Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
Today's
Stories
July
10 / 12, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
The Problem with Neutrality Between
Palestinians and Israel
July
9, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Carlos Delgado on Deck: Blue Jays Slugger
Stands Up Against War
Justin
Delacour
Wishing Kerry Would Shut Up About
Latin America
Robert
Fisk
Iraq in Reverse: Martial Laws Fuel Insurgency
Boris
Kagarlitsky
Two Congresses and a Funeral
William
S. Lind
The October Surprises
Sibel
Edmonds
Our Broken System: John Ashcroft's War on Truth
Ron
Jacobs
Reading Tea Leaves: What Vietnam Tells Us About Iraq's Future
Gary
Leupp
The Lie That Will Not Die: Cheney and
the Iraq/al-Qaeda Link
July
8, 2004
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Inexplicable John McCain
Toufic
Haddad
Protesting Israel's Apartheid Wall:
a Letter from the Hunger Strikers' Tent
Dave
Lindorff
Liberation as Martial Law
Joshua
Frank
The Fall: How Beltway Dems Sank Howard
Dean
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush & Cheney Play the Hitler Card
James
Petras
The Truth About Jimmy Carter
July
7, 2004
John
Chuckman
Kerry's BBQ: a Deafening Silence
of Meaning
Virginia
Tilley
A Line in the Sand: Azmi Bishara's
Hunger Strike
Susan
Martinez
A Letter to Bill Cosby
Mickey
Z
Elie Wiesel's Strange Parade
Michael
Donnelly
Our Own Private Wilderness: Trusting the Land in the Inland Empire
Sean
Donahue
Boston Social Forum: the Dems aren't the Only Show in Beantown
Diane
Christian
Sovereignty and Freedom in Iraq
July
6, 2004
Lisa
Viscidi
Fleeing Guatemala: Central Americans
Risk Lives to Reach El Norte
Marc
Norton
The Felonious Five Ride Again: the
Supreme Court and Enemy Combatants
James
Brooks
Chemical Warfare on the West Bank?
Ray
McGovern
Porter Goss as CIA Director?
William
Cook
Legacy of Deceit: If Dante Knew of Bush and the Neo-Cons...
July
5, 2004
Forrest
Hylton
US Imperialism in Latin America: Sept.
11, July 4 and Systematic Torture
Chris
White
A Former Marine Sgt. on the Meaning
of Independence Day
Joe
Bageant
Cranky Reflections on the 4th of July
Robert
Jensen
Stupid White Movie: What Michael Moore
Misses About the Empire
Kathy
Kelly
"Two Days an' a Wake-Up"
July
3 / 4, 2004
Elaine
Cassel
Bush's Police State and Independence
Day
Stan
Goff
ABC of Opportunism: "Progressive"
Latin American Leaders Support the Coup in Haiti
Snehal
Shingavi
"We Want Real Justice for Bhopal": Two Survivors Speak
Out
Bruce
Anderson
The Cheney-Leahy Metaphor and the Greens
Sharon
Smith
Twilight of the Greens: the Chokehold of "Anybody But Bush"
Josh
Frank
Ralph Nader's Revolt: an Interview with Greg Bates
Robert
Fisk
Pentagon Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing
Joe
Bageant
Sons of a Laboring God: Leftnecks Unite!
Brian
Cloughley
Fortress Bush and the One Law Doctrine
Justin
Delacour
The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber: Venezuela's Media Tycoons
William
S. Lind
Saudi Spillover
Linda
S. Heard
A Joke Called "Justice"
Greg
Moses
"It's Illegal, But It's Our Right": Korean Labor Won't
Back Down
Ron
Jacobs
"Ain't You Proud to be White on Independence Day?"
Toni
Solo
Weary of Indigenous Resistances? Just Pretend They're Not There
Dan
Nagengast
Chicken Manure as Cattle Food: Safe, But Do We Want to Eat It?
Stew
Albert
Brando, a Personal Recollection
Dave
Zirin
From the Black Panthers to Sacheen Littlefeather: a Eulogy for
Our Brando
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Progressive Case for Dodgeball
Steven
Rosenthal / Junaid Ahmad
The Problem is Bigger Than the Bushes: a Review of F911
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Ford and Davies
Website
of the Day
Global Peace Solution
July
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Suicide Right on the Stage: the Demise
of the Green Party
Douglas
Valentine
Fahrenheit 911: Mocking the Moral Crisis of Capitalism
Gary
Leupp
"Just Because I Could": On Obscenities and Opportunities
Lee
Ballinger
Illegal People: Kerry Opposes Immigrant Rights
Robert
Fisk
Saddam in the Dock: Confused? Hardly
CounterPunch
Wire
"What Law Formed This Court?": a Transcript of Saddam's
Arraignment
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's Drug Card Lottery: the Price Ain't Right
Saul
Landau
Buzz Words and Venezuela
July 1, 2004
Katherine
van Wormer
Bush's Damaged Mind: the Madness in
His Method
Joe
Bageant
Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter?
William
James Martin
The Dogma of Richard Perle
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Evacuation Moment
Robert
Fisk
Bread and Circus Trials in Iraq
Alan
Maass
Green Party in Reverse
Website
of the Day
Michael Moore and Israel: Blind or a Coward?
