The Rag Blog

“The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam, which means that either you’re a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you’re a Tom Hayden Democrat and you’re suspicious of any military action. And that’s just not my framework.” – Sen. Barack Obama [1]

Barack, I thought Hillary Clinton was known as the Great Triangulator, but you are learning well. The problem with setting up false polarities to position yourself in the “center”, however, is that it’s unproductive both politically and intellectually.

Politically, it is a mistake because there last time I looked there were a whole lot more “Tom Hayden Democrats” voting in the California primary and, I suspect, around the country, than “‘Scoop’ Jackson Democrats.” In fact, they are your greatest potential base, aside from African-American voters, in a multi-candidate primary.

More disturbing is what happens to the mind by setting up these polarities. To take a “centrist” position, one calculates the equal distance between two “extremes.” It doesn’t matter if one “extreme” is closer to the truth. All that matters is achieving the equidistance. This means the presumably “extreme” view is prevented from having a fair hearing, which would require abandoning the imaginary center. And it invites the “extreme” to become more “extreme” in order to pull the candidate’s thinking in a more progressive direction. The process of substantive thinking is corroded by the priority of political positioning.

I have been enthused by the crowds you draw, by the excitement you instill in my son and daughter-in-law, by the seeds of inspiration you plant in our seven-year old [biracial] kid. I love the alternative American narrative you weave on the stump, one in which once-radical social movements ultimately create a better America step by step. I very much respect your senior advisers like David Axelrod, who figured out a way to elect Harold Washington mayor of Chicago. You are a truly global figure in this age of globalization.

But as the months wear on, I see a problem of the potential being squandered. Hillary Clinton already occupies the political center. John Edwards holds the populist labor/left. And that leaves you with a transcendent vision in search of a constituency.

Your opposition to the Iraq War could have distinguished you, but it became more parsed than pronounced. All the nuance might please the New York Times’Michael Gordon, who helped get us into this madness in the first place, but the slivers of difference appear too narrow for many voters to notice. Clinton’s plan, such as it is, amounts to six more years of thousands of American troops in Iraq [at least]. Your proposal is to remove combat troops by mid-2010, while leaving thousands of advisers trying to train a dysfunctional Iraqi army, and adding that you might re-invade to stave off ethnic genocide. Lately, you have said the mission of your residual American force would be more limited than the Clinton proposal. You would commit trainers, for example, only if the Iraqi government engages in reconciliation and abandons sectarian policing. You would not embed American trainers in the crossfire of combat. This nuancing avoids the tough and obvious question of what to do with the sectarian Frankenstein monster we have funded, armed and trained in the Baghdad Interior Ministry. The Jones Commission recently proposed “scrapping” the Iraqi police service. Do you agree? The Center for American Progress, directed by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, is urging that all US troops, including trainers, be redeployed this year. Why do you disagree? Lately you have taken advantage of Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness on Iran to oppose bombing that country without Congressional authorization. But you carefully decline to say whether you would support bombing Iran when and if the time comes.

This caution has a history:

– you were against the war in 2002 because it was a “dumb war”, but you had to point out that you were not against all wars, without exactly saying what wars you favored;
– then you visited Iraq for 36 hours and “could only marvel at the ability of our government to essentially erect entire cities within hostile territory”;
– then as the quagmire deepened, you cloaked yourself in the bipartisan mantle of the Baker-Hamilton Study Group, which advocated leaving thousands of American troops in Iraq to fight terrorism, train the Iraqis until they “stand up”, and sundry other tasks of occupation;

Perhaps your national security advisers are getting to you when it should be the other way around. Their expertise is not in the politics of primaries. If anything, they reject the of populist peace pressure influencing elite national security decisions. The result is a frustration towards all the Democratic candidates for what the Center for American Progress has recently called “strategic drift.” The political result is the danger of returning to John Kerry’s muffled message in 2004. The policy result may be a total security disaster for our country, draining our young soldiers’ blood and everyone’s taxes on the continuing degradation of our national honor in a war which cannot be won.

Just for the record, let me tell you my position on Iraq. I think the only alternative is to begin a global diplomatic peace offensive starting with a commitment to withdraw all our troops as rapidly as possible. That is the only way to engage the world, including the Iraqi factions, in doing something about containing the crises of refugees, reconciliation and reconstruction. It means negotiating with Iran rather than escalating to a broader war. If you want to “turn a new page”, it should not be about leaving the Sixties behind. It will be about leaving behind the superpower fantasies of both the neo-conservatives and your humanitarian hawks. And yes, it is to be “suspicious”, as Eisenhower and John Kennedy came to be suspicious, of the advice of any Wise Men or security experts who advocated the military occupation of Iraq. Is that position as extreme as your rhetoric assumes?

Your problem, if I may say so out loud, and with all respect, is that the deepest rationale for your running for president is the one that you dare not mention very much, which is that you are an African-American with the possibility of becoming president. The quiet implication of your centrism is that all races can live beyond the present divisions, in the higher reality above the dualities. You may be right. You see the problems Hillary Clinton encounters every time she implies that she wants to shatter all those glass ceilings and empower a woman, a product of the feminist movement, to be president? Same problem. So here’s my question: how can you say let’s “turn the page” and leave all those Sixties’ quarrels behind us if we dare not talk freely in public places about a black man or a woman being president? Doesn’t that reveal that on some very deep level that we are not yet ready to “turn the page”?

When you think about it, these should be wonderful choices, not forbidden topics. John Edwards can’t be left out either, for his dramatic and, once again, unstated role as yet another reformed white male southerner seeking America’s acceptance, like Carter, Clinton and Gore before him. Or Bill Richardson trying to surface the long-neglected national issues of Latinos. I think these all these underlying narratives, of blacks, women, white southerners and la raza – excuse me, Hispanic-Americans – are far more moving, engaging and electorally-important than the dry details of policy.

What I cannot understand is your apparent attempt to sever, or at least distance yourself, from the Sixties generation, though we remain your single greatest supporting constituency. I can understand, I suppose, your need to define yourself as a American rather than a black American, as if some people need to be reassured over and over. I don’t know if those people will vote for you.

You were ten years old when the Sixties ended, so it is the formative story of your childhood. The polarizations that you want to transcend today began with life-and-death issues that were imposed on us. No one chose to be “extreme” or “militant” as a lifestyle preference. It was an extreme situation that produced us. On one side were armed segregationists, on the other peaceful black youth. On one side were the destroyers of Vietnam, on the other were those who refused to submit to orders. On the one side were those keeping women in inferior roles, on the other were those demanding an equal rights amendment. On one side were those injecting chemical poisons into our rivers, soils, air and blood streams, on the other were the defenders of the natural world. On one side were the perpetrators of big money politics, on the other were keepers of the plain democratic tradition. Does anyone believe those conflicts are behind us?

