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Today's
Stories
September 3,
2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: the Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
Max Gimble
Et Tu, Menchu? Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Graves
in Guatemala
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Afghan Electoral Model: "If They Want to Vote
Twice, Let Them"
Todd Chretien & Jessie
Muldoon
Will the Democrats Expel Zell Miller?
Jack Random
Spite and Venom Day: the Turncoat and the Profiteer
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Christa Allen
Contre Bush
Website of
the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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September 3, 2004
The Book of
Slaughter and Forgetting
Intentional
Ignorance from Reagan to Us
By
CARL ESTABROOK
"...I told the American
people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best
intentions still tell me that's true -- but the facts and the
evidence tell me it is not."
--Ronald Reagan, 4 March 1987
There is a germ of truth in the malign
fatuity Ronald Reagan (chief magistrate of the United States,
1981-1989) offered to explain the great crisis of his presidency,
which should have resulted in his impeachment. (It was probably
written for him by Peggy Noonan, who developed a nice line in
maudlin propaganda.) In the gap between what one knows to be
the case and what one chooses to believe, a multitude of sins
and crimes can be covered over.
Although memory is an essential
part of the actor's armory, Reagan had developed his ability
to forget into an art, even before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
What he remembered was what he (or rather his handlers) chose
to remember, whether factual or not.
In 1985 and 1986 the Reagan
administration secretly sold more than a hundred tons of anti-aircraft
and anti-tank missiles to the government of Iran in order to
provide money for the Contras, a mercenary army attacking the
government and people of Nicaragua, support for which Congress
eventually banned. The US military advised its Contra hirelings
to attack "soft targets," with horrific results. An
eyewitness to a Contra raid in Jinotega province said,
"Rosa had her breasts
cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart.
The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off and their
eyes poked out. They were killed by slitting their throats and
pulling the tongue out through the slit."
These acts were repeated throughout
Nicaragua (one of the instigators being the present US ambassador
to Iraq), by people whom Reagan compared to the Founding Fathers.
But when the Tower Commission began looking into the selling
of arms to Iran, Reagan was asked about his conflicting testimony
on those sales. He referred to the notes that his handlers provided
and read out in a clear voice, "If the question comes up
at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were
surprised"!
NATIONAL ALZHEIMER'S
Reagan's more fantastic lies
-- such as his assertion to the Israeli prime minister that he
had been present at the liberation of a German concentration
camp -- may have signaled his own case of Alzheimer's, but much
more serious is what Studs Terkel has called "national Alzheimer's
Disease" -- the forgetting of our country's recent history,
and particularly the crimes for which we, as citizens of an ostensibly
democratic polity, are all responsible.
It is this national Alzheimer's
that the propagandists for US administrations can rely on to
put across even obvious frauds like Reagan. Of course it is not
a medical condition of the US electorate, but it also cannot
be ascribed to the stupidity of the majority of the population,
as many self-styled liberals seem to do. People are not fools,
but when well over a thousand billion dollars is spent every
year to convince Americans what they should think and how they
should live ("marketing"), it is bound to have an effect.
So we forget (with the intense
encouragement of the media and government) that in Reagan's so-called
electoral landslides of 1980 and 1984, three-quarters of the
eligible voters did not vote for him. Polls in both years showed
that Americans strongly rejected his policies. By the time he
and his successor and continuator left office, when the effects
of their domestic programs were apparent, Reagan was tied with
Nixon as the least popular ex-president.
FORGETTING
REAGAN
Ronald Reagan's funeral was
a carefully scripted propaganda-fest organized by the Bush administration
-- nothing like it had been seen in Washington for forty years,
since the assassination of John Kennedy. The actual script was
a 300-page book; the slavish media coverage was, in Alex Cockburn's
phrase, "an electronic Nuremberg rally." But strangely
omitted was not only the fact that Reagan was capable of intentional
ignorance but also that he was a mass murderer. A more fitting
eulogy for him was pronounced by Fr. Miguel d'Escoto, former
foreign minister of Nicaragua:
"...I pray that God in
his infinite mercy and goodness forgive him for having been the
butcher of my people, for having been responsible for the deaths
of some 50,000 Nicaraguans. We cannot, we should not ever forget
the crimes he committed in the name of what he falsely labeled
freedom and democracy. More perhaps than any other US. President,
Reagan convinced many around the world that the U.S. is a fraud,
a big lie. Not only was it not democratic, but in fact the greatest
enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples. Reagan ...
was known as the great communicator, and I believe that that
is true only if one believes that to be a great communicator
means to be a good liar..."
We have forgotten among other
things, in these days of the Christian Right, that the Reagan
wars against the people of Central America were wars against
the church, and that they were already underway during the presidency
of that good Christian, Jimmy Carter. The decade began with the
murder of an archbishop at the altar by a CIA-backed death-squad
and ended with the murder of six Jesuit intellectuals and the
rape and murder of their staff at the University of Central America
by soldiers led by graduates from America's notorious School
of the Americas. The organized resistance to the murder of hundreds
of thousands under the direction of the US came from the Catholic
church in Central America and from Protestant churches in North
America that organized support and accompaniment programs. The
killing of Archbishop Romero (March 24, 1980) and the murders
of the Jesuits (November 16, 1989) were not accidents but policy.
