War Against War: A Meditation on Bradley Manning’s Mind

By Scott Tucker

“Bradley Manning’s Mind.” I took a deep breath when I read that title over this brief item recently posted on Truthdig:

“An investigative video created by The Guardian examines alleged WikiLeaker Bradley Manning’s psychological condition before he was dispatched to Iraq, concluding that he was probably not fit for overseas duty and that security at his station was remarkably lax. The additional reporting provides a fuller picture of Manning’s motivations—and discloses just how easy it was for him to hijack all that classified ‘intelligence.’ ”

Without our defense, a prisoner such as Bradley Manning is defenseless against the media, the military and the government. We can at least spread the word about the Bradley Manning Support Network.

There has already been online discussion among gay folks and the queer left about the “Frontline” show that pathologized Manning, and now The Guardian video report features a soldier with blurred face saying Manning pissed in his pants and curled up on his bunk “in a fetal position.” Maybe he did, after being repeatedly insulted and assaulted by fellow soldiers, by the account of this same anonymous informant.

Why is Manning’s mind the only relevant site of weakness, disability and pathology in the big media stories so far? Why not the sorry condition of our corporate state passing as a democratic republic? And maybe the “Frontline” program, which was distributed through the Public Broadcasting Service, and The Guardian should have given us a fuller picture of the motivations that drove their own reporters to recycle the official military narrative about Bradley Manning.

If I take a detour from the very mind and person of Manning, I assure readers we’ll return to him later; by this roundabout route we may view other figures in the landscape more closely, figures who stand tall in the light of a setting sun and who throw long shadows over the republic.
 
What is the “normal” psychology of soldiers entitled to beat up someone because he’s not much above 5 feet tall and gay? Why not question what the hell is in the minds of “progressives” who will vote by rote for Barack Obama in 2012, even though he just signed an extension of the Patriot Act? Obama was far away from Washington when he used a high-tech version of the autopen (invented by Thomas Jefferson) to ratchet up surveillance of potential traitors and terrorists. In this way the corporate state casts a dumbfounding spell over the Democratic Party, but Obama’s keenest partisans can always claim that the devil made him do it. Necessity is thus the mother of “pragmatism.” The Patriot Act truly makes patriotism the last refuge of scoundrels.

A shame, really, that only Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., held out so stubbornly against the bipartisan majority on the issue of individual rights. Above all, gun rights! As Corey Boles reported in Dow Jones Newswires on May 27, “Before they moved to a vote to finalize the legislation, lawmakers first had to deal with a Paul amendment that would have excluded gun sales from law enforcement officials’ ability to monitor business transactions. Paul said this was a violation of individual rights protected by the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

Ultimately, 22 senators joined Paul in voting against the bill. (In the House of Representatives, 250 voted “yes” and 153 voted “no.”) Rand Paul is an Ayn Randian in the realm of economics, and he argued in Congress that demanding “the right to health care” means demanding the “slavery” of nurses and doctors. The “principled” opposition to the Patriot Act extension was thus spearheaded by a true believer in Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Yet the erosion of civil liberties is one ripe consequence of the very class system defended in Congress by Rand Paul, and by his “libertarian” father, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas. This erosion has advanced under both Republican and Democratic presidents. If an officially Libertarian president was elected, the real cost of the “free market” would still be gated communities for the rich and a strip-mined planet for the poor.

What about the faction that passes for the left wing of the Democrats in Congress, and what about their loyal base of voters? Did they lose their wits when the blade of a guillotine dropped all at once? No, on the contrary, a whole generation of “progressive” frogs got boiled alive one degree at a time, so they just had the strength for a croaking chorus while they thought they were getting an uncomfortably hot bath. And then that Jeffersonian autopen was wielded by the candidate of “hope and change,” a fine finishing touch to the slow crash and burn of the American republic.

Already some “progressives” are claiming the next election will be a referendum on racism, and no doubt they will be right since every big election in this country is always about both race and class. But it does not follow that Obama’s loyalists are thinking clearly about the racial construction of class politics, or that the first black president has the nerve to command his generals or to challenge the corporate state. In this respect, Obama is not much different than any other Clintonista would have been in the Oval Office, including Hillary Clinton. The testy relations between Obama and the Clintons come down to party faction fights, and not to deep disagreements on domestic and foreign policy.