I can understand, in my old age, someone wanting to dissociate from the extremes to which some of us were driven by the times. That seems to be the ticket to legitimacy in the theater of the media and cultural gatekeepers. That appears to be what happened to John Kerry when he tried to erase his heroic past as a Vietnam veteran against the war. I went through a similar process in 1982 when I ran for the legislature, reassuring voters that I wasn’t “the angry young man that I used to be.” I won the election, and then the Republicans objected to my being seated anyway! Holding the idea that the opposites of the Sixties were equally extreme or morally equivalent is to risk denying where you came from and what made your opportunities possible. You surely understand that you are one of the finest descendants of the whole Sixties generation, not some hybrid formed by the clashing opposites of that time. We want to be proud of the role we may have played in all you have become, and not be considered baggage to be discarded on your ascent. You recognize this primal truth when you stand on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, basking in the glory of those who were there when you were three years old. But you can’t have it both ways, revering the Selma march while trying to “turn the page” on the past.

This brings me back to why you want to stand in the presumed center against the “Tom Hayden Democrats.” Are you are equally distant from the “George McGovern Democrats.”, and the “Jesse Jackson Democrats”? How about the “Martin Luther King Democrats”, the “Cesar Chavez Democrats”, the “Gloria Steinem Democrats”? Where does it end?

What about the “Bobby Kennedy Democrats”? I sat listening to you last year at an RFK human rights event in our capital. I was sitting behind Ethel Kennedy and several of her children, all of whom take more progressive stands than anyone currently leading the national Democratic Party. They were applauding you, supporting your candidacy, and trying to persuade me that you were not just another charismatic candidate but the one we have been waiting for.

Will you live up to the standard set by Bobby Kennedy in 1968? He who sat with Cesar Chavez at the breaking of the fast, he who enlisted civil rights and women activists in his crusade, who questioned the Gross National Product as immoral, who dialogued with people like myself about ending the war and poverty? Yes, Bobby appealed to cops and priests and Richard Daley too, but in 1968 he never distanced himself from the dispossessed, the farmworkers, the folksingers, the war resisters, nor the poets of the powerless. He walked among us.

The greatest gift you have been given by history is that as the elected tribune of a revived democracy, you could change America’s dismal role in the world. Because of what you so eloquently represent, you could convince the world to give America a new hearing, even a new respect. There are no plazas large enough for the crowds that would listen to your every word, wondering if you are the one the whole world is waiting for. They would not wait for long, of course. But they would passionately want to give you the space to reset the American direction.

What is the risk, after all? If “think globally, act locally” ever made any sense, this is the time, and you are the prophet. If you want to be mainstream, look to the forgotten mainstream. You don’t even have to leave the Democratic Party. It’s time to renew the best legacy of the Good Neighbor policy of Roosevelt before it dissolved into the Cold War, the Strangelove priesthood, the CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala, the sordid Bay of Pigs, the open graves of Vietnam. It’s time to renew the best legacy of the New Deal before it became Neo-Liberalism, and finally achieve the 1948 Democratic vision of national health care.

May you – and Hillary too – live up to the potential, the gift of the past, prepared for you in the dreams not only of our fathers, but of all those generations with hopes of not being forgotten. #

[1] New York Times Magazine, Nov. 4, 2007

[Naomi Wolf’s new book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot was published by Chelsea Green in September.]

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy — but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree – domestically — as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government — the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors — we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security — remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” — didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable — as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space — the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

Creating a terrifying threat — hydra-like, secretive, evil — is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain — which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks — than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantanamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) — where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders — opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists — are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantanamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemoller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantanamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode — but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China — in every closed society — secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens’ groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four — you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government — after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.

“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.

“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”

“That’ll do it,” the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s — all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy — a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America — it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year — when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantanamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantanamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually — for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence — it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model — you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests — usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency — which the president now has enhanced powers to declare – he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night… Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act – which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere — while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life… How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” — a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president — without US citizens realising it yet — the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions — and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack — say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani — because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us — staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before — and this is the way it is now.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

In a bold move that could dramatically alter the playing field of the 2008 GOP presidential race, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee today named Jesus Christ as his vice presidential running mate.

Huckabee has made an increasing number of comments about his relationship with Jesus in recent debates, but few Republican insiders expected him to announce that he was anointing Christ as his vice presidential pick.

“This could be huge for Huckabee,” said Stenson Partridge, a veteran GOP consultant. “Among Republican voters, Jesus Christ is even more popular than Ronald Reagan.”

The Rev. Pat Robertson, a supporter of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, said he was “blindsided” by the news of Huckabee’s decision: “I talked to Jesus last night, and he didn’t mention anything about it.”

At a raucous Huckabee rally in Davenport, Iowa, today, supporters of the former Arkansas governor could be seen holding signs reading “HUCKABEE/CHRIST ‘08.”†

It is “highly unorthodox” for a presidential candidate to select a vice presidential running mate who is a prominent figure in the Holy Bible, says Davis Logsdon, dean of the School of Divinity at the University of Minnesota.

But according to Logsdon, if the Huckabee-Christ ticket makes it all the way to the White House, it could be historic in more ways than one: “If Huckabee is elected and then something happens to him while in office, we would be looking at our first Jewish president.”

Elsewhere, a madman attempted to take hostages at former Sen. Fred Thompson’s campaign headquarters in Rochester, N.H., but found that everyone had been given the week off.

Award-winning humorist, television personality and film actor Andy Borowitz is author of “The Republican Playbook.”

Let the drooling begin. Over me — one Iowan who, any other time, is as recognizable on the national landscape as a furrow.

Last night was my night. Iowans like me traipsed across icy parking lots and tired TV screens to tell the world, “Hey! Iowa is more than a bunch of vowels! We got the caucus!” (Try to say that without a tongue.)

And boy, do we milk this udderly unique opportunity. Here are a few notes from last night’s proceedings, a “lessons learned,” if you will, on how some of us Iowans make the most of these 15 minutes… or 117, if your bespectacled Precinct Chair goes by the book.

Never arrive at your caucus decided. No matter how decided you are.
Avoid wearing clothing that gives away your leanings (i.e. second-hand duds: Kucinich; anything with the word “rock” on it: Obama)

Politely decline all stickers thrust at you upon entry into your precinct site. Alternately, you may choose, as a friend of mine did, to wear them all.

Remember, though, the goal is to appear available, not slutty.

Sit in a portion of the room on the immediate border of an established group — even better, sandwich yourself between two. People will repeatedly confuse you for a member of their camp, and will then be beholden to woo you.

Talk to as many people as possible, particularly when the Democratic Party Order of Proceedings are being read.

If your precinct is large, and there is a question about something insignificant, like anything at all about Mike Gravel, wave the notebook page written by your 8-year-old and speak authoritatively to keep things moving.

When the Chair instructs you to choose a “preference group,” look down and scuff your shoe in front of you. Only look up if nobody comes to sweep you off your scuffing feet. Then, mill into a camp coyly. They won’t be able to help themselves.

If you find that nobody is panting after you, ask arbitrary questions of glum-looking people. To those on the prowl, this has opportunity written all over it.

Avoid interacting with the loud people. Instead, offer them a stick of gum.

When you ask a question about global human rights issues, and the kid says, “I don’t know about that but I’m in education — do you like education? Let me tell you about this guy and education…” offer him a stick of gum, too.

Be a tease. Commit to a group only after much wandering and waffling. Make them work to get your body.