June
30, 2004
Kurt Nimmo
Nicholson
Baker's Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush
Tariq
Ali
Getting Away with Murder in Iraq
Jennifer
Van Bergen
Bush and the Detainees
Douglas
Valentine
Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen
The Quiet American
David
Price
Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass
Roger
Normand
America's Criminal Occupation of Iraq
Stan
Cox
Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft's
War on Art
Henry
David Thoreau
On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming
Ben
Tripp
Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof
June
29, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
The Cloak-and-Dagger Handover
Robert
Fisk
Alice in an Iraqi Wonderland
Troy
Selvaratnam
New York Times Boosts Pet Developer
Harry
Browne
Bush in Ireland
Ray
McGovern
The CIA According to Anonymous
Elaine
Cassel
Hamdi, Padilla & Rasul: Who Really
Won?
June
28, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn / Leyla Linton
Grisly Rituals in Iraq
Amira
Hass
Confronting Myths and Deadly Power
June
26 / 27, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Venezuela: the Gang's All Here
Patrick
Cockburn
Iyad Allawi, the CIA's New Stooge
in Iraq
Dennis
Hans
Once They Were Sweethearts: Cheney,
the NYTs and the Myth of an Iraq Link to 9/11
Ben
Tripp
Adventures in Fuel Efficiency
Dave
Lindorff
That State Department Terrorism
Report: What They Knew, But Didn't Tell You
Chris
Floyd
Cold Irons Bound: the Russian Gambit
Ali
Tonak
Contamination at Berkeley: Profit Motives,
Academic Freedom and the Case of Ignacio Chapela
Keith
Rosenthal
The Withering of the Anti-War Movement
Bryan
Sacks
The Failure of the 9/11 Commission
Wayne
Madsen
Another Case of Blowback
Thomas
St. John
L. Frank Baum, Racist: Indian-Hating
in the Wizard of Oz
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
American Swadeshi
June
25, 2004
Stephen
Gowans
US to North Korea: "Trust Us"
Saul
Landau
2006 Pentagon Budget as Sacrilege:
Bush Invests the National Treasure in Death and Destruction
Amir
Butler
Iraq: the Deadly Embrace
Jack
McCarthy
Another Times Plagiarism Scandal?
Did Maureen Dowd Lift from the World Weekly News?
Greg
Bates
Chomsky and Zinn Plan to Vote Nader
June 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
John
Lehman on the Iraq / al-Qaeda Links
Patrick Cockburn
A
Day in the Life of Col. Abu Mohammed: Defusing Bombs, Facing
Death Threats
Harry Browne
On
the Rebound: Bush Bounces Back...in Europe
Bill Kaufman
Another
Marxist for Kerry: Joel Kovel's Sad Smear of Ralph Nader
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush,
Cheney and the 9/11 Commission: What Did They Know? What Did
They Tell?
Rick Gioimbetti
Andrea Yates: Victim of Psychiatric Violence?
John Chuckman
Call Center ID Hypocrisy
Diana Johnstone
Kerry
and Kosovo: the Lie of a "Good War"
June 23, 2004
Laura Carlsen
Bush
and Castro Face Off
Dave Zirin
Barry
Bonds vs. Boston: "A Flea Market of Racism"
Kurt Nimmo
From
Saddam, With Love
Patricia Wolff
Foundation Wars
Mahboob A. Khawaja
"They Had Me Arrested and Shackled My Son"
Patrick Cockburn
The
Pretense of an Independent Iraq
Website of the Day
The Road to Abu Ghraib
June 22, 2004
Dave Lindorff
The
Meaning of Putin's Pronouncement: Mutually Assured Pre-emption
Ron Jacobs
Nuclear Plants in US Protectorate of Iraq?
Vanessa Jones
Coogee, Peter Garrett and Valium Earrings
Mickey Z
An Open Letter to the People of Iraq
John L. Hess
Clinton Exhales
Pedro Marset/Ex-Solidarity
Committee for Pacho Cortés
An Exchange on the Case of Pacho Cortés
Bruce Jackson
Saying
No to Prosecutors: Why Steve Kurtz's Colleagues Refused to Testify
Website of the Day
From Boot Camp to Boot Hill
June
21, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Putin's Helpful Remarks
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti After the Press Went Home: Chaos
Upon Chaos
Cockburn
/ Khan
Saddam May Face Death Penalty
Uri
Avnery
Irreversible Mental Damage
June
19 / 20, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Inside the Green Zone: US is Paranoid
and Isolated
Bruce
Anderson
Frozen Gringos
Diane
Christian
Morality and Death: a Meditation
on Bush and Blake
Walter
A. Davis
Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib
Josh
Frank
How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother
Nature
Col.
Dan Smith
Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis
in Sudan
Brian
Cloughley
A Profound Disruption of the Senses
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Timken Plant, a
Year Later
Prudence
Crowther
Mr. Ashcroft, Deport Me!
Poets'
Basement
Iqbal/Alam, Krieger and Albert
Kathy
Kelly
Dying to See Their Kids
June
18, 2004
Chris
Floyd
Blood Victory
Dave
Zirin
Danielle Green, Basketball Player
& Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Christian Question in American
Politics
Gary
Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?:
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi
June
17, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron
Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They
Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
18, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron
Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They
Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
16, 2004
Lenni
Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters
Davey
D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan
Daniel
Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner
Abuse?
Bruce
Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake
Patrick
Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power
Facilities
Gary
Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads
JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop
Mario
Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers
Vicente
Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who
is Rodrigo Rato?
