In a political culture defined by a centrist-to-reactionary political spectrum, Paul Wellstone was a breath of fresh air when he brought his progressive politics to the U.S. Senate in 1991. His death in 2002 robbed the country of a humane voice on the national political stage.
I lived for a time in Minnesota and followed Wellstone's career closely. The last time I saw him speak was December 1998 when I was part of a peace group that conducted a sit-in at his office to protest his support for a U.S. attack on Iraq and force a meeting to challenge the former anti-war activist's hawkish turn. Yes, that's right -- a group sat in at Wellstone's St. Paul office when he supported Bill Clinton's illegal 1998 cruise missile attack on Iraq, which was the culmination of a brutal and belligerent U.S. policy during that Democratic administration.
It might seem odd to recall such a small part of contemporary history when the United States is mired in a full-scale occupation of Iraq, but there's an important lesson in this little bit of history -- one that's is often difficult for many liberals and Democrats to face:
Illegal and immoral U.S. aggression is, and always has been, a bipartisan affair. Democrats and liberals are responsible for their share of the death, destruction, and misery caused by U.S. empire-building along with Republicans and conservatives. I mention the Wellstone incident not to suggest he and George W. Bush are equally culpable, but to make the point that even politicians with Wellstone's progressive politics can be twisted by the pathology of power and privilege.
Precisely because we face such crucial policy choices in Iraq, the Middle East, and the world, we must remember that while W. and the neocons are a problem, they are not the problem. Sweep this particular gang of thugs and thieves out of office, and ... what? A kindler-and-gentler imperial policy designed by Democrats is still an imperial policy, and imperial policies always have the same result: The suffering of millions -- others that are too often invisible to us -- in support of policies that protect the affluence of ... us.
Name a politician at the national level today who has even come close to acknowledging that painful reality. Go ahead, think about it for a minute -- I can wait.
I'm reminded of a meeting that a group of Austin activists had with our congressman, liberal Democrat Lloyd Doggett, as part of a national grassroots organizing effort in the late 1990s to end the punishing embargo on Iraq that the Clinton administration imposed for eight long years. Those economic sanctions were killing an estimated 5,000 Iraqi children a month, and it's likely that as many as a million people died during the Clinton years as a result of this aspect of the U.S. policy of dominating the politics of the region. We asked Doggett -- who had courageously spoken out against U.S. aggression in the past -- to challenge this policy of his Democratic leadership, which he declined to do. One of us mentioned our opposition to this in the context of a larger critique of U.S. empire. Doggett's response: "That was never my analysis."
In other words, even though the United States has been pursuing imperial policies since it was founded -- first on the continent it eventually conquered and later around the world -- that wasn't his analysis. In other words, his analysis was apparently to deny the reality of how the United States became the most powerful nation-state in the history of the world. In other words, his analysis required obscuring difficult truths, which might be called a ... I'll leave that sentence for you to complete.
Again, my purpose in pointing this out is not to suggest that there is no difference in the policies of Doggett and Bush, but rather to point out the disease at the heart of conventional politics in the United States: The willingness to lie about the history and contemporary policies that have made us the most affluent society in the history of the world.
The political elites of the United States of America are united in their acceptance of these historical fabrications and contemporary obfuscations. Whatever their particular policy proposals, they all lie about the nature of the system that has produced U.S. power and affluence. They all invoke mythical notions of the fundamental decency of the United States. And because of that, they all are part of the problem.
Here's a gentle corrective: People can be decent, and many in the United States -- just as everywhere in the world -- are incredibly decent, but no imperial nation-state has ever had any fundamental decency. The rich First World nations of this world got rich through violence and theft. That doesn't mean there's nothing positive about the U.S. system, but is simply a reminder that if we start with a lie, we end up telling lots of lies and doing lots of damage.
So, let's tell the truth, not only about our political opponents but about our alleged allies. Let's tell the truth about the so-called "human rights" president, Jimmy Carter, a man who has accomplished some good things since leaving office and lately has been brave in standing up to critics who denounce him for telling part of the truth about the Israel/Palestine conflict (the part that ignores his own contributions while in office to the entrenchment of Israeli power and control, and hence to contemporary policy failures).
But Jimmy Carter as president -- the person he was when he held power -- was a person who backed the brutal rule of the Shah of Iran and, after the Iranian people has overthrown that dictatorship, allowed the shah to come to the United States. Carter continued to support and arm the military dictatorship of Indonesia through the worst of the genocidal atrocities in its illegal occupation of East Timor. Not exactly human-rights kinds of policies.
Nor was a concern for human rights in evidence in Carter's policy toward El Salvador. By coincidence, yesterday (February 17) was the 27th anniversary of a letter that Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote to Carter, pleading with him to support human rights by ending U.S. funding and arms transfers to the authoritarian government of El Salvador. Romero wrote to Carter that "instead of favoring greater justice and peace in El Salvador, your government's contribution will undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for respect for their most basic human rights." Carter's response was to continue support for the brutal military dictatorship that put guns in the hands of death squads, including one that would assassinate Romero a month later.