Take it to the wire. Make your choice in the final seconds. This will elicit cheers from the prowlers in your chosen camp, and envious stares from those that sat there all along.

Commit dramatically. A throaty “Sticker me” works well.

Notice how, when the Obama camp Captain makes their final count, it’s like they’re doing the wave in slow motion. You are suddenly a rock star.

And that does it. We head home to our foursquares and farmhouses and once again assume the form of Field of Dreams extras to the rest of the country. But a little taller, perhaps. And who knows what these stickers might fetch on e-bay.

More than 1 billion people on our planet are forced to drink foul, infected water, which has killed at least 22 million people in the last decade. They could all have safe, clean water within 10 years, for just a tiny fraction of the cost of global military spending. Why isn’t it happening?

Most governments, especially rich white ones, would apparently rather buy weapons to kill other human beings than build water facilities to save the lives of black, brown and yellow poor people.

According to the Stockholm international peace research institute, in 2006 total global military expenditure topped $1.2tn; with the US accounting for $528.7bn of this spending and the UK for $59.2bn.

At a cost of about 5% of the world’s military budgets, over a period of 10 years clean, safe water could be provided to every person on earth. But this won’t happen because while the poor are deprived, the rich are depraved.

Mega-rich individuals, corporations and nations rule the world. They worship the false idols of celebrity, money, profits, consumerism, speculation and conspicuous consumption. Love, compassion, mercy and human solidarity are largely alien ideals in the ruthless, cut-throat world of free markets and stockmarkets. The super-wealthy know the price of everything and the value of nothing. People are commodities, just like sacks of maize or barrels of oil. Human needs are not important. Money is everything, and since the poor don’t have it, they are held in contempt. Hundreds of millions of non-white people are condemned to drink muddy, stinking water. If the have-a-lots care, they don’t show it. Their unspoken message seems to be: let them drink shit.

While children are dying all over the world every day from contaminated water, the rich world carries on regardless. And we, the people, are to blame. We let the rich get away with their greed. We keep electing governments who, at the drop of a hat, find billions to wage illegal, immoral wars, but who can’t bring themselves to even marginally downsize their armaments budget to finance a truly just battle – the battle to give everyone on this planet what we, in Britain and the west, assume is a fundamental right: easy access to drinking water that tastes good and won’t harm us.

Our government would not tolerate people dying of waterborne diseases in the UK. So why should we tolerate such needless deaths in developing countries? Isn’t a human being a human being, whoever they are and wherever they live on this planet? Aren’t all people’s lives equally precious? Apparently not, otherwise there would be concerted international action to tackle the shame of dirty water and the resultant obscene waste of human life.

I recently interviewed Nick Edmans of the charity WaterAid for my online TV series, Talking With Tatchell. He confirmed that in the eighth year of the 21st century, at least 1.1 billion people have no fresh, safe water to drink.

Before this day is over, 5,000 children will die from infected water, leaving up to 10,000 parents grieving – tonight, and every night.

All in all, around 2.2 million people – 1.8 million of them children – are killed each year by waterborne diseases.

A further 2.6 billion people have no secure, hygienic toilet facilities. They use rudimentary holes in the ground which breed disease. The human waste leaches into the soil, often contaminating the groundwater that supplies wells and despoiling rivers where people bathe, wash and fish.

This morning I woke up and walked 12 feet to my kitchen tap. I drank a large refreshing glass of pure water. Alas, the easily accessible, clean, safe water that we take for granted in the west is only a distant dream for one-sixth of the world’s population, especially in Asia and Africa.

Hundreds of millions of poor people have to trek for many miles and hours every day to fetch often foul-smelling, diseased drinking water that can cause deadly dysentery, cholera, typhoid and intestinal worms and parasites.

The lack of safe water supplies frequently impacts worst on marginal social groups, such as lower castes and ethnic minorities, who may be denied access to the best water sources and be forced to pay premium prices to private suppliers.

Some tourist developments in developing countries, such as big hotels and golf courses, involve the private owners sinking their own bore holes to extract water from below ground. This often results in the depression of the water table, drying up wells and causing water crises in the surrounding villages.

Water shortages and a lack of affordability in developing countries have, in some cases, been exacerbated by privatisation, which has usually benefited urban dwellers to the neglect of their rural counterparts, and has usually resulted in private monopolies and price hikes, to the detriment of low income families.

With global warming and rising populations, the prospect looms of future disputes – even wars – over shortages of fresh water supplies. A foretaste of such disputes can be seen in the friction between Israel and the Palestine over Tel Aviv’s diversion of water from the Jordan river to meet Israeli demand, leaving the West Bank under-supplied.

It strikes me as utterly immoral that in the midst of a world of immense wealth and plenty, billions of people have so little – not even the basics of life like safe water to drink.

Surely, it is time for a major global effort to redistribute wealth from rich nations to poor ones and to divert investment in weapons and wars to health-sustaining, life-saving development projects such as the universal provision of cheap, accessible, clean water?

Safe water is a human right. Give them water, not war.

Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner, and a member of the queer rights group OutRage! and the left wing of the Green party.

What was the greatest failure of 2007? President Bush’s “surge” in Iraq? The decline in the value of the US dollar? Subprime mortgages? No. The greatest failure of 2007 was the newly sworn in Democratic Congress.

The American people’s attempt in November 2006 to rein in a rogue government, which has committed the US to costly military adventures while running roughshod over the US Constitution, failed. Replacing Republicans with Democrats in the House and Senate has made no difference.

The assault on the US Constitution by the Democratic Party is as determined as the assault by the Republicans. On October 23, 2007, the House passed a bill sponsored by California Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman, chairwoman of a Homeland Security subcommittee, that overturns the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression, association, and assembly.

The bill passed the House on a vote of 404-6. In the Senate the bill is sponsored by Maine Republican Susan Collins and apparently faces no meaningful opposition.

Harman’s bill is called the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.”When HR 1955 becomes law, it will create a commission tasked with identifying extremist people, groups, and ideas. The commission will hold hearings around the country, taking testimony and compiling a list of dangerous people and beliefs. The bill will, in short, create massive terrorism in the United States. But the perpetrators of terrorism will not be Muslim terrorists; they will be government agents and fellow citizens.

We are beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers being built in the US by Halliburton under government contract.

Who will be on the “extremist beliefs” list? The answer is: civil libertarians, critics of Israel, 9/11 skeptics, critics of the administration’s wars and foreign policies, critics of the administration’s use of kidnapping, rendition, torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions, and critics of the administration’s spying on Americans. Anyone in the way of a powerful interest group–such as environmentalists opposing politically connected developers–is also a candidate for the list.

The “Extremist Beliefs Commission” is the mechanism for identifying Americans who pose “a threat to domestic security” and a threat of “homegrown terrorism” that “cannot be easily prevented through traditional federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts.”

This bill is a boon for nasty people. That SOB who stole your girlfriend, that hussy who stole your boyfriend, the gun owner next door–just report them to Homeland Security as holders of extreme beliefs. Homeland Security needs suspects, so they are not going to check. Under the new regime, accusation is evidence. Moreover, “our” elected representatives will never admit that they voted for a bill and created an “Extremist Belief Commission” for which there is neither need nor constitutional basis.

