Satan doesn’t wear sweaty socks

Jan. 19, 2002

by Matthew Parris

I love America. I love the place and I love the people. I admire the country as a nation. I spent two years as a postgraduate studying at Yale on a fellowship paid for by an American philanthropist, and assimilated fast.
I like their warmth, their courage, their vision. I like their individualism, energy and capitalist spirit; and I like their deep belief in liberty. You will not find a readier apologist for American values or the American way of life.

So if I sound a note of warning about the United States as a political ally, do not write me off as one of those sour European lefties with a grudge against Uncle Sam. I am a pro-American British Conservative.

My difficulty is not with America as America, but with Washington as a hoped-for coalition partner. Partnership in foreign policy is not in their nature. Consensus is not in their lexicon. They do not see their place in our world as we would do. America is either right outside, or right on top. For Americans, alongside is not an option.

My first encounter with this truth came at Yale in the 1970s. A group of us were talking about oil prices and Saudi Arabia. My friend Dave McCormack, a spirited Southerner from Charleston, had pointed out that while US hegemony protected producers from the Russians, US technology enabled Arabs to extract their oil, and US demand created the market in which to sell it. “It’s our oil, goddammit!” Dave roared.

He meant it. When Ronald Reagan remarked of the Panama Canal: “We built it; it’s ours; and we’re going to keep it,” he was tapping into the same vein.

The vein runs deep. It is not unusually greedy; and not, in any malignant way, bullying. It is a simple conviction that America will decide. Her citizens do not see her as one country among many but as nonpareil, the biggest, the best, the one-and-only: final judge of her own interests and a pretty fair judge of what’s good for the rest of us too.

None of this is inconsistent with a strong sense of justice: a sense of justice characterises America at home and abroad, but it will be their justice and they will be the arbiters. Nor is it inconsistent with a wish to do good abroad: no people have shown such a consistently generous ambition to make our world a better place.

But their help will be given ex gratia and its terms dictated by them. America will save the planet if America must, and it will pay the piper: but it will then call the tune. A negotiated process of cooperation is not what America has in mind.

It seems to me that the past century of international affairs points this lesson in no very shaded way. British dreams of a transatlantic marriage of interests are always being dashed, yet still hope triumphs over experience. My earliest political memory is Suez, a debacle on which it is unnecessary to elaborate. Succeeding memories are of a colonial boyhood in Southern Rhodesia.

The United States was running her own clear policy in Southern Africa at the time and it was unfriendly to British interests and our gradualist approach to decolonisation. The American Reading Room in Salisbury (now Harare) was a focal point for impatient young African nationalists whom America was eager to befriend before the Russians did.

Washington may have been right. My point is that it would not have occurred to them to reconsider if we had not agreed. Twenty years later the Queen was actually head of state in Grenada when America invaded the Caribbean island, to the acute discomfiture of Sir Geoffrey Howe, our Foreign Secretary. Tory Eurosceptics, ever-vigilant for threats from an alliance in whose policies we do have a say, carelessly recommend one where we don’t.

Now that President Bush has signed up Tony Blair as British Robin to the American Batman, is there reason to think these verities have been suspended? The question is not posed rhetorically, for there are some reasons for hope. Terrorism is, after all, against all our interests.

But how we define terrorism, where we diagnose it, and to what resorts we think it right to go in combating it, are debates in which we Europeans and the United States may find our preferred positions sliding apart. I think that slide began this week, as the unsavoury pantomime took to the stage in Guantanamo Bay.

Take Donald Rumsfeld’s angry brushing aside of concerns about the treatment of prisoners, an outburst which, from the Prime Minister down, members of the British Government have been trying to sidle past, looking the other way. Said the US Defence Secretary: “I do not feel the slightest concern at their treatment. They are being treated vastly better than they treated anybody else.” In a saloon bar this will do, but is that the standard? How much does the Secretary of State really know about these individuals? And why are they not prisoners of war? Face it: Mr Rumsfeld does not care about the niceties and cares little who knows it. Washington’s way of “fighting terror” is not, despite appearances, the same as Britain’s. We seek to project the message that there are rules to which all nations are subject. America has a simpler message: kill Americans, and you’re dead meat.

The British Foreign Office may huff and puff that US swagger is “counterproductive”, alienating “moderate Arab opinion”, but Washington proposes a different approach: show them who’s boss.

America — not Britain, Europe and America and not “the international community”, but America — is boss. On this analysis Rumsfeld with his visual aids — cages, razor-wire, manacles and sedating syringes — is not maladroit: he’s on message. Be sure that frantic private telegrams are winging their way over the Atlantic explaining the embarrassment this is causing Mr Blair. Be equally sure where Mr Bush is putting them.

America has simple gods and likes to keep her satan simple, too. Every populace has a tendency to see for a while evidence of a single demon’s fiendish plans beneath every stone, but Americans take this to extremes. In Salem it was once witches. In Senator Joe McCarthy’s heyday it was Commies. Now it is al-Qaeda. And September 11 offered tremendous provocation.

Of the brutality and ill-intent of the United States’ fundamentalist foe there can be no doubt, nor of the righteousness of American wrath. But this does not make their assessment of the foe accurate.

We are told on very little evidence that the al-Qaeda network is incredibly sophisticated, yet the things we know it has done have been relatively crude, the technology modest.

We are told (and the slavishness of the British press in printing this unquestioned is depressing) that al-Qaeda “masterminds” are at work here — in London, Leicester, or wherever else some fundamentalist nutcase with nasty ambitions and contacts abroad is found in a bedsit. But in the claimed evil genius about whom we do know a bit, Richard Reid, we see little to justify the term. This imbecile is about as inconspicuous as a bag-lady. He has been attracting suspicion wherever he goes. When he flies El Al it puts a marshal in the adjacent seat. He couldn’t even devise a way of detonating his own shoes, short of bending down in his aeroplane seat, with passengers around, and trying to set fire with matches to a foot-sweaty fuse. Why didn’t he go into the loo? If this really is the cream of al-Qaeda then things are less dire than we feared.

You, reader, will have furrowed your brow about some of this already.

So will a million others. A silent minority used likewise to wonder if half the village really were witches; if the goofy clerk at work really was a key communist spy. Of course al-Qaeda exists; of course it is numerous; of course it is murderous; of course it must be fought. But it is not the only, and may not even be the cleverest, terrorist organisation in the world.

Suicide bombing is as old as the bomb, and dangerous prisoners who would stop at nothing have been transported and held in custody since courts and prisons were invented.

This is not the greatest evil the world has ever seen, nor the cleverest, nor the first — and nor, certainly, will it be the last.

But America is moving into a phase of believing so, and America is apt to throw her weight around.

It may go to some lengths and last some time. We should hang back.

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What the Guys in Wigs Really Thought About God

I know that for some this will be like telling you that your mother isn’t a virgin, but someone’s got to say it

by Hardly Waite

Aug. 31, 2002

 

A Madrid newspaper recently said that the great Pledge of Allegiance debate in America was especially “emotional.”  And it should be, the paper remarked, “in a country that puts ‘In God We Trust’ on the item most sacred to its philosophy–the dollar.”

It’s funny yet sad to hear Americans–a full half of whom, polls now tell us, would be perfectly willing to give up their First Amendment guarantee to free speech in exchange for having to worry less about getting an anthrax letter or being infected with smallpox by the Evil Ones–to hear these same nervousnelly patriots whimper and whine about not getting to say “under God” when they repeat the “Pledge.”  After all, they always say, it’s what the Founding Fathers intended.

Never mind that the Pledge was dreamed up by someone a hundred years after the Founding Fathers had finished doing their intending,  and never mind that the “under God” part was not spliced into the Pledge until sixty or seventy years later, in the McCarthy years, when people were too afraid of being called Commies to suggest that it might not be quite in keeping with the separation of church and state. (That was around the same time, by the way,  when they started regularly putting “In God We Trust” on our national idol.)

And never mind that when the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allan spoke of Nature’s God they weren’t even talking about the same Guy that the Undergodites are evoking–the insecure Almighty who has to be constantly reminded that we trust in Him and Him alone and who, the Bible thumpers admonish, may not be able to make good on all  his Armageddon threats unless America pitches in with some serious Arab ass kicking.