Website
of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch
June
15, 2004
Harry
Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe
Neve
Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
David
Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI
John
Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming
Dave
Lindorff
God Wins in TKO
Bill
Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step
In
Patrick
Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast
John
Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo
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.
|
Weekend
Edition
July 10 / 12, 2004
The
End of Innocence
Reflections
on American Pathology
By
RICHARD LICHTMAN
After September 11 much was made of
America's "loss of innocence." What was meant by this
phrase was that our sense of inviolable security had been forever
breached and that we could no longer feel safe in our impregnable
fortress, this chosen land protected by two oceans and God's
divine munificence that had so defined us as blessed and so granted
us suzerainty as "the first new nation" and "the
city on the hill."
Of course, such a realization
of utter vulnerability as 9/11 provided would assuredly produce
a violent trauma in our national consciousness. But the wound
went deeper still. For it has always been a fundamental assumption
of the American political- religious psyche that we alone were
inviolable, and that our geographical distance from the remainder
of the world conferred upon us a special status among nations,
one that freed us from concern for immediate political consequence
and thereby provided us with an impartiality of judgment marked
by a special purity. In the middle ages the distribution of land
was understood as the embodiment of God's transcendent purpose,
and similarly, in the consciousness of the first Puritan settlers
our secure distance from Europe was construed as an ideological
premise in an argument that provided us with unique moral possibility.
Our geographical separation and our moral mission were merged
into a single claim of unique theological purpose.
From its Puritan origins America
was steeped in a transcendent claim to moral purpose and mission.
The "American jeremiad," as Sacvan Berkovitch has reminded
us, produced as one of its cultural manifestations such ceremonial
confirmations as the litany of Fourth of July oratory, hailing
in Charleston in 1788, "the Revolution as the beginning
of a new age in human history;" and in New York, proclaiming,
in the words of Thomas Yarrow, "From their birth,"
the American states were "designed to be the redeemers of
mankind." From Pennsylvania to Rhode Island, the country
was averred "the Great Temple of Liberty." "Long
streams of light emanate from its portals...its turrets will
stream into the heaven...and the pillar of divine glory, descending
from God, will rest forever on its summit." In Maine, Virginia
and South Carolina, orators asserted the correspondence between
local developments and the "vast design of providence...for
the universal redemption of the human race." This was not
the vision of human corruption born of original sin that the
Puritans had brought with them from the despair of Europe. Nor
was it merely a proclamation of American superiority, though
this claim was certainly included. It was, rather, the embrace
of a mandate to lead the "redemption of the human race"
in total transfiguration. Winthrop's very notion of "a city
upon a hill" connoted separation from the turmoil of European
corruption for the sake of a new social order. The water passage
was a metaphorical ablution, a symbolic rite of purification
from those sins of our original nature.
Berkovitch has stated the matter
with brilliant concision:
Only in the United States has
nationalism carried with it the Christian meaning of the sacred.
Only America, of all national designations, has assumed the combined
force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many other societies have
defended the status quo by reference to religious values; many
forms of nationalism have laid claim to a world-redeeming promise;
many Christian sects have sought, in secret or open heresy, to
find the sacred in the profane, and many European defenders of
middle class democracy have tried to link order and progress.
But only the American Way, of all modern ideologies, has managed
to circumvent the paradoxes inherent in these approaches. Of
all the symbols of identity, only America has united nationality
and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, secular and redemptive
history, the country's past and paradise to be, in a single
synthetic voice. `
And Melville, in his novel
White-Jacket:
And we Americans are the peculiar,
chosen people -- the Israel of our time; we bear the arc of the
liberties of the world...God has predestined, mankind expects,
great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls...Long
enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted
whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come
in us.
However, it is crucial to understand
that "redemptive history" was a task still to be completed
and that the mission might indeed fail. The giddy self-congratulation
of Fourth of July oratory has moved considerably from the original
Puritan understanding that their failing their covenant with
God would lead to harsh affliction." As Winthrop warned
his congregation:
if wee whall deale falsely
with our god in this worke we have undertaken and so cause him
to withdraw his present help from us...wee shall shame the faces
of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to
be turned into Curses.
False dealing would produce
swift and terrible revenge. This understanding, along with America's
simplistic optimism, has always been an aspect of our fundamentalist
heritage.
The situation that cried out
to us after September 11, and that we as a nation struggled to
deny, was the awareness that rather than the redemptive savior
of the world, we had become instead a despised pariah among the
world's nations. The development of this articulated world condemnation
was not without its terrible irony. Immediately following the
attack upon the World Trade Center the United States became the
recipient of considerable world sympathy. Such at least was the
prevailing cliché. For whatever the manifest expression
of grief for our catastrophe, it was not likely to be without
its own peculiar irony. The United States had been responsible
for entirely too much disaster and grief in the world for there
not to have developed a considerable amount of world hatred and
suspicion toward our long imperial history. The consequences
of our irresponsible global destructiveness festered within the
living memory of large numbers of existent men and women and
within the mourning memories of the offspring. The German resistance
toward our manipulation of the United Nations vote on Iraq, for
example, represented among other constituencies that present
generation, previously silenced by guilt for the German role
in the European catastrophe and the Second World War, whose parents
had been incinerated in the fire bombings of Dresden and Dusseldorf.