And then there is the famous "Carter Doctrine" proclaimed in his 1980 State of the Union address, in which he made "absolutely clear" his position on the oil-rich region: "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
In other words: Control over the flow of Middle East oil must remain in U.S. hands. Hmm, does that seem familiar? There was, of course, no outside force attempting to gain control of the region. But plenty of forces within the region -- then and now -- have wanted to break decades of U.S. domination, and those forces have been the real targets of the doctrine of Carter, and every other post-WWII president before and since. While the primary responsibility for the mess we have created in Iraq should be laid on the doorstep of Bush and the neocons, there's a lot of responsibility left to go around.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen's articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
It is always delightful to read Prog. Jensen's articles. In this particular one he rightfully says what many of us feel (including, BTW the conservatives from www.antiwar.com) that the Party of War is bipartisan. But the engine of war is more than that. The engine of war is based on the illusionary premise that the US people, particularly White Christians are BETTER than all other people in the world. That illusion was based on another myth- the myth of omnipotency. The US as a country had never suffered any external occupation since 1805. There has never been a plead for help from the Americans since the Civil War.
But there was a Civil War! Empires are destroyed from within. The 9/11, horrible as it was shuttered the myth of omnipotency and that pulled the rug from under the feet of the beast which ruled supreme in this country for decades. And the beast roared in anger and trampled on everything and everyone around.
Make no mistake. If we do not change, if we do not abandone the myth of us being better than others and embrace the truth that we are the same. the wound will never heal.
Mankind survives by wounding the beasts and then giving them a chance to become human once again. Our chance is slipping with every new day. We are blowing it. The 9/11 was an evil deed and many absolutely good and decent people died. But they died because we are no good, I am sorry.
by
Mark Sashine (50 articles, 19 quicklinks, 242 diaries, 3434 comments)
on Monday, February 19, 2007 at 7:10:17 AM
We the people are to blame, not Democrats like Wellstone and
Carter.
People like Jensen like to finger elected Democrats and the Democratic party.
At the time IWR was voted on and the latest war started, support for the war and the President was at or above 70%.
The people are perfectly able to change course if they feel the need as we saw in November, but we all know what happens to people who run as peaceniks. They dont get anywhere. There is not enough support for them. They are ridiculed. You can blame the parties and you can blame the media and other groups, the fact is, people do not support that.
At this time in our evolution, we are a nationalistic species. If you are pro-American, you tend to be VERY pro American, blindly so. If you are pro-Palestinian, you tend to be VERY pro Palestinian, blindly so. pro Israeli? Same. Pro Women? NOW seems to have turned off many feminists with being pro-Women to the point of being anti-men. Pro African Internationalism? People in this camp have gone so far they seem to hate whites. We also have people who are anti-Nationalists. They dont identify with someone so much as they hate a particular group who they identify as pure evil. War and violence is an acceptable means for those with whom we nationalistically identify (or against whom we are anti-nationalists).
I dont necessarily accept the label of imperialism to be used for this. Imperialism is a flawed label originally developed by Marxists in order to further their version of Nationalism.
As you can see, I think the real enemy is nationalism. Anytime people find themselves blindly following or blindly blaming some group in the overwhelming majority of cases, I think you have found their nationalistic allegiance or anti-nationalistic enemy. The prescription for this is for people to stop and ask themselves very hard hitting questions. Orwell said, however, that people who are in this state will have a nearly impossible time breaking away from their thought patterns. Still, it must be tried. "Where might my group be wrong?" "Where might that other group be right?" List and explore those things further.
People must fight this urge to be nationalistic.
by
Steven Leser (208 articles, 44 quicklinks, 32 diaries, 1367 comments)
on Monday, February 19, 2007 at 11:30:24 AM
I wonder if Jensen has ever read "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat. From it, I concluded that all politically-caused problems begin with the concept that groups have rights to act as a group in ways that the individual members of that group would not think of and have no right for acting as individuals.
Keeping in mind that there is no such thing as 'group rights', a reasonably intelligent person wanting to make sense of the current political and economic insanity and injustice can read a few choice books that each deal with one basic aspect of group plunder and domination. Since all physical life is supported by natural resources, or what the classical political economist called "land", a good start is "Progress & Poverty" by Henry George, followed by "The Servile State" by Hillaire Belloc. Since "the State" never acts justly, an honest searcher should include "Our Enemy, The State" by A. J. Noch. There are dozens more that are worth study for this purpose.
Groups usually have more power than individuals, but not more rights. All the world doesn't have the right to do to me or to you anything that each of them personally and individually doesn't have the ethical right to do. If we would use that axiom as the criteria for government action we could answer all ecological, sociological, and economic problems in one generation.
Fooling around trying to balance legally-granted "privilege to plunder" between one group and another, regardless of the names, avowed purposes, or leadership of those groups, can only lead us to that disaster that the late Buckminster Fuller promised in his book "Utopia or Oblivion".
We can't start in the middle to make something work that is based on a design-flaw that has been taken for granted for millennia but that taints everything that touches every life on Earth. Perhaps Mr. Jensen has enough grasp of the rality of things as they really are to be an important voice for things as they can be if we are all willing to give up the least act of that pkrivilege to plunder that we hold so dear and suffer from so much.
by
billmanning (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 21 comments)
on Monday, February 19, 2007 at 2:58:13 PM
3 comments
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