That boss who harasses you for coming late to work–he’s a good candidate to be reported; so is that minority employee that you can’t fire for any normal reason. So is the husband of that good-looking woman you have been unable to seduce. Every kind of quarrel and jealousy can now be settled with a phone call to Homeland Security.

Soon Halliburton will be building more detention centers.

Americans are so far removed from the roots of their liberty that they just don’t get it. Most Americans don’t know what habeas corpus is or why it is important to them. But they know what they want, and Jane Harman has given them a new way to settle scores and to advance their own interests.

Even educated liberals believe that the US Constitution is a “living document” that can be changed to mean whatever it needs to mean in order to accommodate some new important cause, such as abortion and legal privileges for minorities and the handicapped. Today it is the “war on terror” that the Constitution must accommodate. Tomorrow it can be the war on whomever or whatever.

Think about it. More than six years ago the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. The US government blamed it on al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission Report has been subjected to criticism by a large number of qualified people–including the commission’s chairman and co-chairman.

Since 9/11 there have been no terrorist attacks in the US. The FBI has tried to orchestrate a few, but the “terrorist plots” never got beyond talk organized and led by FBI agents. There are no visible extremist groups other than the neoconservatives that control the government in Washington. But somehow the House of Representatives overwhelmingly sees a need to create a commission to take testimony and search out extremist views (outside of Washington, of course).

This search for extremist views comes after President Bush and the Justice (sic) Department declared that the President can ignore habeas corpus, ignore the Geneva Conventions, seize people without evidence, hold them indefinitely without presenting charges, torture them until they confess to some made up crime, and take over the government by declaring an emergency. Of course, none of these “patriotic” views are extremist.

The search for extremist views follows also the granting of contracts to Halliburton to build detention centers in the US. No member of Congress or the executive branch ever explained the need for the detention centers or who the detainees would be. Of course, there is nothing extremist about building detention centers in the US for undisclosed inmates.

Clearly the detention centers are not meant to just stand there empty. Thanks to 2007’s greatest failure–the Democratic Congress–there is to be an “Extremist Beliefs Commission” to secure inmates for Bush’s detention centers.

President Bush promises us that the wars he has launched will cause the “untamed fire of freedom” to “reach the darkest corners of our world.” Meanwhile in America the fire of freedom has not only been tamed but also is being extinguished.

The light of liberty has gone out in the United States.

Imminent Threat

The binary worldview of “us” versus “them,” cultivated and nurtured by institutional leaders and perpetuated by corporate-state propaganda ministers, is sacrosanct orthodoxy. Those in positions of power would have us believe that there are forces of Cold War proportion out in the exterior waiting for the moment to strike and impose their mores upon the “American Way of Life.” Again and again they tell the public that “they” want to break “our” will; that “they” hate “us,” what “we” stand for, “our” freedoms, “our” way of life. Leaders incessantly declare that there are fanatics (mainly Muslim) who want to enforce their mode of existence onto Americans, that “they” want to establish, and export, a Caliphate (the Islamic form of government representing the political unity and leadership of the Muslim world); that America is in a never-ending state of threat. They unabatedly contend that “we” must fight “them” over there, so that “we” do not have to fight “them” over here.

Indeed, there are lunatics of the ultra-orthodox strain, fanatical perverts of many religions who are bent on creating a utopia of their own through wanton violence and destruction. Both inside and outside our borders, homegrown or not, radical groups can summon the ability to wreak havoc. However, we have been misled, for some time now, about the magnitude and true reality of happenings outside, and inside, the country. Most radical groups in the exterior are sparse, disconnected factions comprised of Third World populations in a deep political and economic crisis that most often “eclipse religion.”[1] What many have been led to believe—that there are killers on the prowl everywhere waiting to strike at us because we are an industrialized, “democratic” nation-state with “free” institutions and massive wealth—is certainly not the imminent threat. Our leaders consistently drag out the boogie-men to terrorize us and divert our attention from the real menace. That is, the political and economical fundamentalist class, a “Radical Establishment,” within our institutions backed by military might and nuclear primacy.

In this “Global War on Terror,” State controllers have manufactured an equal, an entity of their quotient. In order to produce and sustain their dominion over society and expand their frontier buffers in Cold War fashion, they must confront equivalence. The government, its concomitant apparatus of corporate-military-industry and their benefactors vie for, and maintain, a defense budget larger than that of the Cold War to fight an “enemy” not of Cold War proportion.[2]

In 2001 Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute, explained:

Whether one considers active troop strength, reserve troop strength, heavy tanks, armored infantry vehicles, airplanes, helicopters, or major warships, the United States and its allies possess a preponderance of the warriors and the tools of war, greatly exceeding the troop strengths and the number of weapons platforms in the hands of all potential adversaries combined. Beyond this numerical dominance, the United States and its allies possess important additional advantages of superiority in weapons technology as well as in communications, intelligence, logistics, training, maintenance, and mobility.[3]

More recently, retired US Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich exclaimed in his 2005 study The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, that “the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era… Indeed, by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.” Thus, Bacevich said, “The primary mission of America’s far-flung military establishment is global power projection…”[4]

The Radical Establishment, these Chicken Hawk “Civilian Militarists,” demand, command, and employ extremes (economical, military and political) to achieve their goals of domination and exploitation so as to sustain their positions as beneficiaries of empire.[5] They try to manipulate and seduce us into embracing and supporting acute measures to achieve their desires. They try to convince us to cede rights for safety. They try to convince us that more surveillance equates to security and is for the public good. They try to convince us that more bombs, bullets, death and destruction will bring everlasting peace, freedom and independence. They consider themselves to be “noble heroes,” “righteous protectors of the weak…” while dispensing immense devastation to those that are, in fact, infinitely weaker—those that have minute economical, political, and military power, if any at all.[6]

The Radical Establishment and Its War of Terror

During the Cold War the late social historian E.P. Thompson described how “extremism… generate[s] its own internal contradictions.” In this calculated “Long War,” the Radical Establishment demands “absolute antagonism, which can only be resolved by… extermination.”[7] In their quest to exterminate via extremes, they have inverted the nation’s self-prescribed principles to match their doctrine. Freedom is tyranny; life is death; security is surveillance; protection is control; democracy is dictatorship. By way of endemic perception and pathological pursuit these extremists embody their concocted antagonist of Cold War dimension. Liberty and autonomy are vanishing, slowly eroding under the torrential weight of elitist-extremist conduct. They see threats to their established power in every corner of our own society and the world at large.[8]

Many of these extremist ideologues would have us believe that violent conduct is confined to the “barbarous other” in the exterior, that America is discharged from atrocity, because it does not commit atrocity. It acts in the name of all that is good, moral and sacred. To question that, then, would be to question all that is good, moral and sacred. This is, essentially, a great fallacy.

Many institutional radicals lobby for and sanctify acts of aggression and butchery, but do not sell them as such. The fundamentalist class—official and governmental, corporate and private—surrounds itself with elections, laws, and Constitutional authority to achieve its objectives.[9] The Radical Establishment claims itself to be the harbinger of justice, virtue and democratic tenets. Individual acts of vigilanteism and destruction equate to terrorism, but collective acts of aggression and demolition by technologically superior “democratic” nation-states do not.

