Are women under attack? Recent attacks on women’s rights look more like straw men for feminists to stress their underrepresentation in the power structure. While the inequality is ever present, social engineers appear to be positioning women’s rights as the wedge issue to divide the electorate in 2016 and insure the two corporate parties are choice enough. Yes all women, except Hillary in 2016.
Dear Michael,
I write you as a longtime, enthusiastic fan, and please pardon me if the deference and affection I’d like to convey have been overcome by my shock at your recent emails. My question may sound rhetorical, but I would really like to know: what the hell compels you to shill once again for Barack Obama? Beside the campaign pablum.
When you visited Occupys across the country, including ours in Denver, I defended you to friends who dismissed you as the usual shepherd’s crook for the Democratic Party. No no no I assured them, he gets it. But did you? We weren’t protesting eight years of Bush followed by an ineffectual Obama, we were protesting Obama and the economic system under his watch. We weren’t protesting the Democratic Party being insufficiently adversarial to the Republicans, we were protesting the corporate party system, the Democrat face being the more two-faced.
Most significantly, while our anger was vented at Wall Street, the repression we were dealt, and which dissenters continue to suffer, came directly from the agencies of President Obama.
Yet now you presume to accuse the same audience of cynicism about the election, and urge us to support Democrat Obama, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, out of fear of the Big Bad Wolf, as usual Republican.
Maybe as the election draws to a climax you’ve become privy to an unseen power struggle you need to tell us about. Because it’s at odds with your earlier giddiness with Occupy. Then your enthusiasm was unclouded by your pragmatism today.
Please do tell, because Mitt Romney seems more a sheep in wolf’s clothing to me. He’s a cartoonish straw man villain spouting wedge-issue threats to scare us crows from lighting upon the real corporate agenda. The banking kleptocracy doesn’t care about gay/women’s rights except to restrict all rights, the easier to pursue its grand thefts. If the GOP had wanted to pick a winner, I’m certain the average doctor or teacher you come across everyday would have made a more suited contender.
Could the GOP have chosen a greedier more callous thug, who didn’t pay his taxes, tainted by so much scandal that a new one emerged every day to titillate and offend? Obama had to sluff the first presidential debate because they’d chosen such an unbelievable, lame duck opponent that the ratings threatened to tank.
When the Neocon Washington Post endorsed President Obama, I knew the stooge from the ringer. The empire would be screwed without Obama to placate its victims. As Glen Ford argues, Obama may appear the lesser evil, but he’s the more effective evil. He’ll sell what arrogantly-white Romney never could: more war, austerity, privatization, fossil fuel. Without Obama, the global populace would push back.
I don’t favor a Romney win, but for another reason than you. A Romney presidency would mean another cycle of voter outrage, with MoveOn once again rallying Democrats, as if they were any different, and you probably among them.
But the election is not even going to be close. The six billion spent on this election was six billion earned by the media by pretending the polling was tied, to extort more spending by both sides. Meanwhile horseless statistician Nate Silver is vilified by television pundits because he’s calculated that surprise, Obama has a comfortable lead over his bogeyman idiot challenger.
Yes I know multitudes who support Mitt Romney. Four years ago they got nowhere with John McCain, because the juggernaut of empire was already up to full steam with Obama. I confess I didn’t know it then, and fretted a GOP win like everybody else, but it didn’t keep me from voting for Cynthia McKinney against war and climate change.
You began your letter by saying “I get it” but then assume we non-voters are motivated by apathy or weariness. You’re the one who sounds worn down. Bummer.
Yours,
Eric
DENVER- Isn’t there something distasteful about a gathering of Obama supporters who want to rail against “The War On Women” and permit no mention of his non metaphorical deadly engagements? Organizers complained bitterly about activist Rita Ague’s successful subversion of their Democratic Party-only event messaging, while pretending the Pro-Obama theme was spontaneous and not partisan astroturf. While attendees carried all sorts of reproductive rights slogans, the only signage hung on the amphitheater was for Dem candidates. We had anticipated as much from early participants instructed not to worry about signs, they’d be provided. Indeed they were: “Women for Obama”, “Latinas for Obama” and anti Right-wingnut signs. Another clue came from Denver colleagues who surprised us with the news that a significant turnout was not expected because the Denver community was not responding. This was strictly a country mouse affair.
By “we fell for it” I mean of course Colorado Springs, where we fall for everything. War, Jesus, and soon, Fracking. The average Colorado Springs Joe would prefer Sarah Palin in the White House, so to fall on the smarter side of that curve it’s enough to favor Obama. In Colorado Springs even the left is right, gays are Log Cabin Republicans, and Occupiers are Teabaggers. Only on conservative campuses did academics look for common ground between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
Sure enough, three of the five organizers were from Colorado Springs, all outside Denver circles. Does it matter? Not really, the day was a fun outing for Spring’s would-be activated women, and the issues are real and persist. But why now? Why the sudden “Rightwing” onslaught on women’s rights, when Republican candidates and representatives are already wearing the black hat in the economic downturn? It’s called baiting, and the Repugs took it. The War on Women, so-called, is the cry to circle the wagons in fear and support your local gunslinger and hey, he’s a Democrat!
