Afghanistan War: a picture tells a story

When I saw the following graphic in Anthony Cordesman's report The Afghan-Pakistan War: A Status Report(Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS]) 05/12/08, p. 15, the line from an old Rod Stewart song started running through my head, "Every picture tells a story, don't it?"

The story here is about the Afghanistan War. After over six years of war and endless talk from the Cheney-Bush administration about how we "liberated" Afghanistan, the green areas show the parts of Afghanistan where the national government, on whose behalf the US and NATO are still at war and escalating, actually exercises full authority.

Apologizing for being liberals?

Back in the days of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, when what we now know as the "culture war" was spawned, liberals weren't just being trashed by conservatives. They were also actively criticized by antiwar activists, civil-rights and Black Power supporters, and others who saw themselves as part of the New Left. The Gene McCarthy/Robert Kennedy trend within the Democratic Party coalesced around George McGovern's candidacy, advocating a "new politics", which meant a break from many of the assumptions of "Cold War liberals".

Much of that criticism was justified. Democratic Party liberals in the postwar era advocated anti-lynching laws, supported Truman's desegregation of the military and backed Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1957 (LBJ was Senate majority leader then). But it took the pressure of the civil rights popular movement, including those rude and unruly African-Americans young people who sat in at the lunch counters and so forth, to push them the Democratic and Republican liberals (the latter once existed) to embrace the decisive Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And even then, the liberal Democrats shared their Party with the Southern segregationists.

And the Vietnam War was very much a liberals' war almost as much as conservatives' in the early years. It was very obviously the Kennedy and Johnson administration who vastly expanded the American war effort in Vietnam from the covert ops of the Eisenhower years to massive military presence at the time Johnson left office.

So there's lots of critical analysis that can and should be done on those years and the failures of the American liberalism that actually existed in practice. Even in these days, I feel the need of some extra identifier like "Jacksonian democrat" to remind myself that real existing liberals can fail to defend democratic and pro-labor causes with the partisan zeal they deserve. Two sad recent examples: the minority of Congressional Democrats (yes, it was only a minority) who voted for the October 2002 Iraq War resolution, which provided political cover but not legal authority for the invasion Bush launched in March 2003, and the reluctance by many liberals to raise a stink to high heaven about the Cheney-Bush torture policy.

But I don't think it's necessary for liberals to apologize or repent for things they never did. Or to concede conservative talking points about the failings of The Liberals which have only the narrowest of factual bases.

Eric Alterman does some of the best work around on the shortcomings of today's Establishment press. He's a well-informed, critical-minded liberal and a good writer, including his Altercation blog. But he also seems to be unable to shake off an aversion to anyone identifying him with those dirty [Cheney]ing hippies of "culture war" lore.

TPM Cafe has a discussion going this week on Alterman's current book Why We're Liberals. I've linked some of the individual contributions below. Joan McCarter responds to an argument of his that seems to echo a number of the factually-challenged assumptions of the "culture war" slams on liberals:

I'm a liberal, and an unapologetic one. I won't apologize for the liberal past of my forbearers [sic]. I won't apologize for the fight against poverty. I won't apologize for demanding a rational foreign policy that kept the U.S. a respectable member of the family of nations. I won't apologize for standing up for a woman's right to make her own decisions about her health care. I won't apologize for believing passionately in the right to privacy for all Americans.

I particularly won't apologize for the fight for civil rights. I certainly won't apologize for being appalled and repulsed by the fact that torture has been added to our nation's repertoire of "intelligence gathering tools." And I won't apologize for having full-throatedly opposed George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, a war based on lies.

This position makes sense. Someone who advocates those ideas doesn't need to apologize for the images that conservatives conjure up in their heads to demonize liberals. Otherwise, you quickly slide into the "FOX liberal" mold, e.g., "I'm a liberal on most things, but ...", "Liberals need to start reaching out to people of faith instead of ignoring them ...", etc.

The experience of the Iraq War in particular has lead me to a far more critical view of US policies in the Cold War period's than before the war, or at least a far more critical mood. And also more skeptical of military interventions, even in concert with allies or for "humanitarian" or genuinely democratic causes. Both liberals and conservatives need to get a far more realistic view of the limits of American military power, become far more skeptical about war and defend international law (including for the US) with far more dedication.

I definitely have a critical view of real existing Democratic liberals in those regards. But when it comes to agreeing with the criticism that liberals are "elitist" coming from partisans of the Republican Party, whose core operative principle is to free billionaires from the burden of having to pay taxes to support their country - that I'm not so inclined to do.

But McCarter seems to have some honest-to-Andrew Jacksonian impulses when she writes:

Again, liberals have made mistakes, but they pale in comparison to what the Republicans have wrought. Out of control deficits and a devastated economy. Another quagmire of a war and what's worse, a war we entered on the basis of lies. A destroyed international reputation. A failing infrastructure. Torture. It's less important that we treat our opponents with respect than that we shine a bright light on the depth and breadth of the mess they have created.

Sounds about right to me.

At TPM Cafe, Alterman quotes a passage from a speech of John Kennedy's during his 1960 Presidential campaign, suggesting plausibly that Democrats today could make good use of the same approach:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal"? If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then . . . we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the -people--their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties--someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

While we're on the subject, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in his 1960 election pamphlet for JFK, Kennedy or Nixon: Does it make any difference? offered the following perspective on how healthy democratic practices at home are essential to foreign policy strength, as well:

Above all, [Kennedy] realizes that national strength includes much more than armies and weapon systems. It depends essentially on long-run factors - on the education and health of our people, on the guarantee of their equal opportunity, on the growth of our economy, on the development of our resources. These all seem to him wise and necessary objects of national investment. Nor does he feel that such things can be postponed to some more propitious time. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to solve our problems. As Lippmann has said, "Once you've failed to educate a child, you've failed, and you can't make that up later." Kennedy's view, it is clear, is that affirmative Presidential leadership is desperately required - to bring about, through the traditional democratic means of Congressional action, a better allocation of our resources; to assure equal rights to all our citizens; to revolutionize the moral tone of the country; to inaugurate the new epoch of national progress. ...

Kennedy is surely right. It is no accident that America has had its most effective moments of world leadership when our foreign policy has expressed a visible reality of American performance. The words of Wilson and Roosevelt went straight to the minds and hearts of the people of the world, while the words of Eisenhower and Nixon fall on deaf ears, not because Wilson and Roosevelt had better words (though this was the case too), but because their words were underwritten by their deeds. The fact that Wilson and matters to the world. It was Wilson's New Freedom which validated his Fourteen Points, as it was Roosevelt's New Deal which validated his Four Freedoms. The effect of TVA, for example, on the imagination of aspiring peoples everywhere has been incalculable. It is Adlai Stevenson's record as an American liberal which makes his the most influential American voice to the outside world today. But what is authentic idealism on the lips of men who have won the right to talk about freedom and opportunity and social justice becomes the sheerest moralism and hypocrisy when uttered to the world by people notably indifferent to such things in their own land. Men who address righteous sermons to the world while at home they tolerate [Joseph] McCarthy and Little Rock [violent resistance to desegregation] and West Virginia poverty and the rest are bound to strike others as ineffectual figureheads or sanctimonious frauds. (my emphasis)

Republican polemics now commonly try to contrast the "tough" JFK foreign policy with the allegedly weaker version of today's Democrats. But Kennedy never embraced the crazy, militaristic idea that negotiating with a potential adversary was not only wrong but weak and cowardly. Much less the notion that war and the threat of war were the only meaningful tools in dealing with actual or potential adversaries.

