because I take the attitude that women are going to terminate babies and deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry babies…I’ve done a couple thousand and it turned into a significant financial boon, but I also feel I’ve provided an important service. The only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman and block out the baby…”

Anonymous abortion doctor, M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves by John Pekkanen (Delcorte Press: New York) 1988, p 90-91

“Of the various ways to perform abortion after the midpoint of pregnancy, there is only one that never, ever results in live births. It is D&E (dilation and evacuation) and not only is it foolproof, but many researchers consider it safer, cheaper, and less unpleasant for the patient. However, it is particularly stressful to medical personnel. This is because D&E requires literally cutting the fetus from the womb, and then reassembling the parts, or at least keeping them all in view, to assure that the abortion is complete…”

American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology Sept 1, 1976, 126[1] 83-90

“The later ones though, they’re bad- you see little arms and feet…little, but you know what they are and you know what’s really being done.”

Anonymous abortion doctor, “The Abortionist”; Mary Ellen Mark, GQ Magazine, Feb. 1994

“It was disturbing for me to see recognizable body parts in the removed tissue, usually an arm or a leg. My intent is not to be gruesome, but there is a reality behind all the political jargon that I believe I allowed myself to ignore until this experience. I have images now that accompany phrases such as, ‘Potential for life’ and I understand the emotions that drive pro-life forces…”

Anonymous medical student working at Planned Parenthood, Abortion Action Guide Medical Students for Choice, National Abortion Federation, Sept. 1993

“I don’t approve, but it doesn’t matter if I don’t approve. I’m doing my job, I’m doing what I am trained to do.”

Anonymous abortion doctor, “The Abortionist”; Mary Ellen Mark, GQ Magazine, Feb 1994

“You’re going from dealing with people to dealing with what most people here at the Center consider a real hurdle, to do sterile room, because you have to deal with the actual abortion tissue. And for some people that’s really hard. They can be abstractly in favor of abortion rights, but they sure don’t want to see what an eighteen-week abortion looks like.”

Anonymous clinic worker Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic Wendy Simonds

“So by it looking like a baby, you’re associating it with yourself because you used to be a baby, you used to be a fetus.”
Anonymous clinic worker Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic Wendy Simonds

“When I can identify the four chambers of the heart, I start feeling miserable. And when I put my hands on somebody to feel how big they are and I get kicked, I am barely able to talk at that moment.”

Anonymous abortion doctor, Diane M. Gianelli, “Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts”; American Medical News, July 12, 1993

“It’s hard to be in a profession where you have a hard time answering the questions that other people ask you about what you do.”

Anonymous abortion provider, Diane M. Gianelli, “Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts”; American Medical News, July 12, 1993

[heart, c. twelve weeks]

“You shall not kill either the fetus by abortion or the new born.”
Barnabas, circa 125

“She who has deliberately destroyed a fetus has to pay the penalty of murder…here it is not only the child to be born that is vindicated, but also the woman herself who made an attempt against her own life, because usually the women die in such attempts. Furthermore, added to this is the destruction of the child, another murder… Moreover, those, too, who give drugs causing abortion are deliberate murderers themselves, as well as those receiving the poison which kills the fetus.”
“Let her that procures abortion undergo ten years’ penance, whether the embryo were perfectly formed, or not.”
St. Basil the Great, Letter 188:2, circa 370

“[I]n face of erroneous interpretations of freedom, [Pope John Paul II] emphasized in an unequivocal way the inviolability of the human being, the inviolability of human life from its conception until natural death. The freedom to kill is not true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces the human being to slavery.”
Pope Benedict XVI, homily (May 7, 2005)

“When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society. So when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.”

Mattie Brinkerhoff, suffrage movement leader; The Revolution (September 2, 1869)

“They can be born breathing and crying at 19 weeks’ gestation. . . I am not anti-abortion, but as far as I am concerned this is sub-standard medicine. . . If viability is the basis on which they set the 24-week limit for abortion, then the simplest answer is to change the law and reduce the upper limit to 18 weeks.”
Stuart Campbell, former professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at London’s St. George’s hospital

“300 Dollars that’s the price of living what? / Mommy I don’t like this clinic / Hopefully you’ll make the right decision / And don’t go through with the Knife incision”
Nick Cannon, hip hop artist and comedian, describing his mother’s choice not to abort him, in “Can I Live?”

