The Rag Blog

The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.

In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city’s central square, to protest the skyrocketing cost of tortillas.

In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.

In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect — a consequence of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously defy international order.

In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.

The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of feeding a family in the Americas isn’t direct, of course. But as with all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment opportunities. The objective is commonly called “free trade,” a posture that collapses quickly on examination.

It’s not unlike what Britain, a predecessor in world domination, imagined during the latter part of the 19th century, when it embraced free trade, after 150 years of state intervention and violence had helped the nation achieve far greater industrial power than any rival.

The United States has followed much the same pattern. Generally, great powers are willing to enter into some limited degree of free trade when they’re convinced that the economic interests under their protection are going to do well. That has been, and remains, a primary feature of the international order.

The ethanol boom fits the pattern. As discussed by agricultural economists C Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “the biofuel industry has long been dominated not by market forces but by politics and the interests of a few large companies,” in large part Archer Daniels Midland, the major ethanol producer. Ethanol production is feasible thanks to substantial state subsidies and very high tariffs to exclude much cheaper and more efficient sugar-based Brazilian ethanol. In March, during President Bush’s trip to Latin America, the one heralded achievement was a deal with Brazil on joint production of ethanol. But Bush, while spouting free-trade rhetoric for others in the conventional manner, emphasized forcefully that the high tariff to protect US producers would remain, of course along with the many forms of government subsidy for the industry.

Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices of corn — and tortillas — have been climbing rapidly. One factor is that industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices.

The 1994 US-sponsored NAFTA agreement may also play a significant role, one that is likely to increase. An unlevel-playing-field impact of NAFTA was to flood Mexico with highly subsidised agribusiness exports, driving Mexican producers off the land.

Mexican economist Carlos Salas reviews data showing that after a steady rise until 1993, agricultural employment began to decline when NAFTA came into force, primarily among corn producers — a direct consequence of NAFTA, he and other economists conclude. One-sixth of the Mexican agricultural work force has been displaced in the NAFTA years, a process that is continuing, depressing wages in other sectors of the economy and impelling emigration to the US.

It is, presumably, more than coincidental that President Clinton militarised the Mexican border, previously quite open, in 1994, along with implementation of NAFTA.

The “free trade” regime drives Mexico from self-sufficiency in food towards dependency on US exports. And as the price of corn goes up in the United States, stimulated by corporate power and state intervention, one can anticipate that the price of staples may continue its sharp rise in Mexico.

Increasingly, bio fuels are likely to “starve the poor” around the world, according to Runge and Senauer, as staples are converted to ethanol production for the privileged — cassava in sub-Saharan Africa, to take one ominous example. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, tropical forests are cleared and burned for oil palms destined for bio fuel, and there are threatening environmental effects from input-rich production of corn-based ethanol in the United States as well.

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration ran its warrantless eavesdropping program without the Justice Department’s approval for up to three weeks in 2004, nearly triggering a mass resignation of the nation’s top law enforcement officials, the former No. 2 official disclosed Tuesday.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey said that those he believed were prepared to quit included then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Comey said then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card visited Ashcroft as he lay gravely ill in a hospital bed on March 10, 2004, and pressed him to re-certify the program’s legality. Ashcroft refused.

“I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very seriously sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me,” Comey recalled. “I thought it was improper.”

Comey, who’d assumed Ashcroft’s powers on an acting basis, had raced ahead of Gonzales and Card to the George Washington University Hospital, his car’s emergency lights flashing, and dashed up the stairs to Ashcroft’s room, trailed by his security detail.

“That night was probably the most difficult time of my professional life,” Comey recalled.

Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief counsel, David Addington, also challenged the Justice Department’s stand on the legality of the program, which was intended to detect terrorist threats and would have expired on March 11, 2004, if Bush hadn’t reauthorized it, he said.

The revelations dealt a new blow to Gonzales’ efforts to keep his job as Ashcroft’s successor amid congressional and Justice Department investigations into whether he’s politicized his agency with the pursuit of alleged voter fraud, the screening of job applicants based on their party affiliations, and the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, which Gonzales said Tuesday were overseen by Comey’s successor, Paul McNulty.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – When her heart is heaviest, Sahira Kereem tries to think of the little things her husband did that annoyed her. She remembers times when she suggested they visit her parents, and he just rolled his eyes.

