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July
2, 2003
Reuven
Kaviner
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July
1, 2003
Sasan
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Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
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Susan
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RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
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Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
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Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
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Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
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Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
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June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
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Jeffrey
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Carlsen
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Joanne
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Chapela
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Bob
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Jon Brown
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Julie
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Adrien
Rain Burke
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Adam
Engel
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June
27, 2003
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David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
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Perry
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Hans Blix
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de Rooij
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Avnery
The Best Show in Town
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
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June
25, 2003
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Jackson
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Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
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Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
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Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
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Bill Kauffman
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Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
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June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
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John
Chuckman
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David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
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Conn
Hallinan
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Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
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
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The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
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The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
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WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
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Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
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The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
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Maria
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Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
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Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
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Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
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Watch
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Uzma
Aslam Khan
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Arrogant
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Gore Vidal
The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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July
2, 2003
Even Remote Imperial
Powers Can Fall
Lessons
from the American Revolution
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
Many otherwise well-educated Americans know remarkably
little about the actual circumstances of their country's birth.
Assumptions about that early period, frequently offered as counterexamples
to the current dangerous and dreary American government, too
often contain little more than boyish daydreams of nobler times.
America's central myth about its founding
goes something like this: An extraordinary bunch of men, dressed
in frock coats and wearing powdered wigs, closeted together after
a long and heroic war against tyranny, worked unselfishly to
give the United States a perfect modern system of government.
Since they were men concerned with rights
and abuses and the tyranny of absolute monarchy, they gave Americans
a set of basic rights that is the envy of the world.
Some Americans, blissfully unaware of
European history and the long-term development of democratic
and enlightened government in all advanced societies--a process
that has proceeded as inexorably as the growth of modern science
since the Renaissance, albeit in fits and starts over some periods--add
that the events of those early days were almost a set of miracles,
providing the world with a new concept of government, "made
from whole cloth," as one enthusiastic Fourth of July editorialist
put it.
These notions manage to get thoroughly
muddled with Puritan religious ones that have been around since
America's colonial days, producing a story with strong overtones
of a biblical legend.
Belief in the sudden, unprecedented appearance
of a new form of government reminds one of the sun being halted
in the sky or the virgin birth. Attitudes about the Founding
Fathers uncomfortably mimic those for the Twelve Apostles. There's
even a Judas character in Benedict Arnold. The documents associated
with these events, from the Declaration of Independence to the
Constitution, are regarded with much the same awe as books of
the Bible, even though, as is the case certainly for the Declaration
of Independence, there is a good deal of silly, outdated nonsense.
This set of myths and attitudes has been
called America's Civic Religion, and it is an apt name.
It follows that the thoughts and actions
of someone like Mr. Bush--a narrow politician, a man of few ideas
and less learning--can only suffer by comparison. One sometimes
sees letters in The New York Times from people with lengthy titles,
people you might think should know better, making what are silly
comparisons of real people to myths. Clearly, even the most robust
flesh-and-blood politician would suffer by such comparisons.
But contemporary America is not a case
of a saint who's fallen into sin. The historical fact is that
America was born out of some pretty unpleasant circumstances,
and better understanding of this fact would provide Americans
with perspective in the way they understand the world, especially
concerning the arrogant habit of expecting everyone to see how
clearly America "has got it right." and to instantly
copy the pattern. America, in fact, did not "have it right"
at the beginning, and it has taken more than two centuries to
make a great many corrections, with many still to be made.
Along the way, since its founding, some
moments of genuine human progress have occurred and the concepts
of democracy and human decency for all have begun to take hold,
but no more so than is the case for all other advanced countries
of the world whose history did not start in revolution and the
myths of Sacred Writ.
The myths about America's origins serve
several purposes, apart from the obvious one of tidying up a
not-so-pretty historical record. As I wrote in "Flirting
with Fascism," America has a long history of doing just
that, flirting with fascism. The birth-myths help solidify the
hold on the American imagination of democratic and human-rights
principles and, to that extent at least, serve a worthy purpose.
America was founded by a small coterie
of privileged men who were mainly interested in maintaining their
privileges and indeed in expanding them at the expense of a foreign-born
aristocracy.
The first truly important cause for American
independence was Britain's victory in the French and Indian War
(more generally called the Seven Year's War). The French in the
1750s were setting about constructing a series of forts both
along the Canadian border and in places like the Ohio river valley.
Their intention was to prevent the westward expansion of the
British colonies and to lock up much of the valuable fur trade.
British colonists did not look favorably
on this development. Their intense desire was to become rich
through land speculation and endless westward expansion, the
kind of activity, apart from marrying a rich widow, that made
George Washington one of the wealthiest men in the colonies,
one with rather a reputation for sharp business practices. It
has been said that the shooting of a French officer (the French
flatly called it murder) by an ambitious young George Washington,
serving in the Virginia militia, marked the opening of the Seven
Years War, sometimes called the first world war.
Britain did win the war, but at considerable
cost. The colonies' first reaction to British victory was joy
and celebration. It was later that a series of what can only
be regarded as reasonable tax measures to have the colonists
help pay the costs of the war aroused such great antipathy in
the colonies. The view was simply this: The war was over, the
benefits to the colonists could not be re-claimed by Britain,
so the colonists felt no obligation to help pay beyond what they
had contributed during the war. Hatred of taxes--unavoidably
associated with crippling good, sound government--has remained
to this day a feature of the American cultural landscape.