“I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound. . . I think brain death would occur because the suctioning to remove contents is only two or three seconds, so somewhere in that period of time, obviously not when you penetrate the skull, because people get shot in the head and they don’t die immediately from that, if they are going to die at all, so that probably is not sufficient to kill the fetus, but I think removing the brain contents eventually will. . . My intent in every abortion I have ever done is to kill the fetus and terminate the pregnancy.”
Leroy Carhart, abortion provider, Asheville Tribune

“This act covers every D&E [dilation and evacuation] that I did. Everything that I do to cause an abortion is an overt act. . . The fetuses are alive at the time of delivery. [There is a heartbeat] very frequently.”
Leroy Carhart, Carhart v. Ashcroft

“If you haven’t seen what abortion does, then you will never understand what abortion actually is.”
“Between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 Blacks were lynched in the U.S. That number is surpassed in less than 3 days by abortion. 1,452 African-American children are killed each day by the heinous act of abortion. 3 out of 5 pregnant African-American women will abort their child. Since 1973 there has been over 13 million Black children killed and their precious mothers victimized by the U.S. abortion.”
Clenard Howard Childress, Jr., Life Education And Resource Network

“How is the person who considers abortion to be murder any different from the Pole who knew what was going to happen at Auschwitz? If the Pole was morally obligated to attempt to save lives, isn’t the person who opposes abortion under the same obligation?”
B.D. Colen, The Anti-Abortion High Ground

“[The few doctors willing to replace those who are retiring are] mostly physicians who have had difficulty establishing regular ob-gyn practices. . . Out of [one abortion practitioner's] first six months of work, there are nine malpractice suits … After it was apparent the guy was a klutz, they kept using him, and trying to cover for him, because they couldn’t find another provider.”
“In testimony Wednesday in St. Louis Circuit Court, Crist said that it is not uncommon for second-trimester fetuses to leave the womb feet-first, intact and with their hearts still beating. He sometimes crushes their skulls to get the fetuses out. Other times, he dismembers them.”

Robert Crist, abortion provider

“If women must submit to abortion to preserve their lifestyle or career, their economic or social status they are pandering to a system devised and run by men for male convenience.”
“Until this century, the laws of both Britain and America made women a part of’ their husbands. By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law. . . our law in general considers man and wife one person. The one person was, of course, the husband, who exerted absolute power over his wife and her property. She had no existence and therefore no protection under the law. The only thing a husband could not do was kill her. The earliest feminist battles were fought against the legal chattel status of women. Many feminists were among those who overturned the U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1857, that a black slave was ‘property’ and not entitled to the protection of the Constitution. Feminism totally rejected the concept of ownership in regard to human beings. Yet when the Court ruled in 1973 that the fetus was the property of its mother, and not entitled to the protection of the Constitution, ‘liberated’ women danced in the streets.”
Daphne Clair de Jong, “Feminism and Abortion: The Great Inconsistency”

“I do think abortion is murder—of a very special and necessary sort. What else would one call the deliberate stilling of a life? And no physician involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that…legalistic distinctions among ‘homicide,’ ‘justified homicide,’ ‘self-defense,’ and ‘murder’ appear to me a semantic game. What difference does it make what we call it? Those who do it and those who witness its doing know that abortion is the stilling of a life.”
Magda Denes, abortion advocate, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, “Performing Abortions,” Commentary Magazine (October, 1976)

“There was not one [abortion practitioner] who at some point in the questioning did not say ‘This is murder.’”
Magda Denes, “In Necessity and Sorrow; Life and Death Inside an Abortion Clinic”

“The difference between the way of life and the way of death is great. Therefore, do not murder a child by abortion or kill a newborn infant.”
The Didache, book of Christian apostolic teachings, c. 80 A.D.

“Sonography in connection with induced abortion may have psychological hazards. Seeing a blown-up, moving image of the embryo she is carrying can be distressing to a woman who is about to undergo an abortion, Dr. Sally Faith Dorfman noted. She stressed that the screen should be turned away from the patient.”
Sally Faith Dorfman, paraphrased in Obstetrics and Gynecology News

“To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G. K. Chesterton: when there aren’t enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads. The crime drop was, in the language of economists, an ‘unintended benefit’ of legalized abortion. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.”
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Where Have All the Criminals Gone? Want to understand what made the crime rate drop in the 1990s? Look back to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973″

“No doctor, for ethical, moral or honest reasons wants to do nothing but abortions…women don’t like to do abortions over and over for moral reasons. Sometimes our women doctors become pregnant themselves, which upsets the patients. At the same time, if a woman is carrying a baby, she doesn’t like to abort someone else’s. We have much more trouble keeping women doctors on the staff than men.”
Edward Eichner, director of medicine at a Cleveland abortion facility, quoted in Rachel Weeping and Other Essays About Abortion

“I remain pro-choice. I am not religious. I am an atheist and a rationalist. The findings did surprise me, but the results appear to be very robust because they persist across a series of disorders and a series of ages. . . . Abortion is a traumatic life event; that is, it involves loss, it involves grief, it involves difficulties. And the trauma may, in fact, predispose people to having mental illness.”
Professor David M. Fergusson, Christchurch Health and Development Study, commenting on research he directed, interviewed on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (March 1, 2006).

“When you’re a doctor who does these abortions and the leaders of your movement appear before Congress and go on network news and say these procedures are done in only the most tragic of circumstances, how do you think that makes you feel? You know they’re primarily done on healthy women and healthy fetuses, and it makes you feel like a dirty little abortionist with a dirty little secret. I think we should tell them the truth, let them vote and move on. In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along. The abortion-rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everyone else.”
“One of the facts of abortion is that women enter abortion clinics to kill their fetuses. It is a form of killing, you’re ending a life.”

Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, in “An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied About Procedure”, New York Times (February 26, 1997).

“Lively activities [are] observed by ultrasound in the tenth week, when babies rarely pause for more than five minutes.”
Geraldine Lux Flanagan, Beginning Life 62 (1996).

“No matter how it is worded or performed, abortion hurts women. This won’t stop until women stand up in unison and say, ‘This is unacceptable. We deserve better.’ Lack of emotional and financial resources are the real undue burden and abortion will never lift that.”
Serrin Foster, president of Feminists For Life

“[I]t seems to me as clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.”
Mahatma Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: The Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi As Told In His Own Words

“For God…has conferred on men the surpassing ministry of safeguarding life…Therefore from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.”
Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), Second Vatican Council, promulgated December 7, 1965.

“[H]e was sometimes surprised by the anger a late-term abortion can arouse in him. On the one hand, the physician said, he is angry at the woman. ‘But paradoxically,’ he added, ‘I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria [the top of the baby’s head], for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure which destroys a fetus, kills a baby.’”
D.M. Gianelli, quoting anonymous New Mexico abortion practitioner, in “Abortion providers share inner conflicts,” American Medical News, July 12, 1993.

“To earlier feminists who had fought for the vote and for fair treatment in the workplace, it had seemed obvious that the ready availability of abortion would facilitate the sexual exploitation of women. Women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton regarded free love, abortion, and easy divorce as disastrous for women and children. They would have regarded women who actively promoted those causes as foolish or deranged.”
Mary Ann Glendon, “The Women of ‘Roe v. Wade’”, First Things, June/July 2003

“The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief…So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.”
Emma Goldman, Mother Earth

“Only now are we beginning to consider … the concept that the fetus is a patient, an individual”
M.R. Harrison, The Unborn Patient: Pre-Natal Diagnosis and Treatment

“No one, neither the patient receiving an abortion, nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life…”
William F. Harrison, abortion provider, “Why I Provide Abortions” 1996

Reporter: [Is] the fetus . . . dead beforehand…?
Haskell: No, it’s really not. . . in my case, I would think probably about a third of those are definitely. . . dead before I actually start to remove the fetus. And probably the other two-thirds are not.
Reporter: Is the skull procedure also done to make sure that the fetus is dead so you’re not going to have the problem of a live birth?
Haskell: It’s immaterial. If you can’t get it out, you can’t get it out. . . The point here is to effect a safe legal abortion. I mean, you could say the same thing about the D&E [dilation and evacuation] procedure. You know, why do you do the D&E procedure? Why do you crush the fetus up inside the womb? To kill it before you take it out? Well, that happens, yes. But that’s not why you do it. You do it to get it out. I could do the same thing with a D&E procedure…But that’s not really the point. The point here is you’re attempting to do an abortion. And that’s the goal of your work, is to complete an abortion. . .
Reporter: I wanted to make sure I have both you and (Dr.) McMahon saying ‘No’ then. That this is misinformation, these letters to the editor saying it’s only done when the baby’s already dead, in case of fetal demise and you have to do an autopsy. But some of them are saying they’re getting that information from NAF [National Abortion Federation]. Have you talked to Barbara Radford or anyone over there?
Haskell: Well, I had heard that they were giving that information, somebody over there might be giving information like that out. The people that staff the NAF office are not medical people. And many of them when I gave my paper, many of them came in, I learned later, to watch my paper because many of them have never seen an abortion performed of any kind.
Reporter: Did you also show a video when you did that?
Haskell: Yeah. I taped a procedure a couple of years ago, a very brief video, that simply showed the technique. The old story about a picture’s worth a thousand words.
Reporter: As National Right to Life will tell you.
Haskell: Afterwards they were just amazed. They just had no idea. And here they’re rabid supporters of abortion. They work in the office there. And…some of them have never seen one performed…And I’ll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range…In my particular case, probably 20% are for genetic reasons. And the other 80% are purely elective…

Martin Haskell, abortion provider, American Medical News

“The early feminists found abortion to be the ultimate exploitation of women. [Women had to] become men to compete. We bought into that. We’re smarter today. It’s more empowering to go through with your pregnancy.”
Patricia Heaton, Washington Times

“Nearly ten years ago I declared myself a pro-lifer. A Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer. Immediately, three women editors at The Village Voice, my New York base, stopped speaking to me. Not long after, I was invited to speak on this startling heresy at Nazareth College in Rochester (long since a secular institution). Two weeks before the lecture, it was canceled. The women on the lecture committee, I was told by the embarrassed professor who had asked me to come, had decided that there was a limit to the kind of speech the students could safely hear, and I was outside that limit.”

Nat Hentoff, “Pro-choice bigots: a view from the pro-life left”

(commentary continued…)

Nat Hentoff: Pro-choice bigots: a view from the pro-life left

Nat Hentoff: Civil Rights and Anti-Abortion Protests

Nat Hentoff: Can a Non-Person Be a Victim?