Nineteen hijackers take control of passenger aircrafts and slam them into the economic and military hubs of the American empire, the total fallout is deaths in the thousands; yes, this is indeed terrorism. The United States retaliates by launching a full scale invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The result: over a million civilian casualties (nearly three hundred times more than that of 9/11) and the upending of people’s means of survival; this is not considered terrorism.[10]

A foreign nationalist shoots down coalition soldiers and posts the horrendous act on the internet for the world to see; yes, this is indeed terrorism. Corporate mercenaries contracted by our government are caught on video opening fire on civilians without provocation, justification and hesitation; this is not considered terrorism.[11]

A suicide bomber kills several coalition soldiers, while at the same time killing innocent bystanders; yes, this is indeed terrorism. A jingoistic bombardier barrages civilians, hitting not one single “suspected terrorist”; this is not considered terrorism.[12]

Killing innocent civilians is wrong; forcing unwanted modes of existence is wrong; change by way of gunpoint is wrong; terrorism, oppression, manipulation, torture, atrocity, imperialism, and exploitation—all this is wrong. Extremism begets extremism; terrorism breeds terrorism, whether it is individual or collective. These types of extremities do not make anyone safe. They exacerbate problems and decimate the defenseless. It is an endless cycle of stupidity and senselessness, a never ending confrontation that the Radical Establishment packages and sells to us as our necessity when it is really their desire.

As historian and World War II veteran Howard Zinn recently explained, “There are societies that do not pretend to be ‘civilized’—military dictatorships and totalitarian states—and execute their victims without ceremony. Then there nations like the United States, whose claim to be civilized rests on the fact that its punishments are legitimized by a complex set of judicial procedures.”[13] He continued, “Terrorism is the killing of innocent people in order to send a message… So long as our government engages in terrorism,” the terrorism of war, “claiming always that it is done for democracy or freedom or to send a message to some other government, there will be more” terrorism and terrorists that follow its example. “Individual acts of terrorism will continue and they will be called—rightly—fanaticism. Government terrorism, on a much larger scale, will continue, and that will be called “‘foreign policy.’”[14]

The pertinent question Zinn asked was, “Isn’t it clear by now that sending a message to terrorists through [the terror of war] doesn’t work, that it only leads to more terrorism?”[15]

The most recent report by the main advisory department to the Bush Administration, National Counterterrorism Center, concluded, “Terrorist attacks against noncombatants nearly doubled in Iraq… and were up sharply in Afghanistan, with those two countries alone accounting for a 29 percent increase in terrorism worldwide… The two countries where large numbers of American combat troops are deployed are also where terrorism is rising fastest. Terrorist attacks are up 91 percent in Iraq and 53 percent in Afghanistan.”[16] The answer to Zinn’s question is, then, unfortunately, “No,” it is not clear by now. Nothing has been learned or taken into account. Addicted to the status quo, everywhere are “hideous threats to established power…”[17] Measures, however extreme, must be taken to assert and reassert domination, quail the loss of legitimacy, and maintain a clenched fist over society and the globe.

“War is a Racket”

In 1935 Smedley D. Butler, retired Brigadier General of the United States Marines, stated:

WAR is a racket…. A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes… Out of war nations acquire additional territory… This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few—the same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill… This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.[18]

With the national debt at $9 trillion, and climbing at a rate of approximately $1.5 billion a day, the now Democratic-led-Congress continues to appropriate tax payer money in the billions for continued warfare.[19] The Defense Department persistently siphons these funds to private-military-industrialist coffers to maintain the errand of global domination and continued bid for empire.

We, and the entire world, are less safe today and in fantastically bad shape because of these extremist death dealers who have plunged us into a “Long War” for profit. The Radical Establishment was repeatedly warned of the “potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion… before the [Iraq] war began.”[20] In 2006, it was confirmed—via National Intelligence Estimate—by the National Intelligence Council that “the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism.”[21] In January of 2007, the Council again concluded, “Iraqi society’s growing polarization, the persistent weakness of the security forces and the state in general, and all sides’ ready recourse to violence are collectively driving an increase in communal and insurgent violence and political extremism…”[22] The Administration attributes the current drop in violence to its much touted strategy of “troop surge.” Yet, as the Council has cautioned, “even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation…”[23]

With the implementation of the doctrine of Preemptive War, the fundamentalist class has instigated a spike in the radicalization of foreign populations, terrorist activities and the manufacture and proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.[24] States, some with nuclear arsenal, have taken a protective posture; both they and the global hegemon have itchy trigger fingers, one poised to strike at the other in “defense.” In addition, they have sent our youth to kill and be killed. The Armed Forces is now devastated, overstretched and virtually incapable of responding to factual threats, as 2007 passed as the “deadliest for US troops.”[25]

The Radical Establishment has caused us to become the most hated nation-state on the face of the earth, not because of our “freedoms,” wealth and “democracy,” but because of their reckless conduct, their willingness to play Russian roulette with our lives.[26] As Noam Chomsky has expressed, for these Radical Civilian Militarists, “It is a rational calculation, on the assumption that human survival is not particularly significant in comparison with short-term power and wealth. And that is nothing new. These themes resonate through history. The difference today is only that the stakes are enormously higher.”[27] Their “rational calculation” has amounted to the implementation of their methods of fair dealing without regard for the realistic consequences for us. They are transporting and applying their “civilized” system of “stabilization” without care for the fallout.

Extremism and Long War

These extremists in positions of authority personify the manufactured body they tell us must be destroyed. They are forcing their inverted notions of peace, freedom, civilization and democracy upon communities abroad by way of the most savage means—all in the name of benevolence, morality, and righteousness for our ears. Indeed, under the cover of pleasant oratory they are terminating innocent life; they are the force of Cold War proportion, thrusting their systems of management and modes of production onto others. Tutelage in dictatorial democracy, unfettered, predatory global commerce, and State clientelism are the way toward progress and tranquility. Consequences are secondary.

Their extremities have produced Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, war without end, more death and destruction than that of 9/11; terrorism, torture, unresponsive leadership, divisiveness, xenophobia, hate, fear, death, destruction and the expansion of neo-liberal economic ethos (a disastrous form of capitalism) of profit over the needs of people. Backed by military might and nuclear primacy, they will stop at nothing to achieve their ends and sustain their positions of power, their dominion over society and the globe via full spectrum dominance—land, sea, air and space.

This is their path toward sustaining the status-quo. Statist radicals would have us believe that our interests are synonymous; they are not. They wish to conjure sentiments of hate, fear, xenophobia, inertia, insecurity, anxiety, and pessimism so that they may capitalize on those emotions for their own ends. They want us to be aloof and divided; they want us to remain busy, struggling to survive. They want us to believe that invading Third World countries and toppling their structures and enforcing dictatorial democracies is right, just and for the benefit of security. They want us to become accustomed to the “normalization of war.”[28] They want us to see bombing underdeveloped nations as defensive; they want us to believe that the expenditure of American lives and resources is glorious, correct and beneficial when all this is wrong and to our detriment. The deified statement that “‘we’” must fight ‘them’ over there, so that ‘we’ do not have to fight ‘them’ over here,” so frequently uttered by the Radical Establishment, serves to divert our attention from the fact that “they” are already here, and pitch themselves as our “noble heroes.”

