Coming
Soon!
From Common Courage Press
Recent
Stories
June
23, 2003
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
June
19, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
June
18, 2003
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
Elaine
Cassel
Dark Star Chambers: Secret Trials,
Nameless Defendents, Veiled Threats to Defense Lawyers
Col.
Daniel Smith
Iraq's WMDs: Integrity, Ethics and
Intelligence
Chris
Fagen
Ignoring the World's Bloodiest War
Rick
Fantasia and Kim Voss
Bush's Low Intensity War on Labor
Sam
Hamod
Theater of Deception: Bush, Sharon,
Abbas
M.
Shahid Alam
Illuminating Tom Friedman
Jon
Brown
Greens & Dems: a Reply to Publius
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/18
June
17, 2003
Dr.
Susan Block
Sex, Lies and WMDs
Elaine
Cassel
Scalia, the Rumsfeld of the Supremes
Roger Burbach
Brazil Under Lula
Dan
Bacher
The WTO's War on Salmon
Peter
Phillips and Jason Spencer
Entertainment Media 2003
Nuclear
Age Peace Foundation
The Challenge of Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century
Wayne Madsen
Outting Ashcroft's Latest Hypocrisy
Larry
Kearney
Starlight
Steve
Perry
The Bush Administration
Lies Marathon, Day 3
June
16, 2003
Frida
Berrigan
Death in Aceh: US Weapon Aid the
Repression
Publius
Candidate Dem and Citizen Green
Tarif
Abboushi
Roadmap or Roadkill?
Rep. John
Conyers
Bush's Deceptions about Iraq Threaten Democracy at Home
Julian
Samuel
A Review of Pilger's The New Rulers of the World
Uri
Avnery
The Children of Death
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies,
Part 2
June
14 / 15, 2003
Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pryor Unrestraint: Killer Bill Pryor's
Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
David Lindorff
Rumsfeld v. Belgium
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice
Lee Sustar
US Tax System: Rigged for the Rich
Ben
Tripp
Of Dissidents and Dissonance
William
S. Lind
Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence
Joanne
Mariner
Rebellious Judges
Gila Svirsky
A Macabre Alliance
Mickey
Z.
Where We Are
Chris Floyd
Metaphysics as a Guide to Murder
Noah
Leavitt
Peru as Our Crystal Ball?
Yves Engler
and Bianca Mugyenyi
The G8 and Africa
Dr.
Gerry Lower
Dear Rudy, Let's Get Those Damned Liberals
Ted Dace
A Review of Kovel's The Enemy of Nature
Adam
Engel
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Greeder, Albert, and O'Hayer
Website
of the Weekend
AEI: Starts Wars; Creates
Poverty
June
13, 2003
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Counting Bush's
Lies, part 2
Hot Stories
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
June
24, 2003
The Real Clash of Civilizations
Progressives
versus the Neo-Cons
By
JOHN CHUCKMAN
There is a real clash of civilizations in the
world, but one that has little to do with East and West. It is
found in the advanced world and consists in the values of traditional
liberalism being attacked by the right wing. Nowhere is this
battle noisier and of more consequence to the world's peoples
than in America where victory for the right appears all but certain.
I have no quarrel with honest, decent
conservatives. The essence of conservatism is the preservation
of what is best from the past, the unwillingness to change what
remains useful or valid just for the sake of change.
But all social and political arrangements
are subject to change where there is economic growth. Old ways
pass away, everything from the daily wearing of traditional garb
and the absolute role of males to the average number of children
and the selling of brides changes, sometimes in a single lifetime.
Liberals differ from conservatives in being more ready to recognize
this fundamental reality and to accommodate change in a timely
way.
America's right wing is another matter
altogether. Attitudes here go beyond conservatism into the shadowy
realm of social Darwinism, selfishness exalted as virtue, muscular
arrogance, and turning one's back on many aspects of enlightenment.
These attitudes come embedded in an intense, almost religious,
fervor.
When people read the word Nazi
they first think of mass murder, and rightly so, but the Nazis
had a set of beliefs and attitudes other than racial theories.
In fact many Germans, and even party members, did not share Hitler's
incandescent, almost inexplicable hatred of Jews, although anti-Semitism
was very much a theme in German history, Martin Luther, for example,
a remarkable man in so many respects, having said and written
things every bit as vile as Hitler.
What were the characteristics of Nazism
that might justify comparisons with influential contemporary
groups in America?
As the title of Hitler's book, Mein
Kampf, suggests, the Nazis viewed life as a struggle, embracing
the idea that only the able should thrive and reproduce. It is
helpful when you hold this belief if you also regard yourself
as among the ablest, and so the Nazis did. Hitler was a social
Darwinist with a mystical belief in the special merit of Germans.
The Nazis had an absolute loathing of
Communism, or Bolshevism as it was called then, and contempt
for all forms of liberalism and social democracy. All philosophies
that offered hope against their vision of a world of successful
predators prevailing over the weak were despised. Ruthlessness
itself was held up by Hitler as a virtue because it could bring
victory, or so he thought.
The Nazis were big-business capitalists,
although political expediency had put socialist in the
party name, but where issues of great national significance were
concerned they never hesitated to redirect with subsidies, contracts,
and other pressures the efforts of German industry. The Nazis
encouraged the development of gigantic corporate entities. Small
business was actually held in contempt by Hitler, hence his famous
derisive comment about the British being a nation of shopkeepers.
To support the Nazis' worship of military strength, only vast
enterprises would do.