The refusal to think clearly about class politics will lead us instead to think that a shattered “glass ceiling” in a corporation or in Congress or in the White House is as good or better than an uprising of class-conscious workers from below. That is precisely the level of class consciousness among so many status-conscious cultural entrepreneurs, Ivy League political imbeciles and Democratic Party apparatchiks.

Once upon a time, Bill Clinton became “our first black president,” and white liberals had full permission to be the echo chamber of words that were launched in public by novelist Toni Morrison, an African-American, writing in The New Yorker in October 1998:

"Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

And to that list we must add that Bill Clinton was also the president who pushed policies that would have made loyal liberals cry bloody murder if he had been a Republican, including the deregulation of big banks and high finance, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and tearing down some of the last New Deal protections for mothers raising children on welfare. By Morrison’s count of black presidents, Obama should be our second; but under Morrison’s assessment, Obama never would have been elected. Clinton won many black votes by playing precisely upon the tropes of blackness (just as Morrison claimed), and Obama won many white votes by playing upon the tropes of middle-class prosperity, managerial wisdom and upward mobility.
 
In reality, both Clinton and Obama are deeply loyal to “free market” orthodoxies, and loyal as well to “pragmatism” in foreign policy. The real cost in blood and public funds comes from below, however: not from the very small minority who rise to the heights of the ruling class, but from the vast majority of working people who will never advance to a job on Wall Street or in the White House. Many millions of working people are still in shock after losing jobs, homes and any sense that this country offers them a decent social contract.

Now let’s revisit Bradley Manning, born in Crescent, Okla. (population now about 1,400). His father, Brian, had been in the Navy as an intelligence analyst. Militarism is never simply a mechanical production line of soldiers; for the assembly line depends on a great deal of ambivalence, subjectivity and uneasy loyalty at the cellular level of the neighborhood and family. In public interviews, Brian Manning seems puzzled, disappointed and frustrated that his son did not live in the military by the code of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Whatever Bradley Manning was telling his friends in person and online, the fellow soldiers who subjected him to faggot-baiting and bullying thought he was just asking for it.

Yet, as Brian Manning himself now admits with a kind of pained recognition, the father bullied his son into joining the Army. Bradley Manning became a soldier, in Brian’s words, “after I twisted his arm. He didn’t want to join. But he needed structure in his life, he was aimless. I knew in my own life that joining the Navy was the only thing that gave me structure, and everything’s been fine since then.” What may have given structure to the father destroyed the son.

This is the closed circle of our national and personal fictions. But these are fictions with real force. Otherwise our vast national military cemeteries would cease filing away dead young men and women in neat, endless rows. Year after year, war after war, we witness the destruction not only of the enemy but also of our own social order; and we create the kind of social mayhem that makes scared and humiliated people long for the structure of fundamentalist faith, or the structure of a familiar and brutal class system, or the structure of uniforms and military music and the best weapons money can buy. If we contemplated these fields of dead soldiers without illusions, our hearts would break and we might go mad; if we recognized at long last the greed and presumption of the ruling class, then we might hear and know the real burden of these words, which the poet Wilfrid Owen wrote before dying as a soldier and an officer in World War I:



"My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est,
Pro patria mori."

[Editor’s note: The Latin phrase translates roughly as “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”]

If Manning’s mind was fractured, then (as the paradox is known in the Latin liturgy), felix culpa! If guilty as charged, then Manning is one of the people who helped fracture the state secrets of an anti-democratic bipartisan regime that keeps racking up and tracking down ever more political “suspects”—even while career politicians carry out imperial wars with ever more expensive high-tech weapons. The “intelligence” that Manning is charged with passing to WikiLeaks turned out to be one of the inspirations for the Arab rebellions across the Middle East and North Africa; and there has been a real earthquake in the fields of mass media and journalism, with aftershocks following almost weekly. If the traditional guardians of the daily news so deeply resent Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks, that is because they long ago traded away integrity and independence in the sly scramble for “access” to power, press conferences and photo opportunities.

