I gave this interview over 20 years ago, shortly after losing the 2002 Texas gubernatorial election.
We’ve just been through the 60th anniversaries of two of the most indelible crimes against humanity in our history. One doesn’t wish to let such a portentous anniversary pass without comment, although generally there is the problem that it’s difficult to find something new to say.
This year, however, things are a little different.
Gar Alperovitz’s well-known book The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and the Architecture of an American Myth is probably the key source to read in order to begin to understand an issue almost irretrievably clouded by decades of U.S. state propaganda.
Alperovitz seeks to show, partly by looking at transcripts of Japanese diplomatic communiques interecepted by the United States under an operation code-named MAGIC, that the United States was well aware that Japan was in dire straits and seeking desperately for any sort of negotiated settlement with the United States that would preserve the emperor’s position.
There’s a lot more in the book, for example the creation of the Hiroshima myth, the story that the bomb saved countless lives. Alperovitz traces the evolution of the myth, documenting the way that the number of lives saved soared as the political imperatives became clearer.
Undoubtedly, the majority of his work stands and will stand any test of time. Recently, however, some scholarship has brought into doubt the question of just how ready Japan was to surrender and how much the United States could have known about it.
Richard Frank, writing in the Weekly Standard (not a publication I usually give much credence to), says that more recently (mid-90’s) declassified MAGIC transcripts of Japanese military communiques paint a very different story. While diplomats may have been flailing for a peaceful solution, the military command apparently was rather intransigently preparing to beat back an invasion and showed no sign of incipient surrender under any terms.
From a different angle, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s new book, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, based on throgouhly combing through Japanese, American, and Soviet archives, has come to the conclusion that Hiroshima and Nagasaki played almost no role in the Japanese surrender decision, which was dictated virtually entirely by the Soviet declaration of war on August 8.
This seems very plausible. After all, the Japanese ruling class might have expected that the Americans would hang a few of them, subjugate the class to U.S. strategic interests, and for the most part prop the rest of them up in power so as to rule Japan with relative ease — after making sure they had been properly brought to heel, of course. On the other hand, they could expect the Soviets to liquidate them entirely. This, of course, is precisely the difference between the American treatment of the Nazis and the Soviet treatment.
So what do we make of all this? Does the incredible intransigence of the Japanese military command and its lack of concern for civilian lives exonerate the United States?
Stress due to over-work or unemployment can cause levitra without prescription Erectile Dysfunction and premature ejaculation. Although some medicines like Kamagra, more information cialis generic overnight, Silagra, Aurogra, Caverta etc. are supposed to be easy means of treatment. Experts often advise ED sufferers to exercise regularly, viagra the pill because exercise helps improve overall blood circulation. It does spoil someone’s personal sexual life along with his deep love for his stuffed toy tiger – https://regencygrandenursing.com/long-term-care/pain-management commander levitra Hobbes. This reminds me a great deal of an argument that always got thrown at us regarding Saddam and the sanctions on Iraq. First, we need to kill children because Saddam is intransigent and won’t cooperate fully with weapons inspections and killing children is the only way to make him cooperate. Second, Saddam is hard-hearted and doesn’t care about the children killed, so it’s not our fault that they’ve died.
I believe the logic error is reasonably obvious. In the case of Japan, it’s very clear that the rulers, like Saddam, were hard-hearted and militaristic, that they committed numerous crimes against humanity, and that they shared a great deal of the blame for what was done to their people.
But, just as in the case of Saddam, the United States knew that beforehand. They had incinerated over 500,000 civilians with their deadly firebomb raids, which by the summer of 1945 they were able to carry out without any resistance, and the Japanese military didn’t bat an eye.
So the United States set out to kill as many civilians as possible in these attacks, even though, because of the MAGIC intercepts, they were in a good position to believe the killing of civilians would make no difference to the Japanese government. They gave no warning for the Hiroshima bombing; they did give warning about Nagasaki, one day after the bombing. Civilians had no chance to flee. The bombs were set to detonate at exactly the height above the ground that would maximize the blast devastation. Everything was done to kill as many civilians as possible. And, in the end, it may not have made one damn bit of difference in making the Japanese surrender.
I don’t see that this new scholarship, important as it is, changes anything in the obvious determination that these are two of the most incandescent crimes against humanity ever committed.
Some wags like to justify the atomic bombings by pointing out the destructions of Tokyo, Dresden, etc. I’ve never quite understood why committing a crime makes committing another crime ok.
But it does bring up another interesting point. When I first read about the Manhattan project and the bombing of Hiroshima as a child, I didn’t distinguish between the firebombings and the atomic bombing. They killed similar numbers of innocent people, so they were equally bad.
And yet, in a way, horrific crimes as the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were worse. First, of course, because they started the nuclear arms race and brought us to the point where we can actually annihilate ourselves. Second, because of the radiation and lingering effects.
But there’s another way, and it’s hard to talk about logically. Freeman Dyson, in his autobiography Disturbing the Universe, talks about his experience. He worked as an analyst for British Bomber Command and, over the years, became completely disillusioned with what he called this “crazy game of murder.” Then one day, after he was out and the war for him was over, he picked up a newspaper and saw the headline, “New Force of Nature Unleashed.” He said to himself, “This is it. Childhood’s end.”