“Water filters, like the circulation of blood, are not a moral issue.” –Benjamin FranklinModel 77–“The World’s Greatest $77 Water Filter.”

Thomas Jefferson said:  “I have examined all the known superstitions of the Word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.  They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology.”

Most of the guys in wigs, the Founding Fathers, whom the Undergodites like to cite as models of Christianity,  weren’t Christians at all in the sense that we use the word today. Not even remotely.   Most were deists, which means that they believed in a God of Nature.  This God is also sometimes called the Divine Clockmaker. He built the universe, wound it up, then went about his Divine Business while the thing runs itself.  He did not give a flip whether people said the Lord’s Prayer before the football game, or, for that matter, whether they coveted their neighbor’s ass or remembered the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

If Ethan Allan were around today, that lusty fellow would probably stop the Pledge in progress to demand an understanding about who exactly this God guy is. That’s what he did at his own wedding  He halted the ceremony at the first mention of God to make sure that everyone understood he was saying his vows before the God of Nature, not the cruel, jealous Old Man of the Old Testament.

As for the Bible, Jefferson liked to call it a “dunghill,” and Tom Paine said it was a dishonor to the Creator to attach his name to “this filthy book.”

Our first president thought Christianity was pretty silly.  Though he didn’t make a big deal about it in public, those who knew him attested that he tolerated it but didn’t believe a word of it.  And our second president, John Adams, called the concept of the divinity of Jesus a “convenient cover for absurdity,” and he signed into law a treaty which declared straightway that “the Government of the United States is not founded in any way on the Christian religion.”

I’ll leave off here with the presidents, except to say that in a sermon of October 1831, Episcopalian minister Bird Wilson was still able to say,  “Among all of our Presidents, from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.”

So . . . for my part.  if you want to pledge under God or over God or under or over Anything Else, go ahead. It’s your nickel.   But please, spare me the “Founding Fathers” nonsense and the “Christian Nation” stuff. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, just 7% of Americans belonged to a church. Any church. That’s a fact.

 

 

 

Kissing Jesus

by Lisa Gabriele

May 1, 2002

One of my first crushes was on Jesus. I thought he was handsome and kind, but distracted and lonely; good in thought and deed, but the worst kind of hard-to-get imaginable. Jesus was probably a template for the guys I have fallen for since; those with overbearing dads and Messianic tendencies toward self-exile.

They can be somewhat intimate with many, though never fully intimate with one. Jesus had a hot body too, very rock-star skinny, and he was constantly half-naked. My dirty mind would wander under that loincloth, linger for a moment, then dissolve into a confused mist. I couldn’t imagine what hung dormant underneath — I just knew the Virgin Mary’s unsexy outfit and super-calm demeanor did nothing to draw me into her boring camp.

My friends and I used to practice kissing on Jesus’ life-sized statue in the cemetery across from the church. He was so often molested that you could see the pink-stained cement showing through the white-wash paint. When I tell non-Catholic friends about these dirty forays, they cringe in disbelief. But other Catholic girls understand because sex, for us, would never be a reality until blessed matrimony. Necking with Jesus at the age of ten was more about love than foreplay. It was benign and silly, not sexual and thrilling. And totally normal to us.

During this time, when thousands of priests stand accused of sexually abusing children and teenagers, I often think about these innocent interpretations of love. Recently, in the marbled Vatican halls, papal sycophants were heard tsk tsking The Amoral Americans. Their culture is soaked in sexual images. Americans place such huge premiums on sex. But it’s the other way around.

The Catholic Church is soaked in sexual imagery: Catholic schools are named after the Holy Conception, Mary is never without her virginal moniker, everyone’s on their knees, wine flows freely, and Jesus Christ is tongued and swallowed on a weekly basis. It’s the Catholic Church that places a huge premium on sex, simply by banning it outside the confines of marriage.

American pop culture has often remarked on the church’s twisted sexual hypocrisy. Lou Reed and Billy Joel extolled the virtues of Catholic girls, of adolescent flesh bursting out of plaid skirts and tight white shirts, and many of us lived up to the stereotype. We grew up to be sexual provocateurs, because in our religion, there’s no half-way. Catholicism teaches that women are holy vessels to be worshiped and adored, or filthy temptresses to be fucked and avoided.

As girls, we knew that once we started down that sordid path, there was only one way to go: hell, which is in the general direction of down. Hence the fact that Catholic girls are infamously great at giving head. How else to preserve the sanctity of virginity? How else to explain Madonna’s early appeal? Camille Paglia was the first to point out that Madonna used Catholic imagery to talk about sex; wearing those rosaries and crosses as thrillingly subversive accessories, she brought a pagan, backwards religion into the realm of shiny, pop culture.

Years after my crush on Jesus dissolved, along with my spiritual connection to Catholicism, our parish priest, Father J., left town in a cloud of sexual scandal. He allegedly molested some boys I knew, boys who’d never make these things up in the small, working-class town where I grew up. One boy, a neighbor, who was considered slower than his brothers and had endured years of taunts from kids like me, found solace as an altar boy. He was the first of six boys to come forward, claiming that Father J. molested them on a regular basis. Father J. was questioned by the church, released, then fled home to Malta before any formal investigation took place.

A.W. Richard Sipe, a former Catholic priest turned therapist, has spent four decades studying sexuality and abuse among Catholic priests. His numbers dovetail with other studies that claim nearly half of all priests are, or have been, sexually active. About a third are gay: half of them actively so. But with whom? Each other, and post-pubescent boys, it seems.

In the course of his research, Sipe administered psychological tests; he found that most Catholic priests have the average emotional and sexual maturity of a thirteen-year-old. Sipe claims priests mostly target sad, needy kids between eight and thirteen, because that’s with whom they psychologically relate, and consequently spend much time. Some priests were abused themselves, so they repeat the cycle, but most simply never advance beyond adolescence because celibacy doesn’t exactly foster sexual growth and maturity.

I now understand why I never wanted to be around priests all that much. The ones I’ve known, like Father J., were unintellectual, uninteresting and childlike. They hugged too much, smiled too easily, and nodded too readily, like black-clad, sacral Teletubbies. Their facial expressions floated between squinty, Robin Williams fakery and wide-armed, Michael Jackson creepiness.

And who can blame them: preaching celibacy and virginity until marriage is inherently infantilizing, a set of rules simple to understand but impossible to follow. The church must abolish celibacy so that priests can finally grow up. Let them fuck other consenting adults legally, because we now know they’re hiding more beneath those holy robes than sacred, throbbing hearts.

What’s being overlooked here is that celibacy is not an organic Christian tenant. Jesus did not preach celibacy, and there’s no proof that he lived by it. Celibacy is a medieval concoction, an eleventh century papal land-grab, which prevented property from being passed down to a priest’s son and has enjoyed a phony endurance for eight ignorant centuries. There is an irony here: Celibacy law may have made the Vatican rich, but victims of sexual abuse are now suing the Catholic Church for billions.

For guidance on how to handle the current crisis, the Vatican need only note how the Protestant, Anglican and Jewish faiths are coping with their respective sex scandals. Oh, right, they don’t have any. Those religions, though endorsing piety, do not endlessly obsess about sex, nor do they ask their clergy to take an impossible vow like celibacy. Those religions probably attract healthy-minded, sexually mature adults who enjoy physical expression and release with consensual partners who are not children. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church will continue to attract the sexually confused, stunted and ashamed to its blessedly shrinking ranks.

I used to defend my affinity for Catholicism as a kitschy hangover from my youth, when memorizing prayers, songs and psalms was comforting and fun. It made me feel a little holy back when I needed to belong to anything other than my own screwy family. But today I find sex and shame to be sorry bedfellows. When a religion tells you that a little masturbation will guarantee you a spot in hell, you have to laugh. How can you tackle the more challenging aspects of Catholicism, such as celibacy and sexual orientation, when you’re told a bit of diddling will result in eternal damnation?

Catholic shame nearly crippled me; I can only imagine it hits devout, homosexual teens even harder. They’re in love with a church that clearly hates them. For them, celibacy must be a weird panacea: maybe they can pace, chant, and pray away their demented thoughts! Lord knows, I tried. Problem is, you’re kneeling in front of a naked hottie, tortured, because of you and your rotten lust.