Noam Chomsky asks whether we
would have forgotten so easily, had in 1980's Czechoslovakia
a popular archbishop been murdered in church by Russian agents,
more than 70,000 Czechs slaughtered by Soviet-sponsored death-squads,
and Vaclav Havel and a half-dozen associates in the "Velvet
Revolution" had their brains cut out by Russian-trained
and directed soldiers?
THE EVIL LIVES
AFTER
"Eight years, eight dreary,
miserable mind-numbing years, the years of the age of Reagan,"
wrote the late conservative commentator Murray Rothbard in 1989.
He was however wrong in what he saw as a "glimmer of hope"
-- "that Reaganism might not survive much beyond Reagan."
In fact of course Reaganism lives on, even more fanatically,
in the current administration -- not only the same ideas but
the same people. Those running the "war on terrorism"
now, once announced "war on terrorism" as the theme
of the Reagan administration's foreign policy, in contrast to
Carter's "human rights" (itself a lie).
Reversing the traditional order,
the farce of Grenada was a prelude to the tragedy of Iraq: in
each case a defenseless country is attacked in part because,
as Neocon Michael Ledeen put it last year, "Every ten years
or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little
country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world
we mean business." And yet most Americans have already been
encouraged to forget (if they ever knew) that George Bush's invasion
of Iraq may have killed more than fifty thousand Iraqis, in addition
to a thousand American troops. (Clinton of course killed more
--- hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them children, died
from a decade of sanctions.)
The splendid Reaganite invasion
of Grenada should have alerted us to the ineptitude of the Reagan-Bush
military. Clinton's reluctance to use US troops on the ground
in his attack on Serbia (falsely described as "humanitarian")
-- leaving the work to air power and NATO -- in retrospect looks
like a canny avoidance of the arrogant incompetence of the occupation
of Iraq. Clinton preferred air attacks -- such as that on a pharmaceutical
plant in Sudan, now forgotten, which resulted in the deaths of
thousands, as Chomsky pointed out.
In G. W. Bush's administration,
new Neocon is but old Reaganite writ large, and they fear the
same enemy: the American public. When the US populace comes to
understand what is being done in their name, they are appalled,
so they must be distracted, somehow. For example, an on-going
poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations showed that
seventy per cent of Americans who lived through the Vietnam War
agreed that "the war was not a mistake, it was fundamentally
wrong and immoral." More than a generation of US propaganda,
Republican and Democrat , was employed vigorously to attack this
view, held by large majority of Americans, under the name of
the "Vietnam syndrome."
Representatives of America's
Israeli client were particularly concerned that such popular
revulsion would lead to criticism of Israel's decades-long occupation,
with all its brutality and racism. One of the Neocons' first
appearances in the 1990s was as advisers to politicians to the
right of Israel's war-criminal prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
SOURCES AND
METHODS
A nation founded on two of
the greatest crimes in human history, the destruction of native
Americans and the enslavement of native Africans, has a lot to
forget. The effect of many interconnected political movement
in late twentieth-century America was to combat the intentional
forgetting of these crimes, and many of these movements took
their rise out of the opposition to US attacks on southeast and
southwest Asia.
The result of the forced remembering
is a nation in many ways far more civilized today than it was
in the mid-twentieth century, as Chomsky points out. The US executive
could then carry on a savage war against the people of South
Vietnam -- for the crime of not accepting the government that
we had picked out for them -- for years before there was the
slightest protest in the US. In contrast, some of the largest
anti-war protests in history, at home and abroad, occurred before
the US launched its latest attack on Iraq.
The great crimes have been
recalled, and others (so common half a century ago as not to
be noticed as crimes, such as racism, sexism, abortion, euthanasia,
and capital punishment) are the objects of attention. Of course
this consciousness rose even as American administrations (both
Democrat and Republican) seemed ever more willing to risk the
very survival of the human race for their own demands for hegemony
in the world. The US government under either party continues
to be what M. L. King perceptively called it thirty-five years
ago, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
RETURN OF THE
REPRESSED
Instead of the wholesale and
retail war-criminals whom the official political parties have
thrown up for our consideration this November, the US polity
needs public figures who reject the intentional ignorance required
by the big business backers of American politics. They must say,
like Hamlet's friend Horatio,
...let me speak to the yet
unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' reads: all this can I
Truly deliver.
And they can, too.
All of this suggests that at
least part of the role of the political leader in the US today
should be like that of a traditional psychoanalyst, attempting
to uncover the patient's forgotten history. In the case of the
country, the analysis will be finally a narrative of class --
and that is to say a narrative of crime.
And of course we might expect
that -- in politics as in therapy -- if this unearthing is done
well, its agent may become the focus of quite irrational hatred
as well as excessive love -- rather like Ralph Nader.
Carl Estabrook is a Visiting Scholar University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a CounterPunch columnist. He
can be reached at: galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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