It’s always struck me that, of all the headlines put up on August 7, that one is somehow the most profound. Even now, reading it sends a chill down my spine. To discover the most profound secrets of nature and use them to incinerate over 200,000 men, women, and children is unspeakable in some way that goes deeper than logic.
Some quick thoughts about tonight’s debate: This may not be Bernie’s last chance to command a major national audience, but it’s doubtful there will be bigger ones in the future (unless he becomes president). Although statistically he’s a dead goner after the Florida primary, the coronavirus is the kind of all-encompassing crisis that can overturn all prognostications. It will still take a miracle, bur there’s really no downside to his acting as if the chance of pulling off a political resuscitation is in fact nonzero.
How does he do that? I watched his fireside chat last night, and it wasn’t what he needed. Bernie is never really bad–he stays coherent and says things that make sense–but he is rarely or never great either. I’d be stunned if that chat pulled one more person across the line, despite the fact that it’s obvious you’d rather have him directing the national response to this crisis than Trump or Biden.
He made solid points about the way lack of universal heatlh-care and extreme inequality exacerbate the crisis, and proposed more good ideas to deal with the fallout than we have heard from any other politician, like signficant expansion of unemployment benefits. But he diluted the impact in numerous ways. He quickly pivoted to regular campaign talk, saying for example that he wanted to quiz Biden about why he has donations from 60 billionaires–a question remarkably few people care about right now.
Worse, he speaks in generalities, understates when he should make targeted emotional appeals, and remains broad and unfocused. What is needed right now is a clear, pointed indictment of what Trump and his cronies have done that alarms people, coupled with a warm, reassuring prescription for what can be done. Bernie is good at neither of those things, but he needs to be.
He shouldn’t have done a fireside chat; he should have been looking directly into the camera doing a prepared speech that put flesh on the bones of his general indictment of Trump, with facts and figures. Instead of saying Trump didn’t mobilize for this crisis, repeat actual Trump quotes. Instead of saying this is a crisis, give people some updates on what’s happening globally. Instead of saying that it’s awful that people might be charged for coronavirus testing and treatment, point specifically to Trump’s abdication on this issue and mention that it was left to a freshman Congresswoman to obtain free testing for us. It’s not that people remember them, but specifics can be shocking. They also give people a sense that you know what you’re talking about and are not just engaging in partisan spin.
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It seems clear what his strategy in the debate should be. It’s an audition to be president, not Democratic nominee. And, as in a real audition, he should *show* that he is the better candidate, not *tell* us that he is.
First, every answer should be directed toward the crisis. There will be time later to hear about free college, criminal justice reform, and the rest of it. Second, he needs to attack Trump, not Biden. The reason seems clear: audiences tuned out and turned off to Democratic intramural debates about how exactly they were going to provide universal coverage or how much wealth tax Sanders had vs. Warren or whether they would do a lot for racial justice or much more than a lot. Not enough people cared about these distinction even before the crisis emerged into our consciousness.
Bernie needs to show he is the man (sigh…) to take on Trump and set the country on a path to sanity. Numerous commentators have suggested that the coronavirus helped Biden because people want safety and comfort, but Biden, who can barely read from a Teleprompter, does not inspire confidence in me. All the more so because this health crisis is also sure to be a crisis of capitalism as well. It should not be difficult for Bernie to come across as the person who is on top of what’s going on and has a plan to deal with all aspects of the crisis–at least by comparison with Biden and Trump. He needs to be evocative both about the scale of the crisis and the scale of his solutions. It will be a moment that calls for an FDR, not a Hoover/Biden. People are ready to hear this, as long as it’s from someone who can convince them that he know’s what’s going on.
It is vital that Bernie differentiate himself from Biden affirmatively, by showing he can do this better, rather than by attacking Biden’s negatives directly. All the more so since Bernie has already made it clear he won’t do the latter. Unlike many Berniebots, Bernie has no intention of bringing down the temple upon himself.
Ariel Sharon, 85. See the Washington Post obituary for a tutorial in how to mention Sabra and Shatila without mentioning Sabra and Shatila.
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The latest of the Snowden revelations–that the NSA has managed to compromise most of the encryption commonly used on the Internet–is likely to come as far more of a surprise to the online privacy community than all that has come before. After all, encryption is supposed to be the one remaining unbreachable bastion of privacy and individual identity–despite ongoing concerns about issues like backdoors in encryption programs.
In a way, though, this was the most predictable of all the programs–as long as you assume that this country actually has a strong, functioning state. Though this assumption that has seemed increasingly dubious in light of the legislative shenanigans of the last several years, this heartwarming story of proactive government intervention to shape the emerging social terrain should certainly weigh in the balance as well.
In his path-breaking book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, the political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott talks about the ongoing modern-state project of “legibilization,” of reconfiguring individuals and society to make more and more information legible to the state, or, in particular, to state officials. Unsystematic local knowledge that is difficult to detach from its context and from its knower is transformed into data that can be standardized, replicated, transmitted, and analyzed. To a certain degree, the same kind of thing can be done with the physical environment. Scott describes his own process of realization that this is a fundamental imperative of modern states:
How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.