Show me a human being without fractures and I’ll show you a robot. The well-adjusted and uniformed creature sitting at a computer can now pick out targets on command, and thousands of miles away a drone can direct missiles at a bunker (presumably) filled with terrorists (presumably). And yet these presumptions have proved false whenever the missiles drop on Afghan wedding guests, or any other “collateral” civilians unlucky enough to be in the vicinity of intended targets.

As Laura King of the Los Angeles Times reported from Kabul on May 29, “A new dispute over civilian deaths erupted Sunday when Afghan officials claimed an errant NATO airstrike had killed 14 people, women and children among them.” Afghans in the area claimed that of the 14 killed, 12 were children and two were women. And for those with strong stomachs, there is a video now online showing a truckload of dead children, and a father holding two dead infants in his arms. (See the video and King’s report by clicking here.)

Whatever psychic fractures and subjective states of mind may be featured in the mass media’s Bradley Manning story, there is also an objective social fracture that runs right through our population. That is why different groups of people see and understand honor, treason and loyalty so differently. No doubt some gung-ho, all-American folks (of all sexual persuasions, some in uniform) will find no problem with the “Frontline” show or with The Guardian video coverage. But people who have spent much of their lives building movements of resistance will not be viewing and hearing the ready-made psychoanalysis of Bradley Manning with uncritical minds. Some of us even remember the days when gay activists fought the “expert” knowledge enshrined in such a scripture as the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

If by any chance I turn up on a “suspect” list at the airport this June when I try to fly to Europe, no doubt the agents who guide me to a fluorescent cube will have a neat file ready for reference, listing the dozen or more times I enjoyed the hospitality of the state behind bars. (See footnote at the end of this article.) And perhaps this file will be padded with a “psychological profile.” So yes, I confess that I have my own personal and political reasons for defending Manning.

Obama told the whole nation, “He broke the law.” Well, say no more. Obama was once a teacher of constitutional law, but now he has become the Public Prosecutor in Chief against a prisoner, Bradley Manning, who had already been stripped naked under “suicide watch” in a military prison. Under increasing international protest and pressure, the authorities later transferred Manning from Quantico, Va., to Leavenworth, Kan.—by all accounts, a milder regime.
 
Under such conditions, Manning’s mind may truly fracture. If they keep him in jail for 10, 20 or 30 years—or for life under the charge of treason—yes, he may truly lose his mind. Or else he must cultivate patience and fierce clarity, even to survive day by day. Predictably, some folks on the far right (including that preacher of capitalism and Christian love, Mike Huckabee) have demanded Manning’s execution.

Concluding that Manning “was probably not fit for overseas duty” is breathtaking! Yes, this oracular wisdom comes from “progressive” venues such as “Frontline” and The Guardian, and was then paraphrased on Truthdig. As Susie Day, a lesbian writer who is no friend of empire, wrote to me, “The whole fakakta-osity of this b’cast wasn’t only showing Manning as infantilized and unstable; look at the ‘friends’ they got to talk about him—and his father’s the one who belongs in prison; he obviously has such contempt for a kid who, surrounded by such dolts, did well to survive.” Manning has indeed done more practical good in the fight against war and empire than the great majority of “pragmatic” bleeding hearts will ever do by voting as instructed by MSNBC, The Nation and deadbeat Democrats in Washington.

On May 27 I wrote back to Susie Day about the “Frontline” show, “If there were hours enough, I might write a short Truthdig piece pointing out that plenty of queer viewers (and smart straight folks) will NOT have seen Manning through that lens.” Little did I know then that the “Frontline” view of Manning would then become the basic story for a video reporter at The Guardian! When I got that piece of news through Truthdig, then I was obliged to make time to write this article—longer than I first had in mind, but I am now moved by further evidence and by indignation. And by real concern that Manning is being reduced to a figure viewed through the keyhole of the mass media. Indeed, The Guardian video opens with a s-l-o-o-o-w pan of Bradley Manning at a party full of hipsters and computer hackers, where he looks like a clean-cut choirboy.

That bit of film was lifted from a video taken by someone at the party, and became one of the most telling moments in the “Frontline” story. An editorial decision was made at “Frontline” to slow down the moment when Manning looks at the camera and flirtatiously passes his hand over his hair. Given the slow-motion treatment and the voice-over commentary, Manning’s gender-bending bit of fun was then reframed as another piece in the puzzle of his troubled mind. Indeed, this becomes another piece of evidence that Manning was “unfit” to serve in the military. The Guardian simply could not resist opening its own story with the same slow-motion panning of Manning.
 