Regardless of the more complex
causes and consequences that are still to reveal themselves,
this much seems clear enough: one of the dominant causes of the
emergence of Osama bin Laden was American cold war policy, which
provided him funding, weaponry and logistics and whose own imperialist
fundamentalism manifested itself in the equally fanatical counter-violence
of bin Laden ; the Bush administration had begun planning the
colonization of Iraq long before the attack on the Twin Towers;
our military venture into Afghanistan was morally and politically
without justification and owed more to geopolitical interests
than any concern for justice, or even revenge; the reduction
of Palestinian lands to separated Banstustan enclaves, as entailed
by the Oslo accords and one hundred years of Zionist violation
of the secondary reasons, perhaps, for al Qaeda's 9/11 attack
Given the history of American
imperialism in the 20th century there is nothing unusual about
the degree of our violence in Afghanistan and Iraq. The extent
of those murders pales into insignificance when compared with
other well documented American holocausts. We killed many more
persons in a very large number of other equally unjustifiable
military ventures: 20, 000 soldiers and more than 500,000 civilians
in the Philippines between 1899 and 1902 and some 500,000 to
1,000,000 in the massacres that we supported and expedited in
Indonesia in 1965, and which the New York Times called "one
of the most savage mass slaughters of modern political history."
Nevertheless, there is greater world hatred for the United States
now that there has ever been, for a number of reasons that seem
quite obvious:
First, with the advent of
modern communications there is greater world awareness of the
activity of the United States than has ever existed. Second,
the justification advanced by the United States during the United
Nations debates on Iraq were not only without merit, but so transparently
mendacious, as to produce visceral contempt among the great majority
of members. The same might be said of previous imperialist ventures
and their ideological rationalizations but for two considerations:
the world has advanced considerably beyond the easy 19th century
assumption that the Western nations had the right to dominate
the "undeveloped" peoples of the world, a view that
now appears morally absurd and second, there now exists a forum
for world discussion in which these views can be provided easy
access. With the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the
Soviet Union as a counter force to American hegemony, the prospect
of confronting the United States as a single, dominating world
power exercising its will upon the world, however implausible
it might be in fact, seemed credible enough to a large number
of nations to produce considerable world fear and hatred.
The response of conservatives
to the opposition of France, Germany and Russia regarding our
claims on Iraq in the United Nations was simply that these countries
were as little interested in the fate of Iraq as were we, and
were merely chafing under the likelihood that we would dominate
Middle Eastern resources to the exclusion of other competing
countries. So much is undoubtedly true. It has not taken long
for France to display a thoroughly oppressive attitude toward
Haiti. But this truth misses the point. There has never been
a time in world history when one country has exercised so much
political power supported by total military superiority; it is
no surprise that other competitors in the world market will challenge
our control regardless of their moral commitment or its absence.
We are not the sole world villain opposed by a company of saints.
We are a country on the march toward word domination, opposed
by others who feel rightly threatened by our insanity.
The fact that al Qaeda chose
to act with such barbaric indifference to the human cost of its
carefully premeditated violence made the denial of our responsibility
for centuries of world slaughter so very easy to obscure. But,
ultimately, we cannot evade the moral equation that lies behind
these acts of violence. It was, for example, 30 years to the
day of our own 9/11 that Allende was murdered in Chile and the
Chilean people robbed of their newly won freedom and subjected
to a systematic reign of violence that far exceeded anything
that occurred in the towers of New York. Did it matter to us?
No, of course not, for they are merely Chileans and beside, their
lives are so irrelevant and so far away. This is definitely not
to say that al Qaeda "represented" the oppressed peoples
of the world, being itself an ultra-dogmatic agent of fanatical
oppression and mass murder. But its attack against the United
States did resonate with millions who had been the object of
our own oppression and destructiveness. We, who had created,
nurtured and directed the ultimate intent of al Qaeda's anti-Soviet
mission in Afghanistan with our contribution of money, weapons
and logistics were soon to find ourselves in the position of
a malignant parent, who having contributed to the development
of a grotesque offspring, now found itself under attack from
its own despicable progeny. There was a great deal of empathy
for this parent newly under ferocious assault, but as awareness
grew that it had played a seminal role in the creation of its
own victimization, and as memory returned of its long history
of destructiveness, the world's judgment turned. In fact, as
is generally the case with political movements as well as living
beings, the birth of al Qaeda derived from a number of influences.
Beyond the United States there was of course the contribution
of Saudi Arabia, the home and inspiration of the movement and
once the residence of 13 of the 19 who attacked the United States
on 9/11. It was an "ally" of the United States and
a place of considerable support for bin Laden. Even more to the
point, it provided the fanatical, dogmatic and totalitarian religion
that formed the world view of bin Laden's jihad. This movement
has been called "austere" but that term seems difficult
to apply to a state so saturated with self- indulgences of egregious
waste. It is the religion, as Tariq Ali has noted "of the
Saudi royals, the state bureaucracy, the army and the air force
and, or course, Osama bin Laden...."