Feminists for Life

The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform

[revision 12/24]

On December 29, anywhere from 140 to 200 Sioux men, women and children were killed by the Seventh Cavalry regiment in a slaughterfest underwritten by Empire near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The events of that afternoon were fully in keeping with our intended narrative of racist oppression, decimation, and disenfranchisement—i.e., a virtual American holocaust—the ur-strategy contrived by the investor class for addressing “the Native American question.”

The photo depicts the mass grave dug at the site. Wiki:

“Following the Massacre that day, U.S. soldiers left the wounded Native Americans to die in a three day blizzard. They later hired civilians to remove the bodies and bury them in a mass grave:

“‘Then still frozen stiff, the bodies were dumped unceremoniously into the hole…’

“It was said that some of the Americans stripped the corpses of their clothing and collected some of their personal items as mementos of the occasion. Following the burial, the Americans lined up and took their picture beside the mass grave and twenty medals of honor were later given to honor the U.S. soldiers who participated in the massacre.”

Wounded Knee Massacre

Wounded Knee Incident, 1973

Leonard Peltier, Democracy Now!

Leonard Peltier, CounterPunch

Freeing Leonard Peltier, CounterPunch

(“America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.”)

Regarding the Fort Hood incident, and the obsessively two-poled analyses of Hasan’s motives—i.e., was he 1) simply deranged, or was he 2) a rogue adherent of Islam—consider former CIA analyst Ray McGovern’s argument on the vilification of Muslims, i.e., of Empire’s considered opinion, this time via Dick Cheney—and as dutifully proffered by the MSM—on the need to monitor, corral, suppress, or otherwise impede the lives of that collective portrayed as inherently, mindlessly antagonistic of the US.

That is, he was neither 1) a psychopath—a useful because readily dismissed identity—nor 2) a misguided Islamic political radical and ideologue—also a useful because readily dismissed identity. No, Mohammed, it was determined, has a rational, considered point of view and an entirely legitimate grievance, i.e., the folie à deux of US/Israeli hegemony: the reifying of Zionist prerogatives to the detriment of Palestinian basic human rights, all aided and abetted by oil-obsessed Empire. McGovern:

‘America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.’”

“an unclassified study published, not by some “liberal” think-tank, but by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board just two months after the 9/11 Commission Report. That report directly contradicted what Cheney and President Bush had been saying about ‘why they hate us,’ letting the elephant out of the bag and into the room, so to speak:

As Chomsky has argued many times: to deal with terrorism—theirs, not ours—1) listen to their grievances, and 2) address those grievances. But, this would be too simple, n’est-ce pas? That is, it would contradict the rationale of volatility—its efficacy and supreme value—to Empire, both abroad and on Wall Street.

Ray McGovern

Rumsfeld to Lindh’s American torturers: “…take the gloves off.”

[Letter to Noam Chomsky (24 April 2009)]:

Professor Chomsky,

An article posted at the After Downing Street website by David Lindorff concerning the John Lindh issue here:

After Downing Street

has the credibility to generate a groundswell of support for reexamining the case. If you have not already done so, would you consider an endorsement—i.e., a written statement, however brief—of a reexamination of the indictment and conviction of Lindh. He has thus far served seven years of a twenty-year sentence, in a case established, it is argued, via torture and threats against a then eighteen-year-old student of Islam—with his studies and trip abroad occuring prior to 9/11.

Since Lindh was, arguably, the first casualty of the Bush/Cheney-induced hysteria and dragnet, his cause, it would seem, would possess gravitas, in addition to the possibility that the rush to impale him might imply that all the ‘i’s and ‘t’s were not dotted and crossed, i.e., some aspect of the indictment/conviction idée fixe was left unattended to in that first blush of torture fever. This would mean that a “fissure” exists into which to gain a legal foothold.

Prior to reading the current ADS article, I, too, had been thinking of John Lindh this week and wondering how in the world to go about having his case reexamined (Debra Sweet at The World Can’t Wait had posted “that photo” last week, thus jogging my memory). At any rate, some of the possibilities I’ve considered are writing to, e.g., Michael Ratner at CCR and asking him to look into the matter. And that’s fine. But, a letter would be of greater consequence if it were endorsed by others in a groundswell of support for the cause. That is, I do not want to go off half-cocked, thus missing the moment to realize a re-opening of the case.

If, in fact, you have not already written an argument on the issue, would you posit an endorsement—i.e., a written statement, however brief—of a reexamination of the indictment and conviction of Lindh? Please advise.

Thank you

Dean Taylor

[Letter to website editor David Swanson (7 May 2009)]:

David,

First, thank you for not dismissing the matter out of hand, i.e., I am aware that you have quite a bit on your plate as it is…

At any rate, after reading [David] Lindorff’s article on Lindh at AFD [After Downing Street], and writing to [Noam] Chomsky, and having him respond favorably I contacted Lindorff and asked his advice on the matter. He in turn put me in touch with Lindh’s San Francisco attorney Jim Brosnahan who finally responded to my inquiry. The point is that in all of the web searching I engage in—i.e., possibly a dozen left-of-center websites a day—I did not see one comment about taking up Lindh’s cause.

