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April 14, 2000
25 Years After Vietnam:
Beyond Left and Right
By Alexander Cockburn
I got an invitation
to speak a couple of months ago from an outfit called antiwar.com,
which is run by a young fellow called Justin Raimundo. "Antiwar.com
is having its second annual national conference March 24 &
25, and we'd like you to be the luncheon speaker," Raimundo
wrote. "The conference will be held at the Villa Hotel,
in San Mateo (near the airport). The theme of the conference
is 'Beyond Left & Right: The New Face of the Antiwar Movement.'
We have invited a number of speakers spanning the political spectrum.
Confirmed so far: Patrick J. Buchanan, Tom Fleming (of Chronicles
magazine), Justin Raimondo (Antiwar.com), Kathy Kelly (Iraq Aid),
Alan Bock (Orange County Register), Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas),
representatives of the Serbian Unity Congress, and a host of
others."
Raimundo seasoned his invite with a burnt
offering, in the form of flattery, always pleasing to the nostrils:
"All of us here at Antiwar.com are big fans of your writing:
we met, once, at a meeting during the Kosovo war where you bravely
took up the fight for the united front left-right alliance against
imperialist war. We can promise you a small honorarium, a lunch,
free admission to all conference events -- and a good time."
As a seasoned analyst of such communications,
my eye of course fell sadly upon the words "small honorarium"
a phrase that in my case usually means somewhere between
$l50 and $350. I'd already noted that even though our task was
to transcend the tired categories of left and right, I was the
only leftist mentioned, with the possible exception of Kathy
Kelly, from that splendid organization, Voices in the Wilderness,
which campaigns to lift the UN sanctions on Iraq.
Being a libertarian
Justin had boldly added the prospect of a "good time".
Leftist invitations rarely admit this possibility in formal political
communications, even in the distant days when the left supposedly
had a lock on drugs and sex.
I said I'd be happy to join in such an enterprise,
and in due course got some angry e-mails from lefties who seem
to feel that any contiguity with Buchanan is a crime, even if
the subject was gardening and Dutch tulipomania in the seventeenth
century.
Dear Alexander Cockburn:
I read with horror that you are speaking at an event (the
Anti-War.com conference) where Pat Buchannan is the keynote speaker.
How could you knowing that PB's policies are what could only
be called fascist? I generally agree with your opinion on imperialism,
and supported your view of Seattle. However speaking at an event
which will amongst other things help to give Mr. Buchanan respectability,
is unconscionable. I hope you will reconsider. If not, we will
probably be able to greet each ohter, when you cross our picket
line.
Dean Tuckerman
P.S. I am a member of Anti-Racist Action Bay Area.
Dear Dean, thanks for yr note. So far as
Buchanan is concerned, I assume he was invited because he opposed
the war in Kossovo, and calls for the lifting of sanctions against
Iraq. There is a lot that's funky abt American isolationism,
but frankly, I don't mind sharing a conference schedule with
someone who opposes war on Serbs and on Iraqi kids. Nor do I
think B is any more of a fascist
-- in practical terms -- than Albright and Clinton and Gore and
Bradley, with the first three literally with the blood of millions
on their hands. Go find Mailer's interview with Buchanan in Esquire
a few years ago. See you on the picket lines.
Best,
Alex Cockburn
I pondered what to wear, deciding finally
on a t-shirt advertising the Fully Informed Jury Association,
a group upholding the powers of the jury to set aside the law
and rule as the jurors' understanding of the case and their consciences
dictate. FIJA is also anathema to lefties, who equate juries
with redneck juries in the south in the early l960s. It's useless
to point out to them that northeastern juries were overturning
laws and setting fugitive slaves free long before the Civil War,
or that an all-male jury supported Susan B. Anthony's right to
vote, only to be overruled by the judge. If a judge screws up,
lefties don't call for the abolition of judges. But let one jury
come in with an unwelcome verdict, as with Diallo, and you'll
hear mumbles that the jury is as Michael Lind so memorably
put it after the OJ decision, "a barbaric Viking relic".
At the last minute Barbara said the Villa
Hotel is relatively swanky and a T-shirt might not cut it. I
grudgingly switched to white shirt , chose the 67 convertible
as properly defiant of the auto-safety lobby and headed south
from Berkeley. Barbara was right. This was most emphatically
a shirt-and-tie, skirt-and-nice-shoes. Justin Raimundo was draped
in the sort of gray pinstripe favored by London gents when they
want a holiday from blue. But all the same the folks were unmistakeably
libertarians, not Democrats or Republicans. Democrats would have
been more casual, Republicans far more assertive. From the podium
I gazed out at white faces, seeing only two black countenances,
one of them unmistakeably that of yet another liberal bete-to-hate,
Lenore Fulani.
