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July 4, 2002
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
Resources:
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
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Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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Independence
Day
July 4, 2002
Why
I Will Not Celebrate This Fourth of July
by Rahul Mahajan
I am an American. Let me be clear about that.
It feels strange saying that because
I have so often been made to feel a foreigner in my own country
-- first because of my Indian ethnicity, and then more recently
because of my outspoken criticism of American foreign policy.
My colleague Robert Jensen and I have both received a lot of
hate mail (along with considerable approval) for our writing
after 9/11, but the ones he received never questioned his Americanness.
Nonetheless, I am an American, and I
take it seriously -- so seriously that I'm running for elective
office.
Even so, I will not be celebrating this
Fourth of July.
It's not because I don't love this country.
I do. I love living here. I love the freedom I have, the fact
that I've spoken out openly against what the Bush administration
calls the "war on terrorism" ever since 9/11 and have
never been harassed by the government -- though I also hate
the fact that so much of what our government does is designed
to deny that and similar basic freedoms to others.
It's not because I believe that a country
has to be perfect to celebrate its birthday -- every nation
does and none is perfect. All nation-states commit crimes, although
some commit far more than others.
It's because of what the Fourth of July
has come to stand for.
In 1776, a small, relatively powerless
band of American colonists took on a mighty empire that was
on its way to ruling much of the world. It was a lopsided contest
that the colonists won because they were fighting for their
own freedom.
Even that standard account is not strictly
accurate -- the colonists needed the help of the French, soon
to become themselves an imperial power; the colonists had spent
over 100 years wiping out the Native Americans in what was to
become one of the most successful genocides in world history;
the leaders of the revolution were more interested in establishing
an American landed aristocracy and merchant class to rule than
they were in democracy. But there is a core of truth to it as
well -- democracy could come into being partly because of the
language the Founding Fathers used, even though it didn't accord
with their overall political aims. The colonists were also the
descendants of people who left England so they could live free
of religious persecution and had themselves grown up with a
concept of freedom that was then unequalled anywhere on the
planet.
Now, however, that account is almost
irrelevant. In 2002: America is the empire. It is the one in
all history that has had the most control over the internal
politics of the largest number of other countries.
No external enemy can attack our freedom.
Only we can. The oft-repeated claims that the attacks of 9/11
were an attack on our freedom were a transparent lie, one that
I have written about elsewhere (see "New
Crusade: the U.S. War on Terrorism ). Leaving aside, however,
any question of the terrorists' motivation, the fact is that
they couldn't attack our freedom, because no country, nor all
of them put together, much less a network of a few thousand
men, can dictate terms to us.
In fact, in the real world of 2002, things
are the other way around. The United States leads an assault
on democracy in other places in myriad ways. The recent statement
by George W. Bush that the Palestinians can have democracy as
long as they elect the leaders we want was just the most egregious
and open one. In Afghanistan, we created an assembly to rubber-stamp
our handpicked candidate for president, picked because of his
past association with the CIA and with Unocal. In Venezuela,
we funded a coup attempt against a popularly elected ruler.
In Yugoslavia in 2000, we pumped tens of millions of dollars
into influencing that country's election. Over and above this
constant assault, we have the World Bank, the IMF, and "free
trade," which have been direct instruments of U.S. policy
to destroy the potential for independent economic policy in
the Third World. Their use has led to a situation in which U.S.
bankers and politicians have more say over most countries' internal
policies than their duly elected governments do. This is the
reality of our current role in the world.
The continued celebration of the Fourth,
with its constant invocation of our founding, explicitly keeps
us from coming to terms with that role. In the postwar era,
we could convince ourselves that we were an island of democracy
embattled by a sea of communism, and since 9/11 we can convince
ourselves that radical Islamic terrorism poses such a threat
that we're justified in a whole array of extreme measures to
combat it, even though our resources and our power are such
that international investigation and police action is likely
sufficient to solve the problem -- and even though most of those
measures exacerbate instead of solving the problem (for a more
detailed discussion, see "Hearts
and Minds: Avoiding a New Cold War". Both of these
things are possible only because, although we have been the
unquestioned superpower and we know it, we refuse to come to
terms with that fact and examine seriously what it means. Simultaneously,
we can continue to believe that we are a force for freedom in
the world only by refusing to come to terms with our actions.
The national mythology that keeps us
in this mindset requires constant reinforcement. The Fourth,
in the way it is typically celebrated, is an important part
of that, helping to foster the historical amnesia that is so
necessary to keep a populace befuddled and vulnerable to the
manipulations of those in power. In our case, it's a historical
amnesia that says very little has changed in 226 years.
An example may help to illustrate this.
Israel has a similar story of its founding, a David vs. Goliath
fight of Israel against all the Arab nations. This one is even
more wrong in its details than our own. The most significant
things about Israel's founding was a massive ethnic cleansing
campaign that resulted in the expulsion (through terrorization,
massacres, refusal to allow return, and other measures) of
750,000 mostly defenseless Palestinians. But it was also true
that it was a nation of Holocaust survivors, who, even after
World War II, were still not given their basic due by countries
like the United States, whose racist immigration laws (based
on discredited eugenics theories) and initial support for Hitler
did a lot to help prepare the ground for the Holocaust. Still,
whatever marginal elements of truth existed in the original
story, it is now irrelevant. Today, Israel is the expansionist
regional power, which has attacked every one of its neighbors
repeatedly, occupied other lands, oppressed the Palestinian
people, and is in a position of overwhelming superiority because
of its conventional military advantage and its estimated 200
nuclear missiles. Today, celebrating Israeli independence day
is used in a larger sense to justify Israel's oppression of
the Palestinians, just as today celebrating the Fourth of July
is used to justify America's oppression of much of the world.
I'll say it again. I love the freedoms
we have here, and will fight to keep George W. Bush and John
Ashcroft from taking them away, something they are trying in
a new way almost every day. But I don't believe the pernicious
mythology held in place in part by the Fourth of July that
says all the wars we fought were about protecting our freedom.
The Vietnamese didn't want to invade and occupy us and neither
did the Cubans. Nicaragua was not actually a "dagger pointed
at the heart of the United States," any more than Czechoslovakia
was a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany. Nor would anybody
else if we weren't constantly drowned in a sea of absurd commentary
and mindless flag-waving.
The question of how a movement for social
justice deals with symbols like the Fourth of July or like the
flag has always been a controversial one. At the height of the
Vietnam War, when some were advocating burning the flag, others
said we should wash it instead, try to reclaim the symbol instead
of repudiate it.
I'm no flag-burner (although, of course,
I support freedom of expression). I don't see the point in an
act that simply shocks the sensibilities of people. I'd like
to be able to celebrate the Fourth. But right now the flag needs
a lot of washing, and reclaiming the Fourth of July as a celebration
that plays any positive role will take a lot of work.
Rahul Mahajan
is the Green Party candidate
for Governor of Texas. He is a member of the Nowar
Collective and serves on the National Board of Peace Action.
His book, "The
New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism," has
been described as "mandatory reading for anyone who wants
to get a handle on the war on terrorism." His other work
can be seen at http://www.rahulmahajan.com.
He can be reached at rahul@tao.ca
Today's
Feature
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
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