But is Manning truly “guilty as charged”? We do not really know for sure. After all, he has not yet had his “day in court,” though he has already done hard time in prison. If Bradley Manning broke ranks with war and empire, then thank God (and all the fairies in Bradley’s bonnet) that he was truly fit to tear down the public veil of illusions concerning Alpha Male high-tech killers and the commander in chief.

What makes any person “fit” to win the White House nowadays? From now till kingdom come—if we, the people, are too jaded or too distracted to care—the job description should be spelled out in bold legal print: “Only social climbers willing to rise on a mountain of corpses need apply.”

The first political group I ever joined was the War Resisters League. When I later became a socialist (after my anarchist years as a teenager), this call to action worked its way under my skin as I pondered the real implications of a class-conscious fight against imperial adventures of all kinds: “War against war!” What does war against war really mean? Not one bloody vote and not one bloody cent for the parties of war and empire! That is, for starters, the negative program.

War against war does not mean we volunteer to be shot down by offering the government the provocation of taking up weapons. Violence is an abyss, and we do not show courage by jumping into an open grave. Resistance, however, can take a thousand forms that do not depend on brute force. The war against war must therefore be grounded in ethics, and guided by daily enlightenment. War against war means this government can no longer depend—smugly and brutally—on the uncontested consent of the governed.

A class-conscious struggle against the corporate state is also a struggle against war and empire. If this government makes the free election of real democrats and of socialists impossible, then we, the people, have the right and duty to elect ourselves as public citizens; and to begin creating a new republic founded upon peace, social wealth, ethical obligation, ecological sanity, and the solidarity of labor across all borders. Every workplace is potentially a free council of workers; every street and neighborhood is potentially a public space of freedom.

In Europe, many thousands of working people have already taken to the streets against the austerity programs imposed by parties of the earnest right and the bogus left. What we may call the political warm spring in Europe may yet become a hot summer. In Greece, workers and students waged a general strike, and in Spain they still occupy public squares—recently braving an assault by riot police swinging shields and truncheons against citizens who peacefully linked arms in a mass sit-down protest in Barcelona. We, too, have a history of urban general strikes in this country, and of class-conscious struggles against war and corporate rule. This government depends on our obedience, but our lives depend on open rebellion. Start small and start now.

Footnote: When I speculate about possible detention at an airport, that may suggest paranoia even to some readers who consider themselves civil libertarians. Anyone with a political arrest record (mine is pretty long) has to consider the possibility. And in fact reality is way ahead of my speculation, as a report from Courage to Resist will confirm. That story goes back to November 2010 and concerns an associate of Bradley Manning, David House, who hopes Manning gets a fair trial. House, who is also associated with the Bradley Manning Support Network, was detained at O’Hare Airport, and his laptop computer and other electronic gear were confiscated. The ACLU argued that House’s First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated.

The Jewish Path to Success

By Adam Bellow
Published in The Jewish Daily: Forward 01.08.2003.


The news that Senator Joseph Lieberman had his two children on the campaign payroll as fundraisers with six-figure salaries raised some concerned eyebrows last month in the American Jewish community. Sure, Matt and Rebecca Lieberman are hard and effective workers, and since then have even taken a conspicuous pay cut — but couldn’t their father get them a job in a less conspicuous place?

The Connecticut senator, though, is only doing what dozens of other politicians have been doing of late: bringing his children into the family business.

To be honest, Jews aren’t really upset about the fact that Lieberman hired his children or even that he paid them high salaries. The discomfort with the personnel choices of the first Jewish candidate to make a serious run at the presidency is that his behavior is subjected to a higher level of scrutiny by the general public. In a word, what Jews fear is how it looks to the goyim: clannishness and underlying hypocrisy about meritocracy and nepotism.

What’s that, you say? Hypocrisy? Most Jews would probably tell you that they find the very idea of nepotism abhorrent and unfair.