Where Does American Liberalism Stand Today? by Eric Alterman 05/19/08

About those "Mistakes" by Joan McCarter 05/20/08

Tags: eric alternman, jfk, john kennedy, joan mccarter, liberalism

Salon's headline writers come up with a memorable one

Psycho Christians and the media is the title over the article Gary Kamiya Salon 05/20/08. Maybe "psycho-Christian" will enter the language as a synonym for Christianist.

Kamiya's article features Maverick McCain's good bud John Hagee, who's eager to back Israel in any and every war they could fight and some they don't so it will bring nearer that happy day (happy in his warped theology) when most of the Jews of the world will be killed by hostile armies and the rest convert to Christianity. And also McCain backer Rod Parsely, of whom Sarah Posner wrote in a memorable portrait of him (With God on His Side American Prospect 10/23/05) that he sees himself as "the arbiter of what's right and wrong because, as he is unafraid to say, God told him so."

Kamiya focuses on the painfully obvious double standard of the Establishment press in covering radical Christianist clerics as opposed to, say, scary black preachers like a lot of people apparently find Jeremiah Wright to be. "The dirty little secret of mainstream American journalism is that it operates within invisible constraints that conform to some imagined Middle American consensus," writes Kamiya.

Oddly, though, he also says, "Obama's personal relationship with Wright raised more legitimate questions than were raised by McCain's actively seeking Hagee's endorsement." I'm not sure how he gets to that. The bold Maverick sought out Hagee's endorsement knowing very well that Hagee's main political issue is inciting the US to war with Iran to further his crackpot End Times theology. In other words, McCain sought Hagee's endorsement precisely because of his most violent, bigoted, crackpot views on the Middle East.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, gary kamiya, mccain

Liberal "elitists", race and the "culture war"

"Elitist intellectual" Pennsylvania coal miners on strike, 1910s

(This is the second of 2 posts discussing Christopher Lasch's 1991 book The True and Only Heaven; link to Part 1)

Lasch in a brief autobiographical section described how he grew up as and long remained someone who was distinctly to the left of even most Democratic liberals. Which can mean lots of things, including a thought-out position, a type of active engagement or a sense of political purity that allows one to stand happily outside the dirty business of actual political decisions in the real world. In any case, by the 1980s, he was feeling like a burnt-out leftie and didn't want to associate himself with those Yippies and Hippies and stuff from the 1960s.

Fortunately for the quality of his analysis, he doesn't seem to have quite gone over to the dark side of neoconservatism. Although in part of the book, he seems to treat academic sociology in general, and both liberal and conservative social analyses, as more-or-less equivalent to political liberalism. So he winds up citing conservatives like Seymour Martin Lipset and (neocon) Daniel Bell as examples of how liberal thinking got on a wrong track from his viewpoint. A strange approach, to say the least.

But he gets around to making some decent points. After repeating some stock "culture war" tropes, which I discussed in the previous post on this book, Lasch gets around to acknowledging that plain old raw racism played a role among some of the "culture warriors". Discussing the busing controversy of the 1970s with particular reference to the Boston area where it was especially bitter, he does his best to be sympathetic to the antibusing activists in the following passage, but can't overlook the obvious, either:

The wrongs suffered by black people in America were so glaring and their demand for reparation seemingly so compelling that advocates of busing found it impossible to admit that white workers had important grievances of their own, especially when those grievances were couched in the idiom of racial abuse and championed by leaders who exercised no control over their own followers. Liberals were predisposed to see nothing but racial prejudice in the antibusing movement, but the movement itself did very little to correct this misunderstanding. Antibusing agitators sometimes appealed to the example of the civil rights movement, but they had no understanding of its moral self-discipline. They deplored violence but subtly encouraged it by dwelling on the duty to repel the outside "invasion" of their communities. They protested that "although we're opposed to forced busing, we're not racists," in the words of Dennis Kearney, a South Boston politician; but antibusing mobs undermined such claims with their favorite slogan, "Bus the niggers back to Africa!" "We are racists," said a white senior at South Boston High School. "Let's face it. That's how we feel about it." Ione Malloy, the English teacher who recorded this defiance in her diary of the busing conflict, tried to persuade her students that South Boston's position was more complicated than that. When students complained that "blacks get everything," she challenged them to change places. When they threatened to "start trouble so the plan won't work," she predicted, quite accurately, that the authorities would close the school. She urged them to avoid violence and provocation, to no avail. As the situation deteriorated, she confessed to a feeling of "futility." "We seem to be going to a dead end."

The best argument against busing was that an "ethnically or racially homogeneous neighborhood respected another community's integrity more easily than a weak, threatened neighborhood did." According to this way of thinking, "strong neighborhoods were the solid building blocks of a healthily diverse city." The "preservation of community," accordingly, should have been recognized as a "value competitive with - yet ironically essential to - equality." But these were the words of a sympathetic observer from outside, Anthony Lukas, not an indigenous analysis of the issue. Leaders of the antibusing movement never resorted to this argument. They seldom rose above the level of resentment, self-righteousness, and self-pity. "We are poor people locked into an economically miserable situation," said Pixie Palladino of ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). "All we want is to be mothers to the children God gave us. We are not opposed to anyone's skin. We are opposed to forced busing." (my emphasis)

But is it true that "advocates of busing [i.e., liberals] found it impossible to admit that white workers had important grievances of their own"? Cue up Fred Harris again, the former Oklahoma Senator who played a prominent role on the "Kerner Commission" studying urban violence, from his 1973 book The New Populism. Harris argued for the virtues of local and neighborhood government and democratic city governments, and said:

But how does this square with busing? If neighborhoods are to be given real control over essential services, why should they not have control over neighborhood schools? Neighborhoods should control their own schools - unless neighborhood control really amounts to racial discrimination and inequality of educational opportunity. In this instance, the more fundamental promise of the American inheritance for equality before the law must take precedence.

Court-ordered busing of schoolchildren can be made more understandable if people know that it is a stop-gap measure and that there is an alternative that permits neighborhood control. That alternative, advocated by the New Populism, calls for knocking down the racial and class barriers to housing, so that people can live where they want to live. And it calls for evening up the imbalances in wealth and income, so that people can afford quality education wherever they live.

Supporters of "busing" for desegregation also worked to develop alternatives such as "magnet schools" with a particular emphasis like arts or sciences to attract diverse student bodies on a voluntary basis.

The notion that liberals "found it impossible to admit that white workers had important grievances of their own" (my emphasis) is just silly. But the false accusation - which Lasch should have known better to repeat in this form - fits well with the "culture war" narrative about liberals elitism.

He repeats essentially the same claim in another form, "Liberals were predisposed to see nothing but racial prejudice in the antibusing movement". Nonsense again, for the same reasons. And as Lasch goes on to describe it, since the antibusing movement on which he was focused there presented a blatantly racist and even violent front, why does he think that liberals were "predisposed" to see "nothing" but racism in that movement? Actually, liberal politicians looked hard to find other interests of the protesters which they could address as a way of diffusing racial tensions.