Lindh is the scapegoat, par excellence. I feel that he may have been subject to torture in order to codify and “confirm” guilt—they did not care who signed off at the time. They—i.e., Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, et. al.—needed a scalp after 9/11 [in an attempt] to demonstrate that they are not the feckless characters they are perceived to be.

My rationale for mentioning Ratner [Center for Constitutional Rights] is that in light of the torture memos that have recently been disclosed this might be the cause célèbre he would welcome at this time, i.e., to bring to a head the torture hysteria advocated by Bush and Co. Lindorff feels that Lindh was the first torture victim (Lindorff: “Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s ‘War on Terror,’” and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture…”). That’s certainly plausible—and the shameless corporate media had a field day at Lindh’s expense.

Therefore, if you feel that the issue warrants a reexamination of the facts of Torture Victim #1, then please run it by Ratner. If Ratner feels that the issue is still too volatile—i.e., this is more than Torture Victim #1 because of the stigma attached to the matter courtesy of the MSM—then I will reconsider the cause.

My ambivalence in the matter exists because there is a real danger that Lindh might be “used” to beat up Bush and Co., with no real hope of his case getting a fair reexamination, let alone his being exonerated if, in fact, he is cleared of the wrongdoing he is charged with. Lindh has suffered enough, i.e., he seems to have shouldered the animus of a world seeking revenge after 9/11. There was a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality at large, and he got taken out.

Chomsky feels that the issue warrants further examination. That is of no small significance. I have attached my correspondence with Chomsky. Thanks again David.

Dean Taylor

[From Democracy Now]:

“He was born in Washington, DC in 1981. At the age of sixteen, he converted to Islam. In 1999, Lindh left the United States for Yemen to study Arabic and the Koran. He later traveled to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan, before 9/11, where he received military training from the US-backed, Taliban-run Afghan Army to fight against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan’s civil war. He was captured in late 2001, found emaciated and wounded, one of the few to survive a massacre by the Northern Alliance. To his parents’ relief, he was handed to US forces, but they brutalized him, as well. Donald Rumsfeld had ordered them to ‘take the gloves off.’ He was designated Detainee 001 in the war on terror. When he returned to the United States in January 2002, he was being held as a prisoner accused of conspiring to kill Americans. As part of a plea deal, Lindh pleaded guilty to serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons and was given a twenty-year sentence.”

“While John Walker Lindh was constantly being referred to as the American Taliban and as a traitor in the US media, the government’s case against him largely fell apart. As part of a plea deal, the Bush administration eventually dropped all the terrorism-related charges and the charge that he had conspired to kill Americans. In exchange, John Walker Lindh pleaded guilty to serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons. He was given a twenty-year sentence and agreed not to talk about what had happened for the duration of his sentence and agreed to drop any claims that he had been tortured by the US military.”

[excerpt from Democracy Now interview with Frank Lindh]:

AMY GOODMAN: So he’s in a madrasa in Pakistan—

FRANK LINDH: Beginning, yeah, in November 2000.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this is before 9/11.

FRANK LINDH: Oh, long before 9/11. President Clinton was still the president at that time. And then, in the spring of 2001, he made a decision that he didn’t actually share with us, to go into Afghanistan to try to help defend—what he thought was doing was defending civilians in Afghanistan who were under attack by the Northern Alliance warlords, who were backed not by the United States, but by the Russians and the Iranians, and they were, in fact, committing atrocities against civilians. So John told me and his mom, with emails, “I’m going up to the mountains for the summer.” This was in late April of 2001. But what he didn’t tell us, the full truth was he intended to go over the mountains and into Afghanistan and spend the summer there.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And at that time, the new Bush administration was providing some degree of support for the Taliban, wasn’t it?

FRANK LINDH: Yeah, I think fair to say, Juan, more than “some degree.” We were the largest single donor of money to the Afghan government. IN THE FIRST FEW MONTHS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IN EARLY 2001, WE CONTRIBUTED HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO THE TALIBAN GOVERNMENT. Our government did. And these were—this was all public. Secretary of State Colin Powell in April, around the same time John went, had a press conference and a public announcement about a grant of $46 million to the Taliban government. But that was just one of several grants that we made during that time [stress added].

AMY GOODMAN: SO JOHN WALKER LINDH WENT TO FIGHT ALONGSIDE THE US-BACKED TALIBAN FORCES AGAINST THE ARMY OF THE NORTHERN ALLIANCE, which was run by General Dostum, who has now become the chief secretary—chief security aide to President Hamid Karzai. But very— [stress added].

FRANK LINDH: Well, that’s a lot of—yes, but, I mean, I think we all agree that John didn’t do the right thing. I mean, it was a mistake—I think a mistake for him to go and get involved in another country’s civil war. I mean, if he had consulted with me, I would have said, “No, John. Stay away from that.” But he did, yes. He didn’t go and fight against America. HE WENT AND ALIGNED HIMSELF WITH THE SIDE THAT WE WERE, AND HAD BEEN, SUPPORTING IN THAT CIVIL WAR [stress added].