I’ve never wondered what type of person I might have become had I remained a virgin for my worthy husband. Nothing about that woman intrigues me, in all her pious obedience; a “good” girl who listens to her “wise” priest. But smart women walked away from the church long ago in droves, and it’s too bad.

The church needs vital women now more than ever, to bust up the male propensity towards hierarchy and stoicism, which have contributed to the church’s current perverted state. And frankly, Jesus never struck me as the type to live with hypocrisy or to live without passion, risk and worshipful babes.

 

Lisa Gabriele writes for Nerve.com, where this article originally appeared. 

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Propaganda: Nobody Does It

Better Than America.

by Paul Weber

Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting and having discussions with people who came to America from countries known for their adherence to totalitarianism: China, Russia, and former east European satellites of the Soviet Union. When we discussed how the state managed to control public opinion under totalitarianism, these people would usually produce a weary, knowledgeable, cynical smile and point out that propaganda in those countries was really done quite incompetently. If you really want to know propaganda, they said, you need to study American propaganda technique. According to them, it is, undeniably, the best in the world.

“How can that be?” I asked, honestly puzzled.

Propaganda in those countries was too obvious, they told me. As soon as you read the first sentence you knew it was a bunch of propaganda, so you didn’t even bother to read it. If you heard a speech, you knew in the first few words that it was propaganda, and you tuned it out.

“But,” I then queried, “How do you know when it’s just propaganda?”

The expatriates explained that bad propaganda uses obvious terminology that anyone can see through. Anyone hearing the phrase “capitalist running dogs”, knows he’s listening to incompetent propaganda and tunes it out. Lousy propaganda, these knowledgeable but jaded individuals would tell me, appeals to an abstract theory, to a rational thesis that can be disproved. Even though communists had total control of the press, the people just tuned it out (except for those who were the most mentally defective). Most people, they assured me, just went about their lives as best they could, paid lip service to the state, and just tried to keep out of the way of the secret police. But hardly anyone really believed the stuff. The result, after many decades of suffering, was the eventual collapse of the old order once The Great Leader expired, whether his name was Brezhnev, Mao, or Tito.

American propaganda, however, is much cleverer. American propaganda, they patiently explained, relies entirely on emotional appeals. It doesn’t depend on a rational theory that can be disproved: it appeals to things no one can object to.

American propaganda had its birth, so far as I can tell, in the advertising industry. The pioneers of advertising—a truly loathsome bunch—learned early on that people would respond to purely emotional appeals. Abstract theory and logical argument do nothing to spur sales. However, appeals to sexiness, to pride of ownership, to fear of falling behind the neighbors are the stock in trade of advertising executives. A man walking down the street with beautiful women hanging on his arms is not a logical argument, but it sure sells after-shave. A woman in a business suit with a briefcase, strolling along with swaying hips, assuring us she can “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, but never let you forget you’re a man” really sells the perfume.

Let’s take a moment and analyze the particular emotions that this execrable ad appealed to. If you guessed fear, you win the prize. Women often have a fear of inadequacy, particularly in this confused age when they are expected to raise brilliant kids, run a successful business, and be unfailingly sexy, all the time. That silly goal—foisted upon us by feminists and popular culture—is impossible to reach. But maybe there’s hope if you buy the right perfume! Arguments from intimidation and appeals to fear are powerful propaganda tools.

American advertising and propaganda has been refined over the years into a malevolent science, based on the assumption that most people react, not to ideas, but to naked emotion. When I worked at an ad agency many years ago, I learned that the successful agencies know how to appeal to emotions: the stronger and baser, the better. The seven deadly sins, ad agency wags often say, are the key to selling products. Fear, envy, greed, hatred, and lust: these are the basic tools for good propaganda and effective advertising. By far, the most powerful motivating emotion—the top, most-sought-after copy writers will tell you, in an unguarded moment—is fear, followed closely by greed.

Good propaganda appeals to neither logic nor morality. Morality and ethics are the death of sales. This is why communist propaganda actually hastened the collapse of communism: the creatures running the Commie Empire thought they should appeal to morality by calling for people to engage in sacrifice for the greater good. They gave endless, droning speeches about the inevitably of communist triumph, based on the Hegelian dialectic. Not only were they wrong: their approach to selling their (virtually unsellable) theory was not clever enough. American propagandists (we can be jingoistically proud to say) would have been able to maintain the absurd social experiment called communism a little longer. They would have scrapped all the theory and focused on appealing images. Though the Commies tried to do this through huge, flag-waving rallies, the disparity between their alleged ideals and the reality they created was just too great.

One tyrant who did take American propaganda to heart was Adolph Hitler. Hitler learned to admire American propaganda through a young American expatriate who described to him, in glowing detail, how Americans enjoyed the atmosphere at football games. This American expatriate, with the memorable name of Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstängl, told the Führer how Americans could be whipped up into a frenzy through blaring music, group cheers, and chants against the enemy. Hitler, genius of evil as he was, immediately saw the value in this form of propaganda and incorporated it into his own rise to power. Prior to Hitler, German political rhetoric was dry, intellectual, and uninspiring. Hitler learned the value of spectacle in whipping up the emotions; the famed Nuremberg rallies were really little more than glorified football halftime shows. Rejecting boring, intellectual rhetoric, Hitler learned to appeal to deeply emotional but meaningless phrases, like the appeal to “blood and soil.” The German people bought it wholesale. Hitler also called for blind loyalty to the “Fatherland,” which eerily echoes our own new cabinet level post of “Homeland” Security.

If you study Nazi propaganda, you will be struck by how well it appeals to gut-level emotions and images—but not thought. You will see pictures of elderly German women hugging fresh-faced young babies, with captions about the bright future the Führer has brought to German. In fact, German propaganda borrowed the American technique of relying, not so much on words, but on images alone: pictures of handsome German soldiers, sturdy peasants in native costume, and the like. Take a look at any American car commercial featuring rugged farmers tossing bales of hay into the backs of their pickups, and you’ve seen the source from which the Nazis borrowed their propaganda techniques.

The Germans have a well-deserved reputation for producing a lot of really smart people, but this did not prevent them from being completely vulnerable to American-style propaganda. Amazingly, a nation raised on the greatest classical music, the profoundest scientists, the greatest poets, actually fell for propaganda that led them into a hopeless, two-front war against most of the world. Being smart is, in itself, no defense against skilled American propaganda, unless you know and understand the techniques, so you can resist them.

American politicians learned, early in the twentieth century, that using emotional sales techniques won elections. Furthermore, they learned that emotional appeals got them what they wanted as they advanced towards their long-term goal of becoming Masters of the Universe. From this, we get our modern lexicon of political speech, carefully crafted to appeal to powerful emotions, with either no appeal to reason, or (better yet) a vague appeal to something that sounds foggily reasonable, but is so obscure that no one will bother to dissect it.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this, which is why he called for Social Security. Security is an emotional appeal: no one is against security, are they? Roosevelt backed up his campaign with a masterful appeal to emotions: images of happy, elderly grandparents smiling while hugging their grandchildren, with everything in the world going right because of Social Security. All kinds of government programs were sold on the basis of appealing images and phrases. Roosevelt even appealed to America’s traditional love of freedom, spinning that term by multiplying it into the new Four Freedoms, including Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. Well, what heartless human being could possibly be against that? The Four Freedoms were promoted with images of parents tucking their children cozily into bed, and a happy family gathered around a Thanksgiving dinner, obviously free from want. The campaign was also based on that most powerful of all selling emotions: fear. If you don’t support Social Security, the ads suggested, you will live your last years in utter destitution.

Putzi Hanfstängl, viewing Roosevelt’s evil brilliance from Nazi Germany, was probably jealous.

American advertising executives learned the value of presenting a single image or slogan, and repeating it over and over again until it became ingrained in the public’s consciousness. Thus we are all aware that Ivory Soap is so pure that it floats: a point that has been repeated for the better part of a century. I’m not sure why I should be impressed that a bar of soap floats, but on the other hand, it’s not intended that I think that far. Politicians now sell their programs the way the advertising creeps sell soap: they dream up a slogan and repeat it over and over again. Thus we get empty slogans like The New Frontier, The New World Order (that one was poorly chosen; it sounds too much like an actual idea), or Reinventing Government (an idea that everyone should favor, except that the idea behind it really means Keeping Government the Same, only no one is supposed to think that far). Empty grandeur sells political products.