However, this situation involved
the proliferation of paradoxes, for the fact that the religious
fundamentalism of the Saudi regime and the "imperial fundamentalism"
(Ali) of the United States were locked in a less than holy alliance,
did not deepen the commitment of the Saudi regime in bin Laden's
eyes, but thoroughly corrupted it. The dependence of these two
fundamentalisms upon each other did not multiply the strength
of both, but revealed how far American depravity had destroyed
the Saudi claim to respectful devotion. For bin Laden, the American
presence was an indication of how far the Wahabbism of the Saudi
regime had strayed from its origin. Once the Soviet Union had
been disposed of, this new, armed al Qaeda militancy could direct
itself against both its progenitors, for their own unholy alliance
and for their support , passive in the case of Saudi Arabia and
active if indirect in the case of the United States. So, al Qaeda,
the child of Saudi religious fanaticism and American technological
imperialism, turned against both of its original sources.
Whether historically fortuitous
or more carefully crafted, the events of 9/11 were ripe for utilization
by the Bush administration. This illegally constituted government
was saturated with a deeply fundamentalist evangelicalism whose
primary ideological function was to conceptualize the 9/11 attack
as a war of good and evil. Deep in its apocalyptic fanaticism
was a version of the early American fundamentalism we have previously
referred to, and implicit in that religious mentality was a vision,
as Berkovitch notes, that
the sacred characteristically
defines itself through its antithesis. The significance of "holy
land" depends on other lands not being holy; the chosenness
of the chosen people implies their antagonism to the goyim, the
"profane nations of the earth." Moreover, sacred history
means the gradual conquest of the profane by the sacred.... the
church as a whole wins the world back from Satan in a series
of increasingly terrifying and triumphant wars of the Lord.
Throughout its entire history,
church doctrine has provided one of the ideological legitimations
of expanding capitalist empire. The exact proportion and timing
of missionary conversion and military force varied from one circumstance
to another, but their mutual involvement was commonplace. As
an early American minister wrote; "One thing is very certain,
that the influence of the gospel will have the tendency to make
them (the Indians) more submissive to the rule of the whites...."
and a later Christian advocate noted that "Christianity
civilizes in the broadest sense. Commerce, science and industry
all accompany her majestic march to universal domination."
Long after Christian fundamentalism had lost much of its power
to convert others, it had, ironically, lost none of its powers
to convert the current administrators of the American Empire.
From its earliest claim to spiritual dominance over the material
interests of sinful men and women, religion in America slowly
and inexorably embraced and succumbed to "man's worldly
goods." First as an expression of mercantilism and then
as the arm of a developing capitalism, religion made peace with
the world. As a Commissioner of Indian Affairs once noted: "Secular
ruthlessness was supported by religious fanaticism." But
what of the original covenant with God and the possibilities
of either exaltation or damnation? Some of the Church men, like
Increase Mather expected fearful vengeance from the Lord: "It
is the judgment of very learned Men, that, in the glorious Times
promised to the Church on Earth, America will be Hell."
However, his warning was to dissolve in the expansion of American
empire that swept away all in its path.
There is probably no better
summary of this transformation of Protestantism under the influence
of capitalism than the following passage from Richard Niebuhr's
The Social Sources of Denominationalism, the brilliance of which
may excuse my quoting it at length:
A single line of development
leads from Jonathan Edwards and his great system of God-centered
faith through the Arminianism of the Evangelical revival , the
Unitarianism of Channing and Parker, and the humanism of transcendental
philosophy, to the man-centered, this-worldly, lift-yourself-by-your-own-bootstraps
doctrine of new Thought and Christian Science. The common strand
that runs through these various movements is the adaptation
of the early faith to the changing attitudes of the bourgeoisie....
Here the gospel of self-help has excluded all remnants of that
belief in fatality which formed the foundations of Puritan heroism.
Here the comfortable circumstances of an established economic
class have simplified out of existence the problem of evil and
have made possible the substitution for the mysterious will of
the Sovereign of life and death and sin and salvation, the sweet
benevolence of Father-Mother God or the vague goodness if All.
Here the concern for self has been secularized to the last degree;
the conflicts of sick souls have been replaced by the struggles
of sick minds and bodies; the Puritan passion for perfection
has become a seeking after the kingdom of health and mental
peace and its comforts. This is not the religion of the middle
class which struggles with kings and popes in the defense of
its economic and religious liberties but the religion of a bourgeoisie
whose conflicts are over and which has passed in the quiet waters
of assured income and established social standing.
Each of the stages of religious
expression corresponds loosely to the corresponding system of
developing capitalism. The American Hell that Increase Mather
thundered against did indeed come to exist; not in America, however,
but in the foreign outposts of empire, The prevailing sense of
rational progress and easy accommodation settled itself in the
comfortable circumstances of the American psyche as its power
expanded. Even in contemporary times, and even through the course
of our invasion of Afghanistan, our continued support of the
egregious Sharon government in Israel, our wholly illegitimate
coup in Haiti, nothing in our sense of national purpose was really
disrupted. We would have to conclude that the great majority
of Americans paid little attention to these events; nothing much
disturbed "the quiet waters." However, the escalating
deaths of our troops in Iraq began to unravel the original moral
pride and chauvinistic patriotism felt by most Americans in their
moral venture. At first, this was not because the carnage taught
us anything about the unprincipled nature of our undertaking,
but because the Administration made the Iraq invasion the cornerstone
of its definition of national purpose, and because we Americans
have a deep sense that the righteousness of our cause ought to
protect us against harm. When harm appears and is multiplied,
as in Vietnam, the sense of misadventure appears with it and
insinuates itself in the national psyche as a sign that our moral
purpose has been corrupted. A mangled military body presents
two possibilities: the lacerated flesh of the sacrificial savior,
bearing a transcendent purpose, or the dehumanized wreckage that
suggests to us, against our will, that we have simply and unaccountably
embraced death and disfiguration. Only World War II in the last
century eluded the apprehension that our cause had not been wholly
pure, and even that war, as it ended in the annihilation of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, was not without its insidious fissures.