An excellent crowd! Their amiable hilarity
at my sallies reminded me of Goldsmith's lines in the Deserted
Village about the pupils of the country schoolmaster: "Full
well they laughed with counterfeited glee / At all his jokes,
and many a joke had he." (How many people have read the
whole of that wonderful poem, one of the most savage denunciations
of free trade ever written?)
And here now, cleaned up a bit, is what I
said.
"Hello to you all.
W.H. Auden, poet, wrote a verse once about
a rather mysterious character called Gerald Hamilton who was
actually the origin-- if any of you have read Christopher Isherwood's
novels-, Mr Norris Changes Trains. And he wrote a little poem
which said: "So it's you that I now raise my glass to,/
although I haven't the slightest idea / what in God's name you're
up to,/ or why in God's name you are here".
And I feel a little bit like that looking
out on your pleasant faces. I've been on the left, you know,
and I can usually come to an audience and pretty much characterize
it. I could save the FBI a tremendous amount of money. They go
to extraordinary expense bugging people, going out in the hotel
parking lot, and writing down all the license tags. I could say
the three old ladies on my left there, they're all commies, they've
been commies for sixty years. The people over there carrying
a copy of The Militant, they're Trotskyists. But when the Feds
come up after this one, I don't know what I'm going to say. I'm
going to throw in the towel.
People talk a lot about the need for new thinking,
and the need for new ideas. But mostly on the left, if you actually
raise a new idea, it's a bit like arriving at a town in the year
1348 with spots on your face saying, "Let me in".
I remember some years ago I was in Detroit,
a town I like a lot, and an anarchist friend of mine said there's
a terrible event on the weekend called "Gunstock",
and I said, "Oh, that sounds interesting, what's that?"
He said, oh, it's people against the UN, and people who are in
favor of guns. I said, "Let's go and look, let's go and
talk to them, and see what's going on". And he said, absolutely
not. I said, "I thought you were an anarchist". So
I went to "Gunstock", and of course it was filled with
amiable characters. There was a definite sympathy for guns but
not oppressively so. So I wrote a column in The Nation saying
actually there'd always been the talk of new ideas and I had
a new idea that was that our people should go to gun shows. Nation
readers should go to gun shows, carrying copies of The Nation
and converse with people. There was an absolute torrent of outrage.
People didn't think that was a good idea at all.
Before this
event I got called by a reporter from the Examiner, and he asked
what I thought about Buchanan, and he said Buchanan had written
the speech for Nixon about going into Cambodia in 1970. Where
were you, he asked. And I said, oh, I was outside the American
embassy in London-probably standing next to Bill Clinton, who
may or may not have been reporting to the FBI. He probably was.
Or the CIA.
And the Examiner reporter said, "how
would you describe yourself?" And I said "well, how
about radical?" He wasn't totally happy with radical, and
I said all right, left, but then the word "left" can
mean anything. There was probably a left to the Nazi party in
1935, wanting to wipe out only half the Jews.The word left does
not mean much unless it is cashed in real currency, real positions,
like being against war on Serbia, for example. And if you're
opposed to that, you really do start looking around for allies
and I have noticed you find them increasingly in people like
yourselves. People who would conventionally be regarded on the
libertarian right or people like Buchanan.
In any intervention there's a moment when
the intervening power is trying to achieve critical mass in its
propaganda. The American people, generally, say at first, 'huh,
intervention, no, it doesn't sound like a very good idea.' And
then you get the usual arsenal of propaganda goes into motion.
In Iraq, for example, there was the incubator story. Human rights,
of course, was really brought into currency in the era of Jimmy
Carter. The idea of the moral mission. Of course, its historical
antecedents are much, much longer, but it's my belief that with
that when the liberals began to try to regain the moral confidence
that they'd lost in the wake of Vietnam it took them from 1975
to the Carter era, in other words no time at all, to reestablish
or to begin the work of reestablishing their moral credentials.
We had the rhetoric of human rights. Jimmy Carter pronounced
the rhetoric of human rights just as he was mandating the first
Argentinean torturers into the creation of the contras. The rhetroric,
and the reality. And since that time, we've seen the gradual
accretion and accumulation of confidence of the intervention
in the cause of human rights plus a fairly impressive armory
of techniques and accomplices.