Lasch may have been feeling burnt-out when he wrote this book. But he does give some good insight into the political-ideological-marketing approach conservatives used to redefine the pro-labor, pro-civil-rights Democratic Party as "elitist". They created a framework of a "new class". The "new class" concept had various antecedents, as Lasch explains. It built on economic theories that stressed the significance of scientists and engineers in the production process. And also on the notion of the "managerial revolution" that meant that managers of corporations rather than owners of the company's stock made most of the actual decisions about business behavior, a notion associated with the economists Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means in the 1930s.

Those descriptions were realistic and empirically based. But the brand of intellectuals we now know so fondly as "neoconservatives" contributed their own twist to the notion of a New Class, eventually applying concepts they used to describe Soviet and Eastern European Communist societies to domestic US politics. Lasch writes:

Those who had been raised on the Marxian theory of history ... - and this category included a number of intellectuals who later became neoconservatives - ... needed [to define] a ruling class [to oppose], if only to sustain their own self-image as a lonely band of truth tellers who dared to question the reigning orthodoxy, and they found it in the makers of the "managerial revolution."

Lasch even traces the New Class notion back to critics of the French Revolution liek Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville which made much of the irresponsibility of revolutionary intellectuals.

The neocons gave a highbrow version of the New Class which provides a framework so that the Kathleen Parkers and Rush Limbaughs of the world can sneer at the "elitism" of Democrats while they themselves defend the narrow interests of billionaires and plutocrats:

Neoconservative intellectuals' restatement of these well-established traditions of speculation - in which the new class was described variously as practical and efficient, domineering and repressive, alienated and adversarial —represented these intellectuals' most important contribution to the rise of the new right. New-class theory enabled the right to attack "elites" without attacking big business. Businessmen, it appeared, were responsible and public-spirited: they were accountable to the consumers to whom they sold their products, just as practical politicians were accountable to the voters; and the market thus limited any power they could hope to exercise. The new class, on the other hand, was accountable to no one, and its control of higher education and the mass media gave it almost unlimited power over the public mind. Yet the members of this class still felt marginal and isolated: the more power they achieved, the more they resented their lack of power. (my emphasis)

Rightwingers, apparently since the beginning of time, have been convinced that colleges are full of dangerously subversive professors, however little reality on the campuses conformed to that delusion:

[Lewis] Feuer spoke of the "intellectuals' acute authoritarianism, arising from frustrated desire for power." Commentary [the leading neocon journal] caricatured the "radicalized professor" as a "man who has wandered through life, never testing himself outside the university," "envious, resentful," unable to bear his exclusion from the "magic circle where power, glory, and virtue reside."

Since this concept of the New Class was an imaginative ideological construct to begin with, tweaking the definition according to the marketing needs of the moment wasn't difficult:

Although the "new class" often seemed to refer only to literary intellectuals an4 their "adversary culture," it could easily expand, when the need arose, to embrace bureaucrats, professional reformers, social workers, and social engineers as well as literary types. In this version, which derived from the theory of the managerial revolution, the "new class" seemed to refer to anyone working in the public sector. According to Irving Kristol [father of William and godfather of neoconservatism], it consisted of "scientists, teachers, and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communications industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their careers in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of the larger foundations, the upper levels of government bureaucracy, and so on." Charles Murray's description was even more expansive: "the upper echelons of ... academia, journalism, publishing, and the vast network of foundations, institutes, and research centers that has been woven into partnership with government during the last thirty years." Murray included even politicians, judges, bankers, businessmen, lawyers, and doctors - at least those who were liberals. From this point of view, the new class could be recognized not so much by its culture of hedonism as by its relentless pressure for an "activist federal government committed to 'change,' " as Michael Novak put it. Professionals in the public sector wanted massive federal programs, according to Novak, because such programs created "hundreds of thousands of jobs and opportunities" for "those whose hearts itch to do good and who long for a 'meaningful' use of their talents, skills, and years." As Novak, Murray, and Kristol saw it, the culture of the new class was not just antibourgeois [i.e., permissive on culture values] but antibusiness. It aimed to replace private enterprise with a vast bureaucracy that would undermine initiative, destroy the free market, and subject everything to central control.

These wildly divergent descriptions of the new class made it clear that the term referred to a set of politically objectionable attitudes, not to an identifiable social grouping, much less a class.

This is the larger framework that allows Republicans championing massive tax subsidies to the wealthiest citizens to become down-home good ole boys who are the kind of people you'd like to have a beer with, while Democrats determined to expand opportunity for the majority and defend the poor are transmuted into stuffy elitists who look down their noses at the regular folks.

In closing, it's always worth remembering that such constructions which prove useful over a long period of time, however fantastic they may be empirically, have to hitch onto some kernel of truth to be effective. The seemingly ever-increasing role of experts and specialists in society is one of those realities in this case. I'm not going to develop the idea in this post. But the near-ubiquitous experts which we encounter daily who we supposedly need to consult to lives our lives in the correct way do provide a real-world experience of a kind of elitism that gives emotional force to the scam Republican partisan accusation.

Tags: culture war, christopher lasch, neoconservatives

Iraq: Will We Ever Get Out?

And will we wind up Hucked in 2013?

Iraq: Will We Ever Get Out? is the title of an article by Thomas Powers in the New York Review of Books (article dated 04/30/08; issue date 05/29/08) that's well worth a read. A couple of excerpts:

The state of play in what some writers call the Greater Middle East is roughly this: 190,000 American troops are at the moment engaged in two unresolved hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The magnitude of this endeavor is hard to exaggerate - two wars thousands of miles from home, covering a total area roughly as big as California and Texas, with a combined population of almost 60 million, speaking half a dozen major languages few Americans know. In addition, both wars are insurgencies, and in both the "enemy" is not a well-defined political, social, or military entity under central command, but something much more fluid. The difficulty of defining the "enemy" helps to explain why success, not to mention "victory," is so elusive. In Iraq and Afghanistan alike the Americans have been trying to establish a government of convenience—friendly to the West, moderate in politics, predictable in business, open to peace with Israel, hostile to Islamic fundamentalists. The United States has been trying to establish such governments in the Middle East for sixty years. (my emphasis)

But in Afghanistan the United States and its reluctant NATO allies face a revived Taliban with the simplest of war aims - they want the foreigners to go. What is remarkable about the situation in Afghanistan - even astonishing - is that the Americans, after watching 100,000 Russians fight Afghans at great expense with no success for nine years, have signed on for a dose of the same. ...

... After their invasion in December 1979, the Russians walked into Kabul with ease, as invaders of Afghanistan invariably do, but after that it was mounting trouble all the way. The Russians paid a substantial price for thinking they could "win" if they stuck to it ...

Powers does a very good job at the end describing how a Democratic President, despite their initial intentions and despite public opposition to the Iraq War, could wind up having their Presidency and the chance for a major politica realignment favoring the Democrats wrecked by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

[T]o my ear Clinton and Obama don't sound drained of hope or bright ideas, determined to cut losses and end the agony. Why should they? They're coming in fresh from the sidelines. Getting out, giving up, admitting defeat are not what we expect from the psychology of newly elected presidents who have just overcome all odds and battled through to personal victory. They've managed the impossible once; why not again? Planning for withdrawals might begin on Day One, but the plans will be hostage to events.

At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment somewhere between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going.