And there they were, keeping to themselves at upstage right, the candidates waited to make their speeches about who was going to save the women.
As a LONG TIME party faithful, Rita Ague sussed immediately that this “grassroots” event was a DP hoax. She recognized the usual suspects and traditional call outs. Newly activated citizens are prey for election year campaigns, and Rita suspected the Dems were after the better half of the 99% like the GOP did the Tea Party.
Even in their country mouse afterglow, organizers pretend they didn’t know their rally would become Pro-Obama. Does that make them duplicitous or simply stupid? I’m tired of suspecting otherwise earnest, personable, and very effective fellow activists of being deceitful, hence the depressing tone of this story. We’re idiots, in a more disguised analogy, we’re sheep.
Rita Ague was criticized for upstaging the speakers with her sign, NO WAR ON WORLD OR WOMEN. Because it clashed with the programmed message. (No Democrat is offering to save women from war.) In threatening Rita, the organizers proved themselves as comfortable as their political guests with censoring all public assertion of free speech at what was supposed to be a grassroots rally. What unmitigated, transparently blank-headed dicks, for want of a sexist term.
The newly formed War on Women defenders circle thought they’d parlay their apparent momentum by calling for a Slut Walk for the following weekend. Why not, the media image-friendly meme has become a successful Jezebel feminist protest form , though not usually scheduled in the cold of MAY.
The authentic grassroots element had a blast on the march, here you can observe a large Occupy Denver contingent, participating to show solidarity and to meet people like-minded enough to take to the street for something they believe in.
I’ll say this with the sensitivity I know White Males of Privilege have in spades: I’m sorry, isn’t the War On Women an obvious wedge issue? To me it’s the usual progressive ideals versus religious brick wall, meant to divide voters during an election year. Submitting to the traditional patriarchal framing of this debate sets back the goalposts on women’s rights. And where yesterday the public was questioning the undemocratic authoritarian fiscal system which perpetuates, among many ills, gender and social inequalities, now the American population’s better half is being misdirected to the usual Neanderthal bogeyman. Who is against female reproductive choices? The same Scooby-Doo straw villains who keep Gay Marriage in a seesaw of legal battles. The moral struggle against archaic cultural traditions has already been won, but corporate feudal interests pretend that the public they poll would forbid it. It requires a continuous drive, especially if we keep falling for the Kabuki illusion that the end zone grows further off. To women now mobilizing their energies against the so-called W.O.W. I have to say, way to let the ass’s tail wag you. Yes, Rush Limbaugh is doing today’s henchman cameo, yesterday it was the church and the GOP, but who declared this “war” to divide the 51% from the 99%? None other than President Obama with his health care measure meant to provoke church-administered health facilities. You don’t think this was a depth charge set to fire exactly now? As local women’s groups extemporize defensive demonstrations, it will be interesting to see what activism infrastructure already had the astroturf on order.
The same uptick of seismic activity which prompted Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi to condemn Western immodesty might be the best reason not to shake your breasts at Mother Earth in defiance of another earthquake. BOOBQUAKE organizers want to show Iran’s fundamentalists that American women can titillate with disdain for religious superstitions, although the mullah’s Rube Goldberg ipso facto seems appealingly pagan to me. Of course the refutation to be made with #BoobQuake (or #PantsQuake depending on the lure you’re shaking) counts on plate tectonics not batting an eye. How arrogantly Western to presume Mother Nature does not respond to us.
[Andy writes:] “TODAY is International Women’s Day (IWD). it is marked on March 8 every year. It is a major day of global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements of women. See anything in your local newspaper??” –Even in the international press, the coverage is chiefly from the Third World: New Delhi, Xinhua, al-Jazeera, AngolaPress, Jamaican Observer…
On Fillmore Street there is one of those giant, obnoxious billboards with a giant smiling baby on it, and the words, ‘Smile, your mom chose life’. Probably put up there with the help of one pedophile plagued church, too. You know the name of that church, I think?
All over the world this church that aided the Nazis and aided in the genocides against indigenous people in the Americas and aided in the pogroms against Jewish people even before the Nazis, is on one giant campaign to make people think that they respect life because they want to impose their will on young women. Smile, but did your mom always not have an abortion when she got pregnant? One rather thinks that it is not quite that simple at all, in fact.
You see, these crazy church people are often liars and hypocrites. They do one thing for themselves and urge something else entirely on others. Does Ted Haggard come to mind? Maybe many of those religious moms did have an abortion even if they did later on life give birth to you and your brothers and sisters? Maybe they had several abortions before they started to raise kids? Maybe they had an abortion or two after you were born? It’s not quite as simple as that billboard portrays it as being, now is it?