The mental trick rarely brings her comfort. The fact remains that Riyadh Juma Saleh, her husband of nearly 15 years, went missing one day nearly three years ago and Kareem has no idea what became of him.

Over the past four years, as sectarian kidnappings and killings have gripped Iraq and U.S. forces have arrested untold numbers in an effort to pacify the country, tens of thousands of Iraqis have vanished, often in circumstances as baffling as that of Kereem’s husband, a Shiite Muslim father of three.

There’s no accurate count of the missing since the war began. Iraqi human rights groups put the figure at 15,000 or more, while government officials say 40 to 60 people disappeared each day throughout the country for much of last year, a rate equal to at least 14,600 in one year.

Way back in 1999, when I was still a Tomdispatch-less book editor, I read a proposal from Chalmers Johnson. He was, then, known mainly as a scholar of modern Japan, though years earlier I had read his brilliant book on Chinese peasant nationalism — about a period in the 1940s when imperial Japan was carrying out its “3-all” campaigns (kill-all, burn-all, loot-all) in the northern Chinese countryside. The proposal, for a book to be called “Blowback” — a CIA term of tradecraft that, like most Americans, I had never heard before — focused on the “unintended consequences” of the Agency’s covert activities abroad and the disasters they might someday bring down upon us. Johnson began with an introduction in which he reviewed, among other things, his experiences in the Vietnam War era when, as a professed Cold Warrior, a former CIA consultant, and a professor of Asian studies at Berkeley, he would have been on the other side of the political fence from me.

In that introduction, he recalled his dismay with antiwar activists who were, he felt (not incorrectly), often blindly romantic about Asian communism and hadn’t bothered to do their homework on the subject. “They were,” he wrote, “defining the Vietnamese Communists largely out of their own romantic desires to oppose Washington’s policies.” He added:

“As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulse of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.”

It was a reversal of sentiment to which no other American of his age and background, to the best of my knowledge, had admitted. It reflected a mind impressively willing to reconsider and change — and, as it happened, it also reflected a man on a journey out of the world of Cold War anti-communism and into the heart of the American empire. When Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire finally came out in 2000, it was largely ignored (or derided) in the mainstream — until, that is, September 11th, 2001. Then, “blowback,” and the phrase that went with it, “unintended consequences,” entered our language, thanks to Johnson, and the paperback of the book, now seen as prophetic, hit the 9/11 tables in bookstores across the United States, becoming a bestseller.

Johnson’s intellectual odyssey had begun when the Cold War ended, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the American imperial structure of bases (and policy) in Asia remained standing, remarkably unchanged and unaffected by that seemingly world-shaking event. An invitation, five years later, to visit the heavily American-garrisoned Japanese island of Okinawa, in turmoil over a case in which two U.S. Marines and a sailor had raped a 12 year-old Okinawan girl, also strongly affected his thinking. There, Johnson saw firsthand what our global baseworld looked like and what it did to others on this planet. (“I was flabbergasted by the 37 American military bases I found on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands and the enormous pressures it put on the population there… As I began to study it, though, I discovered that Okinawa was not exceptional. It was the norm. It was what you find in all of the American military enclaves around the world.”)

Now, five and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, Johnson has reached the provisional end of his quest and the single prophetic volume, Blowback, has become “The Blowback Trilogy.” In 2004, a second volume, The Sorrows of Empire, arrived, focused on how the American military had garrisoned the globe and how militarism had us in its grip; and finally, this year, a magisterial third and final volume, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, appeared. No one should miss it. It lays out in chilling detail the ways in which imperial overstretch imperils the American republic and what’s left of our democratic system as well as the American economy.

Now, in a step beyond even his latest book, Johnson considers whether we can end our empire before it ends us. Tom

U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams told a group of Jewish Republicans Thursday that the effort the United States is investing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is aimed at lessening the pressure from Arabs and Europeans who weren’t happy with the U.S. in its past approach.