We are committed in Afghanistan. We are not ready to leave Iraq. In both countries our friends are in trouble. The pride of American arms is at stake. The world is watching. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. Unless something quite unexpected happens, four years from now the presidential candidates will be arguing about two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one going into its ninth year, the other into its eleventh. The choice will be the one Americans hate most - get out or fight on. (my emphasis)

What has to happen in that case is that the peace movement and the Democratic base keep the pressure on the new Democratic administration to set a early timetable to get out of Iraq, refrain from escalating in Afghanistan and find some kind of sensible exist strategy out of Afghanistan.

Otherwise, we could wind up having four years of an Obama Presidency during which the Congressional Republicans obstruct everything from judicial nominations to a new national health-insurance program and wind up looking at President Mike Huckabee on a mission from God in 2013.

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, thomas powers

ETA sets off another bomb in Spain

The Basque terrorist group ETA just bombed a yacht club in the city of Getxo in Spain a few hours after a ceremony honoring the victims of an ETA attack on May 14: ETA explota en Getxo una furgoneta bomba horas después del homenaje a las víctimas El Mundo 19.05.2008.

No one was injured or killed in the Getxo bombing. The explosion occurred at 12:30AM Spanish time. ETA claimed responsibility in a phone call. The club is used as the meeting place for a group of leading businesspeople in the Basque region, Círculo de Empresarios Vascos, who meet there with political leaders.

In addition to the May 14 attack which killed one person and wounded several others, ETA also did a bombing on May 12 that damaged property but no people were injured.

Tags: eta, españa, spain

A 1968 poem

The Jul-Aug 1968 issue of Radical America from which I quoted historian George Rawick also contained the following poem. It gives a flavor of the attitude of activists who saw themselves as revolutionaries in 1968. I have posted much about the May-June demonstrations/uprising whatever you want to call it in France. This poem alludes to those events.

The poem by Diane DiPrima is apparently called "May, 1968".

When you seize Columbia, when you
seize Paris, take
the media, tell the people what you're doing
what you're up to and why and how you mean
to do it, how they can help, keep the news
coming, steady, you have 70 years
of media conditioning to combat, it is a wall
you must get through, somehow, to reach
the instinctive man, who is struggling like a plant
for light, for air

when you seize a town, a campus, get hold of the
power stations, the water, the transportation,
forget to negotiate, forget how
to negotiate, don't wait for De Gaulle or Kirk
to abdicate, they won't, you are not
"demonstrating" you are fighting
a war, fight to win, don't wait for Johnson or
Humphrey or Rockefeller, to agree to your terms
take what you need, "it's free
because it's yours"

So far as I know, Diane DiPrima wasn't speaking for any political group of note. But the poem gives a hint of why even many of those sympathetic to left-leaning protest movements were concerned about the lack of realism on the part of some enthusiasts. It's free because it's yours? What does that even mean? Forget how to negotiate? I won't make any comparison here to recent political controversies. But, good grief! And I'm also pretty unclear about what reaching "the instinctive man" might mean.

Still, I'm citing it here for historical value.

Tags: 1968, diane diprima

Kathleen Parker, Blut und Boden and the "culture war" (Pt 1 of 2)

"Elitist" textile workers striking in Lawrence MA back when - some of them were no doubt less than 100% Americans (by Kathleen Parker's definition)

Washington Post Writer's Group Columnist Kathleen Parker, whose specialty has long been to phrase nasty prejudices for respectable white folks to use in polite company, may be losing her touch. In Full-blooded Americans Orlando Sentinel 05/14/08, she uses an approach that may embarrass some of their disciples here and there.

Glenn Greenwald (High Standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page Salon 05/17/08) calls it her White Power column. Although I would say that its only a slightly more egregious example than her standard efforts.

But I suppose I should be grateful to her for giving me an in-the-headlines opening for a follow-up post on historian Christopher Lasch's ideas on the "culture war". Parker's latest says - with attempted polite language, of course - that white folks shouldn't vote against Obama because he's a scary black man, but because Great American McCain has a longer American ancestry.

Here she makes a stock "culture war" pitch phrased for white folks who think of themselves as the polite middle-class:

Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday's Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with the illegal-immigration fiasco. It isn't necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story.

Yet, white Americans primarily - and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially - have been put on the defensive for their throwback concerns with "guns, God and gays," as Howard Dean put it in 2003. And more recently, for clinging to "guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," as Obama described white, working-class Pennsylvanians who preferred his opponent.

The "guns, God and gays" trope has haunted Democrats, and Republicans have enjoyed dusting it off when needed to rile the locals. It's an easy play.

But so-called ordinary Americans aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know. (my emphasis)

The phrase I bolded makes it a nonpartisan criticism of those nasty elitists, you see. And it also let middle-class white folks who don't want to be completely identified with "rednecks" or with - mercy me! - low-class types who might join unions a way to remind their listeners that while they themselves aren't part of such a class of people, they still respect them as the salt of the earth and all as against those "elitists" in the "Democrat Party".

I posted before about Christopher Lasch's 1991 book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. In that book, he was addressing the question that engaged conventional wisdom so intensely at the time, of how the Democrats could ever win the Presidency again in the face of the Republicans' successful "culture war" appeals.

A large part of that discussion, then and now, missed or ignored some bedrock basics about the American political scene. Two major regional political shifts have occurred in American politics since Richard Nixon began the Republican Southern Strategy in 1968. The South now votes Republican in national elections. And California votes Democratic.

The later shift had not yet occurred in 1991. Bill Clinton carried California in 1992. And that fool Republican Governor Pete Wilson had the dandy idea to support the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994. Since the polite language of nice white ladies like Kathleen Parker couldn't hide the nativist and racial bigotry displayed by many of Prop 187's supporters, it had the effect of galvanizing Latino voters to register and go to the polls in higher proportions than ever before, a habit that has continued. It also reminded them dramatically that the Republican Party is the one that doesn't like black and brown people all that much and thinks Spanish is some kind of sinister plot against regular white Americans.

Since then, the state that gave the country Presidents Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon has generally voted Democratic in statewide elections ever since, the Rovian political coup of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003 and his re-election in 2006 being exceptions.

Now Democrats cannot expect to win the Presidency without carrying California. That fact sometimes gets obscured by press discusses of "the West" leaning Democratic. But California's huge electoral vote prize and the significance of Silicon Valley and Hollywood fundraising clout for the Democrats means that the Dems have to keep California Democrats reasonably happy. And while California voters rejected gay marriage in a statewide referendum - unconstitutionally so, as the state supreme court happily just ruled - the need to keep California in the Democratic column means that the national Democratic Party can't afford to pander too heavily to conservative hot-button issues.

And what had already become true in 1991 is that the South was something close to a Solid South for Republicans. And today, the Republicans are more dependent on the South, both in Presidential races and in their Congressional delegations, than the Democrats ever were.

The Democratic Party prior to the Second World War involved a coalition of Southern segregationists with Northern liberals, city-dwellers and the labor movement. That doesn't mean that there was no support for liberal economic ideas among Southern whites, on the contrary. Mississippi's Theodore Bilbo, who was to become one of the Senate's most notorious racists ever, entered the Senate as a New Deal partisan.

But while the postwar Democratic Party in the South remained the protector of segregation, the contradictions in the national party increasingly showed. Truman in 1948 faced party splits on the left with Henry Wallace and his Progressives and on the right from Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats. Democrats in the 1970s assumed that the recently-enfranchised African-American vote might give them a shot at holding on to the South. However we weigh the role of race and the so-called "white backlash" in the shift to the Republicans in the South, voters there clearly trended more conservative.

