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December 8, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
December 6, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Hampshire
College the First
to Condemn the War
Robert
Jensen
University
Teaching After
September 11
Jack McCarthy
Does
Tom Friedman Read
the New York Times?
Sam and
Leila Bahour
The
Psychology of a Suicide Attacker
December 5, 2001
Edward Hammond
The Only
Real Way to
Prevent Biowarfare
Harvey
Wasserman
Atomic
Treason in the House
Carl Estabrook
America's
Israel
Don Williams
Questions
Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George Bush
Cockburn/St. Clair
Liberals
Hail War as
Return of Big Government
Robert
Fisk
The
Last Colonial War?
Bahour/Dahan
It's About
the Occupation
December 4, 2001
Dave Marsh
A
Plea for Byron Parker
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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December
8, 2001
Fallout From the
Afghan War
High-Tech Puritanism
By John Chuckman
How did carpet-bombing Afghan villages and conducting
air strikes against Taliban prisoners represent the actions of
a free people, of a great democracy? The forces of darkness required
an immediate, crushing response rather than any mere effort at
securing justice through diplomacy and existing international
institutions.
However disturbing to some, the answer
does accurately reflect important American attitudes about the
War in Afghanistan. The success of the war, as measured by the
fairly rapid change in that country's government and quite apart
from what will almost certainly prove a failure to end terrorism,
may well usher in a dangerous and bizarre era of international
relations.
Since the collapse of the Cold War, America
has addressed the world with a new emphasis on democracy and
human rights. We enjoy official pronouncements on these precious
concepts at fairly regular intervals, although they are often
used in ways that resemble chamber-of-commerce boosterism, trade-concession
negotiations, or just plain advertising and leave one's hunger
for worthy principles in international affairs satisfied only
by the taste of flat beer or stale bread.
Apart from the statements' too-often
self-serving nature, and apart from their considerable selectivity
and inaccuracy, they generally contain an implicit assumption
that democracy is always and everywhere good. But this is far
from being true. Democracy is subject to the same arbitrary and
unjust measures as every other form of government, requiring
only the shared prejudices, hatreds, or selfishness of a bare
majority to inflict pain on others.
The Bill of Rights in the American Constitution
exists precisely to protect people from the tyranny of a majority.
But even a Bill of Rights often does not protect against injustice,
for such tyrannies have existed through much of American history.
Those held in slavery for most of America's first century were
held in a revised form of servitude for a second century precisely
by the tyranny of a majority of voters. And the proverbial tyrant-sheriff
or judge in backwater rural America or crooked machine-politician
in larger cities has inflicted injustice on countless Americans,
including stealing their votes and corrupting their courts, despite
the high-sounding principles of the Bill of Rights.
Rights must be interpreted by courts,
and members of any court generally reflect the attitudes and
will of those in the majority or at least of that portion of
the population that exercises effective power (which at America's
founding was tiny). The times that courts go beyond this fairly
pedestrian role are rare and are invariably followed by accusations
of having exceeded their authority. And, of course, even bringing
issues to court implies the means to do so.
Apartheid South Africa was a democracy
for whites that held a majority population of blacks in a form
of perpetual bondage. Israel follows almost the same pattern
except that the group held in bondage is a minority. But America
only spoke out about South Africa's practices in the last few
years of its existence when tremendous international and private-citizen
pressure had already been brought to bear. And America has yet
to say anything about Israel's practices.
America's penchant to criticize, selectively,
other forms of government and social arrangements together with
new efforts to apply American laws abroad (examples here include:
penalties under Helms-Burton against third-party business with
Cuba; the abuse of American anti-dumping laws to change previously-negotiated
terms of international trade agreements; frequent efforts to
extradite citizens of other countries to face American courts;
programs to control what farmers in other countries grow; the
opening of FBI offices abroad; and, most recently, intense pressures
on other countries to change their visa and refugee laws to be
more consistent with America's fairly harsh regime) signal a
fervent, new burst of enthusiasm for shaping the world to America's
liking.
The world would almost certainly welcome
the sincere application to American foreign policy of liberal
principles. I mean, of course, the ringing 18th century meaning
of liberal, not the degraded, pejorative that America's right-wing
establishment has worked so hard for decades to make of that
word. (The widespread effort to debase the meaning of this fine
word by our many commentators and politicians who promote attitude
rather than analysis is itself evidence of insincerity concerning
principles).
But America's interventions in the world
are shaped by a witch's brew of self-righteousness, simplistic
answers, and the same kind of narrow self-interests that have
characterized the interventions of all former great powers. The
world's first (at least superficially) democratic great power,
despite the official pronouncements about rights and freedoms,
still does not match its interventions to broad principles that
most of the world's peoples would embrace.
An important and overlooked explanation
for inconsistent words and actions is the nation's legacy of
Puritanism. This legacy generates the zeal about changing the
world to our own liking while ascribing the actions to the very
mind of God, at least as revealed through the Holy Writ of our
Founding Fathers: Americans often having some difficulty distinguishing
between the two.
We are taught in elementary school that
the "Pilgrim Fathers" and other extreme, fundamentalist
Christian groups came to our shores seeking religious liberty.