So, for example, even today in Afghanistan there are many people who only go by a single name. If, in their locality, there is a chance of confusion, you can also mention their father’s name. This sort of thing is fine for people who might need to know this person on an individual level, but it’s no good for a state that has an interest in maintaining a centralized record of every citizen’s identity and salient characteristics. Thus, for example, in 1934, the modernizing Turkish state under Kemal Ataturk promulgated the Surname Reform, making every citizen come up with a surname that the state could use. Ataturk himself was born just plain Mustafa; he became Mustafa Kemal in school when there was another boy named Mustafa in his class, and he took Ataturk as a surname in 1934.
This may seem a trivial example (though it really isn’t), but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Scott takes the reader through examples as varied as the conversion to arboreal monocropping fostered by 19th-century German “scientific forestry,” the reduction of a mess of locally varying customary land-use rights to the simple dichotomy of property ownership or non-ownership, and the imposition of geometrically regular street grids in urban redesign and renewal projects.
These kinds of measures generally have two important overarching effects: they decrease local autonomy and the ability to resist government impositions, and they destroy at least some local knowledge in the process of transforming and uniformizing it. Legibilization projects have sometimes had terrible consequences, especially when part of a larger “high-modernist” transformation project carried out by an authoritarian state (or by a nominally democratic one with no effective accountability to marginalized populations), but they always involve at the very least creation of further potential limits to individual freedom and autonomy.
What does all this have to do with encryption? Well, the first thing to realize is that the extraordinary scope of the NSA’s ongoing project–one tiny piece of it is the expenditure of “$250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to ‘covertly influence’ their product designs”–is an argument that one should actually have faith in strong encryption. If you understand number theory and cryptography, you probably already believe in strong encryption, at least in principle, since you’ve seen mathematical proof of its effectiveness, but the NSA is providing “sociological proof” as well.
This has been leading with excellent promising results of getting rid from the cialis no prescription http://seanamic.com/privacy-policy-cookies/ problems of impotent victims. There is a reason behind this issue and that cheap viagra samples is Sildenafil citrate. If you have very firm bowel movement, once a day or two between two doses; otherwise, tadalafil side effects it may increase the side effects of using the drug. You will be on seanamic.com buy cheap viagra the receiving end of unwanted health effects if more than one pill per day is the recommended and advised dose for men suffering from ED, which must be taken 1 hour prior getting into sexual intercourse. Strong encryption represents in principle a permanently unbreakable bastion of illegibility, an area that must, by the ineluctable dictates of mathematics, remain terra incognita to all governments for all time. Since any kind of electronic communication can be hidden behind the walls of this fortress, there is the prospect of governments being permanently blind to a major chunk of human society.
Indeed, as soon as the threat reared its head, the U.S. government went into action to preserve the principle of legibility. The Clinton administration introduced an initiative to foster use of the “Clipper Chip,” working toward a “key-escrow” paradigm, in which strong encryption was possible, but the U.S. government would have a permanent back-door into any encrypted communication.
Lance Hoffman, a computer science professor, articulated the NSA’s concerns at the time:”The agency is really worried about its screens going blank. When that happens, the N.S.A. — … — goes belly-up.” Primarily because of the public-relations work of a coalition of hackers, IT people, the ACLU, and such types, the NSA was stymied, and, according to the New York Times, turned in 2000 (NOT 2001) to under-the-table efforts to get the same results de facto.
These efforts include brute-force encryption cracking, pressuring tech companies to build in back doors and yield up master keys and private information of subscribers, and even attempting to influence the security architecture that IT entrepreneurs build into the new systems that are constantly revolutionizing the world of electronic communication. Shelley once called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world; today, sadly, IT entrepreneurs and computer programmers are–at least in this case, we know that democratic accountability is being intruded into that legislation by our own government’s National Security Agency.
All of this work will not preserve perfect legibility. As long as you write your own encryption programs, make sure you keep your private encryption key on an “air-gapped” computer that has never been connected to the Internet, and encrypt and decrypt messages only on that computer, the NSA will have a tough time gaining access to your communications. For the 17 people who do that, I guess, things will be just fine. But perfect legibility has never been a requirement for the ongoing encroachment of state power into our lives. As long as maintaining your own illegibility requires you to live like a fugitive–or, in this case, like a spook–the legibility project has served its purpose.
Although principled right-wingers, libertarians, anarchists, and the ACLU would surely disagree, legibilization projects are hardly an unalloyed evil. The state needs capacity in order to create public goods and to foster public coordination. An increasingly complex world is going to need a state with increasingly complex capacities. And sometimes soulless number-crunching does come up with better answers to problems than inchoate local knowledge.
These projects need to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Even here, though, it’s a big mistake to think of them as being akin to individual programs that can be judged case-by-case. Instituting a legibilization project involves an ongoing and likely permanent change in governmental and societal infrastructure that will impose unforeseeable constraints in unimaginable future situations. On this one, in principle, in the most abstract sense, I would side with states–because strong encryption is forever. In practice, however, at the current time, the results are all negative. There’s no reason to believe NSA meddling has had any real effect in preventing terrorist attacks and there’s every reason to believe that the NSA, the Obama administration, and states around the world are on a “national-security” power trip that has nothing to do with security and everything to do with increasing the asymmetry in access and accountability between individuals and the state, an asymmetry that is already crippingly stacked against the individual.