[excerpt from CounterPunch: Michael Teitelman]

“Lindh was kept from telling his story in the courtroom and from his prison cell for political reasons. He was the first detainee of the Afghanistan war. He was probably the first detainee to be tortured. He was also the Bush administration’s first major cover-up….

“After two weeks of imprisonment in the container, he was cut loose from the stretcher, given pajamas to cover his nakedness, and interrogated for several days by an FBI agent. During the questioning, he was, in all likelihood, in a state of delirium resulting from gastrointestinal infection, starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, frost bite, pain, and infected bullet wounds. When he was transferred to a U.S. navy ship, medical personnel were shocked at his condition. Denial of medical care and food to prisoners of war was still, in late 2001, a violation of the rules of conduct set by the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual….

“From the start, the absence of legal representation alarmed legal staff in the Justice Department. The Professional Responsibility Advisory Office issued an advisory that interrogation without an attorney would be illegal and that evidence obtained would not be admissible in court. The FBI proceeded with the interrogation anyway.

“None of this was revealed in public testimony because the Bush administration decided to bring the legal proceedings to a halt. This decision undoubtedly had the imprimatur of Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft. The plea offer was made three days before a hearing on the defense’s motion to exclude the FBI interrogation, which was the prosecution’s only incriminating evidence. The defense had military and medical witnesses from Afghanistan ready to testify about Lindh’s mistreatment and his debilitated condition while he was held in Camp Rhino.

“One clear objective of the plea bargain was to prevent testimony about the torture of an American citizen. In the light of the newly released torture memos which were in gestation at the time, Lindh’s mistreatment included elements of “aggressive treatment” that were later built into the regime of “enhanced interrogation techniques”: extreme confinement, enforced posture, threat of execution, humiliation, nutritional deprivation. Compared to the treatment of detainees at Guantanmo Lindh’s torture was mild and brief. It was also gratuitous. It was not carried out with the objective of obtaining information from Lindh or terrifying other detainees into cooperating. It expressed the hatred and the desire for vengeance that prevailed in the post-9/11 zeitgeist.

“So the administration had several powerful reasons for wanting to keep Lindh’s case out of public view. It is not stretching the truth to say that he was railroaded into taking a guilty plea for the political needs of the administration. Had the hearing and trial proceeded, the country might have been alerted early in 2002 about the moral and political dangers that lay ahead” [Teitelman].

Democracy Now

CounterPunch: Teitelman

the prelude: systemic oppression as stimulus for collective activism…

Consider: for as long as men and women have engaged with one another—and, generally speaking—men have dominated, exploited, abused, raped, vilified, or otherwise disenfranchised their other-gendered partners on the planet. And—again, generally speaking—such hideous behaviour went without redress or reparation as well. That is, not only was it condoned, the “permission” was codified as well, i.e., endorsed by the State. Women were treated like chattel, i.e., the man’s movable property. This was the nightmare reality of many women’s existence since time out of memory.

Further, and although feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft had published works arguing to women’s rights—e.g., A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)—and the Suffragettes had been a political force to reckon with here in the US early in the last century, the feminist movement came into its own as recently as the sixties at places like Cal-Berkeley—a split second ago in the full, historical context of the matter of women’s disenfranchisement! And, how could it have been otherwise that the academy is where the issue would be addressed? Outside of the university, the topic was generally off the table, but within its halls—ostensibly, a site of inquiry into values, ideas, etc., unhindered by norms taken for granted without—the issue was fixed, i.e., for analysis, dialogue, and, ultimately, activism. Specifically, in the academy feminism became praxis, and not merely ideology or socio-political scholarship.

sound and fury: a myriad of voices and a struggle to coalesce…

Having established the essential fact of male domination and abuse, the “remedy” for socio-political and economic gender inequity—inequity occurring most egregiously in the Third World—for many here at Empire has been to apply to misandry, endorsed by the media, and manifest via contempt or even in more pronounced violence and malicious behavior. Moreover, it is not merely coincidence that some of the most salient acts of malicious sexism by women against men have occurred at the wellspring of the modern feminist movement, i.e., in the universities across America. It is the ur-ground of their manumission—which they had carved out for themselves within the moment of general upheaval taking place in America. And it is also in the academy, first and foremost, in which they staked their claim on a relatively level field of gender interaction, but now where legitimate contention degenerates into retributive Power-play enmity and injury to male colleagues and students alike.

And, owing to the prolonged narrative of male dominance and abuse—and with the attendant fixing  of victimizer/victim identities—the malicious sexism by women becomes received by both “victimizer” and “victim” as condign, often tacitly, but accepted, for all that, via a collective “guilting” of the male and an assumed punitive “redress” of wrongs. Further, the effect of assumed, ill-defined, and largely tacit politicized gender identities in the academy is in knowing service, ultimately, to a base inversion of the Power construct. That is, the victim now assumes, to whatever degree, the coveted—and corrupting—role of wielder of Power, while the “guilt” of the victimizer, in “accepting” this penance, is remitted for the moment. Identities are always tenuous, and, therefore, the perpetuating of those politicized, now internalized gender identities necessitates hyper-vigilance. And, as always, the corporate media serves no minor role in the service of libidinous Power—i.e., here assigned yet another precinct in which to play out—helping to sustain said internalized identities via management of consent.