Abrams was quoted by sources at the meeting as saying that Arab and European countries want to see that there is at least an attempt or energy being exerted by the U.S. to move the peace process forward.

Abrams said the talks are sometimes not more than “process for the sake of process.”

The comments were made during a breakfast meeting of a forum of Jewish Republicans directed by Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia, chief deputy minority whip.

Some of the attendees understood Abrams’ comments as an assurance that the peace initiative promoted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice doesn’t have the full backing of President George W. Bush.

“He was basically telling us that he [the President] will not let it get out of hand,” one of them said.

Abrams has long been seen by Americans and Israelis as the more skeptical member of the team responsible for Middle East diplomacy.

About two weeks ago, Haaretz reported that “Rice even has to contend with skeptics within the ranks of her own department, most notably Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, who holds the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio in the White House. Israeli Foreign Ministry sources say that Abrams believes her plan will likely fail.”

However, people close to Abrams say it is wrong to portray him as someone who is not in tune with Rice.

The National Security Council, in a statement released Thursday, claimed that it “is inaccurate to suggest that the White House and State Department are at odds on this issue, for the entire administration – including Mr. Abrams – is committed to pursuing it and the rest of the President’s agenda.”

A Washington diplomat commenting on Abrams’ remarks told Haaretz that “it might make him uncomfortable because of the tone, but he really didn’t say anything new.”

The diplomat pointed to comments made by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during a visit to Washington two weeks ago that “we should negotiate because it’s better than sit and do nothing.”

The Wall Street Journal’s main Hugo Chavez antagonist is its self-styled Latin American “expert” Mary Anastasia O’Grady who makes up for in imagination and vitriol what she lacks in knowledge and journalistic integrity. She, however, wasn’t assigned to write the May 1 Journal attack piece reporters David Luhnow in Mexico City and Peter Millard in Caracas got to do titled “How Chavez Aims to Weaken US.” Of course, when it comes to Venezuela, the issue is oil and Chavez’s having the “audacity” to want his people to benefit most from their own resources, not predatory foreign oil companies the way it used to be when the country’s leadership only served the interests of capital ignoring essential social needs. No longer.

Chavez, of course, announced months ago his government would complete renationalizing his country’s oil reserves when state oil company PDVSA became the majority shareholder May 1 in four Orinoco River basin oil projects with a minimum 60% ownership in joint ventures with foreign partners. The plan was broadly denounced in the US major media with Journal columnist O’Grady writing April 16 “Chavez (was) brimming with bravado as he shredded (the) oil contracts (telling) foreigners to step aside because he’s in charge now (but the move will likely) end up hitting the ‘commandante of the revolution’ in the pocketbook (because of) corruption, incompetence and mismanagement” meaning Venezuela will now run all its own oil operations and forge its own future, not Big Oil O’Grady wants sole right to do it. No longer indeed, and O’Grady’s not pleased. She’s also dead wrong in her outlook for Venezuela’s oil future run by PDVSA with foreign partners, but don’t ever expect her to admit it.

So is the New York Times agreeing April 10 with O’Grady and other corporate media Big Oil cheerleaders. The Times used charged language condemning Chavez’s “revolutionary flourish (and his) ambitious (plan to) wrest control of several major oil projects from American and European companies (with a) showdown (ahead for these) coveted energy resources….” The Times went on to claim this action would undermine Venezuela’s growth hinting Big Oil’s threat to leave might get Chavez to back down enough to get them to stay. It never happened as this writer suggested April 12 in an article titled “Wall Street Journal and New York Times Attack journalism.” The article made it clear oil exploration and production in Venezuela is so profitable that even with a smaller share of the profits US, European and other Big Oil investors wouldn’t dream of leaving. Whine plenty, leave, not likely, and now we know they won’t.