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Yesterday, I watched the video of Wael Ghonim, a young Google executive held incommunicado for 12 days by Egyptian security forces, on Dream TV. Everyone should watch it, and everyone in Egypt already has. Ghonim came almost straight from captivity to the TV studio, and the interview reflects the tremendous stress he had been under–kept blindfolded the entire time, with his family and friends completely ignorant of his status, presumably wondering about his fate. The interview is rambling and repetitive, but incredibly moving (for those of you us who can’t follow rapid-fire Egyptian Arabic, there is a subtitled version). At the end, when the host starts showing pictures of young men martyred in the protests, Ghonim breaks down and, sobbing violently, apologizes to the parents of the martyrs, but says it wasn’t the protesters’ fault but rather the fault of certain people in charge who don’t want to leave–then, unable to bear it any longer, he walks off the set. The interview is already being credited with bringing out many people who had not protested earlier to the massive protest in Tahrir Square yesterday.
In the interview, Ghonim hits on a series of politically powerful points: the protesters are not traitors and not in it for themselves, just people who love their country; the protesters didn’t want to destroy anything, let alone harm anybody; the state of emergency (30 years old) must be lifted and the rule of law restored; there are many good people in the government, but the government treats the people of Egypt like children and lies to them, and it must stop; that there are many good people in Mubarak’s NDP, but the NDP is hopelessly corrupt and must go.
For some reason, I hadn’t thought about it before, but it occurred to me while watching the interview that this is really the revolution of the “shabab,” the youth. Khalid Said, a young man killed by the police. Wael Ghonim, a young man who started a Facebook page devoted to Said’s memory, that became a key organizing center. Countless other young people, who have been coordinating electronic communication and arranging the low-tech logistics of the occupation of Tahrir Square. Countless others, who have been trying to protect the protesters from first the police and then the undercover police. Mohammed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation started the springtime of the Arab nations. More than a dozen other young men who electrocuted themselves or set themselves on fire.
This is an Internet revolution at least as much because the core of it is a generation shaped and formed by the Internet as because of the use of the Internet for communication and coordination. Yes, there are old men and old women, middle-aged women in headscarves, and small children in the square, but at the core are the young men and women born to usher in a new age. They are teaching older people about horizontal structures and “rhizomatic” networks and self-organizing, ideas that don’t occur naturally to the old of any culture, let alone those of the authoritarian Middle East (they are also discovering right now the limitations of those ideas).
All of this puts me in mind of the only parallel in Arab history to the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts–the first Palestinian intifada. Spearheaded (seemingly) by young boys throwing stones at tanks, it hit an Arab world disillusioned and embittered by defeat, repression, and accommodation like a thunderbolt.
The great Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani wrote a poem about it, “The Trilogy of the Children of the Stones” (Qabbani was a romantic poet, known by the epithet “Sha’ir al Hubb”–“Poet of Love”–but in places where the people are oppressed, all poets of love are poets of politics and vice versa):
The children of the stones
have scattered our papers
spilled ink on our clothes
mocked the banality of old texts…
What matters about
the children of the stones
Is that they have brought us rain after centuries of thirst
Brought us the sun after centuries of darkness,
Brought us hope after centuries of defeat…
The most important
thing about them is that they have rebelled
against the authority of their fathers,
That they have fled the House of Obedience…
O Children of Gaza
Don’t mind our broadcasts
Don’t listen to us
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Of addition, of subtraction
Wage your wars and leave us aloneWe are dead and tombless
Orphans with no eyes
Children of Gaza
Don’t refer to our writings
Don’t read us
We are your parents
Don’t be like us.
O mad people of Gaza,
A thousand greetings to the mad
The age of political reason
Has long departed
So teach us madness.(This translation is found in Tariq Ali’s Clash of Fundamentalisms)
Here, Qabbani is neither saying that the activists of the intifada are mad nor is he exalting madness. He is saying rather that in a world where the “rational” thing to do is to accept and even collaborate with oppression and not to resist, it is better to be mad.
Qabbani’s phrase “the children of the stones” (atfal al-hijara) to me has a double meaning. The first is, obviously, “the children throwing stones at Israeli tanks.” I think, however, that he also means that this is a generation born of stones, of the deaf and dumb and impassive. I imagine whenever a revolutionary generation arises, it seems that it has been born of stones, or, perhaps, that it has not been born of its parents but is a mysterious new species.
When Ghonim tells the people in charge that they must not act like they are the fathers and the people of Egypt are the children, that the protesters are adults and have the right to know what is going on and to make their own decisions, he is asserting the voice of his generation, just as radical activists did in the West in 1968.
Revolutionary generations can turn bad or fail of their promise, but their passing always leaves an indelible mark. After the first intifada, Palestinians could never be the same again. The revolutions of 1848 were distinguished by the rapidity of their success but even more so by the rapidity of their failure and the completeness of the reactionary backlash they engendered. And yet afterward the traditional authority of monarchs was a dead letter, and universal manhood suffrage and civil rights were permanently enshrined in the expectations of the peoples involved.
The Egyptian struggle is at an impasse now, with an inflexible military hypocritically and corruptly backed by the United States pitted against a brave and resolute people, of whom at least 302 have already been murdered by the Egyptian state. It will be very difficult for the protesters to hold out, unless the U.S. government can be pressured to change its position. Anything may happen (and if Mubarak falls, the rest of the ossifying autocrats of the Arab world had better watch out). But whatever the denouement of this struggle, these young people have already achieved something that will not be stamped out.