Can we unite on the anti-war platform? We
have already, in the case of Kossovo for example. But where would
you as libertarians want to get off the leftist bus? A leftist
says "Capitalism leads to war. Capitalism needs war".
But you libertarians are pro-capitalism, so you presumably have
a view of capitalism as a system not inevitably producing or
needing war. Lefties have always said capitalism has to maximize
its profits and the only way you can maximize profits in the
end is by imperial war, which was the old Lenin thesis.
Leftists say that corporations must plunder
the earth. Corporations will brook no resistance. Corporations
don't care for interference with their ways, whether it's by
the Zapatistas or by insurgent groups around the world. The minute
you have a insurgent group then the capitalists, the corporations
say, enough, and whistle up the state to do their bidding. In
the early days of the newsletter I coedit, Counterpunch, we ran
across a Chase Manhattan bank memo. You know, occasionally you
think, 'God, it's so tiring trying to find news, let's just like
think of what they would say and then write it and say they said
it.' I've never done that, but sometimes they say so exactly
what you want them to say, you're worried that other people will
think that you made it up.
So a fellow
hired by Chase Manhattan bank wrote a little memo, which had
the line, "the Zapatistas must be eliminated", simple
as that. Must be eliminated. It turned out to have been written,
that memo, by a professor, a liberal professor, as I recall,
from Johns Hopkins.
So, my libertarian friends, at what point
do you get off the train? You say, 'we like corporations, the
right for people to associate and form a corporation and issue
publicly held stock and maximize profits. This is part and parcel
of the economic package we favor.' Then you have to do battle
with leftists, those who say corporate greed will lead to war
and waste.
Take Pentagon spending. Is the economy basically
underpinned by Pentagon spending, defense spending, and has been
ever since 1938-roughly when the New Deal failed, which it did,
effectively. Then they had to turn to war spending to bail the
whole system out, and ever since then we've had Pentagon spending
underwriting everything. Keynesianism. Military Keynesianism,
at that. Now that's another bit of left analysis, I wouldn't
go on to tedious length with the various weapons of argument
in our arsenal. I'm saying that one could have and should have
important debates about why we think wars start.
I was asked by Justin to give a talk here
. He cunningly billed my speech as "The psychology of liberal
interventionism", thus removing it from the corporate economic
plane to the mentally nutty plane.
A while back
I did an interview, actually for a terrific book which I happen
to have written myself called "The Golden Age Is In Us",
and I was interviewing Chomsky. It was for a magazine called
Grand Street, and the theme we were meant to talk about was models.
And so Chomsky and I were very pleased, we thought we were going
to talk about models, you know, in the normally Vogue magazine
sense of the word. But they said, no, they wanted us to talk
about intellectual constructs. Boring. But some of what Chomsky
says is interesting. Bear with me, I'll just read a couple of
things he said.
"The same is true of intellectual development
and the same is true of moral life. You're constantly making
choices and decisions and judgements. Sometimes you don't know
quite what to do, but over a wide range you know what's right.
And even when you disagree with people, you find shared moral
ground on which you can work things out. That's true on every
issue. Take a look at the debate over slavery. It was largely
on shared moral ground, and some of the arguments were not so
silly. You could understand the slave owner's arguments. The
slave owner says, If you own property, you treat it better than
if you rent property, so I'm more humane than you are. We can
understand that argument. You have to figure out what's wrong
with it, but there is shared moral ground over a range that goes
far beyond any experience. And this can only mean, again short
of angels, that it's growing out of our nature. It means that
there must be principles that are embedded in our nature or at
the core of our understanding of what a decent human life is,
what a proper form of society is and so on".
Now, he goes on, "the idea that human
beings are malleable and that people don't have an instinctive
nature is a very attractive one to people who want to rule, and
to control. If you look at the modern intelligentsia over the
past century or so, they're pretty much a managerial class, a
secular priesthood. They've basically gone in two directions,
one is essentially Leninist. Leninism is the ideology of a radical
intelligentsia that says we have the right to rule. Alternatively,
they have joined the decision-making sector of state capitalist
society as managers in the political economic and ideological
institutions. The ideologies are very similar", says Chomsky
who went on,"I've sometimes compared Robert McNamara to
Lenin, and you have only to change a few words for them to say
virtually the same thing. That's why people can jump so quickly
from being loyal communists to celebrating America, to take the
Partisan Review's famous phrase back in the early Cold War."