Yet regarding said misandry, still others identifying themselves as feminists—quote-unquote—abjure and even condemn the animus, retribution, and malevolence approach to solving the pressing issue of the capitalist predation of women in the Third World. That is, there does not obtain socially, economically, or culturally a unique model called “feminist,” which stands for the thoughts, ideas, conclusions, and praxes of all those—men and women both—who identify themselves via a now politically- and semantically-charged rubric.

Similarly, the conflating of all particular contention as informed by a generalized “misogyny” can undo a vital cause owing to, e.g., animus or mercenary impulse. As this occurs, the aim of improving the material welfare of women in toto may degenerate from the collective addressing global goals to one where, e.g., the executive becomes self-focused, insisting, nevertheless, upon her own “feminist” motives. The values and ideals which inform the cause are marred by what is merely self-serving behaviour, and its integrity and vital momentum impaired.

plurality versus paradigm: defining a feminist model…

To continue, as there does not occur one feminist identity amidst the plurality of voices within the collective, so, too, is there not one claim of misandry that can be generalized into one, all-purpose grievance against, e.g., spouses, colleagues, authorities, etc., deemed irresponsible, or worse. That is, there exists in every sphere of influence an ongoing “negotiation” of identity, niche, rights, etc., for women—and, by association, for men as well—now called upon as they are to apportion material and political gains. And, as said negotiation is a work in progress, an uneasy truce obtains until essential fluid boundaries and norms can be agreed upon and then established.

And, within the plurality of identities, ideologies, drives, etc., at both poles, an appeal to individual integrity as a premise for the effective working out of collectivized terms seems essential for a cause to sustain itself. Specifically, a cause would seem to demand authentic participants committed to moral objectives. To the degree that this does not obtain here, and as there is no ”feminist”—save as a media ideal and asymptote—it is ludicrous, therefore, to speak of “the feminist movement”—definite article. The wished-for ideal of a feminist “model” contrasts with the plurality of contradictory, dissenting voices, and what remains an ill-defined ”center.”

a cause deferred: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy brother…”

Further, and despite the validity of grievances against males guarding their prerogatives all the while defrauding women—i.e., their personal rights and material needs, and, generally speaking, the great necessity and legitimacy for the collective known as the feminist movement—there exists within its precincts a co-opting, as it were, of the cause by those having no real interest in the collective well-being. That is, when are the “feminist’s” actions more properly considered merely self-serving behaviour—the true focus belied via a pretentious claim of having acted to serve the cause—and when are they accomplished in the genuine interest of the collective, and possibly at some cost to the activist?

Putting this into context, what of the student not receiving an anticipated grade who then attacks a male professor via various means—i.e., means both received and outside of channels—and then considers her behaviour “feminist activism”? Or, what of the department chair hiring a faculty and staff biased in favor of women, and believing that behaviour to be responsible feminism? Or, someone having their third abortion, all the while believing not that the act is morally bankrupt, or that her own behaviour is suspect and should be reconsidered, but that it is her prerogative as an enlightened, emancipated feminist. Or, again, the now-single mother and the gender battering her male child endures, without compunction on her part, as men in toto are actively portrayed in the various media—i.e., movies, television, journals, etc.—as inherently base and demanding remedial feminist reorientation and “adjustment” away from perceived “masculine” traits.

“innocent” is a discrete legal identification–not a moral or existential one

To continue, the notion of “victimhood”—whether applied to the targets of fascist atrocity in Europe, white racism, or misogyny—does not, in truth, translate directly into “innocence.” That is, whether the “victim” identity is shared within the collective or is the discrete viewpoint of an individual, the assumption of correspondence between “victim” and “innocence” is false. Similarly, the choices and actions of a participant in the feminist cause do not elide from the very real possibility of her own self-focus and drives, i.e., she is a Self  (with a history, psychology, etc.)  before she is a participant. Said another way: 1) we never cease to be responsible, no matter what has occurred, and 2), victimhood does not—indeed, cannot—”annul” responsibility. The notion of responsibility posited here occurs less in the sense of culpability—or ”blame”—and more towards the moral imperatives of “obligated,” and “involved.” For the “feminist” to assume that she is no longer responsible as an individual, i.e., that the moral imperative does not apply is to see a cause degraded.

Further, there inheres the fact of malicious acts occurring against women by women—for example, the female executive determined to profit from labor exploitation—which acts elide from the concept of misogyny, qua misogyny, but which, nevertheless, may inflict serious, even long-lasting harm to those ”victims of victims.” This malign behaviour does not occur within the conventional context of the lexeme, but its reality is an ongoing feature in class conflict—i.e., unfocused exploitation and abuse—and the effects are, nonetheless, just as injurious to women, both actual and in the long term. This truth holds as well for the inversion of the term, i.e., misandry, whereas men may also victimize men in the interest, again, of sustaining class privilege and entitlements, both their own and in the aggregate of the investor class.