Well, what I predicted–that the United States would come down on the side of the Egyptian military and against real democracy–is already coming true. Headline in the Times today: Obama Backs Suleiman-Led Transition. Secretary Clinton wants “to support Mr. Suleiman as he seeks to defuse street protests and promises to reach out to opposition groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood.” And “the United States and other Western powers appear to have concluded that the best path for Egypt — and certainly the safest one, to avoid further chaos — is a gradual transition, managed by Mr. viagra samples australia It is a rich source of vitamins, they should constitute a major chunk of your diet since your body needs them to produce testosterone. The dosage of the impotence free levitra medications is recommended to be taken once in day, so please take it as recommended. You do not need to brand viagra canada swallow any sort of tablet. Vitamins form an cialis 40mg important part of home remedies for infertility. Suleiman, a pillar of Egypt’s existing establishment, and backed by the military.” What a fitting conclusion to our sordid backing of Egypt’s military dictatorship for over 30 years. More later.
There is a conflagration in the Arab world right now. The wave of popular protest unleashed by the self-immolation of a poor, oppressed, despised young man in a small town in Tunisia is already making an indelible imprint on that world. However things turn out, and it is far too early to say how they will, nothing will ever be the same again.
Zine el Abidine ben Ali of Tunisia is gone, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is on the threshold, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen has promised to step down when his term ends in 2013, Abdullah of Jordan has dismissed his cabinet, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria is planning to end a 19-year state of emergency (imposed after Islamists won the 1992 elections), and the contagion of popular protest has reached even Khartoum, previously embroiled in questions of civil war, secession, and brutality in Darfur. As I write, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians are in Tahrir Square for “Mubarak’s Day of Departure.”
Many commentators have compared this wave of popular uprising and revolution with 1989, when the Soviet satellite regimes of eastern Europe toppled like so many dominoes. The historical comparison I find more compelling is to 1848, when urban insurrections swept the provinces of Italy, France, the German principalities, and Austria-Hungary, and radicalizing effects were seen in eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and even Brazil (exiled radicals also played an important role in American politics leading up to the Civil War). France, of course, being France, had two insurrections, the second one being the first to bring forth the ideas of democratic socialism (the uprising was quickly crushed, but democratic socialism took much longer to die). Within months, conservative governments toppled all through central Europe, and within another year a wave of reaction restored, or seemed to, the status quo ante.
It is utterly foolhardy to attempt to predict what will happen; at this moment, I don’t even feel sure that Mubarak will have to step down. I do want, however, to put forth some general considerations.
Most fundamental is the First Law of Revolutions: He who hesitates is lost.
Some of the early tests of resolution have already been passed by the protesters. Tunisians weren’t fooled by ben Ali’s talk about being misled by other officials, whom he then dismissed, or by his promise to magically create 300,000 jobs. In Egypt, when Mubarak promised to step down in September, the people didn’t allow themselves to be mollified; when the army told them to go home, they stayed in Tahrir Square.
They have figured out that they have power only so long as they remain mobilized, and if they leave the streets their activist core will be eviscerated by September–and that promises only mean something when the other side can enforce them.
They have also figured out, if they had any doubt, that the military is not on their side. Despite President Obama’s commendation of “the Egyptian military for the professionalism and patriotism that it has shown thus far in allowing peaceful protests while protecting the Egyptian people,” the truth is quite different. Undoubtedly, early on there were commanders who took the side of the people and even protected them from the riot police, but after the protesters rejected Mubarak’s plan to arrange a slow transition to military rule with a different dictator at the head (Omar Suleiman, most likely), the military took that as a sign that anti-Mubarak now meant pro-democracy; after this, the military knew which side it was on.
Since then, the military has stood by and allowed protesters to be attacked by Molotov-cocktail-wielding thugs, who seem to be largely plainclothes police, criminals, and some young toughs who were paid to show up and keep protesters out of Tahrir Square. It has also been arresting and presumably torturing human rights activists and bloggers and harassing and beating foreign journalists.
Of course, the people being subjected to these indignities cannot be fooled by Obama’s or anyone else’s sententious pronouncements. Early on, there was a great deal of friendship and good-will manifested between people and the military and, on occasion, even the riot police (see numerous iconic kissing photos)–this makes a lot of sense, since the success of these sudden mass popular protests (see Manila 1986, Jakarta 1998) requires that the security forces be split and that they lack the will or the ability to crack down. The arc from kissing soldiers to being mowed down by them is not an unusual one, though–see for example Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The latter has not happened yet in Egypt, and may not happen, because the military is torn between defense of its prerogatives and power, on the one hand, and, on the other, the need to retain a broad legitimacy among the Egyptian middle class. Thus their attempt to make it seem as if the protests are just back-and-forth violence between pro- and anti-Mubarak protesters, causing nothing but chaos and economic loss. That effort looks to be failing, but the military is still held back from unleashing real force, perhaps in part by a feeling that lower-level officers might mutiny, and certainly by the fact that the military is America’s stooge and beneficiary, and that the U.S. government has shown great squeamishness regarding open and public atrocities (what the Egyptian security services do behind closed doors is not only not much of a problem, we have relied on it as an asset, especially since 9/11).