These crazy religious nuts don’t even choose much life at all, but choose death most often instead. Imagine advocating that women give birth wholesale in countries like Nicaragua, where this obnoxious church, the Catholic, has gotten the government to ban all abortions for all reasons. The Nicaraguan people do not even make $1,000 per year per capita to raise their families on. Does this church do anything to ‘choose life’ when these children are born? I rather think that they do not. How about you?
You know what this church does with its money? It invests it in real estate. It invests it in sanctimonious propaganda billboards that tell others what they should do. But they don’t help raise those poor families in countries like Nicaragua where they force women to give birth to often unwanted and uncared for children. They spend it on lawyers to get out of paying money to people molested by their priests when these people were still children. This is the Catholic Church for you. This is the American Catholic Church.
‘Smile, your mom chose life’ my ass. The Catholic Church has a totally checkered attitude towards choosing life, and that’s their little secret they don’t want you thinking much about. Life with the Catholic Church! What a trip! And NO, life does not begin at conception. And NO, there was no ‘immaculate conception’ either.
So keep your nutty religion away from the rest of us, OK? And reform yourself before you go getting ‘papal’ on those you disagree with you on this issue. (No Catholics were actually harmed by this commentary, I might mention) And Catholics, stop trying to force women to do dangerous things to keep from getting themseves financially sunk into a hole! They have kids to raise, you know? You’re not going to raise these kids for them. Now are you?
PUEBLO, COLO- Here are pictures of Saturday’s Obama campaign rally in Pueblo, which his family wedged in between appearances the same day in Nevada and Missouri. Our peace contingent positioned early at the rally entrance on Main and C Street and greeted absolutely every of the over 25K attendees, from the Orange Pass-holders to the public whose line extended over the horizon.
We stood near a facilitator who barked this instruction to folks who’d arrived to the entrance from the wrong direction, with very likely an unconscious lack of warmth, “Obama welcomes you! [Go to the] back of the line!” Another volunteer warned attendees to please remove their campaign pins, empty their pockets of change, and leave their cell-phones and cameras on for the security inspection. These lines offered us a great opportunity to add our own admonitions. Don’t let them take your voice, for example. In addition to forbidding bags and non-disposable water bottles, participants were forbidden to bring signs.
Department of Homeland Security officers wore their strange black gloves.
A group of anti-abortion protesters managed to sneak through the preliminary security cordons and were summarily ousted. It was tempting to weigh in on what of course should have been their right to political expression in a public area, regardless their extremist views, except that they make such creepy bedfellows. Angry white idiots demonstrating against women’s rights. Even the woman who held the Catholic Vote sign was not a Catholic.
Wherever the anti-abortion “bad change” white guys next attempted to raise their signs, Obama volunteers blocked their visibility with pro-Obama placards. The Obama enthusiasts even borrowed our PLEASE OBAMA NO MORE WAR poster for the purpose. If you count the rally holders themselves as protesters of the current administration. The anti-abortion disruptors would be the counter-demonstrators, as would we. Which means the counter-counter-demonstrators used our counter-demonstration poster, and the who’s who gets cloudy.
The Pueblo police force were in constant communication with each other.
Tony brought a Halloween costume to represent another disenfranchised minority.
The DHS officer pictured in the middle accosted me immediately after I took this photograph. He threatened me with arrest if I did not put down my camera. If I was neither coming nor going, he forbid me from documenting the security area in the interest of protecting the country from terrorism.
We walked around the perimeter of the secured area in order to reach our car. This is the view we had of the press recording the rally.
This is the main stage from which the Democratic candidates were speaking.
Attempting to cross Union Street, north of the Historic District, our crossing was blocked by a security detail amidst a scene so quiet it seemed to be anticipating an important arrival.
Sure enough, within minutes the Obama motorcade arrived. Michelle Obama waved to everyone as their vehicle passed.
The SUVs disgorged their passengers. Secret Service agents exited from every door.
Churches want to tell you what to do as do parents influenced by these churches. Insurance companies get into the act and mess up the process of getting decent medical care when you need it. And government, too, wants to make life’s decisions for you and force you to be pregnant and have a child against your will. Thank goodness that some people are on your side and are trying to help young women out despite all the barriers others have put in the way of doing so.
After all, some of us don’t want more women to become just another part of the forgotten statistics of women dying from abortions made illegal by others. Women on Web can help make it possible to have an abortion at home, minus all the moralizing religion, government bureaucracies, and all the idiots that want to convince you it is murder to stop one’s own pregnancy from continuing to delivery.
This service by Women on Web is especially important in countries where all abortions have been made illegal by government and church decree. An abortion through Women on Web may not be an ideal method, but it sure beats back alley medicine in a poor Third World country any day. Spread the word about this service being available to young women in countries where abortion has been made illegal or access has been greatly restricted.
AYBABTU variant: All Your Babes Are Belong To Us. In ancient days when kingdoms conquered each other, the winners would slaughter the vanquished males and keep the females for themselves, to augment their own number. Warring cannibals still do the same when they raid rival villages. They kill the men, eat them to acquire their power, and take the girls for brides or for slave labor.