Yet, with the influence of a media marketing a gender mythology there remains the “feminist” whose focus remains fixed upon “the woman’s adversary”—i.e., the male—even at this current stage of corporate globalization, investment deregulation and the designed volatility of late capital. Specifically, the “feminist” participant in Empire who denies the verities of predatory capitalism in favor of a politicized myth stressing gender identity as the “feminist” cause célèbre does so in the service of the investor agenda, to the detriment of men and women alike. Or, via the anarcho-syndicalist model: “no war but class war.”

courting Power: libidinous, variable Power as diffuse phenomenon…

The global issue of corporate exploitation bears consideration, then, in order to address the social malaise in the modern era in a holistic, all-inclusive manner. To forego objectivity in favor of subjective bias via a common obscuring of goals is seen, again, in the predisposition to myth-making regarding the other gender. And, the tendency to mythopoesis has sapped vital momentum at both poles, yet persists, e.g., within the feminist canon many decades after the fact of its emergence.

Ultimately, Power—quote-unquote—like its reflection, injustice, is a diffuse phenomenon, unremitting, but with shifting sites of dominance, and often resisting identification. The counter-resistance, as it were, would seem to require an equally fluid tactic of confrontation, influencing its paths while mindful of the libidinous nature of its being. Anything less would unwittingly feed the Power/injustice agenda by, e.g., becoming Power/injustice itself. That is, a mere inversion of the Power/injustice verity—i.e., “now I (or we) have the Power…”— is not a defusing of Power/injustice, but its proliferation. And, for the “feminist” to heedlessly court Power is to betray what is not, in fact, an alternative, presumably improved, Weltanschauung but, rather, a prolonging of both women’s and men’s immiseration, particularly—and most notably—via Empire.

authentic, objective activism versus the dissembling, “feminist” Self…

Therefore—and within the context of both gender and class conflict ”injustice”—which disenfranchisement, which abuse, which exploitation, which “rape” is construed by one or the other injured gender as the more baleful, the more damaging, the more disruptive of lives—and, therefore, the one meriting address? If one gender pole is reified a false ideology inheres. That is, in the context of a Self suffering under a veritable program of neo-liberal coercion, injustice and oppression on a global scale, when one pole is stressed or valorized and another denied the whole is compromised, and the motives are deservedly suspect. To prescind from the larger issue at hand, i.e., the fact of greed for capital—our own avarice and that of others—as the one, all-encompassing reality in the world is to eclipse the echt task and the possibility of enduring reform, in lieu of a diversion, i.e., the always-volatile yet seductive political and professional leverage. That is, the integrity and drive of the moment is degraded and, ultimately, lost when seduced by Power.

To conflate instances of injustice occurring in the world (including those occurring incidentally to a woman, i.e., where both men and women are victims) as owing to male gender bias is not only to misperceive the problem at hand—and, therefore, miss the moment of confronting and resisting the global agent—but, rather, is at cross purposes with what one imagines we might achieve—i.e., for men and women in thrall to investor privilege and entitlements—through, e.g., dialogue. All of the gains to be realized via said authentic dialogue may be forfeited with imputations of misogyny used as a political or personal opportunism.

imputations of misogyny and exclusive terrains of injustice: a cause co-opted…

Yes, both misandry and misogyny exists as matters of fact, both are unconscionable, and both obtain—by degrees—within the global arena. But the prior ”sin,” as it were, occurs “locally,” i.e., within the individual, and what was valorized—and, which fault does not scruple to injure either male or female. As an example of unfocused exploitation, the male as entrepreneur who unselectively exploits both men and women, as well as the female as entrepreneur who similarly “rapes” both men and women for material gain, again, with indiscriminate application and calculated finesse. This prior lapse, taken in the aggregate—i.e., within the context of an entire investor class—is the global narrative, and does contain the issue of ”gender conflict” as well, so diffuse is its effect.

To prescind from, e.g., the fact of late capital’s global depredations via agents of both genders, or the abiding reality of class warfare, and to argue, instead, to exclusive terrains of injustice, e.g., misogyny—as the university professor exhorting her male colleagues, but actually belying her own self-interest and vulgar careerism while doing so—is to see a vital cause co-opted, often for crude self-aggrandizement. As there does not yet exist a “masculist” organized collective pursuing political aims, the potential for the always-corrupting pursuit of Power—in that arena—obtains largely at one pole only, which pursuit obscured but grounded, in fact, within the purely subjective aims of a dissembling, “feminist” Self. Again, the “feminist” courting Power qua Power merely inverts that which corrupts and, specifically, the dynamics of exclusion and inequity which inform it remain intact, regardless of gender.

Mary Wollstonecraft

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Alice Paul

Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture

Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men

(revision: 7/11)