The textbooks neglect to explain what truly nasty people the
various Puritan groups of the 16th and 17th centuries were.
They were despised across much of Europe
not so much for their private beliefs but for their intolerance
of others' beliefs and their vicious public behavior. Truly violent
pamphlets and sermons about the beliefs of others were standard
Puritan fare: most of their contents would meet the most stringent
modern standard of hate-speech. Some Puritan groups went well
beyond ranting to their own people. They crashed into the church
services of other denominations to deliver vitriolic attacks
on what was being preached.
And it was Puritan groups in England
who, after the Reformation, raged through the beautiful old cathedrals,
hacking up statues, destroying historic tombs, and burning priceless
works of art that they regarded as idols: actions no different
in any detail from recent ones by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
These furious, unpleasant people, dizzy
with paranoid feelings of religious persecution, streamed onto
the shores of America, hoping to create their own version of
society. It was not their intention to permit religious liberty
or any other liberty at odds with their harsh dogmas of predestination
and damnation of all those not elected by God. It took worldly,
late 18th-century skeptics like Jefferson making political alliances
with the many schisms that irascible Puritan personalities created
to bring the beginnings of what we understand as religious liberty
to America.
Patterns of thought and behavior among
America's contemporary conservatives still strongly resemble
those of Puritans from three centuries ago. Perhaps the most
persistent, and for our theme the most relevant, is the inability
to see gradations or subtleties in controversial situations.
You are either right or wrong, saved
or damned. There is no middle ground. Note in this regard President
Bush's graceful, memorable words to the world about being either
with America or with the terrorists. Thirty years before, during
the War in Vietnam, one heard repeatedly, "Love it or leave
it," an ugly expression that has reappeared a few times
even in the far less stressful domestic atmosphere of the War
in Afghanistan.
So many American minds instinctively
follow this pattern of thinking, one suspects it's in the gene
pool. During the insane episode of keeping a little boy away
from his father and his country on the basis of ideology, a perceptive
Australian wrote in a Sydney paper that he was grateful Australia
got the convicts instead of the Puritans.
Americans are convinced they are the
modern version of "God's chosen people." This identification
with the struggles and fortunes of the Old Testament Hebrews
was a strong Puritan characteristic. With Americans' good fortune
in growing up on a continent whose vast resources and space and
favorable climate have nurtured health and prosperity as well
as attracted ambitious and talented people from all over the
world, who can fully blame them? A land of milk and honey, if
ever there was one.
But much as the successful 17th-century
Puritan businessmen typically did, many Americans regard their
success as a visible sign of God's favor. Favor, not blessing,
is an important distinction. One is humbled and grateful by blessings,
but hubris (or, its rough, earthy equivalent, chutzpah) and arrogance
tend to be the less attractive results of believing oneself favored.
While historical events tend more to
develop than erupt -- eruptions, if you will, reflecting local
pressures built up from years of the glacially-paced movements
of history's tectonic plates-- the first massive eruption of
American Puritanism on world affairs-- there were earlier, lesser
ones and a history of domestic ones--came with the closing days
of World War ll.
Following the titanic, destructive failure
of Nazi Germany's crusade against Bolshevism (a fundamental part
of Nazi ideology), America effectively took on the same burden
with the Cold War. There was more of a direct connection here
than is often realized, since not only German scientists were
grabbed up in large numbers for military research but many political
and industrial figures, with unmistakable Nazi pasts, were eagerly
recruited and assisted after the war by the CIA and its predecessor
agency.
This struggle was regarded by America's
establishment as a life-and-death one, much as Hitler's Germany
regarded it. Few Americans today realize how deadly serious it
was. The "blacklisting" in Hollywood, featured on film
and television as the tragedy of the era, was almost a trivial
aspect of the struggle.
Warning the Soviets of America's willingness
to be ruthless was one of the important considerations in the
decision to use atomic bombs on civilians in Japan. During the
early Fifties, our government seriously planned a pre-emptive
atomic strike on the Soviet Union. The full story here remains
unknown, but perhaps only the revulsion of allies who learned
of this prevented its taking place. (Revulsion at American attitudes
and plans may have played a role in motivating some of the many
extremely-damaging Soviet spies in Britain at this time).
It is an interesting observation that
while classical economists and astute students of history always
understood that Soviet-style communism must eventually collapse
of its own structural weakness, much like a massive, badly-engineered
building on a weak foundation, this knowledge seems not to have
influenced American policy during the Cold War. Delenda est Carthago
became a terrible, palpable presence in American society. Communism
must be defeated because it was godless and failed to recognize
the elect nature of America's way of doing things.
The high-water mark in America's impulse
to wage holy war against the benighted adherents of communism
and free their people to buy Coca-Cola and receive the Good Word
was undoubtedly the war in Vietnam. While defeat in Vietnam proved
a disaster not quite on a scale of Germany's Götterdämmerung
in Russia, it was a humiliating and destructive experience.
I often ask myself what America learned
from the Vietnam War. Yes, we now have professional soldiers
rather than conscripts. Yes, every congressman has added "boys
in harm's way" to his or her kit-bag of Rotary-Club phrases.