It would seem tribal prejudices aren’t entrenched when it comes to another culture’s women. Is this because foreign females are less threatening, or because coveting another’s spouse transcends bigotry? Westerners fantasize that Native Americans raided the pioneer settlements to take captive the white women on account of their white beauty. I doubt it. Women are smaller than men and can be dominated, wives and laborers being more or less the same thing.
Western society seems preoccupied to fetishistic extremes with the safety of its white women, while negligent about the fate of those of darker skin. But does that mean we are not interested in non-white women? Of course not. The recent focus on trying to introduce western education into Islamic cultures is strategically targeting young Muslim girls. It seems altruistic, but follows the usual pattern of male-mankind’s predatory nature.
Naturally the benefits of separating girls from their communities serves the need of human traffickers, for the sex trade but to a much bigger degree, all industrial applications.
Look at the Maquiladoras on the Mexican border, where US manufacturers have relocated to exploit cheap Mexican labor without having to ship products too much further to reach American consumers. Look into those factories, they are full of women.
Look at the sweat shops in our port cities, where non-citizens labor undocumented -or falsely documented- they’re women.
The work camps set up in the US territories to skirt our labor laws and duck import tariffs are also full of women. Indeed clothing mills and electronics factories across the globe are staffed predominantly with women. Men are left with the construction, transportation and extraction industries, the labor issues of which affect the industrialist bottom line not the least.
We may guard our white women closely, feigning paternal self-interest, but we’re after all women, for the traditional role of indentured servitude.
I was under the impression that the Catholic Church had solidly embraced modern science, like with supporting women’s rights, allowing married priests in, and in having a Papal and palpable understanding of how pedophilia works.
Further, I thought that those unhappy yesteryears of burning witches, burning Jews, and jailing scientists was completely forgiven and forgotten. but some just don’t forget, and some things don’t really change that much at all. There are still saints walking amongst us in far Right Wing circles always, angels accumulating on the tip of a needle’s head, and YES, even exorcisms and Holy Water!
See the protest of the Pope in Rome though. I never knew that Rome was a hot bed of atheism! Can’t they just leave Pope Rat alone?
I’m afraid my Neo Liberal roots are showing. Greg Mortenson is delivering a lecture at CC on January 15th and I hardly know how to object. I too believe that the fate of mankind depends on education.
However, where have I the right to hold such a belief system, mine, above others? You can call Islam a religion for uneducated poor people, and be mostly right, as indeed the same applies to all fundamentalist absolutists. But that is only to regard education in the liberal sense, with its belief that a secular utopia awaits man’s bettering himself through progress. Technology, medical advances, and the celebration of the individual lead mankind where exactly? To a healthier, more antiseptic life certainly, civil discourse often, but to chaos and nihilism so far, quickly.
Fundamentalist Luddite religious systems may not take man to the moon, but they do ensure spiritually grounded lives, full families, and the same for all foreseeable descendants. Which model is likely the more sustainable? If we posit that the greater percentage of mankind need such intellectual tethers, to whom do you entrust their guidance? Allah or Coca Cola?
The West may think it offers salvation to the women of Islam, but is it true? Are the middle class advocates of women’s rights prepared to take in their rescuees? A Muslim wife’s life is at the mercy of Muslim males, and we’ve been treated to horrific accounts. How do they compare to what capitalism has to offer? Those liberated from the Koran can look forward to the certainty of exploitation by globalization bosses be they man or woman, regulated by amoral corporations and corrupt officials, now without the comfort of leading lives of spiritual purpose.
Isn’t the jury still out on the West’s liberated women? They’re having fewer children, that’s for certain.
White knights like Mr. Mortenson offer a gift horse that indeed cannot deliver. Meanwhile of course our soldiers and free trade carpetbaggers quietly pile on inside. Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea has been requisitioned by the Defense Department and issued to our counter-insurgency forces, probably to teach the Hearts and Minds lingo, hopefully not worse.
Mortenson’s visit to Colorado Springs is being sponsored by a new department of UCCS, the Center for Homeland Security, I kid you not! It’s a major now offered by UCCS, established with funding from the Pentagon, staffed with retired military instructors, and chaired by career CIA officer Steve Recca. Look him up, his name is tied completely to CIA activities. As they say in the intelligence biz, he’s totally “mobbed up.”
The tag line to Mortenson’s book tour is to use education outreach as an alternative means to combat terrorism. While it is a refreshing change-up to our direct war making against terrorism, I can’t imagine behaving cavalierly toward Islam is going to endear us greatly. Osama didn’t want US feet on the ground in Saudi Arabia. Do Muslims in general want westerners building schools for their girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Could stealing their young women be seen as anything but a provocation for a terrorist response?
Harry Reid, Democratic Party senator from Nevada and Senate Majority Leader, gave his approval in an interview this Sunday, to Bush’s plan to increase US troops in Iraq.