"All of this," Chomsky concludes, "was predicted
by the anarchist, Bakunin, probably the only prediction in the
social sciences that's ever come true."
Now that is a very provocative and stimulating
set of propositions .This idea of the managerial impulse, the
technocratic impulse. What I'm sure is attractive about the idea
of the left-right opposition to war is the idea of a shared moral
outlook, which of course then has to confront or perhaps gloss
over temporarily economic and political differences. And I think
the shared moral outlook should extend beyond war into other
very, important areas. I might just suggest a few. To me they
are enormously important.
If you're paralleling your opposition to intervention,
to the liberal humanitarian interventionist spirit at home, what
are you talking really about? You're talking about defense of
liberty. What we are seeing at the moment is the rise of the
prosecutorial state, a ferocious onslaught on substantive liberty,
almost everywhere you look. Its reached epidemic crisis and emergency
proportions.
You can look
across the country at one example after another of the cops,
of the prosecutorial system being out of control. Lying by cops
in court is endemic. Lying and snitching, that's the underpinnings
of law enforcement. And it is reaching, I think, a major crisis.
And in this crisis constitutional protections are going by the
board.
The fourth amendment is gone. Absolutely gone.
In a car you have no rights whatsoever. They can do anything
they want. The sixth amendment is gone. Now your kids are driving
down the road to San Francisco. No rights in a car, right away.
A cop sees them, thinks they're driving a V.W. with a hip hop
beret on or something like that, or a tail pipe is out, they'll
stop them, it's a pretext stop. They're got no protections. And
then you've got, of course, all this driving while black stuff,
crowding in on top of that. Now you get into court, you're confronted
with cops perjuring themselves and jailhouse snitches saying
you confessed all to them in your cell. You've got people told
to snitch or they'll face 20 years, you've got the mandatory
sentences, you've got the crack disproportion, a 100 times disproportion
in sentencing on powder cocaine and crack cocaine. Take every
instrumentality and abuse of the drug war, and there's something
on which everybody in this room could unite.
How many times have we heard a real debate
thus far this year? On basic issues of liberty and freedom? Not
one bleat, except, I hope, from Mr. Buchanan when he gets going.
And Ralph Nader, hopefully when he gets going.
Now take the environment, and what we've seen
over the last 20 years since that great Green president Richard
Nixon brought in EPA, is a steady conversion of the militant
organizing defense of nature, defense of open space, defense
of things we all like, into a collusive operation between extremely
rich NGOs and the government. Look at the big environmental organizations.
Totally undemocratic, socked in with major foundations like the
Pew Foundation, like Rockefeller, like Ford, like the MacArthur
Foundation, whose processes are secretive, the politics of manipulation,
and ultimately coercive regulation which causes huge offense
to people who should be the allies of the Greens. I'm talking
about small ranches, I'm talking about small farmers who see
themselves being destroyed by big government.
So, in area after area, these things have
to be argued through in an amiable and pleasant and energetic
way.
I think the old categories are gone. I see
no virtue to them. I see Bernie Sanders listed as an Independent
Socialist in the U.S. Congress. I see what Bernie Sanders has
supported, starting with the war in Kosovo. And then I see Ron
Paul, on the other hand, writing stuff against war which could
have been written by Tom Hayden in 1967. I say what is the point
of fooling around with the old categories? Bernie Sanders says
he's an economic populist. What's he trying to do? He's trying
to export the nuclear waste of the northeastern states to a poor
Spanish community in Texas. And that effort was stopped by George
W., figure that one out. Of course George W. had a Democratic
opponent in Texas who was making a stink about it, so he wanted
to outflank him, that's why he did it.
We live in exciting
times. There's no question about it. It's been a long process.
I think I met my first libertarians back in the early 70s. I've
seen these shivering of the old categories go by the board over
this period.
I don't know how much will happen this year.
These are periods of action, periods of creative effort, We've
got two things to do: one is to cement our basic capacities for
alert resistance at the next specter of war, have our troops
ready, our messages ready, have our propaganda ready, have our
alliances and our coalitions prepared.
And beyond that, through functions like this
and the stuff that Justin's been organizing, and hopefully something
from the left, we have to reforge our ideas and hopes, based
on those simple ideas of Chomsky or the French Enlightenment
and move forward from there.
Thank you."