The Nazis were willing to accept a good
deal of repression in their society if that guaranteed the success
of their primary values, and, despite Germany's being in many
ways one of the most advanced and cultured of European states,
the Nazis were willing to tolerate floods of ignorant propaganda
so long as it supported their aims.
Based on these criteria, it might be
hard to distinguish America's extreme right from a good many
Nazis, but I think the prefix crypto helpful in distinguishing
them from their more straightforward cousins. For America does
have a set of written ideals about human rights and freedoms
at odds with Nazism, although these ideals have been interpreted
with great flexibility or totally ignored over long periods of
the country's history, often accommodating dark and brutal practices.
Where the will to make good on constitutional promises does not
exist, they remain fine words on parchment, as many wonderful-sounding
third-world constitutions attest.
That is why the cypto-Nazis always attack
the courts as unelected legislators when what the courts are
mostly doing is the necessary job of deciding how to interpret
grand general statements into the specific day-to-day circumstances
of people's lives, and that under ever-changing circumstances.
By the way, in the Nazis' early period, before they felt free
to drag judges from their courts or murder them, they had exactly
the same view of courts that dared to make unfriendly decisions.
The father of this contempt for courts
in America was Thomas Jefferson who loathed the idea that the
Supreme Court would interpret the Constitution's generalizations
on behalf of the states. That is why he is the patron saint of
America's crypto-Nazis. Jefferson was an expert at sounding high-minded
while acting shabbily.
During the early Federalist period, Jefferson
was ready to have Virginia secede - more than half a century
before the rise of the Confederacy - over the issue of the Supreme
Court's authority. Why? Because he understood the intrinsic conflict
between a Bill of Rights and a society of aristocratic slaveholders,
a democratic-sounding Constitution and a Virginia where about
one percent of people could vote, and he was, despite all his
high-sounding language, quite comfortable being an aristocratic
slaveholder. The Bill of Rights sounded fine, but just don't
set up anyone to interpret and enforce it.
Parts of America's right drift off into
utter blindness and even phobic hatred. Jefferson to his dying
day believed blacks were inferior, almost another species, and
that women didn't merit the same education, and certainly not
the same political privileges, as men. You don't find America's
Aryan churches or weird militia groups or anti-gay organizations
with liberals on their membership rolls. America's extreme right
provided the vicious anti-Semites of American history - the founding
males of many clans like the Fords or the Bushes - but they rule
now in an odd partnership with the religious right whose eyes
tear over with every mention of words like Holy Land,
the End of Time, and Armageddon.
One of the major bonds tying them together
is the fundamentalists' fear of social change. Fundamentalist
minds seem fixed somewhere around 1840 or so as offering the
ideal family and social arrangements, although they do enjoy
suburban living, television, fast food, and SUVs, and not many
of them have ten children or mail-order brides anymore. They
see the never-ending pressure for change in American society
- the inexorable result of long-term economic growth - as destructive
to their vision of what society should be, and they are right,
it is. This is why undefined blubber about "family values"
joined the right-wing lexicon some years back. Ironically, the
right wing's simplistic and enduring love for "the hell
with regulations" economic growth, actually works against
the long-term interests of fundamentalists, creating even greater
future stresses on their vision of society, but few of them seem
to understand this fact.
What of liberalism and its history in
America? Although America rejected the idea of a king or lifetime
president, taking what was a liberal view in the 18th century,
the early Republic was effectively an aristocracy, an aristocracy
of men with money, farms, and slaves rather than noble birth.
It was the spirit of liberalism that gradually extended the franchise
to include more than a small number of (male, white) property
owners. It was the same spirit that gave the franchise to women
and that made the United States Senate an elected rather than
appointed, aristocratic body. It was liberalism that finally
freed America's blacks from a second bondage, brutal apartheid
in every detail, and gave them the franchise a century after
the supposed end of slavery. It was liberalism that produced
the great reforms of the Depression, creating hope and saving
America from the brutal coups and civil wars of Europe during
the troubled 1930s. It was liberalism that drove hope and progress
for universal education. It was always liberalism pushing to
make the tolerance for speech or religion promised in the Constitution
into something tangible.
The mouthpieces for America's equivalent
of the 1930s' Krupp or Farben - Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter,
William F. Buckley, and dozens of others - are rarely seriously
challenged over their sophomoric historical knowledge or their
sneering jokes at hard-won human values. There appears to be
a large appetite in America for re-cycled political garbage.
The money supporting its production comes in truckloads. And
there are truckloads, too, for phony institutes where ideologue-propagandists
pose as academics, much like actors in white lab coats posing
as doctors on ads for hemorrhoid relief. Money gushes like blood
from opened arteries to support meaningless advertising's suffocation
of genuine debate in American elections, and the George Wills
of this world are paid handsomely to cover this naked display
of power with arguments about free speech.
All the insensitivity and stupidity spewing
over America's airwaves and carried in its newspapers does have
an effect, as its sponsors intend that it should. Without any
serious political opposition inside the country, America has
launched two meaningless wars on weak nations, killing and maiming
thousands of innocent people. It threatens still others and keeps
prisoners in cages offshore. There is considerable public acceptance
of barbarities like torture and assassination, and hundreds,
perhaps thousands, inside the country are arrested and held with
no access to courts or legal help. There is a vast increase in
spying on your own people, and there is selective support for
leaders of some countries no better than tyrants or murderers.
Meanwhile, "Hon, they've got a special
on air conditioners down at the mall. Do you think we could drive
down after the news?"
John Chuckman
lives in Canada. He can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org.
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|