Both German and American politicians carried the use of banners to new heights. Flags are impressive emotional symbols, particularly when waved by thousands of enthusiastic people: it’s a rare individual who can resist the collective enthusiasm of thousands of his fellow human beings, cheering about their collective greatness. Putzi Hanfstängl understood this, advising Hitler to fill his public spectacles with not just a few, but countless thousands of swastika flags. The swastika, too, was a brilliant stroke of advertising and propaganda: it has become, in the public consciousness, the official emblem of Nazism, even though it had nothing to do with Germany. In fact, swastikas were used by ancient Hindus and American tribes, but I’m not aware of it being used by anyone in Germany prior to Hitler.

Now observe how Americans in the current crisis have taken to displaying huge flags on their cars. Flags are not rational arguments; they are instruments for whipping up the Madness of Crowds. Observe how many Americans have, with a straight face, called for a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag desecration, oblivious to the obvious contradictions such an amendment would have with the rest of the Constitution. But again, if you learn nothing else about propaganda, learn that it must not appeal to rationality.

Politicians don’t just use warm, fuzzy images to sell us on the road to tyranny. They also need emotional appeals to intimidate their enemies. Thus the small percentage of the population that really does use thought and reason more than emotion must be demonized. Roosevelt managed this with some masterful propaganda strokes. Those who opposed him were Isolationists, and Malefactors of Great Wealth! (The gut-level emotion appealed to here is envy.) Roosevelt thus showed himself to be an early master of what former California Governor Jerry Brown called “buzz words”; that is, words intended to silence counter-argument by appealing to unassailable emotional images. No one is for Isolation, and almost everyone reacts to an appeal to hate anyone who has a lot of money. The latter appeal, of course, had great power during the Great Depression, which Roosevelt managed to maintain for the entire length of his presidency, all the while blaming others for its evils. Was this guy an evil genius, or what?

The propaganda cleverness used in successfully branding anti-war people as Isolationists is breathtaking. After all, a rational person (ah, keep in mind, that’s not a common individual) realizes that those who oppose war are the exact opposite of isolationists. The Old Right at the time called for peaceful, commercial relations with all nations, based on neutrality in foreign affairs. If anything, those who oppose war and meddling in other countries’ affairs are the opposite of Isolationists as they really stand for open, profitable relationships with other countries. The people who stand for such ideas do not “sell” them by means of strictly emotional appeals, so they tend to lose the propaganda wars. When Roosevelt succeeded in whipping the country up into a war-frenzy after steering us into the Pearl Harbor fiasco, the Old Right realized their opposition to the war was hopeless.

The role of the government propaganda camps known as public schools cannot be discounted in all this. Schools are not so much centers of learning as they are behavior conditioning camps in which children are taught to be unquestioningly obedient to authority. Since reason and morality are the death of propaganda, schools busy themselves with systematically stunting students’ ability to reason and think in moral terms. Because the government owns the propaganda camps, it’s not surprising that the beneficiary of the propaganda is almost always the government. Americans accept obvious absurdities because they were drilled into their heads, year after year, in the government propaganda camps until they became true and unquestionable. Thus, everyone knows Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression, even though the worst depression years were precisely those in which he and his party controlled every branch of government. Everyone knows Lincoln was a great president because he saved “government by the people” and freed the slaves, even though he became a war tyrant and only freed the slaves when it was politically convenient to do so. Wilson, everyone knows, made the world “safe for democracy”, evidently by instituting a draft and getting America involved in a European war that was fought for reasons no one to this day can fathom. When minds are young and pliable—government experts understand this principle—you can fill them with nonsense that is practically impossible to root out. Laughable falsehoods in effect become true because everyone knows them to be true.

Advertising executives learned, early on, that companies could not be too obvious in using their propaganda. If their agenda could be clearly seen, then it could also be rejected. The answer to this problem was the American propaganda technique of the “independent expert” and the “guy on the street.” One of these appeals to our timidity before authority, and the other to our smugness when dealing with someone at or below our perceived social level. Of course, these two techniques are really just two sides of the same coin. In product advertising, sports heroes and celebrities are used to sell corn flakes because no one would listen to the president of Kellogg telling us why corn flakes are so good. In selling detergent, plain-looking housewives are preferable to sexy models because they look just like us. In political propaganda, “experts” are often trotted out to tell us, in convoluted, circular reasoning, why minimum wage laws are really good for us, why a little bit of inflation is good, or why we just can’t rely on the free market for something so crucially important as education. Or, using the “guy on the street” approach, we are told to support idiotic wars because the common soldiers (“our boys”), cannot function unless they know we stand united behind them. If the rare sensible person tries to argue against war, he is accused of making things harder for “our boys.”

This brings us to the latest iteration of masterful American Propaganda: the War on Terrorism. Any attempt to explain why the terrorists (crazed as they obviously were) felt motivated to attack the World Trade Center is looked on as “siding with the terrorists.” Indeed, Ashcroft and Bush have said, in so many words, that if you don’t support them in everything they do, you stand with the terrorists. Ashcroft and Bush have evidently studied their propaganda lessons from World War II, when Roosevelt silenced all opposition by accusing anyone who stood against him of undermining the war effort. Anyone who suggests we should not risk World War III by invading the Middle East is alternately accused of siding with the terrorists, of slandering the memory of those who died, or (of course) of not “standing by our boys” in times of great need. It’s easy to feel alienated in a nation of flag-wavers singing patriotic hymns. The fact that they are marching lockstep to a world in which the government will monitor their e-mail, snoop into their bank accounts, and eventually throw them in jail for voicing opposition doesn’t seem to bother them one bit.

Now, most libertarians or otherwise thoughtful people will react with dismay when told that most of their fellow human beings react so unthinkingly to sock-you-in-the-gut emotional propaganda. Unfortunately, most people are not capable of really thinking things out. Most people really do buy perfume because of the emotional imagery. Most people really do believe the “independent expert”, whether in politics or buying a car. Most people want to go with the crowd, or follow the leader. To do otherwise requires independent thought and the willingness to be ostracized, which is an unbearable psychological burden for many.

If you want to take heart, remember that the Vietnam War ended because a few people just continued to speak against it, despite the overwhelming government propaganda for it. The fact that a lot of the anti-war protesters were motivated by the wrong reasons (support of commies), doesn’t matter in light of the fact they were able to turn the tide. They were right, even if for the wrong reasons. If advocates of freedom continue to speak against the creeping tyranny that our masters justify on the phony grounds of the War on Terrorism, we might just be able to prevent the transition from Republic to Empire. The thing about propaganda is that, once it is exposed for what it is, no one listens anymore. People tune it out, just as the slaves in Russia and China learned to tune out their official propaganda.

Paul Weber’s novel, Transfiguration, is available at http://www.xlibris.com/Transfiguration.html.

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The Island of Diego Garcia, B 52s and You and Me

A Letter from Lindsey Colleen to any interested people in Britain and the U.S.A. about injustices elsewhere

Introductory Note;  Ever wonder how the United States came to possess an island in the Indian Ocean that could serve as a bombing platform for the attack on Afghanistan? And did you know that the United States has nuclear weapons on an island in the Indian Ocean?  Can you guess what the residents of the area–in the Republic of  Mauritius–think about our bombs and planes being in their neighborhood?

The history of Diego Garcia island is replete with all the usual dark secrets and dirty tricks of colonialism, including a long history of enslavement and forced labor of the native Ilois and their eventual forced removal by the British.  You can find it, but you have to dig deep to sort it from the U.S. and British propaganda, by simply typing “Diego Garcia” into a good search site. You’ll also find many very delicious photos of a very beautiful place.  

 Please read the fascinating account of writer and activist Lindsey Colleen, a resident of Mauritius.--Hardly Waite,Gazette Senior Editor. 

 

Dear people of Britain and the USA,

I write from Mauritius. You may not remember quite where that is. Although, then again “The Overcrowded Baracoon” by V.S Naipaul, especially since he has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, may just stir a memory, if ever you came across his bitingly accurate travelogue where Mauritius is depicted as a lousy hell-hole of a place. His story was banned by the Mauritian government at the time.