Hardly had I
stopped before a Serb came up and said angrily that I wrecked
everything I'd said with my kindly allusion to the French Enlightenment.
He spat out the word Rousseau with the sort of indignation I
imagine he attaches to the name of Wesley Clark. I was trying
to defend myself but then was sidetracked by the effort of exchanging
comradely greetings not only with Lenore Fulani but of Ron Paul.
Raimundo lived up to his promise. It was fun. And it was fun
later that afternoon to listen to Fulani give an interesting
address on the decline of the anti war left and to Raimundo talk
about the 30s isolationists. Alas, the Libertarians' presidential
candidate, Harry Browne, was repetitive and a bit of a bore.
Driving back to Berkeley with $300 in cash
in my pocket, I mentally toasted antiwar.com. Alas, not many
leftists will ever want to have much to do with them.
At the end of
April we'll have arrived at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
end of the Vietnam War, when the last fugitives clambered into
helicopters at the US Embassy compound in Saigon. Gays are planning
a big march on Washington for April 30 but not, at least officially,
to celebrate that setback for US imperialism. Nonetheless, I
hope some speaker in Washington that day will note that the Stonewall
riot and gay liberation drew inspiration and fury from the antiwar
movement, as did women's liberation. Environmentalism too.
For years the antiwar left was told to be
embarrassed about the sixties, put through re-education rites
designed to elicit the confession that "excesses" were
committed, mistakes made. Of course mistakes were made, starting
with the failure to stop the war eight years earlier, in l967.
We misread the larger calendar. After Tet, after the MayJune
events in Paris, we thought revolution was around the corner.
The Tet Offensive of 1968 remains one of the great moments of
the twentieth century, even though one can see in retrospect
that General Giap's desperate throw signaled the fact that the
Americans had indeed been successful in exterminating-the appropriate
word, no?-the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. We
make mistakes all the time, again and again, however much we
try to "draw the correct lessons." Big deal. History
isn't like a bus, conveniently carrying a destination sign above
the windshield. Every time I go to political gathering on the
left, it's filled with people, self included, who have made mistakes
about the way history was headed, about the vulnerability of
capitalism, but who were on the right track all the same. The
most mistaken people of all are those so frightened of making
mistakes they end up missing the right bus when it finally comes
round the corner.
A phrase I hate is that tag from the Italian
revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci leftists love to quote, "optimism
of the will, pessimism of the intellect." What's so wrong
with optimism of the intellect, as well as of will, to get one
out of bed in the morning? OK, qualified (ITALS) optimism. There's
no sense in getting totally carried away. The British leftist
Perry Anderson, has just written an editorial in New Left Review
marking that journal's "re-launch" as it enters its
fifth decade. "The only starting-point for a realistic Left
today is a lucid registration of historical defeat, Anderson
writes with gloomy relish."For the first time since the
Reformation there are no longer any significant oppositions-that
is, systematic rival outlooks-within the thought-world of the
West; and scarcely any on a world scale either."
Anderson notes that amid this historical defeat
leftists can opt for "accommodation," "consolation"
(search for silver linings, favored occupation of present writer)
or "uncompromising realism" (NLR's official position).
But he does add in a footnote that there is another possible
reaction, "namely, resignation-in other words, a lucid recognition
of the nature and triumph of the system, without either adaptation
or self-deception, but also without any belief in the chance
of an alternative to it."
As I read these
dour lines by my old friend (I am on NLR's editorial committee)
came news over the radio of a tree-sit in a section of the Headwaters
redwood forest, in Humboldt County, northern California. A young
woman called Firebird, fresh up from San Francisco, was at time
of writing, tree-sitting forty feet up in the air. She'd fixed
up a rope with a noose round her neck, with the other end tied
to a gate on the ground. If the loggers or their allies launch
an attack, Firebird was in imminent danger of being hanged. No
accommodation, consolation, resignation or uncompromising realism
here.
Firebird has optimism of the will and optimism
of the intellect. I don't think many of us, back in the sixties,
would have taken optimism that far. Hurrah for the Vietnamese
war of liberation, hurrah for the antiwar movement, hurrah for
Firebird. Hurrah for others like Firebird who battled the WTO
to a standstill in Seattle last fall, and for a reprise in Washington
this month, where the Ruckus Society, Direct Action Network and
other insurgents have planned demonstrations and civil disobedience
to shut down the IMF and World Bank meeting. Hurrah for optimism!
CP
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