| Number 135 | December 7, 2001 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, I got a thoughtful letter from a reader taking exception to my statement last week that "We Americans are the Johnsons." As she pointed out, while "we" are all Americans, that does not mean that "we" are united in support of our warlike posture in the world. Of course this is true, and I appreciate the letter. By saying what I did I wasn't intending to imply a unity between the American Friends Service Committee and the National Security Council. This is an important point to emphasize, and not only on a personal, moral level. If the myth that "Americans are united" in waging a vengeful war of mass murder against the Afghan people is allowed to stand before the world uncontradicted, it will be unbelievably demoralizing, not only for the victims of that war, but for the millions—yes, I say millions— of Americans who are working to bring into being a different, peaceful, vision of this mighty country. If one thinks one is part of an infinitesimal minority, it is that much harder to do what needs to be done to separate oneself from the "we" who are killing innocent people. Whether it is writing letters to your representatives, hosting a teach-in around the neighborhood, or taking to the streets in protest, it is morally and politically important for peace-loving people to go beyond clucking our tongues and venting our outrage to our friends at parties, and move into an active stance. I much appreciate all the Nygaard Notes readers who have taken action, and thank you for telling me about it. If you are looking for a good tool to use for introducing a friend or family member to the basic issues surrounding the current U.S. war, the new issue of Z Magazine (November 2001) features one of the best introductory articles I've seen. Presented in an easy-to-follow question-and-answer format, authors Michael Albert and Stephen Shalom methodically respond to the most common questions that we all have been hearing (or asking!) since September 11th. Go to page 10 of the current Z. Alternatively, you can get access to this piece, and many others, on the web at the ZNet site at http://www.zmag.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html. Click on "Albert/Shalom: War in Afghanistan." Out of room, gotta go. Peace, Nygaard |
-- David H. Ready, city manager of Palm Springs, California, commenting on the city's installation of 24-hour video cameras on the city's public main business street. |
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Since last week's Nygaard Notes featured a rare book review, I thought it a good idea to feature a website where you could buy the book. As I said in the review, it's best to buy any book from your local independent bookstore. However, that option is not available to some people, for a variety of reasons, and these are the people for whom on-line book purchasing makes lots of sense. If you are one of them, you should visit the website of 100Fires.com at http://100fires.com/cgi-bin/home.cgi. 100Fires.com is a relatively new site, having been started in the mid-1990s, grown from the roots of New Society Publishers, of whom I had been a fan for many years. This "alternative" site lets you search for books in all the usual ways—by title, keyword, author—but also has a fascinating "search by subject" option. I say it's fascinating because, in addition to the usual categories like "Education," "Fiction," and "Humor," readers will find such less-standard topic areas as "Climate Change," "Corporate Rule/Capitalism," and "Economic Systems" (note the plural). If you look at the topic area "Love, Sex, Eros" you won't find the latest cheesecake calendar or Hugh Hefner autobiography (is there such a thing?). Instead, 100 Fires offers such titles as "Emma Goldman: Sexuality and the Impurity of the State," "Policing Public Sex" by the Dangerous Bedfellows Collective, and "Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write About Class." (That last one was edited by a good friend of mine—Hi, Susan!—and is excellent.) It's refreshing as well to see some of the creative placements within topic areas ("Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda" is listed under "Humor!"), and they have a limited supply of calendars, videos, T-shirts, and other delightfully ridiculous stuff, as well. Beyond the great selection of really worthwhile books—including the subject of last week's Nygaard Notes Book Review, although they got the title slightly wrong, in the way that these mom-and-pop operations often do—I have to admit I was drawn in by the attitude I saw in this online alternative to the Great Behemoth known as Amazon.com, as expressed in the following blurb that appears at the bottom of each page: "Still can't find what you're looking for? Visit your community's locally owned and managed bookstore (if it hasn't already been erased from memory by giant corporations)." Elsewhere on the site they say, "You will notice that 100Fires Book Company sells very few books from corporate publishers...The point is: in THIS bookstore, corporate-published books will NEVER crowd out those gems from independent publishers who choose to keep taking the kinds of risks that a true democracy requires to survive." You gotta love a small upstart bookstore website that lays it out so plainly. I myself have never purchased anything online, but I imagine this site works as well as the next one. You can also call or write for specific information on the book you're looking for: 100fires.com, POB 27, Arcata CA 95518, 707-825-0740. Some readers may find it useful to browse this site in the subject areas that interest them before they head out to their local bookstore. It's a gem of a site. Go take a look. |
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About a month ago the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") quoted Vice President Dick Cheney's chief political aide, Mary Matalin, saying that the existence of a "war news bureau" allows the Bush administration to "collect all the utterances, proclamations from around the world that will buttress our arguments" in favor of war. Given that those arguments have been soundly rejected by the people of the world (as I reported in Nygaard Notes #132, "Act of War? Or Crime Against Humanity? The World Weighs In"), those proclamations must be a little hard to find. If any at all can be found, however, our de facto propaganda system will make certain that we are well aware of them, as this week's Propaganda Watch illustrates. Who Plays the Trumpet? In the November 6th edition of the Times ("U.S. Tries to Rally Public Support Overseas"), we had a "senior military official"—anonymous as usual—saying that "This is a war against terror, and not against Islam. We need to have Islamic voices saying that." The Times added, "To that end, [White House spokesman Ari] Fleischer today trumpeted comments from Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, who said Mr. bin Laden did not act of behalf of Muslims." Wait a minute: Who, exactly, is "trumpeting" here? It seems to me that it is the media that is playing the trumpet, with the White House merely playing, well, the media. When the President's team sends Ari Fleischer out to talk to the White House press corps, they are counting on that group to faithfully transcribe the current "line of the day" and transmit it uncritically around the world. It's a well-deserved faith. The media is not a monolith, however, so it is possible to go out hunting and come back with some other things that Mr. Moussa said. For instance, one of my hunting trips yielded a Chicago Tribune story of October 4 (before the U.S. started its attack on Afghanistan) which included the following comment by Mr. Moussa: "If [a United States military attack] occurs, it would lead to a very dangerous and critical situation in the region and will harm the idea of international cooperation or an international coalition against terrorism." I doubt that Mr. Fleischer "trumpeted" that important "utterance." And he was counting on a well-trained press corps to refrain from going hunting for such a quotation. The few that did received little notice. This is where the normal day-to-day functioning of the media crosses over and, without ever resorting to an actual conspiracy, functions as propaganda. The press does not follow any official orders, since the White House rarely gives any. They don't need to. Official propagandists—remember, they're back in fashion!—simply count on the fact that the media, for a variety of reasons, will dutifully pass on the official "line of the day" and neglect to trumpet any "utterances" that fail to "buttress our arguments" in favor of, in this case, war. Such utterances are occasionally found in the foreign press, however, which perhaps explains why the Times reported on November 11th that Bush's new propaganda chief Charlotte Beers, who "has begun addressing groups of foreign journalists in Washington, many from Muslim nations," has decided to keep those sessions "closed to U.S. journalists." These are apparently private trumpet lessons. In a separate article this week, I think about the unthinkable: that the current war is neither a War on Terrorism nor a War on Islam. |
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As any parent knows, if you present a small child with two pre-selected choices ("Would you like apple juice or orange juice, Tommy?") then you set the terms of the debate, and you reduce the chances that other choices (Root beer? Cherry Coke?) will come up and set off a power struggle between you and the little tyrant. Similarly, if a complex political decision is reduced to only two pre-selected choices, the chances are reduced that the American public will ever consider alternative explanations for the events of the day. So: War on Terror? Or War on Islam? These are the two choices which form the premise for the current debate, with one being the official U.S. position, the other being the view held by many of our official enemies, or so we are told. Neither is plausible. Over the years, U.S. power has been brought to bear against numerous countries, with the search for democracy having little to do with it. Certainly the U.S. has attacked some quite venal and undemocratic leaders, often calling these interventions "humanitarian." Think of Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Panama's Manuel Noriega in this context. But our government has also struck against numerous democratically-elected governments, including Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, Indonesia in the 1960s, Chile in the 1970s, and Nicaragua in the 1980s (hardly an exhaustive list; see any book by William Blum for further details). Reagan's U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, in a 1979 article, famously distinguished between "authoritarian" (read: good) states and "totalitarian" (bad) ones. Echoing the arch-conservative motto of Barry Goldwater—"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice!"—this emphasis on ends over means has been embraced by U.S. leaders ever since, and it now is being used as a justification for wars against "bad" terrorists like al-Qaeda, waged in order to install "good" terrorists like the Northern Alliance. It's inconsistent with a "War on Terrorism," since both are terroristic. The official hope is that a Northern Alliance-led government will turn out to be somewhat more subservient to U.S. power than the Taliban. There's plenty of doubt on this point, but it's not that important. What is important to the U.S. generals is that the world see the devastating consequences of angering the United States. As far as the anti-Islamic charge, it is true that anti-Islamic sentiment helps to dehumanize the current enemies of the United States, which is always useful in wartime. But the fact that various of our allies, including the Northern Alliance, are Islamic makes it difficult to maintain that this war is fundamentally a war on Islam. Furthermore, does anyone really think that our government would forego the bombs in favor of diplomacy if the Taliban were Christian? So, what is motivating this war? I'd like to suggest that the current attack on Afghanistan is essentially a "show war"—analogous to a "show trial"—conducted for the purpose of deterring leaders elsewhere in the world from considering doing anything to upset the world's only superpower. That requires a lot of deterrence, since there are so many ways of upsetting the United States, the carrying out of horrendous terrorist attacks on innocent civilians being only one. Trying to exert domestic rather than U.S. control over a country's resources is another way. Attempting to opt out of the New World Order is another. Publicly criticizing the U.S. in international settings is still another. What do the popularly-elected leaders Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, and Chile's Salvador Allende have in common with such non-democrats as Moammar Khadafi, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden, beyond the fact that they have all been targets of U.S. power? They were all willing to misbehave. To act, or even to threaten to act, independently—whether by killing innocent Americans, or by limiting U.S. corporate power, or by questioning the legitimacy of the New World Order—is to invite the terrible wrath of the United States, as we have seen again and again. Seen in this light, the current U.S. war can perhaps be best understood not as a War on Terrorism, nor as a War on Islam, but as a War on Independence. And if, as Indian writer Arundhati Roy has said, millions of the world's poor believe that a successful Operation Enduring Freedom will mean Enduring Subjugation for them, we have created a Frankenstein more terrifying than anything we have yet seen. |