So as long as black voter participation in the South was relatively low compared to whites, and as long as California was presumed to be a more-or-less safe state for Republicans in Presidential elections, the national Democratic Party felt strong pressure to mitigate the effect of "culture war" issues in the South. It also meant that there was more pressure to bring swing voters in states outside the South into the Democratic column.

In other words, the idea of a massive cultural shift among working-class voters or voters in smaller cities from Democrats to Republicans nationally can be highly misleading. At least according to one count I've seen discussed recently, working-class voters (the definition of which can vary greatly) nationally vote more consistently Democratic today than 40 years ago. And that makes perfect sense. In the 1960s, the now-extinct species called "liberal Republicans" was still extant in the person of politicians like Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Jacob Javits of New York and John Lindsey of New York City (who switched to the Democrats later).

Failure to take that distinction into account leads astray a lot of the writing from the last 25 years or so on how Democrats can deal with "culture war" issues. And to a certain extent, that happened with Christopher Lasch's book, as well.

In Part 2: Liberal "elitists", race and the "culture war"

Tags: culture war, christopher lasch, kathleen parker, neoconservatives

Maverick Iraq War policy

Sen. Joe Biden points out that the bold Maverick McCain's talk about winning in Iraq by 2013 is empty talk (McCain Has Zero Plan to Get Us Out of Mess President Bush Has Created Huffington Post 05/15/08):

John McCain revealed today that he has no plan - none - to get us out of the mess the president has created. Senator McCain said that it is important for presidential candidates to "define their objectives and what they plan to achieve not with vague language but with clarity." But especially when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan, the picture he painted today of where he hopes to be by 2013 is totally divorced from reality and there is zero clarity about how he would get there. It's beyond being vague: John McCain is totally silent about how he would realize his rosy vision for 2013. ...

Exactly how will we have any chance of winning in Afghanistan and defeating al Qaeda if we keep 140,000 troops in Iraq for another three or four years? Senator McCain doesn't say because he can't. ...

Today's speech is further proof that when it comes to Iraq, there is no daylight between John McCain and George W. Bush. They are joined at the hip. When it comes to Iraq, there will be no change with a McCain administration and so there is a real and profound choice for Americans in November. (my emphasis)

That's our Maverick!

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, joe biden

A "60s" view of African-American history

I can't help but be fascinated, this year especially, by "the 1960s", which has defined the views of present-day Republicans to a remarkable extent.

I've mentioned before that there is an online archive of the journal Radical America, which began as "An SDS Journal of American Radicalism", SDS being Students for a Democratic Society, one of the more explicitly radical organizations of the time, with primarily white membership. The initials SDS are still enough to trigger apocalyptic nightmares among our "culture warriors", although they seem to have more fun obsessing about its violent offshoot, the Weather Underground.

This post is about an article that appeared in the July-Aug 1968 issue of Radical America, "The Historical Roots of Black Liberation" by Marxist historian George Rawick (1929-1990). (The link is to a PDF of the entire issue.) The article is also online in HTML format, The Historical Roots of Black Liberation (July 1968) at the Marxists' Internet Archive. So if you are afraid of catching demons in your head or some other part of your body from seeing a Marxist writer quoted, you should stop reading now. Rawick is best known in his profession as editor of the 29-volume The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. He was apparently associated for at least some years with the largest of the American Trotskyist groups, the Socialist Workers Party.

There's an appealing earnestness about much of the left activist writing from that period, not to be equated with the false innocence of which psychologist Rollo May warned. Rawick, born in 1929, was no kid in 1968. But this article addresses an audience that was focused on both developing an honest understanding of racism in American and on finding effective ways to combat it.

In that, they were acting out the heritage of the democratic ideology of the Second World War as well as the best of American religious and political-radical traditions. Yes, trolls, this is the kind of stuff scary black preachers sometimes talk about.

Rawick frames his approach as a way of understanding the "Black Revolution", which is how he understood the civil rights and Black Power movements of 1968. He seeks to throw light on the historical context in which the contradictory yet complementary impulses of rebellion and conformity have developed in the US.

The image of "Sambo" the compliant slave is one of the most discussed topics in studies of American slavery. Sambo was a contemporary term under slavery and it is still commonly used in discussing that phenomenon. Historian William Freehling, who discusses this topic in detail, uses a different contemporary term, "Cuffee", in a similar way but uses it to emphasize that the whites in slave states were uncomfortably aware that Sambo was at least in part an act put on for the benefit of whites.

Rawick writes quite perceptively about the historian Eugene Genovese, who was then regarded as a "left" historian, even a rising star among left historians. Genovese has long since developed into a genuinely reactionary historian who defends the slaveowning class in the South. Rawick wasn't calling him a reactionary then, but he did see aspects of Genovese's work that tended in that direction:

All previous indication of rebelliousness in San Domingo [before the Haitian Revolution of 1794] is relegated by Genovese to unimportance: "We find a Sambo stereotype and a weak tradition of rebellion ... when the island suddenly exploded in the greatest slave revolution in history, nothing lay behind it but Sambo and a few hints."

This conclusion is fundamentally absurd, the absurdity of sincere but pessimistic radical scholarship.

Rawick argues that those who claim that the Sambo mentality prevented slaves from engaging in more active revolts than they did in the US are trying too hard. Applying a version of Occam's Razor - giving preference to the simplest explanation that explains the known facts - he writes:

Slaves in North America were in every respect far outnumbered by the whites, who in any area could successfully hold off an attack until help came from elsewhere.

The slave revolt was not the usual method of direct action on the part of slaves in the United States because it was obvious that such a small, isolated minority could not successfully struggle this way. Rather the slaves usually chose other, more suitable tactics. While the slaves did not engage, particularly after the defeat of Nat Turner in 1831, in large revolts, they did struggle in a most conscious fashion and in a most successful manner through the Underground Railroad, strikes, and acts of individual withholding of or destruction of production. Most important, they fashioned their own independent community through which men and women and their children could find the cultural defenses against their oppressors.

The black community was the center of life for the slaves. It gave them, marked off from the rest of society, an independent base. The slave did not suffer from rootlessness – he belonged to the slave community and even if he were sold down the river, would usually be able to find himself in a new community much like his previous one, in which there would be people who shared a common destiny and would help him find a new life.

Rawick's essay stresses the role of African-American culture in keeping alive dignity, self-respect and the will to be free among the slaves. Revolutionary movements like the Haitian Revolution of 1794 led by Toussaint L'Ouverture seemed to many to spring suddenly from nowhere. This is a widespread phenomenon. To take just one more recent example, the Shah of Iran was also surprised by the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

But Rawick argues that in reality, to understand the roots of such surprising, seemingly sudden outbursts of revolutions, reform movements or just large-scale acts of social disruption, one has to understand the cultures that gave rise to them. While that may seem obvious, we're dealing in 2008 and for years to come with American involvement in Iraq's civil war(s) that came about with President Bush not considering it especially important to understand so much as the difference between Shi'a and Sunni Islam before he invaded and occupied that country. Rawick references another Marxist historian, C.L.R. James, who was apparently a favorite among SDSers (he has an article in the same issue of Radical America), on this question:

Despite Genovese’s stated respect for C.L.R. James, he seems to be turning the historian upside down. For the point James is making in The Black Jacobins – a point which cannot be missed by the careful reader – is that the oppressed continuously struggle in forms of their own choosing and surprise all mankind when they transform the day-to-day struggle into monumental revolutionary deeds. The pre-revolutionary activity was a necessary predecessor to the Haitian revolt; and without Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey and Nat Turner, there could have been no Fredrick Douglass, Rap Brown, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver.