After all, haven’t Jews been at the forefront of the liberal revolution, insisting on equality of rights and opportunity not just for themselves but for other minority groups? Haven’t Jews championed the principle of merit, supported affirmative action, attacked the idea of restrictive quotas and legacy admissions, and striven to overcome the impression that they are clannish and insular?

All true. But at the same time, like other immigrant groups, Jews have relied first and foremost on familial resources to adapt, survive and prosper in America.

In the mid-19th century, when the first wave of German Jews arrived, itinerant peddlers named Seligman, Guggenheim, Levi, and Straus built their pushcart businesses into enormous dry-goods empires, bringing their relatives over to run their chain department stores. Later on, excluded from the white-shoe legal and financial firms of Wall Street, the Lehman, Kuhn, Loeb, Sachs and Goldman families created their own.

When millions of Russian and East European Jews arrived in the 1880s and 1890s, established Jewish families — obeying the ancient injunctions to Jewish charity enshrined in the Mosaic code — constructed an elaborate welfare system, including hospitals, orphanages, settlement houses and trade schools. Most of these immigrants went into the booming garment industry, putting their whole families to work and giving rise to a thriving ethnic economy in which Jewish factory owners employed Jewish workers to create goods sold by Jewish merchants to Jewish customers.

The immigrants also created dozens of landsmanschaft organizations that helped bring over new immigrants, settled them in jobs and provided welfare services for widows and orphans. Such communal and family ties lent solidarity and strength to the heavy Jewish presence in the labor movement.

During the 1920s and 1930s a group of hard-nosed Jewish entrepreneurs turned a patch of desert near Los Angeles into the Hollywood movie industry. Entertainment juggernaut Paramount Pictures, founded in 1919 by Adolph Zukor, was financed by an enormous loan from the Jewish Wall Street firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. — thanks to the intervention of Otto Kahn, brother of Zukor’s partner Felix Kahn. The studios were famed for their nepotism.

Jewish families also went into the media business, founding Random House, Knopf, Simon & Schuster and other distinguished publishing houses. And the Sulzberger-Ochs clan has owned and run The New York Times since 1896.

During the Depression, Jewish families pulled together once again, outdoing other groups in solidarity and mutual support. After World War II, Jews gained access to the middle class and moved to the suburbs, leaving their ethnic roots behind them. Yet Jews did not disperse throughout the economy like other immigrants but continued to congregate in medicine, law, academia and the communications industry, where relatively high numbers have afforded leverage and security.

Speaking at a recent seminar on Jewish women in television at New York’s Jewish Museum, Terri Minsky, creator of the hit series “Lizzie McGuire,” unapologetically remarked: “I got into TV the way I thought all Jewish people did — I had an uncle in the business.”

How can we square this long record of familial and ethnic nepotism with the public insistence of Jews on equal opportunity and merit? While most would surely point to the long Jewish tradition of social idealism, a more practical reason may be found in the disproportionate benefit Jews derive from a meritocratic system.

But this genial hypocrisy is tempered by the fact that Jewish nepotism has always been meritocratic. For thousands of years, Jews have placed enormous value on learning and education, and Jewish parents have insisted on high standards of achievement for their children. This longstanding habit gave Jews an edge over other groups and enabled immigrants to escape the ghetto much faster, within one or two generations.

Lieberman’s nepotism seems to call into question the whole Jewish commitment to meritocracy. A similar scandal erupted in 1983, when Bess Myerson, appointed as New York City’s cultural affairs commissioner by her old friend Mayor Ed Koch, gave a job to Sukhreet Gabel, the emotionally-disturbed daughter of the family court judge assigned to Myerson’s divorce case. Jews were outraged, though not so much by the seriousness of the offense as by Myerson’s failure to uphold the communal honor: how could the Jewish Miss America behave like any other politician?

Has Lieberman embarrassed himself or his supporters by hiring his children? Not at all. To the contrary, he is a good father and family man who is doing proudly and openly what generations of Jews have done before him. The whole history of American Jewry is a tribute to the power of Jewish nepotism. Indeed, nepotism has been a positive and wholesome force in Jewish life for thousands of years. It is high time to acknowledge and even celebrate this fact instead of trying to keep it hidden like a shameful family secret.


Adam Bellow is the author of “In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History” (Doubleday).

