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July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
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:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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July
5, 2002
Independence
and Terrorism
by Todd May
Two hundred and twenty six years ago, a newly
declared country on this land fought a war against an occupying
colonial power. Using guns, geography, and a superior military
strategy, it struggled against the arrogance of British power.
Underlying the complaints against unjust taxes, arbitrary authority,
and humiliating treatment was a single theme: democracy. A people
cannot be free unless it can determine its own future through
its own political institutions.
Imagine if King George III had pronounced
that the taking up of guns against the legitimate authority of
the British was unacceptable. Of course, he did. Imagine further,
this time against the facts, that the British had had the military
power to make that pronouncement stick. Would that have rendered
the American Revolution not only unsuccessful but also illegitimate?
Or would it have been better to say that might does not make
right?
Imagine another scenario. King George
III, having successfully defeated the colonists, announces that
perhaps we are entitled to nationhood, but only after we change
leadership. We must have an election in which we choose leadership
that the British can live with, and then perhaps some form of
independence can be discussed. Would we have welcomed this proposal
or found it to be a further exercise of British aggression?
Would we, perhaps, have taken up whatever
means were at our disposal to rid ourselves of this foreign occupation?
Tonight the shoe is on the other foot.
Two hundred and twenty six years after our own struggle for independence,
another George (the Second this time) has announced that a people
under foreign occupation do not deserve nationhood unless it
votes for leadership acceptable to the United States. In the
meantime, he, with the enthusiastic support of those who govern
us, continues to offer billions of dollars in aid and military
hardware to an occupying power intent on further dispossession
of those people. Had we been those people, what would we have
done? When those people were us, what did we do?
There are those who will protest that
my analogy is misleading. The United States, they will say, is
not occupying anybody. Another country is. We are just trying
to broker a peace that at the same time avoids terrorism. Such
a protest would be lame. The United States and the occupying
power are as one on policy toward the occupied, and always have
been. The amount of aid, the vetoes in the Security Council,
and the rhetoric from those elected to speak in the name of the
U.S. all point in the same direction. There is a seamlessness
between the U.S. and the occupying power that is rarely glimpsed
in colonial history.
So let us turn back to our imagined scenario.
King George, having defeated us militarily, and having laid down
his demands upon us, decides on further policy changes. He divides
the land of American into various regions, and posts sentries
at all the roads, where people have to line up in order to pass
from one region to another. At these checkpoints, the sentries
often degrade the colonists: strip-searching them in front of
their families, making them wait unnecessarily for hours, turning
them back arbitrarily. This is not all. The King sends his soldiers
to gut our roads, blow up our public institutions, commandeer
private homes to shelter his soldiers, cut our water supplies,
and parade through what is left of our streets.
And this is not the worst of it. The
worst of it is that all the while, he is sending British citizens,
loyal to his policies, to strip of us of our land and call it
their own. He is gradually expropriating the land of America
for British use. The King, of course, does not put it this way
(although perhaps some of his less discreet ministers are not
so careful). He says that he is protecting the British from colonial
assault. And the newspapers and broadsheets across Europe dutifully
print his defense as though it had something to do with the reality
of his policies.
What would we have done? Would some of
us have attacked the British settlers who expropriated our land?
Would there have been those desperate enough among us to have
taken the battle to British soil, offering our own lives in order
to terrorize the British into leaving? Or would we instead have
said, "Yes, King, you have won and you are right. We will
vote for the leadership you recommend, and will hope that all
works out for us in the end." Is that the spirit we celebrate
tonight?
One further twist to this Independence
Day scenario. Imagine that Britain, by itself, were not strong
enough to continue its occupation without foreign support. Imagine
that a superior power provided it with the economic and military
wherewithal to enact its policies. Would there be those among
us who would have been willing to attack that third country,
with the means at our disposal, in order to motivate it to remove
itself from the field? And if they had, what would the rest of
us have said about it?
What is it, exactly, that we Americans
celebrate every Fourth of July?
Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University.
He can be reached at: mayt@clemson.edu
Today's
Feature
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
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