Of course the notion of sacrifice
is the great defense against the threatened realization of our
own corruption. And in a strain derived from the original Puritan
covenant, suffering becomes the sign of superiority. Along with
the ancient Hebrews we can, in the words of Amos, cruelly comfort
ourselves with God's declaration: "From all the families
of the earth I have chosen you alone: for that very reason I
will punish you for your iniquities." But there is a dark
side to the maneuver. The acts of revulsion which we impose or
receive can prove too powerful for the thin ideology that we
construct to defend ourselves. The doctrine of "proportionality"
used to distinguish just from unjust wars has also a psychic
dimension. And the horror of mass violence may overflow the banks
of our moral dikes, flooding the adjacent countryside of our
being. This is never more true than when we find ourselves, despite
massive efforts at denial, attracted somehow to the hideous pathologies
we know we should abhor, as in the case of the sado-masochistic
tortures of Abu Ghraib. The terrible secret, exposed beyond repair,
is that we find it difficult to turn away from the degeneracy
we find exposed before us. In a culture as saturated as ours
with pornographic sexuality, the tortures we witness and our
response are all too easily folded into the collective perversion.
As Adorno noted in another context, still relevant to our own:
A modicum of madness furnishes
collective movements -- apparently for the time being regardless
of their content-- with their sinister power of attraction. Individuals
cope with their own disintegration, with their own paranoia,
by integrating themselves into the collective delusion, the collective
paranoia..."
We need only add that as this
"integration" is itself a defense against individual
disintegration, so collective pornography provides legitimation
for individually despairing sexuality. And whether our response
is excitement, indifference, or the moral thrill that comes with
the revelation of the subaltern, we have been found out.
Our society is no different
from others in attempting to codify "ideologies" designed
to establish and perpetuate the "legitimacy" of our
ruling order. What distinguishes us is the manner in which we
construct this ruling illusion: by technology, the manipulation
of mass media, the proliferation of integrated civic institutions
and the state's endorsement of professional, that is, expert,
identities. This effort is exercised in the realm of popular
culture, the political and economic systems, and in the enclaves
of the intellectual elites. We possess no generally acknowledged
set of institutions charged to construct definitions of the "moral"
and "immoral," "good" and "bad,"
or "normal" and "pathological." The closest
we come, perhaps, is in the realm of psychotherapy, where the
DSM, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual serves to define what
would generally be considered by the mental health profession,
"mental disorders." This is a manifestation of what
Niebuhr had referred to as 'the conflicts of sick souls being
replaced by the struggles of sick minds' in "a seeking after
the kingdom of health and mental peace and its comforts."
Of course, the DSM being itself an ideological work, that is,
an analysis designed to disguise, mystify and invert the actual
creation of "dysfunction," must be "stood on its
feet" to reveal the reality it functions to obscure. So
it is no accident that the DSM begins by informing us that "Neither
deviant behavior (e.g. political, religious, or sexual) nor conflicts
that are primarily between the individual and society are mental
disorders unless the deviance or conflict is a symptom of dysfunction
in the individual...." By this account we are precluded
from locating the sources of individual aggression, destruction,
violence, venality, manipulation, exploitation, subordination
and other such "pathologies" in the larger society.
In fact, in the DSM's notion
of "conduct disorder," for example, which it analyzes
into the four subcategories of 1) aggression toward people and
animals, 2) destruction of property, 3) deceitfulness or theft
and 4) serious violation of rules, the operative though unspoken
imperative is to treat these disorders as emanating from the
characteristics of individuals and affecting essentially the
lives of other distinct individuals. Those who control the major
corporate and state institutions of capitalist society are, in
their collective existence, excluded from the charges of aggression,
destruction, deceitfulness and violation of rule that is understood
to pertain exclusively to individuals.
* *
*
Puritan America conceived of
itself as a people chosen to lead the redemption of mankind.
And it was long so regarded by many nations aspiring to liberty.
But several centuries later much has changed and a great number
of the world's people look upon the United States as a scourge
and the most fearful threat to any possibility of world peace.
The idealization of itself it has constructed to justify its
role in the world has turned hollow and rancid, and the claims
of its origin can only bring derision. Rather than a stance of
moral transcendentalism it is now forced into a grim embrace
of technocratic reason in the service of a degenerate capitalism.
With these considerations in mind let us consider the recent
film "The Fog of War," an overview of the political
life of Robert McNamara. Such an examination is useful as the
film has made McNamara's political life common knowledge, because
it relies largely on his own account of himself, and because
through the prism of this life we are made to see the larger
contours of American policy of which he is a manifestation. Three
aspects of the film seem particularly noteworthy:
First, there is for all of
McNamara's self-creation as an analyst of note, a profound lack
of significant theoretical perspective, His intelligence is completely
circumscribed within the assumptions of American chauvinistic
ideology. One of his most vigorous attempts at self-critique
leads him to hold that while the Vietnamese leadership saw the
situation in Vietnam prior to our invasion as a civil war and
a struggle for national independence, he saw the conflict from
the perspective of the cold war. Granting that this confession
is honest and that McNamara so conceives of America's role and
obligation, it in no way obviates the further need to trace the
cold war itself, at least in significant part, back to American
post war expansion. For this task McNamara lacks all capacity
and motive. The idea is never even contemplated. Why does the
DSM recognize individual psychosis as involving serious distortion
of thought and lack all reference to the reification of murderous
social reasoning.?