The World’s Last Handwritten Newspaper?

A film by Carrot Communications
Posted in Truthdig on the 25^th of May, 2011

Showing rare devotion to the craft of journalism, lifelong staffers at The Musalman in Chennai, India, have been publishing a daily newspaper penned in Urdu calligraphy since 1927. The kicker? No one has ever quit the paper, laboring until death and often passing their responsibilities down to their next of kin. —KDG

The Musalman - Preservation of a Dream
by Indiandiplomacy

"This kind of inclusive [...], pluralistic society makes India perhaps... definitely a Super-power."

Mr. Fish: Civilization and Its Malcontents

by Mr. Fish

Mr. Fish

In post-1950s America, an average person’s concept of what might be the meaning of life was more likely than at any other time in history to draw on a wide range of source material culled from a broad swath of disciplines throughout the culture. In order to understand why peace was elusive in Indochina, for example, in addition to looking to contemporary scholarship and modern reporting on the subject, one was as likely to draw on the teachings of Gandhi, Jung and McLuhan as much as on the work of Kerouac, Coltrane and Warhol. When contributing to a conversation about baseball, transcendental meditation or political assassination, insight was as likely to stem from a passage pulled from C. Wright Mills, Samuel Beckett or Susan Sontag as it was from a musical quote excised from Charles Mingus or a visual denouement remembered from Ernie Kovacs or a publicly pulled punch line from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. MAD magazine was in competition with The New York Times for truth-telling; female sexuality was the volatile and thrilling combustible MacGuffin created by combining equal parts Miller and Millett, and the news analysis offered from “That Was the Week That Was” and “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” was often eminently more insightful than that offered from Walter Cronkite and CBS News or Bishop Sheen or Mom and Dad.

Specifically, the concept that one required a certain familiarity with a number of different points of view in order to perceive the three dimensionality of existence—that is, that one need not automatically assume that mainstream media was the most complete and reliable information source available—was verging on common knowledge, and, as a child, I thrilled to the notion that I might grow up both contributing to and becoming enlightened by all the burgeoning guesswork being offered by humanity as to what it meant to be the missing link between the most compassionate apes and the most treacherous angels.

In fact, there was a definite sense while growing up in the early ’70s that, finally, after a very deliberate and concerted effort by a dedicated group of very brave and very imaginative baby boomers, all the repressive social apparatus that had found its fullest expression by the middle part of the 20th century had been unraveled by the emergence of the counterculture and the growing popularity of a number of different literary, social and art movements, including the beatnik movement, the civil rights movement, bebop and cool jazz, abstract expressionism and action painting, protest folk, modern dance, Theater of the Absurd, neorealism and art house films, gonzo and New Journalism, the Confessionalist movement among poets, the feminist movement and the satire boom. Never again, so sounded the promise, would Americans need to feel so pressured to believe that their civic duty to both God and country alone trumped whatever personal journey of self-discovery their natural curiosities and personal inclinations begged them to commence. Never again would the citizens of the United States believe that in order to succeed in life they had to subjugate themselves to the woefully narrow fairy tale that the upward trajectory of Western civilization required that everyone maintain an unquestioning allegiance to, and nonparticipation with, the bureaucratic elitism of the federal government while simultaneously maintaining an almost manic devotion to cloying patriotism, rampant materialism and the codification of racism, sexism and classism into the status quo.

Because of the counterculture, anti-establishmentarianism could no longer legitimately be regarded by straight society simply as a non-belief—as nothing more than a reactionary disdain for the tenets of the dominant culture for the sole purpose of demonstrating contrarianism—but, like atheism, was correctly perceived in more contemporary terms as a viable, humanitarian philosophy unto itself, characterized by its own moral and intellectual purpose and self-perpetuation and frank usability. In other words, there was a definite sense while growing up in the early ’70s that, finally, after decades of political and cultural and existential struggle, American democracy was enjoying its fullest expression and that anything—at long last!—was possible.