Or the word “Mauritius” may evoke the equally accurate tourist brochures showing luscious green islands, where it never rains of course, a place so perfect for visitors to holiday in, that there are no people actually living there. No factory workers on piece rates, no sugar cane workers in that hot sun, no computer workers linked to satellite, not even hotel workers as human beings. Maybe just as stage props for dreams.

But there are people living here. In all the contradictions. And some of us have a link with you. Through our shared history. That’s how it is that I come to write to you, who vote in and are citizens of Britain or the US? I, who vote here and am a citizen of Mauritius.

It’s all because of an island.

It’s a particular island that you, over there, and us, over here, share responsibility for. Only maybe you don’t know that you share this responsibility. And while we know we do, we can’t do enough about it so long as we are on our own.

This island is being used for waging war.

In Mauritius, it is hard to find anyone who agrees to the island, part of our country after all, being used for B-52’s to set off from to go bombard the cities of Afghanistan. Our hearts ache to see the children in the rubble the next morning. Maybe there is someone here who agrees, but I haven’t met the person yet.

The Mauritius Foreign Affairs Minister did publicly “give assent”. So he agrees. But he only says it in his formal speeches as representative of the state. At a political party rally, he would certainly not try it. The people are too angry with “America”.

I’ll share the story with you, the story about the island. It is a “small story”. But it is one that will perhaps help understand the deepness of the rage felt in so many places against the powers that be in your countries. A rage often wrongly projected on to “Americans” as a whole. A rage that sometimes makes it hard for people world-wide to pardon the ignorance amongst ordinary folk in the US and Britain about the role of their elected governments in “the rest of the world”. (The rest of the world is such a big place.)

And this rage here, and I would think elsewhere in the rest of the world, too, has somehow got mixed up with the horror that spread on the day of the attack on the World Trade Centre, an attack by missiles made up of passengers and aimed at the level of the hearts of the Twin Towers. Causing collapse. And the terrible emptiness left at Ground Zero. Giant in rubble. Enough to cause everyone on the planet insomnia. And yet somehow the recurring image, no matter how much I try to wipe it from my mind, is that of Goliath being felled by the hand-made sling of the new millennium, a carpet-cutter.

And then? As if bombarding Kabul from B-52’s could rout out young men with carpet cutters.

But, I am speaking today, in particular, of an island. The island of Diego Garcia. And the role of the Diego Garcia military base on it. A US base it is, in the Indian Ocean. In the Republic of Mauritius, more specifically. And curiously, just one week before the 11th September came and changed everything, the Bush administration announced that Diego Garcia was being expanded to take in all the hardware and troops from US bases in Europe that, they added, would from then on be gradually phased out.

The story I will tell is so evocative that you may not have believed it, were it not for all the articles in November last year on the High Court in London’s stinging judgment against the British state in a case brought by people from here. The time had come around for a court action for the right of inhabitants to return to the island, when all the relevant facts, after a 30-year period of being held under secrecy laws, were “declassified” in Britain, in 1998.

The story is another story of a terrible emptiness.

In 1965, in the preparation for the Independence of Mauritius, the Harold Wilson Labour Government in Britain decided to act illegally and to cut out part of Mauritius and hold on to it, as a condition for Independence, which was to be “granted” in 1968. This kind of blackmail is against the UN Charter. A colonizing power cannot impose conditions on a part of itself, that is to say, on one of its colonies, in exchange for Independence.

Britain then tagged on some of the Seychelles Islands (Seychelles was still a colony too), and made up a new fiction of a “colony” on 8th  But whatever the price, the US Government is the receiver of the stolen goods.

We want to close this base down.

We want the terrible emptiness of the tarmac runways out! And the concrete docks out! We want the emptiness of all the military hardware out, too. We want to regenerate the coral around these islands. And the palms.

Living life. We want Diego Garcia to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site immediately on the closure of the base.

But, more than anything, we want to heal the terrible emptiness in the hearts of a people forcibly removed. We want to heal the tearing apart of a country. We want people to be free to go back home.

There have been UN resolutions, year after year, for the reunification of Mauritius through the return of Diego Garcia and the whole of Chagos. Only the US and UK governments voted against. But these two votes have, so far, been enough.

The 1995 UN “Pelindaba Treaty for a Nuclear-Weapons Free Africa” was signed by all the countries concerned, but on the insistence of the representatives of your two countries, there were the infamous “dotted lines” scribbled in around Diego Garcia.

So Diego Garcia is not “nuclear free”. And nor are Pakistan and India. Which is all the more reason for all of us to say “no” to war. And “yes” to the closing down of the base.

I write to ask if perhaps you could start by writing to your MP’s and Congressmen to inform them that the theft of the islands and the receiving of stolen goods was done without the knowledge of the people of your lands, that the forcible removals of our people were done behind your backs, that your people would never have condoned this ultimate violence, that you want the people of Diego Garcia to return to their homes, that a Court judgment has granted them the right to return, that the base is illegal and must be closed down.

That the base must be closed down in any case.

We ask this to be included as part of the movement towards ending the war. As part of the movement for peace.

And as we all know, peace only comes with justice. And justice only comes when we find out about injustices being committed near and far, and all over the rest of the world, so we can put a stop to them. It is these injustices that sometimes breed the ideas that sometimes breed terrorism.

At other times, the injustices breed rioting. In Los Angeles and in Mauritius. In Harare and in Northern Towns in Britain. In Algeria and in Indonesia. And whether it is terrorism or rioting, it brings in its wake, repression.

So, we need coherent, conscious movements against the war, and for justice worldwide. And justice, as we all know in our hearts, is only born in the movement towards equality. The e-word. You are not allowed to say it in good company anymore. It is only permissible in reference to past revolutions.

But it is, curiously, precisely the e-technology that may help now.

We live in a world of sufficient technological advancement to permit a much better form of democracy than we ever dared dream of before. Democracy at the work place. Democratic control over finance. Where democracy will be much more than casting a vote to choose between two political parties, both financed by private companies, once every five years, where you live or where I do.

Democracy in which human rights in all spheres – political, civil, economic, social, cultural – gain broader and broader definitions through our struggles, wherever we are.

Democracy where human beings gain in dignity. Democracies from which guns and land-mines are not exported to prop up dictatorships in countries unknown, nor to make profits from warring factions in countries elsewhere in the world. We have to inform ourselves and act. Together.

So that dog stops eating dog. And horse horse.

Lindsey Collen, For LALIT, in Mauritius 16th October lalmel@intnet.mu

Lindsey Collen was born in South Africa and lives in Mauritius. She is the author of several novels “There is a Tide”, “The Rape of Sita” and “Getting Rid of it”. “The Rape of Sita” won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa Region in 1994 and was longlisted for the 1996 Orangeprize. Her latest book is called “Mutiny”. She is a human rights’ activist in Mauritius, active in the women’s right’s movement, in the movement for social housing, in an organisation for adult literacy and in the political organisation, Lalit.

For a brief, Americanized “history” of Diego Garcia, with map, please go to http://www.infoplease.com/spot/dg.html.

For a complete and well-documented history of the British/American theft of Diego Garcia, please go to http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=diego_garcia.

Reprinted with Permission of Lindsey Coleen.

Wave Our Flag!

Jim Hightower
October 16, 2001

I’m waving the flag these days — the stars & stripes, Old Glory, our flag.

Since September 11, I’ve been waving it all over the place, because it stands for something special, historic, important, and uniting. I’m not waving it as some macho bravado assertion of American Empire, but in the spirit of America Eternal, the land of deep democratic values and ambitions, the place where “Liberty and Justice for All” is not a throw-a way line, but a founding principle that we must struggle daily to try to implement.

Our flag is more than the emblem of America’s financial and military might, it’s a mirror in which we can see reflected our finest ideals of economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity.

Or not. This is why it’s especially important for us to wave America’s flag now, in these dark days when anti-democratic forces are loose in Washington and in the media, howling for a repression of the very freedoms the flag symbolizes. I’ll be double-damned to hell before I meekly allow this banner of democracy to be usurped by political opportunists, corporatists, xenophobes, war-mongrers, and fear-mongers who confuse conformity with patriotism, demanding that we be quiet, get in line, and be “patriotically correct.”