AP’s Natalie Obiko Pearson reported April 26 that “Four major oil companies (stopped whining April 25 and) agreed to cede control of Venezuela’s last remaining (majority-owned) privately run oil projects to President Hugo Chavez’s government” with ConocoPhillips coming around May 1 showing it, too, was all bark and no bite. Those agreeing through signed memorandums of understanding were Chevron, BP(Amoco) PLC, France’s Total SA, Norway’s Statoil ASA, ConocoPhillips, and with most antagonistic of all to the idea ExxonMobil finally doing it privately as was almost certain to happen and then did.

AP reported ConocoPhillips has the most Orinoco basin exposure in two of four projects, Ameriven and Petrozuata with a (former) 50.1% stake in the latter. It was inconceivable the company would abandon them, and on May 1 it announced it would stay on. The one remaining issue to be resolved is compensation with foreign investors having until June 26 to negotiate terms for their reduced stakes. Expect more Big Oil whining followed by capitulation again to Venezuelan Energy Ministry’s expected offer of fair and equitable takeover terms.

On April 26, PDVSA’s web site reported a total of 10 foreign oil companies agreed to transfer majority control of their “Oil Belt” operations to the state-run oil company. Further, the company expects to achieve a daily capacity of 5.85 million barrels in 2012 and said its January 1 taking control of 32 oil fields will advance the country “toward full national sovereignty over (its) natural energy reserves.”

In response to these actions, and on the day it took effect, the Journal went on the attack again with more ahead certain to be as false and misleading. Its writers called Chavez a “self-proclaimed Maoist (wanting to) reshape the global oil business by sidelining the US and making China his country’s chief strategic energy partner” for investment and export. The Journal also accused Chavez of using “oil as a political weapon” since taking office in 1999 offering discounted oil “to dozens of Latin American countries” as his weapon of choice plus forging alliances with US “economic rivals like China and political rivals like Iran.”

Hugo Chavez, in fact, is a self-proclaimed social democrat charting his own independent course toward progressive “21st century socialism” along the lines Latin American expert James Petras calls the “pragmatic left” in contrast to the more “radical left” of Colombia’s FARC guerrillas; elements of “teachers and peasant-indigenous movements in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas in Mexico;” many “small Marxist groups in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere;” and Venezuela’s “peasant and barrio movements,” among others. Other Latin American leaders Petras calls “pragmatic” leftists include Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Cuba’s Castro and many “large electoral parties and major peasant and trade unions in Central and South America” including Mexico’s PRD party, El Salvador’s FMLN, Chile’s Communist Party, “the majority in Peruvian (Ollanta) Humala’s parliamentary party;” and others including “the great majority of left Latin American intellectuals.”

Unlike what the Wall Street Journal and rest of the US corporate media report or imply, Chavez and others on the “pragmatic left” aren’t aiming to destroy capitalism, just tame it. They also plan no wholesale renunciation of accumulated IMF, World Bank and other international lending agency debt, only calling for it to be on more equitable terms; restructuring it to make their nations’ debt burden fair; and aiming to become free from its repressive yoke as Venezuela did paying it off completely with Chavez announcing May 1 his country is pulling out of the IMF and World Bank, formally breaking free from the kind of debt slavery these institutions impose on countries they lend to guaranteeing their people continued impoverishment.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is trying to evade responsibility for problems at the Guantanamo Bay prison by falsely blaming defense lawyers for the trouble, the New York City Bar says.

The group’s president leveled the criticism in asking Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to abandon a U.S. Justice Department proposal to limit lawyers’ access to the nearly 400 detainees.

In a court filing this month, the department said attorney access via the mail system has “enabled detainees’ counsel to cause unrest on the base by informing detainees about terrorist attacks.”

The mail system was “misused” to inform detainees about military operations in Iraq, activities of terrorist leaders, efforts in the war on terror, the Hezbollah attack on Israel and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the department said in this month’s court filing.

“This is an astonishing and disingenuous assertion,” the association president, Barry M. Kamins, wrote Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Kamins said many detainees have been held in solitary confinement for prolonged periods and have lost hope of a fair hearing to demonstrate their innocence.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lt. Daniel Zimmerman, an infantry platoon leader in Iraq, puts a blog on the Internet every now and then “to basically keep my friends and family up to date” back home.

It just got tougher to do that for Zimmerman and a lot of other U.S. soldiers.

