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CounterPunch
March 18,
2003
We Must Not Let Each Other Down
Confronting
Our Fears So We Can Confront the Empire
By ROBERT JENSEN
I am finally ready to admit what for months I
have kept hidden: I am terrified.
I am more scared than I have ever been
in my adult life. For weeks now I have felt a new kind of free-floating
terror at what has been unfolding, as the Bush administration
has made it clear that nothing would derail its mad rush to war.
Until now, I have not spoken of it. In
organizing meetings or talks to community groups or rally speeches,
I held back. The task was to build the antiwar movement, and
I worried that talking too much about my fear might undermine
that. People need to feel empowered, hopeful, I told myself;
we should be talking about the potential of the movement.
That hasn't changed. We have to continue
to build the movement, which has enormous potential over the
long-term to turn this society away from war and profit, toward
peace and the needs of people. We cannot abandon our commitment
to the people of the world, the work of education and organizing
that we all must do if we are to make good on that commitment.
But I no longer think we can build such
a movement by suppressing or keeping quiet about this fear we
feel. In the past few weeks I have seen this fear so clearly
in the eyes of my friends, heard it in the nervous comments of
strangers, and been surprised by it in the unease with which
even many supporters of the war talked.
I knew it when this past weekend my father
-- a conservative, Republican small-town businessman and World
War II-era veteran -- tried to convince me that Bush wouldn't
really start a war, that he was bluffing, just being cagey. Even
my father was scared of the plans of the man he voted for.
I think people all over the world whose
capacity to feel has not been occluded by power or hate are feeling
something like this. It is not a fear of terrorists or weapons
of mass destruction or even necessarily of this particular war,
as frightening as all those things may be. I believe it is a
fear of something more difficult to pin down, a fear of the forces
that will be unleashed when the United States defies the world
and launches a war that -- while couched in talk of protecting
people from threats -- is so obviously about projecting U.S.
power to achieve a kind of world domination that was never possible
before.
Bush and his advisers proudly announce
that they have cast aside any commitment to collective security,
real diplomacy, and international law. Will the United Nations
survive? Will there be anything left of an international system
when Bush and his gang are finished? Will there be any hope for
the peaceful settlement of disputes? Of course none of these
concepts has ever been fully implemented, and we all know that
the international institutions have flaws. But will anyone feel
safer in a world in which the law comes only from the blade of
the American sword, permanently drawn?
This fear I feel is not just of power-run-amok
but of an empire with the most destructive military capacity
that has ever existed -- an empire with thermobaric bombs and
cruise missiles, cluster bombs and nuclear "bunker busters."
No matter how hard the government works to try to keep us from
seeing the results of those weapons -- and no matter how much
the news media cooperate in that project -- we understand how
many civilians could die under the onslaught of these horrific
weapons. They can censor the pictures, but not our imaginations.
This fear I feel is not just of the unchecked
power of the United States but of the fact that Bush and his
advisers seem to think they understand their own power and can
control it. It is the arrogance of virtually unlimited power
married to lifelong privilege. It is hubris, and in a nuclear
world there is no sin that is potentially more deadly.
This is the fear that I feel, that I
think so many of us feel. The Bush administration wants us to
be afraid, but remain quiet about it. Our power will come not
from denying the fear but in confronting, and overcoming, it.
So, we must speak of it, not to scare others but to bring us
closer together. Our only hope against the fear is in each other,
in our organizing, in our resistance. And if we can confront
our fears, we can confront this empire.
If you feel this fear and aren't sure
that, in the face of it, you can remain involved -- or get involved
for the first time -- in the antiwar movement, all I can say
is, "Where else will you go?" If we retreat into our
private spaces, thinking we can hide, we will find out quickly
that this fear will follow us everywhere.
Our only way out is together, in public,
facing not only our fears but the fears that others will project
onto us, and inviting them to join us. It will be painful. It
will carry with it certain risks. But it is the only way we can
hang onto our own humanity.
I am scared, and I need help. We all
do. Let us pledge not to let each other down -- for our own sake,
and for the sake of the world.
Robert Jensen
is an associate professor of journalism at the University of
Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author
of the book Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
and the pamphlet "Citizens of the Empire." He can be
reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
Yesterday's
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