But in a more fundamental sense, I don't
think America learned a great deal. Most of the horror of Vietnam
was inflicted on Vietnamese ten thousand miles away, a people
who suffered death on a scale only Russians or Jews could appreciate
with the equivalent of about fifteen million deaths when scaled
to the size of America's population. While the Vietnamese suffered
a virtual holocaust in rejecting the wishes of the favored people,
many Americans still believe they are the ones who suffered a
massive tragedy, surely an extraordinary example of Puritan-tinged
thinking.
If you compare America's less than 60
thousand deaths -- about a year and a half's fatalities on America's
highways spread over ten years of war --to Vietnam's loss of
3 to 4 million, you realize that the conflict marked a turning
point in methods of war and the use of military technology. Our
government's efforts to limit unpopular American casualties -
this was, after all, the youth generation of the Sixties intended
according to all the advertising and pop magazine articles only
to enjoy itself and never think of dying - meant a new reliance
on air power and technology. The carpet in the carpet-bombing
was in the homes of Vietnamese peasants.
Economists call this a substitution of
one factor of production (physical capital) for another (labor)
in the production function (in this case, destruction abroad).
This substitution has continued down
to the present at an increasing pace. Indeed, the recent, much-criticized
proposals of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (I don't know why,
but I am always tempted to call him von Rumsfeld) really amount
to an acceleration of the process. More technology, less soldiers
mean more precision, less domestic political risk from deaths
in conflicts, and, just as in any other industry, more efficiency
("bang for the buck" as the Pentagon so quaintly puts
it).
Of course, taken too far, quite apart
from possible specialized military implications, this substitution
threatens to undermine America's popular support for the military.
"Joining up" with its advanced training opportunities,
large benefits towards post-secondary education, and even tolerance
for enlisted families and non-uniform life outside daily duties
provides an important economic and social option for many young
Americans, most of whom, naturally enough, never expect to see
combat. For a couple of million people, the armed forces today
offer one of the few equivalents of what a secure union job with
plenty of benefits in a sound corporation was fifty years ago.
The greatest danger of the Vietnam War
to America was that the nation showed genuine signs of beginning
to crack apart, just as it actually had done a century before
in the Civil War. Changes made in the nature of American interventions
since that time reflect more an avoidance of this kind of internal
divisiveness than a fundamentally different way of regarding
the rest of the human race. They reflect also the unexpected
collapse of Lucifer's evil empire. We now have only the vicious
scrambling of lesser demon-princes on which to focus our fury.
However, an increasingly technology-intensive
armed forces comes to the rescue for hunting out these lesser
varmints. Not only are our chosen enemies generally smaller and
weaker, but our ability to reach out with fairly little risk
to American lives is vastly improved.
While the Pentagon has not achieved the
precision-capability that its spokesmen and supporters almost
salivate describing, it has nevertheless come a very long way
to delivering overwhelming destruction on selected targets with
very little risk to its own pilots or troops, at least in the
kinds of places it has been called upon to attack - that is,
countries with small economies such as Iraq or Serbia and places
still immured in the culture of earlier centuries, such as Afghanistan.
Over the long term, big investments in
technology do pay off, as the last ten years of general American
prosperity prove, and the military is no different in this regard.
But the ability to kill without being
killed reflects a potentially destabilizing influence in world
affairs. One of the few universally-true dictums ever uttered
is Lord Acton on power.
Immense power in the hands of a people
who neither know nor care about the world except as it reflects
their own attitudes is inherently dangerous, but this is something
Americans have already experienced in the post-war period. Even
then, as in Vietnam, the results were often grim.
Given the ability to kill without being
killed and with no other power great enough to offer counterbalancing
influence, a new, bizarre version of Pax Americana is the prospect
for decades ahead - at least until a united Europe, a developed
China, and a reinvigorated Russia and Japan can offer effective
alternate voices. (As for the influence of Puritanism within
American society, only time plus lots of immigration seem likely
to have effect).
And I believe this comes with its own
built-in tendency towards instability, as people across the globe
resent and resist the changes and adjustments expected by America,
not only in the sphere of economics through developments in globalized
free trade, but in the political and social spheres at an intensity
rarely known before, except by unfortunate neighbors in the Caribbean
Basin.
America's inclination to ignore international
institutions and to declare people or states as criminals whenever
they seriously oppose its demands combined with its ability to
punish with impunity unavoidably will increase resentments and
bring relations to the boil over much of the world time and time
again. New forms of terrorism, or what the dear old CIA has always
euphemized as "dirty tricks" where it was doing the
terrorizing to promote American interests, seem virtually certain.
But wasn't that what the war in Afghanistan was supposed to end?
Listen carefully to Mr. Bush's words
about a long, complicated war. I don't think the words advisors
have put into his mouth are just about Afghanistan or even about
anything so specific as extending the action to Iraq. In effect,
I think he's talking about the kind of perpetual low-grade state
of war that was part of Orwell's vision for 1984. Only it's not
going to be Big Brother that prosecutes it, but the Puritan forces
of America's New Model Army.
John Chuckman lives in Port Dover, Ontario.
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