© Copyright 2008 by AxisofLogic.com

George Aleman III is an MA student in history. He is also a writer, activist and musician. His writings have appeared in Z Magazine, Dissident Voice, Third World Traveler and Axis of Logic.

This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the article its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite the author and Axis of Logic as the original source including a “live link” to the article. Thank you!

Endnotes

As the US election season draws ever nearer, the attention of political commentators, professional pundits and the corporate media is currently focused on which Democratic Party candidate will face off against the Republican choice to succeed George W Bush.

The progressive community in the US has likewise been focused on this contest to see who will lead the Democratic Party in 2008 elections. It is hoped that whoever wins this contest will lead them and the US people out of the darkness of a Republican administration, an administration, they observe, which has destroyed US standing in the world over the last eight years.

Whether it is the disaster that is the war in Iraq, whether the disrespect with which the current administration has treated the UN and international law or whether it is the astounding ignorance that it has shown in denying the irrefutable scientific evidence that climate change is the result of human activity, the common consensus among those who would happily label themselves “progressive” is that the only hope for the US in 2008 is a Democrat incumbent. Judging by the polls, this will be Hillary Clinton.

But there is a fly in the ointment. It is a word of caution arrived at via a cursory examination of recent US history – a history of war, military intervention, the subversion of human rights and democracy and economic imperialism which has been every bit as brutal and ignoble under Democratic Party administrations as under administrations led by their Republican counterparts.

Towards the end of the second world war, with Japan to all intents and purposes a defeated nation, then president Harry S Truman, a Democrat, ordered nuclear strikes against Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If this wasn’t enough, he also sanctioned the decimation of Korea and the deaths of 3 million people between 1950 and 1953.

It was a Democrat, JFK, who ordered the first US troops into Vietnam in 1963, who sanctioned an attempted armed intervention in Cuba and who initiated the embargo against the Cuban people which continues to this day.

It was Democrat Jimmy Carter, currently the world’s favourite ex-president, who initiated the doctrine of military intervention in the Middle East, who covertly provided sanctuary and funding to Pol Pot and his followers in Thailand, who poured millions into development of the neutron bomb and who sanctioned Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor in 1976, which led to the massacre of a quarter of a million East Timorese.

Then there’s Bill Clinton, that star of the Democrats, the man who, to the millions who recall his tenure in office with misty eyes and warm hearts, walks on water.

Tell that to the millions of single mothers forced to leave their kids at home while they went to work long hours to make ends meet under the Clinton welfare-to-work programme, which set in motion a transfer of wealth from poor to rich of which Ronald Reagan would have been proud.

Tell that to the Cuban people, who found their country further isolated as a consequence of the Helms-Burton Act penalising any US trading partner that also trades with Cuba, a law signed by Clinton in 1996. And tell that, finally, to the Iraqi people who saw their nation decimated for 13 years under US orchestrated, UN sanctions, sanctions in which half a million children perished, an infanticide which Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described as a “price worth paying.”

As for John Kerry, the so-called liberal from Massachusetts, he fought an election campaign in 2004 around his combat record in Vietnam, one of the most immoral and criminal wars ever waged, along with pledges to prosecute the war in Iraq even more vigorously than Bush. He also pledged to maintain US support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its repression of the Palestinian people.

Such is the human material in which so many who would describe themselves as progressive or liberal place their hopes for a new dawn in US politics.

But no-one anywhere should be under any illusions as to the true nature of this country which proclaims itself the land of the free.

The American revolution was not fought in the interests of liberty, as the official history would have us believe. It was fought in the interests of a white, property-owning class which decided that its continued prosperity would be better served by taking political power from the British.

After the successful colonisation of the continent’s indigenous population, which ended towards the end of the 18th century, and after solving the problem of slavery after the civil war by moving three million Africans from chattel slavery to wage slavery on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, where they remain to this day, the same ruling class turned its attention to the rest of the world.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had already taken care of its neighbours to the south, but to the beneficiaries of an economic system predicated on expansion, this wasn’t enough.

This is why the first world war proved such a godsend. In its wake, as a gesture of appreciation for Washington’s belated help, the British allowed the US access to the Middle East for the first time.

The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France carved up this imperial prize, handing control of Iraq’s oilfields to Britain, which brought the US in to share in the spoils as a junior partner. This arrangement lasted until after the second world war when, with Britain’s economy in tatters, the US assumed the mantle of imperial master over all.

The skilful and cynical use of repressive client regimes throughout the region post-WWII in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Israel achieved two things – maintenance of US economic and strategic control and the illusion of non-intervention and influence.

At various times, the mask slipped, but, overall, it was a policy that worked to keep the flow of petroleum and petrodollars going without interruption.

Beyond the Middle East, US overt and covert military interventions have taken place in every corner of the globe. From Africa to south-east Asia, from the jungles of Colombia and Vietnam to the streets of Chile, US power has been utilised with the aim of forming a world in the service of the US ruling class and its economic interests.

In the US itself, this thirst for profits has created a society in which over 44 million men, women and children are without health care, in which 35 million are mired in poverty, in which over 2 million people, more than any other nation on earth, are in prison and in which juveniles can be legally executed.

Both Democrats and Republicans have labelled next year’s presidential election the most important modern history. In terms of stemming the tide of US imperialism and its savage consequences at home and abroad, it means nothing.

Meaningful change will require more than just a change of government in the US. It will require a change in the system of government.

A court hearing has been set next week for Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich in his effort to secure a spot on the Texas primary ballot, a judge said Thursday.

The hearing is in response to a lawsuit Kucinich filed Wednesday against the Texas Democratic Party, which informed the candidate that he would not be on the ballot because his application was invalid. Kucinich refused to sign a loyalty oath to support the eventual Democratic nominee for president.

Kucinich, along with country music star Willie Nelson, filed a lawsuit to get Kucinich on the ballot in Texas. U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel set a Jan. 11 hearing in the case.

The civil lawsuit was delivered late Wednesday afternoon to U.S. District Court for the Western District of the United States, Kucinich spokesman Andy Juniewicz said later Wednesday.

The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order to stop the Texas Democratic Party from certifying to the Texas Secretary of State a list of candidates and to restrict the secretary of state from accepting any list that doesn’t include the name of a qualified candidate who refuses the loyalty oath.

The party must certify candidates by Monday, although the court could order them to certify a candidate after that date, said Scott Haywood, a spokesman for Secretary of State Phil Wilson.

Kucinich, a congressman from Ohio, also wants the court to declare that the oath requirement violates the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment in the Constitution.

“He’s right to challenge a blind loyalty oath to the Democratic Party because it’s un-American,” Willie Nelson said in a news release from the Kucinich campaign.

In the coming year, we will see a deluge of observances of the 40th anniversary of 1968. TV specials, t-shirts, conferences, websites and reunions will mark this defining year in U.S. history, and try to define its legacy. I certainly respect the movement activists who fought for a better world in the 1960s, and we still have much to learn from them. But I am also troubled that successful social movements are being situated only in a decade that is (for young people) in the distant past.