This question of understanding where such surprising events originate was a matter of no small concern in the 1960s, even to conservatives. Between urban riots, mass antiwar protests and student demonstrators, a lot of people wondered why such unexpected outbursts were suddenly disrupting their established views of how things worked in American society.

Understanding the role of slave and free-black culture is also critical to understanding the abolitionist movement. While it often impinged on the political process in the form of disputes among whites - since the vote was restricted to white men - that can distort our view of the movement. Certainly, there was antislavery/abolitionist sentiment among whites which could and did go along with racist, white supremacist ideas and feelings. But, as Rawick writes:

Through the instrumentality of the African cult [another term for slave culture], a concrete expression of a philosophy most adequate to the task at hand, the Afro-American slave prepared the ground and built the community out of which could come the struggles of the abolitionist movement. Abolitionism was at all times dominated by Afro-Americans, not by whites. Every abolitionist newspaper depended upon the support of Negro freedmen for its continuation. And these black freedmen received their impetus from the struggles of their brothers and sisters in slavery. Rather than stemming from the New England Brahmin conscience, abolitionism grew from, and carried, the necessity of black liberation whatever the cost. And in liberating the black community abolitionism transformed American society; it took the lead in creating a new America.

Although it will seem outrageous for those who think of movements as primarily organizations, offices, finances, printing presses and newspapers, writers and petitions, the heart of abolitionism was the slave community itself. The Underground Railroad, the efforts of the slaves for their own liberation, and their struggles’ impact on Northern Whites [sic] and slave blacks – these were the movement’s indispensible [sic] core. In the South, it gave the slaves the hope that enabled them to engage in the daily struggles that won for them that amount of breathing space which made more than mere continued existence possible. (my emphasis)

Rawick also talks about the dynamic relationship of slave culture to that of the masters:

The slaves themselves created the conditions for the inner corruption of the Master Class. While the rulers portrayed the institution of slavery as beneficent, the constant rebellion of the slaves made them know they lied. And when there is no way in which men can believe in the fundamental morality of a social system, even one they profit by, that system begins to die because the masters lose their ability to defend it. The slaves, in the struggle to the death with the rulers, repudiate the latter’s claim of moral justification, demonstrate to all the bad faith of the masters. (Seen from this vantage point, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn depicts the superiority of the moral claims of the runaway slave, Jim, to those of the masters based on property rights.)

The southern slave owner was denuded of civilization by the very system he fostered. Instead of the southern plantation owner and the classes close to him being made up of the knights in armor of racist folklore, slavery produced a society in the American South dominated by a class who lived in corruption and within an atmosphere worthy of the Marquis de Sade. ...

The myth of the gracious South dies hard, but die it must. (my emphasis)

I like this description of the inner turmoil between the urge to rebel and the fear of doing so:

This is not to argue that the slave was in no sense Sambo. A man is Sambo precisely when he is at the very point of rebellion he is fearful of being the rebel. Rebel he must be, but self-confident he is not. The greatest of all abolitionist leaders, the ex-slave Fredrick Douglass, tells repeatedly in his autobiography that when in the very act of fleeing, he was not only afraid – he also felt he was doing something wrong. Everything seemed to tell him that he was incapable of being a freeman; but at the same time, everything told him he must be a freeman. Unless we understand the contradictory nature of the human personality in class societies, we can never portray reality. One never knows whether the victim or the rebel will manifest himself again, but then again one need never know. It does not matter. In real life, men engage and then they see. The man of courage is not afraid to act, not because he is certain he will not be the coward, but only because he knows that, if he does not act, he most certainly will be the coward.

What he is describing here is a psychological condition, not a prescription for rebellion whenever one feels like it. Rawick's article makes clear that rebellion is not only or even primarily about dramatic events like the fabled storming of the Bastille.

I've emphasize in this post that Rawick was a Marxist historian because of the context in which I'm quoting him. But writing this got me thinking about whether there are particular advantages for an historian in taking a Marxist approach to understanding history.

Volumes could be written on this, and probably have been. I'll restrict myself to paragraphs here.

My basic answer is that the Marxist viewpoint doesn't confer any advantage not available to historians with an understanding and appreciation of democratic movements. But Marxist historians are possibly more interested in the history of rebellions and revolutions and popular movements than others, although the decades-long trend of academic interest in the history of daily life may mean that even that is no longer the case.

But, however one weighs the various forms that 20th-century Marxism took, from social democracy to Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot (to name some of the most consequential variations), Marx and Engels saw themselves as part of the radical cutting-edge of the democratic and labor movements of the 19th century. So historians working in that tradition presumably are alert to the importance of those movements, their dynamics and contradictory aspects.

But it makes sense in that way that historians like W.E.B. DuBois and Herbert Aptheker, both of whom were members of the orthodox, Soviet-line Communist Party in the US, made significant contributions to the history of slavery. Aptheker's work, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), can perhaps serve as an example of risks and opportunities in that approach. His book is respected and widely cited on that topic. But he is generally regarded as having overstated the significance of overt slave revolts. If your ideology values such occurrences highly, it can affect the empirical historical work.

Also, Marxist historians are as capable of writing junk as anyone else. Conforming one's historical work to a current party program can also present challenges of its own. Political science geeks might enjoy picking apart Leon Trotsky's position on the Confederacy, for instance. But so far as I'm aware, that particular dispute hasn't added greatly to our understanding of the Civil War.

And I was quite interested to see Rawick's takedown of some of Genovese's early work. I read one of Genevese's essays from the late '60s not long ago. I'm not sure if he called himself a Marxist then. But I came away thinking, this doesn't sound either very "left" or very well-founded to me. And although William Appleman Williams was not a Marxist historian, he was an influential historian among left activists and writers, especially his work before 1970. But he also managed to find room in his framework for elaborate praise for Herbert Hoover's economic policies and for the ne-Confederate view of the Civil War. And some of his anti-imperialist analysis of late 19th century American history may not have had the empirical rigor one might have hoped.

So I suppose my bottom line on that would be, you have to take good research and analysis where you find them. And you have to recognize bad ideas wherever they pop up.

And, in this particular case, it's a reminder that some of those scary hippie radicals of the 1960s were thinking about more than just sitting around saying, "Down with the racist pig power structure." Although they were known to say things like that, too, on occasion.

Tags: 1968, george rawick, slavery

Obama on foreign policy

If Obama can stay in this mode, he can win in November.



He still makes a couple of references to bipartisanship. And as long as it stays mostly atmospherics, as it seems to be here, it won't get in his way too much. McCain and the rest of the Bush fans aren't interested in bipartisanship. And until they get slammed at the polls over and over like they did in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District this past week, they will continue with their "rule or ruin" approach.

Of course, I guess with the Republicans we get "ruin" even when they rule. So maybe that saying doesn't apply to them any more.

I should add that I think Obama's position on not talking with Hamas until they recognize Israel is unrealistic. It seems to me that such a recognition can only come as part of a larger settlement package.

Tags: barack obama, republican party

"Munich", "Munich", go away!