Besides, the colonists were used to a
rather privileged position that none of them wanted disturbed.
They lived a healthy and relatively happy life, as all the statistics
and observations of the time attest. Foreign observers frequently
commented on how healthy Americans under the Crown were. As well,
it was widely observed, and commented on in Europe, that these
colonies--well before the Revolution--were amongst the freest
places in the world to live.
Ben Franklin at one point made the forecast
that America's population and wealth, given the conditions under
which they prospered, would one day far outdistance those of
the Mother Country. He was not alone in understanding this.
So, after the French and Indian War,
things at first looked favorable for the desires of settlers
to build limitless land empires, but then several developments
considerably darkened the view.
A key one was the Quebec Act which vastly
extended the territory of Quebec to include what today is Illinois
as part of a vast Quebec Territory. Most Americans will not know
what a huge storm this caused in the colonies because it is not
an attractive subject for elementary texts.
First, it appeared to make the possibility
of endless western expansion impossible. England, quite fairly
and reasonably, wanted to discourage expansion over the Appalachians
into Indian territory like the Ohio valley as a way of maintaining
peace. The Mother Country had a conscientious policy of avoiding
further conflicts with native Americans. This policy American
colonists had tended to ignore, but the creation of a new Western
jurisdiction under a Catholic province like Quebec, was an entirely
different matter.
There was a paranoid fear of "papism"
in the colonies, peopled as they were by many Puritan extremists
who had run away from the dislike they often aroused in the old
country. Anti-Catholic feeling ran very high in the American
colonies. Indeed, it was an old custom, and remained the custom
for decades after the Revolution, to burn effigies of the pope
each year on Britain's Guy Fawkes Day. America's nasty-tempered
Puritan settlers wanted nothing to do with "papists."
Yes, the very same nasty, hateful words we heard during the Northern
Ireland conflict over the last thirty years were constantly on
the tongues and in the newspapers of American colonists.
Britain's final reaction to the colonists'
refusal to pay taxes, after a long period of adjustments in the
taxes and talks with colonial representatives, and to their contempt
for Imperial regulations over boundaries and trade--many of the
colonies' richest men such as John Hancock were simply smugglers--triggered
an authentic "grass-roots" revolt in Massachusetts.
When the unthinkable actually happened
in Massachusetts--violent revolt being originally unthinkable
for most well-known and established colonial figures like Franklin
or Washington or John Adams--there was no going back. The central
issue became one of how things were to be managed by the colonies'
ambitious little Establishment.
Washington's appointment as commander-in-chief
represented an important turning point. What had been an almost
spontaneous revolt organized by militia groups who elected their
leaders became an organized opposition with an organized army
under an appointed commander who suddenly started lashing and
hanging volunteers who didn't obey orders or show proper respect.
Washington, the cold Virginia aristocrat, expressed contempt
in his letters for the New England militiamen who had taken all
the chances and started the whole business. He wanted to command
a real army with smart uniforms and traditional discipline just
like the British army he so admired. He had been frustrated for
years about getting a permanent commission in the British army,
something that was then rarely awarded to colonials.
Washington actually proved one of the
worst generals of all time, losing battle after battle, although
he offered a strong and stubborn figure as symbol and rallying
point. Had the battle-hardened British commanders been ruthlessly
determined instead of complacent and actually more than a little
indulgent towards their American cousins, there is little doubt
the Revolution would have died quickly (of course, the same local
grievances and ambitions would years later have flared up again
in some other form). In the end, it was French assistance, as
I've detailed in "France's Great Folly," that made
the Revolution a success, although this was rarely acknowledged
later by Washington, an attitude still widely displayed today.
The real lessons of the American Revolution
include the fact that early Americans were not motivated by quite
the high ideals that contemporary Americans generally attribute
to them. Anti-Catholicism and greed for Western expansion were
basic causes. So, too, antipathy to taxes. Still, given enough
time, America outgrew some of these early narrow prejudices.
One narrowness that has not disappeared
with time is found in the Declaration of Independence. Few Americans
ever actually read it, but after a few stirring, handsome words,
this document is a long, whining list of grievances, almost amusing
to read now. Jefferson's first draft, which included even blaming
the slave trade on Britain--Jefferson was very poor at economics,
not recognizing the need for demand as well as supply in any
market--was heavily excised by the Continental Congress, making
the petulant Jefferson so irritated he disowned the document
until in his later years it had become an American icon. Then
he wanted credit for it engraved on his tombstone. Whining, unthinking
demands and petulant attitudes remain readily-identified with
America even as a world power.
The great lesson of Yorktown in 1781,
the final, decisive battle, was that even a great power like
Imperial Britain really could not suppress the naturally-grown
ambitions and desires of a people thousands of miles away, not
without investing at a cost out of all proportion to the benefits,
and not without becoming intensely disliked. This is a lesson
that America, now grown strong and very arrogant in its strength,
has utterly failed to learn.
Weekend Edition
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Alan Maass
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Noah Leavitt
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Joanne
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Ignacio
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Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
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Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
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