| Number 272 | October 8, 2004 |
|
This Week:
|
|
Greetings, No room for much of an editor’s note this week. Why? Because this is the longest “Quote” of the Week in the history of Nygaard Notes. And it’s 56 years old! (The quote, that is, not Nygaard Notes.) Well, at least I’m not serving up a double issue, like the last two weeks. I have SOME self control. Briefly yours, Nygaard |
|
Here’s a famous quotation from Director of the Policy Planning Staff George Kennan, which is found in “POLICY PLANNING STUDY 23,” a top-secret memo to the Secretary of State written on my birthday – February 24th – in the year 1948, in the wake of the Second World War. This is only a part of it, but it’s worth reading carefully, as something very much like it may be circulating within the federal government right now, perhaps to be declassified in 30 years or so. Kennan was speaking of the “Far East,” but today’s version would be about the “Middle East,” one can imagine.
|
|
Readers tell me from time to time that they enjoy opportunities to hear me in person, rather than only reading these scintillating words on paper (or, for many of you, on your computer monitor). With that in mind, I’m passing on the notice below. The event is part of the DebateWatch project of the Commission on Presidential Debates (http://www.debates.org/). Thanks to Lena Jones for inviting me! Come on by if you are in town next Thursday. Here’s the official notice: The Minneapolis Community and Technical College Student Senate and Department of Political Science, in collaboration with the Minnesota Chapter of the Association of Black Women in Higher Education and the Concord Coalition, will be hosting a DebateWatch event on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2004 from 12-2pm Location: MCTC Campus, 1501 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the Helland Center Room H-9. The event will include a viewing of the October 13 Presidential debate, followed by a discussion tentatively titled “What Bush and Kerry Aren't Saying – Important Issues That Aren't Being Discussed During the 2004 Election Campaign.” Confirmed panelists include: Corey Davison, Midwest Regional Director of the Concord Coalition; Victoria Davis from the St. Paul NAACP; and Jeff Nygaard, a long-time local media watcher and activist whose ongoing analysis can be read in his weekly newsletter Nygaard Notes. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Lena Jones, Department of Political Science, Minneapolis Community and Technical College (lena.jones@minneapolis.edu). |
|
When I apologized last week for not writing anything about the presidential debates, I was actually kind of joking, since everyone seems to have so much to say on the subject. But there is a perspective on these media spectacles – at least the first one – that I haven’t heard, so I’ll briefly spell it out this week. You may not have watched the first debate, but 62 million people did, and it may be the deepest thinking about “foreign policy” that many of them do this year, so it’s worth thinking a little bit about what they heard. Just before George W. Bush’s inauguration in January of 2001, his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was quoted as follows: “American foreign policy in a Republican administration should refocus the United States on the national interest. . . There is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect.” This echoes a comment that State Department adviser George Kennan made in 1948: “We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. . . Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. ” Debating The Defense of Inequality In other words, some things never change. Although deeply encoded, this fundamental approach to the world was the core subject of the September 30th Presidential Debate. The frame of the debate more or less said it all: “Foreign Policy and Homeland Security.” If you watched the debate, you would have noticed that the focus was almost exclusively on Iraq, North Korea, and other official “enemies” of the United States. That makes sense, if you accept the unspoken basis of agreement between the two “major” candidates, which is that the world is a hostile place and the paramount purpose of our “foreign policy” must be to defend ourselves from those who would like to “reduce the disparity” between the haves and the have-nots. Rather than “Foreign Policy and Homeland Security,” the focus of the debate could just as easily have been “Foreign Policy and Social Justice.” Or, “Foreign Policy and American Values.” Or, “The Proper U.S. Role in the World.” Etc etc etc. But, instead, the Kennan/Rice Doctrine of “maintaining the disparity” – the code-word these days being “security” – was the issue, and on that the two candidates agree wholeheartedly, differing only on the most effective strategy for doing so. The difference really is hardly even strategic, but more tactical. Kennan’s figures are still roughly accurate, with this country now having less than 5 percent of the world’s population, and the U.S. share of the world’s wealth – while a bit tricky to compute – still in Kennan’s ballpark. True multilateralists focus on the larger context, which shows that the “Global North,” which includes not only the U.S. but also other wealthy countries in Europe and elsewhere, now has roughly 20 percent of the world’s population, but uses up to 80 percent of the world’s resources. Kerry is more of a multilateralist than Bush, which explains a key difference: Bush would like to see the United States dominate the world single-handedly, while Kerry says that “I believe we're strongest when we reach out and lead the world and build strong alliances.” Alliances among nations of the Global North, he means, against the Global South. Or, more accurately, alliances among elites in various nations against popular resistance anywhere it may be found. It’s a global enemy, we’re told, which calls for “security” in “homelands” around the world. Back to the Future: Cold War II What the candidates are talking about, in other words, is a return to something very much like what used to be known as the “Cold War.” Except that, instead of “The Free World” against “Communism,” now it will be “The Civilized World” against “Terrorists and Those Who Support Them.” (or, “Who May Support Them,” or “Who Could Support Them” or “Whom We Can Convince You To Fear.”) Why would both Bush and Kerry want to return to the “Good Old Days” of the Cold War? Let me quote journalist and essayist H.L. Mencken here (he’s not one of my heroes, but he says it well): “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” I don’t agree that it’s “the whole aim” of politics, and I don’t think all of the “hobgoblins” are imaginary, but certainly the creation and manipulation of fear has been a central feature of U.S. political culture for decades. Professor Lawrence Freedman of King's College London, a leading military historian, points out that “In 1947, Senator Arthur Vandenberg explained to President Harry Truman that if he wanted to persuade the American people to take on international communism and re-engage with a war-prone Europe he had to ‘scare the hell’ out of them. It worked. America poured trillions into the Cold War.” Noam Chomsky referenced the same quotation in some recent comments about the secret planning of the U.S. economy after World War II: “People care about hospitals and schools, but if you can ‘scare the hell out of them,’ as Senator Vandenberg recommended, they will huddle under the umbrella of power and trust their leaders when it comes to jet planes, missiles, tanks, etc. Furthermore, business was well aware that high-tech industry could not survive in a competitive free enterprise economy, and ‘government must be the savior,’ as the business press explained. Such considerations converged on the decision to focus on military rather than social spending.” Today we have reached another fork in the road, similar to the choice facing the U.S. after World War II. We can choose to orient our economy toward meeting the needs of our citizens in ways that are socially and ecologically sustainable. This would require a massive sea-change in our foreign policy, which is part of why neither “major” candidate will ever mention this possibility, let alone advocate for it. Alternatively, we can re-tool the existing structure of the military-industrial complex and the phenomenally expensive and repressive military/police/prison/intelligence structures that will be needed to continue to maintain, as the Kennan/Rice doctrine says, our “position of disparity.” The original reasons why we had a so-called “Cold War” have not changed and – more importantly – the power relations in this country that brought it about have not changed. So it’s highly likely that, instead of a real debate on how best to use our phenomenal wealth and creativity to better meet human needs, we’ll continue to see an ongoing debate on how best to consolidate what might be called Cold War II. We won’t call it that, though. We’ll call it the War On Terror. |
|
Legendary Journalist I. F. Stone has been quoted as saying, “The great thing about The New York Times and The Washington Post is that you never know where you'll find a front page story.” I say the same thing about the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!), and here are a few reasons why, all from recent weeks. In the September 15th Star Trib was a story headlined “Republicans Blast Bush for Environmental Policies; A Former EPA Leader Says Bush Is Tarnishing the GOP Legacy.” This article told the story of how many “Republican conservationists” are highly critical of the incumbent president in regard to his environmental policies. The former head of a group called “Conservationists for Bush” – that’s Bush I, not W – called the current administration’s environmental policies “profoundly disturbing,” and an “abomination.” That was on the bottom of page 10. On page 13 of the same day’s paper was a four-paragraph article headlined “Bush’s Tax Cuts, Spending Could Cost $3 Trillion.” (This four-paragraph article was credited to the Boston Globe, where it was given 23 paragraphs on the front page.) Meanwhile, in the local paper, the front-page story that day was straight horse-race. Headline: “Bush Inches Up on Kerry; But Democratic Candidate Leads by 9 Percentage Points.” On September 2nd a story headlined “Justice Throws Out Terrorism Conviction” started out, “In a dramatic reversal, the Justice Department acknowledges its original prosecution of a suspected terror cell in Detroit was filled with a "pattern of mistakes and oversights" that warrant the dismissal of the convictions.” Pretty important story about the “War On Terror,” right? In the Star Trib, it only merited page 4, reserving the front-page banner for this earth-shaking headline: “Cheney, Zell Miller Take Aim at Kerry; They Rip His Record, Say Perilous Times Demand Bush's Leadership.” Uh huh. On September 29 we find the headline “Ballot Woes Plague Overseas Voters,” about how “millions of civilians and soldiers living abroad still face a bewildering and unwieldy system of absentee balloting that could prevent their votes from being counted.” Included in the report was this tantalizing paragraph: “Federal officials activated a new system last week in which voters can obtain absentee ballots through the Internet. But the Web site, http://www.myballot.mil, will be offered only to military members and their families, raising concerns about fairness.” This article took up four paragraphs on page 12. The front page banner headline that day? “BLACKBOARD BLUES; Though Whiteboards Are Gaining Favor, Some University Instructors Are Passionate about Keeping Their Chalk.” I’m not making this up. Here’s the head from the following day, September 30, page 9: “Study Finds Billions in No-Bid Pentagon Contracts.” We read: “The Pentagon awarded $362 billion in contracts to private companies without competitive bidding over the past six years. . . ‘These are terrific times for defense contractors,’ said Charles Lewis, executive director of the independent Center for Public Integrity. . .” On the Star Trib’s front page that day? “Teen Genius Accepts Award on Trip to D.C.” And so forth. Many people look at the front page of the paper – or listen to the electronic equivalent, the “top of the hour” updates – and think they are getting “the day’s top stories.” It ain’t necessarily so, as I hope the preceding examples illustrate. |