The "Munich analogy" is itself becoming an analogy of history degraded to slogans and then degraded to even more mindless slogans, producing an all-too-real threat inflation that causes all-too-real problems.

Our Dear Leader Bush was addressing the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) on Thursday and he used the Munich analogy to criticize Obama; he didn't mention Obama by name, but the White House made it clear that he was one of the appeasers referenced. But I want to note before getting to more specifics that Dear Leader was so off-base on this one that it actually drove Chris Matthews, yes, that Chris Matthews, into acting like a real journalist for several consecutive minutes! It was that bad.

Dear Leader said:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Obama fired back immediately. Joe Lieberman agreed with Dear Leader. And that bold, independent Maverick McCain ... agreed with Bush 100%. (See quotes below.)

The Munich analogy as it has become embedded in the American political vocabulary over the decades has usually been used to refer to backing down unwisely in the face of a military aggressor. Bush's usage today is a neocon version that takes it into a further step of deterioration: "appeasement" in his Knesset speech means even negotiating with a potential enemy.

Wasn't it the neocons political god Winston Churchill who said on that topic the "jaw, jaw" is better than "war, war"? John Kennedy's famous line - "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate." - doesn't sound like cowardly shirking of duty to me. It sounds more like plain common sense.

But in CheneyWorld, we've gone from "Munich" being a bad deal (the more-or-less reality-based version) to a cowardly backing down from a dangerous aggressor (the threat-inflation version) to the problem having been the whole idea of even attempting to use diplomacy to avoid war. If it keeps going down this path, "Munich" will eventually mean the cowardly failure to invade and occupy Germany in 1921 or so when Hitler's political career was just getting started. Even with Bush's version, any attempt to seriously apply historical lessons from the "Munich" experience of 1938 has evaporated into the air.

Sen. Joe Biden, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called Bush's comment "bulls**t". A perfectly sober analysis, I would say.

Chris Matthews is the walking embodiment of what is wrong with our sad excuse for a press corps these days. But credit where credit is due. He at least pinned down some fool rightwing radio ranter named Kevin James on what he knew about "Munich". And the guy didn't know squat. Enjoy the show in text and video at Chris Matthews Stumps Right-Wing Radio Host: ‘Tell Me What Chamberlain Did?’ ‘I Don’t Know’ ThinkProgress.org 05/15/08.

Let's not go overboard. Since this Kevin James guy has a head so empty that even OxyContin probably isn't in there, Matthews looked like a well-informed guy by contrast. But even in those unaccustomed moments of committing an act of journalism, he was a little shaky on some details. He didn't seem to know much about William Borah (rightwing isolationist Senator who actually admired Hitler), who Dear Leader referenced in his Knesset speech. And he was kind of shaky on whether the Munich Conference was in 1938 or 1939. (It was 1938.)

See: 'Appeasement' remark by Bush sets off political fray by Johanna Neuman Los Angeles Times Online 05/15/08

McCain: Bush ‘Exactly Right’ On ‘Appeasement’ Remark, Praises Reagan’s Handling Of Iran Hostage Crisis ThinkProgress.org 05/15/08. The bold Maverick even had the gall to say:

Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain. I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.

What a shameless bunch of hooey! Leave aside for the moment Reagan's arms-for-hostages deal that Ollie North and his boys ran for him that became infamous as the Iran-Contra scandal.

There's a substantial body of mostly circumstantial evidence, circumstantial but very persuasive in an historical sense, that the Reagan campaign did negotiate with Iran behind the backs of the Carter administration in 1980 to delay the release of the hostages until after the 1980 election. Yes, I know that conventional wisdom considers this "October surprise" story to be a silly conspiracy theory.

But I'm one of maybe ten people in the US who believes that it was Oswald in the book depository with the rifle in 1963. Single assassin. And I'm probably the only person alive who doesn't believe Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had an affair (though I'm willing to concede there's evidence for a one-night stand that could convince a reasonable person). Which is not evidence of any kind for the October surprise. But I'm just saying.

Gary Sick laid out the evidence in his 1991 book October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan. Robert Perry reported on his own two-year investigation of the story in Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (1993). Sick's book provoked the Democratic-controlled Congress into a desultory investigation, which concluded with no thorough digging into the story. But the investigations did produce some additional information, as Perry reports in his account.

It's too bad the investigation wasn't pressed much more seriously. One of the key players in the October Surprise story, for instance, was Laurence Silverman, who went on to become a federal judge who played a disreputable role in the Whitewater witch-hunt against the Clintons in the 1990s.

The Congressional investigations drug on into 1992. But this was the year the Establishment press went off the cliff with the Whitewater story. We were entering a new era of press malfunction. The Republicans in Congress belligerently opposed the investigation. The press poo-poohed the evidence. And the Dems finally gave it up.

Now, the Maverick can say, "He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home."

Will any of the Great American's Hannah Montana fan-boys and -girls in the press dig into what a ditzy statement that is? Hell could freeze over tomorrow, too. Life is full of surprises.

Joe Lieberman has really become a sad case, as we see in Lieberman On Bush Comparing Democrats To Nazi-Appeasers: 'The President Got It Exactly Right' ThinkProgress.org 05/15/08:

President Bush got it exactly right today when he warned about the threat of Iran and its terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. It is imperative that we reject the flawed and naïve thinking that denies or dismisses the words of extremists and terrorists when they shout "Death to America" and “Death to Israel,” and that holds that — if only we were to sit down and negotiate with these killers — they would cease to threaten us. It is critical to our national security that our commander-in-chief is able to distinguish between America’s friends and America’s enemies, and not confuse the two.

This viewpoint doesn't see diplomacy as even part of foreign policy in dealing with potentially hostile states or groups. Foreign policy without diplomacy is not really foreign policy, it's just straight-up militarism. War and the threat of war are the only tools in that toolbox.

And for anyone who actually cares about the history of the Munich Conference and what real lessons sane people might learn from it, I can't recommend highly enough Jeffrey Record's The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007), which I reviewed on 01/02/07. It's a serious book but it's not that long and it's very accessible.

Most of the book's text is available online from the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Aug 2005).

The scary thing is, people like Dick Cheney and Rummy and the rest of Bush's crew actually make policies and invade countries based on thinking that's this disconnected from the actual experience of the past. Used in this way, the "lessons of Munich" just become a magic talisman to use against anyone who disagrees with your foreign policy of the moment.

Tags: appeasement, jeffrey record, munich agreement, second world war, world war two

That Mississippi win

Bob McElvaine is Paintin' It Blue in Mississippi at his new Huffington Post blog 05/14/08. The topic, of course, is Travis Childers win in the 1st Congressional District special election:

But the Tuesday poll result that provides the clearest (and for Republicans most terrifying) writing on the wall came from here in Mississippi. The victory by Democrat Travis Childers over Republican Greg Davis in a special election for the House seat representing Mississippi's First District is sending shock waves throughout the Grand Old Party. ...

Three of the four Congressmen from Mississippi are now Democrats. What's more, there is a very real chance that, with Obama at the head of the ticket, a huge African-American vote in November will enable Democratic former Governor Ronnie Musgrove to defeat newly appointed Republican Senator Roger Wicker. Furthermore, as I argued nearly two years ago, there is a real possibility that Obama could carry Mississippi. ...

It has rarely been the case that as Mississippi goes, so goes the nation, but when this red state turns blue it's a sure indication that the GOP is the Gone Old Party.