This comes just days after Nancy Pelosi appointed the utterly ignorant Silvestre Reyes to head up the House Intelligence Committee, where he promptly stated that he also supported a troop increase, and not withdrawal. The Democrats as a whole are utterly enthusiastic about continuing this war, even as they in the same breath blame Bush and the neocons for it. Can it be underlined any more, that the Democratic Party is not an oppositional party to the Republicans? Only their powerless rank and file voters are against the Iraq occupation to some degree or other. But so what? These people most often act as if paralyzed beyond being able to vote. Otherwise, they go about their business as if it didn’t much matter at all to them.
The Democrats are not just a non-oppositional party in regards to the Republican plan to continue the occupation of Iraq. Harry Reid is great case in point. His pretense of being something different than a Republican in donkey suit is rather ludicrous. An example is him stating strongly that the Democrats are going for an increase in the US minimum wage. How? He is going to try tying getting the increase to legislation giving members of the Congress yet another pay raise! Pay raises they don’t deserve and shouldn’t get.
Reid is a Mormon. That being said, can any even mildly liberal person actually think that he represents possible progressive change because he is a Democrat too? Any visit to his Senate website shows nothing but the most mealy mouthed rhetoric on other issues such as immigration, women’s rights, labor, environment, etc. Cases in point, he is opposed to radioactive waste being dumped in Nevada at Yucca Mountain, yet supports nuclear reactors. He wants to grab more of the boondoggle ‘Homeland Security’ funds for Nevada. He supports building a giant Border wall while talking of ‘reform’. He is for better medical care for people, yet can’t voice support for universal coverage. Wants to help women out, yet can’t support abortion rights for them. No opposition to the use of torture, etc. No defense of habeus corpus. He supports phoney ‘war on terror’ that actually makes us more endangered by it.
In short, he is a mealy mouthed, fork tongued Democratic Party hack, who is planning to do absolutely nothing to block the Republican assault on the American and Iraqi people. The Democratic Party is not an oppositional party, and Reid is what you get, Liberals, when you continue to cast your votes for these asses. Get out of the Democratic Party and demonstrate if you want change. You have to spend more time in opposing the corporate hacks that run this country, than by just going out and voting for one of them or the other.
The majority of Democratic Party politicians are not going to oppose this war in any meaningful way.
A post 9/11 essay by anti-imperialist political prisoner David Gilbert.
9-11-01: The terrorism that terrorism has wrought
by David GilbertLike most people in the U.S., I was horrified by the incineration and collapse of the two towers at the World Trade Center (WTC). Thinking about the thousands of people, mainly civilians, inside, I was completely stunned and anguished. (Even the attack on the Pentagon, certainly a legitimate target of war, felt grim in terms of the loss of so many lives, and of course the sacrifice of civilians on the plane.) In the days and weeks that followed the media, as well they should, made the human faces of the tragedy completely vivid.
At the same time, the affecting pictures of those killed, the poignant interviews with their families, the constant rebroadcast of the moments of destruction all underscore what the media completely fails to present in the host of widescale attacks on civilians perpetrated by the US government. With the pain to 9/11 so palpable, I became almost obsessed with what it must have been like for civilians bombed by the US in Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Yugoslavia – and what it would soon be like for civilians in Afghanistan, already just about the poorest and most devastated country in the world. (While the media very deliberately have downplayed the issue of civilian casualties from the bombings in Afghanistan, they already exceed those at the WTC.)
Terror Incorporated
The US bombing campaigns in Iraq and Yugoslavia not only killed hundreds of thousands of people but also deliberately destroyed civilian survival infrastructure such as electric grids and water supplies. And these are countries that don’t have billions of dollars on hand to pour into relief efforts. The subsequent US economic embargo of Iraq has resulted in, according to UN agencies, over 1 million deaths, more than half of them children.In addition to bombing campaigns, the US is responsible for a multitude of massacres on the ground. 9/11/01 was the 28th anniversary of the ClA-sponsored coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically-elected president; the military then tortured, “disappeared” and killed thousands in order to impose a dictatorship. The US instigated terrorist bands and trained paramilitary death squads that have rampaged throughout Latin America for decades. In little Guatemala alone (population of 12 million) over 150,000 people have been killed in political violence since the U.S.-engineered coup against democracy in 1954.
Listing all the major examples would go way beyond the length of this essay. (See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 457 pp.) But what’s worse is that these bloody actions are taken to enforce the greatest terrorism of all: a political and economic system that kills millions of human beings worldwide every year. To give just one example, 10 million children under the age of 5 die every year due to malnutrition and easily preventable or curable diseases. Talk about anguish: how would you feel as a parent helplessly watching your baby waste away?
Since the early ’60’s, I actively opposed these U.S. terrorist attacks. But without the videos, the personal interviews, the detailed accounts, I never fully experienced the human dimensions. Now, seeing the pain of 9/11/01 presented so powerfully had me trying to picture and relive the totally intolerable suffering rained down on innocent people in these all too many previous and ongoing atrocities.