No more using the military’s computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and nine other Web sites, the Pentagon says.

Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department’s computer network.

The change limits use of the popular outlets for service members on the front lines, who regularly post videos and journals.

“I put my blog on there and my family reads it,” said Zimmerman, 29, a platoon leader with B Company, 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment.

“It scares the crap out of them sometimes,” he said.

“I keep it as vague as possible,” he said. “I’m pretty responsible about it. It’s just basically to tell a little bit about my life over here” he said.

He’s regularly at a base where he doesn’t have Defense Department access to the Internet, but he has used it when he goes to bigger bases. He’ll have to rely on a private account all the time now.

Memos about the change went out in February, and it took effect last week. It does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department’s network.

The cafe sites are run by a private vendor, FUBI (For US By Iraqis).

Also, the ban also does not affect other sites, such as Yahoo, and does not prevent soldiers from sending messages and photos to their families by e-mail.

Internet use has become a troublesome issue for the military as it struggles to balance security concerns with privacy rights. As blogs and video-sharing become more common, the military has voiced increasing concern about service members revealing details about military operations or other information about equipment or procedures that will aid the enemy.

At the same time, service members have used the Web sites to chronicle their time in battle, posting videos and writing journals that provide a powerful, personal glimpse into their days at war.

“These actions were taken to enhance and increase network security and protect the use of the bandwidth,” said Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.

The Pentagon said that use of the video sites in particular was putting a strain on the network, and also opening it to potential viruses or penetration by so-called “phishing” attacks in which scam artists try to steal sensitive data by mimicking legitimate Web sites.

His cravenly pro-US policy on the Middle East misunderstood Bush’s real agenda and resulted in catastrophic failure

Tony Blair’s opposition to an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war last summer precipitated his downfall. Now that he has announced the date of his departure from Downing Street, his entire Middle East record needs to be placed under an uncompromising lens.

Blair came to office with no experience of, and virtually no interest in, foreign affairs, and ended by taking this country to war five times. Blair boasts that his foreign policy was guided by the doctrine of liberal interventionism. But the war in Iraq is the antithesis of liberal intervention. It is an illegal, immoral and unnecessary war, a war undertaken on a false prospectus and without sanction from the UN.

Blair’s entire record in the Middle East is one of catastrophic failure. He used to portray Britain as a bridge between the two sides of the Atlantic. By siding with America against Europe on Iraq, however, he helped to destroy the bridge. Preserving the special relationship with America was the be all and end all of Blair’s foreign policy. He presumably supported the Bush administration over Iraq in the hope of exercising influence on its policy. Yet there is no evidence that he exercised influence on any significant policy issue. His support for the neoconservative agenda on Iraq was uncritical and unconditional.

Blair failed to understand that America’s really special relationship is with Israel, not Britain. Every time that George Bush had to choose between Blair and Ariel Sharon, he chose the latter. Blair’s special relationship with Bush was a one-way street: Blair made all the concessions and got nothing tangible in return.

American policy towards the Middle East was doomed to failure from the start, and the end result has been to saddle Britain with a share of the responsibility for this failure. The premise behind American policy was that Iraq was the main issue in Middle East politics and that regime change in Baghdad would weaken the Palestinians and force them to accept a settlement on Israel’s terms. The road to Jerusalem, it was argued, went through Baghdad. This premise was wrong. Iraq was a non-issue; it did not pose a threat to any of its neighbours, and certainly not to America or Britain. The real issue was Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and America’s support for Israel in its savage colonial war against the Palestinian people.

Two elements are necessary to commit the crime of genocide:

1) the mental element, meaning intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and

2) the physical element, which includes any of the following: killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births; or forcibly transferring children to another group.

Considering that such clear language comes from a UN treaty which is legally binding on our country, things could start getting a little worrisome — especially when you realize that since our government declared economic and military warfare on Iraq we’ve killed well over one million people, fast approaching two.

This summer will be one year since researchers from Johns Hopkins University collected data for a study which concluded 655,000 additional deaths were caused by the military war, and things have only gotten worse since then. Then consider that the economic war killed an additional 500,000 Iraqi kids under the age of five during only the first seven years of sanctions which were in force for a dozen years, according to a 1999 U.N. report.