I appreciate Bob's optimism, though an Obama win in Mississippi is hard to imagine. If that happens, the Republican Party might want to think about disbanding altogether. I can easily imagine that Musgrove has a shot at Trent Lott's old Senate seat. Bob's post is also a reminder that the business about "red" and "blue" states can be misleading. Three of Mississippi's four members of Congress are Dems, the Dems have a good shot at one of the Senate seats, and the Republican Senator Thad Cochran is about 150 years old and probably more reactionary than Dick Cheney. Mississippi may become a "purple" state rather than a "red" one.

Terrorist attack in Spain

There's certainly not time enough for me to blog about everything I might like to. I probably try to blog about too many things anyway.

But I do want to start at least taking blog notice of terrorist attacks in Spain. Because most of them come from the Basque separatist group ETA. Our broken media give some attention to terrorist attacks and to real or alleged Muslim terrorist groups. But non-Muslim domestic terrorist groups and individuals, which are surely far more numerous in the US, don't get even that inadequate amount of coverage.

And to understand terrorism, as opposed to the fearful images of The Terrorists that the Republicans use to justify war and increasing military budgets, terrorist attacks like those from ETA in Spain give a broader picture of the concept of real existing terrorism.

ETA stands for "Euskadi Ta Askatasuna", which in the Basque language means "Euskadi (their name for a Basque fatherland) and liberty". ETA styles itself as a leftwing revolutionary group. It traces its origins to 1959 during the Franco regime.

ETA carried out attacks against targets during the Franco regime and continued to do so under the Spanish democracy established in 1975. ETA observed a truce in 1998-99 and renounced assassination as a tactic in 2000.

During the current Socialist (PSOE) administration of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the government achieved a difficult truce with ETA. As El Mundo summarizes it:

El 30 de diciembre de 2006, la organización terrorista ETA rompe el alto el fuego que había declarado el 22 de marzo del mismo año. Aún pasan cinco meses hasta que la banda terrorista anuncia de manera oficial, el 5 de junio de 2007, que a partir de las 0.00 horas del 6 de junio «quedan abiertos todos los frentes».

[On December 30, 2006, the terrorist organization ETA broke the cease-fire it had declared on March 22 of the same year. It was five months later that the terrorist group officially announced, on June 5, 2007, that beginning on midnight of June 6, "all fronts would be open".]

And so it has been since.

The Basque country (País Vasco) in northern Spain

The Council on Foreign Relations Web site has a useful Q&A - or maybe I should call it a FAQ - on ETA. It gives a quick summary of Basque history:

The Basques are a linguistically and culturally distinct Christian group that has lived since the Stone Age in the mountainous region that straddles the border between modern-day Spain and France. The Basques have never had their own independent state, but have enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy over the centuries under Spanish and French rule. About half of the 2.1 million residents of the three provinces that make up the autonomous Basque region speak fluent Basque or understand some of the language. Basque nationalists include other areas with smaller Basque-speaking minorities - the Spanish province of Navarre and three departments in southwest France - in their vision of a Basque homeland.

The most recent attack by ETA was on Wednesday, ETA mata a un guardia civil y hiere a otros cuatro con un coche bomba en Álava El Mundo 14.05.2008; Resurgent Eta kills policeman in car-bomb attack by Elizabeth Nash The Independent 05/15/08.

A member of the Spanish security forces was killed and four people wounded. Nash's Independent report says:

The Prime Minister, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, condemned the attack as "cowardly, miserable and criminal", and thanked MPs for closing ranks in a declaration of repudiation. "We are stronger when we are united," he said.

"Eta has a very powerful infrastructure," Javier Balza, who is responsible for security in the Basque region, said yesterday. Eta enjoyed backing from a great number of radical sympathisers who provided the organisation with help and support, Mr Balza warned.

Unusually, police received no advance warning before the bomb ripped through the barracks where officers and their families, including five children, were sleeping. Four officers, two of them women, were being treated in hospital for serious injuries.

And, in contrast to the approach of the Cheney-Bush administration which went to an extreme of cynicism in exploiting fear of terrorism for crass, narrow partisan purposes, Zapatero's government has worked to achieve a broad consensus on fighting ETA terrorism. Nash reports:

MPs from all parties signed a joint statement condemning the attack, which included for the first time in many years the wholehearted participation of the conservative opposition Popular Party. "The government knows it has the PP's maximum support for whatever measures are needed to defeat Eta," a party spokeswoman said.

This marks an important change of tack for the PP, which refused to join a cross-party statement condemning Eta's previous fatal attack in March.

Party differences over terrorism have embittered Spain's political scene for years, and weakened Mr Zapatero's anti-terror policy during his first term. But following defeat at the polls, the PP has recognised that public opinion yearns for cross-party consensus. The PP is undergoing a deep crisis following its second electoral defeat, with barely veiled challenges to Mariano Rajoy's leadership.

Background sites on ETA: La dictatura del terror El Mundo; Chronology - Basque separatist group ETA Reuters 05/14/08; La pesadilla dura ya 40 años El País 15.05.2008.

Tags: españa, eta, spain, zapatero

Remembering 1968: Ralf Fücks gives a Green view

Ralf Fücks, chair of the German Green Party and co-president of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Foundation)

The best of the ten essays in Dissent magazine's Spring 2008 symposium on "1968" is the contribution by Ralf Fücks (Dissent uses the Anglicized spelling "Fuecks" - and, no, it's pronounced more like "fooks" than what some of you are thinking). Fücks is the chairman of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the foundation aligned with the German Green Party. The Heinrich Böll Stiftung also has an English-language Web site, which features a copy of the Dissent article under the title 1968 and the Discovery of Politics.

Opening by observing that the year 1968 resonated in some "truly revolutionary" political and cultural develops, he proceeds in the second paragraph:

It is true that the protest movement of that year did not lead to a dramatic overturn of the political order like the French or Russian revolutions. The extent of violence and counter-violence of 1968 is not comparable to the excesses of past wars and civil wars. It was the Prague Spring - an event that is often ignored when we speak of 1968 - that came closest to being the revolutionary overthrow of a regime. A peaceful revolution began in Czechoslovakia, and it shook "really-existing socialism" to its foundations. The revolution was destroyed by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact. The tragic gravity of the Prague events went far beyond the symbolic actions and theatrical stage-managing of student protests in the West. The Soviet invasion buried hopes for "socialism with a human face." In fact, communist hegemony in Eastern Europe was doomed from that moment. It was only a matter of time until a system incapable of reform collapsed. If there is an inherent link between 1968 and 1989 it is that the defeat of the Prague Spring would lead one day to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. (my emphasis)

The German Green Party always opposed the hardline Cold War pressures for military buildups and political confrontation between East and West in Europe. But the Greens were also notable since their founding for their active solidarity with the democratic opposition in Communist East Germany (DDR, Deutsche Democratische Republik, English GDR, German Democratic Republic). In this way, they distinguished themselves from the two major German parties of today, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Christian Democrats (CDU). The Green Party supported the Ostpolitik initiated under the leadership of the SPD's Willy Brandt to make a de facto normalization of relations between East and West Germany. But, unlike the SPD and CDU in practice, the Greens understood Ostpolitik to include active solidarity and interchange with the grassroots democratic movements in the DDR, which organized around religious, peace and ecological issues.

The Greens' version of support for democracy and human rights in the Eastern bloc was not simply a slogan against