I was only six years old in 1968, and came into activism in the early 1980s. Today I’m teaching in a relatively progressive college, watching a new generation of antiwar and social justice activists come of age. Many of the students are learning about movements of the ’60s and early ’70s, and are finding plenty of books, websites and other sources about Vietnam, civil rights, women’s liberation, and other movements.

But recently I’ve gotten some questions about the upsurge of activism that took place in the 1980s. Students want to know more about Ronald Reagan, Rambo, and the Iran-Contra Scandal. But when they try to find any relevant information, it’s simply not there. For one class I searched the web to find photos and stories of the anti-apartheid and Central America solidarity movements, and was shocked by how little I found. A library search was even less useful.

There are specific reasons why the generation of 2008 knows more about 1968 than about 1988. The problem is partly technological, because the period before the Internet took off in the 1990s was simply not recorded or archived as it happened. The problem is also cultural, since the 1960s have been so ingrained into the popular consciousness that its memory (or at least the accepted version of its memory) has not been lost.

But there is a “black hole” in public memory after Woodstock and before the Web. The late ’70s and the ’80s were not as cool as the ’60s, but not as digitized as the ’90s. True, we didn’t invent tie-dye, but we did have punk Mohawks. We didn’t give Hendrix or the Dead to the world, but we did have the Clash and Grandmaster Flash. We can compare Papa Bush to Baby Bush, or Cheney, Gates and Rumsfeld to…Cheney, Gates and Rumsfeld. And we can tell you how much Mitt Romney reminds us of Max Headroom.

The implicit message of much of the 1968 nostalgia is that the world needs a massive political mobilization and countercultural revolution in order to create any real social change. Pundits are, for example, constantly comparing the current movement against the Iraq War to the much larger movement against the Vietnam War. In the ’80s, movements were definitely smaller and less vibrant than in the ’60s, and the mood was more conservative and apathetic. In other words, the 1980s were more like today.

Nevertheless, the ’80s movements had some notable successes that resonate today, and can provide some positive inspiration. Activists were able to persevere against great odds and win victories (or partial victories) that remain very relevant in the 2000s. Several examples come to mind, but there are certainly many more.

Successes of the ’80s

* Anti-apartheid. The African American community joined with student groups to form a powerful movement to end government and corporate collusion with the apartheid (racial separation) regime in South Africa. In the mid-’80s, they held rallies and sit-ins to pressure campuses and city councils to divest from companies doing business on the backs of black South Africans. By kicking out the U.S. buttress supporting apartheid, they can claim part of the credit for the final collapse of the white dictatorship, and the 1994 election that brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power.

*Central America solidarity. The peace movement opposed U.S. support for the right-wing death squad regime in El Salvador fighting leftist FMLN rebels. It also opposed aid to the right-wing Contra rebels fighting the Sandinista revolutionary government in Nicaragua. The powerful movement against “another Vietnam” won a congressional cut-off of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras (forcing the Reagan Administration to use surreptitious means to fund the rebels). Through the Witness and Sanctuary programs, the solidarity movement gave a human face to Central American refugees. It did not prevent the invasions that toppled nationalist governments in Grenada and Panama, but did help to prevent full-scale U.S. invasions of Nicaragua and El Salvador.

* Nuclear freeze. When medium-range missiles were stationed in Europe by the Carter Administration, an enormous global movement erupted against the growing threat of nuclear war. The widespread sentiment later pressured President Reagan to make an agreement with Soviet leaders to slowly withdraw the Euromissiles. The European movement against the nuclear arms race fueled the growth of Green parties opposing corporate globalization–long before anti-globalization was cool.

*Anti-nuke. The nuclear power plant accidents at Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl galvanized horror and opposition to civilian nuclear energy. Huge rallies, concerts and local site occupations effectively halted construction of new atomic reactors and uranium mines in the U.S. (though construction continued in some other countries). Reviewing the anti-nuke literature of that era can remind us that more radioactive waste would not be a solution to global warming.

*Act Up. In the early stages of the HIV epidemic, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) began to use creative direct actions to create public awareness, using the slogan “Silence = Death.” The activism was obviously unsuccessful in halting the epidemic, but after Reagan it helped direct some government resources toward medical research, and may have slightly alleviated the homophobic ostracism that patients received. Act Up became the most visible example of the larger LGBT movement (remaining active to the present), and sparked more organizing in the community.

*Clinic defense. When the fundamentalists of Operation Rescue harassed, blocked, and sometimes attacked women entering abortion clinics, feminists around the country rallied to escort the women. The pro-choice movement successfully defended many women’s rights to a safe and legal abortion, yet many poor, rural and young women lost access to that right.

Whether it was pro-choice, Act Up, Witness, Sanctuary, anti-nuke or divestment, the ’80s movements did not rely on lobbying or presidential elections to pressure for change, but took direct action on a grassroots level. Before the Internet, we had to organize through mailings, phone trees, and something called face-to-face contact (not to be confused with Facebook). By relying on listserves and on-line petitions, we sometimes forget the powerful combination of personal organizing and direct action.

Why Study the ’80s?

When a historical era is ignored and not accurately taught, the vacuum will inevitably be filled with lies. The late Carter Administration activated the doctrine for Middle East interventions, yet today Carter is hailed as peacemaker. The Reagan-Bush Administration rationalized the secrecy and militarism we now see in the Bush-Cheney Administration (with some of the same leading figures), yet today Reagan is credited for ending the Cold War. Most of our current crises can be traced to the policies of the 1980s, and studying the lessons of that era can help guide decisions we make today: “Same Shit, Different Century.”

Vietnam Syndrome. After the U.S. lost the Vietnam War in 1975, the American public was reluctant to intervene in another debacle. The late Carter and Reagan Administrations defined this reluctance as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and began treating the “disease” with fearmongering, Rambo movies, and a series of interventions against Iran, Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, etc. We can anticipate a healthy “Iraq Syndrome” following the current disastrous war, but should not relax if the U.S. withdraws from Baghdad. For example, there are direct parallels between support for right-wing death squad governments in El Salvador in the ’80s and in Colombia today, and between the destabilization of socialist governments in Nicaragua in the ’80s and in Venezuela today.

Scare tactics and lies. If you think that “War on Terror” scare tactics are harmful to civil liberties today, you shoulda’ seen the anti-Communist hysteria of the late Cold War. Instead of possibly building a single dirty bomb, the “Evil Empire” had thermonuclear missiles aimed at our cities, with both sides always on a hair-trigger alert. After the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and Iranians ousted the Shah in 1979, the “Carter Doctrine” created the Central Command to defend Middle Eastern oil fields for U.S. corporations. Since anti-Communism was not as potent an excuse as it had been earlier in the Cold War, the media and Hollywood resorted to a demonization of Muslims, which proved more effective to psych-up Americans for war.