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If Mubarak steps down and things move into a negotiating phase between the people and the military, the Second Law of Revolution comes into play: Nothing is more dangerous than a failure of the political imagination.
I had occasion recently to read Engels’ Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (originally misattributed to Marx). In March of 1848, successful popular insurrections in Vienna and Berlin had dramatically shifted the balance of power in the German states. The powers-that-were, including the various princes and the Diet, the traditional consultative body of the German states, had little choice but to allow arming of the populace and popular elections. The newly elected representatives gathered in Frankfurt am Main and called themselves the German National Assembly.
In his signature intemperate prose, here is Engels’ analysis of that body:
The German National Assembly was expected, by the people, to settle every matter in dispute, and to act as the highest legislative authority for the whole of the German Confederation. But, at the same time, the Diet which had convoked it had in no way fixed its attributions. No one knew whether its decrees were to have force of law, or whether they were to be subject to the sanction of the Diet, or of the individual Governments. In this perplexity, if the Assembly had been possessed of the least energy, it would have immediately dissolved and sent home the Diet—than which no corporate body was more unpopular in Germany—and replaced it by a Federal Government, chosen from among its own members. It would have declared itself the only legal expression of the sovereign will of the German people, and thus have attached legal validity to every one of its decrees. It would, above all, have secured to itself an organized and armed force in the country sufficient to put down any opposition on the parts of the Governments. And all this was easy, very easy, at that early period of the Revolution. … THIS Assembly of old women was, from the first day of its existence, more frightened of the least popular movement than of all the reactionary plots of all the German Governments put together… Instead of asserting its own sovereignty, it studiously avoided the discussion of any such dangerous question.
Engels had the wrong idea about old women, but he was spot-on about everything else. People in the Arab world are rising against an equally illegitimate group of autocratic aristocrats. 1848 was a battle of modernist liberal values against traditional authoritarianism; 2011 is a battle of modernist liberal values against neo-traditional authoritarianism. Indeed, the way that the conservative powers of Europe ruled from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until 1848–through militarization, spies, strenuous censorship, and the creation of police states–is strikingly similar to the way that U.S.-supported Arab autocrats rule today (although maybe not tomorrow).
The Egyptian military, if it negotiates with the people (whatever exactly this would mean), will want to do so in the framework of the existing constitution, in which a national assembly dominated by the NDP (National Democratic Party–Mubarak’s organization) is supposed to remain in power until 2015. If the January 25 movement is not able to assert the sovereignty of the people and its special role as their representative, the chances of real democratization are minuscule.
The U.S. government, all factions united in terror of a genuine popular uprising in the Arab world (let alone one in the country that gave birth to the Muslim Brotherhood), will be on the army’s side in this, ideologically aided, no doubt, by the bland institutionalism of the “democracy promotion” bureaucrats and scholars. Les Gelb, so apt a spokesman for the U.S. foreign policy establishment that he almost seems a self-caricature, sums up the reasons for worrying about any precipitous removal of Mubarak:
“The worry on Mubarak’s part is that if he says yes to this, there will be more demands,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “And since he’s not dealing with a legal entity, but a mob, how does he know there won’t be more demands tomorrow?”
When the people have been excluded from being a legal entity, then it is impossible for them to be one. This is a problem insurrectionaries have always faced and will always face. But it is up to those people to decide whether they are, in Gelb’s charming term, a “mob” or whether they are the legitimate expression of the popular will. If they do so, they will get no support from the United States, Europe, the United Nations, other Arab states (except perhaps Tunisia), the bien pensants of the “international community,” or Mark Zuckerberg. The will need support from the one place they may actually get it–what the New York Times dubbed the “other superpower,” global public opinion.
Of course, Gelb, reprehensible as he is, has a point. Who will the military negotiate with and how? Tunisia and Egypt are striking because they belong to that class of revolutions where, suddenly, as if out of the blue, “everybody” is on the same side. Seemingly, the whole country unites and wants the dictator out. Of course, this is not literally true; there are always, if nothing else, the pampered security forces, cronies of the dictator, and a small paid-off subgroup of the elite. But if a vast majority of all sectors of society outside the dictator’s small group is on one side, revolution can come very swiftly.
The negative side to this is that such revolutions do not cohere around any kind of unified ideology, program, or organizational core. If they were ideological, they would not be unanimous–despite occasional fantasies you may hear from activists, “the people” are never united on some broad, principled approach to society. What is a strength in the tumultuous phase of rapid mobilization becomes a weakness once the question becomes, “What is to be done?” It is difficult and tiring to protest, deal with the disruption of daily life, see people be beaten and killed–at some point, it can be comforting to accept the word of some source of traditional authority that you can go home now, the problems will be fixed. I hope that will not happen in Egypt, but there is no use in anyone telling the people who are so heroically making this revolution what they should want next.
I don’t want to convey the impression that I am a fan of Engelsian “iron resolution,” and its long and sad history in the world of “actually existing communism.” Revolutions have a tendency to conflate the means with the end, but there is no need to worry about that here yet.
I listened to the State of the Union speech. What I heard, though, was not President Obama’s string of irritating platitudes, but the sound of a nation bent on self-destruction.
I don’t say this lightly. Intellectuals have been talking about the fall of the new Rome for decades, and mostly it has been hyperbolic nonsense. This time feels different. It even makes the darkest days of the Bush-Cheney administration seem like some distant, bygone utopia.