Regretfully, however, after spending my entire adolescence memorizing, first, all that had inspired the ’60s enlightenment period—namely, the turn-of-the-century European and Russian intellectualism as demonstrated famously by the worldwide propagation of Marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, individualist anarchism, modernism, bohemianism, naturalism, realism, nihilism, agonism, futurism, decadence and absurdism—followed by a thorough examination of all the players responsible for igniting the democratizing era that ran for about 14 years known as The Sixties, I eventually came of age in a culture composed of significantly less symbiotic parts than I’d been preparing for. Gone, suddenly, was the worldwide peoples movement that had promised to socialize empathy, communalize self-reliance, intellectualize the passions of the id and to institutionalize a radical intolerance of institutions. In its stead was something that appeared to be its opposite, exemplified by such things as the war on drugs, the yuppie movement, Reaganomics and fashion trends that, like a network of completely perplexing diseases, sociologists are still wary to approach for close analysis for fear of contracting a truly virulent strain of Jan Hammer.
 
Staring open-mouthed at 17 in my Buddy Holly glasses, chinstrap beard, espresso-stained insides, putrid Chuck Taylors and newsprint-smudged fingertips, I wondered what had happened to the world into which I was hoping to enter so well rehearsed. Had the idealism of the ’60s been so ethereal as to have dissipated like cherry smoke, a victim of its own weightless optimism, or had it been dismantled by the super-sizing of corporate America? Had it been forever destroyed by the massive deregulation and privatization movements begun in the 1970s and early ’80s; movements that had given unprecedented amounts of power and influence to business markets which had then in turn—by being, at their philosophical centers, nothing but private anti-democratic tyrannies capable of corrupting even the most humanely driven among us (Jerry Rubin being the most famous example) with what Lewis Lapham once referred to as “enlightened selfishness”—bribed its participants, literally, away from their ideals with the most excessively narcissistic and ego-gorging of creature comforts?

Existing both in celebration of all that was promised to my generation by the artists and writers and public intellectuals from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s and in mourning of all that the 21st century has failed to collect upon with respect to those promises, I find myself everyday straining hard against the tether of time, back toward a past that had every indication of becoming some sort of dawn for the Age of Aquarius and away from a future that more and more feels like a pre-apocalyptic dusk that pre-empts the inevitable arrival of a very brutal and very dark nighttime, and I have to ask myself: Where is one expected to direct his rage when the enemy is the turning of the whole wide world and you’re met with the agonizing realization that, no, you didn’t say you wanted a revolution?



Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

By Noam Chomsky for Guernica: a magazine of art & politics

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.
 

It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”



We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

 

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.



Copyright 2011 Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are a new edition of Power and Terror, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audiobook.

Twitter the enemy of self-expression?

by A.C. Goodall for the NewStatesman

Social media may have cultural relevance, but it's no good when everyone says the same thing.

There's a scene set in the near future in Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, in which a conversation between two people in a café becomes so awkward they conclude it via an instant messaging service called T'ing, in which language is reduced to its most basic: 'GrAt. Il gt 2 wrk.' As one character remarks after the exchange, T'ing is "pure -- no philosophy, no metaphors, no judgements."

Whilst Egan understands what her character doesn't -- that even the most reduced linguistic exchanges cannot be "pure" -- the idea of appreciating social medias because they restrict self-expression is an interesting one in the context of our current eagerness to give sites like Twitter increasing cultural relevance.

Last April the US Library of Congress announced tweets would be part of its archive, Harvard Professor Marjorie Garber recently noted that Twitter's "artificial limits on form [are] very good practice for writing and for reading", and James Poniewozik in TIME contextualised Twitter within "the history of literature [that] is the story of writers shaping their work to exploit technology."

Meanwhile in PORT magazine's inaugural issue this March, journalist Ekow Eshun argued that Twitter is about creative self-expression, a place where "we curate our lives". He goes on, "people wanted to tell me that a 140-character limit is the enemy of good writing -- as if Hemingway or Carver or centuries of haikus hadn't made the case for concision."

The form may be similarly restrictive, but don't the how and why also define content? And Twitter's how and why is essentially anti-literary, anti-creative; Twitter is all about fitting in.

In literary Twitter circles, for example, clusters of publishers, authors, editors, journalists and agents build wide networks whose strength lies in blurring the distinction between professional contact and personal friend -- a blurring that makes group consensus all the more persuasive.