Military pressure and democracy. Reagan followed Carter in 1981 with a massive military build-up, which his supporters credit for bringing down the Soviet Union ten years later. Yet media histories largely overlook the movements of Polish Solidarity workers and Soviet “national minorities” who internally cracked the Soviet bloc. We forgot that peoples are perfectly capable of overthrowing their own dictators, without being undermined by outside military intervention. This lesson, had we learned it, may have later proven useful in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

War with Iran. From the moment of the Iranian Revolution and seizure of hostages in the U.S. Embassy, Washington has tried to topple the Shi’ite government in Tehran. In the current Iran hysteria, how many Americans realize that the U.S. has already been at war with Iran? In 1987-88, the U.S. Navy actively sided with Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, by escorting tankers carrying Iraqi oil, attacking Iranian oil rigs, sinking Iranian boats, and “accidentally” shooting down an Iranian civilian jetliner. A war with Iran is not a hypothetical future possibility, but a continuation of a long-simmering conflict.

Iran-Contra Scandal. Reagan armed both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, providing naval escorts and intelligence for Iraq, while selling missiles to Iran. Col. Oliver North secretly sold the missiles to Iran, to raise funds for the Contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Henry Kissinger advised Reagan to “bleed both sides” in the Iran-Iraq War, much like Bush in Iraq today arming both the Shi’ite-led government and Sunni militias. The secrecy of the Reagan years also laid the basis of the PATRIOT Act after 9/11. Some activists saw Reagan’s “shadow government” as a Republican aberration, while others saw it as an inevitable outcome of imperial expansion — much the same debate as we have about Bush and Iraq today.

Jihadists in Afghanistan. Carter armed the Islamist mujahedin rebels fighting against the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan, triggering the Soviet invasion in 1979. Carter’s national security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski knew he was drawing the Soviets into their own “Vietnam,” which they lost within a decade. Part of the U.S. aid went to the northern Afghan groups that later controlled and fought over Kabul in 1992-96. But most U.S. aid went to Pashtun jihadist groups supported by the Pakistanis and Saudis, who sent in a young engineer named Osama bin Laden. In this way, the U.S. helped lay the groundwork for Taliban rule in 1996, and the jihadist “blowback” in 2001, when Bin Laden successfully drew another superpower into the Afghan quagmire.

Military rule in Pakistan. Much as Reagan backed Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq as a key ally against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Bush has backed Pervez Musharraf as a key ally against the Taliban. But in both cases, undermining democracy in Pakistan has only exacerbated the regional crisis. Benazir Bhutto has lost her life under Musharraf’s watch, just as Zia executed her father, also a former prime minister. In the 1980s, Pakistani intelligence aided the jihadists who would later become al-Qa’ida (though you wouldn’t learn this by viewing the new film Charlie Wilson’s War). If you’re looking for “9/11 Truth,” stop looking for phantom missiles shot at the Pentagon in 2001, and start looking at the real missiles that the Pentagon sent to Afghanistan two decades earlier. The true “conspiracy” was part and parcel of U.S. imperial history, not outside of that history.

Failures of ’80s movements

Like the ’60s movements, the ’80s movements made some critical mistakes. The peace movement floundered as U.S. interventions targeted Middle Eastern countries, where there were few leftist “good guys” like the ANC or FMLN, and even fewer Christian “good guys” like Archbishops Tutu or Romero. As we expressed solidarity for popular revolutions, we didn’t adequately support civilians caught between two “bad guys,” particularly in the 1991 Gulf War.

We had also hoped that an independent leftist alternative to the superpowers was possible in countries such as Nicaragua and East Germany. Yet their peoples were overawed by the West’s military power and were drawn to its consumerism, leading to conservative victories in 1990 elections. It wasn’t until recently that progressives won electoral victories in Latin America, and could again criticize capitalism in Eastern Europe.

Movements in the 1980s had trouble integrating class and anti-imperialist politics with racial/ethnic “identity politics” and the “new social movements” (feminist, LGBT, environmental, cultural, etc.). Like in the 1960s and today, white straight males held social advantages that prevented the growth of progressive movements. When activists turned to more domestic issues in the early Clinton Administration, and another upsurge of activism began against WTO globalization in the late Clinton years, these problems were carried forward.

Revisiting the ’80s

Mindful of these and other failures, veterans of 1980s movements have never drawn much attention to our experiences. We’ve been reluctant to tell the stories of the ’80s, lest we sound like the ’60s movement veterans who rest on the laurels of their past glories. But it has become important to revisit our memories of the ’80s, as the media focuses on memories of 1968.

It’s time to look in the basement and garage for those old boxes crammed with treasures found nowhere on the Internet. Dust off those old glossies and xeroxed newsletters and ‘zines, and warm up the scanner. Get those stories and images on the web or, better yet, set up websites where people can post their own memories, and apply past lessons to the present day. Assign students to interview 1980s activists and community organizers, and search for documents in library archives to summarize and put on-line. Hold reunions of old activist groups, and videotape them to capture the stories and strategies for new generations.

But ultimately, neither 1968 nor 1988 can really provide models for the generation of 2008. Today’s generation shouldn’t have to recycle the images of by-gone eras, or follow the templates of past student groups. Instead of always chanting the golden-oldie slogans from the Vietnam era or the WTO rallies, they can be creating their own new forms of protest, more appropriate to these wired times. But it always helps to have a fuller view of the past, to figure out what to keep and what to discard.

For those of us who experienced the 1980s, we should study our past in order to renew our own involvement in social change, to keep trying to make the world a better place. And we’d better hurry up to define our own history, before Tom Brokaw produces a special on the “’80s Generation.”

The unimaginable has happened, to the displeasure of arrogant Europe. Africa, thought to be so poor that it would agree to anything, has said no in rebellious pride. No to the straitjacket of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), no to the complete liberalisation of trade, no to the latest manifestations of the colonial pact.

It happened in December at the second EU-Africa summit in Lisbon, where the main objective was to force the African countries to sign new trade agreements by 31 December 2007 in accordance with the Cotonou Convention of 2000 winding up the 1975 Lomé accords. Under these, goods from former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific are imported into the European Union more or less duty-free, except for products such as sugar, meat and bananas that are a problem for European producers. The World Trade Organisation has insisted that these preferential arrangements be dismantled or replaced by trade agreements based on reciprocity, claiming that this is the only way African countries can continue to enjoy different treatment. The EU opted for completely free trade in the guise of EPAs. So the 27 were asking African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to allow EU goods and services to enter their markets duty-free (1).

The president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, denounced these strong-arm tactics, refused to sign and stormed out. South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki immediately supported his stand and Namibia also decided not to sign (bravely, since an increase in EU customs duties would make it impossible for Namibia to export or continue to produce beef). Even French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who made unfortunate remarks at Dakar in July 2007 (2), supported the countries that were most strongly opposed to these agreements, saying he was in favour of globalisation but not the despoliation of countries that had nothing left (3).

The EPAs aroused wide public concern. Social movements and trade union organisations south of the Sahara mobilised against them. And the revolt against them bore fruit: the summit ended in failure. The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, was forced to back down and accept the African countries’ call for further discussions. He has promised to resume negotiations in February.

This crucial victory is another sign that things are improving for Africa. In the past few years, the bloodiest conflicts have been settled, leaving only Darfur, Somalia and East Congo. Democratic progress has been consolidated and local economies prosper under the guidance of a new generation of leaders, despite social inequalities.