The reason for this change is the emergence of two extremely powerful groups that have not the slightest interest in any notion of the public good and are willing to put all of it in jeopardy to satisfy the shortest of short-term interests.
I’m not talking about the forlorn neoconservatives and their paleoconservative allies. They wrecked Iraq, which may never recover. They ripped the velvet glove off America’s iron fist. They made American foreign policy a byword for destructive incompetence. They were arrogant and senseless. They instituted what looks to be a permanent national security state.
But they couldn’t quite touch, and mostly didn’t try to, most of what was good, or at least adequate, about living in America.
That job falls to two of the most sinister forces in the country: finance companies and the Republican Party, also known as the Tea Party.
Now, as Obama might say, let me be clear. I am not saying that these two groups don’t have the good of working Americans at heart, that they are in it for themselves, or anything that banal. I am saying that their deliberately unenlightened self-interest, fixated on immediate aggrandizement, puts at risk the good of even the most privileged Americans, and that they are quite happy to hang it all on a throw of the dice in which there are no winning rolls, just losing ones. They are as happily jeopardizing their own long-term interests too.
Before the financial crisis, finance companies made 40% of all corporate profit in the United States (see Freefall, by Joseph Stiglitz), up from typical postwar levels under 20%. The reason is that, except for information technology and entertainment, the one remaining bastion of good old American corporate knowhow is figuring out how to fleece suckers–the raison d’etre of the modern American financial service company (see Griftopia by Matt Taibbi).
Their toxic combination of arrogance, ignorance and short-sighted avarice built a vast imaginary economic empire and when at last it collapsed under the weight of enormous stupidity, the collapse caused very real consequences. And yet they are still not grateful to Obama and his administration for working so hard to save themselves collectively from the consequences of their own actions. The administration’s ceaseless labors to repair the damage to credit markets, stock markets, and financial profits (to be contrasted with their half-hearted efforts to address the problems of unemployment, dislocation, and alienation the rest of us have been faced with) have been met with anger, hatred, and constant declarations of victimization by those very lords of the financial earth
When Stephen Schwarzberg, the found of Blackstone, compared Obama’s idea to make a minor change in taxation procedures for hedge funds (applying income tax rather than capital gains tax to managers’ compensation) to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, one might have written it off as the reaction of a rabid McCain supporter (one of the few on Wall Street during the presidential campaign), but in fact the phenomenon is far more widespread. Daniel Loeb, another hedge-fund founder, probably came closer to a consensus viewpoint among financiers when he warned that the administration seemed focused on “redistribution rather than growth” and that believers in the free market should be frightened. It is funny enough that we live in a country where redistribution is considered an evil in principle; it is beyond farce to characterize Obama as a redistributor.
In fact, in order to avoid both redistribution and economic collapse, Obama put the country even more dramatically into hock with the stimulus–a package of almost $800 billion in spending and tax cuts designed to avoid confronting redistribution. This debt is not one the financiers will have to pay.
All across the country, states and localities are confronting the same problem. Like the federal government, they won’t do anything redistributive. In the absence of that, in particular in the absence of the necessary taxes on the people who can afford it to pay for the things society needs, what’s left is a zero-sum game pitting the good of society against the budget. Where the federal government wrecked the budget so as not to wreck society , local governments are wrecking society so as not to wreck the budget.
Detroit is considering closing half of its public schools, sending the student-teacher ratio in high schools to 62. And it is not as if Detroit’s schools are the envy of the world, so superlative that they can afford to cut back–quite the reverse.
Camden, NJ closed its pubic library system and laid off nearly half of its police and firefighters. And it’s not as if crime in Camden is so low it can afford to let policemen go.
Arizona’s governor has just asked for federal permission to drop 280,000 of the poor from its Medicaid rolls. And most disturbingly in a country awash in guns where an entire political party and most of the broadcast media are dominated by a group of hired liars, and the occasional maniac, who spout nonsense intended to induce paranoia, Arizona (of all places!) has already slashed mental health spending and is planning to cut another $17.4 million.
The issue of mental health brings me to the second pernicious group, the Republican Tea Party. Although the sudden emergence of the Tea Party from the bowels of the radical right and its placement of a remarkable series of stubborn ignoramuses (and undoubtedly some clever but utterly dishonest operators) in positions of real political power is a big story, there are two bigger stories. One is the takeover of the rest of the Republican Party by the Tea Party. Virtually every previous Republican politician is now a fellow traveler or a hostage of the Tea Party; the so-called “moderates” over whom Obama wasted so much time in the health-care debate know very well that if they don’t move sharply to the right they will be primaried and possibly ridden out of town on a rail.
The second is the open articulation and implementation of a strategy of obstruction uber alles. Mitch McConnell said the Republican strategy was to make sure Obama failed, and that is what he did. With a mere 40 or 41 Republicans in the Senate, he managed to keep the Democrats from doing virtually anything to try to repair the damage caused to the country during the Bush years.
The rule was very simple–if the Democrats supported something, McConnell opposed it and he rallied the Republicans in the Senate in lockstep behind him. He opposed things he would have supported, and Republicans filibustered bills that they had co-sponsored in earlier years. Even the most mundane action was subjected to the maximum possible number of holds and delays, bills were read out at full length on the floor, and all of it was in aid of making sure that nothing got done.