It might be said in rebuttal
that McNamara's management of American policy in Vietnam is precisely
what we would anticipate of an individual committed to the administration
of the war and its success. We can hardly expect such a person
to organize massive violence against others and simultaneously
find their organized destruction lacking in justification. The
very truth of this reply undermines itself. For it leaves us
to ask why any human being could morally adopt such a role and
it simultaneously suggests that the very exercise of its functions
renders one's thought grossly pathological. But can we legitimately
adopt this position of extreme psychological moralism, accusing
every thinker who disagrees with our assessment of the situation
as suffering from some profound pathology.? Certainly not for
every disagreement or even the mass of them. There are, however,
forms of thought so deeply rooted in perverse structures of political,
social and psychological activity as to require examination of
their normative condition. The more deeply rooted the system
of pathological activity, the more pathologically inseparable
the mentality of those whose behavior expedites its function.
The structures of thought that define, justify and organize the
military operations that kill 3,500,000 human beings cannot be
separated in their function from the activities they discharge.
Second, McNamara plays at the
acceptance of responsibility while all the time denying any ultimate
guilt for the activities he has fostered. In reference to "agent
orange," for example, he maintains that he did not know
that it was toxic. If this claim can be believed, it indicates
a level of ignorance regarding a matter of egregious moral consequence
that exceeds anything the law could conceptualize as criminal
negligence. It is, rather, an act of depraved indifference on
a scale of mass murder. Rather than reflect on the devastating
consequence of applying a toxic defoliant to the great mass of
Vietnam land and populace, Mcnamara engages in a pseudo-serious
exercise designed to clarify the legal foundation of the distinction
between acceptable and unacceptable chemical weapons. But this
is more an exercise in denial and the obsessive thought employed
to facilitate it than any useful consideration. For the whole
exercise is a carefully contrived distraction. The fundamental
question concerns our right to invade another country without
any credible appeal to self-defense or legitimate call from the
international community. "I would not have authorized an
illegal action," he brazenly informs us, thereby folding
in the lies of the invasion with the obfuscating account of the
original Tonkin Bay incident. But we should not be surprised,
for at the conclusion of the film interview he tells us, laughing,
that one should never answer the question that has been asked
of you, but the question one wished had been asked. This operation
in evasion is not merely a device for deceiving the larger public,
but simultaneously a device for deceiving one's self.
Third, it is illuminating to
compare McNamara's response to the death of one individual with
his response to the death, by his own account, of 3,500,00 human
beings. When citing the death of John Kennedy and the process
of locating an ideal place for his burial, McNamara shows some
sign of grief; he becomes teary and approaches a public display
of pathos. But the death of the Vietnamese produces no such effect.
It is, of course, perfectly obvious that nobody can feel or display,
in appropriate proportion the grief that would be the measure
of the death of millions. This fact in itself reveals the utter
corruption of war; for it strips of human response and leaves
our capacity for compassion wholly disengaged. But to show no
meaningful affect at all? This is an indication of pathology
and it is no less so for applying equally to all of us as well
as to McNamara. We are all made inhuman by our participation,
willed or not, in the horrors carried out by the military, economic
and state apparatus that we continually reproduce. McNamara's
first stated rule advises us to "empathize with our enemy."
But McNamara appears incapable of any such response. What he
actually seems to intend is to "grasp the strategy of your
enemy," a wholly different notion of subservience to state
planning and control.
Finally, though McNamara cites
with admiration T S Eliot's conclusion to the Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
This is intended to indicate
that McNamara too has actually returned in his comprehension
to Vietnam and understood "for the first time" the
nature of the situation that previously alluded him. But what
precisely is this understanding? Two of McNamara's favorite concepts
are "complexity" and "errors in judgment."
However, nothing could mark a sharper contrast between Eliot
and McNamara than the transcendent, moral mysticism of the former
and the technocratic positivism of the latter. McNamara's vocabulary
is a manifestation of reified, technocratic instrumentalism that
facilitates the system of power constructed by modern corporate
scientism. When asked at the end of the interview whether he
feels responsibility and guilt for his role in Vietnam he speaks
in the language of "complexity" once more, as though
the slaughter he helped to plan was a matter of administrative
flow charts and mathematical probability. When asked why, after
his separation from the administration he did not speak out against
the war, he can only respond, pathetically, that "these
are the kind of questions that get me into trouble." As
though his prosecution of the war was not in itself a trouble
of enormous and repellent magnitude.
