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A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 17, 2001
Zoltan Grossman
It Ain't
Over Til It's Over
November 16, 2001
Rick Giombetti
Rep.
McDermott and
the Decay of Liberalism
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Voices
of Muslim Feminists
Mokhiber/Weissman
Kill,
Kill, Kill
November 15, 2001
George
Monbiot
Blasting
Our Way
Toward Peace
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens
Mind-Meld
and Hot Bodies
Steve
Perry
Afghan
Puzzle Palace
RAWA
We Do Not Accept
the Northern Alliance
November 14, 2001
Jensen/Mahajan
The
Press Must Press Harder on Afghanistan
David Vest
The Great Unificator
Harry
Browne
Preventing
Future Terrorism
November 13, 2001
Peter Mahoney
Veteran's
Day, 2001
Rep. Ron
Paul
Expanding
NATO
Is a Bad Idea
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
November 9, 2001
Karen Snell
Torture By
Proxy
John Troyer
A
New Kind of Activism
Tariq Ali
Q &
A About the War
Michael
Colby
Schoolgirl
Gets Booted
for Anti-war Views
November 8, 2001
Mokhiber/Weissman
The
Cipro Rip-Off
Mitchel Cohen
The Smear Campaign
Against Nancy Oden
Steve
Perry
American
Roulette
November 7, 2001
Bahour/Dahan
Placebo Peace
Plan
Tom Turnipseed
Bush
Gives Billions
to His Oil Buddies
Cockburn/St. Clair
Greens, Airports
and
National ID Cards
Dr. Susan
Block
Ayatollah
Asscroft
Brian J. Foley
Bombing Campaign
Not "Self-Defense" Under International Law
November 6, 2001
Mark Scaramella
Where's
That Red Cross Money Going
C.G. Estabrook
Our Torturers
Sheperd
Bliss
Scott
Nearing on War
Rep. Ron Paul
Underwriting
the Taliban
Tariq
Ali
The
General Who
Came to Dinner
Evan Ravitz
Stop the War
Through
Direct Democracy
Steve
Perry
Hunger
in Afghanistan
November 5, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
Living
in the Minefields
David Price
Terror
and Indigenous People
November 3, 2001
Declan McCullagh
Nancy Oden Interview
Daniel
Wolff
The
Memphis Blues Again
Mark Weisbrot
War on Civilians
Dave Marsh
How
the RIAA (and the FBI) Cheat Musicians
Robert Jensen
Speaking
Out Against
War on Campus
November 2, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Green
Party Leader Detained at Maine Airport; Prevented from Boarding
Any Plane
Alexander Cockburn
FBI Eyes
Torture
November 1, 2001
Dean Baker
Dying
for Patents
Sami Amarah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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The
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November 17,
2001
American Crusades
By C. G. Estabrook
A generation ago the US launched wars against poor
countries in Southeast Asia and killed millions; Americans were
told that it was a necessary step in the crusade against communism.
Now in the midst of a war against a poor county in Southwest
Asia, we are told that it is a necessary step in what the president
called a "crusade against terrorism."
Mr. Bush was quickly taken aside and
told, perhaps without explanation, that that term would not do.
But he was undoubtedly right in connecting the two crusades,
as he has now done several times. And he has extended the parallel
to the campaign against fascism, the account of which by the
Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, was called CRUSADE IN EUROPE.
Our president has gone so far as to connect the crusades on the
level of personal psychology, and it's difficult not to hear
a reference to his own family in this careful plant in USA TODAY:
"Bush has told advisers that he believes confronting this
enemy is a chance for him and his fellow baby boomers to refocus
their lives and prove they have the same kind of valor and commitment
their fathers showed in World War II."
Terrorism has clearly taken over that
pride of place that communism occupied for so long in American
propaganda. And not a moment too soon: ten years ago, with the
fall of the Soviet Union, Colin Powell, then chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, blurted in a moment of unwonted candor,
"Think hard about it. I'm running out of demons. I'm running
out of villains!"
In another peculiar and revealing comment,
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld replied to a reporter's question in
the immediate aftermath of September 11. How, he was asked, will
we know when a victory over terrorism is achieved? "I say
that victory is persuading the American people and the rest of
the world that this is not a quick matter that's going to be
over in a month or a year or even five years."
American policy makers clearly think
that they have found something that they can comfortably crusade
against for some time, something that is as fearful as communism.
In doing so they are following a time-honored tradition in US
politics. After the Second World War, Senator Arthur Vandenberg
advised President Truman (secretly) that it would be necessary
to "scare hell out of the American people" in order
to accomplish his policies. The communist menace was the way
to do it.
Of course there were communists to crusade
against then, as there are terrorists now. The authoritarian
society of the USSR was a model for anti-colonial struggles in
the Third World, including China, and a pattern for how to conduct
rapid industrialization. Although the USSR observed carefully
the dividing line established with the US and UK at the close
of the Second World War, harsh Soviet control of the governments
of Eastern Europe mirrored (on a much smaller scale) the world-wide
economic control exercised by the US.
All admit now that the US never feared
Soviet military conquests -- it was rather the principles that
the communists said they stood for, economic justice and workers'
rights, that the US government feared would be attractive in
Europe and the Third World. The view of the American economic
elite was spelled out quite candidly in a study from the mid-1950s
headed by a Harvard professor of government. It pointed out that
the real threat of communism was the transformation of governments
that adopted it "in ways which reduce their willingness
and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West."
How US planners actually saw the world
was set out by the leading liberal figure in the post-WWII State
Department, George Kennan. In 1948 he produced the (secret) Policy
Planning Study 23, in which he wrote
...we have about 50% of the world's wealth,
but only 6.3% of its population ... In this situation, we cannot
fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in
the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which
will permit us to maintain this position of disparity ... To
do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming;
and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on
our immediate national objectives ... We should cease to talk
about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the
raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day
is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight
power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better.
Of course the "idealistic slogans,"
suitable for a crusade, would be the way the matter would be
presented to the public. Meanwhile, from Guatemala to Vietnam,
"straight power concepts" would mean the deaths of
millions in the next decades as the result of a policy that might
be summarized in the oft-repeated words of George Bush: "You're
either with us or against us."
Had we understood the last crusade at
the time, we might not have agreed to kill so many innocent people.
Perhaps we should try to understand the present one. CP
Carl Estabrook
teaches at the University of Illinois and is the host of News
From Neptune, a weekly radio show on politics and the media.
He writes a regular column for CounterPunch.
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