As Twitter's influence grows, instead of blithely thinking of it as a place of free expression, it might be a good time to wonder if the commingling of public and private realms doesn't potentially make expressing opinions more difficult?

Considered in this light, Twitter functions as banally as a school hierarchy: who to like, who not to, who you're allowed to criticise, who you can't etc. Whilst Malcolm Gladwell's article in The New Yorker last year enraged many with his claims that social networking was not instrumental to social change, his most salient point was that social media is "not the natural enemy of the status quo." Twitter relies on people's desire to be the same.

Nor is it really challenging from a linguistic perspective. Poniewozik writes, "Twitter is pure voice, an exercise in implying character through detail and tone", but the most striking thing about it is its uniformity of tone, how difficult it is to create any distinctive voice in its tight-lipped text box. Tweets can cause misunderstandings aplenty, but there isn't much room for subtlety.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter itself seems comfortable with its functionality, its stated desire only to transmit information. On its homepage it says, with knowing simplicity: "Follow your interests". So should we be a little more aware of its limitations?

Eshun reflects that Twitter's "merging of public and private self [is] the defining condition of the hyper-mediated modern age." The key word in the sentence is "merging". Twitter splices together public and private spheres, and doesn't have time for doubt. This is its commercial strength, but its creative and cultural limitation.

Truthdig: The Collapse of Globalization

The Collapse of Globalization

By Chris Hedges

The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.

AP / Jacques Brinon

Demonstrators carry an effigy of Ronald McDonald

We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.

Adequate food, clean water and basic security are already beyond the reach of perhaps half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of 5 percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be inevitable. But it will not necessarily mean more democracy.

The refusal by all of our liberal institutions, including the press, universities, labor and the Democratic Party, to challenge the utopian assumptions that the marketplace should determine human behavior permits corporations and investment firms to continue their assault, including speculating on commodities to drive up food prices. It permits coal, oil and natural gas corporations to stymie alternative energy and emit deadly levels of greenhouse gases. It permits agribusinesses to divert corn and soybeans to ethanol production and crush systems of local, sustainable agriculture. It permits the war industry to drain half of all state expenditures, generate trillions in deficits, and profit from conflicts in the Middle East we have no chance of winning. It permits corporations to evade the most basic controls and regulations to cement into place a global neo-feudalism. The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the Democratic Party, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear—fear of secular humanism or fear of Christian fascists—to turn the population into passive accomplices. As long as we remain afraid nothing will change.

Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, two of the major architects for unregulated capitalism, should never have been taken seriously. But the wonders of corporate propaganda and corporate funding turned these fringe figures into revered prophets in our universities, think tanks, the press, legislative bodies, courts and corporate boardrooms. We still endure the cant of their discredited economic theories even as Wall Street sucks the U.S. Treasury dry and engages once again in the speculation that has to date evaporated some $40 trillion in global wealth. We are taught by all systems of information to chant the mantra that the market knows best.

It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s  promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has became concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent—from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—are banished as heretics.
 
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
 
The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.

The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations. But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs. This idea comes from a former hedge fund manager whose personal fortune was amassed largely by firing workers, and only illustrates how rational political discourse has descended into mindless sound bites.

We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.


The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore.”

The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.

The propagandists for globalism are the natural outgrowth of this image-based and culturally illiterate world. They speak about economic and political theory in empty clichés. They cater to our subliminal and irrational desires. They select a few facts and isolated data and use them to dismiss historical, economic, political and cultural realities. They tell us what we want to believe about ourselves. They assure us that we are exceptional as individuals and as a nation. They champion our ignorance as knowledge. They tell us that there is no reason to investigate other ways of organizing and governing our society. Our way of life is the best. Capitalism has made us great. They peddle the self-delusional dream of inevitable human progress. They assure us we will be saved by science, technology and rationality and that humanity is moving inexorably forward.

None of this is true. It is a message that defies human nature and human history. But it is what many desperately want to believe. And until we awake from our collective self-delusion, until we carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the corporate state and sever ourselves from the liberal institutions that serve the corporate juggernaut—especially the Democratic Party—we will continue to be rocketed toward a global catastrophe.


Chris Hedges’ column appears every Monday at Truthdig. Hedges, a fellow at The Nation Institute and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of “Death of the Liberal Class.”