Hey, we’re not lemmings. We’re citizens, and as the founders knew, the first job of a citizen is to keep your mouth open. Our democracy was forged in rebellion, crafted by mavericks and risk-takers who refused to salute authority. They rejected all autocrats who tried to suppress liberties in the name of providing security and order.

This is Jim Hightower saying … Ours is the flag of the pamphleteers and Sons of Liberty, the abolitionists and suffragists, Populists and Wobblies, Mother Jones and Joe Hill, Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. — freedom-fighters all. Too many true patriots struggled and died to bring our democracy this far. We have no right to be quiet. Stand up! Wave our flag! Speak out!

Saying goodbye to patriotism

by Robert Jensen

 [A talk delivered to the Peace Action National Congress, November 10, 2001]

 

This summer I wrote a book review for an academic journal — one of those terribly important pieces of writing that will be read by tens and tens of people, some of them actually people outside my own family. The book is about the history of governmental restrictions on U.S. news media during war, and it’s a good book in many ways. But I faulted the author for accepting the American mythology about the nobility of our wars and their motivations. I challenged his uncritical use of the term patriotism, which I called “perhaps the single most morally and intellectually bankrupt concept in human history.”

By coincidence, the galley proofs for the piece came back to me for review a few days after September 11. I paused as I re-read my words, and I thought about the reaction those words might spark, given the reflexive outpouring of patriotism in the wake of the terrorist attacks. I thought about the controversy that some of my writing had already sparked on campus and, it turned out, beyond the campus. I thought about how easy it would be to take out that sentence.

I thought about all that for some time before deciding to let it stand. My reason was simple: I think that statement was true on September 10, and if anything, I’m more convinced it is true after September 11.

I also believe that nestled in the truth of that assertion is a crucial question for the U.S.-based peace movement, one that we cannot avoid after 9-11:

Are we truly internationalist? Can we get beyond patriotism? Or, in the end, are we just Americans?

That is a way, I think, of asking whether we are truly for peace and justice.

I realize that framing of the question may seem harsh. It may rub the wrong way people who want to hold onto a positive notion of patriotism.

I mean the statement to be harsh because I believe the question is crucial. If in the end we are just Americans, if we cannot move beyond patriotism, then we cannot claim to be internationalists. And, if we are not truly internationalist in our outlook — all the way to the bone — then I do not think we truly call ourselves people committed to peace and justice.

Let me try to make the case for this by starting with definitions.

My dictionary defines patriotism as “love and loyal or zealous support of one’s own country.” We’ll come back to that, but let’s also look beyond the dictionary to how the word is being used at this moment in history, in this country. I would suggest there are two different, and competing, definitions of patriotism circulating these days.

 

Definition #1: Patriotism as loyalty to the war effort.

 

It’s easy to get a handle on this use of the word. Just listen to the president of the United States speak. Or watch the TV anchors. Or, as I have done, be a guest on a lot of talk radio shows. This view of patriotism is pretty simple: We were attacked. We must defend ourselves. The only real way to defend ourselves is by military force. If you want to be patriotic, you should — you must — support the war.

I have been told often that it is fine for me to disagree with that policy, but now is not the time to disagree publicly. A patriotic person, I am told, should remain quiet and support the troops until the war is over, at which point we can all have a discussion about the finer points of policy. If I politely disagree with that, then the invective flows: Commie, terrorist-lover, disloyal, unpatriotic. Love it or leave it.

It is easy to take apart this kind of patriotism. It is a patriotism that is incompatible with democracy or basic human decency. To see just how intellectually and morally bankrupt a notion it is, just ask this question: What would we have said to Soviet citizens who might have made such an argument about patriotic duty as the tanks rolled into Prague in 1968? To draw that analogy is not to say the two cases are exactly alike. Rather, it is to point out that a decision to abandon our responsibility to evaluate government policy and surrender our power to think critically is a profound failure, intellectually and morally.

 

Definition #2: Patriotism as critique of the war effort.

 

Many in the peace-and-justice movement, myself included, have suggested that to be truly patriotic one cannot simply accept policies because they are handed down by leaders or endorsed by a majority of people, even if it is an overwhelming majority. Being a citizen in a real democracy, we have said over and over, means exercising our judgment, evaluating policies, engaging in discussion, and organizing to try to help see that the best policies are enacted. When the jingoists start throwing around terms like “anti-American” and “traitor,” we point out that true patriotism means staying true to the core commitments of democracy and the obligations that democracy puts on people. There is nothing un-American, we contend, about arguing for peace.

That’s all clear enough. As I have said, I have used that line of argument many times. It is the best way — maybe the only way — to respond in public at this moment if one wants to be effective in building an antiwar movement. We all remind ourselves, over and over, that we have to start the discussion where people are, not where we wish people were. If people feel “love and loyal or zealous support of one’s own country,” then we have to be aware of that and respond to it.

But increasingly, I feel uncomfortable arguing for patriotism, even with this second definition. And as I listen to friends and allies in the peace-and-justice movement, I have started to wonder whether that claim to patriotism-as-critical-engagement is indeed merely strategic. Or is it motivated by something else? Are we looking for a way to hold onto patriotism because we really believe in it?

I think it is valuable to ask the question: Is there any way to define the term that doesn’t carry with it arrogant and self-indulgent assumptions? Is there any way to salvage patriotism?

I want to argue that invoking patriotism puts us on dangerous ground and that we must be careful about our strategic use of it.

At its ugliest, patriotism means a ranking of the value of the lives of people based on boundaries. To quote Emma Goldman: “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.”

People have said this directly to me: Yes, the lives of U.S. citizens are more important than the lives of Afghan citizens. If innocent Afghans have to die, have to starve — even in large numbers — so that we can achieve our goals, well, that’s the way it is, and that’s the way it should be. I assume no argument here is needed as to why this type of patriotism is unacceptable. We may understand why people feel it, but it is barbaric.

But what of the effort to hold onto a kinder and gentler style of patriotism by distinguishing it from this kind of crude nationalism? We must ask: What are the unstated assumptions of this other kind of patriotism we have been defending? If patriotism is about loyalty of some sort, to what are we declaring our loyalty?

If we are pledging loyalty to a nation-state, we have already touched on the obvious problems: What if that nation-state pursues an immoral objective? Should we remain loyal to it? The same question is obvious if our loyalty is to a specific government or set of government officials. If they pursue immoral objectives or pursue moral objectives in an immoral fashion, what would it mean to be loyal to them?

Some suggest we should be loyal to the ideals of America, a set of commitments and practices connected with the concepts of freedom and democracy. That’s all well and good; freedom and democracy are good things, and I try to not only endorse those values but live them. I assume everyone in this room does as well.

But what makes those values uniquely American? Is there something about the United States or the people who live here that make us more committed to, or able to act out, the ideals of freedom and democracy — more so than, say, Canadians or Indians or Brazilians? Are not people all over the world — including those who live in countries that do not guarantee freedom to the degree the United States does — capable of understanding and acting on those ideals? Are not different systems possible for making real those ideals in a complex world?

If freedom and democracy are not unique to us, then they are simply human ideals, endorsed to varying degrees in different places and realized to different degrees by different people acting in different places? If that’s true, then they are not distinctly American ideals. They were not invented here, and we do not have a monopoly on them. So, if one is trying to express a commitment to those ideals, why do it in the limiting fashion of talking of patriotism?

Let me attempt an analogy to gender. After 9-11, a number of commentators have argued that criticisms of masculinity should be rethought. Yes, masculinity is often connected to, and expressed through, competition, domination, and violence, they said. But as male firefighters raced into burning buildings and risked their lives to save others, cannot we also see that masculinity encompasses a kind of strength that is rooted in caring and sacrifice?

My response is, yes, of course men often exhibit such strength. But do not women have the capacity for that kind of strength rooted in caring and sacrifice? Do they not exhibit such strength on a regular basis? Why of course they do, most are quick to agree. Then the obvious question is, what makes these distinctly masculine characteristics? Are they not simply human characteristics?