A Gift to the Right
What made the immediate grim event all the worse was the political reality that these attacks were an incredible gift to the right-wing in power. George W. Bush entered office with the tainted legitimacy of losing the popular vote by half a million. The report on the detailed recount of votes in pivotal Florida was about to come out. (When it did, the post-9/11 spin was that the recount the Supreme Court stopped would have left Bush in the lead. What got less attention was the finding that with a complete recount of all votes cast Bush was the loser.) The economy had started to tank. The Bush administration was making the US in effect a “rogue state” in the world: pulling out of the treaty on global warming, refusing to sign the treaty against biological warfare, preparing to scuttle the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And the US and Israel had just exposed themselves, badly, by walking out of the World Conference Against Racism.9/11/01 and its aftermaths became a tidal wave washing away public consideration of the above crucial issues. Not only did the crisis lead people to rally around the president, but it also provided the context and political capital to rush through a host of previously unattainable repressive measures that had long been on the right’s wish list. We’ve also seen an ugly rash of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes and a new-found public support for racial profiling.
I won’t attempt here to summarize all the serious setbacks to civil liberties. One measure that struck closest to home for me was not covered in the mainstream media. Within hours of the first attack, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) moved about 20 of the political prisoners (PPs) – prisoners from the struggles for Black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, Native American and Asian activists, anti-imperialists, and peace advocates – held by the BOP into complete isolation. Most of these PPs weren’t even allowed to communicate with their lawyers – an extremely dangerous precedent. Once established, it clears the way for sensory deprivation and torture to try to break people down.
The BOP’s ability to move so quickly in prisons around the country means this plan had to have been on the drawing boards already – just waiting for the right excuse. What makes the “terrorist” label placed on these PPs all the more galling is that the Dept. of Justice knows full well that 1) while the CIA had past connections to the 9/11/01 suspects, these PPs certainly never have; and 2) while the perpetrators emulated (albeit on a smaller scale) the US’s cavalier attitude about “collateral damage” these PPs have always placed a high priority on avoiding civilian casualties. Indeed, it was precisely the US’s wanton slaughter of civilians – carpet bombings, napalm & Agent Orange in Vietnam; Cointelpro assassinations of scores of Black Panther & American Indian Movement activists at home – that impelled us to fight the system.
In pushing through the host of repressive measures without serious debate, the government has carried out a giant scam: a perverse redefinition of the dreaded term “terrorism.” Instead of the valid, objective definition of indiscriminate or wholesale violence against civilians (by which measure US-led imperialism is the worst terrorist in the world), the political and legal discourse has twisted the word to mean use of force against or to influence the government. If their “newspeak” goes uncontested, the long run implications for dissent are dire.
Global Strategy
More broadly these events have been a tremendous boon to what I believe has been imperialism’s #1 strategic goal since 1973: “Kicking the Vietnam syndrome.” You just can’t maintain a ruthless international extortion racket (to describe the imperial economy bluntly) without a visible ability to fight bloody wars of enforcement. They’ve taken the US public through a series of calibrated steps: from teeny Grenada in 1983, to small Panama in 1989, to mid-sized Iraq in 1991 and Yugoslavia in 1999. But public support for these ventures was only on the basis of short wars with minimal US casualties. Now the real sense of “America under attack” has generated widespread (if still shallow) support for accepting a more protracted war, even with significant US casualties.Other repressive forces around the world have been quick to capitalize on these events. A key example is Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Talk about terrorists … as Defense Minister in September, 1982, he was in charge of Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon when local, Israeli-sponsored militias were given free rein for three days of butchery in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. 1,800 Palestinians were murdered. Now as prime minister, he very deliberately encouraged and provoked Islamic militants opposed to the peace process to attack, and then he immediately cried “terrorism!” (the Palestinians are always labeled as the terrorists even though it is Israel who occupies their lands and Israelis have killed 4 times as may Palestinians as vice versa) to discredit and isolate Chairman Yasir Arafat, who’s taken great risks to try for a peace agreement. Sharon’s strategy, as he continues to tighten the occupation and escalate the violence, seems to be to completely finish off the peace process, either by liquidating the Palestinian Authority or by forcing the Palestinians into a heartbreaking civil war that would bleed their nation to death.
Funding and Fostering Terrorists
The US government played a key role in cultivating and empowering the forces charged with the 9/11/01 terror attacks. It’s not just a question of whom the US supported after the December, 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; CIA aid to guerrilla groups preceded that by over a year, while US interference through it’s client regime (until toppled in 1979), the Shah of Iran, went back at least to 1975. The goal was to destabilize a government friendly to the Soviets and sharing a 1,000-mile border. (See Blum’s Killing Hope – relevant chapter available here ) As the US National Security Adviser of the time, Zbigniew Brzezinski, boasted years later, “The secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.” Brzezinski also justified the harmful side effects from this medicine, “What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire?” (see here for source )Even though baited, the Soviet’s invasion was inexcusable. The CIA, of course, seized the opportunity with its largest covert action operation ever, aside from Vietnam. It did not, however, simply support existing national resistance forces. Progressive Islamic forces, tolerant of other sects & religions and supportive of education for girls, got no aid and withered. The CIA instead deliberately and directly cultivated the “fundamentalists” who interpreted Islam in the most sectarian and anti-female fashion. (I’m wary of the term “fundamentalist” lest it play into US biases about Islam, although in the same context as the reactionary Christian and Jewish fundamentalisms, it would apply. I prefer Ahmed Rashid’s terminology of “Islamic extremists” for forces who have interpreted, or, as he argues, distorted Islam as hostile to women and generally intolerant.)