Based on the Johns Hopkins estimate of Iraqis killed in the war, one could conservatively estimate that another 2.6 million people have been wounded. The U.N. estimates that between 1.5 million and 2 million Iraqis are now “internally displaced” by the fighting and roughly the same number have fled their country, including disproportionate numbers of doctors and other professionals.

If you are sitting down and possess a healthy imagination, try conjuring up similar conditions here in our land. Start with the fact that few people buy bottled water and what comes out of the tap is guaranteed to at least make you sick if not kill you Three times as many of our fellow citizens are out of work as during the Great Depression On a good day we have three or four hours of electricity to preserve food or cool the 110-degree heat No proper hospitals or rehab clinics exist to help the wounded become productive members of society Roads are a mess Reports of birth defects from exposure to depleted uranium have begun surfacing around the country. Reflect for a minute on the grief brought by a single loved one’s death. Then open your heart to the reality of life if we suffered casualties comparable to those endured by the people of Iraq.

In the former cities of Atlanta, Denver, Boston, Seattle, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, Baltimore, San Francisco, Dallas and Philadelphia every single person is dead. In Vermont, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Oregon, South Carolina and Colorado every single person is wounded.

The entire populations of Ohio and New Jersey are homeless, surviving with friends, relatives or under bridges as they can. The entire populations of Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky have fled to Canada or Mexico. Over the past three years, one in four U.S. doctors has left the country. Last year alone 3,000 doctors were kidnapped and 800 killed. In short, nobody “out there” is coming to save us.

We are in hell.

Of course our government didn’t intend to commit genocide, it just sort of happened. The Iraqis kept getting in the way while we were trying to complete the mission. Mistakes were made as we were building democracy, but surely no genocide was intended. After all, we are the international deciders of what is and what isn’t genocide, and we know full well that intent is a requirement.

It was only “collateral genocide” and lord knows we did our very best to avoid it.

Editor’s Comment: Perhaps never before in history has the popular class been so challenged by an illusion of the invincibility of the barbaric state. When the mass media and the state enjoy an alliance for advancing the purpose and direction of the ruling class, ghosts of futility and defeat often visit the consciousness of the people. James Petras’ essay reveals the deepest hopes and abiding power that lives in the “cultural renaissance” now thriving in the face of state’s militarism, mass media control and economic violence. In this essay, we on the left, learn from our mistakes, renew our confidence and reinvest our selves in the mission we share with “the people”. – Les Blough, Editor

“The truth is that the barbaric state is vulnerable, tactically powerful because of money and arms but strategically vulnerable: No institutions, even those that buttress a police state, can stand in the face of a sustained cultural and political resistance that exposes its deceptions, its criminal acts, its corruption and depredations.”

Introduction

We live in a time of imperial-driven destructive wars in the name of ‘democracy’, savage exploitation in the name of ‘emerging world powers’, massive forced population displacement in the name of ‘immigration’ and large-scale pillage of natural resources in the name of ‘free markets’. We live in a time of barbarism and the barbarian elites employ an army of linguistic and cultural manipulators to justify their conquests.

The great crimes against most of humanity are justified by a corrosive debasement of language and thought – a deliberate fabrication of euphemisms, falsehoods and conceptual deceptions. Cultural expressions are a central determinant in class, national, ethnic and gender relations. They reflect and are products of political, economic and social power. But just as power is ultimately a social relation between antagonistic classes, cultural expressions are also mediated through the lenses, experiences and interests of the dominant elites and their rebellious subjects.

Even as the writers of the barbarous elites have fabricated a linguistic world of terror, of demons and saviors, of axes of good and evil, of euphemisms which embellish the crimes against humanity, so have new groups of writers, artists and collective participants come forth to clarify reality and elucidate the existential and collective bases for demystifying the lies and creating a new cultural reality.
In the face of elite barbarism, a cultural renaissance is born. Revelations of crimes are made through journalistic investigations, plays and songs. Affirmations of integrity, social solidarity and individual rejections of the monetary enticements strengthen moral commitment in the face of ever-present threats, assassinations and official censure.