We identify masculine tendencies toward competition, domination, and violence because we see patterns of different behavior; we see that men are more prone to such behavior in our culture. We can go on to observe and analyze the ways in which men are socialized to behave in those ways. We do all that work, I would hope, to change those behaviors.

But that is a very different exercise than saying that admirable human qualities present in both men and women are somehow primarily the domain of one of those genders. To assign them to a gender is misguided, and demeaning to the gender that is then assumed not to possess them to the same degree. Once you start saying “strength and courage are masculine traits,” it leads to the conclusion that woman are not as strong or courageous. To say “strength and courage are masculine traits,” then, is to be sexist.

The same holds true for patriotism. If we abandon the crude version of patriotism but try to hold onto an allegedly more sophisticated version, we bump up against this obvious question: Why are human characteristics being labeled as American if there is nothing distinctly American about them?

If people want to argue that such terminology is justified because those values are realized to their fullest degree in the United States, then there’s some explaining to do. Some explaining to the people of Guatemala and Iran, Nicaragua and South Vietnam, East Timor and Laos, Iraq and Panama. We would have to explain to the victims of U.S. aggression — direct and indirect — how it is that our political culture, the highest expression of the ideals of freedom and democracy, has managed routinely to go around the world overthrowing democratically elected governments, supporting brutal dictators, funding and training proxy terrorist armies, and unleashing brutal attacks on civilians when we go to war. If we want to make the claim that we are the fulfillment of history and the ultimate expression of the principles of freedom and justice, our first stop might be Hiroshima. We might want to explain that claim there.

If we are serious about peace and justice in the world, we need to subject this notion of patriotism to scrutiny. If we do that, I would suggest, it is clear that any use of the concept of patriotism is bound to be chauvinistic at some level. At its worst, patriotism can lead easily to support for barbarism. At its best, it is self-indulgent and arrogant in its assumptions about the uniqueness of U.S. culture.

None of what I have said should be taken as a blanket denunciation of the United States, our political institutions, or our culture. People often tell me, “You start with the assumption that everything about the United States is bad.” Of course I do not assume that. That would be as absurd a position as the assumption that everything about the United States is good. I can’t imagine any reasonable person making either statement. That does raise the question, of course, of who is a reasonable person. We might ask that question about, for example, George Bush, the father. In 1988, after the U.S. Navy warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner in a commercial corridor, killing 290 civilians, Bush said, “I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”

I want to put forward the radical proposition that we should care what the facts are. We should start with the assumption that everything about the United States, like everything about any country, needs to be examined and assessed. That is what it means to be a moral person.

There is much about this country a citizen can be proud of, and I am in fact proud of those things. The personal freedoms guaranteed (to most people) in this culture, for example, are quite amazing. As someone who regularly tries to use those freedoms, I am as aware as anyone of how precious they are.

There also is much to be appalled by. The obscene gaps in wealth between rich and poor, for example, are quite amazing as well, especially in a wealthy society that claims to be committed to justice.

In that sense, we are like any other grouping of people. That doesn’t mean one can’t analyze various societies and judge some better than others by principles we can articulate and defend — so long as they are truly principles, applied honestly and uniformly. But one should maintain a bit of humility in the endeavor. Perhaps instead of saying “The United States is the greatest nation on earth” — a comment common among politicians, pundits, and the public — we would be better off saying, “I live in the United States and have deep emotional ties to the people, land, and ideals of this place. Because of these feelings, I want to highlight the positive while working to change what is wrong.” That is not moral relativism — it is a call for all of us to articulate and defend our positions.

We can make that statement without having to argue that we are, in some essential way, better than everyone else. We can make that statement without arrogantly suggesting that other people are inherently less capable of articulating or enacting high ideals. We can make that statement and be ready and willing to engage in debate and discussion about the merits of different values and systems.

We can make that statement, in other words, and be true internationalists, people truly committed to peace and justice. If one wants to call that statement an expression of patriotism, I will not spend too much time arguing. But I will ask: If we make a statement like that, why do we need to call it an expression of patriotism? What can we learn by asking ourselves: What makes us, even people in the peace-and-justice community, want to hold onto the notion of patriotism with such tenacity?

When I write or talk with the general public and raise questions like these, people often respond, “If you hate America so much, why don’t you leave?”

But what is this America that I allegedly hate? The land itself? The people who live here? The ideals in the country’s founding documents? I do not hate any of those things.

When people say to me “love it or leave it,” what is the “it” to which they refer?

No one can ever quite answer that. Still, I have an answer for them.

I will not leave “it” for a simple reason: I have nowhere else to go. I was born here. I was given enormous privileges here. My place in the world is here, where I feel an obligation to use that privilege to be part — a very small part of, as we all are only a small part — of a struggle to make real a better world. Whatever small part I can play in that struggle, whatever I can achieve, I will have to achieve here, in the heart of the beast.

I love it, which is to say that I love life — I love the world in which I live and the people who live in it with me. I will not leave that “it.”

That “it” may not be specific enough for some, but it’s the best I can do. Maybe it will help to answer in the negative, for I can say more clearly what the “it” is not. I can describe more clearly what is the America I do not love.

The America I love is not this administration, or any other collections of politicians, or the corporations they serve.

It is not the policies of this administration, or any other collection of politicians, or the corporations they serve.

The America I love is not wrapped up in a mythology about “how good we are” that ignores the brutal realities of our own history of conquest and barbarism.

Most of all, I want no part of the America that arrogantly claims that the lives and hopes and dreams of people who happen to live within the boundaries of the United States have more value than those in other places. Nor will I indulge America in the belief that our grief is different. Since September 11, the United States has demanded that the world take our grief more seriously. When some around the world have not done so, we express our outrage.

But we should ask: What makes the grief of a parent who lost a child in the World Trade Center any deeper than the grief of a parent who lost a child in Baghdad when U.S. warplanes rained death on the civilian areas of Iraq in the Gulf War? Or the parents of a child in Nicaragua when the U.S. terrorist proxy army ravaged that country? Soon after 9-11, I heard a television reporter describe lower Manhattan as “Beirut on the Hudson.” We might ask, how did Beirut come to look like Beirut, and what is our responsibility in that? And what of the grief of those who saw their loved ones die during the shelling of that city?

We should ask: Where was the empathy of America for the grief of those people?

Certainly we grieve differently, more intensely, when people close to us die. We don’t feel the loss of a family member the same way as a death of a casual friend. We feel something different over the death of someone we knew compared with the death of a stranger. But we must understand that the grief we feel when our friends and neighbors became victims of political violence is no different than what people around the world feel. We must understand that each of those lives lost abroad has exactly the same value as the life of any one of our family, friends and neighbors.

September 11 was a dark day. I still remember what it felt like to watch those towers come down, the darkness that settled over me that day, the hopelessness, how tangible death felt — for me, not only the deaths of those in the towers but also the deaths of those who would face the bombs in the war that might follow, the war that did follow, the war that goes on.

But humans are resilient; in the darkness we tend to look for light, for a way out of the darkness.

I believe there is a light shining out of September 11, out of all that darkness. It is a light that I believe we Americans can follow to our own salvation. That light is contained in a simple truth that is obvious, but which Americans have never really taken to heart: We are part of the world. We cannot any longer hide from that world. We cannot allow our politicians, and generals, and corporate executives to do their dirty business around the world while we hide from the truths about just how dirty that business really is. We can no longer hide from the coups they plan, the wars they start, the sweatshops they run.

For me, all this means saying goodbye to patriotism.

That is the paradox: September 11 has sparked a wave of patriotism, a patriotism that has in many cases been overtly hateful, racist and xenophobic. A patriotism that can lead people to say, as one person wrote to me, “We should bomb [Afghanistan] until there’s no more earth to bomb.”

But the real lesson of September 11, which I believe we will eventually learn, is that if we are to survive as a free people, as decent people who want honestly to claim the ideals we say we live by, we must say goodbye to patriotism. That patriotism will not relieve our grief, but only deepen it. It will not solve our problems but only extend them. I believe there is no hope for ourselves or for the world if we continue to embrace patriotism, no matter what the definition.

We must give up our “love and loyal or zealous support of one’s own country” and transfer that love, loyalty and zealousness to the world, and especially the people of the world who have suffered most so that we Americans can live in affluence.