One reason for this US preference was apparently the belief that the best way to mobilize people against a pro-Soviet regime that had offered land reform and education for girls was on the basis of religious opposition to such policies. Another reason was that most US aid was channeled through Pakistan’s Interservice Intelligence (ISI), which had close ties with these extremist factions. A prime example is Gulbuddin Hikmetyar who started with virtually no political base but became a major power thanks to US arms and funds. US aid breathed life into numerous reactionary and power-hungry warlords. It’s no wonder, then, that a devastating civil war raged in Afghanistan long after the Soviet’s 1989 withdrawal. In short, the US didn’t have the slightest concern for Afghans’ rights and lives; they were simply canon fodder in the Cold War. When this chaos gave rise to the Taliban, they were backed by the US and Pakistan as a counterweight to neighboring Iran, based on Taliban antipathy for Shia Islam. Also the US made an early bet in 1994 on the Taliban as the force that could bring the unified control and stability needed by the US company Unocal to build its projected multi-billion-dollar oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan. This hope unraveled by 1998 but now has become quite realizable with the US military victory there. Bush’s new special envoy to Afghanistan, who will spearhead US efforts to put together a post-Taliban government, is Zalmay Khalilzad. This Afghan-born US citizen was, in the late ’90’s, a highly paid consultant to Unocal on how to achieve their Afghan pipeline.
The jihad against the Soviets in the 1980’s attracted Muslim militants from around the world, including Osama bin Laden. In 1986, he helped build the Khost tunnel complex, which the CIA was funding. As he later stated, “I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.” From 1982 to 1992, 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 different countries participated in the war in Afghanistan, many training at ClA-supported camps. Tens of thousands more were involved in education and support work. Now, the US demonizes one individual, but it is very unlikely that one man or one organization controls the range of groups that spun off from that baptism of fire … and therefore very unlikely that “neutralizing” bin Laden will at all contain the current cycle of violence.
The results of 20 years of US-abetted wars – even before the Taliban came to power – were 2 million deaths, 6 million refugees, and millions facing starvation in that nation of 26 million people. Infant mortality is the highest in the world, as 163 babies die out of every 1,000 live births, and a staggering 1,700 out of every 100,000 mothers giving birth die in the process. (Most of the background and data in the above section comes from Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.) What a bitter irony that the US, which did so much to foster the most anti-female forces and to fuel the ferocious civil war, now justifies bombing that devastated country in part as a defense of women’s rights. (See Naomi Jaffe, “Bush, Recent Convert to Feminism,” in Sojourner: The Women’s Forum, November 2001.)
While the direct aid to the now demonized groups is sordid, the US has had a much more major role in breeding such terrorism. Imperialism’s top priority has been to destroy progressive national liberation movements, which sought to unite the oppressed and end the economic rape of the third world. Since 1989, the US has achieved major strides against national liberation with a counter-revolutionary offensive that uses both relentless brutality (such as sponsoring various terrorist “contra” guerrillas) and sophisticated guile (a key tactic is to divide people by fanning tribal, ethnic, and religious antagonisms). But the conditions of extreme poverty and despair for billions of people have only gotten worse. Thus, the very successes against national liberation have left a giant vacuum.… now being filled by real terrorists indeed.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
The dominant power has discredited as unspeakable some truths essential to an intelligent response to the crisis. 1. The horrible poverty and cruel disenfranchisement of the majority of humankind constitute the most fundamental violence and are also the wellspring for violent responses. 2. The reasons given for the 9/11/01 attacks don’t at all justify the slaughter of civilians, but they do in fact have some substance: US military presence and bolstering of corrupt regimes in Muslim countries (not to mention throughout the third world); the brutal occupation of Palestine; the large-scale, ongoing killing of civilians in Iraq; 3. The Pentagon and the WTC are key headquarters for massive global oppression.The system’s massive terror does not at all mean that anything goes in response. As the Panthers used to say, ‘You don’t fight fire with fire; you fight it with water.’ Ghastly examples from Mussolini to Pol Pot have proven, at great human cost, that articulating real grievances against the system does not automatically equal having a humane direction and program. True revolutionaries spring up out of love for the people, and that’s also expressed by having the highest standards for minimizing civilian casualties. In the wake of 9/11/01 the example of the Vietnamese has become even more inspiring. They suffered the worst bombardment in history but always pushed for a distinction between the US government and the people, who could come to oppose it.