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McConnell discovered a loophole in democracy, at least in a democracy with so many veto points placed in it by design–if the opposition votes even for bills that it supports, passage and implementation of necessary programs makes the country better off, which often translates into support for the party in power. Thus, the opposition is best off politically if it simply opposes everything–as long as it has the power actually to stop things from being enacted, which the absurd interpretation of the filibuster rule gives it.
Why repeat all of these things that are obvious or ought to be obvious right now?
Because both of these malign forces have gotten away with everything and now Mr. Obama comes in to tell us that we should forget everything, that the last two years never happened, and that we should let him get away with spinning the same starry-eyed bipartisan nonsense with which he inaugurated his presidency.
He actually had the audacity to tell us that things are looking up because “the stock market has come roaring back” and because “corporate profits are up,” while gracefully ignoring the fact that unemployment is still extremely high and the entire political establishment has agreed to do nothing about it for the foreseeable future.
And then what did he talk about? Our enemy is China, and we must be ready to “out-compete” them. Nothing about those in this country who have far more power to harm us and are intervening far more directly to do so. We have experienced another “Sputnik” moment and we must respond with a gusher of meaningless platitudes about education and science; this while speaking in front of a Congress half of whose members think of science as a bigger enemy than China.
And, most importantly, we must freeze the federal domestic budget for five years, thus doing nothing to prevent the massive austerity measures coming from state and local governments, and must lower corporate tax rates while somehow raising revenues, presumably with the same magic incantations that the supply-siders used during their ascendancy in the 80’s and the aught’s. Even though corporate profits are back up, so that clearly the current corporate tax rates have not deterred all that much activity.
To add insult to the injury that was the State of the Union address, all of this happens in the aftermath of Jared Lee Loughner’s attempted assassination and act of political terrorism in Arizona. While Loughner’s political beliefs are relatively unclassifiable, a dozen other violent incidents, many of them involving murder, have clearly involved right-wing messaging and, in the case of an abortive attack on the Tides Foundation, direct right-wing targeting (Glenn Beck has now trained his sights on a 78-year-old retired sociology professor because of paranoid fantasies he has spun from an article she wrote when he was two years old).
And all of this is being done by people who encourage their partisans to carry guns, to believe that guns are what will defend them from the overweening authority of the state, and to believe that Barack Obama, our pro-corporate center-right president, is bringing a socialist tyranny down on our heads.
It is true that these killings incited by the right wing (with reckless indifference to people’s welfare, not direct intent to kill) are minuscule in number compared to the daily toll of gun-related violence in this country. But, unlike ordinary criminal killings, these are terrorist acts, and terrorist acts are disruptive far beyond their immediate physical consequences. Fewer than 3000 people were killed on 9/11, about the number of Americans who die in car crashes every month, yet look at how disruptive to the whole world those attacks have been.
Arizona’s extremist right (also known as the Republicans) is planning to respond to Loughner’s act of terrorism by increasing the scope of right-to-carry laws to universities. Imagine teaching a class about slavery and the Civil War or the genocide of the Native Americans to a right-wing student body carrying guns.
If we allow the continuation of phenomenally lax gun-control, the proliferation of pubic carrying, and the constant metastasization of right-wing paranoia, we may see a wave of terrorist acts that dwarfs those that have already occurred. This will have an absolutely chilling effect on politics in the United States.
Yet how are we supposed to react to this? Major authority figures like President Obama and Jon Stewart tell us that assassination has no politics, that the left and the right are the same (when was the last time you heard a prominent left politician tell people to carry guns at political rallies or say that people are looking toward a “Second Amendment solution” to their problems), and that the real problem is not the people whipping up the violence but the people trying to stop it. Even after all this, only marginal figures will break the conspiracy of silence about the importance of gun control.
And now Barack Obama goes to Congress, says not a word about the fact that the Republicans would rather destroy government than allow it to accomplish anything, and once again calls on Republicans to work with him. He is now as lost in his own arrogance as George Bush and Dick Cheney were. Does he really believe that his shameful capitulation in December on a tax cut for the wealthy was some sort of victory? The only time the Democrats managed to pass anything (except for the mediocre health-care bill which they did pass at the expense of allowing the entire rest of their agenda to go hang) was in the lame-duck session when they made a crooked deal with the Republicans to take the last step to gut the long-term fiscal solvency of the country while doing almost nothing to stimulate the economy, in exchange for passing START and repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
All this has taught the Republicans is that they can get what they want if they are sufficiently obstructionist. What it has apparently taught Obama is that he can do anything he wants–and he has forgotten that it only becomes true when he decides to want what the Republicans want.
Somehow, major figures on the oppositional liberal left have reacted to this shameful capitulation with bland observations on minor political maneuvering, and with a stunning lack of outrage or serious analysis.
Well, it’s time for someone to say, “Enough! Ya Basta!” If you don’t want to see your country deliberately descend into an abyss of madness and self-destruction, then stop listening to all of the self-congratulatory centrists who are telling you that you are the problem and that you need to stop being so polarizing.
Nero apparently recited from Virgil’s Aeneid while Rome burned. If things continue as they are, we’ll be watching Comedy Central and waiting for Obama to fix things as our Rome burns.