We must be able to say, as the great labor leader of the early 20th century Eugene Debs said, “I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.”

I am with Debs. I believe it is time to declare: I am not patriotic. I am through with trying to redefine the term patriotic to make sense. There is no sense to it.

That kind of statement will anger many, but at some point we must begin to take that risk, for this is not merely an academic argument over semantics.

This is both a struggle to save ourselves and a struggle to save the lives of vulnerable people around the world.

We must say goodbye to patriotism because the kind of America the peace-and-justice movement wants to build cannot be built on, or through, the patriotism of Americans.

We must say goodbye to patriotism because the world cannot survive indefinitely the patriotism of Americans.

Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective (www.nowarcollective.com), and author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (www.peterlangusa.com). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

 

Reprinted with permission.

Editor’s Note: Tiger Tom’s “I support the war but not our troops” originally  appeared in the early days of the most recent U.S. invasion of Iraq,  during the reign of Bush the Younger.

I Support the War But Not Our Troops

Our Slogans and Our Battlefields Aren’t So Hot, Either

by Tiger Tom

— “My country, right or wrong” is like saying “My mother, drunk or sober.”–G.K.Chesterton.

Like all red-blooded Americans,  I’m crazy about this nifty war in Iraq.  It is truly something to be proud of.  Us, with the most expensive military machine ever assembled,  kicking the ragged ass of a downtrodden third world country,.  What could be sweeter?  That’s what America is about.

We can be proud that we have not allowed the lessons of history to spoil our noble primitive nature. Like our beastly ancestors,  we know that when some problem comes up,  there’s nothing as effective and as satisfying as good old brute force. By not learning a whit from the  grief caused by the 36,452,765 wars of the past, we’ve disproved the theory of evolution.  We’re as dumb as we were in the Garden of Eden, and we still believe whatever the snake tells us.

This is a pretty good war, but frankly our troops don’t meet the test.  I have seen many soldiers on TV, and  I, Tiger Tom, say that what this war needs is better troops.  Most of these guys are pretty plain and, frankly,  don’t seem a lot smarter than the Commander in Chief, although, like the great civilian soldiers at the Department of “Defense”(1),  when the camera is rolling they can spit out a few modern soldier cliches like “survivability”  and “shape the battlefield.”

They do not have good haircuts. It is hard to support troops with bad haircuts.

Do You Support Our Troops?

I, Tiger Tom, am confused about what our armchair warriors mean when they say that they “support our troops.”  As soon as a good TV war gets rolling,  everyone “supports our troops.”   How do they support our troops?  I, Tiger Tom, who pay my taxes, do not know how to support our troops other than that. So I looked for ways in which other citizens support our troops.  I did some research.

I read a Z-Net quiz that asked people questions about the war and how to support our troops. Here is the first item of the questionnaire.  See if you can answer it.

War Quiz

by Stephen R. Shalom

1. The anti-war movement supports our troops by urging that they be brought home immediately so they neither kill nor get killed in a unjust war. How has the Bush administration shown its support for our troops?

a. The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee voted to cut $25 billion in veterans benefits over the next 10 years.

b. The Bush administration proposed cutting $172 million from impact aid programs which provide school funding for children of military personnel.

c. The administration ordered the Dept. of Veterans Affairs to stop publicizing health benefits available to veterans.

d. All of the above.

(D is correct.)

Now, I, Tiger Tom, offer the following questionnaire for Gazette readers.

 

The Pure Water Gazette Troop Support Survey

by Tiger Tom

I, Tiger Tom, support our troops by paying my taxes.  Other than paying your taxes, how do you support our troops?

a. I knit mittens for our troops.

b. I bake cookies for our troops.

c. I do not drive my car, thus saving gasoline for the use of our troops.

d. I spend countless hours watching our troops on television.

e. I write letters to my congressperson demanding that my taxes be raised to take care of our veterans.

f. I volunteer 20 hours per week at a Veteran’s Hospital cleaning the bed sores of quadriplegic veterans of past wars.

g. I bought a paper poppy from a veteran in front of the Post Office in 1993.

h. I get drunk frequently at dances at the local VFW chapter.

i.  I go around saying, “I support our troops.”

When I gave this test to a group of patriotic Americans,  selecting only true patriots (those who had big, gaudy flags on their vehicles),  here were the results:

a. 0
b. 0
c. 0
d. 86%
e. 0
f. 0
g. 3%
h. 29%
i. 100%

We need  better battlefields

In addition to better troops, we need a better battlefield.  Whoever thought up having a big, expensive, televised war in Iraq was a moron. It’s like playing the Super Bowl game in Fairbanks, Alaska.   I, Tiger Tom, say that when it’s time for Operation Iranian Freedom and Operation North Korean Freedom, we must not let them host the war in their dumb countries. It’s our war.  We should get to choose the battleground. Iran will just be a rerun of Iraq. Sand, wind, and desolation. Boring.   And North Korea is way too cold, plus it’s about as

scenic and appetizing to a TV audience as a rotten turnip.

I say, let’s move both wars to a really nice place to fight. A place like Hawaii.  It will make for better TV, and our troops and journalists will enjoy it so much more.

Support our troops.  Demand that the next war be fought on a nice island in the South Pacific. Or in Florida.  In and around the governor’s mansion.  That would be good.

We need better slogans

Another thing our next wars need is better slogans.  I mean, the guy who writes this “Iraqi Freedom,” “Valiant Shield,” and “They hate us for our freedom”  crap should be cast down from the highest pinnacle of Saddam’s palace (if Saddam still has an unbombed pinnacled-palace left).  I, Tiger Tom, suggest some better war slogans. The obvious one has two good variations.  Either “Operation Ignorant Arrogance” or “Operation Arrogant Ignorance” seem equally powerful. Here are some others:

“Operation Enduring Arrogance”

“Operation Overwhelming Arrogance”

“Operation Never-Healing Wound”

“Operation Enrich Halliburton”

“Operation Pepsi Peace”  (This one would be used only if Pepsi agrees to cough up several billion for the reconstruction of whatever country we plan on demolishing.   This very sound idea for war financing is based on the reality that Pepsi has a lot more money than the combined wealth of the bottom 90% of the countries that make up the Coalition of the Bribed and
Intimidated–our “allies”–and it makes more sense to sell advertising rights in order to finance the war than to bleed Cameroon dry to rebuild buildings in Iraq.  The schools prostitute themselves to the corporations, so why can’t the military?  We give Pepsi an exclusive on, let’s say, all soft drink machines in Iraq (with an option for machines in Iran)  for a 10-year period in exchange for a few $ billion to rebuild the country. And while we’re on this train of thought, selling advertising on the sides of tanks isn’t all that shabby an idea.)

“Operation Arrogant Shield”

“Operation Valiant Arrogance”

“Operation Fight Fair”  [This one, made relevant by the dirty fighting in the Iraqi war, is designed to remind the enemy that only WE get to have big

powerful weapons.  Fighting with unorthodox methods and un-approved weapons (like sharpened sticks) is not fair and will not stand. Enemy troops are required to wear U.S.-approved uniforms and stand in open areas away from civilians where we can easily bomb them “cleanly and fairly.”]

In conclusion, I, Tiger Tom,  say that this war thing needs better planning. War is our main export. We need to get serious about it.  It needs professional management. I say, dump Donald Rumsfeld.  “Rummy” is clearly an arrogant and ineffective old fart.  We need someone dynamic who can give our wars the epic sweep that will command weeks and weeks of top prime time ratings.  The man for the job, I say, is Charlton Heston.  He has epic movie experience aplenty,  and even the most weepy-eyed of the bed-wetting liberals would not object to soldiers having guns. Everyone would be happy.

Another Editor’s Note:  Rummy, of course, did get dumped, but unfortunately Charlton Heston has gone on to the great rifle range in the sky and is not available.

Footnotes

1. As with most things that regard war, this is a commonly inverted term. When they say Defense they really mean Offense.

A Kinder, Gentler Patriotism

by Howard Zinn

i sing of olaf

e.e.cummings

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but–though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments–
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
“I will not kiss your fucking flag”

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but–though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat–
Olaf (upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some shit I will not eat”

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ (of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see; and Olaf, too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me: more blond than you.