As painful and frustrating as US dominance is, the simplistic thinking that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ does not advance the struggle. All-too-many battles in the world are between competing oppressive forces. US embassies may be legitimate targets, but blowing up hundreds of Kenyan and Tanzanian workers and shoppers is unconscionable. And even within the belly of the beast, groups that would cavalierly kill so many civilians and who would hand such potent ammunition to the right-wing are not forces for liberation. At the same time, we can’t let our human commitments be blinded by floodlights that shine solely on this one tragedy. By any objective standard based on concern for human life, US-led imperialism is – by several orders of magnitude – the biggest and bloodiest terrorist in the world. We can not let the immediate horror, which the US did so much to engender, then be used to strengthen its stranglehold on humankind. Our first and foremost human responsibility is to oppose US-led imperialism.
The Challenges Ahead
It was encouraging that the anti-war movement here didn’t just collapse under the deafening roar of jingoism. But with the public’s attention on the US juggernaut in Afghanistan, it’s been hard to maintain the momentum of the anti-war, anti-globalization, and anti-racist movements. In many ways, it feels like a bleak time in the US because of the dramatic lurch to the right and the public support for many “anti-terrorist” measures that can be used in the future against dissenters. Nevertheless, even if the US completes this phase without a hitch, we are likely to be in for a protracted, if irregular, war as US action escalates the cycle of violence. While the situation is scary, it would only be scarier to give up because that would clear the way for continuing this highly dangerous skid into war and repression.Even the most formidable fortresses of domination develop cracks over time. Contradictions in the war on terrorism as well as stresses in the economy and social fabric are likely to develop. Our task is to keep a voice alive for humane alternatives rather than let every setback add fuel to the imperial fire. We are not as isolated as in 1964, when it was completely unheard of to publicly challenge such interventions. However, in other ways our task will be more difficult than the decade-long struggle to end the war in Vietnam. This time, people in the US do feel directly attacked and those now labeled as the “enemy” are not a progressive national liberation movement.
To me, the most apt, if somewhat gloomy, analogy is to the “War on Drugs.” In both cases: 1. the CIA actively fostered some of the worst initial perpetrators. 2. The “war” response only makes the problem worse. (Making drugs illegal makes them much more expensive, which is the main factor promoting crime and violence; waging a “crusade” against Afghanistan and “Muslim fundamentalists” and backing Israel’s suppression of Palestine are likely to result in many more terrorists.) 3. Both wars pit unsavory foes against each other whose respective actions justify and animate the opposing side. 4. While each war is a colossal failure in terms of its stated aim, each is a smashing success in building public support for greater police/ military powers and in diverting people’s attention from the fundamental social issues. 5. Finally, sky high barriers have been erected to challenging these insane wars. You can’t raise the question of decriminalizing drugs or of addressing the roots of terrorism without getting hooted off the public stage. One difference, unfortunately, is that the war on terrorism is likely to become bigger, more violent, and lead to an even worse loss of civil liberties. A difference from facing the McCarthyism of the 1950’s is that, hopefully, recent currents of organizing and activism provide a basis to begin challenging such reaction from its onset.
Building an Anti-War Movement
The starting point is a love for and identification with other people. We don’t have to become callous about the lives lost at the WTC, even though the government has used them so cynically. Instead we have the job of getting those who’ve awakened to this pain to feel the injustice and suffering of the many other atrocities that have been perpetrated by the US. As hard as that may seem, many Americans were asking, “Why do ‘they’ hate us so much?” While the government and media have done their best to shut down public discussion of this pivotal issue, we can offer genuine and substantive responses, which resonate with the widely-held value of fairness. We have to break through the colossal double standard and insist fully on stopping all violence – whether bombings or hunger – against civilians and to be very clear on all the major examples. There’s a related specific need to puncture the dangerous misdefinition of “terrorism.”In the discussion I’ve seen about building an anti-war movement, I wholeheartedly agree with those who insist that it must be anti-racist at its core. White supremacy is the bedrock for all that is reactionary in the US; in addition, the current gallop toward a police state will be used first and foremost against people of color. To be real about this, white activists have to go beyond the necessary process issues for making people of color feel welcomed at meetings and events. We also need to ally with and learn from their organizations and to develop a strong anti-racist program and set of demands.
It also seems crucial to develop strong synergy with the promising “anti-globalization” movement – not only because that’s where many young people have become active but even more importantly because the only long-term alternative to “the War on Terrorism” is to fully address the fundamental issues of global social and economic justice.
We face an extremely difficult period, without much prospect for the exhilaration or quick successes. But we don’t have the luxury of despair and defeatism – that only hands an easy victory to the oppressors. To draw a lesson from the past, we now celebrate the many slave rebellions, going back centuries before abolition became realizable, because they weakened that intolerable institution and kept resistance and future possibilities alive. History, as we’ve seen, goes through many unpredictable twists and turns. Principled resistance not only puts us in touch with our own humanity but also keeps hope and vision alive – like spring sunshine and rain – for when new possibilities sprout through the once frozen ground.