The point of this examination
is to establish that there can be no final separation between
the pathology displayed by McNamara and the society from which
he derives. Nor can there be such a separation for the rest of
us. The dehumanization of a society dominated by alienated, technocratic,
corporatist military imperialism is the dehumanization of its
leading agents and, to a greater or lesser degree, the remainder
of us as well. In our society, as McNamara's presentation reveals,
moral problems are more and more reduced to practical tasks to
be judged by their efficiency, the ends and normative principles
that direct them less and less open to scrutiny, unexamined and
left subservient to capitalist domination. Our unwillingness
to engage in moral reflection and accept moral responsibility
is the willed attempt to avoid looking into the face of a society
of very deep corruption. And what does this corruption finally
consist in? One of its root assertions is the prevailing hypothesis
that we Americans, are superior to the remainder of the world's
peoples, that we have the right or even the obligation to dominate
them and decide on their behalf; that we alone understand what
justice, virtue and human fulfillment consist in, we who have
so degraded ourselves and destroyed the long nurtured hopes of
others. The occurrence of 9/11 was a malignant and apocalyptic
attempt to destroy a singular manifestation of our society, its
secular modernism. But the course of action we undertook in Afghanistan
and Iraq only convinced an enormous number of the world's peoples
that we had become a power of little moral discernment given
to malicious and terrible violence of our own. When to these
events were added our continuing support for mass violence and
terror in Palestine and our support of a vicious coup in Haiti,
there remained very little in our world position that could elicit
anything from the world but terror and revulsion. The conclusion
we must draw is that the pathologies of others, particularly
those we have nurtured for our own purposes, certainly do not
eliminate our own and do not permit us to escape recognition
of our own immoral descent.
Of course, the very idea that
we are "pathological" as a collectively, as a politically
engaged people, is not likely to be credited as a serious proposal.
It is a proposition most often met with scorn and derision. But
it must be remembered that the notions of pathology and human
nature are dialectically related. Since we regard individuals
as "naturally" egoistical and self-serving, we conclude
that their acts of what we call "self-gratification"
fall within the realm of normalcy, that is, of reasonable nature.
Some acts of self-gratification, such as theft and murder, may
well be considered illegal and immoral, but they are not considered
prima facie pathological because we believe we understand their
motive and conception according the criteria of self-assertion.
They are what a rational person, someone like ourselves for example,
might do under similar circumstances. Pathologies, on the other
hand, are acts that we believe defy rational consideration, particularly
when the appear for "reasons" that can neither be understood
nor controlled. So we readily define others as pathological when
their acts, particularly those directed against ourselves, appear
to us completely unintelligible. Then their irrational destructiveness
appear to violate the limits of human, that is, "humane"
nature. Yet, our intentions, directed as they are toward "the
good," that is toward rational self-fulfillment, are endorsed
as transparently luminous. But how are we to understand the murder
of 3,500,000 people? And whose rational self-gratification do
they provide for? For McNamara, and those institutions of our
society which have produced him and from which his mentality
is inseparable, these are issues of complexity and failure in
judgment. The moral dimension of the situation appears to dissolve
under the corrosive assault of positivist calculation. Is this
not social insanity?
* *
*
To reframe Niebuhr's discussion,
the original struggle between good and evil souls has been replaced
by the accommodation of sick and healthy individuals. Behind
this change is the secularization of American society under the
influence of capitalist world expansion. So theocracy gives way
to positivism. However different the origin of the United States
from its present constitution, the constant is the drive toward
control of resources, markets and peoples. The accompanying mentality
is an arrogant sense of entitlement and superiority. We are left
finally with this question: how, ultimately, can we understand
the activity of a people, made up of those we know as friends,
family, lovers and acquaintances, so often decent in their individual
relations, participating in the requirement s of a society so
given to barbaric destruction? This is one of the central questions
that perplexes us and demands our deeper scrutiny.
Richard Lichtman is the author of "The
Production of Desire," "Essays
in Critical Social Theory," and most recently, "Dying
in America," which among other aspects, includes
a memoir of the death of his father. He can be reached at: rlichtman@earthlink.net
Weekend
Edition Features for July 3 / 4, 2004
Elaine
Cassel
Bush's Police State and Independence
Day
Stan
Goff
ABC of Opportunism: "Progressive"
Latin American Leaders Support the Coup in Haiti
Snehal
Shingavi
"We Want Real Justice for Bhopal": Two Survivors Speak
Out
Bruce
Anderson
The Cheney-Leahy Metaphor and the Greens
Sharon
Smith
Twilight of the Greens: the Chokehold of "Anybody But Bush"
Josh
Frank
Ralph Nader's Revolt: an Interview with Greg Bates
Robert
Fisk
Pentagon Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing
Joe
Bageant
Sons of a Laboring God: Leftnecks Unite!
Brian
Cloughley
Fortress Bush and the One Law Doctrine
Justin
Delacour
The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber: Venezuela's Media Tycoons
William
S. Lind
Saudi Spillover
Linda
S. Heard
A Joke Called "Justice"
Greg
Moses
"It's Illegal, But It's Our Right": Korean Labor Won't
Back Down
Ron
Jacobs
"Ain't You Proud to be White on Independence Day?"
Toni
Solo
Weary of Indigenous Resistances? Just Pretend They're Not There
Dan
Nagengast
Chicken Manure as Cattle Food: Safe, But Do We Want to Eat It?
Stew
Albert
Brando, a Personal Recollection
Dave
Zirin
From the Black Panthers to Sacheen Littlefeather: a Eulogy for
Our Brando
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Progressive Case for Dodgeball
Steven
Rosenthal / Junaid Ahmad
The Problem is Bigger Than the Bushes: a Review of F911
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Ford and Davies
Website
of the Day
Global Peace Solution
Keep
CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home
/ subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|