The great crimes of the imperial powers and their local clients include the massacres and daily death counts, propaganda, which pronounces every victim a criminal, and every criminal a savior. The political delinquents have not, do not and cannot silence, deafen or blind a new generation of critical intellectuals, poets and artists who speak truth to the people.

There are several themes which are essential in the advancement of the emerging cultural renaissance and our challenge to the reign of barbarism: These include the politics of language, conceptual misconceptions and intellectual courage in everyday life. The great conflict is between the power of the mass media and collective solidarity, and the false association of class with high and mass culture.

The Politics of Language

The corruption of language is a prescription for complicity in political crimes. Corruption of language takes the form of euphemisms concocted by propagandists, transmitted through the mass media, echoed in the pompous language of academics, judges, and translated into the gutter language of the sensationalist yellow press. Monstrous crimes against rural communities perpetuated by the police state are described as ‘pacification’; reduction of salaries and social services are described as ‘stabilization’; and the elimination of labor legislation protecting employment from arbitrary firings and weakening of trade unions is described as ‘labor flexibilization’.

Human rights advocates defending victims of military violence are called ‘accomplices of terrorists’; systematic state and paramilitary violence is called national security; opposition to military and political linkages to death squads is called terrorism; large scale counter-insurgency plans designed and funded by foreign imperial powers are labeled measures for ‘national salvation’.

There is also the pretext of providing a pseudo-scientific neutral terminology to inhuman acts – destroying thousands of communities and displacing millions is described as ‘liquidating subversive elements’ and likened to the extermination of noxious insects.

Euphemisms are a form of collective anesthesia – to tranquilize the population not directly affected by state violence. The imagery evoked by euphemisms is always portrayed as benign to obscure the malignant reality. To ‘pacify’ suggests a ‘pacifier’ and allows a parent to gently calm an infant and eliminate its irritable cries. ‘Pacification’ of a people means the opposite: the violent eruption of military forces into a tranquil community that causes screams of pain and shudders of death.

Stabilization in the mouths of state authorities means to reduce trade and budget deficits by lowering wages and salaries while retaining subsidies and tax-exemptions for the ruling class. Stabilization for big business and the banks means de-stabilization for the working class and the poor: the loss of health services, increases in the prices of basic commodities like food and transportation and the loss of employment leading to family break-ups, children leaving school, single parent homes and rising rates of suicide and alcoholism.

The dress rehearsal for any political and social transformation is linguistic clarity – speaking and writing in a language in which words and concepts evoke the reality we live, especially the differential class impact of specific policies. The unmasking of euphemisms is not a job for linguists but for all committed intellectuals and artists.

Language and the Left

Too many times the left fails to elucidate the meaning of euphemisms – resorting to the lazy device of hanging quotation marks around the targeted phrase. The quotation marks are meant to indicate irony and criticism or rejection of the euphemism – but they are just as obscurantist as the euphemism they seek to discredit. For example, many writers deal with authoritarian or police state regimes which claim to be democratic by simply putting quotes around ‘democracy’ – as if the quotes are self-explanatory. The critics fail to take the time and make the effort to elaborate a more precise term, which captures the cognitive meaning of the political system. The resort to quotation marks has a long tradition of abuse on the left, an abuse that serves to undermine the pedagogical purposes of educating the popular classes and providing a new and useful political vocabulary.

More recently, especially among intellectuals who have a pretence of communicating or leading the working class and peasantry, they abuse popular understanding by swearing. When using ‘swear words’ intellectuals abdicate their responsibility to widen the vocabulary of the working class or peasant activists. When workers or peasants resort to swear words, much depends on the context and tonality to determine meaning. The same swear word can be a denunciation or a term of affection, depending on the context. But when there is a political vocabulary that is more precise and varied, the pseudo-populist intellectual should introduce and define its meaning instead of pretending to establish rapport on the basis of the most limited and simplistic level of communication: vulgarity.

The intellectual playing down to the workers and peasants doesn’t raise their understanding; instead it reduces the literacy of the intellectual.